Forty-Three. The Requisition
Chapter Forty-Three
The Requisition
Reuben died in January. Tapp gave the morning orders himself after that.
That was how Esther had it, and it was the whole of how she had it, because the difference a death makes on a place that size is a difference in the work.
Reuben had stood in the barn lot at first light every morning Esther had been on that place and said who went where, and he had done it in a way that got the day done and kept four or five people out of trouble every week without any of it showing.
Tapp stood in the same spot and said the same kind of thing, and the bad shoulder went where he sent it, and the man who went stupid when he was shouted at got shouted at.
Reuben had accounted for those things. Tapp did not.
So the work got done and it got done worse.
Esther kept the account of it the way she kept every account, which was in jobs and not in people.
The ploughing was three days behind by the middle of March and it had never been behind in March.
The plant beds got burned late. Anna was sixty-seven and was doing what she had done at fifty and was doing it with two fewer pairs of hands in that kitchen, and the bread came out heavy twice in a week, and nobody said anything about it in the house because there was nothing to say.
And the loom went again, all winter, which it had not done since before Esther came.
That was Esther’s part of it. She had come to that place able to cut a claret silk from a woman standing in a doorway, and in the winter of 1863 she wove and cut osnaburg and homespun for twenty-two people because there was no cloth to be had in Louisa County for money, and she turned the missus’s grey poplin for the second time and took the good of the skirt for the bodice and put the worn part where a woman’s arm hangs down over it.
She was as good at that as she was at the other thing. Nobody said so. It is not the kind of work anybody says anything about.
—
Corbin Ashmore was failing and she could only see the outside of it.
He did not ride after February. He came out onto the steps and stood there in the mornings and went back in.
In June he asked her twice in one week whether the missus’s dress had gone to Fairlawn, and it had gone in May, and the second time he asked her he asked it in the same words as the first time, in the same place in the passage, with the same movement of his hand.
His hand had got thin. That she could see. The rest of it she could not, and she did not ask Anna and Anna did not tell her, because a house that size has one piece of information in it at a time and that one belonged to whoever was carrying the basin.
—
William had been home since the last week of September.
He had come up the lane on a hired horse and not the bay, and he had a paper, and there was a man from somewhere else standing in his place in the company.
That was the fact of it and Esther had it inside two days, and what she had after that was what the county said.
Aleck Dabney said one thing about it in the yard and said it in a voice arranged to be overheard by nobody, and the Wallers said nothing at all in Esther’s hearing, which from the Wallers was a good deal.
There was a figure that went about. She heard it twice at different times and it was the same figure both times and it was more money than she had ever heard said out loud about a person, and she had stood in a yard in 1859 and heard men put a figure on her son.
She did not know what any of it meant inside him and she had stopped trying to know that about him in November of 1859.
What she knew was that he was on the place, in the house, at the table, and that from October he was the one who said what happened at Fair Prospect, because his father could not.
—
The requisition came in the second week of April.
It came out from the Court House on a printed form with a number written into it, and it wanted hands for the works, sixty days, and it named what the government would pay for the hire of them, and the county had apportioned it, and Fair Prospect’s part of it was two men.
William sat at the table in the passage with it in front of him and Tapp stood at the end of the table with his hat in his hand, and they worked it out.
Esther was in the passage door with the missus’s sleeves in her lap and she heard all of it.
It took about a quarter of an hour and it was entirely practical.
Little Ephraim could not go because he was the only man on the place who could keep the mowing machine running.
Old Isaac was too old and would be sent back and then they would owe another man.
Tapp said Overton was no good in the wheat and had never been.
William said Jim Pond, and Tapp said Jim Pond had a wife at the Beasleys’, and William said he knew that, and there was a pause of about two seconds, and then he wrote Jim Pond.
He wrote both names on the form in ink and blotted it and gave it to Tapp to carry back.
They went on the eighteenth in a wagon with a blanket each.
—
Jim Pond came back at the end of August, twenty pounds down, with something wrong in his chest that he still had at Christmas.
Overton did not come back and no word about him came back either.
