Lonnie Coleman
THE LEGACY OF BEULAH LAND
PART ONE
1879
1
Bessie Marsh pulled the reins, halting mule and wagon. To the boy on the plank seat beside her she said, “You can see it clear, now the orchard’s bare.” He looked where his mother pointed through leafless fruit trees and the oaks and cedars lining the carriageway to Beulah Land. The house at the end did not face the main road as had the old one until it was burned by Sherman’s men, but turned rather toward the fields and woods that had nourished Kendricks and their kin for almost a hundred years, since the first of them started the plantation in 1783. It was always thought of as Kendrick property, though all but one now bearing the family name were Negroes who, born there, had chosen to remain after the war, or who had left it and returned. The house was not as fine as the old one, but it was still grand enough with its generous rooms and extravagant porches to appear palatial to the poorer county farmers when they went there to ask a favor.
“That’s where we’d be living if they’d reckoned your ma good enough for Ben Davis.”
Leon Marsh knew, as everyone did, that Benjamin Davis was his father and that he managed the plantation with his grandmother Sarah Troy. Although he would not be five until April, the boy had heard the story all his life. But the raw January morning made him shiver and imagine the warm indoors of the store they were going to in Highboro to trade the nineteen eggs and four hobbled hens in the back of the wagon for flour and sugar. They had been up before day to milk the cow and feed the stock. Bessie had not bothered to build a fire in the kitchen, since they were going to town; so they breakfasted on buttermilk and cold biscuits, and Bessie advised her mother, who was nearly blind, to remain in bed for warmth until they returned.
“It’s cold, Ma,” Leon said.
She was gazing through the trees. “It’s warm in there, you can bet. They’ve a fire in every room, and the table set for breakfast. Fried ham and eggs, grits and gravy, hot biscuits and preserves, coffee and cold pie. Leave more than they eat, I expect. No wonder their hogs and niggers are the fattest in the county.”
“Ma, let’s go.”
She waved a hand. “Everything, they have it all.”
“Ma—”
She slapped him hard with the end of the reins. He flinched but did not make a sound. Deciding that he looked more than ever like his father, she laughed. The sound splintered the air like falling icicles. “Spit and say: ‘I spit on Beulah Land.’”
Thinking of the warmth waiting in Highboro, he pursed his chapped lips, turned his head over the side of the wagon, and spat. Taking that as obedience enough, Bessie flicked the reins on the mule’s back, and they continued the journey.
The wagon creaked past the old Campgrounds and over the wooden bridge, and they saw the first cluster of houses. The woman said, “I don’t want you to cry like you done last time. If Mr. Sullivan feels like patting me some, it’s nothing to you, is it? Maybe I’ll coax a can of snuff out of him for your granny. She lives for snuff.” The boy looked angry but said nothing.
The mistress of Beulah Land had also been up before daylight, leaving her husband sleeping and going to the kitchen, where she found the cook Josephine rolling out dough and her helper Mabella boiling first coffee.
“How is she this morning?” Josephine asked.
“I haven’t been to see yet; I need my coffee.” Sarah Troy drew a chair to the kitchen table as Mabella set down cup and saucer and poured from the pot on the stove.
“Hasn’t boiled enough,” Mabella warned.
“It will do me,” Sarah said, and then to Josephine, “I expect she’s no worse or Bianca would have knocked on my door during the night.”
“Yes’m.” Josephine sighed and sprinkled flour over the rolled dough. “Making sweet potato biscuits.” They were one of the many favorite dishes long enjoyed by the fat little woman who lay dying in her room. Finishing her coffee, Sarah touched Josephine on the back to thank her and went for the first visit of the day with her aunt, Nell Kendrick. She often found her asleep, or if awake, with her mind as cloudy as her eyes, but this morning her eyes were open and sensible. It was her maid Bianca who sat nodding in the chair beside the bed. Hearing them exchange greetings, Bianca opened her eyes warily.
“I smell coffee,” Nell said.
“Mabella’s bringing yours.”
“I’ll go get it,” Bianca announced, and left the room.
