Love and Lament Read online

  ALSO BY JOHN MILLIKEN THOMPSON

  The Reservoir

  Copyright © 2013 John Milliken Thompson

  Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Thompson, John M. (John Milliken), 1959-

  Love and lament : a novel / by John Milliken Thompson.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-59051-588-4 1. Young women—Fiction. 2. North Carolina—History—19th century—Fiction. 3. North Carolina—History—20th century—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3620.H68325L68 2013

  813′.6—dc23

  2012030141

  Publisher’s Note:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v3.1

  In memory of my grandparents

  Mary Myrtle Siler Thompson

  and

  William Reid Thompson

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Family Tree

  Chapter 1: 1893

  Chapter 2: 1893

  Chapter 3: 1893–1895

  Chapter 4: 1895–1897

  Chapter 5: 1897–1899

  Chapter 6: 1900

  Chapter 7: 1900

  Chapter 8: 1900

  Chapter 9: 1900–1901

  Chapter 10: 1901–1902

  Chapter 11: 1902

  Chapter 12: 1903

  Chapter 13: 1903–1905

  Chapter 14: 1905

  Chapter 15: 1905

  Chapter 16: 1905–1906

  Chapter 17: 1906

  Chapter 18: 1906–1907

  Chapter 19: 1907–1916

  Chapter 20: 1916

  Chapter 21: 1916–1917

  Chapter 22: 1917

  Chapter 23: 1917–1918

  Chapter 24: 1918

  Chapter 25: 1918

  Chapter 26: 1918

  Chapter 27: 1918

  Chapter 28: 1918

  Chapter 29: 1918

  Chapter 30: 1918

  Chapter 31: 1919

  Chapter 32: 1919

  Acknowledgments

  Ah my dear angry Lord,

  Since thou dost love, yet strike;

  Cast down, yet help afford;

  Sure I will do the like.

  I will complain, yet praise;

  I will bewail, approve:

  And all my sour-sweet days

  I will lament, and love.

  —“Bittersweet,” GEORGE HERBERT

  CHAPTER 1

  1893

  THE DEVIL WAS coming for her, of that she was sure.

  He was riding a big gray horse, and he was all dressed in black, from his slouch hat to his long swallowtail coat to his black-stock tie and pointy hobnail boots. He had a black handlebar mustache, and though she couldn’t see his eyes under his hat brim she knew he was the Devil because the horse’s eyes were red. She was standing by the dusty road clutching her dolly by the arm, her thumb stuck in her mouth. She had come outside to see the thingum, because her mama had told her she should. And now she knew why she’d been afraid to come out. It was because Mama had also told her that someday the Devil was going to get her.

  He slowed as he came up, and lifted his hat. And just then came the clang of a horseshoe striking a rock in the road like a bell. She was too scared to do anything but stand there, trying to go invisible, her free hand pressing into her pinafore. His forehead was high and shiny, but there was black hair hanging long in back, and thick eyebrows that raised. He had a flat smile, if it was a smile at all, and she thought he looked fine, until she remembered who he was.

  She shook her head. “I won’t go,” she said.

  He brought his horse to a stop and leaned over until he was covering the sun and the trees. “Won’t go where?” he said. He had a deep smooth voice like molasses pouring from the jar.

  “I won’t go with you.”

  He laughed. “I expect you will someday, and you’ll be glad to.” He put his hat back on and continued up the road. She watched until his black hat disappeared over the rise between the woods and the cornfield, and he never once turned around. She crossed her heart the way Ila had taught her and ran inside, a breeze lifting the hem of her pinafore so that she thought he was still out there trying to snatch her.

  “ ’Twasn’t the Devil,” her mother told her. “It was the circuit preacher. Presbyterian, by the sound of him. You’d know if it was the Devil, now go wash your hands and make yourself useful. There’s beans to snap.”

  The Devil was a Preacher; the Preacher was the Devil. You had to be good or the Devil would take you away forever and you would never see God. But God could punish you, the same as the Devil, and you had to be especially mindful in church, because God was there, listening and watching. He could help you, but you had to be good, and you couldn’t work on the Sabbath.

  Mary Bet would see that Devil Preacher at night sometimes, riding up the road, or standing in a field waiting for her with a flat smile on his face, haunting the edge of her dreams. But she knew he was real. And that someday he would come for her.

  SHE WAS BORN the year the railroad came to Haw County, her arrival associated by her family with that greatest of events yet known in the area, a harbinger, like the railroad itself, of a good and prosperous future.

  The more she puzzled over it as a young girl, the clearer it seemed that the railroad brought the misery as surely as the heavens turned in the night sky, as certain as death itself, the hulking black engine an unholy smoking beast on straight and narrow rails of steel. And yet who could deny the excitement the railroad promised, the freedom of movement out beyond the fields and hillocks of the piedmont to the endless blue horizons of the mountains and the seashore?

