“Was it only that?”
“I am not a harlot.”
“You don’t have to be to enjoy your husband. Some women—”
“Spare me your knowledge of ‘some women’—”
“I’m sorry.”
“This is not a time to talk, Benjamin. Please leave me so that I may sleep.”
“Let me sleep with you. I promise to do no more.”
“No.”
His voice faltered with the words: “I beg you to let me sleep beside you tonight.”
“I should not close my eyes. You make me say now what I’d have said later. I don’t want to anger you, but I see no other way.” She stopped to consider her words. “I will live with you and do my duty, but I will not sleep with you.”
“I don’t understand.”
She hesitated, sat down again in the chair, and pulled the robe about her legs. “It violates my feelings for you. I cannot respect you as I should when I see you sweating and red and uncontrolled. It must not happen again.”
“Tell me why,” he said coldly.
“I have prayed, and God has answered me that it is wrong to lie with you. The miscarriages were the expression of God’s disapproval. Can you believe them to be anything else? The child’s defect is God’s last warning—”
“Priscilla!” For a moment he was too saddened to say more.
She hurried on. “If we let ourselves have another child, it will die, and I will die. I know it. That is what God tells me. I have heard His voice in my heart.”
“You have heard your mother!” he said, voice and anger returning.
“I knew you would say that, because you don’t want to hear the truth. That’s why I hoped I shouldn’t have to tell you. I wanted you to understand without my speaking.”
He said, “You have no love for me.”
“If you will let me alone, I will try to love you in God’s way. But I cannot love you—if that is what you call it—in your way. I swear I cannot and will not.”
Again he said, “You have no love for me.”
She shook her head. “Promise me, Benjamin, to pray on this. You don’t see now because you don’t want to see, but if you pray as I have done, it will be clear to you. Do this not only because I ask but for your salvation. Unless you repent of past sins—”
“What sins?”
“Ask God’s forgiveness. He is a stern God, but He will hear you as He has heard me.”
“You call my loving a sin?”
“What of Bessie Marsh and the others before her? Is that not sinning? Even now you go to her house—”
“I go to see my son.”
“He is a child of sin and doomed as you will surely be if you do not beg God—”
“I’ll beg for nothing! You have no love for me?”
“I am afraid. You have not borne a child and you can’t know the terror of being a woman. I at last understood that all I endured was the result of the things you did, the things you wanted me to do, but always your pleasure!”
“I can never hope for another child?”
“It would die. I would die.”
“You want me to live a celibate life?”
“You want to make me your whore?”
“You were to be my wife and I your husband. Together we were to be what we hadn’t been apart.”
“I have said all. I am exhausted.”
“I am to have no love—”
“You are like a little child. Go to bed.”
He turned and left the room, slamming the door behind him. Next door the baby woke and cried. He stopped dead in the hallway until he heard Velma’s voice, murmuring and soothing. It was a warm night, and the door of the nursery was open. He waited until the baby was quiet, and then he went into his room and closed the door.
The windows were open to the air and moonlight. He needed no lamp. When he had undressed, he pulled back the top bedclothes and lay naked on his back. Going over everything Priscilla had said to him; he knew there was no way of changing her. He even began to understand why she felt as she did. He had not wept for a long time, but he did so now, turning on his face as if to hide his grief and his need.
15
“Tell me what you’re thinking.”
He looked at her and then at the plate from which he had eaten. They were on the west porch, Sarah having asked Mabella to set the breakfast table there because it was a warm morning, getting on for hot even at seven o’clock.
“The cantaloupe,” she said, “wasn’t ripe, but it’s good to have the taste again. They’ll soon be better. I don’t understand your putting pepper on it, but then some people like salt on watermelon. You ate two eggs and a slice of ham and two biscuits and some honey. I’ve known you to make a bigger breakfast when you had a fever and could hardly swallow. Something is wrong.”
“Nothing, Grandma.”
