“I hope you don’t mind,” Pickett said. “I didn’t encourage him. I simply telephoned to ask about prices. Watch him. He’ll try to honey up to you.”
“She embroiders. You understand, of course, that with the economy in such a muddle, what I can afford to pay . . . But there it is.” He held out his hands, palms up. Then he said he would make a more pleasing arrangement if I would consign the furniture to him.
“Philip, if you push her like that, you can just go on home.” Pickett turned to me. “Mind you, you aren’t obliged. I told Philip what was inside, and he insisted on seeing for himself. If you’d rather not make a decision about selling just now, we’ll tote the lot over to the Buzzard’s Nest. You can store it there till it rots.”
“Cher! You are an unbalanced woman!” Philip protested. “Now run along and powder your nose like a good girl, and leave me with Miss Nora.”
Pickett ignored him. “Your things are going in the driveway for now, Nora, and we’ll haul them to the shipper’s this afternoon. Tilly’s taking apart Miss Amalia’s bed for you.” She looked at Philip. “Prudent Mallard, Philip, and she’s keeping it.”
Philip pouted until Pickett said there was a second Prudent Mallard bed upstairs.
“The things you’ve offered me”—she dipped her head in appreciation—“go onto the big truck. The rest will stay in the yard, where Philip can haggle over them.” She waved to a man carrying a chair and indicated the lawn. “Philip can tell you what he wants, and the prices are up to you. Don’t accept his first offer, of course. He adores to steal things.”
Pickett smiled at Philip, who huffed and said, “I believe you’d skin a gnat for hide and tallow.”
“Stuff and nonsense. The Mallard’s not anything for you to sell it, and you know that’s right.” Pickett dismissed him with a flip of her hand, and when he had gone off to examine another piece of furniture, she whispered, “That little twelve-ounce man is a dear, but he’s so touchy. Of course, those Oscar Wildes are. You can always tell, can’t you?”
“Can you?”
Pickett was directing a workman with a chair in his arms. “What?”
“Ezra says Miss Amalia wanted the statue thrown into the Mississippi.”
“I hope you’re not sob-hearted woman enough to do it.”
“He also said the thing is supported from the cellar and that the house will fall down if it’s moved.” Then I added, “But the house will fall down anyway.”
“Tell me something I don’t know. But perhaps we’d better leave it there for now.” She called to a workman who was carrying out the petticoat mirror, “Oh, my cake, Mobile! Be taking care with that looking glass.”
While she went to see if the mirror had been chipped, I wandered onto the driveway to look at the chair Tilly had set there, a Belter. I picked it up, but Philip took it from me. “I was hoping you’d sell that.” A goat had wandered over to him and now began nibbling on his shoe. Philip pushed it away with both hands, then brushed his hands together.
“It’s a Belter,” I told him. “I love Belter. There are two more chairs, a sofa, and a table that match. They’re in awfully good condition.”
“People these days prefer those horrible davenports.”
“I know. That’s why I think I’ll keep the set.”
Philip sized me up while I looked at him stupidly. “You stinker. You are every bit as cagey as Miss Pickett—and as tight. When she opens up her pocketbook, moths fly out.” He sat down in the chair. “I’m sure we can work something out, cher”.
After he left, Pickett said, “That poor fish doesn’t stand a chance. You told me you don’t like Belter. Why, you can fib as fast as a horse can run.”
“Or at least as good as you can.”
As I went into the house, Pickett yelled at Tilly that she’d step on his corns if he dropped the marble bust he was carrying. From the back of the house, a man’s voice said, “She cackles so much, she’d give a hen the blues.”
I went into the dining room, where a man with moles all over his face and rolls of fat under his chin, which gave him a screw-neck look, sat at a table. He was watching a woman use newspaper to wrap the Old Paris china. When I thanked her, she said, “You got a gracious plenty here—enough for you here, enough for you there. Your family wouldn’t want nothing better.” The table was covered with china, and as she finished filling a box, she looked for someplace to set it. “Gimme that chair you setting in, Pretty. I rather have your space than your company.” She turned to me. “We call him Pretty ‘cause he’s so ugly.”
“You ain’t no Miss Bessie Smith yourself, sugar.”
