Benton's Row

by Frank Yerby

  “Then why on earth—” Tom began.

  “Did I stay with you?” Lolette whispered. “Because, by then, even knowing what you’re like didn’t do any good. I’m a woman, Tom. All right, I’m much younger than you; but I’m still a woman. And nobody has ever figured out the way to measure the distance between a woman’s mind and her heart. You can only measure it in years, in centuries, not in anything so puny as miles.”

  “Cut his black heart out!” Louis roared from the gallery, “and eat it, yes!”

  “Papa mad!” Babette said suddenly, clearly.

  “You’d better go,” Lolette whispered.

  “I’ll see you?” Tom said.

  “Yes. Funny you need to ask. I could no more do without seeing you than I could do without drinking water or breathing air.”

  “I’ll send you money for the kid,” Tom said.

  “If you like,” Lolette said indifferently. “Now kiss me quick and go.”

  A rail fence was a wonderful place for sitting and dreaming back over the good, lost years. Sitting there, that early autumn day of 1844, a few days past his thirty-fourth birthday, Tom Benton was almost drunken with content. The hounds still mourned through the pine wood, fainter now; amid the topmost branches of the oaks the doves cried out, far off and sad. He could smell his favourite opiates, hot earth and pine wood and the sweet, overpowering perfume of magnolia grandiflora. He had no will to move away, to go back to the house where Sarah waited with the babies, surrounded by the house servants, busy, happy.

  He frowned. Funny about Sarah, he thought. Never heard tell that having children made so much change in a woman. First met her, she was panting wild; wanted it more than I did, never gave me no rest—but now . . .

  His frown deepened. How long has it been since we been together? ‘Pears to me every time I make a move in her direction I hear something like “Tom-love, I’m so tired” or “Tom, be good! You want to wake the children?” Damn! And I can’t get to see Lolette oftener than once a month. That Louis is too damned suspicious.

  There were, he decided, no unmixed blessings. He sat there a little longer, but the mood had passed. He felt cramped now, uncomfortable. So he got down at last and mounted the black stallion which had replaced the roan mustang, and turned back in the direction of the house.

  The next day he rode down to see Davin Henderson about the last parcel of land that lay between Broad Acres and the river. He had already by-passed the town, surrounded it, swallowed it; but he permitted it to stand there as a reminder of his magnanimity. He had given it a school, enlarged the church. Already men were beginning to speak of it as Benton’s Town, or more simply, because of its straight narrowness, having no really long cross-streets, giving it the name that was to cling to it all down the years: Benton’s Row. He was on his way to making his ownership of the town, which, mistakenly, men assumed already, a reality. His lusts consumed him and, of them, none was stronger than his passion for possession, for ownership, carrying as it did, in its very essence, the implication of mastery over time, over men. His hungers were gigantic: he wanted to drink all the whisky, bed with all the women, master all the men. He could have now, if he had been willing to slow his pace, freed himself of debt within five years. More, he could have acquired many of the things he wanted; the half, perhaps even three-quarters, free of liens, mortgages, the dead weight of money borrowed, the slow leakage of interest charges, if only he could have waited, accumulating the sums with which to buy them outright. He could have, that is, in the sense that such a possibility existed; but given his temperament, being inflexibly and unalterably himself, actually he could not. He had to have it all—and now.

  Nothing rankled him more than his failure to gain the thing which in reality he actually needed: land fronting on the river, where he could build a steamboat landing, and thus freight with ease his crops down to New Orleans. The only available acreage was high-bluff land, useless for growing either cane or cotton since it always escaped the floods, and was thus never enriched by the river silt. It might afford a meagre growth of foodstuffs, vegetables, potatoes, corn; but beyond that it had little value. Yet the man who held it hung on to it stubbornly, resisting all Tom’s blandishments, resisting even offers of five times what the land was conceivably worth.

  In this, indeed, there was something else again: there was Davin Henderson, himself. From the outset, Tom had disliked Henderson intensely; now he hated him with that towering passion he brought to all his emotions. The man bilked him, tormented him, defeated him by the mere fact of his existence. It was, had Tom Benton been capable of analysing it, all very simple: Davin Henderson was what Tom wanted to be, could not, in simple fact, ever be: an aristocrat and a gentleman. And this to such a degree that he could reduce Tom to impotent, speechless fury by a tone, a gesture, a tiny, negligent wave of his exquisitely slim hand.

