Benton's Row

by Frank Yerby

  “Hard-earned?” Mary Ann snorted. “At sixty per cent? And you and Oren call the ‘Yankees thieves! You listen to me, Wade Benton. You’ve been complaining that you have no son. Well, now you’ve got one—or maybe a daughter—I can’t guarantee which—”

  Joy flooded Wade’s round face.

  “You’re sure, Mary Ann? he breathed. “You’re really sure?”

  “Certain sure. But if you don’t start treating these poor folks better, I’m going to leave you. I’ll go so far away you’ll never find me—and a sweet lot of good it’ll do you to have a son you’ll never see!”

  “You wouldn’t!” Wade got out.

  “Just try me,” Mary Ann said. “And Bascomb goes, too!”

  “I can’t, Mary Ann!” Wade croaked. “I just purely can’t!”

  “Why not?” Mary Ann demanded.

  “No reason. But I can’t. You got to take my word for it, Mary Ann.”

  “He goes,” Mary Ann said flatly, and walked to the doorway. In it, she turned.

  “You know one thing, hero?” she said. “I think Oren’s lying about Briar Creek. I think you ran like hell!”

  Then very quietly she went out into the sun-washed street. And Wade Benton, alone in his store, sat turning the pages of the big ledgers, which held in tenuous, fading ink the black and white tenants of the entire parish in thraldom, having here, in its essence, the new slavery of debt and poor men’s honour—this and more: the measure, the record of his own dishonour, his greed, and the sickness of mind and soul which drove his breed to gorge in vulturish rapacity upon men made defenceless by ignorance and poverty. Then, suddenly, he put his head down upon the ledger and cried.

  “Dear Lord!” he wept, “Dear Lord! Dear Lord! Dear Lord—”

  4

  “SO,” Randy growled, “I’ve got the job of explaining to Mary Ann, eh? And without telling her the truth. That’s hard, Wade.”

  Wade kept turning his round face from side to side to avoid meeting Randy’s eyes. He couldn’t look into them—not now, not any more.

  “Tell her part of the truth, then,” he said. “Tell her Oren’s got some kind of a hold on me—you don’t know what. Lord God, I’ve been putting her off about that for more than a year now—ever since she told me she was going to have the twins—not that we knew it was going to be twins. I can’t put her off no more.”

  “I won’t lie,” Randy said. “I’ve never stooped to that, Wade. But I’ll try to arrange things. That’s all I can do.”

  “You can see my point, can’t you, Randy?” Wade pleaded. “I’m Mayor of the town now, head of the local branch of the Knights of the White Camellia. Folks say I’ve got a chance to run for Governor, come next election. I can’t give all that up, Randy—I can’t!”

  “I see,” Randy said slowly. “You’ve got two choices, boy. You can kill Oren Bascomb or submit to him. You choose to submit; that’s your business. But tell him not to cross my path. I’d as soon shoot him as I would a rattlesnake—no, sooner!”

  “On what basis could I kill him?” Wade burst out. “They hang folks for murder. Lord God, what excuse could I have? He don’t even tote a penknife, let alone a gun. So it couldn’t be self-defence. And you told me not to get excited.”

  “If you have to risk a stroke for any reason,” Randy said, “this is at least a good one. I don’t think life is important enough to be preserved by dishonour. But if you want to spend the rest of your life under perpetual threat of extortion, again I say it’s your affair. By the way, how are Mary Ann and the twins?”

  “Just fine,” Wade said. “Lord God, Randy, how those youngsters can eat! I’ve got three nigger women wet-nursing them in relays. They’re so big now Mary Ann can hardly pick them up. You can tell them apart now. Stone—he’s the older by about two hours, is darker. But both of ‘em’s got Pa’s blue eyes.”

  “You mean to tell me,” Randy laughed, “that Mary Ann insisted upon calling that child Stonewall!

  “Yep,” Wade grinned sheepishly. “Stonewall Jackson Benton, and Nathan Bedford Forrest Benton. Still, Stone and Nat ain’t half-bad names, and that’s all folks are going to call ‘em, anyhow.”

  He stood up.

  “Got to be going now,” he muttered. “Randy—”

  “Yes, Wade?”

  “You won’t breathe a word about what I told you to anybody, will you now? Not even to Ma. If that was to get out, I’d be finished.”

