New Mercies

by Dallas, Sandra

  “Happier?” Mr. Satterfield asked. “Why would you say that?”

  I was foolish to talk about something I didn’t know about, so I only shrugged.

  “There never was a person happier than Miss Amalia. Queer as she was, Miss Amalia was loved by everybody, except for Frederick and the Lotts, and to tell you the truth, I think Bayard did love her,” Mr. Satterfield said.

  “You never met a person so sweet-natured,” Parthena said. “Oh yes, she was happy.”

  “Right well content,” Mr. Satterfield muttered. The others nodded, while I tried not to show how shocked I was to think that this strange old woman who had lived in a decrepit house with goats might actually have been content with her life, might have preferred it to any other.

  Mr. Satterfield, apparently done with the conversation, announced that he had promised to show me the gardens.

  Pickett rose, saying she would take the ladies outside, while Buckland and the men retired to the library for cigars and brandy. Parthena and Odalie led the way into the hall. Pickett lagged behind with me. “Mr. Sam is right about Miss Amalia being happy. The time I told you about when she was dancing, she was smiling. I swear I could see she was. She might even have been laughing. Miss Amalia never spoke a cross word to anyone except for Bayard, and she didn’t speak to him at all. Of course, she liked her privacy, but when you did encounter her, she was all goodness. I should have taken better care of her”—she waved off my protest—“of course I should have, but Miss Amalia’s happiness was so golden. I think if I had taken her over, I would have tarnished it. Perhaps one day you will understand.”

  “I think I do.”

  “No, you do not. Not yet,” she said.

  Odalie had opened the rear door, revealing an iron fountain framed by the doorway, water cascading over the edge into a small pool. There was no sign of the chute the slaves had used to activate the workings of the fountain, so I assumed the water must be forced through pipes by a motor these days. The terrace was paved with stones, and on either side of the steps beyond the fountain was a stone balustrade. Iron urns filled with tuberoses stood on the railings. Ferns and other shade plants, some the size and shape of elephant ears, were thick in the garden and gave a feeling of dampness, and there was the strong scent of overripe flowers. The air was yet hot, and the lighted torches scattered about made the evening sultry, which made me homesick for the cool, clear summer nights of the Colorado mountains. David and I had spent summer weekends in the little house in Georgetown that had belonged to Grandmother’s brother. We’d throw an old quilt on the ground in the backyard and lie under the stars, listening to the mountain noises—the wind in the pines, the stream near the house, the whistle of the train. The nights were so cool that even in midsummer we slept under blankets. And except for mosquitoes, I thought as I slapped something that bit my leg, there were few insects in Colorado.

  Pickett led us down the steps along a walk that was bordered with foliage. She pointed out sweet olive trees, japonica, and cape jasmine. An enormous tree hovered above us, its outstretched branches, which were almost parallel to the ground, covered with wispy moss, like a ragged lace shawl. “A live oak,” Pickett told me. “Sometimes the Spanish moss looks like ghosts swinging in the trees like monkeys. You should see the azaleas in the spring—pink and white and cerise. The yellow jasmine are like chains, and the wild dogwood blossoms look as if they’re suspended in air. You must come back then.”

  “Come back?” Parthena asked. “She’s the mistress of Avoca now. Why would she leave?”

  “That makes her one of us, doesn’t it?” said Odalie. In a single evening, I had gone from Yankee outsider to a member of Natchez society.

  “Unless she already has a small fortune to fix it up, how could she live at Avoca?” Pickett asked.

  “Do you?” Odalie asked, stopping on the walk in front of me. The Spanish moss behind her blew softly in the breeze, framing her with its torn gray and giving her a Madonna-like look that was out of character. She picked a flower and waved it in the air, spreading its perfume.

  “Do I what?”

  “Have a small fortune.”

  “Odalie, you are a snoop,” Pickett told her. But like Odalie, she and Parthena waited for me to answer.

  “You have all suggested that Miss Amalia was penniless,” I told them, having no intention of discussing my finances. “Perhaps the lumberyard could be revived.”

