Forty-Six. Nine Dollars and Sixty Cents
Chapter Forty-Six
Nine Dollars and Sixty Cents
The mill stopped on the eighth of January and they settled the year on the fifteenth.
It was done in the yard at a table. The man who kept Bergeron’s store had the book and a tin box, and Bergeron stood behind him, and there was a soldier there from Thibodaux because the order said there was to be, and the hands came up one at a time and had a figure read to them and were given money.
Nelson had never in his life been handed money that was his.
The figure read out to him was nine dollars and sixty cents.
He stood there with it in his hand — a paper five, and four in silver and small paper, and sixty cents — and he did the sum standing at that table with everybody behind him waiting.
Three dollars a month for the year is thirty-six dollars.
“There’s a difference of twenty-six dollars and forty cents,” he said.
The storekeeper turned the book round on the table so it faced him, which Nelson had not asked him to do, and put his finger on the column, and said, “Read it, then.”
—
He read it.
The thing he could not get past was that the man had let him.
It was all in there and it was all written plain.
A blanket in November at four dollars, because a blanket in Lafourche Parish in November of 1863 cost four dollars.
Shoes in December, three dollars and a half.
Nine yards of cloth. Tobacco nine times, at various.
A hat. And down at the bottom, in the same hand as everything else, lost time, Aug, 8 dys, and a figure of eighty cents.
Eighty cents. Eight days at ten cents a day, which is what three dollars a month comes to, and the eight days were the fever, and two of them were the Tuesday and the Wednesday that had not been anywhere.
He went down the column twice. The arithmetic was correct. Every entry was a thing he had actually had.
There was one line he could not read, near the top, four words and a figure of a dollar and a quarter, and he stood there working at it and could not get the first word, and the storekeeper waited with his hand flat on the table, and behind Nelson a man said something to somebody about how long this was taking.
“What’s that one,” Nelson said.
“Salt,” the storekeeper said.
It might have been. Nelson could not make the word be salt and he could not make it be anything else, and there was no third party in the world to ask, and the soldier from Thibodaux was sitting on the steps with his hat off looking at nothing.
“All right,” Nelson said.
He took his nine dollars and sixty cents and stepped out of the way, because there were fifty-odd people behind him and every one of them had been standing in that yard for an hour.
—
Nobody in that street thought he had done wrong. That was not the trouble.
The trouble came in February, when the new order came down and the contracts had to be made for the year, and every hand on that place had to have the thing read out to him and then put his mark to it.
Bergeron did not read it out.
He sent for Nelson.
So Nelson stood in that yard on a Thursday in February and read a contract out loud to sixty people, the same as he had read the newspaper out loud in January of the year before, and this time he was standing beside the table and not in the middle of the street.
The rates had gone up. Eight dollars a month for a first-class man, six for the second class, five for the third, three for the fourth.
Half to be paid by the month and half to be kept back until the end of the year out of the crop.
Rations to be found, and clothing, and quarters, and fuel, and a doctor when a doctor was wanted, and schooling for the children — all of that over and above the wage and not against it.
No whipping. Nobody to pass off the place except under the rules the provost marshal made.
He read all of it and he read the part about the half being kept back twice, because he wanted it heard, and then he stood there while fifty-three people came up to the table and made their marks, and he wrote nine of the names beside the marks himself, because the storekeeper’s hand got tired.
That evening a man out of the far cabin — not Basile, and not anybody Nelson had a quarrel with — said to him at the fire, without any particular heat:
“You read out ours and you read out theirs.”
Nelson did not have anything to say to that and did not try to find anything.
—
What the year was, once the paper had been read:
The wages were eight dollars a month and half of them existed.
He had four dollars a month in his hand and four dollars a month in a book, and the four in the book was to come at the end of the year out of the crop, and he had now watched one settlement out of one book and knew exactly what a figure in a book was worth against a column of charges.
The ration came whole in February and short in April and shorter in May, and by the middle of June the meal came out on a Saturday and the pork did not, and a man ate what was in his own garden ground and what he could get out of a ditch, and Jonah’s catfish arrangement was feeding four people by the end of that month.
There was no clothing found at all. Not that winter and not that spring.
