The Legacy of Beulah Land

by Lonnie Coleman

  They sat still until they heard Annabel slam the front door behind her. Then James took Frankie’s hand. “That saves us a visit. She means it about taking the children home with her. In which case, we might spend an hour or so in bed, hm? I feel myself in need of it.”

  Annabel was wrong in her prediction that the town would ostracize the new couple. The depot had seen many gatherings in its history, and even a routine arrival or departure commanded a modest attendance; but next morning at the hour of the train to Savannah, a veritable mob, or as near such as the town of Highborn might produce, was there to call congratulations and say farewell. We are always a little grateful to those who keep us from tedium, and there is comfort in recognizing the base impulses of our fellows.

  10

  There had been warm days, but not of the continuous sort to be relied upon. In April it stayed warm at last, and one morning Nancy carried a hide-bottomed chair down to the brookside and sat with her hands loose in her lap and her eyes closed against the sun. She may have slept a little, but mainly she thought and dreamed, thought becoming dream and changing back again, mind turning up disconnected bits of the past and setting them in meaningless juxtaposition that was neither nightmare nor farce but contained elements of both. It was what she had learned to call her “sick mind,” a part of the illness she suffered.

  ’“Whatever you’re thinking, I hope it isn’t me, with such a frown on your face.”

  Her eyes opened to Abraham smiling at her. “What you doing up here, middle of the workday?”

  “Brought you a fishing pole,” he said. “Luck says tell you she’s coming tomorrow morning to take you fishing, rain or shine.”

  “I never been fishing in my life,” Nancy protested.

  “You don’t have to work at it; anybody can do it. Everybody’s born knowing how, like breathing and—let me see—”

  “Never mind what it’s like.”

  “I was going to say swimming. You still treat me like you’re my mama.”

  “I was your mama after your mama died.”

  He squatted beside her, friendly, then dropped to his behind on the ground at her feet. “How come you didn’t answer me when I saw you that time in Savannah?”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I saw it was you, Miss Stuck-uppity. Wanting nothing to do with her old pickaninny—”

  She reached to tap his head at her knee. “Coarse as a burr,” she told him.

  “Who’s that gazing at us yonder?”

  She followed the line of his eyes to the liver-colored hound who, halfway to them from the house, had lowered her hindquarters to pee. Even as she peed, she wagged her tail and smiled, the soul of amiability.

  “Rosalie’s hound dog. They call her Old Mama.”

  “Not hard to reckon why.”

  Still wagging her tail, Old Mama waddled forward, teats low and swinging side to side. Nancy scratched the dog’s head when she stopped and was paid with a look of adoration. “That’s enough,” she said after a minute, slumping back in her chair. “Wear me out. Coat’s rough as this boy’s head.”

  “You’re looking better,” he said without the teasing tone characteristic of his speech with almost everyone.

  She frowned. “What you doing away from the cotton mill? Thought they’d started building on.”

  “Ever get lonesome up here?”

  “Rosalie’s in and out all day long. Miss Sarah, Miss Jane. The children, they come too. I try to run them off, tell them I’m ‘catching,’ but they slip back.”

  “That leaves you a lot of time.”

  “Not so much.”

  “What do you think about?”

  “Old times.”

  “Old times here or Savannah?”

  Her sharp look dismissed his question. “I also make up stories: what’ll happen to you and Luck and Bruce and Leon.”

  “What’s going to happen to me?”

  “One day you’ll get grown, I hope.”

  “I was legal grown on my last birthday.”

  She roused herself. “Then start learning to be a credit to your pa and not such a smart-Alexander.”

  “I’m polite to everybody.”

  “Not nigger-polite. That’s all right with Miss Sarah and them; they’re your people. But I’ve seen you in town with others. You walk and stand before them like you. Learn to edge. Guess they didn’t teach that in Philadelphia. Watch your uncle Roman; he knows how. Most dignified man you ever did see, and everybody has a good word for him, but it wasn’t always so. He had to learn to walk slow and talk low when he got back from Philadelphia, and he never looks white folks in the face, for it’s not genteel. Always keeps his head down, and he edges. Take a lesson from this old dog, the way she’s niggering up to me.” Old Mama had not left them when Nancy stopped scratching her. Instead, she waited, not in the way, but there to be noticed if they remembered her.

