To ignore her mother-in-law was no longer enough, and Frankie’s question to Casey sounded irritable. “How is Mrs. Ben?”
“Frankie!” Annabel said in a correcting tone. “Strictly speaking, Troy is not family. One does not ask a gentleman who is not family the condition of one who—”
“I only hope she is healthy and comfortable.”
“I believe she is both,” Casey said in a tone as remote as the moon. Closing one eye and holding his pencil vertically, he squinted intently at the subject of the drawing. Both women were daunted to silence. It never failed; Casey reflected.
3
Isaac was a light-colored Negro in his middle fifties who appeared older, perhaps because of his hermit existence. He had one real leg and one carved from wood, a substitute for that crushed under a bale of cotton that tipped and fell on him when he was a young man and first began to work at the cotton gin. He had a solemn passion for machinery, which perfectly suited him for his job as caretaker.
As he and Benjamin paused at the office door after their round of inspection, he picked up a kitten from the floor and held it out by the scruff of its neck. “Take him, Mr. Ben. My old mouser wants to kill him. Never been much of a ma, but never before bad as now. Litter of five, and she kilt everyone but him, and would have got him if I hadn’t stopped her. I been pondering what to do with him.”
Benjamin accepted the creature and looked him over. He was black except for a white strip around his left hind leg and a few white hairs at his chest. “All right, Isaac.”
“Maybe Miss Priscilla see some good in him.”
“Afraid she doesn’t care much for cats.” He smiled and scratched the kitten’s ears. “I’ll take him to Aunt Doreen. She and Miss Kilmer keep up with the cat needs of Highboro.” Benjamin stuffed the kitten into a loose outer pocket of his coat, where, after some experimental squirming, he seemed content to remain as Benjamin got on his horse and walked him back through town to Sullivan’s store. There were two farm wagons pulled up under the sign lettered Groceries and Dry Goods. In one stood a ragged boy he would have taken no notice of had not Bessie Marsh come out of the store just then. He looked again at the boy and recognized his and Bessie’s child.
Dismounting, he hitched his horse and greeted her. “Morning, Mrs. Marsh.” Everyone accorded Bessie the courtesy title of “Mrs.” after Leon’s birth. “As though,” Bessie put it, “I was married to myself.”
“Morning,” she said. “Leon, you remember Mr. Benjamin Davis. He was out to see us—” She turned to Benjamin. “Last fall, was it? Say ‘howdy,’ Leon.”
“Howdy, sir.”
“Howdy, son,” Benjamin replied. Man and boy colored as they exchanged looks, and Bessie glanced from one to the other with pleased malice. Running a hand under her shawl, she pulled from a dress pocket a small can with a printed label. “Bruton snuff,” she read. The boy blushed more deeply, and as Benjamin wondered why, Bessie laughed at his puzzlement. “I haven’t taken up dipping, though they say it’s a comfort for troubled minds. It’s for Ma. Mr. Sullivan added it to the flour and sugar he traded me for my hens and eggs, and other considerations.”
The boy was staring at Benjamin’s coat pocket, which moved. Benjamin drew forth the kitten. “Picked him up at the gin. His ma wouldn’t keep him.”
“Unnatural,” Bessie said. “I call it unnatural to deny your own flesh, don’t you?”
“What you going to do with him?” Leon asked.
“Why—give him to you if you want him,” Benjamin surprised himself by saying.
“Can I, Ma?”
“Sure, boy! Always take what you’re offered and say, ‘thank you.’”
Benjamin handed the kitten over the side of the wagon. Bessie said, “Hope you won’t think my boy’s too tattery. He’s got better at home Miss Sarah gave him last Christmas, but it’s not for every day. That old sweater’s warm enough, ain’t it, boy?” She pulled the shoulder in a way that further exposed rough darning and worn areas.
Benjamin shifted uncomfortably. “Grandma asked me to stop for nutmeg.”
Bessie clapped her hands. “Somebody going to cook something good? You’ll find Mr. Sullivan feeling pert this morning.”
