Love and Lament (9 page)

Siler was the first person she found. She pulled his hand because she did not want to make the word for “dead.” She would show him and let him decide what to do.

Mary Bet held Siler’s hand through the whole funeral, and it felt to her as though she could never let go. Cicero got the stonecutter to carve a bas-relief hand in the stone, with a finger pointing the way to heaven. The stonecutter had a number of new sayings. None of them seemed just right for O’Nora, but Cicero picked out, “None knew thee but to love thee,” engraved in cursive. He decided it was after all perfect. After the service he had Essie strip O’Nora’s bed and bring him the sheets. “These is good sheets,” she said, shaking her head at the waste, and at her employer’s impulsive, erratic grief.

“Let the day perish that I was born,” Cicero said, taking the bundled bedding. “Let the stars of the twilight be dark.” He took
the sheets out into the backyard and tore them into strips, then placed them on the fireplace where Essie boiled the laundry, shoved the cauldron to the side, and burned them. Then he ordered Essie to scrub the floor of the girls’ room.

The gray-haired servant got on her swollen knees and scrubbed the floorboards to wipe away the curse. “At least he didn’ tear his own close,” she said, hoping Mary Bet would hear. “Ought to be grateful for the livin’,” she said, eyeing Mary Bet and pitying the motherless girl. She shook her head and continued with her work, pausing every so often to glance up to Mary Bet. Essie’s lower lip nearly covered the upper, the way it curled over, hiding an almost bare gum—her ponderous slowness reminded Mary Bet of a large turtle. She liked the comforting slowness of Essie and her heavy smell of laundry and cooking and sweat; besides Myrtle, Essie was the only woman in the house now, with any regularity. She was tall and had heavy eyebrows that knitted together when she was serious and opened out when she was making a joke. Mary Bet could talk to her and not have to think about O’Nora, and the thrown glass, and the soft rabbit that loped through her dreams and followed her in daylight shadows.

Though she was too old for imaginary friends or guardian angels, she knelt before the small fireplace in her bedroom that evening, the low-banked fire making the angels glow and seem to move upon the black iron. There were two of them—surely enough to watch over herself and Myrtle Emma. You couldn’t pray to graven idols, but you could pray in front of them and so she said her prayers right there on the hearth bricks.

Cicero aired the room out, as he had done after the other deaths. And he went back to work, his family now down to four.

CHAPTER 6

1900

I
T WAS JUST
before Siler was to go off to Morganton that he and Mary Bet became at last good friends. She had school friends, but she had always preferred her own family. Now with O’Nora gone, she and Siler, five years apart, were the youngest. Siler would’ve had trouble making friends in the village even if he were outgoing, which he was not particularly. At home he would do and say funny things that made Mary Bet laugh, yet in public he behaved like a trim little soldier, his watchful, deep-set eyes ever alert and his thrust-out chin daring anyone to make fun. He wore a boater tilted back on his head in the cocky way the baseball players did. He tried out for the Hartsoe City team and made right field, his strong arm cutting down many a would-be run. He was considered friendly and handsome, but, above all, quiet, deaf, and a loner. Mary Bet noticed him more now that he was leaving.

They went together to the Fourth of July celebration. The Hartsoe City Concert Band was marching by, the trombones and drums
pounding excitement into the chests of the bystanders, the dignitaries’ carriages draped in bunting, the flags, dipping and rising, carried by the Masonic Lodge members, stiff in their starched white shirts and dark ties, stepping proudly along. A midget named Gus Hightower marched by holding a large flag, beside six-foot-five-inch farmer Richard Wren, who waved a small flag. Then came the veterans, some in uniform, some on horseback, with swords strapped to their waists, and as the crowd cheered Mary Bet felt a strange sadness that had been with her for days now. She had been feeling out of sorts in a way that was new and disturbing. And then she decided to go home, and she wished she had brought a friend other than Siler. She made her way out of the crowd of mustached men in linen suits and bow ties, women in flower-pile hats and long-sleeved white blouses, then hurried back to her house.

It felt as if she had sat on a wet chair—why did she have to wear white today? Well, there was nothing she could do about it now. Myrt had showed her what to do with the sanitary napkins, so she was not unprepared. She washed her hands, letting the water trickle down past her wrists, the way the Hebrews did long ago. She laughed at herself in the mirror—it’s just me, she thought. No more a woman than I was yesterday. Her breasts were growing, her hips taking shape, yet she was still short, still unsure of herself. No one at school thought so, of course—at the new public school, divided into two rooms and attended by fifteen children, she was a smart aleck, always quicker to answer than anybody and reading books that the others could not understand. They thought her strange. One teacher told her not to be so proud of herself, and for the rest of the year she quit raising her hand until, her mind wandering during class to the characters in her book, she was thought as dull as the others.

When her father heard about it, he came in and spoke with the teacher, who told him that his daughter was of average intelligence.
Cicero said nothing. He went home and told Mary Bet to answer up loud and clear in school. “I shouldn’t be proud,” she said. “Not if you don’t have anything to be proud of,” he replied.

She wanted to tell someone about what had just happened to her. She wanted to open the window and shout, “My monthly started!” She looked at herself again, tucked a loose piece of hair, readjusted a clasp on the back of her head, and thought, “I’m not bad-looking.” She shook her head at her vanity, staring into her own black, impenetrable eyes. “Not pretty,” she whispered, “just not bad to look at.”

