Once or twice I traveled to Memphis with the ladies in Miss Beaurie’s superior auto (I also went on trips there with my parents). That auto! It must have just missed being a limousine. I believe it had jump seats like old-fashioned taxis. Often I had to sit by one of the ladies. (I could not ride backwards long without getting carsick.) One of them wore a fur piece, a black silver-fox fur with its head left in place, wicked glass eyes set in above its narrow snout. The mouth was hinged to bite the tail, right above one paw—the paws were also intact—and so to hold the pelt in place. The lady would open and close the mouth, pretending it would bite me. I never liked this. One of the other ladies was a marvel for the long black line that I observed coming down the side of her mouth. I asked my mother about it, and was told she “dipped,” meaning took snuff, but not to mention it. She believed her habit to be secret, though everyone knew it.
“Everyone knows it, but don’t mention it.” It was easy for any child to see how such a regulation about one thing extended to multiple others.
Through the years, stories emerged. The Somerville cousins, girls of a likely age and beauty, came to visit from Oxford during my mother’s girlhood. They came for a “house party” at Cousin Beaurie’s. When I taught at the state university, which is located at Oxford, I became friends with Ella Somerville, who many years before had been one of these girls.
“Oh, yes,” she recalled, “we were invited for buggy rides with the unmarried young Presbyterian minister. Cousin Beaurie doted on him. I think one of us was supposed to marry him. And of course you knew about the murder.”
“Murder!”
“Why, yes, in those days, she would tell about it. You must have heard it.”
No, I hadn’t but I heard it then. It began like so many stories: It was a dark and stormy night…
Envision for a moment Carrollton, Mississippi, an old town of scarcely five hundred souls, set off from any railroad, run through by one narrow, graveled highway. White houses perch on hills surrounded by enormous yards; crooked roads wind outward from the town square, out from the courthouse, past the jail, churches, law offices, post office, out from shaded walks on the square that went past the hardware store and drugstore, bank and lodge hall. On a rain-lashed night, who or what could or might or would want to wander around there? Somebody did.
A man, neither young nor old, no kin to anyone, came out of the rain and knocked at a door. It was the side door of the Somerville house. He was asked in.
Only Miss Beaurie and her husband were there. She always had a cook and a butler, also a gardener and the chauffeur, whose name was Fox. But none of them lived there, and evidently no one other than the two Somervilles was present when the knock came.
The nameless man was appreciative and cordial, well-mannered and full of the right things to say. Food was brought him and dry clothing, and he was invited by these Christian folk to sit and talk. What the talk ran to has not been passed down, but the Somervilles were impressed enough and good-hearted enough to ask him to stay the night. One can know the phrases: “You can’t go back out in this sort of weather. You’ll be sure to catch pneumonia!” One can all but hear the heavy pounding of rain on the gabled roof, the rumble of thunder, the shifting pressure of wind. Cozy within, they talked of beliefs so devoutly held, the Bible, the church. Oh, yes, the guest himself, despite his misfortunes, was a believer. The family Bible appeared and passages of encouragement were read aloud. There were prayers. The Somervilles opened up a guest room. How happily they must have gone to bed.
But in the night they heard noises from below. The two of them got up and crept down the stairs. Their guest was in the dining room relieving them of the family silver. He was putting it in a sack. Evidently there was enough light to see by, for nothing was done to disturb what he was up to. Their cousin Ella remembered and told me what it was Mr. Somerville took up for a weapon, but I have forgotten. Maybe a poker? A flashlight—one of those bold, eighteen-inch-long nickel-plated monsters, with a wheel-like enlargement at the head? No, to the best of my belief, Miss Beaurie herself held the flashlight and beamed it on the thief at the appropriate moment. With poker or tongs, gold-headed walking cane or whatever was handy, the guest in the house, the unfortunate Christian believer come in from the cold, was bashed in the head and brought down on the dining room floor, silver cutlery falling all about him, stone dead.
I asked my mother if this could possibly have really happened the way I had it from Ella. She evinced no surprise or regret. But then it was a long time later.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “They hated it mighty bad. Of course, Mr. Somerville never meant to actually kill him.”
