Love and Lament Page 11

  She threw herself now on his bed, and he said, “Careful, baby girl, you’ll knock me off.”

  “He’s a little dizzy,” Dr. Slocum explained.

  Mary Bet tried to blink back the tears, but they came anyway. She got up and came around to kiss her father’s bearded cheek. “Daddy,” she said.

  Cicero watched the doctor buttoning up his shirtsleeves and putting on his jacket, and he said, “They brought you here against my orders.” His chest bounced as he tried to speak. “But I don’t know as you did me any harm.”

  Three days into Cicero’s recovery, Joe Dorsett came over with a strawberry rhubarb pie and a jar of apple jelly. Mary Bet stood on the front porch talking to him, wanting to invite him in simply to have another presence in the house for a while besides her aunt’s. “And I brought this just for you,” Joe said, handing her a little tin of Pendergrass snuff, made with tobacco and sneezeweed. “I don’t know if you care for it or not.”

  “My aunt doesn’t allow it,” Mary Bet told him, glancing back into the house. But she took the tin and slipped it into the pocket of her strapped frock. “Why don’t you come in and visit for a minute.”

  “I can’t—” Joe started, then, surprised by the invitation, said, “okay, just for a minute then.” He’d never been inside their house and he entered the vestibule and looked around as though he were in a bejeweled cavern. “I didn’t know you had all these things. A piano—does it play?”

  “Not by itself. My sister can play. I can play one thing she taught me.”

  “Play it.”

  “No, I better not.” She glanced over her shoulder toward the stairs.

  “Where’d you get all these books?”

  “They’re my father’s. He reads a lot. Sometimes I read to him.” She felt suddenly self-conscious, and her hand went to her hair; it was as if she were seeing the living room for the first time. How ridiculous, she told herself—it’s just bragging old Joe Dorsett. But he wasn’t bragging now; he was actually being polite, and he was glancing at her kind of shyly, as though they’d never met. She wondered if they should take seats in the wing chairs, but that seemed even more ridiculous.

  “We have peacocks,” Joe told her. “You’ve probably heard them.” He made a funny little trumpeting sound that was more like a goose than a peacock, and Mary Bet was sure that her aunt would appear any second now. “I’ll bring you a feather. They’re right pretty, with a big black eye in the middle. They’ll ward off the evil eye.”

  “I don’t believe in that,” Mary Bet said. What she’d heard was that a peacock feather in the house was a harbinger of death. “I like to see them outside,” she said. And then Joe stood there looking at her eyes and her mouth with a serious, almost frightened expression, as though he wanted to come over and kiss her. Then, as if she’d been waiting for just this moment, Cattie appeared from the vestibule. She had not been on the stairs, for surely Mary Bet would’ve heard the treads creaking—she had simply materialized out of the air.

  “Look, Aunt Cattie,” Mary Bet blurted, “Mrs. Dorsett sent us some strawberry pie and apple jelly.”

  She regarded Joe, and in a tight voice, said, “Hello, I’m Cattie Jordan Teague, Mary Elizabeth’s aunt from Williamsboro. You must tell your mother how much we appreciate her thoughtfulness.” Before he could think of a reply she turned back to Mary Bet. “I’ve been lying down with a headache.” She paused to see what effect those words would have.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Mary Bet said. “I’m sorry.” Then, in a quieter voice, she told Joe, “I have to go now.”

  Joe showed himself out, and when he was gone, Cattie turned to Mary Bet and said, “What did he want?”

  “He just wanted to bring us these things,” Mary Bet replied, feeling the complaint in her voice, the edge of indignation.

  Cattie’s eyes surveyed Mary Bet, passing over her frock, where the tin of snuff was secreted, then down her legs and back up to her face, trying to ferret out every hidden secret and thought. “Is that all?”

  “Is that all what?” She hadn’t said it in an impertinent way—she simply didn’t know what her aunt was driving at.

  “Don’t you get smart with me, young lady.”

