Thirty. The Office
Chapter Thirty
The Office
She knew something was wrong at about a quarter past nine, and what told her was the quiet.
It was the twenty-fifth of August. They were cutting the second ground, and nearly everybody who could be spared was down there, and that was not the wrong part.
The wrong part was that Tapp’s horse was standing at the yard gate at a quarter past nine in the morning with the reins over the post instead of tied, which is how a man leaves a horse he intends to get back on directly, and Tapp was not on it, and Tapp had no business in this yard at all on a cutting morning.
Esther was in the passage with the window up, hemming, because it was the coolest place in the house before noon and the missus let her have it. She did not stop hemming. She put four more stitches in and looked at the horse and put in four more.
Then the office door opened and shut, and it was Corbin Ashmore’s step going up the stairs, and it went up fast, and doors began.
She thought: William.
She thought it with something that was almost relief, because a great deal can be wrong with a young white man and nearly all of it gets absorbed.
Debt. A horse. A girl at the crossroads or in Gordonsville.
A quarrel with the Dabney boy that had come to blows.
She had a whole shape ready for it — Nelson would have been with him, Nelson was always with him, so Nelson would be asked what he had seen, and the thing to do was make sure Nelson understood before he was asked that he had seen nothing, had been elsewhere, had been sent for water.
She was already thinking how to get down the hill and say it to him.
Then the stairs again, and Ashmore’s voice through the floor, not loud, and above it William’s voice, loud, saying something with a rising end to it. Then a door shut on William’s voice and the shutting had a key in it.
Esther sat with the needle stopped in the cloth.
A key was not a girl in Gordonsville.
She put the needle through the shoulder of her dress where she kept it and folded the work over her arm and stood up and went down the passage as far as the office door was still open, which was three feet, and looked through it at nothing but the corner of the desk and Tapp’s hat on it, crown down.
Nobody sent for her for another two hours.
—
She did not go out to look for her son.
She thought about it the entire two hours and did not do it, and the reason was arithmetic.
If she went down the hill and asked, then whatever it was would from that moment include her; she would be a woman who had come running, and everything she said afterward would be discounted at that rate.
If she stayed in the passage and hemmed, she was a woman doing her work who had noticed nothing, and a woman who has noticed nothing can be told things.
So she hemmed. She did the whole side of a sheet she had not intended to do until Friday.
Sarah came up at ten with the basket and sat down on the low stool across from her without being told, which was the one thing about Sarah that could not be taught and which Sarah had.
She was seventeen and she was slow. Not lazy-slow.
Frightened-slow — she was afraid of a crooked seam, so she went at half speed and got it right, and Esther had told her twice that a fast honest seam beats a slow perfect one because there is always more work standing behind the work, and Sarah had heard it and agreed with it and gone on at half speed.
They worked. Sarah had the side seams of a shift and she did four inches in the time Esther did a foot of hem, and after a while Esther put her own work down and reached over and took the shift and turned it inside out and looked at the four inches.
“Feel that,” she said.
Sarah felt it.
“It’s puckered.”
“Mm.”
“It’s the — “ Sarah turned it over. “It’s tight.”
“It’s tight because you’re pulling the thread up with your whole arm instead of your fingers. You’ll have that seam sitting proud on her ribs by Christmas.” Esther unpicked the four inches with the point of the needle, quick, four passes, and handed it back. “Again.”
Sarah did it again, and it was better, and Esther said nothing about it being better, and Sarah went on.
Esther watched the girl’s hands a while.
Two years, she thought. Eighteen months if there was somebody standing over her.
The missus came through twice. The second time she asked whether Esther had seen William, and Esther said she had not, and the missus said, “No,” in a voice that meant she had already known that and had asked for some other reason, and went away.
At half past eleven two of Tapp’s hired men came into the yard, the tall one and the one with the pink around his eyes, and stood by the gate not talking.
A minute later Junie came up the yard the other way with the dinner basket on her hip.
