Fifty-Four. Miss Gaines
Chapter Fifty-Four
Miss Gaines
Junie read it to her that night with the door shut.
She had been at the school at the Court House since the spring, three days a week when she could be spared and not always three, and what she had out of it was that she could get through print if the print was not too small and if nobody hurried her, and that she could write her own name and about nine other words.
She got through it in something over four minutes and stopped twice.
“Again,” Esther said.
She had it read six times that night, and on the second time she stopped Junie in the middle and made her go back and do a piece over, and on the fourth time she stopped her twice, and by the sixth she had the whole of it by heart the way she had things by heart, which was as a shape, in order, with the numbers in the right places.
Then she took it off her and folded it and put it away and told her to go to sleep.
—
She was eleven days getting it written and the eleven days were not idleness.
She could have had it done inside a week.
There was the Bureau office at the Court House with a clerk in it who wrote letters for people all day, and there was a man at Fairlawn who had been the Wallers’ and could write a fair hand, and there was Elias Poindexter, who had read her contract out to her twice on those same steps in January and would have done it in an hour.
She did not want a clerk and she did not want a favour and she did not want a man.
What she wanted was somebody who would put down what she said.
That is not a common thing in a person who writes for other people.
Esther had watched it her whole life from the other side of it — a woman says a thing and a man who can write it improves it on the way through, because he cannot help it, because he thinks he is helping — and she had made up her mind about this letter before she had made up her mind about one word in it.
So she walked the five miles to the Court House on the second Saturday and went to the school.
—
The school was in a building that had been a store and it had forty-odd children in it on a weekday and nobody in it on a Saturday but the woman who kept it.
Her name was Miss Gaines and she was from Norfolk and she was about thirty and she had been in Louisa County since the previous October.
Esther said what she wanted and Miss Gaines said she would do it and got the paper and the ink and sat down at the table with her back straight and her pen up, and said, “Go on, then.”
And Esther, who had been composing it for eleven days in a passage with a needle in her hand, said it.
—
What went in it was this.
That she was living, and that she was at Fair Prospect still, in the loom room, and that she was working for wages under a paper.
That Junie was living, and had been sixteen since June, and could sew a whole dress and was at the school at the Court House.
That old Mr. Ashmore had died in December of the year before, of a thing in his chest.
That Anna was living and was seventy and was still in the kitchen.
That Little Ephraim had gone to Richmond in May of ’65 and had not been heard of since.
That Sarah had gone in the war and was said to be at Charlottesville.
That Patience was at a place near Trevilians.
That Overton had been taken for the works in ’63 and had not come back.
That she had got his notice out of a Richmond paper on the fourth of September and had it in her hand.
That she had eight dollars a month and could put by some of it, and that if he wanted money to come on he was to say how much and she would get it, and that if he did not want to come he was to say that too and she would not ask him twice.
And she had them read that last part back and did not change it.
—
Then there was Reuben, and she took the longest over Reuben, and Miss Gaines sat with the pen up and waited and did not ask.
Because he did not know. That was the whole of it. He had not had that name when he left her. Somewhere out there he had taken Reuben’s name and put it on himself, and Reuben had been in the ground since the January of ’63, and he had signed it to a notice in a newspaper and had it printed.
He was going to find out. He was going to come up a lane and ask after Reuben in the first hour, of somebody, and whoever it was would tell him standing in a yard.
So she had it put in.
Reuben died in the second winter of the war, in the January. He is buried at the top of the branch field. There is a white stone on him, oval, with the point up. I chose it.
That was all of it. She did not put in one word about the name and she did not ask him about the name, and she went straight on to the next thing, which was the corn: that there was corn in the ground on the half-acre behind the loom room and that it had come to something, and that nobody in that county was going hungry this year the way they had gone hungry in ’65.
—
What she left out was two things and she knew both of them while she was leaving them out.
She left out how it had been for her. There was a version of that letter with the seven years in it and she had composed some of that version too, at night, over the years, and she left the whole of it on the floor of that schoolroom, because a man does not need his mother’s seven years handed to him in a paper before he has even said whether he is coming.
And she left out William.
—
She thought about that one for a while and Miss Gaines waited through it.
The facts were that a man had stood at a desk in that house on a Tuesday morning and read a newspaper and gone and got the shears and cut a notice out of it and put it in his breast pocket, and had ridden to the crossroads and come back, and had gone upstairs for an hour, and had then come down the passage and read it to her twice and given it to her.
That was what he did. She had watched every part of it and she could have put the whole of it in the letter in four sentences.
She did not put it in.
Not to punish him, though she could not have sworn that on a Bible.
It was that she could not see, turning it over, one single thing her son would be able to do with the knowledge that would not cost him something — and that if a man is going to be handed a fact like that he had better be handed it by a person standing in front of him who can see his face while he takes it.
She was not going to send it eleven hundred miles in a stranger’s handwriting.
She would tell him herself or she would not, and she did not decide which in that schoolroom, and she went on to the next thing.
—
It took an hour and a quarter and Miss Gaines wrote steadily and did not talk while she was writing.
At the end of it she read it back.
She read well and she read it all the way through, and it was Esther’s, in Esther’s order, with the numbers in the right places — until close to the bottom, where she had written:
Not a day has passed in seven years that I have not thought of you.
“I never said that,” Esther said.
Miss Gaines looked up.
“It’s true, though,” she said. “Isn’t it.”
“It’s true,” Esther said. “I never said it. Take it out.”
Miss Gaines took a rule and struck it through, twice, so that it could not be read, and wrote below it what Esther had actually said, which was that she had never had any word of him from anybody in seven years and had asked everybody there was to ask.
Then she read the whole of it back a second time, and Esther said it would do.
—
The direction on the outside was Nelson Reuben, care of the Rev. J. W. Pollard, Thibodaux, Louisiana, and Miss Gaines wrote that out large and clear and blotted it.
At the bottom of the letter itself she had put Your mother and stopped, with the pen up.
“Esther,” Esther said.
Miss Gaines wrote it and waited.
“And the other one,” Esther said. “Ashmore. It’s what’s on my paper.”
So it went out of that county on the Monday, the seventeenth of September, with a woman’s mark on it and two surnames in it that had nothing to do with one another, and neither of them explained.
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