Benton's Row

by Frank Yerby

  And Hank, too, half-way, she thought. I done what I could to help Jeb and Pat bring him up right. He was a fine boy. Maybe there’s some excuse for automobiles ‘cause they take you a mighty heap farther and faster than horses. More comfortable, too. But aeroplanes was plumb an invention of the devil. The good Lord never meant for folks to go a-flying through the air. Roland’s fault. He led Hank into that flying business. Should of never let him go abroad—then he couldn’t of got into that there Lafayette Escadrille.

  Bentons are just too wild, she reflected bitterly. White or black, they always have to get themselves killed off by the worst way a body ever heard of. Reckon Hank topped ‘em all, though. First one I ever heard of who got killed by falling ten thousand feet straight down.

  Then she hobbled forward, leaning on Jeb’s arm and her cane, towards the family plot. It was laid out in the form of the letter H. On one side were the Bentons and the other was reserved for the Duprés. Though the Benton side was nearly full, the Dupré side was all but empty, having but a single grave in it, which proved nothing except, perhaps, that the Duprés were less violent than their kindred.

  But the cross-bar of the capital H was the grave of the one man who was neither Benton nor Dupré, but who lay among them by common consent, continuing thus, even in death, the role he had played so faithfully in life: the link, the conciliator between those two often warring clans, born as they were of the same blood. Beloved of them both, Randy McGregor slept here the long sleep among the graves of the proud, intractable Bentons, and the equally proud, but quieter and more sensitive Duprés. It was as he had wished it, he, who had fathered no sons, but who had been more than father, guide, counsellor to many, becoming thus, in essence, clan chieftain, sage, leader of men who, fearing nothing that breathed, yet bowed in deference to his higher courage, sensing in it something superior to their own, though they knew not what it was.

  It was Sarah who expressed it, without knowing how much more her words held bound in their simplicity than lay upon the surface:

  “He was a good man,” she said; “wasn’t many like him.” The others held back, watching her. They knew the pattern and they made no attempt to alter it, would have, in fact, resented alteration; for this was ritual now, made sacred by repetition, so that any change would have struck them as blasphemy.

  First to the grave of Tom Benton himself, the man who had ridden out of the sunset seventy-eight years ago to alter in the small span of eighteen years the life of the little community, caught between the river and the bayou, so completely that it was beyond conception that it would ever escape his stamp, his brand, the mould into which so violently he had forced it; pausing there in silent prayer for the soul of this turbulent man who had much need of prayer. Then, one by one, down the other Benton graves: Wade, Tom’s son, of whose death, and the manner of it, no Benton ever spoke, nor any Dupré either, bound up as were both the families in it, so that not one of the younger generation yet knew its connection with the most rigid of their tribal taboos, the fact that pork was never served on any Benton table, a taboo so strictly enforced that now the townspeople honoured it, with the result that Roland Benton had never tasted pork in any form in all his life. A little apart from him, his wife, Jeb’s mother, lay; for Sarah’s strict sense of justice prevented her from having Mary Ann laid by Wade’s side as was customary; and propriety forbade burying her in the Dupré section, next to the place where Clinton now, since 1904, also lay, which was just.

  But for the twins, Wade’s sons, one single grave sufficed: Stone had slept under the dreaming grass since that day in 1894 they had brought his broken body in, lifting the overturned buckboard off it; of Hope, his wife and Roland’s mother, there was no sign. She lay in the graveyard of a Massachusetts ‘hospital’ labelled thus by courtesy among the Bentons, though they, some of them at least, must have known it was, in sober fact, an institution for the insane. Nor did his brother Nat, almost his image, have here his resting-place. Only a polished metal plaque recalled his memory. For he had been buried at sea.

  Then Sarah turned and pointed towards the second plaque inscribed:

  “Sacred to the memory of Fred Douglass, faithful negro servant to the Benton Family, who died gloriously atop San Juan Hill in defense of his Country. 1876—1898.”

