Claire Louise and her husband, Walter, had gone to Chicago some years before, not too long after they married and Walter had worked his way up in the insurance business. They were well off before the Depression hit, but Rose didn’t have any way of knowing how they were faring lately. She knew that several people from the Dobbin area had gone to Chicago in the last year hoping that Walter could find work for them. Rose and Jack seemed pretty safe, seeing as how Toby Nash’s farms had been in the family for generations even before the Civil War and were not likely to be lost. There sure wasn’t much of an income anymore, though. Nobody could afford to buy anything the farmers harvested. But at least you could always grow your own food. “Something to eat and a roof over your head” was enough to give thanks and praise to God for during those lean times.
But then, the worst that could happen, happened.
1930 Winter and the Spring of 1931
Rose knew something was going wrong at the Nash farm. She could feel extraordinary tension whenever Mr. Nash was around. Whatever was causing the stress was never talked about or even hinted at, but where there used to be laughter and gay evenings around the supper table or in the parlor after supper there was now a dark and ominous quiet. Voices hushed when either she or Jack entered a room. Looks were exchanged that were fearful or angry … or what? Rose was deeply puzzled, but Jack had no answers for her and she dare not question his family. So she watched and waited for some clue to explain the mystery but none came. Many days passed in that deep purple twilight. Rose felt the darkness of night coming, but it dallied and that strange twilight lingered. And the days turned into weeks, until months had passed. And still the darkness waited to fall and she became more and more fearful of its coming.
Then one especially oppressive, sultry evening in early spring, a storm came up. It was so violent with the wind ripping limbs from trees, and lightning and thunder crashing and rumbling and cracking that the house started shaking with a strange and alarming vibration that filled Rose with foreboding and dread. She lit a lamp in their bedroom because the flashes of lightning jarred her so badly coming out of the pitch blackness of that night. And the tempest went on and on. “Jack, I’m gonna lose my mind if this doesn’t stop.” And Jack was uneasy himself, though not unduly. But neither of them could sleep, so he held her in his arms there in their four-poster bed and sang to her. All the bawdy ballads he could remember. Eventually she was laughing with him at the ribald stories the songs told. Toward dawn the storm passed and the house settled down to an occasional creak. Jack blew out the lamp and they both slept.
And it was to an unexpectedly harsh world that they awakened.
Downstairs in the parlor, sometime during that terrible night, Tobias Nash had taken a gun and put it to the head of his wife, Abigail Butler Nash, and squeezed the trigger. Then after he saw for certain that she was no longer alive he pressed the same gun to his own temple and ended his life as well. There was a long letter of explanation on a lamp table between the chairs where they slumped.
Sally and Molly, their two daughters, had found them like that after they came down for breakfast to discover the kitchen cold and dark and empty. Their search took them to the master bedroom, where they commented jokingly to one another that because the bed was already made it was plain they were no longer in it and from there they broadened the search to the barn and smokehouse and stables. The last place they looked was the parlor because that was the last place anyone would think to go so early in the day.
The sight that confronted the two young women in that room was one that Sally the eldest would carry with her into an institution for the insane some years down the road, and Molly the social butterfly would carry through three doomed marriages and into a slow death in an alcoholic stupor, abandoned and alone in the elegant New Orleans townhouse she had received in her second divorce settlement.
Of the three Nash heirs, only Jack would overcome the memory and he alone seemed to be the cause of it. The letter told the story.
When Jack, after having been beaten and humiliated by Art Saylor, ran away from Rose and his Daddy’s farm, he threw his saddle on Honey’s broad back and rode west. He got as far as Texas, where he happened upon a dance hall and got blind drunk. Before he’d sobered up again, somebody started a fight over somebody’s girlfriend and somebody got killed. Jack, being a stranger and incoherent, was the most convenient suspect and he was subsequently arrested and charged and pretty well convicted even without a trial. Feelings against him were high and he was in a dangerous situation. He needed the best lawyer money could buy and maybe a juror or two and perhaps even a judge. It would take a massive amount of cash to save him.
