Ezra bowed his head a little, then went out onto the gallery and passed by the side of the house. When he was gone, I crawled under the desk and pressed my hand at three or four spots along the molding until a drawer was released. Inside were scraps of paper, all with dates and the notation, “Paid to B.L., $50.” Except for them, the drawer was empty. Disappointed, I closed the drawer and backed out awkwardly, bumping against the opposite side of the desk, where a panel opened, revealing a doll’s trunk. When I lifted the lid, I found it filled with letters. Amalia must have hidden them from Ezra, but I would not take the time now to discover why. The little trunk in hand, I closed the panel and backed out from under the desk, then placed the trunk in a carpetbag of Amalia’s, along with the two handwritten books and the pictures. Afraid that Ezra would return and somehow wrest the satchel from me, I quickly left the house and started for town.
__________
Except for a man in overalls, who was on a white mule, and who tipped his hat to me as he passed, no one was on the road. The thick underbrush and the trees with their long, gnarled branches that formed a canopy over me seemed friendly. The foliage was damp and lush, and after the thin rain, the evening was cool. Mist rose like smoke from a campfire. Kicking up dirt with my new canvas shoes, I found the walk relaxing, the lateday shadows soft and enveloping. Fireflies darted in the dark recesses of the woods, their pinpoints of light like sparks from a cigarette lighter. The sounds were pleasant ones—the breeze rustling the leaves, the scurrying of animals in the woods, birds fluttering among the ferns, even the barking of a dog. An ugly mongrel followed me from the other side of a split-rail fence, growling softly. Then a voice called, “Let ’er pass, you muleheaded thing.”
In a field of goldenrod, tall brick columns, the ruins of an antebellum home, stretched into the sky. Nothing else was left of the house, only the columns, like blackened pine trees after a fire. As the dirt turned to pavement, I came upon small houses with oversize pillars and tall windows and verandas with straight chairs and rockers. The houses grew larger, more imposing, and there were commercial buildings. As I reached the center of town, I saw a sign that read SHERIFF. To my surprise, for the sky was dusky now and it was long after business hours, the door to the building was open, and a light shone from a far office. When I knocked, a man leaned back in a swivel chair until he could see me and said, “Ma’am?”
“Are you the sheriff?”
“Yes, ma’am. Sheriff Cheet Beecham. Can I help you?” He pronounced the word help as “hep.” The sheriff got up and stood in his office doorway.
“I’m Nora Bondurant, Amalia Bondurant’s niece.”
He nodded as if he were not surprised to see me. “I heard you was in Natchez. You come on in. I’m real sorry about Miss Amalia. She was choice.”
I thanked him and said I hadn’t known her, and he nodded again. He probably wasn’t surprised by much.
“Do you have a few minutes? I could come back tomorrow.”
“I got all the time you need right now. You come on in and take you a chair.” He pushed aside a grilled cheese sandwich that rested on an ink blotter. “The wife died last year, God bless her soul. I nearly grieved myself to death, and even now I can’t hardly stand to be alone in the house anymore. If I don’t stay here, I got nothing to do but sit on the front porch and watch the cars go by.”
“I’m awfully sorry.”
“Cancer. The good Lord didn’t give me hardly no time at all to say good-bye. Before you could say Jack Robinson, Pie had passed. Pie, that’s what I called her, for sweetie pie, you know. You married, are you?”
“I was.” I sat down on a hard wooden chair in front of the desk and set the carpetbag on the floor.
He folded his hands on the desk and leaned forward, all business. “Now, what was it you wanted to ask about?”
“My aunt’s death. First, is there any doubt that Bayard Lott shot her?”
“None that I could see. You’d not hardly think a man would shoot a person, then reload the gun and shoot hisself, especially being old and shaky like he was. They was shot with the same gun, of course, one of those old Odells that was made right here in Natchez ’bout the time of the War. They don’t hold but one bullet. It had to take him a minute to reload, and you might think he’d’ve reconsidered. Old Bayard never struck me as a man wanting to die.”
“Could she have shot him, then killed herself?”
