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by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “I can see why,” Mike said.

  “No, you can’t,” Priss said tartly. “The reason they don’t is that he got up in Sunday school class one morning right after he got here and as much as told that pompous old fool Horace Tait that he didn’t know his Old Testament, and then proceeded to make a speech about integration.”

  “God, really?”

  “Really. You know—or I guess you don’t know—Horace Tait thinks he’s the greatest expert on Bible history since the Dead Sea scrolls, and he was blowing up like a puff adder, and then when Sam made his little speech on the ancient and modern prophets and the Civil Rights Movement, you could have heard a pin drop. Melvin and Carrie Sue Hinds got up and walked out. I knew he’d just cooked his goose in Lytton, of course, so I asked him over here for Sunday dinner and he came, and we’ve been friends ever since.”

  “I bet you have.” Mike smiled at her, interested in spite of herself. “What on earth did he say?”

  “Well, Horace was holding forth about Ezra in the court of the high priest, and how the high priest told him to go on back south, that he was nothing but a tender of sycamore trees. And Sam got up and said that wasn’t Ezra, it was Amos. He was right, of course; Horace is getting as senile as a goat. And while he was sputtering, Sam went on and said that Amos had always reminded him of the ‘outside agitators’ in the Civil Rights Movement, the ones who came in from up north and kicked up such a fuss and made such trouble and almost got run out of town by the very liberal white Southerners who were trying to do the same things that the agitators were. Well, you could cut the quiet with a knife, and I got tickled and interested, so I said that I thought they were too strident for their own good, whatever they were trying to do; the northern agitators, I meant. And he said yes, but, like Amos and the others, it was the strident outside saints, the troublesome loudmouths, that got the changes made, not those of us down here who had all the experience and tools and sensitivities and understanding that our long association with the blacks gave us to work with. And so then I asked why he thought that was, and he said because the blacks are us, a part of us, whether we like it or not, and that working for their real liberation would be like self-mutilation. That’s when Melvin and Carrie Sue got up and left, when he said they were us. Didn’t have any more idea than a pair of donkeys what he was talking about. And then he went on to say that the real prophets were more than just liberal humanists; they were mystics as well as social activists; and that their social activism sprang from a strong inner life, a sharp sense of vocation and a single-minded obsession, a real mystical vision. Like Gandhi, he said, or Martin Luther King. I knew then he wasn’t going to get any more clients in Lytton, so that’s when I asked him home to dinner, and I was right. He hasn’t had another one.”

  “I’m surprised anybody’s still speaking to you,” Mike said, amused.

  “Oh, everybody’s used to me,” Priss said comfortably. “Everybody knows that the Comforts were always wild-eyed and smartmouthed, and half-cracked to boot. They grew up with me. Sam made the mistake of spouting off way too early in the game.”

  “Well, it really was pretty stupid,” Mike said. “Especially if he’d just gotten his law degree at age … what? He must be my age or older. I wonder why he bothered to get a degree if he was going to blow it the first time he opened his mouth? He must have known what this town was like. What has he done for the rest of his life, anyway? Sold Chevrolets?”

  “You’ll have to ask him that,” Priss said. “I never bothered. Doesn’t matter a happy rat’s fanny to me what he did. He’s a good lawyer and he makes me laugh, and that’s enough for me.”

  “Well, he may be smarter than I thought, but I still don’t like him,” Mike said. “He’s ruder and cruder than he has to be if he does indeed know better, as you say he does, and he’s in and out of that house far too much. He calls Daddy ‘Colonel,’ did you know that? It makes me want to throw up.”

  She was aware that she had said “Daddy” freely and naturally, and for some reason felt heat rising from her chest and neck into her face.

  “What does it matter to you what he calls your father, if you’re not going to be around him and don’t care about the whole DOT thing? The point is that John likes and trusts him, and he doesn’t anybody else, much. You ought to be glad he’s got some company and won’t be on your neck. How do you and John get along, anyway?” Priss Comfort said. She looked keenly at Mike.

