Love and Lament Page 3

  “What in God’s name?” Captain Billie said.

  “There’s no God in here,” his wife said. “So you can cuss him all you want. He won’t hear you atall. Go on.” She had managed meanwhile to uncork a smaller jug and then decided to just drop it, and she watched satisfied as it broke across the already whiskey-wet floor. Too cowed to interfere, Captain Billie could only stand there as his wife went one by one to the jugs parked against the wall and assaulted them as best she could. When the floor was a smashup of glass and whiskey and rolling jugs and bottles, she paused for breath, hands on her narrow hips, her gray-black hair fallen over her face.

  “Well,” Captain Billie said, “at least you saved me some.”

  “Get out!” she yelled. “All of you, get out of my house now!” She pointed up the stairs, where Mary Bet and her mother were huddled, too stunned to move. “And don’t you ever come back. You hear? I’ll get the constable!” She grabbed the envelope from the table and stuffed it into her blouse, then stood waiting for the men to collect themselves. They traipsed up, heads bowed like scolded boys; Alson paused on the steps to touch his hat to his head. He started to offer an apology, but Margaret cut him off. “Keep on stepping,” she said.

  Samuel Hartsoe could not simply leave more than two hundred dollars for Billie Murchison, nor could he dip into the pot to extract his share. He glanced down at the two hands of cards, then up to Billie. Billie nodded at him, almost imperceptibly, and as the two men reached for their cards, Margaret threw herself on top of the table, scattering cards and money all over the sticky floor.

  The men went down on hands and knees, grabbing up what bills they could, not caring how wet they were, and stuffing them into pockets. “For shame,” Margaret said, “for shame.”

  Crabtree woke up. He rolled over, sniffed the pool of whiskey in front of his face, and regarded his father and Samuel Hartsoe crawling around on the floor. When Margaret saw him, she went and stood over him a moment as if undecided. Then she bent down and tugged at his elbow. “Come on, son,” she said. “Get you upstairs.” He rose and walked with his mother to the steps. The last thing Mary Bet saw before her own mother whisked her off to her bedroom was her two grandfathers getting up, brushing themselves off wordlessly, and looking at each other as if there was nothing they could ever say about what they had just done.

  In the morning the house was so quiet all Mary Bet could hear when she came downstairs was the ticking of the tall-case clock. She opened the cellar door and slowly descended. Shafts of light from the half-window revealed a clean-swept room that looked as though no business of any sort had been conducted there of late. There were things she didn’t want to remember, but they were inside her mind and so they had to be real.

  CHAPTER 3

  1893–1895

  MARY BET STAYED with her grandparents for two weeks, during which her brother got sicker and sicker. It began to seem as if Willie had always been sick. He was eighteen and a string bean, their mother said, and he could walk on his hands and recite Julius Caesar at the same time, rolling over when he came to “all of us fell down.” He had green eyes and he brought home orphaned squirrels and rabbits and other animals he found out in the woods.

  Finally, on an Indian summer day in late September, he died, and there was another funeral to attend. This time Mary Bet was allowed to go to both the funeral and burial, and she could not understand why she had not been allowed at the funeral of her sister—it was just like a church service, except that her mother was crying, as were her sisters, O’Nora and Myrtle Emma. Myrtle Emma, who was fourteen and a good singer and pianist, let her play with her cameo brooch, which made Mary Bet very happy, though she could not help crying a little herself because Myrt seemed so sad.

  On Sundays they went to the new Baptist church in town, but for funerals they went to Love’s Creek north of town, where the ancestors were buried. The preacher said that Annie had been so lonely in heaven that her twin brother had to go up there and keep her company. Mary Bet pictured God calling Willie from a magnificent bank of sunlit purple clouds, and Annie there waiting for him. Outside, the men lowered the coffin on ropes and then everybody came back to the Hartsoes’ for refreshments. The women brought platters of fried chicken and roast beef, sliced ham and biscuits, vegetable casseroles, deviled eggs, cucumbers, and pies and cakes, and Essie, who had attended the funeral, was back in the kitchen in her apron stirring pitchers of iced tea and lemonade. But hardly anybody touched the food.