  He was a Virginian, a younger son, crowded out of lands grown too poor to support so many; ploughed over, cut over, bled of their strength and substance by the rapacious, devouring root tendrils of tobacco and cotton; so that he, Davin, had come here; and, as the slim, exquisite, beautifully mannered Virginian gentleman usually did on the frontier, he had failed. A frontier is no place for gentlemen. It was made for horse-traders, sharp dealers, hard, violent men, thieves. In short, it was made for Tom Benton, and men like him, who would provide the beginnings, pile up the money gouged out, stolen, gained by chicanery, by fraud, by force and, at bottom, from the sweat of black men’s faces, to the tune of the whip-lash and, in the cabins, the sorrow-songs. It would be left for their descendants then to whitewash them into gentlemen, invest them with the polish they never had, make affairs of honour of their drunken brawls, and bloom their unpainted pine and cypress cottages—with saddles, ploughs, drying corn, the impedimenta of rural living cluttering up the verandas, the galleries—into white Grecian mansions, silver in the moonlight, serene under the magnolia trees.

  But Davin Henderson complicated matters by being a little more than a Virginia aristocrat, by retaining some of the toughness of fibre of his own debtor-prison, impressed-children, indentured-servant ancestors (for, being of a realistic turn of mind, he had been known to laugh at the Cavalier theory of Virginia’s forebears, knowing well that landed, wealthy lordlings don’t come to starve, freeze, and be slaughtered by savages in a new land, that, even when driven out by Roundheads, they go by choice to near-by, civilised France). “Your pioneer,” he was fond of saying, “is always born of starvelings, or of criminal scum.” Which is to say that, though he failed, he did not fail completely. He managed to scratch enough poor, short-fibred cotton out of his bluff lands to pay a creditor or two with sufficient frequency to keep them off his back. He operated then, on a lesser scale, precisely as Tom Benton did on a greater, by ceaseless borrowing. And Tom, who knew from his own experience how the system worked, knew too that Davin could go on for ever upon it, neither rising nor sinking, growing older and shabbier, but keeping his lands and, above all, his pride. It was questionable which of the two things Tom Benton wanted the more to accomplish: to take Davin Henderson’s lands or to destroy his pride.

  Damned uppity Virginia bastard! he thought as he rode towards the shot-gun cabin, but little better than those occupied by the negroes, which served the Hendersons as a home. Be damned if I’ll let him git under my skin this time.

  He saw, as he came closer, that Davin was sitting on the gallery fanning himself. He had only five negroes, but he didn’t believe in killing himself with work. His wife, Griselda, was in the kitchen, Tom guessed, supervising the cooking, and at the thought of her slim figure and red-gold hair Tom smiled. That’s another thing I’m gonna take off’n him, one day, he thought. He rode up to the gallery, dismounted. Davin Henderson stood up with languid grace. He was a tall, thin man with hair so blond it was almost white, and a long, bony face, out of which his blue eyes perpetually twinkled in quiet mockery.

  “Mister Benton,” he drawled; “my poor house is honoured
—again.”

  And Tom felt the veins at his temples stand up and beat with his blood. That ‘again’ so negligently added, with absolute lack of expression, so that the mockery in it was almost completely hidden; this was perfection itself, the essence and refinement of baiting, and Tom Benton seeing it, knowing it, was helpless to reply in kind.

  “Yep,” he growled, “I’m here again and you know why, Davin. I want to buy this here place of yourn. A body would think I was trying to cheat you or something. Why don’t you face facts? The land ain’t worth nothing much to you, an’ it’s worth a good bit to me.”

  “Why?” Davin Henderson said.

  “Because it ain’t really cotton land,” Tom snorted, “as any fool can plainly see.”

  “Then why do you want it?” Davin asked.

  Tom looked at him. All right, you finicky bastard, I’ll have to tell you the truth this time—even if it means you’ll jack up the price on me.

