Love and Lament Page 9

  She looked at him, then down. He knew how she felt about drinking, how her grandparents had preached the evils of liquor until she couldn’t stand the sight of it. She was allowed her moral high horse as a kind of eccentricity, and Cicero’s own modest indulgence went on unobtrusively, the bottles secreted on a high shelf. That he would ask her to dose his tea must mean he was very sick indeed.

  In the morning, he told her to stop in at the store on her way to school and report that he was feeling unwell and likely would not be in. He had never missed a day from illness that she could remember. “I’m going to get Dr. Slocum directly,” she said.

  Cicero raised himself on his elbows and said, “I won’t have that man in this house. Not on my account. You hear me?” Then he sank back and made such a rattling cough he had to roll onto his side to clear his throat.

  Mary Bet fetched a pink-and-red afghan she’d knitted, and draped it over him. He was shivering and she felt his forehead and found him clammy and warm. “I’ll stay home today, Daddy,” she said. “I’ll make you chicken soup and soft-boiled eggs on toast.”

  “No, you don’t. Essie’ll tend to me.”

  “She’s afraid of sickness. I’m not,” Mary Bet said.

  “You run along,” he managed, then lay there, his eyes closed, his mouth open so he could breathe.

  She went down to the pantry and found an old bottle of swamp-root tonic and poured a spoonful in a teacup. To this, she added a spoonful of Valentine’s meat juice. She put the kettle on the stove. Then Essie began lumbering up the back steps. “What is it, child?” Essie said, letting herself into the kitchen. “Why you not at school?”

  “Daddy’s taken sick.”

  “Law. Is it the typhoid?” Essie’s veiny eyes opened wide, lighting up her sagging face.

  “I don’t think so,” Mary Bet said, calming herself in the process.

  “You bednot go up there,” Essie replied, her brows relaxing. “We better call the doctor.”

  “He doesn’t want the doctor. Maybe some ox gelatin.” Mary Bet was pleased with herself when Essie agreed.

  When the tea was ready, Mary Bet took it up to her father and sat at his bedside for three-quarters of an hour until he began stirring. She went back down and reheated the tea, then came and woke him and helped prop him up on pillows so that he could drink. He wrinkled his face. “That doesn’t taste right,” he said.

  “I added some meat juice to give you strength,” she told him. She didn’t mention the tonic, and she watched him until he had drunk the whole cup.

  The next day he was worse. Though he would not want to see the doctor and she was only thirteen, she had to do something. She decided that her father wouldn’t even know whether or not Dr. Slocum was there, so she sent a neighborhood boy to fetch him. Dr. Slocum arrived, dressed in his suit and overcoat and carrying his black medical bag.

  After his examination, Dr. Slocum announced, “Bad case of influenza. He needs plenty of rest and liquids. A cup of water alternating with a cup of broth every hour.” How could he rest with all that drinking? Mary Bet wondered. But for the next five days she arranged for both Essie and her sister Elma to tend to her father while she was at school, then in the afternoons she took over the job herself. She wrote letters to Siler and Myrtle Emma and wondered if the matter were urgent enough for a telegram. Dr. Slocum said not, and the nearest neighbors—the Dorsetts, who lived across the road and down near the creek—agreed that the flu was not usually a matter of grave concern, but they were new in town and didn’t know her family history.

  The oldest Dorsett boy, named Joseph, began coming over with gifts of food from his family. They were from Salisbury and they were fond of canning. They sent over cucumbers in brine, jars of green beans and kraut, apple jelly, pear and strawberry preserves, and dried peaches. Their new garden and orchard promised to be just as fruitful as the one in Salisbury, while Cicero’s garden was going to weeds now that Siler was away. Joseph was fifteen and he told Mary Bet he hired out at fifteen cents an hour and would happily do whatever needed doing, including putting in a new garden in the spring.

  “We don’t need any help,” Mary Bet told him, annoyed with this new boy’s impudence. She didn’t like the way he regarded her with half-closed eyes, as though sizing her up and finding her lacking. He was red-haired and freckled, and stood with his hands on his hips like a grown-up, but what she disliked most was the defiant way he tilted his head back, his chin out. It was uncannily like Siler, yet he was loud and broad-chested, light-haired and short—an anti-Siler if ever there was one.

