In spite of the cool day, they were sweating when all was loaded and ready. Hearing Leon’s plea to Fanny to come to Beulah Land for a few days, Benjamin added his encouragement, saying that both Sarah and Bruce had missed her visits and were eager to see her. Clearly wanting to accept, Fanny said no but listened as they reasoned that her clothes were already packed, and they had only to drive the gig to her mother’s house and obtain her permission.
At that point Eugene Betchley appeared driving a wagon and told Fanny he’d come for her.
“We’ve other ideas, Mr. Betchley,” Leon said, and explained the proposal that had been made and all but accepted.
Eugene looked earnestly at Fanny. “Your mama wants you at home.”
“Is she not well?” Fanny asked.
“As well as she ever likes to say, but the house needs you,” Eugene answered positively. “So does your sister.”
“I’ve a present for her—”
“Where is your trunk?” She found it, and Eugene ordered one of the loungers to set it on his wagon.
“We’ll go along after you and speak to Mrs. Betchley ourselves,” Benjamin said.
“No call for that,” Eugene replied flatly. “Get in the wagon, Fanny. It’s my place to look after you.”
Seeing that Leon was about to object, Fanny said to Benjamin, “Give my love to Bruce and Aunt Sarah and say I’ll be out to see them very soon.” Eugene helped her into the wagon and drove away without another word.
“I’ll take Nancy,” Roscoe said. “Plenty of room beside me, and it’s on my way.”
Leon handed up the last of the smaller articles to Nancy, who had set herself beside Roscoe. Neither had looked at the loungers, but they’d been aware of them. Watching them go, Benjamin said to Leon, “Might as well stop by the mill; Davy will be there.” Leon nodded, and they got into the gig, leaving the station to the loungers.
“Hear it? Hear Gene?”
“I heard.”
“He don’t take sass from nobody, do he? Not the gal nor them Davises.”
“Biggety niggers calling white folks by first names—”
“Je-rusalem!”
“Prissing around like the Queen of Sheba after going off to Savannah to buy stuff for getting married. You reckon our Highboro lard ain’t good enough for ’em?”
“I reckoned black apes nested in trees, didn’t you?”
“Trying to out-white white.”
“It’s them Beulah Landers put them up to it. If I had my way, I’d run ever’ nigger out of the county and kill them that didn’t run fast enough to suit me.”
“So’d Gene. He don’t believe in spoiling niggers.”
“It was old lady Troy started it all with that school out yonder, you know. Taught ’em to read and write and wipe their asses just like me and you.”
“When’d you start wiping your ass, Raymond?”
They laughed. They spat, they repeated, they argued, they fumed; and when they had exhausted the variations on what they’d said a thousand times before, they went back into the freight office and sat around the stove in the middle of the room, hawking now and then and watching their spittle sizzle and disappear on the fat red belly of the stove.
3
Soon to be twenty-one, Leon was no longer thought of by the farm hands as a smart boy but as a knowledgeable man. He seemed to remember every bit of legend and lore that came his way concerning rain and moon, sun and soil and seed; and he had learned to temper hearsay with his own experience, to leave allowance for the unpredictable and the inexplainable. Animals were calm under his hands, and the men trusted him. While not indulgent, he was thoughtful of their welfare and quick to appreciate effort and care. Benjamin might be considered “big boss man,” but it was Leon they worked with; and Benjamin, having responsibilities to the cotton mill and the gin and other properties, was happy to have such a son. For all there was to do, they were companions too. When not at work, and sometimes when they were, they were together, hence the plantation byword: “Find one and you’ve found the other.”
At fifty Daniel Todd worked his own farm with the help of Bobby Lee, who had taken to the land as naturally as Leon. Daniel was given to saying with satisfaction approaching smugness that there were no holidays for farmers, adding in genial wonder, “Seems like there’s twice as much to do as there used to be.” Still, there was time for hunting, often at night; and it was this father and son who kept the plantation tables supplied with game: quail and wild turkey, rabbit, squirrel, even an occasional deer. Benjamin and Leon had no love of guns. Jane would grumble complacently that Dan and Bobby Lee were never happier than when they were out all night, returning at daybreak wet and noisy and smelling of feathers, fur, and blood. She was becoming more full-bodied, yet in spite of the eyeglasses she wore and the gray that showed in her hair, her face remained girlish. She reminded Sarah of her great-grandmother Edna. “Look at Dan,” she would say to Sarah. “Eats a lot more than I do and lean as a fishing pole. Every bite I take goes here and here and, Lord help me, everywhere. Tell me why, Grandma?”
As for Davy, nothing bored him more than plowing and planting and waiting for things to grow. When he turned seventeen and finished the local school, he declined the suggestion that he continue his education at university and asked to work at the cotton mill. He liked the hum and clatter of the little factory, the buzz of talk, the comings and goings, the very dust and vibration in the air that made Leon on his occasional visits with Benjamin long for the rows of cotton and corn stretching to sky’s end, the quiet fecundity of earth. Roscoe and Benjamin had made Abraham manager of the mill, for as they told each other, “If we hadn’t, he’d have taken it away from us.” It was natural enough for the young white man to learn from the Negro who was his senior by a dozen years and who had always been a friend.
