Love and Lament Read online

  For weeks no one could coax a word from Mary Bet. She was afraid to speak, afraid that the Devil would come and take her away if she opened her mouth to say anything. It seemed there were crows everywhere that summer—squawking somewhere in the distance, flapping their black capes up to roosts on high dead limbs, perched in the trees outside her window, clicking and jabbering like crazy people, watching her and waiting. She talked mostly with Siler, using her hands in the way he and her mother had taught her. “Make it go away with your slingshot,” she told him. But he only laughed and patted her head, telling her it was bad luck to shoot a crow.

  One morning Cicero asked her, “Would you like to go back and stay with your grandparents for a time?”

  Mary Bet shook her head. “No,” she said, “I want to stay here.”

  Cicero nodded. “Well, child,” he said. “I’m glad to hear your tongue still works.”

  She talked incessantly after that, to anyone who would listen, including a stray puppy she found behind a neighbor’s house and gave to Siler. She talked about the weather and her sewing and the book she was reading that featured a girl who lost a silver dollar her mother gave her and had the hardest time finding it. There was nothing she wouldn’t talk about if you got her going, until Cicero wondered if she wasn’t talking so she wouldn’t have anything else in her mind to trouble her. Perhaps that was a good thing.

  The next spring, her oldest brother, Tom, got married; Captain Billie rapidly declined; and Cicero expanded his store to the rear. For now that his wife was dead he could not simply abandon his children and go rambling around the countryside.

  Captain Billie no longer got out of bed at all. He would sit up and shout orders as though he were drilling the Haw Boys on the front lawn. Margaret hobbled up the stairs three times a day with a tray of food. In his final week he said he craved nothing so much as a final taste of Tennessee sour mash whiskey, which Margaret refused to supply him.

  Finally, she broke down and went to Cicero’s store and asked him for a small bottle. Nobody but moonshiners sold liquor in Hartsoe City, but Cicero had a few bottles he kept hidden in the back of his store—gifts from customers who were cash poor. He gave her one as a present. She got home with her package and slipped the little flat bottle from its paper sack, the label with its wicked handwritten script spelling out ruination in honeyed words.

  She twisted off the top, breaking the seal and releasing the sharp yeasty sweet smell of the whiskey. She wrinkled up her nose in disgust, pouring a small glassful, for she had no idea how much constituted a proper drink. Thinking she’d put in too much, she considered returning some to the bottle. It would be easier to pour it out, but that would be a waste. She put the glass to her lips and tasted it. Sherry wine on special occasions was the strongest stuff she’d ever had, and since banning all liquor from her house she had not even touched fruitcake moistened with rum.

  The whiskey was warming at the first sip, sliding down her throat like a golden spike. She smacked her lips and took another sip—the taste of men and drunken revelry filled her with a satisfying revulsion. She understood at last why men drank it so greedily, but as to why they became slaves to it (and some women too), she could not fathom. It seemed such a pointless thing to devote one’s life to. She held it up to the window so that it caught the late afternoon light like water and took one more little gulp, shivered, and carried the rest up to her husband.

  Captain Billie, propped up like a grimacing mummy with bristly gray eyebrows and beard, reached a feeble, shaking hand out for the elixir. His once-bulging midsection was deflated now to a shriveled pouch. Margaret had to wrap her hand around his as he drew the glass to his lips. Then he shook his head and pushed her hand away with murmured protest. He touched the liquid to his lips, then stopped. “Get thee away,” he said, and tossed the glass down on his quilt that his mother had made for them as a wedding gift. The stain spread quickly over the green-and-yellow-check pattern.

  He died that night with Margaret sitting beside him in the bed, the quilt drying over the end of the footboard. She sat beside him until he no longer felt warm, and then she went and roused Crabtree. It was just after one in the morning.

  Margaret no longer wanted to stay in the house, so she sold it, paid off the back taxes and penalties that her husband had made a religion of ignoring, and went to live with Cincinnatus’s wife and children in Fuquay-Varina, where nobody knew that he had never enlisted in the war because he didn’t believe in fighting. Crabtree moved away to Slocum, and a family from Elizabethtown bought the old house and painted it and fixed it up so that it was hardly recognizable anymore as the old Murchison place. But Mary Bet would remember it all her life.

