Eleven. Saturdays
Chapter Eleven
Saturdays
Mr. Ashmore married again in the November and brought her home the week before Christmas.
She was twenty-four. Her people were from over toward Orange and there was money on her mother’s side and not much on her father’s, and her name was Cornelia, and Esther did not learn one thing about her that winter that she had not got out of a Fairlawn girl in a doorway inside the first fortnight.
Esther spent six months being extremely careful.
A new missus is the most dangerous weather there is.
A new missus can decide in her first spring that she does not care for a face, and there is no appeal from that and no warning of it and no way of knowing which face it will be.
A new missus reorganizes. She looks at a place that has been run by men for nine years and finds it slovenly, which it is, and she sets about it, and in the setting about it people get moved, and hired out, and sometimes sold, and none of it is done out of cruelty; it is done out of a woman putting a house right.
So Esther did what she had done in Richmond in the first months and at the place before that in the first months, and she did it well, having had the practice.
She was never anywhere the missus had to walk round.
She got the two front rooms’ curtains down and washed and turned within the first week without being told and without saying she had done it.
When she was asked a question she gave the answer and stopped, and when she was asked a second question she gave that answer too and did not add to it.
She let it be found out that she could cut, rather than saying so.
In February the missus sent for her and looked at her a while and said, “Mrs. Waller tells me you did her daughter’s claret silk.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“She says you got it out of Richmond.”
“No ma’am. I made it here.”
“That is what I said to her,” said the missus, and gave her two lengths of poplin and a great deal of instruction that Esther listened to attentively and did not need, and after that Esther had four times the work she had had in 1851 and no more hours in the day than before.
—
Junie was twenty-two months old that spring and had learned to run and had not learned anything else at all.
She could not be left. She could not be carried.
She could not be put anywhere, because she got out of it.
Esther worked with a rope round the child’s middle and the other end round her own ankle for six weeks, and Anna laughed at her every single day of it, and then Junie learned to untie a knot, at two years old, which nobody at Fair Prospect ever satisfactorily explained.
Nelson was twelve and was some help, when he was there. He was not there. He was up at the house or down at the branch or off to mill, and by that spring he was going to mill by himself and had got a reputation for it with Reuben, and he came in at dusk and ate an enormous amount and slept.
—
The Dabney bundle came over on the second Saturday in April.
It came in a wagon instead of on a girl’s hip, which was the first difference, and the wagon was going on to the crossroads afterward with barrel staves, which was the reason, and the man driving it got down and came up to the loom room door with a bundle in brown paper under one arm and stood there.
He was about forty. He was not tall. He had heavy shoulders and a way of standing with his weight on his heels, and he had a broken nose that had been broken a long time before and set itself.
“Mrs. Dabney’s grey,” he said.
“Come in out of the door, I can’t see it.”
He came in two steps and put it on the table and unwrapped it himself, which nobody ever did, and turned it right side out for her, which nobody ever did either.
“She says the sleeve.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that sleeve.” Esther had it up in both hands. “That sleeve’s been set by somebody who knew what she was about. It’s the body — look at it, she’s carrying it round to the left, it’s dragging the whole thing over and pulling on the arm and she thinks it’s the sleeve.”
The man looked at it.
“Mm,” he said. And then: “She does carry over to the left.”
“Everybody does something.”
“What do I do?” he said.
Esther looked at him. She had not expected it and she took a second, and then she gave him the truth because she was busy.
“You favor the right leg. Not much. Enough that you’re wearing that shoe through under the outside of the heel and you’ll be walking on the nails inside of two months.”
The man looked down at his own foot for a while.
“Huh,” he said.
He picked up the paper and folded it, which nobody did, and put it in his coat, and said, “Bristol,” and went out to the wagon.
—
He came back the following Saturday with nothing.
That was the whole of the courting for about six weeks: he came, on a Saturday, with a reason, and the reason got progressively worse.
The second time there was a message about the grey that could have gone with anybody.
The third time he brought a piece of hickory for Reuben, which Reuben did not want and said so at some length after Bristol had gone.
