Love and Lament Page 18

  “I had something to finish up.”

  They walked toward the Raleigh Road, past the prison camp and Carter’s rabbit plant, to where the lots became small farms and then, on the Raleigh Road, just houses with gardens and fowl and a barnyard animal or two. “I have something I need to tell you,” she said.

  “I do too,” Joe said. Mary Bet waited for him to speak. “I have to find a new job,” he said. He explained that he’d been given the boot for fudging his time card and being late one time too many. “Maybe I should leave town for a while. I have an uncle in Raleigh who works in a glass factory. I’ve told my daddy I might want to go work there sometime.”

  “Is that what you want to do?”

  “Do you think I should?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think, Joe,” Mary Bet said. “I didn’t—. You know I don’t want you to leave, but I don’t want you to be without a job either. What makes you think you can’t get one around here?”

  “If word got out—” Joe hesitated, looking around. They were now at the farrier’s across from the post office, the banging of metal spilling into the street. A black street sweeper came along, gathering the horse droppings into piles for later pickup. The wooden sidewalk began at the undertaker’s, and Joe and Mary Bet stepped up onto it.

  “I have to see to my father,” Mary Bet said. “Good-bye, Joe.”

  She hurried home to her father to see if he had gotten himself into any more trouble. It seemed that she would forever be looking back on this time as a crucial turning point in her life—the loss of her first sweetheart and the certainty that her father was mentally unstable. She would put it out of her mind until she got home; until then she told herself that her life with its problems was a speck in all the universe, a mote of dust floating in a mill with millions of other dust particles and the thousands of other dusty mills falling through the heavens like leaves in autumn.

  When she got home she found the house empty, so down she went to the store. There her father was, closing up the shop as he did every day as this hour. From where he stood, back in the shadows near the storeroom, he looked as he always had when she was young and would come by for a stick of peppermint on her way home from school.

  She lifted the hinged counter and went back to greet him. “I just wanted to see if you needed any help closing up,” she told him.

  “Oh?” He looked around, glanced at the orange box in his hands, then up to the shelves stocked with big jars and cans and boxes. “I don’t know that I do … did you think I did?”

  He’d said the words automatically, as though reaching back into his mind for the proper response, and Mary Bet wondered if at that moment he could even say her name.

  That night she dreamed the Devil was riding behind her, somewhere just out of sight beyond a low hill. Home lay a long road ahead, but there was a shortcut through a woods. She looked back and thought she could see his black slouch hat; she tried to push her horse, but it wouldn’t go any faster. She could feel his shimmering presence drawing nearer and nearer, and she knew there was nothing she could do but let him overtake her, no matter how much fear and pain and suffering lay ahead. She awoke in a panic, her own stifled voice echoing in her mind. For a long time, she listened to see if she had disturbed her father.

  CHAPTER 15

  1905

  CATTIE JORDAN ARRIVED the day after Thanksgiving. Mary Bet had not seen her since a brief visit to Williamsboro last spring to celebrate the swearing in of her son, Mary Bet’s cousin Hooper, as county sheriff. She had been cordial, even friendly, to Mary Bet, no longer the unbending killjoy Mary Bet remembered from her father’s bout with pneumonia. Perhaps it was only because she was better at being a hostess than at taking charge in someone else’s home, but it was Mary Bet this time who suggested to her father that they invite Cattie Jordan to stay for a while, until he was feeling better.

  “I don’t know what you mean exactly,” her father said, eyeing her under his thick white eyebrows.

  They had been sitting at dinner, Cicero with his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, because, he maintained, he couldn’t breathe otherwise. “I don’t mean anything,” Mary Bet said. “I’d just like to see her, is all.”

  “You can invite anybody you please. I won’t stop you.” He paused to scratch his shoulder with his fork. “I’ve got so much work to do you won’t hardly know I’m here. If I stop working, you see, I’m liable to drop dead.” He winced, and his face fell and went blank.

  “What is it, Daddy?”

