Thirty-Eight. The Bay Horse
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The Bay Horse
She knew a fortnight before anybody said anything, because of the horse.
The bay had been shod in April and did not want shoeing again, and Little Ephraim took him down to the smith at the crossroads anyway and brought him back with new fronts on him and the hind ones reset, and the smith had put more iron into it than a horse needs for going about the county.
Then the saddle came off the peg in the harness room and stood on the block in the passage for three days with the flap turned back, and somebody worked on the billets.
Then a blanket got rolled and tied and set on top of a chest in the upstairs passage where nothing was ever set down, and stayed there.
Esther had been twenty-odd years in houses. A house tells you.
She went on with what she had. There were the missus’s two summer dresses to get out and let out, and a set of pillow slips, and Sarah’s cutting to look over, and then the missus came into the sewing room on a Tuesday and said she wanted six shirts, plain, and quick, and Esther said yes ma’am and got the linen down and did them.
It took her and Sarah nine days. She sewed them with the brass thimble, which had never fit her and turned on her finger, and she stopped twice an hour to push it back around.
Nobody told her what the shirts were for. It was not the kind of thing anybody would think to tell her, and by then she did not require telling.
—
The men began coming on the twenty-first of May.
Mr. Waller came first, from Fairlawn, and stayed two hours.
Then Aleck Dabney, who came four miles and brought a son.
Then a heavy man in a grey coat she had never seen before and never got the name of, who came out from the Court House and would not sit down.
Then Waller again, twice more that week.
She heard all of it. That was the thing about the sewing room: it was off the passage and the passage went to the front, and men standing in a passage with their hats in their hands talk at the volume of men who are not thinking about who else is in the house.
They talked about the company. It was making up over toward Charlottesville under a man named Winston, and it had thirty-odd already, and a Perkins had gone into it and one of the Trice boys, and the Beasleys’ eldest was going to but had not yet.
They talked about when William should report, and settled on the twenty-eighth, and then talked about whether the twenty-seventh was better and settled on the twenty-eighth again.
They talked about the road. Aleck Dabney was for going by Boswell’s Tavern and down, and Waller said the other way was two miles shorter but there was a ford in it that would be up, and they went at that a good while, and got the two miles and the ford both settled to their satisfaction.
They talked about the horse more than they talked about the war.
Aleck Dabney went out with William to the yard and Esther heard them come back in and Dabney was saying that he liked the shoulder on him but that a horse doing that work wanted his feet looked at every week whatever the smith said, every week, and no man in a camp would do it for him.
Waller said, at the front door, going out, “You’ll do.”
That was the whole of the approving. There were no speeches in that passage in that fortnight and nobody said one word about Virginia or about rights or about the Yankees that Esther heard.
They talked about shoes and roads and dates and what a horse would stand, and they shook his hand on the way out, and one of them left a pair of gauntlets on the hall table that were too small and were not mentioned again.
—
Corbin Ashmore asked four questions in Esther’s hearing over that fortnight and all four were practical.
He asked whether the horse had enough shoe on him for the road.
He asked whether William had money on him and how much and where he was carrying it.
He asked whether anybody had written to Winston, and when William said Waller had, he asked whether Waller had written or had said he would write.
And on the last evening he asked what William meant to do about the other horse if the bay went lame.
He did not ask him not to go. He did not tell him anything about himself at twenty-two. He stood in the passage with his hands behind him and got his four answers and said, “Well,” and went in to his supper.
—
It was the addresses that did it.
Because they worked those out too, standing in the passage, the same as the roads.
Letters were to go to Charlottesville, to a man named Garth who kept a store there, and Garth would send them on to the company wherever the company was.
And if the company moved out of the county altogether then Aleck Dabney’s boy was in it and the Dabneys got word back to Fairlawn most weeks, and the Wallers were half a mile off, and so nothing could be lost. They said that.
Waller said it twice: nothing gets lost that way.
Esther sat in the sewing room with a shirt across her knees and heard three separate ways of finding one man.
What she had was two things, and one of them was not information.
She had been kept in that office until it was done.
She had heard the whole of it through a window that was open because it was August, and she had counted it the way you count anything, and she had got to twenty and started again from one without meaning to.
There had been eighteen months since. There was not a week of them she had not had some part of that sound in her somewhere.
The other thing she had was Richmond.
Corbin Ashmore had told her that much himself, in the November he was sold, in the yard, without being asked, in the manner of a man giving out a piece of information he considers he has been generous to part with: that Pendleton had taken him down to Richmond. Not who. Not where after. Richmond.
She had worked at it for six weeks. She had got a question to Pendleton in the end, by way of Elias Poindexter, who was a free man and went to the Court House with barrel staves and could stand in a road and ask a white man a thing Esther could not safely ask for herself.
Pendleton’s answer came back through Elias in Pendleton’s own words, and it was that he had sold to a man in the trade, and he did not recollect which, and there had been a good many that month.
There was no lie in it Esther could find. There was only nothing. Whatever Pendleton had known had not remained useful to him after the money was counted, and there was nothing at the end of the string to pull on.
She had understood that in January of that year and she had stopped pulling on it, and she had not said so to anybody, and she went on with the shirts.
—
He went out on the twenty-eighth at about seven in the morning.
He had cut his hair. He had done it himself or got somebody to do it badly, and it was short up the neck in a way that made him look younger instead of older, and he had one of the six shirts on.
The yard was full. Both Wallers, and a Dabney, and Tapp standing back by the gate with his hat on, and Anna out on her step, and Reuben holding the bay’s head, and the missus on the top step with her hands together, and Junie in the middle of the yard where she had no business being, and Esther in the passage door with the mending she had brought out so as to be holding something.
He checked the cinch. He got up, and then he came back down and checked it again, and Reuben stood there and let him.
He talked more than the occasion took. He talked about the ford, which had been settled a week ago, and about a strap, and about a man at Boswell’s, and twice he came back around to the ford, and Mr. Waller answered him the same way each time.
He shook his father’s hand at the bottom of the steps. Corbin said something short and William said something short and they let go.
He said something to the missus that Esther did not hear, and the missus said, “Yes. Yes,” and put her hand up to her mouth.
Then he came across the yard and Junie was in the way, and he stopped.
“You’ve got tall,” he said.
“Yes sir,” Junie said.
He stood there another second and then he went past her to the horse.
—
At the last, with the reins in his hand, he turned round to Mr. Waller and said something about a letter, and Waller said Garth’s, at Charlottesville, and the missus came down two steps and said it back to make sure she had it — “Garth. At Charlottesville” — and Waller said yes ma’am, and that Garth would know where the company was even if the company itself did not.
The missus said it once more to herself, moving her lips over it.
Then William Ashmore put his own foot in his own stirrup and got up on his own horse and went out through his father’s gate at a walk, at the hour he had picked, on the road six men had agreed on, and turned left at the end of the lane.
The dogs went with him as far as the second gate and came back.
Esther stood in the passage door with the mending in her hands until the missus had gone in and the yard had let out.
They know where to send a letter.
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