  “We get along as well as we need to,” Mike said. “He’s changed so much that it’s like being around a stranger. He’s cranky and mean-mouthed, but I don’t care about that. Like I said, I don’t plan to be around him that much. We’ve got a competent woman coming in on Monday, and Sam is there at night, and J.W. is around, of course. Daddy doesn’t have to see much of me, either, and I think that suits him as well as it does me. We can certainly be polite to each other, or at least I can be to him, and I really don’t care what he says to me. He hasn’t any power to hurt me. What he thinks of me hasn’t mattered to me for a very long time, Priss.”

  “My poor Mike,” Priss Comfort said softly, and Mike stared at her as if she had not heard her correctly. Priss was gazing out the window of the living room where the burning light of afternoon was slowly fading into the still-hot mauve of early evening. She did not say anything else.

  “DeeDee thinks Sam Canaday is after my father’s money,” Mike said into the silence, more to get Priss back than anything else.

  “DeeDee has got a fixation about money,” Priss said. “She hasn’t had any for so long that she thinks it’s the reason anybody anywhere does anything. Your father hasn’t got any money to speak of, Mike; he never did have, except for what he set aside for your college …” She faltered and looked at Mike. Mike looked back impassively.

  “Anyway, all he’s really got is that old farm,” Priss went on, “and with the price of land down here in this end of the county lying there like a dead dog in a ditch, it’s not worth much either. I think the price the DOT offered him is probably more than fair. Thing is, he doesn’t need the money; he’ll be dead long before he could spend it. It’s that land he needs.”

  “What on earth for?” Mike said. “If he’s going to be dead so soon, why does he need the stupid land? He sounds like Gerald O’Hara: “The land is all that matters, Katie Scarlett. Look to the land.’ Does he think it’s going to make the family fortune? I certainly don’t want it; DeeDee’s going to get it, anyway; he knows it’s going to stay in the family …”

  “I don’t know why he needs the stupid land so much, as you say,” Priss said severely. “I just know that he does; it’s probably kept him alive up to now, through a year of cancer and two months of stroke. It’s always had a powerful hold on him; I’ve always thought that next to your mama, he cared more about the land than anything else on earth. I’d watch my mouth if I were you, Mike. It’s not up to you to legislate what a man loves.”

  “I thought you weren’t ever going to forgive him,” Mike said, and the words sounded sullen in her own ears. But Priss’s words had chastened her as they always had, and she disliked the ensuing feelings of childish petulance.

  “I’m not, for what he did to you,” Priss said evenly. “But that doesn’t mean I’m blind to what hurts him, or hard enough not to care just a little. Which is more than I can say for his younger daughter.”

  “Why should I?” Mike said, looking straight at Priss in the gathering twilight. “He doesn’t about me. And I don’t care that he doesn’t. He and I are two adults, and at least we know where we stand with each other …”

  “I wonder,” Priss Comfort said, but then she was silent.

  “DeeDee is in bad shape, then,” Mike said presently. She knew that she ought to get back to the house on Pomeroy Street, that her father would be waking from his nap and find himself unattended. But despite the small, stinging exchange between them, she did not want to leave the warm stasis of Priss’s little house.

  “Well, you saw her,
” Priss said. “She looks awful, and I can’t think her health is any too good with all that extra weight she’s carrying, and it must be agony for her to look like that, as pretty as she always was, and as proud of it. And then those two children have turned out real badly; the boy left here about a year ago after some funny business at the Genuine Parts place up in Red Oak where he worked … never had held a steady job, just like his pa … and the girl married soon as she turned sixteen and went off somewhere with her no-good husband on a motorcycle. Heard she’s divorced and working in some kind of health spa thing down around Panama City. She’s not but nineteen now, and little John, as DeeDee still calls him, is twenty-three. They’ve been a terrible disappointment to her, though she never will admit it, and talks about them as though they’d graduated summa cum laude from the best Ivy League schools in the country.”

  “Ah, poor Dee,” Mike said. “I thought Daddy had set up some kind of trust for little John, something to get him through college.”