“She wants her own,” Nell said. They smiled at each other. “How old am I, Sarah?”
“Ninety-seven.”
“Am I?” Nell mused. “I was a delicate child; no one thought I’d live to put on my first corset.”
“Josephine’s making sweet potato biscuits.”
“Dear soul.”
An hour later everyone had breakfasted according to appetite and begun the day’s occupations. Casey Troy, Sarah’s second husband (her first having been Leon Kendrick, master of Beulah Land), was a painter and photographer. At sixty-five he was three years younger than his wife, but both led active lives and retained a fair portion of earlier health and looks. Plain at ten, Sarah was allowed to be interesting at twenty, and beautiful from thirty on.
Casey saddled a horse and rode into Highboro with his sketchbook dangling from the saddle horn. He was to begin work on the portrait commissioned by Mrs. Bonard Saxon, still known as “the beautiful Miss Frankie” although she had borne two children and been wife as well as mother for more than five years.
Benjamin Davis always began his day early, coming down the half mile from his house in the Glade and assigning the men their work. Most of them were plowing the highest ground. After looking over the non-working stock, he joined his grandmother for breakfast. He had coffee at home, but his wife Priscilla rose later than he and breakfasted lightly, if at all. Her pregnancy was in the eighth month, and their hope of safe delivery grew each day stronger. In four years of marriage she had miscarried twice.
It was Benjamin’s habit to companion Sarah for the hearty morning meal they both enjoyed as they discussed the day’s expectations. Forty-three years different in age, they were alike in their love for Beulah Land and each other. It was true, as his wife and her husband agreed, that each was the other’s nearest friend. As Benjamin helped himself liberally to peach preserve, Sarah said, “Was Priscilla awake when you left?”
“I don’t know.” After a moment’s pause he added, “I didn’t want to bother her if she was sleeping.”
They did not have to look at each other to acknowledge what was unspoken. The courtship and marriage of Benjamin Davis and Priscilla Oglethorpe had surprised town and county, so different had they been. But both went about it with a determination that made it look like destiny, overcoming where they could not ignore the misgivings of friends and the opposition of her mother.
Sarah said briskly, “She’ll be content when the child is born.”
He looked at her then. “Pray God. Town girls take some getting used to country living.”
She nodded as if she believed what they were saying, then offered him the comfort of being teased. “You’re mighty sure it’s going to be a boy.”
“Yes’m, and he’s going to be named Bruce Davis for Grandpa.”
She watched him fork a bit of preserve onto the last crisp bit of ham. “How can you do that? I like my salt, and I like my sweet, but I want the salt first and the sweet after.”
“I like them together. Otis has put the best men on the high west fields. They’ll spend the rest of the week plowing their way down.” She nodded. “Thought I’d ride into town this morning and look over the gin. Not do anything other than kick a piece here and there to see if it rattles
right.”
“If it rattled wrong, Isaac would already know it; but you’re right to go.” When he pushed his plate away, she said, “Stop in Sullivan’s and ask if his new nutmeg has come. Josephine won’t use any of that old he sold her, and sweet potato biscuits need a touch of it.”
Benjamin’s sister Jane Todd lived with her husband Daniel and their two sons next door on what had been part of Beulah Land. With the arrival of their second son, their little house in Sarah’s side yard was discovered to be too small. Sarah and Benjamin talked privately about an idea they’d long had and decided to make Jane and Daniel a deed to four hundred of Beulah Land’s sixteen hundred acres. Daniel Todd had been a Union soldier who deserted, wounded and half starved, during the last year of the war and found his way to Beulah Land, where its mistress took him in. He paid her with hard work. Without him the place might have been lost, its load of debt the consequence of punitive taxes at the war’s end and Reconstruction. Jane knew what Sarah and Benjamin guessed: deep in Daniel’s Vermont soul he hungered to own part of the land he’d helped them save and come to love. And so, although he protested when it was offered to him, he looked happy. Accepting the deed, he proceeded to build a house and farm buildings, and to dream lives for his sons, unaware that those who follow must always make their own.
