Forty. Edges
Chapter Forty
Edges
The first thing that came was not meaning. It was edges.
For most of that first year the street had been one noise with words in it somewhere, the way a creek has stones in it, and then at some point in the spring Nelson found he could hear where the words stopped.
He did not know what any of them were. He knew there were six of them and not one, and where the second one ended, and that the last one had been said before by somebody else about something else.
After the edges came the fact that there was more than one.
He got that off Duplessis, of all men.
Duplessis came out at eleven and rode the headland, and twice that spring Bergeron came out with him, and the two of them sat their horses at the end of the row and talked, and what they talked in was one thing.
Then Duplessis turned in the saddle and said something down to Numa, and it was a different thing.
And Numa turned and called it out across the gang and it was a third.
Nelson could not have told anybody what the difference was. He could hear that a man had changed his mouth twice inside of a minute, and he watched Duplessis do it all spring the way you watch a man do a trick with his hands.
So it was not one language that he could not understand. It was three, and they were not stacked in any order he could have drawn, and the one Numa used in the field was the one that mattered to him at four in the morning.
—
He understood before he could say anything, which he had not expected and which was worse.
By June he could follow an order. By August he could follow an order and the argument about the order. What he could not do was open his mouth, because the sound of it in his own mouth came out wrong and every time it came out wrong somebody’s face did something.
Nelson learned more off Ovide than off anybody, and Ovide never gave him a lesson in his life.
Ovide did Nelson’s mouth for the street the way he had done Nelson’s stripping motion the first autumn — got the vowel wrong in the same wrong direction Nelson had got it, three times, with his chin out, and got his laugh.
And then he said it right, to finish the joke.
He said it right every time, at the end, because the joke did not work unless the right one came after the wrong one.
Nelson took the right one and did not thank him, and by the autumn he had a hundred words that way.
The other one was a child. There was a girl of about seven named Rosalie who belonged to the woman two doors up, and Rosalie corrected him with no more feeling in it than a person moving a chair.
He said a thing about water and she said the word back at him the way it went, and when he said it wrong again she said it again, and she did that for months, and it never appeared to occur to her that she was doing anything.
He learned faster off a seven-year-old girl than off any man on that place, because she corrected him every time and went straight on.
—
The year had things in it he did not know about.
There was a Friday in the spring when Fielding was given fish and Nelson was given fish and nobody in that street would touch meat, and it was not a holiday and they worked the whole day, and Nelson ate his fish and did not ask.
There was a burial in July, a man of sixty out of the far cabin, and it was nothing Nelson had ever been at.
There was no preaching. There were prayers he did not know said fast by everybody together in a rhythm that never varied by a syllable, and a woman at the front with beads going through her fingers, and water sprinkled off a wet branch, and two crossed sticks set at the head, and the whole thing was over in a quarter of an hour and then people stood about.
He had been at a dozen burials in Louisa County and every one of them had had a man in it talking.
There was a day in September that people put in front of dates.
A thing was to be done before Saint Michel or after Saint Michel, and Nelson worked out that this was the twenty-ninth and that the whole back end of the year was hung on those pegs, and he began saying it himself in October because it was the only way to be understood about when a thing was to happen.
A priest came in the middle of October and was there one morning. He did four children and a woman of thirty in the yard by the landing house, and Bergeron stood there for it, and he was gone before the middle of the day, and that was the only time Nelson saw a priest on that place that year.
And on the first of November everybody went to the ground at the back of the second field with hoes and brushes and lime.
It was the day for it. They cleaned the graves — took the grass off them, mounded them up again where the winter had taken them down, whitewashed the wooden crosses and whitewashed the bricks where there were bricks, and set things on them.
It took the whole afternoon and it was the nearest thing to a holiday between the harvest and Christmas and nobody had to be told to go.
Nelson went, because everybody went, and he stood in that ground with a brush in his hand and looked at it and he did not know one name in it.
He whitewashed the cross on the grave of a man he had never met, because Rosalie’s mother put the brush in his hand and pointed at it, and did a good job of it.
—
The first time he spoke in front of anybody it was an accident.
