by Dot Jackson
It was, I thought maybe, just like Rose looking after us. “How long did that go on?” I said.
“Till Cleone married Coy Ray,” Nam said.
She got up and reached into a sack she had brought. The smell of roasted coffee beans made me wince with the memory of that first morning I stood on that porch. Oh, how I had hoped that there would be somebody with a pot of coffee, in the house. Or even just somebody…It seemed like so many years ago.
“I ground this before breakfast,” she said. “I’ll go put on the pot.”
No, I said, I would in a minute. “Tell me about that wedding first,” I said.
“Well, you could’ve knocked me over,” she said. “Now, Coy Ray had been a-courtin’ her all his life. If he shot four doves he brought her two. If he had pretty apples he took her the best of ’em. She was always good to him, she was that kind of lady. But nobody ever in this world thought she’d marry Coy Ray Wilcox. Other things aside she was a full head taller!”
“And not a bit of kin,” I said. I didn’t mean it to be ugly—just an observation. But Nam flattened her mouth and was quiet till I begged her to go on.
“When Celestine was a few months old,” she said, “Sophier decided she wanted to go home to ’er people and get away from the baby; if Cleone put it down it hollered like somethin’ wild in the woods. Sophier wanted Ben Aaron to go with ’er, leave the baby with Cleone. First he said he would. But he was strugglin’ with the mill, about to get it on its feet. At the last he sent her on and stayed.
“I guess she was gone six weeks or so,” Nam said. “Cleone kept the house and looked after the baby. I ’spect they were right happy. Peaceful. Sophier hadn’t been back but a week or two, then, when Cleone packed up and left, one night, and married Coy Ray…”
A breeze came up, it made that little shivery sigh down in the birches. We watched a wasp butting the ceiling, falling back, butting again.
“Why did he do it?” I said. It was due time.
“Who do what?” Nam said.
“I tried to ask him and he put me off like I had a pox,” I said.
She rocked and frowned and studied.
“If I was to tell you what I think…” she said. “No, I can only say what I know. You know, this whole place was in straits.”
“He told me,” I said. She looked a little bit surprised.
“Did he tell you what a time he was havin’, how he went from shipyard to shipyard, all along the coast, tryin’ to sell lumber? They had been our biggest market and they weren’t buyin’. And finally, somebody he knew told ’im about Sophier’s daddy, wantin’ to move a furniture plant south from Massachusetts. Did he tell you that?”
No, I said, but I was getting a picture.
“Well he went up to see the ol’ man. Right then the ol’ man had a big contract for a lot of school furniture. And hadn’t bought the lumber. Aaron of course had on all ’is charm you know. Ol’ man Orpington took ’im home to supper. Had two daughters. I don’t know this for a fact, but I’ve seen the other’n once. And I’d say, since Ben Aaron had to take one, he took the sweetest and the most beautiful.”
I guess I had been waiting for somebody to drop that. But still I marveled at it. It was just like he had said. He had done some things he wasn’t real proud of.
“He’d do anything,” I said out loud.
After a while, Nam said quietly, “Yes, I think he would. In fact I think he’s done it.”
I was not surprised; I don’t know what I was. Except weak. I staggered up, directly, and went and put on the coffee. I would have loved a drink of likker at that point but there was not a dram in the place.
Even without it, I let it slip what I was thinking. “How could he?” I said. “It’s not how she LOOKS…”
“But you can’t figger out what ’e does in the bed with ’er,” Nam said. She was always subtle. “I had bad dreams, m’self, about that quare match o’ legs all tangled up.”
We laughed out loud. Mainly, with me, it was from the mouth out. But a big dark issue was at last in the open.
“Shoo, I don’ know,” Nam said. “Some men they say’ll do it with a cow. Or a sheep. I reck’n a GO-rilla’d do all right for some. I reck’n this ain’t much worse than that.
“On the other hand,” she said, warming to the subject, “it’s been told around that ol’ Chick Aleywine, ol’ slutty woman up at the Forks, it was told she had a litter o’ pups. Now mind, I never saw ’em. Or anything…”
I got up laughing to see about the pot. As I started in the door I got an awesome feeling. I stood and felt the door jamb, thinking about that house.