  Her brother Tom got pneumonia early the next year and died, just before their grandmother Margaret, who did not survive her husband by so much as a year. All that were left now were Cicero and his youngest son, Siler, and his three youngest girls.

  Cicero let his beard grow long, though it was no longer the fashion, so long that he tucked it into his shirt front. He went to work every morning except Sunday and came home, feeling older and more bent over nearly every day. His friends told him to take another wife. “Don’t know one that’ll have me,” was his response. “Not with my luck.”

  Her family was diminished, but even so, the next three years were among the happiest in Mary Bet’s life, and it seemed as though they could go on living that way for a long time.

  CHAPTER 5

  1897–1899

  AS THOUGH AFRAID their baby sister might die young, Myrtle Emma and O’Nora doted on Mary Bet as they would a cherished plaything, dressing her up in their old Sunday clothes, or taking her temperature if she had the slightest bit of flush to her face. Sometimes Myrt gave her a plaster of camphor left over from Ila’s illness. She would smear the fragrant oily paste on Mary Bet’s bare chest, then drape a fresh sheet lightly over her, and Mary Bet would lie on her pillow inhaling the nasal-clearing, hot, piney scent and feel as if she were floating in the clouds. Her sisters would wait on her until she grew so restless she got up and ran downstairs and out into the fresh air.

  “Mary Bet,” Myrtle Emma said, for she was now the oldest at seventeen, “you get back in the bed until I say.”

  “You’re not my mother,” Mary Bet replied.

  “But you’re not well enough to be out. You’re sensitive.”

  Mary Bet smiled prettily at her sister, because she didn’t like to contradict her, but really Myrt had nothing to worry about and she ought to know better since she was almost a grown woman. Mary Bet felt her own forehead. “I’m fine,” she said.

  “But you’ll get your dress dirty.”

  “It’s O’Nora’s, and she doesn’t mind.” It was the smallest possible lie—Mary Bet couldn’t remember any such permission, but it sounded like something O’Nora would grant. O’Nora was a tomboy who still climbed trees at thirteen.

  “It’s yours now, Mary Bet. You have to learn to take care of your things.” Myrt was quoting their mother and talking in a bossy way—both habits that annoyed Mary Bet.

  “I don’t need anything nice,” Mary Bet said. She shook her head so that the coiled braids Myrt had fixed for her swished against her neck.

  “Don’t say that, dearest. Don’t ever. Everybody needs nice things.” Mary Bet looked up and saw that her sister’s eyes were glistening; it made her own eyes water. Pretty soon they were both laughing at their foolishness and swinging each other around and around, hand in hand, and Mary Bet wondered if she would ever be as tall and lovely as Myrtle Emma, who could play the piano as if she were playing a harp, her long slender hands flowing gracefully over the keys. She had a narrow waist and a pronounced bustline, and though she claimed her eyes were bug eyes, Mary Bet thought her face was beautiful. Mary Bet had often admired her when she was dressing, and Myrtle Emma said, “You’re going to have a right smart figure. I can tell.” Which made Mary Bet giggle—but she thought that Myrt must be telling the truth, for why wo
uld she fib about that? O’Nora could only look from one to the other of her sisters, shake her head, and say, “I’d rather be strong than pretty.” The irony was that she was the most naturally beautiful of all Cicero’s children, with snapping blue eyes, sharply defined cheekbones, perfect skin, and dark reddish hair that she kept bobbed and unadorned.

  O’Nora liked to go out hunting with Cicero and Siler. She rode horseback with them, wearing a baggy pair of Tom’s old riding britches she’d altered and not minding the looks she got from neighbors and farmers. In an old hunting jacket and with her hair tucked beneath a slouch hat, she sometimes went unnoticed out to the cut fields, where she used her father’s sixteen-gauge over-and-under to bring down doves and quail. She was a better shot than her father, nearly as good as Siler, which kept him in a nervous state of concentration during their outings.

