Cape Fear Rising

by Philip Gerard

  Downstairs, Elizabeth Alma King, who called herself Bessie, let herself in the unlocked back kitchen door. A fat ginger cat, sprawled on the cold floor, got up and rubbed against her leg, bare under the gray skirts. It purred like a little engine and meowed.

  “Hush, you cat,” Bessie said and gently swept it across the smooth floor with her foot. The cat played with her shoe. “I swear, you just like a child.” She poured some milk into a chipped dish and set it on the floor. The cat lapped it up.

  “All God’s creatures got to fill their belly,” she said. She wrapped an apron around her middle and fumbled with the strings. A girlhood of chopping cotton had left her hands scarred and arthritic. She was still strong and slender—the other women at the Negro service at St. Thomas’s envied her slim waist. Came from living close to the bone, she liked to say.

  She kindled a fire in the stove. Lord, it was hot already. She left the door open to make a draft with the open window over the sink. The Colonel liked his hot breakfast. But she wouldn’t fool with lace waffles today.

  The cat finished the milk and sprawled again on the floor, licking its front paws delicately. “My boy David,” she told the cat, “he a good boy. He got a little devil in him, any boy got that. But they ain’t no call to beat the boy. Ain’t no call.”

  She thought she heard someone stirring upstairs. She paused in her work, cocked her head, turned an eye to the ceiling. She had a few minutes yet. This morning, she was working alone. Saffron was home with David. Saffron knew how to take care of a man. She’d put David right. She had all that loving in her and nobody to spend it on—her man had been taken in a mill accident. Yanked into the machinery, chewed right to the bone. They shut it down for two hours to pull him out, and when they did, he came out in pieces. An eighteen-year-old widow—it wasn’t right. The Almighty just hadn’t been paying attention.

  The cat stretched and yawned, and Bessie shook her head, then wagged a crooked finger at the cat. “You got the blessed life. You got no trouble and toil. You got no chirren to squeeze your heart. You got no cares and woe, all you gets is the sweet milk.” She reached down and stroked the cat, who leaned into her hand, craving more.

  Now, she was sure someone was moving around upstairs. “That be the Colonel,” she told the cat. “Man got worry on his mind. Man visit rooms at night.”

  She stirred up batter for flannel cakes and sliced off a rasher of pork to fry. She larded a frying pan and set it on the stove to sizzle. She moved across the kitchen into the pantry to fetch the preserves. A woman of gravity—some days, she felt like she was dragging the whole world around with her.

  In the far corner of the pantry, near the ceiling, the brown spider quivered in her web, and Bessie smiled. “How do, Miz Spider,” she said. A spider upright on the web was good luck. She looked for it every day. But if the spider hung upside down, death would visit the house before the next sunrise. She paused in the cool pantry, enjoying the stillness, the faint aroma of sealing wax and cured pine boards. The shelves were lined with neat rows of vacuum jars—green beans, strawberries, apple butter.

  The presence of so much good food—stored carefully, each jar labeled with india ink—reassured her. Bessie knew that, as long as she worked in this house, she would never know want. It was insurance. Like a second family. She had a kind of right to this food. Her own hands had done most of the work of putting it up, though Miz Gabrielle had helped. “Whatever you need, come to me,” Miz Gabrielle had told her in this very pantry almost two years ago, the day she had moved them all into the house as the Colonel’s wife.

  Whitefolks were always saying things such as that to show off, to remind you how much extra they had, but Bessie believed her: Miz Gabrielle had stood close to her and whispered it. She remembered her perfume, like gardenias. Whatever you need.

  She went back to the kitchen and the early heat. The cat was perched on the windowsill above the sink, tail curled around itself, looking out. Upstairs, she could hear the Colonel pissing away his night pizens. Miz Gabrielle must be still asleep.

  She told the cat, “I be sleeping, too, that old peckerwood be my man.” She ladled yellow batter into the sizzling skillet, where it hardened into brown coins. “I be sleeping morning, noon, and night. I be Sleeping Beauty, that man come sniffing around me for a taste.” She laughed in the back of her throat. The cat ignored her.

