by David Hill
Three generations of Churchill good ol’ boys had splashed down in that adulterous surf with a chorus line of Honey Buns. Soames had never known Henri’s father or grandfather. Henri had told her about it himself when he first took her down there twelve years ago. He was of course married at the time. Soames was twenty-three and working as a secretary in Atlanta. Every extra dime over the rent went to Jeanine, an old French whore who quoted Voltaire and sold her matchmaking services to a certain caliber of ambitious young Southern women. Beauty and brains were essential. You had to be well educated or pass for it. You also had to be self-possessed and eternally graceful. That meant some harridan magnolia had molded you from childhood for the role of an American geisha. Though no one ever said “geisha”—they said “Southern lady” instead.
You also had to know what you wanted. Henri met every one of Soames’s specifications. Henri was a Southern prince. Naturally, his wife was a lady. According to the ancient code, that meant he shared her bed enough to make a few babies while he bought his serious fun on the side. Henri was one of the breed when it came to that. What set him apart was a certain rigidity, a temper that flared when he sensed a woman had the upper hand. Then, in bed, there was an unmistakable air of cold necessity that told her Henri never had a good time in bed with a woman. Not that he was homosexual. His desire was real. It was his execution, somehow more determined than passionate, that told her she had found The Man she understood.
He was a mama’s boy. A matriarch who inflated his ego with constant references to his innate superiority had ruled him. He was a demigod, a paragon, and women should prostrate themselves before him and glory in the fulfillment of his every whim. The South was loaded with those iron battleaxes who stroked their sons’ egos while they squeezed them down below if they made a move to break away. At that point his elevated nature turned base and idiotic. He was cruel, conspiratorial, unconscionable and disgraceful.
Soames knew that a man like Henri expected perpetual adulation from all women, and certainly from a paid escort. She knew that his world was filled with self-effacing females who tried to attract him by demonstrating their natural civility and delicate, deferential style. Would the genuine heir to a textile empire grown out of his ancestor’s cotton interests settle for any less?
Her considered opinion was yes, he would. A soft-spoken angel might win his praises in public, but her acquiescence in private would bore him witless. She was right. She mocked his mannered lovemaking and insulted everything about him—when they were alone together. In public her emasculation took the subtle form of ordering for him in restaurants, sending his wine bottle back to chill ten more minutes, taking up his cause with waiters and bellmen and concierges and drivers.
She practiced her manipulations by trial and error until she had almost complete control over him. Of course, his friends complained. Certain business associates stepped back when Soames began to offer opinions. Most of the people Henri Churchill knew were too deeply involved, too financially dependent on his approval to do anything but listen and nod and figure a way around her later.
Not that she ever had any real power. He was using her like a shield. Meanwhile, his wife held down the family fort in Memphis, playing the indomitable angel who suffers her husband’s outrage in relentlessly cheerful, obsequious public oblivion to his disgrace. When Henri finally began making insincere overtures to Soames about “some day,” she promptly changed the subject every time. Of course, her dismissal was more than he could resist and he brought it up time and again. Like a great actress carefully calibrating the most important role of her career, Soames very gradually changed her tone from dismissive to baffled. It took her months to extract his first indignant demand to know why she discarded any attempt to seriously discuss marriage.
There were a hundred wrong answers, a thousand glib responses that would have tipped him off. Soames had become an expert on manipulating Henri by then. She knew the one that he would find irresistible.
“Because Henri, darling, I adore you, but we both know you don’t have the balls to divorce her and then ruin yourself by marrying me.”
Though he did both. He divorced his first wife, charging her with frigidity and accusing her of having attempted to remedy her condition by virtue of the favors of several young men, two of whom he paid handsomely to support the lie on the witness stand. Rich men had done worse things to rid themselves of unwanted wives in Memphis divorce courts. He aroused some disapproval in and near the country club. But he was too rich, too facile, and too Delta to be ruined by any such epithet.
