The Nameless Method

Chapter 3: Two Corn Dodgers

Sourwood

The roof over him was mud and broom sedge gone black on the underside, and it smelled of mildew and wood smoke and the dirt that had sifted down into it since before he was born. It smelled that way every night of his life. In the daytime he did not notice it. At night it came down off the poles and lay on his face.

Beside him Dale had the middle of the bed and most of the quilt. He was already a long way under, breathing long, then a stop, then long again, and every so often a snore he took his time over, like a man drawing water out of a well he had doubts about.

Past the foot of the bed the wall was mud over split lath. There were four cracks on the near side, and Hollis could have drawn them for anybody who asked, and once he had. His mother's voice came through them, going on the far side of the wall the way water goes under a bank. Now and then a word came up out of it clear and went back down, and the words were not for him. Under it, his father's pipe: the long pull, the wait, the stem tapped twice on the table edge, the long pull again.

Down the bank, below the house, the branch came down over its rocks. That was the only sound that reached him from outside. There was no other house on that stretch of it, and the sounds inside did not change much from one night to the next, and he had all of them.

Hollis lay on his back with his eyes open. There was nothing up there to look at and he looked at it anyway. At first light he was going up the cut-over for deadwood with the other boys. They would not wait on him, and a boy who came home with half a load answered for it at the table, and he had heard what that sounded like.

So he shut his eyes and lay still and let his breathing go long on purpose. He had taught himself to do it in the dark when he was smaller than he was now, and it worked on some nights and not on others, and this was one of the others.

There were seven of them in that house, counting the eldest, who was up in Oxbow learning a trade, and he was the fourth. He was ten years old.

His name was Hollis Vance. It had cost his father two corn dodgers, carried up the creek in a sack to the old man who had once in his life carried books for a man in town that had money. The old man took the dodgers and stood in his yard and thought about it and gave him Hollis. He had been about a year old and had no say in it, and it was still the only thing his father had ever bought outright that had no use in it.

Most of the children in the hollow got their names the same way, out of the same yard, for about the same price. The old man had run thin on names some years back and had taken to handing out the ones he had left over, so a family could walk up the creek and come home with something another family had already used twice.

What the hollow called him was Lunk.

There had been a Lunk in Sourwood before him, and there was still one. The first Lunk was six years older and thick through the shoulders and slow to answer and slower to move, and the name had fit him so well that nobody ever troubled to work up anything better for him. Then a second boy came along with a face nobody could hold on to, and the hollow did what it did with names. It used the one it had.

He had sorted the hollow's names out one night a year ago, flat on his back in the dark, because there was nothing else to do with the dark and because he liked a thing that came out even. He put them in order by what they cost a man to carry.

Buster came first. Buster was a town name. A man called Buster could walk into the store at Oxbow and lay down a dollar and nobody would study him twice. Skeet was next, for the same reason and a syllable cheaper.

Bud came after that, because Bud was short for something, and nobody in the hollow had ever heard the long end of it, and a name with another name behind it had money in it somewhere.

Then Red, which was true and cost nothing. Then Shorty, which was true and had never once bothered Shorty.

Then a gap the length of the fence line.

Then Tater. Then Bird, which was a woman's word hung on a boy anyway. Then Possum, which was a thing that ate your corn and got run off with a stick, and Possum had the name because his father had it before him, and there was nothing to be done about that either.

Then him.

Lunk sat at the bottom of the list on account of what the word meant — a big, slow, thick-headed man — and on account of it coming second-hand, which made it worse than the names that had been made up fresh for somebody. He went down that list five or six nights running and it came out the same every time.

And the word was not true of him. He was quicker than any boy on this branch, and quicker than most of the men on it, and nobody had ever had the chance to find it out.

There was one other thing, and it was the thing he had never said out loud to anybody.

He was going to leave Sourwood. He had thought about it more times than he had thought about anything else in his life.

A man did not say a thing like that in this hollow. The men at the store said a man might go down and see the county seat someday, and they said it with their hands in their pockets and their eyes on the road, and as far as Hollis knew not one of them had ever gone and come back to say what it looked like.

