Leon’s eyes owned the truth of it.
“You want to see her? I got her laid out and ready.”
She led them in and turned the sheet back from the face. After she explained when and where the burying was to be, Benjamin said he would bring a coffin from town.
Bessie accepted without thanking: “She’d appreciate that.” She covered the face and led them to the porch, where they found Eugene lifting the cloth on the hamper. “What you got there?”
Eugene handed her the hamper.
Bessie looked over the things under the cloth. “Pity we’ve eat. Well, won’t none of it go to waste, will it, Gene?”
“Sure won’t,” Eugene said, picking up the fruit jar of Brunswick Stew and uncapping it to sniff.
“That’s Gran’s!” Leon said sharply.
Eugene smiled at him dolefully.
“Don’t you take it bad,” Bessie warned Leon, and then put herself in Benjamin’s way when he moved a step toward the boy. “You go along,” she said. “We’ll expect you early as you can make it in the morning.”
The funerals were as different as the lives and deaths of the two women.
Mrs. Marsh was put down in earth as hard as her lot had been. The rural church with its dozen splintery benches was on a hill that afforded no tree, no flower, not even a weed or blade of grass. The ground was dead, and summer had baked it as if it were clay. Sarah had planned to go but could not with Nell’s funeral to settle, so Benjamin and Zadok arrived at the Marsh farm soon after eight o’clock, having roused the storekeeper in Highboro at six-thirty to sell a coffin. Watching them carry it to their wagon, he told them it was good luck for a coffin to be his first sale of the day.
Bessie waited impatiently and offered no refreshment. The long summer days, she said, were not long enough for all there was to do. Eugene was in the fields; he would not go with them. Benjamin and Zadok carried the coffin into the house, where Bessie helped them to load it and return it to the wagon. Then Leon sat between Bessie and Benjamin, who drove, while Zadok knelt in the body of the wagon, his hands steadying the coffin over the bumpy road to the church. Benjamin and Zadok dug the grave, and the others waited, blind in the sun. Miss Ona tried to lead them in singing but gave it up after shrilling solo through all the choruses, which she prided herself on knowing, of “In the Sweet By-and-By.” Reverend Paul, when the grave was ready and the sweating men who’d dug it stood aside, lifted his hands and bowed his head. In a voice that begged without hope and threatened without power, he consigned body to earth and soul to heaven. The ceremony was as bleak as its setting. Throughout it Bessie farted quietly, having eaten largely of the Brunswick Stew the night before on top of her early supper. Benjamin and Zadok filled in the grave, and nobody cried. Benjamin gave Reverend Paul a dollar before they left.
The funeral of Nell Kendrick was the next morning at St. Thomas’s in Highboro. The church would not hold all who came, and those unable to enter waited in the graveyard to witness the burial. There was good singing from the choir and bad from Eloise Kilmer and Doreen Davis, each trying to keep her companion to the pitch and failing, like panicked swimmers drowning one another. There were two long readings from the Bible in addition to the words of the burial service, which the Reverend Horace Quarterman intoned with soaring awareness of the magnitude of occasion and congregation. Nell, had she not been dead, would have slept through it.
There was no weeping on the main floor, but upstairs in the section reserved for the Negroes of Beulah Land, there was. Mabella’s familiar wail rose high. Josephine itched to give her a slap. In truth, Josephine grieved more than any, perhaps, except Sarah. When Josephine, who had been head laundress, became cook at Beulah Land on the death of Lotus, Nell complained that her biscuits tasted of soap; but that had been at the beginning of Josephine’s reign in the kitchen. They had long since been each other’s admirer, Josephine loving Nell for her appetite—what cook can altogether resist greed? and Nell loving Josephine for her unfailing ability to satisfy both appetite and greed. Josephine would never again wake with the certainty she’d enjoyed in Nell’s lifetime of how necessary she was; and to be needed is all.
Downstairs, Sarah’s mind wandered. She came out of a study aware of the smell of the old hymnals. They had endured all weathers, and even in this driest heat of midsummer conveyed a memory of the chill of December devotions and wet Sundays in February. Heavy on the air too was the smell of flowers mingling with the too sweet scent of face powder. For a moment Sarah, knowing where she was, could not remember why she was there.
She brought herself back to the present moment. Aunt Nell.
Sarah smiled. Beside her, as if he followed her thought, Casey smiled and squeezed her hand. Sarah loved Nell Kendrick and would love her as long as memory held, but she understood that Nell had not been, nor wanted to be, a lovable woman. She was selfish, first to last. She’d lived entirely to suit herself insofar as she could. She had lied to herself about almost everything and everyone around her. She saw no fault in the people she approved, no virtue in those she disapproved. By denying love to her husband, Felix Kendrick, she had denied him the children he wanted and turned him into something of a libertine; and she had done it all persuaded that she loved him. But Sarah would not forget that when Felix became ill, Nell nursed him day and night until danger of death was over; nor would she forget it was Nell who insisted, since Felix could not, that every penny they possessed go to saving Beulah Land when it was threatened with bankruptcy; nor that it was Nell who, begging and praying, had tried to save Lotus and Nancy from being raped by the Union soldiers, and that when she could not, she had hidden Jane from them. Nor would she forget Nell’s dedication to besting Annabel. How she would miss her old ally there! And beyond these reasonable claims on love and memory, there was the further one, the all but incredible yet undeniable fact that perfect selfishness such as Nell’s not infrequently generates the purest affection.