They were at the burial in July, and the prayers were going, and they came to a place where they all stopped at once — and Nelson said, “Amen.”
He said it the way he had said it at Anna’s house for nine years. It went out into that quarter of a minute of silence by itself and sat there.
Two people looked round. A man in front of him did not, and moved his shoulder.
Nobody said anything to him about it and the thing went on.
—
In January he did it on purpose, which took him five months to get up to.
There were eight or nine of them in Zénon’s room on a Sunday evening because the mill was still running and a woman’s child had been sick a week, and they had said what they said, and there was a space, and Nelson opened his mouth and prayed out loud in English in the way he had learned it — no set words, a thing built up on the spot and going where it went, taking the child’s name up and putting it down and taking it up again, going a good while, getting louder in the middle and quiet at the end.
He was aware of the length of it about two-thirds of the way through and did not stop.
When he was done there was a silence of a kind he could not read at all. One man looked at the floor with his hand over his mouth. Zénon said, “Mm,” which on that place could mean anything.
Then an old woman named Félicité, who was somewhere past seventy and who had a chair when other people had the floor, said to him on the way out, “You talk plenty to God.”
She said it the way you would tell a man he was tall.
—
Nobody called it wrong and nobody called it right. It went into the street as a fact about him, along with the knives and the barn fires: the Virginia man talks plenty to God.
In February, Sylvain came and found him.
Sylvain had been a year with one arm by then. He had been put to the stock and to whatever else a man can do with one hand, and he did it, and he was not a man who came to people for things.
“Do that again,” he said. “That you did at Zénon’s.”
Nelson said, “Now?”
“Sunday,” Sylvain said. “For me.”
Nelson said he would, and did, and he did not ask why and Sylvain did not say, and afterward — that same evening, on the step — Sylvain talked for a while about a mule.
—
The last of it was Numa, and it came in with the language, and it came in all at once.
In the autumn Nelson understood a whole exchange for the first time and the exchange was this: Duplessis, up on the horse at eleven o’clock, said the second gang was to go on the canal.
And Numa said no — not no in that word, but a sentence, with a reason in it about water standing at the lower end and the men being wanted three days at the ditch below the sugar house first. And Duplessis sat there and looked down the field and said, in the end, all right.
Nelson was on the second gang. He had been on the ditch below the sugar house for three days that week and had not known why, and now he did.
He got the rest of it over the winter, in pieces, once he could hear it.
Numa decided the order of work. Numa decided who went where, and which men were put together, and which man was told to keep off a job because he was no good at it and which man was put on it to learn it.
Numa knew what was wrong with every acre on that place and he knew it in his feet.
He was in the ground from before four and he was the last man out of it, and everything that happened between those two hours happened because he said so.
By then Nelson understood why Duplessis came at eleven. Numa had been there since four.
—
He got the other half of it in March and it cost him nothing to learn, which was the worst part.
Duplessis came out and ordered the second gang onto the canal, and Numa said the thing about the water standing, the same as before, in the same words.
And Duplessis said no.
He did not argue it. He said it twice and turned his horse and went, and Numa stood in the headland for a second and then straightened up and sent the gang to the canal, and they were three days on it, and the lower end took water in the last week of the month exactly the way Numa had said it would, and about six acres of plant cane came up thin.
Nothing happened to anybody. Duplessis wrote in the book. Numa did not mention it again, to Nelson or in Nelson’s hearing, and the next morning he was in the ground before four the same as always, and gave the orders, and forty people moved.
Nelson worked that out and it came out in a shape he did not like. Numa ran that place. Numa also belonged to it, and could be sold off it in a morning, and had just been made to drown six acres by a man who was on a horse for two hours a day.
Both those things were true at the same time and there was no way to hold them that made either one smaller.
—
The knives came back out in October and the mill lit and the watches ran, and he knew what all of it was for now, and then it was over and they were hoeing again.
The plant cane wanted going over three times and the ratoons wanted it twice, and it was April, and it was hot enough to want a hat by nine in the morning.
Numa called something down the row.
Nelson called something back.
Ovide laughed.
They went on hoeing.
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