  “I’m plucky,” he told her.

  “Is that so?” she said.

  “Yep, everybody says so.” He handed her the jar of damson preserves his mother had sent. “This is good for colds, and hiccups.” She took it and thanked him, and as she was closing the door on him, he asked, “How is your father?”

  “Better, thanks,” she said.

  But just as he seemed to be recovering from influenza, Cicero came down with something that at first seemed to be a relapse. He went to bed in the middle of the day with a high fever and woke up after midnight, his sheets soaked and his head “swimmy.” He called out for Susan Elizabeth, and Mary Bet awoke and came into his room and stood by the old four-poster bed where she and her siblings had been born and where her mother had died, the bed that Captain Billie had provided as a wedding present. “Susan,” he said, “is that you?”

  “No, Daddy, it’s me, Mary Bet.” She stood holding onto one of the turned wooden posts at the foot, afraid to look him in the eyes. The post was loose from when her father had twisted it, anguished over his dying wife and his inability to help.

  “Mary Bet? I can’t see you.”

  She came around and felt her father’s face and held her kerosene lantern up to where she could see him. He stopped turning his head side to side and stared up at her with wide, terrified eyes. “It’s just me,” she said, quietly, trying to keep the fear out of her voice. What was he seeing?

  “It’s my leg,” he said. “Take it off, for God’s sake.” He lay back. After a while he sat up and said, “They’re coming over that rise yonder.”

  She had the thought that if he just went ahead and died she could bear it better, and then she felt so ashamed she thought she might faint right there. She set the lantern on his bedside table and went to pour him a glass of water. Somehow he had gotten himself out of bed to use the slop jar, which she took as a good sign. She watched as he drank the water—his eyes were red, the lids swollen; and when he sank back onto his pillow he was racked with a coughing fit that bent him double and had him clutching his ribs and then his throat, inarticulate with pain and delirium. She didn’t think she could stand to see him like this, nor to wait all night before summoning the doctor.

  Her father kept no chairs in his room, except the toilet chair, so she went and sat on her mother’s cherrywood quilt chest, determined to stay there until morning’s first light. As soon as she sat down, her father roused himself from his layers of fevered half-dreaming and said, “I’m sorry, Susan. I never meant any harm.”

  “It’s all right, Daddy,” Mary Bet said.

  “You’re a good wife,” he said, then lay back, breathing heavily and coughing to clear his throat. He drifted back into a restless sleep, and after a few minutes Mary Bet got up, took a quilt out of the chest, and curled up on the floor to wait until morning.

  CHAPTER 8

  1900

  CICERO DEVELOPED A case of measles, then pneumonia, and he had Mary Bet wire her aunt Cattie Jordan in Williamsboro to come help out for a week or so. He didn’t want to bother Myrt way off in the mountains at a new job. Mary Bet knew her aunt to be more than a little bossy, but she could not convince her father that she needed no extra help. Arguing with him only seemed to agitate him the more. She imagined that if he were just a little sicker she would take charge completely. Cattie Jordan was not Mary Bet’s favorite, but the other two aunts had moved out of the state
and there was no one else to call on, except Cincinnatus’s wife—and she had a large brood to take care of. Anyway, she thought, with another person in the house she would not feel so alone.

  She wondered if this turn of her father’s meant the end of his life. Or if it could trigger the mind sickness inherited from Grandpa Samuel. The sickness went back at least as far as Samuel’s father, though Cicero never talked about his grandfather. Mary Bet remembered her grandma Margaret telling her stories about John Hartsoe, the same who had built the house that Margaret and Captain Billie had owned. Not long after selling the house, he had moved in with a daughter who lived on a farm up near Silkton. There he had given way to dementia, and as there was no hospital then for the insane, they had resorted to tethering him to a China tree during the day and to his bed at night to prevent his running off—as he’d done on several occasions—or trying to hurt himself. One time he attempted to put his hand in a meat grinder while turning the handle, and once he sat on the stove until a servant smelled the peculiar mixed odor of singed wool and flesh. He developed the notion that he was responsible for keeping the China tree standing, and he got to where he refused to come in. He ate the tree’s poisonous yellow berries, claiming they gave him the strength of Samson. They built a lean-to for him to shelter in, but in the winter they had to drag him inside, where he developed a case of pneumonia and died.

