Twenty-Nine. The Eleventh of August
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Eleventh of August
They began cutting on the eleventh of August and by the third week of it Nelson had not had a whole night’s sleep in twelve days.
That is what cutting is. You go down the row splitting the stalk and laying the plant over on the stick, and then it is carted, and then it is hung, and hanging is done by whoever is left standing at the end of the day, up in the tier poles in the dark with the sticks coming at you from below.
Then the fires. Then it is four in the morning and somebody wants the barn looked at.
He was nineteen and stronger than he had ever been, and by the twenty-first he was going about with his eyes gone red at the rims and his hands doing things he had not told them to do.
—
William came down on the Wednesday night.
He came down the wrong way — straight down past the quarter, which was Nelson’s way and had been Nelson’s way for two years — and he came at nine o’clock, which was the same hour he had come on the Monday, and Nelson noticed both of those and was too tired to say anything about either.
“Sunday,” William said.
He did not sit down. He stood in the middle of that cabin with his hat in his hand.
“I’ve set it for Sunday. After dinner, when he’s had his dinner and before he goes out.
I’ve got the whole of it now — I’ve got what Orange brings and I’ve got what Meade says it’s worth to sell the remainder of it, which can be done, it is a thing that is done, a man can sell what’s coming to him and take less for it because it isn’t in his hand yet.
It’s eight hundred. Meade says eight hundred, maybe eight fifty. ”
“That’s not twelve.”
“No. But it’s eight hundred in a man’s hand on a Sunday afternoon when he has got a note coming due in November.” William turned his hat over. “And the rest of it he can have out of me at fifty a year for the rest of his life if he wants it, and he will want it, and I don’t care.”
Nelson sat with his back against the good wall.
“You’ve been to Meade about selling the remainder.”
“Twice.”
“You never said.”
“No,” said William, “I never said, because I have been wrong three times since April and I have had to come down here and tell you so three times, and I was not going to do it a fourth until I had something in my hand. And now I have got something in my hand.”
He put his hat on the board and sat down on it and immediately got up again.
“Sunday,” he said.
—
They were up half the night.
They went over the whole of it about six times.
What he would say first. What his father would say.
Whether to lead with the money or with the note in November.
Whether to mention Meade at all. What to do if the answer was no on Sunday and yes in October, which William called likely and Nelson did not.
And they went past that into other things, the way you do at two in the morning, and William talked about Orange, which he had never seen, and about whether a man could live in Pennsylvania, and about a thing he had read years ago concerning the price of land in Ohio, and at some point Nelson stopped being able to follow it and lay there listening to the shape of it instead of the words.
He remembered William saying that the trouble with a tenant was that you never knew what he was doing to the timber.
He did not remember anything after that.
—
He came up out of it the way he had come up out of it a hundred times in that cabin, all at once, without moving.
It was grey. Not dawn — the grey before it, when the trees have got their edges back and nothing has any color in it. There was a bird going somewhere off toward the branch.
And there was weight on his chest.
William was asleep with his head on him, turned in, one arm across, entirely gone, breathing slow, and the blanket was half off both of them and the candle had burned out in the tin and there was grey light coming in at the door because the door was standing open six inches the way it had been standing open all night.
Nelson lay absolutely still and looked at the roof they had put on in October.
And thought — quite clearly, in the two seconds before anything else happened — we have been here all night.
Then a horse blew, out in the weeds, thirty feet away.
—
He got his head up.
Tapp was on the path at the corner of the cabin with the reins loose in one hand and his horse standing. Nelson could not tell whether he had just come up or had been there a minute.
He was looking straight in through the open door. There was nothing between them but ten feet of ground and the grey.
Nelson’s whole body went, from the neck down, into the kind of stillness that is not stillness at all.
He did not wake William. He thought about it and did not do it. He could not tell whether he was deciding not to or whether he simply could not make his arm move.
Tapp looked at the two of them for a count of about four.
His face did not do anything. There was no shock in it, no disgust, nothing Nelson could have called discovery.
To Nelson it looked less like surprise than confirmation — the way a man looks at a fence that has come down in the night, something that had been giving way and now had to be seen to, something that had made his morning longer.
Then he turned his horse’s head and walked it back up the path toward the quarter, unhurried, and did not look round, and was gone.
—
William woke about a quarter of an hour later and Nelson had not moved.
“What’s the — “ He got himself up on one elbow and looked at the light in the doorway and said, “God,” and was up and had his coat and was at the door in about five seconds. “It’s — how did we — “
“Tapp was here.”
William stopped in the doorway.
“When?”
“Just now. Quarter hour.”
“Here?”
“On the path. On his horse. Looking in.”
“Did he — “ William turned round. His face had gone the color of the light. “Did he say anything?”
“No.”
“Did he see — “
“He looked in the door for a second or two,” Nelson said, “and then he went back up.”
William stood in that doorway with his hand on the frame.
“Right,” he said.
Then he said it again. “Right.” And then: “It could be — he was after a stray, there’s — “
“He was on the path.”
“There’s nothing to say we were — “
“He looked in the door for four seconds,” said Nelson.
—
Nelson went to the field.
He went because it was the twenty-fifth of August and there were twelve acres of tobacco lying half cut, and because Reuben would want him at six, and because there was not one other thing in the world to do.
He cut for three hours.
That is what he did on the morning of the twenty-fifth of August, 1859: he went up the hill in the half dark and got his knife and went down the second ground with the rest of them and split stalks and laid them over, row after row, in the heat coming up, with the gum going black to his elbows, and he did not say one word to anybody and nobody said one word to him, and every single time a horse came up the road he stopped.
At about a quarter past nine Little Ephraim came along the headland carrying water and said, in the ordinary way, that Mr. Tapp’s horse was standing at the yard gate with the reins over the post.
Nelson said, “Is it.”
“Reins right over the post,” said Little Ephraim. “Ain’t tied nor nothing.”
And went on down the row with the bucket.
Nelson cut four more plants.
Then he stood up in the middle of the second ground with the knife in his hand and looked up the hill at the house, and the house was a quarter of a mile off and perfectly quiet in the sun, and there was nothing whatever to see, and he stood there looking at it for a long time.
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