Love and Lament Read online

  When, a week after she had arrived, Cattie Jordan announced at dinner that she and Cicero intended to be married, Mary Bet did the first thing that seemed natural. She laughed. She laughed because she was not sure she had heard right, and she kept laughing because, her aunt’s withering look telling her it was not a silly joke, she could not think of a proper response.

  “Are you done?” Cattie said. She had given up calling Mary Bet “young lady” or anything at all.

  “You can’t be serious,” Mary Bet said, looking only at her father, who was already standing up.

  “Yes, we are,” Cicero said, “and out of respect for your aunt and future stepmother, you might be a little more sensitive.”

  “Well, I—” For the first time since the death of Siler, three years back, Mary Bet felt the grief of loss. But this was a new variety of grief, swift and punishing: her father, whose love she could always rely on even through physical and mental illness, had suddenly and arbitrarily withdrawn from her. “I’m very—” She could not make herself say the words. All she could do was look at her father, tears coming to her eyes, and wonder if he had not completely lost his mind.

  “I’m not feeling well,” she said, and hurried upstairs to her room.

  She could not stay up there for long, or she would be late to teach the afternoon sixth-grade English class. She steeled herself and walked down slowly and deliberately, giving her aunt time to get out of the way if she chose. But Cattie Jordan was standing in the dining room entryway, waiting for her. Mary Bet smiled and said, “I’m very happy for you and father. I’m sorry I was feeling unwell.”

  “I know it’s sudden,” Cattie Jordan said. “But you’ll see it’s for the best. You won’t have to worry about him any longer. I expect you’ll be wanting to make your own way in the world before too long.” She smiled placidly, like a bisque doll with a painted face, and added, “Of course, you’re welcome to stay here as long as you like.”

  The rest of that day and the next, Mary Bet tried to adjust to the idea that she was soon to be a visitor in her own house, under the sufferance of her aunt. Very soon, because the wedding was to be held before Christmas, less than a month away. She wanted to talk to her father about it in private, but he seemed never to be alone; it was as though Cattie were guarding him like a mother her child. Finally, near the end of that first week, she found him in his study when Cattie had gone out to see about her wedding dress, the idea of which so repulsed Mary Bet that she moped in her room until she realized she had an opportunity.

  “Daddy?” she said, coming into the study. He looked up, his gaze vacant, and she wondered if he’d been reading or just staring at the book. “Can I talk with you for a while?”

  “Of course you can, baby girl. You can always talk. And I know this has been hard on you, change always is. But Cattie Jordan and I have quite a bit in common, not just our families. I think she’ll be a good wife, and then you’ll be free to do as you please.”

  “I’m not looking to leave you, Daddy.”

  “But someday you may feel differently. Not that I need someone to look after me. Are you familiar with the levirate marriage rule?” He went on. “It’s a Jewish tradition whereby a man marries his brother’s widow. This is a sort of levirate arrangement, it’s just a woman marrying her sister’s widower. There’s nothing wrong with it.”

  “I know that, Daddy. It’s just that—well, I didn’t know you were so fond of Aunt Cattie Jordan. When did that start?”

  “Probably back during my illness, and we’ve kept up a friendly correspondence. And I guess even before that, we were always fond of each other. You know, it was Cattie Jordan that I first courted, and she turned me down for Vernon Teague.”

  Mary Bet shook her head, trying to erase what she’d just heard. “But, Daddy, she’s nothing like mother. Mother could be stern, but she was a saint compared to—”

  “That’s enough of that,” he warned. “I won’t hear anything against her.”

  Then came the wedding, a small affair at the Methodist church. The reception back at home was equally modest, for Cattie was not interested in wasting money on a party. There was no singer; ginger ale and water were the beverages, and there was a small cake and a bowl of hard candy. Mary Bet spent that night at Clara’s house so she wouldn’t have to be alone. After one night at the Mount Jordan Springs Hotel, the bride and groom came home.

