Benton's Row

by Frank Yerby

  The thing that was gone from them was tenderness. To her hurt, puzzled astonishment, every time Wade spoke to her now, his words were barbed. He had an almost feminine genius for the cruel, the cutting, the devastatingly unexpected disparagement. He continually belittled her looks, the same combination of line, feature, colouring which had intrigued him enough before to make him propose to her; her abilities as a housekeeper, which were more than considerable, being on a plane approaching even Sarah’s matchless skill; and her inability to present him still, after four years of marriage, with an heir.

  Mary Ann grimly suspected that at least part of the blame in this last regard was his. She was wrong; all of it was. That his infrequent seizures of a wife half-asleep, unaroused, without preliminaries, without even a spoken word—being in itself a species of rapine, leaving her sleepless, tormented, sick, to the point that now at the first touch of his groping hands she had to fight back the nausea—armed all her spirit and perhaps even the very chemistry of her body against him, becoming thus in its essence a rejection of his seed, he never even dreamed, not to mention thought of.

  Now, jolting along in the light rig, a queasy remnant of the slight discomfort she had been feeling every morning for two weeks rose to trouble her.

  I’d better see Randy, she thought. Lord God, wouldn’t it be awful if—

  She stiffened in her seat and stared straight ahead. She had it then, the very completion of all that had happened to her. She had been very close to it for a long time now. Sitting there in the buckboard, she remembered the last time that Wade, inspired by having Sarah and his stepfather as an audience, had, grown expansive on the well-worn subject of her defects.

  I didn’t even listen to him, she realised suddenly. I didn’t feel hurt or mad, or any way at all. I just didn’t care. It’s been a long time now since I cared about anything he said or did, or thought.

  Then, very slowly, she shaped the thing that was in her mind, putting it into words at last, clear, exact, and terrible:

  I don’t love him. I don’t even like him any more. Oren’s right. He’s a hog. Sitting there bolting his food like somebody was going to take it away from him. Getting fatter and fatter, and Doctor Randy says that fat is going to kill him one of these fine days. . . .

  She stiffened against the seat. I mustn’t think that! she told herself, I mustn’t! It’s wicked and ugly to think that way.

  But she was nothing if not honest. It would be his own fault if it did, she thought bitterly. I’m doing my best to save him, so it would be all his own fault. And I—I would be free of him . . . or would I? Can I ever be freed of him now—can I?

  She could see the town now, in the river bottom. The cluster of houses, the tavern, the white church, the store—the hated, unspeakable store.

  Then she completed her unbidden thought: For three years I’ve been praying for a child; and now, maybe, I’ve got one. Women get sick like this in the mornings at first. Only now I don’t want it. I don’t want Wade’s child. Her lips moved, shaping the words, just below the level of audible sound: “Lord God, wouldn’t it be awful if I am!”

  When she came up to the lovely, gracious house that Randy McGregor had built for his belated bride, Sarah was sitting on the veranda. She got up at once and came to the gate.

  “Come in, child,” she said kindly. “My, but you look kind of peaky.”

  “I haven’t been well lately,” Mary Ann said. “Randy’s home? I want to talk to him about something.”

  Sarah opened the gate and put one arm around her daughter-in-law’s waist.

  “I can guess,” she said. “Getting strange hankerings in the middle of the night? Been kind of sickish mornings?”

  “Yes,” Mary Ann whispered. “Oh, Mother Sarah, you don’t think . . . ?”

  “Yes, child, I do. Heck, I know. You got the look. But talk to Randy, anyhow. He’ll hem and haw and say maybe, till you’re twice as big as you are now; then he’ll swear he was sure all the time. I really don’t see how he saves anybody now that I’m married to him and have found out just how much he knows and how much is humbug.”

  “Randy is a mighty good doctor, Mother Sarah,” Mary Ann said. “He’s the best these folks down here have ever had.”

  “Which ain’t saying much,” Sarah laughed. “Oh, he can cut all right. Anything what needs cutting, sawing and stitching he can fix up just fine. But he really don’t know what makes folks tick. I think he just sits beside ‘em and suffers so much worse than they do that they get well out of sympathy for him.”