“I would do almost anything for you, Benjamin, short of taking a butcher knife to Casey or Jane.”
He was silent.
Sarah sighed. “It’s like priming a pump until you wonder if there’s water after all. You went to Bonard and Frankie’s last night. Did something happen there?” He shook his head. “Very well. You’ve just had word that Sherman is coming through again.” He frowned; he was not listening. The jokiness left her voice. “What’s the matter, boy?” He looked straight at her then, and his eyes misted.
Clearing his throat, he coughed, laughed, clapped his hands, and stood up. “Time for you and me to take a walk, my lady.” He reached for her hand and led her down the broad, shallow steps. They walked and he talked. It was not easy for him. After a while they paused at the swing Casey had rigged from a limb of one of the live oaks for Davy and Bobby Lee. Sarah had not spoken or tried to help him. Still listening, she sat on the swing seat, and Benjamin began to push it back and forth, first gently, then higher and higher. The regular movement freed his tongue; he said everything he could say to anyone. When he tired of pushing the swing in the regular way, he caught it and twisted the ropes together, letting it go, spinning Sarah around.
“Stop!” she demanded, braking herself with a foot to the ground. “You make me dizzy. Let’s go over there.” They strolled in the direction she indicated to a bench circling the whitewashed base of an oak tree, and for a time they sat quietly, considering what he had told her. As if continuing a thought she said, “You have Bruce.”
He agreed with a nod. “I want a son too.”
She hesitated, knowing that what was in her mind was important not only to them but to Beulah Land, because it carried a commitment she had never before made. “You have a son.”
“He isn’t mine.”
“We must think of a way to get him.” Though she said it lightly, her face was serious.
“Take him from his mother?”
“You can’t have her too, nor do you want her, I used to think Bessie a simple girl, but that was simple of me; and now the Betchley man is living with her she’s sly as moonshine. I’ve worried about Leon. I didn’t allow him your grandfather’s name to grow up ignorant in the middle of nowhere. She’s told us she’s no intention of letting him go to school after he learns to read and write. It’s time for me to do something. You’d better keep out of it. Women take advantage of you. They don’t take advantage of me.”
“What will you do?”
“She’ll guess what I want,” Sarah reckoned. “I must put fat bait on my hook.”
He laughed outright and rose from the bench. “I’d better get to the fields.”
“Why?”
“I’ve got all the men hoeing grass; it took over the cotton after last week’s rain.”
“Zadok doesn’t need you to keep them at it. Go away for the day. Are you certain there’s no changing her feeling about you?”
“I am,” he said grimly.
“Then forget her,” she said.
“I can’t; she’s my wife.”
“I don’t mean put her out of your house. Put her out of yo
ur mind. Get your pride back. I’ve seen it drained out of you. I’m not suggesting that you be foolish but live your life as a man if she won’t let you be a husband.” Sarah left the bench, and they began to walk back to the house. “She isn’t going to be one of us after all,” she said musingly. “I thought she would. I wasn’t born to Beulah Land either, I married it. I had a letter from Abraham yesterday. He hates Latin and has been to a play at the Walnut Street Theater. Take the letter to Roscoe for me. That’ll start you. Tell him to come see me when he’s read it, and if Luck is with him, say I send her a kiss.”
“What if she wants me to deliver it?” he said teasingly.
“She wouldn’t be the first little darky you’ve kissed.”
An hour later Benjamin had delivered the letter, and Roscoe, swinging Luck into his arms, came to the porch to watch him go. As he mounted his horse, the child wiggled fat fingers at him and repeated, “Bye-bye-bye.”
“Goodbye, Lucky. I’ll tell Grandma you’re coming to see her tomorrow.”
“I’ve got a new pink dress.”
“She’ll be jealous,” Benjamin said. The girl laughed gleefully.
