Time had altered the circumstances of both. One by one: Alvina, Alma, Annie, Abbie, and Adeline exchanged Crawford for the names of five humble farmers and became wives and mothers of respectability if little consequence. Alf Crawford now lived alone, with only a black woman named Yulee, who was nearly as old as he, to attend him; and when it was put about that his whiskey was not what it used to be, few continued to make the journey to the little farm that had been a magnet for the thirsty and lusty. Feeling no great gratitude for his earlier use of them, the daughters left Alf to fend for himself, and this he did by selling bad whiskey to whomever he could, usually Negroes, and by raising chickens, those of his neighbors when they strayed. In the last year Alf had allied himself with a youth named Eugene Betchley, younger of two sons of another poor farmer, who favored setting traps and throwing seines to tilling the soil with his father and brother.
Early one morning in February, Benjamin discovered Alf and Eugene in the back woods of Beulah Land. Eugene ran when Benjamin hailed them, but Alf, who was old and fat, waited with a smile of fellowship the years had made uncertain. After greetings, civil on one side and hearty on the other, Benjamin began to examine the trap which Eugene had dropped in his haste.
“Don’t know why he run off thataway,” Alf said, “seeing you and me are old friends. I told him you wouldn’t mind us taking a critter or two, or even a few of the many crowding your woods. Them as ain’t fit to eat will have a thick pelt this time of year, a man can sell for a few nickels or a dollar or two. It’s been a hard winter for poor folks.”
Benjamin said, “A trap like that broke a dog’s leg last week, and we had to shoot him.”
“Is that a fact?” Alf exclaimed sympathetically.
“My brother-in-law has found other traps sprung with dead animals. Snares too, and signs of the creek being dragged with seines.”
“Now, Ben, you ain’t telling me, are you, you own the very water and the fullness thereof? It flows onto your land and off it, and the fish flow with it.”
“When it’s on our land, what’s in it is ours.”
“I never expected you to grudge an eel or an old pike.”
“Come fishing with a pole any time you like, but I won’t have seines used and the fish not wanted left on the bank to die.”
“That must be somebody else, neither one of us, Ben.”
“Tell Eugene I’m going to his pa if it happens again.”
Alf winked. “He don’t listen to his pa, and that’s the truth. Kind of goes a separate way, you know. Don’t mean a bit of harm. I never seen harm in him.”
“Tell him what I say, Alf.”
Out of sight, Eugene stopped running. He cursed Benjamin Davis aloud to the woods and swore he’d go back and face him but continued in the direction that brought him presently to a lane that led to the main road. Eugene was eighteen, with a man’s body and a boy’s mind. He resented all who stopped him from having his way. He hated his father and brother and refused to work with them. Often he slept away from home, and when he returned for a meal, he brought his own food: a rabbit or possum or fish, with enough over what he’d eat to pay for the lard and cornmeal he took from the family supply. He was a big fellow with loose black hair and beard. His eyes were black too, and his teeth nearly so with accumulation and neglect. He was proud of his sexual powers and had lain with a score of willing females, black and white, since he was fourteen.
Approaching Bessie Marsh’s farm, he decided that Benjamin Davis had wronged him, because he’d left a good spring trap behind him on Beulah Land. Stopping in the road, he studied the gray board house. Its small porch buckled and sloped and was supported precariously at the corners by piled field stones. Nothing grew near the house, but Eugene knew the extent of the farm, and he suddenly fancied that he could make it his. That would show him to be his own man; his father and brother could go to hell, for he’d be better off than they with forty-four acres to their twenty-seven. He’d own land. As he thought about it, he smiled. In the boy’s mind thought had become accomplishment. Smoke lifted from the chimney as he walked around the house.
Leon stood at the back door and glared when he saw Eugene.
“Where’s your ma?” Eugene called.
“Drawing water,” Leon said.
Eugene went to find her. “Morning, Miss Bessie.”
Bessie made no answer, but she glanced at him as she pulled the rope. The attached bucket came into view, and she poured its contents into the house bucket she’d brought with her.