  Mary Bet’s grandfathers were men of substance in the decades after the War between the States. Grandfather Samuel, an austere and avaricious grandson of Plickard Dedrick Hartsoe, who’d emigrated from Germany, had but one child, Mary Bet’s father, Rezin Cicero Hartsoe. It was as unusual in those days to have only one child as it was to give property to anyone but that child. Samuel had done well with his mill and wanted his son to know the feeling of making his own way. He’d done well by turning over the milling to younger men, leaving to others the breathing of corn dust and the wrangling of two-thousand-pound stones. The life of a mill owner was much preferred to that of a miller, and Samuel Hartsoe squeezed every penny from his mill that his stern voice and tight-ruled balance sheet allowed.

  And then Samuel became an old man and at seventy-one years of age wanted to be remembered for his civic beneficence, and so when there was talk of the railroad coming through Murchison Crossroad, as the town was then known, he offered a slice of the land he owned to the north.

  There was at that time an innkeeper named Captain Billie Murchison who lived in the center of Murchison Crossroad. Captain Billie was Mary Bet’s other grandfather. The fact that he owned and occupied the house of Sam
uel’s father, John Siler Hartsoe, was to some minds an offense that Samuel stored silently in his heart—that his own father would sell his house, the first in the county to have glass windows, to a loud, boorish upstart like Billie Murchison, and sell it for a song, had to rankle.

  It was in Murchison Crossroad that the stagecoach heading west from Raleigh intersected with the stage from Guilford Courthouse heading south. Captain Billie bought the house he turned into a stage stop from John Hartsoe in 1842, when he was twenty-eight years old. The war was but a minor interruption to Captain Billie’s business, which prospered even more afterwards.

  Likewise Samuel Hartsoe’s gristmill, which lay a few miles south of the village. His one surviving child, Mary Bet’s father, Cicero, joined up with the Haw Boys, Captain Billie’s militia. He did not particularly want to fight, nor did many of his acquaintance, but when it became clear that his future standing in the community might depend on military service to his state, he enlisted.

  He came back early from the war with a wooden stump beneath his right knee, and was happy to have come home with so much. He married Captain Billie’s youngest daughter, Susan Elizabeth Murchison, who was one year his senior, and they had nine children: Tom, Siler, Ila, twins Annie and Willie, Myrtle Emma, Siler (after the first Siler died), O’Nora, and, finally, on a hot June day in 1887, Mary Bet. By the time Mary Bet was fifteen, nearly all her family had died.

  Cicero had earned himself a captaincy just before being wounded, but he insisted people call him Mr. Hartsoe, or just R.C., instead of Captain Hartsoe. “I didn’t do a thing as captain but get myself shot,” he said. He stumped quietly back to the general store he had operated for his father before enlisting, and, against his father’s will, offered credit to farmers trying to get back on their feet after losing their slaves and their able-bodiedness. In a few years he had prospered so much that he was able to buy the store from his father and build a fine house on ten rolling wooded acres. The place already had a nice little two-room cottage, which he spruced up and made into an east wing of his two-story clapboard house. He bookended the house with two common-bond brick chimneys, and embellished it with hip roofs, four-over-four sash windows, and expansive porches with chamfered posts, spindle brackets, and an intricate balustrade. It showed what he had accomplished, while others around him were failing.

  Samuel’s wife died two months before Mary Bet was born, but her other three grandparents were still very much alive. As were her parents and seven of their eight other children. Their second, Siler, died of typhoid when he was ten years old. Annie, their fourth, contracted the disease when she was eighteen. Mary Bet was five at the time, and her earliest memory was of Annie, who had been a second mother to her, lying in bed too frail to get Mary Bet a glass of milk. If she could get the glass of milk, Mary Bet thought, then she would be all right.

  “She’s susceptible,” her mother said. For Mary Bet the word became shrouded in the somber rituals and attentions of the sickbed; to be susceptible was to be so ill that one could only lie in bed from morning until evening, waking just enough to drink chicken fat soup held to your lips by your mother or your sister (because Essie the maid was superstitious about typhoid fever, even though the doctor said it was not contagious). Then the clammy sheets would be changed and the chamber pot taken out, and Mary Bet would come in and comb Annie’s long, light brown hair so that it lay flat across her pillow. She would do this quietly with great attention and devotion, the rhythm of her hands through the silky hair soothing and mesmerizing her as she looked from the hair to her sister’s face, the broad almost comical nose and the deep lovely eyes and the soft skin now pale and unanimated save for a wispy smile, so that she felt she could go on combing and combing the entire day. Then her sister would take a sharp breath, which meant she was asleep, and her mother would tell her they needed to let her rest.

  Sometimes Mama would sit in a rocking chair and read aloud from the Bible or a book of Illustrated Stories, and Mary Bet would lie on the brown braided rug and disappear into the sound of her mother’s voice as it opened the door into a world where girls drank tea and went to boarding school and wore pink taffeta gowns at costume balls. Her mother thought it wrong to waste time on such frivolous literature, but she made an exception for a sick child. Susan Elizabeth did not believe in coddling her children, and was not affectionate with them past the age of five or six. She wore plain dark skirts with few ruffles, a high collar, even though they were no longer fashionable, and no jewelry, and she sat in her rocking chair, stern knees together, eyeglasses on the end of her flared nose, her voice unwavering when the story got to the place where the girl was reunited with her father who’d been lost at sea.

