“Miss Amalia beg the captain to buy her this. She wear it lots of times.” Aunt Polly pointed to the pearl necklace. Then she looked at the spray of diamonds and pearls and frowned. “Mr. Bayard give her that. She ain’t never wear it.”
“When did he give it to her?”
“She come home from New York with it. Mr. Bayard, he go up there to try to get her to marry with him, thinkin’ life be a mess of cornmeal dumplings if she done it. He taken that fancy jewelry piece up with him and give it to her. Miss Amalia don’t marry with him, but she don’t give him back that pin, neither. I tell her sell it, but she say what people think? She rather let Avoca shamble down than sell her jewelry.” Aunt Polly shook her head as she examined the contents of the boxes. “Miss Amalia love her pretties. She wear ’em even when she’s old. Sometimes she get dressed up in her fancy dress and her ear bobs and that pearl necklace, and she dance around the house.” Aunt Polly smiled at the memory. “She wear her jewelry sometimes when she sell the goat milk. She always a lady.”
“Which piece do you like best?”
“Oh, I can’t rightly say.”
“Choose something. Miss Amalia would want you to have a piece of her jewelry, don’t you think?”
Aunt Polly stared at me, but whether it was with pleasure, surprise, or suspicion, I couldn’t tell.
When she didn’t reply, I picked up the dragonfly, thinking the bright rubies might appeal to her “What about this? It’s one of the prettiest pieces.” I held it against her dress, which had been red once but had faded to the double pink color of old quilts.
Aunt Polly looked at me skeptically. “What I do with it?”
“You could wear it.”
“Folkses think I all biggity-acting if I wear something like that, think I steal it from Miss Amalia. Can’t no colored person wear that jewelry.”
I hadn’t considered that, and I hoped my offer did not emphasize the class distinctions she had suffered all her life. Still, she deserved something valuable of Amalia’s, even if she kept it tucked away in a drawer.
Aunt Polly leaned close to the boxes. “Them sparkly stones sure is pretty with the sun all shining over ’em.” She meant the diamonds.
I picked up a pendant, a large pink diamond suspended on a diamond-studded gold chain, and thought that if the stone were good—and Amalia wouldn’t have had diamonds that weren’t—it was the most valuable of the jewels. I tested the chain to make sure there were no weak links, then inspected the catch to see that it fastened properly. For a moment, I had second thoughts about giving it away, then chided myself for my selfishness. There were other pieces for me to keep. “You could wear this under your dress, where no one but you would know you have it on. It would remind you of Miss Amalia and how much she loved you.”
Aunt Polly held her face tight for a moment, then slowly looked up at me as if expecting me to change my mind. She took the necklace and held it to her eyes. The catch was tricky, but she opened it easily. Of course she knew how to work it, because she had fastened it around Amalia’s neck. Aunt Polly put on the necklace, straightened it, and ran her fingers over the diamond drop. “The captain give this to Miss Amalia when she sixteen. It richer than top milk. She pleasured herself with it often and on.”
“I hope it will pleasure you.”
Aunt Polly sat up rod-straight and ran her fingers through the green beans, searching again for any that hadn’t been snapped. Her right hand went back to the diamond, and she fingered it, then moved to feel the diamonds on the chain. She buttoned the top of her dress so that the pendant was hidden. “I thank you most sincerely. You quality, like Miss Amalia and Miss Emilie. You a true Bondurant.”
Her compliment went to my heart, and I couldn’t reply. Aunt Polly was emotional, too, because she didn’t say a word after that. From time to time, she touched the diamond through the faded fabric, and I smiled to think that under that old dress, she wore a diamond worth more than a house—a stone far better than any of Odalie’s little ole antebellum diamonds.
Bending over to put away the jewelry boxes, I noticed a black telescope lying on the ground and picked it up. It was scratched and rusted, but the lens was good, because looking through it, I saw the weathered and broken columns of Shadowland as if they were but a few feet away.
“Miss Magdalene give that to Ezra ’cause he put the bottles on her tree. It a spyglass. Mr. Bayard find it under a tree one time when he get wood to chop. He say it there a long time, maybe since the War.”
