Two. Fair Prospect
Chapter Two
Fair Prospect
They changed cars at Hanover Junction and waited an hour and forty minutes in the sun for the Louisa train, and it was in that hour that Esther began to understand what she had been bought for.
She worked it from the man’s boots.
He had come down to Richmond in boots that had been blacked by somebody who knew how, and a coat that had been brushed, and a hat that was two years past its best and had been kept.
All of that said a house with women in it.
But the coat had gone at the elbow and been taken in at the seam by a hand that had no business near a coat — big stitches, wrong thread, done from the inside where it showed anyway — and the shirt under it had a collar that had been turned once and wanted turning again and had not been.
A house with women in it does not let a man out of doors with a collar like that.
So: no wife. Or a wife who was sick, or a wife who was dead, or a wife somewhere else. And a place with money enough to buy a seamstress in Richmond and send her up on the cars instead of walking her, and not money enough or not sense enough to have kept one before now.
She was twenty-five years old and she had been sold twice and this was the third, and she had learned by the second one that the only useful question was what am I for, because everything else — where you slept, what you ate, who could come at you and when — followed from the answer to it.
She thought she had it.
Nelson slept across her lap most of the way up with his mouth open and his shirt stuck to him. He was six and he had been awake since the middle of the night and had not eaten since the morning, and when he woke he woke all at once and sat up and said, “Is this it?”
“Not yet.”
“Is it far?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are there — “ He stopped and looked out at the pines going by and could not think what he wanted to ask about. He was too tired to have a question, only the shape of one. He leaned on her arm.
—
They got down at Louisa Court House at four in the afternoon and there was a wagon and a man in it who did not give his name and did not want them near his feet, and they went out of the village and west on a road with the sun coming behind them and the dust rising and settling behind that.
Esther read the country the whole way, because it was free to do and there was nothing else to do.
For the first four miles it was good. She could see it in the corn — the corn stood up and the rows were even and the woods on both sides had big timber left standing, which is what a man leaves when he has never needed to sell it.
There was a place with a brick house set up on a rise and a lane of oaks and men in a field of tobacco taller than they were, and the man in the wagon jerked his chin at it and said, “Fairlawn,” in the voice men use for money.
Then they went down through a bottom and up out of it and the country changed.
It changed the way a piece of cloth changes when the weaver has run out of the good thread.
The corn on the left came up to her shoulder instead of over her head and it was pale at the tip.
The woods were scrub — pine and cedar and nothing you could saw.
There were three gullies in one field, cut down to orange clay, with brush thrown into them to stop them getting worse, which does not stop them getting worse.
And the fences: the fence along the road had been re-laid in stretches with new rails going in among grey ones, which meant a man mending what he had rather than a man cutting new.
A mile of that. Then a gate, and a lane, and a hand-lettered board on the gatepost with two words on it that she could not read.
“What’s it say?” Nelson said.
“I don’t know.”
The man in the wagon said, “Fair Prospect,” and laughed, one syllable, at something that was apparently his own.
—
The house was frame, two stories, five windows across, white a while ago.
It stood well back in a grove of oaks and hickories with the lane coming up to it straight, and it was a good house — the chimneys were brick and the foundation was cut stone and somebody had put a porch across the whole front of it not long since, and the porch was the newest thing on the place by ten years.
Esther saw the curtains before she saw anything else.
Upstairs, right-hand window: hung crooked, one panel higher than the other by two inches, and both panels faded to the color of weak tea on the outer edge and still nearly blue on the inner where the sun had never got at them.
That happens when nobody takes them down and turns them.
Nobody had taken them down in three summers. Maybe four.
Left-hand window: no curtains at all.
She looked at the two windows and adjusted her figures. Not a wife somewhere else. Not a sick wife. A dead one, and dead long enough that the house had stopped waiting for her and not long enough that anybody had put in another.
And then she thought: and a seamstress on the cars from Richmond.
