father, would call upon him. They would spend hours denouncing the young Quality, dazzled by tales of boundless land out west, who’d abandoned their Virginian birthright. There was still my uncle, Nathaniel Walker, who held Sophia and somehow maintained himself and all of his land. But his tasking folks had, besides a small team for maintenance, all gone west. Harlan was still there at Lockless, pushing the tasking folks to extract all they could from the dying land. But his wife, Desi, no longer ruled the house, because the house had so diminished that there was no need for her hand. My father’s most constant companion was Corrine, who, no matter Maynard’s death, he still held as the daughter he’d never had. She would arrive in full grieving costume—driven by Hawkins. She comforted my father. She let him regale her with that other age before the yawning fallows, when tobacco ever-flowing endowed the estates.
Still, the duties of everyday companionship mostly fell to me. So every evening, after preparing supper for my father, and taking mine with Thena, I would tend the fire in the parlor, serve warm cider, and listen to the last true lord of Lockless unspool his regrets. We now fell into the oddest arrangement, one that had been my secret wish in my younger years. I tasked for him, but the nature of the relation so shifted that he would, on those blue evenings, with the Argand lamp casting its long shadows against the old family busts, ask that I sit with him and imbibe. And it seemed to me, in those moments, that the whole world had fallen away, fallen into the pit of Natchez, and I alone was left bearing witness. On such an evening as this, finding himself far into the cider, my father spoke of his greatest regret of all—Maynard Walker.
At first he seemed to be speaking almost aimlessly, but then his words focused and out of them came a mourning that was larger than Maynard himself.
“My father never loved me,” he said. “It was another time, boy. Nothing like today where you see the young folks open and frolicking. My daddy’s only concern was station. And all my actions had to honor my lineage. Of course, I married a lady, Lord rest her soul, handsome enough. But she was never the girl I burned for, and she knew that. So when Maynard came, I was set on never putting him in that situation.
“I wanted him to be what his own nature commanded. So I gave the boy wide berth—too wide as it happened. He had no handling. He was not built for society and I, never loving society myself, did nothing to encourage it. And when his mother passed, well…He was my boy.”
He paused here. His head was now in his hands, and I sensed he was doing all he could to keep from breaking down and weeping. He pulled his hands away, then stared into the fire for a few long moments.
He said, “I almost feel as though May was put out of his misery. I know I was put out of mine. It is a terrible thing to say it. But there was nothing for him here, you see? I had not built him for this life. I had barely been built for it myself. And the young ones are now all headed west. He would have got himself skinned by an Indian, or lost everything to swindle. I know it, the boy was not prepared, and that is the fault of me.
“I am not a good man, Hiram. You, among them all, know this. I have not forgotten what was done to you.”
I remember how he was still looking into the fire when he said this. He was as close as he could come to an admission, an apology, for an act I knew but could not then remember. And even as we sat there, with our cider, as close as any Quality and Tasked in Virginia could be, still he could not look to me and speak with truth. He was as ill-prepared for repentance as Maynard was for mastery. His world—the world of Virginia—was built on a foundation of lies. To collapse them all right then and there, at his age, might well have killed him.
“The land, the management of Negroes, takes a special hand,” he said. “It was always beyond me. And what is odd is I always felt that you were the one