The Legacy of Beulah Land

by Lonnie Coleman

  “Leon’s not used to a man here.”

  “You and me ought to have us a baby.”

  “You’re the jealous one. If you don’t like it here, the road’s fifty feet from the door.”

  He scowled and was silent. She lifted a lid and stirred the contents of a pot. Replacing the lid, she wiped steamy hands on her dress front, saying in a conciliatory way, “Spring greens, fatback, pot dodgers. Ought to hold us till tomorrow morning.”

  The face he turned to her was as accusing and pleading as a child’s. “Come tonight,” he said.

  “If I’m not tired,” she half agreed.

  “Only time I know what’s on your mind is when I got you under me.” She looked at him steady and unsmiling, and his were the eyes to give way.

  Eugene did a man’s work and ate his three meals a day with them at the table in the kitchen, but he slept in the harness room of the barn, and that was where he and Bessie came together privately. It was true, as he said, that Leon and her mother resented him and feared his staying. The boy’s hatred was pure and simple; the old woman’s included the suspicion that Gene Betchley coveted the farm more than her daughter. Certainly Eugene had first dallied with the idea of making the place his own. Yet if he had roused Bessie to fevers she thought she’d learned to live without, he had in doing so become besotted with her. A few weeks had transformed her from a woman growing old to one in her prime.

  Bessie was suspicious too, but she knew her power over the younger man. She would not be hurried or surprised into anything more than she had already been. There was her son to think of and her mother. Looking at Gene with their eyes, she saw no reason they should love him or he them; but if she decided to marry him—and she saw certain advantages in doing so—then they would have to accept him. Gene was a hard worker now when he wanted something, but she was long acquainted with his shiftless father and brother, and with Gene’s own early history. It was hard to accept the fact that the boy she’d never bothered thinking about was a grown man with will and substance, as well as a body that could make her beg like a soul in hell. He was a great worry to her. Even as she acknowledged it, she longed for the hour she could go to him, and she thought: “Aye, God, better a host of worries than to live and die alone.”

  On the day they were returning from Savannah, Benjamin and Jane settled Velma with Bruce and left them for a while. Jane loved the train and enjoyed walking through it as she rode it. When they came to the dining car, they decided to stop for iced tea and to make conversation with other passengers, although their journey was not long enough for them to require a meal.

  As for Velma, she had taken the precaution of packing a basket in the boardinghouse kitchen that morning, for she feared that hunger might overtake her on the way home. As soon as they were out of the station she opened the basket and peeled a banana, then ferreted out a fried chicken leg and took alternate bites of chicken and banana. She had discovered bananas in Savannah, and Benjamin had been good enough to buy her a dozen just before they left.

  The man and woman across the aisle were whispering to each other. Velma knew they were talking about the baby, but part of her mind was occupied with the enjoyment of the scenery sliding past the window and the taste of her interesting combination of victuals. They were trying to decide something. He shook his head and smiled. She shook her head and frowned, then looked thoughtfully over and cleared her throat. “What’s wrong with that baby?” she asked.

  Banana and chicken consumed, Velma threw skin and bone out the open window before acknowledging that she’d heard by bringing her eyes to rest on the woman’s face. “Nothing wrong with this baby,” she informed her.

  Having made a beginning, the woman was determined not to retreat. “It looks different.”

  “Different?”

  “Different from other babies.”

  “Every baby looks different if you got any eye for babies,” Velma stated.

  “I mean funny-different,” the woman persisted.

  Velma’s eyebrows went up. She glanced at the sleeping baby on the seat beside her. She looked back at the woman. “Mrs.,” she said kindly, “I do not know how many babies you have seen, but speaking for myself who have seen a hundred or more, this baby here is the best I have ever set eyes on.”

  “Something wrong with her mouth.”

  “No ma’am,” Velma averred stoutly. She looked back at the baby. “You maybe mean that tee-niney red crease. Well’m, I can tell you about that.” Velma thereupon did so, with much emphasis on her own reactions to the doctors and nurses at the hospital and her “considerate opinion that the whole business of letting strange folks wearing spook dresses cut you up” was not something she would care to go through again.