“But then what happened?” I pursued.
“What do you mean, what happened? They buried him.”
“Wasn’t there any inquiry, any inquest? Didn’t anybody ever know who he was?”
“No, they never found out,” she said. “He wasn’t from anywhere around here.”
“Wasn’t from anywhere around here.” Key phrases like this extend infinitely into the social order, of no help at all to a nameless stranger.
Of the trips to Memphis when I went along I recall less than I would like to claim. The ladies talked a great deal, but it was not the kind of talk I was interested in. I do remember Fox, the chauffeur, though. In good weather, Fox would efficiently arrange the isinglass windows so that we could get fresh air without being blown apart. If it rained, he would halt the car, get out, and snap them all in place. Fox himself was a well-built tan-colored man, exquisitely polite, and well trained in helping ladies in and out, in being on time to the second.
Memphis, our major shopping town, was all of one hundred and thirty miles away on Mississippi roads that well into the late thirties were completely unpaved. Tennessee had pavement; when we bounced across the state line, everyone sighed with relief. In Mississippi there were dust, curves, hills, and tiny towns to pass through. One of these was called Polk. Miss Beaurie had discovered a filling station in Polk with a sandwich shop that made excellent sandwiches. We would select what kind we would like—chicken salad or ham—and Fox would take the list inside. The sandwiches eventually came out in a bag, each wrapped separately in wax paper, and were distributed. A thermos of iced tea came open. Cups were passed out. These were our “refreshments.”
In Memphis we stayed at the Gayoso, which Miss Beaurie for some reason preferred to the Peabody. Hotels to me spoke of adventure, though of what sort at that time I could not say. The hotel lobby was fascinatingly paved in small hexagonals of white marble, as was the bathroom. And there were big white towels and soaps wrapped individually and a strange enticing smell.
Underneath all the shopping and talk, I lived a small but intense life of my own. I liked to pass through the revolving doors, go to the desk with whoever asked for our key, mount upward in the elevator, follow the carpeted hallways. Trailing the ladies through the streets from shops to department stores, I ogled at window displays and marveled at Mr. Peanut, who strolled about the main business streets advertising Planters Peanuts. His helmet was an enormous peanut shell painted with a face. He wore spats and carried a walking cane. I think my mother took me to the picture show one evening but I fell asleep.
It was understood that on the way home from Memphis Fox was to be granted the favor of going by his sister’s house. She lived in the black section of Memphis, and we would regularly stop before a small low house with a fence around the front yard. Fox left us to sit in the car while he passed within the house carrying a large bundle. “Fox brings presents for his sister,” Miss Beaurie would explain with approval, “and she always remembers to send some things back for his wife and children.” The things sent were all in a large box, which Fox deposited in the trunk of the car. I don’t recall that we ever saw the sister. However, Fox resumed the trip without comment. He was not the talkative kind of servant who invited questions.
Years later it came to light that Fox, season after season, had been running whisk
ey into the dry state of Mississippi in Miss Beauregard Somerville’s car.
When my parents were away, I was sent over from the school to Miss Beaurie’s house to eat dinner—“dinner” meant the midday meal. I had to sit at table with her and with whatever relative might be staying there. I answered questions that were addressed to me. She gave me a fine enough lunch but insisted that I drink hot water out of a china teacup. Some idea of hers made this the perfect thing in winter for the digestion. If she said it, you had to do it.
The rustle of taffeta. Long skirts in hot weather or cold. Petticoats. Black shoes. High lace collars. And no one to doubt that she was right about everything.
She had a greenhouse covered in glass at the side of the house. It was the only one in town. In winter it was nice to venture in there, especially if the day was sunny, but in summer it was unbearable, stifling. One summer a hailstorm rudely smashed many of the panes.