  “Oh, that was sold years ago.” When Odalie was sure she had my attention, she added with a touch of spite, “To Pickett’s family. That’s where all this comes from.” She waved both hands to indicate the garden. “That and the Nu-Grape franchise. And they’ve been selling leases on their plantations to oil companies.”

  “Odalie! You really do talk too much,” Pickett said. She explained to me that the lumberyard sale had been quite legal. No one else had wanted the business, and Pickett’s father had paid Frederick more than it was worth. She continued down the walkway to a pair of stone benches under the tree and sat down.

  The benches were damp-looking and green with moss. Nonetheless, the rest of us joined her and sat listening to the fountain and the movement of some creature in the bushes. Perhaps there were snakes and rats in the underbrush, but if odious things lurked nearby, the others would know it and not sit there so languidly. The greater danger was Odalie’s tongue, a serpent in its own right.

  Odalie spread out her ringed hands in her lap, palms down, and studied a large diamond that sent off glints of light in the glare of the torches. Looking up, she told me, “It’s just a little ole antebellum diamond.” When I did not respond, she said, “I misspoke about Ezra.”

  That did not sound like an apology, and I prepared myself for another tasteless observation. Pickett must have been wary, too, because she tried to turn the conversation to something else. “We’ve talked enough about poor old Ezra. Would you like to see the conservatory, Nora?”

  “Pickett is crazy about orchids. She has all kinds,” Parthena added.

  Pickett grasped my hand and pulled me up with her, but Odalie remained seated, moving her hands back and forth to let the diamond catch the light. “I misspoke when I said he killed Miss Amalia. Why would a person wipe out the gravy train?”

  “What do you mean?” Parthena asked against her will, it seemed.

  “He was blackmailing Miss Amalia.”

  Pickett and Parthena laughed, relieved that Odalie’s revelation was so ridiculous. “You mean he was dunning her for the goat’s milk money?” Pickett asked. “Oh, Odalie, you have gone too far this time.”

  But Odalie cut her off. “Who’s to say Miss Amalia didn’t have a little something more stashed away?”

  Since Mr. Satterfield had been scrupulous about not mentioning my aunt’s bank account in New Orleans, Odalie might have been smarter than she seemed. Perhaps her mind did indeed work in some uncanny way.

  “Even if she did, what could he possibly blackmail her about?” Parthena glanced at me, caught between curiosity and politeness. I bet on curiosity.

  “Really, Odalie!” Pickett admonished her.

  “I’ve been studying on it.” Odalie paused dramatically, waiting for one of us to ask her to go on. When no one did, she continued anyway. “It’s like this. Miss Amalia and her mother went to New Orleans. Her mother died, and Miss Amalia came back with a baby.”

  The other two women exchanged glances, as if they knew what Odalie was about to say, and Pickett, her hand in mine, took a step down the path. “You really must see the conservatory.” Then she muttered to me, “This is all because Odalie was not invited inside Avoca. Her wrath is like the Lord’s.”

  But I withdrew my hand as I waited for Odalie to finish.

  She ignored us for a minute, watching a firefly as it flitted near her. Slowly, she closed her hands around it, and when she opened them, the insect lay dead on her left palm. She flicked it into the bushes. “What if Ezra knew it was Miss Amalia and not her mother who’d had the baby?�
�� Odalie gave me a smug look, and as if I had not understood exactly what she was saying, she added, “What if Ezra knew your father was the illegal child of Miss Amalia, and no mistake?”

  Chapter Four

  ALTHOUGH IT WAS ONLY A little after seven o’clock when I left the hotel the following morning, the air already was too hot for comfort. Fall mornings in Natchez did not seem to be the beginning of a fresh new day, but only a slight letting up of the previous day’s heat. Perhaps southerners were not as torpid as they seemed; they were merely conserving energy. Of course, they might have been stupid from overeating. I had slept poorly.

  Since my only sight of the Mississippi had come from the train window, I walked along Main Street to the edge of a high bluff and looked down two hundred feet or more to the water, surprised at the river’s immensity. The Mississippi was nearly a mile wide, and the quantity of water stunned me. It did not rush on its way to the ocean, but moved sluggishly along, as if it, too, were too hot to hurry.