Toby Nash was very well off, but that much cash wasn’t just lying around the old plantation or even in a bank account, so to get the money quickly he mortgaged his farms. That was no big deal at the time. He would pay it off when the crops came in. The money got into the lawyer’s hands and Jack got acquitted and moved on. He wandered around Texas for a while, worked here and there until he found himself in another triangle and decided to mend his ways. He moved to Maysfield, a mid-sized town in Northeastern Mississippi, got himself a job, turned his life around and came back to Dobbin, where against his family’s wishes he picked up little Rose Sharon Saylor, took her away with him, and married her.
In spite of the family’s fears, all was well enough—until the stock market crashed, the business market turned bad, and the crops couldn’t be sold. So there was no money to pay back the note and no way to acquire the money to pay back the note. Toby had exhausted every hope. The bank was going to foreclose. No amount of talking or compromising, no old friends or family to come to their aid. No hope at all. Everything was lost, and Toby and Abigail could not and would not cope any more. There would be no bread lines for them, no poor house … and most of all, no having to look up to a worthless sharecropper as being better off than they were. Theirs had always been a cultured, genteel, and noble lifestyle; their families had always been highly respected by everyone. They could not accept dealing with poverty and want. The only thing left for them to do was take out the big gun and shoot each other. So sorry, Sally! So sorry, Molly! So sorry, Jack! You no longer have a big fine house to live in. You no longer have all that land and the tenant-farmer-families to work it. You no longer have crops to harvest and sell. You had better pack your suitcases and hit the road. It’s every man for himself now. Please forgive this awful mess we are leaving you. Goodbye and Good Luck!
And so it was that Master Tobias Nash and his faithful wife, Abigail, who had so recently been mighty pillars of society in their little corner of the world and prime examples of the virtues of honest labor and Christian faith, who had always treated their tenants with justice and mercy, became little more than a bad memory and an everlasting dark spot on the parlor carpet.
After he saw to the burying and was able to settle his sisters comfortably in the city of Biloxi with the help of sympathetic family friends, Jack Nash decided to leave Dobbin. The story in the letter became common gossip and nobody wanted him around. Some people felt his questionable character was responsible for his parents’ suicide. Some had old festering resentments because of his notorious reputation with women, and some who were strict teetotalers had heard about his alleged moonshine connection. And then there were some who weren’t so sure he shouldn’t have been hung for that killing in Texas. Whatever their reasons, at the wake and funeral Jack saw plain enough he wasn’t wanted in the neighborhood. He was utterly friendless and even his sisters, especially his sisters, both of whom had once doted on him, wasted no time in booting him out of their lives. Without his Daddy, whose prestige and reputation as a gentleman had up to then been his defense and protection, he was at the mercy of anyone who held a grudge against him.
So the day after the funeral, Jack made his plans to move on. There wasn’t anything to hang around for anyway. Everything belonged to some bank somewhere and would undoubtedly be sold for a pittance to
somebody sooner or later. The tenants would go on working the land. They’d just be giving Tobias Nash’s share to the bankers. There wasn’t any work, and he’d just as soon have a whole lot more miles between Rose and her family, who seemed now to be uncomfortably near. And with all those who saw him as a murderer, it didn’t seem unthinkable that somebody who hated him anyway, somebody like Art Saylor, might just blow him away some dark and gloomy night and get the neighborhood’s thanks and glory to boot.
Being poor was not something he relished either. Rose would handle it, he knew. Rose would handle anything that came along, but he wasn’t really that adaptable himself and moreover he didn’t care to be. Some things just weren’t acceptable and being poor was one of those things. So he decided to do what dozens of his neighbors had done. Go north to Chicago. “Anybody can get rich in Chicago” was a promise he’d heard bandied about by young men of his acquaintance while he was still in high school. Well, maybe rich was too much to expect right now, but at least there was work there and he wasn’t ashamed or afraid of hard labor. So he and Rosy packed two suitcases and left Dobbin forever. He’d found a man from a nearby town who was driving up there in his car. So Jack sold his jazzy Chevrolet soft-top for what cash he could get and they hitched a ride.
