Benton's Row

by Frank Yerby

  She stood there staring at this big man.

  He’s kind, she thought; I ain’t afraid of him no more. And there was a small glow of joy, slow-stealing somewhere behind her eyes.

  “Yessir,” she murmured, “I’d like that. But you’ll have to ask my aunt—if she’ll let me come, I mean.”

  “You go tell her to come back out here,” Tom said heartily; “I’m a-fixing to ask her right now.”

  “Thanks, Tom,” Randy said after Mary Ann had gone back in the house. “That’s the best medicine anyone could have given her.”

  Riding away from there, after it had all been arranged, Randy told Tom the story.

  “So this Randolph Perry challenged Jed Barker to a duel. Over that damned foolishness, a difference of opinion, no more. Not a woman, or a gambling debt, or any of the usual excuses—just the political question of secession. They met early in the morning under the oaks, and Perry shot that child’s father dead because Jed Barker didn’t believe, and said so, that the Southern States have any right to leave the Union. Olive Barker, this poor child’s mother, had a weak heart. The shock killed her.”

  “Hell of a thing,” Tom said heavily.

  “It is. And it’s a thing that could only happen today in this barbaric section we live in. They’ve stopped that obscene nonsense of duelling up North. So since Jane Ransom was Jed’s sister, the child was sent here. You saw what kind of woman Jane is. That’s why I say you’ve done a fine thing, Tom.”

  “Wasn’t much,” Tom grunted. “She believes that story about her pa cleaning his gun?”

  “Yes,” Randy said. “Better that way.”

  “I’ll tell my kids that, then,” Tom said.

  It was night when they got back to town. Even so, they sat over a bottle of bourbon at Tim’s until midnight.

  Tom stood up.

  “Got to be going,” he said. “Sary’ll be worried.”

  “Right,” Randy said. “See you tomorrow, Tom.”

  But, riding homeward, Tom Benton was morosely sure that Sarah would not be worried, that she wouldn’t care much one way or the other if he never came home at all. For that, too, was another casualty of the years: her love for him. He tried now, stubbornly, to win her back again, bringing her presents, behaving at times like a love-sick schoolboy, paying her compliments, admiring her dress, the way she did her hair. But Sarah only looked at him coolly and said:

  “Oh, get along with you, Tom, and stop your fooling!”

  He could not win her back again, and in his secret heart he knew why. It was because love was dead within him, too—love and the capacity for loving. He had all but forgotten how his youthful body had screamed with the most powerful of all hungers; he could not recall how it was to rove the land night-long, searching for surcease from the awful need that drove him. Physically, he was still capable of love; actually, the years which had cooled the fires within him had made him better controlled, and hence, from the woman’s point of view, the better lover; but increasingly the whole thing seemed scarcely worth the bother.

  Yet he needed Sarah—not her still fair and slender body; but as a person, living, breathing, feeling upon the face of earth. He needed to have her to talk to—about things, and in ways he could never talk to Randy; and it was here, chiefly, that she failed him. She did not, would not, could not listen. Her awakened mind, racing ahead of his slow pondering, found him heavy, dull. It may be that secretly she contrasted him with Randy to his detriment; but this he could not prove with any, certainty, for she never mentioned Randy’s name. He was a stranger and alone in the house that he had built; he wandered an alien ghost across the sweep of fields he had stolen, bought, acquired. He belonged to no time, and to no people; his belief in his superiority, his difference, had marked him, for by now other men had come to believe it too.

  There were those who admired him, and they were few. There were many who respected him, deferred to him, sought counsel of him; but there were times when he was painfully aware that among the ranks of those who loved him he could not number with any degree of conviction a single human soul.

  Not even Stormy. She was too much like him for their stubborn personalities and powerful wills not to clash. She knew, as surely as he had known the same thing in his own youth, that right was what she wanted to do, that all the rest of the world was composed of fools, knaves, and cowards, bent upon thwarting her—him alone she paid the supreme compliment of exemption from their numbers. Rules, laws, the conventions of morality were perhaps necessary to govern the human cattle lowing and stumbling through life; with her, the elect, the superior, shining one, they had nothing at all to do.

