Fifty. The Ninth of May
Chapter Fifty
The Ninth of May
It was done in the yard on the ninth of May and William read it.
His father could not. Corbin Ashmore had come out onto the steps and got as far as the top of them and stood there holding the post, and William came out behind him with the paper in his hand and read it, and Esther stood in the yard with everybody else and heard her own condition altered by a young man reading out loud badly in a voice that kept going up at the ends of the lines.
There were nineteen people in that yard.
He read what the paper said and then he said the other thing, which was not on the paper, and which she had known was coming since April: that anybody who wanted to go could go, and that anybody who wanted to stay could stay and there would be an arrangement made about wages, and that he did not know yet what the arrangement would be.
Then he went back in and took his father’s arm at the top of the steps.
Nobody said anything for a while. Anna sat down on the edge of her step, which at sixty-nine she did whenever she got the chance, and Patience began to cry and stopped almost at once and looked annoyed about it, and Little Ephraim laughed once, at nothing, the way you do.
Esther stood there and thought about the corn.
She had been thinking about the corn since the middle of April.
There was not enough of it in the county, there had not been enough of it in the county since the previous autumn, and there was going to be a hungry summer in Louisa whatever any paper said, and the question that had to be answered before any other question was where nineteen people were going to eat between May and August.
—
William had come back eleven days before, walking, in the middle of the day.
He came up the lane with another man who went on toward Gordonsville, and he had a blanket and no hat and a beard he had not had, and he was thinner than Esther had ever seen him and the whole of his colour was wrong.
He had a paper in his coat with his parole on it.
He went into that house and did not come out for two days.
He had gone in the winter of 1864, in January, and that time nobody had come.
That was the difference and Esther had been standing in the same passage for both of them.
In ’61 the yard had been full for a fortnight — Wallers and Dabneys and a heavy man in a grey coat, and roads argued over twice, and a man leaving gauntlets on the hall table, and six men agreeing which way he should go.
In ’64 a printed notice came out from the Court House and William got on a hired horse on a Thursday and rode down the lane by himself, and nobody at all came to the house that week.
What happened to him between that Thursday and the twenty-eighth of April she did not know. Nobody in that house had told her anything about it, and Anna, who carried the basin and knew everything, said only that he did not sleep.
—
Six went in the first fortnight.
Little Ephraim went, and he went to Richmond, and he told everybody so for three days beforehand and shook hands all round on the morning.
Patience went to a place near Trevilians where she had a sister.
Two of the younger men went off together toward Gordonsville and did not say where they were going after that.
Thirteen stayed. Esther’s reason was not gratitude and it was not fear.
A person who leaves a place in May of 1865 in the county of Louisa is a person walking up a road toward nothing with what they can carry, and Esther had already worked out that road in 1863 and had not gone up it then either.
—
The white men met at the Court House on the last Tuesday in May and it took them one afternoon.
She had it in the passage inside a week, in the ordinary way, because Mr. Waller came over and stood in the front with his hat in his hand and told William what had been agreed, and the sewing room was off the passage and it always had been.
They had passed resolutions.
No man was to be hired for more than five dollars a month and his food.
No woman for more than three. Nothing to be paid until the end of the year except what a man had to have to live.
And — the part Waller said twice, because it was the part that mattered — nobody in that county was to hire a hand off another man’s place, at any price, for any reason, and any man who broke that was to be dealt with by the rest of them.
Esther sat in the sewing room with her hands still.
She had spent nearly nineteen years in that county working out what one thing could be traded for another thing. She understood immediately and without any assistance what a wage of five dollars becomes when every man who might pay it has agreed with every other man not to pay six.
—
The contracts were made at the Court House in the first week of July, in front of a man from the government, at a table under the trees, because there were more people than would go inside.
She stood in that line for two hours and forty minutes with Junie beside her.
It was a printed form with blanks in it. The agent read it, or read some of it, at a rate that suited a man with three hundred people to get through, and there was nobody standing at Esther’s shoulder to read it a second time slower, and she marked it because the alternative was not marking it.
What was in it, as near as she could get: that she would work for Corbin Ashmore of that county for the remainder of the year 1865, at the rate that had been agreed on, with quarters and food found; that she would not leave the place without leave; that she would be orderly and industrious; and that the whole of the wage but a small part of it would be paid at the end of December.
Then the man asked her name.
“Esther.”
“Esther what.”
She had thought about that for six weeks and she had an answer ready, because she had known the question was coming from the day she understood there was going to be a paper.
“Ashmore,” she said.
She took it because every white man in that county already called her that when he had to call her anything, and because the Wallers and the Dabneys and the Beasleys and the men at the Court House and the man behind that table would all look for her under it and under nothing else, and because a woman who intends to be found does not choose a name nobody has ever heard.
The agent wrote Esther Ashmore and turned the form round and she made her mark on it and moved out of the way.
—
In August she went twice to the Court House for rations and stood in a line for those too.
The line had white people in it. That was the thing about that summer that she did not get used to and did not expect to: two of the Beasleys’ connexions, and a woman she had made a dress for in 1857 who did not look at her, and an old man off a place beyond the crossroads with a boy holding his elbow.
They drew meal and they drew a little meat and the government wrote it down, and everybody in that line got the same, and everybody in that line went home with it and said nothing about having been there.
—
Junie was fifteen in June and could cut a bodice out of a paper pattern and set a sleeve and finish it, and was faster with a needle than Esther had been at nineteen.
And there was no money in Louisa County.
That was the whole of the situation and Esther had it plain by the middle of July.
She had a trade, and a daughter with the same trade, and her own two hands and legal possession of them, and there was not a woman within nine miles who could pay for a made dress, because the ones who had money before did not have it now and the ones who had it now were not in Louisa County.
She took in mending for meal and for a ham and once for a load of wood. She turned the missus’s grey poplin a third time in September.
—
By the summer William was in the house and he was not doing anything.
He did not take up the place. There was no overseer — Tapp had gone in ’64 and had not come back and nobody had got another — and the place wanted running, and it was not run.
The wheat that went in went in late and short.
Corbin Ashmore sat in a chair in the front room where he could see the lane and asked, most days, whether anybody had been.
Esther watched a man of twenty-six sit in a house all summer.
She had a good deal else to do and she did not spend much of her time on it.
—
He asked her about Nelson five times.
She counted them. There was nothing else in it she could count.
The first was in the second week of May, in the passage, two days after he read the paper in the yard. He said, “Have you heard anything.” Esther said she had not. He said, “No,” and went on down the passage.
The second was at the end of May and it was the same question in the same words and got the same answer.
The third was in the middle of June and he put something on the end of it — he said there were men coming back through and that a person might hear something — and Esther said yes sir, and he did not say what a person might do about it.
The fourth was in the first week of August.
The fifth was on a Sunday in the middle of September, and he asked it from the doorway of the sewing room with his hand on the frame, and Esther was cutting and did not put the shears down, and she said, “No sir,” and he stood there a moment and went away.
Then he did not ask again.
By October she had stopped expecting the sixth.
—
In five askings, he never once said that he would write to anybody.
That is the thing she came back to, in that autumn, standing at a table cutting other people’s cloth. Not that he had done nothing. Doing nothing was the general condition of that house and she had no particular use for a man’s grief about it.
But he had asked her five times whether she had heard anything, and every one of those five times she had been the one who had nothing, and not once in the whole of it had he offered her the one thing he had and she did not — a hand that could write, and a name that would get a letter opened, and the price of the paper.
She had watched six men stand in that yard in 1861 and work out three separate ways of finding him if he were lost.
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