She was nine that spring and she carried the men’s dinner down to whatever ground they were working, which was a real job and she knew it was a real job and she would not let anybody help her lift it.
The way to the second ground went out through the yard gate and down the cart track, and the yard gate was where the two men were standing.
“Come here,” Esther said, through the window.
“I’ve got to take this down.”
“Come here first.”
Junie came, put out. Esther came out onto the step and took the cloth off the basket and looked in it and put the cloth back, which was a thing to do with her hands.
“Go round by the springhouse.”
“That’s twice as far.”
“Go round by the springhouse and down the fence line and come out at the bottom bars.”
“It’s twice as far, and it’s — “
“Junie.”
Junie looked at her. Then she shifted the basket onto the other hip in a manner intended to convey the full weight of the injustice, and did not ask why, because she was nine and not four, and because there had been a rule about strange white men standing about in a yard for as long as she could remember and she had never once been given a reason for that either.
“Is Nelson down there?”
“He’s in the second ground.”
“He said he’d cut me a whistle.”
“Then he’ll cut you a whistle,” Esther said. “Go on.”
Junie went off round the corner of the smokehouse toward the springhouse with the basket bumping her leg, and Esther watched her the whole way until she was out of sight of the gate, and then went back in and sat down and picked up the sheet.
The two men were still at the gate. One of them had moved to the other post. Neither of them had gone to the field.
That was when she understood it was Nelson.
She got it from the men and not from anything anybody said, and she got it the way you get the weather in your knee. Men are not stood at a gate for a debt.
She thought about who she could tell.
It was Thursday. A year ago there would have been Bristol on Saturday, with a pass, and the Dabney place four miles by the road and better than three across the branch.
There was no Bristol. There had been no Bristol since last November, and there was no way of getting word anywhere that did not go through somebody’s mouth, and no reason to think it would do any good if it did.
She put it down the way you put down a tool you have picked up out of habit and have no use for.
Then she made herself sit still and take the thing apart properly, because there were two ways this could go and they wanted different things from her, and if she guessed wrong she would spend what little she had on the wrong one.
It could be that Nelson had done something. Struck somebody. Taken something. Been where he was not.
Or it could be the other.
She had known for two years that there was another and had not once let herself put words on it, and she found, sitting in the passage with a hemmed sheet across her knees, that she had never actually decided what she would do, and that she had spent two years arranging not to have to.
At twenty minutes to twelve the office door opened all the way and Ashmore said, into the passage, without raising his voice, “Esther.”
—
There were four of them in the office and one of them was her son.
Corbin Ashmore was behind the desk. He was not standing and he was not red and he had not been drinking, and he had a paper in front of him — an account of some kind, a column of figures — and when she came in he did not look up.
He finished the column. He set the pen down in the tray and turned the paper face down and squared it with two fingers.
Tapp was against the window with his arms folded.
Nelson was in the middle of the floor. He had come out of the field; there was topping-gum black to his elbows and his shirt was wet through and stuck to him and there was dirt down one side of his face and a cut in his lip that was not fresh, maybe two hours old, already stopped.
He was standing the way a man stands who has been told to stand there.
Both hands at his sides. Nineteen years old and taller than every white man in the room.
He looked at her when she came in.
Esther looked at the desk.
She had worked it out in the passage in the last thirty seconds, and it was this: she was not being brought in to be told anything.
Ashmore had men enough to hold a boy and a voice enough to frighten one and he did not need a seamstress for either.
She was being brought in because Nelson would be able to see her.
She was the instrument. She had been sent for the way you send for a tool.
And the only thing in the world she had any command of, standing on that floor, was where she put her eyes — because if she looked at her son, and he looked back, then every man in that room would see exactly how much she was worth to him, and they would price her accordingly.
So she looked at the desk. She looked at the corner of the desk where Tapp’s hat had been and was not any more, and she kept her face the way she kept it for the missus, and she did not look at Nelson.
She could feel him looking. It went on some seconds and then it stopped.