by Lisa Howorth
In the day, they’d called him the Black Swan because of his dark and dashing good looks—his portrait, an etching after a Kneller painting, was framed side-by-side with the yellowed hieroglyphic page—and Byrd looked charmingly swarthy; a little like Stanley Tucci in a wig. Byrd himself had used the pen name Steddy in his prime. His family crest was crowned by a swallow, a bird that she discovered symbolized perpetual movement and safe return: he’d crossed the Atlantic a few times. Ten times! A trip that sometimes took more than two months! Mary Byrd loved him so much—she could remember when she was a little girl feeling the same way about Fess Parker as Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier—that she’d chosen to write about Byrd for her senior thesis: “Ague, Flux, Blue Wing, and Sallet: Healing and Foodways on an Early Eighteenth Century Virginia Plantation.” If he wasn’t walking about Westover checking on his mill or his orchards or unloading hogsheads full of tobacco or bossing his people around, Byrd was worrying about bad New England rum, sloops and tides, making business deals, arguing politics, writing letters back to England, raising the militia for a smack-down on the Tuscaroras, or complaining about his wife, who was a poor household manager or just lazy, and was frequently “out of order.” Ha! They argued a lot: once, because he wouldn’t let her pluck her eyebrows. This didn’t stop him from rogering her vigorously or giving her a flourish, sometimes on the library sofa or wherever. Other times he committed uncleanness, or kissed or felt up someone else’s wife or a maid, and when he went up to sessions of the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg, he and the other burgesses were merry on canary, syllabub, mead, sack, or persico and played the fool or made good sport with girls, or just spoke lewdly. Talked trash! He was a control freak and super-industrious, like someone else she knew, and read the classics in five or six languages every day, but also found time for gambling at piquet, hazard, basset, cudgels, whisk, and horse races, seeming often to lose some shillings, but never more than fifty, which was his limit. He dealt with characters who had crazily Dickensian names, like Billy Brayne, his dumb nephew; his friend Dick Cocke; and a French pirate named Crapeau! Believing that one should only dine on one dish at a meal, he was always having milk (he said he ate it), caudle, sallet, chine, sheldrake, neat’s tongue, pease porridge, water gruel, and calf’s head. Everyone, black or white, rich or poor, was always indisposed with quartan fever, distemper, bloody fluxes, gripes, gout, dropsy, and impostumes, vapors, and worms, and they came to Byrd for purges of scurvy grass or laxative salts, tincture of snake root, jesuit’s bark, beaver mineral, spirits of juniper, red lead plasters, burnt hartshorn, Venice treacle, stupe, or laudanum. Often, he’d salivate them for rheumatism, or let blood—whole pints of it—for whatever, or have them take a physic or a glyster. He gave his slaves and servants no choice—Mengele had nothing on him—but his wife often sensibly resisted his quacky, experimental cures. For his own terrible piles, he had his wife anoint his fundament with tobacco or linseed oil and balsam or saltpeter. What a guy. No wonder he had ’rhoids: he was always doing stuff like slogging across the Great Dismal Swamp because he wanted to buy it and drain it and grow hemp!
Byrd was crazy busy managing his practically medieval, gigantic estate; he owned something like two hundred thousand acres. If he’d been born twenty-five or one hundred and twenty-five years later he would have been a revolutionary or a confederate. He didn’t like being fucked with and even in 1709 he was already pissed off at the governor and the king for all the cash they were squeezing out of Virginia. Nulla pallescere culpa, he had adopted as his motto. “Pale at no crime.” It was a good thing Byrd hadn’t been around to see his beloved Westover first ravaged by Benedict Arnold and Cornwallis, and then used as headquarters for Union troops in the War of Northern Aggression, as he surely would have called it.
Imagining herself as Lucy Parke, Byrd’s put-upon wife, she saw herself in her undress, meaning a sort of housedress; she’d rather have been in the fancy mantua that Byrd had brought to her from England, thickly embroidered and beautifully scroddled in swallows and flowers, with its lovely scroop, the train tucked up in back, but he wouldn’t have stood for all that froufrou on a workday. She did have on a lovely new lace cap.