“I thought about that, but it makes no sense. She was found in the bed, you know, in her nightdress. Looked like she’d been sleeping.”
“The newspapers didn’t print that.”
“No, ma’am. It don’t signify nothing. Never did I think he did anything to her in an unnatural way. But she was a lady.” He paused. “Here’s another thing: The gun was in Bayard’s hand.”
“Ezra or Aunt Polly could have put it there. Or even Mrs. Lott.”
“Nope. We tested for fingerprints. They was Bayard’s. There’s no two ways about it. He done the deed, as the feller says.”
He glanced at the sandwich, and I said, “I’m keeping you from your supper. Please, go ahead.”
“You don’t mind?” He picked up an open bottle of Nu-Grape and drank.
“Not if you don’t mind my asking questions.” Looking down at my dirty hands and skirt, I explained, “I was just out at Avoca.”
“That would have been some surprise for you. What you going to do with the goats?”
“Give them to Ezra.”
“That’d be my suggestion.”
We were silent while he bit into a pickle and I moved around on the uncomfortable seat. “The biggest question is why Bayard Lott did it?”
“Don’t none of us knows the answer to that.”
“Yes, those were your words in the newspaper.”
“Oh, I don’t tell everything to the newspapers.”
Intrigued, I leaned forward. “What, for instance?”
He lifted a corner of the bread and looked at the sticky cheese, then pushed the two slices of bread back together. He held the sandwich to his mouth, but before he bit into it, he replied, “I didn’t tell them why I thought Bayard did it.”
“And that is . . .”
The sheriff nodded as he ate from the middle of the sandwich. After he swallowed, he said, “I think he done it because she riled him some, and he couldn’t take it no more. She done something that day that made him snap, and it wasn’t about no goats, although he complained about them often and on. Still, he put up with them every day of his life as long as I can remember. Besides, I have an idea that he and Miss Maggie drunk a plenty of Miss Amalia’s goat’s milk without her knowing it. Or maybe she did know it. She was a kindly hearted woman.”
I didn’t speak, just waited for him to continue.
He had eaten the center of the sandwich, leaving the crust like a frame, and he looked through it at me. “It pesters me that I don’t have no least idea what it was.”
I sighed with disappointment. “He must have hated her.”
Sheriff Beecham shrugged. “Them two almost married, and as I hear it, Bayard didn’t have no good time after they broke it off. It’s my belief she ended things twixt them. For all I know, he was sweet on her till the end.”
“Then why did he marry Miss Maggie?”
“You ever hear of a man marrying a woman he don’t love?”
The chair made my back hurt, and my arms were tired from carrying the heavy bag, but those were not the reasons that I squirmed. “Did you know he was blackmailing Miss Amalia? She paid him fifty dollars a month.”
He set down the remains of the crust. “Naw. What’d he go and do that for? What did he have on that nice old lady?”
“Sheriff Beecham, I don’t know much about my father’s family, didn’t know anything at all about them until a few days ago.”
He looked around for a napkin and then, not finding one, rubbed his greasy hands on his arms.
“I have been told twice that my father was not Miss
Amalia’s brother, as he was raised to believe, but her son.”
“I wouldn’t put much store—”
“And if Father were Miss Amalia’s son, I’d put my money on Bayard Lott as his father.”
“Well . . .” He looked at his hands as he rubbed them together. “God knows, you can’t get that way when you don’t have no man. Lordy.”
“If all this speculation is true, why didn’t the two of them get married?”
The sheriff leaned back in his chair, his hand over his mouth, thinking. “Could be it was somebody else got her that way. Or might be, if it was Bayard, she didn’t have no use for him after. . . .” He cleared his throat. “Course, with that prop’ty, she could have kept busy running Shadowland and Avoca and the plantations she had. Back then, gentlemen spent most of their time hunting and drinking bourbon whiskey, so she wouldn’t have had to see much of him.”
“And as you say, people don’t always marry for love.”