The fourth time he did not bother with a reason and stood on the step and said, “It’s a fine evening,” and Esther said, “It is,” and he stood there.
He belonged to Aleck Dabney’s father and he carted.
That was his whole life: he went to Louisa Court House and to the crossroads and twice a year to Richmond with the crop, and he knew every road in that end of the county and about two hundred people on them, and he knew what was happening in Louisa in a way Esther never could, because her news came ten minutes at a time out of a doorway and his came off the whole length of a road.
They traded. That was the beginning of it and it went on being a good part of it: she told him what she got from the women and he told her what he got from the roads, and between them, by the end of that summer, they knew more about the private business of the white people of that district than any two people in it.
He was not a talker. He was dry, and slow, and when he did say a thing he had generally been carrying it about for a while first. He asked Esther in June what a bias was and listened to the answer for six minutes without interrupting, and then said, “So it don’t want to go back,” and Esther said that was exactly it and nobody had ever got there that fast, and he looked pleased for about a quarter of a second.
He had had a wife at the Beasley place. She had been sold in the spring of ’47, to a man buying for Alabama, and he did not know the name of the county, and he had said all of that in three sentences at the end of May and had not said any of it again.
—
Nelson could not stand him.
It came on gradually and then all at once, in the way of a boy of twelve.
The first Saturdays he was indifferent. By July he was making a point of not being in the room, and by August he was making a point of being in it and saying nothing, sitting against the wall with his knees up and answering in one word.
Bristol handled it about as well as it could be handled, which is to say he left it alone.
He left Nelson alone. He did not bring him anything, which Esther noticed and thought well of.
Once, in September, he said, “That mule of yours favors the near fore,” and Nelson said, “I know it,” and Bristol said, “Mm,” and that was the longest exchange the two of them had that year.
The bad evening was in October.
Nelson came in at dark and there were three of them on the step already and his supper was on the shelf and not on the fire, and he took it and sat down inside with his back to the door, and Esther said something to him about shutting the door and he said, “There’s people in it.”
“Then say excuse me and go round.”
“He’s on the step.”
“He’s got a name.”
“He’s on the step,” Nelson said, and his voice went up and broke on it, which it had started doing that summer and which humiliated him every time, and he got up and went out the other way past the woodpile and did not come back until she was asleep.
She should have gone after him. She knew it and did not do it, and what she did instead was sit back down on the step, and the reason she did that — and she was clear about it — was that she had had four months of Saturdays after nine years of none, and she was thirty-one years old, and she wanted the hour.
She got the hour. She paid for it for about three weeks, in a boy who answered in one word and did not look at her, and then it wore off the way it does, and by December he was speaking to her normally again and had transferred the whole of it onto Bristol.
—
All that autumn she waited for him to ask her for something.
Every arrangement she had ever been in had had a price somewhere in it, and generally it surfaced around the fourth or fifth month, once a person had got comfortable — a thing wanted, a thing expected, a thing that turned out to have been understood all along without anybody having said it.
She had been in three of those. She had paid in all three.
So she kept her eye out. She watched for the shape of it the way she watched for a seam going wrong four inches before it went wrong.
He did not ask her to give up the Wednesday work.
He did not ask her what she meant by any of it.
He did not ask her to say a word to Reuben about a thing at Fair Prospect that would have been useful to a Dabney carter and that she could have got done inside a week.
He did not ask her for the account of her life, which everybody she had ever been close to had wanted sooner or later, and which she had given twice and been sorry both times.
He came on a Saturday. He sat on the step. He told her what was on the roads. Sometime after dark he stood up and said he had four miles, and went.
In November, late, with the cold coming up off the boards and Junie asleep inside, Esther sat beside him not saying anything, which they had got good at, and worked out that she had spent the better part of a year braced for a bill that nobody was going to present.
She could not decide what to do with that. She turned it over a good while.
Then Bristol said something about a bridge on the Gordonsville road that had gone in the rain and would not be seen to before spring, and Esther said that was a piece of foolishness, and he said it was, and they sat there.
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