Benton's Row

by Frank Yerby

  “Tarnation, Lolette!” Tom whispered. “Yore paw’s right over there in the next tree.”

  “It’s dark,” Lolette said. “He can’t see or hear us.”

  “I know that,” Tom growled, “but I’d give a pretty penny to know what he’s thinking right now!”

  “Tom,” Lolette whispered. “I heard you and that Mister Rudgers talking on the raft. What you did was very brave and fine. I think maybe I was wrong. You do have some goodness in you.”

  “Thank you,” Tom said shortly.

  “Don’t talk like that. I love you, Tom—you know that. And now I’m beginning to see why.”

  “Just because I saved folks? Hell, baby, that’s only natural.”

  “No. Because you can be kind—really kind.” She raised up a little and kissed him—a long, slow time, very softly and sweetly and tenderly.

  “Tom,” she said quietly, “the next time you ask me—that, I—I don’t think I’ll say—no.”

  “Because you’re grateful?” Tom said angrily. “Hell’s bells, Lolette, I don’t want no damned gratitude.”

  “No, Tom,” she whispered; “only because now I want you, too—that’s all.”

  “Well, I’ll be—” Tom began; but she stopped his profane words with her warm and yielding mouth.

  First in the morning, the sun fought its way through the clouds. The country-side was still flooded; but the current had slowed. When they climbed down they found that the water was no more than waist-high.

  Tom and Jim set out, leading the women, and behind them Louis Dupré came, carrying the sleeping child. Tom could feel the Cajun’s eyes boring two small, precise holes between his shoulder-blades.

  Got his suspicions now, he thought morosely. That’s going to make it hard—mighty hard.

  But Louis said nothing. He recognised, with his Gallic practicality, the unlikeliness of his daughter’s honour being compromised in the high branches of a storm-whipped tree.

  Lolette did not talk either. She waded along beside Tom, looking at him from time to time out of eyes filled with an odd mixture of speculation, awe, and tenderness. But no fear—no longer any fear.

  They came at last to the little hilltop, become an island now, where they had left the first victims of the flash flood.

  “Water’s going down fast,” Tom announced. “You folks stay here a few more hours and you’ll be able to make it home afoot. Me ‘n’ Jim’s got to leave you now—got to go and see after our wives.”

  “You go right ahead, Mister Benton,” Nancy Cattlet said. “You sure Lord done enough for us.”

  Her husband, Hunt, gave her their baby son, Ron, and stood up. He put out his hand.

  “Tom Benton,” he said, “I swore my solemn oath never to take the hand of any man what could do what you done to Bob Tyler. But right now, in the presence of these folks, I want to take back that vow. Mighty white what you done, Tom, yessir, mighty white!”

  Tom took his hand.

  “No hard feelings, Hunt?” he said. “I’m sorry about what happened to the Reverend—and I said so in public. I thought everybody understood how bad I felt about that. Well, if you don’t, I’ll say it again: I’m most humbly sorry I caused the good Reverend’s death—and hope you folks can find it in your hearts to forgive me.”

  “Forgive you?” Hunt Cattlet snorted. “You expect us to hold a grudge against the man who’s just saved half the parish?”

  “God bless you, Tom Benton!” a woman cried.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Tom said. “Thank you all, mighty kindly. Reckon I’ll be going now.”

  He and Jim still had to wade in places, but the water was going down fast. An hour later they reached the edge of Tom’s place; but they stopped there, staring.

  “Where in hell-fire’s the house?” Jim got out. Then they started to run. They scrambled up the muddy rise, and when they were close they saw it: a jumble of timbers, piled in a low mound where the house had been, and, smashed against the trees fifty yards farther on, all that was left of the roof.

  Dear Lord, Tom prayed, let her be safe and I won’t never look at another woman agin—not even so much as look!

  They tore at the timbers with frantic hands, prising the heavier beams up with ridge-poles used as levers. Then the trap-door of the cellar came in sight—untouched.

  The two men stared at it, panting. Then they stiffened. The sound came again-a thin, plaintive wail, rising from beneath the cellar door.

  “The young ‘un!” Tom breathed. “Name of God, Jim—come on!”

