It was late morning when Benjamin turned his horse into the farmyard. Hearing a sound he identified as the beating of wet clothes, he followed it around the house to that area beside the well which Bessie used to do her washing. After presenting the bundle and the message Sarah had charged him with, he asked about the boy.
“He’s bound to be somewhere,” she answered. “He was here a while ago. Little as he is, he has his uses. Takes the cow to forage and totes wood and slops and is pretty good about keeping his eye on Ma. She can’t hardly see now, and he’s her eyes, you might say, when she needs him to be.” Bessie continued with her work after offering to stop and being told that Benjamin could stay for only a few minutes because it was getting on to dinnertime.
“How is Mrs. Ben?” this prompted Bessie to say. “I know she’s not had it yet or I’d have heard.”
“Her time’s overlong,” Benjamin said.
“Poor thing. I remember how tired I got carrying that young’un of mine.” Beating wet clothes again on a stump, she glanced at him and was gratified to see him turning his head and looking about. “Would you like to see the boy?” She lifted her voice. “Leon! You, Leon! Come and say howdy!” When there was no immediate response, she smiled. “Kind of bashful with folks he don’t know. Not that you or Miss Sarah are exactly strangers. Why, most of what we wear on our backs was give us by you and her. Leon! Come running to me when I call you!”
He did so, sprinting around the barn but stopping abruptly when he saw who was there.
“Morning to you, Leon,” Benjamin said.
The boy stared and came on.
“Say it nice like I taught you,” Bessie ordered him comfortably, “lest Mr. Ben decide you’re simple.”
“Morning, sir.”
“Brought you some clothes to wear, that’s what he’s done. Say ‘Thank you.’”
“Thank you, sir.”
Benjamin blushed with embarrassment for him. “How’s the—that kitten?” he asked to ease the moment and was dismayed to see that his question made the meeting worse. The boy looked wordlessly at his mother.
“Well,” she said, taking the response, “I hate to tell what happened to that poor mite. He went and got himself into my old sow’s pen, and she went for him. She’d go for me if I didn’t carry a stick when I went in there. It was terrible. The boy liked to cried his heart out the day it happened. I didn’t know what we’d do to shut him up.”
“I’ll bring you another,” Benjamin said to him.
The child’s look of apprehension increased. Turning, he fled.
“I told you how bashful he can be with strange folks, and he don’t in the everyday way know you, does he? Never mind him.”
“I’d like to know him.”
Bessie wiped her hands on her dress front and folded her arms. “What give you that notion, I wonder? Here he’s been ever since he was born, and good as you and Miss Sarah are about helping out, you never paid any attention to knowing him. Reckon it has to do with you about to have one of your own.” She corrected herself with a wink. “One you can at last call your own. But, hush, Bessie. Nobody wants to dig up old graves. Forget what was and march ahead, has always been my living guide.”
“He’ll be old enough for school in another year.”
“And big enough,” Bessie said, “to be some real help around the farm.”
“He must go to school,” Benjamin said.
She said vaguely, “Well, I don’t know. The school’s there and he’s here, and he’ll do more good working on the farm than squirming at a desk, is the way I look at it. I’ll see he learns to read and write, but otherwise—” She shook her head.
“I’ll send a man over to help you.”
“That ain’t it,” she observed judicially. “The boy’d be learning more here than he would at school, the kind of thing that will stand him in good for the future.”
“I want to educate him when he’s old enough.”
“Out here is going to be his life, this farm. I never remembered you, Ben—reckon I can call you that, with no one to hear me—you never set a lot of store by schooling as a boy. I’ve heard you say so.”
“Times were different,” Benjamin said.
“Well,” she said mildly, and turned back to work, as if they’d said all they could about the matter.
“You’ll think about it?”
“Yes, I will,” she agreed amiably, but in such a way as to show him she was merely humoring him. “Got to get ahead with these things. So much to do and spring practically here.”
“When do you want me to send the plowman to turn your ground and help you plant?”
