The Gamble (I)

by LaVyrle Spencer

  Within her nightgown and wrapper her skin suddenly felt clammy. Her heart thrust so hard within her breast that she heard it in her ears.

  “Sit down, Scott. It’s very difficult for me to talk to you when you’re stomping back and forth as if you wish there were still public dunking stools for recalcitrant women.”

  He drew up short, glared at her for a moment, then plunked himself down on the top step, presenting his back.

  “There are times, Scott Gandy, when you act the age of Willy.” He snorted but said nothing. “May I come over there and sit, or will you bite my head off?”

  “Come!” he snapped belligerently.

  “Are you sure?”

  He glared over his shoulder. “I said come,” he repeated with strained patience. “What else do you want—an engraved invitation like the governor sends?”

  She rose from her chair, tightened her belt, and fidgeted with her neckline. He sat hunkered on the step, his pique so evident she was reluctant to approach him. Her bare feet shuffled across the raw boards of the landing and she perched on the top step, as far away from him as she could get. Looking askance, she noted his resistant pose: facing the opposite direction, knees wide, shoulders curled, the cheroot clamped in his teeth.

  She drew a shaky breath, then began.

  “When I was a child we lived in Colorado. Never in one house for long because my father had gold fever. He’d stake a claim and work it until it proved worthless. Then we’d pull up roots and move to the next town, the next house, the next worthless claim. He was always so sure that he’d strike it rich. When a claim was new, he was happy—and sober. But as it continued showing no color, he’d begin drinking. Lightly at first, then more heavily as his disappointment grew. When he was sober, he wasn’t really a bad man, only filled with self-delusions. But when he was drunk...” She shivered and hugged herself.

  Gandy’s shoulders uncurled and he half turned, captivated by her mellifluous voice and her straightforward gaze. “He was one of four boys whose father had died, leaving them equal shares in a farm in Missouri. My father chose to sell out his shares to his brothers and make his way west instead of spending his entire life being a ‘redneck dirt grubber’—as he put it.” She laughed softly, sadly. “He only gave up one kind of grubbing for another. But he thought it preferable grubbing for gold instead of for rutabagas. That, he said, was woman’s work, and he’d leave it to my mother.

  “She was a hard worker, my mother. Wherever we moved she tried to make it a home, and at first the houses weren’t so bad—we still had some of the money from the division of the farm to live on. But when it was gone the houses got older... colder... just as he did. And he got meaner.”

  Scott was studying her directly as she absently overlapped the panels of her wrapper upon her knees and smoothed them repeatedly. She lifted her face and stared at the invisible horizon.

  “He began taking out his failures on my mother.” She linked her hands and fitted them tightly around her knees. “When I was nine we moved to Sedalia to a pitiful little house with a drafty bedroom upstairs for them, and none for me. I slept in the kitchen on a cot.” A winsome smile tipped up her lips. “At the foot of my bed, Mother had a rocking chair, right in front of a window, with an ivy hanging above it...” Her words trailed off and she turned her head away from him. She touched a wooden bar on the railing, picked at it absently with her fingernail. “I used to love that ivy.”

  He sensed there was more she wanted to say about her mother, but at present she kept the focus of her story on her father.

  “He came home one night, drank, angry, disappointed. It seemed he’d had the choice between two towns when we’d moved the previous time, and—typical of my father—he’d picked the wrong one. His friend Dennis, who’d staked a claim near Oro City, had struck gold, while my father’s mine proved worthless again.

  “He was so drunk that night. Cursing, throwing things. Mother was angry, too, accusing him of drinking up what little money we had when the house wasn’t fit for mice and bats, and hadn’t even a bedroom for me. She threatened to leave him, as she always did, only this time she headed upstairs to begin packing. I remember lying on my cot, listening to them fighting up there. The thumps on the floor, his cursing. I heard a muffled scream and ran upstairs with the childish wish to protect Mother. I know it was silly of me, but when you’re that age you don’t reason, you only react. They were at the top of the stairs, fighting. I don’t remember much about those exact moments, except that I grabbed my father’s arm, thinking to stop him from striking her, and when he shook me off I went backward down the stairs.”

