The Nameless Method

The house smelled of wet ash and kerosene, and under both of those of the wall itself, which went sour in wet weather and stayed sour until the sun came back over the ridge. Hollis lay on his pallet with his boots pushed under the edge of it, where they would be first to hand in the morning. Across the room Dale slept with his mouth open. Polly had the corner by the stove and made a small sound every time she turned over. Through the boards, their mother's voice went on in the front room. The stove drew bad. The wood was green. The flue would have to come down and be cleaned before cold weather, and there was no money in the house for it, and she said so, and then she said it again. Their father's pipe stem tapped the table. Three taps, then quiet, then three more. That was the whole of his answer, and it had been the whole of his answer as long as Hollis had been listening. The c***k in the front-room wall started at the sill and ran up past the window frame and forked into two at the top, the way a creek forks on a map. With the lamp lit, the light came through it in a line two fingers wide at the bottom and a hair at the top. Hollis knew its width to the half inch. He knew that it bent in a north wind. He had never once said he knew either thing, and there was no reason to. He counted what there was, the way he counted things when he couldn't sleep. Eleven hens and a rooster. A hog to be killed in November, and the salt and the jars still to be got for it. One mule, nineteen years old, that had fooled itself and nobody else. Two chairs with backs on them and one without. A stove with a cracked door. A harness on its peg with two splices in the rein, both of them out of fence wire, both of them his. The hens would bring less than a pair of boots from the store in Oxbow. The hog would bring about the boots, if the hog was any good. Boots and a coat together came to more than the hog and the hens both. That was the number that mattered, because his father would hear it and not say it, and not saying it was how Owen Vance said no. Hollis's own things were a knife with the last half inch of the tip snapped off, a pair of boots that had been Dale's before they were his, the left one letting water, and a coat whose sleeves stopped two inches short of his hands. He had one other thing, and it wasn't made of anything you could put on a shelf. It was a list. It was names. Oxbow was eleven miles down the creek road. The county seat was further, past the gap where the coal trucks came through, loaded and black to the axles. Redcliff sat on the ridge above all of it, with lights on after dark and its own water, and men walking around it in boots that cost more than the mule. Hollis had never said out loud that he meant to leave. Not to Dale, not to Zeke Irons down the branch, not to anybody. He had a price for it in his head, and the price moved depending on the year. The intention stayed where it was. He slept, and then he was up before first light with his boots on, because the wood behind the stove was down to what would fit in a washtub. He took the mule up the branch a mile and a half, where a stand of oak had died standing and gone gray, and worked the deadfall until he had all he could drag. He cut to the mule's pace and not his own. He had learned early what a boy got for working fast: the same work twice, in half the time, for the same thanks. By noon he had a load, a sore shoulder, and a piece of cornbread gone. On the way down he stopped at the cut bank, where the red berries hung thick in the sun. He picked his hat full for Polly. It took ten minutes and cost him nothing. Coming around the last bend, he saw the boots on the step, and then the coat over the porch rail, heavier and darker than anything in the house. He knew whose coat that was. Bert was his father's brother, with a roadhouse to keep, and no business up the branch on a weekday. Hollis turned the mule into the lot and hung the rope on the fence, and only then went in. Inside, Bert was in the chair with the back on it. "Lunk," he said. Hollis stood in the doorway. His mother was by the window with the hide in her lap and the needle in it. Polly sat on the floor with the berry can between her feet. His father was at the table with the pipe, and Bert had his hat off and set down, which he did not always do. "You got bigger," Bert said. "Yep." "Where's your brother?" "Tobacco." Bert nodded as if that settled something about the tobacco. He had a broad, red, good-natured face and a coat that had been brushed on a porch somewhere before he walked up the branch in it. "They're taking boys up at Redcliff," he said. His father took the pouch off the table, filled the bowl of the pipe, and pressed the tobacco down with his thumb. He spent more time