Benton's Row

by Frank Yerby

  Clint shook his head.

  “You know what he did?” he burst out. “He killed them in the kitchen! They were fully clothed! Then he—”

  “I know,” Randy said. “Give me the gun, Clint.”

  “No! He dirtied her before the whole damned world to save his miserable hide. I’m sorry, Randy, but he’s going to pay for that.”

  “I agree,” Randy said. “That’s why I want your gun.”

  Clint stared at him.

  “I don’t see—” he began.

  “Listen,” Randy said tiredly: “You go in there and you kill him, or he kills you, and what have you proved? That Mary Ann was not shot in the very act of adultery, as he claims—or merely that she had still another lover? That’s all people are going to think if you kill him. Don’t be a fool, boy. I’m going in there and bring him out, and he’s going down to John Brighton’s office and sign a full confession, clearing that poor girl’s name.”

  “They’ll hang him,” Clint warned.

  “He wouldn’t live that long. In his condition, the fear of it would kill him long before. Better that way. Come on, give me your gun.”

  Slowly Clinton drew it out and passed it over. He smiled crookedly.

  “Thanks, Randy,” he said. “I was about to break my most sacred oath. And Wade’s not worth it.”

  “No,” Randy said, “he’s not. Now we’ll wait. If he doesn’t come out in half an hour, I’ll go after him—alone, Clint. He won’t fire on me. I’ll go before dark so he can see who I am.”

  “All right,” Clint said.

  Wade sat in the kitchen with the revolver in his hand. He’s coming, he thought, Clint’s coming. And I can’t hardly lift this damned thing any more. Can’t rightly aim with this here shaking . . .

  He peered towards the big gates.

  Didn’t think of that damned little bastard! Had plumb forgot he was there. I kilt Mary Ann—kilt his ma. Lord Jesus God Almighty! Didn’t mean to kill her, You know that, God; didn’t mean to—just these damned trembling hands couldn’t aim straight, couldn’t . . .

  He laid the revolver down on the table and got his thickened fingers around the whisky bottle. He forced it upward, level with his mouth. The whisky ran down his chin, soaked his shirt.

  “Damn!” he wept. “Can’t even drink no more!” Planned it so good, too—got rid of Oren. Nobody’ll ever know now—nobody but Randy. Had to tell him. Can I help it ‘cause I was born without guts? Briar Creek—Lord Jesus, ain’t I paid for it? Had to run that day—just had to—man would of been a fool to stay there and fight the whole Yankee army. But they was fools, those boys, fools and heroes, and they was smarter’n I was ‘cause dying is quick, and dead they didn’t have to wake up night after night in a cold sweat, like I do still. I can hear ‘em, screaming with them Yankee bayonets through their guts, and cussing me with their dying breaths for leaving ‘em. Didn’t have no luck that time—wasn’t for that sharpshooting sentry, I’d of got clean away—then there wouldn’t of been all this business about Oren blackmailing me.

  He tried the bottle again. This time some of the whisky went down his throat.

  Pa, too. Cussing me with his dead eyes. Ratted on him, too. Told Louis Dupré ‘bout Babette—got my own pa killed. Didn’t meant it, Pa. Sure Lord didn’t. You know that—you know—Pa! Don’t stand there like that a-glaring at me! Lord God, Pa—don’t . . .

  He got up from the table, hobbling backward towards the door, leaving the revolver where it lay. He went down the back steps, favouring his bad leg.

  “Pa,” he whispered. “Pa, I was young and crazy jealous and, anyhow, I didn’t mean it. You understand that, don’t you, Pa? Pa, you’re dead. Don’t you know you’re dead, Pa? Close your eyes, don’t glare at me like that, Pa, for Jesus’s sake, Pa, don’t—don’t—”

  He was running now, a crazy hop-skip, a wild, lurching hobble, down the path.

  “Pa! Don’t follow me! Pa, you’re Clint and you’re gonna kill me—staring like that—she’s dead, Pa! She’s dead lying there so white with the blood all over her. And I loved her so. . . . But I kilt her, Pa, like I kilt you, like I kilt them boys at Briar Creek, like I—”

  He stopped still. The sun went out suddenly. Then it came back again, swinging dizzily in the sky. His father was gone. He was alone, leaning on the fence by the pig-pen, under a blood-red sky that came down closer, closer until it was all around his head like a blanket, roaring in his ears like a surf tide. He went down, feeling himself going, and the fence crashed in under his weight.