  They yanked at the trap-door, hurled it open. Nelly Rudgers looked up at them, her fingers across her lips.

  “Shhh!” she hissed. “Sary’s sleeping. She’s all tuckered out, poor thing!”

  Tom gulped twice before he found his voice.

  “And the young ‘un?” he croaked.

  “Fine and dandy! You’ve got yoreself a mighty pretty daughter, Tom—”

  “A daughter!” Tom gasped. “Well, I’ll be damned!”

  He swung into the opening and eased his way down the stairs.

  Nelly held up the little bundle for him to see. His daughter was a tiny, red-faced mite with great masses of inky black hair covering her head. She looked like all new babies, red and wrinkled and ugly; but Tom stood there staring at her in breath-gone fascination.

  “Don’t you want to hold her?” Nelly said.

  “Hell, no!” Tom exploded; “my big paws would bust something, sure!”

  Sarah stirred.

  “Tom?” she got out.

  Tom dropped on his knees beside the mattress.

  “Sorry it wasn’t a boy,” Sarah whispered.

  “Hell’s fire, Sary-gal!” Tom laughed; “this ain’t th’ last—besides, hit’s the prettiest little thing I ever did see! What we gonna call it?”

  “I—I named her Stormy,” Sarah smiled weakly. “You see, she come right after the roof blew off.”

  Stormy, eh?” Tom savoured the name. Then he grinned. Stormy! Now there’s a name what’s fitting for a Benton, if Lever heard one!”

  He turned towards where Jim and Jonas were looking at the baby, still cradled in Nelly Rudgers’s arms.

  “Bring her over here, Miz Rudgers! Lemme hold her—I’ll be careful.” He took the infant, holding her as though she were made of delicate crystal.

  “Well, Stormy Benton,” he laughed; “how you like yore paw?”

  The baby set up an anguished howl.

  “Never you mind,” Tom grinned, “we gonna git acquainted real good, ain’t we, missy?”

  He knelt there a long time, holding his daughter, his blue eyes really gentle for the first time in his life.

  And the last.

  4

  TOM BENTON sat on a rail fence and watched Jim Rudgers driving the negroes. He had to watch Jim occasionally, because, as an overseer, Jim was a mite too ready with the whip. Not that a nigger didn’t need a taste of leather on his black hide ever so often; but Jim, out of his disappointment at losing his own poor, marginal lands the year after the big storm, was inclined to vent his towering, impotent fury against man, the universe, fate, upon the helpless backs of the slaves.

  Tom understood that. He had a hard core of practical understanding when it came to what made people tick. He knew, and grinned at the thought, that, deep down, Jim Rudgers hated him.

  Reckon he thought I should of given him back his place when I bought it off of Hilton last year. But that wouldn’t of done no good. Ain’t fitten for nothing but to grow corn for the niggers and fodder for the animals. It gripes his ornery guts to be beholden to me. I give him the job and a house to live in. Pay him good, too—more’n any other overseer in the parish. And I don’t even make him call me Mister Benton, excepting when there’s folks around. But I can’t have him crippling my niggers ‘cause he’s mad with me and the world. Give a nigger a few good ones to git some life into him, show him who’s boss; but you don’t beat him bloody any more than you do a good riding hoss—for t
he simple reason that a field-hand costs just about as much as the best hoss nowadays, and is gonna cost more soon, or I miss my guess.

  He sat there like that, dreaming. His hand moved, smacking his expensive, polished boots with his crop. He wore a frock-coat now, a brocaded waistcoat, a string tie. His shirt was ruffled, and a heavy gold chain crossed his waistcoat front to the massive gold watch in his pocket. He was fine, every inch the great planter, and he knew it. He was extraordinarily pleased with himself. He had managed everything very well indeed.

  Hilton had renewed the loan, of course, and granted him another after the hurricane and flood had wiped out all Tom’s chances, as it had the chances of so many other small planters. He hadn’t done that for many other people; but Tom’s double coup—his faked conversion and his quite genuine heroism during the flood—had put public opinion solidly on his side. There was nothing else for Hilton to do.

