Nelle hops off the fence and says, “I tried to make her not drive, Papa.” Her face is chalk-white. Bonnie wonders if the child will throw up. She almost hopes so. That would be normal. She’d throw up, if she seen her own Ma in such condition. But Nelle appears calm. Maybe she’s too young to remember this. Bonnie will, though. She’ll never forget it, and she might throw up, herself. She pinches the skin between her thumb and forefinger, a trick her Ma taught her. Supposed to ward off vomiting, but never did any good for morning sickness. She pinches harder, and it does seem to help, a little.
Mr. Scott appears to notice Victor for the first time. “Son?” he calls. Victor sits up slowly, as if he hurts all over. Russell, the older boy, goes to Victor, reaches out a hand, and hauls him to his feet.
Russell is the nice one, Bonnie thinks. The only nice one. Well, Mr. Scott is nice too. He must have had the water running, so he couldn’t hear all the commotion.
Something touches Bonnie’s cheek: a raindrop, then another. Mr. Scott scoops up his wife and carries her into the house. The two boys and Nelle follow. Only Bonnie is still outside when Dr. Thorpe gallops up on his horse. He jumps down, unties a bag from the saddle, and hurries into the house. Rain darkens the splintered paddock fence. The rain makes the smell of boxwood stronger, as if every dark-green leaf on the bushes is opening up.
Only then does Bonnie realize she hasn’t sneezed once, in all this. Then she remembers her birds. Stupid to leave them outside, they’ll catch cold. They could die.
That little boy upstairs, what is his name? Charlie. A fine nanny she is, leaving him alone. He might have fell out a window by now. She has to choose, right this minute—the birds or Charlie. Mrs. Scott will probably fire her anyway, because of what she saw. Rich people don’t want poor folks knowing their business.
She runs for home. Halfway there, a buggy clatters behind her, and the driver calls out. Grateful, she raises her head, and in the slanting rain sees Henry Fenton.
“Was your ears burning?” she says. “I was just talking about you.” Soaked through, flinging her hair across her brow, she climbs into his buggy.
“Which is where I belong—with him,” she tells the birds later, the canaries that are wet but alive, although there’s one she’s worried about. Henry Fenton helped carry the cages inside. Of all the amazements of the day, that was the biggest—Henry Fenton in her own house.
“It’s too late, though,” she tells the birds. “His new wife,” for she thinks of Fannie as new although Fannie and Henry have been married for twenty-four years, “got him tied down tight.”
She wriggles out of her clothes, puts on dry things, wraps the sick bird in a piece of flannel and places it in her bosom, next to her heart. She builds a fire for drying out her clothes and sits in her chair across the room. Outside, the rain stops, and vaporous steam rises from the road. Summertime: it’s how she has always felt around Henry Fenton, this deep well of excitement, this all-around fullness.
She told him about the Scotts while he brought her home. Had to yell to be heard above the rain. Hadn’t hardly got to the part about Mrs. Scott firing the Irishwoman, though, when they reached her house.
“The curse of the bottle,” she said to Henry, knowing him to be a upright man—for what man wouldn’t despise a intoxicated female? She told about Mrs. Scott driving the pony cart, busting through the fence, and her and the boy throwed out, and her with a bloody socket. Bonnie couldn’t resist adding, “Her eyeball was laying there on the ground. Big blue eye, looking right up at me.”
Henry Fenton swallowed, and Bonnie felt proud. He’d think about that eyeball, and he’d tell other people what Bonnie told him. He said, “Did they get the doctor?”
“Dr. Thorpe got there quick as he could. I had enough by then. Ain’t going back. They can find somebody else. Mark my words, they’ll run through all the white people and have to hire colored, and see how that suits ’em. Bet Miz Scott won’t like that one bit. Well, they won’t like her, neither.” A realization struck Bonnie. “I fired her. Didn’t I?” and she laughed.
Henry Fenton said, “I hope those folks will be all right.”
“Don’t fool with ’em, Henry,” Bonnie dared to say. She’d always called him Mr. Fenton, but her experience of the day gave her the right to be familiar. “It’s not just because they’re Yankees. She’s a drunk and he can’t control her. And the middle children hate each other, little girl kicked the daylights out of that boy. That Nelle, she’s the oddest of ’em all. Wanted to see her mother’s gouged-out eye! Pressed her face up close. Would you want to see your Ma with her eye put out? It’s unnatural.”