  Except for the time he talked to himself in the mirror, Cicero had never shown any sign of mental instability other than an occasional burst of temper when something didn’t suit him just right, and an equally occasional outpouring of what his wife used to call “the joys” when he was happy. The former caused him to rush outside and start splitting wood (a therapy his mother had suggested); the latter made him practically vibrate with excitement—his eyes would light up, and with gritted teeth he would grab the nearest person and dance around the room. It was an almost terrifying, mad overjoy that took possession of his entire body, sometimes for no apparent reason other than that he was happy. And then it would as suddenly disappear and he would return to his usual quiet, self-effacing demeanor, and it could be months before such an outburst would recur.

  Now that her father was sick with something in his body that the doctor could label and give medicine for, Mary Bet thought that she would have to do as he wished, as long as he had the strength to speak. Two days later, Cattie Jordan arrived in a canopied carriage pulled by two fine black horses and driven by a young Negro wearing a sable suit and silk top hat. Her husband ran his hotel so profitably that he’d added seven rooms to the original ten, and they had started going to Wrightsville Beach for a week every August.

  Cattie Jordan was short and stout and though many people had observed how much Mary Bet favored this aunt, Mary Bet would look in the mirror and be relieved when she saw no resemblance. Cattie Jordan was even quicker to deny the likeness, saying, “I don’t see it atall,” and adding, with what seemed to Mary Bet a disingenuous tone, “Mary Elizabeth is much the prettier.” Cattie Jordan’s hair was lighter, her eyes brown instead of black, her facial expressions of a more limited palette, ranging from placid to mild. But there was that same square Murchison chin that Mary Bet wished for the world she didn’t have, and her mother’s narrow upper lip that only accentuated the nose—though on Cattie Jordan, the effect was exotic, even pretty. Cattie Jordan had the flared nose of the Murchisons, instead of the Hartsoe beak.

  Cattie alighted with her driver’s help, and was pulling off her gloves so that she could take her niece’s hands and offer a cheek to be kissed. She looked around as though for a greater welcoming party. “It’s just me and Essie,” Mary Bet explained. “We don’t need a houseboy but three days now.”

  “Essie and I,” Cattie Jordan said, then, “you might have arranged for this to be one of the three days. But I know you’ve been terribly upset with your father’s illness.” She motioned for the driver to get her luggage, then she gathered the hem of her skirts and climbed the steps to the porch, her wide felt hat blocking the sun. Mary Bet stared at the imposing figure of her aunt. Cattie Jordan kept up with the latest styles, which in her case meant that she might add a mauve ribbon round her hat and wear jackets—always brown or navy—with a bit of rise in the shoulders. The sleeves were tight, the skirt long, with flounces showing at the bottom. She kept her hair in the old style, wound up on the back of her head, and her collars revealed only a sliver of neck.

  After she had settled herself in Ila’s old room and taken a nap, she called for Mary Bet and told her that they should sit down in the parlor to discuss her father’s situation. “A pot of tea goes well with talks like these, don’t you agree?” she said, her rouged face lifting into as much of a smile as it ever dared. Mary Bet agreed, though she could not understand what tea had to do with her father’s illness.

  They sat in the two formal wing chairs, Mary Bet unsure of herself in her own home. “I see mother’s china has been kept in good repair,” her aunt said. “You don’t use it for everyday, do you?”

  “No, ma’am,” Mary Bet replied, wondering whose mother Cattie Jordan had meant, because the china had, now she thought about it, come down through the Murchisons. Her aunt was looking around the parlor in an appraising way—at the little ormolu clock, the brass andirons, her father’s encyclopedias and leather-bound volumes of ancient history and philosophy, the love seat, the straight-back chairs, the square piano that only Myrt ever seemed able to coax music out of, the fold-up secretary in the corner with its vase of dried flowers, the red oriental rug at their feet—worn thin over the years and not likely now to ever be replaced.

