Love and Lament Page 28

  Mary Bet flipped through the pages, one by one, and as she did so a piece of lined paper slipped out. She saw right away that it was in Siler’s hand, and she could not recall ever putting any such page in the book. She was happy that she had, but at the same time her heart was surging with the thought that there was a message from the beyond tucked away for her to find. There were little penciled drawings on one side, the kinds of sketches he used to make when he was dreaming up ideas in his workshop—a horseless carriage with a stick-figure driver, something that resembled a Ferris wheel with a crank-start engine at the base, a flying machine with birdlike wings that apparently flapped.

  On the other side was a note in blue pen: “Dear Sis, please please please” then the crossed-out word “forget” and above it another crossed-out word that appeared to be “forgive,” and then some more crossed-out, illegible writing, followed by, “I have make a terrible mistake.” It was neither signed nor dated. A scene came to mind that she had shut away, but it came back now as startlingly clear as a dream she had just woken from. Her father coming from the closet with the rifle, which he was loading. She had known somehow that he was doing it, just by the way he was talking and acting, and then his expression as he pointed the gun directly at her heart.

  She remembered being unafraid, and how that realization had given her such a welling of strength that she could feel all of her soul pouring forth like a fountain from the top of her head and filling the room with the most buoyant light in the world. It was her father she was worried about and how he would feel if he pulled the trigger. The whole world was squeezed into the tiny word “if,” and it was surrounded by her blinding light. For a moment her father seemed to disappear, and then Cattie Jordan had touched her sleeve—it was silky black bombazine—and though Cattie Jordan said something, there was no sound, because her own wide, refulgent, prismatic light drowned out everything.

  Now, sitting in her bed, her legs folded up in the same way her father’s had been under the apple tree, she thought: Siler must’ve known, must’ve seen something he never told anybody about. The thought pressing in her mind was, He was afraid of turning out the same way … He did turn out the same way.

  Then this morning, walking to the office after a night of tossing and turning, she’d asked herself why she had agreed to go on a long trip with a strange man. Well, not exactly strange, but she didn’t want to lead him on—had she not made a vow never to get married? God would surely punish her for breaking that vow. God had kept her father from dying and had kept her from the flames of hell, and she could not now go back on her word to the highest power in the universe. If she did she would surely be punished for eternity. Was that a childish notion?

  She was almost crying by the time she got to the courthouse. She thought she could be perfectly happy, and useful, as an old maid, just like Flora and Miss Mumpford. She might not be alive now if she hadn’t made her bargain, or was it mere superstition on the part of a young girl? She wanted to ask someone, but the only person who came to mind was Leon.

  And then he came in with flowers, and the worries of the previous night disappeared. They went on the trip to Hartsoe City, and Leon was as charming and natural as if they were strolling up the street. He was quieter than when he was around the courthouse, though, and so polite and courtly she almost hoped he would talk a little more about himself. But he only wanted to ask about her, and whether she was comfortable, or did she need a cushion or a blanket. And then he wanted to know about her family, and she told him a little about each member who had died and what she recalled about that person. “When Myrt died up in the mountains,” she said, “your father was mighty kind to us.” Leon nodded and said he remembered.

  The trip went by in a blur, Mary Bet taking in not so much the sense of what Leon told her about the schools—though she did try to pay attention—as the tone of his voice and how patient and kind he sounded when he was talking to the principal and the teachers. They all admired him because he listened carefully to what they said, and made them smile and laugh at little jokes and witticisms. And he didn’t give them any big promises, just told them he was going to do everything he could to bring in more money and improve their school, and they seemed to respect him for this.

  Not until they were on the way home did she ask him what she had been holding back. “Leon,” she said, “what about this army business. You’re not serious about it?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. His tone, which had been so gentle and solicitous, was suddenly firm.

  “You don’t think it’s best to stay here where you’re needed?”

  “I know where I’m needed. My mind’s made up.”

  “What if I didn’t want you to go?” she said, trying not to sound coy.

