Love and Lament (15 page)

On the stairs she had to flatten herself against the wall to let Cattie by. “Excuse me,” she said.

Cattie held her candle up so that she and her niece could see each other clearly. “How is he?” she demanded. For answer, it began to rain, drumming on the cedar shingles, making the house sound hollow.

“The same,” Mary Bet answered. She felt her heart beating at a faster tempo as the rain increased, as though God were directing her to say something to Cattie that would make her understand that her own precious father was upstairs dying and she could hardly stand it. “It’s raining hard,” Mary Bet said.

“Raining, you say? I’m the one went out there and got soaking wet.” Cattie Jordan looked as if she wanted to say more but was restraining herself. “I’ll take that.” Mary Bet handed over the nightshirt.

“You don’t have to take it outside,” Mary Bet said, as her aunt was turning away. “You can leave it in the basket by the door.” Too late she realized it had sounded like an order to a servant. Cattie turned and glared up at her niece.

Before her aunt came back up, Mary Bet told Dr. Slocum she was feeling tired and asked him to please come rouse her if her father got worse. She and Cattie spent the rest of that long night taking turns standing vigil. Mary Bet would lie in her room for an hour, listening to the rain pelt the roof, then lighten to gentle tapping, then pour again in percussive welts. And then she would get up and relieve Cattie. They spoke to the doctor instead of to each other.

CHAPTER 9

1900–1901

S
HE WOKE
up to the rusty-gate cry of the rooster and the smell of frying bacon, and when she looked out her curtainless window she saw mist rising from the ground and the trees into a thin blanket of clouds, the sun trying to burn through. Essie was here, thank the Lord. She prayed, “God, if he’s alive, I’ll devote my life to your service. I’ll deprive myself. I’ll never marry. I won’t ask for anything fancy. Ever.” She recalled making the same promise to God if He wouldn’t take any more of her family, but it hadn’t stopped Him from taking O’Nora. She sprang up and hurried to her father’s room. Dr. Slocum was putting his things back into his bag, and Cattie was nowhere in sight. So it was over and she had missed being by her father’s side at the very end.

She threw herself now on his bed, and he said, “Careful, baby girl, you’ll knock me off.”

“He’s a little dizzy,” Dr. Slocum explained.

Mary Bet tried to blink back the tears, but they came anyway. She got up and came around to kiss her father’s bearded cheek. “Daddy,” she said.

Cicero watched the doctor buttoning up his shirtsleeves and putting on his jacket, and he said, “They brought you here against my orders.” His chest bounced as he tried to speak. “But I don’t know as you did me any harm.”

Three days into Cicero’s recovery, Joe Dorsett came over with a strawberry rhubarb pie and a jar of apple jelly. Mary Bet stood on the front porch talking to him, wanting to invite him in simply to have another presence in the house for a while besides her aunt’s. “And I brought this just for you,” Joe said, handing her a little tin of Pendergrass snuff, made with tobacco and sneezeweed. “I don’t know if you care for it or not.”

“My aunt doesn’t allow it,” Mary Bet told him, glancing back into the house. But she took the tin and slipped it into the pocket of her strapped frock. “Why don’t you come in and visit for a minute.”

“I can’t—” Joe started, then, surprised by the invitation, said, “okay, just for a minute then.” He’d never been inside their house and he entered the vestibule and looked around as though he were in a bejeweled cavern. “I didn’t know you had all these things. A piano—does it play?”

“Not by itself. My sister can play. I can play one thing she taught me.”

“Play it.”

“No, I better not.” She glanced over her shoulder toward the stairs.

“Where’d you get all these books?”

“They’re my father’s. He reads a lot. Sometimes I read to him.” She felt suddenly self-conscious, and her hand went to her hair; it was as if she were seeing the living room for the first time. How
ridiculous, she told herself—it’s just bragging old Joe Dorsett. But he wasn’t bragging now; he was actually being polite, and he was glancing at her kind of shyly, as though they’d never met. She wondered if they should take seats in the wing chairs, but that seemed even more ridiculous.

“We have peacocks,” Joe told her. “You’ve probably heard them.” He made a funny little trumpeting sound that was more like a goose than a peacock, and Mary Bet was sure that her aunt would appear any second now. “I’ll bring you a feather. They’re right pretty, with a big black eye in the middle. They’ll ward off the evil eye.”

“I don’t believe in that,” Mary Bet said. What she’d heard was that a peacock feather in the house was a harbinger of death. “I like to see them outside,” she said. And then Joe stood there looking at her eyes and her mouth with a serious, almost frightened expression, as though he wanted to come over and kiss her. Then, as if she’d been waiting for just this moment, Cattie appeared from the vestibule. She had not been on the stairs, for surely Mary Bet would’ve heard the treads creaking—she had simply materialized out of the air.

“Look, Aunt Cattie,” Mary Bet blurted, “Mrs. Dorsett sent us some strawberry pie and apple jelly.”

She regarded Joe, and in a tight voice, said, “Hello, I’m Cattie Jordan Teague, Mary Elizabeth’s aunt from Williamsboro. You must tell your mother how much we appreciate her thoughtfulness.” Before he could think of a reply she turned back to Mary Bet. “I’ve been lying down with a headache.” She paused to see what effect those words would have.

“Yes, ma’am,” Mary Bet said. “I’m sorry.” Then, in a quieter voice, she told Joe, “I have to go now.”

Joe showed himself out, and when he was gone, Cattie turned to Mary Bet and said, “What did he want?”

“He just wanted to bring us these things,” Mary Bet replied, feeling the complaint in her voice, the edge of indignation.

Cattie’s eyes surveyed Mary Bet, passing over her frock, where the tin of snuff was secreted, then down her legs and back up to her face, trying to ferret out every hidden secret and thought. “Is that all?”