  Gandy’s heart began pounding as if he himself were tumbling down with her. Oh, God, not that way, he thought. Not by the hand of her own father. His cheroot suddenly tasted foul and he cast it aside. He wanted to tell her to hush, to halt the memories that must be excruciating for her to dredge up. But she went on in the same calm voice.

  “Something...”—she clutched her knees and swallowed—“... something happened to my hip. After that I had a...”

  She could bring herself to say everything but the most painful word of all. Staring at her profile, so outwardly composed, Scott felt afresh the self-recrimination of the day he’d pushed her down in the mud. And contempt for the man who’d crippled her. And a choking sense of inadequacy because he could do nothing to reverse it. But he could say the word for her.

  “Your limp?” he asked in a quiet, understanding tone.

  She nodded, unable to look him in the eye. “My limp.” She gazed off into the distance. “But the irony of it is that I did what I set out to do. I stopped their fighting—forever. She left him after that and we ended up here, where she opened the millinery shop. I never saw him again, but news came back to us when he died. I was in my late teens then. I remember the day Mother told me he was dead—he’d fallen off a mule and rolled down a mountainside. They hadn’t found his body till some weeks later.”

  Scott’s mind recaptured flashes of his own youth juxtaposed against hers. Secure, loved, knowing all the time he was both. He’d spent little time considering what it was like to grow up in any other kind of environment, until he moved to Proffitt and came up against Willy. And now Agatha.

  “I told my mother I didn’t care at all that he was dead.” Her voice became lighthearted, but she rocked unconsciously, giving away the deeper emotions she concealed. “Not at all.” He saw her struggling with tears for the first time since she had begun to relate her story. “Just like Willy the night his father died. He shouted it to me again and again, and ended up punching the mattress and sobbing in my arms.”

  “Oh, Gussie... Gussie... come here.” He slid across the step and took her into his arms, stopping her pitiful rocking. She let herself be taken against him while she began to cry. But her weeping was silent and motionless. She acquiesced to his embrace but took no part in it. Her very stillness tore at his heart like a rusty blade. “Gussie, I’m sorry,” he whispered brokenly.

  “I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. I never wanted that.”

  He pulled her face into the curve of his neck and felt her tears run down his bare collarbone onto his chest. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Yes, you did. That’s why I never told you before. I’ve never told anyone before. Not even the women in the W.C.T.U. But I couldn’t let you go on getting angry at me for what I must do. Please, Scott, don’t be angry with me anymore.”

  She was small and narrow-shouldered, and fit perfectly beneath his chin. He stroked her hair, drawing it back from her face. There had been times lately when he’d wondered what it would feel like in his fingers. He scarcely noticed now, in light of his concern for her. “I’m not really angry at you. Maybe I’m angry at myself because half o’ me agrees with you. Every time I took at Willy I know you’re right. And I have t’ force myself t’ forget that there are thousands of other Willys in the world with nobody to help them out of a situation they don’t deserve.” />
  She closed here eyes and rested against him, absorbing the comfort he offered. His bare skin had grown sleek with her tears. He was hard and warm and smelled of the cheroots he smoked. And when his hand cradled her head and tucked her firmly against him, she went gratefully, her cheek pressed upon his chest with its coarse mat of hair.

  He represented security, strength, and protection, and she’d had too little of all three in her life. She slipped her arms around his warm sides, spread her hands upon his naked back, and held fast.

  And there in his arms, she began healing.

  His fingers moved idly in her hair. His sure, steady heartbeat thrummed against her temple. The night shielded them. She wanted to stay that way forever.

  But in time propriety interfered. She became aware that he was bare-chested and she wore only her nightclothes. She backed away to look up at him.

  “Then you understand why I must go to Topeka?”

  “Yes.”

  Meeting his direct gaze after crying in his arms became disconcerting. She groped for her lost sense of humor and told him, “I hate it when we fight.”

