The Legacy of Beulah Land

by Lonnie Coleman

  33

  When he entered the office, he knew they were talking about him by the way they turned without surprise, as if he had been one in their discussion and they now sought his concurrence in what they had decided.

  His sister said, “I need Freda, and I’ve had a talk with her this morning. She’s willing to come to us, but only if you tell her to.”

  His grandmother said, “You are to bring Bruce and Velma down here.”

  Jane continued, “She’s always been wasted in the Glade with no one but you to care about her cooking, and you away half the time. That kind of treatment drives a cook insane. I’m surprised she hasn’t run amok with a butcher knife.”

  Sarah added to her previous thought. “It isn’t as though the Glade alone is your home. This is your home. All of Beulah Land is your home.”

  “I wish you’d move in with us,” Jane said. “Bobby Lee asked me if you were going to, and Davy asked if we had to take Bruce too.”

  Sarah said, “Don’t be silly, Jane. His place is here with Bruce, and Bruce must come; there’s no question about that. Otherwise, she’ll grow up peculiar like your great-aunt Selma, seeing no one but you and the Negroes.”

  “I don’t know why it took you so long,” Jane said, “to understand that Priscilla wasn’t coming back except to get her clothes—”

  “And her Bible!” Sarah injected triumphantly.

  “She probably has half a dozen, one for every weekday and a special, illustrated, indexed, morocco-bound edition for Sunday.”

  “Does she, Benjamin?” Sarah asked in astonishment, as if she had just discovered a secret they had kept from her.

  “Now you will let me have Freda, won’t you?”

  “You see what I mean about Bruce.”

  He looked from one to the other and said to one after the other, “No,” going out and slamming the door after him. But in five minutes he returned. They watched him in offended silence as he took a chair, set it at an angle facing them, and straddled it, folding his arms on its high back. “Did you mean it when you said you knew all along Priscilla wasn’t coming back to me?”

  “I guessed,” Jane said.

  Sarah said, “I’d have been surprised if she had, given what that foul mother of hers surely considered the excuse of a lifetime. She never liked it out here, never tried to be one of us. I’ve made allowances—”

  Jane patted her grandmother’s hand. “Lord knows, you have. And the way she’s always stuck her nose up at Dan because he was a Yankee, I could wring her neck.”

  “As if a man can help what he’s born,” Sarah said spiritedly. “Yankee or not, Daniel Todd is as good as anybody and better than most.”

  “You said when he came to us we’d make a Southern gentleman out of him. You overstated the need. Dan was born a gentleman.”

  Sarah nodded agreement. “Why, it was he who insisted on naming your first child after our General—”

  Benjamin held his hands up in the air until they were both silent. “Now,” he said quietly, “what about Bruce, Grandma?”

  With more consideration than she had spoken earlier, Sarah explained why she thought he should bring Bruce and Velma down the hill to live at the big house.

  “Well,” he answered finally when she paused, “I think you’re right.”

  Sarah looked relieved. “It really will be better for her.”

  “Safer,” Benjamin said. “Her mother can’t come and get her when I’m away in the fields.”

  “I’d like to see her try it,” Sarah said. “I’d have her head on a platter.”

  “On a pole,” Jane proposed.

  “About Freda,” Benjamin said.

  Jane was suddenly shy. “She really is too good a cook to be wasted, Ben, and my old Poppy, though I’ve tried hard to teach her, isn’t worth knocking over the head with a piece of stove wood. She’d have suited Priscilla. Neither knows a hard-boiled egg from rice pudding. Even the boys complain privately, and they’ll eat anything. It’s no wonder they swarm over Josephine like flies on fresh chitterlings.”

  “I didn’t know Freda was dissatisfied,” Benjamin said.

  “Ben,” Jane said, “Freda would—well, any of Zadok’s family would crawl to hell and back twice a day and twice times that in leap year if you asked them to. But to tell a good cook to put her meal on the table and then take it away uneaten is more than flesh and spirit can bear.”

