Benton's Row

by Frank Yerby

  Griselda greeted him with frigid politeness.

  “Come in, Mister Benton,” she said. “I’ll send one of the girls out for Davin.”

  “No, don’t,” Tom said quickly; “I’d like to talk to you a spell, ma’am, if I may.”

  “Well,” Griselda hesitated—”I can’t imagine what you’d want to talk to me about; still . . .”

  “The same thing I been talking to your husband about, ma’am,” Tom said. “I kind of thought that maybe I could swing you over to my side. When a woman sets her mind to persuading—a poor man ain’t got a chance.”

  “I see,” Griselda said flatly. “You want me to persuade Davin to sell you this place. My God, but you’re a stubborn man, Mister Benton! How many times do you have to be told we like it here?”

  “You’d like it somewheres else just as well, ma’am,” Tom said patiently; “a mite better, to my way of reckoning. ‘Cause with the money I’m willing to pay your husband you could git yoreselves some really good land. Afford to dress in silks and satins, then, ma’am. Wear the kind of clothes that’ll do justice to yore beauty. For if you don’t mind my saying so, ma’am, you’re one mighty pretty woman.”

  “As a matter of fact,” Griselda said icily, “I do mind your saying so. I like compliments—every woman does. But coming from you, it’s no compliment—it’s an insult!”

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” Tom said in pure amazement.

  “Nor do I like your language,” Griselda snapped. “I’m afraid, Mister Benton, I shall have to ask you to go—now!”

  Tom stood there, grinning.

  “High ‘n’ mighty, ain’t you?” he said. “Thought you’d take a bit of gentling. And there ain’t nothing I like better—nothing a-tall!”

  Then he moved forward and seized her, pinning her arms to her sides with his left ann, raising his right hand to imprison her face, to stop the wild thrashing of her head. She didn’t say anything, she just went on fighting like a wild woman, like a thing possessed, until he held her helpless, bending his big head down to find her mouth. It was then that she did the thing that was to him inconceivable, impossible, for already he was quite sure of himself. He had had women fight him before, but, always before, the very ones who fought the hardest became in the space of half an hour—less than half an hour, usually—the moaning, dishevelled, female-smelling she-things, used and broken, which always awoke in him a faint feeling of disgust. So it was that he was savouring in anticipation his triumph, when Griselda Henderson opened her mouth and spat full into his face.

  He released her at once and stepped back, groping for his handkerchief. He wiped his face and stood there staring at her, unaware of the fact that he was trembling.

  “I shan’t tell my husband,” Griselda said quietly, “because he’d want to fight you, and he might be killed. But I’ll say this, Tom Benton—I hope you’ve learned something. I know all your experience has been with these river-basin whores; but now you’ve met a Virginian. We don’t shame our husbands. The vows we take are sacred. So go home now to the kind you’re used to, go home to the woman you whored with, whose husband you killed, and . . .”

  Her figure wavered, blurred before his sight. His head was surrounded by intolerable heat; he was suffocating, stifling. Her voice was an indistinct babble in his ears.

  “Shut up!” he roared at her. “Don’t you foul my Sary with your lying, filthy mouth! Don’t you dare!”

  “Chivalrous, aren’t you?” she mocked. “Or are you just afraid? You have a right to be—for the time will come when she’ll serve you the same way she did her first husband. Adultery gets to be a habit, I’m told.”

  Something burst inside Tom’s brain at her words. He saw with curious detachment his big hand fly out; he heard it explode open-palmed against her face with a noise like a pistol-shot, and her going down in a crumpled heap before him, lying there. Then the rage was all gone, and there was nothing in his veins but ice. He bent down to pick her up, shaking all over from the reaction and the chill.

  “Don’t touch me!” she snarled at him. “Don’t put your dirty hands on me!” She came up into a sitting position. “Unbelievable!” she whispered; “they told me there were men like you.” Then in a sudden, renewed surge of fury she screamed at him: “Get out! And if ever you come back again, I shall shoot you myself—through the belly like a dog! Get out—you hear me? Get!”

  And Tom Benton went.