“I meant to tell you,” she said. “You won’t have to do that this year. I’ve made a kind of—other arrangement. Don’t you worry about us. We’ll be all right. Tell Miss Sarah I asked after her health, and Mr. Troy too. She’s a well-meaning lady, and I have a lot of respect for her.”
“I’ll send a man anyway. You can use him for whatever needs doing, plowing or not.”
That was the moment Eugene chose to appear, looking slyly surprised to see Benjamin, whose arrival he had observed from the barn, where he was working. “Morning,” he called, and approached.
“Morning.” Benjamin looked inquiringly at Bessie.
“He’s helping me; ain’t you, Gene?”
“That’s right.”
“Being a real help.”
Benjamin knew he was being laughed at and didn’t understand.
“Morning I saw you last, I come on here,” Eugene explained. “Had got myself sopping wet somehow—” Bessie laughed aloud and checked herself. “She let me sit in the kitchen till I dried off. Since then she’s done a heap for me.”
“No more’n you done for me,” Bessie said with a simper.
“That’s account I’m sweet on you,” Eugene allowed.
“Listen to him!” Bessie screeched with delight.
“It’s so and you know it,” Eugene declared.
Bessie said to Benjamin, “You tell him I’m too old for him. He won’t listen to me, though I’ve tried. He just hangs around and won’t go home. That’s why I put him to work.”
Eugene said, “Wasn’t I willing?”
“Oh, you were willing enough, I won’t deny!”
“It ain’t a bad farm,” Eugene said. “All it needs is a man.”
Bessie laughed and dipped another load of clothes from the black pot in which they had been boiling. Dumping them on the stump with her stick, she began to pound them. “More to wash now, with his too,” she complained.
“When we going to get married?” Eugene teased her, as if Benjamin were not present.
“Just hear him!” Bessie appealed to Benjamin again. “Always after me. I had to promise I’d think about it. Only way us women folk can get a man to shut up.”
“When’s it to be, Bess?”
“Let you know when the plowing’s done!”
“I’m good at more’n one kind of plowing.”
“Don’t talk ugly front of Mr. Ben. I strictly forbid it.”
Benjamin said lamely, “I’ll be going.”
“Glad you come by,” Bessie said as if they had enjoyed a casual visit. “Give Miss Sarah my thank-you, bless her heart.”
He nodded and mounted his horse.
8
Roscoe Elk attended no church regularly, but he had arranged for a Reverend Curtis Odom to marry him to Claribell because, as he confided to Sarah, “He’s the only colored preacher I know who’s not a shouter.” The ceremony required less than five minutes and took place in Roscoe’s office. It was witnessed by Sarah, Roman, Selma, Pauline, and Mathilda Boland, the teacher who had paid early, particular attention to the welfare of the mother-child when she was more child than mother. Claribell appeared only a minute before the service and left a minute after it. She wore white, as she almost always did. Luck, starched stiff as a tombstone and bribed to silence, was held in check by Geraldine, both of whom entered and departe
d with Claribell. Roscoe had keyed the occasion to the ordinary; hence the brevity and office setting. Refreshment was token: a glass of claret and a plate of plain cake to be eaten from the fingers.
Roscoe and Sarah drank to each other’s good fortune. They were talking about Luck, and Sarah had just produced Abraham’s letter when Geraldine returned and whispered to Sarah that Mrs. Todd waited in the parlor and begged to see her most urgently. With a look of alarm, Sarah set down her glass and hurried from the room. Roscoe followed but paused outside the door of the parlor.
“Is it Aunt Nell?”
“No.” Jane appeared surprised at her apprehension. “Priscilla has started, we think. I was there, so I sent for Dr. Platt. Zadok went galloping. Where is Ben?”
“He went to Bessie Marsh’s for me.”
“He’ll want to be at home.”
Roscoe knocked and then entered without waiting. “Let me find him.”
“You are kind,” Sarah said gratefully.
