The Legacy of Beulah Land

by Lonnie Coleman

  “What about you?” he asked.

  “Benjamin,” she said firmly, “no woman who leaves you to rust is worth a twig of my conscience.”

  Ann Oglethorpe ordered Priscilla to wait in the buggy and stepped down into the Cooper front yard. It was big and bare of grass or flowers, shaded by three large oaks. Approaching, they had seen Ford Cooper raking leaves and adding them to one of the fires smoldering in the ditch that separated his front yard from the public road.

  “Morning, Mrs. Oglethorpe,” he said, strolling to meet her.

  “Mr. Cooper, put aside your rake and lead me to my daughter, if she is here.”

  Ford Cooper dropped his rake and left it where it fell, but it was a courteous rather than an obedient gesture. “She is, ma’am. Your daughter and mine since last night. I’m happy to have her and only sorry it happened in a secret way.” He lifted his voice. “Mrs. Ben, leave your horse and buggy and come in with your mama. You’re both welcome today and any day, though I don’t recollect your coming before, even when Mrs. Cooper was alive to receive you.” There was in his tone something of warning, not to Priscilla but to her mother, that she must not rely overly on his good manners.

  “Thank you, Mr. Cooper,” Priscilla answered. “I’ll just wait in the buggy.”

  “As you will. How is your good husband?”

  “Tolerable,” Priscilla answered coolly.

  “Miss Sarah and hers?”

  “Well, I believe.”

  “The Todds well too, I hope.”

  Mrs. Oglethorpe turned on him impatiently. “Mr. Cooper, it’s not a time for your old-fashioned courtesies. You know why I’ve come. Please take me to Elizabeth at once or tell her to come out to me. Perhaps that will be best.”

  “I can only offer you my hospitality,” Ford Cooper said slowly. “Elizabeth is my son’s wife and not one for me or any other to order: do this, do that. If she wants to see you, I expect she will. I know she does, if you come in the right spirit.”

  Mrs. Oglethorpe marched past him, across the wide yard, up the steps, across the porch, and through the front doorway without a knock or a call for permission to do so. “Elizabeth! It will do no good to hide from me! I have come to have it out with you and in no mood to—” She paused, finding herself in the living room and face to face with her daughter and Tom Cooper. “Elizabeth, tell me what you have done.”

  The girl giggled involuntarily. Tom blushed but spoke up clearly. “Elizabeth and I were married last night, Mrs. Oglethorpe. We are husband and wife and ask your blessing. We’d have come to you as soon as we heard we’d be welcome.”

  Ignoring him, Mrs. Oglethorpe fixed her daughter with a grim look. “Is it so?”

  Elizabeth nodded and was breathless when she spoke. “We came straight here from Beulah Land last night. Papa Ford had the preacher waiting, and we were married in five minutes. Then everybody drank a glass of peach nectar, and it was good.”

  Ford Cooper had followed his guest. “May I offer you a glass of the same, ma’am? It’s made by me, and I vouch for everything made or grown by Coopers, father and son.”

  Mrs. Oglethorpe’s eyes had not left Elizabeth. “You are married?”

  “Mrs. Tom Cooper,” Elizabeth whispered.

  “The preacher’s name.”

  “Reverend Bob Stewart.”

  “Methodist,” Mrs. Oglethorpe said as sourly as if he had been a Mohammedan.

  “You spent the night here with this man.”

  “We are married; this is our home,” Tom Cooper said.

  “You are ruined.”

  “I am happy, Mama. I wish you’d understand that.”

  “I will not call you daughter again. Whether you are what you call happy, I do not consider. You have misled, deceived, lied, sinned against your mother and father and sister. We do not forgive you, nor shall we ever. Can you speak of happiness when I tell you that you have broken your father’s heart? He will not allow you into the house or speak to you again. He would have come himself to say so but that he is so overcome by the wickedness of your behavior. You may have your clothes but wait for me to send them to you. Do not come to us now or ever.”