  He lay there, breathing hoarsely, while the red went out of the sky and the sun steadied into its accustomed place. Then he saw the first of the thick grey shapes come grunting towards him. He started to put down his hands to push himself up, but nothing happened. He looked at his hands, seeing them there: thick, inert, useless. He tried moving them, concentrating with a fury of will upon each finger, then upon his toes. His eyes, rolling in a face that was motionless, too, rested finally on the grey shapes, a yard away, moving in. He screamed then—all the more terribly for the fact that he made no sound.

  “I’m going now,” Randy said. “Don’t follow me, Clint.”

  “All right,” Clint said. Then they both heard the guns. Randy looked at him. Then he jerked his head in the direction of the sound. “Come on,” he said.

  They whirled the horses around the house and went hammering down the path. They pulled up together and sat there.

  The twins were firing into the herd. They were both crying, and their tears had made streaks through the powder black on their faces. But they kept on shooting into the milling, screaming hogs.

  Then Randy saw it.

  “Dear God!” he whispered—and gave Clint back his gun. The two of them sat there on the horses and emptied their revolvers into the herd, firing until the last beast was dead.

  Randy got down from the horse. He took off his coat and laid it over the thing on the ground.

  “Come, Clint,” he said, “help me pick him up.”

  “Too much,” Clint whispered. “Not even he—”

  “Give me a hand,” Randy snapped. “The twins—”

  “All right, Randy,” Clinton Dupré said.

  Book Three

  LUCIFER’S FALL

  1

  I’M old, Sarah thought; I’m too old, and they won’t let me lie down like a body my age ought to have the right to. Reckon I’m a fool. I should give up and let them manage without me. But they can’t. They’re going to have to one day soon; and that’s a fact. I know them too good, and that’s what keeps me going; I know, every time another damned Benton is born, people should run for cover. If there ever is any more of them—Roland don’t seem to be in any hurry to start a family. He’s been married since right after the Armistice and not a word about a child. Funny he ain’t come home yet. War’s been over six months and he’s still abroad. Maybe he’s ‘shamed of that there foreign woman he married.

  Can’t be that, though. Jeb and Patricia said she was a sweet little thing from one of the very best families over there. Poor things—Hank was all they had. Reckon the main reason Jeb took that job in New York after all is ‘cause everything around here reminds them too much. Won’t be no more Duprés after them. Hank was the last, and I reckon Pat’s too old now for child-bearing.

  She sat there on the veranda of Broad Acres that June morning of 1919, rocking in her chair. She sat very straight and tall, and her grey eyes were clear. She was ninety-six years old, and she could still get about after a fashion, leaning heavily on a cane, with her other arm supported by Buck, her negro chauffeur-houseman. Every time she went into a store, which she occasionally did even nowadays, people accepted it as a matter of course that the clerks were going to stop waiting on them without apology and rush to serve her. Before the war, when she happened to visit the court while Jeb Dupré was pleading a case, the proceedings had ceased at once while everybody, judge, jury, lawyers, the criminal being tried, and all the spectators ro
se to say: “Howdy, Miz Sarah.” She was almost never late to church, which was a good thing, because it was a known fact that the Reverend Reddings wasn’t going to start services until she got there, which he proved one Sunday by sending one of the congregation all the way out to Broad Acres to see what the matter was when she miraculously didn’t appear. When the young man got back with the news that Miz Sarah was kind of poorly, Reverend Reddings said:

  “Friends, I reckon we ought to all go out there and cheer Miz Sarah up.”

  So it was that that Sunday’s sermon was preached from the veranda of Broad Acres, while the congregation stood around in the yard and Sarah listened through the window. At the beginning of it she called Cora Lee to her beside, and by the time Reverend Reddings was intoning the final prayer for the health of this good and great lady whom the Lord in His infinite wisdom had seen fit to spare for so many years to be the guiding light and inspiration for the whole community, the serving-girls had enough chicken fried for everybody, with potato salad and all the trimmings. Which wasn’t hard, because Reverend Reddings habitually hammered away at sin, which he was against, the devil, whom he put behind him, and fire and brimstone, which yawned threateningly at the feet of all the spectators, for at least two hours. All in all, it was quite an occasion.

