Twenty-Five. Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Five
Twenty-One
It got to William through the Dabneys inside a fortnight, which is about what these things take.
Nelson knew it had, because on the Wednesday in the second week of April William came out to the barn lot and stood about for twenty minutes without saying anything worth saying and then went off, and did the same thing on the Thursday, and did not come at all on the Friday, which he had not done since the winter.
They went down on the Saturday.
—
It was still cold enough for the blanket.
Nelson had the door pulled to and the candle going and was doing something to the handle of a hoe that had split, wrapping the split with wet rawhide so it would draw up tight as it dried, and William sat on the board with his back to the good wall and got to it in about six minutes, which for him was a long time.
“They say at Dabney’s you’re to be married.”
“No.”
“That is not what I asked you.”
Nelson turned the hoe over.
“My mother,” he said. “She had it all worked up. Bartlett was for it and old Beasley would have said yes. It’s the girl I used to go and see.”
“And you said no.”
“I said no.”
“Why?”
Nelson looked up.
It had not once occurred to him that he would be asked that, and there was a silence in the cabin that went on about two seconds too long, and then he understood that it was not what William meant.
“Why did she,” William said.
“Oh.”
—
He told him.
He did not decide to. He had the hoe in his hands and the rawhide going round and he told the whole of it, plainly, the way it had been put to him on the step: that Patience had a husband at Fairlawn and three children in the quarter and was harder to move than a man with nobody; that a man with a wife on another place goes slower and costs more and makes the neighbors talk; that the wheat wanted fewer hands than the tobacco had and there had been a fortnight last August when three men were mending a fence that did not want mending; that a good hand was twelve hundred dollars and a man had been up and down that county since Christmas asking after young men and not buying.
That his mother had worked all of it out sitting on a step, and had been carrying it in her head for two years, and did it over twice a year the way you check a fence.
“She reckons it up,” Nelson said. “She’s done it since I was six.”
He got to the end of it and pulled the rawhide tight and looked up, and William had gone absolutely still on that board.
“How much?”
“Twelve hundred.”
“For — “
“For me. About. Might be more. I’m young for it and I’ve got the machine.”
William did not say anything for a while.
Nelson could not have told anybody what was going on in that face. He had been reading it for thirteen years and there had been perhaps three occasions in the whole of that time when he had not been able to, and this was one.
Then William said: “I’ll free you.”
—
He said it quite simply and without any flourish at all, which was not his way, and having said it he seemed to find it obvious.
“That’s the whole of it,” he said. “That is — why has nobody — that is the entire answer to the whole thing. You can’t be sold if you’re not — “ He stopped and started again, better. “If you’re free, then the number doesn’t exist. There’s no number.
There’s nothing for anybody to reckon up on a step. She can stop.”
Nelson sat with the hoe across his knees.
“When?” he said.
“As soon as it can be done.”
“When’s that?”
“I don’t know exactly,” said William, “but I’ll find out.
There’s a way it’s done — there’s papers, it’s a thing that’s written and taken to the Court House, Waller’s uncle did it for two of theirs when he died — I’ll find out how it’s done.
I’ll ask Meade. Meade’s a lawyer and he owes my father about forty dollars and he’d tell me anything I asked him inside of ten minutes. ”
“You’re nineteen.”
“I’m twenty in five weeks.”
“That’s not it,” Nelson said. “You’ve got to be of age to do a thing at law. Haven’t you.”
William stopped.
“Twenty-one,” he said, after a moment. “Yes. Well — twenty-one, then. That’s not — that is not a very long while.”
“That’s better than a year.”
“It’s thirteen months.”
Nelson said, “It’s thirteen months,” in a voice with nothing in it, and reached for the rawhide again, and there was a considerable silence in that cabin.
—
“Your father going to do it?”
That was the one. He put it very quietly and he did not look up when he said it, and he heard William draw breath twice before he answered.
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
“He’d — “ William said, and stopped.
Nelson went on with the rawhide.
He knew the shape of what was happening on that board as well as he knew the shape of the hoe in his hands. He had known since he was seven what William’s father was and how much of the world ran through him, and William had never in his life had to walk into it.
“He wouldn’t want to,” William said slowly. “He’d think it was — he’d say it was throwing money in a ditch. But he — “
“He’d say no.”
“He might say no.”
“He owns me,” Nelson said.
He said it flatly and without any weight, because it was a fact about the world like the split in the hoe handle, and there was no possible way of saying it that would not have been a blow, and he said it in the plainest way he had.
William sat forward with his elbows on his knees and looked at the floor for a long time.
And then his whole face came up.
“Then I’ll buy you,” he said.
—
He was up off the board on it before he had finished saying it.
“That’s better. That’s better, that answers the whole of it — because then it isn’t asking him for anything, it’s a sale, he likes a sale, he’d rather have twelve hundred dollars than a man, he has said so about four other people in my hearing — and then it’s mine to do, it’s mine, and I do it the week I’m twenty-one and there’s nothing he can say about it — “
“Where do you get twelve hundred dollars?”
“There’s the Orange land that comes to me from my mother.
There’s — I don’t know what it’s worth. Nobody’s ever told me what anything is worth, which is a thing I intend to see about this month.
” He was walking up and down four feet of a cabin floor.
“And if it isn’t enough there’s the — no.
Listen. Listen. Meade. Meade first. I’ll go Tuesday.
I’ll go Tuesday and I’ll ask him the whole of it as though it were about somebody else, which he’ll see through, and I don’t care. ”
He got to the door and turned round.
“Thirteen months,” he said. “That’s nothing. That is nothing at all. We’ve had thirteen years.”
And then, at the door: “And I’d not tell her. Your mother. I’d not tell her until it’s done and the paper’s in her hand, and then we’ll see her reckon that up.”
He laughed.
“Don’t tell her,” Nelson said.
It was agreement.
—
He went up the hill about ten, out the top way past the barns, the way he had gone for two years, and Nelson heard him going for a while and then did not.
He sat in the cabin with the candle and finished the hoe handle, which took another quarter of an hour, and wrapped the last of the rawhide and set it against the wall to dry.
He had been offered, that evening, the largest thing anybody had ever offered him in his life. He knew that. He had understood it perfectly at the time, sitting there, and had gone on wrapping a hoe.
There was going to be a paper. There was going to be a paper with his name on it, and William would get it, and William would bring it down here, and William would put it in his hand, and it would be the best thing that ever happened to him and it would come to him the way the gloves had come.
He turned that over for a while and could not find the end of it, and did not have words for the part of it that was wrong, and was not sure there was a part of it that was wrong.
Then he put the candle out.
Nobody had asked him.
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