  Mary Ann looked at her mother-in-law and smiled.

  “You love him very much, don’t you?” she said.

  “Reckon I do,” Sarah said. “But I’ll allow that about half of it’s pure relief. It’s kind of good to be married to a real nice man after Tom—”

  “Mother Sarah,” Mary Ann said, “is Wade anything like—his pa?”

  Sarah pushed a rocker forward and stood there, considering the question.

  “Yes,” she said. “He’s got that same Benton streak of poison-meanness, only it shows in different ways. Lots of times I was happy, married to Tom. In all the years we was married, he never said as much pure, low-down ugliness to me as I’ve heard Wade say to you in one half-hour. Wade’s my son, but I have to admit he ain’t the man his pa was. Even if a man’s mean, he don’t have to let it out if he’s strong. Wade’s kind of weak, and he knows it. Reckon that’s why he has to take it out on you.”

  “But he is brave,” Mary Ann said uncertainly. “Everybody says that what he did at Briar Creek—”

  “Ever hear tell of anything else he done in the war?” Sarah said flatly. “Mind you, I ain’t running down my own child; but even a cat will fight if he’s cornered. Wade had good luck that time, Mary Ann. The Yankees had him surrounded, so be got his back up and fought—he had that much of his pa in him. And he happened to have done it before a witness. Folks believe that Oren Bascomb because they know he ain’t the kind of man to say nothing good about anybody else lessen he has to—sit down, child. I’ll go call Randy.”

  The examination took barely five minutes.

  “Hard to say for certain this early in the game,” Randy said; “but I’m pretty sure that in nine months you’re going to make me a grandpa, young lady. Damned if I don’t like the idea! Me, a grandpa! Have you told Sarah?”

  “Didn’t have to, Doctor Randy. She gave one look at me and she knew.”

  “Then it’s a sure thing. When it comes to babies, Sarah’s the damned best diagnostician I ever did see. Come on back out on the porch. Wade won’t be going home for yet a while.”

  “All right, Doctor Randy,” Mary Ann said.

  They sat on the porch.

  “Mother Sarah,” Mary Ann said, “I’ve got troubles—”

  “You sure Lord have,” Sarah said; “but you’ll do all right. I did.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t thinking about that. It’s—it’s that Oren Bascomb.”

  “What’s he done now?” Randy growled. “I’ll be blessed if five minutes of him is just about all I can stand!”

  “Two,” Sarah said flatly.

  “He’s always leading Wade into things. You know about the store—how it works, I mean?”

  “Yes,” Randy said. “Pure, unadulterated robbery! By God, the war was supposed to free the negroes. Maybe it did; but it certainly has enslaved the white man. Damn it all, Sarah! You know those McPhersons? Went out there yesterday and belied and bedamned the place down, trying to get that McPherson woman to understand that children need milk and eggs and vegetables. Know what she told me?”

  “Yes,” Sarah said; “told you they couldn’t afford it because they owe so much at the store.”

  “I’m going to talk to Wade!” Randy thundered. “If that boy’s got a spark of decency left in him, he’ll see—”

  “He’ll see all right,” Sarah said grimly, “but he won’t do a blamed thing, Randy. That black-hearted scoundrel’s got him completely under his t
humb.”

  “They even cheat the negroes,” Mary Ann whispered. “No matter how many bales a tenant makes, with Oren keeping the books, he ends up in debt. Those poor creatures can’t read or write, so he cheats them something awful. I stuck my nose in that, and Oren told me point-blank to tend to the big house, and let him manage the place like he was hired to.”

  “And Wade backed him up?” Randy asked.

  “Yes,” Mary Ann whispered. “But that’s not the worst of it. Oren’s a member of the Knights of the White Camellia, and I’m not sure that—that Wade isn’t, too.”

  “He is,” Sarah said grimly.

  “I’m still not sure, Mother Sarah,” Mary Ann said. “I know he goes out a mighty heap at night.”

  “I am,” Sarah said. “They’ve got to go on playing heroes, all those boys. They’ve got to swill their likker and ride a-whooping and a-hollering down on some nigger’s cabin. And after they whip him ‘most to death and burn his shack, they feel real brave—it’s Gettysburg and Shiloh Church and Antietam rolled into one all over for them. Lord God, it’s enough to make a body puking sick!”

