Benton's Row

by Frank Yerby

  “I’ll do anything,” Mary Ann said fervently, “just so’s we can get married and start living like folks.”

  “Thank you kindly, ma’am. Now, Mister Benton, sir, I humbly beg you to excuse yourself and come with me.”

  Consternation flooded Wade’s face.

  “Tonight?” he gasped.

  “Yessir, tonight. Time’s a-wasting, sir. You want to git married, or you want to sit around holding hands?”

  “Go with him, Wade,” Mary Ann said sharply. “Me’n’ your mother will sit here a spell and talk.”

  “All right, then,” Wade said.

  An hour later they stood at the bar at Tim’s with the Federal cotton agent. Oren did all of the talking.

  “Look at it this way, sir,” he said quietly: “suppose I was to put you on to some Reb cotton—not that I could, really; but just for argument’s sake.”

  “Where is it?” the cotton agent growled.

  “I don’t rightly know. But I can find out, if you’ll use your head a little hit. Send it up to Cincinnati, and what do you git out of it? A pat on the back and a nice letter commending you for your valiant services to the United States. Fine. But can your kids eat that?”

  Wade stared at his overseer, lost in pure admiration.

  The Federal agent considered the idea. Greed showed in his small blue eyes.

  “What do you suggest, Mister Bascomb?” he muttered.

  “A little arrangement. I’ll cut you in for one-third of the profits if I git from you beforehand a stamped seizure order and a signed official release with the Grand Seal of the Republic at the bottom of it, stating over your prettiest signature that this here cotton is untainted with any smell of Reb.”

  “One-half,” the agent snapped.

  “Nosir! I got the cotton and you ain’t. Where I got it, you ain’t got a ghost of a chance to git at it. I’m paying everything: taxes, fees, freight. Give you half, what’s left ain’t worth my while. I’ll just sit on the stuff till hell freezes over and the devil throws a skating party. Take it or leave it!”

  To Wade’s vast amazement and relief, the agent took it. Four days later, nineteen thousand dollars, all that was left of the profits from bales which would have brought them more than fifty thousand in the open market, was deposited to the accounts of Mrs. Randy McGregor and her son, Wade Benton.

  “What do you want out of it?” Wade asked Oren.

  “Tell you later,” Oren Bascomb grinned.

  With the negroes his tactics were different.

  “So you’re free,” he said. “You been wandering about all over. How you like your freedom?”

  “Just fine, boss,” one of the younger negroes said.

  “Had enough to eat?” Oren demanded, looking at Caleb and the other older negroes.

  “Nawsuh,” Caleb said mournfully. “But just as soon as we gits that there forty acres and a mule them folks up Nawth done promised us—”

  “Just you wait, Uncle!” Oren laughed. “Guarantee your backbone be asking your belly if your throat’s done been cut by then! Now, you niggers listen to me! I don’t believe nobody’s going to give you nothing, but even if they was to, you still got to eat till they do. You ain’t slaves no more, and, ‘fore God, ain’t nobody trying to take away your freedom. But I got a little proposition to make to you all. Come on back to Broad Acres, go to work for Miz Benton, who you know and love. We’ll give you your cabins, and the ground around ‘em to grow your vittles. You can keep chickens and pigs long as you stay with us.”

  “Where us going to git them chickens and pigs?” Caleb’s son, Duford, demanded.

  “Got it all figgered, boy,” Oren said. “You pay us rent for the land, out of the stuff you raise. We furnish everything you need against a credit at our store. And I do mean everything: land, seed, implements, work stock, food and supplies for your families, fodder for the animals. You pays us seven bales out of every ten you makes, keeping the three for yourself for your cash crop—that covers the rent for the land and your cabins.”

  “And them other things, suh?” Buford said suspiciously.

  “I’m going to write them down in a book at the store. End of the year, you settles with me. Don’t worry, it won’t be much. You’ll still have cash on hand.”

  They sat there a long time, thinking about it. It was all there, the shape of it, the form and the texture of the new slavery that was to replace the old. But they couldn’t see it then. They hadn’t the knowledge or the experience.

