New Mercies

by Dallas, Sandra

  The name meant nothing to me, but I was learning to keep my mouth shut in Natchez when I didn’t know about a thing, so I did not comment.

  A folded crazy quilt lay at the end of the bed, and I picked it up, studying the patches. Some were shredded, with the foundation showing through. The binding was frayed. But the pieces that were intact were exquisitely executed, with people and animals embroidered in the center and held together with a variety of “chicken scratch” stitches. Names and initials were embroidered on patches. In the center of the quilt were the initials AB entwined with a heart.

  “Amalia Bondurant.” I ran my hand over the initials, which were rendered in satin stitches and French knots.

  Ezra said nothing, just took the spread from me and set it back on the bed. “All those things like that, those bedcovers, Miss Amalia make, her and Aunt Polly. Miss Amalia make this way back, after her growing-up time.”

  “She must have liked to quilt.”

  “Miss Amalia stitched a plenty of quilts. She put ’em together with them stitches she call ‘railroad tracks.’ ”

  “I should like to keep this.”

  “Miss Amalia say once she wonder if you quilt.” He looked at me, waiting for me to reply.

  “My Grandmother Bullock, my mother’s mother, quilted. She took the measure of a woman from her needlework. Women did that at one time.”

  Ezra nodded, as if he understood.

  “She taught my mother to sew, and Mother taught me. I like to work with lace and old silks and velvet.” I fashioned pillows for my friends from those materials and had made a cape of a beautiful piece of antique silk velvet, sewing it by hand because the fabric was so difficult to work with. And I’d once made a bedspread by stitching together bits of lace that had come from my grandmother’s scrap bag, fitting the pieces to one another in the same puzzlelike way that Amalia had made this crazy quilt. Mostly what I did, however, was make little pictures from tiny scraps of fabric too small to be used for anything else. “But no, I don’t quilt. I never cared to.”

  Ezra turned away, and I sat down at the desk and began opening the drawers. “Now is as good a time as any to start going through Miss Amalia’s papers. I ought to get to work.”

  “You need you something?”

  I shook my head. “You surely have other things to do.” I did not want Ezra, any more than Mr. Satterfield, looking over my shoulder while I went through Amalia’s things.

  Ezra stood in the doorway a minute. “You planning to sleep here? I got to tell Aunt Polly.”

  “No,” I said quickly. “That’s very kind of you, of course. But I’ve made arrangements at the hotel to stay as long as necessary.”

  Ezra dipped his head, not looking at all disappointed.

  I turned back to the desk and saw then a rose in a crystal vase. There was dew on the petals, so it had been placed there that morning. Ezra was staring at me from the doorway.

  “I always pick the flower for Miss Amalia. We ain’t got but roses now.”

  “That’s very thoughtful. Thank you.” When Ezra looked embarrassed, I added quickly, “Mr. Satterfield told me about the gardens at Avoca. He said they were so vast, you had to take a carriage to cut the roses.”

  “Dogcart. When Miss Amalia was a young lady, she take a dogcart. I harness it up. That my job.”

  “You took good care of her.” I returned to the desk, then had a sudden thought and asked, “What about the goats? Are you taking care of them? Don’t they have to be milked?”

  “We taken care. Aunt Polly keep the money in the quarters for you. She put down the amount on a paper. It there in the drawer.” He indicated the desk.

  “Oh, I don’t want the money.” The words sounded arrogant. “That is to say, we will consider that part of your pay as caretakers. We can discuss that later. Right now, there is so much to attend to.”

  “I leave be,” he said, and was gone.

  I got up then and wandered around the room, taking a closer look at things without Ezra getting in my way. On the table beside the bed was a dresser set that included a silver mirror and matching brushes and a basket for hairpins. I wondered if that were the cake basket in which Amalia had been displayed as a baby. Straightening the brushes, I pondered how a girl who had been brought up in such splendor could have lived out her life in squalor. The house not only lacked the basic necessities, such as electricity and plumbing—kerosene lamps stood on the desk and bedside table, and I had spotted a chamber pot under the bed—it was uninhabitable for any normal person. And to think that Pickett and her guests had called Amalia Bondurant happy!