  “But, Mother Sarah—all those carpet-baggers and scalawags stirring the coloured folks up. . . .”

  “Don’t get touched—or rarely,” Randy said in his deep, still voice. “No, it’s the black who’s the victim. They know, they must know, Mary Ann, that the negro is no more than the stick in the hand of the bully who beats us. The thing to do is to strike at the men who hold the stick, the Republicans themselves—by patience, by endurance, by quiet courage, which are the things we haven’t got.

  “No, the black man is the victim made to order, because his Republican bosses, who herd him, fête him, drill him to the polls, give him liquor and barbecues, excite him with promises of land, tickle his childish vanity with letting him play at law-making, don’t give a damn about him truly, any further than they can use him. But the others, the Kluxers, the Innocents, the White Camellias, hiding under their dirty bed-sheets, are, I submit, the most despicable band of criminal scum that ever disgraced a land capable of producing a Lee, a Stuart, a Jackson!”

  “You’re speaking of Wade, too, remember,” Mary Ann said.

  “I am. And I regret to speak so. They, our home-grown, night-riding heroes, have their excuses: they say we are damnably misgoverned, robbed, maltreated—and we are. But we were damnably misgoverned, robbed, maltreated long before the carpet-bag became a symbol of dishonour. I soberly beg the young blades of our irregular, baffonic cavalry to consider the record of the Know-Nothings in New Orleans in the ‘fifties—of the endless procession of embezzlers, cheats, thieves who have held office in Louisiana since the day we took over from the French. I ask you, is it the thievery we object to, or merely its preservation as the droit de seigneur of the local talent?”

  “Still, Doctor Randy,” Mary Ann said, “we can’t permit black Republicans and Yankees to treat us the way they do. Most decent white people can’t vote, while all those ignorant darkies can. I haven’t anything against black people. You know that. I’m always taking up for them. But they just don’t know enough; they haven’t had the experience. They’re like children.”

  “I grant you that. That’s not the point, child. It’s not objectives I’m talking about, but methods. Any end is inevitably dirtied by dirty means—and I tremble to think of what the white Southerner is going to be like after thirty years of night-riding, unbridled violence, and mass slaughter of the helpless. We’ve learned to spit on due process of law down here—we have come to condone, here in Louisiana, more—to uphold, to boast of, a savagery that would disgrace a Sioux. Last year, A.D. 1868, was election year; and we, under various provocations, none of which, I insist, justified the sickening barbarity of our actions, engaged in a negro hunt in Bossier parish, chasing black men into the swamps, running them before the dogs, whether they had had anything to do with the killing of those two white men or not. When it was over, we had killed forty negroes, if you accept the Democratic estimate, or one hundred and twenty, if you take the Republican. It doesn’t matter which. Perhaps, in the scales of God, the lives of two white men balance those of forty or even of a hundred and twenty blacks. I can’t measure human souls, add up and balance lives.

  “In St. Landry it was worse: four negroes killed in the first skirmish, eight arrested and subsequently lynched, and a mass man-hunt lasting two weeks, organised like a grand turkey shoot, with an even bigger difference in the tally according to which source you take it from. Thirty, say the Democrats, three hundred, the Republicans. Again it doesn’t matter how many hunks of human meat were left after the shooting, stabbing, knocking out of brains—”

  “Randy, for the love of God!” Sarah said.

  “And even burning. We’ve come to that. We’ve gone back that many centuries into human barbarism. It doesn’t matter. Do not count them. Them nor the forty-odd those Sicilian savages who call themselves the Innocents killed in St. Bernard. And this, ladies, in one year, in one State, in defence of your sacred honour. How do you like possessing an honour of such magnitude, of such shining purity; yet, by definition, of such manifest feebleness that it requires rivers of blood to uphold it? Dear God! We left you alone, on outlying farms, surrounded by young and lusty negro men for four years—and I have yet to learn of one authentic case of rape in all that time. But now it becomes the issue; we must have a stalking-horse. We cannot admit we butcher negroes because it suits our conception of political expediency at the moment—or, more truly, because there’s a sickness of cruelty in us, coupled with a cowardice that dares not touch the real authors of our misfortunes—since, unfortunately, if we kill them, the windy thieves who herd the black to the polls in pursuit of plunder, we ourselves are in danger of hanging. No—rather this slaughter of innocents, this shooting of tame and tethered ducks, until butchery becomes a way, of life, until we reverse the decision lost upon the field of honour— and in this dirty fashion we shall win.”

