Two. Fair Prospect #2
William Ashmore — she did not know his name yet, because nobody had thought to tell her — came down the steps and stopped four feet away and looked at Nelson some more.
“Come on then,” he said.
He said it the way you say it. Then he turned and went off along the front of the house toward the corner where the kitchen was, and got about fifteen feet, and looked back.
Nelson had not moved. He had both hands in her hem now and he had turned his face into her hip.
He was six years old and he had been on the cars since morning and he had not eaten since Richmond and he did not know where he was and he did not know that boy, and he did not, Esther was certain, understand one word of what had just been done to him.
The boy at the corner of the house waited. Somewhere behind her, the man in the wagon clucked at his horse and the wheels started.
She had about a second and a half.
If he did not go, then in one minute somebody would say it again, louder, and in two minutes somebody would put a hand on him, and the first thing that would ever have happened to her son at this place would be a white hand taking him by the arm in front of the whole yard, and he would remember it, and — worse, much worse, she had watched it happen to a boy at the Pattersons’ — he would learn on his first evening that the way you went to a white child was by being made to.
She put her hand flat on the back of his head.
“Go on,” she said.
He looked up at her.
“Go on,” she said. “I’ll be right here. Go on, now.”
And Nelson let go of her dress and went.
He went slowly and he went the whole way with his head turned back over his shoulder at her, and she stood in the middle of that yard with her bundle under her arm and her hand still up in the air where his head had been, and she smiled at him, and kept smiling at him, all the way to the corner of the house, until he had gone round it and could not see her any more.
Then she went and found the near end of the frame building and put her bundle down on the floor, because there was no bed in it, and stood in the doorway and looked out.
There was going to be a great deal of work.
The curtains alone were a week. The man’s collars were a day and would be a day every month for as long as she was here.
And whatever came from Fairlawn and the other places once it got about that there was somebody at Ashmore’s who could cut from a person — that was the part worth having, and she had eighteen months, she thought, before anybody would trust her with it.
She stood there and made her list, and did not go and look for her son, and had her breathing under her own management by the time Reuben came up with a plate.
—
The plate was cold corn bread and a piece of middling meat and four boiled potatoes, and it was more than she had expected, and she ate it standing up in the doorway watching the yard.
Anna came out of the far end of the duplex while she was doing it. She was fifty or thereabouts, broad through the shoulders, and she had her sleeves pushed up and her hands wet, and she looked at Esther for a while from her own doorway without coming any closer.
“You in there,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Mm,” Anna said.
She went back in. She came out again a minute later with a tick over her arm — a grey ticking case, empty, folded flat — and held it out at arm’s length and let Esther come and get it.
“There ain’t any straw up here. It’s all down at the barns and it’s dark directly, so you won’t fill that tonight.” She looked past Esther through the open door into the room. “They took the loom out of there Thursday.”
Esther turned and looked at the room. She had not looked at the floor properly. Now she did, and saw them: four square places in the dust where four feet had stood, and a long clean strip where something had been dragged out through the door.
“Thursday,” she said.
“Thursday,” said Anna. “Carried it over to the kitchen loft and put it up on end. Reuben and Little Ephraim and that was a half a day gone out of Reuben’s week.” She wiped her hands down her apron. “Loom’s been in that room nine years.”
Then she went back inside and shut her door, and that was the whole of the welcome, and Esther stood holding the empty tick and understood that she had been expected since Thursday.
—
She got the room in order in the last of the light, which took no time at all, because there was nothing to put in order.
She swept it with a broom Anna’s door produced without Anna appearing behind it.
She set her bundle in the corner farthest from the door and untied it and took inventory, which she did not need to do, having done it in Richmond: two dresses counting the one she stood in, a shift, a head cloth, a wooden case with her needles in it, wound round twice with thread, and a thimble of her own that she had been given by a woman named Delphy at the second place and had kept through the sale by carrying it in her mouth.
She put the thimble on and took it off and put it in the case.
Then it was dark, and the whip-poor-wills started, and she sat down on the floor with her back against the wall where she could see out the door, and waited.
She heard him before she saw him.
She heard bare feet coming fast and uneven across the packed dirt of the yard, and then a stumble, and then the feet again, and then Nelson came round the corner of the duplex and into the doorway going too fast and had to catch himself on the frame.
He was filthy. He had dirt to the knees and a long grey smear of something up one forearm and his hair had chaff in it, and he was holding something in his right fist, and he was entirely, wildly awake in the way small children go when they have gone past being tired and come out the other side.
“There’s a boy lives here,” he said.
“Is there.”
“He’s got — “ Nelson took a breath and started over, because there was too much and it was coming out in the wrong order. “He’s got a colt that ain’t got a name yet and he says I can help name it and there’s four dogs and one of them’s called Bragg and he’s the biggest one and he let me hold — “ He opened his fist. There was a brass buckle in it, green at the edges, off some piece of harness that had gone to pieces years ago. “He said I could keep it.”
Esther looked at the buckle.
“He said you could keep it.”
“He said I could keep it,” Nelson said, with his whole chest, and then he sat down on the floor because his legs had finished.
“You eat?”
“Yes’m.”
“What’d you eat?”
“Corn bread. And a peach.” He turned the buckle over. “Two peaches.”
“All right.” She put her hand out and he leaned into it and she got the chaff out of his hair with her fingers, working at it. “Turn round.”
He turned round. There was more of it down the back of his neck and inside his collar, and she got at that too.
“They had you in the barn?”
“In the loft.”
“Doing what?”
“Nothing. Looking at where the swallows are.”
“Mm,” she said. She got the last of it and brushed his shoulders off with the flat of her hand and turned him back around and looked at him in the dark, which she could just about do. “That boy hit you?”
“No.”
“Anybody put a hand on you today?”
“No.”
“He tell you to do anything?”
Nelson thought about it, honestly, wanting to be accurate, because she had asked in the voice she used when she wanted a true answer.
“He said come on,” he said.
“All right,” Esther said.
She said it in exactly the tone she’d have used for two peaches, and she laid the empty tick out along the wall and folded her second dress into a wad for under his head, and put him down on it, and lay down beside him on the boards with her arm over him because there was nothing else to put over him and the night was warm anyway.
“Mama.”
“Mm.”
“It’s got a — the colt’s got a white place on its — “
He was asleep before he got to where the white place was.
Esther lay on her back on the floor of the loom room and looked at the ceiling she could not see. Through the wall, Anna turned over twice and then began to snore, which was a comfort, being the only thing about the place so far that had been advertised in advance and turned out true.
Out in the dark the whip-poor-wills kept it up, three of them, going round and round, and did not stop until sometime after she did.
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