Twenty-Three. The Kitchen Doorway
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Kitchen Doorway
Anna said it in the kitchen doorway on a Tuesday in December with her hands in a bowl, and she said it to his mother and not to him, and Nelson was ten feet away at the woodpile and heard the whole of it.
“That old cabin’s got a roof on it.”
That was all she said. She said it the way she said everything — down into what she was doing, no weight on any of it — and then she said something about the meal barrel, and Esther said something back about the meal barrel, and Anna went in.
Nelson stood with his arms full of wood.
He looked over at his mother and his mother was looking at the smokehouse wall, and she stood there a second and a half and then she turned round and came past him and went down the hill, and did not look at him going by.
—
She came for him two days later in the stripping room.
It was the second damp day of the week and there were four of them working in there in the morning and by two o’clock there was only him, because Reuben had taken the others up to the barns, and Nelson was standing at the bench pulling leaf off a stick and grading it into three piles the way he had been doing since he was nine.
His mother came in and pushed the door to behind her.
“How long,” she said.
He did not say anything.
“How long.”
“I don’t know what you’re asking me.”
“Yes you do,” Esther said. “That’s the first thing you’ve said to me in your life that I know is a lie, so let’s have it settled now that we’re not going to do that. How long?”
Nelson put the leaf down.
He was eighteen years old and he had five inches on her and he could pick her up off the floor with one arm and there was not a person alive he was more frightened of, and he stood at that bench with his hands full of tobacco and said:
“A while.”
“A year?”
“Longer.”
“Since the cabin?”
“Before that.”
Esther put her hand out and took hold of the end of the bench.
—
She did not shout. He had known every way his mother had of speaking for eighteen years, and she used one he had never heard.
“They will find out,” she said. “Not may. Will. I have been in three places in my life and I have never one time seen a thing like this not come out, and it does not come out from somebody looking. It comes out from a man walking down the wrong way for a rabbit. It comes out from a boy telling his sister a thing he don’t even know he knows.
Anna’s got it. Anna’s got it off a roof, and Anna’s the best friend I’ve got in this world, and Anna will not say a word, and there is not one other person on this place I would put a penny on. ”
“Nobody’s seen anything.”
“There’s nothing to see. That’s not the way it works and you’re old enough to know it isn’t. Nobody has to see anything. Two men has to have it said about them one time in a store at the crossroads, and then it’s true, and then everybody remembers something.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I’ve watched it done to a woman at Grace Street,” Esther said. “It took three weeks. There was nothing in it at all.”
Nelson turned round to the bench and picked up another stick and started on it, because his hands wanted something.
“And when it comes,” his mother said, “here is what happens. I want you to hear it from me first, once, and then I won’t say it again.”
“Mama—“
“They will not say he did anything.”
“Mama.”
“There is no version of this where he did anything, because he’s the only son that man has got and he’s nineteen years old and there’s not a white man in this county who won’t take the other story before breakfast. It’ll be you.
It’ll be you that started it and you that kept it going and you that worked on him, and they’ll say it in a room with your mouth shut, and every man that hears it will believe it, and not one of them will believe it because they think it’s true. ”
She stopped.
“And then they’ll send him off. They’ll get him out of this county and get him married inside of two year to a girl from Orange or Fluvanna, and there’ll be a bad six months and then there won’t be anything at all, and by the time he’s five and thirty he’ll be a man in this county with a horse and a wife and a boy of his own and it will be the same to him as a thing that happened to somebody else.
That is not me saying he’s wicked. That is me telling you what a life does to a man. ”
“And me,” Nelson said.
“You’ll be sold or you’ll be dead.”
The stripping room was ten feet by twelve and had one window in it.
“They don’t hang people for it,” Nelson said.
“They don’t have to hang you,” said his mother.
—
He went at her then, and he got a good one in, because he knew exactly where it was.
“You had him in your room,” he said.
Esther did not move.
“Two evenings out of three since I was nine years old. You kept things in there for him. You gave him the whole of Richmond a piece at a time like you was paying a man. You made him a shirt out of Dabney cloth when I never had a shirt out of anything but tow till I was twelve. You never one time in eleven years told me to keep off him, not once, not one word — you told me go on up, you told me don’t be where he can’t find you — and now it’s come out different from how you wanted it and it’s my fault. ”
His mother stood at the end of that bench and heard the whole of it.
“That’s so,” she said.
He had not expected that and it took the ground out from under him.
“Every word of that is so,” Esther said.
“I did all of that and I did it on purpose and I’d do the whole of it again tomorrow, because I had a boy of nine on a place where a man could sell him for looking at somebody wrong, and the only thing standing between him and that was a white child that liked him.
So I fed it. Yes. I built the whole of it with both hands and I have never once been sorry. ”
She let go of the bench.
“And it don’t make one bit of difference to what’s coming,” she said. “You can hate me for it. Hate me for it. That’s free. It don’t buy you a single day.”
—
He did not believe her.
He heard every word of it. He understood all of it. He did not believe one thing she said would happen.
Not because he thought she was stupid. He had never in his life met anybody who saw further than his mother.
But she was thirty-eight and she had been sold twice and she had spent twenty years in houses learning what people do, and what she had learned was what people generally do, and there was a thing she did not know and could not know and would not have believed if he had tried to tell her.
She did not know what it was like in that cabin.
She knew what it looked like from a window and she had priced it out to the last dollar, and she was talking about two people she had watched for eleven years the way you watch weather.
She did not know.
“You don’t know him,” he said.
“I know him better than you do,” his mother said. “I’ve known him since he was seven and I’ve never once had to be in love with him.”
And she opened the door and went out, and the damp came in off the yard, and Nelson stood in the stripping room by himself with about fifteen hands of leaf still to do.
—
He went down that night.
It was a Thursday and he had been down on the Tuesday, which broke the first rule they had ever made, and it had rained on the Wednesday and the ground at the bottom of the quarter was soft, which broke the other one, and he went out of the yard the top way past the barns because he did not care.
He sat in that cabin for two hours in the dark on his own with the door open and did not light the candle.
Nobody came. Nobody saw him go and nobody saw him come back and nothing whatever happened, and he walked up the hill at eleven o’clock with his shoes heavy with mud and let himself into the loom room, where his mother was lying on her side with her face to the wall and her breathing all wrong for a woman asleep.
He lay down and looked at the dark and thought: she is wrong about this.
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