“I am sorry for Sophier,” I said. “She really had such awful troubles here.”
“She despised this place,” Nam said. “And the feeling was mutual. This house plain turned her out. She thought she was comin’ to white columns and I bet she hoped for slaves, and what she found—she liked to say it, was ‘a tumble-down old barn.’
“’Course, I will say, it was in a way the truth. It had stood empty three years since Daisy died. Ben Aaron hadn’ had a chance to fix it up since he bought it from your ma…”
Well, I stood and stared down at her. My head swam. “What did you say?” I said, finally.
She turned and looked at me, wide-eyed. Then she frowned, and said, “Did you not know that either—that he bought it from your ma?”
“No,” I said. The word came out very small.
“Did you not know it was left to you…?”
18.
COMING TO TERMS
MY MOTHER WAS IN EUROPE. IT DIDN’T MATTER, WHAT WAS THERE to ask her? What was there to be done? We are all ignorant until we learn better; I came up here as ignorant as she. Almost. I thought about the summers in Europe, the opera houses, what I had gotten from that. Magic. Most of it. Now I knew what it had cost. I thought about it while I chopped weeds with the hoe. And while I mended our clothes, and rubbed out wash, and pulled the tall grass off the cemetery fence.
It was well enough that this was Ben Aaron’s place. I would as soon it be his place as mine. But I felt like he should have told me. Exactly. If it was his, it was Sophier’s too. “The family’s,” he said. And that meant her, not me.
He came by one day very soon after Nam’s visit; he was over in Shiloh a lot, that summer, and it was only a couple of miles through the gap. He came out to where I was working, that morning; he stopped at the spout and got a drink and came down in the garden, wiping his face on his sleeve.
“I hear you and Nam had a nice talk,” he said, overpolitely.
“I know things now I ought to have known before,” I said. I kept on hoeing. I didn’t know what more to say.
He stood there watching me a little while. Directly he came up and took the hoe out of my hands and leaned on it, looking at me.
“You didn’t know anything about it, ever, did you?” he said. I looked at the ground and shook my head.
“Your ma never told you?”
“No.”
“Did you never wonder? Did it not occur to you, even since you got here, how it must have been? Did it not cross your mind that you were Daisy’s only heir?”
“Yes it did,” I said finally, and that was the truth; it had, many times. “But I couldn’t ask you anything about it. When I ask you anything it makes you mad.”
His face wilted. He looked down at his feet. “You never mentioned it to Nam,” he said. I could tell they had fully discussed it.
“No,” I said. “I figured if it was any of my business somebody would tell me, sometime.” What I wanted to imply was I had trusted him.
“Oh God, if that ain’t us,” he said. He got out a cigarette. His hand was trembling when he put it to his mouth and struck the match on the sole of his boot.
“Well. I’ll have to tell you how it was,” he said. “I guess Nam told you how little we ever heard from your ma. We just couldn’t find out anything down there at all. It was a bad time, with Ive and Daisy going as
close together as they did. And us not even knowing about Mack.”
I said yes, we had talked about it, Nam and I. I was sorry about how Mama did, I said. She was not a bad person, I said, only flighty. I meant shallow. She was pretty, I said; she had a pretty voice. I did not want Ben Aaron to despise Mama. Even if there were moments when I had hated her, these last few days.
He nodded and said of course.
“You understand, now, that your granddaddy Ive being three years older than my daddy, and their brother Garland being dead, Ive got this place when their father died. Mack was Ive and Daisy’s only child. Had he outlived them, and then died, your mother would have probably gotten it. But Daisy outlived him. You were her heir. And as soon as I got Ive and Daisy’s business straightened up, I wrote your mother and laid it out to her. You were also due Ive and Daisy’s interest in the sawmill. Or I would buy you out—if that was what she thought the best. She wrote back that you would rather have the money. I wrote her then that I would raise that money. I sent her a pitiful little check from the money Daisy had on hand. And I sent her the deed to The Birches…”
He stopped talking and turned away from me, and looked off across the field. I heard him draw a deep sigh, with a quaver in it.