“A spyglass would suit Miss Magdalene.”
Aunt Polly laughed. “Yes’m, but she can’t hardly tote it. Ezra say we use it to hunt up the goats.”
“What did Mr. Lott use it for?”
“He sit on the porch of an evening and look at the stars.”
“Or Miss Amalia?”
Aunt Polly’s head jerked up. “You think that?”
I shrugged. “Did she say when Mr. Lott found it?”
Aunt Polly thought hard. “Maybe just before he die. My old mind won’t remember.” She added, “There ain’t nothing worth seeing at Avoca, just old furniture. What you do with that furniture?”
She had changed the subject on purpose. So I replied that the furniture would be moved the next day, then asked if she wanted any of it.
“Only Ezra’s bed upstairs. I reckon you seen it,” she said, perhaps as a way of telling me she knew that I had snooped in his room.
“What about the chairs?”
Aunt Polly chuckled. “What I need with a gold chair? Only gold chair I want’s waiting up yonder. I almost went looking for it this past June gone by, when I felt death creeping up on me, but the Lord don’t want me to go before my mist’ess. Maybe now Miss Amalia gone, He take me to look after her. ’Cept I got Ezra down here to care for.”
“That chair will be waiting for you whenever you get there. So will Miss Amalia.”
“Yes’m.” She touched the diamond again with a hand that was the color and texture of a wrinkled brown paper sack. She looked down at the bowl and said, “I best put these on,” but she made no move to get up. “What you do with the big house?”
“What do want me to do with it?”
“It not for me to say.”
“No one would buy it.”
“Don’t s’pose.”
“There are better houses for sale in Natchez.”
“There is.”
I waited.
“You could move in. I and Ezra got nobody to take care of now. We look after you, just like we done Bondurants in bygone days.”
I reached into the bowl of beans and squeezed her hand. “Thank you for that, Aunt Polly, but how could I leave Denver? My family’s there, and I don’t know anyone here.”
“Your family here, too. You a Bondurant. Folkses be all over you like gravy on grits to be friendling with you.”
“That’s a tribute to Miss Amalia and Miss Emilie, not to me. I don’t fit in here.”
Aunt Polly gripped my hand. “This your place,” she said. “You the last leaf on the tree.”
I thought that over. “Where would I live? Avoca’s ready to fall in, and I don’t intend to put you out of the quarters.”
“You doesn’t have to live inside the big house. There’s the hothouse and the poultry house and the captain’s billiard house.”
I looked at her curiously, for I had not seen a billiard house.
“The billiard house.” Aunt Polly shook her head, remembering. “Miss Emilie don’t like the captain’s gentlemen friends in her house smoking cigars, so she has a special house put up for them. It got a billiard room and a room where they plays cards and two or three other rooms where the gentlemens sleeps when they drink too much—and whatnot.” She glanced at me to see if I understood “whatnot.” I did. “It built real nice, all brick, better than the big house now. I tells Miss Amalia to move in there, but she say ladies don’t live in no billiard house. She say what folkses think?”
“Where is it?”
I nodded, and Aunt Polly seemed encouraged. “You and Ezra look after each other. When I’s corpse-dead, there he will be.”
“Ezra doesn’t want me taking Miss Amalia’s place.”
“That’s the truth, but he don’t mind if you take your place. Without me and Miss Amalia, you got the care of him.”
That already had been made plain to me.
“The Lord have His reasons for bringing you here. Might be it a good thing you get to know Ezra. The Bible say the Lord give us new mercies every morning.”
My aunt Emma had quoted that bit of Scripture to me in Georgetown on the day I married David. “Am I Ezra’s mercy, or is he mine?”
“Maybe so both. Miss Amalia want to home you here. That why she give you this house. Maybe your daddy want you here, too.” Aunt Polly sighed and got up, and as she went through the door into the quarters, she said, “You ain’t got no husband no more. You come here to Avoca, maybe you find yourself a new one. Now I go wrassle up these beans.”