  29

  While it afforded some reward, her visit to the Cooper farm was not an event Mrs. Oglethorpe might reflect upon with unqualified satisfaction. There had not been the guilty cringe or remorseful tear she had anticipated. She considered stopping at Beulah Land. The time of day should find Benjamin Davis out of doors and she could depend upon herself to put Mrs. Todd and Mrs. Troy out of countenance for their negligent chaperonage, at the same time suggesting complicity in her younger daughter’s path to perdition. Yet there was ever something unpredictable about the response of Sarah Troy, and she did not want another half success. She would return home to ponder matters.

  Doing so, she found Mr. Oglethorpe in the crowded, small room he called his library, in which he kept war mementos and books, letters and journals, and the swords that had belonged to his sons. To have discovered him lost in a book would have ill pleased her. She found him instead so far capable of forgetting their present trouble as to be dozing benignly in front of the modest fire he had made, snug in his worn velvet chair, beard touching his chest, eyes closed, his one hand cradling on his lap the kerchief that had been taken from the corpse of his younger son where he had fallen at Sharpsburg. Such was the poor man’s only comfort: to love and dream of the dead. Seeing him so, Mrs. Oglethorpe’s outrage at his peaceful escape from disappointment exploded in a barrage of censure.

  Mr. Oglethorpe woke, stared at her first blankly and then with sad comprehension. He made no effort to defend himself. His eyes filled with tears of abhorrence, and he died. It was the ultimate act of denial, and no wonder it infuriated Mrs. Oglethorpe. She continued cursing him until her daughter, alarmed at the violence of language, intruded upon the room and saw the state of things. She called out to their one general servant who came and provided during the next half hour all the clichés of comfort in calamity anyone could want. But Mr. Oglethorpe had escaped, and Mrs. Oglethorpe could not follow him into Valhalla.

  Challenged by fresh tragedy, she rose to meet it with all the considerable strength at her command. News of Elizabeth’s runaway marriage was being enjoyed when word of her father’s death circulated to thrill the town further. A sigh alone from the doubly bereaved Mrs. Oglethorpe would have been enough to link the two events forever in the minds of the townspeople, but she did not satisfy herself with anything so modest as that. It was immediately put about that the old soldier had died of a heart broken by his youngest child. A moment’s sensible reflection would have shown such to be unlikely if not impossible after what he had endured, but sudden marriages and even more sudden deaths do not stimulate the exercise of reason. Eager relays sped the information that Mrs. Oglethorpe disowned Elizabeth and forbade her to see her father in death or to attend his funeral. When the news reached Beulah Land, Sarah and Benjamin and Jane set out immediately to the Oglethorpe house. Having exiled himself from his mother-in-law’s company since Bruce’s birth, Benjamin waited on the porch while his sister and his grandmother entered.

  Sarah told Ann Oglethorpe that Benjamin had commissioned her to include his condolences with her own and that he was at the door to be commanded by her and his wife. Whatever a man might be needed for, he begged to be allowed to do. Mrs. Oglethorpe stared at her visitor briefly. “Nothing,” she said. “You may tell him nothing is required of him. Now, ever.”

  Sarah turned to Priscilla. “Perhaps you would go to the door and speak to him yourself.”

  “I pray you,” Mrs. Oglethorpe said with a glower, “leave me this daughter, as she is my single comfort and support.”

  “As you will.” Sarah shifted her eyes slowly back to the mother. “I shall go now to Elizabeth, who will surely be much distressed. May I take her word that you’d welcome her comfort too? I beg you, ma’am!”

  “You may not interfere in that way, madam.”

  L
eaving Benjamin in town to offer his services discreetly to the Reverend Horace Quarterman of St. Thomas’s and Jane with Priscilla to supply what practical aid she might, Sarah drove the buggy directly to the Cooper farm. Having heard that her father was dead and that her banishment was to continue, Elizabeth was weeping. Her husband and father-in-law had tried to console her, but so unused were they to having an intimate female relation, they welcomed with relief the appearance of Sarah. Sarah’s sympathy was simple and unsentimental, and Elizabeth soon recovered her balance and surprised them all by saying, “My poor father. Do you think Mama killed him?”

