Thirteen. The Second Barn
Chapter Thirteen
The Second Barn
The fires had to be kept starved. That was the whole art of it.
A barn fire that burned clean would take the crop and then the barn and then, if the wind was in it, the woods behind, so you laid your coals in the two trenches down the middle of the dirt floor and you smothered them under wet sawdust until they gave up their flame and only breathed, and then you sat with them all night and you did not let them die and you did not let them wake.
Nelson had the low barn at the bottom of the tobacco ground.
Four bents of leaf hung over him on the tier poles, stick laid across stick all the way up into the dark under the roof, and the smoke came off the trenches slow as syrup and went up through the leaf and found the gaps in the chinking and got out.
Two nights in he could read the whole barn without looking at it.
Dry smoke smelled like a smokehouse. Wet smoke smelled like a pond.
If it went sweet you were burning sugar out of the leaf and you had it too hot and you had maybe an hour before it showed.
He had come down at dusk with the bucket and the shovel and a barrel of sawdust that had been rained on in September and never properly dried, which was what you wanted.
Aleck Dabney’s people used oak chips and swore by them.
Nelson had tried it once on the strength of that and scorched a whole bent, and had not been whipped for it, which he understood to be luck.
Reuben came by while the light was still going, on his way up to the big barn at the head of the ground.
He stood in the doorway a while without coming in, which was his way, and looked at the two trenches and then up at the bents and then at the trenches again.
“You’ve got the near one heavy,” he said.
Nelson went and looked. It was heavy. He had laid it thick at the near end where he’d been working from and thinned it going away, the way a man does when he is being careful at the start and tired by the finish.
“It’ll smother out by two,” Reuben said.
“I’ll turn it.”
“You’ll turn it twice.” Reuben put his hand on the doorframe and looked out at the sky over the trees, which was the color of a peach going bad. “Wind’s coming round tonight. It’ll come up out of the west about the time you stop expecting it.”
“How do you know that.”
“Because it did last night and the night before,” Reuben said, “and because I’ve got four barns going and I’d rather not have three.” He straightened up off the frame. “You want me to send Little Tom down to sit with you?”
“No.”
“No,” Reuben said, without any judgment in it, and went on up the hill.
It was the second year Nelson had had a barn on his own. The first year Reuben had come down every hour like a man checking a pot. This year he came at dusk and then not again. Nelson noticed it every night Reuben did not come back.
He turned the near trench. Then he ate the corn cake he’d brought and drank out of the bucket and stood in the middle of the floor with his head back, looking up.
The bottom bent was going too fast.
He’d suspected it that afternoon and now he could see it — the leaf on the lowest sticks had gone past brown at the edges and started to curl, while up at the third and fourth the color was still coming, still that green-gold that meant it hadn’t given up its water.
That happened. The fire cured what was nearest it first. A careless man let the bottom go crisp and the top go moldy and called it the weather.
So he climbed.
You went up the tier poles like a ladder, one foot on the pole and one hand around the stick above, and you did it in the dark with the smoke going up past your face the whole way, so you learned to breathe out on the way up and in when you got your head into a clear place.
Fourteen years old and long enough in the arms to reach.
He got to the second bent and worked along it, taking a stick of the good slow leaf from up there and passing it down, then reaching for the crisping stick from below and hanging it high.
Trade one for one. Twenty-odd sticks. The gum came off the leaf onto his hands and went black and tacky in the creases of his fingers and would still be there Sunday.
Halfway along, a stick he had just set gave a crack and dropped an inch and caught, and he froze with his cheek against a tier pole and his heart going like a bird in a sack.
A stick coming down went into the trench.
Leaf in the trench meant flame, and flame in the bents meant the barn, and the barn meant the crop, and after that there was no telling.
He got two fingers under it and lifted and re-set it and held it there a slow count of ten to be sure of the seat, and then he came down and stood on the floor and shook for about a minute, and then he went and turned the far trench because it wanted it.
Around nine the wind came up out of the west and got under the north wall.
