I was sorry then for taking the cigarette, although not because of Odalie’s silly little scene. It was much too hot to smoke. Still, having caused Odalie’s funk, I felt obliged, so I accepted a light from Buckland and inhaled. Then I set the cigarette in an ashtray, where it smoldered, adding to the closeness in the room.
As if to punish me for smoking, Odalie gave me a coy glance and asked, “Have you a sweetheart?”
Pickett, who had been sipping her drink, choked, and Parthena sucked in her breath. Mr. Satterfield took a linen handkerchief out of his pocket and patted his forehead. Buckland gave Odalie a disapproving glance, which she ignored, and Stephen said, “Take care, my dearest. People might think you have no regard for propriety.”
“Aren’t we all dying to know, and you, too?” she asked, looking at Stephen.
Pickett opened her mouth, but before she could speak, Odalie asked quickly, “Well, have you? Or maybe you’re a career girl.”
Pickett shook her head in disapproval, although she could not know how the question was a blow to my heart. I tried hard to keep my voice steady as I replied, “I’m divorced.” There was no reason to tell them that David was dead.
“Yes, we know you are, and we do not think highly of that. You are lucky you are a Bondurant, or you would not be taken into Natchez society.”
“Oh, and have I been?” My voice was chilly.
“Well, who do you think we are?” Odalie asked. Her husband had tightened his hand on her arm, but she shook it off. The others looked appalled, but they seemed not to know what to say.
Pickett glared at Odalie, who was only emboldened by the look. “Well, do you have a sweetheart?” Odalie was not just off her trolley but mean-spirited, too.
“No, I do not.” I looked her in the eye. “Do you?”
Pickett shot me a look of triumph, and Stephen chuckled and said, “My golly, she got you there.” The others laughed, perhaps relieved that I had not taken offense.
Odalie was not willing to give me the last word, however. “Just my old fellow,” she said, looking at her husband. “I ask because we intend to introduce you to a gentleman—Holland Brown. He’s a Yankee and divorced, like you. I only mention it out of kindness. You should have invited him for dinner, Pickett.”
The room was very quiet again, and Pickett said bluntly, “Shame on you, Odalie. Nora is here on an errand of mercy. Not all women are lost without a man.” She might have winked at me, but I didn’t know for sure, because she stood up and said, “We must all of us be famished, I’m sure. Dinner is waiting.” Turning to me, she added, “It’s just a poor little supper, not like in the old days, when we never served fewer than two hot breads and two or three desserts. But it won’t kill you.”
There was a clinking of glasses and rustle of clothing as the guests finished their drinks and stood up. Odalie, her body as lumpy as a cotton stocking over an old leg, took Stephen’s arm and left the East Room, limping a little. As Parthena and Merrill followed, Pickett took my hand and held me still, and we let Buckland and Mr. Satterfield precede us.
When the others were out of earshot, Pickett squeezed my hand. “Odalie has a mighty high kick for a low cow. Don’t think poorly of the rest of us, because I want you to be my friend. We’re not all so ill-mannered as Odalie. She takes a grain of morphine every so often, you know. I blame that. She can be entertaining, which is something you do not see much of in Natchez society. That’s why we tolerate her. I’d hoped she would amuse you, since you are here under such grim circumstances, but tonight she is past redemption. By the way, she did not come from one of the old Natchez families, although she pretends she did.” Pickett sniffed.
“But she said her great-grandmother danced with Lafayette.”
“There’s a cottage industry of women who danced with him.” Pickett waved her hand dismissively. “Odalie reached her position by marrying well, and she is afraid we have not forgotten it.”
“And have you?”
“Have we what, dearie?”
“Forgotten Odalie married up.”
“No, of course not.” Pickett leaned toward me and whispered, “We know her family never had any silver to bury, and as for turning out slaves after the War, her family never had them to turn out. Her grandfather was a plantation overseer, and he got into a fight on a Mississippi riverboat and fell off. The body was caught in the paddle wheel, poor old fellow. He bloodied the Mississippi for half a mile.”