  Returning to the desk, I opened drawers, not knowing what it was I was looking for—treasure, financial records, family history? Perhaps there were only curiosities.

  The center drawer’s contents were disappointing, more like the makings of a pack rat’s nest—a pretty rock, half of a bluebird’s egg, dried petals the color of the rose on top of the desk, things that Amalia must have picked up as she wandered about Avoca. There was a sort of quilt diary, with drawings of quilt patterns and scraps of fabric pinned to the pages. Underneath the journal was a book tied together with string, its cover worn down to the boards. “Receipt Book” was written in pencil in the front. The pages were loose. I opened the book to a handwritten recipe for drop cake: “1 cup Sugar 1/2 cup Butter 2 Eggs 2 Table spoons milk 1/2 tea spoon Soda Nutmeg Currants.” There were no directions. Flipping through the book, I found recipes for Cora’s indian pudding, queen of puddings, bird’s nest pudding, and wine jelly. On other pages were instructions “To Keep the Hair from Falling Out” and “The Cure for Drunkenness.” A clipping tucked inside the pages was titled “To Bring the Dead to Life.” Not knowing when such household hints might come in handy, I put the book aside to be read in detail later.

  In the back of the drawer was a packet of letters tied together with a faded ribbon. They were invitations, most of them handwritten, to balls and parties that had taken place half a century ago. The paper was foxed and dotted with spots of mildew. In one envelope were locks of hair. Another held pressed flowers that had crumbled almost to dust. Most of the contents of the drawer could be tossed into the dustbin. But throwing away Amalia’s things might offend Ezra and Miss Polly, so I shut the drawer.

  Opening another drawer, I found myself staring at my own face. On top of a pile of papers was a picture from the 1926 Junior League Follies booklet, folded open to show my friend Caroline and me, dressed in overalls and caps, standing in front of a Denver & Rio Grande Western locomotive. The caption identified us and said that D&RGW’s Panoramic Special was the favorite train of Junior Leaguers going to Salt Lake City and the Pacific Northwest. I remembered posing for the picture. The other Junior Leaguers were shown in front of auto dealers or at the Bredan Butter castle, but Caroline and I had liked the idea of going down to the tracks in railroader uniforms. In a million years, I would never understand how Amalia had acquired that picture.

  Under the booklet were scores of clippings with my name in them, arranged in a haphazard manner, as if Amalia had pulled one out at random from time to time, read it, and set it back on top of the pile. The papers went back sixteen years, beginning with a mention of me in the Denver Post society column, attending a Christmas party when I was seventeen. There were articles on my debut, my marriage, pictures of me at various social functions, and eventually the legal notice about the divorce. She must have subscribed to the Post, read it front to back every day, searching for my name.

  Returning the clippings to the drawer, I mulled over why Amalia would have kept track of me, and only one answer made sense: She was obsessed with me because I was her granddaughter, not her niece. The clippings, every bit as much as Odalie’s pronouncement, convinced me of the truth of my father’s parentage.

  If that were true, the question I now wanted answered was, Who was my grandfather? Perhaps there were clues somewhere in this desk, and I continued my search. But the only thing in the next drawer besides
a bonnet brush, button hook, and glove darner that matched the silver dresser set was an account book, with rows showing dates and dollar amounts. The record started in July 7, 1921, when the amount set down $1.10. The last entry was on September 14, 1933, the day before Amalia’s body was found: $2.40. These must have been the days’ goats’ milk income, and while it was not a great deal for three people—Amalia, Ezra, and Aunt Polly—to live on, there were other folks who got by on considerably less in these hard times. A piece of paper had been placed in the book, and written in a different hand were the dates following Amalia’s death, along with amounts. Ezra must have sold milk this morning, I realized, because today’s date was there, along with the figure $2.20. I flipped to the back of the book, but there was no list of expenses. Did one buy feed for goats or simply let them graze in the yard—or the neighbors’ yards? I laughed out loud to think I had inherited a herd of animals and knew not one thing about them.