“It’s your wedding day,” Jane objected.
Roscoe looked at her a moment before he turned and left them.
“He’s a strange man,” Jane said. “I’ve never understood him.”
They were soon at the house in the Glade, where they found Ann Oglethorpe on her knees at the bedside praying for her daughter while Freda worked around her to render immediate aid and comfort. Sarah lifted the mother to her feet as Jane began to assist Freda, both of them knowing more of what to expect and what would be needed than the older women.
Mrs. Oglethorpe resisted. “I stay with my child.”
“Jane and Freda will attend her,” Sarah assured her.
“It’s my duty.”
“Not beside her now—”
“I won’t desert her in this black hour!”
“You’ll only distress her if you stay.”
“My prayers will console her.”
Sarah, who was the stronger, led her into the hall. “Your prayers are to the Lord; He will hear them out here as well as in there.”
“I must be where I can hear her cries!”
“You would only add your own to them.”
“I am determined to share her suffering—”
“You will compound it if you do. Please.” Sarah maneuvered them into the sitting room. “Now come and sit down. This chair is a good one for waiting, and it is likely to be longer than we think, for it always is.”
Mrs. Oglethorpe pulled away and fell to the floor. “I shall not leave my knees until the ordeal is ended.” She clasped her hands as she raised eyes and voice. “O Lord, hear me now!”
“God is not deaf. If you must pray aloud, pray quietly.”
“Have Thy will of us, for we know that the punishment of lust is pain and sorrow. Spare my child if it be Thy will, and if it not be, take her from this vale of tears to Thy bosom—”
Sarah stared at her in alarm.
“We know that birth is pain, and life is pain, and death the greatest pain of all, as it can be our only way to salvation. The flesh does not fall into final corruption without final agony, and the smell of birth and death are an equal abomination—”
Thinking of Benjamin, Sarah seated herself in the hope of calming the other woman by example and engendering, if she could, an air of order to the event at hand. “I beg you to come and sit beside me, Mrs. Oglethorpe.”
“I cannot rest. My daughter has been sullied by a sinful man. Let her, O Lord, be purified in the fire of Thy wrath. Let her, if it be Thy will, find redemption in that fire and emerge a chastened spirit, no longer doomed to submit to the lust of the wicked—”
Sarah rose. “I cannot allow you to—”
“My voice shall not be stilled! Blessed Savior, smite the wicked and their granddams!”
Sarah took her by the arms and tried to lift her, but the woman twisted free. “Spare me, Lord, to see the wicked punished on this earth and in this house!”
Sarah delivered a slap to Mrs. Oglethorpe, the force of which shocked her to temporary silence. It was on this tableau the doctor entered.
Looking at them with only mild interest, he said, “I called, and no one came. However, I know the way.” He went into the hall.
Mrs. Oglethorpe cried after him, “If there is no hope, I must be told! I must be with my child in her dying hour and know that her heart is fixed on her Blessed Redeemer!”
Doctor Platt had as little patience as do most doctors. Further to that, he had experience of Mrs. Oglethorpe in sickrooms. “If you come in, I’ll leave the house.”
As Mrs. Oglethorpe considered the threat, Sarah made her way to the kitchen to see what she might do there. Food would certainly be needed, and Freda was busy. In the kitchen she found Freda’s mother.
“Zadok told me,” Rosalie said, “so I’m here.”
Sarah felt a wave of relief for the solid presence and good sense of the woman before her. “Thank you, Rosalie.”
“Mr. Ben is mine as much as my own children.”
“I know it,” Sarah said. “I’ll help you.”
Rosalie was about to refuse her when she saw Sarah’s head tremble and knew that she was afraid. “Yes’m,” she said instead. “You and me can do what’ll be needed.”
They set to work—and a good thing too, Rosalie announced when the visitors and messengers began to arrive. Friends meant well, no doubt, but they took no thought of the care they caused, only consulting their anxiety and curiosity.
