Fifty-Five. Care Of
Chapter Fifty-Five
Care Of
He asked Pollard on a Sunday for thirteen Sundays.
He did not go up to him about it. He waited until the room had let out and Pollard was doing whatever he did with the chairs, and then he stood where Pollard could see him, and Pollard would say nothing this week or shake his head, and that was the whole of the exchange, and after the fifth or sixth time Nelson stopped making him say it and read it off the way he stood.
He worked. Four bits a day at the landing, and papers for men in the evenings, and in August a fortnight on a levee gang at a dollar because the water had got under it in July.
He was careful about the money after the two dollars and fifty cents.
He did not buy anything he could get for nothing and he did not go where money went, and by the end of August he had gone from thirty-one dollars down to twenty-six, which for a man living in a town on four bits a day was a piece of work in itself.
—
Two answers came and neither of them was one.
The first came at the end of July, out of Richmond, in a very good hand, from a man who wrote that he was in a position to make inquiries in the counties above the city and had had considerable success in reuniting families, and that the expense of such inquiries was necessarily borne by the party applying, and that ten dollars remitted to him would set the matter forward at once.
Nelson read it twice and took it to Pollard and Pollard read it and put it down on the table and said, “There’s four of those going into every parish in this state.”
He did not send the ten dollars. He did not answer it at all. That was easy and it was over in a day and he did not think about it again.
The second one was not easy.
It came on the twenty-second of August and it was from Amherst County, Virginia, and it was written for a woman by somebody at a church there, and the woman’s name was Esther, and she had had a son sold away in 1859, and she had been a seamstress.
Nelson had that letter in his hands for the length of about four breaths before he saw where it came apart.
Her son had been sold out of Amherst and not out of Louisa. Her son had been fourteen. She had had four other children and she named all four. She had never been in Richmond in her life.
He sat down that night and wrote back to her.
It took him an hour and a half and it came out to seven lines, and he had written a good many letters for other men and had never once had to write that one.
He said the county was wrong and the year was right and the age was wrong.
He said his mother had two children and not five. He said he was sorry.
He said, at the end of it, that she should keep on, and that there was a Bureau office at Lynchburg and that they kept a register in it, and that a notice cost two dollars and fifty cents in the Richmond papers and would run three months.
Then he took it down to the post and paid the postage on it out of the twenty-six dollars.
—
He asked Pollard in September what had come of the other one, the free one, the copy that had gone to Philadelphia, because it had been three months and there had been nothing whatever out of it.
“There won’t be much,” Pollard said. “It goes where the churches are. It goes down this river and it goes up the seaboard and it goes into every place a preacher takes it, and Louisa County, Virginia, is a piece of farming country in the middle of a state with no paper of our own in it.”
“There’s none in Virginia.”
“There was one,” Pollard said. “Norfolk. Good one. A mob went into the office in the spring and broke the press up and that was the end of it. If that press was standing I’d have sent yours there first and it would have been the best two cents I ever spent.”
He picked up his hat.
“The one that was going to reach her,” he said, “was the one you paid for.”
—
The notice ran out on the fourth of September.
Nelson knew the day. He had known it since Pollard brought him the printed notice in June, and he had not thought about it much in June and had thought about it a good deal in August, and on the fourth of September he carried barrels at the Thibodaux landing from six in the morning until dark, and at some point in the middle of the afternoon the thing he had paid five days’ work for stopped existing.
He did not tell anybody that was what that day was.
He gave it two weeks. Then he gave it to the end of the month.
He had done exactly this in the winter, with a letter, and he knew the shape of it, and he was better at it the second time in the way a man is better at a thing he has had practice in and has learned nothing from.
—
It came on the eighth of October.
Pollard brought it down to the landing at the middle of the day and found him and gave it to him and did not say anything, the same as he had done with the newspaper in June, and then Pollard stood about four feet off and stayed there, which he had not done in June.
Nelson looked at the outside of it.
The direction was in a good round hand and it said Nelson Reuben, care of the Rev. J. W. Pollard, Thibodaux, Louisiana, and it was somebody’s writing he had never seen, and he stood there with it and could not make his hands do the next part for a moment.
Then he did it, and he went off and sat on the piling with his back to the whole town, and read it himself.
He opened it himself and read it himself, and nobody in the world knew what was in it until he did.
—
She was living. That was the first line and he got no further for a while.
Then Junie, sixteen since June, at a school, sewing a whole dress.
Then old Ashmore dead in December of the year before, of a thing in his chest, which meant that by the time that letter came back to him in January with the corners gone soft, the man he had directed it to was in the ground, and he sat with that for a minute and then went on, because it did not matter now.
Then the roll: Anna living, seventy, in the kitchen. Little Ephraim to Richmond in May of ’65, nothing since. Sarah gone in the war, said to be at Charlottesville. Patience at a place near Trevilians. Overton taken for the works in ’63 and not come back.
Then the money, and that he was to say how much.
And then: if he did not want to come he was to say that too and she would not ask him twice.
He read that line four times and could not tell whether it had been put in to give him a door or to shut one, and then understood that it was his mother, and that it was both, and that she had made him the offer she would have wanted made to her.
—
Then Reuben.
Reuben died in the second winter of the war, in the January. He is buried at the top of the branch field. There is a white stone on him, oval, with the point up. I chose it.
Nelson put the letter down on his knee.
The January of ’63. He had been in a cane field in the January of ’63.
She had not said one word about the name.
She had put down where he was and what was on him and that she had chosen the stone, and had gone straight on to the corn, and there was not one sentence in the whole of that letter that asked Nelson why.
He sat on that piling a good while.
Pollard was still standing at the end of the boards with his hands behind him, looking at the water, not going anywhere.
—
He wrote the answer that night and it was short, because everything long he tried was worse.
He wrote that he had her letter of the seventeenth of September.
He wrote that he was well and at work. He wrote what he had in money and what he reckoned the passage at, and that he did not want her eight dollars a month and would say so plainly and would take it if it came to that rather than not come.
And then the part she had asked for, and he gave it to her in the fewest words he had, because she had asked it in the fewest words she had.
I want to come. I am coming. It is the money and the road and nothing else.
—
In the morning he went up the stairs over the store and stood in the line for an hour and ten minutes and put the letter down on the desk in front of the same agent.
The man picked it up and read the direction and turned it over and looked at the postmark.
“Louisa Court House, Virginia,” Nelson said. “That’s my mother. That’s where she is and that’s what she’s called and that’s the paper that says so.”
The agent read the first few lines of it and stopped, and put it down, and looked at it on the desk for a second.
“You said get you an address,” Nelson said.
“I did say that,” the agent said.
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