Forty-Eight. Forks of the Road
Chapter Forty-Eight
Forks of the Road
They gave him clothes.
He kept the old coat. He rolled it and it went where he went.
The other thing they gave him, at the end of the second week, was a rifle, and he was three days before he stopped noticing that he was carrying it.
—
The boat went up on the ninth of August.
It went up past Donaldsonville, where Basile had walked back from with a bad foot, and past Baton Rouge, and it stopped at Port Hudson and lay there most of a day, and Nelson stood at the rail in the heat and looked at the bluff and the works cut into it and said the name over to himself, because it was the first one.
Then, on the fourth day, Natchez.
Vicksburg stayed a name.
He had said those three in the dark on the floor of a room in Lafourche Parish until he had them, and he had known when he said them that they were on a river running the wrong way, and now he was on the river and it was still running the wrong way and he went up it anyway.
—
Natchez stood on a bluff and the town was up on top of it and the landing was underneath, and the fort was north of the town on the same bluff, and it was the biggest piece of made ground Nelson had ever seen.
It was an earthwork. Ditch and parapet and bastions, and it took in a great deal of ground, and there had been houses on some of that ground and there were not any now. Inside it there were magazines and stables and quarters, and the quarters were board buildings put up in a hurry the year before.
The work was fatigue.
That was what a garrison did and Nelson had not been told and would not have been told, and it took him about ten days to see the shape of it.
There was drill, an hour and a half of it, and there was guard, and there was inspection, and everything else in the day was a working party.
They cut ditch. They carried. They mended what the rain took off the parapet in July and August, which was a good deal. They unloaded boats.
He had dug ditch in Lafourche Parish for four seasons in water to the thigh, and he dug ditch at Natchez in the summer of 1864, and there was no difference in his back at the end of the day that he could find.
The difference was on paper and he knew exactly where it was and did not have to look for it.
He was fed out of a government’s stores.
He was paid sixteen dollars a month, the same as any man.
He had a jacket. And there was a book somewhere with his name written in it in his own hand, and every man in that fort had one, and none of them had been tested yet.
—
He got known for the letters inside a month, the same way he had got known for the knives.
There were men in that company who had come out of places where a letter had never been possible in any direction, and there were now two things at once: an army post office, and somewhere for a letter to go, because a wife or a mother might be in a camp at Vicksburg or at Davis Bend or at Natchez itself.
So he wrote them.
He was slow and his hand ran uphill and his spelling was his own, and men brought him paper they had bought and sat down beside him and told him what to say and then changed it, and he wrote what they told him.
My dear wife I take my pen in hand. He learned that one because six men in a row began that way and he stopped asking.
He wrote to Vidalia and to Vicksburg and to a place in Tensas Parish and to a woman at Davis Bend, and twice to Ohio, and once to a man’s brother who had gone into a regiment at Memphis.
He read the answers when they came, out loud, sitting on the ground, and there was no privacy in any of it and nobody asked for any.
He did not write one for himself.
He knew nowhere to send it. He had a county and a state and a man’s name and no more than that, and Louisa County was on the other side of a war, and none of the men who handled the post could give him a road into it.
He knew the whole of that arithmetic and he did not have to do it twice.
—
In September he was put on a repair detail on the quarters, because he had told a sergeant he could sharpen and had been put on repair detail, which was near enough.
It was rain damage and rot at the sills. They took the siding off two of the buildings low down, along the whole run of the wall, and put new sills in and put the boards back.
Nelson had the near end of the third building on a Tuesday morning and he took a board off with a bar and turned it over and looked at it.
It had been somewhere else.
He knew that before he had it all the way turned.
The weathered face was inward — a board that had stood twenty years in the sun and rain with the grain raised on it, nailed in with the raised side facing the inside of a soldiers’ room, which no man building a wall does on purpose.
It had been cut to length after it had been weathered; the cut end was clean and pale and the rest of it was grey.
There were nail holes in it in two patterns, an old set that did not answer to anything in the present framing, and the new ones.
And there was a mortise in it. A shallow rectangle chiselled into the face, with a second one down from it, and around the lower one a dark shadow in the wood the shape of a plate, and a line of iron stain running down from a hole in the middle of it where a screw had been, and rust in the grain.
He knew what a hinge cut was. He had hung barn doors.
And the edge along that side had been worn down. Not planed. Worn — gone soft and round for eighteen inches at about the height of a man’s hand, the way an edge goes when people put their hands on it for years.
He stood there with it and worked it through the way he would have worked through a piece of harness. It had been a door. Somebody had taken the door apart and pulled the hardware off it and got a board out of it, and the board was now nailed flat into the side of a barracks and could not open.
A man named Deck was working the other end of the run and came along with a bucket.
“That one’s off Forks,” he said.
“What’s Forks.”
“Market, out east of town.” Deck set the bucket down and put his foot on the board.
“Niggers. Traders’ pens, all along the fork of the two roads.
They pulled it down last fall for the lumber and a good deal of it come in here.
” He picked the bucket back up. “Sills is what’s rotten. Board’s all right.”
Then he went on down the wall.
—
Nelson put the board across the trestles and got the old nails out of it.
Then he turned it over again and put his thumb into the hinge cut, into the top one, and moved it along the chiselled edge, and found the place at the corner where the chisel had gone in twice and left a step.
He had read it right.
He put the board back on the pile with the others.
—
He was three days on that building.
He did not go out east of town and did not ask anybody how to get there, and it was not far and men from that fort went into Natchez on a Sunday and could have shown him. In November a detail went out that way for something else and he did not put in for it.
What he did was the sills.
They were cypress where they could get cypress and oak where they could not, and the ones on the third building had gone at both ends because the ground fell that way and the water stood, and he cut back to sound wood and set the new pieces and toed them and the sergeant looked at what he had done and said nothing, which he had learned in a sugar house was the whole of what a man gets.
Then they nailed the siding back on, the same boards, in the same order, because they had come off in order and there was no sense in doing it any other way.
The one with the hinge cuts went back on second from the bottom, on the north side, near the door.
—
In the second week of October a man in that room drove a nail into it at shoulder height, about a hand’s width from the mortise, and hung his cartridge box on it.
Nobody said anything about that either.
A fortnight after, Nelson drove one of his own, further along, and hung the coat from the New Orleans pen on it, because it was the only thing he had that would not go in a knapsack and because the wall was where things went.
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