Fifty-Seven. A Man Come About Work
Chapter Fifty-Seven
A Man Come About Work
His answer had come at the end of October and it had said I am coming and had not said when.
Esther had thought about that a good deal and had come round to thinking it was honest rather than careless, because a man who does not know cannot say, and because the last line of it was about money and a road, and a road is not a date.
So she had it every day from the first week of November, and she had it in the shape it comes in, which is not hope and is not waiting. It is that every cart in the lane is the cart until it isn’t, and there are perhaps nine carts a week.
By January she had stopped standing up.
—
The fifteenth was cold and bright and she had the fire going in the loom room and the door open on it because there was no other way to have light and heat at the same time in that room in January.
She was making a coat for the missus out of a coat of Corbin Ashmore’s, which she had been told to do in November and had put off twice, and which she had got to at last because there was nothing else in the house that wanted doing that badly.
She heard the wagon at about half past nine and went on with the seam.
—
It stopped in the yard. That was the first thing that was different, because a wagon in the lane goes past to the barn or up to the front, and this one stopped in the middle of the yard between the two.
She heard a man’s voice paying another man, and a horse moving, and then the wagon going out again.
She put the needle in and got up and came to the door with the coat still over her arm.
—
There was a man standing in that yard with a bundle at his feet.
He was tall and he was heavy through the chest and shoulders in the way of a man who has done lifting work for a long time and eaten enough while he did it, and he had a short beard and a soldier’s overcoat with the cape on it, and another coat under that, and boots that had been walked in.
He was looking at the house. Not at the door she was in — at the whole front of the house, at the roof and the windows and the chimney at the end, the way a man looks at a building he is checking against something.
Esther stood in that doorway and looked at a stranger.
The son she had in her head was nineteen.
She had kept him that way for seven years, the way you keep a thing you use every day — thin through the shoulders, with the neck a boy has, with his sleeves too short by the middle of every winter, standing with his weight on one foot.
She had made his clothes. She had had his measurements in her head since he was nine years old and had never once had to write them down.
None of that was in the yard.
She looked at the beard and it was nobody’s. She looked at the coat and it was the Army’s. She looked at the size of him and it was wrong by three inches through the chest and by a good deal more than that everywhere else.
And she thought, with a completeness that she was not proud of: that is not him, that is a man come about work.
—
Then he turned his head to look up the side of the house, and his shoulders came round with it, and the right one sat lower than the left.
It sat lower by about the width of a finger, and it had sat lower since he was nine years old and carrying on it, and she had put an extra half-inch into the right shoulder of every shirt she had ever cut for him and had never mentioned it to him or to anybody.
Esther’s hands went cold on the missus’s coat.
She did not say anything. She could not have.
—
Then he saw her.
He was mid-turn and he came all the way round and stopped, and whatever went across his face went across it once and did not come back, and he stood there in the middle of that yard about fifteen feet from her and did not move at all for a moment.
“Mama,” he said.
It was his voice underneath and it was not his voice on top of it, and there was something in the way he made the word that was not from that county.
Esther came down the two steps with the missus’s coat still over her arm because she had forgotten she had it, and she got to him and put her hand flat on the front of that overcoat, on his chest, and left it there, which was as far as she got.
He put his arms round her and she felt how long they were and how little of him she could get her arms round, and the two of them stood in that yard.
Neither of them said one word for as long as that went on.
It was Anna who broke it, from her step, at the top of her voice, calling for somebody — and after that it was nine people in a yard and there was no more of it to be had.
—
Junie came up from the springhouse with her hands wet.
She was sixteen and she had been nine when he went and had never once in seven years said a thing about him that Esther could tell was a memory rather than a thing she had been told.
She came into the yard and stopped about eight feet off, and stayed there, and looked at him.
Nelson said, “Junie,” and put his hand out, and she looked at the hand.
Then she came the eight feet and let him take hold of her shoulder, and said, “You’re big,” and stood there while he laughed at that with his hand still on her shoulder, and got away from him inside of about two seconds and went and stood by her mother.
After that she kept near her mother.
Esther watched that and did not do anything about it. Junie had been nine. What Junie had of him was seven years of what other people had said about him, and a thing you have been told is not a thing you know, and it was going to take however long it took.
Esther put her hand on the back of Junie’s neck once, in the middle of the afternoon, without saying anything, and Junie let her.
—
They fed him in Anna’s house because Anna would not have it any other way, and about a dozen people came in and out of that kitchen in three hours, and he answered everything anybody asked him and Esther watched him do it.
He was good at it. That was the thing she had not expected and did not entirely like.
He told them about the cane and about the sugar house and about the fort at Natchez, and he told a story about a man on a boat that got a laugh out of the whole room, and he kept the answers the right length and gave everybody a turn, and it was a thing a man learns somewhere and she did not know where he had learned it.
He did not say one word about a whipping and nobody asked him.
She got him to herself about four o’clock, in the loom room, with the fire.
—
He looked at the room for a while before he sat down in it. Then he sat down on the box by the fire, which was where he had always sat, and it was too small for him now and he put his elbows on his knees.
She gave him the whole of it in order, because that is how she had it: the war on that place, and Reuben in the January, and Tapp gone, and Overton, and the wheat, and the corn, and the paper she had signed in front of the Bureau man, and the eight dollars, and what a made dress fetched in that county now, which was nothing.
He gave her his in order too, and it was shorter, and she noticed where it was shorter.
Then he said, “Who put that paper in your hand.”
—
Esther had been waiting four months for that question and had not settled it, and she found that it settled itself the moment it was asked, because a woman does not lie to her son on the first day.
“William,” she said.
Nelson did not say anything.
“He takes the Richmond paper. He read it standing at the desk and he went and got the shears and cut it out and put it in his pocket and rode to the crossroads and come back, and he come down the passage at half past three and read it to me twice and put it in my hand.”
“And said what.”
“Nothing,” Esther said. “He never asked me one thing. Not that day nor since.”
She watched his face while she said it.
And she got nothing.
She sat there in her own room in front of her own fire and looked at a face she had been reading since it was a day old, and there was not one thing on it that she could name.
Whatever he did with it, he did somewhere she could not see.
“All right,” he said.
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