  “All right, suh,” Buford said at last; “we be there tomorrow early.”

  “Fine, boy!” Oren said. But in his mind he guarded the thought: Have to watch that young nigger. He’s smart, and uppity. Going to have to take him down a peg or two.

  By the Friday before the day set for the wedding, Oren had made a sizeable hole in Wade’s nineteen thousand dollars. But Broad Acres had mules, ploughs, seed, fertiliser, axes, saws, new wagons and feed for the beasts. The labour contracts had been filed with, and approved by, the Bureau, and for the first time in four years Broad Acres was beginning to look as it had under Tom Benton’s firm hand.

  Oren had divided his labour force. Two-thirds of the negroes he put to work at once about the usual business of ploughing, for most of the plantation’s vast spread of land had been untouched by war; but the remaining third had other things to do. The section near the river and touching on the bayou had been marched over, fought over, and here the fences had fuelled the camp-fires of the armies, the barns had been burned, and the gins smashed with that savage vindictiveness that the Yankee troops brought to bear upon anything having to do with cotton, holding it the very root of this hateful conflict which kept them marching in heat and dust and cold, and dying, too, far from their own cornfields and the girls they had left behind them. There hadn’t been much they could do with the fields themselves, but there were the gins, symbols, in wood and iron, of everything that had cost them so much in weariness and boredom, blood and pain. So they had burned them, after taking sledgehammers and axes, and more rarely gunpowder, to the machinery. Sometimes, caught in their looting of silver and feminine finery from the big houses, and fired upon, they had burned them too. Tom Benton’s house, however, had escaped burning or pillage, because it was built so far from the river, a circumstance determined by chance itself, because when the bayou people had built it for him he had owned no land on the river, his conquest of Davin Henderson having come after that time.

  The house, actually, had been in greater danger from Confederate skulkers, that savage and cowardly crew, most of whom had avoided service for their country for four long years, and the rest, unwilling patriots from the first, had deserted from her armies. Three times Sarah had had to stand off marauders with the big Walker Colt Tom had brought back from the Mexican War. Of all the Southern legends, the one most nearly true is the belief that had her soldiers been as indomitable, unconquerable, as her women, the South would have won her war.

  So the house stood, but the fences were out for miles in every direction, and gangs of negroes worked all day and far into the night rebuilding them, while others pulled down the charred wreckage of barns and gins to make room for the new ones they would presently build. The very old and the very young among the blacks had still another occupation: collecting the bones of dead horses and mules left after the skirmishes, to be sold to the fertiliser factory near Natchitoches, and the minie balls, broken muskets, and occasionally even sabre blades, to be sold to the ironmongers.

  In such fashion life came back to Broad Acres, in general conformity, with minute variations, to the pattern being established all over the South. Dressing, that Sunday morning, for his wedding, in his patched and faded uniform, with the brass buttons decently covered with cloth—for to wear anything bearing the Confederate insignia was now a crime, the epaulettes stripped off, the stripes of rank traced in sad fidelity by the unfaded cloth beneath them, guarding thus, proud and unconquerable, the marks of their having been, Wade could
see Oren driving the negroes, nothing about the scene below his window differing one jot from before the war; the new overseer (for Jim Rudgers had died, a Yankee bayonet through his guts, at Shiloh Church) from habit having forgotten he was now dealing with free men, the free men from the same habits having almost forgotten they were free.

  Sarah had baked a cake, a poor thing, unworthy of her usual standards, but good enough considering the scarcity of eggs, the total absence of butter, the use of a sugar brownish, lumpy, only half refined. She had almost cried over it; but it would have to do. The house was spotless, for the negro girls, who dearly loved both their mistress and a wedding, had worked harder than ever before in their lives.

  Dressed at last, Wade and Sarah mounted the buckboard and drove down to Benton’s Row, to the little white church, where Wade’s guard of honour, more than half of them crippled, waited to erect an arch of sabres over the wedded pair.