  CHAPTER 16

  1905–1906

  THEY WERE A family of three, then, at Christmas, and it was all Mary Bet could do not to look at her father across the table during their turkey dinner—to which they’d invited no guests—and burst into tears. The whole thing had the unreality of a bad dream from which she was bound to awaken. She had only to endure it for a while.

  “Mary Elizabeth,” Cattie said, “I see your posture hasn’t improved much in the past five years. I suppose it’s my fault for not correcting you more, once I’d spotted the defect.”

  Mary Bet found herself wondering why it was that people like Myrtle Emma and Siler had died, while Cattie Jordan was as healthy as a horse. She sat there happily eating her turkey and dumplings. Could she not come down with typhoid, or a bad case of pneumonia? Mary Bet pictured taking care of her aunt as punishment. Could she not meet with a freak accident—being struck by lightning, or inhaling a bee, or slipping in a hog pen? She silently asked forgiveness for such a horrible thought. She sat up straight. “No,” she said, “it’s my own fault. I know I shouldn’t slump.” Or choking? It sometimes happened.

  “When I was a boy,” Cicero said, “my father used to make me go out and tell Zeke and the others to hurry with the horses.” He made a muffled laugh. “I didn’t much care for that.”

  “What are you talking about, Daddy?” Mary Bet glanced at her stepmother, but Cattie paid no attention.

  “My daddy had all kinds of things he made me do. He had me to sit in the outhouse until I’d memorized ten verses out of the Bible, every Sunday.”

  Now Cattie looked at him, her calm smile refusing to break. “Cicero, I don’t believe that’s a proper subject for the dinner table.”

  He belched and nodded. “I’d be out there hollering, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.’ And thinking, ‘except I wouldn’t mind some fresher newspaper.’ ”

  “Mary Elizabeth, you may be excused. We’ll finish up here.”

  Mary Bet had already lost interest in cleaning her plate, so she got up and began clearing away the dishes. Cattie had taken the liberty of letting Essie go, telling her new husband that Mary Bet could easily handle the work of a servant, and besides, Essie was scarcely worth keeping, her rheumatic joints making it so she could hardly get up the steps. They needed to save money, because she only had her “widow’s mite” and Cicero was paying a young man to run the Alliance, a young man, mind you, who had ambitions, Cattie Jordan had heard, though she couldn’t remember exactly from whom. Mary Bet wondered how small this “widow’s mite” really was, but she knew better than to ask. Her main job as she saw it was to get along, helping her father as best she could until such time as she deemed it appropriate to leave. She didn’t know where she would go or what she would do. Clara had told her she could come live with her and her mother. She thought she might go to St. Mary’s finishing school in Raleigh, but when she mentioned the idea at supper a few nights before Christmas, her aunt smiled placidly and asked her where the money would come for such an extravagant plan.

  Mary Bet wondered if her aunt had given the matter of her future any consideration. The day after Christmas she decided to find out. The three of them were sitting in the parlor, Mary Bet arranging decorations on the spindly cedar tree she’d been allowed to drag in (though Cattie had ruled that candles were not a good idea). Cattie was putting embroidery to a cushion piece and talking about what a waste it was to spend money for a new brick building out at the prison camp. “The wooden buildings are fine,” she said. “Those criminals are not going to run off.”

  �
��It’s because the conditions aren’t humane,” Mary Bet said. “They’re drafty and you can’t keep things clean.”

  “Well, I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but I think the old buildings are just fine for criminals.”

  “Daddy,” Mary Bet began, “and Aunt Cattie Jordan, I wanted to ask you what you had in mind for me to do with myself. If you don’t want me going off to college in Raleigh, did you have anything particular in mind?”

  Keeping her head in her work, Cattie glanced over at Cicero, who only cleared his throat and went on reading. “Most young ladies stay at home and help out until they’re married,” Cattie said. “I was married by the time I was your age, but you still have plenty of time. Until then, I would think you’d be happy to have a roof over your head and good food to eat and warm clothes. Consider the lilies.”