  “Because yore place fronts on the river,” he said slowly. “The land itself don’t interest me much, except in so far as I could grow corn on it for the niggers and fodder for the animals. But you got deep water right out in front of you—steamboat water, Davin. Build myself a landing right there. Float my bales down to New Orleans, sell stuff as far north as Shreveport, now that the channel’s been cleared that far. Save myself a mint of money in transportation, warehousing and the like. Now do you see?”

  “A snort of bourbon, Mister Benton?” Davin Henderson said.

  “You mean you ain’t a-goin to sell?” Tom roared. “Why, look here, Davin—with what I’ll pay you for this here homestead, you could buy yoreself a decent spread of land—good land, somewheres else.”

  “About that bourbon, Mister Benton?” Davin smiled.

  “Oh, all right, don’t mind if I do,” Tom said. “But I must say you’re the most peculiar cuss I ever run across.”

  “Hardly that,” Davin said calmly. “I’m just a Virginian, Benton. Our land is more to us than a means of gaining a livelihood. My attachment to this place has nothing to do with its commercial advantages or lack of them. As you say, I could buy better lands. But I like the view here. Notice how the sunlight falls through the Spanish moss on the oaks by the bluff? And there’s the river flowing beyond that—a rather imposing vista, don’t you think? I find it immensely satisfying—one of the good things of life. And then I haven’t any particular desire to become rich. Odd, isn’t it?”

  “Odd!” Tom snapped. “Mister, you’re as crazy as a bedbug!”

  “Perhaps,” Davin smiled. “Another?”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” Tom said automatically. “Look, Davin, if it’s a question of price—”

  “It is not,” Davin said firmly. “I’ve had a good season this year. In that barn there—” he pointed with his fan—“is enough to tide me over until next year. Of course, I’ll admit that that crop is the only thing standing between me and bankruptcy. But God has been kind. And, as I said before, there’s the matter of my view. I find it priceless. You haven’t enough money to buy that from me, Mister Benton. I doubt if there’s that much money in the world.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Tom said helplessly.

  “I rather think you are,” Davin said. “Any man so blind to beauty, so driven by his acquisitive instincts, is most apt to be damned. Don’t you ever think of anything but getting, Benton? After all, the hog is hardly the handsomest of animals.”

  Tom stood up, his eyes blue ice.

  “You callin’ me a hog, Davin?” he said.

  “No. The simile was rather overdrawn. I withdraw it—and apologise—largely because I consider it beneath me to insult a guest in my own house. Sit down and stop looking so fierce. It’s tiresome.” He smiled. “You know, Benton, if I compared you to any animal it wouldn’t be a hog. A panther, Perhaps—a black one. Or a tiger.”

  Slowly Tom Benton grinned.

  “A tiger, eh?” he said. “That’s better—much better.”

  “I thought you’d like it,” Davin said. “By the way, since you’re so bent upon having your own steamboat landing, why don’t you buy a piece of ground from one of those Cajun families north of here, from some of the white-trash squatters? There are plenty of other spots on the river.”

  “Not like this one,” Tom said. “In the first place, you’re directly in front of me. In the second, this is the first really clear stretch of water on the Red. Even though old Henry Shreve’s been butting away at the logs and debris in the river with those steamboat rams of his for more’n five years, the stretch north of here is pretty tough going. From here on down to where the Red runs into the Mississippi just above the State line, it’s clear sailing. If you had any sense, you’d build a landing yoreself.”

  “Or any money,” Davin said; “that’s the principal thing, isn’t it?”

  “Look, Davin,” Tom said eagerly, “let me build a landing for you. Advance you the money, I mean—all I’d want out of it would be the right to cross yore place and use the landing with you. I wouldn’t press you. Hell, man, you could pay me back when you got around to it.”

  “No,” Davin said quietly.

  “Of all the mule-stubborn! Would you mind telling me why not?”

  “Not at all. I just don’t like being beholden to any man. That’s one thing. Another is that I’d have scant use of the landing, while your wagons would come rumbling through here all the time. I wouldn’t like that. I like quiet.”

  Tom stood up.

  “I reckon there’s nothing more to be said,” he growled.