  He did not go home. He was in no state to face Sarah. Instead, he went to the little saloon in Benton’s Row where he often spent his evenings, basking in the warm approval of the poor whites, buying them drinks, pontificating a little before them—the great man before his inferiors, the Patron surrounded by his Clients. Not that they realised they were being patronised. Rather they thought Mister Benton a hell of a fine fellow, a slashing beau sabreur, but with no pretences:

  “Nothing grand about him, no sirreebobtail! Stands right up there and drinks his pop-skull with the next man, passin’ the jug from mouth to mouth and swapping yarns with the best!”

  But tonight he was too quiet, and after a time they noticed it. They were about their usual pleasures, the less violent ones at least, for the usual pleasures of the poor white included such niceties as biting off the nose or gouging out the eye of a favourite enemy, or beguiling the tedium of a hot afternoon by soaking a woolly dog in turpentine, setting him afire and turning him loose to run, to the vast amusement of all the spectators. Tonight they were confining themselves to their quieter amusements. At the end of the bar one of them was standing on his head while his fellows timed him with the big watch they had borrowed from the saloon-keeper. Two or three scraggly, unkempt, pine-barren men were having a whisky-drinking contest, seeing how much they could down at a gulp without taking the bottle from their lips, the loser to pay for all the liquor consumed. In the middle of the floor, several others were vying with each other for the tobacco-spitting championship of the parish—the target a row of spittoons, aimed at with deadly precision from chalk-marks drawn on the floor; at each round the distance between the marks and the spittoons being increased until the weaker practitioners of the back-country art of expectoration began to fall by the wayside. Outside, an iron-jawed countryman had just taken the loose silver of all and sundry by lifting a hogshead of flour clear of the banquette with his teeth.

  Tom, but lately escaped from their ranks himself, always felt at home among them. He enjoyed their simple pleasures hugely. And if he now felt it beneath his new-found dignity as a planter to indulge in them, he none the less spurred the poor whites on, encouraging them and buying them drinks, first for the winners for having won, then for the losers as consolation for having lost, and ultimately for the whole house for the hell of it. They accepted him, not as one of themselves, but as something more: a father-image, actually, clan chieftain; regarding him as primus inter pares, they fell quite naturally into the habit of honouring him, deferring to his knowledge and judgment, consulting him on every occasion, and looking to him for leadership and opinion—all of which warmed the cockles of Tom’s heart.

  And not only Tom. They felt that way about most of the planters, knowing them intimately, hunting with them, eating from time to time at the big house, not infrequently sleeping there; for the planters, instinctively realising that in the coming struggle with the Yankee they were going to need the common white, were sagacious enough to make the social lines most elastic. More, in the sparsely settled back country the poor whites were often related to the big planter by blood, no further removed, at times, than the first or second degree of cousinship, so that the planters’ attempt in the presence of Yankee guests to explain them as a different breed, children of redemptioners, bondsmen, debtor-prison scourings, was, in part at least, a lie. But only in part. Such were some of their ancestors; but, on the other hand, such were some of his. And to complicate matters the more, not too rarely, a lank, scraggly, clay-eating countryman could claim in truth a lineage to put the best of theirs
to shame. Men rise. Men fall. It was as simple as that.

  But it had not occurred to Tom Benton consciously, any more than it occurred consciously to the other great planters, to actually use the poor white. His morose mood that night was genuine. He had been wounded in his tenderest, his most vulnerable part: his pride. A woman had scorned him, and he was unaccustomed to being scorned. A man had balked his dearest ambition, and there was nothing he could do about it—absolutely nothing at all.

  They noticed it finally. Zeke Hawkins shifted his chew of tobacco from one side of his cavernous jaw to the other and nudged one of his fellows.

  “Sumpin’s bothering Mister Tom,” he said. “Ain’t never seed him look so down in the mouth before.”

  The others nodded in sage agreement.

  “Go ax him, Zeke,” Lem Toliver said; “maybe we kin help him out a bit.”

  Zeke walked over to where Tom sat, brooding over his glass of bourbon.

  “What’s the matter, Mister Tom?” he demanded with that perfect, idiot’s gravity which was so much the mark of his breed.

