“No, sir; nor will she. She is embroiled in a meeting with other church ladies about the proposed memorial to our Confederate dead. There are conflicting viewpoints as to what form it shall take.”
“Why are you not one of them? I fear that I am keeping you at home—”
“For which I am grateful.”
He smiled. “What are the conflicting proposals?”
“Miss Doreen and Miss Eloise lead a faction that is in favor of representing General Lee with a drawn sword in the very act of slaying a stone dragon clearly lettered on its side ‘The Union’!”
James’s smile broadened. “Has no one told them the outcome of the war does not accord with such a monument?”
“I believe so, but they were unswayed.”
“And Annabel’s idea, what is it? It is she, if we are to believe her, who insists that we have a statue like other communities.”
“And she will get her way,” Frankie said. “No doubt of it, but after a fight, which I expect she will enjoy. For once I can say she has reason on her side. She points out that while we are all of us devoted to the memory of the General’s leadership, the town of Highboro has no claim to the distinction of being noticed by him. He was not born here; he did not even find the occasion to ride his horse through town. She is in favor of a simple figure of a Confederate foot soldier. It is dignified, and it is cheaper than the other.”
“What have you given as your opinion?”
“I have not been asked it. I am not quite one of them, you know. But I believe our hearts hold the memory of the past, and that is the best any of us may do.”
“That is too true to be debated. You might be a much older woman for the sensible head on your shoulders.”
“Pray do not make me older than I am, sir, for that is quite old enough!”
“You are a child beside me.”
“Age does not signify with a man,” Frankie said. “You are in the full vigor of your manhood, as anyone may see.”
Indeed, anyone might have seen one evidence of such condition at any rate, for James, all his life subject to sudden erections over which he had little control, proceeded now to have one. Frankie smiled; it was all so very easy. James made an effort to shift his mind to prosaic matters. “I hope you did not share the disapproval of the others yesterday when I revealed my plan to allow Eugene Betchley a measure of partnership in the sawmill.”
“I did not,” Frankie said soberly. “It appears to me admirably reasoned. As you so truly said—if you want a man’s loyalty, you must buy it.”
“Such is not the case, however, with a woman’s.”
“No,” Frankie agreed. “Not a woman worth having.”
He sighed. “A man is a fool to try it, I suppose.”
“For you there has been no need,” Frankie said. “Miss Maggie was a saint.”
“God rest her soul,” James concurred.
Frankie allowed a pause, her eyes on the slack, wrinkled trouser crotch of her visitor. “I fear that my own marriage was less idyllic than yours. I would speak of it to no one else—” She paused again.
“I am your friend.”
“I have always believed so; now more than ever. Misfortune draws me to your strength, for you are a very pillar. It is reprehensible to say ill of the dead, and I could not bring myself to do so; but my husband did not always understand a wife’s needs. Is that dreadful of me to confide? Yet I feel better for it. You will comprehend, sir, I was aware of my husband’s philandering. I never let on that I knew. After our children were born, he turned to others as if he had grown tired of me.”
“Impossible,” James breathed.
“As to that, sir, it was surely open knowledge that he strayed—”
“I did not mean that. I meant that it was impossible any man ever could tire of you, my dear Miss Frankie.”
She smiled gratefully, as one starving for any grain of praise. “If I had married such a one as you, strong and good, how happy I might have been.” She was not surprised to observe that the trouser crotch was no longer slack and wrinkled.
“Miss Frankie—” James’s voice was thick. He paused, swallowed, and licked his lips.
“I have said too much. You think me vile—”
“No!” he said joyously.
“I have longed for affection and not had it, affection that is tender and true—”
James groped the air blindly. Frankie allowed her fingers to touch his sleeve. He grasped her hands and then her arms. She stood. He stood. She was in his arms. Holding him tightly to her, which he considered all his own doing, she turned her lips aside for a moment. “I am mad—”
“And I with love of you!” he declared.
“What would the world say of us?”
“Are we likely to be interrupted?” he asked hoarsely.
Her answer was to give him her lips again. She led him across the hallway to the room she had once shared with Bonard. An hour later, as James rested from his second ejaculation, he said, “We must marry.”
“Beloved,” she murmured, and his penis rose again as hopefully as a flower lifts its head to the sun.
9
“I’ve waited near an hour,” Benjamin complained as Frankie turned her buggy into the grove of trees and halted the horse.
“I was delayed,” she said shortly. “I’m sorry.” She secured the reins and sat looking at him.
Unable to gauge her mood, he continued, “I wondered why your note said to meet here.”
“I didn’t think about the cold.”
He put his impatience to the weather. “It ought to be warmer, almost April. Everything will be late this year.”
She made no move to join him on the ground but looked beyond him into the pines. “It was here we came together first.” He smiled and held a hand to help her from the buggy, but she shook her head. “I wanted a place we wouldn’t be seen or interrupted.”
He gave her a puzzled look. “The cotton gin is always safe, and there’s a bed. It’s too damp, and I’m too old, for pine needles on the ground.”
“There won’t be any of that. I want to talk to you. Come and sit with me out of the wind.”