  She was rewarded with a small, sympathetic grin. “So do I.”

  She chuckled self-consciously and swiped her lower eyelids with the backs of her hands. “And I’ve never in my life dribbled all over a man’s chest. I certainly don’t intend to make a habit of it.”

  “Was I complainin’?”

  “No, but it’s not decent. You in practically nothing, and me in my night things. I’ve left you in a mess.” She caught the edge of one sleeve, stretched it taut, and began drying his chest with it.

  He caught her wrist. “Gussie, stop fussin’ and listen.”

  His eyes were only dark shadows as she looked up into them. Her pulse suddenly drummed in her throat. She sensed that he’d become as discomposed as she by their brief intimacy, and the realization spurred her sexual awareness of him. He caught both her hands and held them loosely, dropping his gaze, then lifting it in a prolonged study of her shadowed features.

  “Thank you for tellin’ me. It means a lot t’ me t’ know I was the first one you trusted.” Her chin dropped. She’d told him all that without blushing. Now, when there was nothing to be ashamed of, she felt herself get hot all over. He rubbed her knuckles with both thumbs. “And what I said before is true. When I say I’m sorry, I don’t mean I go around feelin’ sorry for you because you limp. You don’t feel sorry for yourself, so others don’t either. That’s one of the things I admire about you. Long ago I stopped thinkin’ of you as anything except Agatha, my spunky neighbor who’s too much of a thorn in my side to be considered a cripple.”

  She couldn’t help smiling sheepishly, still looking down at their joined hands.

  “I don’t mean to be a thorn in anybody’s side, least of all yours.” She withdrew her hands carefully before asking, “So, what do you intend to do with me?”

  He leaned against the far rail and studied her from beneath lowered brows for some time before asking, “What are the chances this law’ll pass?”

  She was relieved that once again, though still members of opposing factions, they could discuss the issue without rancor.

  “The latest issue of The Temperance Banner gives it about a forty percent chance,” she answered honestly. “But that margin is narrowing all the time.” He drew in a deep breath and ran a hand through his hair, then sat gazing distractedly at a point somewhere beyond the rooftop of the necessary. “What would you do if it passed?”

  “Do?” He rested both elbows on his knees and swung his face toward her. “I’d pack up and leave Kansas. What else could I do?”

  The thought sent a bolt of dread through her. “Where would you go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  A coyote howled. The lonely sound seemed a proper accompaniment to their morose speculations.

  “What about Waverley?”

  “Waverley?” He bristled. “What do you know about Waverley?”

  “Please, Scott, don’t get belligerent again. I’m your friend. Can’t you talk to me about it?”

  She saw him struggle with some inner turmoil before finally admitting, “I don’t know where t’ begin.”

  “Let me help you,” she suggested softly. “You lived there before the war with a wife and a daughter.”

  He scowled sharply at Agatha and she sensed his surprise that she knew this much. He remained silent for so long that she thought he would refuse to talk about it. After some time he shifted on the hard step, and pressed his thumb knuckles against his chin. She waited, listening to the coyotes, supposing that whatever he held inside was as difficult for him to reveal as her own story had been. At last he let out a deep sigh, dropped his hands between his knees, and said, “My wife’s name was Delia. She was...” He paused, stared at the night sky, then finished emotionally, “all I ever wanted.”

  Agatha simply waited. In time he went on.

  “Her daddy was a cotton buyer who came to our plantation periodically and often brought Delia and her mama along. So I’d known her nearly all my life. They sometimes stayed the night, and we had the run o’ the place, Delia and I. And how we ran. We explored the river, and the gin, and the hen coops, played with the black children and picked wild scuppernongs, and dipped our hands in the melted wax in the dairy on cheese day and stole molasses cakes from the kitchen out back and ran wild as deer.” His recollections had brought a soft grin to his face. “Her daddy stopped all that, though, ‘long about the time she started tuckin’ up her pigtails and my voice started changin’. Seemed like from that time on I knew I wanted t’ marry Delia. Our mamas and daddies knew, too, and favored the idea.

