Love and Lament Page 14

  “If we’re not talking about marriage, what’s the problem? Unless he’s dallying with her.” Cicero slowly got to his feet, a hand going to his back as he straightened up and arched. “I won’t catch up with him, you know. And by the time he gets home, I’ll be asleep.”

  “Then speak to him in the morning.”

  “He’s always up and doing his deliveries before I’m hardly awake,” Cicero said. Then, “I’ll speak to him tomorrow,” raising his voice just enough to make her back down. “Now I’m going to my study where I don’t want to be interrupted for the next hour solid, not unless the house is afire, and then only if you can’t handle it yourself.” He trundled off, leaving her to clear the table and take the dishes out back to the washstand, where she worked until the light had turned grainy and the lightning bugs winked like watchful little eyes in the warm, still air.

  She waited for Siler to say something to her the next day, but he acted as if nothing unusual had happened. Her father was short with her, and so she assumed he’d not had a pleasant day and was not disposed to conversation. The next day he was at his lodge meeting, and it was not until the day after that she had a chance to ask if he’d talked with Siler. Cicero shook his head as if hardly remembering. “I’ve been so busy, I haven’t had time. It slipped my mind. I’m not sure why it’s so important to you. You could speak to him yourself.”

  “Daddy, you don’t—” She’d started to say “understand,” but that would be rude, and not quite accurate—he understood.

  There was never a good time to bring the matter up again, to either Siler or her father. When they saw Siler off at the train station, he seemed happy, probably, she thought, to be leaving and heading back to what he considered his real home now. He looked so serious and grown-up standing there in his gray pinstripe suit, his raincoat draped over his arm, his fedora cocked to one side. She felt an upwelling of love for him that she was afraid of—she wanted to embrace him there and tell him that she loved him and would always love him, and that they should forgive each other for what had happened that dreamy afternoon years ago. But the train was coming, its scolding whistle shrill and certain as it cut the morning air. There was still time to kiss him … all her life, she thought, looking back on this place, she would regret that she hadn’t.

  But in the bustle of bags and last-minute questions about tickets and his lunch sack and reminders to write every week, there was no chance even for another hug. Siler shook hands with his father. “I’ll be home Christmas,” he vocalized. He winked at Mary Bet. “Be good,” he said.

  At the “All aboard!” he was swallowed in the gathering of passengers, and he never looked back.

  ON THE EIGHTH day of November the Western Union telegram came. Siler had been making his way along a train track outside of Morganton, where the roads were too muddy for walking. The conductor had blown his whistle in plenty of time, he said, and had put on his brakes. He couldn’t understand why the young man wouldn’t get out of the way, but he never even turned around. When Mary Bet later had time to think about it, what she could not understand was how Siler was unable to feel the train coming. She could feel it herself down at the platform—you didn’t have to see it or hear it. “He couldn’t hear it,” Cicero said, “that’s all there is to it. He had no business walking along the tracks like that.”

  “The girl—” Mary Bet tried to tell him. But when she saw the pain in her father’s eyes, she couldn’t go on. She wanted to tell him what was on her mind, that perhaps Siler had had a falling out with Rebecca, that they were afraid of what their parents would say if they were to become engaged.

  Cicero shook his head. “He couldn’t always feel vibrations. I could walk up right behind him sometimes and he wouldn’t know I was there.”

  He always knew, Mary Bet thought. He just didn’t always turn around. But he always knew; he knew even better than people who could hear. He chose to stay on that track, and he left us no reason why.

  After the funeral, Mary Bet went into her father’s study and sat with her toes just touching the carpet, the way she used to as a little girl. He was in his easy chair, a book on his lap, his glasses midway down his nose, and it was hard to tell if he was reading or just staring at the book.

  “What is it, Daddy?” she said.

  He shook his head. “I’m not sure if we shouldn’t’ve asked more questions.”

  “Questions?”

  “Of the sheriff out there last week. Why did they not take him to the hospital, or a doctor?”