  Mary Bet got up and added another log to the fire—there was still an early spring chill to the parlor that wouldn’t go away for at least a month. And somehow it felt even colder than when she was sitting alone with her needlework.

  “As I see it,” Cattie Jordan said, her eyes tarrying over the piano, “your father is going to need all the help he can get for the next fortnight, at least.” She paused to sip her tea, then glanced at Mary Bet, not for an answer so much as to register her presence. Mary Bet had never heard anyone use the word “fortnight” before, and it sounded ominous, for it meant her aunt would be here for some time.

  “He’s a gravely ill man,” Cattie Jordan went on, “and the house must be kept quiet and clean.” Now she looked at her niece and gave her a conspiratorial wink that felt to Mary Bet like a little stab in the heart.

  But Mary Bet nodded and said, “I like it clean too—Essie and Elma and I manage with that, and it’s quiet except for when I have friends come over. And when Joe Dorsett brings preserves or something, I talk to him on the porch.”

  Cattie Jordan listened to all this with her head resting on the tips of her fingers as though she had a headache, her eyebrows rising higher at every word from Mary Bet’s mouth. “Joe Dorsett?” A slight shake of her head.

  “The boy across the street. They moved in last fall. They’re from Salisbury. His father is assistant manager at the bending and chair factory.”

  Again, Cattie Jordan slightly shook her head, as if shooing away a fly. “Your father is going to need absolute quiet. The friends will have to take a hiatus, I’m sure you understand, honey.”

  Mary Bet nodded, trying to be agreeable, “We can meet over at Clara’s for a while. She likes to play our piano. She just has a spinet, but it works fine.”

  “Mary Elizabeth, I’m afraid I’m going to need all the help I can get. If you go traipsing all over town to parties and jamborees, where does that leave me? Now is not the time to think of our own needs and comforts. It’s time you learned that life is not just about having fun. Your mother was the baby of the family, just like you, and it’s a hard lesson for the youngest to learn. Now, as for entertaining boys over here by yourself—it’s strictly forbidden. I don’t know what your father allowed when he was well, and frankly I don’t care. I can’t be up and down the stairs, worrying about your sick father and you down here with some neigh
bor boy.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Mary Bet saw the fortnight now stretching out like the longest train at the crossing, boxcar after boxcar after boxcar.

  “Don’t look so blue,” Cattie Jordan said. “We’ll have us some fun. I brought my dominoes. I just love dominoes, don’t you? And there’s not a word in the Bible against them—not that I’ve found.” She made another wink, as if she had just sold a wagonload of bootleg whiskey to a preacher, and said, “And we can tell stories.”

  “Stories?” Mary Bet asked.

  “I could tell you things to make your hair stand right on end.” She seemed to enjoy the thrill this produced, the nervous excitement in Mary Bet’s eyes now that she had her full attention, and Mary Bet was not at all sure she wanted to have her hair stand on end.

  The doctor came by in the morning. It had been a long night, Mary Bet spending most of it by her father’s bed and not saying a word about it in the morning when Cattie Jordan awoke with the sun and found her niece asleep. “Am I to wake you, Mary Elizabeth?”

  “No, ma’am,” Mary Bet said, getting up in a hurry.

  With Dr. Slocum there and attending the patient, Cattie Jordan looked more relaxed. “It’s the Lord’s will, honey,” she said, “and if your father were taken today, we should be happy that he’s in a better place. Isn’t that right, doctor?” She smiled so that the rouge fissured along the wrinkles in her face.

  “Yes, well,” Dr. Slocum said, looking from the aunt to the niece, uncertain whom to address, “this is a very serious business, coming right after the flu and the measles. He’ll need constant vigilance for the next few days. An elderly man doesn’t have but so much fight in him.”

  Cattie nodded and smiled, as if certain that the vigilance was only for the sake of his not dying alone. “We’ll read to him, and pray to him,” she said. The doctor said that would be fine, and he gave her a list of medications and instructions and said that he would stop by in the evening.