Fifty-Three. Out of Tuesday’s Dispatch
Chapter Fifty-Three
Out of Tuesday’s Dispatch
The paper came up from the crossroads twice a week with whatever else came, and it came because the subscription had gone on through the war without interruption, which was the truest thing about the way William Ashmore ran that place now that it was mostly his.
Corbin Ashmore had died in the first week of December, of a thing in his chest that took nine days, after the last of it was over and everybody on the place was already free.
The commissioner had been out twice since Christmas to set the estate straight and had set out the missus’s thirds in the land, and the missus had those and the use of the two front rooms upstairs, and William had the rest, and the two of them had divided the house between them along about the same lines the commissioner had used on the fields.
Esther had the loom room still. She had it by a paper of her own, an agreement drawn in January in front of a Bureau man at Louisa Court House, which gave her the room and her rations and eight dollars a month against the sewing, and which she had made Elias Poindexter, who had been a free man since ’51, read out to her twice on the courthouse steps before she put her mark on it.
Eight dollars was what the county had agreed among themselves to pay a woman, all the places together, sitting down in a room and settling it in December so that nobody had to bid against anybody.
She knew that. She had signed it anyway, for the room.
She was in the passage with the window up, because it was the fourth of September and hot, and the passage was the only place with light enough to sew by that she was allowed to sit in all day.
Junie was down at the springhouse. There was nothing much wanting at a springhouse in September and Esther had let her go anyway, because sixteen wants an errand.
—
She saw him with the paper about nine in the morning.
The office door was open across the passage and he was standing at the desk, not sitting at it, with the paper spread flat and his weight on his knuckles, reading.
He read like that for a long time. He was twenty-seven and he had come back from Petersburg the April before last with a cough and without any of his own teeth on the left side, and he stood the way a man stands who has learned not to put his weight on one leg for long.
Then he straightened up and went out of the room and came back with the shears.
Esther watched him take up the shears and bend over the desk and she thought: the missus’s dress patterns.
Because that was what a man came in and cut out of a newspaper — a notice about a horse, or a page of something the missus wanted, and Esther would be handed the scrap in an hour and told to make something of it.
He cut something out. She heard the shears go through the sheet twice, the long tearing sound and then the short one. Then he put the shears down and picked up what he’d cut and read it again, still standing, and folded it once, and put it in his breast pocket.
Then he went out to the yard and got on the gray and rode off toward the crossroads.
He had ridden to the crossroads every Tuesday and Friday since January on the business of his father’s estate.
Esther had no reason to make that morning’s trip mean anything.
He was gone until two, the same as always.
—
She worked.
She had Miss Louisa Waller’s grey poplin to take in at the waist and let out through the shoulder, which was the whole of Miss Louisa’s history in the last four years, and she did it and thought about nothing except that he had put it in his pocket.
Because that was the part she could not do anything with.
A man who cuts a notice about a horse does not put it in his breast pocket.
He leaves it on the desk. He gives it to somebody.
A thing in the breast pocket is a thing carried on the person, and a thing carried on the person is either money or it is something a man does not want left where it can be found, and there was nobody in that house to find anything any more except her.
At noon she stopped and ate and went out and looked at Junie and came back.
At two he rode in and put the gray up himself, which he did now, and went into the house by the front and up the stairs, and did not come down for better than an hour.
He came down at half past three.
—
He came along the passage and stopped where she was sitting and stood there.
He was not holding his hat. He had it under his arm, and he had the folded paper in his right hand, held by the fold, and the first thing he did was turn it over once, so that she understood he had it, before he said anything.
Esther put the needle through the poplin and left it there and put her hands in her lap.
“This is out of Tuesday’s Dispatch,” William said.
Then he unfolded it and read it to her.
He read it straight through in a flat voice, the way a man reads out a bill of lading, and he did not stop in the middle of it and he did not look up from it at any point.
“Information wanted of my mother, Esther, and of my sister Junie, whom I left in Louisa county, Virginia, in November of 1859, at which time I was sold to Richmond by Mr. Corbin Ashmore of that county, my mother being then his seamstress and having belonged to him thirteen years. I was carried by water to New Orleans and sold thence into the parish of Lafourche, in Louisiana, and served in the United States Colored Troops. I am now at Thibodaux in that parish. I was then called Nelson only, having no other name. Any information concerning them will be most thankfully received by their son and brother, Nelson Reuben, care of the Rev. J. W. Pollard, Thibodaux, Louisiana.”
He stopped. He looked at the bottom of it.
“There’s a mark at the end. June four, three m. That means it went in the fourth of June and it’s to run three months.” He turned it over and looked at the back of it, which was the other half of somebody’s advertisement for a mill. “It runs out today.”
Esther heard about half of it.
She got Esther and she got Junie and then she lost several seconds entirely and came back at sold to Richmond, and then she got the rest of it well enough except that she could not make it hold still, and at the end of it there was a name she did not know.
“Read it again,” she said.
William read it again.
He read it exactly the same way, at the same speed, without putting anything into it the second time that had not been in it the first, and she got all of it this time and put her hands down flat on the poplin to stop them.
“Read the last of it once more.”
“By their son and brother, Nelson Reuben, care of the Rev. J. W. Pollard, Thibodaux, Louisiana.”
“Nelson Reuben.”
“Yes.”
She did not say anything about that. Reuben had been dead since the second winter of the war and was in the ground at the top of the branch field under a stone Esther had picked out herself, being a white stone, oval, with the point up, and she did not say one word about it in that passage to that man.
“That’s my son,” she said.
“Yes,” William said.
He folded it once along the fold it already had and held it out to her, and she took it, and he let go of it, and that was the whole of the transfer.
—
Then Esther waited.
She had it ready. She had had it ready since about eleven o’clock that morning, since the breast pocket, without letting herself look at it directly, the way you keep a knife in a drawer you don’t open — because there was one thing he was going to ask her and she had decided what she was going to say to it.
He was going to ask her to put something in when she wrote.
That was all. He would not ask to write himself, because he would know better than that, and he would not ask her to give a message, because he would know better than that too, but he would find some road round to it.
If you send, you might say. Or he would ask what she meant to say, which is the same thing wearing a coat.
Or he would stand there long enough that she was obliged to offer, which of the three was the one she thought he would take, and she had decided she would let the silence run and would not offer, and that if he asked her straight out she would say No sir and nothing else, and see what he did with it.
She sat with her hands on the grey poplin and the clipping in her fist and waited for it.
William put his hat on.
“The smokehouse door’s off the bottom hinge,” he said. “I’ll see to it tomorrow, or the day after.”
“Yes sir.”
He went out down the passage and out the front and let the door to, and she heard him go down the steps, and then she heard nothing for a while, and then she heard him out in the yard telling one of the dogs to get down.
He did not come back that evening. He did not ask her anything at supper, and he did not ask her anything the next day.
Esther had a great deal of it ready and got to use none of it, and she could not settle on what that meant, and after some days she stopped taking it out to look at.
—
She sat in the passage a while after he had gone, until her hands would do what she told them.
Then she got up and went into the loom room and shut the door and got her needle case down off the shelf — the wooden one, wound twice round with thread — and unwound it, and took out the brass thimble that had never fit her, and put the folded clipping in flat against the bottom where the needles couldn’t go through it, and put the thimble in on top of it, and wound the thread back round twice, and put it up on the shelf.
Then she went out and down to the springhouse to find Junie.
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