Bonnie didn’t wait for him to answer. She felt an urgent need to make him understand just how dangerous the Scotts really are. She said, “That’s one scary little girl. Don’t let your boy Richard go near her, Henry. She’ll be after him one day.”
Henry chuckled, and Bonnie remembered his good humor from a long time ago, when she’d march some stranger into his mill office and announce, This man was crossing the bridge, and the man would turn out to be harmless, some local fellow, and Henry would tease her about what a good guard she was. Playful, that’s Henry’s nature, and Bonnie can bring it out in him. She was delighted to see that twinkle in his eye.
He said, “So the child’s a regular outlaw, huh? Compared to, say, Jesse James?”
“Nelle Scott makes Jesse James look like a angel,” Bonnie declared. “Well, the apple don’t fall far from the tree. Just look at her mother. There’s one wife whose price ain’t above rubies, nothing like yours, both of ’em sweet as can be. The one that died, I always thought we’d a-been good friends. Mary, right?”
Henry’s face went somber. “Mary Jane,” he said.
Bonnie saw she’d made a mistake. She said, “And Fannie, you and Fannie make a fine couple. Not like those Scotts. Just goes to show, money don’t bring happiness…”
Henry Fenton said, “Sounds like they just had a hard day. That can happen to any family. Well, bye now, Bonnie,” and he was out the door, leaving Bonnie to play the conversation over again in her mind.
The sick canary stirs between her breasts, and she lifts it out, kisses its head, and puts it back. There was so much more to tell Henry. She wanted to tell him about Mr. Scott in his bathrobe holding his wife around her waist—“like dancing,” Bonnie mumbles to the birds—and about Mr. Eldred racing for the doctor. She imagines Mr. Eldred ran into Dr. Thorpe’s house without knocking, and maybe Mrs. Thorpe’s new bird was on the loose, flying around, and got out, and now Mrs. Thorpe’ll need another canary. Maybe Bonnie’ll get a better look at that emerald ring on her finger.
She hears a train whistling into the Rapidan depot and wonders if the Irishwoman will get on it. Northbound, this time of day. Yes, she bets Moira is handing her ticket to the conductor, putting up her satchel, and taking a seat. Bonnie’s heart reaches out to Moira. It would be fun to have an Irish friend.
Oh, she could have talked to Henry Fenton for hours. She wishes she’d told him about her new grandson, Benjamin Harrison Hazlitt. Henry would’ve had to say something nice, something personal, about a baby named for the president.
Seven Sons
I
In April 1908, Nelle Scott Fenton, pregnant with her first child, felt a fist of pain in her stomach, discovered blood like roses on her underclothes, and realized she had miscarried. She recovered rapidly. Within three weeks, she once more rode daily, and by Thanksgiving, she knew she was pregnant again. This time she passed through the danger stage and delivered the child on the first of July 1909. She named him John.
“Seven sons,” an old woman in India had told her when she traveled the world with her parents and brothers. The old woman held up seven fingers, the nails horribly long and whorled. “You will have seven sons.”
The effort that will take. Nelle doesn’t want to think of it.
Her husband, Richard Fenton, shows his pride in the way he carries himself, a short man feeling li
ke the cock of the walk. Why hadn’t Nelle noticed, when he was courting her, how short he really is?
To the mill he goes. Sometimes his father, Henry, aged eighty-one, still goes with him, spending all day chatting with farmers or napping, Richard tells her, in the oak swivel chair in the office. When Nelle visits the mill, that’s the chair that Richard or Henry offers her, with armrests carved like an animal’s paws.
Henry Fenton was born in 1828, a date that seems antediluvian to Nelle. Richard was born in 1874, and now he is older than his father was when he enlisted to fight in the Civil War. “The generations go long,” is how Richard puts it.
It seems to Nelle, still a new bride in the Virginia countryside, that old Confederates are as common as crows, numerous and somehow pesky, their pants wrinkled, uncreased, uncuffed. Why should shabby trousers bother her? Yet they do. The men attend each other’s funerals and recite, on Nelle’s porch, the causes of comrades’ demise: pneumonia, heart attack, grippe. What they all fear is a fall down the stairs. Nelle hasn’t understood till now that a fall can be fatal. Old spines and bones and hips can crack like sticks, crazing the nerves and causing the whole body to fail.