“Let me tote for you,” Eugene offered.
“I tote for myself,” Bessie said.
Eugene took the full bucket from her; and when she made no protest but wound the well rope around a nail to hold it in place, he said sociably, “Cold this morning.”
“If you worked, you’d warm up.”
He laughed long enough to set the bucket down on the hard ground.
“Tired already?” she mocked. As she reached for the handle, he took her and pulled her against him. Twisting her arms, she freed herself.
“Get further and smell better,” she ordered. “I won’t be grabbed at by no stinking young’un.”
“I’ve got my full growth, Miss Bessie, as some could tell you.”
“Go tote water for them.”
She went toward the house with her heavy bucket, and he returned to the well to draw more water. There was no dipper, so he lifted the well bucket and drank from the side. She paused at the door beside her son. “Look here, Miss Bessie! I’m washing myself for you!” With that he threw the remainder of the water into the air over his head, wetting himself.
“You crazy young’un!” she cried.
“Can I come in the kitchen to get dry?”
She hesitated. “I’m not asking you to breakfast.”
That was his beginning. The next time he appeared in her back yard she was on her way to milk. Again he took the bucket, this time empty, and found the cow in her stall.
“Know your way, don’t you?” she said, following. “I’m missing a chicken or two,” she added slyly, for country gossip was never far behind events, and Eugene and Alf’s small forays were known.
“Does she kick?” Eugene said, slapping the cow’s flank.
“When she takes a notion. She’s skittish.” Eugene squatted, spat on his hands, and began to massage the cow’s teats. “What’s her name?”
“Got none.”
“Coo now, Sooky,” he murmured as gently as a lover, resting his head against her warm flank. “Don’t that feel good to you, old girl?” When the teats were warmed and beginning to give, he clenched the bucket between his knees and directed the streams of milk into it. She watched him speculatively.
“Shaved off your beard.”
He shrugged. “No good to me.”
That morning he stayed to breakfast, having assured his acceptance by bringing a freshly caught and skinned rabbit. After she’d fried it, Bessie ate as hungrily as did her mother and son, for they enjoyed little game. Now and then she directed a scornful look at her guest to warn him that his contribution allowed him no liberties. Leon ate sulkily, but he ate. Finishing what had been given her, the old woman dragged her chair as near the cookstove as she could without burning herself and sat in it unmoving. Bessie scraped plates and carried the scraps of bone and gristle that had not been consumed to the yard to throw to the chickens, who came running, not knowing how little there was.
Eugene remained half the morning, wandering and looking. Bessie went on with her work. Leon followed his mother until she told him to get from underfoot and fill the wood box in the kitchen. When he brought in his first armload, the grandmother stirred in her chair. “Who is it?” she whispered.
“Me,” Leon said.
“Afraid it was him.”
Bessie came in with three eggs she had found.
“Is he gone?” her mother asked, again in a whisper.
“Yes’m,” Bessie answered.
“Who is he?
”
“You’ve known his pa all your life.”
“I couldn’t see him clear. My eyes are gummy.”
“Gene Betchley.”
“Gene Betchley.” The old woman repeated the name as if she knew him and did not know him. “What does he want?”
He returned every day at different times until they came to expect him and wonder when he would arrive. He seldom presented himself empty-handed, and Bessie guessed that most of his gifts had been stolen. All were useful and none of a personal nature: a couple of cabbages, a half side of salted pork, a gallon of syrup. His face was pale and pimpled where beard had grown, and Bessie could look at him with indifference and think: a boy. Although he made an effort to appear cleaner, his clothes smelled rankly of old sweat and long, continuous wear. One morning he found her at the washtub, and she told him she’d wash his shirt if he left it with her. He took it off on the spot, and when she saw the grime of his drawers, she told him to go into the house and remove them and instructed Leon to bring them to her. Eugene sat by the cookstove wrapped in a quilt until his clothes were washed and dried, the old granny squinting at him calculatingly, and Leon watching him as if he were a coiled snake. He didn’t seem to mind or even to notice them but spent the waiting time whittling a spoon from a piece of pine he took from the wood box. He broke it finally trying to make the neck thinner. When Bessie came in to cook noon dinner, his eyes followed her. It was not that he looked at her admiringly, but no one for a long time had looked at her so much, and she enjoyed the attention. When her hands were busy kneading dough for flour hoecake, he sidled over and slipped an arm low around her waist.
