Twenty-Four. Five Saturdays
Chapter Twenty-Four
Five Saturdays
By the Tuesday Anna spoke in the kitchen doorway, Bristol had missed five Saturdays.
The second in November had been nothing. That had happened three or four times in six years — a wagon wanted, a horse lame, a Saturday the Dabneys had other uses for — and Esther had put the pot back and gone to bed at nine.
The first in December she got up twice in the night and stood in the door.
Then there was the Tuesday, and the roof, and the stripping room two days after it, and her son going down to that cabin on the Thursday with the ground soft and coming in at eleven o’clock with the mud on him.
And on the second Saturday in December she sat on the step until half past ten in the cold with her shawl over her head and her hands inside it, and Junie came out twice and was sent back in, and at half past ten she went in and banked the fire and lay down and did not sleep.
She heard on the seventeenth, from a Fairlawn girl who had it from a Dabney girl and did not know she was carrying anything, in a doorway, in the middle of a great deal about a christening.
He had been sold in Richmond on the eighth of November.
Old Mr. Dabney had gone security on something for a man at Gordonsville four years ago and the man at Gordonsville had gone to pieces in the autumn, and there was a note, and it came due, and the Dabneys sold three: a woman named Fanny out of the kitchen, a boy of fifteen, and Bristol.
The girl in the doorway said he had gone on the cars on the seventh with a man from the Court House. She said it took about a day and a half from the time anybody knew.
Esther said, “Is that so,” and asked her something else about the christening.
—
Nobody at Fair Prospect said anything to her about it.
That was not unkindness. Anna made a great deal of noise in the kitchen for three days and put things in front of her.
Patience took Junie for two evenings without being asked.
Reuben came to the loom room door on the Friday and stood in it and said there was a piece of work wanted doing at Fairlawn in January and he had a mind to send Sarah, and did she think Sarah could do it, and Esther said Sarah could do it, and Reuben said, “That’s what I thought,” and went away.
Not one of them said his name. That is how it is done, when the thing that has happened is the thing that can happen to anybody in the room.
She asked in the doorways that winter, in the way you can ask. What came back was Richmond, and after Richmond nothing, which is what always comes back after Richmond.
—
Her son was not speaking to her, and she was not speaking to him, and the two of them lived in a room ten feet by twelve.
It was not a silence. They spoke every day.
He said the wood was in. She said there was meal.
He carried things for her that she did not ask him to carry and she washed things for him that he did not ask her to wash, and Junie, who was eight and had the whole of the house’s weather in her before anybody said a word, talked the entire time and filled it.
But there was a stripping room between them and neither of them went into it.
She wanted him to say one thing so she could take it up. He wanted her to be wrong. Neither happened, and the winter went on, and in the fourth week of January she got up one night and sat on the step in the cold, which is where she did her thinking now, and made herself go over what she had left.
She had three things and she looked at each of them properly.
She could go to William.
She could get up out of that house and walk into the passage and stand in front of a nineteen-year-old white man and say a sentence to him, and there was a version of it in which he heard her and was frightened and stopped.
There was also a version in which he was insulted.
There was a version in which he went straight to his father.
There was a version — and she thought this was the likeliest of the four — in which he went straight to Nelson, and Nelson knew that she had gone behind him, and that would be the end of the last thing she had.
And there was the thing under all of it: that at present she was the only person in Virginia who knew, and the moment she said it out loud to anybody it stopped being true that only she knew, and it would never be true again.
She could go to Mr. Ashmore.
She turned that one over for less than a minute. She had worked out fourteen months ago exactly what that man would build the day he found out. She was not going to be the one who handed him the timber.
She could get Nelson hired out. A year at the Central Railroad. A year anywhere.
And she had seen, six weeks earlier, what a place does when it wants money in a hurry, and she knew what hiring out is: it is a man finding out that a person is worth cash away from his own ground.
Overton and Jim Pond had gone in September of ’56 and had come back in December, and there had been eighteen dollars in it.
She was not going to have that demonstrated twice with her son.
So there was nothing. She sat on that step with the cold coming through and got all the way to the bottom of it, and there was nothing at all.
And then, about four in the morning, she thought of the fourth thing.
—
She had done the sum herself, on that same step, in March of ’57.
Not Patience. Patience had a husband at Fairlawn and three children in the quarter, and selling her would tear through too many other arrangements at once.
A man with a wife on another place and children in the quarter is a different figure on paper.
He goes slower and he costs more to take, and every hand on that place watches it done and works badly for a month, and the neighbors talk, and there is a whole class of trouble a man will pay a hundred dollars to avoid.
It was the only thing she had ever found that moved the number.
And it would do the other thing as well. She did not let herself be delicate about that in her own head at four in the morning on a step in January. It would do both, and she knew it was doing both, and if it did both then she did not much care in what order.
—
The girl at Beasley’s was called Rachel and she was Bartlett’s granddaughter and she was eighteen years old.
Esther had a piece of work for the Beasleys in February, a mantle, and she made the fitting take three visits when it wanted one, and the girl who came over with it was Rachel’s mother’s sister, and by the second visit Esther knew that Rachel had nobody; that the Beasleys had sold two men in the autumn of ’57 and had not sold anybody since; that Bartlett had been asking his own people about somebody for her; and that the family thought well of the Ashmore boy who had come over that year and a half and had stopped coming and had never once given anybody any trouble.
By the end of February the aunt had said, in a doorway, in the way these things are said, that it was a pity he had stopped coming.
And Esther said, in the way these things are answered, that he had been very much taken up with the machine.
That was all it wanted. That is all it ever wants.
By the middle of March there was a thing standing there that everybody concerned could see and nobody had said, and Bartlett had let it be known through two mouths that he would not be against it, and old Mr. Beasley, who wanted more people on his place and not fewer, would have said yes inside of a week.
Esther put it to her son on the last Sunday in March, on the step, in the sun.
—
She did not dress it up. She laid it out the way she would have laid out a piece of work: what it was, what it wanted, who had said what, and what it would do.
She told him about Patience and the three children. She told him what a man is worth with a wife on another place and what he is worth without one. She told him that Bartlett would not be against it and that the Beasleys would say yes and that the whole of it could be done by the summer.
Nelson sat on the step with his forearms on his knees and looked at the yard and let her finish the whole of it.
Then he said, “No.”
“You don’t have to answer me today.”
“No, Mama.”
“It’s a good girl. You liked her. Don’t you tell me you didn’t, I know what you were walking four mile in the dark for—“
“I liked her fine,” Nelson said. “That’s not — “ and stopped, and started again. “You want me to marry a girl I quit going to see, and get children on her, and put them on a place four mile off where I’d see them Sundays if I got a paper, so that I’d cost too much to sell.”
“Yes,” Esther said.
She was not going to lie to him about it. She had thought about that a good deal and she was not going to do it.
Nelson nodded slowly, still looking at the yard.
“And what happens to her,” he said.
Esther did not have anything to say to that.
They sat there. Down at the bottom of the yard Junie was doing something to a hen that the hen did not care for.
And then her son did the thing she had not been ready for at all. He turned round and put his hand on her back, between her shoulders, the flat of it, the way you do to somebody who has had a fright.
“It’s going to be all right,” he said.
Esther sat on that step with her son’s hand on her back and looked straight ahead at the yard and did not say one word, because there was not one word in the world that would not have been the wrong one.
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