  Both the man and the woman enjoyed the harrowing recital and at its conclusion, if they were not ready to agree with Velma that Bruce was the prettiest thing they ever did see, the woman was willing to praise her as a sweet, good-tempered little thing to have gone through so much.

  Five waited for the train.

  Standing on the platform when they heard the whistle blow and straining their eyes to espy the distant smoke, they made a picture. But Sarah’s hold on Davy’s hand and Daniel’s on Bobby Lee’s were more in the nature of physical restraint than familial affection. Casey Troy stood behind them holding his own hands.

  Benjamin having reclaimed his child, Velma was first to step off the train, and by wedging her empty basket in the doorway and dropping her shawl and tripping over the first step, managed to delay the moment of reunion. But seconds after she regained shawl, basket, and balance, Jane stepped down after her; and her sons were astonished to see their father push past them to crush his wife to his heart, whereas clearly the important matter to be settled was the number and quality of the lead soldiers they had been promised. As Casey attended to their luggage, Jane freed herself and bent to hug the boys, and Benjamin kissed his grandmother. Only then did he present his daughter for them to see.

  Studying her, Sarah said simply, “It will be better. That’s what they said, isn’t it? You wrote and told me that. As she gets older, the scar will fade some. It appears so prominent because it is all we look at now, but that will never be true again. It may not disappear entirely, but we shall note it ever less.”

  The Todds went home directly in Daniel’s buggy, the children longing to inspect their prizes, which Jane declined to show them on the station platform. Casey drove the Beulah Land carriage. Sarah said goodbye when Benjamin alighted at the Glade with Bruce and Velma, promising to come back later. Thus, Priscilla was allowed to greet her husband and child in more privacy than was usually vouchsafed the return of family members. She submitted to Benjamin’s embrace, but when he faced her around to see the baby in Velma’s arms, he felt her trembling. She looked and looked away. Turning, she walked swiftly from the porch into the house and to her bedroom, where she was presently heard weeping. Benjamin did not follow her.

  Mrs. Oglethorpe broke her vow not to set foot in the house again when her son-in-law was there. She wouldn’t, however, go further than the little parlor off the living room, waiting there for the child to be brought to her. Hands clasped as if in prayer, she peered long before delivering herself of two statements.

  “God is not mocked,” was the first.

  Mrs. Oglethorpe would have been surprised and offended to be told that she equated herself with the Lord, and in truth she did not; but she did impute to Him judgments and opinions that, properly speaking, were her own. She called herself a Christian, but her God was of the Old Testament.

  Her second pronouncement was: “She will never be a temptation to any man, and that I take as a blessing.”

  Mrs. Oglethorpe’s visit was brief. Priscilla showed herself when Sarah returned, but listened to the sensible words of the older woman without comment. Benjamin ate supper alone and after walking in the Glade for half an hour went to the nursery. Opening the door, he discovered Velma with the child in her lap. She had
bathed and fed her and was brushing her soft hair into decorative whorls, which the baby seemed to like, because she submitted amiably. “You is pretty,” Velma was saying. “Prettiest baby in the world.” For the first time that day Benjamin’s smile was genuine, as he stepped forward to congratulate both of them on coming home.

  12

  By common agreement the most dreaded social event of the year was Annabel Saxon’s family supper, which exacted its toll upon those who attended and those who served it on the last Sunday of every April. “Before the hot summer,” Annabel explained, although April was frequently marked by high temperatures, if not by that intense heat that would reduce them in August to mumbling, stumbling automatons. Many were the resolves to avoid the affair next time, and the ways considered were as ingenious as they were various. Yet when the night arrived, all who had been summoned attended, even as an execution is a magnet for a crowd.