Benjamin nodded to woman and boy and started into the store, but her voice stopped him. “Hear you and Mrs. Davis are hoping again. Well, you’ve had bad luck, haven’t you?” She used wheel spokes to ladder herself up to the plank seat. Untying the knotted reins, she yanked the mule into a stiff, backward walk before turning him into the street.
The mule knew the way. The boy tended the kitten, and the woman followed her thoughts. When he was nineteen and she twenty-five, Bessie and Benjamin had come together in mutual need, neither innocent, neither seducer. It was a hot and fleshy affair both enjoyed, with nothing begged and nothing promised. She was the plain daughter of poor farmers, he the heir to Beulah Land. There was no question of his marrying her, although he acknowledged responsibility for her pregnancy and promised to help her family in every way short of marriage. And so he and Sarah had done.
Later the same summer he courted the beautiful visitor from Savannah, Miss Frankie-Julia Dollard, but she married Bonard Saxon when she understood Benjamin’s determination to stand by Bessie Marsh. And eventually he married Priscilla Oglethorpe. Bessie Marsh was not at the time resentful. She had a mother and a father and other beaux, and she had not expected to marry soon, let alone well, for after the war the ranks of young men were thin. And so he married, and she bore the child. Her father, who was a poor farmer in all ways, contracted consumption and died of it. Her beaux were content to lie with her but not to wake with her; the bit of land that became hers was insufficient bait for a permanent attachment.
Sarah and Benjamin helped the Marshes, but with bad luck and bad management, Bessie’s little became less until now she kept only a few chickens, three or four hogs, a mule and a cow. She tended a vegetable patch, mainly turnips and potatoes, but the land was rocky and sour, and its yield was meager. Bessie let her pride go with her youth and was now glad if favors to the storekeeper allowed her some feeling of independence of Sarah Troy and her grandson. It seemed to Bessie that they had all and she nothing. But when Priscilla Davis was cursed with miscarriages, Bessie began to realize an advantage: she had a son.
Still, she could be moved to rage, as she had been this morning when she saw Benjamin Davis, young at twenty-five whereas she felt herself old at thirty-one.
They came to the creek on the edge of town, and after crossing the bridge, Bessie stopped the wagon. “Now,” she said to her son, “take him and drown him.”
Leon stared at her. “You said I could keep him.”
“I said you could take him. The givers don’t like their gifts refused. But I won’t have nothing that might kill my biddies.”
“I’ll train him, so he won’t, Ma.”
“We got nothing to feed him.”
“He’ll catch mice.”
“The rats are bigger than him.”
“Ma, let me keep him?”
“Do what I told you and let’s get home. It’s cold.”
He had edged away from her on the seat. The kitten, gripped in one hand, complained. Sliding over the side of the wagon, he dropped to the ground, and the woman followed him. He had run only a little way when she caught him. He lost the kitten as she grabbed and slapped him. Stripping a branch from a bush, she began to lash him across the back and around the legs. She administered the whipping quickly and thoroughly, and she was almost warm when she pushed him away from her. The kitten crouched nearby, frightened to immobility.
“You’ll mind me now,” Bessie said, “or I’ll beat you raw.”
The boy picked up the animal.
“Take him yonder and hold him under.”
The boy carried the kitten to the edge of the creek, where he knelt and did as his mother ordered.
When the creature struggled no more, she said, “Let him go.”
Back in the wa
gon and on their way again, Bessie said, “You’ll learn to be hard.”
4
The Glade consisted of a few acres of high ground with trees and grass, and a spring that fed a brook. Its rockiness made it useless for farming, so Benjamin, having loved it all his life, built his house there when he became a man and thought of marrying. On the day he and Priscilla climbed the hill as man and wife he dreamed that the next years would fill the house with children and that the Glade would yield its quiet to their rackety games, their ponies, and passing pleasures.
