Forty-Four. Who’s William
Chapter Forty-Four
Who’s William
Twenty-eight people going off a place in nine days leaves rooms.
Fielding had gone with the column in October. So the room had two men in it.
By the spring they were sleeping in the same place in that room and neither of them had said anything about it beforehand or since.
—
The first thing Jonah said anything about was the food, and it took him about a year to say it.
Whatever there was, Nelson broke it and gave Jonah the bigger piece.
He did it with cornbread and he did it with a fish and he did it in August of that year with a melon out of the garden ground, and he did it fast, without looking at it, the way a man deals a card, and then went on talking about something else.
“You always do that,” Jonah said.
Nelson looked down at his own half.
“Do what,” he said.
—
The fever took him in the second week of August.
It came the way it came to everybody in that parish in August — a day of feeling wrong, then the shakes so hard his teeth went, then the heat, then the sweat and the whole thing letting go of him about dark — and then it came back on the third day, and then again on the fifth, and by that time he could not have stood up in a row if a man had paid him.
Félicité sent something in a cup and he drank it. Numa came to the door once, looked at him, and said something to Jonah about not putting him in the sugar house wood gang, and went away.
Nelson had eight days of it and he did not have all eight of them.
He knew that, coming out. He had the first two and he had the last three and in the middle of it there was a Tuesday and a Wednesday that were not anywhere.
He had lain on that floor and he had been somewhere else, and he came back on the Thursday with his shirt wet and his hands shaking and Jonah sitting on the floor by him with his back against the boards, awake, in the middle of the night, doing nothing.
Something in that room was different when he came out of it. He could not find what.
—
Jonah said it in the middle of September, in the daylight, outside, while he was doing something to a hoe.
“Who’s William.”
Nelson stood there.
He got his breath before he did anything else and he was aware of getting his breath, and then he said, “Where’d you get that.”
“Off you.” Jonah did not look up from the hoe. “Two nights running.”
“I don’t remember it.”
“I know you don’t.” He turned the hoe over. “You wasn’t talking about him. You was talking to him.”
—
He did not ask Nelson one question about it that day, or the next, or for a week and a half, and Nelson could not tell whether that was a kindness or whether Jonah was doing something else.
What he did instead was put it together, and Nelson had to stand there and watch him do it, and there was nothing to be done about it because everything Jonah had he had got honestly, over three and a half years, without going after it.
He had a name.
He had a bone-handled knife that a man kept oiled and would not lend for four seconds to cut a string.
He had a man who had been on that place for three years without telling anybody in it that he had letters, and who had stood up in the street in January and read a newspaper out loud to sixty people, and who had learned his letters somewhere, from somebody, and who had never once said where.
He had a back he had been looking at for three and a half years.
And he had the bigger piece of everything, every day, from a man who did not know he was doing it.
He said two of those out loud over the next fortnight and he did not say the other three, and Nelson understood that he did not need to.
—
The first one was not a question.
“You still got his knife,” Jonah said. They were on the step. It was the end of September and the knives were coming out of the shed for the cutting.
Nelson said, “Yes.”
“Three and a half year.”
“Yes.”
Jonah got up and went in.
He was in there a long time before Nelson came in, and he did not say anything else about it that night or the next day, and on the third day he was ordinary again, and Nelson found he could not tell whether the thing had gone or had been put somewhere.
—
The second one was worse and it came out of nothing on a Sunday.
Jonah had opened his pit that month. Nine months to the day, near enough, and it had cured the way he said it cured — the grey gone off it and the black wire left, and he had it in the shed behind the cabin in two sacks and a heap, and it was the best of it he had ever got out of that swamp.
There was no lugger man.
There had not been one up that bayou since the autumn before.
The trade was broken and the boats that came were the army’s or they were nobody’s, and the store would not give him anything for it because the store had nothing to give, and the moss sat in that shed all through September being worth exactly what a man in Thibodaux would pay for it, which was nothing.
He did not say much about that either. He turned the heap once so it would not take damp, which Nelson watched him do.
And then in the afternoon, sitting outside with his back on the boards, he said:
“He made you.”
Nelson said, “No.”
It came out of him faster than anything had come out of him in years and it was too fast and they both heard that it was too fast.
Jonah turned his head and looked at him.
“No,” Nelson said again, slower, and then he stopped, because the second thing he had been about to say was going to be worse than the first.
“You was how old.”
“Which time.”
Jonah did not answer that, and Nelson wished immediately that he had said something else.
—
What Jonah did with it, over about ten days, was look at him.
Not coldly. That was the whole difficulty.
If it had been coldness Nelson would have known the shape of it and could have waited it out the way he had waited out the moss refusal in ’61.
What Jonah did was be careful with him, in small ways, in a way he had never been careful with him in three and a half years — he did not push an argument to the end, he moved a thing out of Nelson’s way before Nelson got to it, and twice he stopped himself in the middle of a sentence and said something else.
Nelson could not stand it and could not say so without saying what he would be objecting to.
On about the tenth day Jonah handed him the bigger half of something.
Nelson looked at it in his hand.
“Don’t do that,” he said.
“You do it.”
“I know I do it.”
They sat there.
“All right,” Jonah said, and took it back off him, and broke it different, and that was the end of that part.
—
He asked it in October, two nights before the mill lit, in the dark, in the room, out of a silence that had been going on so long that Nelson had thought he was asleep.
“Was he your man, or were you his.”
Nelson lay there.
He had the two of them in front of him and they were both there and he could get hold of neither.
He tried the first answer in his head and it was a lie.
He tried the second one and it was a lie in the other direction and it was a worse lie, because it took the whole of it and made it into one night.
“He was born the May before I was born,” he said.
Jonah was quiet for a while.
“That ain’t what I asked you.”
“I know it.”
The room did what a room with two men in it does at that hour. Out at the top of the street they were stacking the last of the cypress for the mill and you could hear it going onto the pile a long way off, a piece at a time, somebody working late.
“All right,” Jonah said.
In the morning they went out to the cane, and the mill lit on the twenty-second, and Nelson went onto the second watch at the batterie, on the fire.
---