  No one anticipated the occasion more gloomily than Annabel herself. Miser-mean, she grudged the expense. The servants complained a month before and sulked a week after. Something was always spilled, something broken. It meant that Annabel must cease or curtail her usual activities, and she vastly enjoyed a talent for scolding and harrying as she organized the female concerns of the community. With the bleakest of sighs she decided, however, that it must be done. Rank imposes obligation was a dictum never far from her mind. Was she not the wife of the town banker and the daughter of Oaks, which for nearly a century before the war had been one of the greatest plantations? She knew her duty.

  Each year the guest list grew longer. There were never enough deaths to balance out the births. At last night’s supper more than forty sat down at two tables, the young ones better off at theirs on the cool side porch than their elders crowded into the stifling dining room. The young children, attended by their mammies, were included because they were family. They must learn from the earliest age what that meant and accept the superiority and ascendancy of Annabel Saxon. No one was spared, except the dying.

  Children who played peacefully together every other day spat and fought and cried, and the mammies quarreled with each other as they tried to pacify their charges. Adult relatives who might ordinarily meet in harmony and even affection were inspired to contradict and accuse. Why the party always went badly might only be guessed. Perhaps it was nothing more than the lack of any desire in the hostess to give or take pleasure.

  It was, Sarah said to Jane, the only time she caught herself ready to snap at Casey, the best of men and most loving of husbands. As antidote to the predictably vexing evening, Sarah and Jane had taken to using the day after it for what they called their cemetery drill. This was a sort of work ceremony initiated by the first mistresses of Oaks and Beulah Land, whose cemetery plots abutted as nearly as their home plantations. Although it would be easy to command others to the work, Sarah and Jane enjoyed it, because for the day they were able to forget routine responsibilities, to talk about any and every thing that occurred to them, and to remember their dead with more of speculative interest than grief. It was always a happy day. Shears, hoes, rakes, twig brooms, and gardening tools were tied to the back of Sarah’s buggy; and taking a basket of victuals that included a bottle of wine, they drove off to be their own women and no one else’s until sundown.

  Others were not tolerated: no child or friend or husband. Doreen Davis used to help them but had not since moving to Highboro to live with Miss Eloise Kilmer and her cats five years ago. When Benjamin married Priscilla, Sarah invited her to join in the family ritual, but Mrs. Oglethorpe advised her daughter against it. Mrs. Oglethorpe rivaled Annabel Saxon in her dedication to duty, but only as long as she found it indoors. She was ready to do the Lord’s work, she vowed, but ladies did no labor where they might be observed by passers-by.

  Ending a long silence as they hoed grass alongside each other, Jane said, “Do you think Frankie has changed?”

  “By asking, you are suggesting that she has. I don’t know. I don’t see her often or think about her much.”

  “Last night she seemed gentler.”

  “How?”

  “Everyone,” Jane said, “knows about Bonard’s drinking. Usually, the more he drinks, the harder her jaw sets. Last night she ignored him altogether.”

  Sarah removed the straw hat she wore against the sun and wiped sweat from her forehead with a dirty hand. “If that is your evidence of a new softness in the lady, I shan’t credit it. People are never more typical of themselves than when they surprise you. I am forever being surprised by the people I know best; and when I stop to think about it, it seems to me they are only being true to themselves.” Replacing her hat, she wielded the hoe again and caught up with Jane, who had worked a little ahead.

  “When you turn the particular to the general, it means you don’t want to talk about the particular.”

  Sarah hit her lightly on the rump with her hoe handle. “Very well, missy. Five years ago I’d have said there was little question that Frankie would make Benjamin unhappy and that Priscilla would be a good wife. The one problem was Mrs. Oglethorpe, and they seemed to be getting around that. I was a little amused when both Benjamin and Priscilla were at pains to tell me how good the other was. That should have been my warning.”

  “Bonard’s drinking hasn’t kept him from doing his work at the sawmill. Papa says he couldn’t run it without him.”

  “Bonard doesn’t have much choice. There was no place for him at the bank. Blair Second is clearly going to get that; he’s his father all over again. The way Frankie spends, Bonard would be a pauper if he didn’t work at the mill and work hard.”