She had been sold twice. She put it in the ledger under the collars and the curtains and did not turn the page over twice, and got down off the wagon with her bundle in one arm and her son by the wrist, and put her chin up, because there is no profit in arriving looking like you already know.
—
There were maybe twenty people on the place. She counted what she could see and estimated the rest, and got twenty, and was near enough.
The quarters were in two lots and the two lots told her everything about how the place was run.
Down the slope, three hundred yards off toward the tobacco ground, four log cabins in a row with dirt swept hard in front of them and no glass in the windows and the chinking gone at the corners, and past those, off on its own, a fifth one with the roof going.
Up close to the house yard, thirty feet from the kitchen, one frame building on brick piers with a chimney in the middle and a door at either end.
A duplex. Two rooms, one hearth between them, and a raised floor.
A man came up from the barns while she was looking at it. He was thirty or so and had the walk of somebody who has been given a thing to do and given the whole day to do it in, and he stopped a respectful distance off and said, “You the seamstress.”
“Esther.”
“Reuben.” He looked at Nelson without any particular expression. “That yours?”
“Nelson.”
“Mm.” He put his hands on his hips and looked back at the house and then at the duplex. “You’re in the near end of that. Anna’s in the far end and she’s all right, she snores. There’s no bed in there. I’ll see about a bed.”
“Thank you.”
“Water’s the springhouse, that way, and don’t take it out of the barrel by the kitchen, that’s the missus’s — “ He stopped. He rubbed the back of his neck. “That’s the house barrel,” he said. “Springhouse.”
Esther said nothing, and the correction went into her ledger along with the curtains.
“Supper’s what you get,” Reuben said. “It’s late for it. I’ll get you something.” And then, to Nelson, in exactly the same voice he had used for the water: “You want to stay out from under the horses.”
“All right,” Nelson said.
—
She was standing in the yard with the bundle still under her arm when Corbin Ashmore came out onto the porch.
He was forty-odd and he had his coat off and his shirtsleeves rolled and he was reading a letter, and he came out reading it and got to the rail and stood there finishing it, and did not look up for some while.
Down at the far end of the porch a boy was sitting on the boards with his back against a post and his legs straight out in front of him.
Ashmore folded the letter into quarters and put it in his trouser pocket and came down two steps and looked at her.
She had been looked at like that before and she stood still for it.
He looked at her the way you look at a horse you have already paid for and are now, a little late, curious about.
It took perhaps four seconds and then he seemed to arrive at something satisfactory and said, over his shoulder, toward the door:
“She’s in the near end of the frame.”
“Reuben said.”
“Did he.” He looked at her again, and something in her having answered went across his face, and she noted it with the particular cold care she reserved for the things that pleased men who had bought her.
“You’ll do the missus’s — “ He stopped, exactly the way Reuben had stopped, and did not correct it as neatly. “You’ll do the house work and whatever comes to you. Can you cut?”
“Yes sir.”
“From a pattern or from a person?”
“From a person.”
“Hah,” Ashmore said. It was the same hah he had given her in Richmond.
He came down the last step and stood on the ground in front of her and looked past her at nothing for a moment; then his eyes went to the boy at the end of the porch, who had got up off the boards and come along to the top of the steps and was standing there looking at Nelson.
Nelson was standing against Esther’s leg with two fingers in the hem of her dress.
The two boys looked at each other the way children do, which is to say without any expression at all and for much longer than adults find comfortable.
Ashmore watched that for a second or two.
Then he said, “Take him with you.”
He said it offhand. He was already half turned. He did not look at Nelson when he said it. He did not look at Esther. He said it toward his son with his body pointing at the barns, and then he said, “Tapp’s got the wagon out?” to nobody in particular, and went down the yard.
—
Esther stood in the yard and held on to her bundle.
She understood it entirely. It went into her in one piece, whole, the way you understand a thing when you have been sold twice: that her son had just been given to a white child as a possession, that no paper would ever be written about it and no promise had been made and none could be called in, that it was the best thing that had happened to her in a year, and that she could not yet put a price on it.