She and her father-in-law tend to circle each other warily. He and his wife, Fannie, Richard’s mother, live across the field from Richard and Nelle. Iris, Richard’s younger sister, is living with Nelle and Richard this summer, ostensibly to help with the baby, but Nelle knows Fannie asked Richard to introduce Iris to eligible bachelors.
On baby John’s first birthday, Richard hires a photographer to come out to the farm and take pictures of three generations of Fen-tons. Henry, the old veteran, squints into the camera, looking hostile, Nelle thinks. Iris hovers at Richard’s side. The photographer clicks a picture and says, “What beautiful ladies in this family.”
Iris blushes and slips away into the house. Nelle wants to say, He didn’t mean you.
“Let me have the baby,” Fannie begs, and Nelle hands her little John. Fannie’s neck sags softly; she presses the child into its folds.
Nelle knows that she has only to wait, and these people will pass from her life, this old generation of southerners who treat her with veiled suspicion, though Fannie smiles and Henry offers a joke now and then. The thought of their deaths moves across Nelle’s mind as the photographer clicks the shutter. A dove casts a tiny shadow, flying to the top of a magnolia tree.
She leaves the baby with Richard and his parents and ventures into the garden, which is taking shape according to her directions. Bricks have been laid for a terrace in the fashionable shape of a key. A gazebo with double benches has been built. She has had arborvitae planted and a sundial erected. A fish pond has been dug and lined with brick. She kneels beside the pond. Here and there she can see the cement bottom, which is painted green. Washtubs weighted with rocks hold water lilies whose thick flat pads make islands on the surface.
Eyes: eyes meet hers. She draws in a sharp breath. A snapping turtle is braced against the side, its head above water, its narrow, judgmental gaze fixed upon her face. She blinks, and it’s gone. A fantail goldfish drifts beneath a lily pad, slowly, as if unaware of danger.
She’ll have to get the snapping turtle out, or it will eat the fish. Its yellow eyes remind her of the old Indian woman’s, knowing and ancient.
She returns to the others and tells them about the turtle.
“They’re smart as hell,” old Henry says, “and hard to catch.”
“Don’t let him bite you, Nelle,” says Fannie. “If he does, he won’t let go till he hears thunder.” Fannie keeps the baby in her lap. Fannie’s ankles are swollen above her shoes, bulging in stockings that look too tight. It’s her heart, the doctor says. Fannie kisses the baby on both cheeks. “We won’t let any snapping turtle get you,” she says, and Nelle feels a shudder run through her. She summons the wet nurse, Tillie, from the porch, and says, “Take the baby inside and feed him.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Tillie says softly, her hands dark against the baby’s white dress. Richard and his parents watch the nurse carry the baby away, and from them emanates a current of criticism, as if Nelle has cut short their fun.
“Well,” the photographer says, bustling with his equipment. “One more? Young mister and mizziz?”
Richard sweeps a long arm toward Nelle, but she shakes her head.
* * *
II
A fat woman has been pushed off a cliff, to her death. All summer Nelle hears the talk: people go out to look at the spot, the highest bluff along Raccoon Ford, and point at the rocks where the woman fell. Nelle listens with horror and fascination. People say there is blood. They talk of brains and pieces of skull spattered about, but as days pass, and rain falls, Nelle concludes the site must have been washed clean.
Finally, on an August morning when she is riding alone, she turns the horse’s head toward the Ford, five miles from Rapidan. She reaches the bluffs, ties her horse to a tree, and scans the rocks below.
She recollects the sparse facts. The woman was poor; she was taking eggs to the general store at Raccoon Ford, perhaps to trade for coffee and sugar. An angry husband pushed her; no, they were just common-law. Accounts differ. The couple was on foot, the woman with her basket over her arm. The eggs were smashed all around her.
