Three. A Thing They Did
Chapter Three
A Thing They Did
Everybody at Fair Prospect had a thing they did, and by the second week Nelson had worked out that his thing was William.
Anna did the kitchen. Reuben did whatever wanted doing and told other people what wanted doing after that.
Little Ephraim, who was twelve, carried water and drove the cart and got shouted at.
His mother sewed. There were seventeen other people and they were all in the tobacco from before it was light, because it was September and the cutting had started, and the whole place smelled like the inside of a green stem, and everybody came in at dark with their hands black to the wrist and did not talk much at supper.
Nelson did not do any of that.
In the morning somebody would say go on up, and he would go on up to the house yard, and William would be somewhere about the porch or the barns or already coming to find him, and then the day happened, and at some point in the evening it stopped happening and he went back down.
Nobody had explained it. He had asked his mother once, in the first week, what he was supposed to do, and she had said, “Do what he tells you,” and then a moment later, “and don’t be where he can’t find you,” and he had understood the first part perfectly well and had thought about the second part for a long while without getting anywhere with it.
—
There was a great deal about William that was good.
He knew the place absolutely — every gate, every gap in every fence, which dog would let you sit on it and which one would not, where the springhouse was cold enough to make your teeth ache, which of the men would give you a piece of anything they had.
He knew that the colt was called nothing yet and that Nelson was going to help name it, and he brought that up two or three times a week as an outstanding item of business between them.
He had a knife. He had a real one, with a bone handle, and he let Nelson hold it, and once he let Nelson cut something with it, and stood over him the whole time saying “Away from you. Away from you,” which was the first thing anybody at Fair Prospect had bothered to teach him.
And he talked the entire time. Nelson had never met anybody who talked so much and required so little back. You could go a whole afternoon with William and say ten words and he would tell people afterward that the two of them had been talking.
Nelson liked all of that. He liked it a good deal.
He did not like William.
He could not have said why and he did not try. He was six. It sat in him the way a stone sits in a shoe you cannot take off because you are being taken somewhere.
—
The game started in the second week and it was William’s invention and it had no name.
You threw a stone at the trunk of the big hickory at the top of the yard.
If you hit it you got a point. If you hit it above the black place where the bark had come off, you got two.
Then it was three points from behind the well.
Then hitting the black place itself was worth all the points that had been scored so far. Then there was a rule about the dogs.
The rules came out of William the way water comes out of a spring — continuously, without effort, and slightly differently every time.
Nelson turned out to be much better at it than William.
He was better the first afternoon and he was better the second and by the third he was better in a way that was becoming a fact about the world, and on the third afternoon he was ahead by seven points and threw and hit the black place dead in the middle, and stood there.
“That doesn’t count,” William said.
“It’s the black place.”
“You have to call it. You have to say you’re going for it before you throw or it doesn’t count, it’s just luck.”
Nelson stood with his hand still up.
He knew. He was six years old and he could not have laid it out, but he knew the way you know somebody has moved a cup: there had been no rule about calling it, there had never been a rule about calling it, William had made it thirty seconds ago in his own mouth and was already saying it as though it had been there since the beginning and Nelson was the one who had forgotten.
He looked at William’s face. William’s face was completely ordinary. There was nothing in it — no sneaking, no daring him, no waiting to see what he would do. He had said it as though saying it made it so.
“All right,” Nelson said.
They played until dark. Nelson called every throw after that and won anyway.
That was the thing, and he thought about it that night lying against his mother’s back, and could not get the shape of it, and what he came out with in the end was that it was not fair, which was the only box he had big enough to put it in.
—
He wanted to go down and see his mother in the middle of the day, and that was the other thing.
He could go at night. Nobody stopped him at night. But the days were very long, and about the fourth week there came an afternoon when he wanted to go down and be in the loom room and not do anything, wanted it so badly it made his throat hurt, and he said so.
“I want to go see my mother.”
“All right,” William said.
And came with him.
He did not ask, did not stay where he was — he just turned and came, still talking, all the way down across the yard and round the smokehouse to the frame building, and stood in the doorway of the loom room with one hand up on the frame.
Esther was on the stool with the grey light behind her and a coat across her knees, and she looked up.
Nelson watched his mother’s face change.
It was not a big change. She had been looking at the coat, and then she was looking at the door, and something went across her and settled, and what she had when it was done was a face he had never seen on her before — pleasant, and interested, and awake, and turned entirely toward William.
“Well,” she said. “Good afternoon.”
“Good afternoon.”
“You’ve been in the creek.”
“I have not.”
“You’ve been in something.” She put the coat down over her arm. “What’s that on you?”
And William came the rest of the way in and told her.
He told her about the creek, which he had in fact been in, and about the mud at the bottom of it being a different mud from the mud at the top of it, and about a snake he had seen the week before and had a whole account of, and Esther listened to every word of it and asked him two questions and laughed once, and William stood in the middle of the loom room floor with his thumbs in his waistband getting bigger the whole time.
Nelson sat down on the boards by the wall.
He had come down here to be in this room. He had wanted it so much his throat had hurt. Now he was in it and there was somebody else in it and his mother was being nice to him.
He knew, watching, that she was doing it on purpose.
He did not know what purpose. He knew that the face she had on was not the face she had, in the same way that the good plate was not the plate, and that both of those things were about company, and that this was the first time in his whole life that company had come to wherever he lived.
After a while William said he had to go and see about the colt, and went, and his boots went away across the yard.
His mother’s face came back.
“You eat?” she said.
“Yes’m.”
“Come here and let me look at your foot.”
He came and put his foot in her lap and she turned it over and looked at the cut on the heel and pressed round it with her thumb and said it was going to be all right, and then she held on to his ankle for a second longer than the looking wanted.
“He treat you nice?” she said.
“Yes’m.”
“That’s good,” she said.
—
There were graves on the ridge above the tobacco ground, four of them, under a cedar, inside a fence of chestnut palings with the paint gone.
They went past it in October running somewhere else and William stopped, so Nelson stopped.
“That’s my mother,” William said. He pointed with two fingers, casually, the way he pointed at the colt. “And those are my brothers. Two of them. They were before me.”
Nelson looked at the stones.
“What are their names?”
“They didn’t get any,” William said. “You have to live a while.”
Then he said, “Come on,” and went, and Nelson went after him, and they ran the rest of the way to wherever it was they had been running to, and did not look back at it.
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