The Handsome Road

by Gwen Bristow

  Corrie May patiently said “Yes ma’am,” to the lecture, but she ran all the way home with the dollar in her hand so she could give it to Fred.

  “If you’ll go to school tomorrow like a good boy,” she told him, “you can have this. Go by the store tomorrow after school and for a dollar you ought to get cloth enough for two shirts, one to be in the wash while you’re wearing the other one.”

  Fred’s mouth popped open and his eyes widened with delight. He had never held a whole dollar in his hand before. Oh sure, he’d wear the flour-sack shirt another day. Then he’d have some good ones. A blue shirt and a white shirt, maybe, both new at once.

  Corrie May scraped out the last hominy grits for his supper. It was all the food she had in the house. Unless Mrs. Price paid her the rest of what was owing her she didn’t know what they’d eat the rest of the week, but if Fred had good shirts he oughtn’t to mind being a little bit empty for a few days. The next morning she made him coffee for breakfast, which was all she had, but she felt so pleased when he scampered off that though she was hungry herself the day’s work seemed hardly like work at all.

  When he came in from school she ran out to meet him. But as he caught sight of her he broke out crying again like a baby.

  “What on earth is ailing you now?” she demanded.

  Fred came in and pitched his primer and slate on the bed and sat down on the floor sobbing. It took her a long time to get any sense out of him. He just bawled.

  “Why don’t you act bright?” she exclaimed at length. “A boy going on nine years old.”

  Finally he told her. Some of the big boys always stayed around shooting craps after school. He never had, because he’d never before been to school with a copper cent in his pocket. But today he’d been so proud to have a whole dollar on him he had shown it to all the boys. They invited him to join the crap game after school was out. And he had joined, and they had won every bit of his money.

  Corrie May was so sorry for him she nearly burst out crying herself. Then she remembered she mustn’t do any such thing, because he was just a young one and she was a grown-up woman. He had to have some sense put into him right now and there was “nobody but her to do it. So by the time he had quit blubbering enough to notice she shook him by the arm, though it nearly killed her to do it.

  “You’s the no-countest, triflingest boy I ever saw in my life,” she told him. “I declare, I’m ashamed you’s my son. Shooting craps. Well, I’m glad you lost your money. Serve you right. And if I hear one more whine out of you I’m gonta spank you. Wearing flour-sacks is all you got a right to wear. Shut up.”

  Fred shut up.

  The next morning she took him by the hand and dragged him to the schoolhouse. “You go in there,” she said to him at the door, “and learn all they got to teach you. Lord knows you need something in your head.”

  But that afternoon she went back to Mrs. Price and told her they didn’t have a scrap of eating in the house, and finally she got the other dollar that was coming to her. She went by and bought a loaf of bread and some beans, and then some calico for a shirt. Hurrying home, she ironed a pile of clothes belonging to another lady named Mrs. Harris, and took them around to her, though they weren’t due until Saturday. Mrs. Harris told her she couldn’t give her the money for them until the end of the week, but Corrie May remarked that it was time to weed the flower-garden for spring, and didn’t Mrs. Harris want a good strong boy for the weeding? Mrs. Harris said she believed she did. So Corrie May said well, her little boy was sitting around most of the time doing nothing and for two bits he’d weed the garden fine. She arranged with Mrs. Harris to have him come around Saturday afternoon.

  When she saw Fred coming down the street she was still sewing on his new shirt, but she hid it under the mattress. He came in, still resentful, for the boys had continued to make fun of the lettering on his back. She told him he was a smart lad to go to school anyway and not to mind them, and the trouble was those boys didn’t have any manners anyhow, and here was a good supper, beans and fresh bread. Then she told him about the weeds in Mrs. Harris’ garden, and how he could earn two bits by pulling them up. “For a quarter-dollar,” she reminded him, “you could get calico enough for a shirt, I expect.”

  “You reckon?” exclaimed Fred, beginning to beam.

