And Elias knew what she was thinking before she said it. $200, she said. That's what he offered for me. “You sell me to him, you clear half the note in one stroke, and you find the rest somehow.” It's the only way you keep the land. Elias lifted his head.
We've had this talk, he said. This ain't the same talk, Delphia said. Last time it was pride. This time it's arithmetic.
You lose that bottomland, you lose everything. The place, the graves, your daddy's name on the deed, all of it. For what? For me?
A woman you paid $3 for and known one winter. That's not a bargain either, Elias. That's just a foolishness dressed up as decency. But her voice shook on the last word, and Elias understood that she was not truly arguing to be sold.
She was doing the thing she always did, laying out the cruel practical arithmetic, and watching his face to see whether this time, with everything on the line, he would finally take it. She was testing the ice one last time, with her whole weight. “No,” Elias said, and then he said the rest of it, the thing he had not let himself say through the whole long winter. “I'm not selling you because you're not mine to sell.”
That paper in the strong box says you are. I know what it says. But I've know the truth of it for months, and I'll say it plain now. You're not my property, and you're not my field hand.
You're the reason this house has laughing in it again. You're the reason I get up before light, glad of the day. He turned the ledger over in his hands, not looking at it. When Sarah died, my wife, I stopped noticing things.
The sun coming up, the smell of the fields after rain. All of it went gray, and I let it because it was easier to let it. And then a wagon come up that lane with you on it, and slow, without me hardly knowing, things started having color again. The stumps you pulled, the well-running sweet.
You bent over that slate, spelling out your own name like it was the finest thing you ever made. And it was. He stopped, his face red. A man unused to speaking his heart.
I paid $3 for you, and you have paid me back a hundredfold. And none of it was ever the work. It was you. I'd sooner lose every acre and go sharecrop another man's dirt than hand you to petty.
“And if that’s foolishness, then I’m a fool, and I’ll be a fool clear to the grave. Now, let’s hear no more about selling. We’ll find another way.”
Delphia did not answer for a long moment. Then she said very quietly, in a voice stripped of all its roughness, “Nobody ever said a thing like that to me in my whole life. Nobody.” She went inside before he could see her face. Elias heard the loft boards creak above him long into the night and did not know whether she was weeping or only lying awake, learning the strange new weight of having been wanted.
But there was no other way, and they both knew it. The sixty days began to run like water through open fingers.
Elias rode the whole district looking for a loan and found every door shut. No man would lend against a failing farm, and no man wished to cross Pettigrew, who had a long memory and a longer reach. He tried to sell timber off the back 40, and found that Pettigrew, anticipating him, had already spread word that the title was clouded, and no buyer would touch it. Every road out was blocked quietly, methodically by a man who had all the time and money in the world, and wanted one small piece of creek bottom badly enough to squeeze a neighbor into the ground to get it.
And all the while Delphia worked, worked harder than ever, as if she could hold the farm together with the strength of her two arms alone, clearing new ground, planting a garden that might feed them through the ruin she saw coming, digging as though she could dig their way out. It was Kato who thought of the mother. Juny, he said one evening. She was sold west ten years back.
But west from here in those days meant one of maybe three markets. And a woman that size that strong. Folks, remember folks always remembered Juny. He looked at Delphia.