by Amy Stewart
“You didn’t tell Norma!” Fleurette protested.
Constance shot a look at her of the type that passed between sisters and said, “She’s the only one in this entire camp whom I can trust completely with a secret, and that includes you. I don’t know why the two of you are here tonight, by the way.”
Hack said, “I brought them, miss. I thought they were to train with the others.”
Constance wasn’t fooled. She frowned at that but said, “Well, they’re not, but you might as well come along. I don’t want you going back by yourselves.”
Margaret was the one who found the route deeper into the woods, and she showed them the way. The others followed silently, in a straight line, putting their feet down in each other’s footsteps as Hack demonstrated. He led the group with his lantern. Constance took up the rear with hers.
It seemed to Beulah that they trudged for hours in those dark woods, but when they emerged in a wide, flat, hilltop clearing, Hack checked his watch and announced that only twenty minutes had passed.
“Let’s get on with this,” Constance said. “First let me see your stances.”
Constance went from one girl to the next and showed them how to put one foot in front, and to anchor the other foot behind. Fleurette and Beulah tried to stand alongside and imitate them, but Constance said, “Go sit over there where I can see you, both of you,” and they did.
While they worked on their stances and passed a pistol around, Hack walked the edge of the clearing.
“There’s not a house or a road or anything out here,” he said to Constance. “You won’t wake up anybody but the birds.”
Constance nodded but went and checked for herself.
“Your sister doesn’t trust a soul,” Beulah whispered to Fleurette.
“Not when it’s her responsibility,” Fleurette said. “If she can be blamed for it, she does it herself.”
That gave Beulah an idea about Constance and her mysterious past. Perhaps she’d been blamed for some mishap. “Sometimes people blame you for things that aren’t your responsibility,” she proposed.
Fleurette nodded. “She doesn’t like it when that happens.”
It was cold on the damp grass, but they’d been ordered to sit there and didn’t dare move now that guns were being passed around. Fleurette never did relieve herself of her uniform to show off her green dress: there wasn’t a minute to do it when Hack wasn’t watching, and it would’ve been awfully strange, even on this already strange night, for her to start stepping out of her clothes. A little bit of green silk hung below the hem of her uniform, and she fingered it absently as the girls took their places in line.
Beulah was sleepy, in spite of the cold. She leaned against Fleurette for warmth. The sensation of a shoulder and elbow next to her, faintly reminiscent of those early years when she shared a bed with Claudia, was so soothing that her eyes started to droop.
She’d hardly slept the night before: she’d awoken several times in a terror over what she would do when camp ended. Where would she go, on the very last day? When the gates opened and the parents came to retrieve their daughters, what would happen to her? If she could make her way back to New York, she could borrow a few dollars from Mabel and resume her old life, but if that was all she had waiting for her, why stay at the camp? She was doing poorly in her classes. She hated to sew and couldn’t manage the telegraph codes. She was too squeamish for nursing and bored by cooking. There was nothing for her, if France was out of reach. But she’d have to walk back to New York if she wanted to leave now. She hadn’t a penny in her pocket.
Such were the thoughts running around in her head at night. Sometimes they raced into the past, too, where they hadn’t been allowed to go for so many years: back to Meemaw, and Claudia, and Henry Clay, even, when he was sweet and tender to her, before everything went so terribly wrong.
Nestled against Fleurette, she was halfway back to her dreams when the first girl fired her gun.
Beulah jerked away from Fleurette and gasped with such force that she nearly choked.
26
THE PAPERS ALL claimed that Beulah was the last one to see Henry Clay. That must’ve been right, because he took her driving on July 17, 1911, and she told him that it was her birthday.
“It hardly seems possible that I’m nineteen already,” she said as she wrapped a scarf around her hair. He liked an open-topped auto in the summer, no matter how dusty or windy. “It’s just so strange, because in my mind Claudia is always nineteen, but now I’ve caught up to her and Claudia’s a mature and married woman of twenty-three.”
Henry Clay didn’t hear a word she said, he was driving so fast. Since the day they met back up again at the ball park, she’d allowed him to come around and see her once or twice a week. This felt like a triumph, on one hand, because she’d wrestled him away from Louise, but Henry Clay himself had become so unpleasant that it outweighed the sweetness of that small victory.
He was half-crazed over his predicament and obsessed with the idea that he’d been trapped for life. He believed he was, in every meaningful way, already interred in a grave dug for him by his very own family. They had put him in a box and meant to keep him there. Increasingly, Henry Clay saw this not as the sort of warm and comfortable strait-jacket that a well-to-do southern family might wrap around its errant son, but as an active conspiracy, aimed at strangling him quite literally to death.
On their drive that day, he could talk of nothing else. “They do mean to kill me. They mean to crush my spirit and to stifle my soul and then to smother me in the night until I can’t hardly breathe. Why, they’re already doing it. I believe Louise put a pillow over my mouth last night. I woke up gasping for air.”
Beulah was puzzled and a little alarmed by this kind of talk, but also, she had to admit, ever so slightly fascinated. She kept him talking about it.
