Benton's Row

by Frank Yerby

  “Jeb. He’s six now. Curious little critter: thin and dreamy. Lot different from the twins. ‘Course, Pa had jet-black hair; but Jeb’s the first Benton I ever heard tell of who ever had real dark eyes—dark as yourn, in fact.”

  Clint looked down a little, seeing Wade’s awkward fingers trembling on the reins.

  A child, he thought bitterly. A third child—a son. And this is the first I’ve even heard of his existence. Mary Ann never mentioned him in her letters—all those wonderful letters she begged me not to answer. Nobody in the whole time I’ve been here—that’s natural enough, I guess, as far as the townspeople are concerned. Unless it happened to come up accidentally, they’d assume I already knew. But Mother Sarah, and Randy. . . . That’s something else again—something deliberate. Is it because they know, or suspect? Dear God! Dark hair and eyes. And she never told me—not even so much as a word.

  “I think it depends upon the mother, sometimes,” he said quietly. “For instance, I’m Benton—every bit as much of a Benton as you are, Wade, and my eyes are dark. If you insist upon blue eyes, you shouldn’t have married Mary Ann.”

  “Reckon you’re right,” Wade said. “By the way, your ex-lady friend, Jane Henderson, married Barton Hendricks and moved away to Texas. But I reckon you knew that.”

  “No,” Clint said, “I didn’t.”

  “And her brother Ash and his wife have a little girl. Named her Pat—Patricia. Cutest little tyke you ever did see. But then them Hendersons always was mighty handsome folks. Well—here we are.”

  She got up very slowly as they came in and, even from the doorway, he could see her face paling. She had to put one hand on the counter to support herself. But she recovered very quickly, and put out her hand.

  “Howdy, Clint,” she said quietly. “I’m bound to say that you sure Lord have neglected us.”

  “I—I’ve been busy,” Clint said lamely.

  “So I hear,” Mary Ann said. “It’s a fine idea, Clint; but I’m not sure it’s wise.”

  “Why not?” Clint said. “The Democratic voters have approved of schools for negroes. The Knights have disbanded. And, since the Hayes election, everything the conservatives down here were fighting for has been won. No more carpetbaggers, Mary. ‘The Good White People of the South,’ like your husband, here, are in control again. So surely there won’t be any trouble over a little thing like a school.”

  “There will be, though”, Mary Ann said softly “The Knights haven’t disbanded at all. They just don’t have to wear their robes any more. And the Democrats voted the way they did as a sop to Northern opinion. The few schools they’ve opened for the coloured people are just put there to point at—so that they can say, ‘Look what we’re doing for the poor benighted heathen.’ ”

  “That,” Wade growled, “is a hell of a way to talk, Mary Ann!”

  “And one day,” Mary Ann went on, ignoring him, “they’ll burn that school of yours, Clint.”

  “Oh, come now, Mary!” Clint laughed; “they’ve stopped that. People don’t burn school-houses nowadays. Ten years ago, maybe, but not now.”

  “Now,” Mary Ann said. “Benton’s Row is ten, twenty years behind the times. The whole South is.”

  “Why do you hate it, Mary?” Clint said. “You were born here. Why do you hate the South?”

  “I don’t.” Her eyes caught his, implored them, entreated. “I love the South. All of it, the beauty of it, I mean. There’s a place down by the river I love most of all. Where the water makes a hook, and catches the moon in the bend, and there are fire-flies and Spanish moss when the light is in it, and—”

  Wade stared at her.

  “You crazy or something?” he said in his thick, blurred voice.

  “No. Just different from you, Wade. Clint understands me, I think. Don’t you, Clint?”

  “Perfectly,” Clint said.

  “Well, I don’t,” Wade growled. “You drop in on that school every night, don’t you, Clint?”

  “Yes, I do—usually,” Clint told him.

  “Good!” Wade Benton said.