  “I ain’t so sure you deserve a job of work,” she returned casually. “You shooting craps and all.”

  “I ain’t gonta shoot no more craps,” he cried. “Honest, ma.”

  “Arright,” said Corrie May. “Now come eat your supper.”

  But when he earned the quarter for one shirt, and she got the other from under the mattress and showed him he had two, Fred was the proudest white boy on the river. “Now maybe you’ve learned some sense,” Corrie May said to him.

  She made him keep on at school a long time. He not only learned to read and write, but to do sums, and he told her he could do sums better than any of the other boys. He was the only boy in the class who liked arithmetic, but he liked it so much he sat up in the evenings doing the sums out of the back of the book. Corrie May was uncertain just what good arithmetic did even if you were smart at it, but she figured it must be useful if the teachers said so. After awhile Fred began coming home with his head full of the most remarkable knowledge. He told her people hadn’t always known about America, but a man named Columbus had come from across the ocean and discovered it. Corrie May hadn’t known the country had needed to be discovered.

  “He just—found it,” Fred informed her.

  She looked around. “Well, I must say I don’t see how he could have missed it.”

  Later he told her about a man named George Washington who had made the country free.

  “Free of what?” asked Corrie May.

  “The British,” said Fred.

  “Who’s them?”

  “People over the ocean.”

  She sighed. “Fred honey, I reckon them things is too big for my head. They didn’t even know the United States was here, and then it had to get free of them after they found it.”

  Fred laughed at her, and she blushed.

  But by the time he was twelve years old Fred was protesting in earnest about school. He didn’t want to stay there all day while she worked. She told him to hold his tongue. She didn’t mind working. Besides, he carried the bundles for her now on Saturdays, and helped her all summer.

  “That ain’t sho ’nough work,” Fred insisted. “I’m big enough to make money.”

  “You got to get some learning in your head,” said Corrie May.

  “I got plenty learning. I can read good as anybody, and I can write and do number work. I ain’t very good on spelling but I’m faster on sums that any of them. And ma, they make us do such damfool things—”

  “You quit saying such words. You hang around the wharfs too much as it is.”

  “Well, some things is damfool!” Fred exclaimed hotly. “They make us learn verses. I’m sorry that I spelt the word I hate to go above you because the brown eyes lower fell because you see I love you.” He said it fast as though it were all one long word. “Ma—” he got up and came toward her—“I wouldn’t mind school if they taught you something reasonable all the time but if you think I’m gonta sit around and bang stuff like that in my head you got another think coming.”

  “Ah, go on,” said Corrie May.

  Fred looked away from her and smiled a funny determined smile. For the first time she noticed that he looked like Gilday. Fred was a chunky little boy with a roundish face, but with that little mirthless smile on his mouth it was as though she were seeing Gilday again and hearing him tell her, “I got to get places, Corrie May.” She knew if Fred had got his mind made up now there would be no stopping him.

  He spoke, still looking away from her. “I’m tired watching you scrub clothes all the time. I’m going down on the wharfs and get me a job
.”

  His hands were thrust into his pants pockets, and she saw the pockets bulge as the hands doubled into fists. His whole attitude was so familiar that though she had an unreasoning reverence for school she could not answer him.

  The next day Fred went down and started running errands and doing odd jobs on the wharfs.

  Chapter Fourteen

  1

  In the Spring after little Denis was eight years old Ann ordered the family portraits brought down from the attic and rehung in their places. She took Denis by the hand and showed him the picture of his father.

  “He was a great man, Denis,” she told him. “One of the most gallant gentlemen who ever lived. You’re going to be like him when you grow up.”

  Denis nodded gravely. Already he had heard so much about his father that in his mind the older Denis had become an inspiring legend. For a moment he looked up at the portrait as he might have looked up at a shrine that symbolized the ideals of his race. At length his eyes shifted to the other portrait hanging beside it. “Who’s that lady in the big blue dress?” he asked.