It seemed as if half the people I’d met in Natchez wanted to marry me off.
Inside the quarters, Aunt Polly put kindling onto a banked fire and used a bellows to create a flame. She took down an iron pot and added water and the beans. Watching her through the doorway, I thought about living in Mississippi. The idea was absurd. A river never could take the place of mountains for me. And I never would fall in love with a man in a wrinkled suit.
Inside the quarters, it was cool despite the fire. Ezra stood in a corner, his head wrapped in a bandage made from a red kerchief, supporting himself with walking stick made from a tree branch. Its knob was smooth, polished by the hands that had gripped it over the years.
“You did a fine job of looking out for Avoca. I think Miss Amalia would have been proud of the way you smashed those men to protect her home.”
Ezra gave me the glimmer of a smile. “I crumple their feathers.”
I smiled back and said, “Mr. Satterfield’s bringing in men to guard the place tonight. We’ll move furniture tomorrow. Miss Amalia’s bed and her quilts are going to Denver.”
“Miss Amalia like them quilts. You take care of ’em, not put ’em on mules.”
“I won’t.”
“What you do with that statue of Miss Amalia?”
Perhaps I’d been hasty in agreeing to offer it to the library, but surely, I thought, Ezra wouldn’t want it. The idea of a marble statue of their mistress inside the slave quarters was grotesque. “I thought it could go to some public place, like the library. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“Miss Amalia won’t want that.” Suddenly, he laughed, the first time he had really laughed in my presence, and the sound was warm and infectious. “She won’t want it to go to no library, have peoples stare at her. She tell me throw it in the river when she gone. She never like that statue and ask her daddy after it’s made to keep it in the barn. But the captain think it mighty pretty, and he set it up in the big house so everybody see it.”
“Why didn’t she move it after the captain died?”
“The captain too smart for her.” Ezra laughed again. “He cut out a place in the floor for it; then he brace it down below with a big pole. He tell Miss Amalia the house fall down if she move it. Maybe it will.”
That would solve my problem of what to do with Avoca. “Is there anything of Miss Amalia’s that you want to keep?”
Ezra shook his head back and forth. If he had wanted to keep anything—a chair, a book, a picture—he’d already taken it, just as he had destroyed anything he didn’t want me to see. The scraps of paper hidden from Ezra in the desk were all that I was likely to find that would give me a clue to Amalia’s life. “That a kindly thing you done to give that neck bob to Aunt Polly.”
I wasn’t sure what to say in response and was glad that Aunt Polly interjected, “Ezra, you take young miss to see the billiard house. Maybe she live there.”
“Why she want to live in there? Ladies don’t smoke no cigars and play no billiards.”
“ ’Cause she can’t live in the big house without the roof fall down on her head.”
“Bondurants always live in the big house. It good enough for Miss Amalia.” He rubbed his right hand over his left arm, which was taut and corded. At his age, Ezra still was a powerful man. I would not have wanted to be one of the “varmints” he had attacked.
“No it ain’t. You know we try to get our mist’ess to move out that place, and she don’t do it. Now go on with you.”
I suggested we wait until Ezra was steadier on his feet, but Ezra said defensively, “I ain’t strattledy-legged.” He did indeed appear to walk normally as I followed him from the quarters down a path overgrown with foliage. “This where Miss Amalia have her blue garden when she’s a girl. Every flower blue. Miss Amalia like her flowers. When she walk to town, she stop in folkses’ yards and plant what she think they need. She leave vegetables by the door of them that needs, too. Miss Amalia keep her own garden till she die. I pick the flowers for her every morning.”
“And you still do.” I remembered the rose he had left in Amalia’s memory on her desk and the jar of blossoms at the cemetery.
Ezra kept on until we came to a Greek Revival–style cottage that looked like a small temple, situated at the edge of a long slope that ended in a meadow. The building was the size of a bungalow and was shaded by magnolia trees. Ezra opened the front door, and then, his walking stick tapping on the wide floorboards, he led me through a wood-paneled hallway and into a large room where a billiards table was set up. In the center of a wall was a fireplace so large that he could stand up in it. Corn-colored brick surrounded the opening, which was set off by a dark wood mantel. Four-foot-high firedogs were spaced far apart to let the captain burn enormous logs, and it appeared from the blackened bricks in the fireplace that he had done so often.
