Thirty-Six. No Laying-By
Chapter Thirty-Six
No Laying-By
There is no laying-by on a sugar place.
That was the thing he could not get used to. At Fair Prospect the year had a shape: it filled up and it emptied out. There were weeks in August when Reuben had to invent work, and there were four days in a snow when nothing got done at all and nobody thought anything of it.
Here the cane went in in the spring and then it stood in the ground the better part of a year growing, and it did not want anything much doing to it after June, and the place did not slacken by one hour.
Because the ground itself had to be kept.
They hoed the cane through May and June, three times over, and then that was done. And then from July to the middle of October they were on the ditches.
—
Nelson had never dug anything in his life.
He had dug post holes. He had helped take out a stump. That is not digging.
A quarter section of that place had fourteen miles of ditch in it counting the little ones, and the whole of it silted and grew up and fell in every year, and if it did that for two years the cane drowned.
So from July a gang went down the lines with shovels and took the ditches out again, standing in them, in water to the knee and sometimes to the thigh, in Louisiana in August, throwing wet spoil up over the bank all day.
And there was the canal, which was twelve feet across, and which was done in the autumn with more men on it.
And there was cypress to cut in the swamp at the back for the sugar house fires, all year, and hauled out on a tramway they had built themselves; and the levee to be watched and mended; and cordwood; and roads.
The whole place was a thing men had made out of a swamp and it was going back to swamp every hour of every day, and the entire work of ninety-one people, when they were not putting cane in or getting cane out, was holding it still.
—
He was strong. That was the one thing he brought and it was not enough.
He was twenty years old and five feet eleven and a half and he had cradled wheat for four summers, and he found out in the first fortnight of the ditches that he had the wrong strength.
Cradling is a turn from the hips and it is done standing on dry ground.
Shovel work in a ditch is a thing you do bent over with your feet in water, and it is the back and the front of the shoulders, and by the fourth day he could not lift his arms above his head to put his shirt on and had to get into it from underneath like an old man.
There were men on that place of forty-five who did nine hours of it and went home and worked their gardens.
—
And everything he actually knew was worth nothing.
That was the part that sat worst with him through that summer, and he could not have explained it to anybody in that street, and did not try.
He knew tobacco. He knew it the way you know a language — the plant beds and the burning and the transplanting rain and the topping and the worming and the cutting and seven weeks of fires and the stripping on damp days and what a bent leaf sounds like when it is right.
Nine years of it. There was not one plant of tobacco within four hundred miles.
He knew wheat, which nobody grew there.
He knew a threshing machine. He knew how to feed one all day without losing his hands, and how to hear when the drum was loading up, and he had had two autumns of Sowers asking for him by name.
There was not a threshing machine on the Bayou Lafourche.
He knew how to read a barn full of curing leaf in the dark by the smell of the smoke, standing in a cane ditch in Lafourche Parish.
—
They began cutting on the eighteenth of October.
The knife was fifteen inches long and about three inches across at the middle and it tapered to a point at one end and to the handle at the other, and it had a hook on the back near the point, and it weighed more than it looked.
There were a hundred and ten of them in a rack in the shed and they went out at four in the morning and came back at dark.
Cutting cane is three motions and Nelson had been told what they were.
You strip the flags — the long dead leaves down the stalk — with the flat of the blade, going down. You cut the green top off, which is worth nothing and goes to the cattle. Then you cut the stalk at the ground, one stroke, low, and lay it over on the pile.
Three men to a crew. One leading and two flanking, all three feeding one pile, and a cart for every three men following up the row.
He got the top and the ground stroke inside a day. The stripping is the thing. The stripping is a wrist, and the whole speed of the business is in it, and he had a wheat cradler’s wrist and it was wrong.
—
He was the slowest man in that field for eleven days and it was not private.
That is what he had not reckoned on. On a wheat harvest a slow man is slow and it is his own affair.
In a cane crew of three feeding one pile, a slow man is a thing that happens to the other two, all day, every row, and there is no possible way of hiding it, and it is worked out in a headland at dinner by everybody.
His crew was Fielding, who was as bad as he was, and a man of about twenty-four named Ovide who had been born on that place and was one of the eleven.
Ovide talked about it. He talked about it at dinner on the first day, and on the second, and by the fourth he had a way of doing Nelson’s stripping motion — a big slow chopping thing with the shoulder in it, like a man killing a snake — that got a laugh every time he did it, and he did it for a week.
Nelson took it. There was nothing else in the world to do with it. He stood at the end of a headland at noon in front of thirty people and watched a man do an imitation of him and laugh, and he did not say anything, and the second week he did not say anything either.
He thought about the fact that at Fair Prospect he had been the best hand on the place at nineteen, and that there had not been one thing there that he could not do better than most, and that it had made him a person who had never once had to stand in a field and be laughed at, and that he had not known that about himself.
—
Numa fixed it in about four minutes on the twelfth day.
He came down the row at the middle of the morning and stood behind Nelson and watched him do two stalks and then took the knife out of his hand.
He did not say anything about the shoulder.
He put the knife in Nelson’s hand again and moved his fingers on the handle — took the grip apart and put it back together an inch further down and turned the wrist over — and then held Nelson’s forearm against his own side, hard, pinned, so that the arm could not travel, and said one word and pointed at the cane with his chin.
Nelson stripped a stalk with nothing but the wrist because the rest of his arm was held against another man’s ribs.
The flags came off in one pass.
Numa let go of his arm and watched him do four more and said, “Mm,” and went up the row.
He did not mention it again and neither did Nelson.
—
He was not good at it that season. He got up to the middle of the gang by the end of November and he stayed there, and he was not going to be Ovide, who had held a cane knife since he was nine years old.
But there was the other thing, and it came out of nowhere in the second week of November.
A cane knife wants sharpening two or three times a day, because it is going into dirt at the ground stroke, and a dull one takes twice the arm and three times the strokes, and on that place it was every man’s own business to keep his own edge.
Most of them were bad at it. Nelson found that out with something close to astonishment.
He had been putting an edge on things since he was eight years old — plant-bed hoes and tobacco knives and a cradle blade four summers running and a scythe and William’s bone-handled knife, which he still had.
He knew what a stone does. He knew the difference between a blade that is sharp and a blade that has been made thin, which is the difference between a man who knows and a man who has been rubbing at it.
He did his own on the second Sunday and it took twenty minutes, and Fielding watched him do it and asked him for his and Nelson did it, and by the first week of December he was doing four knives every Sunday afternoon and had been given, in payment, without any of it being discussed: two fish, a quantity of tobacco, a place at a fire, and a bad knife-scabbard made out of two pieces of leather that fitted nothing.
Ovide did not bring him a knife and Nelson did not offer.
The sugar house had lit on the nineteenth of October, the day after they started cutting, and it had run day and night ever since, and Nelson had been in the field the whole season and had not once been inside it.
He could see the two chimneys going from any row on that place. At night the whole top of the street was orange.
They sent for him on the ninth of December.
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