  Mary Bet didn’t see the use in pointing out that she only wanted reassurance that she was, in fact, welcome in her own house. Her aunt’s privations extended to every corner, with a few exceptions—the food was always plentiful, particularly on her own plate, and she had started ordering things from catalogs. From Raleigh and Richmond and even New York came a new walnut credenza, a turkey rug for the vestibule, brass andirons, three ceramic hens, a brass umbrella stand. Old things went up to the attic, already crammed with pieces she’d brought from Williamsboro. Mary Bet didn’t know where it would end, unless it was with them all in the poorhouse.

  One morning as Cattie was finishing her breakfast, she asked Mary Bet if she’d ever heard why it was that her grandfather Samuel was so bent on perpetual motion. Mary Bet shook her head. “I didn’t know there was a reason for it,” she said, and she could feel the hair on her arms rising, as her aunt licked her lips.

  “Yes, indeed there was a reason. There’s a reason for everything. You see, he went crazy, and the reason he went crazy is what his father made him do. John Hartsoe was a hard man, and he believed in a certain way of doing things. I told you about him beating Scilla’s father, but what I didn’t tell you was about Scilla’s uncle. His name was Shorty—that was because he was short. He apparently didn’t listen any too well, or he was just naturally obstinate. He was out mending a stone fence one day, and your great-grandfather rode along and told him he wasn’t doing it right and that he had to take it all apart and start over. Shorty said something about how if he knew anything, he knew how to mend fence. Scilla said he used to talk to himself and probably didn’t mean any harm, he was just encouraging himself to the task—‘Shorty know how to mend fence’—something like that.”

  Mary Bet could hear her father turn a page in his sitting room. She wished that Essie were here, so that maybe Cattie Jordan would not tell tales from the slavery days. On the table the cut-crystal stopper to the syrup vase caught the morning light and made a pencil-thin rainbow against the wood. She nudged the stopper with her finger so that it rolled over; her aunt caught it and stuck it in the vase.

  “Something must’ve upset old John Hartsoe earlier in the day for him to do what he did. He ordered his son to shoot the old slave.” Cattie stopped talking and ate the last bite of toast.

  “What?” Mary Bet said. “My grandfather shot Shorty?” She’d never heard the slave’s name before, and now he seemed as real as anybody.

  “According to Scilla, he did it without protest. After that, a Nigra named Jonas ran off. When they caught him, they nailed his foot to the barn floor with a tenpenny nail. After they let him loose, the foot swelled up. But he still could walk, so they nicknamed him Able, because he was able to walk. They still, some of the Nigras, name their chilren A-b-l-e, Able. And you can’t tell them it’s spelled differently. Anyway, your grandfather turned out to be no better than his father. Your daddy when he was a boy had a little black dog that he loved more than anything. Old Mr. Samuel would kick it and make your daddy cry, and then he’d laugh. At his own son. To toughen him up.” Cattie clamped her mouth and stared away, as though trying to decipher the riddle of the Hartsoes, or to forget it.

  That winter was colder than any Mary Bet could remember, though it could’ve been simply that the house was colder. She spent more time in her room than she ever had, with her books and her sewing. She wrote long letters to friends, trying to explain her situation without complaining about it. If not for Clara’s friendship and understanding, she thought she might just kill herself. But as soon as the thought surfaced, she saw her brother walking along the tracks and she shook the idea away. She resolved to confront her aunt, and so she kept a mental list of everything that she would tell her. Yet it felt petty—what could she say that would not make her feel small herself? She wanted to make her aunt as miserable as she was made to feel.

  But it turned out that she didn’t get the chance. One morning in early spring, the first day that Mary Bet didn’t see her breath when she woke up, her father had another spell. “I feel like I’m at the bottom of the river,” he said, sitting over the remains of breakfast.

  “What river, Daddy?” Mary Bet said. She glanced over at Cattie Jordan, who was still working on a biscuit thick with jam.

  “You know what river. The Deep River, of course.”

  “Maybe you’d better go lie down,” Cattie Jordan suggested.

  “That wouldn’t help atall,” he said. “But maybe if I went upstairs, I’d get to some better air.”