  It went smoothly, almost to the end. But standing before the pulpit to receive the blessing of Reverend Benbow, clad still in his uniform of a Confederate chaplain, Wade was aware of the rustle in the audience, and finally, in spite of himself, he too turned to see the tall thin man in the faded garb of a lieutenant-colonel standing in the doorway, looking upon them with eyes benign and thoughtful, filled with peace.

  “Randy!” Sarah got out. “Lord God, it’s Randy!” Then she left her place next to her son, and went down the aisle, all the illumination of heaven poured into her face.

  Randy’s hair was snow-white now, not a trace of its former red showing. He had grown a military moustache and goatee, which became his lean, aquiline countenance wonderfully well. He stood there, smiling, the very epitome and idealisation of all the South believed her men to be; then he bent and kissed his wife in full sight of the congregation, so that they, forgetting for the moment the purpose for which they had come, made the very rafters ring with their cheers.

  Randy turned to them, smiling. Then he took Sarah’s arm.

  “Come, Mother,” he said, “we mustn’t break up the wedding.”

  The two of them came back down the aisle together. When they passed Nancy Cattlet, sitting there in her widow’s weeds which never again in her life would she put off, in faithful mourning for both husband and son, dead at Fredericksburg and before Atlanta, she looked up at them, and whispered in a voice which in the silence after the cheering carried better than any shout:

  “Lord God, a body’d be hard pushed to tell Sarah ain’t the bride.”

  3

  I’M going to tell him, Mary Ann thought; I’m going to tell him now. I won’t wait until he comes home for supper—I’ll go down to the store right now, this minute!

  She picked up her bonnet and tied it firmly under her chin. Then she went out on the veranda and called Caleb.

  “Yes’m, Miz Mary Ann,” Caleb said; “I’m a-coming.”

  “No,” Mary Ann said sharply. “Stay where you are, Caleb, and hitch Nellie to the buckboard. I’m going to town.”

  “Yes’m,” Caleb said. After a quarter of an hour, which was the absolute minimum it took him to do anything whatsoever, Caleb came round the side of the house, leading the mare.

  “You wants me to drive, Miz Mary Ann?” he said.

  “No,” Mary Ann said. “For God’s sake, Caleb! You know I can handle Nellie. She hasn’t even enough life to bolt at a gunshot.”

  “Yes’m,” Caleb said. “But it don’t look proper, Miz Mary Ann, for you to be driving yourself. You’s a Benton. Folks kind of expect Benton ladies to have they niggers drive for ‘em. ‘Sides—”

  “Besides what, Caleb?” Mary Ann said.

  “Sure Lord would like to take a little drive. Ain’t been nowheres in so long.”

  Slowly Mary Ann shook her head.

  “Not today, Caleb,” she said. “Today I want to be alone.”

  “Yes’m,” Caleb said sadly, and helped her to mount.

  I’m going to put a stop to it, she thought. I’d rather starve than live on the misery of poor people this way. It’s all Oren’s fault. He put Wade up to opening that store. Cheating those pine-barren folks out of their last red penny. Time rates forty, fifty, sixty per cent. He and Wade have foreclosed on half the small farms in the parish, and then rented them back to those poor devils on share rates so high they can’t never get out of debt. Lord God, how I hate that store! I can’t help what Randy says about not getting Wade excited. I’m going to fix that. I’m going to fix it right now!

  But she wasn’t sure she could. In the first place, there was the matter of those attacks that Wade had been having for more than a year. He suffered frequently from nose-bleeds, ringing in the ears, and even dizziness. Once or twice he had fainted. When, upon her insistence, he had gone to Randy, he had been found to have an alarmingly high blood pressure.

  “You’ve got to make him diet,” Randy said sternly. “It’s his weight mostly. And, above all, he mustn’t get excited. He’s just the type to have a stroke.”

  She had tried. But dieting was one of the many things that Wade Benton simply could not do. He realised dimly that his gluttony was itself a species of illness, a symptom of the malaise of soul into which his private furies had driven him; but he would not, could not, do anything about it. He had neither the character nor the will.

