by Frank Yerby
“None,” Stormy smiled; “but I’ve every guarantee in the world I wouldn’t marry him, Ma. To marry a man just because you love him is stupid—and that’s one thing I ain’t . . .”
“You mean you’d turn a poor boy down because he didn’t have no money?” she demanded.
“Of course not,” Stormy said. “Who said anything about turning him down? I just wouldn’t marry him—that’s all.”
Sarah stood there, letting the meaning of this sink in.
“Lord God, Stormy!” she gasped. “You don’t mean. . . .”
“That I’d copy after you, in your younger days, Ma?” Stormy mocked. “Not exactly. I’m smarter than you ever was. Never would of married an old fool like Preacher Tyler in the first place lessen he had a pile of cash. What I would of done in your place would of been to marry some rich old jackass, and just kind of keep a fine young stallion like Pa sort of rallying round. You wasn’t smart. You had to play it according to the rules. And even when you broke ‘em, being young and having blood in your veins, you suffered. But I’m a Benton, and we make our own rules. And we sure Lord don’t suffer. So, Ma, I don’t aim to cook and do nigger work and get myself tied down with a passel of brats. You better understand that right now, Ma—that way, you’n’ me can live together real peaceful-like.”
She had yawned then, and walked out of there, leaving Sarah in helpless silence, wondering what she should have said to her, recognising finally, with the bitterness of total defeat, that there was absolutely nothing to be said.
A passel of niggers to work for her, Sarah thought, her fingers flying now, shelling the peas, moving from the twin compulsions of anger and bitterness, not from any increase in hunger. Well, that’s one thing that’s done, and I’m glad. I always hated slavery after I got to know what it was. Made white people spend a lifetime controlling niggers and losing their own self-control in the bargain. Young men getting themselves ruined, ‘changing their luck’, as they called it, down in the cabins. People getting so proud ‘cause they had niggers to do everything for ‘em that their minds shut tight and they never learned nothing at all. And women going crazy in the big houses having to manage a passel of worthless, trifling nigger wenches. No, we’re free, not the niggers. They’ll never be free lessen somebody ships ‘em back to Africa where they can be amongst their own kind. They’re just too different to fit in—leas’ways not in a white man’s world. But it’s us who’ve been freed; ‘cause just like Nancy Cattlet said:
“Before the war, the only two really free things in the South was a nigger woman—and a white man.”
She saw the two men, far off, coming up the river road. But she didn’t pay any attention to them. That spring of ‘sixty-five, returning Confederate veterans were too commonplace a sight.
2
EVERY day for weeks, that spring and summer of ‘sixty-five, you could see them coming back. Sometimes alone, but more often by twos and threes, they came very slowly over the desolate land, walking tiredly through the roads, lanes, tracks; those of them who had their own two feet supporting the others who had but one, and sometimes not even that, hobbling on hand-cut canes, swinging along on rude crutches, filthy, bearded, vermin-infested, an army of spectres on the march, moving through a country-side so broken, stripped, devastated, that they said of it with wry humour:
“Hell, even a crow flying ‘cross these parts have to carry his own rations.”
Begging at farm-houses, sleeping in hay-lofts, moving half fearfully towards what had been home, not knowing what they would find when they got there, what manner and species of horrors: the big house gone, burnt, perhaps; the stock run off; the negroes fled, wandering themselves like gipsies over the endless expanse of devastation, driven by some blind instinct to try the dimensions of this thing called freedom, to go to the ultimate ends of it, see how far it extended north, south, east, west.
And the women. They dared not think of that. Marauding bands in all the land the last few months of the war. Confederate deserters, skulkers, even negroes.
“By God, if they laid a hand on her—I’ll—”
But even the threats were left unfinished, swallowed deep in the throats of men too worn out, hungry, desolate of heart to even utter them. So came home the South’s tall sons, too tired to scratch the vermin that devoured them, their nostrils blunted by long habit to their bodies’ unwashed stench, their hound-lean bellies so accustomed to hunger that they looked at food placed before them and ate very little, and that little very slowly, staring at each morsel in wonder and in awe.