  It was very dark in the pine wood and Jeb was having a hard time keeping up with the twins. He was afraid of the dark, but he didn’t want them to know it. He ran behind them, hearing the hounds belling somewhere ahead, the sound deep, long drawn out, sad. It gave him the shivers, but he liked it. He was very tired and frightened, but most of all he was puzzled. The elaborate plans the twins had evolved to sneak him out of the house, without his mama knowing it, hadn’t been necessary: for some strange reason, Mama had not come home at all.

  It was the first time in all his life that that had ever happened. He had questioned the twins about it, but they had only shrugged. Whether Mama came home or not didn’t interest them. They were all Benton—nothing interested them but the business in hand.

  “Let’s stop here,” Nat said. “The li’l’ fellow’s winded. ‘Sides, when they scent something, we’ll know it.”

  “How?” Jeb said.

  “They’ll start bugling,” Stone told him. “Different kind of a sound. Git real close, you’ll hear ‘em yapping. Then you’ll know they’ve treed something. Silly to run after them all night, ‘cause they run in circles anyhow, mostly. All right to stay here as long as we can hear ‘em. Git too far away, we have to go after them again.”

  The three of them sat down on a fallen tree.

  “Mama didn’t come home,” Jeb said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Stone said. “She’s all right, kid. Probably stayed over at Grandma’s. She’ll be home in the morning; you can bet on that.”

  “First time she ever stayed off,” Jeb said.

  They didn’t answer him.

  “Aren’t you going to light the lanterns?” he whispered.

  “Not yet,” Nat said. “Not until we come up on something. If it’s a ‘possum, we light them and shine them in his eyes.”

  “Then what happens?”

  “Then we climb up the tree, and catch him by the tail, and put him in the sack.”

  “Won’t he bite?”

  “Naw—’possums don’t bite. They’re too scairt.”

  They sat there, waiting. It was a warm night with many stars. There were fire-flies in the trees. It was still and quiet and peaceful, except for the sound of the dogs mourning through the pine wood. The sound grew fainter, came back again. The dogs were quartering the wood, working it back and forth in long diagonals. They would cover every inch of it sooner or later. Jeb didn’t feel afraid any more.

  When the dogs changed their note, the twins didn’t have to tell him. He was on his feet as soon as they were, running towards the sound. It wasn’t far, but before they got there, the dogs started yapping.

  “What is it?” Jeb panted.

  “ ‘Possum or coon. Can’t tell yet,” Nat said.

  They burst out into a clearing in the pine wood. There were three dogs, tumbling over each other in their eagerness, around the foot of a tree.

  “Damn!” the twins chorused.

  “What’s the matter?” Jeb said.

  They were busy getting the lanterns lit while they told him. “That tree. Ain’t much more than a sapling. Git halfway up and it’ll bend over and—”

  “Why?”

  “Me or Nat’s too heavy. Can’t git nowheres near that damned ‘possum.”

  They stopped suddenly, staring at him.

  He opened his eyes wide. He was afraid two ways: he was deathly afraid of climbing that tree in the dark; but he was just as afraid of losing his brothers’ respect. The tree was one thing; but he didn’t have to live with the tree.

  “All right,” he said; “I’ll do it.”

  “Good for you, kid,” Stone said gruffly.

  They gave him the sack. Then they boosted him up as far as they could reach. He grasped the trunk and started upwards. It wasn’t as hard as he had thought. But the higher he got, the worse it was. The tree swayed, and the unwinking little eyes stared down at him. On the ground even
the dogs were quiet now. Jeb climbed. There was a hollow in his middle that grew and grew. Sweat trickled down into his eyes. From the tree-top the opossum stared down. The obscene little beast wrapped its scaly, rat-like tail around a branch and glared at him.

  “Grab him, kid!” the twins called.

  His hand shot out, grasping the tail. He jerked it loose from the branch, almost losing his balance. Then he dropped the little beast into the sack he had slung across his shoulders. It made no resistance. He clung to the tree trunk, shuddering.

  “Good for you, kid!” Stone called. “Come on down!”

  He felt good suddenly; warm and good. He did not know it, but he had something the twins lacked. He was actually braver than they, because he knew what fear was—the meaning of it. But he didn’t let it stop him.

