Forty-Seven. Nelson Reuben
Chapter Forty-Seven
Nelson Reuben
He did not put his name down at Thibodaux in May, and the reason he did not was that he had to ask Jonah first, and he did not ask Jonah until he had been back on the place two days.
He did it in the room, at night, which was where things got said.
“They’ll take us both,” he said. “He told me. Two men off the same place is nothing to them.”
Jonah lay there.
“No,” he said.
Nelson had another argument ready. There was nowhere to put it.
“All right,” Nelson said.
After a while Jonah said the water in the near ditch had gone bad early that year and would want watching, and Nelson said he had noticed it, and they lay there in the dark.
—
That was the twenty-ninth of May and he was better than five weeks working at it.
He worked at it the only way he knew how to work at anything, which was as a sum, and he had a good deal to put in it.
Sixteen dollars a month against eight dollars a month of which four existed.
The sixteen had come in June. In May the sergeant had said ten with three kept back for clothing, and in the third week of June word came down the bayou that Congress had done it, and a soldier’s pay was sixteen dollars and the same for everybody, and it was the only piece of news out of Washington in Nelson’s life that had ever moved in his direction while he was standing still.
A term of three years, which at twenty-four is a thing a man can count.
The bounty, which was real, and which he could get the figure of two ways and did.
Rations that came out of a government’s stores instead of a planter’s yard.
And on the other side: three years of doing whatever he was told by men he had never met, in places he could not point at, and a war that had been going four years and was not obviously going to stop.
And the sergeant’s sentence, which was not a number and would not go into the column: they come after a soldier.
He could not make it come out. He did it at the end of rows and he did it lying awake and he did it once on the step with a stick in his hand while a boy of nine wrote Ovide forty times in the dirt beside him, and it would not come out, because the two sides of it were not the same kind of thing and there was no honest way to put them in the same column.
He had been doing sums in his head since he was thirteen years old and this was the first thing he had ever done that a sum did not get him to.
He went anyway. That was the whole of the decision and it took about four seconds and it happened on a Wednesday morning in the first week of July while he was carrying a bucket.
—
There was almost nothing to get ready and it took him no time at all.
He had thirteen dollars and forty cents, which was what was left of a year and a half of a wage that was half a wage, and he sewed twelve of it into the lining of the coat from the New Orleans pen and put the rest in his shoe.
He had Delphy’s thimble.
He had the knife.
He did not tell anybody except Jonah, and he told Jonah on the sixth, in the afternoon, standing in the shed with the moss in it, because that was where Jonah was.
“Tonight,” he said.
Jonah went on turning the heap.
“All right,” he said.
—
The last of it was ordinary and Nelson had known it was going to be and had not been ready for how ordinary.
They ate. Jonah said something about Basile’s foot, which was worse in the wet, and said that Anténor had told him the mill would want a new set of rollers before another season and that nobody was going to get a new set of rollers in the state of Louisiana in that year, and he went on about the rollers for a while.
Nelson listened to the whole of it.
Then he took the whetstone off the shelf where it had been for four years and put it on the sill by Jonah’s side of the room, and said nothing about it, and Jonah looked at it and said nothing about it either.
At about eleven o’clock Nelson got up.
“Well,” he said.
“Mm,” Jonah said.
Nelson went out the door and down the step and up the street past twenty-two cabins in the dark, and did not look back at that room, because there was nothing in looking back at it that was going to be any use to him on a road.
—
It is nine miles from Bergeron’s landing to Thibodaux and he did it between eleven and four in the morning, on the levee road, which was the road with people on it and therefore the road where a man walking is a man going somewhere rather than a man hiding.
He had no pass. He had no written leave of any kind, and there was a contract with his mark on it in a book at Bergeron’s store saying he would work on that place through the year and would not pass off it except under the rules the provost marshal made.
He was stopped once, about two miles short of the town, by two men on the road with a lantern, one of them a soldier and one of them not.
“Where are you going.”
“Thibodaux.”
“What for.”
And Nelson stood in that road in the dark and found out, by saying it, that there was exactly one sentence in the world that would open it.
“I’m going to enlist,” he said.
The soldier put the lantern down.
“Go on, then,” he said.
—
They took him on the seventh of July.
It was in a brick building on a street in Thibodaux with two rooms in use, and there were nineteen men there that morning off five or six places, and it went slowly and nobody explained any part of it in advance.
The surgeon was in the back room and he was about fifty and had been at it a long time.
He had them in one at a time and stripped and he went over a man in about three minutes: the mouth, the eyes, the chest, the hands, the feet, made him bend and made him hop, and asked four or five questions in a voice with nothing in it at all.
He turned Nelson round and looked at his back.
He put two fingers on the wide one and moved them along it once. Then he wrote something.
“Turn round. Open your mouth.”
That was the whole of it. Nobody in that room asked Nelson to account for it and nobody told him what to say about it, and the man wrote what he wrote and went on to the chest, and when he was done he said “Pass” to the clerk in the next room and “Next” to the door, and Nelson put his shirt on and went through.
—
The clerk had a printed book with ruled columns in it and he filled a line across as you talked, and he did not look up much.
“Age.”
“Twenty-four.”
“Born where.”
“Louisa County. Virginia.”
The clerk wrote it. Nelson watched him write it, upside down, and got most of it.
“Occupation.”
He thought about that one for longer than the clerk wanted. Tobacco. Wheat. A threshing machine. A cane knife, badly, and then not badly. A furnace under a batterie for four seasons. Every blade on a place for three years.
“Laborer,” he said.
The clerk measured him against a strip nailed to the doorframe and said, “Five eleven and a half,” and wrote it, and Nelson did not say that he already knew that, or where he had been standing when he found it out.
Then: complexion, eyes, hair. The clerk did those himself, looking at him for about a second and a half each, and wrote three words.
“Name.”
“Nelson.”
“Nelson what.”
—
There was a pause there.
Nobody had ever asked him for two names.
There had never been an occasion for two names in his life, and everything that had ever been written down about him — a pass, a bill, a manifest with thirty-one people on it, a line in a store book with a blanket and a hat charged against it — had had one word in it where a man’s name goes.
The clerk waited with the pen up. There were eighteen men behind him.
“Reuben,” Nelson said.
The clerk wrote it.
—
They swore them in the front room in a lot, standing, with their right hands up, and a lieutenant read it out of a card and they said it back in pieces, and there was a man at the end of the line who could not get the words and said them a beat behind everybody all the way through, and nobody stopped or waited for him.
Then the clerk called them up one at a time to put a mark against the roll.
When it came to Nelson the clerk turned the book and held the pen out to him crossways, the way you hand a pen to a man who is going to make a cross with it.
“I’ll write it,” Nelson said.
The clerk looked at him for the first time that morning.
Then he turned the pen around and gave it to him properly, and moved his own hand off the page.
Nelson took it and set the nib down and did it the way he had been taught in a hole in the ground under a tobacco field by a boy with a spelling book, one letter at a time, badly, with his tongue between his teeth, and it came out large and crooked and ran uphill at the end of the line.
Nelson Reuben.
It took him a while. Nobody hurried him.
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