Six. Four Thousand Plants
Chapter Six
Four Thousand Plants
By the middle of July the tobacco was over Nelson’s head and he lived in it.
Topping came first — going down the row and breaking the bud out of the top of every plant with your thumbnail so it would put its strength into the leaf instead of into flowering, eight or ten leaves left on and the rest of the ambition taken out of it.
Then suckering, which was the same job done forever: the plant would put out sprouts where the leaf met the stalk, and you took them off, and it put out more, and you went back down the same row six days later and took those off too.
And worming.
Every plant. Every leaf of every plant, top and under, because that was where they hung. And there were four thousand plants in that ground.
—
They were the size of Nelson’s finger and then, by the end of July, the size of two.
Green as the leaf and ridged and cold to the touch, with a red horn on the tail end that looked like it would sting you and would not, and eight legs down each side that let go one at a time when you pulled, so that getting one off was a slow sucking business you could feel all the way up your arm.
Then you put it on the ground and put your heel on it, or you took it between finger and thumb and pressed, and it went with a sound.
By the third day Nelson could take one off in a second and a half.
He was good at it the way he had been good at carrying brush, which is to say he found the way of it early and then went faster than anybody expected, and by the end of the first week Little Ephraim was calling him over to do the bad ones — the ones up under the top leaf where you had to get your hand round without tearing anything.
William came out on the fourth day.
He had been going out with them on and off since the transplanting, which nobody remarked on any more, and he came down the row with his shirt sleeves rolled and got to the second plant and stopped.
“There’s one.”
“Where.”
“There.” He pointed, from a distance of about two feet, with his whole arm.
Nelson came and looked. It was a big one, three inches, hanging along the underside of the third leaf with its head down.
“Take it off, then.”
William did not move.
Nelson looked at him. William was looking at the worm with his hands slightly out from his sides and an expression on his face that Nelson had not seen on it before and could not immediately name, and then he could name it, and it was the first genuinely surprising thing that had ever happened to him at Fair Prospect.
“You don’t like them.”
“I don’t care for them.”
“They can’t do anything to you.”
“I am aware of that,” William said, with dignity, still not moving.
Nelson reached past him and took it off — the slow pull, the legs going one at a time — and held it in his palm and offered it over.
William took two steps back.
And Nelson laughed. He did not decide to.
It came up out of him and it went on longer than it should have, and he stood in the row with a hornworm in his hand and laughed at the master’s son until he had to lean on a plant, and William went red from the collar up and said, “It’s the legs,” which made it worse, and then William started laughing too.
That was the day.
—
After that they had a whole world in there and it lasted five weeks.
They counted. That was the beginning of it.
You kept your count out loud and if you lost it you went back to the last number you were sure of, and William cheated so consistently and so badly that it became one of the pleasures of the day — he would go from forty-one to sixty and say sixty as though it had cost him nothing, and Nelson would say forty-two, and William would say sixty-one.
They named them. There was a class of enormous worm they called a bishop, and a bishop was worth six, and there was an argument that ran the entire month of August about whether a worm that fell off before you got hold of it counted at all.
They developed a firm belief, on no evidence, that the ones with more white on the side were the ones that had been at it longest and had therefore committed more crimes.
William was in favor of a system of trials.
Nelson pointed out that they had four thousand plants to get down and that trials would take some while, and William said that justice was not to be hurried, and did four plants’ worth of trials, and left off, and did not bring it up again that month.
And there were the turkeys.
Reuben turned twenty-odd of them into the ground in the mornings and they went down the rows on their own account, and a turkey will find a hornworm that a boy has walked past, and will do it all day for nothing, and will also stop dead in the middle of the row for no reason and refuse to be got round.
Turkeys were the funniest thing either of them had ever seen. That is a thing about being eight and nine in a tobacco field in July: a turkey is enough.
—
On the last Thursday in August, William ran them.
He had been at the trials again, or something like the trials, and had left off, and there was a stretch in the middle of the afternoon where the heat came down and stopped everything, and the turkeys were bunched up at the head of the row in the shade doing nothing, and William went at them with his hat.
