Fifteen. The Flax
Chapter Fifteen
The Flax
The flax had been lying in the barn since August and came out in January, and that was the whole of the work for three weeks.
You pulled flax; you did not cut it, because the good fiber went right down into the root and cutting threw an inch of it away.
You pulled it in July in handfuls and stood it in stooks to dry.
Then you rippled it — dragged the heads through a comb of iron teeth set in a plank to take the seed off, and the seed went in a sack and was worth money on its own, which is why nobody was ever allowed to be careless at the rippling.
Then you drowned it.
That was the part Nelson had never got used to.
You put the whole crop in the branch under stones and left it there for a fortnight in the summer heat to rot — deliberately, on purpose, watching it go — because the gum that held the fiber to the woody core had to be rotted out before you could get at it, and the trick of the entire business was to rot it exactly enough and not one day past. Reuben went down and pulled a stalk every morning of that fortnight and bent it in his hands and looked at it and put it back.
Then it came out and got dried again, and then it lay in the barn until winter, when there was time.
—
Breaking flax is a noise.
The brake was a thing of oak like an enormous dull-bladed hinge, and you fed the dried stalks across the bed of it and brought the top down, thump, and moved them along an inch and did it again, and the woody core inside snapped into little pieces and fell out and the fiber did not.
Thump. Thump. Thump. All day, from three brakes in the barn, with the shives coming off in a fine sharp dust that got into everything and made everyone cough.
Then scutching, which was standing the handful up on a board and beating it down the length with a wooden knife to knock out what the brake had left.
Then hackling, which was the good part.
The hackle was a block with iron teeth like a plant-bed ripple but finer, and there were three of them, coarse and middling and fine, and you drew the fiber through each in turn.
It came out of the coarse one looking like a horse’s tail.
It came out of the fine one looking like a woman’s hair, three feet long, pale and heavy and cool to the hand.
Anna ran the hackles because Anna ran anything that got done sitting down.
They put the three of them at the end of the barn out of the dust with the door open for light, and for three weeks in January there were four or five women down there for part of every day and whoever else could be spared, and the talk went on continuously and had a particular winter quality to it, which is to say it was long, and circular, and concerned people who had been dead for twenty years.
Nelson worked the brake, which was the boy’s end of it. He worked it three days and then his shoulders gave out and Reuben put him on hauling for two days and then back on it.
He was fourteen and he had got tall in the autumn — not William’s kind of tall, but enough that his sleeves were wrong — and the flax was the first work he had ever done where he could tell, day to day, that he was stronger than he had been in the summer.
He thought about that a good deal at the brake, because there is nothing else to think about at a brake.
—
William went to Orange on the second of January and was gone a fortnight.
The missus’s people were over there and they went every year, and this was the first year they had gone since the marriage with the whole household in the coach and Little Ephraim up behind, and they left in the dark in a great deal of confusion about a hat.
Nelson watched them go from the barn lot and then went and got the mule and hauled brake shives out to the hog pen until dinner.
—
It snowed on the eighth for a day and a half and lay for six days, which is a long time in that country.
The first morning nothing got done at all.
That was not laziness; you cannot haul on ice and you cannot get at a fence, and Reuben went round at first light and looked at things and came back and said the word Sunday, which meant nothing but what wanted doing, and the whole place went quietly mad with the free time.
Sarah, who was twelve, and Junie, who was four and a half, made something out of snow behind the kitchen that was supposed to be a man and was, Anna said, more of a suggestion.
Nelson and Wesley — who had come over from the Dabneys’ with a note and had been told to wait for an answer and had been waiting for an answer for four hours by then, by arrangement — went up the long field and came down it seven times on a barrel stave that Wesley claimed to have permission for.
On the fifth run Nelson went off it and into the fence and got up with his elbow bleeding and could not breathe for laughing.
There is not anything else to say about that day. It was a good one.
—
The bucket went down the well on the eleventh.
That was the great business of that winter, and it took two days, and six people had a theory.
The rope had been going for a year and everybody knew it and nobody had done anything, and Patience brought it up in the morning and the whole of it parted about four feet above her hand and the bucket went down and hit and turned over and sank.
The well was thirty-two feet deep with eight feet of water in it.
Reuben’s theory was a grappling hook, and he made one out of three horseshoes and a length of chain in the forge in about an hour, and it was a beautiful piece of work and it did not catch the bucket in three hours of trying.
Anna’s theory was that you would have to let a boy down on a rope, and she was in favor of Little Ephraim, who was twenty and enormous and who said that Anna could go down herself.
Old Bartlett, over from the Beasleys’ on some errand and drawn to the well the way men are drawn to any hole with an argument going on round it, said the thing to do was to lower a stone on a line and let it settle the bucket upright first, and then hook it. Nobody objected. It did not work either.
They tried a barrel hoop on a pole. They tried the hook again with a candle let down beside it, which nobody could see by.
They tried a boy — Nelson, in the end, because he was the lightest of the ones tall enough — sitting in the loop of a plough line with his feet against the stones and a lantern in his fist, twenty-two feet down in the dark, with the whole world reduced to a coin of grey daylight overhead and six people leaning into it and shouting contradictory instructions.
He got the hook onto the bucket bail on the second try.
They brought him up and they brought the bucket up after him, and it was full of water and had a dent in it and was otherwise entirely undamaged, and there was a good deal of noise about it, and Reuben looked at the bucket and said, “Well,” and everybody went back to the flax.
Nelson’s arms shook for an hour afterward and he was extremely pleased with himself for about two days.
—
They finished the flax on the twentieth.
The fine hackle turned out about fourteen pounds of line, which is the long good fiber, and a great deal of tow, which is the short stuff that comes out in the teeth and goes for rope and sacking and rough shirts.
The line went to the women who spun, which at Fair Prospect meant Anna and Patience and, that winter, Sarah, who was being taught.
Esther did not spin. Esther had not spun since she was fifteen and made a point of it.
But she came down to the barn on the last afternoon and stood at the fine hackle for a while and put her hand into the finished line, right into the middle of the hank, and turned it over, and said, “That’s good flax.”
“It’s a fair crop,” Reuben said.
“That’s good flax.”
And she took a handful of the line and stood in the barn door with it in the light, pulling it out flat between her hands to look down the length of it, and Nelson watched her do it from the brake and could not tell you one thing she was thinking.
William came back on the sixteenth with a cold, and told Nelson at length about Orange, which was flat and had a bad inn in it, and about a girl of his own age at the missus’s uncle’s who had played the piano at him for an hour and a half, and about a dog there that could count.
“It can’t count.”
“It counted, Nelson. It counted to four. There was a man there who—“
“Did it count when he wasn’t looking at it?”
William stopped.
“That’s a very poor question,” he said, with dignity, “and I shall want some time to think about it,” and blew his nose, and they went and looked at the well.
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