As he joined her, she reached behind them for the buffalo robe and spread it over their laps and legs. He took her hand under the robe, and finding it cold, began to knead it. She allowed her head to tilt toward him as his eyes asked her to, and he kissed her on the lips, but in the light, dry way a couple long used to one another will touch in greeting.
“That’s better,” he said comfortably. “You’ve been worrying too much about the future.”
Her laugh was involuntary. “I shan’t anymore.”
He held her hand still, surprised.
“I’ve come to tell you the future.”
“Like a fortune-teller?” he teased her. “If we were able to marry, you could forget next year and the next century—”
“Hush, Ben.”
When she did not go on, he frowned. “You laughed funny.”
“That’s what a laugh is—funny.”
“Not that way.” He waited.
“I oughtn’t to find it hard. What I’m doing is best, but you won’t see it so. You admit there’s no future for us.”
“No more than we’ve had, I suppose.”
“I’ve decided to marry,” she said. Having looked away to give him a moment, she now looked at him again. “I have to marry.”
“Bonard’s been dead only two months,” he protested.
“If he’d been dead only two minutes,” she said irritably, “it would be permissible for me to marry again.”
“Who?”
“I can’t beg my bread and clothes from Annabel Saxon. She’s polecat-mean.”
“Don’t make excuses, just tell me—”
“I’m not making excuses! You’ll hate me.”
He made himself breathe evenly and said carefully, “I can’t imagine who I’d hate you to marry most. I’m sorry it isn’t me, but how can I blame y
ou when I can’t offer to be your husband?”
“I’m going to marry your father. Today.” He stared at her and shook his head as if she’d waked him from sleep. “I’m going to be James Davis’s third wife. He’s going to be my second husband. God, Ben!” When her voice broke, her will broke with it, and she cried passionately. He sat still, not looking at her or touching her, until presently it occurred to him to set her reticule before her. Taking it gratefully, she fumbled a handkerchief from it, wiping her eyes and mouth.
“Why him?” he then asked.
“He’s wanted me the longest time—”
His quick nod mocked her. “So you made it easy for the poor old man. Let him into the house when you were by yourself, and put on perfume because he can’t see how pretty you are, and sat close and talked low and—”
“Don’t be so damn noble!”
“All right, Frankie. I see your reasoning. You don’t want to be dependent on Aunt Annabel. Who would? So you’ve decided to marry him. But why him?”
“He’s a good man. You’ve always been against him because he sold Oaks plantation instead of holding it to pass on to you. Well, you’ve got Beulah Land, and he needs me.”
“Your logic isn’t clear. Aunt Maggie hasn’t been dead long, and you’re the greenest widow in town. Couldn’t you have waited a while?”
She started to answer but shrugged instead. “Would that have made any difference to you?”
“Does Aunt Annabel know?”
Frankie shook her head. “I haven’t talked to her yet.”
“I’m the first you’ve told?”
Again she shook her head. “The children, this morning, before they went to school. I didn’t want them to come home for dinner and be surprised.”
“How did they take it?”
“Fanny was embarrassed. Girls are like that. Blair just laughed and asked if we’d be rich again.”
“He’s practical like his mama. Wait, Frankie. For your sake, not mine or anybody else’s. Think what a lot of talk there’d be. After a few months, if you want to and he does—oh, I’ve no doubt he will, but it’ll be good for him to bide his time—”
“Have you ever enjoyed waiting?”
“Be engaged, have an open understanding, let people get used to the idea. That’ll be enough to put Aunt Annabel on notice to watch her manners, and it will give Fanny time to be reconciled.”
Breathing more quickly, she stared at him, and her voice trembled with anger when she spoke. “Wait?”
“Neither of you is in the first bloom of impetuous youth.”
“Exactly. And I can’t wait because I’m going to have a baby. Yes, yours and mine. Do you understand now? I don’t know why it didn’t happen before but is happening now. You say there’ll be talk. Think how much there’ll be if I have a child ten months after my husband died. James doesn’t need to know anything. When the time comes, I’ll see that he thinks it’s his. He’ll want to, so it will be easy. Ben, are you crying?”
“I won’t let you do it.”
“Ben, I have to leave; I’ve so many things to do today. I’m meeting James at the rectory at twelve o’clock. Mr. Quarterman promised to marry us. Then in the morning we’re going to Savannah for a week to give everybody a chance to get a straight face. Mr. Quarterman told us to wait too and agreed to marry us only when we said we’d go to Savannah and marry there if he didn’t.”
“How can you let him think my baby is his?”
“It’s all the same blood. Yours, his—what does it matter? Men are so particular; I’ll never understand them. It won’t be his or yours; it’ll be mine because I’ll have the trouble of it!”
He stumbled out of the buggy and had to pick himself up from the ground before he could head into the trees.
“Ben, come back here and tell me goodbye and wish me well!”
He turned around to look at her. “Goodbye, Frankie, and I damn the day I first set eyes on you!”
“You are silly.” Her voice rose in alarm. “You’re not going to the woods to hang yourself, are you?”