Then off to sleep in one more hay-loft, hearing the day noises dying away into silence, and the quiet little night sounds, the rustle and creaking, the hoof stamp of the beasts below, the whippoorwill’s cry, rising to take their place. Then, tomorrow . . .
“Ain’t far now, is it, Wade?” Oren Bascomb said.
Wade glared at him.
“Be there tomorrow,” he growled. “I told you that already.”
“I know. Kind of like to hear it agin. Lord God, it’s been so damn long since I slept in a bed! Tell me, Wade-boy, ‘scuse me, Lieutenant, sir! Tell me—”
“Mister Benton,” Wade said dryly. “You promised, Oren.”
“Mister Benton,” Oren mocked; “yessir, Cap’n, sir, I won’t forget!”
“You know why,” Wade said. “You come from these parts. Be mighty funny if my overseer was to call me Wade. Or Wade-boy, like you do, mostly. People’ll think something. And it’s mighty important that they don’t.”
“Sure thing, Mister Benton,” Oren laughed. “Can’t have them thinking anything funny about the Hero of Briar Creek. You’re going to be mighty big back home, Lieutenant. Don’t worry about that—”
“I got a heap more to worry about than being big,” Wade burst out. “How do I know I can trust you, Oren? How in hell-fire do I know that?”
“Now, now, Lieutenant, don’t take on. Going to be plumb, downright easy. In the first place, there’s your honourable scars—”
“A minie ball through the knee,” Wade said; “just enough so I’ll have to limp the rest of my life and carry a cane. What the hell is honourable about that?”
“Then there were that charge. Remember, I saw it. Here you come, at the head of your boys, jumping your hoss over Briar Creek, riding hell for leather towards the dam the Yankees was building to float their gunboats over the shallows. Then all hell busting loose! Your boys surrounded, but fighting like tigers. No surrender. Yankees going down in droves and—”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Wade said disgustedly.
“All right, Mister Benton,” Oren Bascomb said. “See, I got it down pat now. Tell me, Mister Benton, are the girls pretty up your way?”
“Yes,” Wade said quietly.
Oren looked at the young lieutenant. At that moment his face held something infinitely dark and disturbing, but lighted with an inner joy—a malicious glee that made it worse, that heightened it.
“Any one of them you specially interested in?” he said.
“What you want to know that for?” Wade demanded.
“Struck me funny,” Oren grinned. “You and me been down there on Ship Island for more than a year. In all that time I never heard you mention a single filly by name. ‘Tain’t natural. Young fellow like you, son of the richest man in the parish, good-looking to boot—‘pears to me there must of been gals round you in droves. You been hiding something from me, Mister Lieutenant Wade Benton?”
“No,” Wade said. He looked at Oren. Can’t call him good-looking, he thought again. Matter of fact, he’s a homely cuss. Then what am I scared of? Never mentioned Mary Ann to him because—because, the remorseless honesty of his private thoughts insisted miserably, I’m always scared of something. ‘Cause I wasn’t born with what fellows like Oren have. Lord God, the minute those New Orleans girls who came to visit us with food and stuff looked at him, you could see their eyes sparkle. It ain’t looks. Looks don’t matter. I reckon men like Oren were just p
lain born exciting. A woman looks at me and yawns. Let her see him and she starts wondering about all sorts of things, most of which she ain’t supposed to think about a-tall, if she’s decent.
“Well, sir,” Oren mocked, “what’s her name?”
“What’s whose name?” Wade countered.
“This here very special filly you been hiding out on me,” Oren said.
