Ezekiel was a married man who regularly attended Sunday services at the church that he had built on his island. He gave the excuse of piety or work to his wife, whenever she knocked on the door of his bedroom and he did not answer. She may have known that he was not in his separate bedroom, but lying on the cot in his office, pressed on top of the back of a muscled young man. Before Samuel had accepted the position of his overseer, Ezekiel had forced one of a group of handsome Negro men, which the previous overseer had culled for him from field slaves. That overseer had left a few days before Samuel had knocked on the back door of Ezekiel’s kitchen house. Ezekiel never had known congress with any man who had not been forced to comply; he had ignored the grunts of pain, the leaking blood and bowel effluvia of his Negroes. Thus, when Samuel did not shrink from Ezekiel’s searching hand on his shoulder, and then his open mouth and tongue, Ezekiel quickly fell in love. He was unaware that, while he was ecstatically pressing himself inside the slim blond-haired man with the aid of a generous slathering of lard, Samuel was fantasizing about murdering Ezekiel in torturous, inventive ways.
After Ezekiel had finished with his passion, Samuel would pretend he could not bear to part with his older lover. He clung to Ezekiel, and in a matter of weeks, Ezekiel had told him many important pieces of information: about the running of the plantation; the yearly expenses and profits; the buying of slaves; the selling of slaves; the tending of the land; and how a man of property did not merely own that property, but must make sure that he paid taxes on this property. A man who did not pay taxes could not retain what he had worked so hard to possess.
While Ezekiel spoke, Samuel kissed him with flutters. He touched Ezekiel’s lips, his cheeks, his collarbone, and more often than not, Ezekiel became capable again, this time in Samuel’s mouth. While Samuel tried not to choke, he no longer fantasized about Ezekiel’s death. Instead, he calculated what he would purchase that would require taxes. Within two years, and with the benefaction of Ezekiel, Samuel owned a secondhand two-wheel carriage, on which he paid taxes, as well as other goods that required the same. When the lawmakers in the （then） capital of Georgia, Milledgeville, passed the act announcing that each county should submit the names of the white heads of households, single white men, and white widows who had paid taxes for at least one year into a land lottery through which Creek lands would be distributed, Samuel’s name had been written down many times in Ezekiel’s record books as a respectable white man. And it was Ezekiel Waterford’s love, his grateful, sacrificial feeling, that persuaded him to write a letter certifying that one Samuel Edward Pinchard of legitimate, white birth had labored in his employ from March 1801 to September 1804, so that there would be no doubt that Samuel had a right to our land stolen from the Creek. When the announcement came that Samuel’s name had been drawn, that he was now the owner of a parcel of two hundred and two and a half acres, Ezekiel gave Samuel three hundred dollars and a better, younger horse than the one Samuel had taken from his dead father’s farm, and Ezekiel sent the younger man on his way with tears, well-wishes, and prayers.
The day Samuel rode away, he was not only proud of his status as a landowner; he was proud that he had suppressed his own tastes for little girls. Ezekiel had been devoted to Samuel, but also jealous. On certain days, he had ridden down to the tobacco fields unannounced to see if Samuel was standing too close to large, handsome Negroes. He had watched from a distance for a time, never climbing down from his horse, then ridden back the mile to his office. Samuel did not know if his jealousy would extend to children, but he hadn’t wanted to take the chance. Thus, Samuel spent four years in agony, watching little Negro girls carrying water out to the fields he supervised. The sound of their laughter was like knives in his flesh, but he was patient.
The Monster Makes His First Friend
Aidan Franklin was not as young as Samuel. His eyes were not Samuel’s strange, ever-changing color, only a pedestrian blue, but he was still a very handsome man. Aidan had scrambled for a living since he’d been a young boy in his parents’ one-room cabin. When Aidan married, his wife had given birth to five children, before she died in the blood of the childbed. Aidan married again, and that wife had given him seven children, so that children seemed to hang everywhere. Yet life’s misfortunes had not stolen Aidan’s optimism. When Samuel met him and his very young, tired wife along the way to the new town called Chicasetta in the middle of Georgia, Aidan quoted to him from Romans: “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose.” Aidan and his wife rode one horse. His children walked beside it.