He heard it before he saw it — a sound like a sheet snapping — and then the far trench opened orange down four feet of its length and the leaf above it went from brown to gold.
He was on it with the shovel before he had decided anything.
Wet sawdust off the top of the barrel, both hands, a bucketful thrown flat and long the way you’d broadcast seed, then the blade, then the blade again.
The gold went out of the leaf. He stood over it with his heart going and watched the place where the flare had been until it settled to the dull red he wanted, and then he went and looked up at the bent and there were maybe a dozen leaves along the bottom edge gone crisp at the tips.
A dozen leaves was nothing. He looked at them a long while anyway.
He was still looking when the dogs went off up the hill, and then there were boots, and then somebody swearing quietly at something in the dark that had got him across the shins.
“There’s a stob out there,” Nelson said.
“There’s a stob out there.” William came in with his hands up in front of him like a man walking into weather, blinking. “Thank you.”
“It’s been there since March.”
“Then it has had ample opportunity to make itself known.” He found the block Nelson had rolled in and sat on it, which left Nelson the ground.
Nelson took the ground. William had a heel of cornbread wrapped in a rag and he broke it and gave Nelson the bigger piece without making anything of it, and for a while they ate and did not talk.
William was fifteen that spring and had got tall in a way that had not finished happening.
He sat with his knees up. He had come out in his coat but no hat and his hair had that flattened look it got from being slept on, though it was too early for him to have slept on it, so he had been lying down somewhere reading and not sleeping.
“You’ve got smoke all in your hair,” William said.
“You will too, directly.”
“My father says he can smell the barn on me at breakfast. He says it like it’s an accusation.” William turned the rag over and picked the crumbs out of it. “As if I’d been somewhere I oughtn’t.”
“You have.”
“I have not. There’s nowhere in the world I’d rather be than a tobacco barn at nine o’clock at night with a boy who won’t tell me where the stobs are.”
He had a way of saying things like that extravagantly and then never mentioning them again.
“What’s that on your hands?”
“Gum.”
“It’s black.”
“It comes off the leaf.” Nelson turned them over and looked at them himself. “It’ll be there Sunday.”
William put his own hand out next to Nelson’s, palm up, for comparison, and they both looked at the two of them a moment — the black in the creases and the clean — and then William said “Hm,” in a tone that meant nothing at all, and took his hand back.
“Latin,” he said.
“Mm.”
“Mr. Ould says a man who cannot read Latin cannot read anything. So I said, what about a man in China. And he made me copy out forty lines.”
“Which forty?”
“I don’t know. Forty of them.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “They’re all the same after a while. It’s all somebody’s ships getting wrecked and somebody’s mother crying about it.”
“Say some.”
William looked at him. Then he straightened his back the way you do when you’re going to perform, and he said, slowly, with the wrong weight on nearly every word:
“Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris.”
“That’s not forty.”
“That’s one. Do you have any conception how long forty is?” He said it again, faster, and got it wrong differently the second time, and swore, and said it a third time.
Nelson said it back to him.
He hadn’t meant anything by it. It was just there in his ear, the whole shape of it, the way a tune is there after you’ve heard somebody whistle it twice, and it came out of him with the stresses in the places William’s had missed.
William stopped picking at the rag.
“Say that again,” he said.
Nelson said it again.
“That’s — “ William sat forward. “That’s it. That’s exactly how Ould does it. How did you do that?”
“You said it three times.”
“I said it three times wrong.” He laughed, and then he didn’t.
He sat there with his elbows on his knees looking at Nelson with an expression Nelson could not do anything with.
“You should have the Latin,” he said. “Not me. It’s wasted on me, it goes straight through, and you — “ He stopped. He seemed to hear himself arriving somewhere he had not intended to go, and he pulled up short of it the way a horse pulls up short of water it doesn’t like.
“Anyhow,” he said.
“Anyhow,” Nelson said.
The wind came round and the smoke came down and they both got up and went and stood in the doorway till it lifted.
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