Seventeen. The Cradle
Chapter Seventeen
The Cradle
There were seven acres more of it than the year before and Mr. Ashmore had bought a second cradle in Louisa Court House in the spring, and Nelson spent the first two days behind the cradlers as a binder, which is a boy’s work — you gather the swath the cradle has laid over, and you twist a band out of the straw itself, and you bind it and stand it, and you do that about six hundred times a day.
On the fifth day Old Isaac’s back went in the middle of the morning and he sat down in the stubble, and Reuben looked at the field and looked at the sun and picked up the cradle and held it out sideways.
“Go on.”
A cradle is a scythe with a rack of four wooden fingers standing up off the blade to catch the cut stalks and lay them over in a swath, and it weighs about seven pounds, and the whole of the trick is that you are not swinging it, you are turning your body and letting it go round with you, and the moment you use your arms you are finished for the day.
Nelson had watched it done since he was six years old.
He was terrible at it for about forty minutes.
Then he got the turn of it, and by dinner he was slow but clean, and by the end of the second day he could hold within about a third of a cradler’s pace, and Reuben came down the field at noon and looked at his swath for a while, at the lay of it, not at him, and said, “Hm,” and went off up the row.
That was the summer his work got settled.
He was on the wheat in June and in the tobacco after, and Reuben stopped saying go and see and started saying go and do, and twice in July he was sent to Fairlawn with a message about the threshing and once to the Dabneys’ with a mule, and he came in at dark every day of that summer used up to the bone and slept like a stone.
—
William came down the row on the second afternoon of the harvest.
“Come and see this thing in the branch.”
“I’m on the cradle.”
“You’re on the — “ William looked at it. “Since when?”
“Since this morning.”
“Well, come after.”
“I can’t come after. There’s the barn wants doing after.”
“Then come now, it’ll take ten minutes, Isaac can — “
“Isaac’s sat down with his back,” Nelson said, and swung, and turned, and swung.
And that was all true. Every word of that was true, and it was true in the same way a week later, when it was the rail on the far fence, and true again the following week, when he had said he would take the meal down to the quarter and had said it in front of Reuben.
William took it the first two times without any difficulty at all. He took the third one with his hands in his pockets and a look at the sky.
By the middle of July he had a phrase for it.
“You’ve been doing that all day,” he said.
“There’s a good deal of it.”
“There’s a good deal of it every year and you’ve never once — “ He stopped. He tried again from a different place, in a lighter voice. “Come on. Half an hour.”
“I’ve got the rail.”
“The rail has been down since March. The rail is not going anywhere. The rail is the most patient object in the state of Virginia — “ and then, when Nelson did not laugh, which a month ago he would have, “What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing’s the matter with me.”
“Something is the matter with you.”
“I’ve got the rail,” Nelson said.
—
The Thursday after that he had nothing.
It was the middle of the day and it was a hundred degrees and Reuben had sent everybody out of the ground until four, which he did twice a summer, and Nelson was sitting in the shade at the end of the quarter with his back against Anna’s woodpile doing absolutely nothing whatsoever.
William came round the corner and saw that.
“Right,” he said. “Come on.”
“I said I’d — “ Nelson stopped, because there was nothing on the end of that sentence, and he sat there with his mouth still open for a second, and then he said, “Anna wants the water.”
“Anna’s asleep.”
“She wants it when she wakes up.”
William looked at him for a while.
He was sixteen that May and he had got a good deal taller in the winter and he stood the way a man stands who has recently become the tallest person in most rooms, and something went across his face that Nelson had not seen on it before.
It was not anger. It was closer to the look a man gets when he puts his hand on a gate he has been through ten thousand times and finds it will not go.
“Get the water, then,” William said, “and then come on.”
And Nelson got the water and then came on.
—
They went up the branch to the place where the ford was, because there was nothing else to do and it was cool up there, and William talked for two miles.
He talked about the University.
He had a whole thing about it that summer.
He had a scheme by which he would go for two years and read law and come back and take an office at Louisa Court House and be a great man in that county by the time he was thirty, and there was a good deal of detail in it — what he would do about the fees, how a man got read into a practice, which of the Wallers had done it and how long it had taken him.
He had got it up somewhere. He had been working on it.
He laid the whole of it out in the shallows with his trousers rolled, turning over stones with his foot, in his ordinary expansive way.
“October twelvemonth,” he said. “That’s the whole of it. One more year of Ould and then October twelvemonth and I’m gone.”
Nelson was sitting on the bank with his arms round his knees.
“Ould says you won’t get in on that Latin.”
William stopped turning over stones.
“What?”
“He said it in the spring. He said it to you and then he said it again to Mr. Waller’s boy after you’d all gone out, and Mr. Waller’s boy laughed. He said you’d been at the Aeneid two years and hadn’t got the second book, and he said your father would do better to put the money in a mill.”
There was a considerable quantity of water going over the ford and it was the only sound for some while.
“You listen,” William said.
“Every day.”
“You — for how long?”
“Two years,” Nelson said. “There’s four of us sits under that window.”
William stood in the branch with his trousers rolled and the water going round his ankles and looked at him, and his face did a thing that Nelson had never seen it do — it went, in about a second and a half, from open to shut, the whole of it, the way a house goes when they take the furniture out — and it stayed like that.
Nelson watched it happen. He was looking directly at him and he saw the whole of it and he knew exactly what had done it.
Then he got up off the bank and picked up his hat and said, “I’ve got the rail,” and went back down the branch and did the rail, and got it up before four, and was in the tobacco with the rest of them when the ground opened again.
—
William did not come near him for nine days.
On the tenth he came down to the barn lot at dinner with a bridle over his shoulder and stood about for a bit and then said something about the mare’s off hind, and Nelson said something back about the mare’s off hind, and William said, “Well,” and went off.
The day after that they were up at the ford again arguing about whether a snake could bite underwater, and William was laughing so hard he sat down in it.
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