  “You mean,” Abraham said, “if I act like her and show myself accommodating, I’ll grow tits that sweep the ground?” She kicked him and he rolled over on the ground out of her way. “How about you? What’s going to happen when you grow up?”

  “I’m all over. Nothing going to happen to me. I’ll die one day.”

  “Need a man in your life.”

  She moaned, mocking ecstasy. “Used to be girls, the house I worked in, said they just couldn’t stand menfolks. I’d tell ’em, ‘All right, ladies, wasn’t for them, you’d have to work with your hands.’”

  She laughed, and he did too, and she began to cough, and Benjamin arrived.

  “Confound it, Abraham, I heard nothing out of you for six months except ‘Let’s expand, build onto the mill!’ Here I find you making Nancy cough and the work going on without you—”

  Abraham jumped to his feet. “Yassah, boss man, didn’t see you coming, sah! I’se movin’ fast as my po’ old feets kin carry me! This the way, Nancy?” Still laughing, he threw the fishing pole at her feet and left them, fetching his horse from the back yard and riding away down the hill with a goodbye wave.

  Watching him, Nancy said, as if continuing an earlier thought, “And another thing. He oughtn’t to ride that horse. A nigger on a mule is one thing; a nigger on a horse is something else.”

  “I think you’re both crazy.”

  “I was trying to talk sense to that boy, so he won’t get in trouble. I don’t forget what happened to Floyd.”

  “You’re still trying to be his mammy. You and Grandma worry the same way. He’ll be all right when people know him better and get used to him. The only ones— Never mind Abraham. I came to see how you are.”

  “I’m all right,” she said glumly.

  “I heard you coughing.”

  “Everybody coughs.”

  “Not blood.”

  “Who are ‘the only ones’ you started to say?”

  He looked at her carefully before answering. “The poorer whites that work across the creek at the sawmill. They hate everything about him—the way he walks, way he talks, way he wears his clothes, way he looks at them.”

  “White trash.”

  Benjamin shrugged. “I got to get on. Everything was late; now everything’s in a hurry to grow with the good weather. Grass taking over the world—”

  “Be growing over me pretty soon.”

  “You reckon?” She waited for him to object, and when he did not, she frowned, which made him smile.

  “Get on,” she ordered him, and watched him go. When she was alone, Old Mama edged closer and began to wag her tail. “Me and you,” Nancy said to her, and reached to touch her head.

  11

  Having had a husband and a lover who were passionate, Frankie did not consider herself innocent in sexual matters. She had managed Bonard, giving and withholding herself as she pleased. With Benjamin she was better matched; they were nearer equals than often happens in such a relationship. But nothing in her experience or her imagining had prepared her for James Davis. A sense of security, of h
aving leapt safely over the yawning chasm—relief approaching triumph—saw her through the first week in Savannah. She was even proud of the demands of her new husband, finding it a compliment to her womanliness that he wanted her two and three times daily. James had, she reminded herself, been without wife for some months; and when she thought of fat, red-faced Maggie Davis, she could only pity and indulge him. Besides, he was good to her, encouraging her to buy whatever she fancied in the stores, insisting upon their eating in the finest places, providing her with a carriage every hour of the day. She remembered her mean childhood in the same city; and she reflected on what her life would now be had she continued dependent upon Annabel Saxon. The moments her mind was thus fixed she was able to answer James’s needs with something more than tolerance.

  But by the time they returned to Highboro, her nerves were as sore as her flesh, and she looked to the future with foreboding, for there was nothing she might do but submit. She was well enough acquainted with her husband’s character to realize that he would not be put aside or controlled as Bonard had let himself be. What he wanted he would have; he wanted her, and she was his. With Bonard she had never lost a sense of herself, and for that matter, of him. She may seldom have enjoyed him and never loved him, but he was always recognizably Bonard, and she was able to remain herself in their encounters. Thinking of Benjamin, she had to restrain herself from weeping that she should ever have quarreled with him. Had he not been a true lover in every way? As considerate as he was eager, gentle with himself as well as her, he had been alert to each nuance of response.

