He has been on that block four times in 3 years. Four. He was carried down to New Orleans in March and carried back. There is not a trader on the river who will lay out money on a man that won't speak because a man that won't speak is a man that has decided something and you cannot buy out a decision. Then I have got the best of him, she said, because I paid seven cents.
You have got a mouth to feed the size of two mouths and a mortgage on this place at the Britain House in Natchez that I happen to know the figure of. He let that sit. Folks are saying things, Orura. Folks always did. They're saying Barnabas is 6 months in the ground and his widow has sold the good mules and bought two grown negroes at above market and now a enslaved man for pennies and cannot say what for.
He leaned down. I am asking you as a friend of your husband’s. What are you doing? She looked up at him from the bottom of the steps, a small dry woman in a rusty black dress, and Fenwick would testify later under oath that her face at that moment was the calmest face he ever saw on a living person. “I am paying a debt,” she said.
“Good evening, Charles.”
That night late, Zilpa came up onto the gallery, which she did not do. She stood at the rail with her back to the house and said, “Why that cabin?” “It was empty. It’d been empty 11 years. It has a good roof.”
They all got good roofs. Zilpa turned around. In the dark, her face was only a shape. Mrs. Renfruit, I have cooked in this house since I was 9 years old.
But I know when you lying, you got a way of getting real polite. Or Renfruit sat in her dead husband's chair with her hands flat on her knees and told the woman the first lie she had told her in 40 years that she knew at the moment of telling it she would have to answer for.
“He is a large man,” she said. “He needs the room.”
It had begun in February in the room Barnabas had called his office 5 weeks after they buried him. He had died of an apoplexy in the gin house in the middle of a sentence on a cold morning in the second week of January and he had died the way he lived in the exact center of his own arrangements and had discovered within a week that the arrangements were rot all the way down. The cotton had failed twice. There were notes at two houses in Natchez. There was a judgment out of Wilkinson County she had never heard of.
She sat in that office 6 hours a day for a month with the books, and she was good at books. She had kept her father's store ledgers in Kentucky as a girl, which was the only thing about her Barnabas had ever praised out loud, and by the end of the month she understood the plantation better than her husband had, which is how she came to notice the chimney. The office fireplace had a brick out of true on the left side of the throat, and she noticed it because she was cold and poking at the fire and thinking about money. She worked the brick loose with a letter opener. Behind it was a cavity a foot deep, and in the cavity was a pine box the size of a Bible box, and in the box was a book.
It was a ledger of the ordinary kind, marbled boards ruled in blue. It began in 1826 and ended in the spring of 1848, and it had nothing in it about cotton. The columns were headed in Barnabas Renfruit's small upright clerk's hand. No. Sex. Age.
Date. To. Price. Account given. There were 31 lines.
She read the first one four times before it came apart into words. No. 1.
Girl, infant of Zilpa. 9 May 1826. $75.
Bledsoe Woodville. Account given: born dead. Her hands were entirely steady. She noticed that and found it obscene.
She turned the page. No. 2, boy, six, of Charity.