He's Mine

One. The Upstairs Room

Chapter One

The Upstairs Room

They kept her upstairs, and that was the first thing she had to be afraid of.

Chesley’s was three narrow buildings run together on Locust Alley with a yard behind, and the yard was where the lots were — thirty or forty people at a time in the open with a plank fence round them and a shed along one side for the rain, and the noise of it came up through the floor of the upstairs room all day and most of the night.

Esther had been put in the upstairs room with two other women and a girl, and there was a bed in it, and a window with glass, and a basin.

She understood the room the first hour. The room meant fine goods. The room meant a woman who would be shown to a particular sort of buyer in a particular sort of way, and who would go by private sale and not off the block, and who would fetch more than anybody in the yard.

And it meant that whatever they thought she was worth, they had already decided it was more than they thought she was worth with a six-year-old boy attached.

Nobody had said that. Nobody would say it. She worked it from the room.

—

Mr. Stith had died in February and it had taken until August to settle him, which was longer than usual and meant the estate was in some trouble, and in that six months Esther had gone on doing exactly what she had done for the ten years before it, which was cut and sew for a house on Grace Street with four women in it.

She was very good. She had been made good by a woman named Delphy who had been the best in that house and who had not been jealous, which was rarer than the skill.

Delphy had taught her to cut from a person — to look at a woman standing in a doorway and know what her shoulders were doing under the wrapper, and to make a thing that fit that woman and not the paper pattern of some other woman in Philadelphia.

Ten years of it. Esther could take a bodice apart with her eyes across a room.

None of that had come to anything in February and none of it came to anything in August.

On the morning they took her, Delphy came out to the yard gate on Grace Street with her hands in her apron and said, “Here,” and put the thimble into Esther’s palm and closed her fingers over it, and said, “Don’t you let them see it,” and went back in the house without stopping.

Esther carried it to Chesley’s in her mouth, under her tongue, and did not put it down for six hours.

—

They were four days in the upstairs room.

She spent the four days doing two things. The first was keeping Nelson quiet, fed, and out of the way, and looking as though he had been kept quiet and fed and out of the way, which is not the same and is harder.

The second was working out what kind of man she needed.

Because there were only two ways this went. A buyer could take her and leave the boy — Chesley would sell him after, to somebody, at some price, and she would never know the name of the county. Or a buyer could take both.

Nothing about the law was going to help her. She had asked, once, years back, out of the sort of hope you have at nineteen, and had got the answer, and the answer was that there was no age at which it could not be done in Virginia and no paper anywhere that said otherwise.

So: not a city buyer. A city house wanted one woman for the sewing and had no use for a boy and no room to put him.

Not a trader, obviously, and not one of the men in the good coats who came through the yard with a book, because those were buying for the south and buying by the head and would take her and not him and be gone by Thursday.

What she wanted was a place. Somewhere with ground and people already on it, where one more child was not a question anybody had to sit down and think about.

A country buyer, come up to Richmond for something particular, with a wagon at the other end and no notion of what a boy cost to keep because he had never had to reckon it separately in his life.

That was what she wanted. She had four days and no way at all to get it, and so what she actually did was keep the boy clean and tell him a lie.

“We’re going on the cars,” she told him.

“When?”

“Directly.”

“Where to?”

“Out where there’s cows,” Esther said, which was the only thing she could think of that a boy born on Grace Street had never seen and had opinions about.

He asked her about it maybe two hundred times in four days.

Whether the cows would be close by. Whether you could touch one.

Whether cows knew their names. She answered every one of them and made up whatever she did not know, and by the fourth day he had a whole country in his head that did not exist anywhere and he was in a state about getting there.

She would rather have had him frightened, some of those four days. It would have been easier to hold.

—

Three men came up to see her before Ashmore.

The first was a tobacconist’s wife’s agent who asked Chesley twice what she was and did not speak to her at all, and went away.

The second was an old man from Petersburg who had her walk to the window and back and then asked her what her age was, and when she said twenty-five he said, “She’ll say that at thirty-five,” to Chesley, in front of her, in the voice of a man being shrewd.

The third one made her sew.

He was perhaps fifty and he came up with a bundle under his arm and had the clerk bring the chair over to the light, and out of the bundle came a girl’s dress, a good one, a blue-figured muslin, with a torn sleeve where somebody had gone through a doorway with an arm out.

“Mend that,” he said.

Esther sat down and looked at the tear.

She could have closed it in six minutes. She could have run a seam up the underarm and turned it and had it shut and it would have held for a year and a man like that would never have known the difference from the doorway of the room.

She did not do that. She took it to the window and turned it inside out and found where the muslin had gone thin along the whole underarm seam, which is where it always goes, and she picked the seam out for four inches on the good side of the damage and cut a piece off the inside of the hem, which is where a dress keeps its spare cloth, and set it in behind the tear as a backing and worked over it.