  It was a day made for dreaming. The negroes moved down the rows with the sacks slung from their shoulders, picking the cotton with easy, rhythmical motion in tune to the lead-hand’s song. The fields stretched out before Tom Benton clear to nowhere and beyond, washed in the yellow afternoon light, shimmering with the rising heat-waves, so sun-filled, broad, lovely, that Tom remembered again the name he had given his place: Broad Acres. He said the name aloud, savouring the sound.

  His now—his. All this. And in two short years. The land was his, and the blue heavens above the land, and the fantastic spires and cathedrals of cloud towering up into them. He half listened to the boom of the lead-hand’s belly-deep bass, and beyond that, far off and faint, the sound of coon-hounds mourning through the pine wood. It was cool here where he sat in the blue shade under the cheniere, cool and a little dark, so that the sun-filled fields glowed even brighter before his eyes—hazed over a bit from dreaming.

  He had worked for it, and it was his. Been lucky, too, he thought. Everything’s turned out just fine. . . . He was seeing again, vividly, more real than the shimmering wash of sun over his fields, the day the whole population of the parish had descended upon his land, two days after the last of the flood-waters had gone down. He had been in the lean-to he had built for temporary shelter, tending to Sarah, alone, because the Rudgerses were gone, grubbing through the wreckage of their own place, when he had heard the shouting:

  “Come on out, Tom! Come out of there and greet your friends!”

  He had come out, blinking. All the men of the parish were there with their sons and wives and daughters. The men had axes, saws, hammers. Tom stared at them, open-mouthed.

  “We’re aiming to build you a house,” Hunt Cattlet said, “and a barn. The wimmenfolks done brought vittles, and we got a fiddler here, not to mention a drop or two of the best bust-head your lips ever did taste. Now tell us, Tom—where you want your house?”

  Tom looked from one of them to the other. And it was then that he saw that Louis and Lolette Dupré were among them. He stared at Lolette, seeing again how lovely she was. He had never believed a Cajun girl could look like that. Usually—he tore away his gaze.

  “Why—same place the old one was, I reckon,” he said. “And thank you, Hunt; thank you all. Mighty white of you folks to do this for me. Yessir, mighty white.”

  In three days they had the house up. The house and the barn. Tom and Sarah lived in that house still, and it now had eight rooms instead of the original four. Tom had added the others as the need, more fancied than real, arose. It was a typical planter’s cottage, low and rambling with verandas, called galleries in that Cajun country, all around it; all of it built on one floor. The following spring Tom had painted it white, more to satisfy Sarah than for any other reason. On a shopping trip to New Orleans she had seen one of the neo-Grecian great houses the very richest planters were building, thereby creating one of the dearest-held and most undying of all Southern legends—that planters lived like this, grandly, in these huge, chaste temples of domesticity; but legend it was, and near-myth, and would remain no more.

  “What in hell-fire would I do with a house like that?” Tom said; “a body could put his feet on the banisters!”

  Tom knew he wouldn’t have felt at ease in such a house. And most planters, great or small, shared his opinion; shared it, that is, whenever they had even so much as seen a neo-Grecian house. Since there were never even a thousand of them, and perhaps, more truly, not even half that number, scattered across the vast length and breadth of the Southland, among the eight million of her inhabitants, this was seldom indeed.

  Besides the house and the barn, Tom owned his own gin now, and over fifty slaves. He was moving eastward, towards the river, buying land, snapping up mortgages. Git that last parcel of land off of Davin Henderson, he thought grandly, and I’m gonna have my own steamboat landing, too.

  He was, of course, up to his neck in debt. But to the great planters debt was the accustomed mode of life. To the day he died he would continue to spend and borrow, treating his creditors with regal contempt, throwing them a payment now and again as a sop to their fawning but insistent demands, precisely as one throws a bone to a starving dog.

  He did not even think of his debts. His mind was on other, more pleasant things: his daughter, Stormy, beautiful as a cherub at two, with his own black hair and startlingly blue eyes; and Wade, his year-old son. My two sons, he corrected himself, and a grin of pure deviltry lighted his eyes.

  Louis would cut my heart out if he knew, he thought wryly. Thank God little Clint ain’t got blue eyes!

  He remembered now, again, his shock when the Cajun guide he went duck-shooting with had told him:

  “That Lolette, she done made her dirt, her! Belly this big, yes! Old Louis, he mighty mad, him; he done beat her so bad she like to die.”

