Read Online Gabriel's Story by David Anthony Durham - Free Book Online Page B

his thoughts, and smiled at the boy.
    â€œHey, Gabriel, I was wondering what you were up to. Just looking over some things here. Just dreaming, you know. Just dreaming. What do you think of this here?”
    He held out the new plowshare that he’d been contemplating. He ran his fingers over it and checked the blade from different angles in the light, divining a future in its contours. He held it with the delicate fingers of a glassblower as he explained that this blade was some new steel, harder than the old stuff, longer-lived. Perhaps with a blade such as this they could turn up the whole of that south-facing slope and double their tilled land in no time at all. He asked the boy his thoughts and got answers, such as they were, only in shrugs and nods, which seemed neither to confirm nor deny his hopes. Whether disheartened by this response or not, Solomon decided to make the purchase. He took the plowshare and his other supplies up to be tallied by the storekeeper.
    Gabriel stood back a little, watching the man calculate their bill. He looked over his features, settling on the man’s thick and unpleasant eyebrows and the slightly sinister curl of his mustache. He was cordial in the way of whites to blacks, joking with Solomon and asking after the health of his family, wondering whether they were turning much soil, assuring him that this plow would indeed help their progress, and saying that Solomon was lucky, as this was the last one he had in stock.
    This statement, casual as it was, caught the attention of another man, a small fellow with reddish skin and ears that craned forward, rodentlike, as if to pick up just such information. He approached the counter, watched the goings-on for a second, then spoke. “Did I hear you right, Howe? Is that there the last of them new blades?” Howe answered that he had heard right. The man thought this over, his eyes fixed hard and suggestively on the storekeeper’s. “Don’t you remember I asked you to set one of those aside for me? Just the day before yesterday, came right in here and asked you explicit not to sell the last one except to me.”
    Howe slowed in his work and drew himself up, his eyes finally meeting the other white man’s and joining in some optical discourse. Before long he began to recall just such a conversation. “Hal, damned if I didn’t forget all about that.”
    â€œI thought you’d remember, though,” Hal said, letting a smile tilt his lips. A trickle of tobacco juice escaped the corner of his mouth and blended into the reddish hair of his chin. “I had your word, didn’t I?”
    â€œThat you did.” Howe hung his head for a moment and considered the sad state of these events, then looked up at Solomon. “Sorry, Solomon, looks like this here plow blade was on hold, just like Hal says. I can’t sell it to you.”
    Solomon was slow in answering. Across his face passed many emotions in rapid-fire succession, not the least of which was anger. From where Gabriel stood, he could see the man’s fingers grip the gray boards of the counter as if they would pierce through them and rip the wood asunder. The boy waited for what words or deed would come, as surely some must, for this was the man who had so lamented the pain of dreams deferred and cried the virtues of the freedom of honest work.
    â€œYou can’t?” Solomon asked, as if no other words would come to him.
    â€œNaw, he can’t,” the customer said. He reached over and took the blade from Solomon’s things. As he turned to resume shopping, he murmured, “It’d be wasted on you anyway, damn nigger farmer.”
    Gabriel followed the man with red-hot eyes. They fixed on the man’s ears, on the scrawny tube that was his neck. He looked back at Solomon, his face for once characterized not by a look of loathing but beseeching instead, longing for a wrong to be righted. Solomon held his gaze for a