  Buck drew himself up stiffly before this tribute placed in honour of his father among the mighty dead. He didn’t remember his father or his mother. He had been a year old when Fred was killed in action. And his mother, a high yellow girl, had departed with the drummer of a showboat band before his second birthday, leaving him to be cared for by Miz Sarah.

  That Fred’s death had been somewhat less than glorious was another thing that Sarah never mentioned. Partially out of a profound belief that no violent wrenching of a human soul out of life is ever glorious, and partially because from Nat’s letters she knew the exact circumstances of his death, she never spoke of it. That the first Benton to die in battle was black did not bother her. She was far above that peculiar littleness of soul. But what did bother her was the manner of it.

  Nat had written from the field hospital where he lay sweating his life out through every pore, “I’m very sick, and they’re shipping me home next week. Maybe that’s why I don’t understand it. All I know is a skinny nigger boy named Fred Benton went up San Juan Hill in the very vanguard. He went up and he got to the edge of the trench with a group of his buddies when a piece of a shell from the American artillery hit him in the back. Those artillerymen killed more of our boys that day than all of the Spaniards put together. And when Lt.-Colonel Teddy Roosevelt came storming up that hill every tooth and eye-glass gleaming, that skinny nigger boy Stone and I used to take turns kicking in the tail was already lying in the bottom of the trench, bleeding to death. Only they patched him up as well as they could and started him back down the hill on a stretcher, but it wasn’t any good, because the whole division only had three ambulances. And when they got him down here, they laid him on the ground, not because he was black, Grandma, but because they had nowhere else to put him. They were doing the same thing with the wounded white boys, too.

  “We’ve just gone through the worst-managed, worst-fought, maybe even the most dishonest war in our history. I say that because I’m sick and that makes me too sad, maybe; but also because Fred was wounded in line of duty by American artillery-fire, and finished off by American Medical Corpsmen who didn’t know their posteriors from an excavation.

  “I’m tired. I don’t understand it. He never had anything but a hard time from me and Stone and all the world except you, Grandma. Why did he do it? Why was he brave?”

  She had received the letter and the notification of Nat’s death aboard that hospital-ship the yellow journals transformed within a week to ‘horror’ ship. He had been killed by the same things that killed Fred: bungling, inefficiency, the crass stupidity implicit in the very idea of settling human disputes by mass murder. But she had the answer to that last question he had asked; and she said it now, standing beside a skinny, gingerbread-coloured boy in the cemetery in the rain:

  “He was a Benton, too.” That, to her, explained everything.

  They went then to the section reserved for the Duprés. There was but one grave in it, so far, that of Jeb’s father, Clinton. Of course, there had been other Duprés; but they were not of Benton blood. Besides, the first of them, Louis, had been hanged for killing Tom Benton; and Clinton’s mother, Lolette, whose name had been given him because he had had no legal right to bear his father’s, lay in the Saint Louis Cemetery in New Orleans. In New Orleans, too, in the Cemetery of Saint Vincent de Paul, lay the almost unmarked grave of another Dupré whom neither Jeb nor Hank had ever heard of. But any number of sporting gentlemen could have given them a rather complete account of Babette, Clint’s mother’s sister, who for so many years had enjoyed the unique distinction of being listed in The Blue Book as the “Queen of the Madams of Storeyville”. That was another of the many things that Sarah never t
old them.

  “He was a real nice boy,” Sarah said aloud, standing by Clint’s headstone. “You look like him, Jeb—only you’re better-looking. But his life was sad.”

  It had been, too—the rest of it, after Mary Ann’s death; but out of that sadness had grown the Dupré fortune, so that today they were far wealthier than the Bentons had ever been. Having left only the child, Jeb, having only this living reminder of the love that had cost three lives in a single afternoon, Clint had centred all his affection upon the boy. Nothing had been too good for Jeb. And being possessed still of a considerable portion of the fortune his mother had left him, as well as the ownership of two newspapers, one in Benton’s Row and the other in Memphis, Clinton had set out to see that Jeb had it all, everything in the whole world.

