Washington and Caesar by Christian Cameron

music of his hounds. The boy was feeding them.
    He got up and walked out, his anger rising from a small curiosity to a rage before he reached the kennel. The boy was rolling balls of bread and soaking them in broth, then throwing them to each hound by name. It was a curious ritual, and not the way he did the feedings himself. It neither slowed his anger nor increased it. It was a subject for another day.
    “Caesar! I told you to call me every day before the dogs were fed.”
    Caesar fairly leapt in the air at the sound of his name, and his sudden tension threw the dogs into confusion. They sensed their master’s anger and the boy’s worry, and some barked. Others milled, biting each other. Caesar recovered and moved slowly, trying for calm. Washington had to look at the scars over his eyes.
    “Sorry, suh.”
    “Is that all, boy? You are sorry?”
    Bailey was hurrying out from the overseer’s house, his coat off, clearly torn from his supper. Someone had seen the Master headed for the kennel and called him out. Washington resented this as an intrusion.
    “Caesar, did you forget, or were you deliberately sullen? Answer me, boy.”
    The slave looked up to him slowly, and his eyes were a little hard—not reproachful or hurt, as might be expected from an innocent slave, nor wary or deceitful, either. Washington was a good judge of men, and this one was hard to read. The eyes held his for one flash, then were cast down.
    “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t do it on purpose.” The sentences were delivered like a verdict; the enunciation was strong and crisp.
    Bailey wiped some crumbs from his chin but stayed mute, waiting for the explosion, worried that the enunciation might be read as rebellion.
    Washington waited with the rest of them, balanced on the sword’s point of his own conflicting feelings of anger and fairness, until fairness won out. The boy had done nothing. If called, he would not have come to the feeding. His business held him, and he was still angry at Muse’s letter, at his stepson’s stubbornness in marrying a Maryland papist without reflection, at the loss of prestige involved in Jack’s estates. It was a witch’s brew of discontent and no mistake; he was fair enough a man to know that the black boy had little to do with it.
    The boy’s way of speaking was another matter entirely, but like his careful feeding of the dogs, it needed to be dealt with another time. The boy was arrogant; arrogance had no place in a slave, a point he had made to Bailey countless times.
    “Look at me, Julius Caesar.” His voice was calm, and as he hoped, the eyes that met his were not hard or rebellious, but concerned now.
    “Always call me before the dogs are fed.”
    “I won’t forget again, suh.”
    Washington shook his head, smiled very slightly, made a small bow to Bailey, and went inside. Bailey stopped a moment longer.
    “For God’s sake, call him next time. Or you’ll be the worse for it, young Caesar. I can’t be plainer than that.” He tried to project a number of pieces of information through those sentences, because he worried about fairness at times. But his dinner was waiting, and his wife. His wife often chided him about slaves. “Catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar,” she said, meaningthat a little conversation was often better than punishment. But he lacked the knack of it. She always carried herself above the blacks but spoke to them all the time; he couldn’t do it.
    He wanted to warn the boy, but he couldn’t find any words that wouldn’t betray his own notions of loyalty to the Colonel. So he stood for a moment, a short man in his smallclothes with a napkin tied under his chin, leaning on the rail of the kennel. And when nothing came, he simply nodded to the boy, and went back to his dinner, his spirits lowered.
    The next morning dawned with more bad news. His party of indentures and Palatine Germans going to open the farms in his new land in the Ohio was held up by the