  A road led down from the bluff—Silver Street. The cliff shaded it from the thick yellow sunshine, so I followed it down to a single street at the bottom, which was lined with very old buildings. This must be Mr. Satterfield’s Natchez Under-the-Hill, I thought.

  The buildings were mostly two-story structures of soft red brick, a few with makeshift porches and fanciful iron balconies, and they had long windows and French doors to catch the breezes coming off the river. Many were boarded up. Others, which appeared to be speakeasies or stores, were not yet open. An Orange Crush sign hung from the window of a grocery store that looked as if it had been closed for some time. The building’s broken shutter doors were tightly closed, and what had been a wooden sidewalk was all but gone, leaving only dirt and weeds. A thermometer was inserted in a tin bottle-shape Coca-Cola sign nailed to the porch post of a general store but the glass tube was broken, so I had no way of knowing the exact temperature. That was just as well.

  Steamboats would have once docked at Natchez Under-the-Hill, and perhaps they still did. In the old days, the crews got drunk in the saloons, then visited the whores in the upper floors, which were now boarded up. Mr. Satterfield had thought to protect me from the knowledge of such goings-on, but I was well aware of the underside of frontier life. David and I had once tramped the mountains around Breckenridge, an old Colorado mining town, where in exploring the buildings along the river, we had come upon the Blue Goose. We knew that it was a whorehouse and still in operation, but we were surprised at the homey scene around the little cottage. A woman hung washing on the line. Another sat on the porch, shelling peas. We waved and exchanged pleasantries and continued on.

  I sat down and looked out at a ferry that was making its way from the Mississippi side of the river to Louisiana. The river, the color of dirty dishwater, was low along its banks, but it was a massive force nonetheless. Branches and trash, a broken oar and a wooden crate, all were swept along in the flow. Far out in the river, an uprooted tree moved with the current. I leaned over and scooped up a handful of the water, which felt silty as it ran out through my fingers.

  Leaving the silent river, I walked back up to Silver Street, nodding to a large white-haired Negro woman who had come out of the building with the broken thermometer and was sweeping the wooden sidewalk. When I asked if the store was open, she nodded, saying nothing, and held the screen door for me. Inside, the room was gloomy and damp and smelled of garlic and kerosene and rotted wood. Strings of dried herbs hung from the ceiling, along with bunches of bananas that had turned the color of the woman’s skin. Muslin bags of sugar and flour filled the shelves. Packs of Old Golds, Fatimas, and Lucky Strikes, little bags of tobacco fastened with gold strings, and packets of cigarette papers rested on the counter. Tootsie Rolls and Milky Ways in faded water-stained wrappers were piled inside a case whose rounded glass front was scratched and cracked. The woman caught me eyeing the case and said, “Puttin’ the sweetnings in there keeps ’em from being thieved.”

  She did not walk so much as undulate from side to side on legs that were angled from rickets. With the rhythmic gait, she made her way to a wooden chair behind the counter and eased herself onto a pillow. I selected a bottle of Coca-Cola from a tub filled with tepid water and handed her a nickel, which she put into a drawer under the counter. She took the bottle from me and opened it, and while I sipped the cola, she pried up the cork that lined the bottle cap, placed it inside the bosom of her wash dress, then put the metal cap on top of it and pushed the cork into place so that the cap was afixed to the dress like a brooch. “First one today. This how I keep track.” Her dress was dimpled from where she had attached bottle caps on previous days.

  The smells inside the store were unpleasant, so I started for the door.

  “Two cents deposit for the bottle if you want to take it round and about.”

  “I’ll bring it back.” I went outside and sat on the edge of the porch and drank the Coke. Below the store, a driver unloaded crates from a wagon hitched to two red mules. There was the rattle of glass as he set a box on the ground, and I thought the man was a bootlegger making deliveries to a speakeasy.

  Two little girls in dresses made from flour sacks played jacks in front of a building where a broken iron balcony hung precariously over the street. White chickens pecked at the gingercolored dirt beside them. One girl dropped the ball, which rolled down the street toward me. I scooped it up and rolled it back, and the girl called, “Why bless your black heart.” Her friend whispered something, and the girl shaded her eyes to look at me, snickering when she discovered I was not a Negro.