Mrs. Oglethorpe observed something of this to Annabel and Frankie Saxon late in the afternoon, whereupon Frankie replied, “So true. I remember when mine were born.”
“Everybody came,” Annabel said. “And when they went home, they still sent servants for news. It is the way when these things happen in the important families. It is like the birth of princes. The child born this day will be the future master of Beulah Land.”
Emerging from the dining room, Sarah said tartly, “That child’s father is not yet in a position to hand it over; nor has he indicated that he is impatient to be. You will try to hurry me off to heaven, Annabel.”
Annabel laughed complacently. “You are shocking, Auntie Sarah.”
Frankie said, “Miss Sarah, I wish you’d put in a word for me with your husband. Mr. Troy promised to have the portrait done a week ago and has put me off. Now I fear it will not be ready for my little entertainment a week hence.”
Benjamin had arrived soon after his sister and grandmother, Roscoe Elk having met him on the road from the Marsh farm. Allowed to see his wife briefly, he was then banished from the room where the birth would take place. For a time he played host to callers, but he was too distracted to keep his temper with either the archly sympathetic or those whose concern was more genuine, and he retreated to the yard, where he found Zadok. When his day’s work was done, Daniel Todd came and joined them, and the three men walked and talked of the commonest things, which are matters of life to all farmers.
Casey appeared and went on small errands for Sarah, was everywhere, in fact, and nowhere for long. Sarah thought she had never loved him so well or needed him so much. It wasn’t what he said or did that gave her solace, but the love in his eyes reminding her who she was. Priscilla’s younger sister Elizabeth came and sat and cried, and her mother told her to go home and give her father supper. Three dozen came and sat and asked the same questions and were given the same answers; and the day wore on to evening.
Daniel went home to take supper with his sons and see that they went to bed, and then returned to wait for Jane, who had no thought of leaving her sister-in-law until the child was delivered. The woman in labor worked on in exhaustion, fainted and woke again. Her groans were low and few, but when they came, they were of such keen distress they harrowed the listeners more than steady screaming might have done. Terror showed in her eyes; she opened them only now and then, as if to make certain the world was still there.
The night advancing, an eerie quiet gradually possessed the house in the Glade. The woman who was
the center of all thoughts was attended by Dr. Platt, assisted by Jane and Freda, who had not left the room for more than a few minutes since entering it that morning. Although urged to go home, Rosalie kept vigil in the kitchen with Zadok, the two whispering now and then but speaking mainly with their eyes, ever ready to do anything needed. But nothing was needed, nothing wanted but for the time to be over. Benjamin sat with Sarah and Daniel, a bottle of brandy on the table beside them and glasses in their hands. They seldom spoke, for all had been said, and all waiting is finally silent. Apart from them sat Mrs. Oglethorpe, waking occasionally to look at the others with disapproval.
It was after midnight when Dr. Platt emerged and told them that the child had arrived. There was no keeping them out, nor did it matter, for Priscilla slept. “I have given her opium,” Platt said, collecting his tools. “I am going home and have some myself.”
Jane lifted the baby as Daniel held the lamp for them to look at her. “She’s a girl,” Jane had said to Benjamin. The baby’s closed and sleeping face was in shadow until Daniel moved the lamp another inch, and they saw the deep, disfiguring harelip.
Mrs. Oglethorpe found her voice. “She bears the mark of Cain, for she was begot by the devil’s disciple.”
9
Night had been mild, and morning promised fair. Benjamin did not wake until seven. In spite of the long birth day of the child and the short night since, he woke with acute awareness of the new life across the hall from his bedroom. He felt her nearness, savored their kinship, and found that he had accepted the fact that she was flawed. Dressing quickly, he went to look at her. Rosalie sat beside the cradle. There was wonder when he saw the child, but none that she was his. She was a girl, she had a harelip, she looked almost as raw as something yet unborn; but she was his, and his satisfaction was touched with no regret.
The Legacy of Beulah Land Page 5
