Twenty. The Knife
Chapter Twenty
The Knife
Mr. Ould gave up the school at the end of July and went to Orange to keep another one, and that was the end of it, and William did not go to Charlottesville in October.
Nothing was said about it that Nelson heard, and he was in a position to hear a good deal.
There was a week in August when Mr. Ashmore had a man from the Court House out twice and the office door was shut both times.
There was a business about a note. There was the thresher to be paid for, and the second cradle, and fifteen bushels of clover seed, and forty dollars of plaster that had gone onto the low ground in the spring and had, Bristol said, done exactly nothing anybody could see.
And there was the other thing, which Nelson knew and nobody else in that yard did, and which he had known since a Thursday at the ford in the summer of 1855.
He did not know which of them it was. He did not know whether it was any of them.
What he knew was that in September the word October stopped being said, and that in the third week of October a Waller and a Dabney went off to Charlottesville with three trunks and a good deal of noise about it that carried the length of the Fairlawn road, and that William was in the barn lot that morning looking at a horse’s mouth.
He did not speak of it. He did not speak of it that day or that winter, and a boy who had talked about one subject continuously for six years stopped talking about it entirely and did not appear to notice that he had stopped, and nobody at Fair Prospect mentioned it to him where Nelson could hear it, and Nelson did not mention it either.
—
So William was at home, at eighteen, with nothing whatever to do.
He had been at home before — he had been at home every day of his life at two in the afternoon, coming back from Ould’s — but that had been a shape, and this had no shape at all.
He got up when he liked. He rode. He read a great deal in October and less in November and by January hardly at all.
He went to the Dabneys’ twice a week and quarrelled with Aleck Dabney about something in December and did not go again until March.
And he came out to wherever Nelson was.
That was the whole of 1857 and it was different from anything that had gone before it, and Nelson could not have told you why except that it was.
Before, they had gone somewhere. There had always been somewhere: the branch, the ford, the mill road, a scheme about a dam, a place they were getting to. Now William came and stood where the work was and stayed there.
He came out to the stripping room in February and sat on a barrel for two hours.
He came into the barn lot in March while Nelson had a horse’s foot between his knees and talked at him about a book.
In June he came into the wheat and did not pretend to cradle and did not offer, and stood at the headland in the sun with his hat off for the better part of an hour, and then walked back down the row beside Nelson at the end of it saying nothing much.
Nobody remarked on it. Reuben looked at it once or twice.
—
Nelson stopped going to Beasley’s that spring.
There was no falling out with Rachel and nothing happened between them at all. He went less in March and twice in April and once at the end of May, when he walked the whole three miles and a half there and sat in the barn for an hour and a half and walked home.
He did not ask for another paper.
William did not ask him why he had stopped. Nelson noticed that, and did not think about it.
—
The cabin was the fifth one, off past the four in the row, standing on its own in the weeds with the roof gone at the ridge and one wall out of true.
Nobody had lived in it since before Nelson came.
It had been used for a while to keep sacks in and then the roof got worse and the sacks came out, and by 1857 it had a hole you could see the sky through and a great deal of grass growing up through the boards at the far end, and it was the only building on Fair Prospect that nobody had any business in whatsoever.
They started going there in the wet weather because it was that or the barn, and the barn had people in it.
It was not a decision. It happened the way most things do: they were caught out in the rain in April and went in there because it was nearest, and sat against the good wall with the rain coming through at the other end, and William said something about it being a disgraceful building, and the following week when it rained they went there again.
By the summer they had a board off the sacks laid over two stones for a seat and William had brought a candle end down and left it there in a tin and never mentioned having done it.
—
Somewhere in that year they stopped putting their hands on each other.
They had done it their whole lives. Two boys knock each other about; it is most of what boys are for.
There had been eleven years of it — shoved off logs, tripped in the yard, held down in the branch until somebody gave in, the whole business at Christmas in ’52 when they had rolled the length of the barn lot in front of the entire place and Anna had come out and put a stop to it with a spoon in her hand.
And that stopped.
Nelson could not have told you when. It was not a day. Sometime between the plant beds and the wheat, that year, the thing simply went out of the way they were with each other, and neither of them said one word about it, and it did not come back.
They still went at each other. They argued about everything they had ever argued about and four new things besides.
But it was all in the mouth now, and when they came near each other in a doorway or on a narrow place in the path there was a half-second in it that had not been there before, and both of them stepped round.
He noticed it in September, all at once, standing in the stripping room by himself with a hand of leaf in each hand, and what he thought was: we don’t do that any more.
And then he thought: when did we stop?
And then Little Ephraim came in wanting the tie-string and Nelson gave him the tie-string.
—
In the last week of October it rained for three days and on the third afternoon they were in the cabin and Nelson fell asleep.
That was not a thing he did. He had been on the thresher four days the week before, feeding it, ten hours a day with the drum going under his hands, and he had come off it Saturday with his ears ringing and had not got right since, and he sat down against the good wall with his back to the boards and went out like a light.
He woke because the rain changed.
He came up out of it the way you do, in one piece, not moving, and the first thing he knew was that it had gone quieter outside, and the second thing he knew was that William was looking at him.
He was sitting three feet off with his arms round his knees, and he was looking at him, and he had been for some while, and Nelson knew he had by the way he stopped — not the way a man stops looking at a thing he has been idly resting his eyes on, but the other way.
It took about a second.
Then William said, “You snore,” and got up and went and stood in the doorway with his back to the room and said the rain was easing, and Nelson said his ears were still bad from the machine, and William said something about the machine, and then they walked up together and Nelson went and did the horses.
Neither of them said anything about it.
—
That was 1857.
He turned seventeen in February and was on the thresher in October and got through the whole six days with all his fingers, and Mr. Sowers said something to Reuben about him at the end of it that Reuben passed on in four words.
At Christmas William gave him a knife.
It was a good one, bone-handled, not new — it was William’s own, the one from when they were small, the one out of the pack-house cellar and the ford and eleven years of everything — and he did not make anything of the giving of it.
He put it in Nelson’s hand in the barn lot and said, “I’ve got another,” and went in to his dinner.
Nelson stood in the barn lot and turned it over.
Then he put it in his pocket and went and did what he had been doing.
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