It took two days driving straight through, and the man turned out to be a crook. He tried to drive off with their suitcases when they made a rest stop in Memphis, but Jack caught him and after a serious discussion behind the gas station there was no more trouble.
April 1931
In Chicago, the man drove them directly to Sister Claire Louise’s great big elegant, yellow and white mansion, which turned out to be in a very comfortable neighborhood. Both Jack and Rose were surprised at its grandness.
Not wanting their crooked friend to impose on the Bradley hospitality, they hurried him away as soon as he dropped them off in front of the house and made their way up the wide walkway to an impressive Victorian-style front porch. Once they reached the security of the front door, Jack’s natural confidence and pride returned in full measure and he grinned gleefully at Rose Sharon. “Well, Sugar, we have done it! We are on our way to the good life!” And then he pressed the doorbell. “Look around you! What do you see little Rose Sharon?” He pressed the doorbell again and by then Rose was practically bouncing up and down and she just kept smiling and shaking her head as if she couldn’t believe any of it. “Shit! Sugar, the world is beautiful, ain’t it?” and he pressed the bell a third time. “Give us a year, maybe less, and we’ll have a house like this. And we’ll have our own automobile again.” He tilted his head toward a fine, shiny black car in the driveway. “Don’t it feel good, Rosy? Dammit! I sure feel good!” And he leaned his head toward her, flashed her a big grin, and whispered “Maybe you ought to start thankin’ that man upstairs you’re always talking to.”
Then he hugged her and she had just raised her head for his kiss when somebody pulled open the heavy front door. It didn’t open wide, though, just enough to see Sister Claire’s skinny face peering at him with those unpleasant watery blue eyes of hers; that was when Jack noticed how much she favored her old man and a foreboding shudder shook him. But being naturally optimistic, he thought maybe she didn’t know who he was so he pushed Rose up in front of him. Then Claire Louise made a strange moaning noise and appeared to be undecided on whether to open the door further or close it altogether.
Rose smiled sweetly at her big sister and Jack grinned happily, and they both leaned forward anticipating their invitation inside. But Claire all of a sudden was outside with them and she was pulling the heavy door shut behind her. It made a soft solid thud and something about the sound froze the blood in Rose’s veins and sent a stabbing pain through her heart. She didn’t look at Jack but she knew he was feeling the same chill move over him.
Claire’s face looked a lot like Papa’s, and her voice was full of a similar poison. A lethal poison that was killing all the hope and the joy and the love that had just started to grow again in the two of them. The poison poured out all over everything and would have utterly destroyed them had not Walter Bradley, curious about his wife’s disappearance, opened the door and interrupted the flow of venom.
Claire Louise went right on talking while he stood behind her and when he realized the gist of her words, his face darkened and in a low and angry authoritative voice, he told her to shut up.
But Claire Louise was undaunted and with her neck stretched back to get a look at him, she growled. “These are my people, Walter. This has nothing to do with you!”
“This is my house, Claire, and I will say who can come into it!”
“These two will never come into my house, Walter!”
“My house, Claire.”
“My house, your house, St. Peter’s house!” She was hissing and flailing her arms by then. “Whose-ever house! Jack Nash will never enter into it.” She looked so malevolent and sounded so deranged that Jack backed away and pulled Rose with him.
But Walter stepped out the door and took Jack’s arm “My wife is having some kind of serious mental collapse, Jack, there’s no other explanation for her action. And you mustn’t take anything she has said seriously.”
But Jack did take it seriously. “Thanks, anyway, but if she feels so strong against us, we don’t want to come in. We’ll find someplace else to stay till we get on our feet.”
“Oh come on, Jack! I won’t hear of it! We’ve got plenty of extra bedrooms. Of course you’ll stay with us. And just as long as you need to.”