Impulsively, I asked the woman to set aside place settings for eight, for I’d begun to wonder about restoring the billiard house. It was an absurd idea, of course, but I could always ship the china later.
I wandered into the great hall and went upstairs, where the shutters were open and the rooms flooded with light. The tent and Ezra’s bed were gone, along with his quilt. The other quilts were still in the cupboard of one of the bedrooms, so I shook out a dust cloth, set an armload of quilts on the clean side, and wrapped them up. I carried the bundle down the stairs and out to the driveway, where Pickett had set my things, then returned for a second load, and a third.
As I set down the last bundle, Philip took out a pair of round gold glasses and put them on, commenting, “I wear eyeglasses for show and for seeing close.” He leaned over for a better look at the quilts.
“My aunt made them. I’m keeping them.”
With his walking stick, Philip flipped through the quilts. “Oh yes, do. I thought they might be Baltimore Albums, but they’re just primitives.” I straightened the quilts before returning to the house, where I asked two workmen to haul Amalia’s desk to the quarters. Ezra and Aunt Polly might want it.
At noon, Aunt Polly, wearing a starched apron, her hair tied up in a crimson bandanna, brought biscuits and vegetable stew, pickles and stewed apples, and sweet-potato pie for Pickett, Philip, and me. We three whites sat on the porch, eating off china, while the black workers gathered in the yard with tin plates.
I hadn’t thought about lunch, and I asked Pickett if she had given Aunt Polly the makings. “And insult her? Why, she used to cook for dozens of people at a time.”
“Today reminds me of such good times as that, Miss Pickett, and I happy as a dog in the smokehouse to wrassle up that somethin’ good to eat,” Aunt Polly said, coming up behind us. “This morning, we don’t have enough to make a fly a snack, but I tell Ezra to go in the garden and fotch the takin’s, be they small or big, and he come back with enough to fill the cook pot. I expect this the last party I make for Miss Amalia.”
By midafternoon, everything worth saving, except for the statue, had been removed from the house. As I stood in the yard with Pickett, watching the workmen start off, Mr. Sam drove up. He pulled over to let the caravan of trucks pass, then got out of his car and observed that they looked like “Confederates fleeing the accursed Yankees.”
“When will you stop fighting that war?” I asked.
“When you surrender.” As he walked toward the big house, he called over his shoulder, “I believe you are in retreat—cornered up north, eating beans.”
I followed him into the big house, where he peered into the empty rooms on the first floor. “Bondurants have lived here for near a hundred years,” he said, mopping his eyes with a handkerchief, wiping away either sweat or tears. He passed the statue of Amalia, removed his hat, and bowed low. Then he gazed up at the marble face and said, “Miss Amalia, it has been a pleasure to serve you, a pleasure.” He stood up but kept his hat in his hand. “I remember standing in this very spot when I was a boy, watching Miss Amalia come down these selfsame stairs in a yellow satin dress and yellow satin slippers with the toes covered in gold. The house was lit up by candles. Natchezians called Avoca ‘the house of a thousand candles.’ Miss Amalia glowed in that candlelight like a flame, and folks stopped talking to stare at her. The ne
xt season, every woman in Natchez ordered a yellow satin gown of her dressmaker. They looked like honeybees. Miss Amalia was the only woman who could ever wear that color.” He glanced at me and added, “I believe yellow would be becoming to you.”
Yellow made me look like a banana, but I smiled at the compliment and asked Mr. Sam if he wanted to go through the rooms on the second floor again. “The workmen have been going up and down all day, so we should be safe on the steps.”
“I have not the slightest doubt.” He led the way to the upper floor, pausing when he reached the hall to say, “You have taken hold here.”
I did not understand, and he explained. “That is to say, you have come to belong to Avoca.”
“Not belong,” I said, taken aback, “but I like it. Of course I do.”
“You should have seen it when Miss Amalia was in her time of blossoming. But she’s gone now. Yes, she’s gone.” He raised his head and looked me in the eye. “Aunty said Ezra showed you the billiard house. Would you stay?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you don’t, they would be left lonesome.”
The sun beat down through the broken roof onto my face, and my shoulders ached from lifting boxes. I was tempted to hurry Mr. Sam, but I knew I might not find him in such a reflective mood again. “It makes me uncomfortable that others know my family’s secrets when I don’t.”