What came back, in October, was a paper about the money — the hire for the sixty days, at the rate the form had named, and a second sheet with it about a claim for the value of a man lost in the service of the state, and William took both of those into his father’s room and was in there some time.
Esther understood what that second sheet was inside about ten seconds of seeing William’s face come out of that room, and she was hemming in the passage at the time, and she went on hemming.
That was April to October. Two men went out of that lane on a wagon in the spring and one of them came back with a chest and the other one became a claim.
—
The cavalry came through the county in the first week of May.
It was two days of it. They were down at the Court House and they burned the bridges and something at the depot, and a party of them came within a mile and a half of Fair Prospect on the second afternoon and did not come up the lane, and the whole place stood in the yard and listened to horses in the road they could not see.
Four people went that night. Sarah went, who was twenty-one and who Esther had trained for thirteen years and who was the only other pair of hands on that place that could cut.
Two of Patience’s boys went. A man named Ned who had come from the Beasleys’ in a hire two years before went, and he went south, which nobody understood.
Esther stood in her own door in the dark and watched three of them go up past the corncrib, and Sarah stopped and looked back, once, and Esther put her hand up.
Then she went in and lay down beside her daughter.
—
Junie was thirteen years old in June.
That was the whole of the reason and there was not any other part of it, and Esther had it worked out the way she worked everything out.
A woman going up a road at night in Louisa County in May of 1863 with a girl of twelve, going toward soldiers, not knowing where the soldiers were going or what was at the other end of it or whether there was anything at the other end of it at all.
She had heard, by then, what she had heard: that they were taken in at Fredericksburg and at Yorktown and put in camps, and that there was sickness in the camps, and that a woman with a child in one of those camps had nothing whatever except the child.
And she had been in a camp of a kind. She had been in Chesley’s yard in Richmond in 1846 with a boy of six and she knew exactly what a place looks like when there are more people in it than anybody has made arrangements for.
She was not going to take a girl of twelve up a road at night to find out.
So she stayed, and she did the other thing instead, which was the only thing she had ever had.
She taught her. Hard, and fast, and worse-tempered than she had ever taught Sarah, and she started that summer and did not let up: how to lay a pattern out on cloth so as to waste nothing, how to set a sleeve, how to make a buttonhole that would still be a buttonhole in four years, how to take a bodice apart with your eyes from across a room.
Junie was quick and pushed back and got pushed.
Esther knew what she was doing and could have said it in one sentence if there had been anybody to say it to. A girl of thirteen on that place with no trade was a field hand or she was whatever else somebody decided. A girl of thirteen who could cut was a thing the house needed.
It had worked once. It had worked for thirteen years and then it had come apart in a yard in November with a man saying you go, and she knew that better than anybody alive, and she did it again anyway, because there was not one other thing in the world to do with a daughter.
—
There was one moment in the whole of that year and nothing came of it.
It was in September, in the passage, in the afternoon. William came in from the yard and stopped, and he was looking at the loom room door, which was shut.
He stood there long enough that Esther, who was on the bench with her needle up, stopped.
Then he said, “Is that loom going to want new heddles.”
“It’s wanting them now,” Esther said.
“Tell Ephraim what you want and he’ll get it out of the shop.”
“Yes sir.”
He went on up the passage.
—
In November he brought her needles.
He had been to Richmond about the claim, three days, and he came back and came into the sewing room where she was at the table and put a paper of needles down on it and a card of thread beside it, and there was no way in Louisa County that year to get either one of those things for money.
He said, “They had them.”
Then he said something about the road being bad past Beaver Dam, and went out.
Esther sat and looked at them for a while.
She could not refuse them; there was no shape in which a woman on that place refuses a thing put down on her table.
She could not pay for them. She could not ask what they were for, and if she had asked she would have got an answer about the road past Beaver Dam.
And there was nothing in them she could turn into anything — not a word about Nelson, not a pass, not a place to send a letter, not a name in Richmond, none of the things she had spent thirteen years learning how to build out of what men handed her.
They were needles. She had needed needles since March.
She put them in the wooden case with the brass thimble and wound the thread round it twice and set it up on the shelf, and in the morning she opened it and took one out and used it, because the missus’s grey poplin was not going to turn itself a third time.
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