  Ann turned abruptly. “Why darling, that’s a picture of me.”

  Denis’ eyes went to her, wide. “You?” he asked in a voice too childish to have acquired any polite cover for astonishment.

  She dropped his hand. “Yes, dear, in sixty-one I looked like that.”

  Without saying anything else she left him and went into the back study where she kept her confused plantation records. She sat down at Denis’ old desk. Wonderingly, as if she were becoming acquainted with something hitherto strange to her, she put her hands up to her face, feeling the crease that had replaced her dimple and the little rolls of skin that were relaxing under her eyes. Sixty-one, and this was only sixty-nine. In August she would be thirty years old.

  That afternoon she made Napoleon drive her to Silverwood. She saw Jerry alone and gave him the key to the Ardeith liquor-closet. “Keep it,” she said to him. “Don’t give it back to me. No matter what I say, don’t give it back to me. Not even if I tell you I only want some sherry to season a pudding, not if I say I’ve had a heart attack and need brandy—” she laughed harshly. “Oh, I can already think of good excuses for getting it back, can’t I?”

  Jerry answered simply, “I understand. I won’t let you have it.”

  That was all he said. She looked up at his grave ugly face, wondering if he had ever wanted to drink. How little, after all, one knew about the people one knew best. Jerry was wise; he did not proceed to read her a lecture or tell her he approved of her resolution. But suddenly he bent and kissed her forehead. It was the first time she could remember his ever having kissed her.

  As she drove back to Ardeith it was with a sense of relief and victory, though she knew there would be nights ahead of her when she would regret having given that key to Jerry more than anything else she had ever done in her life. She looked out at the wasted fields, thinking how like them she was. Then it occurred to her that but for the wreckage she might never have discovered even such reserves of strength as she possessed.

  She thought of Denis, and wondered what it would have done to him to have had to face the ruins. Remembering Jerry’s bitter, scurvy-ridden face she was glad she did not have to know. Denis would always be young; he was forever the soldier in the portrait, valiant and full of glory. She herself, worn out with defeat, did not feel capable of giving her son very much, but with such a changeless tradition as his before her, it should not be hard to make young Denis like his father.

  As soon as she could afford to pay for it, Ann ordered a granite monument set up in the Larne plot in the churchyard along with the stones placed there in honor of Denis’ ancestors. Cut into the monument were Denis’ name and the date of his birth, and the line, “Slain during the siege of Vicksburg, 1863, and buried on the field of battle.” On Sundays when they came to church they brought fresh flowers in the carriage and young Denis arranged them at the foot of the granite pillar. Their friends said it was touching to see Denis’ devotion to a father he could not even remember. He was such a beautiful boy, and so jolly and clever. He must be a great comfort to his widowed mother. Ann said, “Yes indeed, already he almost takes his father’s place,” and she watched him proudly. Cynthia admired Denis too, though she took more interest in his skill at riding almost anything on four legs than in the pretty reverences Ann had taught him.

  Two days a week Denis did his lessons with his cousins at Silverwood, under a tutor Jerry and Ann had engaged jointly, and the rest of the time he studied at home under Ann’s supervision. She loved teaching him and would have liked doing it always except that she wanted him to have such subjects as fencing and Latin, which her own education had not included. Denis liked his lessons with her. Even after he was a big boy he would bring her his storybooks, saying, “Read to me, mother,” and would sit raptly, his arm across her knees, enjoying the sound of her voice.

  Cynthia watched them impatiently. “He reads as well as you do,” she exclaimed to Ann once or twice. “Why don’t you let him do it?”

  Ann resented her saying that. She could not help feeling that since Denis was all she had left she was justified in finding such joy in him. Except in her moment of confession just before Frances died she had never owned to a soul that her marriage had been a disappointment. But she could not deny it to herself; fair and shining it had been, but it had not given her the comradeship she needed, perhaps because she had hardly felt the need for that until her marriage was so near its end. But now she knew what she wanted, and she had another Denis to give it to her.