  Randy stared at him, his gaze so level and still that Wade’s pale little eyes danced in his fat face, trying to avoid meeting it. But he could not. Randy’s eyes drew him, held him.

  “Lord God, Randy,” he spluttered, “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know,” Randy said quietly; “but I still think you ought to shoot that blackguard.”

  “And I told you I don’t have no excuse to,” Wade whined; “don’t you see that, Randy?”

  “No,” Randy said coldly, “I don’t. You could do it the very next time he lays a hand on Mary Ann. And he will, you know. Under the circumstances, you could hardly expect him not to.”

  “Oh, Mary Ann can take care of herself,” Wade blurted. Randy stood up then, towered up, his face granite, his eyes cold.

  “Get out of here, Wade,” he said. “Get out before I really lose my temper. You heard me—get!”

  “All right, all right—I’m going!” Wade Benton said.

  Randy stood there without moving for a long time after he had gone. Then he turned slowly back to his desk.

  You poor bastard, he thought; you poor, fat, whining, womanish bastard! Lord God, where on earth did Tom Benton get a thing like that?

  He reached for his hat. No use hanging around the office, he thought. This good weather means mighty lean pickings for an old sawbones. Might as well go on home for a while, and then go look in on Mollie Murphy. Poor thing, I’m afraid she isn’t long for this world.

  As if in answer to his thought, the door burst open, and Tim Murphy stood there, trembling, his eyes bloodshot and wild.

  “Doctor Randy!” he got out, “you’ve got to come! Mollie’s took bad! ‘Pears like she’s going to die!”

  “All right, Tim,” Randy said. “You go wait in the buckboard while I get my things together.”

  “Oh, Lord, Doctor Randy, please hurry! She’s suffering something awful!”

  “Wait outside, Tim,” Randy said sternly.

  “Yessir, Doctor,” Tim Murphy said.

  So it was that Sarah was alone in the house when the stranger came. She heard his light, diffident knocking on the door, and swore with great force and feeling. Another one, she thought. Another poor-white devil or no-’count nigger come to beg Randy to drop everything and come. And he’s killing himself by inches, the poor old thing. Dear Lord, after I finally got myself a good man—it’s his very goodness what’s going to take him away from me. Oh, stop it! I’m coming.

  But when she opened the door, the strange young man stood there.

  “You’re Mrs. McGregor, I presume?” the stranger said.

  Sarah stood there, staring at him. It was not merely his use of that word, ‘presume’, which Sarah had never heard spoken, as a part of living speech, before in her life, though she knew what it meant; it was more: a hint of foreignness, the faintest trace of an accent that clung to his speech, so that the words were precisely, correctly spoken, pronounced with exactitude in a deep, well-modulated voice, wonderfully musical, but the lilt of them was wrong, and the tune. Beyond this there was something else, that strange, dream-like feeling of having stood and looked into this same face before, oh, many, many times before, of having watched these same lips move, shaping words, having looked into these eyes that—no. The eyes were strange, she realised suddenly, and it was this which convinced her she had never seen this young man before.

  “Yes, I am,” she said, “but you’ve got the advantage of me, sir. Who might you be?”

  “I am Clinton Dupré,” he said simply. “I suppose you’ve heard of me?”


  “Yes.” Sarah’s voice sank to the barest husk of a whisper. “My God, but you’re like—”

  “My father. Yes, I am. You must find it terribly strange that I call upon you.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” Sarah said; “but come on in. I don’t aim to hold Tom’s sins over your head, young man. I’m glad you did come. Reckon we’ve got right smart to talk about, you and me.”

  He smiled then, and she saw one of the ways that he was not at all like Tom Benton. He was actually much handsomer, and his smile was something to see, lighting the dark eyes his mother had given him, transforming his whole face, making it boyish and sunny, without any of what Sarah had called Tom’s poison-meanness at all.

  She led him into the parlour and sat there looking at him in frank and open curiosity. What she saw both pleased her and made her sad. Mighty fine, she thought, mighty fine. So Tom did have it in him after all. That means that Wade’s my fault. Never knew that Lolette Dupré well, but she must have been a better woman than I am, to get a son like this.