  She looked out the window past the cat. “My David never stole no chicken. Ain’t no call, what they done to that boy. You got to give a boy a chance in this hard world.” She wanted to reach out and stroke the cat, but her hands were full of work. The skillet hissed, and sweat dampened her forehead. It beaded on her upper lip and ran down. She tasted salt.

  Breakfast frying was usually a good smell, sour and sweet at once. It filled up the soul and put a small ache in the belly. But not this morning. This morning, she had enough ache in her belly.

  “Lord,” she said softly to the cat as she shook the skillet, “feed my sheep. Feed my little lambs.”

  Sam woke to the peal of church bells. He opened his eyes and was pleased to see Gray Ellen lying next to him. They’d taken connecting rooms at the Orton and until last night had slept apart. They’d sat up late talking—soothing, quiet talk.

  They’d cuddled on the bed, and soon she was fast asleep in his arms. He had not made love to her, but this was almost better. Little by little, she was trusting him again. Beside him now, lying under a single sheet, she stirred in her sleep. The early sunlight caught the sheet and made it shine. The mosquito netting filtered the light so that her face looked softer, younger than it had in years.

  He slipped downstairs to the hotel kitchen and fetched a pot of coffee and a platter of breakfast rolls. Gray Ellen woke to breakfast in bed on a silver tray.

  She sat up against the oak headboard and smiled. Sam looked handsome, his face and neck sun-browned against his white shirt, open at the collar. His eyes were clear these mornings. He was losing that haggard look of never having slept enough. Since he’d quit drinking, the years were falling away. She touched her own face to reassure herself of its smoothness.

  “You and me,” he said. “Let me court you.”

  She smiled. “You won my heart the first time.” They’d met on a Sunday promenade along the Schuylkill in Philadelphia. All the other men wore hats, but his bright blond head had bobbed toward her, hatless, above the crowd. He was slim and strong, with an air of confidence lacking in all the other young men she knew. He had no bravado, and no false modesty either—just an accurate sense of his own abilities. “Someday, I’m going to be publisher of my own newspaper,” he had told her matter-of-factly. Even in bad times, he always talked across to her, never down.

  “After mass,” she said, “let’s go to the ocean.”

  It was a good moment. Gray Ellen thought, this is what it means to be married, a moment like this. A man and a woman together on a quiet morning for no special reason, saying nothing in particular, but saying it with love and tenderness. Tenderness, that’s what the drinking took away. A drunken man could not be tender. But this—if this was the way it was to be from now on …

  He took her hand and held it, saying nothing. She was aware that she was letting it start all over again. She had deliberately put distance between them—that was the only way she could heal. It was like cotton batting to insulate herself from his rough edges. He could no longer cut her, make her bleed inside. It had taken all her will and strength. If she let him win her again, let him back into her heart, she might never get loose again. It was a risk, but she longed to take it.

  After a time, Sam said, “Do you think we’ll be able to stay here?”

  She sighed. It was exactly the wrong question for the moment, couldn’t he see that? “I don’t know,” she said. “A lot of things can happen, I suppose.”

  “Meaning? I thought you liked it here, the job and all. You’ll be teaching again real soon.”

  “Things are very different down here.” She pause
d. He waited. “The people are different.”

  He nodded. “The way they talk.” He thought of Harry making him work for every sentence. “I can hardly follow it sometimes.”

  She looked at him curiously. Maybe he was having a difficult adjustment, too—maybe that’s why he’d brought it up. She hadn’t considered that before—men just adapted so much more easily. The whole world was set up for men to adapt easily. “It’s not just how they talk,” she said. “It’s what they say. What they don’t say. Whenever I leave a room, I can feel them talking about me behind my back.” She had told him all about her interview at Hemenway School. It was important he understand how small they had made her feel.

  He poured more coffee, stirred in sugar. “Don’t get paranoid, sweet. People are the same here as anywhere—some good, some bad.”

  “They wait on me last in the shops. They never include me in the conversation.”