  With James she ceased being herself, and she had no inkling who he was or how he thought of her. He was always tumescent and went at her with an urgency that might be spent but was never satisfied. Even when they were not actively engaged, he would not let her alone. She would wake in the night to find his sticky hardness pressing and smearing her naked thigh, his blunt, dry fingers prying and probing. His blindness seemed to include his whole body.

  She longed for privacy, but there was none for her. He wanted her to be with him all the time, day and night. In the presence of others, he must hold her hand to be certain she was still beside him. (Acquaintances were touched by his devotion and dependence and congratulated her.) He had dismissed the boy Enoch as attendant; she became his guide. With Fanny and Blair he was either silent or impatient, and they learned to avoid him when they could, which left Frankie even more alone with him. And when they were alone, he was capable of taking her anywhere and at any time—on a sofa, on the floor of his office at the sawmill, on the ground, once in the buggy as they rode through the country and, not minding the horse, presently found themselves in a ditch. She went to sleep in apprehension and woke with dread. What drove him, she could not say and did not care. The memory of her early pride at his attentions now chilled her heart. He was inflamed by a joyless, implacable desire to consume her.

  She minded least the time they spent at the sawmill, and in doing what she could to prolong the hours there, began to learn about the working of the mill as she had only imagined knowing something of it before. Eugene Betchley was now a quarter-share partner as he’d been promised, and he seemed to have forgotten the interview in which he urged her to sell him Bonard’s land across the creek adjoining the cotton mill. He was courteous in a stiff way, having no instinct for good manners but meaning to behave correctly with her. When he saw that she was determined to take a serious interest in the operation of the mill, he tried to ignore her efforts but gradually accepted what he could not avoid. She knew that he was watching her; and it did not take her many days to understand that it was he who ran the work, that it was to him the men looked for hour-to-hour and day-by-day direction and control. Decisions might seem to be made in the office with James speaking the final word; but that Eugene Betchley was brain and brawn of the sawmill, there was no mistaking.

  James decided to be pleased with his wife’s interest in business and was presently boasting to all that he had found the ideal partner. Galled by such praise, Annabel said sharply to Frankie, “You mustn’t overextend yourself, for you are looking quite haggard, I declare you are.” After a few weeks of marriage Frankie “discovered” that she was pregnant, and her pale looks were ascribed to her condition. Although James professed himself delighted, in his heart he damned as a nuisance the child that would eventually put a pause in his pleasures.

  Gazing at Casey Troy’s painting and then at its model, Annabel marveled, “How much you’ve changed, Frankie! You mustn’t expect a pregnancy at your age to be an easy one. You were comparatively young when you carried Blair Three and Fanny, and you know what they say: ‘A baby makes a young wife bloom, an old one wither.’ Never mind.” She patted Frankie’s hand. “You’ve done very well for yourself and mustn’t grumble, must you?”

  There was, of course, joking among acquaintances. The husbands made mild, envious sallies about old men with young notions, while their wives indulged in cruder gibes about old fools and flatterers. James had been popular with the women of the town; he was so no longer. To marry twice made him interesting, evidencing his appreciation of their sex. To take a third wife, and such a one as Frankie-Julia Dollard Saxon, exposed him as a sensualist. At his age, they opined, a man should be pondering his fitness for the next world. James clearly was not.

  Much as there was to exasperate her, Frankie kept busy, did not mope or complain. She carried ledgers home from the sawmill to study. She verified or challenged addition and subtraction. If she was to be her husband’s guide, she would be so in ways other than leading him about the town as young Enoch had done. She was more than a walking cane. As she came and went every day, the men at the mill grew used to her and no longer bothered to alter their attitudes in her presence, which pleased her. She had her share of vanity, but she knew she would learn little of the routine if the laborers treated her like a lady on a visit. Now they continued working and talking as she passed among them, and along with other things revealed their dislike and resentment of the Negroes who worked at the cotton mill. The discovery did not much concern Frankie; she merely noted it.