  “Amen to that,” Sarah said.

  For the first time that day Benjamin smiled. “Take care of the body, and the soul will take care of itself.”

  “I’m not a hedonist like you and Aunt Nell,” Sarah said, “but a little balance is a good thing.”

  Benjamin got up from his chair, taking it and setting it back in its usual place. “All right, Jane, you can have Freda. I’ll tell her.”

  “Even Dan may give you a hug.”

  Benjamin laughed. “I’ll help Velma bring Bruce, down with her things, Grandma.”

  Sarah stood. “Million things to do. I’ll turn out that big corner room upstairs, the one facing our little cemetery. You won’t mind looking out on dear Floyd’s grave.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Benjamin said, “if I was going to be there, but I’ll stay in my own house in the Glade, Grandma, I thank you.”

  “Stubborn,” she declared. “You can’t be by yourself up there.”

  “I’ll be here for meals,” he said, “since Jane is stealing my cook, but it’s my house up there, Grandma. Don’t you get too bossy and carried away.”

  “Don’t you either,” she said tartly, but when he kissed her cheek, tears came into her eyes. She didn’t try to hide them but wiped them away matter-of-factly. “I’m going to drive my buggy over to Roscoe’s this afternoon. Me and him have got a lot to talk about. Did I tell you I had a letter from Abraham? He’s taking the boat from Philadelphia, and Roscoe will meet him in Savannah and bring him home for his holidays. I’ve agreed to let him stay with Roscoe. Roscoe wants him, and Abraham wants to be there. I thought I’d take Roscoe a mess of backbone and a yard or two of sausage today too. They won’t be killing any hogs, he told me, till just before Christmas. They always like to wait. I wish you’d ride over to see him with me. He has this idea he wants to talk to you about. It’s to build our own cotton mill here in Highboro. He says the boys and girls who come to Elk Institute then go off to Augusta or some other where to work in the mills. They make them work twelve hours a day, he says. They don’t see daylight all winter. He’s going to make an estimate of what a beginning will cost and hopes we’ll go shares. What do you think? It might be something for Abraham’s future. I’ve done a lot of thinking about it. Benjamin, I wish you wouldn’t fidget. You make me rattle when you edge off like that. Just wait a minute, if you please.”

  “I have a lot of things to do.”

  He had moved to the door, but her next question stopped him, hand on knob. “How serious are you about Frankie Saxon?”

  He looked at her amazed but answered calmly enough. “As serious as a married man can be about a woman married to another.”

  “I’m glad you remember that you’re both married. Adultery is never a simple matter, and it can turn out to be most painful for people around, as well as the two themselves.”

  “How did you know about Frankie?”

  “Jane and I have noticed you together. Oh, there’s nothing anyone would see who wasn’t looking for it but be careful. I don’t condemn you or her. How could I, since I was an adulteress myself? I just feel profoundly sorry for you both.”

  “Grandma!” Benjamin and Jane said together.

  “Oh, I married the man later. You’re young, and there’s so much you don’t know. I’m afraid you won’t be marrying Frankie, though. Priscilla will outlive Methuselah.”

  34

  It was an unhappy time for Benjamin. Married, he was without wife. A father, he was without children. He saw Bruce, but she was no longer his in the way she had been at the house in the Glade when her
mother avoided her, and Velma wove the child’s day life around Benjamin’s comings and goings. At the big house there were many people, and although Velma conscientiously and even jealously followed her duties as mammy, she made friends and began to share her charge with Sarah and Casey, Jane and Daniel, and the frequent visitors who stopped at Beulah Land for conversation, a meal, or a week. Bruce thrived on the attentions of a large household and was so good-tempered that even Jefferson Davis Todd was heard to admit that she wasn’t the worst baby he had seen, although she still smelled of milk.

  Benjamin did not miss his wife.