“Could you please get off your ass and do something around here?” he’d say.
“And what is it that my lord and master would have me do?” Mary Byrd would reply, lounging on some fabulous piece of furniture, picking sadly at a sweetmeat.
“I’ll have you unloading some hogsheads, if you can’t find anything else to do. God in heaven, woman,” he’d say.
“I’m indisposed at the moment,” she’d say. “I’m overwhelmed and despondent, having just lost my only son.”
“Work is the best cure for that,” he’d say. They’d fight a little more. Then, he’d say, “I know what you need, my good wife,” and he’d yank her up, toss up her skirts, and bend her over the billiards table.
In William Byrd’s mind, she’d enjoy it, and he’d believe that they were reconciled, but Lucy Parke probably faked it. Mary Byrd would’ve straightened her cap and gown, smiled weakly, and gone upstairs to lament her lost baby, do up some laudanum, and nap.
“Fuck this guy,” she’d think, hoping he wouldn’t follow her and have her anoint his fundament.
Byrd was a hard-ass. He had to be! When their baby son had died he barely mentioned it in the diaries, which had led some famous, dumbass feminist historian to offer this as further proof of his misogyny, or some silly crap. Mary Byrd knew Byrd better than that: it didn’t mean that his heart wasn’t broken. A teeny coffin was made from one of his walnut trees, and his baby boy was buried in a hard summer rain. William Byrd couldn’t afford the twentieth century luxury of grieving. Hundreds of people depended on him. He just sucked up his gripey, colicky, hemorrhoidy guts, swallowed his tears, and attended to what needed attending to. Got back to work.
Mary Byrd’s very favorite thing about him was the daily notation: I danced my dance. He mentioned it nearly every single day. No matter what wildness was going on around him—Indian uprisings, incompetent overseers and public officials, unpaid bills, shipwrecks, crop-ruining or sloop-stalling weather, people sick and dying—he got up at the crack, read his books, ate some milk, and danced his dance. Of all the Merchant Ivory vignettes of Byrd she carried in her mind, it was this one that fascinated her most. She pictured him shedding a Chinese silk wrapper, and then his billowing white shift—rough flax to mortify himself—and in front of a blazing fire, he’d do a sort of combination minuet, tai chi, and yoga, his longish colonial balls and mauve, sheathed cock bobbling and slapping against his strong, capable, and no doubt hairy thighs. Maybe there was a merkin, too. She couldn’t remember if he ever mentioned lice. How did they stick merkins on, anyway? Call it exercise or exorcism, his dance got him prepared for, or through, his days and years. It seemed to give him what he needed to go on.
The truly bad things about him, though, Mary Byrd hated knowing. He not only had slaves but was part owner of a slave ship. He bought political favors. He lost his temper and sometimes resorted to yelling like a maniac or cruelly punishing people; Evagreen would not have fared well in Byrd’s household. He suffered remorse and guilt, though, about these things, and at the end of each day’s entry, he’d usually write, “I recommended myself to God.” But just as often, no doubt completely exhausted by his responsibilities and busting his ass all day, he’d regret that he’d “neglected to say his prayers.” Then, he’d always close with that same upbeat entreaty, “I had good health, good thoughts, and good humor, Thank God Almighty.” She loved Byrd anyway because he wasn’t exemplary but struggled to be, even knowing that perfection was never going to happen. Was he so much worse than Thomas Jefferson? Historians—about whom Mary Byrd often wondered, because, despite seeming to have boring little faculty lives, they made careers out of examining the lives of guys like Byrd who lived large—had kicked around the question of what would inspire a man to keep such an obsessive, personal diary every da
y of his life, but she totally got it. Duh. It was a way, like praying or keeping an expense account, to try to impose some order on a scary, random, calamitous universe where the overseer was a vengeful, Old Testament God. By keeping his diaries Byrd had used every way he could think of to make sense of things. Diaries were great until other people read them. She was certain that Byrd had never intended for other people to read his. Why else would he have written them in a secret language? Too bad she hadn’t done that back in 1966.
