Twenty-Seven. What Meade Told Him
Chapter Twenty-Seven
What Meade Told Him
William turned twenty on the twentieth of May and there was a dinner for it with the Wallers, and the following morning he rode in to Louisa Court House and was gone the whole day.
He came down on the Saturday and told Nelson about the Orange land.
—
“It’s a hundred and forty acres and a tenant on it,” he said, “and it was my mother’s, and it comes to me. That much is right. I had that much right.”
“And?”
“And my father has the use of it until he dies.”
Nelson looked at him.
“There’s a name for it,” William said. “Meade said the name and I have forgotten it and I am not going back to ask him again. When a man’s wife dies and there’s been a child of the marriage, the land is the child’s but the man has the whole use of it while he lives.
Every stick of it. The rents, the timber, the whole of it.
It is not mine until he is dead. It has never been mine.
It has been mine to inherit since I was three years old, which is a different thing entirely and which nobody has ever once said to me in plain words in twenty years. ”
He was sitting on the board with his hands hanging between his knees.
“How much does it bring?”
“About ninety dollars a year,” William said.
“Which he has had. Every year since I was three. Which is, Meade says — Meade did the figure in his head while I sat there, he did it in about two seconds and then wished he hadn’t — which is more than fifteen hundred dollars that has come off my mother’s land and gone into this place since you were a child. ”
Nelson sat with that a while.
“Fifteen hundred,” he said.
“Yes.”
“That’s more than — “
“Yes,” said William. “I know what it is more than. I sat in that office and worked out what it was more than while Meade was talking about something else.”
—
After that, the telling changed.
It went over about six weeks from here is the whole of it to I am seeing about it, and Nelson could not have said where the change began.
In June he was in to the Court House twice and said, when asked, that it was tedious and that there was a question about the tenant.
At the end of June he came down and talked for an hour and a half about a mare of Aleck Dabney’s, in great detail, with animation, and went up again.
In the first week of July Nelson asked him straight out how it stood and William said, “It stands. I’ll tell you when there’s anything to tell,” and then, seeing whatever was on Nelson’s face, put his hand out and took hold of his wrist and said, “There is something to tell. There will be. I am not — Nelson. I am not letting go of it.”
And Nelson believed him, and that was true, and it was also true that he had not been told anything, and both of those went on being true all through July.
—
He got the rest of it the way his mother got things.
He had been getting things that way his whole life without ever having thought of it as a method, and that summer he started doing it on purpose, and was ashamed of that, and went on.
Little Ephraim was in the house yard most days and heard the front of the house.
Anna heard the kitchen. Sarah, who was seventeen now and sewed in the passage two days a week when the work was heavy, heard the passage.
None of them knew they were telling him anything.
He asked about other things and let them arrive at it.
By the end of July he had this much.
That a man named Pendleton had been out from the Court House three times since April and had not stayed to dinner once.
That there was a note that had been renewed in May and that the missus knew about it, because she had said a thing to Anna about the kitchen accounts in June that she had never said in seven years.
That the wheat had come in light on the low ground — the ground with the forty dollars of plaster on it — for the second year.
That Mr. Ashmore had said at his own table, in front of Sarah, that a man who put his money in machines was a man who had bought himself a hole in the ground with a roof on it.
And that Mr. Ashmore had asked Reuben, in the barn lot, in June, what he thought Little Ephraim would fetch.
—
Nelson did not tell his mother any of it.
She would have had it inside a fortnight anyway, and probably had most of it, and they had not spoken about anything that mattered since the step in March; and there was the other reason, which was that if he took it to her she would put it together in front of him in about two minutes and say the thing she had already said, and he would have to stand there and hear it again.
He put it together himself instead, walking behind a cradle in the last week of June.
A man who is short does not sell his best hand. That was the first thing and he held on to it a long while. He sells the one he can spare — Little Ephraim, who was twenty-five and strong and not quick; or a woman; or two off the field.
But a man who is short and who then finds out that he has a further reason —
He got that far and stopped, and did the rest of the field, and did not go any further with it that day or for some days after.
—
On the third Sunday in July there were voices in the office.
They came out of the front of the house at about four in the afternoon on a still day and they went across the yard as far as the kitchen, and Anna was in the kitchen, and Sarah was in the passage, and by the Monday morning every soul on that place knew that Mr. Ashmore and Mr. William had had words, and not one of them knew about what.
Nelson was up at the barns and heard nothing but the fact of it, twice, from two people, before dinner.
William came down on the Tuesday.
He was perfectly ordinary. He sat on the board and said that the tenant at Orange had put in for a new roof on the barn and would not be getting one, and that Aleck Dabney had bought the mare after all and had paid too much, and he was in a good humor and stayed two hours.
At the end of it Nelson said, “Have you talked to your father?”
“About Orange?”
“About me.”
William did not take any time over it at all.
“Not yet,” he said. “Not till I’ve got it straight. There’s no sense going at him with half of a thing; you don’t know him the way I do, he’ll take hold of the weak place and pull. When I go at him I’m going with the whole of it and it’ll be done in one afternoon.”
Nelson said, “All right.”
He said it in the same voice he had used all summer and William took it the same way he had taken it all summer, and put his hat on, and went up the hill out the top way past the barns.
Nelson stood in the door of that cabin and watched him go.
He had known this man since he was six years old. He could tell from forty feet in the dark which of two people coming up a yard was him. He had spent thirteen years learning that face the way you learn a road.
And he stood in the doorway on the third Tuesday in July, 1859, and did not know whether he had just been told the truth.
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