Eight. The Mill Creek
Chapter Eight
The Mill Creek
In the March he turned ten, Reuben sent him to mill.
He said it the way he said everything, which was in the middle of something else. Nelson was in the barn lot holding a hame strap and Reuben was under the mule doing something to its foot, and he said, “You’ll take the corn to Yanceyville Thursday,” and went on with the foot.
Nelson stood there holding the strap.
“By myself?”
“You know the road.”
“I know it.”
“Then that’s who’s taking it,” Reuben said.
—
Mr. Ashmore wrote the pass on Wednesday night at the desk in the office and Reuben brought it down and gave it to him folded in three.
It was a piece of paper about the size of his hand with four lines of writing on it and a name at the bottom. Nelson took it and turned it over twice and looked at both sides of it and could not make out a single mark on it, and he was so proud of it that he could not eat his supper.
His mother made him a place for it. She cut a square of ticking and folded it and stitched three sides and made a loop for a string, and put it round his neck under his shirt with the paper flat inside it, and pulled the string out and looked at the length of it and shortened it an inch.
“Don’t take it off,” she said. “Not to swim, not for anybody. If a man on that road says give me that paper you give it to him and you stand still while he reads it and you say yes sir and no sir and where you’re going and who you belong to and nothing else. Say it back.”
“Yes sir and no sir and where I’m going and who I belong to.”
“And nothing else.”
“And nothing else.”
She looked at him for a second. Then she said, “It’s five mile and a piece. Don’t run the mule going up or she’ll be no good coming back,” and turned him round by the shoulder and sent him to bed.
—
Thursday was the first warm day of the year.
They put four bushels on the mule in two sacks and Nelson got up between them, and he was out of the yard gate at ten past six in the morning and on the road before the sun had got over the trees, and there was nobody on it.
That was the thing he had not expected. Nobody.
Not a soul for two miles. The road went down through the bottom and up the far side past the Beasley line, and there was frost in the low places and steam coming up off it where the sun got in, and a heron went up out of the branch with its legs hanging, and the mule walked, and Nelson sat on four bushels of corn in the middle of a road with a piece of paper round his neck and nobody in the world who knew exactly where he was.
He did not sing. He thought about singing and decided against it in case somebody heard.
William caught him up a mile short of the crossroads, coming at a canter on the mare with his coat flying, which meant he had got up at some hour he was not accustomed to and had not told anybody.
“Did you think I wasn’t coming?”
“I hoped you wasn’t.”
“You did not,” William said, and pulled the mare in and walked her alongside, and that was the last quiet Nelson got that day.
—
Yanceyville was a mill and a store and an ordinary and a house where a man made whiskey, at a place where two roads crossed a creek, and by eight in the morning there were nine people ahead of them.
That was how a mill went. You came, and you got in the order, and you waited, because Old Man Yancey’s wheel ground about as fast as it wanted to and there was no arguing with water.
Some of them had been there since before light.
There were sacks stacked along the wall of the mill house in the order they had come and a boy sitting on the end of them whose entire job was to know the order and to fight about it if necessary.
Nelson put his two sacks at the end and said his place and the boy said it back.
Then he turned round and there were fifteen Black men and boys sitting along the creek bank in the sun with nothing to do for three hours.
He knew two of them. He had seen four more of them before. The rest he had never laid eyes on in his life.
“Whose are you?” said a man with a grey beard, not unkindly, moving over on the log.
“Mr. Ashmore’s.”
“Mm,” said the man. “Sit down, then.”
William had gone off to the store.
—
Nelson had three hours on that creek bank.
They talked about nothing. That was what astonished him.
They talked about the weather and about a horse and about a man in Gordonsville who had put up a machine for threshing that had cost him four hundred dollars and did not work, and about whether the creek was lower this year than last, and about a dog.
Squire, who belonged to the Dabneys, could do a thing with a jew’s-harp that made a boy from Fairlawn fall backwards off the log.
Nobody asked Nelson anything for the first hour.
He sat at the end and listened and got the shape of it — who was funny, who was listened to, who was old enough that people shifted along the log when he came — and somewhere in the second hour a man handed him half a piece of cold pone without saying anything about it or looking at him, and Nelson understood that he had been let in.