  “I hope you’ll forgive me, Mrs. McGregor,” he said; “but my father invited me out to Broad Acres to visit you two, the week before—he died. I told him I’d come; but things—his death chiefly, and after that, the war—got in the way.”

  “You fought, didn’t you?” Sarah said. “What was your regiment?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” Clinton said, “but it was the Fourth Massachusetts.”

  “Union army, eh? Don’t worry about that, Clint. It’s 1870 now. Besides, I don’t care what side you were on, if you fought like a man and a soldier. That would be all Tom would ask of you. Were you decorated?”

  “Yes,” Clinton said, “three times, Mrs. McGregor—and promoted to captain on the field. Guess I was a reckless young fool.”

  “You must have been in it right from the first,” Sarah said.

  “As a matter of fact, I was—though not as a soldier. I was only seventeen the first year—too young, though I was big enough to get by if I had thought of it. But at seventeen, ma’am, I was the authorised correspondent for five French newspapers, including Le Soir itself. I was the only American they could find who spoke and wrote French. I’ve finally broken myself of thinking in French; but I still speak and write it better than I do English.”

  “I thought you talked sort of funny. You lived abroad, didn’t you?”

  “In France—practically all my life. I went through a year and a half of the war as a newspaper-man. Then I joined up. I’d seen too many battles, had boys I’d grown fond of killed before my eyes. And, again I don’t mean to offend you, ma’am, I hated slavery.”

  “So did I,” Sarah said grimly. “Go on.”

  “Did you, ma’am? That’s strange. Besides, in the lycée in Paris my best friend was a black boy named Antoine Hébert—from Martinique. He was a brilliant student, a fine athlete, and a wonderful fellow generally. That made it sort of personal. We talked a lot about slavery in Paris. He told me some terrible stories of the days when his own people were slaves. I felt like I was doing it for him.”

  “I see. Why do you say ma’am, like a Southerner, Clint?”

  “Picked it up in New Orleans, I guess. Then a lot of those mid-Western farm-boys I knew in the army said it, too. I don’t really know. But I had to see you, ma’am. My father loved you so. My mother, with all her faults, never permitted herself to say an unkind word about you. She said that you were a wonderful person—that sometimes she wished you weren’t, so she could have taken my father away from you.”

  “She tried hard enough,” Sarah said dryly. “How is she, Clint?”

  “Dead, ma’am. She died in ‘sixty-five, just before the end of the war. I think she just didn’t care to live. She was too unhappy. She neglected to eat or take care of herself. She caught a cold, and died of double pneumonia within a week.”

  “God rest her soul,” Sarah said. “I’m sorry, Clint.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. In a way it was the best thing. My mother was sick and nervous and unhappy for years. She was—difficult, ma’am.”

  Suddenly, impulsively, Sarah put out her hand and laid it over his strong, brown wrist.

  “Call me Mother Sarah, won’t you, Clint? I’d like you to. In a way, you’re my son now. Any son of Tom’s would have to be mine, too.”

  He stared at her, a long, slow time.

  “Thank you for that—Mother Sarah,” he said.

  “Good! Now we’re friends. What are you going to do now, Clint?”

  “Start a newspaper—here in Benton’s Row, if I can, ma’am. My mother left me a good bit of money, but I’d like to do something useful. A newspaper can be a powerful force for good, Mother Sarah. Besides, as little as I’ve seen of this place, I love it here. I don’t know why, but everything about it intrigues me. I feel I can recapture the life I should have had with my father—and didn’t.”

  “Fine,” Sarah said. “You can stay here with us. I’ve a spare room.”

  “Thank you, Mother Sarah, but I’d rather not. I’d be an embarrassment to you. After all, I do look rather like my father—”

  “His spitting image,” Sarah said, “only better-looking. Stay for a while, anyhow—till you find yourself a proper place.”

  “But, ma’am, your husband—”

  “Was Tom’s best friend, and fair doted on him. Heck, Randy would be delighted.”

  “Then I will stay,” Clinton said. “Mother Sarah—”

  “Yes, son?”

  “There’s one more thing I guess I ought to tell you. My sister, Stormy, is in New Orleans. She’s married to a Yankee general turned carpet-bagger. They came down on the same boat I did.”

  “Lord God!” Sarah whispered.

