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doomed not only to die but to capsize, which would have made it impossible for their spirits to find a way home.
“Don’t cry, Senegambia,” she wailed, trying to comfort some man or woman long dead. “It ain’t your fault.”
When she quieted down, Cornelius kept watch over the rise and fall of his mother’s narrow chest, certain that his attention would somehow help keep her alive. He studied her face, so frightfully thin. He’d once heard Mistress say,
“Our Maydee is good as gold, but homelier than dirt.”
What did she mean? he wondered. His mother’s skin—a smooth, rich mahogany brown—made the whites look ugly as old cheese. Her smile was a crescent moon in a dark sky.
He stroked her bony hand as she whimpered in her sleep. Her face twisted in disgust. “The smell,” she croaked.
“Please, sir, some air.”
He opened the windows and the door, and when that gave her no ease he washed the floor with vinegar-water.
He brought pine boughs and broke the needles beneath her nose. Still, she wailed that the stench was choking her and Cornelius had to cover her mouth with a towel, lest Mistress Finson make good on her threat to fetch the doctor, who always brought death with him.
In her last hours, Maydee’s skin burned to ash. She thrashed on the cot and would have tipped it over if Cornelius hadn’t sat on it with her. “Maggots,” she moaned, raking her fingers through her scalp and over her eyes.
When Cornelius saw that she was drawing blood, he tied her hands down with soft rags. He was as gentle as he could be, but it set her to weeping, and he was ashamed.
When she finally fell asleep, Cornelius put his ear to her mouth to make sure that she was still breathing, and lay
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his head on his arms to rest beside her. He woke to see Maydee’s head and shoulders lifted off the bed, straining every muscle upward, like she was trying to fly. She stared intently at the ceiling, her eyes hollow as teacups. Cornelius tried to push her down into the bed, but she was rigid and would not budge, until suddenly, she relented and fell back.
Supple and light as a falling leaf, dead.
He rarely thought of his mother, but the memory of her death walked beside him on that sultry night, past the last few houses attached to the city, up to the spot where he turned back, out of habit, to make certain no one saw him step onto the old path into Dogtown.
Cornelius felt the familiar twinge in his left knee. He was sixty-one years old, and although his back was still straight and there were only a few strands of gray on his head, his legs were not what they used to be. He couldn’t help but envy men of his years who spent their afternoons smoking pipes and recalling better times. Those were white men, of course. White men with generous daughters.
Cornelius was altogether alone. He touched no one and spoke to the people around him as little as possible. He had stopped butchering hogs mostly so he wouldn’t have to talk to the likes of Silas Hutting and his vile neighbor, Eben Crowley. Both of them had taken to paying less than what they promised, daring him to dispute it, and calling him
“Nigger Neal” into the bargain.
His one piece of luck was his job as bookkeeper for Jacob Somes, a fish wholesaler, who paid Cornelius a few dollars a week, plus room and board. Somes was pleased with Cornelius’s steadiness and knew the man worked hard. But no one saw how much Cornelius cherished his
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position and labored over his rows of numbers, rechecking every calculation three times not only for accuracy but for appearance as well. He wanted every digit to be perfectly square and lined in exact rows, which required his total concentration. At the end of every day, he would set down the pen and run his weary eyes up and down the pages, savoring the order he’d created.
Numbers were forthright, definite, and reassuring, entirely unlike words, which were slippery and sharp. To Cornelius, language had come to seem untrustworthy, double-edged as a plow that could just as easily sever a foot as cut through sod.
He had quit reading some years back, dismayed by the half-truths and contradictions he found in print. One volume argued for the power of faith, another claimed that the works of man were ascendant. One newspaper article claimed the governor was a great man; another on the very next page called him a thief. The Bible was the worst of all, riddled with impossibilities, opposing accounts of the same story, and hideous acts of cruelty. If the Bible had been at all mathematical, he might have become a Christian.
Had Mrs. Somes known anything about Cornelius’s