  “I wasn’t being smart,” Mary Bet snapped back, tossing her head, because she had had enough. “If I was smart I’d’ve known what you were getting at, but I still don’t.” She felt blood rushing to her face, then draining, as she waited for her aunt to come over and slap her, or yell at her, or send her off to her room—something, anything, to relieve the tension. She closed her eyes, then opened them, her hands hanging limp at her sides. There was something about her aunt that suddenly seemed simple and pathetic, standing there in her plain brown dress, almost the exact match of half a dozen others, her little pearl-ringed brooch at her bosom, her solid arms and legs ready for daily battle with forces beyond her control that would want to interrupt and vex her. She was no longer even facing her niece, but looking off toward the vestibule, as if she wanted to leave.

  “Honestly,” Cattie said, as though talking to an invisible person, “I don’t know how my poor sister stood it. With the typhoid, a deaf mute, a husband who spoils his children, and a willful little girl.”

  “I’m not a little girl,” Mary Bet said quietly.

  Cattie nodded and sniffled. “We’ve all been strained to the breaking point,” she murmured. Mary Bet could see that her aunt was crying, and she felt more wicked than she had in a long time. Cattie Jordan took a handkerchief out of her bosom and blew her nose, and after a moment or two Mary Bet went quietly up the steps to her room.

  She managed to keep out of her aunt’s way for the rest of the fortnight. She brewed her father a Dorsett family recipe of sassafras tea with cinnamon and licorice root, and, when Cattie Jordan was not around, she reached up to the flour tin behind the canned beets on the top shelf of the pantry for an unlabeled jar of moonshine whiskey and added two or three thimbles to a hot toddy of lemon and honey. On Essie’s days off, she found relaxation in going out to the backyard to churn butter or stir a steaming vat of laundry and bluing with a long-handled, triple-pronged agitator while staring meditatively off into the woods. She would imagine her grandmother’s grandmother Sally, a Tory who married an Indian named Rufus Cheek and moved west from the fall line until they found this hilly fertile land and its patchwork of land grant farms owned by English pioneers, who then intermarried with Scotch-Irish and German pioneers down from Virginia. Her grandmother had told her that Tories and Regulators, or Patriots, as they came to be called, did unspeakable things to each other. There was something called spigoting that she never explained, but the word was itself enough to send shivers down Mary Bet’s spine.

  One evening shortly before her aunt was to go, Mary Bet asked Cattie Jordan if she knew how Captain Billie and Grandma Margaret met.

  “They met at church,” Cattie said. “Daddy had just bought the house we used to live in. He said all he needed now was a wife. It was a shame Mama had to let that house go. You know he bought it from your father’s grandfather, John Hartsoe?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Mary Bet vaguely knew the overlapping family history.

  “They used to keep your father’s grandfather chained in the barn up there.”

  “I thought he was roped to a tree,” Mary Bet said, wondering why her aunt had chosen to tell her something from the Hartsoe closet instead of her own.

  “A tree? Where did you hear that? No, indeed. It was the barn and a chain. I could show you where ’twas. Aunt Scilla, the nigger cook we used to have, showed me. He’d lost his mind and there was nowhere else to put him. Aunt Scilla said her father got himself put in charge of John Hartsoe and he would whip him if he soiled himself—that was to get him back for all the times he’d been beaten himself and, a worse disgrace, for making him stand out in the rain until his shoes were nothing but mud. Can you imagine? A slave in charge of his owner? Scilla would hear them out there yelling at each other and she and the other bla
ck folks would sing so nobody could hear them. But the funny thing was that after years of beating that poor old lunatic, and getting away with it, he felt sorry for him, and he started taking the old man out on walks, with a rope tied around his waist like he was leading a horse. And when John Hartsoe died, Scilla’s father went out and sat on the grave all night crying and begging forgiveness. Isn’t that the strangest thing? I’ve often wondered if Aunt Scilla didn’t make it up to scare us children into behaving.”