“Do you have need of knowing them?”
“I do.”
“What if you don’t like what you find out? What if the weight of it puts a grief on you?” Mr. Satterfield looked troubled. “Had you thought you might be better off not knowing the Bondurant secrets?”
“I think you have opened a door.”
“No, Miss Nora, not even a window.”
“Perhaps a peephole.”
Instead of sparring with me, Mr. Sam sat down on the top step and waited while I seated myself below him and wiped my damp face on my dirty skirt.
“You already know the half of it, that Miss Amalia was your father’s mother. That’s not worth denying.”
“And it’s not worth denying that Bayard Lott was my grandfather. You know that every bit as much as Ezra and Aunt Polly do.”
“Oh, servants.” He gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “No need to pry on that score. There are burdens no descendant should carry. You needn’t ask me his name, because I’m not going to say it. That’s a thing past telling.”
“It doesn’t matter. I already know it. But I still don’t know why Bayard Lott killed Miss Amalia. I believe you could tell me something about it. I would like to know before I go home.”
Mr. Sam stood up. “The light’s fading, and I should like to see the rooms downstairs for the last time.”
I did not stand, however, and good manners forced Mr. Sam to wait for me. “Bayard Lott was primed for more than fifty years,” he said. “Ezra won’t tell you the truth of what lit the fuse, but Aunt Polly might could do so. Nothing ever happened on Avoca that she didn’t know about.”
He reached his hand for me, and I got up, and together we descended to the first floor, where Mr. Sam stopped and bowed again to Amalia’s statue. “Good-bye, my dear girl.”
Aunt Polly hadn’t confided in me before, of course, but armed with the knowledge that if anyone knew the reason for Amalia’s death, it was she, I decided to try one more time. After Mr. Sam drove off, I went to the quarters.
Aunt Polly was sitting a little distance away, under the shade of a live oak. Bent over a quilting frame, she was sewing in the dappled light. The frame was propped on the backs of chairs turned outward, and I sat down on one. “Mr. Satterfield’s shipping Miss Amalia’s quilts to Denver for me.”
“She like that.” Aunt Polly took half a dozen stitches on her needle; then, with her free hand steadying the quilt from underneath, she pushed the needle through the fabric. “This a string quilt, mostly tore-up clothes. Miss Amalia make the toppen part.”
My grandmother Bullock had made string quilts, sewing together tiny strips of leftover fabric, but in Amalia’s quilt top, the strips formed stars. The fabrics were yellow calicos, handwoven butternut, indigo-dyed homespun, and double pinks, but the predominant color was red.
“Thread you a needle,” Aunt Polly said. “I show you to quilt. It bring me peace. It bring you peace, too.”
I shook my head.
Nonetheless, Aunt Polly set down her needle on the quilt top and cut a length of thread. She took a second needle from a piece of folded cloth and, holding it to her good eye, threaded it, then laid it at the edge of the quilt in front of me and picked up her own needle. “Watch me. You starts when you want to.” I made no move toward the needle, and she resumed her stitching. “Ezra take you to town in the car, so he don’t have to follow you through the brush no more.”
I jerked up my head. “That was Ezra following me yesterday?”
“He afraid some of those mens go after you when you got Miss Amalia’s gatherin’s. He think you don’t want him to look after you, so he stay to the trees, not drive the car.”
After telling her that Mr. Sam would transfer the title of the REO to Ezra, I stopped, embarrassed. “I don’t know your last name.”
“Oh, it Bondurant, like you.”
“I suppose that makes sense. After all, the captain was Ezra’s father.”
Aunt Polly’s head jerked up. “What you say?”
Had I offended her? But she had told me that herself. “Forgive me, Aunt Polly. I didn’t know it was a secret.”
“That ain’t no secret. That ain’t even no truth. Bless God, what Miss Amalia say to that!” Aunt Polly laughed, shaking her head back and forth. “Ezra’s daddy the marster but one. The captain buys me when I pregnant for Ezra. My other marster in my way back yonder time a dog that mistreat me terrible, gave me bread and water and lashes for no reason. He just mean. Slavery do that to white men. He hurt me fearful, and I pray for a new marster. God is awful kind to me when I need Him, and He give me the captain. The captain never laid no hands on me.”