  He shook his head. “Something I said to your mama one time. Told her she was a snake in the cistern. I don’t know why. All the shameful things I’ve said and done—if only I could stop them flowing through my brain.”

  “It’s all right, Daddy,” Mary Bet said, patting his hand. He pulled it away and looked at her with suspicion. He got up, leaving half his food untouched and went out to the greenhouse to tend to the chrysanthemums and dahlias she’d bought him. He had quit going down to the store, and on his more lucid days he told her he was thinking of selling it. She said she thought that was a good idea, that she was sure Robert Gray could help him with the details, and she’d even spoken with Mr. Gray about it herself. Mr. Gray had assured her that he could help find a buyer and draw up the papers, but suggested that she first get Dr. Slocum to come out and make sure her father was compos mentis. To which she’d replied that of course he was in his right mind—he just needed some rest. Anyway, he’d been thinking for years of selling out and running a much smaller operation from his home.

  “Of course, of course,” Mr. Gray said. “At sixty-four, he’s at an age when many have already quit work. He’s driven himself hard all this time. As his lawyer, I just want to have everything square. How old are you now, Mary Bet?” She replied that she would be nineteen next June. Gray nodded and said it was too bad she wasn’t already twenty-one. “I’ll come pay a visit,” he told her.

  And then it was Thanksgiving, and Mary Bet and her father had had a lonely time of it because he decided he didn’t want to have anybody over, nor go to anybody else’s house. They’d eaten in haste and gone off to their separate activities—he to his reading and she to her sewing, in adjacent rooms so that they could hear each other, yet have no need for talk. Keeping him quiet seemed the best medicine. Dr. Slocum had visited twice since the episode with the banana plants and had left some Hill’s sedative pills that her father threw away. She’d served him tea infused with skullcap and ginseng. Acquiring these ingredients had been awkward since she’d broken off with Joe. But Mrs. Dorsett was as neighborly as ever. Two weeks after he was fired, Joe left for Raleigh to take a job in a glass factory, the same that had supplied panes for Cicero’s greenhouse. The night before he left, he came over and brought her a jar of his mother’s damson preserves.

  “I never gave you a ring,” he told her. “But someday maybe you’ll let me.” She smiled and took the jar and offered him a seat. “I’m not angry with you, Joe,” she said. “I don’t know what happened at work, but there are people around who’ve said things.”

  “I wasn’t even allowed near the shaping and framing machines,” he said. “They just had me sweeping and carrying. And sometimes dusting. Like a colored boy. One time they let me take inventory of a shipment.” He sat back. “How’s your father?”

  “He’s fine. Now you go on home and thank your mother for sending this over.”

  “It was my idea,” Joe said. “I don’t want to leave you like this.”

  “You’ll be fine. I expect you’ll take up with some girl in Raleigh before Christmas.”

  He didn’t disagree. “Won’t you miss me?” he asked.

  “Of course I will,” she said. “You’ve been a good friend.” She could feel the dismissive tone to her voice, like a grown-up reassuring a child, and she really did wish he would go on home, for the truth was she felt a pain of longing for him already.

  Cattie Jordan’s arrival a week after Joe’s departure seemed to
Mary Bet a blessing worth any amount of her aunt’s high-handedness. Like all children of a forgiving nature, she believed that her own people were basically good and kind, and so any slights or cruelty could not have been deliberate. Because she chose to love her aunt, she could not, in fact, recollect any particular transgressions, let alone that Cattie had constantly corrected her grammar and table manners, had banished her friends, had suggested that Mary Bet pick out heirlooms for herself, had even tried to dictate how much time she spent with her sick father. It had, after all, been a trying and tense time for them all.

  Now that she was a grown woman, the lady of the house, and her father’s sole heir, things were different. It was her decision to invite her aunt, and it never occurred to her that Cattie Jordan would be anything other than helpful. From her aunt she had learned what she considered an invaluable lesson—you can’t be slighted if you don’t recognize an offense.

