Fifty-Eight. The Court House Road
Chapter Fifty-Eight
The Court House Road
He slept on the floor of the loom room the first night and woke before it was light, which he had done every morning for seven years and did not expect to stop doing.
The fire was down to nothing. He built it back up and sat by it, and it was quiet in a way that Louisiana had never been quiet, no water moving anywhere and no frogs and no mill, and after a while Junie came through to get something and looked at him sitting there and said, “You’re up,” and he said he was.
He started to count something. He got as far as the number of days since he had left Thibodaux and then let it go, and it did not come back, and he sat there with his hands out to the fire.
—
He worked because there was work.
He put the smokehouse door back on its bottom hinge, which had been off it for a while by the look of the wood.
He got up on the loom-room roof with a kit of tools nobody had taken away and did the two courses that had been letting water in over the north end.
He split wood for three days because Anna had been getting hers off a boy of eleven and it showed.
Anna took him over completely. She was seventy-one and she had known him since he was six and she fed him twice a day for a fortnight and told him at length about everybody who had died.
He sharpened everything on the place. It took him three afternoons and by the end of it people were bringing him things off other places, and he did those too, and would not take anything for it, and got a chicken anyway.
Nobody at Fair Prospect asked him what he was going to do.
—
He saw William once in that fortnight.
It was on the fourth or fifth day, in the middle of the morning. Nelson was in the barn lot with a scythe blade across his knees and William came out of the house and went down toward the stable, and there was about eighty feet of open yard between them, and William stopped.
He stood there for a moment.
Then he went on down to the stable and Nelson went on with the blade, and neither of them said anything and neither of them moved toward the other, and that was the whole of it.
After that Nelson saw him at a distance perhaps four more times in that fortnight and it was the same each time.
—
Esther took him up to the branch field on the third day.
It was a quarter of a mile above the house on the high side, in a corner nobody ploughed, and there were fourteen or fifteen of them in there and most of them had wood at the head that had gone grey and two had nothing at all.
She went straight to it without looking round for it.
It was a white stone, oval, about the size of a man’s two hands, set in the ground with the point up.
Nelson stood in front of it for a while. Then he went down on his heels and put his hand flat on the top of it, which was cold, and left it there.
There was no name on it. There was nothing on it.
It was a stone that had been picked out of a creek because it was white and because it was the right shape, and it had been carried up a hill by a woman and set in the ground with the point up, and anybody in that county who wanted to know who was under it had to ask somebody who knew.
“You picked it,” he said.
“I did,” Esther said.
He stayed down there a minute or so more. Then he got up and they went back down the hill and she showed him where the wheat had been that year.
—
The papers for 1867 came round in the last week of January and Esther did not put her mark on hers.
They talked about it for two evenings and most of the talking was arithmetic, which she was as good at as he was and quicker.
She had eight dollars a month and the loom room and her rations, and what the eight dollars was against what a room and food are actually worth was a thing she had worked out in 1865 and had gone on working out every month since.
He had forty dollars of another man’s money and about nine of his own and a discharge that would get him hired anywhere there was hiring.
On the thirty-first of January he paid a quarter’s rent on a house on the Court House road, three miles down from Fair Prospect and two miles short of the town, out of the forty dollars.
It was two rooms and a lean-to and a half-acre behind it and the chimney drew badly. The man who owned it was a Beasley. The quarter was in hand, and cash money was cash money in Louisa County in 1867.
They went on the second of February in a borrowed cart, in two loads.
Esther took the loom-room shelf with her, which was a board, because she had been putting her needle case on that particular board for twenty-one years.
—
The house was better than it looked once the chimney had been seen to.
Junie went to the school at the Court House four days a week instead of three because it was two miles now instead of five.
Esther put a sign in nothing and told two people, and had work inside a fortnight, because there were women in that county who had been wearing the same three dresses since 1863 and could now pay a little, and because Esther Ashmore’s name in that county was a thing that had been in circulation for twenty years.
Nelson got taken on at the depot at the Court House, loading, at a dollar a day when there was a day.
In the evenings he read to them. He read the newspaper if there was one and he read out of a book that Miss Gaines lent Junie, and he read badly and got better, and Junie corrected him twice a week with a good deal of satisfaction.
—
He had not done a sum in three weeks.
He noticed it on a Tuesday, standing at the depot with his hands on a crate, waiting on a wagon: that he had not, at any point since they came down off that place, worked anything out. He had not weighed one thing against another thing. He had not put a column together in his head and gone down it.
He was twenty-six years old and he had been doing that since he was thirteen and it had got him through every year of his life, and it had stopped, and he had not noticed it stopping.
There was nothing left in it to work out.
—
On the ninth of February he ate at four in the afternoon and got up and put his coat on.
Esther was at the table with the lamp lit and a sleeve in her lap. Junie was on the floor by the fire with the book.
“I’m going up the road,” Nelson said.
“It’s coming on dark.”
“There’s an hour.”
Esther put the sleeve down and looked at what he had on.
“Take the other coat,” she said. “That one’s not warm and it’s got holes in the pocket and you’ll lose something out of it.”
So he took the other coat, and moved what was in the pockets over — the discharge, folded in three, and Delphy’s thimble — and put it on and turned round for her because she made him.
She looked at the shoulders and did not say anything about them.
“Bar the door if I’m late,” he said.
“I won’t,” Esther said.
—
It was cold and clear and the road was hard.
He went out of the yard and up the lane between the two fields and turned north where the lane came out, and there was frost still in the ruts on the shaded side and the mud was solid and rang a little under his boots.
He walked at the pace he walked, which was a working man’s pace and had been since he was a boy.
There was nobody on that road. There was a dog at the second place that came out and thought about it and went back in.
There was a man burning brush a long way off across a field, and the smoke went up straight and then flattened out along the top of the trees, and Nelson smelled it for about a quarter of a mile.
The light went orange along the tops of the pines on his left and the ground fog began coming up out of the low places on his right, the way it does in that country in February when a cold clear day gives out.
He crossed the branch on the plank bridge.
Half a mile past the bridge a sycamore stood on the bank where the ground rose, the biggest thing on that road, and past it the road divided: the right-hand fork going on west up the ridge, and the left-hand one dropping down toward the second lane past the branch.
He came to the fork without slowing.