Nine. Nine Days Without a Name
Chapter Nine
Nine Days Without a Name
Esther knew in November and told nobody until February, and Anna knew in December.
Anna did not say so. What Anna did was start leaving things — a second piece at supper, and then, one evening at the beginning of January, a cup of something bitter and grey on the step outside the loom room door with a saucer over it to keep the flies off, and no word about it before or after.
Esther drank it. It was raspberry leaf and something else and it tasted like a wet fence, and there was another one three days later, and after that there was one twice a week until June.
They did not discuss it once.
—
What she thought about, that winter, was the work.
She was twenty-nine years old and she had built the thing on her table over three years, out of seven minutes on a cloak and a great deal of listening in a doorway, and the whole of it rested on one fact, which was that she was the best in the county and everybody who mattered knew it.
The trouble with that arrangement was that it had to keep being demonstrated.
There was no shop. There was no sign. There was nothing anybody had signed.
Miss Louisa Waller sent her work over to Fair Prospect because the last thing had been right and because Mrs. Beasley had said so, and if two things went out slow, or one thing went out with a shoulder wrong in it, then Miss Louisa would send the next one to the woman at Green Springs who was not as good and was closer, and the whole thing would be gone in a season and Esther would be a woman on a place with twenty-odd people on it who could not lift a hogshead.
So she made a plan and worked it the way she worked everything.
She took in more than she could do from January onward, and she did it, and she did it at night with candle ends, and by March she was six weeks ahead of what anybody had asked her for and had a shelf of finished work standing back that nobody knew about.
She put by two lengths of good linen. She got Sarah — who was eight then, and who nobody had thought about — started on plain seams by giving her a doll’s worth of scraps and telling her the truth about her hands, which is more than most people get at eight.
By April she was carrying it in front and could not hide it any more and did not try.
Mr. Ashmore was told, or noticed, or both. Nothing came of it. Nothing was said to her at all, that spring, by anybody in that house, which was the outcome she had worked for and had not been at all sure of getting.
—
She was very sick with it in the last six weeks and she went on standing to cut, because you cannot cut sitting down.
Patience took her water twice a day out of the springhouse without being asked and without stopping.
Little Ephraim, who was fifteen now and had got tall and clumsy and had a voice that was going wrong, took to appearing in the loom room doorway with things — a chair back he had mended, a bundle of the long grass for the floor, and once, unaccountably, a live turtle, which he presented without any explanation whatsoever and which Esther kept in a box for two days before she let it go.
Reuben came by in May and stood in the door and looked at the room and said, “There’s no cradle.”
“No.”
“Mm,” Reuben said, and went away, and came back three days later with a cradle. It was not a new cradle and it had been three other things first and one of the rockers had been cut out of a barrel stave and did not match, and it was the single best-made object in that room.
—
It came on the eighteenth of June at about two in the morning, and it went hard for eight hours and then very fast, and it was Anna and Patience in the room and nobody else.
Anna was fifty-four and had done it perhaps forty times and had a way of talking during it that was entirely about other things — about the crossroads, about a woman she had known at her second place, about the price of shoes — and did not stop for anything.
She talked for eight hours and never once changed her tone.
Esther held on to the voice because there was nothing else in that room that stayed still.
The girl came at about ten in the morning, and cried straight off, and was small.
“She’s early,” Anna said.
“She’s not.”
“She’s early or she’s small. Take your pick.” Anna had her wrapped and was looking at her with her lower lip out. “She’ll do.”
Patience opened the door and stood in it and said something out into the yard, and there was a noise from over toward the kitchen, and then it went quiet again and everybody went back to work.
—
Esther had a name ready and never used it.
It was her mother’s name and she had been holding it for eleven years, and she had it in her mouth that morning and did not say it, for a reason she could not have given anybody. She has it still, she thought. She can keep it.
So the child had no name for nine days.
And in the nine days, Anna, coming in and out, said how’s the June baby and give me that June baby and that June baby’s got a set of lungs on her, because Anna named everything by whatever was nearest to hand and always had.
By the fourth day Patience was saying it.
By the sixth day Little Ephraim was saying it.
On the ninth day Esther heard herself say hand me Junie to her own son and stopped, with her hands full, and thought: well.
There it is, then. That’s what she’s called.
It is not nothing, to have a name arrive at you like weather. But Esther had been called four things in her life by people who had the say of it and she was too tired to make a stand about the fifth, and the truth was she had come to like it.
—
Nelson had been very quiet about the whole business for five months.
He came in on the second afternoon and stood a long way off and looked at the bundle in the cradle from a distance of about six feet, exactly the way he had once looked at William across a porch, and said:
“What’s it do?”
“Not much.”
“What’s it for?”
“She’s your sister.”
“I know that.” He came a step closer. “But what’s it for now?”
“Nothing,” Esther said. “That’s what a baby’s for. It’s for nothing for about a year and then you can’t get shut of it.”
He worked round that. He came another step, and then he was at the cradle, and he looked into it for a long time with his hands behind his back like a man at a horse sale.
“Her hands are tiny.”
“They are.”
“They’re — look at that. Look at the — there’s a fingernail.”
“There’s ten of them.”
Nelson put one finger in and the baby took hold of it, which they do, and he went absolutely rigid.
“She’s got me.”
“She has.”
“She’s got me. What do I do?”
“Wait,” Esther said.
He waited. He stood there bent over a cradle with one finger held by a day-old girl for about three minutes without moving his feet, and when she let go he came away and sat down on the floor by the wall and did not say anything for a while, and then said, “When can she talk?”
By the end of the week he was in and out of that room forty times a day.
—
That first night, with the child asleep on her and the boy asleep against the wall and the whole place quiet, Esther lay in the dark and did the sum, because she had never once been able to stop herself doing it.
Two, now.
She had carried one for ten years — knowing where he was, knowing who had him, knowing what he was worth on a Tuesday in Richmond and what he would be worth at fifteen and at twenty, keeping the figure in her head the way you keep a hand on a purse in a crowd.
Now it was two.
And there was no arrangement, no work, no reputation in the county, no shelf of finished bodices, no thing she could do with her hands or say in a doorway that changed that figure by one.
She lay there a good while with that.
Then the baby moved, and Esther shifted her up onto her shoulder and put her hand flat on her back, and thought about the linen she had put by, and the two Waller pieces standing finished on the shelf, and Sarah’s plain seams, and whether Reuben would take three days off Little Ephraim in August, and got the whole of the next six weeks laid out and settled in her head, and went to sleep.
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