  “I’d say, Miss Mary Bet, I’m flattered, but I’ve already signed on. We’re assembling this summer at home stations. I’ll be up in Durham.”

  “For how long?”

  “As long as it takes. I don’t mean that in a smart way, I just mean I’m on for the duration. They say it’ll take eight or nine months to train us up right.”

  “By then it’ll be all over.”

  “I expect so.”

  “And you’ll quit all that marching about like boys and come home?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  She sat there letting the carriage wheels fill the silence. She watched the withers of Leon’s bay shift right and left under the checkrein, a white mark there pulsing with the neck muscles. A motor chugged somewhere behind them, and then a black Model T duck-honked as it passed, kicking up a cloud of dust. Leon watched in admiration as it drove off. “I found a note from my brother last night,” Mary Bet said.

  Leon was quiet.

  “He died up in Morganton a long time ago.”

  “Yes, I know,” Leon said. “I stopped by the Alliance that day and your father wasn’t there, and I thought that was strange. And Thad Utley told me your brother had been hit by a train.”

  “That’s right, he was. This note hasn’t any date on it, but he was apologizing for something. He said he’d made a mistake, and he slipped it into my scrapbook so I’d find it, and here it’s been fifteen years and I discover that note. It gave me a chill, I tell you. It was like his ghost coming back.”

  “Maybe he was telling you it was all right to move on.”

  Mary Bet regarded Leon Thomas, how he was chewing the inside of his cheek, as he did when he was trying out a thought, unsure what effect his words might have. Was he only trying to get her to give up her past, or did he really mean what he was saying? “I could never forget my brother,” she said.

  “No, of course you couldn’t. You were close to him, weren’t you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you loved him like any good sister would. You and he were the last left, so it’s natural you would …” He couldn’t seem to arrive at the right word, so he let it go at that. From dark clouds in the west came an eructation of thunder, like a barrow full of stones, tilted and holding a moment before rumbling forth. It suddenly felt cooler. Leon clicked his tongue and flipped the reins, and the bay stepped lively.

  Mary Bet nodded, thinking, so that’s what people think of the Hartsoes—survivors, clinging to each other in the storm. “You think I oughten worry about it?” she asked.

  Leon hesitated, then looked at Mary Bet, his gray-green eyes searching her eyes and nose and lips, as though he would know everything about her. It jolted her so, she could feel her insides lurch. She was not sure she wanted to be known like that, by any man or woman. And she realized then that she had never been in love, and that it could be she was now falling in love for the first time in her life and that it might be the only time she would. Looking into Leon’s eyes was like looking into a mirror, for he was reflecting what he saw, and seeing only her. It was such a simple giving up of the self and its heaviness that she smiled and then laughed.

  “What?” he said. “Do you think I’m funny-looking?”


  “No, of course not, Leon,” she said. “I think you’re right good-looking.”

  He smiled and nodded, then turned to the road to hide his embarrassment. “I think you’re right good-looking too,” he said.

  The thunder echoed for a while, but then grew fainter, the storm passing toward the north, leaving them with just a shower that pattered on the canvas buggy top as Leon was raising it. They rode along quietly, the gentle rain cocooning them in the buggy, with the smell of watered earth rising all around. By the time they got home they were singing “Sweet Adeline,” and Mary Bet didn’t want the trip to be over.

  CHAPTER 23

  1917–1918

  THEY HAD TWO months before he was off to training. They went to church picnics and on group outings with friends. Mary Bet got Flora to come along on a bicycle expedition to Siloam Springs, where it was loud with whip-poor-wills. And one Saturday they went in two automobiles, in a merry group that included Amanda and Mr. Hennesey and Clara and her husband, to a nickelodeon in Raleigh. The piano player was quite lively, they thought, but they felt uncomfortable with all the cigarette smoke and the smell of beer and the click of balls from the adjacent poolroom. Leon had been there before, and when they were out on the sidewalk Mary Bet asked him if he was a drinking man. He said he had “had the occasional drop,” but, no, he was not a drinking man. She looked at his broad, strong features and let it go. Afterwards they went to a real movie theater and saw a Mary Pickford feature, and they all laughed and later crossed the street for ice cream sundaes.