Down the branch and over the low water the road went west to Oxbow, and that was eleven miles, and he knew it, because he knew that number and every other number anybody had ever said in front of him. What he did not know was anything past Oxbow.

The world past Oxbow came up this branch twice a year in his oldest brother's pockets. A comb for his sister June. A paper of pins for their mother. And twice, for him, the paper wrapping off a bar of bought soap, flat and printed all over with small letters, because his brother had seen it in the store and thought he might want it. He had both of them under the flat stone at the corner of the house. He did not take them out often, on account of what paper did in that weather.

The pipe stopped, and his mother's voice ran down after it.

Dale turned over and took the rest of the quilt, and Hollis let him have it and went on looking at the roof, and the last thing he was on before he went under was how many bundles he wanted tied by noon. Six was a day. Four was a waste.

The sun was high when he came out of the cut-over.

He had the deadwood tied in a bundle on his back with the rope over the top of his right shoulder, in the spot where the skin had gone hard and dead years ago and had quit complaining about it. Five bundles with him, and the sixth tied and standing against a stump for tomorrow, which put him one ahead of where he had to be, and he had been carrying that extra bundle around in his head since the middle of the morning.

The flies came down the hill with him. The rock had the heat in it and gave it back through his soles, and he did not stop where the water came out of the ground to drink, because a man carrying wood who stops to drink takes twice as long getting where he is going, and there was nobody on the road to see him do either one.

In his shirt, against his ribs, he had a bag of raspberries. The last of them, off the hot side of the cut-over, where they came red first and where the blackbirds always got the best of them before he did. They were for Polly, who would eat them until her mouth and her hands were red and then turn the bag upside down and say, Is that all, and say it exactly the same way she said it every time.

He came around the last bend above the house and stopped, because there was a wagon in the road.

It stood below the house with the paint still on the bed of the wagon, and the traces hung neat over the rail, and it was turned out toward the road and ready to go again. There was no other rig like it on that side of the county.

Hollis knew whose it was. There was one man in the whole family with a wagon, and that man was Bert. The Vances had been on this branch a hundred years, and Bert was the only one of them that had ever got off it. His oldest brother had his place in Oxbow because Bert had walked into a shop and asked for it. Bert sent things up the branch with whoever was coming — meal, coffee, a shirt that fit nobody, and once, in November, a ham.

He put the bundle down behind the house where the wood kept, pulled the rope off over his head, and rubbed his shoulder two or three times with the flat of his hand. Then he went in.

The front room had the door standing open and the heat off the stove still in it. There were boots by the door that did not belong in that room, good boots, hard-shined. A brown coat was over the back of a chair, and a hat sat on the table with the crown up. His father had the pipe going and the pouch open between them, and his mother was at the stove with her back to all of it, working at the pot.

Bert was round in the face, with a little brush of a mustache he combed, and there was a watch chain across the front of him and a white collar under his chin with the button done.

Bert looked him over, up and down, and took his time about it.

Hollis stood just inside the door and waited, because a boy who walked into a room with his father and his uncle in it did not start it off.

"He don't run at the mouth," Bert said. "That's half of it right there."

Nobody at the table picked that up.

Then Bert looked at him again.

"You ever been off this branch, boy?"

"No."

"You ever ride in anything with wheels on it?"

"No."

Bert laughed, short, and sat back.

"Owen," he said.

His father drew on the pipe.

"I'll say it once and say it straight, and then you can do what you like with it. The house I run belongs to the Sevenfold Order. Not to me. To them. They've had Redcliff and the mountain under it since before your daddy was born, and the land around it, and more men on it than there are people in this hollow, and their own store, and their own school, and their own rules about everything."

He put his hand flat on the table.

"They take boys in. Every five years they run what they call the Choosing, and it comes next month. A boy has to be between seven and twelve, and he has to be put up by a man that's on the roll. I've been on the roll since spring."

His father pressed the tobacco down in the pipe with his thumb and did not say anything.