“Grandma!”
“Grandma!”
“Here I am!”
The calls came from Robert E. Lee Todd and Jefferson Davis Todd, aged four and two, named for the general and the president to bring new names into the family as well as to commemorate the past. Sarah’s answer coincided with her rounding a corner of the house after gathering eggs with Mabella. It was good luck that Mabella was carrying the eggs, for both boys threw themselves upon their great-grandmother, sure of their welcome, and she swung one under each arm as they made their way up the steps of the back porch toward the kitchen, where Jane waited.
“You spoil them,” Jane said.
“Your mother used to say that when I swung you,” Sarah answered.
“May the Lord rest her soul,” Josephine intoned. Fond of both children, she was partial to Jefferson, called Davy. “Who this baby come to see Josephine?”
He wrapped himself around her long-skirted legs as if he would crush her. “Not a baby—two years old!”
“Look like a baby to me, don’t he to you, Mabella? Reckon we better give him a sugar-tit to pacify him?”
“I’m too big for sugar-tits, I want a biscuit!”
“Maybe there’s one left, maybe there ain’t.” Josephine simpered. “Who you love best?”
“You, Josephine!” both boys shouted.
“Well,” she said complacently. They followed her as she went to the cookstove and took biscuits from the black pan on top. She made a finger hole in each and filled it with syrup. Holding them high until they stopped dripping, she presented them to the children and watched as they devoured them. “Always hungry as hound dogs. Mabella, clean the chicken mess off’n them eggs like I told you. How many times I got to say don’t use water, it weakens the shell? Use your hand like this.”
A little later, sitting with Nell while Bianca rested, Jane heard whispering in the hallway and tiptoed to the door.
“Who is it, Jane?” Nell asked.
“Bobby Lee and Davy.”
“And who might they be?”
“Mine and Dan’s boys.”
“Yes,” she remembered.
“I’ll send them away.”
“Let them in,” she said to Jane’s surprise, for she had never liked having children about her.
They wanted no further invitation. “Come here so I can look at you,” Nell said, and the boys obeyed. Awed to silence by the unexpected, they stared at her as curiously as she did at them. “You look like Daniel,” she said to Bobby Lee, and to Davy, “You don’t look like anybody.”
Unabashed, Davy said, “Come play marbles with us.”
“I reckon not,” she said after appearing to consider it. “I got to lie here and think about going to heaven.”
“Are you going today?” Davy said, and Bobby Lee nudged him with an elbow.
“Might,” Nell said. “Haven’t made up my mind when I’m going.”
“Will you grow wings?” Bobby Lee wanted to know.
“I’ll tell you a secret: they’ve already started.”
“Can we see them?” Davy asked.
Nell frowned. “A lady doesn’t show her wings to gentlemen.”
Davy beamed at her admiringly. “Do they have tater biscuits in heaven?”
“If they don’t,” Nell said, “I won’t stay.”
2
Casey Troy was uncertain what to do with his horse. He and Sarah visited the Bonard Saxons once or twice a year, but on those occasions they came in a buggy, or in the rockaway if Jane and Daniel accompanied them, and a servant was waiting to dispose of the equipage. Today he came alone and in a professional capacity. After dismounting he stood, reins in hand, as one who pauses to admire the prospect (Miss Frankie was house proud) but hoping that someone inside would spy him. This happened. Annabel Saxon opened the front door of her son’s house with the greeting: “Here you are, painter Troy!”
She never knew how to address him. She called Sarah “Auntie” to annoy her, although they were not kin. Sarah’s daughter had married Annabel’s brother James Davis; Sarah’s grandson Benjamin was, therefore, Annabel’s nephew. Casey Troy was nobody, as she had said at the time he married Leon Kendrick’s widow, and she still referred to him sometimes as “the nobody who married the mistress of Beulah Land.”
Casey was on surer ground, for although Yankee-born, he knew Southern manners and understood that a gentleman might address any lady by her first name if he preceded it by “Miss,” whether she was maid or madam. “Miss Annabel,” he declared, “you look pretty as a picture, if I may say so.”