I laughed, impulsively putting my arm around Pickett’s waist as we went into the dining room. She was frank and kind and witty, but she was nobody’s fool, and I had begun to think of her as my friend, too.
Pickett quickly assigned us places around the mahogany dining room table, which was big enough to seat twelve and no doubt could have been expanded to accommodate another dozen. Two large pyramids of fruit were spaced between lighted tapers in tall silver candlesticks along the center of the table. Like the East Room, the dining room was fifteen feet high, with tall French doors that were open, but no air came through. Unfolding my napkin, I discretely used it to rub my sweating palms while making a show of looking around the room.
Hanging above the center of the table and attached to the ceiling was a heavily carved wooden apparatus, a little like an outsize breadboard, which appeared to be some sort of chandelier. But neither candles nor lightbulbs were attached to it, and immediately we were seated—I between Buckland, at the head of the table, and Merrill Carter and as far away from Odalie as possible—a little black boy came into the room and began pulling an attached cord, which caused the thing to swing back and forth. “A punkah,” Mr. Satterfield explained when he caught me staring at it. “A shoofly. When your Ezra was a boy, he had the charge of the fly brush at Avoca.”
Pickett rang the little bell beside her plate, and York entered the room and went to a sideboard, where he ladled soup from an enormous tureen—part of the china set stored in the cupboard—into soup plates and set them before us.
“Hot soup always cools me,” Parthena said.
That was an absurd contradiction, but the others agreed, and Stephen even had a second helping, so perhaps there was something to what Parthena said. After York cleared away the soup plates, he brought in an enormous ham—a Virginia ham, Pickett said, not that I could tell the difference between that and the garden variety; it was ham, which is to say it was heavy and salty. There was, as well, a cornmeal soufflé, called spoon bread, butter beans, sliced tomatoes, deep-fried potato balls that Pickett said were potato croquettes, and Mr. Satterfield’s favorite, beaten biscuits. I was not so sure Pickett was right when she said the meal wouldn’t kill us. This was a “little supper” like Diamond Jim Brady gave little suppers, and I was glad I had not been invited to a large supper. The Confederacy must have lost the war after dinner, when the soldiers were snoozing off a big meal.
No one seemed willing to start a real conversation over the dinner table, perhaps for fear of what Odalie would say. So instead they made little sounds of approval about the dinner. “Southern cooking makes the world a better place in which to live,” remarked Stephen. The others nodded in agreement. I ate a beaten biscuit, which was tasteless, and when the bread basket was passed to me a second time, I took another, broke it, and put both halves onto my plate, one overlapping the other, so that it appeared partially eaten. Pickett caught me and winked, and to make up for my little act of deception, I told her the tomatoes, which were sprinkled with a tiny bit of sugar, were the best I had ever tasted.
She replied that she grew them herself and then asked if I gardened.
Handy Dan and I had worked in the garden the day Mr. Satterfield’s telegram arrived, but spading manure did not seem like the sort of thing southern ladies would discuss at dinner parties. “A little. Sometimes, I write gardening articles for the newspaper at home.”
“A newspaper woman!” cried Parthena. “Oh, how exciting. You must meet our editor, my neighbor. He is a gardener himself.”
Since I h
ad intended to visit the newspaper office to find out about my aunt’s death, I said I would like that, and Parthena offered to make the introduction.
“We are passionate about gardening,” Pickett said, and she and Mr. Satterfield launched into a discussion of what made the best compost. Parthena announced that she used chicken manure in hers, and Odalie threw in that her gardener thought the best manure in all of Natchez came from Miss Amalia’s goats. So apparently I was wrong about southern dinner-party conversation.
“Ezra tried to keep up Miss Amalia’s gardens best he could,” Mr. Satterfield said. “But he couldn’t.” Then he gave a nod of acknowledgment to Odalie and added, “Even with the goat manure.”
“Oh, that Ezra,” Odalie said. “He’s nothing but a colored sport.”
“He’s Mr. Roosevelt’s ‘common man,’ ” her husband added with more than a hint of condescension.