  Cattie Jordan arrived with no fanfare in a rockaway pulled by a single gray mare, driven by an old family retainer who stayed seated while she got herself down. She wore a heavy dark brown coat over a beige dress, a wide-brimmed black hat piled high with dried flowers in tulle, and a strand of pearls. Her auburn hair looked faded, with here and there some gray, and new lines had etched themselves around her eyes and mouth, little betrayals of her vanity. She greeted her niece and brother-in-law on the front porch, then took herself upstairs and settled right in as though she had only been gone a few weeks. Though reduced in circumstances, she was determined to establish her place in the family. Her husband had died of overwork a year back, and with her children grown she had nothing except her D.O.C. meetings and the town gossip to live for. But she had returned to a family that had changed. Mary Bet was no longer the obedient adolescent girl she had been five years earlier. She was now the survivor of a family that had once swelled the house with laughter and talk and activity, and her father was the withered tree that had somehow borne the storm, while the weaker had uprooted and tumbled away.

  Cattie bustled in and immediately started ordering Essie to air out the south guest room and change the sheets, because she didn’t “believe in letting linens sit unused for weeks at a time—they get musty and moldy, and mold can cause migraine, which is what killed my husband’s sister.” Mary Bet went out to help the driver struggle with Cattie’s trunk and bags—enough luggage, Mary Bet thought, for a grand European tour.

  From the first night, it became clear that something had shifted in the way the three of them got along. Cicero was now sick in his mind instead of his body, but Cattie’s philosophy, it soon became clear, did not allow for sickness. She and Mary Bet had once tolerated each other to work toward the common goal of nurturing Cicero back to health. Now, Cattie’s intentions were different, and Mary Bet could not at first put her finger on exactly in what way.

  At supper they talked mostly about Cattie’s son, the new sheriff. Mary Bet told her aunt, as she had before, that, yes, she was very proud of her cousin. Hooper Teague was a likable young man—the county had elected him by a big majority, black and white.

  Then, after Cattie had taken a mouthful, Mary Bet said, “Daddy has decided to take some more time off from the store, haven’t you, Daddy?” For she was not sure from one day to the next what her father would say. Just the day before, he got dressed as he had for thirty-nine years and headed down to the Alliance. He sold items to his old customers and told them stories just as if he hadn’t been gone the last two weeks. When people asked how he was he said, “Never better,” and everyone, Robert Gray included, had thought he was back to himself and might stay that way. But after dinner he’d gone upstairs to nap and had not come down until after four, and then he came rushing down pulling his suspenders up over his undershirt and Mary Bet told him he should go on back up. He’d said, “Nonsense, I’ve got to order some coffee for Thad and Oren.” But he caught sight of himself in the mirror, and Mary Bet took his arm and reminded him that William Wade was managing the store for a while and would order the coffee. He went back upstairs complaining of a headache.

  Now Cicero looked at his daughter and nodded, smiling in his old wise way, and it felt to Mary Bet like a blow to the heart because it was only a simulacrum of her real father, as though a lesser man were playing the part of Cicero Hartsoe. “I reckon so,” he said, taking another bite of sweet potato.

  “Well, I think that’s just a wonderful thing,” Cattie Jordan said. “I wish Mr. Teague had taken time off. It would’ve done him a world of good, but it’s too late for that now. Cicero, you should be proud to have a daughter who looks after you so well. She’s capable of running things. Why, I bet she could even run that store of yours, if you’d give her a chance.”

  Mary Bet wished her aunt could phrase things a little more tactfully, but she appreciated the effort she was making. She doubted Cattie Jordan had had much experience with the kind of illness her father was experiencing, but at least she was game enough to try to help out in a crisis. Anyway, her father seemed unfazed by his sister-in-law; he even laughed in a way that appeared genuine, and she wondered if his personality was undergoing such a change that he would soon become someone she no longer recognized.

  “Daddy,” she said, “tell Aunt Cattie Jordan what Mr. Gray said at the store yesterday.”

  Cicero looked puzzled. Then he brightened. “He told me he was thinking of putting a lemon tree in his summer kitchen. Said my bananas gave him the idea. He likes to chew on the peel—claims the citric acid keeps him from getting sick.”