“Now, why would your own wife do a thing like that, now that y’all have a little baby to bring up?” she said. It stung to even think of the new Beattie baby, but Beulah conjured him up anyway, if only to bring Henry Clay to his senses.
“Don’t you see?” Henry Clay raged. “That’s precisely the reason! She has everything she needs now. A son with the Beattie name, a house to call her own, her share of her parents’ fortune and mine. What purpose do I serve in any of it?”
“Well, what purpose did you expect to serve when you married her?” Beulah said. She was growing tired of all this talk about Louise. She resolved, once again, to refuse to see him the next time he came around. He wasn’t the man she remembered, but she had trouble keeping this newer version of him fixed in her head when he was away. It was only after she’d stepped into his auto that the truth came to her: something had gone seriously wrong with Henry Clay. Or maybe something had been wrong with him all along, only he used to be better at hiding it.
They were on their way to an old stock pond he liked to frequent. It was long abandoned and overgrown with high grass that summer, as there weren’t any cattle on the land anymore. The place was private but not hidden. He explained that he did not like to be sequestered behind a stand of trees. Even a canopy of branches made him feel smothered. Here, on this old dirt road, miles away from any living thing and under an open sky, he could relax.
He stepped out of the auto and stretched out on the grass, not having bothered to bring so much as a blanket for the two of them. Romance was not on his mind. It didn’t matter: Beulah hadn’t had relations with him in some time. He was often ill and feverish, and said he didn’t like to take his clothes off in the daytime, which was the only time he could visit with her. At night he was expected to be at home, “in my place,” as he put it, spitefully, as if there was anything at all wrong with a man being in his own home with his own family in the evening.
He was still muttering about all of this as he stretched out in the grass, but he did not stay there long, and did not call for Beulah to come and lay with him. Instead he was up again, restless, pacing, pleading with Beulah t
o try to understand him, to see things his way, to help him find a way out of the mess he’d made for himself.
“Her mother knows everything I do,” Henry Clay said, kicking a rock into the mud around the edge of the stock pond. “She knows every step I take when I leave the house. She even knows I’ve been seeing you again.”
“Now, how did she find out about me?” Beulah demanded.
“She’s got somebody following me, I know she does.”
Beulah didn’t like that one bit. She had no interest in tangling with Louise’s mother or anyone else of her ilk. She was living on her own now, working as a laundress, and enjoying a nice quiet life. If Henry Clay wanted to make a mess of his marriage, he ought to do it on his own.
“I have no part in this, and if you were any kind of man, you’d leave me out of it,” Beulah said. “You come by and pull me out of my house, and haul me out here to listen to you rant about your family, as if any of it matters one bit to me. Well, it doesn’t, and you don’t.”
It had been a terrible idea to be out with him like this, all alone in an empty field. What did she hope to gain by running around with him? He’d brought her nothing but trouble and heartache, and that was still all he had to give.
He dropped down on the grass again and pulled at her skirt, as if she would find that enticing. “We had something together, didn’t we? Doesn’t that matter?”
She jerked her skirt away from him. “What did we have? A room in a whorehouse? A baby you threw away? You paid me to go with you, Henry Clay. Did you ever think of that? Whatever we had between us, it was because you paid to have it.”
“Don’t be like that,” he moaned. His eyes were dark and liquid and should’ve moved her to sympathy. They did not.
“Now you’re the one being paid,” she said. “You’re living on your daddy’s money and Louise’s money, and you have to do what they say and act how they say to act, don’t you? How’s that any different than what I had to do for you?” She wrapped her scarf around her hair again and looked down the road, making it obvious that she was thinking about walking off.
Henry Clay was furious. He scrambled to his feet. “Don’t you dare call me a whore.”
Now that word was offensive? Beulah would’ve laughed if she wasn’t so desperate to get away. “Go on back to Louise. Next time you come by, I won’t be at home.”
Was she really going to walk all the way home? How far could it be? She didn’t know, but she’d walk down that old dirt road and take it all the way back into Richmond, if only it carried her away from Henry Clay.
She didn’t look back. She could hear him rummaging around in his automobile. He could chase after her if he wanted to. She wasn’t about to climb back in that machine with him.
For the first time she thought it might’ve been for the best that her baby didn’t live. What if he’d been crazy like his daddy? She wondered how she could’ve missed this side of him before.
It was peaceful, walking down that country lane by herself. Crickets sang in the grass and bumblebees tumbled through the air. She’d only been walking for a few minutes when she heard the shotgun.
She jerked forward as if she’d been hit. Never once had Beulah feared for her life as she did in that moment. She found herself down on the ground, running a hand over her legs, across her shoulder and the back of her head, expecting to find blood. When she determined that she was alive and unhurt, she slumped face-down on the ground, wanting to wrap her arms around the entirety of the earth in gratitude.
Was he still behind her? Don’t turn around, she told herself. But then she did. There he stood, silhouetted against a blazing afternoon sky, with his rifle up over his head, pointed at the heavens.
“Is that what I have to do to get your attention, Beulah Binford?” he shouted, although she could hardly hear him with the wind carrying his voice away.
