Thirteen. The Second Barn #2
It was cold out there after the barn. Properly cold — the first night of it, the kind that would be frost by the small hours.
Nelson could feel his ears. There was no moon he could find.
The tobacco ground went down away from them into nothing and past that was the branch and past that was the Dabneys’ four miles off, and up the hill the other way there was one light burning low in the house yard, which would be his mother’s.
He looked at it and remembered.
“I’ve got to get back.”
“What for?”
“She’s making me a shirt. She wants to see it on me before she sets the sleeves.” He was already turning. “She’ll be sitting up for it.”
“You could stay,” William said.
Nelson stopped in the doorway with one foot out.
“She’s waiting on me.”
“Stay here tonight.”
Nelson’s hand had gone up to the doorframe. It stayed there. The wood was rough under his fingers and there was a place a foot above his head where the adze had gone in crooked and left a lip, and he found it with his thumb the way you find a chipped tooth.
“They’ll be looking for me at the quarter,” he said.
“You’re with me.”
Nelson came back in and sat down on the ground by the near trench and put his hands out to it.
“Also you’d fall over the stob,” William said.
“I know where the stob is.”
“You do not.”
“I put it there,” Nelson said, and William laughed so hard he had to put his head down on his arms, and that was the end of it.
—
They talked for hours.
They started on the mare. William said the mare was going to founder and had got the idea from somebody at the crossroads, and Nelson said she was fat and lazy and that there was a difference between a horse that couldn’t walk and a horse that didn’t care to, and they went at that a good twenty minutes.
William brought up her feet. Nelson said her feet were as sound as William’s and better shaped.
William said that was not an argument, it was an insult with an argument standing behind it, and Nelson said he was welcome to take whichever one he liked.
Then Purdie. Purdie at the crossroads had told the whole county he was going to marry a woman in Gordonsville and had lately stopped saying so, and the question was whether the woman had refused him or whether Purdie had simply run out of steam, which is a thing Purdie had done before with a mule and with a store.
“She refused him,” William said.
“He never asked her.”
“He told everybody.”
“That’s how you know he never asked her,” Nelson said. “A man who’s asked and been told yes goes quiet about it and goes to work. A man who’s asked and been told no goes quiet about it and goes to Richmond. Purdie’s still standing in the road.”
William went quiet for a while, his face serious.
“That’s true,” he said, in the voice of a man conceding money.
Nelson got up and turned the trenches. Both of them this time, slow, all the way down. The coals came up orange when the sawdust shifted and he laid it back over them and pressed it flat and they went red and then dull, and behind him William said, “Is that all it is? Just — putting it back?”
“That’s all it is.”
“It seems as though it ought to be more.”
“It’s about ten hours of it.”
“Yes,” William said. “Well.” After a moment he said, “I should be no good at that at all.”
“No,” Nelson said.
He said it easily and William took it easily, and Nelson sat back down.
They got onto whether a hog could swim.
William said no. Nelson said he had seen one swim, in the branch, in the spring.
William said that was a hog falling in and getting out again and was not the same thing.
Nelson said that if the hog got in on one side and out on the other then somewhere in the middle of it, whatever you wanted to call it, the hog had swum.
William said that by that reasoning a stone thrown across the branch had swum.
Nelson said a stone doesn’t come out the other side deciding anything, and the hog did, and William said —
William said, “The hog didn’t decide anything either, it was a hog,” and Nelson said, “It decided which bank,” and William gave it up and lay down on the dirt laughing with his arm over his face.
The dogs stopped up at the house. The night got very quiet the way it does past a certain hour. The barn made its own noises around them, the leaf shifting and settling up in the bents as it dried and let go of itself, a sound like somebody turning over in bed.
“My mother used to come out to the barns,” William said.
Nelson didn’t say anything.
“When they were firing. She liked the smell of it. She’d come out and stand in the door and not say anything and then go back up.” He was quiet. “That’s about all I’ve got. That and she was tall.”
