Forty-Five. Second Watch
Chapter Forty-Five
Second Watch
The fires here did not have to be starved. Here you fed them. That was the difference and it had taken him a year to stop working against it — three years now of feeding a fire instead of smothering one, and still some part of his hands went on expecting the sawdust.
Second watch. Somewhere past three. The batterie was coming up and Anténor had the ladle and Nelson stood behind his shoulder where he was supposed to stand, holding the skimmer, waiting to be told.
He put his free hand out to the post to lean on it. It was cypress, adzed square, and there was a lip in it where the blade had gone in crooked.
His thumb found it.
He had one foot out of the door. He was already turning. Down the hill there was the one light at the house yard, low, and she would be sitting up with it.
The hand came across the dirt in the dark, without any aim to it, and stopped against his.
In the morning she had the shirt across her lap with the sleeves still loose in it, and she moved his plate toward him, and she told him the hog pen wanted mending.
She did not ask him where he had been.
“Nelson,” Anténor said.
The syrup was threading off the ladle in a way that meant something and he had missed the moment it began.
He got the skimmer up. Anténor watched him do it and said nothing about it, which was its own kind of remark, and they struck the kettle late — not late enough to lose it, late enough that Nelson knew it.
There were four hours left in the watch. He worked them.
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