by Frank Yerby
“Why, Randy!” she whispered; “you’re crying! For him—you’re crying!”
She did not need to say the rest of it: How strange it is, my love, that you should weep for him, who all these years has been the stone in our path, the wall, the barred gate, the locked door.
“Yes, Goddammit!” Randy said. “He was a man, Sarah. With all his faults, you have to give him that. The way he was, he couldn’t help, any more than I can help being what I am, or you.”
He got up then and turned to the sheriff.
“You can charge Louis Dupré with murder now, John,” he said.
The case of The People of the State of Louisiana versus Louis Dupré was heard three weeks later, when circuit Judge Neal Hanley got back to Benton’s Row. The trial was over in six minutes less than one hour. And five days after that they hanged Louis Dupré from the tall gallows behind the jail. He died very well and bravely, as he had lived.
The Cajun people hired a mason, and put a stone bearing these words above the grave: “Louis Dupré, né 1802, decédé le 25 Juin, 1860. Victime de son honneur, il mourut pour garder intact le nom de famille. Passants priez pour lui.”
They might better have invoked the prayers of passers-by for the immortal soul of Wade Benton. He had the greater need of prayer. For life is a harder thing than death for one like Wade, with private horrors in him, his dread of life made hopeless by his greater dread of death, and now—having no place to throw his thirty pieces down, nor the strength of will to seek his final tree—the necessity of living with that with which no man can in any comfort live, or any peace: a selfcontempt grown now into loathing, a hatred for the thing he knew himself to be, utter and final and complete.
Such men have need of prayer.
Book Two
INCIDENT AT BRIAR CREEK
1
SARAH sat on the veranda at Broad Acres, holding the pan of peas in her lap. She was shelling them, but without haste, because they were for her own dinner, and after nearly five years of eating alone, her meal-times had become very irregular. She was seldom if ever hungry. Being alone did that.
Maybe now, she thought, I won’t be lonely no more. Thank you, Lord, for sparing Randy. Reckon You do look after Your own.
She stared out into the desolation of the yard. The weeds had mounted, all but hiding the fences, because ever since the Union armies under General Banks had devastated the Red River parishes last year, the negroes had fled.
It had been something to see, that flight. It had been and was, because largely it was still going on, although the war had been over for weeks now. Sitting there on the porch, her hands moving with listless inattention over the peas, Sarah could see the wall of dust rising above the river road. She knew what was beneath it: a crowd of negroes, men, women, children, grandsires and babes in arms, moving forward at a slow shuffle, their kinky wool white with the dust, their brows and lashes filled with it, even their black faces whitened by it, except where the pencilling of their sweat had drawn traces. They weren’t going anywhere; they hadn’t anywhere to go. They were simply moving, following some dim, instinctual migratory drive, their eyes glassy, staring straight ahead; moving like that, not even speaking, in the dust-filled vortex of that silence, except when they broke into their weird, chant like singing. It would take them hours to pass, there were so many of them; and afterwards anyone walking that road would find those who had fallen, the ones too old, too tired, too sick to keep it up; they, the others, not even turning their heads to watch them fall, shuffling forward in that blinding heat, moving, going on.
She had tried to prevent the Benton negroes from joining that senseless, directionless, all but purposeless wandering; but she had failed. Old Caleb, speaking for the rest, told her:
“Got to go, Miz Sarah—just nacherly got to. Don’t go, how us ever even going to feel like us is free?”
And they had gone—to ‘cross over Jordan’, as they put it; to explore this formless, dimensionless thing they had hoped for, dreamed of, prayed for—so many, many years.
If Randy’d been here, he could have stopped them, she thought; and, as always, her face relaxed into warmth and beauty, remembering him.
He waited so long, she mused. Thought for sure I was going to have to ask him to marry me. ‘Course, it wasn’t no more than right to wait. A body’s got to have a decent amount of respect for the dead—and Tom and Randy was such good friends. Reckon, hadn’t been for the war, he never would of got around to asking me.