Giving the portrait the lightest kiss, just touching the glass with the tip of her tongue, Mary Byrd went upstairs to bed, hoping that wherever he was, the Black Swan wouldn’t hold it against her for peeping.
Six
As the cold night wore on, things grew quieter on McCrady Hill Road. Cars that had parked at both houses, first the Kimbros’, then the Bons’, on opposite ends of the street, gradually went off into the night, one by one. The two little brick houses, almost identical, remained brightly lit, glowing yellow like lanterns, a blue flame inside: TV screens in the front rooms. There were so few streetlights in this part of town, and all the other houses had gone dark hours earlier, so that from a distance, the two homes might have looked afire in the blackness.
Inside Evagreen and L. Q.’s house it was hot and still. The phone had stopped ringing, and the ladies had put up all the food that needed putting up, and covered and arranged the breads and cakes and pies for whoever gathered the next day. People were shocked and confused as to what to do. It was Roderick Kimbro who was dead, not Angela Bon, but having a child who was a murderer and in jail in Memphis might be worse for a parent to bear than death. They all knew one another and both families attended West St. Peter M.B. Church. Everybody was making two pans of macaroni and cheese and praying two sets of prayers.
Evagreen and L. Q. had gone to bed after Evagreen finally consented to eat something: a skinny slice of Haseltine pound cake and a glass of buttermilk, into which Ken had mixed a teaspoon of Benadryl. Normally, Evagreen’s sharp tongue enabled her to deconstruct any recipe after sampling just one bite and to name off every single ingredient in it, but she drank her buttermilk in two swallows without seeming to taste it. Ken gently wiped her lips, and L. Q. firmly led her to bed. Ken stayed up, sitting in the La-Z-Boy and writing on a yellow legal pad. Early in the morning—although it was nearly morning already—he’d go to Memphis and see Angie and get her a good lawyer and begin sorting this thing out. He had some ideas. He had some hope.
His baby sister. After all the tragic, senseless things he’d seen in New Orleans, and then in the Air Force, he still couldn’t believe this. Angie had been the cutest, fattest baby and the prettiest, skinniest little girl. Ken had been gone, pretty much, by the time she was a teenager, but he’d remembered how proud he’d been of her. Cheerleader, homecoming court, working weekends at the bakery, principal’s list. Sassy, too, but in a sweet way. Same thing with Rod: smart, great basketball player, good to his folks, nice guy. Didn’t seem like a player. Everyone but Ken had been so glad when they’d married after graduation and headed to college. Not too far away, both going to Memphis State; Rod playing ball on his scholarship and Angie going for Communications. They had seemed so happy, but Ken had hoped she’d go off somewhere to school, see more of the world, get to know herself. He didn’t care for Memphis much. What happened to people there? There was nothing up there but crossfire, crack, and barbecue, as far as he could see.
New Orleans had plenty of crime when he was at Tulane law school, but that’s not all it had. A beautiful, funky, historic city—it was worth its problems: too many poor folks and the kind of trouble they had. He’d worked with many of them as part of his legal training. He and Irmgard and their kids weren’t even noticed down there when they went back on vacations. Ken wished Angie had gone to Loyola, a good school that wanted her, but no, she had to follow Rod and Rod had to follow the money. It was hard to imagine that drugs had been a part of his—or their—problem. Hell, now he was going to be fooling with their mess, the same kind of messes he’d had to deal with in New Orleans: Ninth Ward crack hos and crackhead trash, and now with pot and pills and meth heads in the military. How had this happened in his own family?
Ken could only imagine what his poor mother was going through. And his dad, although his dad’s expectations for Angie had been, if not lower, at least not verbalized so relentlessly as Evagreen’s. Having seen some of the things he’d seen, many of which were unknown to Evagreen and the others in the family, he thought he’d learned not to let anything take him completely by surprise. Evil was a way stronger force than good in this world. Ken knew it. Give the devil a wink or a smile, next thing you know you’d be dancing cheek to cheek.