  He roared at her, threatened to beat her; but in sober fact he could not control her. For like him, she possessed the fearful Benton force, the iron will. She could never be bent— she could only be broken; she could never be defeated—only destroyed.

  And he loved her too much to contemplate breaking her, destroying her. To kill the thing she was, was in a strange way suicide, for Stormy was the himself that had been, in a way and to an extent that Wade could never be.

  She balked him, teased him, irritated him, and he was powerless. He suspected dully that only the fact that no one dared speak of it to him had prevented his learning that some kind of scandal had already attached itself to her name. He contemplated the idea in slow misery, but beyond that he would not go. He preferred not knowing; to find out the actuality of ill fame would necessitate his taking steps, and what steps could anyone take against Stormy Benton?

  Scold her, you have to beat her, he mused painfully; beat her, you have to kill her—and I couldn’t do that—I couldn’t.

  He rode into the courtyard and saw to his astonishment that the light was still on in the master bedroom. He pulled the bell-cord to awaken the slave who slept in the loft above the stable, and went into the house without waiting to see whether or not the negro had come for his horse.

  Sarah was waiting for him, her grey eyes dull with misery, her face drawn, tired, old.

  “What is it, Sary?” he growled. “Something wrong with Wade?”

  “Not Wade,” Sarah said grimly. “Stormy. I told you, Tom Benton, you’d live to weep over—”

  “What’s she done?” Tom croaked.

  “She’s not home yet!” Sarah said, “and here it is after midnight. Lord God, the times I’ve tried to reason with her about . . .”

  “About what?” Tom Benton said.

  “Ron Cattlet,” Sarah whispered.

  “That wild young bastard!” Tom growled. “And you never told me! Sary, in the name of hell-fire, why?”

  “What good would it have done?” Sarah said tiredly. “She always could wind you around her little finger. I’ve tried to reason with her, but she won’t listen. It’s an open scandal how she rides over to the Cattlet place to seek him out. Nancy Cattlet had words with me about it—told me to keep my little hussy of a daughter off her place.”

  “Damn my soul!” Tom roared.

  Sarah was crying now, an ugly, noisy sound.

  “They’ve been seen kissing in public places. Folks have come up on them sitting in Ron’s buckboard after dark in deserted lanes. That uppity Jim Rudgers said to Hunt Cattlet right in front of my face: ‘Hunt, I hear that boy of yourn has been putting in a crop afore he’s built a fence!’ ”

  “Jesus!” Tom cried out, naked anguish in his voice.

  “She ain’t never stayed out this late before; but you don’t have to stay out late to get into mischief. And when I try to talk to her, she looks me in my face and says: ‘You should talk, Maw. At least I ain’t cheating on my husband; and ain’t nobody killed hisseif over me yet!’ ”

  Sarah covered her face with her hands and gave way to a storm of weeping.

  “It’s true, Tom!” she sobbed; “it’s true! What can I say to my own child? What right have I to say anything a-tall?”

  Tom put out his big hand and patted her shoulder with awkward tenderness.

  “D
on’t take on so, Sary,” he said; “ain’t your fault—ain’t your fault none a-tall.”

  “Oh, but it is!” Sarah wept. “You’re a man, and folks don’t expect much of a man. But a woman’s different. She’s supposed to uphold the decency of her house—and now look what’s happened.”

  “I think you’ve been doing that all these years,” Tom said heavily; “you made one bad slip, and that one was my fault. And you repented of it and kept your word ever since—so don’t take on so. Now I’ve got to go. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Sarah looked up at him then, her grey eyes big with terror.

  “Tom,” she whispered.

  “Yes, Sary?”

  “Don’t use your gun. He ain’t nothing but a boy, and . . .”

  Tom drew his revolver and handed it to her, butt first.

  “You keep it,” he said quietly. “Don’t need a gun to handle that young sprig. Besides, the Cattlets are pretty decent folks—and if this thing has been going on long enough . . .”

  “Thanks, Tom,” Sarah said.