  She paused and looked at Mary Bet with a gleam in her eye, trying to judge the effect of her story. Mary Bet did feel the hairs standing up on her back, and her palms felt cold and sweaty, because her aunt had brought to life some long buried people Mary Bet knew only vaguely, and it seemed as if they were walking around the parlor when they should be resting quietly in their graves. And something else—there was more to this story, the part her father had withheld at Grandpa Samuel’s deathbed. She felt a leaden weight of gloom tugging her, a mind sickness that she thought might haunt her entire life. And then an image of splintering fragments, as though her memory, and her family’s memory, were pulling apart, breaking into shards of light. It was the queerest sensation.

  “What did he do besides beat Scilla’s father?” Mary Bet asked, though she didn’t want there to be an answer.

  “Lord, child, I don’t have any idea. Those things are long gone, and Scilla’s dead now so you can’t ask her, though I don’t know why you’d want to. The sins of the fathers, they say, are visited upon the sons. I don’t know why your father has suffered so much tragedy. It seems to me as if those sins were paid for at the time. If losing your mind and having your servant beat you isn’t payment I don’t know what is. But then I’m not one to judge.”

  Finally the day came when Cattie Jordan’s packed bags were sitting at the top of the steps, waiting for someone to haul them out to the carriage she’d hired for the ride back to Williamsboro. This not being the houseboy’s day, Mary Bet happily volunteered for the job. At the carriage, Cattie leaned over, and briefly held her niece. “Take good care of your father, now,” she said, “you know he counts on you.” Mary Bet said she would, and then she was waving to the black carriage, the dried flowers of her aunt’s hat just visible over the seat back.

  CHRISTMAS CAME AND the family was back together again for one brief week. Siler cut down a cedar in the woods south of town, and they decorated it with strings of cranberries and popcorn, chains of paper angels, and candles on wire fasteners, with paper doilies to catch the drips. When the candles were lit, Mary Bet was in charge of making sure the tree didn’t catch fire.

  Siler told them that he had a special friend, a girl from Wilmington whose father was in the railroad business. He seemed more outgoing, less brooding than before, but Mary Bet could never seem to find him alone to talk as they used to. He had started smoking cigarettes, and he came in late at night and stumbled up the stairs—no one knew where he’d been or what he’d been doing.

  Myrt was faring well with her students up in the mountains—she was also playing piano in the Baptist church out there, volunteering twice a week at the colored school, and had joined the Women’s Auxiliary Charitable Committee which put her in charge of distributing food and clothing to the needy families of Watauga County. “And there are a lot of needy families, I can tell you,” she said, her eyes popping wide.

  Just when they had begun to seem more like family than visitors, it was time for them to leave, and Mary Bet and Cicero were alone again in a house that seemed even emptier than before. Another term at school went by, Mary Bet going to the four-month public school, then switching in the spring to the Thomas Academy. She had just turned fourteen when they got an important letter from Boone. Myrt wrote to say that she was doing well, and that she had made a good friend at church and they went on long walks together, sometimes taking a picnic up to a waterfall with gentlemen friends. She had decided to stay on for most of the summer because of her church job, but would be home for all of August. “P.S. I got kicked milking the cow here at Mrs. Henderson’s. It cut my leg pretty badly, but the doctor says I’ll be fine in no time.”

  Her letter the next week began by saying that her leg was better but that she felt stiff and sore, “especially in my neck. I hope I’m not coming down with the flu.” Four days later another letter arrived: “Dear Daddy and Mary Bet, I hate to have to tell you this, but my condition has not improved. I’m stiff all over. I can’t chew good, so I have to drink soup through a straw. The doctor here said it could be lockjaw and that I should write you to come up, if you can. I’m feeling out of sorts and I hate to bother you. I don’t think it’s serious, but I am rather blue and my arms are awful sore and they’ve begun twitching and my neck is worse, like my collar is too tight, even when I’m not wearing one. Please pray for me and come if you can. The weather here is real nice. Mrs. Henderson brought me a bouquet of daylilies to cheer me up. I’m too tired to write more. Love, Myrt.”

  Mary Bet wanted to travel up to the mountains with her father, but he told her she should stay at home and take care of the animals. She said, “I’m not afraid of seeing Myrt, Daddy. I’d a sight rather see her like that than in a box.”

