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she muttered aloud how much she’d like to shrivel their tongues with a spell, or send a bat to blind their eyes. “What makes them think a real witch would tolerate that kind of meanness without a punishment. I’d turn them into toads if I could,” she said. “And then I’d run them all through with a sharp stick.”
Cornelius hadn’t even looked up from his bloody work when she arrived. Had he felt her humiliation? she wondered. Did he notice? Did he ever think of her?
She walked back to her house and sat in a chair, too injured to sleep, too angry to weep. In the dark of the night, she decided to put Cornelius behind her. Exhausted and enraged, she pounded the table and let the tears come. Her life was hard enough without pining for something as unnecessary as a man. “He can go to hell,” she said, not meaning it in the least.
By the next spring, Judy had tamped down her hopes and wore herself out putting in the biggest garden she could manage. She weeded ferociously and carried so much water that her carrots grew sweet as sugar, her potatoes large and creamy. She set plenty by for winter and grew calmer as the days shortened: it was easier to wean her heart when the leaves fell, and the evenings grew chill. Judy had stopped hoping for his return by then, and she prayed only that the longing for him would decrease more with every change of the season.
His sudden presence on the icy winter night of
Abraham Wharf’s laying out seemed like a childhood dream sprung to life. Judy lay beneath the quilts, waiting for the door to open, her jaw clamped, her hands clenched, and she willed herself not to hope for anything.
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The bed shuddered as Cornelius sat on it. His boots thudded to the floor and then he lay down with his back to her, slowed his breathing, and pretended to sleep.
I should not be here, he thought, eyes wide. Even though he had covered his tracks so no one would ever know he’d come. Even though the old man’s death made it safer. It was a mistake, even if it was the last time.
He had stopped seeing Judy Rhines because of
Abraham Wharf. The old man had been waiting for him outside Lurvey’s house one night before he left for her bed.
Wharf had grabbed him by the back of his arm, like he was a child. “You stay off Judy Rhines, you hear me?” he said.
“You black bastard, you touch that girl again and I’m going to see to it you’re killed. Or worse.
“I oughter do it now,” he hissed. “I oughter tell some of the boys in town and have ’em cut you to pieces or sell you down South. But I ain’t going to, ’cause she wouldn’t like it.
Not yet, anyhow. But I’m going to be watching and I will see you dead before I let this go on. An abomination, that’s what it is.”
So Cornelius had stayed away. He told himself it was to protect Judy as much as himself: after all, she’d be ruined if word got out. But that was a lie to cover up his own wretched fear. He knew how easy it was to kill a black man.
And he knew that Judy Rhines was lost to him, no matter what he did or did not do.
Cornelius had been born on Cape Ann under Nicholas Finson’s roof. The Finsons were not entirely pleased when
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they discovered their new-bought slave girl, Maydee, was carrying a baby. Their farmhouse was already crowded with their own three children, but they named the slave baby and kept him, after he could walk and talk. They kept him even after his mother died, when he might have fetched them a good price. Cornelius was only ten years old when Maydee perished of fever, so Mrs. Finson had looked after him from then on and even taught him to read and figure, alongside her own little girls.
He was not quite eighteen when Mr. Finson died.
A month after that, the mistress sold the farm and prepared to join her eldest daughter in Portland. Cornelius had his clothes in a sack on the day the wagon pulled up to fetch her, but after he’d helped load the trunks, she asked him to sit down and handed him her husband’s belt, boots, and good hat. “These are for you, Cornelius,” she said.
“Thank you, Missus.”