Nelson went through the whole of it in the coat he had been given in the New Orleans pen in January of 1860, which had been a cheap coat when it was new and had done four winters, and there was not one man in that street with a whole coat on him.
There was a doctor twice. He came out from Thibodaux in February and again at the end of March, and when a child in the second cabin went bad in the middle of May there was nothing on that place to give her but what Félicité had in a cup, and she died on the twenty-second.
And there was a school. It was a real school and it existed.
It was on a place beyond Thibodaux, better than nine miles off, and it had one teacher in it, and it was for the children of every plantation in that district, and an inspector came to it in the spring and wrote about it, and no child from Bergeron’s place ever went to it, because it was nine miles off and there was nobody to take them.
—
So the children came to Nelson.
It started with Félicité, who did not ask him and did not consult him. She put a boy of nine in front of him on a Sunday in March and said, “He can sit with you,” and went away, and the boy sat there.
Nelson had three hundred words and no paper and no book, and he taught out of the dirt with a stick, and he was not good at it and he knew he was not.
He could not have told anybody in that street where the letters had come from and nobody asked him.
By June there were six children and two grown men, on the step, on Sunday afternoons, and it was not a school and nobody inspected it and it never got written down anywhere.
He did the alphabet and then he did names.
He did every one of their names first, because a name is a shape, and a man who can find his own name in a column can find out something about himself.
Ovide’s sister’s boy learned to write Ovide before he learned to write anything else, and he wrote it forty times on the packed dirt in front of that step, and Nelson let him.
—
In April Jonah wanted a strap cut and had nothing on him, and Nelson handed him the bone-handled knife and went on with what he was doing.
—
The thing that ran under the whole of that year was the other thing, and it did not come from Bergeron and it did not come out of a book.
In February word came down that seven men had been taken off two places above Donaldsonville in the night, and carried west, and that nobody had got them back, and that the army had not gone after them.
In May it was three men off a place at Raceland, at night, the same way, and what came back down the bayou about them was that a provost officer had been told and had written it in a book.
That was the shape of it. A man on Bergeron’s place in 1864 had a contract with his mark on it that said he was to work there for the year. What the contract did not say, anywhere, in any clause, was that anybody would come looking for him.
Basile said the thing that went round the fires that spring, and he said it more than once, and he had earned the right to say it by walking back from Donaldsonville on a bad foot in 1862.
“They come after a soldier,” he said. “They got to. He’s theirs.”
Nobody argued with him because nobody knew whether it was true, and every man at that fire could see the difference between a piece of paper that binds you to a place and a piece of paper that makes somebody responsible for you.
—
They were taking men at Thibodaux in the last week of May, and Nelson was in Thibodaux in the last week of May, because Bergeron sent him with the cart.
That was how it went. He did not seek it and he could not have sought it; a man could not walk off that place to go and hear about the army.
He was sent to town on a Tuesday for two barrels and a keg of nails with a line of writing in his pocket saying who he was and who had sent him, and the recruiting was being done in front of a brick building on a street he had to pass along twice.
There were two white officers and a sergeant, and the sergeant was a Black man from a Mississippi regiment with two years’ service on him, and there were perhaps thirty men standing about in the street listening.
Nelson stood the cart up and listened for the better part of an hour.
He heard about the bounty, and about the term, and about the pay, which was ten dollars a month with three of it kept back for clothing, and one of the officers said that Congress was on the point of making it the same as a white man’s and the sergeant did not say anything at all while he said it.
He heard about what happened to a man’s people, which was less than the officers made it sound and which the sergeant did not embroider either.
Then he waited until the officers had gone in and asked the sergeant one question, and it was the same question he had asked a soldier on the levee road in November of 1862 and had got nothing for.
“Where do they send you.”
“Up the river,” the sergeant said. “Port Hudson. Natchez. Vicksburg.”
He said it the way a man says the names of towns he has been in.
Nelson thanked him and got his barrels and his keg of nails and took the cart back down the bayou road nine miles, which he was allowed to do, on a line of writing that said whose cart it was.
Every one of those places was on a river going the wrong way, and he knew it the moment he heard them, and it did not make one particle of difference, because it was the first answer to that question that anybody had given him in two years.
He said them over to himself that night in the dark until he had them.
Port Hudson. Natchez. Vicksburg.
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