The Foxes of Harrow

by Frank Yerby

  Stephen looked at his wife and the white brows smoothed.

  “All right,” he said, “I promise, but just the same I hope Julie will tell us the whole story.”

  “I’m certain she will,” Aurore said.

  As Stephen went into his study, he could hear her summoning the Negroes. The house would be set in order—there was no doubt of that. Seating himself at his desk, Stephen opened his other letters. One of them, as he expected, was from Etienne. His son had proved a steady correspondent. This fact pleased Stephen as much as it surprised him. His relations with his son had been anything but smooth, yet, time and again, unwittingly by some odd turn of phrase, Stephen had discovered how much the younger man admired and respected him. His advice was asked on all sorts of matters: running the plantation, dealing with the Negroes, even, to his puzzled amazement, the management of a much-too-spirited wife.

  “It goes well with us here,” the letter read, “after a fashion. That is, we manage to eke out a living. Ceclie currently suspects me—not without some justification, I must admit—of carrying on an affair with one of the ladies of the town . . . Her tantrums of jealousy are something to behold! Inch continues surly and unreliable. I have a feeling that he is preaching emancipation to my Negroes. I made the surprising discovery that an astonishingly large number of them could read simple sentences and even write their names. When I confronted Inch with this fact he made no attempt to deny that it was he who had been teaching them . . . so I had him whipped . . .

  “I have grown a beard. It adds enormously to my dignity and even to my control over my household. . . .”

  Stephen sat holding the letter in his hand and gazing out over the landscape. At fifty-nine, he was thinner, and the red had all but disappeared from his hair. The lines about the corners of his eyes, and the two that descended from the thin, flaring nostrils to the edges of his mouth had deepened. His face, even in repose, was as keen as the blade of an ax. The eyes, bluer and paler than ever, had taken on a look of constant reflection, so that they seemed to be always fixed on far distances. “He looks through you,” his friends said.

  The streamers of moss in the oak trees caught the afternoon sun rays and blazed. Under the levee, the river went quietly. The Negroes sang as they worked under the bright October skies, but word and note and cadence were drowned in the vast distances. On the chocolate-colored waters a steamboat whistled, pounding upstream toward Natchez. It’s all so peaceful, Stephen thought, how long . . .

  Early the next morning, Stephen and Aurore met Julie and her husband at the wharf in New Orleans. They had come down from New York by coastal streamer, around the tip of Florida and upriver from the gulf. The trip had taken more than a month. As they stepped ashore, Aurore burst into sudden, unexplainable tears. Julie stood looking at her mother, her black eyes very wide and bright.

  “Mother,” she began, “what on earth . . .”

  Stephen smiled at her gently, his blue eyes alight.

  “ ‘Tis the shock of seeing that ye’re no longer a child,” he said. “Ye’ve changed, Julie. In carriage and air and everything.” He put out his hand to his new son-in-law.

  “Welcome home, Tom,” he said.

  Tom gulped two or three times before answering. Then he took Stephen’s hand in an iron grip and got out:

  “Thank you, sir. I’m awfully glad . . . I hadn’t expected . . .”

  “What’s done is done,” Stephen said. “Though I think that Julie rather cheated her mother. Aurore had entertained the idea of a wedding in the Cathedral—with white wedding gowns and oceans of flowers, but then young folk are so headstrong!”

  “I’m sorry, mother,” Julie said, keeping her arms around Aurore’s waist, “but then, you see, we had to get married rather suddenly.”

  Stephen’s brows made white thundercaps.

  “Papa!” Julie said, stamping her small foot. “If you think what I think you’re thinking, I’ll never speak to you again!”

  “Wait, Julie,” Tom said. “Your father knows you too well for that. And I hope that I can prove to him that Northerners can be gentlemen.”

  “That ye’ve done already. Come children, ‘tis no short ride to Harrow.”

  As soon as they reached the plantation, Aurore sent Negroes with invitations to the Damerons, the Nortons, the McGarths, the Le Blancs, the Lascals and the Sompayracs to dine with them that night. Julie would have preferred dining alone in the company of her family, but Aurore loved to entertain, and this was the best excuse she had had in years.

