Love and Lament (4 page)

Captain Billie leaped up from the table, his chair tumbling away. Reaching for the table, he managed to get himself positioned so that he could stagger over to the stair rail. Alson jumped up and went after him, “For godsakes, Captain Billie,” he said, “come back here and put down your IOU.”

Mary Bet saw her grandfather coming and tried to shrink into the wall. She nearly cried out before he saw her, his eyes narrowing
in confusion. But he just pulled past, opened the basement door, and headed into the hallway.

Now she could hear a commotion behind her, while down below Alson was trying to talk Grandpa Samuel out of the bet. “He’s not in his right mind when he’s drinking,” Alson said. “Let’s just call it a night. You boys split what’s in the pot and that’ll be that.”

“I didn’t ask him to drink,” Samuel said. “Matter of fact, he invited me to this game. And, more to the point, ve don’t know vhat cards he’s holding.” He pointed a bony finger to the five overturned cards at Captain Billie’s place. “How can you say who’s taking advantage?”

From off beyond the open basement door came the rising voice of Mary Bet’s grandmother. “William Murchison, if you go up those stairs you’ll be sorry!” There were muffled pleadings from her mother, then the pounding of footsteps and her grandfather roaring back something profane and indecipherable that ended with, “… the whole burdensome goddamn lot of you!”

Captain Billie came tearing back down the stairs, stumbled, but caught himself on the handrail. In his free hand was a worn brown envelope, which he smacked onto the card table. He caught his breath. “There’s my house, Samuel Hartsoe. I call you.”

Grandmother Margaret Murchison then came skipping down the stairs like a young woman. She went to the half-open jug nearest the table, pulled the cork out and pushed it over so that the mouth cracked on the cement floor and amber liquid began leaking out. “There’s sin in this house,” she said, as though to herself, “and I aim to get it out.” She struggled with the cork on the next one, another two-gallon jug, and, failing to loosen it, just turned it over and watched as it rolled toward her husband’s chair, off which it bounced before continuing on under the table and coming to rest on Samuel Hartsoe’s foot. He had some difficulty pulling himself free.

“What in God’s name?” Captain Billie said.

“There’s no God in here,” his wife said. “So you can cuss him all you want. He won’t hear you atall. Go on.” She had managed meanwhile to uncork a smaller jug and then decided to just drop it, and she watched satisfied as it broke across the already whiskey-wet floor. Too cowed to interfere, Captain Billie could only stand there as his wife went one by one to the jugs parked against the wall and assaulted them as best she could. When the floor was a smashup of glass and whiskey and rolling jugs and bottles, she paused for breath, hands on her narrow hips, her gray-black hair fallen over her face.

“Well,” Captain Billie said, “at least you saved me some.”

“Get out!” she yelled. “All of you, get out of my house now!” She pointed up the stairs, where Mary Bet and her mother were huddled, too stunned to move. “And don’t you ever come back. You hear? I’ll get the constable!” She grabbed the envelope from the table and stuffed it into her blouse, then stood waiting for the men to collect themselves. They traipsed up, heads bowed like scolded boys; Alson paused on the steps to touch his hat to his head. He started to offer an apology, but Margaret cut him off. “Keep on stepping,” she said.

Samuel Hartsoe could not simply leave more than two hundred dollars for Billie Murchison, nor could he dip into the pot to extract his share. He glanced down at the two hands of cards, then up to Billie. Billie nodded at him, almost imperceptibly, and as the two men reached for their cards, Margaret threw herself on top of the table, scattering cards and money all over the sticky floor.

The men went down on hands and knees, grabbing up what bills they could, not caring how wet they were, and stuffing them into pockets. “For shame,” Margaret said, “for shame.”

Crabtree woke up. He rolled over, sniffed the pool of whiskey in front of his face, and regarded his father and Samuel Hartsoe crawling around on the floor. When Margaret saw him, she went
and stood over him a moment as if undecided. Then she bent down and tugged at his elbow. “Come on, son,” she said. “Get you upstairs.” He rose and walked with his mother to the steps. The last thing Mary Bet saw before her own mother whisked her off to her bedroom was her two grandfathers getting up, brushing themselves off wordlessly, and looking at each other as if there was nothing they could ever say about what they had just done.

In the morning the house was so quiet all Mary Bet could hear when she came downstairs was the ticking of the tall-case clock. She opened the cellar door and slowly descended. Shafts of light from the half-window revealed a clean-swept room that looked as though no business of any sort had been conducted there of late. There were things she didn’t want to remember, but they were inside her mind and so they had to be real.

CHAPTER 3

1893–1895

M
ARY BET STAYED
with her grandparents for two weeks, during which her brother got sicker and sicker. It began to seem as if Willie had always been sick. He was eighteen and a string bean, their mother said, and he could walk on his hands and recite
Julius Caesar
at the same time, rolling over when he came to “all of us fell down.” He had green eyes and he brought home orphaned squirrels and rabbits and other animals he found out in the woods.

Finally, on an Indian summer day in late September, he died, and there was another funeral to attend. This time Mary Bet was allowed to go to both the funeral and burial, and she could not understand why she had not been allowed at the funeral of her sister—it was just like a church service, except that her mother was crying, as were her sisters, O’Nora and Myrtle Emma. Myrtle Emma, who was fourteen and a good singer and pianist, let her play with her cameo brooch, which made Mary Bet very happy,
though she could not help crying a little herself because Myrt seemed so sad.