  But, beyond her husband’s illness, there was still another obstacle blocking her desire to change the shameful methods by which they lived: something dark, deep-rooted, powerful, that she would have to overcome. She had learned that in the first year of her marriage; even now, in the autumn of 1869, thinking about it brought her bolt upright against the seat of the buckboard, white about the corners of her mouth, her nails digging into the palms of her hands. It was a thing that escaped time, that existed for her now and here, as living and vivid as it had then and there.

  She had been in the kitchen when Oren came in. He stood, or rather lounged, there, watching her out of those dark eyes of his that were the epitome and intensification of malice, always laughing, but without mirth, having in them that expression of mockery, of contempt for man and all his works, that always made her feel cold and faintly sick.

  “What do you want, Oren?” she said.

  “You,” he grinned. “ ‘Pears to me I done held off a sight too long. Damn it all, honeybunch, you’re as cute as a speckled setter pup.”

  “I have a husband, Mister Bascomb,” she said tartly. “Or have you forgotten that?”

  “Nope,” he said. “But that’s only about half-way true. Maybe less than that. You been married to that shoat-hog more than a year now. Time enough to find out he ain’t no man—not even by half.”

  And the barb in the slow-spoken, lazy words, the hook twisting in her flesh, was that he was right. She had listened enough to the negro women when they didn’t know she was within earshot to know that. This thing a woman did with a man had more in it than the mere begetting in the dark, in shame, in secret, in disgust, of a child.

  “Lord—Lord!” Luella had laughed; “then the roof fell in and the stars kind of reeled around crazy-like, and when the bed broke down, we never even noticed it! That there Tim! Lord God Almighty!”

  But for her, there was—nothing. The faint disgust, the unwilling, dutiful submission. Thank God, she thought, he doesn’t even bother me much that way.

  She looked at Oren speculatively. In her innocence, she did not know how she was looking at him, or how he would interpret it. How precisely, correctly, he would understand her curiosity, her quite impersonal longing, that had nothing to do with him as a man, living; just the quiet, half-formulated desire to find out, to know.

  But the next instant he had taken her in his arms. She fought him then with cold, controlled, savage fury—but silently. But Oren was all bone and sinew, he prevailed finally, found her mouth, holding her like that, so bound, helpless, captive, that neither of them heard Wade when he came into the kitchen.

  “That’ll do now,” he said, and his voice made splinters
of ice, tinkling against the floor.

  Oren turned her loose. He stood there; then slowly, insolently, he grinned.

  “Reckon I’ll be getting back to work now,” he said. He walked straight towards Wade. And, at the last possible instant, Wade stood aside and let him pass.

  “Wade!” Mary Ann got out, her voice high, taut, strangling. “How could you?”

  Wade started towards her then. When he was close enough, he drew back his hand and slapped her hard across the mouth. Then he turned and went out again without another word.

  That should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. Although Wade had never again come upon them, there had been many occasions in the last three years when she had had to deal with Oren—to lash him off with words, most of the time, but not infrequently to hold him off with the tiny, silver-mounted derringer she had bought in New Orleans, called the “virgin’s pistol”, and designed expressly, in those lawless years, for the exact use to which she put it. Beyond this, there was another thing: the belief that she had, slowly deepening into certainty, that Wade knew Oren hadn’t ceased his attempts upon her and, knowing, incredibly said nothing, did nothing, about them. She had dug into the why of it in a silent fury of concentration, but she had come up with nothing. Either Wade was afraid of Oren Bascomb or he simply did not care. She dismissed the first idea as unworthy of consideration: a man who had fought the whole Yankee army almost singlehanded, and this by Oren’s own corroboration as an eyewitness, was scarcely likely to be terrorised by one man. The second was almost equally unacceptable: she knew with a certainty granted to few women that Wade did not so much as look at anyone else; she had seen his blue eyes upon her with the sad, hopeless adoration of a faithful dog in them. Then they would change, and there would be fury in them, blank, mindless rage.