  After two weeks Annie developed a rash and the doctor said her condition should start to improve if she kept her strength up. But they couldn’t get her to take much nourishment. She lay in bed now, her eyes half-open, staring at the muslin curtains waving in a late spring breeze. Mary Bet still combed out her hair every day, but it had become brittle and lost some of its color. More of it came out in the tortoiseshell comb, and Mary Bet was afraid to keep combing. Annie seemed unaware of her presence, or of anything except the curtain.

  One week Annie was so racked with coughing that the doctor worried she would break her ribs, and he gave her a daily spoonful of laudanum, which made her sleep so deeply and peacefully she looked to Mary Bet like a pale, blue-skinned angel, her pulsing temples the only sign she was alive. It became a room of dreams, filled with the spicy aroma of camphor plaster and their mother’s low voice, turning the Psalms into word pictures.

  After they found blood in the chamber pot, Mary Bet was not allowed to go back into her sister’s room. She saw people going in and out—the doctor, her mother, and one or two neighbor women. And then one Sunday morning she heard her mother crying and she knew that Annie was in heaven. The undertaker came and moved her onto a wooden cooling board and drew a sheet up over her face. Mary Bet wanted to say good-bye, but they were already taking her out and her mother wouldn’t let them stop and pull the sheet back. Mary Bet could see Annie’s yellow nightgown through the little holes in the cooling board.

  She was too young to attend the funeral. But she was allowed to go to the burial, and she stood between her mother and her sister Ila, her bony knees locked, while her father threw a handful of dirt on the coffin. She wore the black tulle dress that Ila had made, and she held Ila’s hand and wished she had stayed home after all, because everybody was crying.

  The earth was open and raw-smelling as it swallowed her sister. But there was no evil in sickness or in dirt, just the terrible hollow feeling of grown-ups not knowing what to say. The Devil had no part in it, because God had taken Annie. Yet Mary Bet could feel him lurking, watching, somewhere along the edges of the churchyard, over where the green trees rustled in the wind.

  CHAPTER 2

  1893

  CICERO WAS BACK at work in his store the following day. Hartsoe’s offered seeds and medicines and dry goods and candies and housewares of all sorts, and he pulled all the bottles and gallipots of medicine down from the shelf and threw them into a wooden flour barrel that served as a wastebasket. He didn’t mind if the glass broke and the medicine spilled. Men came in for their usual twists of tobacco and took up seats near the Franklin stove to watch the proceedings. They said not a word.

  He kept the lycopodium, which worked on cuts, and some castor oil, and Bellingham’s Stimulating Unguent for the hair and whiskers, which his brother-in-law Crabtree Murchison liked. He looked in the wastebasket and saw an unbroken bottle of swamp-root tonic, which he himself had used on occasion. He pulled it out and put it back on the shelf. “The rest is quackery of the vilest sort,” he said, “and I’ll not have it in my store.”

  Thad Utley, a fat overall-wearing man with stained teeth as crooked as old headstones, said, “You’re right, R.C. Them nostrums never did me any good. Old Doc Slocum said—”

  “You can tell your Doc Slocum t
o go to the Devil,” Cicero cut in. “He’s no better than any of this.” He gestured at the pile of glass and rubbish in the barrel.

  “R.C.,” said Robert Gray, “why don’t you take the day off? The world will get along without you for one day. You’ve suffered a terrible blow.” Robert Gray was a retired lawyer who dressed in a suit every day of the week.

  “No, sir,” Cicero said. “I’ve never taken a day off, and I don’t aim to.”

  “You never heard of a vacation?”

  “I don’t care to vacate.” Cicero had worn his black suit to work, but was now jacketless, sleeves rolled up, suspenders bulging over an impressive middle-aged paunch. He smoothed his mustache with a thumb and finger and regarded his cronies—over beside Thad sat Oren Bray, a farmer with a growth beside his nose that looked like a second, melted nose. His face was as shriveled as a dry peanut, and he wore his usual gray pants and jacket with the letters “C.S.A.” stitched onto the collar. Cicero never wanted to see his own uniform again—his wooden leg was enough of a reminder. And yet he pitied other men’s bondage to the past.

  “I’m feeling aggrieved is all,” he said. “Willie’s taken sick, and if he has the typhoid I don’t know how Susan Elizabeth can stand it.”

  “Has Dr. Slocum seen him?” Robert Gray asked.

  “That damn foo—no, he hasn’t, nor is likely to. I could treat him better myself with what I just threw in the trash.” Cicero grabbed the broom and began sweeping just to have something to do. He stopped and scanned the neat shelves, those not stocked with medicine, as though to see what needed ordering. Hardware, candles, ropes, coffee, flour, beans, biscuit meal, twists of Red Meat tobacco, yellow boxes of Arm & Hammer soda, barrels of molasses, bolts of cloth, gunnysacks of animal feed from his father’s mill. The men behind him had gone quiet. From next door came the metallic banging of the smithy who rented his place from Cicero; one door over was the livery that Billie’s son Crabtree had been operating since closing his curio shop—he, too, rented from Cicero.