Sixteen. The Subscription
Chapter Sixteen
The Subscription
It had been talked about for six years and it got done in three weeks, the way those things do, because old Mrs. Waller died in February and left forty dollars toward it in a will that was read aloud to a great many people, and after that no man in that district could afford to be the one who had not put his name down.
Mr. Ashmore put down fifteen. Esther knew that within the day and knew what Beasley had put down within two, and she knew before the end of March that there was a quarrel coming about where it was to stand, because there were two pieces of ground offered and one of them was Waller’s and the other was a Beasley’s.
None of it was anything to do with her. They would build it and it would be a white people’s church with a gallery at the back, and she would go up into the gallery on a Sunday if she was let, and hear a man tell her that servants should obey their masters, and come home and cook.
She was interested anyway. She was interested in all of it, the way you are interested in weather at sea.
—
Corbin Ashmore started talking about wheat that spring.
Esther first heard it in the passage in April, through the office door, between Ashmore and a man from Louisa Court House whose name she did not catch.
She heard the words forty acres and the low ground and he gets nine bushels off it and I get five, and then a long stretch about somebody’s plaster and somebody’s clover that she did not follow, and then Ashmore said, “The tobacco eats the ground and it eats the year,” and the other man said, “It does both,” in the tone of a man who has been saying so for some while.
She filed it. She filed it the way she filed everything, without turning it over: he is talking about wheat.
She had no reason to do anything else with it that spring. There was nothing in it. Half the men in that county were talking about wheat in 1855 and had been talking about it since before she came, and talk is not a thing you can act on.
She heard it three more times before Whitsun.
—
The missus lost a child in the November of 1854 and was not right through the whole of the following year.
It had been a girl and it had lived four days and it was on the ridge with the others, and after Christmas Cornelia Ashmore came downstairs and went on as before, and she was twenty-eight years old and she ran that house perfectly well and gave her orders in the same voice as ever and did not speak of it once.
Esther sewed for her all that spring. She took her in an inch and a half at the waist in March and let her out again in June, and neither of them said anything about either occasion, and once in April, standing behind her with pins, Esther watched the woman’s shoulders come up in the glass and stay up for a good three seconds and then go down again, and she went on pinning.
She had no love for her. But she gave her the truth about a sleeve when she asked for it, and did the work as well as she could do it, which was very well, and there are worse arrangements between women than that and Esther had been in several of them.
—
By that spring Esther had, by any reckoning available to her, a life.
She had the work of that district, which was as far as any of it went, and it came steady, and the missus had stopped querying the time it took.
She had a shelf. She had a box of thread behind a loose board that would have taken a woman two years to spend.
She had Sarah at thirteen doing plain seams and buttonholes and beginning on set-in sleeves, badly, with a tongue between her teeth.
She had Bristol on Saturdays, going on three years, and one Saturday in every four or five he could get a whole afternoon and they walked the fence line at the back of the place where nobody went, and talked about the roads, and did not talk about anything else, and came back.
She had Junie, who was four and three-quarters and who was, by common agreement across the whole of Fair Prospect, going to be a handful. Junie could untie anything. Junie had learned to do a thing with her face when she was told no, and Anna had been observed giving in to it twice.
And she had a son of fifteen who had got his growth that year.
—
She looked at him a good deal that spring, being careful about it, because a boy of fifteen will not be looked at.
He had come up past her shoulder in the autumn and past Bristol’s in February.
He had his hands and his feet already and the rest of him was catching up, and he had that way of moving they have at fifteen, all elbows going up stairs and then perfectly economical the moment there is work in front of him.
Reuben had him on the wheat and the tobacco both and had stopped sending anybody with him anywhere.
He was not handsome and was going to be. She could see it coming the way she could see a garment coming off a table.
And there was the other thing, which she made herself look at squarely twice a year, in the spring and in the autumn, because a woman who will not look at a figure is a woman who gets surprised by it.
Fifteen. Sound. No mark on him except the one on the heel.
Tall, and going to be taller, and strong with it, and quick, and — this was the part that had begun to sit badly with her — known.
Known at the mill and at the crossroads and on four places within six miles, as Ashmore’s boy who came for the meal, who could be sent, who did not have to be watched.
A man buying in Richmond does not know any of that and does not pay for it.
But a man buying in Louisa County knows all of it, and does.
She turned that over on a Sunday afternoon in April, sitting on the step with her hands still for once, and got to the end of it and put it away where she kept things, and it did not spoil her afternoon, because she had been carrying the figure for fifteen years and had never once let it get out and walk around.
—
The last week of April, on a Thursday, she was at the passage window with the missus’s grey and the light going.
Out in the yard Nelson was doing something to the barrow.
It had a wheel coming loose and he had it up on its side with the wheel off, and he was down on one knee in the dirt with the hub in his hands, turning it over, looking at it — taking his time about it, the way he did with anything he was allowed to take his time about.
The house door went and William came out onto the porch.
He came out with his hat in his hand and got to the top of the steps and stopped.
And stood there.
Esther, at the window, with a mouthful of pins, waited for the shout.
Because there was always a shout — Nelson — at a hundred yards, at two hundred, across a field, out of a window, before daylight; that boy had been shouting her son’s name across that yard for nine years and the whole place could set a clock by it.
He did not shout. He stood at the top of the steps with his hat in his hand and looked at the boy kneeling in the dirt with the hub, and he did not go down the steps, and he did not say anything, and he did not do anything at all, for a length of time that Esther, standing at a window with a garment in her hands, could measure, because measuring is what she did.
It was about as long as it takes to thread a needle.
Then he came down the steps and went off round the corner of the house toward the barns without going near him, and Nelson never looked up, and the yard was as it had been.
Esther took the pins out of her mouth.
She thought: he is being sent away.
It made sense of it. He was sixteen in May.
They would have Ould another year at the outside and then it would be somebody’s academy and then, if the wheat went as Mr. Ashmore was talking about it going, the University — Charlottesville, which the boy had been announcing to anybody who would stand still for it since he was eleven — and a young man about to be got up and sent off looks at the place he is leaving in exactly that way, and cannot say so, because he is sixteen and has been telling everybody for five years that he is going.
That was a kind thought and it fit, and she was pleased with herself for having had it.
She stood at the window a moment longer with the grey over her arm.
Then Sarah came through wanting to know about the gathers, and Esther turned round and dealt with the gathers, which took some while because Sarah had done them the way they looked right rather than the way they lay right, and by the time she came back to the window the yard was empty and the barrow was standing on its side where he had left it.
---