  One Saturday she surprised Eugene Betchley staring over the creek with an expression that prompted her to say to herself: “Of course. He is white trash like his men. They think the same, and where they don’t, he will always lead them his way.” She felt a thrill of danger with the discovery. Eugene was not aware of her presence until his eye caught a wave from the other shore from Benjamin Davis and he turned to find Frankie behind him. It was the first time she had seen him off guard. As he walked away, she called to Benjamin, “Come over! I want to see you!”

  Hearing the invitation, the men on the sawmill side did pause over their last work of the day and exchange looks, for the Davis father and the Davis son were rare visitors to each other’s mills. Benjamin exaggerated a shrug as people will at a distance to ensure that they are understood. “No bridge! I’ll see you in church tomorrow morning!”

  “Frankie?” Her husband was beside her. “I wondered where you’d got to. Who are you speaking to?”

  “Why, your son Benjamin across the creek. He seems to have gone away now.”

  James took her by the hand. Since their marriage he’d been jealous of any man she spoke to, and he had not forgotten that Benjamin and Frankie were once very nearly engaged to marry. He was as aware as others that Priscilla had long chosen to live with her mother and not her husband. He had no idea of how Benjamin found sexual gratification, but he was wary of Frankie’s speaking to him in such a free and casual way, for it suggested intimacy.

  “It’s time to go home.”

  “Is it?” Frankie murmured. “May days are so long.”

  “Day and night are one to me. Isn’t there something you have forgotten?”

  They were strolling back to the office, and Frankie observed the workmen forming a loose line. “Payday!” she exclaimed.

  “The money box is ready,” he told her. “Blair Two brought it from t
he bank.”

  It had been one of James’s conceits early in the marriage to allow Frankie to hand their pay to the men at the end of the week. It was now regular practice. As they sat down side by side at the pay table, the line of men shuffled forward. Frankie handed each one the money he had earned, checking his name on the list before her and setting the sum down neatly in another column as having been paid out. It was a task that gave her satisfaction, for she understood perfectly well that poor men had a regard amounting to awe for those who actually handed money to them. Had she not been poor herself?

  When the last had claimed his due, Frankie shut the box and handed it to her husband. James locked it and lighted a cigar, another part of the ritual. Frankie said, “What of me, sir? Am I not worth a wage?”

  Placing the box under one arm, James rose and took her by the hand. “You have me,” he said before he kissed her palm.

  12

  The sun of summer and the winds of winter affected her more acutely every passing year, and Sarah had gradually given over the management of Beulah Land to Benjamin. She seldom ventured into the fields nowadays, and when she did so, she rode Buster, a gentle and uncharacteristically tractable mule she preferred to any of their horses for both saddle and buggy. Meeting always at meals and in the evenings, she and Benjamin talked over all that happened, but she left decisions on the working of land and livestock to him.

  If he was now master of Beulah Land, she was still its mistress, however. She might not have been so ready to hand over authority had a wife hovered at his side to challenge her position in the eyes of the inhabitants of Beulah Land, for she was determined to live out her life as mistress there. After Lovey’s death at the end of the war no servant had risen to the requirements of managing the great house, and so Sarah did it herself. It was not simply a matter of beds and barrels of flour, but of lives. “I can’t leave for half a day,” she boasted with as much truth as pride. Things would have gone along, she knew, but she favored supervision to momentum. She who had never borne a child was a mothering woman. Both Floyd and Casey used to tell her, only partly in jest, that Beulah Land was her child, although she considered that she had many others. Roman, when he was a boy and she little more than a bride, had been her first adoption; and since then there had been Rachel, daughter of her husband Leon and her sister Lauretta; Rachel’s children, Benjamin and Jane; and now their children; as well as Floyd’s son Abraham and Roscoe Elk. All were hers in a way they had never belonged to their blood mothers.