The old man with the grey beard was called Bartlett and he belonged to the Beasleys.
“Where’s the one that was with you at Christmas?” Squire said to him, at some point, about nothing. “The tall one.”
“Gone,” Bartlett said.
“Mm,” said Squire.
And that was all of it. Nobody asked where. Nobody said anything else about it. The talk went on to the threshing machine, and Nelson sat on the end of the log with half a piece of cold pone in his hand and felt the whole bank change temperature for about two seconds and then change back.
Later — and it came round naturally, because they had got onto barns and who fired their beds when — somebody said, “Ashmore’s, ain’t you?”
“Yes sir.”
“He’s all right,” the man said, to the log in general, not to Nelson. “Ashmore’s all right.”
“Ashmore ain’t sold nobody since the old man died,” said somebody else.
“He sold Cassius.”
“Cassius wanted going. That was different and you know it was.”
And they argued about Cassius for a while, comfortably, the way men argue about a thing that happened before some of them were born, and then Bartlett said something about Beasley that made two men laugh in a particular short way and nobody take it any further, and the talk went on.
Nelson sat there in the sun with his back against a willow and did his arithmetic.
Ashmore’s all right. He turned it over. It was the first time in his life he had heard the place he lived described from the outside by anybody, and what the outside said was that it was all right, and he found that he was pleased about it.
He was pleased in his chest. He noticed himself being pleased and did not go any further into it than that, because he was ten years old and it was March and the sun was on the water.
He did notice one thing. He noticed that Bartlett, getting up off the log to see to his sacks, could not get his left arm above his shoulder, and that he got the sack up with his right and his knee, and that nobody offered to help him and nobody looked, and that this was plainly the way it had been for a long time.
He did not connect the two. That is not how a boy of ten thinks. He put Ashmore’s all right in one hand and Bartlett’s arm in the other and carried them home separately.
—
William came back at eleven with a paper of horehound drops and no explanation of where he had got the money.
He sat down on the bank at the end of the log and the talk stopped, and did not start again, and after a while Squire got up and went to see about his meal and then two more of them went, and by the time the meal was ground there were six men on that bank and none of them were talking.
Nelson knew exactly what had happened and could not have said one word about it. He sat between the log and William with the paper of horehound in his hand — William had given him half — and looked at the water.
“That man can play,” William said.
“That’s Squire.”
“He ought to come and play at the house.”
“Mm,” Nelson said.
—
They got the meal at half past twelve, four bushels gone in as corn and coming back out warm as three and a half sacks of meal, and the miller kept his toll, and the boy on the sacks said “Ashmore” and struck it off with his thumbnail on the door frame.
The meal was warm. That was the thing nobody tells you. Nelson got his hand right down into the top of the sack while the boy was tying the second one, and it was warm as a dog, and it smelled the way the inside of your own mouth smells when you have been running.
They went home slow.
They went home very slow, because there was no reason not to, and because the day had turned into the kind of afternoon that does not happen in March more than once, and William got off the mare at the bottom of the long hill and led her, and Nelson got off the mule, and the two boys walked five miles up a road in Louisa County eating horehound drops out of a paper.
They argued the whole way. They argued about whether a mill could be made to go faster by putting more water on it, which William said was obvious and Nelson said would break it.
They argued about whether the meal was warm from the grinding or warm from the sun, and Nelson won that one by putting his hand in the sack in the shade.
They argued about the jew’s-harp and whether it was blown or plucked, neither of them having the least idea, both certain.
About a mile from the gate William said, “That was a good day,” in the flat matter-of-fact way he had, and then went on talking about something else without waiting for an answer.
Nelson got the sacks in and got the mule rubbed down and got up to the house yard at dusk with the paper still round his neck under his shirt, and his mother took it out of the ticking and looked at it and put it back, and asked him three questions about the road and none about anything else, and gave him his supper.
He lay awake a long time that night, which he almost never did, running the day back from the start.
The frost steaming in the low places. The heron. The nine ahead of them. The pone. The willow at his back and the sun on the creek and six men talking about a threshing machine.
He went to sleep thinking it was the best day of his life, working out how soon Reuben might send him again.
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