It took her forty minutes. The man watched the whole forty and did not say anything, and Chesley came up twice and looked and went away again, and Nelson sat on the floor by the wall exactly where he had been put.

When she was done she turned it right side out and shook it once and held it up.

You could see where it had been if you knew. You had to know.

The man took it and turned it over and put his thumb on the place and worked it back and forth, and then he put it down on the chair and said, “Where’d you learn to take out of the hem?”

“Grace Street, sir.”

“Mm,” he said, and rolled the dress up under his arm and went downstairs, and she heard his voice going in the office below her for some while, and then the street door, and then nothing.

He did not come back, and nobody told her why, and she turned it over the way you turn over a door you did not go through.

—

Corbin Ashmore came up at ten in the morning on the fifth day with Chesley behind him talking the whole way up the stairs.

He was a heavy-shouldered man of forty-odd in a coat that had been brushed and boots that had been blacked and a collar that had been turned once and wanted turning again, and he came into the room and stood in the middle of it and looked around it once, at the bed and the basin and the window, the way a man reads a price off a room.

Then he looked at her.

“This is the one,” Chesley said. “Ten years at Mr. Stith’s on Grace Street, the whole of the ladies’ work, four ladies in the house and every stitch of it hers. There’s nothing in this city can cut like her and I don’t say that of everybody.”

“You say it of most.”

“I say it of her.”

Ashmore came two steps closer and looked at her hands, which she had put where they could be looked at, and then at her face, and then he said, to her and not to Chesley, “Can you cut a coat?”

“I can cut a coat, sir. I’d not be as quick at it as a tailor.”

“Would it fit?”

“Yes sir.”

“Hah,” he said.

He turned away and asked Chesley something about the terms and Chesley answered him, and there was some back and forth that Esther did not attend to at all, because she had four days of work coming due in the next thirty seconds and she was watching the wrong man.

Then Chesley said it. He said it the way you mention a chipped saucer in a lot of good china, quickly, getting it behind him:

“There’s the boy with her. Six years old, sound, no trouble in him. I’d let him go for a hundred to move the two together.”

And Esther looked at Corbin Ashmore’s face.

She had been waiting four days to look at some man’s face at exactly that moment and she got the whole of it, and what was in it was nothing.

He glanced at Nelson against the wall — a glance, less than a second, the length of time it takes to see that a thing is a boy and not a dog — and he did not look at him again, and he turned back to Chesley and said, “A hundred,” in the tone of a man who has been told the price of a barrel he was going to buy anyway, and started arguing about her.

Nothing. Not distaste, which would have been dangerous.

Not calculation, which would have been worse.

Not the softening that some of them did, which was the most dangerous of the three.

He did not care one way or the other, and he had the room, and it did not signify to him whether there was one more child on his place or not.

Esther stood with her hands folded and her face doing nothing and understood that she had got exactly what she had spent four days praying for, down to the particulars.

It was the best piece of luck she had had in a year.

—

Chesley wrote the paper at the desk downstairs in the front room and it took him a long time, and Esther stood where she was told and watched him do it.

She could not read a word of it. She watched anyway — the pen going and stopping and going, the sand shaken over it, the two men’s hands on the desk on either side. There was her, in there, somewhere in the middle. There was Nelson in there too, in less of it.

Ashmore read it and folded it into his breast pocket without any ceremony at all, and Chesley said something about the cars, and Ashmore said he knew about the cars, and they went out into Locust Alley into the heat.

They went down past the end of the yard fence and Esther put her hand on the back of Nelson’s head and turned it, and walked him past the gap on the far side of herself, and he asked her what the noise was and she said it was the market.

—

At the depot Nelson had to be got up the step into the car and could not do it, and a man behind them lifted him under the arms and set him in without being asked and without looking at either of them.

There were two other people of theirs in the car, going somewhere else, with a man in a checked coat. Esther put Nelson by the window and sat on the outside of him and put the bundle at her feet and the thimble was in the bundle now, in the needle case, wound round twice with thread.

Nelson knelt up on the seat with both hands on the sill.

“Is it going to go fast?”

“I expect so.”

“Faster than a horse?”

“I don’t know.”

“Mama. Mama. When it goes will you tell me.”

“You’ll know,” Esther said.

The bell went and the car banged once, hard, all down its length, and Nelson’s whole face came open, and Richmond began to go backwards past the window — the sheds, then the back of Shockoe going up the hill, then a long field, then trees.

He watched it every mile. He did not sit down once in the first hour.

Twice he turned around and knelt up backwards on the seat to see something they had passed, and had to be turned back around, and about eleven o’clock he said, “There,” in a small stunned voice, and Esther leaned over and looked, and it was cows.

---