  Then he went back into the yard, finding Prince Rupert still at the rail, for Caleb, the groom, snoring blissfully in his loft above the stable, had not even heard the brazen clangour of the bell.

  At last he rode out of the big gates into the impenetrable darkness that was around him, and inside him too; there being for him, at that moment, no light anywhere in the world.

  He rode the lonely road beside the river, and the lonelier lanes that curved into the woodlands and skirted the edges of the bayous. He heard the soft, secret night noises: the scurrying of the small furry beasts, the beat of predatory wings. The demented screaming of the marsh heron slashed against his ears, and all the mourning sounds, too: owls hooting in the tree-tops, the sad, far-off howling of the watchdogs crying the absent moon.

  But though he could not find his daughter, he came very close to finding himself: what he was, living, the essence of his being. Night and brooding darkness have their uses; they can drive a man inward upon himself until he is face to face with the actuality of his mind, soul, spirit. But, being what he was, Tom Benton recoiled in anger and in fear. He could not accept himself yet; that required further humbling. So he rode the whole night through on the edge of the discovery that might have saved him. But of Stormy he saw no sign.

  He came finally—as dawn was greying the east, when trees, buildings, fences were taking on their first faint shapes of unreality in the process of becoming the things they were by day, when witchery dies before the slow-creeping light and the world is itself again, commonplace and comfortable, known, seen, believed—to the outbuildings on the very edge of the vast Cattlet plantation. He had not looked there before, because it seemed to him incredible that Stormy and Ron would have had the nerve to go there; but considering the matter from the standpoint of how closely his daughter resembled himself, even in her habits of thought, he came to the conclusion it was precisely the sort of thing that would appeal to her habitual audacity.

  So he dismounted and walked quietly among the buildings, a secondary group placed, for convenience in servicing the plantation’s outlying acres, more than a mile from the big house. He saw then with the weary recognition of one who has found precisely what he expected, the two horses, tied up behind one of the barns, well enough hidden to keep them entirely out of sight of the road. He pushed against the small door cut into one of the huge doors. It was bolted from the inside. He tested it with his shoulder, noting the amount of give. Then he stepped back a few paces and slammed his body against it with all his force. It gave way at once with a splintering crash as the cross-bar broke, and he half fell into the barn.

  He stood there, blinking against the darkness; then he heard the rustle of their movements, and Stormy’s voice saying coldly, clearly, filled with abysmal disgust:

  “Oh, my God, it’s Paw. . . .”

  He took a step forward, and his eyes began to adjust themselves to the gloom. Then he saw Ron Cattlet, on his feet now, shivering a little from fear and from his nakedness.

  Tom stood there, waiting. When the boy was close enough he slapped him, open-handed, to the ground. Ron came up again, wild with fury, driven by the insult of being struck thus like a woman or a child. This time Tom did not knock him down again at once, but slapped him right and left, jerking his head from side to side on his slender neck, jetting the tears out of his eyes, still striking, his own big hand making a blur moving, the explosion of the blows like a fusillade of small-arms fire, and the boy hanging there, taking it, unable to reach Tom Benton with his own wild swings, until finally the big man ended it, slashing the youth down with one hard blow, and stepped back, leaving the boy there sobbing and retching, the blood trickles from his broken mouth pencilling his chin.

  Tom looked at his daughter. Stormy didn’t move or speak; but there was no fear in her eyes.

  “Get up,” Tom said, and his voice was curiously mild. “Get your things on, I’m taking you home.”

  She didn’t answer him, but stood up at once, and Tom turned away from the aching loveliness of this nakedness that was his own nakedness, flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood. He lit a cigar and stood there, smoking quietly, listening to the silken rustle of her clothing, the ugly hoarse rasp of the boy’s sobbing. Then she came up to him and touched his arm. He took her by the elbow and started towards the door. Then he felt her stop.

  “ ‘Bye, Ron,” she said.

  “Stormy!” The boy’s voice was a near-scream, edged with death and hell.

  “I said good-bye,” Stormy said flatly. “For good, Ron. You’re no man. And I can’t stand anyone who isn’t.”

  Then she walked on, a little ahead of her father, and stepped through the door.

