Twenty-Two. The Rules
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Rules
There came to be rules, and Nelson made nearly all of them.
Never leave the yard in the same direction. He went down past the quarter and along the fence line; William went out the top by the barns and came round. It added a quarter of an hour to William’s walk and he never once complained about it.
Never at the same hour two nights running, and never on a Sunday, when the whole place was about and had nothing to do but see things.
Never in a wet week. Ground that takes a print keeps it, and there were three months of the year when Nelson would not go down there at all, and would not be argued with about it, and was not.
Never carry anything down. That one was for William.
Nelson had a reason to be anywhere on that place at any hour and could produce one in his sleep; William had no reason and needed none, but a young man walking to the bottom of the quarter after dark with a bundle under his arm is a thing somebody remembers, and a young man walking down there with nothing at all is a young man who has gone for a walk.
The signal was the shutter of the loom room, which stood at an angle from the yard where it could be seen from the top of the tobacco ground.
Open meant Esther was in it. Shut meant she was not.
It had nothing to do with anything and it told them whether Esther was in the loom room, and Nelson had thought of it in about four seconds one evening in November and had been pleased with himself for a week.
William obeyed every rule, never had to be reminded of one, and never once argued about any of it. Sometimes when Nelson added another he smiled.
—
By the second summer the cabin had things in it.
The board on two stones had a second board.
There was the tin with the candle end, and then there was a second tin with two more candle ends and a flint.
There was a horse blanket that had been condemned in the spring and that Nelson had carried down in daylight in front of everybody, over his shoulder, on his way to somewhere else, which is how you move a thing.
There was a cup with a chip out of it. There was a jar of last year’s damsons gone out of Anna’s stores, about which nothing was ever said.
And by August of ’58 there was a place where the boards had been taken up at the far end and put back loose, and under them a flat tin box, and in the box the spelling-book page and four others that had come out of the same book in the years since, and a stub of pencil, and the whole of it wrapped in a piece of oilcloth against the wet.
—
They were down there perhaps twice a week for two years and Nelson could not have told anybody what they did.
They talked. That was most of it. They talked about the wheat and Aleck Dabney and whether Reuben was fifty or nearer forty and what had actually happened to a man at Green Springs; they had a running argument about the thresher that lasted seven months; they went back over things they had gone over when they were nine.
And William read to him.
That started in the spring of ’58 and it was not a plan and neither of them ever called it anything. He brought a book down inside his coat — the only rule that ever got broken, and he did it about once a month and Nelson let him — and he read out loud by the candle with his back to the good wall.
He read badly. He read too fast and he skipped and he could not do the voices and would not be told.
He read the whole of Ivanhoe over the better part of a year and had opinions about all of it.
He read a piece out of the newspaper about a canal in Egypt that was not going to be dug and got angry about it.
In July he read four pages of the Latin, in an accent that Ould would not have owned, and Nelson said it back to him — all four pages, in order, once through — and William put the book down and looked at him.
“You did that when you were fourteen.”
“I remember.”
“You did it in the barn,” William said. “You did it in the barn and I have been carrying that about ever since and I have never once — how do you do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nobody can do that.”
“Then don’t tell anybody,” Nelson said, and William laughed, and picked the book up, and read four pages more.
—
Nelson was off Fair Prospect thirty days that year that he had not been the year before.
Eleven at the Fairlawn threshing. Four days with staves to Louisa Court House and a night with the wagon each time. Six at the Dabneys’ with the machine, because Sowers had asked after him by name, twice.
He put it down to Reuben. Reuben had put him on the thresher in ’57 and had been giving him the outside work ever since, and Nelson had worked out that a man who is asked for by name is a man a place likes to have asked for.
He was pleased about it. He was pleased about it every time.
—
In the last week of May, Miss Cordelia Waller and her mother came over about a dress and stood about the yard for the better part of an hour, and Nelson was at the barn lot the whole time and saw the whole of it.
That evening William said, “Do you know what she talked about? For an hour. A hat.”
“What about it?”
“That is precisely what I was unable to establish,” said William.
Nelson found that a good deal funnier than it was, and knew he did, and did not examine it, and went to sleep on it in a very good humor.
—
In September they talked about the roof.
It came up because there had been a wet fortnight and the hole at the ridge had let a great deal of it in at the far end, and the boards down there had gone soft, and the flat tin box was underneath boards that had gone soft.
So they got up on the outside of it on a Sunday when the place was at the quarter and looked at it, and it was not much: eight or nine feet of the ridge where the shingles had gone and a rafter that wanted sistering, and there was cedar shingle in the loft of the pack house left over from the smokehouse in ’54 and nobody had counted it in four years.
“Two days,” William said. “Two afternoons. We’d want a saw. There’s the short ladder.”
“You can’t be up on a roof at the bottom of the quarter.”
“Then I’ll hand things up.”
“You can’t be standing at the bottom of a ladder at the bottom of the quarter either.”
“Then I shall stand a long way off and shout advice,” William said, “which is what I am best at,” and got down off the wall and went round the corner to look at the north side, and went on talking about it — about the rafter, about whether the whole of the ridge wanted taking off, about a way of doing the flashing that he had seen at Fairlawn and had a theory concerning.
Nelson stood in the weeds with his hand flat on the wall of that cabin and listened to him.
He was eighteen years old. He had one shirt his mother had made him and one his mother had made him the year before that was too small, and a knife in his pocket, and a page of a spelling book in a tin box under a floor, and a ticking bag round his neck with a piece of paper in it that said whose he was.
He could not have held a nail in that building in law. He could not have held the ground it stood on, nor the cedar shingle in the pack-house loft, nor the saw, nor the two afternoons it would take.
And he was standing in the weeds working out whether the rafter would want sistering the whole length or whether you could scab a piece on the sound end and save the timber.
He got as far as the timber and stopped.
Then William came back round the corner saying that the north side was worse than the south and would want the whole of it off, and Nelson said that if he took the whole of it off in September he would have no roof at all in October, and they went at that for twenty minutes.
They meant to do the roof in two afternoons. It took three. It did not leak after.
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