  “There’s a reason for everything,” her mother said. “Everything under the sun is God’s will and we have to accept it.” Usually something had gone wrong when she said this, and her lips would tighten, as they would when she didn’t approve of things.

  Mary Bet still thought of her family as the ten fingers of her hands—her father was her right thumb, her mother the left. Then there was eldest sister Ila (a beautiful young woman engaged to be married to the eldest son of Robert Gray) and big brother Tom (the tallest finger), both on her right hand, then Willie and Annie—the weak fourth fingers who were in heaven. Myrtle Emma and Siler were younger, so they were on the left hand; Siler was special because he had come to replace the other Siler who was in heaven, and he was also deaf. O’Nora and Mary Bet were the baby fingers.

  She still prayed for Willie and Annie in her prayers at night. It felt to her as though something were missing, her own fingers or her hand. She felt as if God had robbed the family, but she didn’t like to talk about sad things, because it made other people sad. Everyone wore black for a long time after the funeral, and the person who wore it the longest was Mary Bet’s mother. It seemed as if she had always worn black and always would—long black dresses and black high-shouldered jackets on Sundays and black pleated skirts and blouses around the house. So that it came as a surprise to see any bit of color at all—a navy blue blouse, or a bit of purple in her scarf, as if a long winter was finally thawing and the crocuses were coming out again.

  Willie had brought home a crow with a broken wing. The bird would hop along a perch Willie had fashioned from a green stick and nailed to an eave in the hen coop. It would chortle at the hens, eyeing them with its head tilted. Sometimes it would flap down for some grain, scattering the chickens, and then use its beak and feet to climb the wire mesh back up to its perch. It was given a separate, smaller enclosure. Since she was now six years old, Mary Bet inherited the job of taking care of the crow, which merely meant giving it fresh water, because whoever grained the chickens would toss some grain over to the crow.

  She was afraid of the crow, but she tried to be brave because it was an honor to do something for her departed brother. The crow would see her coming and would watch her out of one beady black eye. She discovered that she could wait for several days before adding more water. When the crow sickened and lost its luster, no one said anything but that it missed Willie and, anyway, they never expected a wild bird to live long in a cage.

  She spent a night at her grandmother’s and when she came back she was busy with her new hobby of threading needles and sewing patches together for a doll quilt. When she went near the coop, the bird gave her an accusing look, and she was afraid even to use the stick to turn the old water out.

  After a while the water turned stale and green. The crow sat on his perch and no longer squawked at her or at anything. Sometimes he rustled his dull feathers in the sun. She decided that the crow was sick for some other reason and that when he hobbled about his cage, eyeing her with his now milky eye, he was blaming her. Then one night she heard a long low caaaaw. The next day she thought she might have dreamed the sound, yet when she went out to the crow’s enclosure it was empty. No one said a thing at breakfast, but later on Siler told her, in his back-of-the-throat voice, “Ya caw’s daahd.” No one had ever called it hers before.

  “Do the chickens need fresh water?” she asked, thinking that he would never guess why she was asking.

  He looked at her, his dark brooding eyes piercing her, and po
inted to her lips. She repeated it while he held her jaw, then shook his head in confusion. He touched his open palm, “Show me.” He was five years older than Mary Bet and already skilled with his hands. He could repair chairs and tables and fashion toy tops and soldiers as quickly as anybody. His tutor had given him some basic signs so that he could talk with his family. At the deaf-and-dumb school in Raleigh, if he used his hands to talk he had to sit on them; if he used them again that day the teacher rapped him on the knuckles with a ruler, or tied his hands behind his back. He was sent home halfway through the term for hitting a baseball through a window and refusing to say “I’m sorry.”

  Siler studied Mary Bet’s lips, held her jaw and made her repeat the question. She pointed to the well, then to the chicken coop. She dropped her arms and pouted. You couldn’t ask a roundabout question of Siler—you had to say what you meant. His eyes brightened, then narrowed as he studied her. He nodded, “Yah.” He put bird-beak fingers at his mouth, crooked a finger down, then touched W fingers to his lip. “Birds need water.”