  “It may indeed be so,” Sarah replied with a calmness that astonished the two men, and with more truth than she knew. “Mrs. Oglethorpe possesses an excitable temper not generally appreciated, but I well remember her several tantrums at the time Benjamin and Priscilla were contriving to marry. I can believe that she might today have expressed herself to your father in intemperate terms on the subject of you and Tom. Mr. Oglethorpe was a gentle soul. His experience on the battlefield did little to prepare him for violent family exchanges.”

  “Still, I am to blame.” Reassured, but ready to deny that she was, she wept again, but not for long. Withdrawing after a moment or two from the embrace Tom offered, she dried her eyes and face and produced a smile to thank the three for their patience with her.

  Ford Cooper looked more cheerful. “I’ll go to the kitchen and tell Mercy to boil some coffee!”

  “No need, Father,” Elizabeth said, “if you will allow me.”

  She stepped briskly out of the room.

  “She is a good young woman,” Ford said to himself as much as to his son and neighbor.

  Sarah responded warmly, “She is, Mr. Cooper. I have always found her as sensible as she is pretty. I regret Mrs. Oglethorpe’s attitude toward her daughter’s choosing to marry and should like to say, since there has been no time to say it before, that I think Elizabeth has done an excellent thing for herself—as well as for you, Tom. I am sorry she is to be kept from the funeral. It is not right.”

  “As to that,” Tom said, “she won’t be. My wife is subject to no one’s dictates but her own. If she wants to go, I’ll take her. I consider her claim to be there as a daughter equal to her mother’s claim as a wife.”

  Ford Cooper said, “I knew the man long if not well, and nobody will keep me away, though it’s not my church.”

  “You will do me honor,” Sarah said, “if the three of you share our family pew for the funeral.”

  Priscilla went to the Glade for an hour for clothes she needed in town, but she did not see Benjamin, since he was attending to a working party at the time. She left some lines to let him know she would return in a few days and to say, “If you think it fitting to attend, the funeral is at ten o’clock day after tomorrow. It would be best for me to sit with Mama and you with whoever comes from Beulah Land, as I imagine someone will feel obliged to do.”

  Revealing naught but black backs, Priscilla and Mrs. Oglethorpe sat stiffly alone in the foremost pew, the coffin within an arm’s reach. A few rows behind, Sarah and Casey flanked Tom, Elizabeth, and Ford Cooper; and further along were the Todds. Between Jane and Daniel were Davy and Bobby Lee, and between the brothers sat Leon, commissioned to pinch either if they squirmed. Children commonly attended funerals, which thereby became a recognized part of their social requirement. Leon had not, however, been to a large town funeral before, and being present gave him a further sense of belonging to Beulah Land.

  The service was standard and brought forth no stronger emotion in the attendants than to wonder whether there would be an encounter between Ann Oglethorpe and her alienated daughter. When the church service ended, the congregation broke for those who were interested in making their way to the graveyard for the final ceremony. Sarah Troy was seen to address a few earnest words to Mrs. Oglethorpe during the transition, but the widow shook her head vigorously, and Elizabeth made no further effort to be reconciled with her mother.

  As usual when all was over, people drifted among the graves recollecting their own dead and reminding each other when there were lapses of memory. Leon had learned to print his name and therefore recognized it when he saw it. Benjamin found him staring at a tombstone. Taking the boy’s hand, Benjamin told him, “Leon Kendrick was your great-grandfather. And it was his grandfather, whose grave is over there, who planted the first seed and harvested the first crop at Beulah Land.”

  30

  Sarah handed the short letter to Benjamin and waited as he read it. “I knew it was time,” he said as he handed it back to her.

  “Tomorrow.” She watched as he went to the window of her office and looked out.

  “I’ll go tell Otis to be at the depot with the wagon, and I’ll see everything’s in order. I’ve no doubts of Otis, but I won’t have complaints of him from Bessie or Eugene.”

  “Why should they complain?” Sarah asked.

  “Because they think that’s the way you handle Negroes.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” She relaxed a little. He had taken it better than she expected. Although he was upset, his voice revealed little beyond a reluctance to be resigned.

  Having so decided, she was caught unawares. “Grandma, I can’t let him go back to them!”

  “There’s nothing else to do.”

  “I’ll pay Otis or another to help Bessie work her farm.”

