The Gamble (I)

by LaVyrle Spencer

  He shrugged aside the thought, rounded a corner of the house and bumped into something soft.

  He gasped and let out a yelp.

  But it was only Jack, prowling about the foundation of the old place, trailed by the others, who’d grown restless waiting in the carriages.

  “She’s a beauty,” Jack declared, “and sound, too, from what I can see in this light.”

  “Let’s go inside.”

  As he inserted the key into Waverley’s front door, Scott found himself relieved to have the company of seven others, especially Willy, whose small hand he clasped tightly.

  But once inside, all thoughts of ghosts fled. Even in the light of two candles, the massive rotunda welcomed him back. It smelled of disuse and dust, but nothing had changed. The Southern pine floors, the double staircase curving downward like two open arms, the giant pier mirrors reflecting the flickering candles, the hand-carved spindles lining the stairs, disappearing into the shadows overhead, the elegant brass chandelier dropping sixty feet from above—all waited to be polished and put to use again.

  “Welcome to Waverley,” he said softly, his voice echoing to the lookout four stories above his head, then dropping back down as if the mansion itself had spoken to him.

  They lit a fire in the massive downstairs dining room and ate the supper Leatrice prepared, though only Ivory and Ruby caught a glimpse of her as she delivered the hot food to the back door. Afterward, discussing sleeping arrangements, both Ivory and Ruby said they’d be more comfortable away from the big house, which they’d scarcely seen before as slave children. Though Gandy tried to convince them they were welcome to sleep there, they prevailed upon Leatrice and Moses to put them up out back.

  Gandy settled Marcus and Jack into one of the four massive second-story bedrooms, Pearl and Jube in another, leaving himself and Willy. Of the two remaining rooms, there was the one he and Delia had shared and the northwest bedroom, which had forever been known as the children’s room. After inspecting them both he left the choice to Willy.

  “That one.” Willy pointed. “It’s got a rockin’ horse.”

  Scott, relieved that he need not face sleeping in his familiar rosewood bed without Delia, led Willy into the children’s room. Together they turned back the dust covers, shucked down to their underwear, and settled down beneath the dusty coverlets.

  “Hey, Scotty?” Willy’s voice sounded smaller than ever in the big room when the candle was blown out.

  “Hm?”

  “I’m cold.”

  Gandy chuckled and rolled onto his side. “Then get over here.”

  Willy presented his back and burrowed his posterior into Scott’s belly. Coiling an arm around him, Scott couldn’t help thinking of Leatrice barking out the word “mosquito.” It felt as if Willy had twice as many ribs as other people and half as much fat.

  “This is nicer than the storeroom. Mmm...”

  That was the last sound Scott heard from Willy. In minutes the boy was asleep.

  But Scott lay in his childhood bed for hours, feeling Willy’s heartbeat beneath his palm, listening to the regularity of his breathing, drawn back to Kansas by Willy’s last remark.

  He thought about Gussie, the empty town, the emptier saloon. He closed his eyes and pictured her at her sewing machine with Willy’s empty stool beside her, limping down the street to eat alone at Paulie’s, sitting on the top step in the winter wind, wrapped in her pelisse while snow fell on its hood. But the picture that burned brightest of all was none that he imagined, but one he recalled—Gussie with blood staining her nightgown as she lay in his bed and he kissed her.

  He forced his eyes wide, as if attempting to transmute the memory into reality.

  But around him pressed only unrelieved blackness. He tried to acclimate himself to its density, but it was difficult to do so. In Kansas there had been streetlamps. On the train the moon had lit the landscape. But here, at Waverley, beneath the giant magnolias and pines and creeping wisteria vines, the blackness was absolute. If there were a ghost, it could surely choose no better place. And if it wanted to make itself known, it could certainly choose no better time. After all, he already felt haunted by Agatha. What was one more ghost?

  But none appeared. None spoke. And in the end, Gandy slept fitfully, warmed by Willy’s small body.