“Don’t you know you have everyone’s attention, Henry Clay?” she shouted back. “You’re driving everyone around you crazy, including me.”
He put the gun down at his side, but he didn’t make a move toward her, nor she toward him.
“What do you intend to do with that thing?” she called. She stood up on shaky knees and brushed the grass off.
This time his voice was more subdued. “Nothing,” he said. “Just fire it up at the clouds.”
“All right, then, why don’t you put it away? And don’t ever go shooting it off around me again.” She was more afraid than she let on, but she stood her ground, and waited until he went around to the rear of his automobile and put the rifle back where it must’ve been all this time. Beulah hadn’t even suspected that he carried a gun with him.
She walked away again, the dust kicking up into her skirts, thinking that she might pass a farmer going into town who would give her a ride. Henry Clay called after her a few more times, with such sorrow in his voice, but Beulah refused to turn around. He was a haunted man now, governed by his own misery, ruled by demons Beulah couldn’t even fathom. How a man could have everything a person might reasonably want, and still go around so aggrieved and wounded, was something she would never understand.
Just seeing what a wreck he’d made of his life made Beulah want to do something with hers. She would stop chasing after ball players. They were only ever passing through town anyway. It wouldn’t do her any good to try to go to school now, after all this time, but maybe she could find Claudia and ask for help securing some kind of better work for herself.
It had never before occurred to Beulah to imagine what she wanted her life to be, or what kind of person she hoped to become when she was twenty-six like Henry Clay was then. All she knew was that she didn’t want to end up like him.
It was too far for her to walk all the way home. She followed the road quite a ways, until the sun started to sink into a low hill on the horizon. She might’ve kept going in the dark, except that Henry Clay managed to settle himself down eventually and came driving up behind her, slow as he pleased. He asked her very politely to climb back in and let him take her home.
“I won’t bother you again,” he said. “I know you don’t want to see me like this. You won’t. I promise. I’m going to go home and take care of my own mess. You’ll see.”
“I don’t want to see, is my point,” Beulah said.
“I know. I know. You won’t. Just let me take you home. You’ll be out here all night if you keep walking.”
She bent down and squinted at him, and saw how tired he was. He’d worn himself out with all that ranting and raving. There wasn’t any fight left in him.
“All right,” she said, wary but willing. “You take me directly home, and then go put your own house in order.”
“That’s exactly what I intend to do,” Henry Clay said.
27
LATER, BEULAH WOULD look back on that night and recall the scent of murder in the air. They say a hound can sniff a raw kill in the wind. Beulah didn’t have a nose like that, but something smelled wretched. It wasn’t rot and decay: this was a fresh horror. It had a tang to it.
She’d allowed Henry Clay to take her back to the little room she rented, but she couldn’t stay there. The air was oppressive, even long after dark. She sweated, not from the heat but from nausea, the kind that always came over her at the sight of blood. There was an unbearable pounding at her temples. She couldn’t be alone in that state. Around midnight, she crept over to Meemaw’s, slipped inside, and passed a sleepless night on her divan, waiting for whatever was to come.
It was a neighbor lady who told her. Beulah was sitting on Meemaw’s front steps the next morning, sewing a strap on an apron because Meemaw couldn’t see to do it herself anymore.
“Lady got murdered out on the Midlothian pike last night,” said the neighbor, stepping outside to dump a pail of washing-water. “They sent the dogs out looking for the man that did it.”
Beulah knotted the thread, snapped off the needle, and said, “Was she just out walking by herself and somebody got her?”
“Oh, no, she was in a motor car with her husband. A man stepped right out into the road and shot the lady. The husband got out and wrestled the gun away from him, but the fellow ran off. It was too late anyway. The wife was already dead. He drove all the way back into Richmond with her leaning up against him, him driving with one hand and all covered in blood.”
“Haven’t they caught the man who did it?”
“No,” said the neighbor. “I’m staying inside until they do. Looks like a sweet young couple, too. They were only married last August, and the wife had a baby a few weeks ago. Poor little thing don’t have no mama now.”
Beulah tried to make it sound like she had only a passing interest in the story. “Who was it—the lady who died?”
The neighbor shrugged. “She don’t live around here, if that’s what you’re wondering. Last name Beattie. Must be the same ones that own the department store, because I heard they closed down today so all the men could join the manhunt.”
The neighbor went back inside her house and locked the door rather loudly, calling attention to herself by rattling it. Beulah stood up off the step, slowly, and stretched, as if she was in no hurry. When she turned around, Meemaw was standing just inside the screen door, her arms folded across her chest, looking down at her with an expression that Beulah could not read.
“Do not bring the police to my house” was all Meemaw said to her.
“Then I guess I’ll have to go,” Beulah said. She handed the apron back to her grandmother, and wandered on down the street to her own rented room.
It was a strange day, because she stayed inside and did so little. She thought she ought to clean the place, as long as she was housebound, or see what she could salvage from her mending basket, but she found that she could hardly move. She sat in a chair most of the day, near a window but not too close, looking out on the street and wondering if the police had found what they were looking for.