Whatever Angie’d done, he was going to work for the best possible outcome. He hoped not to have to ask Charles Thornton for help. His Auntee Rosie and his mother had worked for the Thorntons forever, and they’d helped the Bons many times. In his legal work, he had no problem getting help from white people, but here it all felt a little too down-on-the-plantation. Ken knew his mother had “issues” with Miss Mary Byrd, maybe unjustified, but issues all the same, and she might resent the Thorntons’ involvement. But if he had to ask them for help, he would. Whatever it took. He’d ask whoever he needed to to help Angie. And he had an idea about who that whoever might be.
In their small, neat box of a bedroom, Evagreen and L. Q. lay side by side in the dark. L. Q. held Evagreen’s hand between them on the thick, velvet-like duvet cover that Evagreen had just bought the week before. She’d been sprucing things up—“freshening,” as Veranda called it—and she’d redone the room in rich burgundy, hunter green, and gold. The window treatment matched the wine duvet cover and the cushion, shot through with gold threads, on the white wicker chair in the corner. L. Q. squeezed her limp hand every so often, and finally said, “We don’t know why these things happen, Evvie, but they can happen to anyone, even nice folks. Part of God’s plan, we have to believe.”
“You think that, you a jackass,” Evagreen said very quietly.
“Evvie, Evvie,” L. Q. said. “We can’t know what the Lord has in mind. You know that. We got to keep our faith.”
“Why.”
L. Q. rose up on one elbow and stroked Evagreen’s cheek with his hand. He tried to turn her face to look into her eyes, but she stiffened her neck and refused to turn to him.
“Because that all we got, girl. That is all we got. You turn loose your faith, you be adrift on a ocean without a paddle, any kind of flotation devices, and sharks will be circlin’. Sure as I know my name.”
“Don’t talk at me with that mess no more,” Evagreen said flatly. “You can shut up with it right now.” She closed her eyes. From the front room they heard faint TV noise and the sound of Ken in the kitchen. “And don’t y’all be slippin’ nothin’ in my food again.”
L. Q. sighed. “We’ll see Angie tomorrow. Hope we’ll be able to talk to her.” He took a deep breath. “I hope. But for sure Ken will see her, Evvie. You know how smart Ken is and you know he gone do everything he possibly can do. That’s another thing you can have faith in.”
“I don’t know can I see her.” Evagreen pressed her eyes and her lips tightly together.
“Course you can. She need you. You still her mama, no matter what she done. Course you can see her,” L. Q. said sternly.
Evagreen’s chest swelled and she opened her mouth wide to expel a long, lowing sound out of the back of her throat. L. Q. scooped under her shoulders with one hand and with the other gathered his crushed, empty wife into his arms. She continued crying, her skinny frame heaving violently against him, with almost soundless sobs now, in spite of how tightly L. Q. held her.
“My poor girl,” he said. “My poor, poor girls.”
Charles had come in sometime during the night and did not wake Mary Byrd up. Or so he thought. She was actually always semi-awake. Who could sleep with children and animals in the house? He was still asleep when she got up to set
all the day’s work into motion, banging on the ceiling with the broom to wake William and Eliza, then going upstairs and thwacking them with William’s Styrofoam boffers to get them to dress, eat something, remember their lunches, and pile into the car for the ride to school. Alarms didn’t work with them because of the OFF button.
In the car William asked, “Why are we taking the Vulva?” He was too sleepy to snicker. Eliza disgustedly squinched away from him as far as she could get. She was now grossed out by their family nickname for the car, although she had been the one to name it when she was little and she first heard the word from her grandfather. Always in every way correct, especially anatomically, Dr. Big William corrected her when she had fallen on a toy and had come crying to him. “The vagina is the internal part; what you hurt is actually your vulva,” he’d said. “The outside part.” “Okay,” she had whimpered, “I broke my vulva, then.”
“We’re taking it because my car is almost out of gas,” Mary Byrd said. “And the backseat’s full of junk for the animal shelter and the Salvation Army.”
“Just like it always is,” said Eliza.