  “I’m sure it was too late for that, Daddy.”

  “But why to the sheriff’s office, then, and not straight to the coroner’s? Why do him that a-way? If he was dead and hadn’t done anything wrong.”

  “I’m sure there’s an explanation for it. We’ll wire and find out. Or you can call on your telephone at the store.”

  Cicero shook his head. “No, I’ll write, if I can think what to say. I don’t want to trouble anybody, and I’m sure you’re right.”

  It was not for another three weeks that Cicero brought the subject up again. One evening as supper was ending, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a letter and his reading glasses, which he exchanged for his regular pair.

  “Letter here from Sheriff Meacham out in Burke.” He read,

  Dear Mr. Hartsoe,

  In response to your inquiry, your son, Siler B. Hartsoe was brought to this office by the Southern Railway Company after the accident on the 8th of November. He was already deceased and had been declared so by Dr. J. Trimble Bone, Burke County Coroner. Since your son was not a local resident, the railway company decided to transport the body to my office rather than an undertaker’s to await shipment back to his home and so that I could sign the release form allowing said shipment and provide you with a copy of the death certificate. We have had two similar cases that I recall, one when I first took office nine years ago, and another a few years before that time. After the superintendent of the North Carolina School for the Deaf came and identified your son (verifying the identity card in his wallet), I immediately called the Hartsoe City sheriff’s office and was given your telephone number at the Alliance Store. The death occurred at approximately 3:15 p.m., and I spoke to you at approximately 5:30 p.m. that same day. I believe, from the wire I received, that the body of your son arrived the next morning at approximately 8:45 a.m. I hope this clears up any questions and concerns, and I want to express my deepest sympathy for the loss of your son.

  Yours sincerely, John Meacham, Sheriff

  He carefully folded the letter, replaced it in the envelope, and tucked it back in his pocket. “I reckon that explains it.”

  Mary Bet nodded, and though she wasn’t convinced, she didn’t want her father worrying about it any more. But now the letter had raised more questions than it had answered, and she could not help wondering what Siler was doing out there. Was he alone? Where was he going? And were the reports from the railway and the coroner and the sheriff one hundred percent accurate? She had no reason to doubt them, but she wondered how complete they really were, and if the conductor, for example, had something more to add than the impersonal statement on record, “male pedestrian failed to heed warning whistle.” She would like to talk to the conductor, ask him if Siler turned around at all, shrugged, gave any sign of awareness. Anything would help put her mind at ease, because she could not help imagining the worst possible scenes. If Siler had thrown himself under the wheels, certainly the conductor would’ve reported it, but if he’d glanced back, ever so briefly … well, that would be worth knowing, though she couldn’t say exactly why. Maybe it was better to assume that he simply was lost in his thoughts—but what thoughts? Could his foot have gotten stuck? She looked at her father, tears stinging her eyes, and she didn’t bother wiping them away.

  “What is it, baby girl?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing, Daddy, I just don’t want you to worry so.” She got up and cleared the dishes.

  CHAPTER 12

>   1903

  THE MONTHS AFTER Siler’s death were among the hardest Mary Bet thought she’d ever be able to endure. If there is more grief to come, she told God, I will not survive, and when she thought she might not be able to stand waking up and going to school one more day she pictured her father, more bent now, but still walking to his work. She thought of him sometimes as a gray statue carved from a lonely mountain, bearing the wind and the rain. We go on living because we have no choice, she told herself, because there is nothing else for us to do.

  Several weeks before the monument that was to grace the courthouse grounds arrived in Haw County, the Winnie Davis chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy held a contest to elect a speaker who would represent Hartsoe City at the unveiling. The event promised to be the biggest gathering in the county since the hanging of Shackleford Davies.

  “You ought to enter that contest, R.C.,” said Oren Bray one morning at the Alliance.

  “What contest?” Cicero said, not looking up from the clipboard where his monthly tabulations ran in neat, hand-ruled rows.