  “Oh—Zeke! Sit down and join me. Tim, another of the same for Zeke here.”

  “You’re looking mighty poorly, Mister Tom,” Zeke said. “Don’t reckon I ever seed you looking so sad like afore.”

  “I’ve got troubles, Zeke,” Tom sighed.

  “Tell me about ‘em,” Zeke said promptly. “Maybe I kin figure something.”

  Tom’s natural impulse was to laugh. But he did not. Instead, for no better reason than a very human need to get the whole thing off his chest, he told Zeke the story, omitting, of course, the tale of his encounter with Griselda.

  “And the worst part about it,” Tom finished, “is that the land is no good to him. He ain’t no planter. Wasn’t for a few miserable bales he’s got in his barn, he’d be bankrupt right now. I wish to hell lightning would strike that barn o’ his’n.”

  “Why?” Zeke said.

  “Because then he’d have to sell, don’t you see? Or else Hilton would take him over and I could buy the land from him. Damned Virginia bastard!”

  “Hmmmm,” Zeke said. “Thankee fur the snort, Mister Torn. Thankee mighty kindly.”

  So it was that Tom was entirely unprepared for Davin Henderson’s descent upon him the next day. The Virginian came riding into Tom’s lower acres, surrounded by all five of his blacks.

  “There he is,” he said coldly, as soon as he saw Tom. “Grab him!”

  The five big negroes swarmed all over Tom, holding him with their big, work-hardened hands. For the second time in two days, Tom Benton was completely outraged. First a woman had spat in his face; and now a man had set his niggers upon him—niggers, by God!

  “What in hell’s fire!” he roared. “Davin, you gonna pay for this!”

  Davin sat on his horse, a smile lighting his pale, cynical face.

  “I suppose you don’t know,” he said quietly, “that my barn was burned to the ground last night? I suppose you are completely uninterested in the fact that I am now a bankrupt—that I have no other recourse but to turn over my lands to your so very close friend, Mister Hilton?”

  Tom stared at him, dawning comprehension showing in his face.

  “Zeke!” he said aloud, the name escaping him before he had time to stifle the impulse.

  “Ah, so you did know!” Davin smiled. Then very slowly he began to uncoil the big mule-skinner’s whip he had coiled around the pommel of his saddle. “Under ordinary circumstances, considering your exalted position as a planter, I would challenge you, Mister Benton. But I won’t dignify dirt by meeting it on the field of honour, no matter how high its pretensions. So, Mister Benton, I’m merely going to flay the living hide off of you. Perhaps—who knows?—I might even be able to awake in you some small appreciation for the meaning of the words honour and decency. Rufe, snatch that coat off of him!”

  The command was a mistake. The removal of one pair of black hands from his arms was all Tom Benton needed. Veteran of a hundred bar-room brawls, he was in his element now. The negroes, big men, strong men that they were, knew nothing of the art of dirty fighting, and of that art Tom Benton was past master. He moved with sudden, savage violence, bringing his knee up between a black’s thighs, and the man lay on the ground moaning, clutching the tenderest parts of his body; and Tom, still moving, the motion uninterrupted, unbroken, one blow flowing into the next, an elbow to the solar plexus, two fingers bridging a blunt nose, ramming hard into a field-hand’s eyes, a fist brought up almost from the ground to smash against a black jaw—and he was free, tugging at the shoulder holster where he kept his equaliser; but the shoulder holster, a concession to his new elegance, defeated him. The Colt stuck. Once more Davin Henderson smiled.

  “I regret to have to do this,” he said, and shot Tom Benton through the body with the derringer he carried loose in his side pocket, firing through the pocket itself without even drawing the gun. He sat there on his horse, looking at the sprawling body of his foe. He sighed deeply.

  “Come,” he said to his negroes, “I guess we’ll have to get out of the State after this.”

  5

  WHEN half an hour later, Jim Rudgers and the negroes brought Tom to the house, Sarah did not scream or faint.

  She simply stood there, and her face whitened to the roots of her hair.