Until the broken woman took a pistol and shot herself in front of his young sons.
Soames had counted on Henri to become bored with her in time. She had assumed she had several years to wrangle and maneuver a large enough slice of his pie to live in luxury for the rest of her life. But the suicide turned his world against him. (It also made Soames front-page news and a household word in certain Greek Revival bastions of New South Republicanism for decades to come.) The party was over. Her cleverly constructed house of illusions began to crumble in the heat of this all too lurid spotlight.
They’d used up all their honeymoon fun and games during their courtship. It hadn’t taken him long to realize he’d been manipulated, hoodwinked, maybe hypnotized a little. Soames had expected that. She had figured rightly, though. He had behaved very badly toward his first wife and his children. He’d gone soft in the head over a trollop. He wouldn’t turn around and beg that world he had defied to forgive him. He wasn’t about to admit his mistake. Then he had his first wife’s blood on his hands. In his mind, Soames graduated from unrespectable to evil.
Now he saw everything. He would have to take this slowly. He couldn’t divorce her now. She’d have the whole savage drama on cable with daily installments nightly from Little Rock to Atlanta. Worse, she’d beat him. She’d walk away with millions as a reward for her scheme. He had to move slowly. So he settled her into the farm in Mississippi where she had less to spend and less on which to spend it. He let her sit there, knowing she was bored to death and frustrated while he auditioned willing candidates for her replacement in the foaming Caribbean.
What could she do? He could buy as many lawyers and witnesses as it would take to expose her scam. Meanwhile he’d pay lip service to her, admit and betray nothing. She was bound to go crazy from loneliness. She’d crack. His lawyers would find a way to get rid of her cheaply. It was a waiting game. Meanwhile he was having his fun. What did he care how long it would take? Time was always a better friend to the rich.
Averill Sayres had no idea of the situation as he sat in the parlor drinking too much wine and imagining his head on Soames’s breasts. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that by that time he hadn’t picked up on the fact that there was trouble between them. The cold fact was that Averill didn’t particularly care, as long as it stayed between them. Maybe he understood on some level that Soames’s seductive manner was connected to it. He was pretty sure he’d be sorry if he followed her swaying torso up the stairs.
“I’d best be going.”
“Why?”
How he would have loved to tell her the truth. He had a place to go that night and someone waiting he very much wanted to see. Unfortunately, for the foreseeable future that had to be no one’s business.
“Things to do.”
“On a Friday night?”
She smelled like orchids. She wasn’t wearing a bra. She was practically sitting on top of him by now. He had to get up then and there. He had to go. There was no time to worry how insulted she’d get or how he’d explain it later. Women woke madness in him, a foolhardy ache that measured considerably higher on the scale than ordinary desire. It troubled him. It kept him in a near constant state of excitation. That in itself was a terrible distraction. How often had he begged God to cast that demon out of him?
“You’re a very sensual man, Reverend.”
Now her hand brushed his lap and found the zipper. When she softl
y wrapped her fingers around him, it was finished. Heaven lost a zealous guardian and somewhere down in hell he thought he heard a tango as he followed her up the stairs.
She told him everything as they ate breakfast in the kitchen the next morning. Henri had a lover. Soames would soon have nothing. Though Averill was quick to discern that “nothing” didn’t mean nothing, it meant Henri. Then she cried with shame at her seduction. She had dragged him down to her sewer. It wasn’t his fault. He mustn’t blame himself. She was without shame or character, she said. Her desire had been building over weeks of neglect and loneliness. He was a very sexy man. Never had she been so completely satisfied.
In the end, of course, he was no match for her. This time he took her in the shower, the same shower where an hour earlier he had knelt under the cleansing stream of warm water and repented of his sin. Now in his state of arousal and depravity he understood that it wouldn’t be much of a thrill unless it felt like sin.
“You’re getting me addicted to you.”