“It was years, I’ll have to tell you, before I could send her the money for your part of the mill, what it was worth when Daisy died. It amounted to mighty little, I admit. We were so low at that point nobody would’ve paid a nickel for us. We owed too much.”
He scuffled the dirt with the hoe, with one hand, while both of us stood speechless. Then he said, “I don’t want you to think, ’course, I couldn’ blame you, the way you’ve been done all the way through…I wouldn’t want you ever to think that I set out to cheat you, Sen,” he said. “I can’t say I always did so pure, with other folks. But in this case…”
Such a thing would never have entered my mind. I didn’t know how to say to him what did hang over me so heavy. What could be more heavy than the spectre of Sophier? He seemed at that moment right on the brink of tears and I didn’t know what to say.
All of a sudden my stomach growled the biggest growl, it went YOWWWwwwrrr! It snarled like a lion. I started to laugh. I laughed and ran and threw my arms around his waist and hugged him to me, liked to squeezed him in two. And we stood there clinging and rocking back and forth in the bean rows, laughing to tears that were not from laughing at all.
“Ben Aaron, Ben Aaron,” I said, “I am starving to death. I have not swallowed a bite since Nam was here yesterday. Come in the house with me, and let’s get something, before I fall over.” We went up toward the house arm in arm.
“I’ve got to finish telling how I came to buy you out,” he said. “You’ll understand things better.”
I said all right. But at that point I didn’t care a lot.
“I never thought of this place being sold,” he said. “I thought your mother would know you ought to keep it. That’s how ignorant I am about the world. First I knew of what she had in mind, I just happened to be in the courthouse one day, oh, a couple of years after your daddy died. Man I never saw was in there talkin’ to Philo Spivey, Philo’s the tax collector. Wanted to know about the taxes on a piece of property, had a legal description on a piece of paper. Wanted to know if the taxes had been kept up, what it was worth on the books and all.
“Well, you know, I ah…” he stopped and cleared his throat and went through a noseblowing ceremony. “I know a little bit about these things…so I was listenin’. When he gave the owner’s name, ‘Natalie T. Steele, trustee for Mary Seneca Steele,’ my innards went into spasms. Philo looked around the man at me but I shook my head no, don’t say anything. I just leaned back agin the wall, like the ol’ dumb mountain boy I am, y’know.
“Finally I said, ‘Hit’s a cryin’ shame what thur a-askin’ for that ol’ snake-den, up yander.’
“That flatlander turned around to me like he’d found ’im a good friend. ‘Sir do you know anything about that piece of property?’ he said.
“‘Tell me which it is, let me be sartin,’ I said. He showed me the paper. Lord, girl, there it was. ‘Nine hundred and thirty-three acres, more or less, bounded on the east by Big Caney River…’ I shook till I could hardly read the thing.
“I stood there sizin’ that old boy up. He was a soft-lookin’ son of a bitch, hair greased and parted down the middle, little moustache turned up with wax. ‘Yeah, I know OF it,’ I said. ‘Know whur it’s at, been by thar sevral time. Hunt bear, wild hogs, they use about that place a lot. Ol’ Steele place, ain’t it?’ I said.
“‘That’s it!’ he said.
“‘I reck’n you must be a-wantin’ a huntin’ persarve, ’at’s all hit’d be good fer,’ I said.
“‘Well, actually no,’ he said. ‘I want a nice summer home for my wife. We have a lovely home in Charleston but she is too delicately disposed to take the heat of the summers.’
“‘She like snakes?’ I said. I could tell by his looks that did not go over good. ‘Lot o’ land for a summer home.’
‘“My plan is to renovate the home to live in, and subdivide the acreage,’ he said. ‘I can see a hundred cottages—a summer colony!—along that river.’
“I thought, well, buddy, I’ll be damned if you ever will. ‘I guess the old house could be made nice with a hell of a lot o’ work,’ I said. ‘You been in it yet?’
“‘No, I am supposed to find the man up here who has the key,’ he said.