Swift river, gray boulders, wet grass along a narrow shore, a steep clay bank. A hill rises above the road. Nelle focuses on a protrusion that the woman was said to have struck on her way down. She sees no blood or chunks of hair. She can imagine a body upon those rocks, lying still and broken. According to reports, the woman gave a single scream, a sustained shriek that would never be forgotten by people who live on the hill. Those across the water didn’t hear it. The river ate the scream. Children claim to hear a ghost yelling and to see a pale shape at night.
A kingfisher dives and surfaces with a fish in its beak, its feathers blue and glossy in the sunlight. Beside the road there’s a wild apple tree. Nelle takes an apple and puts it in her mouth: juicy and tart.
Fat, the woman was, and now her man is in jail, and the woman is reduced to a scream, an echo. Nelle picks more apples and offers them to her horse, holding her palm flat. The mare hooks her mouth over them. Nelle would not be surprised if the man’s sentence is light, if he is released before many months go by. He will say it was an accident. There were witnesses, Nelle has heard, a couple picnicking down by the water. Yet the banks are so narrow. How could there be room to spread a blanket for a picnic? Another witness was a colored man who told the sheriff he saw the man shove the woman. Now the colored man apparently cannot be found. He too has become a ghost, and the picnickers are said to have been from out of town, from some other place entirely.
Nelle suddenly feels sick. She bends over and vomits on the road, clutching her middle. When it’s over, she leans against her horse, breathing in the comfort of the mare’s smell, the soft mane. She wants to think it was the apple, but she knows it isn’t. Well, she will ride as long as she’s able, unless Richard sets up a hue and cry as he did before.
She pats her mouth with a handkerchief, and her stomach settles. She swings herself into her sidesaddle. She wonders if she ever saw the woman. Probably she would not have been a person Nelle would have noticed. She’d have worn a sunbonnet, in the old-fashioned way, and the lumpy, patched clothing of the poor. What became of the basket? Was it of wood or wire? Who is gathering the eggs from the woman’s chickens now? Are any children left behind? If no relatives take them in, they’ll go to the county poorhouse, a place so foul that passersby can smell it from the road. Nelle has smelled it and felt scorn, not pity, for the people unfortunate enough to live there; the odor is their sin and punishment.
She throws her soiled handkerchief down on the road. As she rides away from the Ford, the woman’s name comes to her. Bertha. Bertha Mize.
Nelle agrees to accompany Iris to a séance one evening at the home of a soothsayer. Richard drives Nelle and Iris, and they talk little during the trip in the lovely twilig
ht. In Nelle’s opinion, Iris is a foolish, insipid old maid; Nelle imagines the séance has something to do with an obscure disappointment in Iris’s love life. At thirty, Iris seems both silly and staid. It annoys Nelle the way Iris exaggerates her role as baby sister to Richard, who is six years older.
“Turn here,” Iris directs Richard, her voice tense with excitement. “I think that’s the place.” She points to a ramshackle house overhung with weeping willows. Richard ties up the horses and helps Iris and Nelle out. Others are arriving. Nelle recognizes several of Iris’s friends.
Richard says, “I’ll wait out here.” He takes his pipe from his pocket.
Iris looks at him, startled. “Don’t you want to see this?”
Richard shakes his head, and Nelle is glad that Iris is disappointed. Always she and Iris are in competition for Richard. Nelle won so long ago, though Iris never seems to fathom that. Nelle thinks that if Richard weren’t Iris’s sister, they would make a happier couple than she and Richard do, better matched in temperament.
A Fenton cousin named Dorothy Taylor arranged the séance. Dorothy Taylor waves to them from the warped porch. When Iris and Nelle approach, Dorothy whispers, “It’s better inside. Not so shabby.” She indicates a sullen boy beside her and says, “He’s collecting the money.”
Nelle and Iris fish coins from their purses. Iris drops her money, and the boy stands, hard-eyed, not picking it up. Iris retrieves the coin and puts it in his hand.
It’s all tricks, Nelle knows, fakery and sham. She follows Dorothy and Iris into the house. She smells old-fashioned tallow candles and a scent that takes her back to India, where incense burned in the temples and in the streets, the sweet smoke mixing with all that was rank.
A child barges toward them and runs into Nelle’s knees. Nelle grabs its shoulder and determines it’s a girl, face dirty, hair snarled around her ears. Nelle says, “Watch where you’re going.”
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