  Though she had just begun to learn her own alphabet, she knew what he meant. His whole face explained that it was a stupid question, that of course they needed fresh water, every single day.

  It was the next spring when the hanging of Shackleford Davies took place on Gallows Hill in Williamsboro. It also happened to be a market day and so Mary Bet was allowed to ride the thirteen miles over to the county seat—starting at six in the morning got them there just past nine. The frost on the ground had melted by the time they arrived, but they still needed coats and sweaters and bonnets.

  When they got there, carriages were already parked solid half a mile west of the courthouse. Cicero found a colored boy to mind the horse, then they began walking, the crowd getting thicker as they approached. They took their time, Cicero limping along with his peg leg and walking stick. The courthouse looked to a small girl like a castle, its cupola rising in three layers from the roof; but its pillars and pediments sent a sterner message than the turrets and arches of fairy tales—justice was the center of the county, not silly romance. And today there was punishment and revenge in the air, and the excitement frightened her.

  They began walking north. Throngs three and four people deep lined the wooden sidewalks along the two blocks of downtown and spilled into the road. Mary Bet asked her father to lift her up on his shoulders so she could see, but he was crippled and she knew better than to ask.

  Then shouts arose and people said he was coming. Mary Bet worked her way through the sea of legs until she was at the edge of the street, and she could hear iron wheel rims grinding, hoofbeats drumming closer. And right then came two men mounted on big black horses, one of the men wearing a metal star on his jacket, and behind them a cart pulled by a mule. In the cart sat a man in a black suit and a wide-brimmed hat. His face was shaded so that Mary Bet could not see his eyes, but he seemed to be squinting into the sunless sky. She shivered when he looked in her direction. It was the Devil again, Mary Bet felt certain. But then she was not so sure, because his hands were bound together in his lap. She watched him as he swayed, perched on a long yellow pine box.

  Some people yelled out mean things, but most watched and talked and laughed, as if they were at a parade. Mary Bet felt a shivering tingle run all the way from the back of her neck to the base of her spine. Maybe he was the Devil, and he wouldn’t die from the hanging. People said he’d come from the west, from Tennessee, where he’d been a preacher, and he’d gotten a job on a farm up near Silkton. But he wouldn’t do what the farmer asked him to, and when the farmer told him to leave, he took a hand ax and chased him out to a field. Then he chopped him until he was dead.

  Mary Bet could see this man wasn’t the same as the preacher in the road, because he had lighter hair and he was shorter and thicker. But the Devil could change shape, and it could be that he was after her for killing the crow. Now she was back with her family and they were caught up in the crowd as it followed the bad man’s carriage. She took Myrtle Emma’s hand—Myrt was her favorite now that Annie was dead. Myrt scolded her for running off.

  Her father chuckled and said, “I thought they’d taken you to Gallows Hill.”

  But Mary Bet didn’t think it was funny and she blushed. She was guilty, and if she didn’t mend her ways she would end up just like the bad man. “Do they ever hang girls?” she asked her sister.

  Myrtle Emma laughed and said, “What a silly question, Mary Bet. Of course not. They don’t hang women either, unless they’re very very bad.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I guess if a woman killed somebody, she could be hanged, but I don’t want to think about it.”

  “Neither do I,” Mary Bet said, but she did think about it. She knew that Shackleford Davies was guilty of murder, as well as robbery and incest. “What’s incest?” she asked.

  “Hush now,” her sister said.

  “I don’t want to go to the gallows,” Mary Bet said, for she was worried now that they would follow the crowd. It was sure to be a long walk, and she did not want to see a man hanged from a rope.

  Myrtle Emma laughed again and lifted her sister up by her armpits so that she was looking straight into her face. “You’re as good as pie,” she said. “You’re never going to the gallows, ever.”

  She wanted to tell her sister about the crow. But she was afraid. Perhaps Myrtle Emma already knew and had forgiven her, or perhaps the family had met and decided it was not her fault after all. She was still the baby, and always would be.

  Myrtle Emma took her father’s hand and said, “Can we go to Pfifer’s?”

  Cicero slowed and looked at his children, his beard like a buffalo’s, and said, “Isn’t it too early for ice cream?”