  “He did, yes,” Priss said. “That much I do know. But that boy couldn’t have gotten through freshman year at the Georgia College of Bartending. Just like his father. Duck’s still too sorry to live. Always was. He’s got DeeDee stuck in some godawful little shotgun house out from town next to the old trailer park he grew up in, and now he’s moved that demented old slut of a mother of his in there for DeeDee to take care of, so she can’t even go back to teaching and make a little extra money if she wanted to.”

  “I thought Duck was burning up the woods in real estate,” Mike said. “He told me on the way home all about how South Fulton was riding the crest of a real boom …”

  “South Fulton County may be on the edge of a boom, but Duck Wingo isn’t on the edge of anything except bankruptcy, and never will be,” Priss said. “He can’t hold a job; I don’t know how many he must have had over the years. The only real estate he knows about is the crumbs he gets …” She fell silent, abruptly. “Anyway,” she went on presently, “your daddy is about all that DeeDee has left, him and being a Winship, which is no bad thing, of course, but not what it used to be. Half of Lytton is new people now, and they don’t even know who DeeDee is, or who your father is, for that matter. DeeDee won’t admit that, of course; it’s the life raft she’s holding onto. In her mind she’s still pretty, pampered little DeeDee Winship, the apple of her daddy’s eye and the heir to his name and the old family plantation. No wonder she thinks Sam Canaday is after John’s money. I think it’s gall and wormwood to her that John seems to like having Sam around more than he does her, now.”

  “Well,” Mike said, “she is pretty hard to take sometimes, Priss. She hasn’t had the needle out of me since I got here.”

  “I don’t wonder,” Priss said. “Think how you must look to her. Elegant, citified, even famous by her lights, without the ties of a no-good husband and kids, plenty of money, a smart daughter …”

  “Oh, god, poor Dee,” Mike said again, smiling unwillingly. “If she only knew! Anyway, it was she who begged me to come down here …”

  “But he asked for you, first,” Priss said. “Don’t forget that. He’s all she has, and now she has to share him with you and Sam Canaday. I don’t like to be around her either, so I’m not, but I can understand why she’s the way she is.”

  “Well, so can I, of course, now that you’ve told me how it is with her,” Mike said. “Who told you Daddy asked for me, anyway?”

  “Sam did,” Priss said.

  “It strikes me that Sam Canaday knows entirely too goddamned much about all the Winships, including me,” Mike snapped, rising to leave. “I’ll come see you again tomorrow, if I may.”

  She was nearly to the door of the little house when Priss Comfort said, “Mike, wait. There’s one more thing I think you ought to know.”

  Mike paused and turned to look at her. Priss’s green eyes gleamed in the dusk.

  “What?” she said.

  “Bayard Sewell is around that house a lot, too,” Priss said. Her voice was neutral, pleasant, but Mike caught something in it, a carefulness, a kind of delicate groping.

  “Bayard Sewell?” Mike echoed. “Bay?”

  “Yes,” Priss said. “He usually comes by about four, leaves his office early, and has a drink and a chat with your dad. He’s been doing it ever since he got home from college; he’s crazy about John, and has been awfully good to him, especially since the cancer. He’s … away now, on business, I think … but he’ll be back in a few days, and I didn’t want him to catch you by surprise. He says he’s looking forward to seeing you, but I didn’t know how you’d feel about seeing him. I didn’t even know if you knew he was still in Lytton …”

  Priss’s voice trailed off. Mike said nothing. The bell jar snugged close around her, and through it the interior of the little room and the heat-hazed trees and shrubbery outside the windows shimmered as though through crystal. Inside the bell, Mike felt nothing at all.