  Promptly at six the guests began to arrive. By seven they were all there, and the great salon rang with laughter and toasts. The ladies of course made veiled hints for information about the affluence and social position of young Tom, which the lad answered with a simple directness that was more than a little disconcerting.

  “My father is a very wealthy man,” he said. “He owns one of the largest mercantile establishments in Boston. I hope that you folk will forgive me for that, but really neither cane nor cotton will grow in Massachusetts!”

  “What does grow there?” Amelia asked after the laughter had subsided.

  Julie made a face.

  “Beans!” she said in a tone of extreme dislike.

  “Beans?” Amelia asked. “You mean red beans like the Negroes eat?”

  “Something like that—only they’re smaller and lighter in color. And the Bostonians cook them in little earthen pots with molasses and strips of bacon. And then instead of feeding them to the pigs as they should, they eat them themselves!”

  “You know, young man,” Andre Le Blanc said with heavy joviality. “You robbed me of a daughter-in-law. I had been confidently planning on having Julie for my son’s wife.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t know about that.”

  “Would it have made any difference if you had?”

  “Truthfully, no, sir. I would have fought every Creole in Louisiana for Julie.”

  “I don’t blame you. Julie is a rarely lovely creature—like her mother before her. May I propose a toast, gentlemen?”

  The men all nodded. Andre got to his feet, lifting his glass. The clear wine caught the light of the immense crystal chandelier and sparkled. The light fell softly upon the bare shoulders of the women and the dark evening attire of the men. The white tablecloth and napkins threw it back, the silver glistened with subdued fire, and the jewels at neck and earlobe and cuff and shirtfront blazed. Stephen had a feeling that time was arrested for the moment, that the dark, tumultuous torrent of events was held for a little while in check. Andre stood there, holding his glass.

  “To Madame and Monsieur Meredith,” he said. “May their union prosper—and may their felicity herald a renewal of cordial relationships between the two great sections of our homeland that they represent.” He made a short flourish with his glass and lifted it to his lips.

  “Papa!” the voice was young and masculine, growling from the doorway. “Don’t drink that toast!”

  They all turned at once. Young Victor Le Blanc, the blond twin, was standing there in the doorway. His clothing was dusty, and his young face was red and streaked.

  Slowly Andre lowered the glass.

  “You had better explain that,” he said. “And fast.”

  “I come from the Picayune’s offices,” the boy said flatly. “While you sit here eating with a damned Yankee, Southern soil is being outraged! Not four hours ago a Yankee abolitionist named John Brown attacked Harper’s Ferry in Virginia. The fighting is still going on.”

  Stephen looked at Aurore.

  “Holy Mother of God!” she whispered.

  “He’s freeing the slaves and arming them for insurrection!” the boy went on, his voice hoarse with passion. “At this very hour daughters of the South go in peril of more than their lives!”

  “Silence!” Andre thundered. “I won’t have such intemperate speech from a son of mine!”

  “Intemperate, Papa? Intemperate! While he holds the Federal Arsenal! Whil
e he seizes the railroad and sends his followers foraging over the country! Is war intemperate, Papa? Is rapine and sudden death?”

  Stephen stood up.

  “Ye’re mistaken, lad,” he said quietly.

  “I only wish I were, sir,” Victor said, almost weeping with rage; “but I’m not. I’ve been working at the newspaper offices all Summer. I was there when the first wire came in. And they’re still coming in—every hour brings worse news.” He turned to his father. “So, Papa, if you drink that toast, I say before this whole company—including the ladies—God damn your soul to hell!”

  Andre put the glass down untasted upon the table.

  “I have not drunk it, son,” he said quietly.

  Stephen looked around the table. Every glass stood full and untouched upon it—every glass except one. Julie held her glass in her hand; then with every eye upon her she stood up and very slowly drained it, tilting back her head until the last drop was gone. Instantly Tom Meredith was upon his feet, his face very white. In one gulp he too drained his glass and stood beside his wife.

  The chairs scraped back from the table. Stephen nodded to the servants. In a brief moment they were back with the hats and cloaks.

  “I am very sorry,” Stephen said. “Perhaps after we’ve all had time to think . . .”