  Young as he was at the time of Mary Ann’s death, Clinton never married, did not, men swore in awed wonder, ever again so much as look seriously at another woman, bending thus all his energies and his not inconsiderable talents to the task of making money. With these, and the great advantage of a comfortable sum to start with, he plunged into publishing, controlling a string of journals in New Orleans, Natchez, Baton Rouge, Memphis, Minden, Shreveport, and several other towns. With the money thus gained he financed a cotton-seed oil plant, a lumber concern, a turpentine and related products works growing out of the lumber business and saw-mill, branched out naturally into paper-making, until, at his death in 1909, he was a millionaire many times over. But, as Jeb had said, he died of loneliness and fatigue as much as from the pneumonia which finally killed him.

  But for Sarah, Jeb might have grown up spoiled, a typical example of too much money, paternal indulgence, and the purposelessness of a man too rich ever to need concern himself with the problem of gaining a livelihood. Sarah, however, supplied the discipline, guiding him with the same stern, loving hand that she did his half-brothers, Stone and Nat Benton, making, for that matter, precious little distinction even between them and black Fred Douglass Benton, orphaned by the school-house fire that had killed his parents about the same time.

  So Jeb had grown up unspoiled, completed his education at the Sorbonne, travelled widely on the Continent, and returned at last to marry Patricia Henderson of that Henderson family with whom the Bentons had been warring for two generations, and promptly fathered another Benton—Dupré, giving him, in fact, both names, Henry Benton Dupré, which his boyhood friends and later the family reduced to merely Hank.

  But the full name was there on the newer, brighter bronze plaque before which Patricia stood now weeping quietly, hopelessly, with absolutely unbearable grief:

  “In Loving Memory of Second Lieutenant Henry Benton Dupré, of the Ninety-Fourth Pursuit Squadron U.S. Army Air Corps, Born April 2nd, 1895, Killed in Action, June 10th, 1918, in the air, above the Villeneuve Sector, while fighting gloriously against overwhelming odds. In his death he honored his country, his family, and himself.”

  The words were taken from the letter Patricia and Jeb had received from Hank’s squadron commander. From his almost brother, Roland Benton, who had witnessed Hank’s death, there had been no word. He had merely, being a Benton, avenged it.

  Standing there, in the soft drip of the water from the trees, for the rain had stopped now, looking upon the graves of her own offspring and Tom’s, and also upon Tom’s descendants in which she had no share of blood, Sarah began to form it in her mind, this thing which a lifetime of living with them had given her; and when she had it at last, she said it:

  “Reckon there’s some people just naturally born to trouble the world, to stir it up out of its sleepy ways. They come along, and nothing’s the same any more. They cause a mighty heap of crying, and hurtfulness and even the shedding of blood. It’s been hard for me, specially since the Bentons got the bad habit of getting themselves killed off and leaving their babies for me to raise. I’ve done that twice now, with Wade’s children, and afterwards with Stone’s. Even the Benton niggers got the same bad habit. But I’m too old now; and I’m too tired. All I can do now is hang on like I promised Roland I was going to, till he gets back. I’m asking the Good Lord to spare me that long; and maybe a little while more—long enough to see Roland’s first child, if he ever has one. Don’t reckon I can die content until I know there’s going to be some more Bentons in the world.”

  She paused, and a smile lighted her frail, beautifully wrinkled face, etched by time, by her own goodness, her enduring strength, into something very fine under its halo of white hair.

  “It’s been hard. But don’t misdoubt me: I wouldn’t of missed it for nothing in the world. Come on, you-all, we got to be going. Cora’ll have dinner ready by now.”

  In the car, on the way back out to Broad Acres to celebrate the tribal custom of always eating Sunday dinner there, Patricia said:

  “No word from Roland yet? When they’re coming, I mean?”

  “Roland don’t write,” Sarah said, “but Stormy told me they were having to go through a mighty heap of red tape trying to get that child into this country. Hope I’m going to like her. It’ll be strange having a foreign great-granddaughter-in-law.”

  “Oh, you’ll like her all right,” Jeb said enthusiastically; “Athene’s absolutely adorable!”

  “Think I will, Pat child?” Sarah said. “Can’t take a man’s word for it—men are such fools when it comes to a pretty face.”