Down the carriageway he saw his Great-aunt Selma on the porch of the school waving to a visitor in a buggy. The buggy moved off; Selma went back inside without seeing him. She had become nearsighted from so many years of teaching, and Benjamin suspected that she was selective about what she saw, as well. He thought of stopping to visit, but she looked busy, and he was curious to know who was in the buggy. Trotting his horse ahead, he came alongside as the rig turned into the main road and saw that its driver was his hostess of the evening before. She was as surprised as he, and they laughed at each other as they explained. Her errand had been not dissimilar to his own. Annabel, who considered herself the principal patroness of the school, had asked her to deliver a bundle of clothing she’d bullied town acquaintances into contributing for the girl pupils. Because of the heat and the length of the drive, Annabel was disinclined to make the journey herself. A servant might have been sent, but that would have looked cold, and Annabel prided herself on her humanity when she thought of it. Besides, she wanted the message of gratitude to be returned to her intelligibly, not garbled by one of the Negroes, so she persuaded Frankie that the thing she needed after her evening party was a morning of country air.
Surprise and amusement gave way to ease and eagerness to please as they trotted their horses along at an equal pace. Benjamin realized that it was the first time he and Frankie had been relaxed together. Certainly they had not been during the days he courted her; he’d been too much in love. Perhaps it needed accident for it to happen. For once he could think her pretty without feeling compelled to say so. Her complexion fair, her color high, her face shone rosily in the heat, which she appeared not to mind, although there was no breeze except that made by their motion, which was hardly enough to stir her hair or the open collar of the voile dress she wore.
He decided that she was without artifice today because she didn’t need it. They were alone together, so she could be herself. This was the way it might have been if they had married each other.
They were delighted with the morning; gaiety sparked between them. At a junction she slowed her horse to a walk, as did he, and she pointed with her whip. “Where does that road go?”
“Through woods for half a mile before farmland begins again.”
“I’d like the shade.”
“Do you want company?”
“Yours, yes.”
As they turned off the main road, she saw a tree full of yellow plums. “Look.”
He stopped his horse and without dismounting picked and ate one. “Not yet sweet,” he said, tossing another into her lap.
“I want some anyway.”
He gathered a dozen and tied them into his handkerchief before following her down the road with woodland on both sides. Benjamin knew it; it was the one he used to take five years ago when he squired Bessie away from the family farm for dalliance. It was Frankie, not he, who decided the stopping place. Was it where he used to leave his buggy? He didn’t remember, but it was pretty and inviting with its brown pine needles covering the ground and the pungent smell of green pine in the air.
As he dismounted and tied his horse, she stepped down from the buggy and secured hers. “For a Savannah girl you know your way with a horse and buggy,” he said.
“I learned because I like to be independent.”
The thought of his situation at home and her closeness here gave him a partial erection, and before he could try to hide it he saw that she was aware of it. She strolled a little way into the woods, and he followed with the handkerchief of plums. “Have you never been here before?”
She shook her head, bending a low, leafy tree limb out of the way. Smiling, she waited for him in the open space beyond. “I don’t believe there’s anyone else in the world.”
He untied the handkerchief and held the plums before her in his open palms. Instead of taking one, she looked directly into his face with an invitation that was clearly beyond flirtation. The plums scattered as he let them go, and she came against him.
At nine o’ clock there had been no thought of her in his head. At ten they’d met by accident. Before eleven they were lovers. And now, as they lay side by side on the buffalo robe he’d fetched from the buggy, they became friends.
“That’s what we missed,” she said.
When he reached for it, her hand met his. “I suppose we mustn’t meet again.”
“Why?” she asked.
“I’m Bonard’s cousin.”
“That keeps it in the family,” she said. “Very sensible and Southern.”
“I’ve betrayed Bonard’s trust,” he declared.
“He betrayed yours five years ago, and so did I. Good revenge for you.”
“I don’t feel that way.”
She let go his hand and turned on her side to look at him. “I know you don’t. You’re a good man, Ben. I shouldn’t have let you go.”
