Nightjohn by Gary Paulsen Read Free Book Online Page A

hear me, didn’t hear anything. “You hit him too hard. He ain’t there anymore.”
    “I’m sorry,” the black man said, and he looked sorry too. “I didn’t know you were coming or I would have held back a tad.”
    It was Lucy that saved me. I turned away and the black man went back to hitting Greerson and I moved out of the yard and was near crying, thinking of little Delie and Tyler. The wind blew four ways and they could have gone any of them. No way to know.
    “In the shack,” Lucy said. “There might be something in all those papers about little Delie and Tyler …”
    And I would have walked away hadn’t she said it, would have walked away and never thought of it, never known.
    We went inside and started to work. I didn’t know what to look for, didn’t know where to begin, but Lucy just picked up a piece of paper and went to reading.
    “Male, teeth show age not over eighteen, answers to name of Herman, no whip scars, to be at auction. Nope.” She threw it aside andpicked up another. “Female, teeth show age between twenty-five and thirty, answers to name of Betty, no whip scars, trained for house duties, to be at auction. Nope.”
    That’s what all the papers were. Bills of sale, hundreds and hundreds of them, all records that Greerson kept for all the time he sold slaves.
    It was soon dark, too dark to read, but Lucy she found an oil lamp with an unbroken chimney and some matches and soon we had light. Still hard to read but by holding the paper close to the lamp we could make out the letters.
    Must have read fifty or a hundred of them when I looked up and Lucy she was sitting there crying, holding the paper.
    “What’s the matter?”
    “I just come across old Willy. You remember him?”
    For certain I remembered him. Delie she said that she and old Willy once had eyes for one another. Soft old man used to carve willow whistles for the children in the quarters. Called them whoop-te-do whistles. Gray hair, gray beard, soft voice, soft smile.
    “They sold him for fifty dollars,” Lucy said. “That was all. Fifty dollars …”
    And it caught me then, what we were lookingat. I had been too much on little Delie and Tyler, couldn’t see past my darlings.
    Lives. These were lives. All the people we knew and didn’t know and Greerson, Waller, all the small evil men had been selling lives. Whole lives. My mammy, pappy, Delie, Billy—didn’t matter. All bought and sold, people bought and sold for money, for work, to work to death. Heard once that when they worked the men down in the cane fields south, far south, they figured on the men being dead by twenty and seven. It was the way they worked it out. After they were twenty and seven they started to break and it was easier to just let them die and get newer ones, younger ones.
    People. People bought and sold and each of them on these little pieces of paper, each of their lives down to a slip of auction paper. “Answers to name of …”
    Swore then, swore in my mind so I suppose it’s the same as swearing in the open and I hope God he don’t get to keeping too close a track on those things. Swore at all the evil that men could do and I cried some with Lucy, cried for the people on the small papers we read in the yellow light from the lamp.
    We stopped for a bit and sat, getting sad, but then I shook my head. Crying wouldn’thelp. “We have to eat something now. So we can keep going.”
    She took out one of the hams. We didn’t have a knife but there was broken glass from the windows and I found a piece and sliced two chunks, thick with fat and smelling of hickory smoke. The smell must have been more than I thought because twice men came to the door while we were eating. One white and the other the same black man who had been beating Greerson. The white man he just looked in and moved on, scared looking, a white face flashing in the lamplight and gone. The black man he came in and we gave him some ham and he chewed it quiet, sitting in the