Love and Lament (35 page)

“God’s truth, I don’t know. Warn’t made for drinkin’. ’Twas made for sellin’. I don’t remember gettin’ any complaints. Fact, one customer said it was the best busthead he’d ever drunk. That’s the
truth.” Otis couldn’t help but laugh, his mouth opening in delight and showing his twisted tooth and a mottled fringe of rotting gum.

Hooper took his hat off and fanned his face. His shook his head. “I don’t doubt it,” he said. “All right, we’ve done all the government business here we can for one day. Otis, I’d give you a ride, but we’ve got a full load, with my two deputies here.”

Mary Bet looked at her cousin, expecting him to wink at her, but he was straight-faced, and she suddenly felt more important than she ever had in her life. The men touched fingers to their hats in token of farewell, and then they began walking out of the woods, leaving Otis behind to sort through the piles of broken glass and wood and metal.

The sun was lower now, painting the trunks of trees so that they seemed to pulse with their own light, and the heat of the day was giving way to slips of cool air that rose from sinks in the forest floor as if from lost icehouses. Mary Bet listened to the tread of the men upon the leafy duff, over which the sound of her own exhilarant breath was like a new voice coming to life.

And yet from all around the darkening woods, like a rising chorus of winged insects, long-dead voices tugged at her, at her terrible guilt and unworthiness. They would never let her go, if she lived to be a hundred. She had committed the worst of sins possible—how could she ever be forgiven?

CHAPTER 21

1916–1917

M
ARY BET HAD
moved into a little cottage west of the courthouse in the early spring with her best friend, a thin, angular woman named Flora Whitson. There were two bedrooms, and she had no intention of turning the study into another bedroom, even though she could have taken in another boarder. “We’ll be just fine by ourselves,” she told people.

And so they were, she and Flora, a woman with no attachments and a self-declared old maid. Flora was as skinny as a broom handle, Mary Bet thought, watching her at her work in the evenings, the way she leaned, straight-backed over the machine, feeding the hungry needle, her dress front puffing open off her flat chest, her bare, bony arms working and working the cloth in an expert way that Mary Bet admired. “I could never in a million years do like you do,” she said. “You’re so fast, and you never make a mistake.”

Flora looked up again, a faint smile on her lips—the only part of her that was fleshy and sensual—then shifted her eyes back to her work. “It’s just sewing, Mary Bet.”

“But I wish I was that good, you’re a natural. I’m not a natural at anything. I wanted to play piano once—” she hesitated, then, deciding it was okay to bring the dead into their cozy little communion, said, “like my sister.”

Flora glanced up again, even more briefly, as she fed the fabric with her hands into the biting needle, her foot busy on the treadle. She nodded and said, “You’re smart as a whip, Mary, that’s enough.”

“I reckon it’s all right.” Mary Bet turned back to her darning—the ripped socks and blouses in a basket at her feet would not be finished before there’d be more to mend.

Being smart was all right, but was it enough? A new world was coming, people said, and Mary Bet tried not to think of it with fear but with hope. A world in which the railroad was no longer king, a world where unmarried women weren’t pitied and humored as eccentric aunties, a world of peace and electricity. But now there was a great war in Europe, and everyone prayed and hoped that it would end soon.

She wanted to be as drawn to the future as Flora, who seemed to have no reason for it. But it was not the future that drew Mary Bet. Even something as simple as a warm breeze on a cool day, something quivering and unaligned that seemed to come from a deep pocket of earth, from beyond the edges of dusk and the places where pasture gave way to meadow and woods, illuminated a way back into the world of childhood and the Devil and incantation. It was a world of candlelight, of muddy roads not macadamized, the sound of iron-rimmed carriage wheels crunching sand and gravel across a stream, the froth of horses cantering an open field to a stone fence at the far end.

The balance of her days could not be rectified against the weight of what she had lived already. There was too much … and yet if she could free herself, could find her brother’s secret sorrow and her father’s, she might be light enough to step across into another part of life. If she could be borne into the bright new world, the shadows of the old might no longer determine where she put her feet.

Sometimes she wanted to have no past, to be as a child, to be an idiot, deaf as her dead brother to the rock hardness of her memories, which were as fixed and unyielding as the shape of the land, the X of the crossroads where she was born, the granite in Love’s Creek Cemetery, the words in the Book, which she knew as well as her own voice. Then there would be time enough for play and laughter and kissing her friend. There would be time for the moon to cast its orange light across the Haw River and across her pale skin and to feel its warmth and the touch of a boy, not her brother, but a boy whom she knew from far back in her mind with its ceaseless clamoring.

But her mind would give her no peace, nor would her father’s mind give him peace, and so on back through the generations like the turning of the leaves in the Book. Why must it always be so, the already written fighting with the yet-to-be written?

She saw herself an old crone, sitting amid the ashes of her memories and her drooled thoughts, thin and wasted, her ripeness gone to seed, her hair white as the eyes of dead crows, hands withered like the skin of gone mushrooms. She saw herself alone and teetering, in a rocking chair far out at sea, the smoke of her ship the final thing she knew of humanity and love.

