Love and Lament Page 8

  CHAPTER 7

  1900

  FOR SOME DAYS she could not shake off a sense of impending doom. She and Siler avoided each other, speaking to the other only when they had to. He went off to school and his short, weekly letters, ungrammatical and misspelled, were the only news they had of him for some time. Then came word that Grandfather Samuel was on his deathbed, and Cicero and Mary Bet traveled down to Hartsoe’s Mill to bid him good-bye.

  This time Zeke did not come out to greet them and unhitch the horse from their buggy. A stillness hung over the place, and as they alighted and began to walk toward the house, something caught Mary Bet’s attention. It was peeking out from beside the barn—a curved piece of wood that looked out of place. They walked around to the back of the barn and beheld the strangest contraption they had ever seen. Mary Bet knew right away that it was the remains of a full-size version of the model she had seen months ago in the mill house. A wheel mounted to the side of the barn sat suspended above a wooden basin lined with clay and sand, in the bottom of which stood a few inches of murky, putrid water. A long, hollowed-out pole teetered on the edge of the basin and ran along the ground to a pile of timbers that suggested perhaps a scaffolding system that had given way and tumbled over, taking with it the pole and its complicated gears and helical piping. A long trough lay at the farthest reach of the destruction, the millrace that, but for gravity, might have channeled an unceasing circuit of water. Off to one side were the crude beginnings of a millstone apparatus. Lying spread on the ground, recumbent as a dreamer, the whole thing bore a kind of grand abstract logic that it was apparently unable to achieve standing up.

  “What in God’s name?” Cicero said.

  “Perpetual motion,” Mary Bet replied.

  They stood gazing at the fallen pile of timber and metal, grass and jimsonweeds sprouting up through the heap, as at the ruins of a stone colossus in the desert. “Perpetual motion,” Cicero echoed quietly.

  They went inside. Mary Bet had been in her Hartsoe grandparents’ house only once, and that had been so briefly and so long ago she could barely recall it. Now strips of whitewash hung from the clapboards, and bees flew in and out of a chimney.

  They let themselves in the dust-rimed front door. The first thing that Mary Bet noticed was the smell. It was as though she had entered a tomb that had been anointed with camphor and sealed up for a thousand years. The odor was so sharp she had a hard time inhaling, yet in a few moments she adjusted to the predominant smell and noticed complicated hints of mold and overcooked greens and chicken grease. The furniture was draped with heavy cloths bearing a gray film that turned out to be thick, coagulating dust. Cobwebs festooned the walls and stretched from the corners down to the cracked ridges of ancient china cabinets and the latticework on an old secretary. Shawls of cheesecloth soaked in moth-proofing camphor were draped on floor lamps and chandeliers and even doorknobs, like hexes to keep out the Devil.

  It was so hot and musty they were sweating just walking around the first floor, looking for a window to open that wasn’t nailed shut. They headed upstairs and then along the dingy corridor that overlooked the vestibule, the bare floor canted dangerously toward the rail and balusters, which themselves looked less than sturdy. Outside the closed bedroom door of his father, Cicero paused. He tapped lightly with a fist. “Father?” he said. “It me, Rezin Cicero.”

  For a moment the house was as quiet as the wreckage outside; then they heard a shuffling from within, and a strange, soft jabbering. They entered the room. Zeke, dressed in a patched-up butler’s uniform, with tails and white gloves, was just coming to the door. He raised his grizzled head, sunk beneath bony shoulders, and said, “Won’t y’all come in?” He gestured vaguely toward the opposite wall, but there was nowhere to sit, other than the broken split-bottom chair that was apparently Zeke’s final post in the house. Samuel lay propped on feather pillows, his long nose angled not quite heavenward and his right hand gripping the edge of the sheet up at his chest as though afraid someone might try to pull it away. His left arm was crooked around a leather bag that lay half on the bed, half in his lap. The bed was littered with open books, trays of food-encrusted dishes, and papers filled with diagrams and writing in Samuel’s precise, minuscule cursive.

