Ten. The Ordering Pit
Chapter Ten
The Ordering Pit
The pass came back out of the ticking bag in March, for the second trip to mill, and Nelson sat on the step with it in both hands while his mother was getting the sacks counted, and turned it over, and said:
“What’s it say?”
William was on the wall. “Give it here.”
He read it out.
Permit the boy Nelson to pass to Yanceyville mill and return this day. He is my property. C. Ashmore.
“That’s all?”
“That’s all there is.”
“There’s four lines of it.”
“There’s four lines because he writes big,” William said. “Look — that’s Nelson. That’s you. That word there, the whole of it, that’s your name.”
Nelson looked at it.
It was six marks long. It did not look like anything.
It did not look like a boy on a step in March; it looked like a fence with something wrong with it.
And he put his thumb under it and moved his thumb along it and could not make the marks come apart into anything, and something turned over in his chest that he had no name for and did not enjoy.
“How do you know that’s the one?”
“Because it’s — because I can read, Nelson.”
“But how do you know.”
William opened his mouth and shut it. He looked at the paper. Nelson watched him try to find the bottom of the question and fail to, which was not something that happened to William often, and it took him about five seconds to get from there to the next thing, and the next thing was:
“I could show you.”
—
They did it in the ordering pit because William said so.
It was William who said not up at the house, and William who said not the barn either, and William who came up on the second day with the whole thing arranged: the pit under the pack house, which was a cellar with a dirt floor eight feet by twelve where the cured leaf got hung in the wet months to take up damp before it could be handled.
It stood empty from March to November. It had a hatch and four steps and one small barred window at ground level at the far end that let in about as much light as a candle would, and it smelled of dirt and old leaf and rain.
“Nobody comes here,” William said, going down the steps backwards. “Nobody comes here. This is perfect.”
Nelson came down after him and stood at the bottom.
He knew what this was. He had known since the words I could show you, and he had lain awake on it the night between, and he had come anyway.
His mother had told him a great deal over the years about what could be done to a person and by whom, and somewhere in all of that, years back, she had said — not as a warning, just as a fact of the world, the way she said things about the weather — that there was a law against it and that it went hard on both sides.
He did not ask William whether he knew that.
He thought about asking, standing at the bottom of those steps in the dark with his hand still on the ladder.
He worked out that if William did not know, then telling him might make him stop.
And he worked out that if William did know, then William was doing it anyway, and that asking would spoil something.
Then William said, “Come on,” and Nelson went and sat down in the dirt, and that was the whole of his deliberation on the subject, at eleven years old, in a cellar.
—
They wrote with a stick on the floor and rubbed it out with a foot.
That was Nelson’s idea. William had brought a slate down the first day and Nelson had looked at it and said no, and William had said why not, and Nelson had said because you leave a slate lying about the way you leave everything lying about, and William stood on it for five seconds and then laughed and took it back up.
They did the letters in three weeks.
William taught the way he did everything, which was to say all at once and in the wrong order and with enormous confidence and a good deal of made-up material.
He taught the alphabet as a song because that was how he had learned it.
He was very sound on the shapes and unreliable on the sounds.
He said aitch one week and haitch the next and would not have it pointed out.
Twice he taught Nelson something and then came back the following day and said, “That was wrong, that’s not what a g does at all,” and taught it again correctly, and carried on as though the correction had been part of the lesson.
And Nelson went through it like water through a shirt.
He got the letters in three weeks and could put them together by the end of April, and by the middle of May he was reading — badly, slowly, aloud, with his finger, but reading — off the two things they had, which were a page torn out of the back of a spelling book that William said nobody would miss and a piece of the Richmond Enquirer that had come round something from the store.
It was like the moment at mill when the sacks went in as corn and came out as meal — the same thing, entirely changed, still warm.
A mark was a sound. Four marks were a word.
The word was in his mouth and had come off a piece of paper that had been lying about the place for two months not saying anything, and now it said steamer and had been saying steamer the whole time.
He went round for six weeks in a condition his mother took for a fever.
He read the tin at the store when they went.
He read KEEP off a board on the Fairlawn road and then thought about the rest of it the whole way home and got KEEP OUT three days later and nearly fell off the mule.
He looked at the letters cut into the head of the axe.
He looked at Anna’s mark on the meal barrel and understood for the first time in his life that it was not a picture.
—
His mother came down the pit steps at the end of May.
She did not say anything. She stood at the bottom with her arms folded and looked at the floor, where there was a good deal of writing in the dirt, and then at the two of them, and then at William for slightly longer.
“Good afternoon,” William said, from the floor.
“Good afternoon.”
She looked at the floor again for a while.
Then she said: “You rub that out before you come up. Every time. Both of you. Not with your hands, with your foot, and then you scuff the whole of it so it don’t show where you rubbed.”
“Yes’m,” said William.
“And you don’t do it anywhere else, ever, either of you, and you don’t do it for anybody, and if a man was to come down them steps this minute you was playing at a game and you don’t know what them marks is.”
“Yes’m.”
“Say it back to me.”
And William Ashmore, on the dirt floor of his father’s pack-house cellar, said it back to her, all of it, in order, and Esther nodded once and went up the steps.
—
It went on until August, and then it thinned, and then it stopped, and there was never a day you could point at.
Nothing happened. There was no falling-out. It was the summer, and there were six other things, and there was the branch and the colt and a scheme involving a raft, and the pit was very hot in August, which had not mattered in May.
Some weeks they went down twice. Then once.
Then Nelson would say something about it in the morning and William would say, “Yes — after,” and there would be a reason after, and the reason would be a perfectly good reason, and it would be a fine afternoon and they would spend it doing something else and it would be a good afternoon and Nelson would enjoy it.
In September Nelson asked and William said, “Oh — I’ve got Ould coming Thursday, I’ve got to get the whole of the Latin,” and that was true.
In October Nelson asked and William said, “Yes, we ought to,” and did not.
In November Nelson stopped asking.
That was the part of it he could not get comfortable with: that it was he who stopped.
Nobody had refused him anything. Nobody had ever once said no.
He had simply worked out, somewhere in there, without putting it in words, that asking twice in a week made William say yes, we ought to in a certain voice, and that he did not want to hear the voice, and that it was easier not to ask.
He went down there on his own six times that winter with the page out of the spelling book and could not get any further than he had got in May, because getting further wanted somebody to say what a word was when you were stuck at it, and there was nobody in the world he could ask.
He kept the page. He kept it inside the ticking bag with the pass, folded small.
—
The last thing that happened that spring, before it thinned, was that Nelson read the pass.
He did it in June on the way back from mill, sitting up on the sacks with the mule walking, taking it out of the bag one-handed and holding it against his knee out of the wind.
It took him a long time. He had it nearly by heart from William reading it, which he knew was cheating, so he made himself do it out of the marks and not out of his memory, and he went at it word by word with his finger.
Permit the boy Nelson to pass to Yanceyville mill and return this day.
He got that in about four minutes and it was the best four minutes of his life.
Then there was the short line, which was only five words and had two words in it he had done a hundred times, and he had it in under a minute, and then he sat there on four bushels of meal in the middle of the road with it in his hand.
He is my property.
He read it again to be sure. He was sure.
He put it back in the bag and put the bag inside his shirt and rode the rest of the way home. He did not tell William about it that evening. He did not know why.
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