“She was tall,” Nelson said.
“You remember her?”
“No.”
“No,” William said. “You wouldn’t. You weren’t here.”
They let that sit. After a while William said, “There’s four hundred and some lines of it.
The ships. Do you want to hear how it starts?
” and Nelson said he’d already heard how it started, three times, and William said he’d learned some more of it since, and said the same line again anyway, and got it right, and was insufferable about it.
—
The barrel went low sometime after midnight.
Nelson found the bottom of it with the shovel and heard the change in the sound and said so, and William stood up and stretched until his back cracked and said, “Well, where is it?” as though he had been waiting all night to be useful.
The pile was out behind the barn under a sheet of bark weighted with stones.
They took the barrel between them, one hand each, and went round the corner into the cold, and it was properly frost by then — the grass gone stiff and loud underfoot, the stars out hard, their breath going up in the dark.
William held the bark back and Nelson dug.
The wet sawdust came up in heavy black slabs that had to be broken over the edge of the shovel, and the smell of it was sour and cold and nothing like the smell inside.
“How much.”
“Full.”
“It’s not going to be full, it’s going to be a great deal more than full, it’s going to weigh — “ He got his hands under the near side. “ — as much as that. Yes. All right.”
They carried it back with the frost creaking under them and set it down inside the door harder than either of them meant to, and stood there breathing, and Nelson looked at William’s hands and saw the gum had come off the barrel onto them, black in the creases, and did not say anything about it.
William was blowing on his fingers and did not look at the gum.
“Cold out there,” he said, as if he had discovered it.
“It’s October.”
“It was not cold like that an hour ago.”
“It was,” Nelson said. “You were sitting on the fire.”
He turned both trenches, working the new sawdust in on top, and it took a while because the wet slabs had to be broken small before they’d lie flat.
William went back to his place near the near trench and sat with his arms round his knees and watched him do it, and did not offer to help, and was not asked.
It went to frost inside the doorway too, after that.
You could feel the line of it — the air by the door going hard and clean, and the warm coming off the floor all the stronger by comparison.
Nelson lay back with his hands behind his head.
The dirt held the heat of the trenches and gave it up into his shoulders and the backs of his legs.
Somewhere up under the roof the leaf let go and settled.
“You’re going to be doing this all your life,” William said. It came out of nowhere.
“Probably,” Nelson said.
“I’m going to go to Charlottesville and be a lawyer and come home and be a great man in this county.”
“All right.”
“You don’t think I will.”
“I think you’ll be a great man in this county,” Nelson said, and William sat with that a moment and then said, “Well,” in the pleased flat way he had, and let his head go back against the wall.
After that neither of them said much. There was nothing wrong with it. It went on long enough that the fire needed nothing and the barn said nothing and Nelson could hear William breathing and the small tick of the coals and, once, far off, an owl.
William had slid down off the block at some point and was lying with his shoulder against Nelson’s shoulder, because there was only so much floor near the fire, and neither of them moved away. His breathing had gone long and even and stupid.
Nelson thought he was asleep. Then William said, in a voice already most of the way gone, “The one that doesn’t move is the north one.”
“Go to sleep, William.”
“Mm,” William said, and did.
Nelson stayed awake because somebody had to. That was the job.
He watched the underside of the roof where the smoke went up and got lost in the dark and the leaf.
He thought about the shirt a little and then not.
He thought Junie would be asleep by now across his mother’s feet, which was where she slept whether anybody wanted her to or not.
The trenches wanted turning again in a while. Not yet.
Then William’s hand came across the dirt in the dark, without any particular aim to it, the way a sleeping person’s hand moves, and found his, and stopped there.
Nelson looked at the roof.
He turned his hand over and took it.
He lay like that a good while and did not think about anything at all, and then the near trench wanted turning, and he took his hand back carefully so as not to wake him, and got up, and did it.
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