  “I asked her if she were coming to see you. She said, ‘Oh, you tell Ma I’m here. She’ll drop by sometime when she’s in New Orleans.’ ”

  “That’s Stormy all right,” Sarah said bitterly. “Dear Lord, what did I ever do to deserve such a child?”

  “I’m sorry, Mother Sarah,” Clint said. “By the way, I’d like to meet Wade and his wife, if it’s possible. When I asked about you down in town, they told me he was running the plantation now, and that you lived here.”

  “ ‘Course you can,” Sarah said “Tell you what: I’ll send Buford, our nigger house-boy, to ask Mary Ann to come here for supper tonight. You can ride over to the store and ask Wade yourself. Know where it is?”

  “Why, yes—I passed it on the way here. But I didn’t know my brother ran it. Strange, isn’t it, to have a brother you’ve never seen.”

  “A half-brother,” Sarah corrected grimly. “And I wouldn’t go claiming kin with Wade too quick, Clint. He’s kind of prickly, that boy. But you’ll get used to him, I reckon.”

  “I hope so,” Clinton smiled. “Now, ma’am, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go over there.”

  “All right, son. But hurry back, won’t you. Kind of nice to have somebody to talk to. Reckon I spend too much time by myself.”

  “Yes, Mother Sarah,” Clint said gently, “I’ll hurry back.” She went out on the veranda with him. He had scarcely ridden half a block when she saw Randy coming home. He came from the same direction in which Clint was riding; and as he passed the young man, he stared at him, half in recognition, half in puzzlement.

  Sarah waited until he came up to the house. He climbed down from the buckboard, his face grey with weariness and misery, and she knew, without thinking about it, that another of his patients was dead.

  “Who,” he drawled, “was that handsome youngster who just left here? Appears to me you’re picking ‘em kind of young these days, Sarah—”

  “Tom’s boy,” Sarah said; “by Lolette Dupré. You knew about that, I reckon. Not that you’d ever tell on Tom.”

  “Yes,” Randy said, “I knew. No wonder he looked so familiar! By God, but he’s like Tom!”

  “Very much,” Sarah sighed. “Come on in and let me fix you something to eat—”

  “Don�
��t want any,” Randy growled. “That poor bastard, Murphy—”

  “I know,” Sarah said. “Come on, Randy, you’ve got to eat. There’ll be others you can save.”

  “All right, Sarah,” Randy said.

  But when Clinton reached the store, he found it closed. He stood there a moment, looking at it. Guess he’s gone home, he thought. Doesn’t matter really. I’ll ride out there and present myself. It’s not very far, and anyone hereabout can direct me.

  He remounted, whistling the tune of ‘Lorena’. He was then still a very simple and cheerful young man.

  Some four hours later, Randy woke up from a deep and refreshing sleep. He felt much better. He had made peace with himself over his failure to save Mollie Murphy’s life. It had been a thing beyond human science, a thing that could only have been staved off, not cured. And what above all had been lacking, the missing factor which could have kept her alive, was simple compassion. And this, Randy realised with sad acceptance, was, in any time, rare almost to the point of non-existence.

  He got up and looked for Sarah. He found her in the kitchen, her eyes both worried and wrathful.

  “That Buford!” she said. “I sent him out to Broad Acres with a message more than four hours ago. Bet my bottom dollar it’s Cindy again! Buford’s gone plumb crazy over that little wench.”

  Randy smiled.

  “Reckon we’d better get them married, and hire Cindy as your maid,” he said. “That way, we’d be able to keep Buford around.”

  “Ain’t a bad idea,” Sarah said. “Cindy’s kind of flighty, but she’s a neat little thing. I could learn her some sense. But I’m worried about Clinton, too. He’s been gone just as long and he promised to hurry back.”

  “I’ll ride out towards Broad Acres,” Randy said, “and see if I can’t find both of them. You seem quite taken with that boy, Sarah.”

  “I am. He’s a mighty fine boy, Randy. Kind of a son I wish I’d had. You ain’t too tired?”

  “No; I’m fine now,” Randy said.

  It was, by the time he got there, already too late, though he did not realise it then. He had merely the vague feeling, all the time be talked to Mary Ann, that something was wrong—a hint of tension—a certain inquietude, which he dismissed, at first, as imaginary.