Her fingers were not even moving now. She sat there, surrendering to the warm lassitude of memory, sliding back into time, finding that moment again, recapturing it.
Randy McGregor had stayed away from her with such tortured self-control after Tom Benton’s death that she had been moved finally to send him a note:
“Folks ain’t that concerned,” it read, in part; “they’ve got other things on their minds—things a heap more important than you and me, Randy. I’m too lonely, and I’m pining to see you. Tom’s dead. He’s been dead nigh on to a year now—and it’s been a whole lot longer than that since I ceased to really care for him. So come to see me, please. It would do me right smart good to sit a spell and talk with you—even to look at you, Randy, if you will excuse the boldness. So please come. You and Tom was friends. He liked you and respected you; and you never gave him cause not to. I kind of think that, wherever be is, he really don’t mind.”
He had come the very day he received her note, dismounting and loping up the stairs with wonder and pain and pity and joy and hope commingled in his eyes. He had stood there like that, looking at her, trying to get it out, trying to put it into words, all of it—the wonder, the pain, the pity, the joy and the hope; but he could not. Too many years of waiting had crowded it down too far.
“Sarah,” he whispered, “Sarah . . .”
And he had stepped forward, her hands outstretched in welcome, and drawn him very simply and naturally and peacefully into her arms.
They were married the very next day, April 12, 1861, at Broad Acres, with only the minister, Wade, fourteen-year-old Mary Ann Barker, whom Wade had invited, and the servants present. By the time they reached the landing to embark on the down-stream boat for their honeymoon in New Orleans, the north-bound boat, the one coming up-stream from Alexandria where there was a telegraph office, had already brought the news of the bombardment of Fort Sumter.
Randy McGregor stopped then and there, but Sarah caught at his arm, whispering:
“It ain’t going to be over in four or five days, Randy. You can enlist after our honeymoon just as well as before.”
Randy looked at her and smiled.
“Right,” he said. “I might as well know exactly what it is I will be fighting for.”
And after those five brief days of magic, he had gone, swallowed up in the flame-shot mists and echoing thunder to the north. Tales had come back of him—of his kindness, his patience, his valour. For this Scotsman, this convinced abolitionist, became, like Lee, a hero in a cause he did not truly believe in, fighting with matchless devotion for the land whose sins he wept over, because at bottom he loved it with all his heart.
Well, it was over now, and she was glad. Randy would come back to her, and life would start again. There would be the long years ahead—many of them, barring accident, because, aside from her own mother and father, who had fallen victim to a cholera epidemic, all of her family had been exceedingly long-lived, not one of them to her certain knowledge ever having failed to reach their seventies; and not a few persisting on into their eighties and nineties. Besides, thirty-seven wasn’t really so old, come to think of it. She knew women who were still bearing children at her present age. Even Randy, past fifty, could expect to bring her many more years of happiness and peace.
She needed that, the peace, anyhow, for it was the one thing she had never really had. She had known great happiness with Tom Benton, but absolutely no peace at all. And certainly her children hadn’t helped matters.
&n
bsp; Poor Wade. He certainly had never been anything much; but in the end he had proved himself a Benton—and a man. She had long since given up hope for him, for even in the wording of the military communiqué there had been small grounds for it. “Missing in action,” it had read, “under such circumstances that his death must be presumed.”
For Wade Benton, after trying every trick of evasion his normal cunning sharpened by his cowardice could dream up, had gone off to war, finally; and when events had demanded it of him, he had risen to the occasion, and conducted himself with a gallantry that even Tom Benton could have been proud of.
But it was not that she was remembering. Though she had seen war itself, here on the very outlying fields of her own plantation, or even, perhaps, because she had seen it, her mother’s heart rebelled against picturing in imagination the scene of her son’s presumable and indisputably heroic death. What she went back to, with almost painful honesty she could not control, was Wade’s boyhood, and how she had pitied him.