  “Frankie seems a good mother.”

  “Fanny is a pretty child,” Sarah conceded, “and Blair Third is more nearly civilized than are most boys of five.”

  “All children are on their best behavior at Aunt Annabel’s, even mine. She scares them.”

  Sarah laughed. “And yet, think of what her own were. When you were children, you and Benjamin used to fight them. One day right over there,” she pointed with her hoe handle, “you shinnied up that big angel and whacked Bonard with your Bible every time he tried to untie your sash. Benjamin was at the base doing his best to kill Blair Second.”

  “Prudence is getting fat.”

  “I don’t imagine anyone minds,” Sarah said.

  Jane giggled. “I don’t think Blair Second minds anything except the bank. He and Blair First both were born to ignore the women they married. The bankers never looked once during supper at the bankers’ wives.” They were quiet for a little time merely working and sweating, the only sound that of their hoes chopping and prying up the roots of crabgrass. “I saw Ben watching Fanny and Blair Third.”

  “Benjamin has children on his mind. I wish Priscilla did, but she doesn’t. I’m sorry, but I can’t love her. I’ve tried for five years. She defies loving. Maybe Benjamin was thinking last night that Frankie would have given him children, and maybe she would have. Still, he loves Bruce in a way I feared no one would. She’s a happy, good baby. I give Benjamin and Velma credit for that, not Priscilla. I’ve never seen her look at her without frowning.”

  After a moment Jane said, “I saw Frankie watching Benjamin last night.”

  “You appear to have spent the evening watching people watching people. It was one way to get through it, I suppose. Millie’s cooking is down. The asparagus was overcooked, and the coconut cake had a dip in the middle. Josephine wouldn’t have served either to guests.”

  “I think it was the worst ever of Aunt Annabel’s family funerals.”

  “That’s like saying the devil’s left horn is sharper than his right,” Sarah said. “Casey maintains they are the same every year, even to the overdone asparagus. He claims to be able to predict each remark, who will make it, and at what point it will be made. He knows exactly when to listen for the crash of the first plate at the children’s table and the first shouting from the kitchen.”

  “We’re going to Frankie’s for
supper on Thursday a week.”

  “Why?” Sarah said.

  “When we were standing around admiring Aunt Annabel’s portrait again, Frankie reminded Ben that he hadn’t yet seen hers. He and I were in Savannah with Bruce when Casey finished it and you all went to look at it. She said we must see it and invited us on the spot: Priscilla and Ben, Dan and me.”

  “Mm.”

  Sarah wandered away and stood frowning down at a tombstone. Jane came to stand beside her. It was the grave of Edna Davis, the old mistress of Oaks and great-grandmother to Jane and Benjamin.

  Jane picked gravel from a split in her hoe blade. They never brought good hoes to the cemetery drill. “You have a special look on your face when you think of her,” Jane said.

  Sarah said, “She was my friend. Women need each other, but they seldom trust each other. You and she are the only true friends I’ve had among my own sex. I get on better with men.” They turned from the Davis graves back to the Kendrick ground. Sarah picked up a twig broom from the ground and brushed away old leaves from the grave of Felix Kendrick. “Aunt Nell knew we were coming and said to get her place ready. ‘By my beloved Felix,’ she said, ‘only not too close.’”

  “Did she love Uncle Felix, or did she marry him because her sister married the other Kendrick brother? Sisters don’t marry brothers the way they used to, do they?”

  Sarah said, “She’s never talked about it, and she wouldn’t. From bits and pieces over the years I’ve gathered that the intimate side of marriage was not to her liking. Certainly Uncle Felix took his pleasures where he found them, and he found them everywhere. In other ways he and Aunt Nell were devoted to each other. When he had his stroke, she wouldn’t leave him until he was past danger. Then she happily turned him over to the Negro woman he’d been taking to the hayloft for years. She’s a strange one, Aunt Nell. She loves all of us, I suppose, but eating was her only passion.”

  “I can’t believe she’s dying,” Jane said.