Twelve. The Weaving House
Chapter Twelve
The Weaving House
They put him in an old building on the Waller land out beyond the crossroads — it had been a weaving house and then nothing for years — and they mended the roof and put in a stove and four benches and a table, and from the first Monday in October there were five boys in it six days a week from eight until two.
It was three miles by the road.
William rode. Nelson walked, because you do not put a boy on a horse to go three miles and then have him stand about all day with nothing to do but hold the other one, and because it was a good road and dry most of the year, and because nobody had ever once discussed it.
He carried the satchel.
—
It was a leather satchel with two buckles and it weighed about seven pounds, and Nelson packed it every morning and unpacked it every evening and knew every item in it and where it went.
There were four books. There was a Latin grammar with a green board cover coming away at the spine, and a reader, and a small thick one with tables in it, and an atlas that was too big for the satchel and had to go in sideways with the corner sticking out and had got rain on it twice.
There was a slate. There was a wooden case with two pens in it and a knife for the pens.
There was a copybook with a marbled cover.
Nelson had all of that in his hands twice a day, six days a week, from October.
He could read Latin Grammar. He worked out Atlas in the second week off the spine, which he was pleased about, and then found that he could not read one single thing inside it except the numbers.
That was the year he understood what had actually happened to him in that cellar.
He had got the letters and he had got words when the words were short, and he had stopped there, at eleven, in November of 1851, and he had been standing in the same place ever since.
He could read a barrel and a board and a pass.
He could not read a page. There is a great deal of country between those two and he had been put down at the near edge of it and left.
—
There were four of them outside that schoolhouse and by the middle of October they had a whole society.
Major belonged to the Wallers and was seventeen and had done this for three years and had it worked out: he sat on the sunny side of the building in the mornings and the lee side in the afternoons and slept a great deal, and when he was not asleep he was doing something with a pocketknife and a piece of bone that took him the entire term and turned out to be a fish.
Wesley was Aleck Dabney’s and was twelve and talked without stopping. Preston was the Beasley boy’s and was fourteen and did not talk at all, and had a way of looking at you before he answered that made you go over what you had said.
They had a place round the back where they built a fire in the cold weather, which was tolerated. They had a game with stones that Major had brought from somewhere and that Nelson had not once beaten him at. They ate at eleven, all four of them together, whatever their people had put up for them.
And they could hear every word of it through the wall.
The old weaving house had one window on the back side with the shutter warped, and the stove was at that end, and the boys’ benches were between the stove and the window, and Mr. Ould stood at the table and taught at the volume of a man who has to be heard by five boys who do not want to hear him.
Major had been sitting outside that kind of room for three years and had got nothing out of it and did not care.
“It’s Latin,” he said, the first week, without opening his eyes. “It’s all Latin. It don’t mean anything, they just say it.”
—
It was not all Latin.
Latin was the first hour and the last hour. In between there was reading aloud and there was writing, which you could not hear, and there was geography on Tuesdays and Fridays, and there was arithmetic every single morning at half past nine.
And arithmetic was done out loud.
That is how it was done then: the master said a thing and five boys said it back, all together, twice, and then he went round and made them say it one at a time, and if one of them got it wrong they all did it again.
It went on for forty minutes. It was the most tedious noise in Louisa County and it came through that shutter every morning at half past nine as clear as a bell.
Six sevens are forty-two. Seven sevens are forty-nine. Eight sevens are fifty-six.
Nelson sat down against that wall on the fourth morning and did not get up when Wesley wanted him for the stones.
He had it to the sevens by the middle of November.
He did not tell anybody. There was nobody to tell.
Once, in December, Wesley was working out on his fingers how many days it was until Christmas and got it wrong twice, and Nelson said “Nineteen” without thinking about it, and Wesley said, “How do you know,” and Nelson said, “I counted,” and got up and went round the front for a while.
He had the whole of it, to the twelves, by February.
He had no earthly use for it. He was thirteen years old and owned nothing and nobody in his life had any use for his knowing what eight nines were. He got it because it came through a wall at half past nine in the morning and it was the only thing in the world that anybody was giving away.
—
The day was in the third week of November and it was cold and clear, and William came out at two absolutely on fire about something.
Geography had run over. It had run over by half an hour, which Nelson knew because he had heard it run over, and it had run over on the subject of a place called the Isthmus of Panama, which Nelson had also heard, in pieces, through a warped shutter, along with a great deal about a canal that some people wanted to dig there and a railroad that other people were digging instead.
William talked about it for the whole three miles.
He was fourteen that year and he talked the way he had always talked, at length, extravagantly, with his hands, and Nelson walked beside the mare with the satchel over his shoulder and got about two-thirds of it, which was more than usual, because he had the shape of it already from the shutter.
It was good. It was very good. Nelson asked him how wide it was and William said forty miles, and Nelson asked whether the two seas were the same height and William stopped the mare dead in the road.
“That’s — “ He turned round in the saddle. “That is exactly what Ould said. That is the whole question. There’s a man says they’re not the same and there’s another one says they are and Ould says if they’re not you can’t have a canal, you’d have to have — locks, or a — how did you know that?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s a good question,” William said, and started up again, and Nelson walked along beside him about a foot off the ground.
They did a mile like that. William laid the whole thing out and Nelson asked him things and twice William laughed at something Nelson said, properly laughed, the way he did, and once he said, “You’d have liked it today, it was a good day,” and Nelson said nothing at all to that and kept walking.
Then, about a half mile short of the gate, still going, still cheerful, William said:
“Which would you have? The canal or the railroad?”
Nelson said, “The canal.”
“Why?”
“Because a canal — “ He had it, and then he did not have it. He had it out of the shutter and the shutter had given him half. “Because you can put more on a boat.”
“Well, but you don’t put anything on it,” William said.
“That’s the thing. The whole business of it is you don’t unload — that’s what Ould was saying, that’s the whole of why anybody wants it, you keep the same ship and you go straight through and you never touch the cargo.
Whereas the railroad, you’ve got to take it all off at one sea and put it all back on at the other, and Ould says that’s where the money goes. ”
He said it in about eleven seconds, without stopping and without any weight on it at all, the way you would tell a man the time, and then he said, “Anyway, they’ll never dig it, my father says the whole thing’s a swindle,” and went straight on to something else.
Nelson kept walking.
He did not say anything else for the last half mile, and William did not run out of things to say, and did not appear to notice, and they came in the gate at about four with the sun going and William got down and Nelson took the mare’s head and William said, “Take her round, would you,” and went in to his supper.
Nelson took her round.
He got her rubbed down and got the satchel down to the loom room and unpacked it — the grammar, the reader, the tables, the atlas with its corner rained on twice, the slate, the pens, the copybook — and set them on the shelf in the order they went back in the morning, which he did every evening, and stood there for a minute with his hand flat on the top of the pile.
His mother asked him what he had eaten and he said the bread, and she said there was more, and he ate it.
—
In the morning he packed the satchel and walked three miles and sat down against the back wall of the schoolhouse at twenty past nine, half an hour before he had to, with his back against the boards under the warped shutter, and waited for it to start.
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