  He had gone at once to see her, having himself poled through the twisting wastes of the bayous, whose ramifications he could never remember. And when he reached the shack, perched upon pilings above the stinking marsh, with musk-rat skins nailed to its walls for drying, Louis Dupré was there.

  “I heard you beat Lolette, Louis,” he said quietly. “That was a mighty mean thing, my friend.”

  “She lucky I don’t kill her,” Louis said. “She turn whore on me, her. I give her everything—sent her down to the convent in New Orleans, me. She read good, write good— speak good French, good English, her. Was gonna find her nice Creole boy, bon famille, to marry her. Now look what she done!”

  “Can I see her?” Tom asked.

  Louis paused, staring at him. His eyes were brown coals suddenly.

  “Wasn’t you, was it, M’sieu Tom?” he whispered. “You been good friend to Louis. Bring me good likker, new traps. But t’ink it was you, I cut yore heart out, me. I cut it out an’ eat it raw, yes!”

  Tom looked back at him steadily.

  “No, Louis,” he lied, “it wasn’t me.”

  “All right,” Louis grunted. “I don’t t’ink you lie to me. I don’t t’ink. You got black hair, you. An’ Lolette got black hair. But, M’sieu Tom, you better pray your Bon Dieu that bébé don’t have blue eyes!”

  Tom turned to the boatman who had brought him to the shack.

  “Hand me up that jug, Antoine,” he said. He took the jug and turned back to Louis.

  “Here, Louis,” he said, “this’ll take yore mind off yore troubles a mite—”

  “Thank you,” Louis said. Tom paused long enough to see that the trapper had sat down on the gallery, the jug cradled in his arms. A few drinks of that pop-skull and he could forget about any more trouble from Louis Dupré. He opened the door and entered the cabin. He saw at first only little Babette playing in the corner with a home-made doll. Then, as his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, he saw Lolette.

  She lay upon the bed moaning softly to herself. Even in the smoky lamplight, Tom could see the blue-green welts on her thin arms. He stood there, staring at her, seeing her again, as though this were for the first time, with wonder, with awe, caught by her soft loveliness. For hers was such
a quiet beauty, a velvety, violet beauty that shunned the sunlight, soft and simple and sweet, but night-blooming only. Her hair was midnight, blacker than midnight, the very negation and absence of light; and her eyes were animal-brown, soft and frightened and shy, like the eyes of the little furry creatures, or like does’ eyes, staring at him out of the thickets of her fears-until almost he took pity on her, almost he would let her go. Her skin was brown, too; paler than her father’s; but a golden tint so definite that Tom, who knew how she hated daylight, was inclined to think she had Houma or Tangipahoa or even Choctaw blood. More than likely Choctaw, he mused; she’s too gentle and sweet to come down from them murdering Houma bastards.

  He stood there, looking at her.

  “How you feel, Lolette?” he murmured.

  “Just awful, Tom,” she whispered. “I want to die. At least, I would want to—if—if it wasn’t yours.”

  “Sure about that?” Tom said.

  Her brown eyes were enormous suddenly.

  “That’s what you think of me?” she said. “Now I do want to die!”

  “Sorry,” Tom said. “I didn’t mean it thataway. Lolette, you know I got a wife and a kid.”

  She looked at him. It was so still, he could hear the child babbling to her doll in the corner. Tom felt something close around his heart. He couldn’t breathe. He hadn’t the words for it. He didn’t know how to describe this dignity as simple, profound, and deep as time itself. He didn’t even know what was. All he knew was how it felt to have to face it.

  “I told you I knew that, the first time you came here,” she said quietly. “Why do you mention it now? It’s not important. What counts is the way you are. I thought the day you saved us that you’d changed, that in spite of all the bad things you’d done, you were at heart a good man. But now I know I was wrong then—that the feeling I had about you the first time I saw you was right: a brave man, yes; strong, yes; as beautiful as Thoume Kene, the Great Spirit my mother used to talk about. She was Indian, you know—Chitimacha. But bad really—a bad, wicked man with a cruel, laughing mouth and the devil’s own blue eyes.”