Then suddenly there was complete silence; it was as if the world had stopped turning. Rose stood stunned, staring at her sister and marveling that she could be so mean and ugly. Surely it was all a mistake. Surely it was some terrible misunderstanding and she hadn’t meant to say what it sounded like she said. To come up to your relative’s front door full of good feelings and love and to be met on the front porch without even a “Hello, how are you?” and ordered to take yourself and your suitcases back where you came from, was just too outrageous. Even Claire Louise wouldn’t be that nasty on purpose. And Rose decided to give her another chance. She really believed she’d jump at the chance to apologize and make up for the bad feelings and explain that she really didn’t say what it sounded like she said.
So Rose smiled at her again. A trusting and hopeful smile. “We didn’t get a chance to say anything, Claire Louise, but Jack and I came up here to Chicago to get work because we’ve had some real bad times back home. Jack’s folks lost everything and there’s no jobs anywhere. But we won’t be no burden on you and Walter. We just need a place to stay until Jack finds work and a house for us. Surely that won’t take us long in a fine big city like Chicago is. If you could just put us up till we get our own place. Jack’s got some cash.” She grabbed his hand and held onto it. “We will be glad to give it all to you. And I can help around the house … cleanin’ and washin’ dishes, and cookin’ too if you’d like…” Her voice started trailing off into nothingness when she realized that Claire’s face was still frozen in the same hateful expression and that her eyes, though she met them straight on, held no mercy at all.
Rose turned hopelessly to Jack who looked beaten and then back at her sister, who crucified her to the wall with a look. “I don’t care where you go, Rose Sharon—just get off my porch, take that man and your suitcase, and go away from here. This is a big city—” She had more to say, but Walter took her arm and moved her aside. “Claire!” he was so astonished by her invective that his reaction time was sluggish. But she wasn’t ready to back down—she pressed forward instead and thrust her face close to Rose’s.
“Our Papa warned you not to marry Jack Nash, and you betrayed him and ran off with that heathen! My loyalty is to my Papa and I don’t care if you find a place to stay or not. I just want to make it clear to you that Walter and I will not use our money to keep Jack Nash in whiskey and tobacco. He can sleep in the gutter for all we care, and since you chose to share his bed you can sleep ri
ght there beside him!”
With that, Jack picked up the suitcases and turned on his heel toward the steps. Rose followed without a word.
Walter took a moment to squeeze Claire Louise’s arm until she whined with pain and then he called after Jack. “Wait! Wait a minute! Jack! Don’t go anywhere yet! Get in the car … my car’s in the driveway. Get in it! I’m going to call some people I know and get you a place to stay.”
Jack turned toward the car and then looked at Rose. “What should we do?”
“Get in the car,” she whispered.
April 1931 to December 1933
Walter Bradley was a big man, and tall, with wide shoulders and a broad chest. He stood 6 or 7 inches taller than Jack Nash and was raw-boned without a speck of fat on him—and the man’s heart was as big as he was. He was so distressed about Claire Louise’s mean reception of them that he thought they could never make up for it. But he did. He found them an apartment that very afternoon, moved them into it and paid 3 months’ rent so they could keep what cash they had, and by that evening he even had Jack lined up for a temporary job loading and unloading trucks at a warehouse not too far from the apartment. They had two rooms and a bath above a shoe repair shop with two tall windows in each room overlooking the street. Their landlady, Mary Jean Turner, owned both buildings. Her husband had operated the shoe repair shop, and the grocery store to its right on the corner was rented out to the Wesselmans, a middle-aged couple of German descent. Mary Jean had lived in the front apartment herself for years until the recent death of her husband, when she moved to a smaller apartment at the back of the same building. Her door was at the other end of the landing, and she mostly used a narrow back staircase that went right down to the grocery store or outside to the alley. Walter had known her for years, and also the Wesslemans—he had sold all of them insurance when he first came to town. That was how he knew Mary Jean had a vacant apartment after her husband died.
Pray for Us Sinners Page 9