  During the week Leon worked hard, helping the interim superintendent, a young teacher from Hartsoe City, prepare for the coming year. The county board thought it a shame that their new superintendent should be taken off to war so suddenly, but they told him he’d come back a hero and be even more ready to tackle the job.

  Every one of their fleeting weekends, Leon and Mary Bet spent at least a few hours together. They went to a croquet and watercolor party, and to a pig roast out at Leon’s brothers’ place, where they put big yellow onions on the coals until the outsides were black. And one time he took her to Chapel Hill to a lecture on the German Immigrant Question, in which the lecturer cautioned the audience to be on their guard but not to draw hasty conclusions. “All of our families were immigrants at one time,” he said.

  On the weekend before Leon was to leave, Mary Bet invited him to a musicale at Clara’s house in Hartsoe. They borrowed a friend’s Oldsmobile, and when they got there it was just like the old days. Afterwards, they drove across the creek and up to Mary Bet’s old house. They got out and stood admiring it, the wide porch with its fancy balustrade seeming to welcome them back, and Mary Bet pointed out where such and such had happened. She was hesitant about going up to the door, but Leon went on ahead and said he’d like to look inside. He knocked and a small, friendly-faced woman in her middle thirties came to the door. Mary Bet recognized her as the wife of the couple who had rented and then bought the house more than ten years ago. Leon introduced himself, and by this time Mary Bet was at his side. The woman invited them in.

  The house had a different smell, but there was something familiar about it too, a dark whiff of well-trod pine and the lingering sense of a ghost tribe that had merely moved to the corners to accommodate a new familial presence. They sat in the parlor on a tired formal sofa with a red brocade. Mary Bet said she’d heard the Dorsetts had moved, and the woman said that they had gone back to Salisbury after Mr. Dorsett was fired for mouthing off at the manager.

  “You know there’s a bag full of gold around here somewhere?” Leon said.

  “Is that right?” the woman asked, looking at Mary Bet to see if Leon was serious.

  Leon got up and went to the window. “Colored fellow that used to live here buried it out there somewhere. Isn’t that right, Mary Bet?”

  Mary Bet came and stood beside Leon, feeling the warmth of him through his shirt. He had kissed her for the first time only the day before, and now there was but one week until he left. She wondered if he were not a little afraid of her—did she give off an attitude of superiority that made him treat her like a piece of china? He seemed so earthy and manly with his friends; the expressions he used and the way he laughed and joked made you think he’d be more physical and aggressive. She appreciated his tact, but now she wanted him to hold her. “Yes,” she said, “old Zeke buried that money of my grandfather’s. We dug around but never found it.”

  Outside, a girl was playing in a crab apple tree that had been too small for climbing when Mary Bet was her age. These people had let the place go a bit. The old icehouse was scabbed with whitewash, and high weeds grew about the pump and its washstand, upon which lay a few grimy dishes. There was no need for the pump, since the house had running water; it also had electric current, which the power company had installed for free. Electricity was coming to Williamsboro too—it was just a matter of time.

  On the wall beside the fireplace a cuckoo came out of his clock and announced the time. The pinecone-shaped weights shifted, and Mary Bet remembered the sapphire pin.

  Leon turned to the lady of the house. “Shall we go out and tell your daughter about the buried treasure?”

  When the woman began leading Leon through the side porch, Mary Bet held back. She went over and ran her finger along the crack beside the fireplace. Still there. She thought she’d take it out now, but she couldn’t make herself do it. It felt like stealing. The pin was no longer hers, never had been—it was her mother’s, and then Myrtle Emma’s.