She had not loved her son. Wade Benton had never been a person anyone could love, not even a mother, wanting and needing to. She could picture him now, porcine and fat, his sleepy little eyes staring out upon vacuity with mindless fatuousness.
Not that he couldn’t think, she mused bitterly. He just plain didn’t want to. He never did want to do anything but eat. Lord God, what a hog he was at the table! And every time Tom pushed him into something, he would come a-whining to me. Reckon he was just plumb, downright womanish. Not—not strange like them curious kind of men-folks what loves other men; but just too delicate and weak, with a girlish way of doing things. Like the Good Lord meant to make a female of him and then changed His mind. I remember the time . . .
That Wade had broken his arm, after Tom had forced him to mount a not too spirited horse. He hated horses because he was afraid of them. He was afraid of nearly everything that drew breath. He lay in the bed and cried for three whole days without stopping except for the times he slept.
“It hurts, Ma!” he quavered; “aw, Ma, it hurts so damned bad!”
“Look, Wade,” Sarah told him, “you’re a boy—and one day you’re going to be a man. For the Lord’s sake, try to act like one! ‘Course it hurts, but a-weeping and a-wailing ain’t a-going to help it none a-tall. Menfolks got more pride than to lay there blubbering because something pains ‘em a mite. Buck up, boy—show me what you’re made of.”
“Can’t, Ma!” Wade sobbed. “It just naturally hurts too much—and Pa was a mean old bastard to make me do it! Don’t need to ride no boss. I can walk, can’t I?”
“Oh, my Lord!” Sarah said; but Stormy came into the room and stood there looking at her brother, her lips curled in purest contempt.
“Tired of listening to him, Ma?” she said. “Sick of hearing that sissy little old snot whine?”
Sarah looked at her daughter darkly.
“To tell the truth,” she said, “I am. But I don’t see what you think you can do about it.”
“I can, though,” Stormy said. “Just leave it to me, Ma.”
Half an hour later the blubbering coming from the bedroom ceased. When Sarah entered it to see what had happened, she found Wade sleeping peacefully, his round, red face covered with a sticky mess, and a huge stick of peppermint candy in his hand. At that time he had been all of fourteen years old.
Sarah called Stormy and pointed.
“Did you give him that?” she said.
“Yes, Ma,” Stormy answered calmly. “Only way to deal with him. He ain’t nothing but a baby—and what’s more he’s gonna stay a baby all his life. Some folks grow up, and some don’t. Wade’s the kind what don’t.”
And you, Sarah thought, looking at her, are the kind that will never know what it is to grow up—how kind of wonderful it is being young, because, bless my soul, you was just born old!
Her hands moved again, shelling the peas, but she was not conscious of it. She stared out into the weed-filled yard.
I wonder where she is now, she thought; five years—and not a word from her.
She did not for a moment think that Stormy was dead. What she did think was something else: she’s leading a shameful life—and that’s why she don’t dare write.
In this she was both right and wrong. Stormy Benton, by her mother’s standards, was indeed leading a shameful life: in the five years since she’d run away from Benton’s Row she had been the mistress of three men in succession, each richer than the last, and all of whom she had despised. She was at the moment contemplating marriage to the last of them, old General Rafflin, a man who could have been not only her grandfather, but even her great-grandfather, if age were the only consideration. But the wrongness of Sarah’s conception lay in the fact that, being both a Benton and a female, Stormy was almost absolutely incapable of shame. To her, then, her life was not shameful, but eminently practical.
She had soon found that her original idea of becoming an actress was completely impracticable. And since she was as ignorant as a field-hand and twice as lazy, she soon found that she could live only by capitalising upon the rather remarkable assets which nature and her Benton heritage had given her: stunning good looks, keen intelligence, and remorseless will. The combination saved her from the usual fate of a young girl alone in a big city—saved her, that is, if one is prepared to accept that curiously feminine genius for rationalisation which makes the difference between prostitution and respectability a question of price. Stormy’s luxurious instincts made her from the start such an expensive proposition that she could only be an old man’s darling, few young men possessing the means to afford her.