  “Yes,” Patricia said. “She is the sweetest little thing, as kind as the day is long. At first I didn’t think she was pretty because she’s so—so French. But after I got to know her I saw she was more than pretty—she’s actually beautiful—all the way through, Granny, if you get what I mean.”

  “I do,” Sarah said. “That makes me feel a heap better about it.”

  “She and I got along famously,” Pat said. “I heard a lot about her the first time Jeb and I were in Paris on the way to his job with the Red Cross in Switzerland. But I didn’t meet her until we came back to France about a month after the Armistice. Then I saw what she was like. She— she’d met Hank, you know. She came up to me and kissed me, as though she’d known me all her life, and said, ‘He was so very nice, your son. I loved him, too. He was like my brothers.’ And I didn’t find out until after the wedding, until Stormy told me, that she had had all three of her brothers killed in action, and her husband, too. She hadn’t been married a month when that happened—like—like Hank, Granny, shot down in flames.”

  “Don’t, child,” Sarah said, and put her arm about Patricia’s shoulders. “You’ve cried enough, I reckon.”

  “They’re still at Stormy’s?” Jeb said harshly.

  “Yes,” Sarah said.

  “That’s good. Stormy has a lovely old house in the Passy section—a real hôtel particulier with a garden. I was very happy there when I stayed with her when I was studying in France.”

  “Granny,” Patricia said, “why won’t Aunt Stormy come back home?”

  “She was mixed up in a scandal she really didn’t have nothing to do with,” Sarah said. “A man she knew, a friend of hers, embezzled a lot of money from the lottery company. Since she’d gotten him the job in the first place, the newspapers claimed she helped him do it. But they couldn’t prove it. And they were wrong. Stormy was wild and wicked and meaner than old hell, but she wasn’t dishonest. I know that.”

  “That’s why she went abroad in the first place?” Pat said.

  “Yes. She left in a huff; and she’s been living in Paris ever since, except for that six-months’ visit she paid us in ‘ninety-four. Wouldn’t come home for General Rafflin’s funeral. Reckon he wouldn’t have minded much if he had known. Never seemed to mind anything else she did, which was plenty. Old man like him, marrying a girl young as Stormy was when they got hitched, knows what to expect, I reckon. Went right ahead and left her so much money that it would take her more than the rest of her life to count it. She moves with the best over there. The Metroyers introduced her all round, since she’d been a friend of theirs in New Orleans.
”

  “She sure does,” Jeb said. “She dragged Athene over to meet Roland the day he arrived. Athene’s family dates back to François I; she’s a noblewoman, you know, Grandma—a viscountess.”

  “That’s so?” Sarah said. “Never did have much faith in European nobility—mostly no good, from all I heard tell. But I won’t hold it against her, long as she’s nice.”

  “Oh, she’s all right,” Pat said, “and Roland’s lucky. I was worried sick that he’d get too involved with that other one.”

  “What are you children talking about?” Sarah said.

  “Oh, just a girl Roland used to know,” Pat said quickly. “Seems she tried to hook him, but he was smart enough to get away. Don’t worry about it, Grandma.”

  “I won’t,” Sarah said.

  They had turned into the yard before they saw the taxi. Roland stood beside it, while the driver unloaded the bags. Nothing that any of them had told her had prepared Sarah for the way her great-grandson looked. She took of her glasses, polished them, put them on again. It did no good; the tall young man who stood there was wraith-thin, emaciated, almost skeletal. She could not have recognised him but for his eyes, those terrible Benton eyes of blue ice, staring at her with the dead-level steadiness she remembered not only from him, but from his father and great-grandfather, but with something else in them now, something new, that was bad, very bad, the worst thing in the world, although she did not know what it was. Even his hair was different, being no longer the dark honey-blond colour which he alone of all her descendants had got from her, but thickly grey-thatched, the temples already snowy, so that although he was only twenty-six years old he seemed immeasurably older than Jeb, who was nearly twice his age.

  He came towards the car, moving awkwardly, slowly, tiredly; and the girl followed him. He stuck his head in through the window.