Ezra showed me the dining room and a pantry, the bedrooms and storerooms. One of the bedrooms could be made into a kitchen, I thought, and the linen press into a bathroom. It would not cost so much to make the building habitable.
Back in the billiards room, I asked about a place where boards had been ripped from the wall. “Rats?” I’d never live in a place that had rats.
“Maybe so.” Ezra smiled to himself at the question. “One anyway—Mr. Frederick. When the captain build this place, Miss Amalia a snot of a baby. The captain order wine special from France and have them to plaster up the bottles in the wall. Captain say they stay there till Miss Amalia’s wedding day. Frederick and his chaps steal them and drink the wine, and what they doesn’t drink, they pours out. Only time I ever know of the captain cowhiding a white boy.”
“You didn’t like Frederick.”
Ezra didn’t reply. “Look you how nice this place is in the hot of the day.” He raised the top half of the sash, then unlatched the paneling below, which swung to the side, turning the window into a large doorway. I nearly clapped my hands with delight.
“This called a jib window. Two of ’em here, two across, so the breeze just go right through.”
“You can see all the world from here,” I said.
“And maybe Texas.” He paused. “You believe maybe you live here?”
The question surprised me, because it seemed as if Ezra was encouraging me to stay, too. “What would you think of that? Do you want another generation of Bondurants to look after?” I asked.
“I never done nothing else since my way back yonder time. You Young Miss now. Aunt Polly say maybe you find a husband here. She worry about that.”
“She can’t have worried very long, since I just met her.” I heard the edge in my voice but wasn’t sure Ezra had.
“She worry about you before, ever since you get you a divorce. Her and Miss Amalia worry.”
“And you?” Ezra could not have missed the sharpnes
s in my voice this time.
He looked at the place in the wall where the wine bottles had been hidden and touched the end of one of the laths, which was broken and ragged. “You all Miss Amalia has got.”
“Had.”
Ezra ignored me. “When we get that letter long time gone past saying your daddy die, Miss Amalia’s heart drop below her knees. Folks say she turn queer when the boll weevil come and she lose her plantations, but it was your daddy passing. Onliest thing that keep her going on was you. Then your husband go to glory. Don’t none of us know why, but Miss Amalia real smart about folks. She afraid you die of sadness, and she worry even more about you.”
“I was divorced by then.”
Ezra looked at me with dark eyes that I could not read. “Miss Amalia think what happen no accident. She say you hurting in those terrible times. Aunt Polly tell her write you a letter. She say if Miss Amalia don’t do it, she will. But Miss Amalia know Aunt Polly can figure but she sure can’t write.”
Pushing aside one of the dust cloths, I sat down on an oversized leather chair, because my legs suddenly were wobbly. “If she cared so much, why didn’t Miss Amalia contact me when I was a child? After all, Father died thirty years ago.”
“She say wait till you old enough to come looking for her. She wait a long time.”
It was not necessary for me to point out one more time that I did not know about Amalia. “Why did she care about me and not Frederick’s child?”
Ezra looked outside, and I realized that the shutters in the billiard house had been opened before I got there. Perhaps Ezra and Aunt Polly had intended to show me the place all along. “I can’t say,” he replied.
He could, but he chose not to.
“She tell me onliest thing she want was to see you before she die. Maybe she do that if Mr. Bayard don’t kill her.”
“You found the body, didn’t you?”
Ezra dipped his head.
“How long after Miss Amalia was dead?”
“Maybe a minute, maybe not so long.”
Startled, I looked up at Ezra, who was leaning on the walking stick, his body hunched. He was tired but would not sit down unless I told him to. I threw off the dust cloth covering another chair and gestured to it, and Ezra lowered himself into it. “You were right there when Miss Amalia was killed?” I asked.
New Mercies Page 22