  It had started to rain, a thin driving mist, but she didn’t move. Jeb and Pat would come for her. They had promised and that was that. The idea of giving up her monthly visit to the cemetery, of not indulging in the quiet worship of her dead, because of such a thing as bad weather, never even occurred to her. It was her chief interest in life now, this ritual of going the third Sunday in each month and walking among the tombstones, the many tombstones bearing the name “Benton”, and communing in quiet and peace with the revered dead. She didn’t even think about going back into the house. She had too many things on her mind. She had not become unclear with age. She remembered everything in chronological order and never got things mixed up as some of her contemporaries did. Only she hadn’t any contemporaries to speak of. They had all drifted down the dark river into the mists and the silence.

  “Make him come home, Lord,” she prayed silently; “don’t he know that’s all I’m waiting for—to know there’s going to be more Bentons to trouble the world? Got to make sure of that. Can’t have them finished like the Duprés.”

  No, that would be unthinkable to her; that the strong strain, that the heady, hard violence of Benton maleness should no longer set their iron tread upon earth—that the passion in them, the wild sweet delirium they so easily evoked in response to their clarity and their force should cease, should vanish from out of life and time, was more than unthinkable—it was insupportable.

  Buck came round the house now and stood by the edge of the porch a yard from where she sat. Out of her great need, she asked him again, although she knew already exactly how he would answer her.

  “You saw Roland abroad, didn’t you? When you were in the army, I mean.”

  “Yes’m,” Buck said.

  “And this here French girl he married?”

  “Yes’m—tell the truth, ma’am, I only saw her oncet, and it was real dark. But from what I saw, she was really something.”

  There was a warmth to his tone that nettled her, arising as it did out of this black boy’s memory of a woman who, however foreign she might be, was, after all, white. Certain dim memories stirred reluctantly into life: the whispered reports that had passed from man to man upon the A.E.F.’s return from France about the peculiar response of the French, and more especially of Frenchwomen, to negroes—dim not because they were not recent, even current; but because she had dismissed them completely the first time she had heard them, with an outraged snort, as being plainly beyond belief.

  “Did you,” she snapped, “know her before?”

  “No, ma’am!” Buck’s tone was so shocked that her ugly, half-formed suspicion vanished at once, disappeared as though it had never been. But he was talking again, rushing into speech: “It was only ‘cause I took Mister Roland home to Miz Stormy’s up there in Passy that I saw her. She was staying with Miz Stormy at the time. I come up on Mister Roland by accident—he was sick and—”

  “You mean he was drunk,” Sarah said clearly.

  “No’m—sick. More sick than drunk, anyhow,” Buck insisted. “That was right after Mister Hank got kilt—and poor Mister Roland was half out of his mind. He was pitiful, ma’am—the way he talked didn’t make much sense a-tall. Anyhow, he told me how to git up there, so I took him—and this French lady opened the door and said: ‘Okay, soldier, I’ll take care of him now.’ ”

  “Apparently—” Sarah began, but the word was muffled. She put her hand to her mouth and then said loudly, clearly, in the toneless voice of the partially deaf: “Damn these store-boughten teeth!”

  Buck let a chuckle escape him.

  “What you laughing at, Buck?” she snapped.

  “Nothing, ma’am,” Buck said.

  “Apparently,” Sarah went on serenely, as though her thought had not been interrupted, “she did just that.”

  “Did just what, Miz Sarah?” Buck said.

  “Took mighty good care of him,” Sarah said.

  The big Packard drew to a stop in the yard and Jeb and Patricia Dupré got out of it. They were a very handsome couple in their early forties. They were well dressed and calm, moving towards her with easy grace so that anyone seeing them would have said: “Lord, what a fine-looking pair!” That is, until he saw their eyes. Their eyes were terrible.

  “ ‘Lo, Grandma,” Jeb said, and bent to kiss her cheek.

  “Howdy, son,” Sarah said fondly.