“Exactly. The way I hear it, the Lotts was real glad when them two got engaged, ’cause the Bondurants had money, and the Lotts didn’t. Bayard had almost about hit the jackpot with Miss Amalia. She was a fine-looking woman, too, icing on the cake, as the feller says. Bayard hisself was no yellow dog. Even at the end, he was a nice-appearing man, with black eyes that could see right through you.” The sheriff peered at me, as if looking for any resemblance to Bayard Lott. “He wasn’t the likely one to call off the wedding.”
“If she refused to marry Bayard, why did Miss Amalia come back to Natchez after the baby was born? Why didn’t she go someplace where people didn’t know her, get a fresh start?”
“Now, how could she do that? Her daddy had need of her after Miss Emilie died. Besides, Miss Amalia wasn’t one of your suffragettes, going off to the big city to get a job. And what kind of work would she’ve done? We train our women to be charming. Miss Amalia couldn’t hardly teach or operate the typewriter. Best she could have done was wash clothes, and my guess is she never even done that before. We treasure our womenfolk in the South, but there ain’t no market for ’em.” He picked up a bottle of Nu-Grape, which had left a pattern of wet rings on the blotter, and took a swig.
The sky outside was very dark, and streetlamps had come on. So I picked up the carpetbag and told him he could find me at the Eola if he thought of anything else.
“I don’t know what difference it’ll make. All those folks are gone, and me and you will be, too, one day. Maybe we best let the dead rest easy in the heart.”
“That’s an odd remark for a sheriff to make.”
“Maybe so, Miss Nora, but not for a Natchez gentleman.”
On Main Street, I turned toward the hotel, walking under wooden awnings that covered the sidewalk. Moviegoers came out of the Star Theater, which was showing The Kid from Spain with Eddie Cantor, and a few bought food from a hot-tamale man who waited on the sidewalk with his cart. I passed a creamery and a barbershop, where back beyond the wire shoe-shine chair and the white porcelain sinks with their white bottles and black razor straps, a woman sat in a chair, getting a permanent wave.
Stopping in front of a drugstore, I peered at the window display of plaster reproductions of a banana split, a chocolate sundae, a pink ice-cream soda. Since I’d had nothing to drink since the coffee at lunchtime, I was thirsty. The store looked inviting, with its gleaming floor of hexagonal white tiles and a soda fountain of pink marble the color of melted strawberry ice cream. So I went inside, sat down on a swivel chair at the counter, and ordered a glass of soda water from a fountain man who greeted me with “Hello.”
After I drank the water, the young man said, “You most likely got the indigestion. Nobody drinks soda water ’less they got the indigestion. I got it myself last night due to fish and green peppers.” He rubbed his stomach.
“Just thirsty.”
“I’m a real good soda jerk. I might could make you a New Orleans eggnog, if you want me to.” He was very eager. “You should try it.”
“I should?”
“Course you should,” he said. “Course you should.”
“What’s a New Orleans eggnog?”
“Vanilla ice cream, milk, egg.”
“Does it really come from New Orleans?”
“Ma’am?”
It sounded tame enough, and I ordered one, watching with a certain amount of apprehension as the soda jerk added cream, molasses, and nutmeg to the shaker. He snapped on a lid and placed the container in a green stand, turning it on. The eggnog jerked back and forth. When it stopped, the soda jerk poured the concoction into a glass, setting it down in front of me with a flourish. He placed a napkin and a straw beside it and grinned as I sipped it and pronounced it good.
“You thought you wasn’t going to like it,” he said. “It’s mighty damn fine.”
“Mighty damn fine indeed.”
“I can make a swell brown cow, too.”
I held up my hand.
“And there’s sandwiches. Most ladies like the cottage cheese, honey, and nut, but we got Roquefort cheese and Worcestershire ones, and westerns. That’s with chicken and egg and cream cheese.”
The combinations sounded ghastly, but his talk of food made me hungry, so I asked if he had peanut butter.
“You bet. You want sardines or bananas with that peanut butter?”
He was a good salesman, because the extras undoubtedly added a nickel or more to the cost of the sandwich. “Jelly. Grape jelly.”