Odalie licked a tiny bit of cornmeal off her upper lip. “What is this ‘common man’ business anyway?”
“You never saw Avoca’s gardens in their heyday,” Mr. Satterfield said, turning the conversation back to the safer subject of gardening. “The plantings covered ten acres. You had to take a carriage to gather the roses.” Mr. Satterfield piled up beaten biscuits on his plate. When he saw how many he had taken, he said, “I am overhungry tonight.” He patted his paunch. “I am overhungry most nights.”
“Well, I say Ezra’s a slowpoke, like all of your Negroes. There was never a darky did a lick of work when he didn’t have to. They were a good deal better off under slavery.” Odalie sent me a sly glance, and the others cleared their throats and stared into their plates.
Odalie was baiting me again, of course, and I had no intention of responding. If Odalie’s family had had silver and slaves to bury it, the slaves would have dug it up and kept it.
When I did not reply, Parthena said, “Oh, Odalie, don’t be tiresome. You know the sun never rose on Ezra in bed. He is a worker.”
But Odalie thrived on being tiresome. “Ezra is not to be trusted. He was always there to make sure Miss Amalia gave you not so much as one drop more of milk than you’d paid for. Whenever I called at Avoca, he told me Miss Amalia was busy with spring cleaning and was not receiving. Who was he to say she didn’t want guests? You’d not hardly have allowed a servant to do that in the old days.”
That was a point in Ezra’s favor. Surely, my strange old aunt, who evidently had enjoyed few people, would not have relished a visit from Odalie.
“Did you expect him not to answer the door?” Pickett asked.
“Oh, you know what I mean.” Odalie, who was buttering a biscuit, waved her knife in the air, sending a yellow dollop onto the Oriental rug. York quietly wiped it up. “He didn’t know his place. A white woman taking orders from a servant—it is too much to consider.”
Pickett glanced around the table and, seeing that we were finished eating, nodded at York, who began removing the plates. “Ezra took wonderously good care of her, he and Aunt Polly,” Pickett remarked.
“So they say. But Ezra knew too much about what went on at Avoca,” said Odalie, turning to me. “I advise you to turn them out.”
“Now, Odalie, you know that’s not our way,” Mr. Satterfield said.
“What was there for Ezra to know?” I asked.
“Oh, this and that.” Odalie looked up at the punkah instead of at me. I did not push the subject, knowing that she wished me to do so. Besides, I believed that Odalie would not be stopped if she intended to tell something, and in a minute, she looked at me coquettishly. “Maybe he knew about Miss Amalia’s murder. Maybe he saw it.” Looking around the table to make sure she had all of our attention, she said, “Or maybe he did it.”
While the others looked at her in astonishment, I caught York’s eye. He had just entered the room with a huge china bowl in his arms, and his eyes widened in surprise. He stopped in midstep and stared at me, shaking his head slightly.
“Why Stephan ought to whip you all the way home for saying that,” Buckland told her.
“Don’t believe it if you don’t want to.” Odalie leaned so far across the table toward me that the diamond on a chain around her neck clinked against her plate. “People here cannot bear the thought that their servants would turn against them, but it happens.” She shrugged and looked around the table. “Ezra will not bear close inspection. I have a mind that figures out these things. That’s the way I am, although I never cared to brag about it.”
Not bragging did not seem to be in Odalie’s character, but that was not the point, and I did not challenge her.
The servant still stood rooted beside the doorway with the china bowl in his hands, and Pickett told him sternly, “York, be dishing up the pudding now.”
“Yes’m.” He turned to the sideboard and spooned berries into dishes. He covered the berries with custard from the bowl he’d been carrying, then topped each serving with whipped cream. Holding a silver grater above each dish, he ran a nutmeg across it. Then he put the dishes onto plates and set them before us.
“Oh, your wonderful custard!” Parthena explained to me that Pickett made it herself from an old family recipe. “She won’t share it. Isn’t she the mean thing?” The others grunted their approval of the dessert and began eating, while Pickett insisted she couldn’t give out the recipe because she herself didn’t know how it was made, just a little of this and that. Even her cook, who had prepared the rest of the dinner, couldn’t make custard to Pickett’s satisfaction.