  “No,” Davin said, “I don’t suppose there is. But don’t deprive us of the pleasure of your company just because we can’t do business. Come and sup with us some evening and bring your good wife. Griselda has been pining to meet her. She’s heard so much about her.”

  I’ll bet she has, Tom thought angrily; but I’ll see the both of you in hell afore I’ll bring Sary over to be eyed by no uppity Virginia woman. But he didn’t say that. All he did say, mustering up the best show of manners he was capable of, was:

  “Thank you kindly; I’ll tell Sary.” Then he mounted Prince Rupert and rode away.

  There the matter might have rested, but for two things:

  Tom’s stubbornness and Griselda Henderson. Tom brooded over the state of affairs for a week, probing deep into his own consciousness to try to discover what Davin Henderson’s real motives were, and how he might surmount them. That Henderson had told him the truth, as he had; that there were men on earth uninterested in money, to whom the sweep of sky, a shaft of sunlight shredded by the moss, the river slow-coiling like a golden snake in the distance, were beyond price, he was incapable of believing. More, he was incapable of even grasping the existence of such a frame of mind. He loved his own broad, sunlit fields with a total passion; but he would never admit to himself, did not in fact realise, that their lilting beauty had something to do with it. And if it had ever been forced upon his conscious mind that he, too, like every man living, was at least to a certain extent a worshipper of beauty, he would have been ashamed.

  One of the things that troubled him most about his relationship with Lolette Dupré was that, based as it was upon this subtlest of all hungers—the hunger for loveliness, he didn’t understand it. “Damned if I know what I see in her,” he told himself time after time. For Lolette lacked his prime requisite in a woman: she was not passionate. The savage, torrential, volcanic passion he was able to awake from time to time in Sarah simply did not exist in Lolette. She submitted to his embraces; but more, he was sure, as a means to hold him than from any specific enjoyment of the act itself. She did not, of course, find it repugnant; she accepted it, as she accepted all of life, with gentle resignation. He wore himself into exhaustion trying to bring her to the moaning, sobbing state of ecstasy he was accustomed to triumphantly inflict upon Sarah and upon the other women he had known. When he could not, he accused her of being cold.

  “But I am not cold,” she protested
; “I love you very much. I—I even like—this—very much.”

  “Why?” he demanded brutally. “You don’t feel, anything.”

  “Ah, but I do,” she whispered. “The most lovely, wonderful feeling—like far-off music, sort of sacred, Tom—like—like tiny little bells.”

  “Damn!” he exploded; but he continued to meet her just the same. Her elfin, nightshade beauty held him, her gentle sweetness. But he didn’t understand that. He couldn’t.

  On the other hand, Griselda Henderson, Davin Henderson’s wife, was, he was sure, his kind of a woman. A mite bitchy, he thought with pleasure, the way a woman ought to be. What he meant was that the relationship between a man and a woman was to him, in its essence, battle, conflict, war. A war, of course, which after several interesting preliminary skirmishes the man inevitably won. “The wilder they are, the better I like ‘em,” he was fond of saying. He was, of course, not nearly so uncomplicated a man as he thought of himself as being; even his lusts were no simple hungers, but carried with them other facets of his being: his acquisitiveness, for he thought of a woman first and foremost as a possession, in much the same way that the negroes were his possessions; his need for domination, for even in embracing a woman he was conscious of the need for making her submit, of bending her to his will; and, perhaps most of all, his cruelty, making the act of love for him a combat, in which the woman was beaten, ridden, broken in will and spirit, humiliated into an open avowal of her animalism. It was this that he could never find in Lolette. He could never make her cry out, look torn, exhausted, dishevelled.

  “Damn!” he said, “her hair don’t even git out of place!” But Griselda Henderson was another matter. He thought of her often now, his mind working on its highest level—which amounted to no more than instinctive, animal-like cunning. Git next to her, and I’ll have that landing. Ain’t nothing like a woman for pressuring her husband into something he don’t want to do.

  So the next time he visited the Henderson plantation, if their few pitiful acres could be dignified by such a name, he was careful to choose a time when Davin would be away from the house, out in the fields, supervising his negroes, since he could not afford to hire an overseer.