The next week was sweltering hot, a hundred degrees, and there was talk of a group going down to Hackett’s Mill on the Rocky River for a picnic and swim, but then somebody suggested they go to Hartsoe’s. Mary Bet and Siler were against this plan, but Myrtle Emma said she wanted to go see her grandfather. After all, he was their last grandparent alive. That he had lately become obsessed with perpetual motion should not prevent them from making a visit.

Myrt and a friend named Sallie Wood were going in the Woods’ surrey, with room for four more. Mary Bet was not much on swimming in places where there might be snakes, but she was not about to be left out. Myrt was going away to Wilkesboro to teach at the end of the summer—a prospect that, along with her brother’s imminent departure, scared Mary Bet more than snakes. Now twenty, Myrt told her father she needed to go out in the world and do some good and make a living. Cicero could only shrug mutely at the diminishment of his family, vowing silently that Mary Bet would never leave him.

Mary Bet and Siler squeezed in on the two seats, along with Sallie, Myrt, and Sallie’s two cousins, visiting from Rocky Mount. The mill was a journey of about an hour, during which Mary Bet discovered that Sallie Wood’s cousins, a boy and a girl—straddling her in age—were unimpressed with anything they had seen in Haw
County. They and Mary Bet were on the backseat, and Mary Bet pointed out some daisies growing next to a patch of little sunflowers. She said, “That looks like eggs and suns. It looks like pastries you could eat nearly.”

The boy sniffed, and the girl, sitting in the middle, didn’t change her sullen expression. Mary Bet wished she was up front with the others. “I can drive a horse and buggy,” she said.

“Who can’t?” the boy asked. Siler turned around and glanced from one person to the other, Mary Bet smiling at him with eyes that she knew he could interpret. He shot a stern look at the boy and girl, but they seemed not to notice.

“I can ride sidesaddle and astride,” Mary Bet said.

“I could ride bareback when I was four years old,” the boy answered, kicking the seat in front of him.

“Well, I can wring a chicken’s neck,” Mary Bet retorted. “I like doing it too.”

The boy was quiet a moment. “I don’t even like chickens,” he said. The girl laughed quietly at her own thoughts. Another mile rolled by, the two young women talking in the front seat and the shadows of pines across the rutted road alternating with the clear spaces where there were green-and-gold fields of knee-high tobacco and corn and wheat and hay and sometimes cotton, not yet flowered.

The boy pulled a tin from his pocket, took a pinch of snuff, and sniffed it into his nose. He offered some to his sister, but she shook her head. Then he held it over to Mary Bet. She too shook her head. “Go on and try it,” he said. “It clears your head right up.”

Sallie Wood turned around. “Leave her alone, Jacob,” she said.

But Mary Bet reached into the tin and took a big pinch like she’d seen the old men doing down at her father’s store. She held it to her nose and smelled the sweet dank foresty odor, and then she breathed some in. It tickled her nose so that she sneezed. But Jacob had been
right—it felt as though cool air filled her entire head. Siler turned and gave Mary Bet the same stern look he’d given the other children, but he took some snuff himself. The young women politely refused. “Not too much,” Myrt warned her sister. “It’ll make you sick.”

When they got there they saw no one about, except Samuel’s last remaining black man, whose name was Ezekiel Hallelujah Monday. He was known as Zeke, and he had once been Samuel’s property. The other handful of slaves had drifted away as soon as the war was over, including Zeke’s own mother. Zeke was older than Samuel, which put him somewhere over ninety. Still, he came out of the barn when the carriage pulled up and greeted the arrivals with a toothless smile, or what appeared to be. He was wearing a shirt of blue homespun, butternut trousers, and a straw hat. He unhitched the horse and led him to a tree, where he watered him, then curried and brushed and rubbed him down.

It was a sweltering, hazy July day, but Mary Bet had not brought her bathing costume because she wasn’t sure the bleeding was finished. She might wade in up to her knees, but that would be enough cooling off. They went around the barn and down to the mill house. The wheel was turning, while behind it in the pond ducks dabbled among the lilies and cattails. The miller waved to them from the window of the two-story whitewashed building. He was a new man, Samuel going through a miller every couple of years because he always thought he was being taken advantage of.

Jacob and his sister took off their shoes and went to dip their feet in the pond, and Jacob found rocks to throw at the ducks. Mary Bet and Siler stayed up under the shade of a willow and helped Myrt and Sallie spread out the picnic.

They had laid everything out, when they heard, from the direction of the main house, a man speaking. It was Zeke, saying something incomprehensible. Then they saw him, his nearly bald head glistening in the sun, walking alongside Grandpa Samuel, fanning
him with his straw hat, and it was hard to say who was supporting whom. Samuel wore a gleaming white suit and a boater with a baby-blue ribbon. “The vheel,” he said, pointing it out with his long beak of a nose, “it never stops. It just goes around and around and around.” He refused a cane because Captain Billie had used one. He stood there seeming to teeter forward, then backward, Zeke catching him as best he could.

Myrt sprang up and went to her grandfather. “Grandpa Samuel,” she said. “We were going to come in and say hello. How are you?”

He nodded, looking at her through filmy, rheum-swollen eyes. “Just fine, dear,” he said. “And how is your mother?”

Myrt glanced at the others. “It’s me, Myrtle Emma, Grandpa. Cicero’s daughter. Mama died three years ago.”

“That’s right, she did. I’m sorry to hear it.” He looked away from the group to the mill wheel, its paddles appearing to endlessly channel water down the race. “I’ve finally done it,” he said.