  * * *

  He awakened early and lay for minutes recalling the past; remembering how his father had begun each day by surveying his domain from the very spot designed for it. That spot drew him irresistibly to follow in his father’s footsteps. Quietly, he slipped from bed into his clothing and climbed up the stairs, up past the third floor, whose four closed doors led into the immense windowless attic beneath the main roof. The trunk room, they’d always called it, where Scott had often played with his brothers on rainy days and where members of the family had been isolated whenever they were ill.

  He opened a door, unable to resist a peek into the dusky interior, cluttered with furniture, trunks, and flotsam from the past. Somewhere inside, Delia’s clothing was stored, and his parents’, too, he presumed. Someday he would explore it again, but now he closed the door and continued up the final sweep of stairs until he reached the railed catwalk that circled the octagonal rotunda, overlooking the entry below and the fields outside. Looking down the chain of the massive chandelier, he remembered nights when the doors of the twin parlors had been rolled back, transforming the area below into one vast, impressive ballroom. He and Rafe and Nash would creep from their beds after all the guests had arrived and from high in the shadows of the rotunda would look down upon the colorful hoop skirts of the ladies, while men in swallowtail coats guided them through the sweeping turns of the waltz.

  He had a sudden vision of what Agatha’s garnet dress would look like from above, with tier upon tier of rear draperies shot by gaslight as she glided across the pine floor below. He saw, too, her hair, neatly coiled up the back of her head, radiating the same red highlights as the taffeta she wore. Odd that he should envision her dancing when she herself had told him it was the one thing she’d always longed to do, but could not.

  Whimsy, he chided himself. And useless at that. The problem at hand was figuring out how to make mis place productive enough to support eight... no, ten—he had to include Leatrice and Moses now, too. To bring one more would be sheer stupidity when he’d have difficulty supporting those he already had.

  Sighing, he turned to the windows that had once been kept sparkling but were now filmed with dust, their corners mitered by cobwebs. He scraped one aside and it stuck to his finger, trailing the dry husk of a dead mud dauber. Shaking it free, he forced himself to look beyond the disconcerting evidence of neglect to the faded empire that was now his heritage.

  He lifted his eyes and there, for as far as he could see, lay Waverley Plantation. But the land that had once been brought to abundance by a thousand black hands now lay lorn and gone to weed.

  He walked slowly, sadly, around the eight sides of the rotunda, as his father had done every morning after breakfast, surveying the fiefdom, which in those days had been self-sufficient. To the east the trees opened, forming a great green meadow that dropped in an impressive sweep to the Tombigbee River, visible in the distance. Cattle and sheep used to graze between the house and the river, but none was there now. The solid sheet of green grass was dotted with brush, which in time would give way to solid forest if not cleared. And in the remaining three directions, woods and fields stretched away to infinity, their chief product nothing but a tangled crop of kudzu vine.

  How could a mere ten people make it pay?

  His morose reflection was interrupted by a small voice echoing softly from below.

  “Scotty?”

  It was the sprout, standing outside the bedroom door on the opposite side of the rotunda two stories below.

  “So you’re up.” Their voices carried like bells across a valley, though they spoke scarcely above a whisper.

  “Whatcha doin’ up there?”
<
br />   “Lookin’.”

  “Lookin’ at what?”

  “Come on up. I’ll show y’.”

  He watched Willy climb the impressive staircase, his bare feet padding softly, the trapdoor of his union suit flashing between the banister spindles of the cantilevered balcony. By the time he reached the catwalk dust lined the edges of his toes.

  “Whew!” he puffed, coming up the last step. “What’s up here?”

  Scott lifted Willy and perched him on an arm. “Waverley.” He gestured, walking slowly from window to window. “All that.”

  “Wow...”

  “I don’t know what t’ do with it, though.”

  “If it’s a farm, don’t you gotta plant stuff on it?”

  It sounded so simple, Gandy chuckled. “Takes a lot of hands t’ plant all that.”

  Willy scratched his head and looked through the dirty window. “Gussie says I’m lucky t’ see it. She says there ain’t... aren’t many like it anymore, so I hafta learn t’ up... up...”

  “Appreciate?”