  He did, however, miss his son. Every day or so he went to the farm to see him, knowing Eugene would not be there and having the excuse of checking on Zebra, the man Sarah had assigned to Bessie’s work; but he did not see Leon alone, except the time he took him to town for a haircut. Afterwards, to take him back to the farm and leave him was almost worse than not having him at all. He wanted renewal of their easy companionship, a continuation of the feeling that he was passing on to his son some of the things he knew.

  Sarah visited Bessie often as the time drew near for her to give birth, and she rarely came empty-handed. The small gifts were part of an accumulative bribe. She knew it and Bessie knew it. She so reiterated the theme of Leon’s going to school, and the convenience to every one of his staying at Beulah Land when he did so, that Bessie was close to giving way.

  For Leon it was as bad a time as it was for his father. Both Benjamin and Sarah studied to pay him minimal attention on their visits, not wanting Bessie to perceive the extent of their feeling for him. However, Bessie was occupied with her concerns and did not give the boy much consideration. Eugene ignored him as much as he could, for which Leon was glad enough; but to be present and feel unseen, or to be seen only to be damned and told to keep out of the way, was eroding to the spirit. Leon began to look as furtive and unwanted as he felt. His conviction grew that he was being thought nothing of by anyone at all. He became awkward and clumsy, dropping things, forgetting to do what he was told.

  Priscilla settled down with her mother as if she had never left her. All was reconciled between them. One was never seen out of the house without the other. They sat together, sewed together, slept in adjoining rooms, walked the town side by side, and shared prayer book and hymnal at church. They absented themselves from no religious service except weddings and attended funerals as if they were paid mourners, whether or not they cared about the family concerned. The Reverend Quarterman became a little wary of them, wanting them to evidence some frailty he might correct. Only once did he, at the behest of Mrs. Oglethorpe, command Benjamin to give poor Bruce into the care of her mother and maternal grandmother. Benjamin instantly and not over-politely refused. Mrs. Oglethorpe complained that Reverend Quarterman had not urged their claim insistently enough; but, in fact, Priscilla was content to be without her daughter, for she had the virtue of being said to long for her, the pity of being deprived of her, and the comfortable certainty that she would not be required to answer a child’s need in the night for milk or love.

  Benjamin made no attempt to see Priscilla. There is nothing appetizing in an empty plate, and he knew she had nothing for him. When they chanced to meet in passing, as they did before or after church on Sundays, and occasionally on a sidewalk in the commercial part of town, they gratified the colder expectations of their acquaintances by bowing to each other without a word.

  So matters stood when on the seventh day of December, seven weeks after the Betchleys returned from Savannah and reclaimed Leon, Bessie Betchley bore another son. She was attended by young Dr. Rolfe, who had recently been taken on as country assistant to the aging, lazy Dr. Platt. The baby was called Theodore Aquinas after a character in a play his father had seen in Savannah and thought very grand. Preacher Paul and his good wife Ona came to pray. Sarah and Jane drove over to speak words of comfort and admiration as they spread before the mother their gifts of caps and long dresses and bootees. Alf Crawford knocked on the back door on the evening of the birth day, and he and Eugene sat at the kitchen table and enjoyed a pint of whiskey he had just drawn from his still. Eugene strutted through town and wore the purple suspenders Bessie had bought him on their wedding trip. Bonard Saxon celebrated the event by raising Eugene’s pay two dollars a week and giving him a cigar out of his best box. The new father wore it between his teeth all day before lighting it and parading down the main street on a sawmill mule. If any thought him a fool, none said so in his hearing, whatever jokes they made behind his back, for Eugene had in a month’s time acquired a fearsome reputation as a man easy to offend and quick to attack. He used his fists on white men and the club he had carved from seasoned oak on the few Negroes at the sawmill who were slow to know his supremacy. Most of them had learned that it was easier to flatter and obey than to lose teeth, or in one instance an eye and the hearing in an ear.

  It was little wonder that Eugene felt himself beginning to be an important man and no wonder at all that he looked on Leon with darker frowns and damned him with quicker curses than ever. One night, the tenth in the life of Theodore Aquinas, the family were sitting at the kitchen table over their supper. Bessie’s breast was bared to the nursing babe even as she ate her meat and bread. Eugene had been alternately jocular and testy since coming home from the mill, but no one spoke at the table.