  Just then, one of my goats jumped up onto the porch and wandered through the French doors. She bleated and took a few steps into the room. Amalia might have considered the goats house pets, but I did not, and so I got up and led the animal outside. Closing the French doors would make the room too stuffy, so I pulled shut the louvers that were on either side of the opening. The shutters let air into the room but kept out the animals.

  They made the room darker, however, and I lighted the kerosene lamp on the desk with matches from my purse before opening the final drawer of the desk. It was filled with small boxes and a stack of photographs tied up in a silk ribbon. I lined up the pictures on the desk, nearly twenty of them, and they included copies of the portraits that I had brought with me, although Bayard Lott’s likeness was not there. Several of the pictures were tintypes, much older than those in the box of Father’s things, They might have been pictures of Amalia’s parents. Mr. Satterfield would know, or Ezra. There were also tiny portraits of black people. One could have been Ezra as a young man.

  After I examined the photographs, I took out one of the small boxes, red leather with gilt edging, thinking all of them were empty. Amalia would have had wonderful jewelry in her day, but she would have sold it over the years, just as she had sold the plantations. But she had not, I discovered when I opened the first box and found a diamond ring, a large champagne-colored stone on a gold band. The ring was very plain, to show off the brilliance of the diamond, which was much better than the ones Odalie had worn. The ring is mine now, I thought, and slipped it onto my finger, holding it up to the kerosene lamp.

  There were a dozen boxes in the drawer, some of them empty, but others containing old pieces, very good ones—a dragonfly inset with rubies, a spray of flowers with blossoms made of diamonds, pearls in their centers. There was a strand of pearls with a bow-shape clasp of diamonds. Amalia must have worn the necklace often because the pearls were not faded like pearls that are closed up in boxes for long periods of time, but fresh and milky pink.

  I returned the pearls to their velvet resting place and opened another box, which held pieces of hair jewelry, never a favorite of mine. They brought to mind women shearing locks from dead friends and relatives, then mournfully braiding and twisting the strands into shapes and preserving them in tiny glass windows to be displayed on their bosoms. Along with a hair brooch framed in gold, Amalia had a plaited bracelet and a watch chain.

  “That be old Miss Emilie’s hair, Miss Amalia’s mama. When she die, Miss Amalia make them,” Ezra said. He must have come from the back of the house, because the porch shutters were still closed. But I had not heard his footsteps.

  “She was very talented.”

  Ezra snorted. “She don’t pleasure herself none with the doing of it. She say you ought not wear pieces of the dead on yourself. But that what ladies did, and the captain, he favored the watch chain.”

  He came over to the desk. “Aunt Polly cook a pan of ginger bread and cut you a corner piece.” He set down a tray and removed a starched napkin that covered a glass of milk—goat’s milk, undoubtedly—and one of the Old Paris plates from the dining room with a piece of cake on it. A polished silver fork lay beside the plate. My dinner companions last night were right indeed when they said the remnants of Natchezian society lived in poverty but still used their finest china and silver. “Miss Amalia like to eat off the tray.”

  I thanked him and asked if he would share the ginger bread with me, but he looked startled and shook his head. In all the years they had lived together had those three, mistress and two servants, ever sat down to a meal together? Then Ezra straightened the tray on the desk with his powerful calloused hands.

  “Aunt Polly say you step by the quarters come dinnertime. She fixing enough for you to join us, just like Miss Amalia. She taken her dinner at the quarters.”

  And I thought how I had been wrong about one more thing in this moldy old place.

  Chapter Five

  EZRA HAD NOT TOLD ME where to find the quarters—servants quarters, I thought at first, but, of course, they had been slave quarters.

  So I followed a path from the gallery to the back of the house and through what must have been the formal rose gardens. There were remnants of shell-covered pathways beside rectangular plots that were outlined by ragged boxwood and filled with weeds and overgrown rosebushes. The bushes still bore bright flowers. Ezra had reached through their thorns to cut the rose for me.

  Two wings extended straight back from the rear of the house. The space between them, once open back galleries on both first and second floors, was enclosed by shutters, the louvers broken. The steps were gone, and a board was propped up to serve as a staircase. It struck me that a ladder was used at the main entrance but a sloping piece of lumber was good enough for the servants’ entrance.