Leon said, “Leave Mama alone.”
Bessie laughed. “You watch how you talk to grown men.”
“I reckon he’s jealous.” Eugene smirked.
“He’s got no cause,” Bessie answered him sharply, though looking at Leon. Shifting her eyes to Eugene, she said, “Keep your hands to yourself.”
Leon ran out the door and did not return until after Eugene put on his dry clothes and went away. When Leon came in, his mother teased him so merrily he decided he hated her too and told her so, whereupon she slapped him. The old woman, who usually had little to say for herself or anyone else, worried about the reason for their visitor’s regular attendance on them as she gummed her soft-boiled peas and hoecake. “What’s he want? Reckon he’s after the farm?”
“It ain’t much to want,” Bessie said.
“More’n he’s got,” the old woman said cannily. “What else would he be after? There ain’t nothing.”
Without being asked, he began to do chores around the place. From drawing water he turned to chopping wood, which gave him the notion of sharpening the ax. One morning he brought a basket of half-rotten apples and fed them to her old sow. He mended harness and made himself acquainted with Bessie’s one mule. Bessie didn’t talk much to Eugene, but she decided he’d got a bee in his bonnet about her, so she figured to let him help her as long as the fit was on him. The weather turned mild, and he mentioned plowing. She said he’d better go help his pa if he wanted to plow, for she couldn’t pay wages.
“Don’t want wages,” he said.
As much as he could he ignored her son and her mother, although it was plain enough the old woman distrusted him and the child felt threatened. Only when they were by themselves did the young boy and the young man show their dislike. After the early physical advances he made to Bessie, he made no more. Both knew he was waiting for a sign from her. Then ten days after coming every day, he did not come.
Night came, but Eugene did not. Nor was he slouching beside the well next morning as Bessie half expected him to be. The feeling of his absence grew as the sun rose higher. It was a clear, dry day, and Bessie suddenly made up her mind to air bedding. Quilts were thrown over the clotheslines. Bessie’s featherbed and the old urine-stained mattress the boy slept on with his grandmother were laid on a slope of pine needles where the sun gradually drew out of them a smell as stale as it was palpably human. Bessie kept busy; she would not admit that she was waiting.
With dinner cooked and eaten, the afternoon passed. Cold supper finished and the weather remaining warm, they sat on the porch, like people dreading bad news. The boy went to sleep when twilight began to blur landscape, and Bessie woke him roughly and told him to go to bed. Her mother went inside with him. The dark deepened, and Bessie sat on. All was quiet inside the house. In the distance—from the Betchley farm? she wondered—a dog barked furiously and subsided abruptly. The night seemed stiller and lonelier than ever. Bessie sighed and rose tiredly from the sag-bottomed chair. Scratching her arm, which did not itch, she turned her face to the breeze to catch the odors of the night. In a meander she then made her way into the yard and around the house, coming at last to the outhouse beyond the barn. It was black inside, but there was, she thought wryly, nothing for her to look at, as she loosened her clothes and settled buttocks over the larger of two holes cut in the wooden seat. After sitting a time she wiped herself with a dry corncob, although she had performed no evacuation. When the door creaked, she knew it was not the wind. She cried out, but softly.
“It’s me.”
She was not surprised. She knew she had wanted something like it to happen; but she had not gone as far as deciding how she would behave, for to admit there was anything to decide would have been to admit too much. Her relief at recognizing Eugene hardened her voice. “What you doing here? Where were you all day, and yesterday?”
“Brought you something.” He reached for her hand and guided it to his penis, which he had drawn from his clothes before entering.
“I don’t want that!” She snatched her hand back.
“You do, Bess.”
