Fifty-One. The Road to Virginia
Chapter Fifty-One
The Road to Virginia
He was ten days getting down.
There was no hurry in it and there was nothing at the other end of it that was expecting him, and he took deck passage twice and walked one stretch and sat two days at a landing waiting on a boat that had been said to be coming.
He came into Thibodaux on the eighteenth of March, 1866, in a soldier’s coat with no soldier in it, with a discharge and eighty-one dollars in his shirt.
He was twenty-six years old and had been in the state of Louisiana for six years and two months, and he had never in the whole of that time stood in a road and been at liberty to choose which way to walk.
He went down the bayou.
—
Bergeron’s place was still there and forty-odd people were still on it and the mill had run a short season and got a poor crop off worn ground.
There were wages now and a contract for the year, and there were the same twenty-two cabins, and Numa was still in the ground before four although he was past fifty-five and the hip had got into his walk. Anténor was dead — the winter before, in a bed, in the room he had always had.
Nelson asked twice about that. He asked who had been with him and he asked who had the batterie now, and got the answers, and did not ask anything else.
Nelson stood in that street at the middle of the afternoon in a blue coat and men came out and looked at him.
Basile said the first thing anybody said, which was, “They let you go, then,” and Nelson took it kindly.
Jonah came up from the shed at the back.
He stopped about six feet off and stood there with his hands down, and Nelson stood there, and neither of them did anything at all for a second or two.
Then Jonah said, “You’re thin.”
“I ain’t.”
“You are.”
He turned round and went into the cabin and came out with two cups.
—
They did not talk about it.
They talked about the year and a half in the way a man talks about a hedge: what was in it, in order, without going into any of it.
Nelson said Natchez and the fort and Rodney and the mustering out and the paper, and Jonah said the crop of ’64 and the crop of ’65 and Anténor and who had gone and who had come, and neither of them said one word about a night in July of 1864 or the two sentences that had been said in that room, and the thing sat there between them the whole time like a chair nobody uses.
What Jonah had was this.
The lugger man had come back up the bayou in the autumn of 1865, and there had been another one after him in the winter, and there was money in moss now, and Jonah had sold what had been sitting in that shed for two years and had sold the pit besides and had cut and put down more.
He said the figure. It was a good figure and he said it flat and did not dress it, and Nelson said, “Nine month,” and Jonah said, “Nine month,” and that was the whole of the celebration.
Nelson stayed two nights in that street and did not stay in that room and neither of them proposed it.
—
Then he went down to Thibodaux and took work, because a man without lawful employment could be called a vagrant in Louisiana and it was better not to find out how that went.
He got on at the landing. It was carrying and it was stacking and it was four bits a day, and he was good at it in the way a man is good at work he has been doing since he was nine.
And then, inside a month, it was the other thing again.
Because Thibodaux in 1866 was full of people who could not read, and there were now papers everywhere.
Contracts. Bureau orders posted up. Receipts.
A summons. A statement of account from a store.
A discharge, of which there were a good many in that town besides his.
Men brought him things folded into eighths and soft at the creases and asked him what they said, and he read them, and half the time what they said was worse than what the man had been told they said, and he had to be the one to say so.
He got paid in the way he had always got paid for the second thing, which was in fish and tobacco and a place at a fire and a coat mended.
That was his living from March to May.
—
He worked at Virginia the whole of that spring and he worked at it as a sum.
The first thing was the road, and he priced it four ways.
Up the river to Cairo and then into the railroads north and east was the one everybody named first, and what a man at the landing told him about the roads through Tennessee and into Virginia was that they were being put back but were not back.
By sea from New Orleans round to Norfolk or to Baltimore and then in from there was the second, and it was the fastest, and it was the dearest, and there was no deck passage on that water at a price he could hear without laughing.
Overland was not a road; it was a thing a young man does with nothing to lose, and it took a season.
The fourth was to go as far as he could afford and be somewhere in the middle of it with nothing.
He got the whole business, at the cheapest honest figure, to somewhere between forty and sixty dollars and between four and seven weeks, and to arrive in Louisa County, Virginia, with about twenty dollars, in a state he had been out of for seven years, in the summer.
And at the end of it there was a county.
That was the part that would not come right however he turned it.
He had a county and two given names. He did not know whether his mother was alive.
He did not know whether she was on that place or in Richmond or in Ohio.
He had written to the one address in the world he was sure of and the letter had come back to him in January with the corners gone soft, and if the county was still a route then that letter would have got somewhere, and it had not.
So the arithmetic came out. It came out clean and it came out fast and it said: not yet, and not like this.
He sat on a piling at the Thibodaux landing on an evening in April with his hands between his knees and did not like one part of it.
In the summer of 1864 he had done a sum and it had refused to come out and he had gone anyway. That had been the best thing he ever did. This one came out, and it went the other way, and he did what it said.
—
He went to the Bureau office in the last week of April and asked about transportation.
The office was two rooms over a store and there was a clerk and an agent and a line, and Nelson stood in it for an hour and a half and was in front of the agent for perhaps four minutes.
The agent was civil. That is the thing to say about him.
He heard the whole question, and he asked two of his own — was Nelson under contract, and was he in employment — and then he explained the position, and he explained it in a tone that suggested he had explained it a good many times that month.
“Transportation gets furnished,” the agent said. “It gets furnished to a place. I can’t put a man on transportation to a county to find out whether his mother’s in it. You get me an address, or word comes down to us out of an office up there, and that is another matter altogether.”
“What can I do now.”
“Leave your name.”
Nelson gave his name and where he was to the clerk.
He watched the clerk write Nelson Reuben, laborer, at the landing, Thibodaux in a book with about two hundred names already in it, and worked it out standing there.
There was this book. There was another one like it in Louisa County, Virginia, in an office he had never seen. A book in Thibodaux could not know what was in a book in Louisa by itself. Somebody still had to carry the name from the one to the other.
He thanked the man and went down the stairs.
—
The church was on the north side of the town and it had been a carpenter’s shop and had a plank floor and no glass in two of the windows, and the man who had it was named Pollard and had been at Thibodaux three years.
Nelson went for the first time in the middle of May, because a man off the landing took him, and he sat at the back.
They did the singing and they did the preaching, and Pollard was better than Nelson had expected and went on longer than Nelson had expected, and then at the end of it, before anything else, he took a folded newspaper off the table beside him and read out four notices.
They were all the same kind of thing.
A woman in Iberville Parish looking for two sons taken to Texas in 1863.
A man looking for his wife Delia, sold from Nashville, and their three children whose names he gave.
A woman looking for her mother, sold out of South Carolina before the war, and she gave the name of the man who had bought her and the name of the man who had sold her.
Pollard read all four out slowly and twice over the names, and said the paper they were in, and said that any person who had anything to say about any of them was to come to him.
Then he said the last one again for a woman near the front who had not caught it, and folded the paper up, and they sang.
Nelson sat at the back of that room and did not move for a while after it was over.
He had spent a year and a half writing other men’s letters in the Army and had never once had anywhere to send his own, and he had been sitting on a piling in April with a sum in front of him that said the road was shut.
He had not, in all of that, thought of the one thing that goes where a man cannot.
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