  “We were married in Waverley—she’d always loved it—in what my mama called the ‘weddin’ alcove.’ Mama insisted on havin’ it put in when the parlor was built—it was an arched alcove outlined with decorative plaster leaves where Mama declared all her children would be baptized and married before she herself was laid out there in her casket.”

  He stopped and Agatha inquired, “How many of her children were baptized there?”

  “Three of us. All boys. But two of us never made it t’ the alcove in our caskets.”

  “You had two brothers?”

  “Rafael and Nash. They both died in the same battle durin’ the war. They’re buried near Vicksburg instead of at Waverley beside the others.” He mulled about it for a moment, then seemed to pull himself to a happier train of thought.

  “So after we were married Delia and I lived at Waverley. Ah, it was somethin’ then. I wish you could’ve seen it.” He leaned back and gazed at the stars.

  “I’ve seen the painting in your sitting room. It’s beautiful.”

  “It was more than beautiful. It was...”—he paused, searching for words—“... majestic.” He sat forward eagerly. “In its prime, Waverley supported twelve hundred people and had every facility t’ make it self-sufficient. We had an ice house, a cotton gin, a tannery, a sawmill, a gristmill, a brick kiln, orchards, vineyards, stables, gardens, kennels, warehouses, a boathouse, and even a ferry.”

  “All that?” Agatha was awed.

  “All that. And the house... everybody called it the mansion...” Again she saw a ghost of a smile on his lips. “The paintin’ doesn’t do it justice. It always reminded me of a proud eagle spreadin’ its wings over its young ones with its head straight up and watchful.”

  “Tell me,” she encouraged. “Tell me everything.”

  “Well, you saw the picture.”

  “Not very closely.”

  “Next time you’re in my apartment, take a closer look. Waverley’s unique. There’s not another house like it in all the South. The eagle’s wings, those are the actual wings o’ the house, the livin’ quarters stretchin’ out on either side o’ the center rotunda—or, as Mama liked t’ call it, the cupola. And the eagle’s head, that’s the rotunda itself—a massive entry shaped like an octagon with twin curved stairwells that climb sixty-five feet to
an observatory with windows on all eight sides. I can still see my daddy strollin’ the catwalk around those windows, every mornin’, surveyin’ his holdin’s. You know, Gussie, the cotton fields stretched as far as the eye could see in all directions. We had three thousand acres in cotton, food, and grain then. Fifteen acres of formal gardens, too.”

  In her imagination she could see Waverley, just as he described, proud and pillared and reigning above the lush green countryside.

  “It was always cool in the house,” Scott continued. “Every mornin’ durin’ the hot weather, Leatrice—she was the bossy old despot who ran the place—would climb those stairs and open all those windows, and the draft like t’ tug the hair out o’ your skull. And if that wasn’t cool enough, off the end o’ the drive there was a swimmin’ pool made of brick and marble, with a roof t’ keep the sun off the ladies.”

  “The one you told Willy about the first night we met him.”

  “The only one in all of northern Miz’sippi. Delia loved it. She and I used t’ go down there and cool off at night sometimes when—” He suddenly halted and cleared his throat, then sat up straighter.

  “I’ve never been swimming. What’s it like?”

  “Never been swimmin’!”

  She shook her head. “Or dancing or riding a horse.”

  “Would you like to?”

  She looked away, embarrassed. But she couldn’t lie. “Most of all I’d like to dance. Just once.” She faced him again, her voice brighter, and enthusiastic. “But swimming sounds grand, too.”

  “I’ll have t’ take you sometime. You’ll love it. It’s the freest feelin’ in the world.”

  “I’d like that,” she said softly. Then more loudly, she added, “But I interrupted you—you were telling me about Waverley.”

  “Waverley—oh, yes.” He went on eagerly. “In the winter, when the fireplaces were lit, there was no place warmer. And we had gaslights, too, fueled by our own gasworks and piped into the house.”

  “Your own gasworks?”

  “It burned pine lighter—that’s what made the resin gas.”