  Mary Bet wanted to be like both of her sisters. But she was afraid of horses and guns, and she thought she would never play as beautifully and look as elegant as Myrtle Emma. She didn’t know what she was good at. Siler was good with sums and good with his hands, which everybody thought was wonderful since he was not likely to succeed as a professional man. He could mend tables and chairs and he had made a three-legged stool with tools his father had bought from old man Hartsoe. Mary Bet admired what her brother and sisters could do, and she thought that when the time came she would prove good at whatever needed doing. Her mother had taught her to sew, but though she was the best in the family at mending she did not feel particularly proud of such a talent.

  “I’ll never be as good as you and Myrt,” Mary Bet said to O’Nora one day after O’Nora had told her she was planning on going to South Dakota to become a missionary to the Sioux Indians. “I’m not brave like you, nor pretty like Myrt.” They were sitting together in the parlor after Sunday dinner listening to Myrtle Emma play and sing from a book of sacred songs; the windows were open to the sighing of trees and the twittering of birds in their early summer nesting frenzy. Cicero was leaning back in his leather armchair—the only thing he’d bought for himself since he’d started a family—asleep with his mouth open. Siler was out hammering something in the work shed.

  “You’re pretty aplenty,” O’Nora told her, and Mary Bet was grateful she hadn’t just laughed. “And you’re brave enough. What do you need to be brave for?”

  “So I can go work with the Indians.”

  O’Nora appraised her sister, a skeptical look on her face. “Is that what you want to do?” Mary Bet nodded. “You want to go out to a reservation where it’s hot and dusty in the summer and so cold in the winter you can’t feel your toes? And there’re Indians everywhere?”

  “I’ll go if you’re going. You oughten to be alone.”

  Now O’Nora gave a little laugh. “I won’t be alone, silly. Who’s going to take care of Daddy if we both go?”

  “Myrt and Siler, I reckon,” Mary Bet said. She could feel a sly smile cross her face—the whole thing sounded absurd. Surely O’Nora would never go clear across the country to South Dakota.

  “Suppose they get married and move out?”

  Mary Bet shook her head and turned away, and when O’Nora realized her little sister was upset she took her hand and turned it over and, studying the lines on her palm, told her she was going to have a long life and two love affairs and three children.

  “Do you think Myrt’ll get married and move away sure enough?” Mary Bet asked.

  “Myrt’s a flirt,” O’Nora said, loudly enough that Myrtle Emma looked up from her music to where her sisters were giggling on the sofa. But whether or not she’d heard, she was still in the world of her song and Mary Bet knew she wouldn’t stop until it was over.

  Mary Bet wanted to ask O’Nora, “Will I ever be good at anything?” but it was vain to worry so about oneself. Just be good, she told herself. Just try to be good at being good, and, as Captain Granddaddy said, God will take care of the rest. “I think I’ll be the nicest,” she said out loud. But O’Nora was reading a book now and was too gone in the story to hear anything.

  Being nice was something Mary Bet thought she could be very good at, yet she did not always feel nice. Her brother, who was between Myrt and O’Nora in age, had a way of aggravating her without his trying. Siler was different from anybody in her family living or dead, and not just because he was deaf. He was alert and sensitive to everything around him to such a degree that if anything was amiss, he was the first to know of it. If Myrt and O’Nora had been arguing with each other privately, he would know right away, and he would sulk off by himself until they had made up and come and found him, holding hands to show that they were no longer fighting. He was relentless until the things of his world were back in their proper place. “It’s his way of keeping himself from grief,” Cicero explained. Myrtle Emma liked that Siler would put his hand on the side of the piano and watch her, and she thought that he might’ve been a great musician. It seemed tragic to her, watching him trying to understand something that was in the air all around, yet as hidden and mysterious as signals running through telegraph wires, or the voices of ghosts who were not yet angels.