Averill woke like a drunken man, which he might have been a little earlier, a still-drunk man who finds himself naked and compromised and afraid of the consequences of the desultory flesh sleeping beside him. Friday night had become Saturday and now it was Sunday. In one panicked action he was dressed and down the stairs. The front hall clock read 5:15 A.M. The sky was silver. It was muggy. He followed Henri Churchill’s wax-green cotton crop down the curve of a bowl of land into the pink-and-orange sun. When he came to the creek bed he dropped to his knees and, trembling from head to toe, he wept with shame and remorse.
“God, Lord God, forgive my debauched and wicked acts.”
He had been sullied and defiled as a boy, rendered filthy and depraved by strange men. From the last time he was used until this day, he had kept his solemn vow never to pollute another human being with intimate contact. He was low and worthless and condemned. This vow of abstinence was his private, holy covenant with God, his means of remaining acceptable to heaven.
Now, in the space of a few hours, he had allowed himself to lie down with the whore of Babylon. He took out the small portable Bible he always carried inside his jacket and he opened it to a familiar quotation from the Book of Proverbs, one on which he had based his first sermon at Whitsunday Pentecost Church:
“… A harlot may be hired for a loaf of bread, but an adulteress stalks a man’s very life …”
Soames’s perfume mingled with the salty odors of lovemaking all over his body. He removed his clothes and waded into the clear, cold stream, letting the waters wash him, praying and baptizing himself new again, repeating God’s promise of redemption for repentance. He floated near the middle of the stream for a long time, giving his curved limbs to the healing water of life and offering himself in service to heaven, rededicating his life to salvation.
The sun was warm on his back, the velvet moss was dry and soft beneath him where he slept on the rocky bank of the creek. When he woke, it was hot and the sky was white. He stretched and then he carefully dressed himself. He was renewed. The answers had come. He was restored. Soames was a fallen woman, a priestess in the temple of evil, a witch sent from Satan to tempt and beguile God’s innocent servants into their eternal damnation by way of her lavender and silk seduction.
He dropped to his knees, closed his eyes and offered heaven gratitude for his deliverance. When he opened them a shadow had fallen over him, blocking the cruel sun. He breathed an alluring scent of feminine tenderness and beauty.
“Why’d you run away, lover?” Soames whispered, and the hair on the back of his neck bristled with sudden need. Then she kissed his neck. When he turned to her, she had already set a large woven basket on the ground. She shook a large quilt open and he helped her spread it.
“I saw you skinny-dipping,” she said with a giggle.
“We better hurry,” he said, “I’m preaching in one hour.”
Then for the second time that morning, Averill began removing his clothes. Forgiveness and redemption would have to wait until he had thoroughly scratched this wonderful itch.
“It’s a drug with people like us, Averill.”
“It’s done now.”
“Until the next craving.”
Later in his guilt and mortification, he was in such a hurry to leave the place and its fateful implications that he flooded the truck engine. It wasn’t just what he had done. People committed these spiritual misdemeanors every day. Sin was always forgiven. No, he wasn’t proud of himself. He knew she’d come back around again some afternoon when his resistance was low and there they’d drop like a pair of weasels on crack.
Sometimes he wondered why God made him if all he could do was fall down in evil. Had he come upon this earth with the curse on him? Had he been sprinkled and immersed and baptized in depravity so powerful no force of heaven could overcome it?
He turned the key again and throbbing bedlam erupted under the hood.
Though someone else, someone not much more than a mile above him through the trees, a ragged woman of no discernible consequence, had been moving in a roundabout way in his direction for several hours that morning.
Darthula always rose with the sun and went to pray at Honey Sweet’s grave. Mama, whom this world had known as “Honey Sweet,” had walked this hill more than one hundred years when she was taken in nineteen hundred and eighty-eight. Nine solitary years had passed since Darthula had gently lifted her from the iron bed, wrapped her in the shroud they had embroidered by the fire and laid her away in the abandoned cemetery, the dry remnants, the useless shell out of which Honey Sweet had risen on magnificent white wings and flown away in the moonlight.
