The Nameless Method

Chapter 4: Boy and Bag

His father was outside long enough for the fire to burn down to where the pot stopped ticking on the stove.

Hollis heard his boots at the far end of the porch and coming back, and the pipe knocked out against the rail, and then the far end again. Bert let his talk run down while it went on. He sat with his hands flat on the table and did not start it up again.

Then the door, and his father in the room.

He stood at the table and looked at the paper. Lines ruled across it, blanks in the lines, Hollis Vance written into the middle of one of them, Bert's name at the bottom. He looked at it the way he looked at a young mule in somebody else's lot.

"Three things," he said.

"Go on," Bert said.

"He eats what they eat. There's meat on the table up there, he gets some of it."

"He will."

"The money comes here." His father's eyes came up off the paper. "To her. It doesn't stay up there where they can spend it on him. It comes here, and she does what she wants with it."

"Every month, into her hand," Bert said. "My name's on it. I'll bring it down the road myself."

"And if anything happens to him, we hear it. Not at the end of a year. Somebody rides down."

"You'll hear it from me before you hear it from anybody," Bert said.

His mother had her back to them, both hands on the pot. "Every day?" she said.

"Every day," Bert said. "Two hot, and a third one in his hand if they've got him working."

"How long," his father said.

"Owen," Bert said.

"How long."

Bert turned his cup around on the table, once. "There's no term to it. The Choosing's next month — that's the only date there is. After that it goes by the rank, and there's no number I can give you."

His father didn't answer that.

"The money," he said. "You said it goes by the rank. What's the bottom of it."

Bert sat back and hooked his thumb under the watch chain and let it drop.

"Last night I told you I wouldn't name a number I couldn't stand behind," he said. "Here's one I can. A new one on the inside draws a hundred and twenty a month. He eats off their table, he sleeps in their beds, and his boots and his coats and a doctor come out of the Order's pocket. Nobody sends you a bill."

"A hundred and twenty," his father said. He said it back slowly, the way he said a hog price back to a man at the gate.

Hollis got the number. His eldest brother up at the smithy had thirty a month, and his board, and a bed in the loft, and his brother was the pride of the house, and four thirties made a hundred and twenty, and Hollis did it on his fingers behind the doorframe where nobody could watch him at it.

Inside was the other word. He didn't know what it was inside of. It could be a house. It could be a part of a house, with a door on it that you had to get through.

Bert got up enough to reach his own pocket and sat back down with bills in his hand. He counted them onto the table out loud, one at a time, each one laid flat and then moved along with two fingers. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty. Then he dug into his pants pocket and came up with a twist of paper, knotted at the top and heavy in the middle, and set that on top of the bills.

"That's for the eating," he said. "Put meat on this table more than you have been. Boots I'll see to out of my own."

Nobody reached for it. His mother stayed with her back to the table, a hand on the pot. His father looked at the money.

"Forty dollars," Bert said. "And change."

His father picked it up with two fingers, bills and twist together, and put it in the cup on the shelf behind the stove, and put the cup back, and did not count it.

Hollis counted it from the door. The bills he had — ten, twenty, thirty, forty. The twist sat on top of them with the paper knotted shut, and there was no telling how many coins were in it, so he left it alone.

He kept his numbers where he kept the others — his brother's thirty, the trays of eggs his mother carried down to the store, the forty dollars. He put the hundred and twenty in with them, and the word that came with it. Then he took his hand out from under his shirt.

"Then that's the three," Bert said.

His father put two fingers on the paper and pushed it across the table. He never put a word to it. That was the whole of his answer, and Bert folded the paper along the fold it already had and put it away inside his coat.

Bert stood and the chair went back and he pulled his vest down with both hands.

"A month," he said. "A month from today, and I come back for him."

He put his hat on. Going past the door he stopped and put his hand flat on the top of Hollis's head and left it there a moment, and then he was out, and his boots went along the porch, and then the road, where the wagon was standing.

The next morning, before there was any light in the valley, the wagon went down the road with Bert in it and crates in the back. It came back up five weeks and a day later, and in between, twice a week, the pot on the stove had grease on it.

The morning it came back for him, the wagon was up the road before the sun cleared the ridge.

His mother had the bag finished and the strap on it. She put it in the wagon bed herself and squared it against a crate, and then reached in and squared it again.

"You said a month," she said.

"The road was two days of mud coming and two going," Bert said.

She let that stand.

His father came out last and stood at the front wheel with both hands on the rail.

"Don't talk back to anybody up there," he said. "That's the main one." He was looking at the rail and not at Hollis. "Somebody puts his hands on you, you walk off, and you don't put yours on him. And don't take a thing that wasn't handed to you."

"Eat what they set down in front of you," his mother said. Her hand was on the buckle of the bag strap, and she said the rest of it down at the buckle. "Sleep when it's dark. Keep your feet dry, and when the cold comes, put on what they give you."

"Yes," Hollis said.

Bert came along the side of the wagon with one hand on the rail, looking in at his load. He counted the crates without touching them, and the sack, and the boy.

"All right," he said. "Boy and bag."

Polly was by the front wheel on his mother's side with both arms up. He had picked a last bag of berries the day before, up on the slope, and he brought it out from under his shirt and put the whole bag into her two hands and folded the top over so it wouldn't spill. One got loose and rolled in the straw, and he found it and put it back in the bag.

Polly didn't say anything. She held the bag against her chest with both hands.

Bert climbed up and the seat took his weight and he said something to the horse, and the wagon leaned and came around, and the road began going away under them.

Hollis got up on his knees between the crate and the side of the wagon and looked back.

He saw his father's boots first, and the pipe in his mouth, unlit. Then the front of his mother's dress, and her two hands on the apron. Behind her the wire of the chicken yard, and the house, and the gap at the door where it never caught right.

The wagon went over a rut and he had to put a hand down. When he looked again, the road had already turned.

He bit the inside of his lip and held his eyes open hard, the way he did when soap got in them, and it worked.

He took his numbers out and counted them up against his knee. Thirty was his brother. Thirty, sixty, ninety, a hundred and twenty, a hundred and fifty, a hundred and eighty, two hundred and ten. Past that the numbers quit being money and turned into a sound, so he took one thirty back off and set the whole of it down at a hundred and eighty, and put that at the bottom of the list, and closed it.

On the seat Bert was talking, to him or to the horse or to the road.

"— and there's a spring up the valley from the town, and a man sells the water out of it, and it tastes like a nail that's been in a bucket, and half the men in there drink it anyway, because he charges for it, which is the only reason they can think of —"

Behind the wagon the road bent around the shoulder of the hill, and the bend took the roofs, and then the thread of smoke coming up out of one chimney, and after that there was nothing behind them but the hill and the trees on it.

"Wait till you see the town," Bert said. "That's all I'll say. Wait till you see it."