Thirty. The Office #2
She could not tell whether he understood why.
“Tell her what you saw,” Ashmore said.
“I don’t see why she — “
“Tell her what you saw.”
Tapp said it in about eleven words, at the window, to the middle distance. The old cabin at the bottom of the quarter, before daylight. Master William asleep. This one with him. How they were lying.
He did not say anything that could not be said. That was the worst of it. There was nothing in the eleven words that a man could be hanged for or even fined, and every person in the room knew precisely what had been described.
“Now,” Ashmore said, and turned in his chair to face Nelson, and put one ankle over the other. “Here is what happened.”
Nelson said nothing.
“You went down to the barn before light. You have been going down there some while — you’ll know how long better than I do — and you have been putting things in my son’s head that had no business getting into it, and this morning you laid hands on him while he slept, and he woke and put you off.
” Ashmore said all of this in the voice of a man reading back a bill of goods.
“He is twenty years old and he has been raised in this house and he has had a hard summer and he is not himself. You have had the use of him since you were six years old and you have taken advantage of it. That is what happened.”
“That’s not what it was,” Nelson said.
It came out low and it came out level and it was, Esther thought, the single most dangerous thing she had ever heard anybody say in that house.
Ashmore did not argue with him. That was the thing she had been afraid of from the moment she saw the squared paper. A man who argues can be argued out of something.
“It isn’t a question of what it was,” he said. “It’s a question of what is said. Do you follow me?”
Nelson didn’t answer.
“You will say it to Tapp. You will say it to Mr. Waller and to Aleck Dabney’s father, because Tapp has a mouth and by Sunday they will both have heard something and I would rather they heard it from a nigger who is ashamed of himself than from a white man who is guessing.
” He said the word without weight, the way he’d say cart.
“And then you will say it once in front of my son.”
Esther heard her own breath go and got it back.
“Now.” Ashmore leaned forward and put his forearms on the desk. “You say it, and your mother stays here. She stays in this house. She keeps her work and she keeps the child and nothing about her arrangement is altered in any particular.
“You don’t say it, and I sell the two of you.
Not together. I will send you where you are going and I will send her where she is going and neither of you will know the name of the other place, and I will do it inside a fortnight, because I have Betts and Gregory’s circular in that drawer and I know what you are worth this month. ”
He let it sit.
“That’s the whole of it,” he said. “There isn’t a third thing.”
—
Esther counted, because that is what she did.
She counted what could be taken. Nelson could be taken. She could be taken.
Two.
Then she did the only thing she did in that room.
“Sell me,” she said.
Everyone looked at her, including Nelson, and she kept her eyes on Ashmore.
“Sell me and let him alone. You’ll get four hundred for me and no trouble.
I’ll go this week. I’ll go to Richmond on the cars with Tapp and I won’t say a word going or coming and I won’t need selling twice.
” Her voice was doing what she wanted it to do, which surprised her.
“You’ve got Sarah for the sewing and she’s slow but she’ll come on, and Miss Louisa’ll take her work if I tell her to, I’ll send word and tell her to.
Sell me. It’s cheaper for you and it’s done Friday. ”
Corbin Ashmore looked at her for what felt like a long time.
She had known this man thirteen years and she could read him better than his own son could, and she knew before he opened his mouth that she had lost, and worse than lost — that she had shown him the size of it, laid out on the desk between them, and that he was now holding a thing he had only suspected the weight of before.
“No,” he said. Not unkindly. Almost gently, which was how she knew.
“Master Corbin — “
“No,” he said. “Go and stand by the door.”
She went and stood by the door.
—
It was very hot in the office. The window was up and there was no air at all coming through it and the flies had got in and one of them kept going at the glass. Outside, somebody was leading Tapp’s horse off to water and the shoes went across the yard, unhurried, and away.
“I’ll ask you the once,” Ashmore said. “Then Tapp’ll take you out and I won’t ask you again.”
The needle was still through the shoulder of Esther’s dress. She had her hands folded in front of her and she could feel the head of it against her collarbone, and she pressed her thumb to it and held it there.
He would say it, she thought. He would say it because he was not a fool and because she had raised him to survive things and because the price of not saying it was her, and she had just stood in front of him and put her own value up out loud so that he could not possibly mistake it.
Or he would not say it. Because he was nineteen, and because he had spent thirteen years being told he was somebody’s, and because there was one word in what Ashmore had laid out — ashamed — that she had watched go into him like a splinter.
She had no way to reach him. There was nothing she could do with her hands or her face across eight feet of pine floor that would not be seen and understood and used by three white men.
So she looked at him.
She had held out an hour and she spent it there, at the end, because she could not do anything else: she lifted her eyes off the desk and looked at her son.
Nelson was not looking at her.
He was looking at Corbin Ashmore, and his face had nothing in it at all, and the room was so quiet she could hear the fly.
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