  “I didn’t know, as a matter of fact,” she said easily. “And I’m glad you told me. It will be good to see Bay; I’m glad he’s still fond of Daddy, and seeing a lot of him. Daddy was always crazy about Bay; you remember. How is he? What is he doing, still in Lytton? I thought surely he’d end up somewhere in a city …”

  “He’s doing as well as you’d expect,” Priss said. “Wonderfully well, as a matter of fact. He came back here after he finished the university; you know, of course, that John sent him through, and he’s always saying how grateful he is to John, and how much he owes him. And well he should. Your daddy set him up in his real estate business, and gave him thirty acres of the homeplace property to get started with, and introduced him to a few of the right people in Atlanta, from his old firm, and Bayard hasn’t stopped since. He’s one of the most successful real estate men in the area now, and has held about every office and honor there is in this end of the county … he was mayor for almost ten years … and he’s just recently been elected to the state legislature. Just as popular there as he is here, too; I hear that there’s beginning to be some talk about grooming him for governor in a few years. So he’s right; he owes your daddy a lot. And to give him his due, he’s as crazy about your father as John is about him, or seems to be. He’s taken on Duck in his firm; God knows how he keeps him from wrecking it, and he spends more time with him and DeeDee than you’d think a sane man could stand. I understand he’s the only reason their boy isn’t in jail now. And like I said, he’s over at your dad’s every day, even if it’s just for a minute. Couldn’t be any closer to him than if he was a son.”

  “He always was fond of Daddy,” Mike said conversationally. “I’m glad to hear he’s done so well. I never doubted that he would. What about his family? He must have one …”

  “Oh, yes, a family, and a beautiful house just up the street and around the corner from yours. He built it back awhile when he bought that old rooming house where he and his mother used to live when you all were growing up. Made it into big lots and put up really nice houses on it, and moved into the biggest one himself. Has a pool and all. Yes, he married Sally Chambers when he got out of college … remember her, that little blond cheerleader from up around College Park? … and has two fine children. Really outstanding boys; just everything in high school, like he was, and are in real good schools … They’re at camp this summer, I think, in North Carolina. Their oldest, Win … they named him Winship, after your father … drowned in the pool when he was just five, long time ago. I don’t suppose Bay ever really got over it, and I know Sally didn’t. She’s … delicate. He’s had a pretty bad time with her, over the years. Loves her and those two boys to death, though. Never leaves her alone. They’re in church every Sunday morning without fail, except when she’s in the hospital …”

  “Does she have some sort of disease or condition?” Mike asked civilly. She might have been hearing news of a pleasant, long-ago acquaintance.

  “Well, like I said, she’s frail,” Priss said. “She’s been in and out of several psychiatric facilities
.”

  “I am sorry,” Mike said. “That must be hard on Bay, too.”

  “You’d never know it,” Priss said. “He doesn’t complain.”

  “No. Well, thank you for telling me,” Mike said. “I wonder why Daddy hasn’t said anything about him being around?”

  “Sam made him promise not to, unless I’d talked to you and found out how you felt about things,” Priss said. “We weren’t sure you’d want to see him. It’s just coincidence that he’s away now.”

  “Well, how should I feel?” Mike asked. “I’m happy for Bay and Daddy both that the association is so pleasant, and I’m glad to hear about his success, and I’m sorry to hear about his wife and his son. That’s all. Really, Priss, it was all so long ago; I never think of it. I hardly ever did, after I left.”

  She was silent a moment, and then she said, “Does Sam Canaday know about … Bay and me, then?”

  “Yes,” Priss said. “He knows about that, and about that business with your father … all of it.”

  Anger flared again, faintly, through the bell jar.

  “I’m surprised Daddy told him about that,” she said. “I’d have thought he’d want to forget it. I thought he had forgotten it, or put it out of his mind. He certainly managed to do that with me. I don’t like that … shyster lawyer … knowing everything about me …”

  “It wasn’t your father,” Priss said mildly. “I told him.”

  “Why? Why did you have to drag all that up to a perfect stranger, a nobody?” The thought of that lank-haired, slow-smiling man looking at her with his wolfs grin and knowing the old intimacies of her pain made Mike cringe as if he had laid too-familiar hands on her body.

  “I thought he ought to know,” Priss Comfort said.

  Abruptly, the heat went out of Mike, and she shrugged. Yesterday’s fatigue came crawling back on sucking hands and feet.