There was no one else left. Nothing much to say, neither. Just Darthula shoveling clay into the hole until she strained her back. After that she sat on the mound till half past dark trying to pull a tune from Honey Sweet’s mandolin. Nine, almost ten years ago.
Darthula had lived alone there in the woods on Whitsunday Hill ever since. The mound was long gone. Twice it sunk and she refilled it. Twice. The second time she used a good bit of gravel. The second time did the trick. Now Johnson grass hid the unmarked grave down on the low end of the run-down cemetery. Honey Sweet had demanded it just that way.
“… where the devil can’t find it; you hear me, child?”
“Yessum.”
The ritual behind her, she had left the cemetery this morning, passed the church and the abandoned ramshackle house beyond it. She followed the all-but-overgrown tire tracks down Whitsunday Hill, leaving its ghosts behind her. She came to the path at the hardest crook where a sudden bank rose on the right and September Woods looked down. From here she could see a fair stretch—more specifically, the driver of an approaching vehicle could see her.
Her mind couldn’t make a person so low that he wouldn’t stop and offer her a ride to town.
Her mama, Honey Sweet, had been a sanctified woman, blessed with second sight. She had raised Darthula in the knowledge that she would one day inherit Honey’s gifts. It would be Darthula’s mission to advance Honey’s duties in this miserable world. But time had taken most of that. Darthula hadn’t displayed any of Honey’s fabulous abilities. She received no premonitions, angels or visions. She heard no voices from beyond except Honey Sweet’s, and that was to be expected. Worst of all, she had never encountered Satan in the woods, as Honey Sweet had promised she would.
“Girl, you keep out the churchyard this morning; I done laid a spell.”
“Why?”
“Why!?!”
Honey Sweet looked like an old lizard squinting over Darthula’s head toward the sun. Then she slapped the child so hard across the mouth that Darthula fell back on the ground.
“Seen him in the woods this morning.”
“Ol’ Scratch?”
“Beelzebub, yes.”
“How he look?”
“Fine.”
Darthula didn’t get that. But she didn’t ask any more questions. Honey’s slap still stung her cheek
s. There’d be two or three more behind it if Darthula provoked her. Sweet generally took a sick headache after she’d laid a spell. Sometimes the pain ran down into her tooth. Ol’ Sweet would beat her own mama blind when she got that way.
“What you think he say to me?”
“Devil?”
“No, Ugly Bitch, Eranaham Lincoln!”
The best part of Honey Sweet’s conversation ran between mocking and trifling.
“He ax me did you like chocolate candy.”
“Do I?”
“Do a baby pig like shit?”
“Then what did the devil say?”
“ ‘Hag, lemme kiss you and turn you young as Little Ugly.’ ”
Sweet played it out for Darthula.
“Back away from me, Satan!”
“ ‘I can make you pretty as Eve when I laid down with her.’ ”
“Step down, Evil!”
“ ‘All right, Hag. You see me leaving.’ ”
“I do.”
“ ‘I’ll get Little Ugly when you’re gone.’ ”
“I know it well.”
Now Sweet aimed her story at Darthula like a pistol.
“He gonna get me?” Darthula cried.
“With a bar of chocolate.”
“I’ll refuse it.”
“You’d swallow a sack of Milky Ways.” Sweet was already battering her face like a drum.
“I’m sorry.”
“Then he unzip and stick you, cut into you like a damned sawmill!”
“No, Mother!”
“And you all hunchin’ and beggin’ the devil for more evil seed!”
“No!”
“A thousand hellions, an army of hell will drop out of you on the ground.”
“Don’t slap me no more, Mother.”
“And then he’ll drop you to boil forever in the lake of fire.”
“Stop it!”
“You will be the mother of all evil!”
Darthula took to holding her breath when Sweet got this bad. In a minute she blacked out into peace. After Honey Sweet had dosed her tooth with corn liquor, she lifted Darthula into her arms and called her “Precious.”