  Attached to the house was a conservatory, its glass panes shattered. And behind was a collection of dependencies that were rotting into the earth. Since there was no kitchen inside the house, meals must have been prepared in one of these outbuildings and carried to the dining room, either because of fear of fire or to keep the smells and the heat of the cooking out of the house. Other buildings would have been a carriage house, which now housed the REO; a washhouse; and perhaps a smokehouse and a dairy, where crocks of cream and milk and butter were cooled in springwater to keep them from souring. Or maybe those housekeeping functions had been performed at one of the plantations, with the milk and meats brought to Avoca. Pickett had told me the antebellum mansions in Natchez were town homes, occupied during the social season. The real work took place on the plantations. The Bondurants, she said, had owned a thousand slaves, but only twenty had worked at Avoca. Now just two were responsible for all the work. No wonder Avoca was falling down.

  A few more steps down the path, past a curious tree that was hung with glass bottles—blue milk of magnesia containers, green Coke bottles, and clear glass canning jars—I spotted a long, narrow two-story building close to the far side of Amalia’s house. It was constructed of brick. Smoke came from a chimney at one end. I knocked on the door frame, then stepped inside.

  The room, calcimined an off-white, was a respite from the outside heat, despite the fire in the enormous brick fireplace, which was fitted with cranes and ovens. A black spider with a lid stood in the coals, and a pot hung from one of the iron bars. This was Avoca’s kitchen. Shelves along the walls held gleaming copper pudding molds. Why would anyone take the time to polish them, when there was so much other work to be done on the estate? Neatly lined up on shelves were cake pans and pie plates and serving platters big enough to hold a roast suckling pig. Heavy iron spoons and ladles and meat forks hung from hooks on the wall.

  A flour barrel stood on the floor, and above it on a shelf, tin canisters for condiments were lined up. One container the size of a shoe box, marked SUGAR, was fitted with a lock. Perhaps the sweetener was once so precious that the mistress of Avoca—Miss Emilie, it would have been—had unlocked the box and, using sugar nippers, had cut the day’s allotment of sugar from a big con
e and given it to the cook.

  A woman moved from the end of a wooden table that stood along one wall. In the poor light, she appeared to be only a shade darker than Ezra. Her face was freckled, and her hair was red, streaked with white. I had expected Aunt Polly to be a yard broad and very black, with heavy features, like the jolly southern mammies in magazine advertisements. Instead, she was slender and bent over and of an indeterminate age.

  “Afternoon, Miss Nora.” Aunt Polly shuffled forward. “My feets on the drag. I got rusty ankles.” She laughed, a pleasing low sound.

  I went to her and took her hands and said we should both sit down, but she shook her head. “I won’t sit just yet.” She turned to a narrow stairway behind the door and called, “Ezra, young miss step by here.” In a minute, Ezra came down the stairs into the room and stood looking at me. Aunt Polly told me, “Turn go my hands, and I’ll dish up the dinner.”

  “Let me help you.”

  She gave me a quizzical look. “God from Glory! Miss Nora. You don’t help. Ezra help.” She shook her head at the absurdity of it. “You taken yourself to the chair. I tell Ezra bring a tray to you, but he say you best get out that old house and come on to the quarters for your dinner.”

  The two of us looked at each other for a long time, each pretending that Ezra actually had invited me. He’d probably told Aunt Polly that I could go into town and buy dinner for myself. Aunt Polly was the one who had wanted me to eat with them. My feelings for Ezra were unsure, but I liked Aunt Polly.

  I pulled out a chair, but Ezra grunted and pointed to the end of the table where Aunt Polly had been arranging the cutlery. Two places along the side had been set with tin plates and spoons, but there was an Old Paris soup plate, a silver spoon and fork, and a white linen napkin at the end of the table.

  “Ezra, you get that chair for Miss Nora,” Aunt Polly said. When he hesitated a second, she added, “You heard me. You ain’t blind,” and Ezra went to the chair and seated me.