Miss Beaurie had a butler, whose name was Aaron. Long after she died, he showed up at our house one day. He was slight, stooped, light-colored, and, like Fox, not talkative. He had considerable dignity and used no wiles on us, simply was there and, in some inexplicable way, ours. We were expected to find work for him, to provide. We did. He did some garden work for my mother and whatever odd jobs could be found for him. He ate there, received clothes, and was paid the meager going wages of that time. He was with us until he grew too old to work, and then, in his last illness, my mother went up and nursed him, she said, meaning, I suppose, that she brought him what food he needed and saw to it that he was sheltered and comfortable. He asked her once for a fruitcake at Christmas “to put in his trunk.” She made it for him, with the others she cooked each Christmas, and he did, I am sure, as he said, store it in his trunk for eating a little at a time.
The edicts of Miss Beaurie thus continued through many years and lives. You did what was expected of you, in the way it was expected for you to do it. Ella Somerville in Oxford had much of this same nature. In her last illness from cancer, she received her visitors in the hospital, I am told, propped up in a splendid negligee, conversant and interesting as if in her own parlor, where I had been welcomed so many times.
Carrollton was part of the Oxford Somervilles’ past. Their mother, a Vassar, had come from there. Though the old Vassar home had fallen into disrepair and at last disappeared, it had stood on the highest hill in Carrollton, where also stood the standpipe. Ella and her sister Nina Cully used to joke about owning our town’s water supply. Connections are what you’d better have in Mississippi in order to mention anything.
The night of Miss Beaurie’s death my father, as I said, went up there. “Sitting up” with the newly dead was the custom in those days. When one group had served out a sufficient number of hours, others would come in to stay, and so on through the night. My father came home late. “She left you her diamond,” he told my mother. My mother burst into tears.
It seemed the gift of the diamond was not altogether based on old family friendship, though certainly that was the major part of it. Miss Beaurie had a place over in the Delta. My father, being well-known as a good businessman, had given free advice to Miss Beaurie through the years. I don’t know if he went so far as to interview her managers, or personally see how well they attended to their work, but he knew what she should be realizing on the farm, and could offer a firm hand if needed, and help her with expenses. She was recognizing his services, as well as the long tie with our family, by this legacy. She was doing, as usual, the right thing.
At the time of Miss Beaurie’s death, a curious detail emerged. Searching through her house for some necessary article, my father opened a closet door and hundreds of small empty paregoric bottles fell out on the floor. Paregoric was used a lot in those days for easing pain. It was measured out by the tea-spoonful in a small amount of water for swallowing down. What painful health problem was going on beneath all those skirts and petticoats, with those arms and legs never exposed, that long neck sheathed in lace? Or was it another sort of pain? Paregoric is also a derivative of opium.
Miss Beaurie’s diamond was an exceptionally large one. My mother had it set with her engagement diamond, which my father as a young man, before he met her, had bought for fifty dollars from a nameless wanderer who had ridden the rails down from Memphis and needed cash. This one, too, was large and fine, well over a carat, and the pair looked well when mounted together.
All links join the world, or did join in the world where I grew up. Once when driving through the South, my husband and I noted a sign in northern Virginia that indicated a battlefield nearby—Bull Run, or in other words, Manassas. We drove to see it. I recall it vividly now—a treeless long green meadow, sloping upward toward a cresting hill.
I thought of Beauregard: General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, C.S.A. Beau regard … beautiful glance.
How easy to visualize him, his ornate New Orleans name worn easily, the noble head, the straight bearing. He holds his fine horse firmly reined beneath him—arched neck, ears forward, rich mane and tail furling in the breeze. See him so poised at the crest there, looking outward on his field of victory. Nothing is before him now but the sweep of tall green grass, bending softly in the light wind. The moment is one of triumph and beauty and silence. There are no dead.
11
SOME OLD GENTLEMEN
AND OTHERS
MR. WALTER Johnson was a singular citizen of our town. I’ve no idea where he came from. He was just always there. He was an elder in our church, white-haired, with longish white mustaches and a sonorous voice, which I remember because elders were often asked during services to stand up and lead us in prayer. I connected him with the smell of paint because, among other lines of work, he was a painter by profession and would come down to the house whenever we needed painting done. I was scared of him.