  “You think so, Doctor Randy?” Mary Ann said.

  “I know it, child. We shall win our ignoble victory. But in the end we shall go down, sink down out of the bonds of civilised men, retreat out of decency, kindliness and honour, bring up generations of young men who will accept the abuse of the helpless, injustice, cruelty, the nasty, stinking business of man-killing, as the normal way of life. We will do it. And may God have mercy upon our souls!”

  They sat there in the silence, feeling the afternoon heat dying a little, the first coolness of the evening stealing in.

  “The Knights asked Randy to join,” Sarah said. “Did you know that, child?”

  “No,” Mary Ann said; “but I’d have given a pretty penny to hear what he told them!”

  “I rather disgraced myself,” Randy said. “Kicked the scoundrel down the flight of stairs from my office. Then I went over to their headquarters and told them I’d pistol the next blackguard who had the temerity to cross my threshold. They haven’t bothered me since.”

  He turned to Mary Ann, his face gentle and grave.

  “You want me to talk to Wade, Mary?” he said.

  “No,” Mary Ann said, and stood up. “I’m going over there and have it out with Wade. Maybe I can get him to see the light.”

  “You do that, child,” Sarah said.

  The first thing she heard when she entered the store was Wade’s high-pitched, nasal voice storming at a client.

  “Damn it to hell, Murphy! You think I’m made out of money? I have to pay dear for this stuff. Folks I buy it from don’t wait. I advanced you fertiliser last season; plough-lines, seed, God knows what else! You was to pay for it out of the crop. Now you tell me you didn’t make a crop! How come, Murphy? Name of God, man, I ain’t no charitable institution!”

  “Mister Wade,” the poor white’s voice quavered, “listen to me! I ain’t got no field-hands. Can’t afford to hire help. And my old woman ain’t been right since the last kid. He was born queer—don’t think he’s ever going to walk or talk o
r anything.”

  “What in hell-fire that got to do with me? I want my money!”

  “Mister Wade, Mister Wade—you ain’t going to sit there and tell me that a man with a sick wife—Mollie’s got a misery in the chest and hit’s mighty bad; she done took to spitting blood—and with my wife like that and a flock of kids to feed you ain’t going’ to let me have a little more credit? Why, Doctor Randy says—”

  “To hell with my precious pa-in-law and what he says! If he wants to tote the whole parish on his shoulders, let him But as for me . . .”

  There’s nothing worse, Mary Ann thought, than putting a snivelling coward in a position of power. Takes out everything what’s eating him on everybody else. Look at him! That’s my husband, the man I married, the man who’s going to be the father of my child. Sitting there slobbering and spitting, so blamed fat you can’t half see his mean little eyes. Ugh! By the living God this is the last child I’ll ever have for you, Wade Benton! Come nigh me again, I’ll take that derringer to you.

  She waited, very quietly.

  “Lord God, Mister Wade,” Tim Murphy half wept; “you really mean you won’t?”

  “I won’t,” Wade said, “and that’s my last word, Murphy. Now get out of here and let me be!”

  Mary Ann stood aside and let Tim Murphy stumble past; then she stepped forward.

  “Wade,” she said evenly, “you’ve got to quit this. You’re going to close up this store. And you’re going to kick that Oren Bascomb plumb off our place. I’m not asking you—I’m telling you.”

  “I can’t close it,” Wade said, “you know that, Mary Ann. The plantation don’t bring in enough for us to live on. Wasn’t for the store, we’d starve sure!”

  “Then you got to give these folks better terms. You can do that. You hear me, Wade?”

  “I hear you all right. But if you think I’m going to start giving away my hard-earned profits—”