  On the ride home neither of them spoke. Stormy looked straight ahead, her blue eyes staring into dark and secret places, a little smile hovering about the corners of her mouth. It got to him almost at once, that smile. And all the way home that slow, secret smile worked in his blood, taunting him into fury, into black and murderous rage.

  They rode into the stable-yard at Broad Acres. Tom swung down and stood there, looking at her.

  “Get down,” he said harshly.

  Stormy got down. She said:

  “You’re going to beat me.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Go into the barn,” Tom said. “Wait for me there. Don’t try any tricks.’’

  He went into the stable and came back with the mule-skinner’s whip. Then he went into the barn after her.

  She didn’t weep, or even cry out. He couldn’t stand that. He slashed harder, cutting the stuff of her dress to ribbons, cutting through the tender flesh beneath it, bringing blood. Still she didn’t cry out. Fire exploded behind Tom Benton’s eyes. A black hood closed down over his head. He brought the whip whining, whistling down, not even hearing the sick, wet, smashing sound it made biting into her, but from Stormy no cry, no sound at all.

  Then, suddenly, the rage went out of him, leaving him sick and trembling, icy sweat beading his forehead, the sour taste of nausea in his throat; and, bending down beside her, he saw that it had been a long time since she could have cried out; the handful of straw she had thrust into her own mouth to prevent the sounds escaping bitten through, her tongue itself bitten through, her mouth half filled with blood.

  He picked her up. She lolled in his arms like a rag doll, limp and boneless. He marched into the house with her, shouldered open the door to the bedroom, and stood there in the doorway holding her.

  “Here,” he said harshly, “take your daughter.”

  Then he put Stormy down on the bed and walked out.

  Four hours later he was on a steamboat headed downstream to New Orleans. He never afterwards remembered going ashore. For before the Bayou Belle had passed Natchitoches, he was already coldly, blindly, completely drunk. Two weeks later he came to his senses in a whore-house run by an enormous German woman called Big Gertie down on Gallatin Street.

&
nbsp; He lay very still, not even looking at the blowsy, ill-favoured wench who snored beside him, and tried to think of what he would do next.

  It took him a long time to think of it; but in the end it was very simple.

  He would pay a call on Lolette Dupré.

  8

  STORMY lay very quietly in the big bed and stared at the ceiling. It was almost two weeks since Tom had beaten her, and during all that time no one in the household, not even the slaves, had heard a word pass her lips. She was perfectly capable of talking; moreover, she could have left her bed days ago if she had wanted to; but it suited both her nature and her plans to lie there and subtly put the whole household on the defensive in their relationships with her.

  She had had ten days, more or less, for thinking; and she had thought everything out very carefully and well. Her mind was an astounding mixture of complete maturity and utter childishness; it was to remain so in varying proportions all the rest of her life. What she proposed to do was a schoolgirl’s day-dream: she was going to run away from home, go to New York, and become a glittering luminary of the metropolitan stage. The simple realities of the matter: that she had absolutely no talent for acting, that she had never even so much as read a play, not to mention having seen one, that her diction was but little better than that of the negro slaves from whom she had unconsciously absorbed it, her ideas of enunciation, pronunciation, grammatical speech practically non-existent—these troubled her not at all, because she was unaware of her defects. And, since she was her father’s daughter, they would have troubled her no more had she known of them.

  One asset she had, and that was rendered ineffective by being itself a commonplace in the theatrical world: she was truly beautiful. She knew this very well; but she attached no special importance to it. Her vanity was beyond that; when anyone mentioned it, she dismissed the compliment with a shrug. She was Stormy Benton—of course she was prettier than anyone else, just as she was smarter, a better horsewoman, a better shot, superior in every way; all this was implicit in her being herself—a part of the very nature of things; and the result of her deep, overwhelming, convinced, utterly complacent vanity was strangely like modesty. She had absolutely nothing to prove; so she never primped, put on airs, or talked about herself, never dreaming that anyone ever saw her in any other fashion than the way she saw herself: a shining goddess set down for a little while among vastly inferior beings whose sole reason for existence was to serve her.