Five. Looking at the Sky
Chapter Five
Looking at the Sky
For twelve days in May everybody at Fair Prospect looked at the sky.
The plants were up in the beds and ready and had been ready since the end of April.
The ground was hilled and waiting. And you could not put a plant in dry ground and have it live, so the whole place stood still and looked east every morning, and the men said things about the wind, and Anna said her knee said Thursday, and Thursday came and went with a high white sky and nothing in it.
Nelson learned in those twelve days that grown people can be afraid of weather. Not the weather itself — of the absence of it. Reuben went round for a week and a half like a man with a debt coming due.
On the twelfth day it came on to rain about four in the afternoon, hard and steady out of the southwest with no wind in it, the good kind, and Reuben went out into the middle of the yard and stood in it and looked up for maybe ten seconds and then started shouting.
Everybody went at once. That was the thing about it — it was not like the burn, which took the better part of a week and had a shape to it.
This was one shout and then the whole place running in four directions in the rain, and by the time Nelson got up to the plant beds there were already women in them on their knees drawing the plants out and shaking the dirt off the roots and laying them in baskets.
The beds were the same ground they had burned in February.
He recognized the shape of the slope and the way it ran down to the branch, and the black was gone out of it, and the whole face of it was green with four thousand little tobacco plants standing up out of the ash, and he stood there for one whole second looking at that.
Then somebody put a basket in his hands.
—
The system was three deep.
The women in the beds drew and laid. The carriers took the full baskets down the hill and across the road to the field and back with the empties.
And the setters — the men, mostly, spread out down the rows with their backs bent — took the plants out and put them into the hilled ridges, hole made with a peg or two fingers, plant in, dirt pressed round it with the heel of the hand, on to the next.
The carriers were children. It was the one job on the place that was entirely children, and there were six of them, and Nelson was one and Little Ephraim was one and there were four girls, and by the second hour they had sorted themselves into an order without anyone arranging it.
It was three hundred yards down and three hundred back.
It rained the whole time and it did not let up once.
The road went to soup by the fourth trip and the field went to worse than soup, and the mud got up over his ankles and made a sound coming out that Little Ephraim could do with his mouth, and did, for about an hour.
His arms ached from the elbow. The baskets were not heavy but they were wide, and you had to carry them out in front of you or you’d crush the plants against your chest, and carrying anything out in front of you for three hours will take the arms off a man of forty.
He was happy nearly the whole time.
His mother was in the beds. He saw her the third trip up, on her knees in the mud in her second dress with her sleeves pushed past the elbow and her head cloth soaked flat to her head, drawing plants and laying them in as fast as any woman there and faster than most, and he stopped for a second and she looked up and saw him and put two fingers up off the basket at him, and went back to it.
—
William came out about six.
He came down the road in the rain without a coat, already wet through, and got to the beds and stood, and Patience came past him going down with a full basket and said, “Mind, sir,” and he minded, and then he took the next full basket off the bed himself and started down the hill with it.
Nobody stopped him. Nobody said anything at all. One of the girls looked at Nelson and Nelson looked back at her and neither of their faces did anything, and they all went on.
He was terrible at it. He carried the basket against his chest for the first fifty yards and mashed a dozen plants flat before Little Ephraim told him not to, and he slipped twice on the road, and the second time he went down full length in the mud and came up with the basket held over his head and everything in it saved and his whole front black, and he stood there in the middle of the road with the basket still up over his head.
“Did you see that?”
“I saw it.”
“I kept them up.”
“You kept them up,” Nelson said.
They went down together after that, and up together, and down again.
William got the way of it about the fifth trip, out in front, elbows locked.
They ran the empties back up the hill because running with the empties was free, which was a thing Nelson knew and did not have to explain, because William had worked it out in one trip by himself.
The rain got harder. Somewhere down the field Reuben was shouting at somebody about setting them too shallow, and the light was starting to go although it was hours off dark, and the six children and one white boy went up and down the hill in the mud.
—
Mr. Waller came out from Fairlawn at seven with his hat brim down and his horse unhappy about it.
He found Mr. Ashmore at the top of the beds and the two of them stood under the one big oak at the corner with the rain coming through it and talked about the line of a fence.
Nelson knew about the fence because everybody knew about the fence; it had been going on since Christmas and involved a lane and a spring and eleven feet.
He came up the hill with his empty basket while they were at it and had to go round them to get to the bed, and Mr. Waller was saying that his father had it eleven feet the other side and that there were people living who could remember it, and Mr. Ashmore was saying that people who could remember it could come and stand on it then, and William came up behind Nelson with a basket over his head and mud to the eyebrows.
Mr. Waller looked at him and laughed.
“Is that Ashmore’s boy under there?”
“It is,” William said.
“Your father’ll have you in the field yet.” He turned his horse a step to see him better. “And who’s this one?”
“He’s mine,” William said.
“Hm,” said Mr. Waller. “Well, Corbin, if you’re going to be pig-headed about it, then I’ll have Meade come out and walk it with a chain and we’ll see who’s eleven feet where.”
And Mr. Ashmore said that he would be glad to see Meade any day of the week, and Mr. Waller said something about Meade’s fee, and Nelson went past them into the beds and held his basket out and a woman he did not know the name of filled it.
—
They went until the light went entirely, which was somewhere after eight, and then a while past that.
Sometime in there William stopped.
There was no moment to it. He came up the hill with an empty and did not go back down. He stood by the bed for a bit and watched, and then he sat down on the wall of the old sheep fold at the top with his arms round his knees, and then when Nelson came up the next time he had gone.
Nelson went down and up seven more times.
The last two he did in the dark by the feel of the road, and the mud had got so bad by then that his legs were going out from under him on the down slope and he had learned to fall on his hip and keep the basket up, which he had learned from watching William do it in daylight and laugh about it.
When Reuben finally called it there were still plants in the beds and he swore about it in a way Nelson had not heard from him before.
His mother came out of the bed and got hold of his shoulder and steered him down the hill without saying anything for a long way.
“Are they all in?”
“Enough of them.”
“There’s some still up there.”
“There’s always some still up there,” Esther said. Her voice was scraped out. “Pick your feet up.”
He picked his feet up. She had hold of the back of his shirt now to keep him going, and he was so tired that the ground was doing something strange, and the rain was still coming and it had got cold with the dark in it.
“Mama.”
“Mm.”
“William carried a basket.”
“I know it,” she said. “I saw him.”
He waited to see whether there was going to be any more of it, and there was not, and they went the rest of the way down to the frame building and she got his shirt off him and put him on the tick, and he was gone before she got the mud off his legs.
---