  Mary Bet stood to help her father, but he was already up and looking at her as if annoyed at the suggestion he was in any way infirm. “I just don’t see the point in any of this,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t. It’s all—” He shook his head and started forward, catching himself on the side table, then on the sofa.

  “It’s what, Daddy?”

  “It’s all black,” he said. He maneuvered out of the sitting room and, catching himself in the doorframe, paused, and then stumped into the vestibule, rattling the tin mail plate on the credenza and the mirror that Siler had framed. “All black.”

  Mary Bet came out into the vestibule and watched her father pull himself up the stairs. She heard the creak of his steps overhead, and she went into the kitchen to start frying pork chops. A few minutes later he was coming back down, his stumping gait quicker than normal. Mary Bet ran out into the vestibule. “What is it, Daddy?” she said.

  “I can’t find it,” he said, moving past her and around to the dining room. She followed him as he pushed through the swinging door and into the kitchen. Then he wheeled around and faced her. “Where did you put it?” he demanded.

  “Put what, Daddy?” She tried to keep her voice calm and even, but her chest felt suddenly tight and it was hard to breathe.

  “I’ll find it,” he said and stormed into the summer kitchen and out the back door.

  Cattie Jordan came and joined her niece, and they watched Cicero stride across the yard toward the toolshed. “Has he been like this?” Cattie asked.

  Mary Bet shook her head. “No, I don’t know what he’s after. He loses things and then thinks I’ve hidden them, but I haven’t. The only thing I hid one time was his whiskey, and he about tore the house apart looking for it.”

  Now Cicero was coming back in, his face red and his eyes wild with some kind of torment Mary Bet had never seen, as though something were pursuing him. The hair on the sides of his head stood out in tufts like a fledgling. He was talking to himself, or singing, and it was not until he was on the back porch, letting himself into the parlor that they could hear a tuneless song—“Heart was all a-flutter, around the bend the number ten, peanut butter.”

  Mary Bet went around to the porch, and just as she stepped out, she saw her father reaching up on the shelf where they kept lanterns and old gloves and hats. And he pulled down a box of cartridges. “Aha!” he said. “I knew they were there. Can’t fool me.”

  “What are you doing, Daddy?” Mary Bet said, her voice shaking, for now she was frightened.

  Cicero brushed past her and went inside to the vestibule closet, reached in, and pulled out his gun. Mary Bet
came in from the parlor just as Cattie Jordan stepped around from the dining room. “I’ll go fetch the constable,” Cattie said. She started out the front door, then paused. “Maybe you should come too.” Cicero was fumbling with the cartridge box, trying to open it with one hand while holding the rifle with the other.

  “Daddy?” Mary Bet said. “What did you need your gun for?”

  He looked up, glanced at his daughter, then at his wife, who was halfway out the door. “To by-God shoot it!”

  “What for, Daddy? What for?” Mary Bet came over to stand by her father. It was instinct to want to close the gap between them. She noticed as she reached for him that her hand was trembling, and it was the strangest sensation, as though her hand were not part of her body. She felt as if she were viewing the whole scene from some distant place, some mountaintop far in the past or the future, and it all slowed down until it was a still-life painting on a wall. In the quietness of her mind she heard the word “life.” And then the word became a feeling of such strange oblivion that she felt herself in perfect balance between sorrow and joy.

  His back to her, he began loading shells into the breech. She touched his shoulder. “Daddy,” she said. He jerked around, the gun swinging against her leg.

  “I’m going to do something I ought to’ve done long ago,” he said. He pointed the gun at Mary Bet’s chest, then at Cattie’s face. He looked calm, almost cheerful, his eyes distant and content, though his breathing was coming in deep gulps, as if he could never get enough air.

  “I’ll just step out a minute,” Cattie said. The words hung in the air like holes in the silence, behind which the pork sizzled in the kitchen.

  Cicero now pointed the gun at the side of his own head, holding the barrel with his left hand and moving his right down to where he could operate the trigger with his thumb. His eyes were wide in fear now, as though he’d finally awoke to what was going on, to the madness he was creating to overcome the madness in his head.