Eighteen. The Beasley Girl
Chapter Eighteen
The Beasley Girl
There was a girl at the Beasley place called Rachel.
She was fifteen and she was Bartlett’s granddaughter and she had a way of looking at a thing sideways before she laughed at it, and Nelson had first taken notice of her at the mill in the autumn and had thought about very little else since about the middle of January.
The Beasley place was three miles and a half by the road and two and a quarter if you went through the timber and across the branch above the ford, and on a Saturday night in that neighborhood there was generally something going on somewhere — a frolic in somebody’s quarter, a fiddle, a preacher of their own who came round every third week and held it in a barn.
To go to any of it you wanted a pass.
Nelson had had a pass in his life for exactly one purpose, which was mill, and Reuben wrote to Yanceyville and back and nothing else, and there was not the smallest prospect of Reuben or anybody else writing him one to go four miles on a Saturday night to look at a girl.
So in February he went without one.
—
He went four times before anybody knew.
He went through the timber, which added a quarter of an hour and kept him off the road entirely except for the last three hundred yards, and he went at nine and came back at two, and he was sixteen years old and could do that four and a half miles there and back across country in the dark like a fox.
The fifth time, Tapp was standing in the barn lot when he came in.
It was three in the morning and there was a bit of moon and Tapp was standing there with his coat on over his nightshirt, having been up about a mare, and he watched Nelson come up out of the timber and across the lot and get about twelve feet from him before he saw him.
“Where you been.”
Nelson stopped.
He had had five weeks to invent something and had never once done it, because he had never got as far as thinking he would be caught.
“Beasley’s,” he said.
“Got a paper?”
“No sir.”
Tapp looked at him for a while. He was not a cruel man and he was not a kind one; he was a man with a place under Corbin Ashmore, and Nelson stood in that lot and watched him do the arithmetic.
“Get to bed,” he said. “I’ll see Mr. Ashmore in the morning.”
—
Nelson did not sleep.
He lay on his back in the loom room with his heart going and did the whole of it out, over and over, all the way to the end each time: Tapp tells Mr. Ashmore at breakfast. Mr. Ashmore comes down after breakfast. There is not one single thing to be said in his defense because he did it, five times, deliberately, and everybody in that yard knows what he was doing and where.
He got up at four and went and did the barn lot and got the horses out and was doing the water when the house door went.
But it was not Mr. Ashmore who came down. It was William.
He came down in his shirtsleeves with his hair up on one side and no hat and got to the trough and said, “Are you all right?”
“What?”
“Tapp came in at breakfast. I heard him through the door.” William got hold of the pump handle and worked it twice for no reason and let it go. “I told him I sent you.”
Nelson put the bucket down.
“You told him what?”
“I told him I sent you Saturday night with a message to Beasley’s about the harrow, and that it was my fault, and that I’d forgot to write you anything, and that if he wanted to make something of it he could come and tell my father why he’d been standing in the barn lot at three in the morning frightening people about a mare that was perfectly well. ”
He said the whole of that in one go, rather fast, and then looked pleased with himself in a manner that lasted about a second before he became elaborately casual.
“So that’s all right,” he said.
“Did he believe it?”
“Of course he didn’t believe it. That isn’t the point of it,” said William, and Nelson understood, standing at a trough at five in the morning with wet hands, that this was entirely true and that he had known it was true for years without ever once having had it said out loud.
Tapp did not go to Mr. Ashmore. Nothing whatever came of it. Nelson went on doing the water and the day happened and by dinner it was as though the whole thing had not occurred.
—
He gave it three weeks.
He did not go the next Saturday, or the one after. He knew exactly why he was giving it three weeks, and he thought about it the entire time.
Because what he had learned in that barn lot at five in the morning was not that William would help him.
He had known that since he was seven. What he had learned was the shape of it — that a sentence out of William’s mouth, believed by nobody, was worth more than the truth out of his own; that Tapp had done the sum in about six seconds and come out on the side of not being the man who made trouble about the son’s boy; and that all of this had happened without one word of it being said by anybody.
And a thing whose shape you know is a thing you can use.
—
In March he set about it.
He did not ask. He knew better than to ask, and he had watched his mother work people for sixteen years without once thinking of it as a thing that could be learned, and it turned out he had learned it anyway.
What he did was mention Rachel.
He mentioned her twice in a fortnight, in passing, not as anything — once as a joke against himself about the timber and the briars, and once, later, lying on the bank at the ford, as a piece of straightforward information, and both times he stopped a little early and left William to fill the silence.
He was fairly sure by the second time. He was entirely sure the following Thursday, when William said, out of nothing, in the middle of a discussion about a hound:
“You know what you want.”
“What.”
“You want a paper. Then it wouldn’t matter who saw you.”
“They’d not write me one.”
“I’d write you one,” William said.
And Nelson said, “Would that do?” — which was the only lie he told in the whole business, and it was not a lie in any word of it, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he said it.
—
William wrote it that evening at the desk in the office and brought it down folded in three.
Permit my boy Nelson to pass to Beasley’s this evening and return. W. Ashmore.
Nelson read it twice.
He looked at the last part of it for a while.
W. Ashmore. Not Corbin. Not the father’s C.
, which Nelson had had against his chest in a ticking bag for six years and would have known upside down in the dark.
William had written his own initial, plainly, in a good clear hand, and had not said anything about it, and there was no earthly way to tell from the paper alone which Ashmore of Fair Prospect had put his name to it, and on a road at night with a lantern nobody was going to inquire.
“Will that do?”
“It’ll do,” Nelson said.
—
The patrol stopped him on the Beasley lane at half past eleven.
There were three of them and one lantern, and he heard the horses well before he saw them and had time to decide not to go into the trees, which he thought about, and which would have been the worst thing he could do.
“Hold up there.”
He held up. He stood in the road with his hands where they could be seen, the way his mother had put it into him when he was ten years old and had put it into him again every year since, and said, “Yes sir,” and gave over the paper without being asked twice.
The man with the lantern read it. He read it slowly, moving the lantern, and Nelson stood in the road and watched a stranger’s lips go over a sentence that a boy had written at a desk that afternoon, and there was a very long moment in which the whole of the rest of his life was inside another man’s mouth.
“Ashmore’s,” the man said.
“Yes sir.”
“Get on, then. And get home.”
“Yes sir.”
They went by him up the lane and he stood in the dark until he could not hear them, and then he was sick into the weeds, and then he walked the rest of the way to Beasley’s and stayed two hours and was very good company.
—
He asked for the next one on the Friday.
He did not mention Rachel. He did not set it up and he did not make a joke against himself and he did not leave a silence for William to fill.
He came round to the porch after supper and said, “Are you going to write me that paper,” and William said, “What, tomorrow?” and Nelson said, “Tomorrow,” and William said, “I’ll do it after,” and did.
It took the whole business half a second.
Nelson went up to the barn lot afterward and stood there for a bit doing nothing at all, and then went and looked at the harrow, which did not want looking at, and then went in.
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