Got to tell him, Wade thought. He’ll meet her, anyhow. Can’t be helped. Lord God, what’s the matter with me? Sweet girl like Mary Ann, and you’d think I couldn’t trust—
But there was more in it than that, and with the sad, half-instinctive wisdom of all dull little men, all those born without the spark, the fire, the lilting, magic quality of desirability, Wade knew it. He knew deep down that Mary Ann did not love him, although she thought she did, for the simple reason that he was not lovable, or exciting, or strong, or interesting, or, indeed, anything that draws a woman to a man. Beyond that, on another level of consciousness, he sensed what he did not permit himself to think: that no woman is ever faithful to a man because the conventions of morality tell her she must be. He had known Babette Dupré too well to believe that. He had also, early in his teens, been all but destroyed inside the very core of his being when he was told by his sister, Stormy, with vicious exactitude of corroborating detail, the story of his own mother’s misdeeds. And he had learned more of Lolette Dupré, had met her in New Orleans, and had been fascinated by her with that curious fascination that causes small beasts to stand motionless before a cotton-mouth moccasin. Women, he dimly realised, are faithful to those men who please them, satisfy their basic physical and spiritual needs, who combine charm with force, tenderness with a kind of quiet, unobtrusive mastery. And when a woman is physically faithful to a man lacking these qualities, it is only because of fear, absence of opportunity, or her own want of sufficient desirability in the eyes of other men. Women, he knew even then, have a great respect for the laws of society when applied to little things—manners, modes of dress, the niceties of social intercourse; in great things they have absolutely none. He reasoned it out painfully: reckon it’s because they’re just more personal than men. Men are bigger sinners, but they always know they’re sinning. A woman don’t. A sin to her is always what the other woman does. What she does is damn near always right, because it’s her who’s doing it, and she’s always got what’s, to her, good and sufficient reasons. Lord God, you can’t understand them nohow.
Knowing all this, without realising how he knew it, or by what precise method he had arrived at it, he had instinctively concealed the name of his fiancée from Oren. For this pine-barren poor white, tall, raw-boned, ugly in a curiously Lincolnesque fashion, had it all: the spark, the fire, the magic. He charmed all manner, classes, and conditions of women with effortless ease; and Wade Benton, enrolled forever in the legion of the pitifully damned, the eternally unwanted, unloved, rejected of this world, both feared and hated him.
“Yes,” he said at last, “there is someone special. A girl named Barker—Mary Ann Barker.”
“Lieutenant,” Oren said with mock gravity, “why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“Because,” Wade said, “a man doesn’t go around spouting about a girl who means that much to him. The way you talk and think about women, Oren—I just didn’t like to bring it up—”
“Lord God!” Oren laughed. “You thought I’d go fooling around your gal, Lieutenant? Reason I asked you was to know which one to leave alone.”
“You mean that, Oren?” Wade said.
“Bible oath. Tell me about her, Mister Benton, sir. She pretty?”
“No,” Wade said honestly. “She’s got a funny little turned-up nose, and a mouth that’s wide and always smiling, mostly. Scads of freckles, and penny-brown eyes. Her hair’s sort of auburn. But she’s not pretty. She’s little and neat and trim, and kind of ugly cute. What she is, I reckon, is just plain sweet. Anyhow, I love her, Oren. And if I have any trouble out of you . . .”
“You won’t, Lieutenant. Known her long?”
“No, I haven’t. She came down our way a little before the war. Her pa was killed in a duel, though she doesn’t even know that yet. They told her it was by accident while he was cleaning his gun. The shock killed her ma. They lived on a place in Mississippi. But old man Ransom, her pa’s brother-in-law, has a little place north of the Cattlets’, and after she lost her folks Mary Ann came there to live. That’s where I met her.”
“Sounds like the girl for you all right. Planning to get hitched right away, are you, sir?”
“Soon as I get back,” Wade said, “if she’ll have me.”
“Oh, she’ll have you all right. After I get through spreading your distinguished war record all over the place, won’t be a filly what wouldn’t jump at the chance to—”
“Aw, shut up!” Wade said.
“I’m serious, Lieutenant. And you don’t have nothing to worry about. I’ll take my Bible oath on that. You don’t for the best damn reason in the world: the bigger you are, the bigger I’ll get to be. And I aim to be mighty damned big!”
“Couldn’t you,” Wade suggested tiredly, “get there by yourself?”
“No. Look at the odds agin me. My folks warn’t much: white trash, swampers and suchlike. No war record. ‘Course I fought like hell, but I fought Rebs as much as I did Feds. Fought for me. What did I care if folks kept their niggers or not? Never owned no niggers. Got caught, either side would of hung me out of hand for robbing the dead, bushwhacking, foraging and stealing. But all that’s finished. Everything’s plumb busted to pieces. Man like me’s got a chance now, if he’s smart. And damned if this thing on my shoulders don’t work right pert good.”