on the pressing than the pressing required. Nobody hurried him. "Feed them," Bert said. "Teach them letters and figures. Put them to work. Pay them. Dollars, not trade." "Whose notion was it?" "Mine." Owen struck the match on the table edge and got the pipe going. Smoke came out across the lamp. "I spoke for him," Bert said. "I put my name on it." "What did that cost you?" "That part's mine." "You came up the creek with your hat in your hand," Owen said. "So tell it." "It cost me money and it cost me a word, and both of them are spent." Bert turned his palm up, flat, on the table. "He's on the paper. He's on it because I put him there." "What's it going to cost me?" "Travel. Boots. A coat he isn't ashamed to be seen in." "And you." "What I put out comes back. After." Owen drew on the pipe. "After what." "When he's got wages. Then we settle." "We'll settle," Owen said, and smoked. Hollis stayed where he was and watched the room. Bert watched his father's hands the whole time he was talking, the way a man watches a latch. His mother watched Bert's boots. Bert had taken them off at the step, on the outside where the mud was, and come in without them. Hers were under her chair, and hers were the only boots in the house with mud on them, and the mud was today's. Polly watched the berry can and worked the lid with her heel. Hollis kept his own hands at his sides, empty, and his face the way he kept it, and did the arithmetic behind it. "Can you count?" Bert said to him. "Some." "Some's enough." His mother's needle went in and out of the hide. She didn't look up from it. "How long," she said. "I can't tell you years, Ruth. Nobody tells you years." "Who feeds him." "They do. Three meals. A bed with a frame on it." The needle went in and out. She had asked her two questions, and she did not ask a third, and Bert, who had known her a long time, did not offer more. "Ruth," he said. She went on sewing. "He's a hand here," Owen said. "The tobacco's coming out of the ground. The hog's coming. The mule's nineteen, and Hollis is the only one it'll let near." "Then take the money he sends back and buy a younger one," Bert said. "I've got a boy that can count and two hands to do it with." "You've got a boy that'll be splitting wood in this yard when he's fifty, and you'll be dead, and so will I." Bert leaned back; the chair complained. "There's a*****e up there. There's men up there get paid every month of their lives. I've eaten their food going on eleven years. I'm not asking you to hand him to the devil. I'm asking you to let him walk up a hill." "And every soul in the hollow will say I sold him." "They'll say you couldn't hold him. That's a different thing, and it's truer." His father set the pipe down on the table, stood, picked it up again, and knocked the ash out against the stove door, twice on one side and once on the other. Then he went outside. At the door he stopped with his hand on the frame, not turned around. "Do what you're told," he said, and was gone. The door came to on its own weight and stopped an inch short of the latch. Nobody talked for a while. Outside, a bucket handle rang against the hog pen. "He didn't say no," Bert said. Hollis watched the hide in his mother's lap. She was making it out of the winter before. It had a way to go yet, and no one in the room had said what it was for. "The both of you use it or don't," Bert said, pushing up out of the chair. "I'll be up the branch for him in a few days. I can't leave off the roadhouse two nights running. Get boots. Get a coat and a second shirt." "How many days," Hollis said. "Don't take that knife, they'll take it off you at the gate, and bring that coat of yours for the wood, not for the walking." Bert got his hat. "And keep your mouth shut up there until you know who's asking you what. Your father's got that much right." Hollis did not ask the second time. Bert put his hat on and went out, got his boots on at the step, and from the porch said something to the yard that got no answer. Then he was gone down the road with his coat over his arm, an hour before sundown. Hollis took the berries out of his hat and put them in the can by Polly's feet. She had both hands in it before he straightened up. His mother sewed. Outside, the light had gone orange along the ridge, and his wood was on the ground where he'd dropped it, and his father was at the hog pen with the bucket, not looking up. Hollis got the maul off its nail and set a piece of oak on the block. It took four blows, which was one more than it should have. He stacked that piece and set up another, and kept at it while the light went, because the wood had to come in and be split whether he went or stayed, and because there were five pieces left and he wanted them done before his mother came to the door to call him.