Elliott stops and turns to look back at his father. “You forbid it?”
“This, this thing you’ve got with Cecily, it’s an obsession,” says Mr. Price. “I should have put a stop to it years ago. But it’s gone on long enough.”
“You, of all people, have no room to talk.”
“Hear me, son. Cecily is dead. You are getting married in less than a week. And there is your sister’s health to consider.”
A smirk crosses Elliott’s face. “Which sister is that again?”
Sally is so busy trying to decipher what he means that she misses Mr. Price close the distance between himself and his son. The next thing she knows, he is wrestling Elliott to the ground.
Maria screams, and Mrs. Price rushes from the porch. When she tries to pull the two men apart, Elliott elbows her in the chest and she is thrown backward.
No one else in the yard makes any effort to break the two men up. Instead, they watch as the Prices rut like a pair of bucks. Heads down, horns out. It isn’t a fair fight—Elliott’s got to outweigh his father by fifty pounds—but what Mr. Price lacks in bulk, he makes up for in pure, unfettered fury. The men pitch themselves against each other, again and again, and Sally can’t help thinking about the carcasses of two whitetails that Andy found down near the banks of the Roanoke River. Their antlers had locked, and they’d died together, neither one of them able to so much as lift his head without the other.
Elliott shows no signs of tiring, but Sally can tell Mr. Price’s stores have grown depleted. Soon, Elliott has him pinned. He lies there for a moment, staring directly into his father’s eyes, while everyone else holds a collective breath. Sally assumes the skirmish has reached its natural conclusion, and that soon Elliott will help his father to his feet. So, when Elliott reels back his head and cracks his skull against his father’s, she feels utterly unprepared for it.
Why does Sally continue to be surprised by the depravity of men? Perhaps because so much has been made of their civility? Her father prided himself on always being courteous in the courtroom. Her uncle, who sits on the bench of the General Court of Virginia, is considered by all to be a fair and honorable judge. Even her brothers—rabble-rousers, all ofthem—diligently transcribed each of Francis Hawkins’sRules of Civility & Decent Behaviorinto their copybooks when they were growing up. She thinks of Hawkins’s last rule, which was so often repeated in her childhood home that she had once embroidered it onto a pillow:Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.
These men have no consciences. Not Elliott, not Mr. Price, not Archie or Tom or any of the other men she encountered in the theater. They pay lip service to the idea of civility, while doing whatever they want at all times. Even Robert, whom she has missed so terribly these last three years, was not a perfect man. She likes to believe that, were he in the theater, he’d have stayed with her until the end, but how can she be sure, after everything she’s witnessed?
As Sally watches Elliott rise and stalk off across the yard, she wonders if—in the time that has elapsed since Robert’s death—she has remade him into a man who never existed at all.
GILBERT
Gilbert heads straight for CallumMurrow’s Carriage Shop, where he worked when he first came to Richmond, all those years ago. There’s a small office in a house near the road, but the bulk of the work gets done in the barn at the rear of the property, and that’s where he hopes he’ll find Samuel Jefferson.
Most of the men who work for Mr. Murrow have cleared out, but Gilbert is relieved to find Samuel bent over a band saw, putting the curves in a spoke. He raises his hand, gives him a “Hey ho” from across the room, so as not to scare him.
Samuel looks up, peers into the dim light of the barn, and says, “Do my eyes deceive me or is that Gilbert Hunt?”
“Indeed,” says Gilbert as he makes his way across the barn, sidestepping a crane-neck phaeton—nearly finished—and the skeleton of what will one day be a one-horse chaise. The two men clap each other on the back. “It’s been too long.”
“Sounds like you’ve had a busy time of it these last few days,” says Samuel with a sly smile.
Gilbert goes stiff, trying to work out what he means, and Samuel lets out a long, soft chuckle and says, “Relax, I’m talking about your heroics on Thursday night.”
Gilbert’s shoulders loosen. “Right, that.”
“I was at the green yesterday when all that cheering started. In all my life, I ain’t never seen anything like it.”
“I was as surprised as you were.”
“That many white men, applauding a Negro. I told myself: Pay attention. You won’t see this again.”
“Why you working today?” Gilbert asks. “Ain’t the shop meant to be shut down?”
“You know me,” Samuel says with a shrug. “Never was very good at not working.”
Gilbert glances around the barn. “Everybody else seems to have no problem with it.”
“I won’t see hide nor hair of them until after the funeral, I’m sure.”
Gilbert picks up a mallet, feels the heft of it in his hand, and tries to call back the memory of working alongside Samuel. Gilbert had to attach the hoop to the wheel when it was red-hot, working as quick as he could, then it was Samuel’s job to plunge the wheel into cold water. If their timing was perfect—which it almost always was—the result was a tight tire that didn’t go anywhere. “You spoiled me for working alongside anybody else.”
Samuel nods once, then says, “That’s true. But something tells me you ain’t here to talk about old times.”
“No, sir,” says Gilbert, trying to figure out the right way into the conversation.