Today, after presenting nutmeg to Josephine and refusing his grandmother’s invitation to stay for noon dinner, he rode home to the Glade and, entering it, thought that it seemed quieter to him now than it had when he was a boy. The silence then had been intimate and waiting. Now it was mere stillness. No dog came barking a welcome; no cat, blinking in winter sun, turned his head to see who approached. Priscilla discouraged their having dogs and cats because there was no keeping them out of the house with all Benjamin’s comings and goings, and they dropped hairs everywhere. Neither was there sound of domestic fowl or cow; these were quartered in the farmyard below at Zadok’s house and barns. Thinking of Zadok’s family, Benjamin’s eyes warmed. His overseer lived with his wife Rosalie and their five children in tumbling profusion of beast and bird, hay smell, hog smell, and cooking. Down there Benjamin could feel things growing in the yards and barns and fields about him; up here was pause, cessation.
Priscilla Oglethorpe had fallen in love with Benjamin partly because of his family. Her own—mother, father, sister—she’d thought of as laced and buttoned, prim in dim parlor, hands folded on laps waiting for Kingdom Come. The Kendricks and Davises were forever moving about, getting into and out of trouble, abundantly acquainted with joy as well as grief. Their appetites had never been tame, and their means of satisfaction had sometimes been exceptional and disorderly. It was their energy that had made such a strong initial appeal to Priscilla, for her own family was without it. Her two older brothers had died in the war, and her father Philip, when his left arm was torn off at Shiloh, abandoned himself to mourning the lost sons and the lost cause the rest of his life. Her mother Ann’s only anticipation was the Afterlife. Often on her lips was the admonition: “Prepare for Judgment.”
That mother whom Priscilla had thought to escape by marriage to Beulah Land exerted a continuing, even, Benjamin feared, an increasing influence upon her elder daughter. And that mother, Benjamin remembered, was expected today with her trunk to spend the remainder of “this painful time” with daughter and son-in-law in the Glade. No death watch could be kept more grimly than the way Mrs. Oglethorpe awaited the birth of a grandchild. On the occasions of her daughter’s miscarriages she would express no sorrow or disappointment. “We bow to God’s will.”
Benjamin unsaddled his horse and entered the house the back way. Rosalie had trained her oldest daughter Freda to Priscilla’s kitchen. She had herself been housekeeper to Benjamin before he married. Freda was energetic and clean, a good cook who might become a better one. So far she had received scant encouragement. Priscilla was not accustomed to the robust meals enjoyed at Beulah Land and soon curtailed Freda’s free hand in the kitchen. Whether result or cause: Benjamin began to eat away from home, usually with his sister or grandmother or Zadok. He often took no more than one meal a day at his own table.
Crossing the back porch and entering the kitchen, Benjamin found Freda with her lips stuck out in a pout. “Mrs. Oglethorpe has come,” he said.
Freda tossed her head. He patted her shoulder, and she relaxed enough to say, “You be eating more at home now, Mr. Ben?”
“I’ll be here for dinner and supper anyway. What are you cooking?”
“My Sunday baked chicken, though it be a Tuesday. Was going to make apple tarts, but Mrs. Oglethorpe say nobody wants them so it’s a waste and don’t do it.”
“Cook them for supper. I’ll want them.”
“Yes, sir,” Freda said, and almost smiled.
Benjamin returned to the back porch, where he dipped water from a bucket into a hand basin and quickly washed his face and hands. He then went to join Priscilla and Mrs. Oglethorpe in the room next the master bedroom, fitted for the child to come during Priscilla’s first pregnancy but since turned into a kind of invalid’s sitting room. His welcome to Mrs. Oglethorpe was all courtesy and no warmth. He had long ago given up trying to love her and knew she would never love him. She could not forgive him for inspiring her daughter’s one rebellion. Losing that battle, she would give no further inch of the field. Bending over his wife’s chair to ask how she was, he observed the strained look of her eyes and mouth. Mrs. Oglethorpe had wasted no time.
It was she who answered for Priscilla. “I found her quite dejected. The girl left a window open, and my poor child’s hands were cold as a corpse’s when I took them in mine. I closed the window and built up the fire, but I fear I was too late, for now she has become feverish as a consequence of the draft she suffered.”
“The sun has made the day milder,” Benjamin said.
“It was bitter cold when I arrived. My feet are still ice.”
