Twenty-One. The Smokehouse Door
Chapter Twenty-One
The Smokehouse Door
She saw it in the door of the smokehouse in the second week of September and it took her until November to believe it.
They came round the corner together and Nelson went in first and William came after him, and the doorway was a shade under three feet wide, and they got through it without touching.
That was all. They got through a three-foot door without touching.
Esther was forty feet off at the wash bench with her sleeves up and she stopped with a wet shirt in her hands.
You cannot explain this to anybody who has not spent twenty years looking at how people stand.
She had made her living since she was nineteen out of seeing what a body was doing before its owner knew: the shoulder carried forward, the weight kept off a hip, the woman who holds her arms half an inch from her sides because the last dress somebody made her was tight under there and she has not trusted a sleeve since.
She could tell married from courting across a churchyard.
She could tell you which of two men in a road had asked the other for money.
And two boys who had been knocking each other into ditches since they were seven do not get through a three-foot door with a hand’s breadth of daylight between them by accident.
She stood there with the shirt dripping on her feet, and then she wrung it out and hung it up, because there is no profit in standing about.
—
She spent the autumn being wrong on purpose.
She built two other explanations and she built them well, because she wanted them.
The first was that they had quarrelled about something and had got past it and had not got the whole way past it, and there was history for that; they had done it in ’55.
The second was that Nelson had got his growth and William had got his and they had both got too old for it, which is a thing that happens to boys, and which she had seen happen at the second place to two brothers who had shared a bed until one November and never after.
She held on to both of those until the middle of November.
What ended it was nothing at all. It was the two of them coming up the yard on the sixth or seventh of the month, forty feet apart, not talking, and there was a wet place at the bottom of the yard where the water stood, and they came round it — one to the left of it and one to the right — and met again on the far side and went on up.
Nobody does that. Two people walk round a puddle on the same side.
She went down to the cabin the following Sunday afternoon while the whole place was at the quarter, and stood in the doorway of it, and looked.
There was nothing in it. That was the thing.
She stood in that doorway with her heart going and looked at a room with nothing whatever in it that a man could take to a magistrate: an old board laid across two stones for a seat, and swept boards, and the grass pulled up out of the floor at the near end and thrown out the door in a heap that had gone brown.
And on the sill of the window with the shutter off, a candle end standing in a tin lid.
Esther looked at that for a long time.
A candle end is a thing somebody carries down. A candle end is a thing somebody carries down and leaves, so that it will be there next time.
She went back up the hill and got the supper.
—
She did not sleep for four nights and on the fifth she got up and sat on the step in the cold and did the whole of it out, properly, the way she did a sum, because she had found long ago that a thing is never so bad laid out flat as it is going round.
It was worse laid out flat.
She began with the part everybody would have begun with and got past it quickest, because it was the part that mattered least. Two men.
She had known of it before — twice at the second place, and a man at Fairlawn that the whole of that quarter knew about and nobody said, and a good deal of talk over the years, and she had never in her life been able to get herself worked up about it the way people expected.
It was a thing that could get a man killed.
So could a great many things. It was not, by itself, the trouble.
Nor was it, by itself, that the one was white. God knows she knew what happened across that line. She had lived inside it. The line got crossed on that place and on every place within four miles of it, in one direction, constantly, and everybody knew and nobody said and the world went on.
That was the whole of it, and it took her until the fifth night to get it in words.
In one direction.
Because when it went the way it always went — a white man and a woman who could not say no — there was a system for it, and the system was silence.
Nothing happened. Nothing was ever said.
Nobody was punished, and nobody was disgraced, and the woman got on with her work, and if there was a child then the child got on with its work.
This was not that. This was two of them, which meant somebody had to have done something to somebody, and there was no arrangement in the world for it, and so when it came out — and it would come out; things come out; she had never once seen a thing not come out — they would have to build the story on the spot.
And she knew who would build it and she knew what it would be, because she had spent eleven years in the passage of that house listening to how a story gets built when a white family needs one in a hurry.
It would not be that the son had done anything.
It could not be. There was no version of it in which the son had done anything, because the son was eighteen and was the only one and was going to be the man of that place, and a boy of eighteen can be led.
Everybody knows a boy of eighteen can be led.
And you can find a man in Louisa County to say so inside of an hour.
So it would be Nelson.
It would be Nelson who had put it into him. It would be Nelson who had begun it and gone on with it and worked on him, and the whole of it would be told in that way, and it would be believed in that way, and the reason it would be believed had nothing to do with anybody thinking it was true.
And then: William would be sent somewhere. He would be got away and got married inside two years and there would be a quiet season and then there would not be anything at all, and in fifteen years he would be a man in that county with a wife and a horse.
And her son would be dead, or he would be in Mississippi, and there is very little difference to a mother between those two and no difference at all in what she can do about either.
She sat on that step until it got light.
—
She went at it two ways and she went at it all through 1858.
The first way was Reuben, who did not ask her anything and had not asked her anything since the forge in ’57.
She wanted Nelson off that place as much as it could be managed without his being off it in the other sense, and she got it done in pieces.
The Fairlawn threshing wanted a man for twelve days in September.
The Dabneys wanted somebody who could handle the machine and Sowers had asked after him twice.
There was a load of staves to Louisa Court House four times that year and a boy could go and stay the night with the wagon.
Reuben gave her every one of them and never once said why, and by the end of the year Nelson was off Fair Prospect thirty-odd days more than he had been the year before.
It made no difference whatever that she could see. But it was the only lever she had that she could work herself.
The second way took her longer to be honest with herself about.
Miss Cordelia Waller was seventeen in the spring of 1858 and was to come out that autumn, and her mother sent everything to Esther, and had done since ’54.
In February Esther made her a blue-figured muslin that took ten yards and fourteen days and was the best thing she had made since the claret.
She cut it two inches lower in the shoulder than the girl’s mother had asked for, and set the sleeve half an inch forward, and did a thing at the waist that nobody in that house would ever be able to name and that made a plain girl of seventeen look, in the glass, like somebody worth a second turn of the head.
And when the Waller girl came over to Fair Prospect in April with her mother, and stood about in the yard in it while the two women talked, Esther happened to be in the passage with the door open, and happened to have got William in there five minutes before that on a business about a coat that could have waited a week.
She did that in April and she did it again in June and she did it a third time in September.
It did not answer either. William was perfectly pleasant to Miss Cordelia Waller on all three occasions and never sought her out afterward.
Esther knew by the second time that it would not answer. She did it the third time anyway.
She was standing at the window watching the two of them out in the yard — the girl in the muslin she had cut, doing what girls do, and the young man being agreeable and looking over her shoulder at the barn lot — and she caught herself at it, entirely, all at once, the whole of what she was doing and what she was doing it with.
Her hands went on pinning.
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