  “Think!” Andre snorted. “What is there now to think about Stephen?”

  XXXIII

  WAKING sometime in the vast night of January 1861 (the year the world ended, afterwards to be born again—but not the same thing; no, never again the same) Stephen Fox was unsure what night it was or even that it was night, or what year. He lay very quietly by the slim form of his wife, an old woman now late in her fifties and thrice a grandmother, in a state of half awareness. It is such times as these, he reflected, that the borders of time and space melt, blend and disappear, so that what was, is; and also what will be. He stood again by the Mississippi awaiting Mike Farrel’s flatboat, watching at the same time with no sense of confusion old Mike (the same but different in age) dying in flames in the Creole Belle. He stood at the side of young Andre Le Blanc, slim, elegant, and almost too handsome, in the Place D’Armes looking into the lovely white face of Odalie, and knelt weeping with no transition in time or space beside her bed as she lay ravished in the arms of death (the final lover, and the greatest one).

  In Ireland he had hungered. In Ireland he had begged, lied, schemed, and stolen. But the mists were swirling thick and black about that part and the night descending. In America the jewelled skies were high and clear and the rains lashed the earth and the prairie winds bellowed and the sun smashed down with hammer-blows, It was one thing, this Nation, something new under heaven, one Nation indivisible . . . the palmetto fronds before Harrow, the oak trees trailing streamers of Spanish moss, the river, the river.

  The river and also the mountains and the prairie lands and the swamps. The plains of Kansas . . . poor, bleeding Kansas. New England, blizzard-whipped, but with flowers blooming in its heart. The sun on the mesa in Texas. Adobe huts, Navahoes, Greasers . . . dead Greasers, lying bloated in the roasting sun, and exuding that smell that you never could remember because there was never again anything to call it to your mind, never again the sick sweet smell of putrefaction, of blood, bone and sinew rotting in the sun. These and the faces of the dead (again living—remembered): Odalie, Pierre Arceneaux, Old Caleen, Achille, La Belle Sauvage, Hugo Waguespack, falling like a pole-axed bull, my bullet in his heart, making the same sound a log would, striking the earth. They were all there, black and white alike, and the mind made no distinction. Was it because in the final democracy of death all men were truly equal?

  These and the tenuous fine-spun memories of his youth; faint and vivid at the same time, the women he had loved and lusted after, the ones whom he had merely lusted after—a fine distinction, that—nicely drawn. Lying there open-eyed staring at the ceiling, high and cool in the darkness, it was the everscent, the unrelated, the small peculiarities that came back with sharp distinctness. (Desiree’s body had been long and cool, just off-white in the darkness, in the daylight pale golden. Odalie was cool glacier-ice, snowy-skinned, with volcanoes of frozen-over passion imprisoned beneath—and Aurore was like her. True ladies of the old South. Ladies. Reserve, dignity, dutiful submission to a repugnant obligation . . . Well, they had learned, both of them, that cologne and cleanness and the twice daily bathings could not hold back the animal sweat, the panting, scalding-hot female-smell of giving and taking and wanting to be hurt, to die into ecstasy and to come alive again . . . with the blood running slow and warm, the body sweat-dewed of the she-thing mastered, conquered and subdued.) But I am sixty-one years old and the young flame is an ember, glowing amid the ashes and the dust.

  The place, the river, the city (New Orleans) and the land . . . all of it North, South and West. California and Texas, South Carolina and Massachusetts. The cities: New York, Boston, Philadelphia (city of brotherly love), Memphis, Vicksburg, Corinth, Natchez, Baton Rouge, New Orleans. The land all of it . . . his land, America. Young giant of the West. The New Idea . . . “That all men are created equal . . . that they are endowed by their Creator . . . by their Creator . . . by their Creator . . .” His land, America . . . all of it.

  A house divided against itself cannot stand. The last, best hope of earth . . . that as long as it exists their empires of exploitation, degradation and misery totter . . . and men everywhere have hope. My son growing upon the soil, and young Inch, black, speaking cleanly and purely the language of Racine. Young Inch. Black, black, black . . . three million blacks sweating in the sun . . . and John Brown out of his grave and marching the earth through the whirlwind and the fire. They hanged him in Virginia but he is not dead . . . no, not dead, not ever dead; you cannot kill an idea. And because of that idea Harrow must perish, its Negroes gone, the slave cabins tenantless, the fields parched and weed-ruined, the house itself burnt.

