lost, and so she often suffered Maynard’s rages. Lockless had begun to feel desolate and gray, and it was not just Lockless but all the manors along the Goose, now drained of their vigor as the heart of the country shifted west.
I took my seat, the same that Maynard had abandoned, and for a few long minutes, my father said nothing. He just stared into the fire, which was dying, so that all I could now see was a diminishing yellow trace on his face.
“You will mind your brother, won’t you,” he said.
“Yessir,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Good.”
And then there was a brief pause before he spoke again.
“Hiram, I know that there is not much I have been permitted to give you,” he said. “But I believe that in what I have been permitted to give you, I have made it known how high you sit in my esteem. It is not fair, I know it, none of it is fair. But I have been damned to live in this time when I must watch my people carried off, across the bridge and into God knows where.”
Again, he paused and shook his head. Then he stood, and walked over to the mantel to turn up the lamp-light, so that the parlor portraits and ivory busts of our forefathers were now illuminated in the flickering shadows.
“I’m old,” he continued. “I can’t reconstruct myself for this new world. I will pass with this Virginia, and these troubled times will fall to Maynard, which means they will fall to you. You have to save him, son. You have to protect him. I don’t just mean tomorrow at race-day. There is so much coming, so much trouble coming for us all, and Maynard, whom I love more than anything, he is not ready. Mind him, son. Mind my boy.”
He paused and looked directly at me. “Mind your brother, do you hear me?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
And we sat there for perhaps another thirty minutes, until my father announced his retirement for the evening. I took my leave and went down into the Warrens, to my room. I sat on the edge of my bed and thought of that day my father called me up from the fields—the day he’d smiled and flipped the copper coin my way. Everything about my life flowed from that decision. It kept me from seeing the worst of our condition. Almost any tasking man at Lockless would have traded his life for mine. But there was a weight of being so close to them, the weight that Thena had tried to warn me about, but something more, the crushing weight of seeing how the Quality truly lived, in all their luxury, and how much they really took from us.
* * *
—
That night I dreamed that I was out in the tobacco fields again, out there with the Tasked, and we were, all of us, chained together and this chain was linked to one long chain and at the end of it stood Maynard, idling lost in his own thoughts, almost unaware that he was holding all of us in the palm of his hand. And then I looked around and I saw that we were all old, that I was an old man, and when I looked back I saw Maynard, not as the young man I knew, but as a baby crawling in a bowling green, and then I saw the Tasked slowly disappearing before me, their familiar faces and bodies fading and fading, one by one, until it was only me, an old man held and chained by a baby. Then everything fell away, the chains, Maynard, the field itself, and I was enveloped in the blackness of night. And then the black branches of a forest sprang up around me, and I was alone, and afraid and lost until looking up I saw a sliver of moon, and then the heavens blinked out from the blackness, and among them I could distinguish Ursa Minor, the mystical bear who secreted away the old gods. I knew this because Mr. Fields had shown me a star map on our last day together. And looking at the tail of the bear, I saw something else: the mark of my future days, wreathed in brilliant but ghostly blue, and the mark was the North Star.
4
I AWOKE SHAKEN AND TREMBLING at the dream. I sat up in my bed for a moment, then lay back again, but found no more sleep.