  “You have to admit, the shops are full of bargains.” There was nothing you couldn’t find in the shops—the advantage of being in a deepwater port. And prices were a relief from Chicago. “Come on, we haven’t been here very long. They’ll get to know us.”

  “You hear all this talk about Southern hospitality. And they’ll break their necks for you, all right, if you’re family. Or if you’ve lived here for a hundred years. But if you’re a stranger …”

  Sam patted her hand. “You miss your family, I know. But isn’t it beautiful here? The pinewoods, the ocean. The way the air smells off the river. I mean, you can smell this place.”

  She pushed away the tray and rested her head on his lap. “This place gets into your blood,” she said. “I understand why they fought for it. Why they don’t want to live anywhere else.”

  “Well, then.”

  “But they don’t even want to go anywhere else. Even for a visit. Even as a tourist. Even in books. Down here, it’s a flat earth.”

  “You’ve made your mind up too fast. You’re not being fair.”

  “The Civil War’s been over for thirty years, Sam. Nobody up north even talks about it. The world has moved on.”

  Sam nodded slowly and stroked her head. “All that is beside the point,” he said. “You and me. I just want us to make a life here.”

  She fixed her eyes on his. “Oh, Sam,” she said, and lightly touched his cheek.

  Father Dennen preached an angry sermon during the late service at St. Thomas’s—the white service. “We all have our place in God’s eyes,” he said. “The brother of whom you are the keeper may have red hair and freckles, like me. Or he may be swarthy, with a flat nose and thick lips. But every man’s soul is the same color as the Lord God who made him.”

  At the door of St. Thomas’s, an uninspired brick-and-frame building on Dock Street, Father Dennen greeted his congregants as they filed out after the late mass. Some shook his hand heartily and blessed him for a sensible sermon in dangerous times. But others pushed out roughly past him, deliberately snubbing the priest.

  Sam shook Father Dennen’s hand. He was much taller than the priest, but he could feel the raw strength in the man’s handshake. Maybe that comes with having the courage of your convictions, Sam reflected. “Good sermon, Father,” Sam said, eager to get on with the day he and Gray Ellen had planned. “We all needed to hear it.”

  Father Dennen held onto Sam’s hand, then clapped his left hand behind Sam’s elbow, pinching it. “You’re Jenks.”

  “Yes, Father. Call me Sam.”

  “Well, Sam, I don’t know what you’re stirring up trouble for, but if I was you, I’d meditate on my immortal soul.”

  “Father?” Sam tried to pull his hand away, but the priest wasn’t letting go. He was squeezing, pinching harder, as if this were some kind of contest. Other parishioners were backed up in the doorway, like cattle jammed in a chute. They wanted out.

  “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  “Chicago, Father. But—”

  “I been to cities. I see what you’re up to. But let me tell you, it won’t do here.”

  “What’s wrong, Father?” Gray Ellen asked. Sam felt rescued.

  “I understand you went to see Alex Manly,” Father Dennen said quietly. “Leave him be. He’s working for his people. Trying to keep his head down, do you see? There’s no call to be trumpeting his good name all over your newspaper. Let Tom Clawson do his own dirty work.”

  Suddenly, Sam understood: the piece about Manly, back in business at Free Love Hall. He’d naturally expected it wouldn’t run until Monday. “Have you got a copy?”

  The priest unbuttoned his cassock above the waist, reached in, and produced a ragged copy of Saturday’s Messenger. “Jenks, you complicate the work of the church militant.”

  He let go of Sam’s hand and clapped him on the back hard enough to knock the wind out of him. Others filed out fast behind them. Sam stood under a locust tree, reading his article. People walked by and stared. Gray Ellen read it over his shoulder.

  “The race-baiter Manly is back in business,” read the lead. “The infamous author of the scandalous editorial defaming Southern Womanhood has set up shop in Free Love Hall, under the auspices of the Black Ministerial Union, and will continue inciting the Negroes to riot and mayhem. In the high-handed style to which his readers have become accustomed, the notorious advocate of rape and miscegenation was holding forth and granting interviews to the press and his disciples. ‘The man who defames me shall be paid in full,’ he vowed, waving his black fist, symbol of the movement to subvert constitutional Anglo-Saxon rule.”

