Free Washington and Caesar by Christian Cameron Page A

English gowns. It all sickened him because none of it was theirs or ever would be. Every pull from the jug seemed to add to his resentment.
    But the hunt had been something, a challenge that he had enjoyed. The fox had never fooled him, and the run had been worth the effort. Caesar was open enough to understand that his triumph at the day’s hunt might be of the same order as that of the sewing crew over an English gown. The thought that he himself was sinking into the same proprietary habit of thought made him sad, because he wasn’t even sure that Washington had noticed his success, and it made him angry and sad that he wanted the master’s praise.
    He didn’t realize that he was pounding the doorframe of the carriage house with his hand until it hurt, and there were Queeny’s hands on his arms, and her mouth on his, pulling him into the dark.
    “If you jes’ goin’ to get drunk like a fool, I got bettah plans.”
    She was wearing stays and a gown that made her waist even smaller than usual; it excited him. She stayed just out of his reach, flitting in to kiss him and away.
    “Sho’ you ain’t too drunk?” she taunted.
    He swayed drunkenly to mislead her, shifted his weight against the great horse barn’s wall and caught her effortlessly with both hands around her slim waist, lifted her a moment and stepped through the stable door.
    “Only the horse boys ‘lowed in heah,” she whispered,but his hand was running up her naked leg under her petticoat and he wasn’t drunk at all, though his mouth tasted of pipe smoke and corn liquor. He settled a saddlecloth under her with a consideration for her best clothes that would never have occurred to most men, and he did it without pausing in his other attentions. A fondness for him entered into her, and then she was lost in other matters.

3
    Truro Churchyard, Virginia, January 1774
    The churchyard at Pohick was complete, with a breasthigh brick wall surrounding a graveyard devoid of graves and the four walls of the church proper. Washington sat on his horse in the winter rain and contemplated the empty churchyard and the costs of ambition; the coveted post of warden had cost him a hefty subscription to an Anglican church to which he felt only social allegiance. All the first men of the county attended the Upper Church. Most of their business was transacted in the yard after sermon, and the vestrymen and wardens had a certain advantage, as if they were “to home” and the others visiting. In Virginia, the sacerdotal meaning of the positions was scarcely spoken of in the community.
    He didn’t fancy deep enquiry about the state of his soul. It sufficed him that he did good works for his peers and subordinates, that every man called him generous and that even his slaves remembered that he had treated them by hand when the pox hit his plantations. He didn’t enjoy the sort of searching often pushed by Reverend Massey; he wasn’t really sure that an afterlife existed, or that it was important that one should search. He had felt from his youngest days that such things were beyond his control, and lay in God’s hands, and he believed in God as he believed in the king and the empire. A pre-eminent spiritcontrolled all, as he controlled his plantation and his tenants controlled their farms, all the way down to the dogs boy controlling the dogs, all the way up to the burgesses and parliament and the king…and God.
    Wolfe had been devoted to Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” which Washington had looked at without a spark of interest. It remained a title to him, but he looked at his own red-earthed country churchyard and wondered if Gray had seen the same things he saw: the value of the building, at 579 pounds Virginia currency; the bricklayer’s time and the value of the land; the work to “view and examine” as the wardens were enjoined. Washington doubted that a poet saw the value of things, or the work that built them.
    By some freak association,