Inclined as both were to mild foolishness, they tended conversely to act more soberly together than apart. They had their jokes, which the Negro factory workers enjoyed, but they worked hard and took work seriously. It was a small factory still, compared to the mills in Columbus and Augusta that employed thousands. They did not produce the variety of goods manufactured by their bigger brothers, who made everything from the finest muslins to the coarsest tenting. Abraham’s factory made thread and only thread, and that of but four different sizes in black and white. They had tried dyes, but the sawmill across the creek shared the water supply and complained about it.
Eugene Betchley had expanded his holdings, now owning half a dozen small farms in addition to the one he had married Bessie for, a couple of thousand acres of backwoods timberland, and a few store properties in Highboro on the back street he rented to Negroes. He was not, therefore, inclined to bother his old enemies across the creek as long as their interests were not in conflict. But the men who worked for him despised the black workers and grudged them their decent wages. They even resented the state, law that had passed in 1889 limiting the factory workday to eleven hours, boasting that they worked twelve and fourteen for their peas and corn bread and sow belly. There had been no violence, but the white men shouted taunts across the creek at the black men and women, while the latter, protected by the width of water, acted elaborate unconcern, or in the guise of comic asides to one another, displayed their scorn for the whites whose work was more menial than theirs.
The first thing Davy bought with money earned at the mill was a bicycle. Having decided he wanted to become a town man, he proceeded to use it instead of a horse to go back and forth to work, although the clay road between Beulah Land and Highboro was slippery in wet weather, and horse power would have been surer than rubber tires. He was sometimes forced to walk the bicycle the whole distance from home to factory, spoiling his boots and his disposition, for the sawmill workers laughed at him, including him with the Negroes he worked alongside.
One who observed him from across the creek and did not laugh was Frankie-Julia Dollard Saxon Davis Betchley. Determined to hold the major share of the sawmill,
Frankie spent several hours there every day, confirming the suspicion of the town women that her earlier boldness in going to work was dictated less by necessity than a common, commercial streak she had brought with her from Savannah. Frankie had never paid much attention to them; nor did she now. She had given much to own what she did and had no notion of allowing Eugene to take it from her, although he ordinarily spoke of the mill as “mine,” not “ours” or “my wife’s.” He made little mention of his wife to anyone. Having schooled himself to put on a patient and resigned public face about Bessie, he let it continue to serve for his second wife, which did him no disservice with the women of the town. (“Such a good man; never misses church, while she finds any excuse enough to stay home. No telling what goes on back of those closed curtains.”)
But if Eugene, along with his show of piety, affected patience and resignation regarding his marriage, Frankie did not. The years had sharpened her temper and made her sour. Growing old with none to admire and love her was a bitter thing, she whose attributes had once made her belle of the county and might still have claimed some devotion and loyalty. It was a bitter thing for her to be married to Eugene, who taunted her with the reminder: “You will always be seven years older than I, and I’ve already been married to one old woman. She’d been used by Ben Davis too.”
Memory was the worst bitterness, for she had only to look across the creek at the youth of Davy Todd to think of the time of her own youth when she might have married Benjamin Davis and had Beulah Land, but refused him because of his liaison with Bessie Marsh. The child of that connection was himself now in the very vigor of manhood and loved her daughter. Frankie had never loved Fanny, and it was a bitterness to think of her acquiring without effort or design the position Frankie had coveted. Her other daughter, Edna May, was a bitter reminder of the hours she had shared with the one man who had pleased her and who now and forever was denied her. Worse: he was not sorry to lose her, not resigned, but happy with a homely, pockmarked Negro woman older than he! Was there no comprehending a man?
The son she had spoiled and looked on with hope had, as she put it to herself, deserted her to live at Annabel’s while reading law under the sponsorship of the retired county judge Claude Meldrim. Sometimes she thought of going away, freeing herself of the past to make a new life. But she was getting old, and those who have been poor and are a little rich do not easily abandon property. Feeding on bitterness, she walked lean and hungry, longing for a snake to cross her path that she might enjoy the release of killing it. No wonder when she heard laughter and looked over the creek she despaired, for there was no laughter on this side she could share.
“Abraham! Don’t you think you’re too old to marry a young girl like that?”
“A prince’s daughter.”
“Boss’s daughter, you mean! Let you grow up in his house treating you like a brother—”
“‘Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled—’”
“Don’t know about ‘undefiled’ but she must be the blackest dove I ever did see!”
“Back to your looms and spindles, slaves—”
High, happy laughter flew across the little stretch of water that separated the sawmill from the cotton mill. The choppers and cutters of wood paused at their work to frown, and Frankie knew she would have one of her headaches that, at their worst, led her to close the curtains of her room and lie in the dark sometimes for two whole days with no one to comfort her.
4
Sarah had never used a maid to help her dress, nor did she now; but when they were making ready for special occasions, Bruce, who always dressed quickly, would come to Sarah’s room and ask to sit and watch. It had begun when she was a young girl soon after Casey Troy died and continued now when she was sixteen. Luck’s wedding day was a day of what they called typical March weather, with fast-moving clouds and squalls of rain, though it was late in the month and spring was well advanced.