“‘Ben Aaron Steele? He’s in the penitentiary,’ I said. ‘If he ain’t broke out agin. Near killed a furriner, flung rocks at ’er ’cause he kotched ’er pickin’ flahrs on his land…’
“I saw he was gettin’ impressed,” Ben Aaron said. “I said, ‘But if ye want to look, you don’t need no key. They’s holes you can crawl thu, head and shoulders. ’At’s the way they say them snakes come in ’at killed them last people.’
“His eyes got this big. He started to open his mouth but I had to keep on him. ‘I guess t’d be all right though if ever ye could get the stench out of it,’ I said.
“I waited for him to say, ‘What stench?’
“‘Why, from the dead people,’ I said. ‘Road’s bad, river comes up when it rains you know. Big rain driv them snakes in the house. River was over the road. Nobody got to them people for about six weeks. And it was a long hot spell, about that time…’
“I was watchin’ Philo nearly split his gut, behind that sucker’s back. That ol’ snake tale had a long white beard, I’d even read it in two books…”
We had got up to the back porch and I stopped to get a mason jar of milk out of the spring box.
“That dunce believed you?” I said. “Why did he believe that junk?”
“I’ve got an honest face,” said Ben Aaron, his honest face full of smile. “Besides, I’m too stupid to make up a lie.”
“And that man was never seen again?”
“No, and in the evenin’ mail I sent your ma a letter, made her an offer I could no way afford and she could no way refuse. I overbid that guy by two thousand dollars.”
I dried the jar on my apron and looked at him squarely. What I said was as mean as a snake. “Where’d you get the money?” I said. It was mean because he knew I knew.
“I got it,” he said, raising his eyebrows and studying his hands. I knew he’d gone as far as he was about to go. But he helped me fire up the stove and set the table, and I cooked dinner, and we called the children in and we all sat down and somehow a sweeter peace descended.
We lingered of course. Always, we lingered, over the crumbs and dishes. Every half hour maybe we’d spoon another bite, butter another biscuit, pour another hot cup. Ben Aaron sat playing with his tea cup, thinking, studying the dregs.
“I see two people in here just a-grinnin’, on their way to Shiloh School,” he said.
“Not in summer!” Hugh said, absolutely stricken. Pet turned her cup round, slowly, and reported, “I don’t see but one goin’; there�
��s another one in short pants walkin’ backwards, goin’ ‘BooHoo! BooHoo!’”
Hugh was furious. He couldn’t bear her to tell that he cried about going to school sometimes. She loved to tell it.
“We’ve got a new teacher comin’ and she looks like this,” Ben Aaron said. He ran out his tongue and lifted his nose with his finger and pulled down the corners of his eyes, looking walleyed. Pet laughed and reached and rapped his hand with her spoon. Hugh half-believed it, and shuddered. “Brrr,” he said, with his mouth full of grits.
“Oh, it’s not till August,” Ben Aaron said, to comfort him. “I bet they’d never let you out of school to hang tobacker in Charleston. Will, here.”
“They wouldn’t admit there IS such a thing as tobacker at the Latin School,” I said.
It interested me how he pursued the school business. I turned it over in my mind. If these children were in school here it meant we lived here. And still, especially in this new light on things, we were only guests. And in a precarious state of welcome.
“Coy Ray’s kids’ll go,” he said to Hugh. “Uh, sometimes they go…”
He reached across the table then and got me by the wrist. “Do somethin’ for me, will you?” he said. “Somehow get Rose to go to school. She’s not been one day since her mother died.”
I was appalled. “That’s frightful!” I said.
“It’s just the way it is,” he said. “That oldest boy Ned had just started school when Cleone died. Herman, the littlest one, was a babe in arms. It was a case of have-to, with Rose; she’s sent the boys, off and on, the ones big enough to go. But she had too much to do at home. Get her to go any way you can. I believe she could finish in a year or so. She’s smart, you know.”
Heaven help that child, I thought. I could see her studying to catch up, into the night, getting up by moonlight in the morning to do all the work and sitting in a schoolhouse all day long.
