Four. The Plant Beds
Chapter Four
The Plant Beds
They burned the plant beds in the middle of February, and it took four days, and it was the coldest work of the year and the warmest, both at once.
You had to have new ground for it. Old ground had weed seed in it and would give you a bed full of everything except tobacco, so in January the men went into the woods above the branch and cut out an acre of scrub and brush and left it lying, and in February, when it had dried and the wind was right, they piled it back over the ground and set it alight and burned the whole face of the earth clean.
It wanted a great deal of brush. Nelson heard Reuben say a number to Mr. Ashmore and did not know what it meant, and heard him say it again to Anna that evening in a different voice, and the second time it came out as a sight more brush than they think.
Everybody was on it. Everybody. The women came out of the house, and Anna stood at a fire at the edge of it all four days with a pot going, and Little Ephraim drove the cart back and forth from the woods with the mule, and the seventeen came up out of the tobacco ground because there was no tobacco to be in, and they worked in the smoke from before light until they could not see.
Nelson worked the first morning.
Nobody told him to. He came up behind Little Ephraim’s cart at the edge of the cut and there was brush lying everywhere in heaps, and everybody was carrying it up the slope in armfuls, and so he picked up an armful and carried it up the slope.
It was cedar and it went through his sleeves and scratched him from wrist to elbow, and it weighed more than it looked, and by the fourth trip his arms were shaking and by the sixth he had got the way of it, which was to take less and go faster.
Nobody said anything to him. A woman named Patience came past him going down while he was going up and moved a branch that was about to get him in the face, without stopping and without looking at him, the way you’d move a branch out of anybody’s face.
By the middle of the morning he had a system. He would take his armful up and drop it and then run back down, because running down was free.
He was seven that month and it was the best he had ever felt.
—
William came out about ten.
He came up the cart track in his coat with his hands in his pockets, taking his time, and stopped at the edge of the cut and looked at it — the whole slope going, twenty people in the smoke, the mule, the cart, the fires laid and not yet lit — and Nelson saw him from the top of the slope with an armful of cedar and knew he had about a minute.
He took the armful up. He came back down. William was still standing at the edge of the cut watching it and had not called him.
He got one more load.
“Nelson,” William said, on the way up with it.
He put the brush on the pile and came over. There was nothing else to do. He came over with his arms bleeding in three places from the cedar and his shirt out and his ears ringing from the cold, and he was so pleased with himself he could hardly stand still.
“I got twelve loads.”
“Twelve,” William said. He was looking past him at the slope. “Are they going to light it today?”
“They said tomorrow. They said the wind’s wrong.”
“Hm,” William said, and turned and started off along the edge of the cut toward the branch, and Nelson looked back once at the cart and at Patience coming down the slope with her hands empty, and went after him.
They spent the rest of the day at the branch, where there was ice at the edges and the whole thing could be smashed with a stick.
It was a good day. That was the part Nelson could not do anything with: it was a good day.
William had brought bread out in his coat and they ate it sitting on the bank, and they broke the ice all along forty feet of the branch, which was genuinely worth doing, and William told him about a man in Gordonsville who had a bear.
And all day, up the hill behind them, he could hear it. The cart, and the mule, and the voices, going on without him.
—
They lit the beds the next day at noon.
Nelson was allowed to be there for that because everybody was there for that. Mr. Ashmore came out and stood at the top of the cut with his coat open and watched and did not say anything to anybody.
Reuben walked the line with a brand and touched it in at seven places along the bottom edge and stood back.
It went slowly at first, low down, a lot of white smoke and nothing to see, and then it found the cedar and stood straight up.
It went up twenty feet. The whole slope came alive at once with a noise like something breathing in and never breathing out, and the heat came off it and hit them in a wall and everybody took a step back at the same time without meaning to, and somebody laughed, and then several people laughed.
The smoke went straight up and then turned east and laid out flat over the branch, and the sun went through it orange, and the ground under the fire went black and then grey.
Nelson stood there with his mouth open.
He was up at the front with the children and Little Ephraim, and William was beside him with his hat off, and neither of them said anything for a long time.
The heat was enormous. You could not look at it for more than a few seconds without your eyes going.
Behind him the men were watching the edges with rakes for anything that got out into the leaves, and one of them stamped something out over on the left and swore, and everyone else went on watching the middle of it.
“Look at it,” William said.
“I am.”
“No, look at — “ He grabbed Nelson’s sleeve and pointed up. “There. Where it comes out the top.”
Nelson looked where he was pointing. Up above the flame the air itself was moving, running upward in ropes, so that the trees on the far side of the branch were sliding about and coming apart and putting themselves back together.
“The trees are going funny.”
“That’s the heat doing that,” William said, and then, with nobody else there to ask: “How is it doing that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I,” said William, and they stood there in front of it side by side for the best part of an hour.
That was the first thing.
—
It was near dark when William noticed his hands.
Nelson had them in his armpits, which is what you do, and had been doing it a while, and had stopped feeling the ends of his fingers about an hour before and had not thought about it because there was a fire.
“Give me your hand.”
“What?”
“Give it here.” William took it and turned it over and held it, and his own were warm. “That’s — you can’t feel that, can you. That.” He pressed the nail of Nelson’s middle finger.
“Some.”
“You can’t feel it at all.” He let go and pulled his gloves off, one and then the other, and held them out. “Here.”
Nelson looked at them.
They were good gloves. They were brown leather with a seam up each finger and a little strap and button at the wrist, and they were worth more than anything Nelson had ever had in his hand, more than the buckle by a hundred times, and William was holding them out with his arm straight and had been for some seconds.
“Take them, they’re cold.”
“Yes sir.”
“Don’t say sir, God almighty,” William said, in exactly the tone Nelson had heard him use for a dog that had rolled over, and pushed the gloves into his chest and went off up the line toward his father.
Nelson put them on.
They were far too big and they were the warmest thing he had ever worn, and his hands came back inside them over the next few minutes in a slow ache that made his eyes water, and he stood in the dark at the edge of the burn with his hands in a rich man’s gloves.
Twenty feet away Patience was going down the line with a rake, and her hands were bare, and had been bare for two days, and were split across the knuckles.
She did not look at him. Nobody looked at him. He would have given a great deal for somebody to look at him.
—
He came down at full dark and his mother was at the door with the light behind her.
She saw them before he was in the room.
“Whose are those?”
“Mine. He gave them me.”
Esther held her hand out and he took them off and gave them to her, and she turned one over and looked at the seams and at the strap and at the little bone button, and she stood with it for a second longer than the looking wanted.
“Don’t lose them,” she said, and gave it back.
Then she got him in and sat him down and turned his forearms over and started picking cedar out of the scratches with the point of a needle, and he told her about the fire — about the heat, and the noise it made, and the way the air had gone above it and made the trees come apart — and she said mm and is that so and went on picking, and when he ran out she said:
“You’re seven today.”
“Am I?”
“You are.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I was there,” Esther said.
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