Thirty-Nine. The Moss Pit
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The Moss Pit
Jonah went into the swamp on Sundays.
It took Nelson until March to see it, because Sunday on that place was the one day with any width in it and everybody went somewhere — the gardens, the ditch with the catfish in it, the store, a man’s brother on the next place if he had a pass — and a man walking away up the tramway with a sack was not a thing that asked a question of anybody.
What Nelson noticed was the sack coming back. It went out empty and folded under his arm and it came back at the middle of the afternoon full and wet and slung, and he did it every Sunday it did not rain and some that it did, and he did not take anybody.
It was moss.
It hung in the live oaks at the back of the place and in the cypress beyond that, grey, in beards, some of it twenty feet down, and you got it with a pole with a hook lashed on the end and you got the good long stuff by climbing.
Then it had to be put in a pit and covered and left, and it sat there rotting for the better part of a year until the grey outside of it was gone and what was left was the black wire inside, and that was worth money.
A man came up the bayou once or twice a year in a lugger and bought moss and hides and whatever else people had to sell.
Every third man on that place picked a little moss. Jonah had a pit.
Nelson worked out roughly where it was by the middle of April, from the direction he came back from and how long he was gone, and never went to look at it, because a man’s moss pit is a man’s moss pit.
—
He asked him on the last Sunday in April.
He had thought about how to do it for a week, which was more thinking than the sentence took, and in the end he did it badly and directly, standing in the street with a knife in his hand that he was supposed to be sharpening for Basile.
“Sunday,” he said. “Let me come back there with you.”
Jonah was doing something to his shoe. He looked up.
“No,” he said.
Then he went back to the shoe.
Nelson stood there with Basile’s knife. He had a second thing ready — that he would carry, that he would not touch the pit, that he had a pole he had made himself — and none of it had anywhere to go, because there was no door in what Jonah had said for any of it to go through.
“All right,” Nelson said.
“Mm,” Jonah said, and got the shoe on, and stood up, and went off up the street to where Zénon’s people were cooking something.
—
That was Sunday. Nelson spent the week waiting for the rest of it.
He could not have said what the rest of it would be.
But there is a shape to that kind of thing and he knew the shape: a man refuses you and then something else goes with it.
The small usefulnesses stop. The man is somewhere else when you come in.
A thing you had before you asked turns out not to be there any more, and nobody ever mentions the asking, and you understand that you have spent something and you are not told the price.
He caught himself on the Wednesday standing at the end of the street doing nothing at all, which is what a man does when he is waiting to find out what a thing cost him.
Nothing happened.
Jonah told him on the Tuesday that the mule in the second stall would take a piece out of him if he came at it from the near side.
On the Thursday he came into the room while Nelson was eating and got something off the shelf and said the ditches were going to be started early that year because the March water had been high, and went out.
On the Saturday he asked Nelson for the loan of his whetstone and Nelson gave it to him and he brought it back that evening.
He was exactly as he had been. Not warmer, to make anything up. Not one degree cooler.
By the end of that week Nelson had stopped waiting, and he did not know what to do with the space where the waiting had been.
—
In July they were put in the same room, and nobody did it for either of them.
A man named Télésphore died in June and two men went out of the far cabin into his place and a woman came in with a child, and Duplessis walked down the street on a Sunday with the book and stood in the doors and wrote, and when he got to Nelson’s door he said, “You. Him and you and Fielding,” and pointed with the pencil at the other end of the cabin, and went on to the next door.
So Jonah came back into the room he had been in for two years, and Nelson was in it, and there was a third man in it who snored, and that was the arrangement.
There was nothing to be said about it. It had been decided by a white man with a pencil on the basis of how many bodies fit in a room.
Neither of them had asked for it and neither of them could have refused it, and if Bergeron had sold two hands that week to a place in Terrebonne, either one of them could have been gone by Friday with no more notice than the pencil had given.
But inside that room, at night, with the door shut, there was no one over anybody.
Nelson had been in rooms his whole life with a hierarchy in them you could have drawn on paper — who spoke, who was spoken to, who got the wall side, who got told.
In this one there were three men and a floor.
Fielding snored and got told about it. Jonah got told when he came in wet.
Nelson got told, by Jonah, on the second night, that he ground his teeth, and Nelson said he did not, and Jonah said, “You do,” and that was the end of the argument and nothing came after it.
—
The knife business happened in September and took about six seconds.
Jonah had a bundle of cane knives to get out of the shed and wanted the strings off them and had nothing on him, and Nelson was sitting on the step with the bone-handled one open in his hand, oiling the pivot.
“Let me take that,” Jonah said.
“No,” Nelson said.
He heard himself do it. It came out flat and fast and without anything wrapped around it, and there was a half second in which he understood that he was going to have to say something else, and he did not say anything else.
“All right,” Jonah said.
He went down the street and got something off Basile and did the strings with that.
He did not ask why. He did not come back to it that evening or the next day.
He did not do the thing of being slightly careful afterward, which Nelson would have been able to feel through a wall.
He came back up the street twenty minutes later with the knives on his shoulder and stood in front of the step and said the strings had been wet and had swelled and had taken twice as long as they should have, and complained about it at some length, and went in.
Nelson sat on that step with the knife in his hand for a while after he had gone in.
—
The moss came up in October, on an evening, out of nothing.
They were sitting outside the door because the room was too hot to be in, and Fielding had gone off somewhere, and the mill had not lit yet but the wood was stacked for it and you could see the pile from where they sat.
“That moss got to sit nine month,” Jonah said.
Nelson looked over at him.
“Nine month, and you got to keep the water off the top of it and let it stay in the bottom of it. Man puts his in a heap on the ground, it rots all through and he ain’t got nothing but dirt.
Man puts it up dry, it don’t cure and it stays grey and that lugger man won’t give you but half.
” He was looking out at the woodpile, not at Nelson.
“And you can’t hurry it. Everybody wants to hurry it. Nine month.”
“How much does he give for it.”
“Depends what he thinks he can get in town and what he thinks you know.” Jonah put his head back against the boards. “Mostly he thinks you don’t know.”
That was the whole of it. He did not offer to take him back there and Nelson did not ask again, and they sat out in front of that door until it was late enough to go in.
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