  “Yeah—appreciate it. She says she wants t’ see it someday ‘cause she never saw no plantation before. She called it a... a way of life. What’s that mean, Scotty?”

  But Scott wasn’t listening to the question, rather to what came before. Almost to himself he murmured, “She wasn’t talkin’ about the land, she was talkin’ about the house.”

  “The house?” Willy craned his neck to look at the peak of the cupola above them.

  “The house...” Scott threw a glance at the windows circling him, then at the ballroom floor below, the doors leading off the grandest staircase this side of the Mason-Dixon line.

  “That’s it!” he exploded.

  “Where we goin’?” Willy bounced on Scott’s arm as his black boots clattered down the stairs. “Hey, what’re you smiling about?”

  “The house. That’s the answer, and it was so obvious, I overlooked it. Gussie told me the same thing she told you, last summer one night when I told her about Waverley. But I was too busy tryin’ t’ dream up a way t’ raise cotton t’ think about usin’ the house t’ make money.”

  “You mean you’re gonna sell it, Scotty?” Willy asked, disappointed.

  “Sell it?” As they reached the trunk-room level, where all those hoop skirts and swallowtail coats waited, Scott planted a loud, smacking kiss on Willy’s cheek, but he was too excited to investigate now. “Never, sprout. We’re gonna make it live again, and those Yankees who burned down damned near all the places like Waverley will pay a king’s ransom t’ see and experience one of ‘em now. What you see around you, Willy, my boy, is nothin’ short of a national treasure!”

  They reached the sleeping level and, without breaking stride, Scott banged on doors, bellowing, “Wake up! Daylight in the swamp, everybody! Jack! Marcus! Jube! Pearl! Get up! We have t’ get this place back in shape!”

  His voice echoed through the rotunda, along with his footsteps, as he ran down the last curving section of stairs to the main entry. Sleepy heads began poking out from doors overhead as Scott, still with Willy on his arm, slammed out the back door.

  “You’re gonna meet Leatrice,” Scott told Willy as they crossed the yard. “She believes in spooks, but other than that, she’s all right. Y’all hear any spooks in the house last night?”

  “Spooks?” Willy’s eyes widened, but he grinned.

  “Weren’t any spooks, were there?”

  “I didn’t hear none.”

  “Any. Then y’all tell Leatrice so, understand?”

  “But why?”

  “’Cause we need her to organize those slowpokes back there and make the dust fly. Nobody I know can do that better than Leatrice. Why, if we’d’ve had her commandin’ the Confederate troops, the war would’ve turned out different!”

  “But, Scotty, I’m still wearin’ my underwear!”

  “No matter. She’s seen li’l boys in less.”

  Willy took to Leatrice like a tick to a warm hide. From the moment she ordered, “Come heah, chile, let Leatrice have a look at you,” the bond was sealed. It made sense: she needed someone to fuss over, and he needed fussing. And being introduced to him while he wore only a scratchy woolen union suit endeared the sprout to her forever. The match seemed made in heaven.

  But when it came to Scott’s decree, she was far less enthusiastic.

  “Ain’t settin’ foot in no house with no hants.”

  “Tell her, Willy.”

  Willy told her, but still she pursed her lips and looked mean. “Nuh-uh! Not Leatrice.”

  “But who’s goin’ t’ get them movin’? The whole bunch is used t’ sleepin’ till noon. I need you, sweetheart.”

  At the word, her mouth loosened slightly. “Always was a sweet talkuh,” she grumbled.

  He went on while he saw her weakening. “And imagine the place full of people again, and music in the ballroom and every bedroom filled, and the old cookhouse fire stoked up and the smell o’ sweet-potato pies comin’ from the ovens.”

  She glared at him from the corner of her eye. “Who gonna cook?”

  That took him aback. “Well, I... I don’t know. But we’ll think of somethin’ when the time comes. First, though, we’ve got t’ get the place waxed and polished again, and the grounds cleared and the outbuildin’s cleaned up. What do you say, sweetheart? Will you help me?”

  “Gotta think a spell,” was all she would concede.