  I finished the Coke and went back inside. After the glare of the street, my eyes took a minute to adjust to the dark, since the woman had switched on a fan but not a light. She remained seated, listening to a soap opera on a large wooden radio behind her as she squinted at a book in her lap. I set the bottle in a box filled with empties and was almost to the door when she said, “You get heatstroke, you don’t cover your head.” She reached up to a shelf above her and took down a braided straw hat. “Two bits is all. It’ll keep your white skin from turning red as a turkey wattle. I got a pretty certain demand for ’em. These days, I ain’t no good for nothing but plaiting straw hats and reading a Sears & Roebuck’s Bible. That’s what I do while I wait for the old ship Zion to take me away.”

  I felt a little intimidated by this large black lump of a woman and a little sorry for anyone consigned to the ill-smelling store day after day, and I did need a hat, so I gave her a quarter.

  “What you doing down here, you don’t mind me askin’?”

  “Visiting.”

  “Ah-huh. You the one visiting at the goat lady’s house?”

  Ignoring my frown, she waved her hand and said, “The taximan that taken you’s my boy, Strotter. I lost his daddy, and he’s dead, but I don’t miss him. His soul was empty as his pocketbook. Strotter was just like him till he confessed religion and give up the gin place. Now he’s a Baptist from head to foot and a taxi driver. You can’t ask for better, ’cept he believe in spooks. Strotter say you kin to Missy ’Malia.”

  “That’s right.” I could not tell if the woman was bored and making conversation or if perhaps she was getting at something.

  “You fixin’ to study on her murder.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe there’s things you don’t want to know. You thought about that?”

  “What things?”

  She snorted, then patted her open Bible with a hand the size of a skinned chicken breast. “Things.” She shrugged. “I know Missy ’Malia from the time I first know myself, bred at the place on yeller cornmeal and sorghum molasses.”

  After sorting through her words to make sense of them, I asked, “Do you mean you lived at Avoca?”

  She nodded. “I got to be the house girl. I was never no good at chopping cotton, but I was a terror with a broom.” Her whole body shook when she laughed. “I live there before that place go down, till I c
ommenced to be prosperous and took on this store. My feets has been in this place forty years.” She picked up a crochet hook and worked it back and forth, using yellow strings from tobacco bags.

  I moved back along the counter toward her. “You must have been at Avoca when my father was there—Winship Bondurant.”

  “Oh, yes indeed. I ‘member when Missy ’Malia brung him home. His borning was in New Orleans. She come home with that baby in a basket on her arm and her mama in a box. She walked off the boat right outside this door.” The heavy flesh on the underside of the woman’s arm flapped as she pointed with the crochet hook. “Mr. Bayard’s right there when she get off the boat, too, his boots polished, his coat brushed, and all such as that.”

  I found myself holding my breath as I waited for her to continue.

  She lowered her massive arm and pushed her lower lip up under her top lip, then rolled her lips around in a circle, as if savoring her story. “Missy ’Malia, her face turn midnight dark when she seen him. She wasn’t craving for him and didn’t say nothing but ‘Get out the way.’ ”

  “And did he?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Did he get out of her way?”

  “Oh, no, ma’am. Not that day. Not ever. Later and shortly, Mr. Bayard was hanging around the place.”

  “I’ve been told the two of them were engaged, but she broke it off, and they never spoke after that.”

  “He’s sweet on her when he’s a young bull, yes, ma’am. I seen him after she come home, watching her when she go out in the day like she’s a piece of molasses taffy. But white mens got foolishments. Maybe his nighttime feelings wasn’t the same as his daytime feelings. No, ma’am, they wasn’t, ‘cause he sure did kill her. No doubt about that.”

  “Why did he do it?”

  The woman looked at me with hard yellow eyes then, making me uneasy with her intensity. “Ain’t for me to say. I know no more about ‘bout white folks’ doings than nothing.” She leaned back and closed her eyes, and the room was silent except for a Rinso jingle on the radio. But she wasn’t finished. “You meet Ezra.” It was a statement, not a question. She knew I had; her son would have told her, so I did not reply.