  Zeke picked up a flyswatter and leaned over to where he could fan Samuel, who lay there quietly mouthing strings of words. “Damn Flood and his Rosicrucians.” “A closed cycle, a closed cycle.” “Around and around and around.” “Vhat did Newton say about it? Not a thing, not a damn thing.”

  “He just keep goin’ like dat,” Zeke said. “Sometime for a hour. Den he shake de bag, and I undo de drawstring so he can see what’s in it.”

  “What is in it?” Cicero asked.

  Zeke looked at Samuel, who at that moment opened his eyes and shot a searing look back, then closed them and said, “Around and around. Sie sind der Teufel.”

  Zeke said, “I’m not s’pose to know, but it’s gold coins, mostly, and some silver. ’Long with some Confed’rate money that ain’t worth burnin’.”

  “How long has he been like this?”

  “I’d say about two, th’ee weeks. But he took a turn for the worse on Friday. That’s why I sent word.”

  “Does he eat and drink regularly?”

  “Won’t touch nothin’ but graham crackahs and chicken brof, chicken brof and graham crackahs. I don’t have the strent in my legs hardly to keep bringin’ it up and down the stairs.”

  Samuel opened his eyes again and tilted his head so that he could see his son and granddaughter. He seemed to look beyond them, and Mary Bet thought she had never seen a head that so nearly resembled a skull, the skin the merest gauze over the bones. He mumbled, “Have you read your book? Your book?”

  “Yes, Grandpa,” Mary Bet said, “I have.”

  “Don’t be proud, proud.”

  “I won’t be,” she said.

  Cicero looked back and forth from his father to his daughter. “Daddy,” he said, “it’s me, your son.”

  Samuel made a faint gravelly sound and closed his eyes. “I know who ’tis,” he breathed. “Vhat do you vant?” He clutched the bag closer onto his lap.

  “Just to see how you were getting along.”

  “Huh,” Samuel noised, his chest rising and falling with the effort of showing amusement, or disgust, or something else—Cicero could not tell what.

  Zeke held two long leather straps that looked as though they’d been cut from bridle reins. “I had to tie his arms to de bed so he wouldn’t bite his toes. Twiced I did dat.” He shook his head, its gray fringes thin and straight as a white man’s. “I din think a old man could do dat. But wif his hands tied, he cain’t pull his feet up close enough to his mouf. I come in once wif a tray and he had his toe in his mouf, bitin’ till de blood come. I say, Mr. Sam’l, no need for dat, I got sumpn to eat right heah.”

  Mary Bet stared at her grandfather, trying to picture him devouring his toes, but he seemed peaceful now, his breaths coming in little puffs from his half-opened mouth.

  “I don’t want your money, Daddy,” Cicero said. He stood there in his rolled-up sleeves, arms crossed over his chest, staring at his father. “I never did.”

  But Samuel lay unmoving and unheeding, and Mary Bet took her father’s hand and said, “We should go downstairs and let him rest.”

  Cicero scratched his beard and nodded. “Well. I ’spect you’re right. Ezekiel, I appreciate all the trouble you’ve gone to. I’ll make sure you’re paid for it.”

  “Mr. Sam’l say he done laid sump by for me. I reckon I be all right.”

  “You know whereabouts he laid it by?” Cicero gave Zeke a friendly, conspiratorial little smile, the look, Mary Bet thought, mixed with a just a hint of skepticism, as his glance shifted over to the bag of money and back.

  “Yes, suh, I do know.”

  Cicero nodded. “Good then. We’ll just go on downstairs and make ourselves at home. Call down if he needs anything.”

  Samue
l stirred and muttered something. Then, “I don’t need that house. I’ll build my own.” A few garbled sounds followed, then silence.