  Cattie Jordan nodded and smiled politely. “That’s a wonderful hobby,” she said. “Growing things like that. I don’t have the touch for it, or the patience. I have to be working with people—I’m down at the church all the time, or the D.O.C., going from one meeting to another. Mary Bet, have you seen to getting your papers together?”

  “Papers?” Mary Bet said, trying to think of a polite way to suggest to her aunt that she had no intention of filling out an application, that she was not interested in an exclusive social club built around her father’s brief participation in a lost cause.

  “You know what I’m talking about. For the Daughters of the Confederacy. I understand when you were younger you hadn’t time for such things, but it looks like now you’d be interested in your heritage a little more. In your father’s distinguished service, if nothing else. It’s really more fun than it sounds, and it would give you some prominence around town, some standing that you can’t afford to pass up. You never know what people are talking about in private parlors, that’s why I make it a point to be in as many private parlors as I can.”

  Mary Bet took all this in, and then said, “I don’t much care for parties that aren’t about doing things—I need to be making things with my hands, or singing.”

  Cattie Jordan faced her across the table, a flicker of her old sternness rippling across her face that suddenly reminded Mary Bet of her own mother. Except that Cattie Jordan in the last few years had taken on so much weight she looked like a puffed-up version of her former self, the family resemblance fainter. “Why, Mary Elizabeth, I’m surprised at how little you understand. The D.O.C. does all kinds of important work—much more important than singing, I can assure you. Why, last year our chapter raised over a thousand dollars for the veterans’ home in Durham, and the historical committee is constantly busy. You can’t turn your nose up at ladies’ organizations for so long before you won’t be invited anymore. I’d hate for you to have to learn that the hard way, dear.”

  “I’m all for ladies getting together for good works,” Mary Bet said.

  Her aunt eyed her with skepticism. “You’re not being influenced by the radical element are you, Mary Elizabeth? Those factory girls who think women should have the vote and go around smoking cigars and wearing pants and I don’t know what else? I expect soon they’ll be wanting to grow beards.”

  “I don’t know about smoking cigars,” Mary Bet said, just to see what reaction she’d get. She realized it
had been a long time since she’d had so much lively conversation at the table, even if it did verge on an outright argument. She could not help adding, “But I’m sure that it won’t be long before women will have the vote.”

  Her aunt looked shocked, as though Mary Bet herself were the leader of a group of trouser-wearing basement revolutionaries. Cicero only glanced from one woman to the other, not apparently following the conversation. Then he suddenly said, “I don’t see that would be such a terrible thing. If a Nigra can vote, why can’t a woman?”

  Cattie Jordan shook her head, then with a tight-lipped smile said, “Well, you have a point there.” Then she winked at her niece and said, “I bet your daddy would just love to see the new pavilion down at Mount Jordan Springs. It’s the cutest little thing, with green-and-white gingerbread trim.”

  Mary Bet looked at her father, his head bent over his plate, napkin at his throat, and thought how strong he still looked, his hair, though grizzled, still covering his head, and his neck wrinkled yet ropy. “What would you think of that, Daddy?” she said, wondering if maybe her aunt was right—an outing would be good for him.

  Cicero nodded and looked up. “Yes, the springs of beauty and health,” he said. “I shall drink only from the spring of health, for I can attain no greater beauty.”

  Cattie Jordan laughed in a way that seemed giddy to Mary Bet, and her eyes flashed as though she were studying an object of value. “I myself shall drink from both,” she said, trying to imitate her brother-in-law’s rhetorical flourish, “because I can’t afford at my age not to.” She laughed to point out that it was a joke, and Mary Bet gave a polite little snicker, though it was difficult having to simulate gaiety for a person who could only ride on someone else’s natural humor and steal undeserved laughs. Cicero glanced at his daughter as if to ask what was funny.

  “We’ll go next Saturday,” Mary Bet said. She wanted to encourage any sign of interest from her father. She assumed that her aunt’s coquettish behavior was also simply a technique for getting him up and moving.