On Sundays they went to the new Baptist church in town, but for funerals they went to Love’s Creek north of town, where the ancestors were buried. The preacher said that Annie had been so lonely in heaven that her twin brother had to go up there and keep her company. Mary Bet pictured God calling Willie from a magnificent bank of sunlit purple clouds, and Annie there waiting for him. Outside, the men lowered the coffin on ropes and then everybody came back to the Hartsoes’ for refreshments. The women brought platters of fried chicken and roast beef, sliced ham and biscuits, vegetable casseroles, deviled eggs, cucumbers, and pies and cakes, and Essie, who had attended the funeral, was back in the kitchen in her apron stirring pitchers of iced tea and lemonade. But hardly anybody touched the food.

“There’s a reason for everything,” her mother said. “Everything under the sun is God’s will and we have to accept it.” Usually something had gone wrong when she said this, and her lips would tighten, as they would when she didn’t approve of things.

Mary Bet still thought of her family as the ten fingers of her hands—her father was her right thumb, her mother the left. Then there was eldest sister Ila (a beautiful young woman engaged to be married to the eldest son of Robert Gray) and big brother Tom (the tallest finger), both on her right hand, then Willie and Annie—the weak fourth fingers who were in heaven. Myrtle Emma and Siler were younger, so they were on the left hand; Siler was special because he had come to replace the other Siler who was in heaven, and he was also deaf. O’Nora and Mary Bet were the baby fingers.

She still prayed for Willie and Annie in her prayers at night. It felt to her as though something were missing, her own fingers or her hand. She felt as if God had robbed the family, but she didn’t like to talk about sad things, because it made other people sad.
Everyone wore black for a long time after the funeral, and the person who wore it the longest was Mary Bet’s mother. It seemed as if she had always worn black and always would—long black dresses and black high-shouldered jackets on Sundays and black pleated skirts and blouses around the house. So that it came as a surprise to see any bit of color at all—a navy blue blouse, or a bit of purple in her scarf, as if a long winter was finally thawing and the crocuses were coming out again.

Willie had brought home a crow with a broken wing. The bird would hop along a perch Willie had fashioned from a green stick and nailed to an eave in the hen coop. It would chortle at the hens, eyeing them with its head tilted. Sometimes it would flap down for some grain, scattering the chickens, and then use its beak and feet to climb the wire mesh back up to its perch. It was given a separate, smaller enclosure. Since she was now six years old, Mary Bet inherited the job of taking care of the crow, which merely meant giving it fresh water, because whoever grained the chickens would toss some grain over to the crow.

She was afraid of the crow, but she tried to be brave because it was an honor to do something for her departed brother. The crow would see her coming and would watch her out of one beady black eye. She discovered that she could wait for several days before adding more water. When the crow sickened and lost its luster, no one said anything but that it missed Willie and, anyway, they never expected a wild bird to live long in a cage.

She spent a night at her grandmother’s and when she came back she was busy with her new hobby of threading needles and sewing patches together for a doll quilt. When she went near the coop, the bird gave her an accusing look, and she was afraid even to use the stick to turn the old water out.

After a while the water turned stale and green. The crow sat on his perch and no longer squawked at her or at anything. Sometimes
he rustled his dull feathers in the sun. She decided that the crow was sick for some other reason and that when he hobbled about his cage, eyeing her with his now milky eye, he was blaming her. Then one night she heard a long low
caaaaw
. The next day she thought she might have dreamed the sound, yet when she went out to the crow’s enclosure it was empty. No one said a thing at breakfast, but later on Siler told her, in his back-of-the-throat voice, “Ya caw’s daahd.” No one had ever called it hers before.

“Do the chickens need fresh water?” she asked, thinking that he would never guess why she was asking.

He looked at her, his dark brooding eyes piercing her, and pointed to her lips. She repeated it while he held her jaw, then shook his head in confusion. He touched his open palm, “Show me.” He was five years older than Mary Bet and already skilled with his hands. He could repair chairs and tables and fashion toy tops and soldiers as quickly as anybody. His tutor had given him some basic signs so that he could talk with his family. At the deaf-and-dumb school in Raleigh, if he used his hands to talk he had to sit on them; if he used them again that day the teacher rapped him on the knuckles with a ruler, or tied his hands behind his back. He was sent home halfway through the term for hitting a baseball through a window and refusing to say “I’m sorry.”

Siler studied Mary Bet’s lips, held her jaw and made her repeat the question. She pointed to the well, then to the chicken coop. She dropped her arms and pouted. You couldn’t ask a roundabout question of Siler—you had to say what you meant. His eyes brightened, then narrowed as he studied her. He nodded, “Yah.” He put bird-beak fingers at his mouth, crooked a finger down, then touched W fingers to his lip. “Birds need water.”

Though she had just begun to learn her own alphabet, she knew what he meant. His whole face explained that it was a stupid question, that of course they needed fresh water, every single day.

It was the next spring when the hanging of Shackleford Davies took place on Gallows Hill in Williamsboro. It also happened to be a market day and so Mary Bet was allowed to ride the thirteen miles over to the county seat—starting at six in the morning got them there just past nine. The frost on the ground had melted by the time they arrived, but they still needed coats and sweaters and bonnets.