  Throughout the day and into the night Mary Bet went up and down the stairs checking on her grandfather. Finally, just as dawn was breaking, Cicero said they might as well go on home. “He could last like this for another week.” They went up a final time to say good-bye to Zeke, and found him curled up on a pallet of blankets beside the bed. Cicero leaned down to his father and said, “We’re going home, Daddy. We’ll be back soon.” He touched the old man’s shoulder and looked closely at him. The leather bag lay enfolded in Samuel’s embrace, his other hand clutching a piece of rolled-up foolscap. “I don’t think he’s breathing,” Cicero said. “Daddy?” He removed the paper from his father’s grasp and unfurled it. Covering every square inch, front and back, were drawings of wheels and inclined cylinders and sluiceways, their lengths and other specifications indicated with arrows and notes.

  It was impossible to tell when he had done these drawings. One doubly underscored note read: “radius must be exactly ¼ the screw’s length!” Another: “as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.” He handed the paper to Mary Bet and she read aloud, “To grasp the total process of redistribution of matter and motion as to see simultaneously its several necessary results in their actual interdependence …” She left off and put the paper back on the bed.

  Mary Bet thought that if she didn’t ask now, she might never have another chance. “Why didn’t you and Grandpa Samuel get along?” she asked.

  Cicero shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, staring at his father’s lifeless face. Then, “He thought I was weak.” He stopped, his mouth open to words that would not form themselves—in his mind or on his tongue, his daughter could not tell which. He said, “I had a dog. He used to beat it, and then he laughed if I cried. To make me tough, I reckon … I didn’t care for how he treated the servants either—he had a different idea about things.”

  “What did he—” Mary Bet started. She didn’t know what she wanted to ask.

  Her father smiled, but his eyes were far away. Then, so quietly she could hardly hear him, he said, “There was something his father did that affected him …” Mary Bet looked from her father to her grandfather and back, waiting for more. “He did the best he could,” he finally said.

  She wanted some explanation—no, he hadn’t done the best he could, she wanted to say. He was mean and miserly, as mean as Satan her mother had said. But her father had gone mute, and would say nothing more about what had happened long ago. He reached into the leather bag, forcing his father’s dead arm out of the way, and pulled out a handful of coins. “Here,” he said, offering a few to Mary Bet, “here’s your inheritance.”

  Mary Bet looked at them and shook her head. “It’s too much.”

  “Just take it. Zeke won’t know what to do with all that.” He grabbed her hand and gave her two five-dollar and two ten-dollar gold pieces. “I’ll give the rest to Myrtle Emma and Siler.” She looked at the money, still shaking her head, then regarded her grandfather. It seemed wrong to rob him like a vulture while he was lying on his deathbed. But perhaps her father was right, and she thought with greed of all the rest of the money still in the bag.

  The funeral at Love’s Creek was sparsely attended, most of those who knew Samuel Hartsoe having long preceded him to the grave, and the others not particularly moved to see him off. Some friends of Cicero’s came and a few distant Hartsoe relatives. Zeke was the only black person in attendance, and after the burial he shook hands with Cicero and his children and, with a forlorn look, said he didn’t know what he was going to do with himself. He came to live with the Hartsoes, occupying a little storage room in the summer kitchen. Cicero told him it would be too cold out there in the winter but that they would figure something out; Zeke said he didn’t mind the cold at all, that the stove on the other side of the wall would make the room warm as toast. In the end it didn’t matter, because he died a week after Thanksgiving. It was unclear what became of the money bag, or exactly how much was in it.

  When they got home the reception had already begun, the house no longer their own. Women from church had laid the dining room table with platters of fried chicken and roast beef, kettles of rabbit stew, pies and layer cakes, casseroles and other dishes that this time would actually be eaten. “R.C.,” one old man said to Cicero, “I’m sorry about your daddy.”

  “I am too,” Cicero said, shaking his hand.

  When she could slip away, Mary Bet went out to meet her brother, who was making his way on a path between the fields at the edge of town. She knew that he would come this way rather than taking the road, where people would offer him rides that he would have to politely refuse. They met up in a grove of tall trees and didn’t say anything at first, just walked back toward their house. After a while Mary Bet said it was sad about their grandfather.

  “He was a mean old man,” Siler said. “He never spoke to me.”