  Leatrice thought for exactly four and a half hours. By that time Gandy’s troops had arisen, eaten breakfast, and were desultorily following his inept orders. But the work they were producing, and the speed with which they produced it, was so disgraceful that when Leatrice glimpsed the clean-up crew carrying household items out into the yard for airing, she mumbled an imprecation about sweet talkers and threw up her hands.

  Minutes later she appeared at the back door wearing an asafetida bag around her neck.

  “Can’t git dust outta rugs layin’ ‘em on d’ ground,” she announced imperiously, standing just inside the door with both hands on her hips. “Gotta git ‘em in d’ air an’ whack ‘em! Any fool knows ya don’t start widda bottom layuh an’ wuhk up. Time ya gits t’ de top, d’ bottom jiss as dirty as when ya commence.”

  Gandy came and gave her a grateful hug, but immediately backed off.

  “Lord, woman, what’ve you got in that sack?” Gandy asked, almost gagging. “Smells like cat piss.”

  “None o’ yer lip, boy. It’s asafetida, keep de hants off’n Leatrice. You want I teach dose sorry white folk how t’ clean, you leave off sass ‘bout how I smell.”

  Gandy grinned and gave a teasing salute. “Yes, ma’am.”

  And from that moment on, Waverley’s speedy, efficient revival was guaranteed.

  CHAPTER

  18

  It was an immense undertaking, turning Waverley into a hotel retreat where Northerners would get the feel of a working plantation. But all the essential elements were there. They only needed dusting off and oiling and waxing and clearing and hoeing and mending.

  Gandy’s troop started with the rotunda and worked downward, as Leatrice dictated. And dictate she did, in a voice that carried like thunder and made the most dedicated sluggard straighten his spine and get his limbs a-flapping. Still, they could never have handled the massive job without the phenomenon that began the second morning. One by one familiar faces appeared at Waverley’s back door—black, all of them, but with expressions telling how eager they were to lend a hand and see Waverley flourish again.

  First came Zach, whose father had been a stable hand and had taught Scott all he knew. Zach set to work checking and mending harness, cleaning the old carriages and the stable itself. Then came Beau and his wife, Clarice, who smiled shyly when they greeted LeMaster Gandy, and obeyed without question when Leatrice told them they could begin clearing a spot to make the old vegetable garden bigger. A pair of brothers named Andrew and Abraham headed up a crew that cleared the long lane, and when it was pas
sable, they went on to begin putting the yard and grand front lawn in shape. They trimmed the boxwoods and pruned the camellias and shaped the azalea bushes that had grown wild and rangy throughout the formal gardens. There followed general repairs on all the outbuildings, and thorough cleaning of their insides, where wild animals had nested, metal had rusted, and wood had warped. A black woman named Bertrissa came along and was put to work filling the black iron pot in the yard and beginning the massive job of washing dust covers and bedding. Her man, Caleb, became part of the crew that painted the mansion. Gandy himself headed it up, ordering four new ladders built, then scaling one to do the highest spot—the rotunda—himself. As the men swarmed over the outside of Waverley, the women swarmed inside.

  Every drapery was aired and dusted, every inch of decorative brass cornice was polished. Rugs were hung and beaten, some scrubbed by hand. Interior woodwork was painted, floors waxed, windows polished, spindles washed and waxed, as were the decorative lyre inserts on the front sidelights. Every piece of furniture was either aired and beaten or scrubbed and polished. Every dish in the built-in china cabinet was removed from its shelf, washed, and replaced on a freshly lined surface. The closets were whitewashed, the chimneys swept, and the andirons polished until their brass knobs gleamed.

  Scott himself checked out the old gasworks and got its burners working again. Ivory took a contingent—including Willy—off into the woods to search out pine lighter, and the evening they lit the jets in the great, gleaming chandelier for the first time they had a small celebration. Marcus played the banjo and Willy the harmonica. The girls danced around the ballroom floor, while the others sat on the stairs watching and teased them about soon having to give up the rowdy cancan in favor of the sedate mazurka, which would be more fitting for entertaining Northerners who would be paying a great deal of money to pretend they were elite Southern planters for a week or two.