“I’ll grant you that,” Wade Benton said.
“But, coming from nowheres, I got to have somebody big to latch on to. Your pa was the biggest man in that there parish. That gives you a head start. Course you’re flat busted like everbody else. But hell, man, you’re still a Benton. And a hero. That makes a mighty heap of difference. Me and you are going to be rich. Your position and my brains. You couldn’t do it alone; you ain’t hard enough. I couldn’t neither; ain’t got the position. But together—”
Wade stared at him bleakly.
“I’d like to go to sleep now, Oren, if you don’t mind,” he said.
They came up to the house at mid-morning. Sarah put down the pan of peas and stood up, doubting her own eyes. But they came on until she could see them clearly: Wade limping along on his cane, his wispy blond beard framing a face that had lost its childish roundness, his body wraith-thin now, so that he looked much older, and with him the tall raw-boned man, moving along beside him, helping him, with an inscrutable, indefinable expression upon his bony face. An expression oddly like triumph, as though he had won through limitless and unimaginable hardships, through difficulties and struggles that would have broken a lesser man, the goal shining before him now, at this moment, the victory in sight.
Seeing her son coming thus, almost literally back from the dead, Sarah was conscious of mixed emotions. She hoped, suddenly, that Wade wouldn’t spoil things now; for his supposed death, in a wild charge to cut off the Yankee retreat above Alexandria, at that nameless little stream the bayou people called Briar Creek, had been, in its essence, a vindication of all she had suffered for his sake. For no one had expected Wade to make a soldier; she, who knew him best, even less than anyone else.
She came down the steps, running. When she was close, she stopped.
“Howdy, son,” she whispered.
“Howdy, Ma,” he said. Then he leaned forward and kissed her cheek.
She got the smell of him then, full in her nostrils, but her control was superb. She straightened up slowly.
“Come on up to the house, boys,” she said. “I’ll fix you something to eat.”
“Ma,” Wade said, “this is Oren Bascomb. He saved my life.”
Sarah put out her hand.
“Thank you, sir,” she sai
d simply.
“Lord God!” Oren got out, in a tone anyone would have sworn was sincerity itself, “can’t get over it! I do declare I can’t. You’re Miz Benton—his ma? ‘Tain’t possible!”
“I’m his ma, all right,” Sarah said, “but I’m Mrs. McGregor. Wade’s father was my first husband. Come on, now.”
“His sister,” Oren persisted; “I’d of sworn my Bible oath. His younger sister at that.”
“Please, Mister Bascomb,” Sarah said.
“Mister Benton told me there was some mighty pretty girls in these here parts; but I sure Lord didn’t expect to find his ma the prettiest of the lot.”
“Mister Bascomb, please!” Sarah said, and her voice was ice.
“Sorry, ma’am. Only we ain’t seen no pretty women in so damn long—Lord Jesus, how I do talk! Forgive me, ma’am. Comes of being shut in so long. Me and the lieutenant been prisoners of war since last April. My compliments, ma’am. You sure got yourself a boy to be proud of.”
“Ma,” Wade said, “we aren’t hungry. We had breakfast this morning at the Cattlets’. What we’d appreciate right now would be a bath. A haircut, too, and a shave. Could you fix all that up? Reckon all the niggers have skedaddled.”
“There’re a few of them left,” Sarah said. “I’ll trim your hair myself. I know how—been trimming hair for boys for weeks now.”
She did know, especially the essential part of it, which was to shrivel the locks on a shovelful of hot coals the instant they fell. Out in the kitchen, the sole remaining housemaid heated water on the clay firebrick stove.
“Give me your clothes,” Sarah said; “I’ll burn them, or bury them. You’ve got some of your things from before the war, Wade. As for Mister Bascomb, some of your father’s things will fit him as far as height goes. Reckon he’ll have to wrap them around him twice in spots.”
“Please, ma’am,” Oren said quickly, “don’t git rid of our uniforms. Have them boiled, cause we’re right pert proud of our country’s duds. Sort of like to keep them—to remind us, kind of.”