Thirty-One. The Barn Lot
Chapter Thirty-One
The Barn Lot
“No,” Nelson said.
Corbin Ashmore sat behind that desk and looked at him for about three seconds, and then he said, “Take him out, Mr. Tapp,” and turned the paper on the desk face up again and picked up his pen.
—
They did it in the barn lot because that is where things were done.
Tapp had him by one arm and the tall one had the other and they walked him out through the passage and down the steps and across the yard, and he did not fight them, because his mother had put it into him at ten years old that a man who fights on the way is a man they can say fought, and he had heard it every year since.
They put him against the fence at the end of the lot and got his shirt off him over his head and tied his wrists to the top rail with a plough line, and it took some doing because the rail was low and he had to bend.
He got his forehead against the wood and shut his eyes.
—
It went on a long time.
It was not the hurt; the hurt is a thing the body does and then afterward you have had it.
It was that it went on, and that it kept on going on after the point at which a person believes it must be nearly done, and that somewhere in there he stopped being able to keep count and started counting again from one without meaning to.
There was Tapp’s breathing.
Tapp was forty-four and heavy and it was August, and by the middle of it he was blowing like a man forking hay, and he had to stop twice and change hands.
Nelson could hear him. He could hear a man getting tired.
—
What Nelson had was the sound.
He had his forehead against the rail and his eyes shut and he heard boots coming across that yard at a dead run, and then William’s voice from about thirty feet, and the voice was doing something Nelson had never heard it do.
“STOP — “
Then the hired men had him. The tall one got him round the middle and the one with the pink round his eyes got an arm, and William Ashmore was held in the middle of his own father’s barn lot and went on shouting.
He shouted, Stop. He shouted, Father. He shouted, It was me — twice, three times, in a voice that was coming apart in the middle — it was me, it was me, it was not him, it was me.
Tapp did not stop. Nobody said anything to William at all. That was the thing: not one man in that lot answered him, or looked at him, or gave any sign whatever that a person was speaking, and Tapp changed hands again and went on.
And William screamed:
“HE’S MINE!”
—
Everything stopped.
It stopped the way a room stops when a glass goes over.
The hands came off William. Tapp came up short with his arm halfway back and stood there with his chest going and his mouth open, looking not at William and not at Nelson but at Corbin Ashmore, who had come out onto the steps at some point and was standing on them.
Nelson had his forehead on the rail and could not see any of it and did not need to. He could hear the whole of it in the silence.
It worked.
Nobody said anything for what felt like a long while.
Then Corbin Ashmore said, from the steps, in a voice pitched to carry no further than the fence: “Cut him down.”
—
They cut him down and he went to his knees in the dirt and got up again, which took a while, and nobody helped him and he had not expected anybody to.
He got his shirt in his hand and turned round.
William was on his knees about twenty feet off where the hired men had let go of him, and he was looking at Nelson, and there was nothing at all in his face — it had gone the way it went, all the furniture out — and his mouth was open and he was not saying anything.
Nelson looked at him.
He did not say I know and he did not say it’s all right and he did not say anything else, and there was nothing in his face either, and the two of them looked at each other across twenty feet of barn lot in front of five people until Tapp took Nelson’s arm and turned him and walked him off toward the quarter.
—
Two days after, Corbin Ashmore came out onto the steps while Nelson was carrying water across the yard, and said, without stopping and without any particular emphasis:
“Your mother stays where she is. You go.”
And went back in.
He did not say why. Nelson stood in that yard with a bucket in each hand and understood that the terms had been that man’s to set on the Thursday and that man’s to change on the Saturday, and that his own refusal had bought him nothing that he had chosen.
—
He was ten weeks at Fair Prospect after that and he worked every day of them.
There was tobacco in the barns wanting fires and eleven acres of wheat to go in and a threshing machine coming in October, and Corbin Ashmore was a farmer with a note falling due in November, and a man who has decided to sell a hand in three months does not stop getting work out of him for three months.
So Nelson cut and hung and fired and sowed, with his back healing crooked in two places, and slept in the loom room, and was not let off that place once — not to mill, not to the Court House with the staves, not anywhere — and Reuben gave him the near work and never once looked him in the face, and Sowers came in October and asked for him and was told he was not available.
He was never alone with his mother. That was done deliberately and it was done by Esther, who put Junie between them for ten weeks the way you put a plank across a hole, and he understood exactly why she was doing it and let her do it.
He saw William five times.
Twice across the yard. Once at a distance in the second ground. And once in the passage of the house at the end of September, coming the other way, with the missus ten feet behind him, and they went past each other and neither of them turned his head.
—
The eighth of November was a Tuesday and it was clear and cold.
Reuben came down at five and stood in the loom room door and said, “Nelson,” and did not say anything else, and Nelson got up off the tick and put his coat on. He had known since the Saturday. Everybody had known since the Saturday.
His mother was standing with her back to the wall by the shelf.
She had his ticking bag in her hands, and she had made it new — new ticking, doubled, with a broader string — and she had put into it his pass, which was no good to him and was the only paper with his name on it that existed in the world, and the page out of the spelling book, and four other pages, and the stub of pencil, and Delphy’s thimble.
She put it over his head and pulled the string out and looked at the length of it and shortened it an inch, the way she had when he was ten.
“Don’t take it off,” she said. “Not to swim, not for anybody.”
“No ma’am.”
She put her hand flat on his chest over the bag and held it there.
“You are going to be somebody’s,” she said. “That’s all that is. You have been somebody’s every day of your life and it never once got inside you, and it is not going to get inside you now, and I want to hear you say it.”
“It’s not going to get inside me.”
“Say the rest of it.”
“I’ll be alive,” Nelson said.
“That’s it,” said his mother. “That’s the whole of it. That’s all I want and it’s the only thing I ever wanted and don’t you dare give me anything else.”
Junie was nine and she came off the tick and got hold of him round the middle and would not be got off, and Esther did not make her.
—
They went in the wagon to Louisa Court House and there were five of them: Tapp driving, and a man from the Court House called Pendleton, and Nelson, and a woman named Alice from the Beasley place who had been bought that week by the same man and who did not say one word the entire way and looked at the road.
The train was at ten.
It came in the way it had always come in, and Nelson stood on that platform with his wrists tied in front of him under a coat that had been put over them to be decent about it, and watched it come.
He had stood in that same village at ten years old with a sack of corn and a paper round his neck and had thought that he had never seen anything so fine as a road with nobody on it.
The cars stopped. Pendleton got down off the wagon and went and spoke to a man and came back and said something to Tapp about the through car.
And Nelson got up the step — a man behind him put a hand out to help and he took it, because you take it — and went along the aisle and sat down where he was told to sit down, on the outside, next to the woman named Alice, who moved over an inch and looked out the window.
Somewhere up at the front a bell went, and the whole car banged once, hard, all down its length.
And Louisa County began to go backwards past the glass.
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