"A boy goes up there, he's fed and he's housed and he's taught. They've got schoolmasters up there, Owen. Real ones. He works too, and he works hard, and nobody up there will apologize to you for it. And if he makes the inside, he stays, and inside men draw pay. Every month, in their hand."

Bert sat forward again.

"And if he don't make it, and most of them don't, he comes down out of there with a trade in his hands and a name that opens doors in three counties. I can't walk down a street in Oxbow without a man stopping me to ask after the house. That's what that's worth. It's where I came from. Twenty years back I went down this road with one shirt in a sack, and now look at me."

He turned the cup around on the table.

"There is not another road out of this hollow, Owen, and you know it as well as I do."

His mother had not turned around. She said it into the stove.

"How long would he be gone."

Bert did not answer her fast.

"Nobody tells us how many years," he said. "I'd be lying to you, Ruth. There's the Choosing, and then there's what comes after the Choosing, and a boy that makes the inside stays. I've never been through it myself and I won't tell you I have, and any man that tells you he knows what they do up there is selling you something."

"And what does he eat."

"Beans," Bert said. "Cornbread. Meat on the days there's meat, and they have it more days than you do."

His father had not moved. Bert looked at him a while.

"It don't cost you a nickel," he said. "Not the papers, not the getting up there, not the shoes a boy goes through in the first month. And I'll say the other part plain, because you're my brother and I won't sit at your table and make a figure up. There's money on the inside and it goes by the rank, and I'm not going to tell you a number I can't stand behind. That's the truth of it."

He turned the cup around on the table, once, and looked at his brother.

"So. Say it or don't say it. But say something, Owen."

The word came up into Hollis's mouth and sat there. Yes. He had wanted it since he was six years old and had never once said it out loud to a living soul, and he stood by the door with his hands at his sides and the raspberries cold against his ribs, and he kept his mouth shut, because a boy did not put a word into talk like that.

Bert reached in under his coat and brought out a paper, folded twice, and laid it on the table and flattened it with two fingers. It was printed. It had lines ruled across it and blanks in the lines.

"There's a form. He goes up with the form."

Nobody else at that table could read it. Bert knew that as well as anybody, and he read it out loud anyway, running his finger under the words as he went, slow — name of the boy, age, parents, where the boy was born — and then his finger stopped in the middle of a line.

"Hollis Vance," he said.

The name went across the room. At the stove the sound stopped; she had been working at the pot and then she was not. Then she turned her head partway, not enough to see Bert, enough to see the door where Hollis stood, and turned back.

Nobody in this house called him that.

Hollis watched the end of Bert's finger. He could get a figure off a*****e bill by the shape of it; this was a page of words, and it gave him nothing. He understood only that his name had gone into the middle of one of those lines, read out loud in a kitchen, and that the name at the bottom of the page was Bert's.

It had cost his father two corn dodgers.

"That's my name at the bottom," Bert said. "If the boy runs, if he breaks something, if he takes sick, it's me they come for. I'm not selling you anything, Owen. I'm putting my name on the bottom of the page."

His father looked at the paper. He looked at it a while, the way a man looked at a piece of machinery that was not his and never would be.

Then he took one more pull at the pipe and held it and let it out slow. He stood up and the chair legs scraped on the boards, and he turned the pipe over and knocked it out against the heel of his boot, twice, and the burnt tobacco went down on the floor by the door and he did not go back for it.

He went out. The door banged on the frame and did not catch.

Bert looked at the door after him. Then he turned back to the table and started in again, easier now, to the woman at the stove.

"A boy going up there wants a pair of boots on him before the cold. Real boots. I'll see to that part."

His mother lifted the pot off the stove and set it down on the hearth and stood with her back to him.

"You know the number or you don't," she said.

"I don't," Bert said. "And I won't make one up for you."

Hollis stayed by the doorframe and let it run on. Bert talked about the road up, and about the cold, and about what a good thing it was, and how she would see that it was a good thing, given time. His mother put the pot back on the stove and did not say anything else.

Not the money and not the years.

He put his hand up under his shirt, into the bag, and worked the berries over between his fingers one at a time without bringing them out. Nineteen.

Then he did it once more anyway, and got nineteen.