“I ain’t seen you in here before.” He took two slices from a waxed sack of Fresh Maid bread and opened a jar of peanut butter, stirring it with a knife to mix in the oil on top.
“No, I ain’t been in here before.” I almost corrected my grammar but then decided he might think I was making fun of him. “I haven’t been in town long.”
“You one of them reporters.” He stopped long enough to take two sticks of chewing gum from his pocket. He unwrapped them, put one on top of the other, and fed them into his mouth, bending them in the middle as if they were ribbons.
“Reporters?”
The soda jerk went back to the sandwich. “They come here ’cause of the goat lady. You know about her?” Not waiting for me to answer, he continued. “She’s an old lady that lived out yonder about a mile. She could cast spells, I guarantee you. You ought not ever to go there after dark. She’s got an old colored man that’ll get after you. He could whip the devil round the stump.”
For an instant, I thought I should stand up for Ezra, but curious to see what the young man might say about Amalia, I asked instead, “What happened to her?”
He finished spreading the jelly on the bread and placed a second slice on top. Then with a butcher knife, he sliced off the crusts and cut the sandwich in half diagonally. He placed the halves on a plate and added pickle chips and half a deviled egg. “She got herself kilt is what she did. You ask me, she cast a spell on the man what done it, cast it early and late. He lived over next door to her, and he raised Cain about them goats eating his yard. I never did unduly care for goats myself. One of those blessed nights, he went over and shot her dead.”
“And then killed himself.”
“Aw, you heard the story.” He put away the sandwich makings and washed the knife in a little sink across from the counter. Then he turned back to me with a sly look. “You sure you ain’t a reporter? You look like you might could be a reporter.”
I was using my tongue to get peanut butter off the roof of my mouth, so instead of replying, I shook my head.
“Well, darn it.” He worked the gum hard.
“Avoca was a swell place once. I’d like to pick me out something from there. It’s most generally known she had money hid all over.”
I should have taken Amalia’s jewelry with me, I realized. But if it had been safe at Avoca all these years, it would keep for one more night.
“I’m afraid of that colored man,” the soda jerk continued. He leaned forward and, using his tongue, slid the gum in front of his buckteeth. “He
killed a man once, maybe more than one.”
“You know that for a fact?”
He shrugged. “Seems like he would of. There’s haunts out there. The goose bumps jump up all over me just to think about it. The goat lady herself told it about that the place had spooks.”
Amalia had been shrewd to give out such a story. It might have kept thieves and vandals away from Avoca.
“It’s a shame about you not being a reporter. I sure would like to get my name in the newspaper. I’d glory in it.” He watched me with a dopey grin on his face. “You’d tell me if you was, wouldn’t you?”
Although I had eaten only half of the sandwich, I pushed the plate forward on the counter to show that I was finished. Doing so, I noticed Amalia’s ring still on my finger. Ezra and Aunt Polly would have seen it, but what did that matter? “Yes, I would tell you. But I am not a newspaperwoman.” I paused a little, thinking my dramatics were not unlike Magdalene’s. “I’m the goat woman’s”—I almost said “granddaughter”—“niece. And I most definitely can tell you there are haunts out there.”
The fountain man’s jaw dropped as he started at me. “Is that a fact? You really kin to that old lady?”
“I inherited her ability to cast spells. I guarantee you.” I laid a quarter and three dimes on the counter.
“Well, kiss the damn dog’s foot!”
The bell on the screen door jangled as I went outside, then turned and waved at the fountain man, who was watching me through the window. Telling him who I was tickled me, made me feel more lighthearted than I had in ages. The soda jerk would embroider on my appearance and tell it around town, which amused me.
At the hotel, the desk clerk, friendlier than on the night of my arrival, asked, “The world treating you all right?”
“Just fine.” He handed me my key, along with three messages, an airmail letter in my mother’s handwriting, and a telegram. I slid open the telegram. SORRY FOR LOSS MISS YOU KIDDO BEST LOVE. It was signed CAROLINE.
“Bad news?” the desk clerk asked, and I wondered why people never asked what was in a telegram but only said, “Bad news?”
New Mercies Page 16