  “Is—is he—alive?” she whispered.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jim Rudgers said grimly; “but he ain’t got long, I don’t think.”

  “Bring him in,” Sarah said.

  They laid him down on the big bed, and Sarah began to loosen his clothes. She turned to one of the field-hands.

  “Take off his boots,” she commanded. Then, to one of the housemaids who was standing goggle-eyed in the doorway:

  “Bring me my scissors. Tell Marie to put water on to boil—get some cloths—hurry, damn you!”

  Jim stood there watching as she cut the blood-soaked clothing away from the wound. It was low on the left side, and it still bled sullenly.

  Sarah looked up at Jim, her grey eyes questioning.

  “If,” Jim said, “it missed the big gut, and if you kin stop that there bleedin’, and if I kin find that damned sawbones in time, and if he kin find the ball, and if he knows what the hell to do after he finds it. . . . A mighty heap of ifs, Miz Benton; but I’ll try.”

  “Do,” Sarah said.

  Jim Rudgers hesitated.

  “Ain’t you even interested in who done it?” he said.

  “No. I’d rather not know. Since it was some woman’s husband—I’d rather not.”

  “Thought you’d think that,” Jim said. “But it warn’t that, ma’am. It were Davin Henderson, and the quarrel was over land and a barn-burning.”

  He could see some of the tension go out of her face.

  “And Davin was wrong. Tom never sent nobody to burn no barn. That ain’t his style. He’s more straightforward-like. So long, ma’am; I’ll be back directly.”

  Sarah didn’t even hear him go. She was much too busy. It took a dozen cold compresses to stop the bleeding. After that, Sarah bandaged the wound, and sat down beside Tom to wait. There was nothing else she could do. If only I could get a little whisky into him, she thought. But she knew she couldn’t. To drink, a man must be at least semi-conscious. She could hear the grandfather clock in the hall ticking. The ticks got louder and louder and louder until they were crashing like thunderclaps against her ears. Outside the window a leaf drifted down from the oak and whispered against the windowpane. She jumped at the sound. It was too still, so still that her ears ached from the thunderous noises of silence: the clock ticks, a board creaking as a servant tiptoed across it, the rustle of her own breathing, the drum-roll of her heart.

  “Dear Lord,” she prayed, “he ain’t a good man—I know that. He’s a mean, wicked, cruel kind of a man; but he’s all I got. And he’s my children’s paw. And—and, God, You understand me; You made me with my blood hotter’n fire and no wits in my head. What I’m try
in’ to say is that I love him, God—You can’t take him away from me! God, You can’t!”

  Then she put down her head and cried.

  Two centuries later, Jim came back with Randy McGregor, the young doctor, having been unable to find old Doc Muller. Sarah did not know it then, but chance, fate, destiny, the unpredictable, the incalculable element, which, like most people, she ordinarily disregarded, had entered in. For Doc Muller was old, tired, and a good bit of a humbug; while young Doctor McGregor was fresh out of Edinburgh, where, above all else, they taught a man surgery. Hearing their footsteps in the hall, she ran to meet them, seeing, in a flash of quiet astonishment, by the grandfather clock that only a little over two hours had passed; then she saw the red, freckled face of the young doctor and stopped dead.

  “Don’t worry, ma’am,” Randy McGregor said; “I won’t kill him—that is, if he isn’t dead already.”

  “Come,” Sarah said. Then, looking back over her shoulder, she saw the sway in his walk, and turned upon him, waiting until he was close enough so that the heavy whisky fog of his breath enveloped her, and then she was sure.

  “Why,” she said, “you’re drunk!”

  “Wouldn’t be surprised,” Randy said. “I quite often am.”

  “But you can’t!” she got out; “I won’t let you touch—”

  “Listen, ma’am,” Randy said quietly. “I happen to be the best damned surgeon in this State—drunk or sober. But if it bothers you, you can go make me a pot of black coffee—and you can boil some water, lots of water—that should keep you out of my way for a while.”

  He entered the bedroom and looked at Tom.

  “Hmmnn,” he said. “Bad. He’s lost a good bit too much blood. Who dressed that wound?”

  “I did,” Sarah whispered.