For a time, he ran a picture show down across the bridge in north town. It was in a large shedlike building among the business houses, and had long wooden benches like the tabernacle, also sawdust floors. We went there to see silent movies. Someone up front banged on a piano, making appropriate noises during chase scenes, when horses galloped, or crooks ran from the law down city streets, or cars sped over country roads. Frilly sentimental tunes came flowing out during love scenes, reunions with long-lost children, the dying of loved ones, and other such occasions. We used to sit on our hands, leaning forward, enthralled. These were the days of Rin Tin Tin, the valiant police dog, and Silver King, the marvelous white horse. There were serials. Pretty girls got tied to railroad tracks with trains chugging around the bend about to cut them in two. Cars shot over the edge of a cliff. Then you had to wait till next week to see how they got out of one predicament and into the next.
The movie house was useful for other occasions, one when I was five being an appearance of Santa Claus. My mother took me downtown to see Santa Claus and there he was, bright among a crowd of other children and their mothers, wearing a red suit, trousers stuffed in boot tops, and thick white whiskers, handing out candy and small wrapped gifts. I was scared to death and cried. A devout believer in everything I was told (I had been crushed with disappointment to come across some dyed eggs before Easter, thereby having to face the fact that the Easter Rabbit was not real), I began to cling to my mother and resist going up for a gift. She whispered to calm me, “It’s just Mr. Walter Johnson.” But I was scared of him, too, and the combination with Santa Claus, with whom he must have had some secret contact, only added to my terror. I wanted out of there.
Another time, when I was walking alone on a town street, I saw come toward me a figure clothed head to toe in a flowing net. His face could no more be seen than his feet. He seemed a god, a daylight spook, a boldly walking apparition. In one hand he held a mysterious large globelike object that seemed to be warping, then shrinking and swelling. I wanted to run, but only had time to step aside into the ditch by the sidewalk. That, too, was Mr. Walter Johnson. What he was holding was a swarm of bees. He knew h
ow to rob hives; so he must have known bees as well as Santa Claus. It was said they did not sting him.
He must have been married more than once; he had a daughter named Vivian, who I understood was a missionary. Once she came home to visit and it was reported that she dumped the church records down a well, but her motive for doing so was not told me. The latest Mrs. Johnson, estranged, was named Lavada, but was known as Mrs. Newspaper Johnson because she delivered the Memphis paper, The Commercial Appeal, all through town. She came daily, wrapped up summer and winter in something with long sleeves, and wore black mitts to protect her hands from newsprint and the weather, also a hat.
Since our house was at the end of our road, with nowhere to go beyond it, she would sometimes come in and sit down for a talk with my mother. Once she did this very thing while Mr. Walter Johnson was up on a ladder in the far back of our glassed sunroom/side porch, which ran the entire length of the house, doing some painting. My mother sat listening to Mrs. Johnson and hoping neither Mr. J. nor Mrs. J. would notice the other, as they apparently never had any wish to be in the same world with each other, let alone the same room.
Inevitably, there came a paralyzing moment of recognition. Mr. Walter Johnson tilted on his ladder while Mrs. Newspaper Johnson jumped up and rushed out the door. No word had been spoken. Mimi claimed to be sorry it had happened but could not help it. What on earth they were so permanently mad about, I never undertook to ask. Maybe she was scared of him, but then why marry him? He was a scary man.
Two other old men were Mr. Philip Shaw and Mr. Lee McMillan. I think they lived together, or shared parts of a house in the country, several miles out of town. Shaw’s Pond, where we swam so happily in the summer, was on Mr. Philip’s property.
Mr. Philip was blind and walked along tapping with a cane. He made scuppernong wine and brought it to the church in a jug to use for our communion service. Since some heavy drinkers were on the church roll and might someday attend, as they were always being besought to do, and as the ladies were always praying that they might, the fear grew that if prayers were answered, a real binge might get launched out of that one little swallow of communion wine. So grape juice was substituted. I pointed out that the Bible said Jesus drank wine, but was told it was unfermented, that is to say, the equivalent of Welch’s grape juice. I did not believe it.
Landscapes of the Heart Page 9