  The twins would go on, all their lives, performing prodigies of valour; but they would never know the special triumph of doing a thing that is agonisingly impossible, but doing it anyhow, conquering both the object and, at the same time, one’s own weaknesses, frailties, fears. It was a very good feeling.

  He started downward, groping with his feet for the branches below him. He missed the first one, slid sickeningly downwards until his left foot jammed hard against a stop limb. He hung there, dizzily; and it was then he saw the glow.

  “Fire!” he yelled. “A whopping big one!”

  “Where?” they cried.

  “That—a—way!” he called, pointing.

  “Come on down!” they roared.

  He came down, sliding, scraping his hands and knees, ripping his clothes, his fears gone, forgotten, the excitement and wonder working within him like an intoxicant, heady and wild.

  They snatched the sack from him as soon as his feet touched ground.

  “Git going, kid!” Stone barked. “You lead!”

  He ran ahead of them in a whooping broil of sound: the dogs bounding around him in all directions at once, it seemed to him, giving tongue, making a symphony of mournful music wonderfully fitting, a thing of rushing speed, and hound bugling, and the hammer of running feet, earth muffled. The twins could out-distance him, but they hung back, letting him lead; and he, running easily, freely, felt neither fear nor weariness, but only the glory of leadership, of being now on a plane with his brothers, a man, truly, among men.

  They burst out into the clearing; and crashed to a halt against an invisible wall of terror: stopped almost physically by the heat blast against their faces, standing there goggling at that inferno; the roll and boom and cackle of flames that soared upwards, boiled up, drowning the stars in a wash of savage red.

  The men on horseback sat there watching it, and, a little beyond them, their father, his round face orange-red in the fire-glow, sitting in the buckboard, tembling. Then Jeb saw it. He caught at his brother’s arms, jerking them, pointing, unable to speak, beyond now even the utterance of sound.

  The big negro came out of the fire, all his clothes, even the woolly hair on his head, blazing, the whole of him burning like a torch. He was carrying something in his arms, something that writhed and moaned. He stopped, knelt, and laid her down very carefully. Then he came on again, without haste, making no sound at all, no cry, nothing, just moving like that towards the riders, walking, coming on.

  Jeb found his voice.

  “It’s Buford!” he shrieked. “Lord God, it’s Buford!”

  Then all the guns spoke at once.

  “Come on,” Stone said, “take his arm, Nat. That ain’t fitting for no kid to see.”

  Clint lay there, holding Mary Ann in the crook of his arm, puzzling idly in the warm lassitude of contentment over how bright the room had suddenly become. Strange, he thought; there’s no moon. Then he saw the glow was red.

  He leaped to his feet, spilling her abruptly out of his arms.

  “What is it, Clint?” Mary Ann said.

  “Fire!” he breathed. “The school! It must be the school—come on!”

  “Like that?” Mary Ann smiled.

  “Oh, damn!” Clint swore, and began yanking the clothes on to his fine, big body.

  But the Henderson place was too far from the school. By the time they got there, only the fallen rafters smouldered stubbornly, surrounded by a crowd of bayou people, who talked in whispers, or did not talk at all, standing there like that, staring at the two objects on the ground from which the smoke still rose, until the wind changed and they got the smell full in their faces; and they, all of them, breaking out and away from there, made a path through which Clint and Mary Ann came.

  The riders were gone by then, and the buckboard. Only the weeping, red-eyed school-marm, her grey hair hacked off by the riders in grotesque tufts, her spectacles broken, her clothing singed, was left to tell them how, after she and her pupils had been ordered out of the school-house and the building set afire, Cindy had missed little Fred. Not knowing him safe in the arms of another woman, she had dashed back into the fire. It mounted too quickly, the kerosene they had flung through the windows had done its work too well, so that when Buford reached her, it was too late—too late for both of them.

  “He put her down and went after them,” the teacher whispered. “They shot him—all of them. But it was a mercy, the way he was burning.” Her voice, speaking, was flat, dead; little more than a whisper, it carried better than any shout; was, to them, listening, more terrible than any scream.

  “Clint,” Mary Ann said, and laid a hand on his arm.