  “Sam, how could you!” Gray Ellen said.

  “Gray, you think I wrote this?”

  “You said you wrote an article—”

  “My God, the style is all puffed up, it’s full of catch phrases.”

  “Manly didn’t swear to get Clawson?”

  “No, no. He owes the man some money or something. I didn’t even write it in the piece—I just told Clawson that Manly’d make good on the debt, whatever it is. Manly asked me to.”

  She read the rest of it. “It gets worse,” she said, her voice quiet and husky. “The article advises him to get out of town before—let me read it—‘before the God-fearing white citizens of this town make an example out of him.’ Good Lord, tell me they’re not going to lynch him, Sam!”

  He took her arm, and they started walking. “Nobody’s going to lynch anybody. It’s just hot air. These small-town newspapers, they get into rivalries to boost circulation. Haven’t you ever read Mark Twain? He writes about this kind of stunt all the time.”

  “Well, you’re all mixed up in it. I don’t like that.”

  “I’ll have a talk with Clawson first thing Monday. Nobody’s going to butcher my copy like that. Not even the boss.”

  They put it out of their minds and passed a long, lazy day together. Borrowing the horse and buggy Cousin Hugh had made available at the livery stable downtown, they rode off down the Shell Road to see the beach. The breeze off the ocean cooled them, and they marveled at the different colors of the sky and sea away from the city—as if someone had taken a sepia photograph and painted in the colors brighter than real life.

  At the wooden causeway, they looked out on low, marshy islands cut by finger channels. Beyond those lay the ocean. They crossed the causeway, overwhelmed by the soft breeze, the plovers and wheeling gulls. It was exactly what Gray Ellen needed today—to ride, to feel the air moving against her cheeks, to get away from the noise of other people. She didn’t like living in a hotel, even a residential hotel. She wanted a little house on a quiet street, with a grocery on the corner and neighbors who sat on their porches in the evening trading stories about the day. She wanted a clean sky drifting over her backyard, and chips of starlight flickering on the leaves of her own spreading oak in the evening.

  They left the buggy in the shade of the Oceanview Hotel and wandered along the wide, clean beach. The long green swells rolled ashore, dramatically serene. Holding his hand, she felt very much in lov
e with her husband. The wind mussed his hair and burned color into his cheeks. He looked ruggedly handsome.

  She stared into the wide-open sky, the long horizon in every direction, feeling a weight lifted from her spirit. She breathed in the air deeply.

  Other couples roamed the beach, hand in hand. She felt a sense of release she had longed for ever since Chicago—the world seemed to open up, to promise everything.

  She was slightly ashamed of herself for having already judged this place so harshly. “Lovely,” she whispered, and Sam only nodded, threading his fingers into hers.

  Then she unlaced her high shoes, kicked them off, gathered her skirts, and ran barefoot through the surf.

  “What are you doing?” Sam laughed, then kicked off his own shoes and followed her into the ocean till the water foamed around his knees.

  Afterward, they ate cold shrimp at a shack that catered to excursionists, then rode back to town in the dusk. The Shell Road had gone slate-colored in the evening shadows. The moon was up, and the horse had no trouble keeping to the level track at a slow but steady pace. On either side, the pinewoods seemed to press closer, filling their ears with a racket of bullfrogs and crickets, cicadas and owls. Once, a possum skittered across the road, her belly pouch fat with kits.

  They came into the lights at Seventeenth Street and heard a commotion of shouting voices several blocks later. A gang of men and boys was running down Seventh, across their path. Sam reined up the horse, and they watched the mob stream by. Redshirted men on horseback rode the fringes of the mob, shouting and brandishing rifles.

  “Lord,” Gray Ellen said, raising her hands to her mouth. If only they could have stayed at the shore a little while longer.

  “The Record’s down that way, three blocks or so,” Sam said.

  “We must do something!”

  Sam squirmed in his seat. The raucous crowd was spooking the horse, and he had to hold her reins firmly. For all the laughter and joshing, it seemed more like a college football game than a lynching. “You can’t do anything against a mob.”