  There were things that Siler seemed not to understand. Words that had more than one meaning were particularly hard for him to grasp, so Mary Bet would talk to him in the most basic way she could. You couldn’t say “make haste,” because there was nothing to make; you just said “hurry.” It was silly to pick a crow with Siler—he would only laugh. Yet he knew distances “as the crow flies,” and was delighted when some expression like that made sense.

  It irritated her that he knew more about her and her secrets than did her sisters. He could tell when someone was coming up the stairs; he knew by feel who it was. And he knew about the crow. When she was out in the chicken yard once gathering eggs in a basket and he was pouring water into the trough, he gave her a stern, meaningful look. He was like a watchful spirit; he seemed to know everything about everybody. And he told her one time that Netty was not real, not even a ghost, and that she should stop talking to her. “Who do you mean?” she asked. Not bothering to use his hands, he said, “Yah Nadda.” Then he mimed patting a little girl on the head, exactly as Mary Bet had done earlier in the day. When his back was turned she said, “You’re stupid.”

  She felt bad, so she went off to find a place where he could never follow her; she walked up to the First Baptist Church and around back to the cemetery where the new graves belonged to people other than her family. It was cool on the grass at the edge of the little graveyard under the shade trees, and she thought it was all right to sit there in her skirt on a warm summer day. One newly cut stone was that of a four-year-old boy, who had died from pneumonia—she’d heard her sisters talking about him. She said a prayer for him, ending with, “If you’re in heaven, see if Annie’s all right.” She made a cross in the air with her joined palms, a ritual she’d invented after her mother died. When she wanted the prayer to have special weight—if someone was sick, or late coming home—she washed her hands before praying. She would also touch her fingertips to her chin three times while praying and whisper the words.

  “You stay here, Netty,” she whispered, as though still praying. When she opened her eyes, she looked around and realized that her friend was gone. But she knew that she could find her here if she ever needed to.

  Later in the summer, Siler was afflicted with glossalalia. It happened in the middle of a tent revival out at Calvin Grove. He stood up when the preacher asked if there were any souls ready to be washed in the spirit. It was as though he’d actually heard the preacher speak. He raised his hands in the air, and began talking in words that came from much farther back in his throat than ever before. The words seemed to issue from down in his belly, from deep in the earth, and he a faucet of indecipherable language that had not been heard since man first named the beasts of the field. It lasted less than a minute—a period of time that felt stretched into the edges of the day—and left on his face an expression of joy and satisfaction
.

  That evening Siler told his father that he thought he might like to go spend a year at the institution in Morganton after all. He could make friends and get a job as a carpenter and maybe even learn to minister in some way to the deaf. He’d had tutors over the years, and spent weeks at a time in Raleigh, but he’d always grown too homesick to stay for very long. His parents had relented and let him come home. “I believe our boy is growing up,” Cicero announced to his family at supper, Siler grinning self-consciously. He patted his little sister’s shoulders, and Mary Bet felt a warmth spreading through her body. Siler was never affectionate with her, had never hugged or kissed her that she could remember, and now he suddenly seemed different.

  THE CENTURY WAS on the point of turning, Mary Bet not yet twelve years old, when O’Nora fell off her horse jumping a stone fence.

  By this time Haw County had shaken off its postwar depression and was shambling toward a modern agrarian future, with Hartsoe City as its boomtown. The Silers and Murchisons and other pioneers were no longer the most prominent families. Newcomers seeing opportunity in the forest and the railroad bought up acreage and built mills to turn trees into lumber, sometimes without even moving from Richmond and Raleigh and wherever else they lived. The village had become a town with a handful of little stores, a tobacco warehouse, two saw and planing mills, an agricultural machinery plant that also made window sashes and blinds, three boardinghouses, and some thirty-five houses clustered around the old Murchison place. There was a farmers’ alliance and a weekly newspaper that advocated for farmers’ rights over those of businessmen. A black entrepreneur named J. T. McAdo opened a barbershop, and then a photographic studio and a jewelry store. And still more things were coming—there was talk of a furniture company and a telephone line to connect Hartsoe City to Williamsboro. Out in the county, the cotton mill up on the Haw River in London was the biggest cash concern.