She continued. Although there did not appear to be cracks in the flooring where the boards were visible, she felt something—yes, right through the carpet. She tugged her shawl closer as if offering proof. Benjamin’s face burned from the excessive heat of the fire. Mrs. Oglethorpe flirted a handkerchief before her nose. There was, she declared, always such a smell of cooking.
“The girl must prepare food,” Priscilla protested mildly.
“Offensive to one in your condition surely. I wish you’d let me find a girl in town for you who is nicer in her ways.”
“The one we have will do,” Benjamin said curtly.
Mrs. Oglethorpe then wondered at length if Dr. Platt quite understood Priscilla’s constitution, if he had fully considered the complications. Perhaps they should have consulted a physician from Savannah, but it was too late now. After all, it was not as if they all had not a great deal to fear. Priscilla had lost two babies and never before endured to the eighth month. Were there not precautions that might be yet taken? She did not want to alarm anyone, but she often lay awake the entire night with the most frightening apprehensions.
That it was familiar made it no less disagreeable. Benjamin bore it the best he could, for he could do nothing else. When he tried to answer her, Priscilla became agitated with nerves. He had begged Priscilla to let him banish her during the last month of pregnancy, but she was clearly afraid of Mrs. Oglethorpe. Benjamin had heard Priscilla defend herself weakly and assure her mother that she was and would be all right; and he had on those occasions seen Mrs. Oglethorpe study her daughter’s face with implacable pity, shaking her head in certainty that ill would come. Ill had come, and she was proved right. Did she not know? Had she not borne four children of her own in pain and sorrow?
Benjamin appealed to Sarah, who told him she could not step between mother and daughter. Jane tried what she might with her natural good cheer and her own happy experience of motherhood. Priscilla appeared to draw strength from her sister-in-law; but whatever comfort she found vanished the next time she met her mother.
Noon dinner was observed, if not shared, by the three. Priscilla ate some of the white meat of the chicken and a spoonful of rice without gravy, which Mrs. Oglethorpe pronounced too rich. Mrs. Oglethorpe refused anything choicer than the back, which she claimed she preferred, having got used to it by deferring all her life to her husband and children. She picked every shred of meat and skin from it and then took the bones into her mouth and sucked them in a way that made Benjamin long to silence her with a shout. She refused coffee, waved aside the offer of cake and observed that it appeared dry. She allowed that, seeing they had left-over cake to finish, it was a good thing she had stopped the girl’s making apple tarts. Benjamin did not argue. He knew that it would only end in distressing Priscilla.
After noon dinner Mrs. Oglethorpe put h
er arm about Priscilla’s shoulders and guided her away. They would lie down together and rest, she said. Benjamin saddled his horse and went his round of the fields, marking the progress of the day’s work. Late afternoon he found his way to his sister’s house, where he put himself into good humor in Daniel’s calm, easy company. When Jane pressed him to stay for supper, and he allowed Davy and Bobby Lee to pull his arms and kick his boots and climb all over him begging him to stay, he remembered Freda’s apple tarts and went home.
Priscilla excused herself from joining her mother and her husband at the table. She would, she promised, have a glass of buttermilk before she went to bed, but she wanted nothing yet. Mrs. Oglethorpe accompanied Benjamin to the dining room silently. Her eyes grew large when she saw the platter of fried pork chops Freda set on the table, and larger still when that was followed by a bowl of potatoes in cream sauce, another of boiled cabbage, another of stewed tomatoes, a platter of fried sweet potatoes, and smaller glass dishes of pickled cucumber and beet relish. Benjamin urged Mrs. Oglethorpe to serve herself. She asked him to call the girl and tell her to bring the cold chicken remaining from noon dinner. This was done, and when it was set before her, she speared a wing onto her plate. When Freda was gone, Mrs. Oglethorpe delivered a monologue on the subject of waste. Benjamin took refuge in his supper, which he consumed with less enjoyment than he pretended.
“What happens to all the food you don’t eat?”
“It is eaten by others, ma’am.”
“No wonder your man Zadok can raise such a large family.”
“They work with him, for me.”
“Fried meat at night cannot be healthy.”
The Legacy of Beulah Land Page 2
