Seven. The Cutting
Chapter Seven
The Cutting
It had taken three years and it had started with a hem.
Old Mrs. Waller had come over to Fair Prospect in the November after Esther came, on some business of her son’s, and had come in out of the wet and stood in the passage with the water coming off her, and Esther had been sent to see to her cloak.
And Esther had taken the cloak away and dried it and brushed it and brought it back, and while she was about it had put three inches of the hem up where it had come down at the back and been pinned by somebody with a pin.
She had not been asked to. It took her seven minutes.
Mrs. Waller had said nothing about it that day. Eleven days later a boy came over from Fairlawn with a bundle and a note that Mr. Ashmore read out to Reuben in the yard, and in the bundle was a grey merino that wanted taking in through the body, and after that it never stopped.
—
The way it worked was this.
The work came to her, because she could not go to it.
A boy or a girl came over from Fairlawn or from the Dabneys’ or from the Beasleys’ beyond the crossroads with a bundle, and Mr. Ashmore was asked, and Mr. Ashmore said yes because Mr. Ashmore was paid — half a dollar, a dollar, whatever was agreed between the white people, and none of it came anywhere near Esther.
That was the front of the arrangement. Esther was not paid for her work in money and never had been in her life and did not expect to be.
But the bundle came with the girl who carried it, and the girl waited while the fitting was talked over, and the girl went back. And that was where Esther got paid.
Thread. That was the first thing and the constant thing.
Nobody counts thread. A woman who has sent over a bodice does not know within a hundred yards how much thread it took, and so Esther had thread — good linen thread, silk when there was silk, and by 1849 she had a box of it wound on cards behind a loose board at the foot of the wall.
Buttons. The ends of cloth, which are the seamstress’s by custom everywhere and which she took full advantage of. A paper of pins. Wax. Twice a year a candle end, which meant working after dark, which meant more work, which meant more candle ends.
Food came too, sometimes — a piece of bacon out of a Fairlawn kitchen, sugar in a twist of paper, once a whole jar of preserved damsons that she and Anna ate over three days with a spoon and told nobody about.
And information.
That was the part nobody had reckoned on when they set the arrangement up, and it was worth more than all the rest of it together.
Esther could not read a word and had never been off Fair Prospect since the day she came to it, and by the spring of 1849 she knew that Mr. Beasley had put a mortgage on his upper place; that the Dabneys had a daughter who was not going to marry the man everybody said; that old Mrs. Waller’s youngest had lost money at Charlottesville and it had been paid for him twice; and that a man over toward Gordonsville had sold three people in February and had told his neighbors it was two.
She got all of it in the doorway, in the ten minutes while a girl waited for a bundle. She never asked a question directly in her life. She said, and how is your mistress keeping, and then she listened for an hour a week for three years.
—
The work itself she loved, which was a thing she did not say out loud to anybody and did not need to.
She loved the cutting most. Anybody can sew; sewing is patience and a good eye and ten thousand hours.
Cutting is different. Cutting is standing across a room from a woman who is complaining about the weather and seeing that she carries her right shoulder an inch forward of her left because she has carried a child on that hip for two years, and knowing what that will do to a shoulder seam, and building the correction into a flat piece of cloth on a table before a stitch is in it, so that when the woman puts it on she says oh and does not know why.
She did it for her own son too, from the year he was nine and got put to carrying on the right shoulder — half an inch more in that shoulder than the other, in every shirt she ever cut for him, and she never mentioned it to him or to anybody.
Delphy had taught her that and Delphy had told her the truth about it, which was that nobody would ever say so.
They would say the cloth was good, or that it was a lucky one, or that they had lost weight.
Esther had made a claret-colored silk for the younger Miss Waller in the winter of ’48 that was the best thing she had done in her life, and Miss Waller had worn it to two things in Louisa and had said, both times, that she had got it in Richmond.
That did not take anything away from it.
Esther knew what it was. She had stood in the loom room with it finished over her arm at eleven o’clock at night with one candle end going and had looked at the way the sleeve head sat, and had been as pleased as she had ever been about anything, and had blown the candle out and gone to bed.