When Bruce knocked and was invited to come in, Sarah was almost ready. “I have no patience with growing old. It’s a matter of having one thing after another taken away until one day I’ll wake up and find so little left, I’ll say to the Lord, ‘All right, take the rest, take me while You’re about it.’ Maybe that’s the way it happens.”
Bruce giggled, and Sarah looked at her warningly.
“Don’t vex me, child; I’m doing my best.” Bruce took a chair at the foot of the bed but close enough to the wardrobe and dressing table to follow Sarah’s progress. Sarah had chosen a yellow silk dress that was nipped in sharply at the waist and left full in the sleeves. She tried to make the sleeves looked puffed, but being silk, they would not. With a twist she finished pinning her hair in a bun at the back of her neck in the fashion Mrs. Cleveland had made popular a few years earlier.
“I like watching you,” Bruce said presently, as she said on every such occasion.
Standing, Sarah surveyed herself in the long mirror glass, tilting it, the better to catch the light. “I’m a bad example,” she said critically, “for I don’t care a fig how I look as long as I don’t outrage public decency.”
“You’re original and independent, Grandma.”
Sarah glanced at her suspiciously, then back at her reflected image. “Am I dressy enough to do Luck credit? She’s particular about clothes, has been ever since she was a little girl. Always loved pink. So many colored people do, and why shouldn’t they? They look good in it. I need something else.” She pulled a drawer open. Its contents were a mess, and she tumbled them more before bringing forth a string of purple beads.
As she studied them, Bruce said, “No.”
Without looking at her or questioning her judgment, Sarah dropped the beads back into the drawer and rummaged again.
Bruce said, “The opals Grandpa gave you.”
Sarah found them, put them on, stood back from the glass, and looked pleased. “But I still look bare.” She found a bunch of large red artificial cherries, but before she could hold them against the dress, Bruce said, “They look like something cut off a hat.”
“They were. You remember it, a sort of green.”
Bruce set her jaw and said nothing.
Sarah abandoned the cherries. “That will have to do. Maybe I’ll carry a—what’s blooming in the garden?”
“Nothing I’ll let you wear.” Bruce left her chair and kissed her. “You’re pretty as you are, and you don’t want to draw attention from the bride.”
“You look nice,” Sarah discovered.
“Will I marry someone too, Grandma?”
“If you marry at all, it will be someone, won’t it?”
“You don’t think—” She pulled her upper lip against her teeth. Sarah touched the red scar lightly. “I won’t say it isn’t there, because it is; but it’s part of you, and no one sees it as anything else.”
“Papa and Leon are ready and waiting. We’re using the six-seater so there’ll be room to bring Fanny back, and the top is up in case it rains.”
Fanny watched at a front window of her mother’s house in Highboro, eager to be off. Annabel and Blair Three were to stop for her on their way to Elk Institute, they being the only other white townspeople who would attend the wedding. Edna May was at Fanny’s side and once again begged her to save something from the wedding, if it was only a flower to press. She was eight and believed that every event should be commemorated because it occurred in her lifetime. When Fanny promised again, Edna May said, “I don’t know why you can go, and I can’t.”
Pausing at the living-room door on his way out of the house for his morning rounds, Eugene said, “You well know I won’t allow it. It’s a nigger wedding, and his to boot. Now get along to school.”
“It’s Saturday, Papa.”
“There’s no excuse to be idle.” As Edna May ran past him, he remained in the doorway looking at the older girl at the window. “You’re willful to go yourself. People think it wrong. If you were my daughter, I’d forbid it.”
Fanny turne
d to look at him for the first time. “Yes, sir, you have said so.”
“Yet you defy me. How you can even want to go—”
“Luck Elk is my friend.”
“Her husband-to-be is my enemy, and people find it odd that you should go.”
“It would be odder if I did not, since we have been friends all our lives.”
“You’re to come home immediately afterwards and not eat or drink anything with them, do you hear?”
“No, sir. I am staying at Beulah Land for a few days. I’ve explained it all to Mama, and she has agreed.”
“You don’t ask,” he said provocatively, “you explain.”
Ignoring his teasing tone which implied an intimacy she would not acknowledge, she glanced again out the window. “They are here for me. Grandmother is very stylish, and Blair a dapper dandy—”
“I forbade him to come here.”
“Then I must meet them outside.” She went quickly past him, taking up the carpetbag she had left in the hallway. Eugene looked about the empty room and then walked into it. It was quiet, and it held the girl’s scent. His eyes went from the pendulum of the mantel clock to the portrait of his wife above it, and he frowned.
The grounds and houses of Elk Institute were a continuous purr and sometimes a roar of voices coming and going, of pleas and commands and, as the pupils of the school complained, of “doing and don’t-ing.” They were all to attend the wedding in the auditorium just as if it was a play. The starch in the dresses was enough to stiffen a circus tent and every drop of perfume on the premises had been used and used again. A drop spilled could sever a friendship.
The Legacy of Beulah Land Page 35