  Cicero looked at his youngest child, nearly a young woman now, and he could not bear to see her unhappy. She had never ridden on a train, nor been anywhere beyond Raleigh—to see the Reverend Billy Sunday preaching on the sins of pride and anger—and he supposed he had neglected to attend to her broader education. He prided himself on being fair-minded.

  They were waiting at the depot at sunrise when the telegram came from Boone: “Mr. R. C. Hartsoe, Hartsoe City, N.C., I regret to tell you your daughter Myrtle Emma died this morning at 3:30. Please advise us your wishes in regards to arrangements. Yours in sympathy, Mrs. Eulalia Henderson.”

  Cicero stood in the station agent’s office, staring at the cruel little device that had received this coded message and the typewriter upon which the agent had written it. The agent, a short man with a bristly mustache, said he hated getting messages like that. Cicero nodded and said, “I thank you. It’s my cross to bear, and I don’t complain.” He went out, the telegram dangling from his hand, looking up and down the platform and seeing nothing.

  “Daddy, I’m right here,” Mary Bet said, waving. “What are you looking for?” She saw the distance in his eyes, the piece of paper he was holding, and she knew.

  He looked so small and lost in his hopeful blue seersucker suit and boater—they were supposed to be on an errand of mercy, of cheering-up. He came and put his arms around her, holding her for what seemed could never be long enough. She buried her face in the warm, cigar smell of his jacket, gripping his wide middle, the end of his gray beard entangling with her dark hair, and the world ceased and there was no sound but her breathing. The pain she felt was for him—there would be time later for her own private pain.

  She glanced at the WESTERN UNION headline, an epitaph to the typing below. “Will we go to get her?” she asked.

  He shook his head and said, “I don’t know. What should we do?” He looked around. Presently, people began coming over and shaking his hand and telling him how sorry they were, and they said the same to Mary Bet: “I just can’t believe the tragedy yall’ve endured,” one lady said. “The Lord must need your people something terrible.” Another, older lady said Myrtle Emma was an angel who was too perfect to stay in this world for long. But most just said they were shocked and sorry, and a few of them kept standing there as though protecting Mary Bet and her father from the grief that was stalking them.

  “I think we should send a telegram back,” Mary Bet told her father.

  Alson Thomas, the same who had played cards with her grandfather, happened to be standing there and agreed. “I’ll send it,” he offered. “Shall I tell them you’re on the way?”

  Mary Bet looked up at her father, but he stood mute and immovable, a breeze lifting the ends of his sparse hair and beard. “Yes,” she said, “the train�
�s due any minute. Could you tell Mrs. Henderson we’ll be there by suppertime, as we’d planned?” She took the telegram from her father and handed it to Mr. Thomas. He glanced at Cicero for confirmation, and then came the rumbling of the train from far down the track, tremoring up from the ground into the concrete platform. And Mary Bet heard the rattling of the wheels and the huffing of the steam before the engine came into view.

  “Daddy?” she said, tugging at his hand. “Mr. Thomas is going to telegram we’re on our way.” Two whistle blasts tore the air, and the huff-chug-huff-chug began to slow as the engine showed itself at the end of the track, its plume of steam and coal smoke trailing. She suddenly did not want to go, did not want to ride the train as if it were a hearse. The harsh smell of burned coal filled the air and she said, “Daddy, I don’t want to go off up to the mountains. Let’s stay here.”

  “I’ll wire them up there if you want,” Mr. Thomas offered. “Make arrangements to have her sent home.” He stood there in his old Confederate slouch hat and farmer’s worn boots, looking from Mary Bet to her father. He and Cicero were fast becoming the old generation; the new world with its factory towers and whistle blasts and telephone wires was wiping away the old-timers’ world. The war had once been their common bond and brotherhood, and now, a generation later, it didn’t so much matter—what mattered was how good you were at spotting an opportunity and taking advantage of it. The newcomers seemed to be the ones making the money in Haw County, while men like Cicero and Alson—one in the town, the other in the country—saw their day slipping past, no longer heralded nor much regarded.

  “What say you, R.C.?” Alson asked, a sympathetic smile creasing his sun-leathered face.