Nineteen. The Threshing Machine
Chapter Nineteen
The Threshing Machine
Esther was in it. She had been in it every June since she came, because when the wheat is ready it is ready for about eight days and after that it goes down in the first weather and you have lost the year, and there is no woman on a place that size who is too fine to bind.
Four cradlers went across the top of the field abreast, a step apart and a step behind, so the whole thing moved like one long crooked thing coming down.
Behind each of them a binder gathering the swath and twisting a band out of the straw and getting it round and tucked and standing it up.
Behind the binders, the children shocking — eight or ten sheaves stood up head-in against each other with two more laid flat over the top of them for a cap, so the rain would run off and not in.
Nelson cradled that year. He was sixteen and he was second from the left and he held it all six days, and second from the left was where the ground fell away and a man had to watch his own line.
Esther bound behind Old Isaac and got a stalk under her thumbnail on the second morning and lost the nail three weeks later.
—
Then, in August, there was nothing to do.
That was the new thing, and she noticed it before anyone said a word about it, because a woman who counts everything notices when a number changes.
A tobacco year has no bottom to it. It has topping and suckering and worming going all through July and August, four thousand plants, every leaf of every plant, and then cutting, and then the barns for seven weeks of nights, and then stripping and grading and tying all winter on every damp day there is.
Tobacco takes a person and holds him from January to January.
Wheat wants everything in one week of June and almost nothing the rest of the year.
Mr. Ashmore had put thirty-one acres in it that year, and twelve of the thirty-one had been in tobacco the year before.
So in August of 1856 there was a fortnight when Reuben had twelve acres less of tobacco to keep men in, and he found things — there is always something, there is always a fence and a ditch and a woodpile — and Esther stood at the passage window one afternoon and watched three men mending a stretch of worm fence at the bottom of the yard that had been standing perfectly well since April, and did not think anything at all about it at the time.
—
In September Mr. Ashmore hired out two men to the Central Railroad for the season.
They went on a Monday and they were Overton and a man called Jim Pond, and it was a great business for about three days and then it was not.
They were gone until the middle of December.
They came back thinner and with stories, and Overton had eighteen dollars in his head that he had earned and not seen a cent of, and told everybody the figure twenty times in the first evening.
Nothing bad happened at all. That was the whole of it. Two men went away and worked and came back and the place got on perfectly well without them, and Corbin Ashmore had a sum of money in December that he had not had in September and had not had to grow anything to get.
Esther heard the figure that Ashmore had got, within the week, from a Fairlawn girl in a doorway.
She did not do anything with it. She put it in the ledger.
—
Bristol gave her the rest of it in the winter, in pieces, without either of them ever sitting down to it.
He came up on a Saturday in January and said Beasley had hired out four.
He came up in February and said the man at Green Springs had sold two men in Richmond in the autumn and told it about that they had wanted going, and that there was nothing wrong with either of them and everybody knew it.
He said in March that the price was up. He said it the way he said everything, flat, in the middle of something else, having carried it about a while first.
“Up how much?”
“They’re saying a good hand’s twelve hundred.”
Esther had a needle in her hand and she did not put it down and did not stop.
“That’s a good deal more than it was.”
“It’s about two hundred more than it was three year ago,” Bristol said. “There’s a man at the Court House been up and down this county since Christmas asking after young men. He don’t buy. He asks.”
—
She did the sum in the last week of March, on a Tuesday afternoon, sitting on the step in the sun with a bodice across her knee.
She did not sit down to do it. It arrived, the way they do, out of four separate things that had been lying about in her for eight months and had not previously been next to one another.
Eleven acres out of tobacco and into wheat, and thirty-one acres of wheat wanting one week of the year.
A fortnight in August when Reuben had three men mending a fence that did not want mending.
Two men hired out and no harm done and money in December.
And a good hand at twelve hundred dollars.
She sat quite still on the step with the bodice in her lap and the sun on her.
It was not that Mr. Ashmore was a cruel man; she had never thought he was, and she still did not, and that had nothing to do with anything. It was that a man who has fewer places to put a person and a rising price for the person has, in the end, only one thing he can be.
Then she did the other half of it, which is the half she had been keeping herself from all winter.
Who.
Not Reuben. Reuben ran the place and knew where every rod of it was.
Not Anna, who was sixty and worth nothing on paper and had run that kitchen for twenty years.
Not herself — and she looked at that squarely and found it solid, and was not comforted by it, because a woman who is safe on a place is a woman who has to watch.
Not Patience — Patience had a husband at Fairlawn and three children in the quarter, and selling her would tear through too many other arrangements at once: the fortnight of ruined work afterward, and the way the whole place would look at a man in the yard for a year.
Sarah was fourteen and could sew and was going to be able to sew very well, and Esther had made sure that everybody knew it.
Which left the field hands. Which left the young men.
Which left the ones with nobody on the place — no wife, no children, nothing that tears when you pull it — because those are the ones who go quietly and cost nothing afterward.
Nelson was seventeen years old. He was sound. He was tall and getting taller. He was quick, and he was known, and he had a girl three miles off at the Beasley place, which is exactly as much as nothing.
Esther sat on that step for a long time.
Then she finished the bodice, because it was wanted Thursday.
—
She went to Reuben in April, about a machine.
The thresher came round that county every autumn behind two horses with a man called Sowers and a boy, and it went from place to place from September into November and you paid by the day and by the bushel, and Fair Prospect had had it in for four days in ’55 and was to have it six days in ’56 on account of the thirty-one acres.
She found Reuben at the forge and stood about until he had finished what he was doing.
“That machine coming in October,” she said.
“It is.”
“Who feeds it?”
Reuben set the tongs down.
Feeding a thresher is standing at the mouth of it all day handing sheaves in butt-first at the rate it wants them, which is faster than a man wants to go, with the drum turning eight inches from your knuckles and a noise on it like the end of the world.
Sowers’s own boy did the feeding at some places.
At others it was whoever the place put there.
A man at Green Springs had lost two fingers to one in ’54 and everybody in four counties knew it.
“Isaac fed it last year,” Reuben said.
“Isaac’s fifty-one.”
Reuben looked at her.
He looked at her for rather a long time, and Esther stood in front of the forge with her hands folded and let him do it, and she understood — she was entirely certain of it — that he had got there before she had opened her mouth, and possibly before she had.
“He’s got good hands,” Reuben said. “He’s quick with his hands.”
“He has.”
“A man that can feed a machine gets asked for. Sowers asks for a man, place to place. He asked after Fairlawn’s boy last October, in front of Waller.” Reuben picked the tongs back up and turned them over. “It’s a thing a man gets a name for.”
“That’s what I’d heard,” Esther said.
They stood there a moment.
“It’ll take his fingers,” Reuben said.
“It might.”
“It took two off that boy at Green Springs and he wasn’t doing nothing wrong. It come out at him. There’s no fault in it. It just come out at him.”
“I know it,” Esther said.
Reuben put the tongs in the fire and stood with his back to her, and after a while he said, “I’ll put him on it,” and Esther said, “Thank you,” and went back down to the house and got on with the missus’s work, and did not tell her son anything about the conversation.
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