  No one had spoken to Leon since Eugene’s return that evening. It was often the way. Leon and Bessie might be tranquil enough with one another all day, but when her young husband came in, Bessie flattered him by taking his side against Leon, usually in ways no more marked than mild ridicule. Bessie did not hate her older son, but she had always resented him for the fact that his father had not wanted to marry her, and she had never tried to love him. To her mind it was only paying him back, particularly in light of recent attentions paid him by Sarah Troy and Benjamin Davis, for the trouble and shame he’d brought her. If ridicule discomforted him and pleased Eugene, where was the harm?

  Leon decided he would like syrup on his flour hoecake because the fried sow belly was salty. Like his father, he fancied sweet and salty together. He didn’t want to ask for the syrup, and when he reached for the pitcher, which was near Eugene’s plate, his hand jerked and the pitcher grazed Eugene’s cup, tipping it and spilling coffee over Eugene’s plate of food. If Bessie hadn’t laughed, the moment might have passed with no more than a curse and a slap. But she laughed, and her laughter shook the nursing baby from her teat and made him cry. Eugene struck out with his wet hand. The blow knocked Leon from his chair. The shock of it ran through his body as he rose to accuse—he did not know why the words came, “You killed Granny!”

  The room and all in it were dead still except for the baby’s whimper. Bessie and Eugene stared at Leon. Eugene said, “I’m going to take you to the barn and whip you.”

  Bessie nodded, frightened. “Yes, hon, you better. You better do it.”

  “Mama!” Leon kicked as Eugene reached for him.

  “No use crying for me, for you deserve it for saying such a lie! You can stay out in the barn all night, no matter how cold it gets!”

  Grabbing the boy by the hair of the head, he dragged him along the floor and out the door. Bessie guided the baby’s mouth back to her nipple. He took it and was quiet.

  35

  Eugene rode a sawmill mule to work every morning after Bessie gave him breakfast, and he was gone when Zebra arrived on a Beulah Land mule before daybreak. Entering the barn in the dark, Zebra found his lantern and lighted it, expecting to enjoy a pipe of tobacco before milking the cow. When he lifted the lantern over his head to look about, he saw the dark, small heap on a mound of hay and went to see what it was. The figure was just recognizable when he held the lantern close. Setting the lantern down, he touched the boy’s cold hand and then his bruised and swollen face. Gripped by fear, he blew out the lantern.

  Zebra and Sarah were old friends, and she’d chosen him to work for Bessie because she could trust
him to watch the way Leon was treated. She’d warned Zebra of Eugene’s temper and reputation for using brute strength, and he had seen for himself the bad feeling between man and boy, so he did not even consider carrying the boy into the farmhouse. Gathering him up as carefully as he could, he remounted his mule, and by constantly kicking the animal’s fat sides made quick progress back to Beulah Land, not knowing whether his burden was alive or dead.

  Benjamin and Sarah were at breakfast when they heard Josephine scream. Running, they reached the kitchen before Zebra had time to hand over the child. Benjamin took him and followed Sarah to Leon’s old room, where he laid him on the bed. Mabella was there with a lamp, her eyes big as eggs. Benjamin made exclamations of rage and reassurance as he removed the boy’s bloodstained clothing, and Sarah told Josephine to send Wally for the doctor as quick as he could ride.

  It was Rolfe who came before the hour was up, by which time Leon was lying quiet after being gently cleansed with warm wet cloths Josephine fetched from the kitchen. Rolfe asked no questions and answered none directed to him until he finished his examination. He worked slowly and methodically, those in the room falling silent and gaining confidence in him as they watched. He had never been to Beulah Land before; Dr. Platt having reserved its illnesses and accidents for his own attention and reward. When Rolfe had done with his bottles and bandages and the boy was covered again with a sheet and the softest old quilt they had, he motioned everyone to leave.