Nightjohn by Gary Paulsen Page A

there and thinks.
    I thinks of all the things I have learned that day and then I tries to add them to the things I learned the day before and then the day before that. I’ve been doing that as long as I can remember, since I was almost just walking, and I remember all the parts of my life. If there is time of an evening and I haven’t been worked to the bone I can just lay there in the dark and think on all my time and remember it. Except for my birthing mammy—I can’t think on her at all except to wonder and wonder about her. Did she have dark skin or light? How was her voice, how did it sound? But you can’t remember whatisn’t there and no amount of thinking on it will make it come into my brain.
    It was in the flower bed that I first heard about Nightjohn. Not by name, but by happening.

TWO
    One morning I was below the window working in the roses. Some leaves had fallen because of the little green bugs that eat the roses and I had to chew tobacco leaves and spit on the plants to kill the bugs. I didn’t much like to chew on tobacco leaves, though some of the men favored it, and it made me sick enough to near heave my guts. I had to stop and while I was stopped, just under the window down in the thick leaves and the soft dirt, I hears it.
    “I swear—if Clel doesn’t stop buying hands we won’t have any money left for dresses.” It was the missus talking to her sister. Her sister be an older woman never found a man, dried up and mean and she hates us. The missus is named Margaret and her sister named Alaine or something close to that. Course we never call them by their names. Never talk to them at all. And when we talk about them in the quarters and ain’t nobody listening but quarters’ people we call them same as the master. Call them dog droppings or horse crap.
    “He went out and bought another hand,” the missus said. “Over a thousand dollars. Honestly, he must think we’re made of money.”
    I didn’t know counting but I knew a little of money. Once I found a penny in the dirt by the quarters and I went to mammy and held it out.
    “Hide that,” she told me. “That’smoney. Somebody see that and they’ll come along and take it from you.”
    So I figured money was something to have and keep and I kept the penny, hid in the dirt at the end of the quarters and I still have it. Sometimes I take it out when there ain’t anybody around and rub it on my shirtdress until it shines and shines.
    And I knew that there was bigger money than a penny but I didn’t know how that all worked, that bigger money, because it wasn’t something I learned. So when the missus she said about a new hand costing a thousand dollars all I knew was that it was more than a penny. More than many pennies. Maybe more than all the pennies in the world because they be rich, the people in the white house.
    Richer than God, mammy said once, but she was just mad and didn’t mean it. She’d been praying and got caught atit. People in the quarters weren’t supposed to pray nor know nothing about God. Mammy she prayed all the time, in her head. Usually she only prayed out loud late at night when there wasn’t anybody to hear her. Sometimes she brought in the big cast iron kettle used for making morning food to pour in the trough for us to eat.
    Mammy would put the kettle in the corner of the quarters, way back in the dark corner, and put her head inside the kettle so’s the sound wouldn’t carry and she’d pray in a whisper. She swore they could hear like cats up to the big house and the only way to keep safe was to pray in the kettle.
    I one time put my head in the kettle with her.
    “Lord Jesus,” she said, talking to the bottom of the kettle. “Lord Jesus, you come be making us free. Free someday. In your name, amen.”
    I was small then and didn’t know about being free, or even how to think about being free, or even what being free meant. So I asked her what free meant.
    “Nothing to talk about now,” she said.