Fourteen. First Light
Chapter Fourteen
First Light
Reuben came down at first light and stood in the doorway and looked at the trenches and then up.
“You moved them,” he said.
“Bottom bent was ahead.”
Reuben came in for that. He went along under the second bent with his head back and his hands behind him, taking his time, feeling one or two of the leaves between finger and thumb the way you’d test cloth, and then he went to the far end and did the same there.
“How many did you trade.”
“Twenty-two.”
“Mm,” Reuben said. He came back down the floor. “Wind get in?”
“About nine. North wall.”
“Lose anything?”
“Dozen leaves. Tips.”
“That’s not anything,” Reuben said, and Nelson said, “No,” and Reuben looked at him a second longer than the words wanted and then took the shovel out of his hand.
William had gone up to the house some time before the light, walking, still half asleep, and had said something on his way out that Nelson had not caught and had not asked him to repeat.
Nelson went up the hill.
It was a hard white frost and the tobacco ground was silver all the way to the fence and the tracks he’d made coming down at dusk were still in it, black, going the other way.
His eyes hurt. Being up all night was not the thing; the thing was the smoke, which got into your eyes and stayed there and made the daylight feel like an insult.
Halfway up he stopped and stood with his hands in his armpits and looked at nothing until his ears stopped ringing, and then he went on.
His mother’s door was open a hand’s width for the light.
She was on the stool just inside it with the shirt across her lap and three pins in her mouth and the sleeves lying loose beside her, not set.
Junie was on the floor with a bundle of scrap and a length of thread, tying the scrap up into what she said was a doll and what was in fact a knot.
“Look,” Junie said.
“That’s a knot.”
“It’s a baby.”
“It’s a knot with a face drawn on it.”
“There’s no face on it,” Junie said, deeply satisfied, having established the presence of an error in him. She went back to it.
His mother moved his plate toward him along the boards without looking up from the shirt. Ash cake, and a piece of fat, and there was milk in the tin from the house because it was Thursday.
“Stand up when you’ve eaten that,” she said around the pins. “I want the shoulder before I do anything else with it.”
He ate. It went in about as fast as food goes into a person who has been awake since four the previous afternoon, and he drank the milk in two goes, and Junie came and stood by his knee and looked into the tin to see whether he had left her any, which he had, a swallow, on purpose, and she took it.
Then he stood up and put his arms out and his mother put the shirt to him, front first, holding it flat at his chest with the back of her hand while she looked, and then round, and then she took his wrist and lifted his arm and set the loose sleeve up against his shoulder and turned his elbow out and looked at the seam and made a noise.
“You’ve come out at the shoulder again,” she said. “Since July.”
“That’s not my doing.”
“I never said it was your doing. I said you’d come out.” She took a pin out of her mouth and put it in the cloth and turned him a quarter and did it again. “Hold still. You’re leaning.”
“I’m not leaning.”
“You’ve been up all night and you’re leaning like a fence.” She got the third pin in. “There. Get out from under it.”
“When will it be done?”
“When I’ve set the sleeves and put a collar on it and done the buttonholes, and I’ve got Miss Louisa’s two bodices before any of that, so don’t stand there looking at me like a dog at a table.
” She folded the shirt over her arm and stood up and put it high on the shelf out of Junie’s reach.
“The hog pen wants mending. The rail’s down on the branch side and there’s two posts gone soft at the bottom and if they get out in the corn before killing time your master will want somebody’s hide and he won’t be particular whose. ”
“I’ll do it.”
“Get Little Tom for the posts.”
“I’ll do it,” Nelson said, and she said, “Then do it,” and that was the whole of it, and he went out.
—
The rail was down on the branch side and the two posts were worse than she’d said. He got his fingers into the base of the first one and the wood came away in wet brown crumbs like snuff, and the second went over when he pushed it with the flat of his hand.
He got the maul and the digging iron out of the shed and went down to the fence line at the edge of the wood where there was chestnut left over from the spring and picked out two that were long enough, and dragged them up one at a time.
The frost was coming out of the ground by then and the top two inches of everything had gone to grease.
He put the iron in beside the old post to loosen it and worked the post out with his hands wrapped in sacking and it came up smelling like the inside of a rotten tooth.
Junie came and stood eight feet away with the knot under her arm and watched.
“Don’t come closer than that.”
“I’m not.”
“That’s right.”
“What’s it for?”
“Keeping hogs in.”
“Why?”
“So they don’t get in the corn.”
“Why?”
“Because the corn’s for the winter and the hogs are for the winter and if the hogs eat the corn then it’s just hogs,” Nelson said, “and that’s not enough.”
Junie thought about it. “Then what?”
“Then we’re hungry in February.”
“Oh,” Junie said, entirely unbothered, and went off round the back of the shed, and came back three minutes later with a chip of wood she wanted him to look at, and he looked at it, and she went away again.
He set the first post and tamped it and set the second and tamped that, and the tamping was the part where he stopped being able to pretend he wasn’t tired.
You had to bring the butt of the maul down straight and hard fifty or sixty times a post, and by the second one he was hitting it crooked and it was taking longer for less, and he knew it, and kept on, because stopping in the middle of a post is how you get a post that leans.
Around ten William went by on the mare, going up the road with Aleck Dabney alongside him on a gray.
“NELSON,” he shouted, from about ninety feet, standing in the stirrups. “HER FEET ARE HOT.”
“They’re not hot.”
“They are hot, I felt them, I have felt them this morning with my own hand — “
“That’s her,” Nelson called back, “she’s a hot-footed horse, she’s been a hot-footed horse four years — “
“HAH,” said William, in triumph, having heard only the first half of it, and put his heels in and went on up the road with the Dabney boy laughing at him and the two of them out of sight in a minute past the cedars.
Nelson went back to the post.
—
He got the rail up before noon and spent the middle of the day splitting a replacement for the second rail, which was cracked and would go by spring, and somewhere in there he sat down on the woodpile to get his breath and went out like a snuffed candle.
Reuben woke him with his boot, not unkindly, maybe twenty minutes later.
“You’re on the barn again tonight.”
“I know it.”
“Then go in the shed and lie down properly instead of falling asleep sitting up in the cold like a fool, and don’t let me be the one that finds you doing it,” Reuben said, and went on.
Nelson went in the shed and lay down on the sacks and slept for two hours with his hat over his face, and woke stiff and stupid with the light gone yellow and low, and got up and finished the rail, and split kindling until the sun was off the trees.
His mother had the pot on when he came by.
She was working on Miss Louisa’s bodice with the last of the light in the doorway and Junie was asleep on the sacking behind her with the knot in her fist, and she gave him his supper and asked him whether the posts were in and he said they were, and whether he’d got Little Tom and he said he had not, and she said something about that which he had heard before, and he ate.
Then he took the bucket and the corn cake she wrapped for him and went down the hill in the dark to the barn, and Reuben came out of the big barn as he passed and said the wind would come round again about the same hour, and it did.
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