  “He told me to read my book, and not be proud.” They walked on a ways, into a glade with shafts of sunlight pouring in like the foundations of heaven. “I saw him playing cards once with Captain Granddaddy. He was scary.”

  “He was the Devil.”

  Mary Bet grasped her brother’s wrist, and put a finger to her lips. “Hush, Siler. God can hear you.”

  “God can’t hear anything,” Siler told her, scowling at the ground as he walked. Then he brightened suddenly and looked up into a shaft of sunlight and raised a fist and uttered something loud and incomprehensible.

  “Are you talking in tongues again?” Mary Bet asked.

  Siler shook his head.

  “Then what did you say?”

  “I said, ‘If you can hear this, strike me dead.’ ”

  Mary Bet breathed in sharply. Of all people, she thought, her own brother, who had sinned with her, should not test God so, and yet she could not bring herself to chastise him. “You don’t think God punishes us for our sins?”

  “He punishes the righteous, and exalts the sinner. Ask Daddy.”

  “Daddy says things because of all his sadness. But he knows it’s not true. Not in heaven.”

  “I don’t care about heaven.”

  “Well, you should.”

  Siler nodded and glanced at his sister. “Maybe you’re right,” he said, smiling his half-smile.

  WHEN SILER WENT back up to Morganton, Mary Bet felt a measure of relief. But then Myrtle Emma headed west to her teaching job, and the house seemed forlorn. The night before she was to leave, Myrt saw her sister’s tears and said, “I’ve made up my mind. I’m just not going to go. I’ll find something here.”

  Mary Bet put her arms around her sister, as much to hide her face as anything, and said what she knew Myrt wanted to hear. “Don’t be foolish. There’s nothing for you around here. You go on, we’ll be fine.”

  And then she was gone and like that they were down to two people, the youngest and the oldest. There was something about the community of three people that was lacking with two—with three nobody had the responsibility for keeping a conversation going at meal times. Now the family was like a two-legged stool. Whatever was she to say to her father, who seemed more remote and older than ever? Was he going to end up as austere as his father? They would pass each other in the house and glance shyly at the other, as if to say, “I see you, I know you’re here.” Every creak on the floorboards, every cough and scraped chair could only be coming from him, and she wondered if the little sounds she made were as obvious. Did she bother him? Was he just being polite around her for the sake of a harmonious household? She would linger in her room if she heard him on the stairs. During the day she would make sure she knew where he was before she attempted the outhouse.

  He let her bring in one of the barn cats for company, and she invited friends over for dinner, and sometimes in the evening as well. He went to his Columbus Club and his church committee meetings and his county road commission meeting
s. But as the weeks went by, it was mostly Mary Bet and her father, and they settled into a routine that, if not perfectly happy, was not exactly unhappy.

  One night, after Mary Bet had brought her father his evening cup of tea—always with honey and a curl of sassafras—and was sitting down to mend his shirt while he read his newspaper and biography and Bible, in that order, he said, “I’m not feeling too good, Mary. I think I’ll go on to bed.”

  She glanced at him, thought of how peaceful it would be in the parlor without his rustling and belching and reading aloud passages about Hannibal or Jefferson, which was like coming into the middle of a story for one minute and then leaving, and then she thought how quiet and lonely it would be without his voice on such a cold, windy autumn night. Then she felt a panic of guilt and terror. “What is it, Daddy?” she said, trying to keep the urgency out of her voice.

  “Just feeling a little poorly, a little sore in my bones. Rest’ll cure me up.” He rose with a groan, smiled at her, and made his way to the stairs. She noticed age spots she had not seen before, and his hair, what little was left, seemed as white and sparse as dust.

  “You’re losing weight,” she said.

  He straightened to his full five feet eight inches and patted his belly. “Well, I could stand to.”

  “I’ll get you some more tea,” she said. “I’ll bring it up, and your oatmeal.”

  “Thank you, baby girl,” he said. “Put a thimble of brandy in the tea if you don’t mind.”