  Burnt? How did he know that? That was not a memory . . . that had never happened. “I don’t know!” he said aloud, crying the words at the darkness, “I don’t know! I don’t . . .”

  “Stephen!”

  “Sorry, my dear; I must have been dreaming.”

  Getting out of bed after she had turned over and gone back to sleep, he crossed to the window. Now it was raining, a hard, pitiless downpour, unstirred by any wind. On the horizon there was the sound of distant thunder. Like guns, he thought. Like the guns that a few days ago had fired upon the Star of the West as she came to relieve the garrison at Fort Sumter in the harbor at Charleston.

  “Oh, my God!” he groaned. This was the end. The end of the young idea, the giant of the West, the brave new world of which men everywhere had hope. Abe Lincoln striding out of Illinois like a prairie wind. Abe Lincoln not yet in the White House, Abe Lincoln who might never have been there had not his enemies split and quarreled among themselves so that although he got a minority of the popular vote cast he had won a majority in the electoral college. If Lincoln is elected, we will secede. Well, Lincoln had been elected and they had seceded: first South Carolina, then Mississippi, then Alabama and Florida, then Georgia and now in Louisiana time was running out. (Thus a condemmed man must feel as the gallows hour approaches.) This and Julie . . . dear little Julie in bleak Boston and Etienne in Missouri with the grandchildren he had never seen . . . this and the signs and portents in the sky and time running out for the brave new world and the young idea dying. How would it be to kill men like the Merediths, linked to him now by indissoluble ties, sighting over the heavy revolver barrel, pulling the trigger, feeling the grip smack against his palm . . . how would it be . . . how?

  Now the rain was slowing and there was a faint lessening in the darkness so that the river showed beyond the levee. Still, there was no real light yet. Stephen wondered if there ever would be any light again in this world. Sighing, he turned to go back to bed. But now at last he heard it, the thunderous knocking at the door, far below on the gallery. He drew on his rob
e and started down the long curving stairs. Where the deuce were the Negroes? Surely one of them should have heard such a clatter. He went swiftly through the hall and threw back the bolts on the great doors. A tall man was standing there in the darkness, rain dripping from his hat—a huge slouch affair in the Western style-and from his cloak, so that he stood in a little pool. His great black beaver of a beard was rainwet too; the candle flame picked up the droplets glistening in the softly curling hair.

  “Well, Father,” he said. “Don’t you recognize me?”

  “ ‘Tienne! Holy Mother of God! How on earth . . . why . . . Come in, come in, lad—ye’re drenched!”

  Etienne came into the long hall, trailing little trickles of water upon the magnificent rugs. He looked about him like a stranger, half amazed at the vastness and the grandeur of Harrow.

  “Father,” he said, “Father . . .”

  “Yes, lad?” Stephen was pulling the bell cord, arousing the servants.

  “It’s different somehow. ‘Tis just as I remembered it, yet it seems changed . . . larger . . . I don’t know why. I guess I’ve become too accustomed to squalor. A log house in a Missouri prairie where the wind never stops howling . . . how’s Mother?”

  “Very well—I’ll have her called. But first some dry clothing for ye . . .”

  Old Jean-Jacques was creeping through the hall, so old now that he could scarcely move.

  “Awaken Georges,” Stephen told him, “and have him bring dry clothing. Tell Suzette to make coffee. Have ye eaten, ‘Tienne?”

  “No, Father.”

  “Tell her then to prepare a breakfast, Jean-Jacques.” He turned to Etienne. “And now, lad, where are the children? And Ceclie? Ye haven’t left them in Missouri, have ye?”

  “No, Father. They’re resting at the Saint Louis. But I couldn’t wait until morning. I had to see the old place and you and Mother.”

  “Thank ye, lad, for that. But what about your own place? Ye’re not in any trouble are ye, ‘Tienne? If it’s money that ye need . . .”