The old men she allowed to keep her she betrayed flagrantly, constantly, with younger men who amused her. There was in this the curious circumstance that Stormy was one of those not too rare women who feel almost nothing but contempt for men. Subconsciously, the heroic father-image of Tom Benton made all other men seem weaklings, cowards, and fools to her; and this very real difficulty was augmented by the fact that, being immensely, formidably strong herself, her feminine need for a man himself strong enough for her to rely upon, lean upon, was almost always thwarted by the curious psychological mystery which inevitably attracts weaklings, little boys in search of a mother, and other male aberrations to such women as her.
She was almost completely honest. As she belonged to the great race of predators, the male idea of the promiscuous female as a warm-hearted, rather stupid little creature constantly victimised by ruthless men made her laugh wholeheartedly, knowing, as she did, that in her case, at least, the shoe was completely upon the other foot. Actually, two rather completely contradictory pictures of herself reposed with blissful lack of conflict in her head: in one of them, she was of the great tradition of courtesans, Pompadour, du Barry—and this was conscious, because, after the initial humiliation of having her almost purely negroid dialect laughed at, Stormy had set about refining both her speech and manners, until, given her acute native intelligence to begin with, in a remarkably short time she had achieved that polished perfection of diction and behaviour that is never found in the duchesses to whom the public attributes it, but almost always in those guttering, expensive ladies of the evening which Stormy herself now was. In the other, quite contradictory, mental image, she pictured herself as the heroine of a great romance; and it was here alone that her basic honesty failed her.
Or rather, it was here that her intense femininity defeated her honesty, for the two things are mutually incompatible. Since her feminine mind was not only subjective and illogical, but actively, fiercely hostile to both objectivity and logic, it followed that that kind of honesty in the masculine sense which makes a man admit: “All right, I was a skunk to do that, but she was such a cute little trick . . .” was a trait even more incomprehensible to her than it is to most women. Stormy, then, regarded her casual, continual promiscuity as part of her search for the great love of her life. But her honesty did save her from the supreme rationalisation that almost results from this pe
culiarly feminine quest: she was incapable of taking some shoddy specimen of masculinity and dreaming him into her prince, closing her mind and eyes to the actuality of what he was. What her feminine instincts did do, however, was to prevent her from ever recognising that her habitual behaviour was exactly the same as that of women whom she herself dismissed as being ‘cheap little tarts’, and that the fact that she was not paid for her favours—at least not directly by the old men who kept her, and not at all by her occasional younger lovers—was a rather complete irrelevancy, all things being considered. Why she behaved as she did, finally, had the same relative importance to the men she betrayed as the nice question whether a gun was fired in anger or by accident has to the man whom the bullet has killed.
It was, therefore, all to the good that Sarah knew nothing of Stormy’s life in New York; though, knowing her daughter, it could not be said that she could not imagine it with rather painful accuracy. Nearly all of her memories of her daughter were painful.
Like that time, she mused, I tried to teach her to cook . . .
Stormy had come into the kitchen and stood there sullenly without touching anything.
“You get the skillet real hot,” Sarah said, “then you dip the pieces of chicken into the batter—” She stopped short, glaring at Stormy. “You ain’t heard a living word I said!” she snorted.
“Right, Ma,” Stormy yawned; “and, what’s more, I ain’t going to. Don’t see why I need know how, anyways, since I’m always going to have a passel of niggers to do it for me.”
“There’s folks what ain’t got niggers,” Sarah pointed out. “And all men ain’t rich. What you gonna do if your husband’s a poor man?
“My husband,” Stormy said flatly, “ain’t going to be no poor man.”
“You’re mighty sure, ain’t you, missy?” Sarah snapped. “The human heart’s a funny thing. What guarantee you got you won’t fall in love with some nice boy who ain’t got a picayune?”