  “Why, to speak at the unveiling. Looks like you’d want to represent Hartsoe City, with your name and all. Course, they’s other Hartsoes could do it, but none with your learning and eloquence.” Oren spat into a pewter cup he kept on his lap, then tilted his chair back until it leaned against the wall beside the stove.

  “I don’t know about that,” Cicero said, judging the amount left in the flour bin by shifting its contents until it was level, then pulling back and eyeballing the whole. “I don’t know about any contest.”

  At home Mary Bet said that her teacher had announced the Confederate Monument Oratorical Contest for the unveiling in June. One child and one adult would be invited to deliver an address in Williamsboro. “She told me I should submit an essay.”

  “Oren Bray told me the very same thing,” Cicero said. “Maybe that way we’d both be up there at the podium. Wouldn’t that be a sight?” He reached over and touched her arm, and the rare feeling of his hand on her sleeve warmed her. She knew he’d forget about the essay contest, but that it didn’t matter. She would write something and show it to him, and then remind him to do the same, and in this way they could work together on a project that was not just for getting through the day but for a loftier purpose, for giving voice to their thoughts and beliefs, even if destined only for the scrapbook that now had three names on its inside cover—O’Nora, Myrtle Emma, and Siler. She would later look back and wish that she had urged her father not to give the contest another thought.

  She forgot all about it until some weeks afterwards when Clara told her that she had composed an essay called “The Spirit of Liberty” and wondered if Mary Bet would read it and tell her if it was good enough to send to the D.O.C. organizing committee. Mary Bet read it and said that not only was it good enough to submit to the adult category, but that she couldn’t possibly write anything as good so there was no point in trying.

  “You’re just saying that,” Clara told her.

  “No, I mean it. I don’t have the knack like you for making things sound clever.”

  “Of course you do. You’re just being modest.”

  Mary Bet smiled at her friend and kissed her on the cheek. They’d walked out to Love’s Creek so Mary Bet could put fresh flowers on the graves. “No,” Mary Bet said, “I have a gift, I’m sure I do because everybody does. I don’t know quite what ’tis yet.” At the foot of Siler’s grave she placed the last of the hothouse roses she’d bought with the weekly dimes Cicero gave her for her few needs beyond food and clothes. He was not one for appeasing or communing with the dead, though he didn’t mind his daughter doing so, provided she spent her own money.

  “I should visit my grandmother’s grave,” Clara said.

  “Then take one of Siler’s roses,” Mary Bet said. “He doesn’t need but one.”

  “No, I couldn’t possibly,” Clara responded. “My granny won’t care. She didn’t even like roses. She said they were mean, because they’d prick you.” The girls laughed as they made their way between the stones. “I don’t much like cemeteries,” Clara said.

  “They won’t hurt you atall,” Mary Bet told her. “They’re peaceful and green.”

  “Do you think the people here will rise up someday and go to heaven?”

  “You know I don’t believe that, Clara. I know it’s just their bodies, and their spirits might not be here now. It’s a place to come and think about the people you loved. All these people around us—they could laugh and talk and walk just like us.”

  They stood a moment at the wide polished granite marking Clara’s grandmother. “My mother didn’t like the idea of sharing a grave,” Mary Bet said. “So Daddy’ll have his own.”

  “They didn’t want to be side-by-side for all eternity?” Clara asked. She started to laugh, then stopped herself. “I didn’t mean disrespect.”

  Mary Bet clapped a hand to her mouth, then caught her friend’s wrist, and they both burst into laughter. “We should stop, we should stop. ’Tisn’t right to laugh.” They both went silent, then burst out anew in gales of mirth, sucking in breaths as if they were about to expire. Clara fell to her knees at her grandmother’s grave, and Mary Bet dropped along beside her and draped an arm around her shoulders. “Should we say a prayer?” Clara nodded, but her shoulders kept heaving up and down, so Mary Bet said, “Maybe we better not right now. I don’t think it would take.”