The conversation was a great deal of bother about a dish as ordinary as custard, but everyone seemed eager to talk about something besides Ezra—everyone but me, since I was curious to know why he disliked me. I told them that Ezra all but ran me off Avoca. Someone groaned at the mention of Ezra’s name again.
It surely was not Odalie, who gave me a surprised look and opened her mouth. Before she could speak, Merrill said, “Well, wouldn’t you if you’d been born on the place and had never spent a day away from it?”
“Not a single day?”
Merrill waved his hand at me. “Oh, you know what I mean. He’s never had another home. The poor old fellow’s probably scared to death that as a northerner, you’ll turn him out, and then where would he go?”
It seemed they expected me to reassure them that Ezra would be taken care of, but I had no idea what would become of Avoca. Instead of responding, I picked up my spoon and tasted the dessert, and although it was rich, I ate most of it. If I had trouble sleeping that night, it would be nice to blame the heavy dinner and not what really might have caused my sleeplessness.
“Why would Ezra have killed his mistress, Odalie?” As I asked the question, York, who had poured coffee from a set nearly as elaborate as the one in the East Room, set a full cup and saucer beside my plate. His hand shook a little, and a drop of coffee spilled over the side of the cup. York started to remove it, but as the others were looking at Odalie now and had not seen the spill, I touched the back of his hand with my little finger, and he left the cup alone.
Put on the spot, Odalie began to hem and haw. “Did I say he did? I just supposed about it. And, of course, you’d not hardly think a Negro could be smart enough to shoot them both, then lay the blame on Bayard?”
“We all know Bayard did it,” Mr. Satterfield insisted. The others nodded while Odalie played with her dessert spoon. “My guess is that Bayard sneaked up on her.” Mr. Satterfield smiled as he seemed to remember something, then turned to me. “Miss Amalia had a temper. There’s a statue of her in the Great Hall at Avoca, covered with a sheet now. It was made when she was sixteen. She was dressed in a riding outfit and had a crop in her hand and a dog beside her. She hated posing for that thing. One day, she just announced she was done with it. When her father objected, she took her crop and whacked off the tail of the dog in the statue, and that was the end of her posing.”
“I didn’t know that,” Stephen said. “It sure was one funnylooking dog. You know, I had a hunting dog that—”
“We all think Bayard did it,” said Merrill, interrupting him, so as to keep the conversation on the subject of the murder. “We’d all like to know why, but we have as much chance of finding out why as I have of roller-skating to heaven on a sunbeam.”
“Why didn’t she ever leave, move to another city?” I asked.
“Leave Natchez?” Parthena was incredulous.
It did not seem so far-fetched to me. Any number of Natchezians must have left over the years. I ventured that Amalia could have sold Avoca when it was in decent shape and moved elsewhere, taken a job.
“Doing what?” Stephen asked.
I shrugged, realizing how different these people were from my mother’s side of the family.
“Stephen’s right. Miss Amalia couldn’t have done a thing but sell goat’s milk,” Pickett said. “She never had an education. Women of her day weren’t brought up to get jobs. They expected to be taken care of. We still do.” She smiled at Buckland, although I thought Pickett could easily take care of herself. “Miss Amalia was not raised in the automobile age, when you can get into a car and drive all the way to Jackson. Besides, leaving Avoca would have been a heresy. These old families didn’t let go of their homes. The women stayed on and on as an act of loyalty. I believe Miss Amalia wanted to preserve the Bondurant heritage.”
“Why?” I asked. “She was the last Bondurant.”
The others were still. Finally Buckland spoke up. “You are the last Bondurant.”
Yes, and as the last Bondurant, I found the idea of my aunt staying on in that moldy old house for my sake demented. If Amalia had wanted to pass along anything to me, she should have contacted me while she was alive. “She surely would have been happier if she hadn’t had to live there,” I said.
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