“No!” he called back furiously.
“That’s a relief. Ben, I can’t see you, can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve got good news for you—you don’t have to worry any more about that piece of land! I meant to tell you so many things—James says I must let you and Roscoe have it and not Gene Betchley. Why don’t you answer me, aren’t you glad? James paid me five hundred dollars for it and said we’d give it to you as our wedding present. Isn’t that good of him? You’ve misjudged him, you see. Ben, come back and talk. I don’t have anybody to talk to—nobody knows me except you. Ben!”
He was gone.
Frankie had not expected the day to be an easy one, but she was of no mind to suffer more buffets than necessary; so after a brief fit of weeping diminished to an uneven heaving of the breast, she took reins in hand, drove home, changed her dress, and met James at the rectory as they had arranged it between them to do, not wanting to rouse speculation by going there together hand in arm. The Reverend Quarterman performed the ceremony with a fine balance of Christian disapproval and beady-eyed excitement, after which the couple repaired to Frankie’s house for a private wedding luncheon. The children had already returned to school from their noon dinner, and Molly served the pair with cheery deference, knowing the ruddy-faced blind man would henceforth pay her wages. After bringing in the wedding cake she had baked as a surprise, she watched Frankie cut it and bent her plump body nearly in two for James when he put a silver dollar of appreciation into her hand. She had just returned to the kitchen when Annabel Saxon marched into the house by way of the front door, and without otherwise announcing herself, demanded to know of the very walls around her: “Frankie! You, Frankie! What have I been hearing?”
James grunted. “Quarterman has lost no time reporting. I knew he was afraid of her but not that afraid.”
“Her bite is worse than her bark,” Frankie said.
Arriving at the dining room, Annabel stopped in the doorway to gaze at the man and woman eating cake. “James, you disgusting lecher!”
“Is it our sister?” James said to Frankie.
“Frankie, tell me exactly what you have done!” Annabel thundered.
Frankie replied circumspectly, “We were coming to ask your blessing when we’d finished here, Miss Annabel.”
James said, “It’s an excellent cake Molly has made us, and I gave her a dollar. You’d better take a chair and have a slice, Annabel.”
Annabel advanced into the room as one in the grip of dread anticipation. “Doreen and Eloise saw you through the window of the rectory. As soon as you’d gone, they got it out of Quarterman that you’d made him marry you to each other. They naturally came directly and in all haste to tell me.”
James said to Frankie, “I wronged the poor man,” and to Annabel, “I’m glad you and Doreen have made it up about the Confederate memorial. Sisters should never quarrel in public, lest they be thought common.”
“Won’t you sit down?” Frankie suggested amiably. “It is good cake, as my husband says, and Molly will be so pleased if you have a taste.”
Annabel rolled her eyes. “Husband! God preserve me. He has been husband as many times as he was brother. Have you no decent feelings, either of you?”
“Yes,” James answered. “That is why we decided to marry instead of indulging our love without benefit of clergy.”
“The disregard,” Annabel mourned, “the callous disregard of my son’s memory—”
“I don’t think Bonard is in any position to object,” James said.
“To see you sink so low, James. Of course, you, Miss Minx, do not surprise me. I have not forgot the sly way you snared my innocent boy.”
“Your innocent boy was more times the lecher than Don Juan both before and after their marriage; and well you know it, Annabel, so let’s have no more of that.” James put down his fork with a bang.
“How can I
face the town? What shall I say?”
“That you have lost a daughter and gained a second sister,” James advised. “That will give you a reputation, however undeserved, for both wit and good temper.”
Annabel addressed herself to Frankie. “I have forgiven you much, but this I shall not forget. Had you no thought of your children?”
“I had every thought of them,” Frankie replied honestly.
“I offered my house to them!”
James said, “That is very fortuitous, Annabel, for we are going to Savannah tomorrow morning and will be obliged if you look after them while we are away.”
Frankie offered a conciliatory smile. “You said once that you would keep them if I decided to pay a visit to my family, Miss Annabel.”
“Poor waifs!”
“We’ll reclaim them in a week,” James promised, “before you can take them to the state orphanage.”
“James, you are beyond redemption. It is evident that you live for naught but sensation. Very well, I forsake you. After using up two noble women—”
“Neither of whom you could abide.”
“One my dearest friend, the other the very jewel of Beulah Land, the daughter of Auntie Sarah, friend and neighbor to our sainted mother and martyred father for half a century—what can your intention now be?”
“To live happily ever after,” James answered.
“Where?” Annabel asked quickly.
“Here,” Frankie said.
“It’s my house,” Annabel told her.
“Mine,” Frankie said, equally firmly.
Annabel sneered boldly. “How well I recollect the manner in which you persuaded Blair to put the place in your name. Now we can all see why. Let that be a warning to you, James. Take care. I wash my hands of both of you. You’ll see the town will follow my example, for I am held in high regard. You’ll have no respectable friend, no acquaintance you do not pay for. I shall go directly to the school and take the children home with me, telling them they are twice orphaned within the year, and the year but three months old!”
The Legacy of Beulah Land Page 26