  That night she wrote an essay; in it she listed all the good traits she could remember about her brothers and sisters, and her mother too. She read it over and decided it was too personal for the contest, so she crumpled it up and threw it in her wicker wastebasket. She retrieved it, flattened it out between her book of English poetry and her cherrywood desk, and then placed it in the scrapbook. Until she could give it to a daughter—that’s how long she would hold on to this book; and if she never had a daughter, then until she died.

  She asked her father if he’d written anything. He said he hadn’t given it much thought, things being kind of busy down at the store.

  “Well,” said Mary Bet, “don’t neglect it too long. Or you’re liable to miss out.”

  He gave her a droll look, but stopped himself from smiling, knowing she might take it amiss. They’d lately drifted into the kind of relationship old couples have. Instead of flaring into resentments and recriminations, they would hide what annoyed them, knowing that their time together was probably limited to a few more years. Sometimes Cicero raised his voice to Mary Bet when she forgot to pull out the stove dampers on a cold morning, or broke a saucer. “How can you be so careless?” he’d snap. Instead of apologizing, she’d look straight at him with a punished expression, then get down on her hands and knees and pick the shards up. For hours afterwards he’d mope about in a sheepish way until she forgave him. Though he never asked for her forgiveness, she learned that they would both feel better if she offered it. “I’m a stupid old man,” he’d say. “You mustn’t mind me.”

  “No, Daddy,” she’d reply, coming over and putting an arm around his shoulder. “I am clumsy, and I don’t know why.” And in this way, she would end up entreating him to forgive both her and himself.

  She hid things from him. She saw him thumbing wordlessly through her scrapbook one day, so she removed it from the living room and tucked it in the bottom of her trunk. She no longer told him when she was feeling sick, because it only upset him. So she lay in bed at night worrying about herself and hoping she wouldn’t die before morning. She’d stopped telling him about her jaunts to the cemetery, for he looked old and sad even when she described the flowers and the beauty of the day. And what about Joe Dorsett—would her father not be angry if he found out she was engaged? Their dinnertime conversations revolved around church and school and the characters that came into Cicero’s store and the sewing projects Mary Bet was occupied with and what household items they needed to restock.

  Thus it was Mary Bet who was surprised to discov
er that her father had been hiding things from her. When the winner of the essay competition was announced in school and her teacher read out her father’s name along with that of eleven-year-old Clyde Fore, Mary Bet was at first confused. Her classmates came over and congratulated her and asked if she and her father had helped each other—all she could say was no. She took her time walking home at midday, then went up to her room and buried her face in a book about a girl growing up in the mountains. Someday, she thought, she was going to see Grandfather Mountain.

  At dinner she sat quietly eating, while her father asked if she’d seen to his britches that needed letting out and when she was planning on boiling the silverware. She told him pants and silverware would be done that very afternoon. She ate some more, glancing up at his face and waiting. Finally, she could stand it no longer. “Well?” she said.

  “Well what?”

  “Don’t you have something to tell me?”

  “What about?” He stifled a belch, then picked his teeth with his little finger, a habit that had crept back after the death of his wife.

  “Your winning essay.”

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you.” He smoothed his beard with one hand while tonguing up bits of stray food on his lips. “I entered that contest and now I have to read at the unveiling. I wisht I hadn’t, though. Fellers I don’t even know came up to me in the street a-wantin’ to shake my hand. One of them said ‘so the good luck’d rub off.’ I said, ‘I don’t want my good luck rubbing off. I don’t have that much on me, that I know of.’ ”

  “Daddy, you could’ve at least told me you were writing something.” She could feel tears coming to her eyes, and she couldn’t understand why but she was furious at her father and upset with herself. He was a stone visage, he was Grandfather Mountain himself, sitting there eating his canned corn and beans as if she were some mouse that perched at his table nibbling scraps.

  He glanced at her, then stopped his chewing. He swallowed. “Baby girl,” he said. “What in the world?” For now she had her head turned away, a napkin at her eyes. “I reckon I beat my own daughter in a contest, and I was too foolish to know how much it meant. I’ll tell them I’m not interested.”