She laughed appreciation. “Who better qualified than you, sir?—painter of countenance and soul! Come and let us see what you make of Miss Frankie. The boy will take care of your horse.”
Casey took his sketchbook from the saddle horn and followed her into the house. Sarah would be amused to hear that Annabel had thought to be in attendance as chaperon or, more likely, director of the session. Frankie Saxon came to meet them in the entrance hall. Having allowed her mother-in-law to open the door, she affected surprise, as if she remembered that she was expecting the artist only when he appeared before her. “Mr. Troy! I have just this moment—” She led them beyond her living room into the small sitting room she used for morning visits.
Civilities were exchanged. Frankie asked particularly after Jane and Mrs. Troy. On her first visit to Highboro six years ago, she had almost married Benjamin Davis, deciding to have the banker’s boy instead only when she discovered that Bessie Marsh was pregnant with Benjamin’s child. The family mammy bustled in behind two skipping children who were entreated to “say howdy to the gentleman” and then consider themselves excused. A quarter hour passed as they remained to be admired. Five-year-old Blair Saxon III recited several verses from the Psalms, secure in the knowledge that no one interrupts the Bible, and three-year-old Fanny demonstrated her curtsy so many times she grew dizzy and fell, bumping her head on the floor and weeping. Thereupon the mammy, young Blair, and Fanny were invited lovingly to leave them. When they dallied, they were told gravely to go; and when at the doorway they still lingered like old actors reluctant to quit a stage, Annabel shouted, “Scat!”
Although she had been told that in the first session Casey would make sketches only of her face, Frankie was carefully dressed, but so she always was. A beauty from a poor Savannah family, relatives of Annabel’s other daughter-in-law, Frankie had known her good fortune in marrying even the second son of a banker and had been quick to learn the perquisites of position. A big frog in a little pond she might be, but a pond, no matter its size, is the world to those who live in it or beside it; and Frankie knew it.
Annabel said, �
��It was my idea, this portrait, Troy.” (She decided the last name would do for a business visit.) “Law, yes. I recollected how much admired was the one you made of me all those years ago—”
“You’ve changed little, ma’am.”
“Everyone says my daughter-in-law is a beauty and so she is, but we must catch the bloom before it fades. I told my son: ‘Send for Troy, he is the man.’ You deal more in the camera these days, I understand; but for lasting there is nothing to my mind like paint on canvas with a stout frame around it. Now, where will you have her pose?”
Casey opened his sketchbook and assumed the preoccupied manner of the artist. He used silence as a shield. Asked again by Annabel where he would have Frankie sit or stand, he merely frowned and ignored her. “On the little settee perhaps? I do think standing beside a pedestal looks common.”
Frowning still and wordless, he directed Frankie with a hand gesture to a chair in a bow window where the morning light was clear but not dazzling, and where there were no shadows to mislead him. Annabel chattered a few more suggestions, but when she was ignored by both artist and subject, she subsided into brief outbursts, like a bird in a bush who reminds us of his presence with a trill at intervals without commanding our attention to a full recital.
“Law, so well I remember. Everyone was delighted. Came from all over the county to admire it when it was done. Troy was much sought after, I assure you. Everyone wanted him. But the portrait he achieved of me was the most admired of any of the many. Fancy your not recognizing it as me when you first saw it, Frankie! Everyone vows it is my spit and image to this day.”
Casey began to work, and Frankie fixed her eyes on a wax rose in a miniature vase.
“And Aunt Nell—how did you leave the old soul?”
There was no answer but the scratching of pencil on paper.
“Poor thing, I wish she’d die. Better for her, and you all too. She’s complained of being an invalid her whole life. Everyone dancing duty and attention on her, never mind the trouble; and look at her, nearly a hundred. Not content with the threescore and ten so sensibly advised by our Creator. Frankie, move your head to the right. The left side of your face— Never mind, the artist eye will make allowance. Nothing terrible, only not as good as the other. Unremarkable with anyone else, but with you we look for perfection.”
The Legacy of Beulah Land Page 1