  She went out with the others, and around to the back where the yard was nearly a meadow, its high grass concealing a choir of crickets and snap wings. They still had a garden, but it was much smaller, the tangle of berry bushes and briars climbing farther up out of the gully. Their hostess took them around to the front, and Mary Bet nodded at what she said, as though everything were new to her.

  The woman asked, “Do you all have children?”

  Leon laughed and glanced at Mary Bet, who pretended she hadn’t heard. “No, ma’am,” he said. “We’re—no, we don’t.”

  “We’re not married,” Mary Bet said.

  The side yard leading to the barn was in much better condition. The grass was clipped, and edged by cheerful borders of petunias and dahlias and hydrangeas. It was as though the house had turned its back on its history, leaving a preserve where children could play. They stood in the shade of the apple tree where her father had plopped himself, his gun in his lap. Over against the summer kitchen, vines of morning glories crept up the side of the greenhouse. The windows were clean, and Mary Bet could see a profusion of hothouse plants inside.

  They thanked their hostess and made their way back to the car. Leon held the door for Mary Bet, then went around and switched on the magneto. She watched him cranking the engine and wondered: Is this competent, kind, irreverent, jolly man to be my life’s companion? They waved to their hostess, who was standing on the front porch. And as their hands came down, she took hold of Leon’s hand and squeezed it. He smiled at her, apparently unsurprised, though she wondered he couldn’t hear her heart thumping.

  They were quiet on the drive home, and as they approached her house, he slowed the car and stopped a block away. “What’s the trouble?” she asked.

  “I’m going to miss you, Mary Bet.” He leaned over and, because she had taken off her hat for the drive and put a shawl on her head, he could only kiss her mouth. She kissed him back, wondering briefly if the neighbors were watching. His lips were soft as a woman’s—of course they were. It had been so long since she had kissed a man on the mouth, but Joe Dorsett was still only a boy then. She could hardly count Mr. Jenkins, because he had not seemed like a man somehow, but a preacher. Leon was strong and yielding, he tasted like cigars and salt and warm water, and she wanted him to go on kissing her like that, though she was afraid it wasn’t the thing to do, out here on the street a block away from her own church. And yet she wanted more, that feeling of the essence of all p
assion held in a single kiss.

  She pulled back and said, “That’s enough for now.” She smiled and put her hand on his cheek. Life, she thought. I haven’t missed it yet.

  “I could come inside.”

  “You’re a sweet boy,” she said, wondering where those words had come from—was it something she’d said to Joe Dorsett long ago?

  “Will you marry me when I come home?” He kept leaning in to her, as though he could hold her there just by willing it.

  “I don’t know, Leon. I’ll think on it.” She didn’t mind that it wasn’t a proper proposal on bended knee. She just was unsure how she felt about the idea of being someone’s wife, a helpmate and friend for the rest of their lives, sleeping with him, having his children. She was afraid of being such a disappointment that he would go off to a city to find satisfaction—probably he already had. Who was he, really? He wasn’t family. But wasn’t that how families were made, by two strangers? It was all so overwhelming, with his big presence here in this automobile, as though she were being driven headlong into some future that could only end in worse tragedy than she’d already known. All this swooped through her mind, and then she heard her own breathing, and his, and she said, “I don’t know if I can give up the love of my friends for some kind of dangerous love.”

  He began to laugh, then stopped himself. “You don’t have to give up your friends. And I’m not dangerous.” He held out his arms. “See?”

  His smile was comforting and so familiar she thought he must have some sort of spell over her. Was she in love? “I’m very fond of you, Leon,” she said. “But I’ll need time to ponder it. I want you to take good care of yourself while you’re away.”

  And then they kissed again for a long time, and somehow, she could hardly recall, she was in her house again. Had he driven that last block, or had they walked it? She knew that he had held her, standing outside the house—she could still feel his arms around her, the weight and shape of him, even his manhood pressing against her belly, urging her to give up everything and come with him. And here was Flora, her thin lips breaking into a tolerant smile, her foot working the treadle and her hands feeding the machine.