She poked her needle in and out of the quilt with fingers as frail as curled leaves. “I sure do have sharp luck when the captain buys me. The more I see, the more I got to give thanks for. Miss Amalia passes, and we gets you.”
“Then Ezra’s not Miss Amalia’s half brother.”
Aunt Polly laughed again. “After freedom come and we gets to pick us a name, Miss Amalia herself say me and Ezra ought to be Bondurants. She never like the name Ezra ’cause Mr. Frederick pick it for Ezra when he born. Miss Amalia call Ezra ‘Bon.’ ”
I stilled Aunt Polly’s hand with my own, and she looked up, waiting. “Mr. Sam says you can tell me why Bayard Lott killed Miss Amalia. Please.”
Aunt Polly did not look away, just narrowed her eyes, focusing on my face. “Ezra say you don’t want to know.”
“And you say?”
“I say maybe you got the right of knowing it.”
“Mr. Lott saw something through the telescope, didn’t he?”
Aunt Polly looked down at her needle, but her hand remained still. “Maybe so he did.”
A piece of Spanish moss hanging like smoke from the branch above us suddenly swung down over the quilt. I broke it off and threw it onto the ground. “He saw something that made him mad enough to kill Miss Amalia.”
“She always keep that shutter on the window by Shadowland closed, but maybe he see through it with the spyglass.”
“And saw what?”
Aunt Polly put down her needle and ran her hand over the quilt, her eyes cast down. “Maybe he seen Ezra in the bed with Miss Amalia.” Her hand was still, and I sucked in my breath.
What had I expected? That he’d seen goats grazing on Shadowland’s lawn? Amalia and Maggie plotting together? No, of course not. But I had not expected that. For a moment, I did not breathe as I let that revelation sink in. Then I let out my breath in a whoosh. “And so he killed her. And then he killed himself.” It was not a question, but a statement.
>
“No.” Aunt Polly waited, slowly raising her head until she looked at me. “He just kill Miss Amalia.”
I narrowed my eyes at her, confused.
Aunt Polly’s hand moved slowly on the quilt, making its way toward the needle. She touched it but did not pick it up. “Ezra kill Mr. Bayard.”
I sat very still, waiting.
Aunt Polly put the point of the needle into the fabric and looked at me. “Ezra already gone upstairs, and that where he’s at when he hear the shot. Ezra have the captain’s gun up there to kill rats, ’cause Miss Amalia, she hate rats. Ezra grab it and runs to Miss Amalia, but she laying there dead in the bed. Mr. Bayard next to her. When he see Ezra, he cusses fire to Ezra’s heart and raise his gun. So Ezra shoot him. Ezra don’t think till it too late that Mr. Bayard’s gun don’t have but one bullet to it and he ain’t got time to get him another. Those two get killed with two guns, but nobody didn’t know it.”
The sheriff had told me only that he’d checked Bayard’s gun for fingerprints. He’d just assumed that both bullets had come from the same gun. “What did Ezra do with the captain’s gun?”
“He throw it in the river.”
“That’s what I would have done.” I nodded my approval. “Was Ezra the reason Miss Amalia didn’t marry Bayard Lott?”
“Ezra or no, she never marry with him!” Aunt Polly spat the words. “Mr. Bayard go to New York and tell her she his, that he want her since their creepin’ days. When she say, ‘See the door,’ he have his way with her. You know what I talkin’?”
I did.
“Ezra, he comfort her, just like he always done. They love each other since they both little chips.”
“Miss Amalia teach him to read, to sign his name with that fancy B. Miss Amalia embroider that B on her quilts. Ezra right proud of that letter.” B for Bon, not Bayard, I thought.
“If he loved Miss Amalia, why did he marry Sukey Pea?”
“He a man. He got his needs.” Aunt Polly grinned. “It make bloody footprints on Miss Amalia’s heart, and she act grievous. But after Sukey Pea leave, Ezra and Miss Amalia stop talking with their tongues and start talking with their hearts.” She nodded as she said, “You got to give heart-room to love, not hate.”
New Mercies Page 25