LEON THOMAS HAD
become principal of the Elisha Springs School and it was rumored he was being considered for superintendent of public instruction. He was so full of boundless energy and enthusiasm he could light up a room with his voice and his broad
smile, offering his meaty hand all around, his body in near constant motion as he talked, as though his mind moved to a different rhythm from regular people. And he had such ideas—he wanted to improve the Negro schools and consolidate the white schools so there would be more teachers per student; he wanted to get state loans and float district bonds for more brick buildings; and he wanted to add vocational teachers and implement state standards so that Haw wouldn’t be limping along like a country ragamuffin, but leading the charge.

He was all the time reading things. Mary Bet would see him coming into the courthouse on school business, walking past her office to the superintendent’s down the hall. Half the time he’d have his nose in a book or pamphlet of some sort. And it was kind of a large nose, even larger than her own, which somehow endeared him to her. He’d be padding down the hall early in the morning, and she’d scrape her chair or clear her throat so he’d look in. He’d tuck his book under his arm and poke his head in and say, “Why, Miss Mary Bet, how fine you look this bright morning.”

She’d glance up as though she had no idea who it was and say, “It doesn’t look any too bright to me, Mr. Thomas. I’ve heard they’re calling for rain.”

“Who’s calling for it? I think it’s a fine day for going out on a raid. What do you say we go catch us a bootlegger or two?” He’d tilt the upper half of his body in a comical way and then step into the door. As soon as he was in the anteroom where she worked, though, he became the polite gentleman, and it was up to her to keep the conversation going.

She’d shake her head, trying to keep from touching up her hair. “Mr. Thomas, you do carry on so. I don’t have any intention of raiding another poor soul and destroying his property. Even if his property is illegal and sinful.”

“You’ll leave that to the men, will you, Miss Mary Bet?”

“Yes, I believe I will.”

“I expect that’s the right thing to do.”

“Right or not—” She thought it best not to speak her mind too forcefully if she wanted to make a good impression on him, then she thought it was foolish of her to worry about what impression she made. And yet, she couldn’t help thinking that he liked her, that he responded to her more adroitly than he did to other women, as though he enjoyed showing her his cleverness and kindness, both, and that he wanted to make a good impression on her.

“And how is your father doing?” he asked, because he would not let her sit there with an awkward half-finished sentence hanging in the air.

“Tolerably, thank you. The weather’s been good out there.” She liked that he asked about her father; so many people acted as though he were dead.

“I need to get myself up here more often. There’s not much exciting going on down in Elisha Springs.”

She smiled in a tolerant way and said, “Well, there’s nothing exciting here in Williamsboro either, unless you count Flossie Pinkley getting married next month, and Mrs. Pendergrass’s daughter Ella Jay having a fifth baby.” Then she blushed because she didn’t want him to think she was only interested in weddings and babies.

“That’s a lot right there,” he said. And the way he looked into her eyes made her think he wanted to say something more personal. “You always brighten my day, Miss Mary Bet.”

When he was gone it was as if he’d taken the air out of the room with him. She looked at the writ in her typewriter and the handwritten version beside her, trying to figure out what she was supposed to be doing. In a few minutes she was back at work.

The weeks went on, and Leon was busy running his school. And though the thought had not bothered her for some time, Mary Bet wondered anew if she was to be a sheriff’s clerk indefinitely, a
person whom Leon Thomas and other men stopped by to chat with but never took seriously as a woman to court. But if they felt that way about a working woman, then she didn’t want their courtship.

And then one day she heard that Leon was courting a young woman from Cotten named Ann Murchison. The news of his attachment to a woman she’d never heard of from a place she hardly knew—and the woman having the same name as her grandparents—came as such a surprise that Mary Bet felt physically ill. She went home early, sick to her stomach, and stayed in bed for two days feeling so anxious and blue she thought she must have some terrible ailment. Flora made her chicken soup.

“I hate to see you like this,” Flora said, feeling her forehead. “You don’t feel hot. Of course, that doesn’t mean anything. My cousin’s husband, Joe Funch, went to bed one night complaining of bowel trouble, no fever or anything, and woke up the next morning … well, he didn’t wake up, because he’d passed away. He’d just come home from Washington, where he was working in a fancy restaurant, and he had to wait on a black couple. I think the shock is what killed him.” She laughed.

Mary Bet said, “It must be the poor ventilation. I can’t believe there’s no sewerage system, and we’ve had pipes in town for—what has it been? And the plaster’s falling down in the sheriff’s office, and those beat-up old cork mats. It’s a wonder everybody in there isn’t sick all the time.”

Flora studied her face as she lay in bed, the covers pulled up to her chin. “You’re not sick that way, are you?” Mary Bet shook her head. “It’s not even your time of month, is it?”

“It’s that Leon Thomas,” Mary Bet said. “I don’t care for him atall. Well, I kind of like him, and I hate to see him tangled up with a rich woman who just thinks he’s a good catch.”

Flora smiled tightly and perched on the edge of the bed. She stared at the wall in a disappointed kind of way that did not help
her looks any, Mary Bet thought. “I should’ve known it was some man you were pining for.”

“He’s not just some man, Flora. He’s a good man, and I’m not pining for him. He’s my friend, and I want what’s best for him.”

Flora sighed. She patted Mary Bet’s covered legs, then rose. “Well, other men are available.”

“Anyway, I’m not getting married. I like it here just fine.”

“I know you do, Mary Bet. But you’re different from me.” She stood in the doorway, hands on her narrow hips. “I didn’t think you’d always want to live here with me.”