“You fell in love with Bonard,” he excused her.
“I was no more in love with Bonard when I married him than I’d been with you earlier. I was tired of being poor, and I despised my silly family. I wanted a more substantial life than theirs, and the way to get it was plain.”
“You weren’t in love with me?” he said.
“Ha! I’ve touched your vanity. Maybe a little if it pleases you to hear it. But more important: Beulah Land was to be yours.”
“You couldn’t have been that calculating.”
Without apology she said, “I was concerned for the future and didn’t allow myself the luxury of swooning over your Adam’s apple.”
“I was in love with you.”
“When did you stop being?” she asked interestedly.
“On January 1, 1874.”
“Do you know the exact moment too?”
“It was when I paid a formal call on you and Bonard and found out you were going to have a baby.”
She did not laugh, but she was amused.
“Do you want me to fall in love with you again?” he said.
“That would be unwise. I shall always be Mrs. Saxon.”
“Why did you decide not to become Mrs. Davis?”
She looked at him with surprise. “Surely you knew. Because of the child Bessie Marsh was going to have. Your child who might one day try to claim what was yours. Cold caution on my part. The crux of the matter, if you remember, was your refusal to deny that the child was yours.”
“How could I lie?”
“It’s the easiest thing in the world.”
He bent and kissed her and kept his face close to hers. “Is that a lie?”
“A sweet one,” she said.
“Would it also amuse you to know that it was right here Bessie conceived the child that made you change your mind?”
Lifting her face, she bit him on the chin.
He pulled away and began to laugh. “You’re jealous!”
“Vanity,” she said. “Never compare women except in your mind.” She ran her hand back of his neck. “You need a haircut.”
“In five years of marriage Priscilla has never told me I needed a haircut.”
“Maybe she doesn’t look at you,” Frankie said. “You need a haircut.”
He put his face close to hers again and whispered, “Don’t you love me a little?”
“I’m glad you don’t chew tobacco. Bonard does, in addition to smoking those stinking Cuban cigars.” She sighed. “At this moment I love you a little, but an hour from now my mind will be on something else, and so will yours.”
He kissed her long and fully. “Not if you stay.”
She drew away. “That will be all for today.”
“I must say you’re cool about it,” he complained.
“We don’t have to count three and drown. We’ll meet again.”
“Do you think we should?”
“Certainly.” She rose briskly from the buffalo robe. “Shake the pine needles out before you put it back in the buggy.”
“Do you feel guilty?”
“No,” she said. “You do.”
“Mm.”
“Enjoy it while it lasts; it won’t last long.” She had begun to arrange her hair and clothes.
“Not guilty about Priscilla,” he said. “It’s Bonard. We were boys together.”
“He’s told me about that,” she said drily. “But you weren’t real friends, were you? Or how do you account for his taking me away from you without a qualm? That was my trump card. He enjoyed cutting you out.”
“Did he say so?”
“Did he not!”
“The bastard!”
“You speak, sir, of the father of my children.”
“Oh.” He blushed.
“Ben,” she chided him, “I joke about everything when I trust someone. Let me trust you.”
“Yes,” he said.
She was ready to go. He shook and folded the buffalo robe.
“I’m not saying Bonard is a bad husband; he isn’t. He gives me a house and a position that I wanted and enjoy. I’ll not disappoint him much in those areas. I’ll be a proper good mother. I’ll manage his house and keep him out of trouble. Without me he’d have gone bad, you know. Everyone says I spend too much money and make him work too hard, but what else has he to do with his life? Before me he wasted it on bets on horse races and drink and women. Now he lives a decent life and he’s better off. His mother was quick to understand that. We don’t like each other, but she knows my value.” They began to walk toward the buggy. “I’m not a romantic girl, and you mustn’t expect me to be. But I’ve always liked you, and I’ll be your friend if you’ll be mine.”
The Legacy of Beulah Land Page 9