There was the other part of the arrangement, too, which had been in it since Richmond and which she had known about in Richmond before she ever got on the cars. It had been in it since Richmond and it was in it still. She did not think about that part in the daytime.
—
Now. The boy.
She had three years of watching it by the spring of 1849 and she had come to her conclusions, and the conclusions were these.
Nelson could not be protected. There was nothing she could do — not a thing, not one — if Mr. Ashmore decided tomorrow to sell him to a man in a wagon. She had known that since Chesley’s and had never once let herself pretend otherwise, because pretending is how women get careless.
But there was a difference between the things that were decided and the things that merely happened.
Most of what happened to a boy on a place like this was not decided by anybody.
It happened because he was in the wrong ground when a man was in a temper; because he was the one standing nearest; because nobody had a reason to prefer him.
And what she had learned in three years was that a great many of those things did not happen to Nelson.
He had been whipped once in three years, over the turkeys, and the man who did it had gone away afterward and bought more turkeys.
Reuben gave him the easy end of things. Tapp — who had been put over the field that spring and who Esther had disliked on sight for reasons she could not itemize — had already been told, by somebody, in some manner she had not witnessed, that the boy was about the house.
None of that was because anybody at Fair Prospect thought well of her son.
It was because of a nine-year-old white child who liked him, and everybody knew it, and nobody wanted to find out how much.
So she went to work on it.
—
She made William a shirt in April.
Nobody asked her to. She did it out of the end of a bolt that came back from the Dabneys’ with the good part used, and she did it in two evenings she could not spare, and she cut it standing across the room from him while he was telling her about a horse — his shoulders, which were narrow and going to be wide, and his neck, which he had grown two inches of that winter — and it fit him the way nothing in his life had ever fit him.
He put it on in the yard and turned round twice.
Mr. Ashmore said something about it at supper, apparently, because Anna reported it, and after that there was less said in the kitchen about how much of Esther’s time was going out to Fairlawn.
That was one thing. The second thing was the room.
She began to keep things there. A tin of the good scraps for making things out of.
The claret silk ends. Half a dozen bird bones Little Ephraim gave her that a boy could make something of.
She sat out on the step in the evenings where she could be seen from the yard instead of inside where she could not.
She found that when she talked about Richmond, William stayed, and she had ten years of Richmond and she gave it out in pieces, a little at a time, the way you pay a man you want to keep coming back.
By midsummer they were in the loom room two evenings out of three.
She could hear every word they said. She could see what was between them from across a room in the same way she could see a woman’s right shoulder from across a room. She knew, by August of that year, more about how the two of them were going than either one of them did.
That was the whole of the design and she was not ashamed of it and did not pretend to herself that she had not built it.
—
In September Nelson came in one evening and threw himself down on the floor by the wall and said, “He’s a liar.”
Esther did not look up.
“Mm.”
“He said he’d give me the — he said the colt was going to be mine to have. He said that. He’s said it about twenty times. And today Mr. Tapp had it out and William was on it and I said when am I going to have my ride and he said what ride.”
“Mm.”
“He said it, Mama.”
She put the needle down.
She could have said several things. She could have said, he never meant it and he never once meant to lie to you either, and you will not be able to tell the difference between those two things for another ten years.
She could have said, there is no colt in the world that is going to be yours to have and I would rather you learned it from a boy who likes you than from a man who does not.
What she said was: “Was Mr. Tapp there when you asked him?”
Nelson stopped.
“...Yes’m.”
“Then he couldn’t very well say anything else, could he,” Esther said, and picked the needle back up. “In front of a white man that works for his daddy. He’d look a fool.”
She let that sit a second or two.
“He gave you them gloves,” she said, “and he give you that buckle, and there’s not another boy on this place has been off it as much as you have. You keep an account, you’ll find it comes out ahead.”
Nelson lay on the floor and worked on it.
“It’s not the same,” he said, eventually, without any force in it.
“No,” Esther agreed. “Go and see if Anna’s got anything.”
And he got up and went, because there is nothing in the world so persuasive to a nine-year-old boy as the possibility that Anna has got anything, and Esther sat in the loom room with the light going and finished the seam she was on.
She was not lying to him. She had considered that carefully before she said it, and she came out in the same place: every single fact she had put in front of her son that evening was true.
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