  He shook it off savagely.

  “Don’t touch me!” he said. “But for you I would have been here. I would have prevented this, or stopped it, or died trying. But for you.”

  “Clint!” she said again.

  He looked her up and down slowly. Then he turned to Miss Crandall-Hyde.

  “Come,” he said, “we’ll take you home now.”

  When Mary Ann got back to Broad Acres, she wasn’t crying any more.

  I’m through crying, she thought; I’ve cried enough for all the rest of my life.

  Through the open door of the bedroom, Wade heard her. He had been lying there, trembling. He was afraid. He had seen it, and he was afraid the way he felt would bring on another attack. Then he heard her.

  “Mary Ann!” he called. “Where the devil have you been?”

  She stepped into the bedroom. She stood there, looking at him. She didn’t say anything. She just stood there, like that, looking at him. Then she turned and went out of the room. He heard the door of the guest-room open and close, the crash of the big bolt being slammed home.

  “Oh, good Lord!” Wade Benton said.

  8

  “YOU are a fool, Oren Bascomb!” Stormy said. “Couldn’t let well enough alone, could you? You had to have it all!”

  Oren grinned at her.

  “Now, baby,” he said, “don’t take on so. Some mighty nice places for a fine upstanding young couple like us up North—that is, after we come back from abroad. Always did have a hankering to see London and Paris.”

  Stormy looked at him coldly.

  “I’m not going with you, Oren,” she said.

  He straightened up then, stiffening out of his habitual lazy slouch for the first time in years, his dark eyes wide.

  “But, baby-doll,” he began.

  “You listen to me, Oren,” Stormy said quietly. “You’ve been with the lottery company long enough to know how it operates. You’re not dealing with General Rafflin alone now. The whole damned organisation is going to be after you.”

  “So?” he said; but his tone was less sure.

  “I got you this job nearly nine years ago. In that nine years you’ve become one of the richest men in the State—legitimately, if anything connected with gambling can be called legitimate. But you weren’t satisfied. General Rafflin, for all his being older than God Almighty, is nobody’s fool. You, lover, have embezzled in the past three years nearly a cool million dollars. Do you deny that?”

  “No,” Oren said boldly. “Going to steal—steal big, I say. Th
is way I can buy myself out of most anything they try to bring against me. Git the right connections, I can buy off extradition from most any foreign country.”

  “If you ever get to a foreign country,” Stormy said flatly.

  “I’d lay you ten to one you’ll never leave Louisiana alive, if 1 had any way to collect the bet.”

  “What the devil do you mean?” Oren snarled.

  “Simple, my sweet. The Mafia. Ever heard of them?”

  “Of course,” Oren said uneasily; “but what have them murdering guinea bastards got to do with this?”

  “Plenty. Ever wondered how a man like Giovanni Maspero ever got elected to the board of directors of the company? They’ve bought their way in, or forced their way in—and believe me, lover, the Black Hand plays for keeps. They aren’t even interested in that chicken feed you’ve stolen. They don’t care if they get the money back or not. Oh, they’ll go through the motions all right. My dear, beloved, antediluvian husband is down-town right now, swearing out a warrant for your arrest. But you won’t be arrested.”

  Oren brightened.

  “Then I don’t see—”

  “Let me finish, lover. A trial would be much too embarrassing to the lottery company, what with the Governor bringing pressure against it now. Oh no, you’re going to be allowed to skip.”

  “Why don’t you skip with me, sugar-pie?” Oren grinned. “You’n’me together could—”

  “Because, my sweet, I don’t relish being found in a back bayou with my nose, mouth and ears notched like a sow’s, and my dainty throat split from ear to ear. That’s what’s going to happen to you, love—with a few variations I can safely leave to your imagination.”

  “Stormy, for the love of God!” Oren whispered.

  “Which is why I’m not going with you. As I said, they aren’t really interested in the money. To them, it’s small change. But they’re very much interested in having a shining example of what happens to little blackguards who cross them on exhibition as a warning to anyone else who might get ideas in the future.”

  Oren stood there, staring at her.