  “Has Leon said anything to you?”

  “No, ma’am, he just looks; but he wants to stay with us, you know he does. This is home to him.”

  “He was born a Marsh on the Marsh farm. We weren’t so eager to have him then.”

  “I didn’t know him then.” She almost smiled. They lived and worked so closely together as equals, it sometimes surprised her to be reminded that he was young. “He just meant trouble to me. Frankie turned me down because I told her he was coming.” He sat down facing her across the desk, as they had sat together so many times to talk of so many things. He crossed his legs one way and then the other before setting both feet on the floor and leaning back. “I despise myself when I remember I didn’t want him.”

  “But you did,” she said. “You and I sat just as we are now, and you told me how, in spite of everything, you were happy at the idea of being a father.”

  “Did I?” he said as if he doubted her.

  “It’s not the first time you’ve forgot your own virtues.”

  “Then I’m lucky to have you remind me.”

  She said drily, “If I didn’t, I expect somebody else would.”

  He stood up. “I’m going to meet the train tomorrow and tell Bessie I have to have him.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I’ll ask her what she wants from us.”

  “No, Benjamin.”

  “I won’t let him live out there with Eugene.”

  “Leave it alone for a while.”

  “She knows he’d be better off here. Bessie’s pregnant again; it’s not as if—”

  “She’s not a bitch who forgets her last pup when she has a new one.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  She paused and spoke with more deliberation. “Benjamin, don’t meet them when they come. Let me take Leon in my buggy. It’ll be easier for him. He loves you, and it would be harder for him to leave you and get in the wagon with them than to leave me. Besides, I won’t prompt him to feel anything, and just the sight of you would. You talk about his looking. You ought to see yourself.”

  “Does it show?”

  She rose and went around the desk to him. “Everything.”

  At his bedtime Sarah told Leon that his mother and Eugene were returning from Savannah the following day. Although he had prepared himself to hear her or Benjamin say it, his shock was nevertheless severe. She kissed him quickly and left him to put himself to bed, knowing he would cry but that he would then sleep. It was better, she’d thought, to tell him at night than to spoil his last full day at Beulah Land. When he woke,
he would remember, but a night’s sleep would ease him into the difficult day ahead.

  Sarah was up betimes to go to the kitchen before Leon’s customary early visit, for she wanted to warn Mabella against any display. Yet Mabella took the news of Leon’s leaving equably enough, making only automatic exclamations of desolation, whereas it was big old Josephine who turned her back and whose shoulders Sarah observed to be heaving in silent distress. How and when it had happened, she didn’t know, but it was evident that Josephine had taken the boy to her heart.

  At breakfast Benjamin presented a calm demeanor, speaking easily to Leon of his pleasure in having him at Beulah Land, but not of his regret at Leon’s leaving. He said he wouldn’t be going to the depot with him to meet his mother because Zadok wanted him to look at the potato mounds. He wasn’t certain they’d used enough straw against the wet weather to come. Josephine brought in sweet cinnamon rolls and they talked of how dear Aunt Nell had loved them.

  The wagon with Otis and the buggy with Sarah and Leon waited at the depot for the Savannah train, but there was no festive air about the occasion as there had been when the Betchleys were going away. It was cool and inclined to rain, and those who had come to observe the ritual of the train’s arrival and departure had taken shelter in the baggage office, where the clerk had built the first autumn fire in his stove. The train stopped, but they had misjudged their place, so Bessie and Eugene descended behind them. However, the two little parties were soon joined, exchanging plain greetings followed by questions about the trip and comments on Savannah. Bessie wanted to know if her farm was all right and if anything had died while she was gone. Sarah noted that she looked tired, whereas Eugene had imposed on his country coarseness a suavity of Savannah manners and a new quickness of gesture and alertness of eye. The wagon was loaded and set off for the farm bearing Bessie and Eugene and Leon with their receptacles of clothes; and Sarah drove the buggy home with Otis beside her, his roll of clothes on his knees. “Sure glad to be getting home,” Otis commented. “Lonesome place out yonder.” Sarah patted his arm to thank him and allowed herself a few angry tears.