Nelson was four rows over and heard it before he saw it — the noise turkeys make, which is not one noise — and came out at the end of the row and William was going up the headland at a dead run with his hat over his head and the whole flock going in front of him in a spreading grey wave, and it was, for about four seconds, the best thing Nelson had ever seen in his life.
Then they went into the woods.
They did not go up the headland and turn.
They went left, off the ground, through the gap by the old sheep fold and into the timber above the branch, all of them, and the noise went in among the trees and got further away and then stopped, and William came back down the headland with his hat in his hand, still laughing, out of breath.
“Did you see them go?”
“They’ve gone in the woods.”
“They’ll come out.”
They got six of them out before dark. Little Ephraim and two of the girls and Nelson went up and beat the timber for an hour and a half and brought six back, and Reuben came up and helped for the last of it and did not say anything at all while he did it, which was worse than if he had.
At dark there were three unaccounted for. In the morning one of them was found by the branch with its neck opened, which was a fox, and the other two did not come back.
—
Mr. Ashmore came down to the barn lot after breakfast.
He had his coat on and he had a switch he had cut on the way, and he did not look angry. Nelson had been trying all night to work out what he was going to look like and it turned out to be nothing at all — a man come to do a piece of business before he did the next piece of business.
“Whose was it?”
Nobody said anything. Reuben was there and Little Ephraim was there and the two girls were there and William was standing at the corner of the barn with his hands at his sides.
“It was—“ Nelson said.
Mr. Ashmore looked at him. That was all.
He did not tell him to be quiet or ask him to go on; he simply stopped and looked at him for about two seconds, without any expression, the way you look at a gate that has swung to, and Nelson heard the end of his own sentence go out of him like water out of a cracked jar.
“Come here,” Mr. Ashmore said.
It was seven strokes across the backs of the legs and the small of the back.
He did it without hurrying and without saying anything and he stopped when he had decided to stop, and then he threw the switch in the weeds and said, to Reuben, “Get another dozen out of Waller if he’ll sell them, and if he won’t, then Dabney,” and went back up to the house.
—
William found him afterward behind the corncrib.
Nelson was not crying by then. He had done that for a while and got it finished and was sitting on the ground with his back not touching anything, and William came round the corner and stopped and stood about six feet off.
“Are you all right?”
“Mm.”
William stood there. He put his hands in his pockets and took them out again.
“Why didn’t you tell him it was me?”
Nelson looked up at him.
“I did.”
“You didn’t. You said it was and then you stopped, and then he—“ William stopped. He worked at it. Nelson watched him work at it. He got partway and stopped, and started again and stopped, and then stood there.
“That’s not fair,” William said.
He said it out loud, in the yard, at some volume, to nobody.
Nelson had had that same word in his mouth for two years and had never once got it as far as the air, and here it was, said, by somebody who could say it, and the corncrib and the barn and the whole place went on exactly as they had been going on.
“No,” Nelson said.
“I’ll tell him.”
“Don’t.”
“I’ll tell him it was—“
“Don’t,” Nelson said, and there was something in the way it came out that stopped William with his mouth open, and after a second he shut it, and did not tell him, and neither of them said anything more about it then.
—
The next day William was careful with him.
He was careful all morning. He asked twice whether Nelson wanted to sit down.
He did not run anywhere. He carried things.
He was quiet in a way that made the back of Nelson’s neck crawl, and at one point he started a sentence with “I’ve been thinking about—“ and Nelson said, quickly, “The turkeys are in the second ground today,” and William said, “Are they,” and went to look at them.
By dinner he had a scheme about the branch and a dam.
By the middle of the afternoon he had told Nelson at length about a boy in Gordonsville who could swim across the river and back, and cheated twice at the counting, and gone from thirty-eight to fifty-five in one plant, and said nothing further about the dam.
And Nelson, walking the row behind him in the heat with his legs hurting every time he put a foot down, felt something go out of his chest that had been sitting in it since the morning before, and understood that he was glad — plainly and completely glad — that William had stopped being sorry.
He was eight. He did not do anything with it. He said, “Fifty-five,” and William said, “Fifty-six,” and they went on down the row.
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