  Jeb bent down to help her up, and Buck ran round to the other side. Together they got her to her feet, with some difficulty, not because she was heavy, but because both of them handled her as though she were made of infinitely fragile, unimaginably precious rare old china.

  Patricia gave her the cane and Jeb started helping her down the stairs. He smiled at her, and a light came into his sad, dark eyes. He was forty-five years old, and Sarah adored him. To her, he was still the same thin, dreamy, beautiful child she had shared with Clinton, his father, ever since . . .

  But she didn’t like to think about that. There were so many things she didn’t like to remember.

  “Grandma,” Jeb said, “you’re still the most beautiful woman in the whole blamed world.”

  Sarah started to make a joke, but then she saw that he meant it.

  “Next to Pat, eh, son?” she said.

  “No. Next to no one,” Jeb said gravely. “Pat’s lovely now. Maybe she will be for many years to come: but she won’t look like you do at ninety-six.”

  “I pray God,” Pat said sharply, “that I won’t live that long!”

  “Oh, it ain’t as bad as all that,” Sarah said. “Go on, boy, flatter me some more. I like it.”

  Jeb smiled sadly.

  “I reckon,” he said, “a woman never does get really beautiful until she’s old. By then her beauty’s real, because it’s the reflection of her soul. If she has refused to get bitter, and gone on loving folks like you have, Grandma, in spite of everything—then the beauty inside of her shines through like a light. And that’s the only kind of beauty that counts.”

  “You always did talk real pretty, Jeb,” Sarah said. “Even as a child! Got it from your poor pa. He had a way of talking that could charm a jay-bird off a branch.”

  “Yes,” Jeb said quietly, “only I never think of him as ‘poor’ Pa. He’d been sick a long time. And lonely, too. Besides, he was sixty-five when he died. That’s quite a respectable age.”

  “Lord God,” Sarah breathed. “That’s one of the troubles of being nigh as old as Methuselah. Don’t seem possible that if Wade had lived, he’d be seventy-five years old by now. Him and Clint. And Stormy’s seventy-six! Reckon I’m just a freak of nature, Jeb. Ain’t nobody supposed to live this long.”

  “You are,” Jeb said. “Come on, let’s get a mov
e on, Grandma. Time’s a-wasting!”

  Sitting beside Patricia, Sarah took out her spectacles and adjusted them. She could see Pat’s profile now, its exquisite lines marred by the tight hold she was keeping against the revelation of her grief and pain.

  “Why don’t you two have another child?” Sarah said flatly. “You aren’t too old—’bout forty-three, aren’t you, Patricia? Heck, I’ve known women to have babies till they was fifty.”

  “Granny, please!” Patricia whispered; and the anguish was there, vibrant in her voice.

  “Shame to let the Dupré strain die out—or the Hendersons. Look, child, I know you’re grieved. Terrible thing to lose an only child. But you should have had more of them in the first place. Handsome young couple like you.”

  “Oh, Granny, we tried!” Pat said desperately; “it wasn’t our fault we had only one child. I wanted six! That’s why I know it’s no good now. If I couldn’t have babies in my twenties and early thirties, I can’t expect to do any better old as I am now.”

  “Never can tell,” Sarah said serenely; “sometimes when a body wants a thing bad enough . . . Would be nice to have a little mite in the family again. Bound to be pretty, specially if it took after the Henderson side. I remember Davin Henderson, your grandpa, mighty well. Aside from being a mite thin, he was one of the handsomest men I ever did see.”

  God, oh, God! Patricia wept inside her mind; I can’t stop her. I have to let her ramble on like that. She’s so old—so old. And such a sweet old thing, really. From the depths of her broken spirit she summoned up a wan ghost of a smile.

  “Here we are,” Jeb said. “Wait, Grandma! Buck and I will help you down.”

  They trooped into the cemetery with Jeb supporting Sarah, and the coloured boy, Buck, walking a little bit behind. He was a very nice, quiet boy. Sarah knew that, because she had brought him up. She had, in her lifetime, brought up two generations of orphans, and both times the children had been of the two races: Wade’s sons, Stone and Nat, and Buford’s Fred at the same time; and now Roland, Stone’s son, the last legal bearer of the Benton name, and Buck, Fred’s son.