Wash by Margaret Wrinkle Page A

neighbors had panicked, calling hers an insurrection when they should have known it was more of a quick run to freedom. That’s what his people called it whenever somebody went off like that. Real insurrections were much quieter and slower to build. More deliberate and more impossible.
    Judging didn’t used to get to Richardson but for some reason, this case kept running through his mind all the way home. That quiet slender woman sitting so still in his courtroom. Her slitting the husband’s and wife’s throats with a pastry cutter she had sharpened. The two of them dead in their bed. How her low keening had woken the couple’s three small children who had come into the room in the middle of the night to find their parents lying in pools of moonlight and how they had automatically turned to her for comfort.
    Her standing there with the blade still in her hand, her dropping it to grab those white children to her, and her holding them tight with blood all over her dress. How the neighbor had found them piled together up in her room in the attic. In her bed. She was holding the sleeping children in her arms, looking out over their heads through the window, watching the sky lighten.
    All of it keeps coming back to Richardson, bright jagged images flashing into his mind. The way she sat so still and so straight, staring at the wall behind him, not even bothering to defend herself. The feel of his hand bringing the gavel down, the sound of the gavel landing on smooth wood and the rope hanging from the gallows.
    Then writing a check from the state to reimburse the dead couple’s estate for the loss of the woman. Richardson guessed the money would be held in trust for the children because they were still so young. He was trying to hurry and get it handled before too much of a crowd had a chance to gather and watch and then wreak havoc on their way home. He was trying to keep other people’s negroes safer that way.
    Riding back home through the dark falling in the woods, he could not stop wondering what had been the thing that tipped her over the edge. What had crossed her mind as her hand wrapped around that pastry cutter, having sat up half the night sharpening its blade against the stone of that big kitchen fireplace where the sound was muffled by the fire popping and crackling? What had it felt like standing over those people’s beds, before and after?
    And now, standing in his own yard next to his sweaty horse, turning to hand Omega off to Ben, he wonders whether Ben knows already. But Ben won’t look at him, not even when Richardson pauses, hanging on to the reins a moment too long before laying them, smooth and worn shiny, across Ben’s waiting upfacing palm.
    “Did you know her?”
    He and Ben stand there in the curve of Omega’s neck, the horse’s warm breath surrounding them. Ben keeps his eyes on the ground, closing his fingers around the soft leather of the reins and nods yes, he knows her. He thinks to himself about Charlotte being Heddy’s wildest girl and here she has finally hit the wall that has been waiting for her all along.
    Both men stand there thinking about her people long since come to cut her down and take her home until Omega dips his big gray head to nudge Ben’s shoulder hard, knocking him off balance. Ben leads the gelding past the cabins to the barn where he’ll strip off his tack, walk him cool, rub him down with a twist of straw to loosen the drying sweat and then feed him.
    Richardson turns toward the house. He’ll have to tell them about it. He can already hear their questions, fueled to a fever pitch by fear of an insurrection, stoked by that small quiet woman. A part of him wishes he was ignorant enough to believe an insurrection was even a possibility out here. He envies his family their obliviousness.
    The smooth leather of his knife sheath lies warm against his hip under his clothes and all he can think about is his hands closing around a drink. He hears Thomas Jefferson saying