“Get!” she commanded.
“If I been watching you, you been watching me too.”
“Get! Go!”
He slipped to his knees. She didn’t know what he was doing when she felt his head burrow under her dress and push upward. His mouth followed hair to her opening, and for a moment his teeth gingerly clenched the fatty mound above it before his tongue entered her. She stood stock-still with astonishment until released by the savagely comic thought: “Won’t get a young’un this way!” As shock dimmed to passive acceptance that stirred to vanity, he paused, and after a moment withdrew his head. Rising to his feet, he shoved her so that she sat on the seat. “Now you.” She didn’t understand. “You, me.” He took her head in both hands and pulled it to his penis. She flinched, but he held her. She allowed it to touch her lips, then to open them. Presently, he drew out, and she waited for him to lead her again. She could not see. She did not know how they were positioned, but everything began to move and meet—arms, bellies, crotches, mouths. In momentary panic she thought his thick tongue would choke her, his penis rend her, and then all eased and gave, and he began a steady, rhythmic motion. As they worked together, she was roused to clutch and groan with pleasure and he to grunt and then to beg, his voice caressing and cursing her until there was only one word spoken over and over to time his movements: “Mama—Mama! Mama—Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama—Maaaa!”
He twitched and died in her, his energy seeming to pass to her and become hers. She supported him now, encouraging his collapse and comforting his dying. “There, sh, there, sh, sh, sh—”
She almost slept but was suddenly alert when she heard another voice, her child’s, from outside the door, which Eugene blocked with his body.
“Mama! Is that you in there?”
She answered faintly, “Yes.”
He had sounded frightened.
“I’m in here,” she said, making her voice stronger. “What do you want?”
“I woke up and hollered and you never answered. Are you sick in there?”
“No.”
“You sounded funny.”
“Go to bed,” she said sharply. Each waited, sensing the other’s uncertainty. “Leon?”
“Yes’m.”
“Go on ba
ck to the house. If you want to pee first, pee in the yard but not on your grandma’s row of fern.” Again she waited. “Have you gone, Leon?” She decided that he had when there was no answer. Eugene stirred. He was on the floor, she on the seat. His head found and rested on her lap. She cradled it with her arms and kissed the dampness from his brows, not caring that his face felt greasy under the sweat or that his hair smelled of swamp and wood smoke.
7
Good timing by coincidence is always more pleasing than its achievement by deliberation, so Sarah was particularly glad to have a letter from Abraham Ezra Kendrick on the morning she attended the wedding of Roscoe Elk and Claribell. Abraham was fourteen years old, the son of Floyd, who until his death had been the only Negro overseer of a large plantation in that part of Georgia. Floyd and Sarah’s first husband, born a week apart, had been lifelong friends. Since Roscoe Elk’s father and grandfather had been in different ways responsible for the suicide of one and the murder of the other, Roscoe and Sarah shared the guardianship of the boy. Judged to be more than ordinarily quick at school, he suffered from overindulgence until Roman had the idea of sending him to Philadelphia to study. Roman had spent his early teaching career there, and Roscoe had read law there, so it seemed fitting. After their first doubts about letting the boy go so young, Sarah and Roscoe agreed to share the expense of his Northern education. It had turned out a good arrangement. Abraham was doing well; he had wanted just such independence to bring out his best. He wrote progress reports to his guardians alternately, which were shared immediately on receipt, for they were often as entertaining as they were detailed.
Benjamin had brought the mail from Highboro that morning. In his impatience during the time of waiting for Priscilla to give birth, he assumed errands and small chores that would have fallen to others another time. He also practiced to avoid his mother-in-law’s company, so when he delivered the day’s mail to Sarah, he was eager to accept her commission to carry a bundle of clothes to Bessie Marsh. There were some worn pieces Bessie might adapt for personal use, but Sarah always sent new things for Leon, and she had been disturbed by Benjamin’s recent report to her of his ragged appearance. The things she had packed today were stout common goods; Bessie could not claim they were too fine for regular use.
The Legacy of Beulah Land Page 4
