Love and Lament (11 page)

It’s not incest
, she told herself.
Forgive me, Lord, and forgive Siler too. I will never let it happen again
. She pictured coming to him in his bed some night and giving herself to him, letting him do whatever he wanted with her. She shook her head and mumbled,
No, I won’t
. She found herself wishing that Myrtle Emma had her own room so that Siler could come to her if he wanted to, and immediately she thought how lucky it was that she and Myrt shared a room.

For what seemed hours, she lay there, the windows open to the noise of Siler sawing and the songs of birds and, behind everything, the chirr of cicadas, as incessant as the heat itself. She felt as though she could not move. When would God choose to strike her dead? Siler was still alive and able to work—the
sizz whoo sizz whoo
of his saw like breathing. And here she was lying on the sofa as if she were unable to move because of a little headache. She jumped up and went over to the bookshelf behind the piano and took down
her Bible with the family tree in the front pages. She studied the limbs of the tree, the strange German and Irish names going back a hundred years and more, and then saw how the branches led out to her own family, and her very name, inscribed by her mother. She flipped over to Proverbs and read, “Be not wise in thine own eyes: fear the Lord, and depart from evil.” She nodded and closed the book,
I
will
depart from evil
, she thought,
I will I will I will. I must
.

CHAPTER 7

1900

F
OR 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.”

Samuel 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.”