Читать книгу The Book of Duels - Michael Garriga - Страница 19

Josiah Pelham, 49,

Owner of Pelham’s Acres

Returned my boy, Brossie, all bloody and beaten, his back sprung open like a deep-bit plum, stains on the split muslin of his shirt, which I bought for him not two months ago—had gall enough to say to me, Your boy wouldn’t work, so I put the whip to his hide and you ought to as well, God’s truth be known—like that was that and he’d drop the whole affair—had he hurt one of my younguns, I’d have shot him down, dog dead, and dared any man find me guilty, but Brossie is a slave who will be beaten again, yet he is a good boy—groomed and behaved, understands what I teach, and owns manners and looks to make a white man proud—I knew his mother too, gone now a dozen years, whom I’d have set free if the law had allowed—because this man had not driven his own workers—the tobacco flowers were starting to bloom, their seeds like sand soon to drop and so to sully the soil for next year’s crop—he came begging my help, so I sent him Brossie to top the tobacco—loaned him for free, no less—this simpleton thrashed the child for not working fast enough, insulting me two fold—harming my property and then my pride—so it has come to this: our left wrists bound each to each by hemp, a seven-foot length of leather in our rights, and I look him hard right square in his eyes and they drop to the dirt where I intend to bury this whelp like I would any man who’d split my mule’s frog or burned down my damn barn.

My ears go a-ringing like funeral bells as the overseer calls the rules, though come swinging time I’ll pop his hide and tear it clean from the muscle, like scraping a scalded hog, and no matter the rules, I’ll not call quits nor hear them neither until I am satisfied.