“Is that all what?” She hadn’t said it in an impertinent way—she simply didn’t know what her aunt was driving at.

“Don’t you get smart with me, young lady.”

“I wasn’t being smart,” Mary Bet snapped back, tossing her head, because she had had enough. “If I was smart I’d’ve known what you were getting at, but I still don’t.” She felt blood rushing to her face, then draining, as she waited for her aunt to come over and slap her, or yell at her, or send her off to her room—something, anything, to relieve the tension. She closed her eyes, then opened them, her hands hanging limp at her sides. There was something about her aunt that suddenly seemed simple and pathetic, standing there in her plain brown dress, almost the exact match of half a dozen others, her little pearl-ringed brooch at her bosom, her solid arms and legs ready for daily battle with forces beyond her control that would want to interrupt and vex her. She was no longer even facing her niece, but looking off toward the vestibule, as if she wanted to leave.

“Honestly,” Cattie said, as though talking to an invisible person, “I don’t know how my poor sister stood it. With the typhoid, a deaf mute, a husband who spoils his children, and a willful little girl.”

“I’m not a little girl,” Mary Bet said quietly.

Cattie nodded and sniffled. “We’ve all been strained to the breaking point,” she murmured. Mary Bet could see that her aunt was crying, and she felt more wicked than she had in a long time. Cattie Jordan took a handkerchief out of her bosom and blew her nose, and after a moment or two Mary Bet went quietly up the steps to her room.

She managed to keep out of her aunt’s way for the rest of the fortnight. She brewed her father a Dorsett family recipe of sassafras
tea with cinnamon and licorice root, and, when Cattie Jordan was not around, she reached up to the flour tin behind the canned beets on the top shelf of the pantry for an unlabeled jar of moonshine whiskey and added two or three thimbles to a hot toddy of lemon and honey. On Essie’s days off, she found relaxation in going out to the backyard to churn butter or stir a steaming vat of laundry and bluing with a long-handled, triple-pronged agitator while staring meditatively off into the woods. She would imagine her grandmother’s grandmother Sally, a Tory who married an Indian named Rufus Cheek and moved west from the fall line until they found this hilly fertile land and its patchwork of land grant farms owned by English pioneers, who then intermarried with Scotch-Irish and German pioneers down from Virginia. Her grandmother had told her that Tories and Regulators, or Patriots, as they came to be called, did unspeakable things to each other. There was something called spigoting that she never explained, but the word was itself enough to send shivers down Mary Bet’s spine.

One evening shortly before her aunt was to go, Mary Bet asked Cattie Jordan if she knew how Captain Billie and Grandma Margaret met.

“They met at church,” Cattie said. “Daddy had just bought the house we used to live in. He said all he needed now was a wife. It was a shame Mama had to let that house go. You know he bought it from your father’s grandfather, John Hartsoe?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Mary Bet vaguely knew the overlapping family history.

“They used to keep your father’s grandfather chained in the barn up there.”

“I thought he was roped to a tree,” Mary Bet said, wondering why her aunt had chosen to tell her something from the Hartsoe closet instead of her own.

“A tree? Where did you hear that? No, indeed. It was the barn and a chain. I could show you where ’twas. Aunt Scilla, the nigger cook we used to have, showed me. He’d lost his mind and there was nowhere else to put him. Aunt Scilla said her father got himself put in charge of John Hartsoe and he would whip him if he soiled himself—that was to get him back for all the times he’d been beaten himself and, a worse disgrace, for making him stand out in the rain until his shoes were nothing but mud. Can you imagine? A slave in charge of his owner? Scilla would hear them out there yelling at each other and she and the other black folks would sing so nobody could hear them. But the funny thing was that after years of beating that poor old lunatic, and getting away with it, he felt sorry for him, and he started taking the old man out on walks, with a rope tied around his waist like he was leading a horse. And when John Hartsoe died, Scilla’s father went out and sat on the grave all night crying and begging forgiveness. Isn’t that the strangest thing? I’ve often wondered if Aunt Scilla didn’t make it up to scare us children into behaving.”

She paused and looked at Mary Bet with a gleam in her eye, trying to judge the effect of her story. Mary Bet did feel the hairs standing up on her back, and her palms felt cold and sweaty, because her aunt had brought to life some long buried people Mary Bet knew only vaguely, and it seemed as if they were walking around the parlor when they should be resting quietly in their graves. And something else—there was more to this story, the part her father had withheld at Grandpa Samuel’s deathbed. She felt a leaden weight of gloom tugging her, a mind sickness that she thought might haunt her entire life. And then an image of splintering fragments, as though her memory, and her family’s memory, were pulling apart, breaking into shards of light. It was the queerest sensation.

“What did he do besides beat Scilla’s father?” Mary Bet asked, though she didn’t want there to be an answer.

“Lord, child, I don’t have any idea. Those things are long gone, and Scilla’s dead now so you can’t ask her, though I don’t know why you’d want to. The sins of the fathers, they say, are visited upon the sons. I don’t know why your father has suffered so much tragedy. It seems to me as if those sins were paid for at the time. If losing your mind and having your servant beat you isn’t payment I don’t know what is. But then I’m not one to judge.”

Finally the day came when Cattie Jordan’s packed bags were sitting at the top of the steps, waiting for someone to haul them out to the carriage she’d hired for the ride back to Williamsboro. This not being the houseboy’s day, Mary Bet happily volunteered for the job. At the carriage, Cattie leaned over, and briefly held her niece. “Take good care of your father, now,” she said, “you know he counts on you.” Mary Bet said she would, and then she was waving to the black carriage, the dried flowers of her aunt’s hat just visible over the seat back.