  As for Cynthia, she was a great help in practical matters —such as voluntarily taking charge of the household so Ann could give all her energy to reclaiming the plantation. But when she spoke of Denis it was obvious that she could never have the same feeling about him that Ann had.

  By the time Denis was old enough to be aware of economics, life at Ardeith was easier. Politically there was still confusion and taxes were still high, but no amount of chicanery could alter the world’s need of the cotton, sugar and rice that grew so richly on the river acres. Ann told Denis of the struggle she had had to keep the plantation for him. She wanted him to appreciate it. “I thought I knew all about cotton and cane,” she said to him. “But I found all I knew was how the fields looked at different seasons of the year.”

  “Then how did you find out?” he asked.

  “Oh, you can learn almost anything if you have to. At first, of course, I could have been the most expert planter on earth without its doing any good. They taxed us till we were in rags. I used to cut up sheets to make dresses for you.”

  “It must have been a dreadful time,” Denis said in wonder.

  “Yes, darling, it was. But I did hold the plantation for you, Denis, and now you’ll have it as long as you live. But for you I shouldn’t have cared.”

  Denis regarded her with admiration that had in it a touch of awe.

  2

  As Denis grew up it seemed to him that the first thing he had learned about the world was the value of gentle behavior. Remembering, he thought the first important occasion of his life had been when he and his mother stood looking up at the portrait of his father, and she said, “One of the most gallant gentlemen who ever lived.”

  He thought he might have liked his father, who looked very gay and handsome in his gray uniform. Though he had been painted just before he went off to war, he looked as if he might have stood for his portrait just before a party. But his father had been the essence of nobility, kind to servants, courteous to ladies, irreproachable among his friends. When Denis was puzzled about what to do in any set of circumstances he needed only to ask himself, “What would my father have done?” His mother told him that, and she should certainly know.

  His mother seemed to know virtually everything. She was a great lady, lovely in a sad way. Everybody called her a remarkable woman. It wa
s splendid, people said, the way she was holding on to the plantation through these years, getting the taxes paid and making the land produce with a minimum of laborers.

  Denis could remember his mother subtly changing with the years. His earliest recollections showed him a woman whom he never thought of as young, teaching him beautiful language and manners so insistently that he was past childhood before he realized that all boys were not taught these subjects. Sometimes she was quietly tender with him, and sometimes she would catch him to her and hold him convulsively as though afraid somebody was going to try to steal him away.

  He frequently heard other women say his mother was the best-dressed woman in the neighborhood, and when he was a boy this used to surprise him, for nobody could ever tell exactly what she had on. She wore dark materials made with exquisite simplicity, and though they gave her an impressive beauty, Denis—with a guilty feeling—recalled her in the years when her faded old dresses had been somehow so soft, inviting for a child to rest his head against. He slowly began to understand that the soft old clothes had been remnants of her fluffy girlhood, and he missed the way she had seemed when she wore them. The heavy fabrics she wore later were like a shell around her. She looked like a great lady, assured and unapproachable.

  In all she did she was so entirely right that nobody ever challenged her—except now and then his Aunt Cynthia, who was habitually irreverent. But even when Cynthia ventured on irony Denis’ mother could quiet her with a word or two. Aunt Cynthia was often incomprehensible but always amusing. One day shortly after Denis’ twelfth birthday she happened to meet him in the parlor. Denis sat by the fire doing his sums, so as to have them ready to show his tutor when he went over to Silverwood the next day for his algebra lesson. When Cynthia entered with her sewing he laid down his book and sprang up to draw her a chair by the other side of the fireplace. Noticing that though the day was cloudy there was a glarish light at that spot, he drew the curtain across one of the side windows to keep the glare from her eyes. As she sat down Cynthia murmured, “Thank you, Denis,” but there was a puzzling flicker at the corner of her thin mouth.