  “We should go now before all that crowd comes back,” Myrtle Emma suggested.

  “That’s a right smart idea,” he said. “I promised your mother I wouldn’t take you to any hanging, and here we were going along like we were off to the circus.” The crowd surged by.

  And then they were heading back into town, Mary Bet riding like a possum baby on Siler’s back. There were other people who didn’t want to go see the hanging. Her father stopped and talked with several men wearing nice clothes, jackets and ties, not like the farm people in tattered clothes who had been surrounding them. But there had also been nicely dressed people who wanted to go see that horrible ugly thing. Why would they want to?

  Siler stood straight, until she was clinging to his neck, her pink dress up over her knees, and she no longer felt like a possum baby. “Pigback,” she said, but he had shaken her off and she had to walk. And then they were in Pfifer’s, where the floor was all tiny white and black tiles, and there were fans high up in a white pressed-tin ceiling. And they sat in a big wooden booth and ordered fancy ice creams. All five of them—her father, Myrtle Emma, Siler, O’Nora, and herself.

  “Don’t tell your mama about this,” her father said, winking at her. Then, “You want chocolate this time?”

  She shook her head and said, “Vanilla.” Which made him and the others laugh, and she blushed. She thought she should be more grown up next time, but she liked the eggy-sweet taste of vanilla. And when the cone came she forgot that she was embarrassed, and she licked it to a smooth ball like Siler did, except without the slurping noise, because her mother said it was rude but that Siler couldn’t help it. Her father was talking about the price of milk and how corn and wheat and cotton were falling dangerously, and she thought it had to be one of those things that grown-ups worried about. Maybe somewhere corn and cotton were falling, but she could see out the window that they weren’t falling here. She closed her eyes quickly and thought, “Please, God, don’t let corn and cotton fall, amen.”

  Siler tried to follow what the others were saying. He was the only boy at the table, Tom having stayed at home because he was grown up and had a job, and Ila because she was visiting with her fiancé. O’Nora said that if the farms failed the factories would fill
in. Cicero tilted his head in that funny way that made everybody laugh and said, “How does a ten-year-old girl know more than the idlers down at my store?”

  Mary Bet was sure it was something O’Nora had heard at school, and now Siler wanted to know what it was. Cicero turned to Myrtle Emma, who could spell with her hands faster and knew more signs than any of them, and she translated. Siler nodded and smiled his thin-lipped half-smile, as though he understood everything, whether he did or not.

  Market day was ending with ice cream, when it could’ve ended with a hanging. Mary Bet was bursting to tell everybody how happy she felt. She wanted to tell about the crow and the bad man and how cold it had been, but how after they had turned back to the confectionary the sun had started coming out and it had made her feel safe and hopeful. Her mother had recently stopped tucking her in at night and kissing her forehead and saying, “I love you, darling.” Her father still called her “baby girl” sometimes, when he was in a happy mood. She wanted to say that she loved her family and her place in it, and that she loved being alive on such a nice day with friendly people all around. Finally, she said, “This is a nice outing after all.”

  Her father laughed and pinched her cheek a little and said, “Yes it is, but you oughten tempt fate.” He rapped his knuckles on the table, and she picked her father’s hand up in both of hers. It was heavy and warm, mottled and bristly on the back but worn smooth as a river stone on the palm. If only she could protect it from danger and worry—and anger, too—then she would feel safe.

  ALL THROUGH THAT summer and fall and well into the next spring, no one was sick in the Cicero Hartsoe family. Ila’s wedding was fast approaching, was, in fact, only two weeks away when she took to her bed with a fever. When it was clear she was not going to make a quick recovery, the wedding was put off a month. Robert Gray’s son visited every day to see how his bride was faring. She would smile and lift her head from the pillow, and take his hand in hers. Mary Bet combed her hair out for her the way she had for Annie. Though she had never felt as close to Ila as to Annie—for Ila was a grown woman with her own concerns and more often than not away in some village teaching poor children how to read—she did admire her oldest sister. She had long jet-black hair, the same color as her own, and Mary Bet had decided to let her hair grow down to her waist, if her mother would let her.