There was singing again; it was nearly over. Then brief silence and general rustle told Sarah the church service had ended. She took Casey’s arm, and they walked up the long center aisle, followed by Benjamin and Priscilla, and then by Jane and Daniel and the Todd boys. In the graveyard there was another prayer, and the coffin was lowered into the ground, “by my beloved Felix, only not too close,” as she had wanted it.
They turned away with that quick release of tension all ceremonies produce. Voices rose cheerfully, filling the bright July morning.
“The last of her generation—”
“A great lady—”
“A loss to us all—”
“Her fine Christian spirit—”
“Too bad she couldn’t live to be a hundred.”
Again Sarah smiled as she and Casey waited for those who wanted to speak the words they’d saved until now. There was little that anyone could regret in Nell’s death, and so the suggestion was made a number of times that it would have been fitting had she lived to be an even hundred. It was like Southern hospitality, Sarah thought—no one allowed to go home without its being said that his stay had been too short.
Here was Annabel at last, touching her handkerchief to the oily sweat of her chin. “Well, Auntie Sarah,” she said brightly, “with Aunt Nell dead, you become the family elder.”
Among the attendants and witnesses was one who did not deplore the brevity of Nell’s earthly exile. Ann Oglethorpe, attended by husband Philip and daughter Elizabeth, took her turn before Sarah. “I pray the Lord to forgive her greed and snatch her from the flames in time.” She turned away, leaving daughter and husband to bow and smile amends.
Shortly after, as Sarah accepted the more conventional comfortings of others, she saw Priscilla leave Benjamin to join her mother; and the two walked soberly among the graves with their heads close. Elizabeth left her father standing statue-lone among the carved tombstones and went to Jane’s side, where she was immediately joined by Thomas Cooper, the only one of Jane’s old beaux still a bachelor. Benjamin w
as with Frankie and Bonard. Bonard’s usual flush deepened as he began to laugh and then to cough, lighting a cigar. Frankie ignored him to look at Benjamin as if, Sarah suddenly realized, she owned both of them. Was Jane right that there was something between them now? Annabel commanded the attention of James and the ebullient Maggie, whose cheer was undimmed by the occasion. Nell’s maid Bianca was at the graveside watching the filling in. Casey caught Sarah’s eye; it was enough to induce him to move off to Bianca, who had no special friend among the other house women at Beulah Land. She had served Nell all of her adult life and was considered “stuck-up.”
The last consolation acknowledged and the graveyard empty of all save family, Sarah went to Casey and Bianca. Casey was saying, “She looked very pretty, Bianca, our thanks to you.”
Tears trembled on the old one’s eyelids, slipping into the wrinkles of her cheeks. “What’s to become of me?”
“You’re to do as you please,” Sarah told her. “If there’s anything of Aunt Nell’s you’d like to have, except her jewelry, which she said was to be Miss Jane’s—”
“I want her clothes,” Bianca said promptly.
“They’re yours.”
“And her walking cane?”
“Yours too.”
“Can I have her bed?”
Sarah hesitated only briefly. “Everything in her room will be moved to your cabin. I’ll tell Wally this evening to attend to it.”
Bianca nodded with satisfaction. “I want to see Josephine’s face when she finds out.”
22
Sarah was not a patient woman, but she made herself wait more than a week before going to see Bessie. It was a busy time at Beulah Land anyhow. With the corn being harvested, everything bent to seasonal expedience. Fodder was pulled when the corn was mature but the leaves still green. These were stripped from the stalk, twisted, and hung on a standing ear, later to be gathered and tied together with a strong green leaf before being loaded into wagons. It was hot dirty work for the men. Their arms and backs ached; and sometimes their hands, used though they were to rough labor, bled from the cutting leaves. When the corn was harvested, the cotton would be ready for picking and ginning. The picking was easy on hands, hard on knees and backs. Taking the cotton to gin was like a holiday after the long weeks of toil that had gone before. The house women were busy too, pickling and preserving and drying the fruit and vegetables from orchard and garden.
But beyond these occupations and preoccupations of the day was Sarah’s resolve to have Leon at Beulah Land, if she could. She and Benjamin talked about it, and when he continued to put the natural question “How?” she could only say she didn’t know how but means would be discovered. On a Sunday afternoon when others were sleeping or wishing it was Monday, and others were loving and wishing Monday would never come, she hitched her buggy and drove off to see Bessie. She had no plan; she trusted to luck, and luck, as sometimes happened, was with her. She found Bessie alone in her kitchen boiling tomatoes to put up for the winter. They were already overcooked, Sarah noted on entering, and the kitchen was steamy. At Bessie’s invitation Sarah set a straight chair on the back porch outside the door so that they might talk while Bessie watched the tomatoes.
“Smell of these things has brought every fly in the county,” Bessie declared.
Casual interchange established after opening amenities, it was easy enough for Sarah to express regret at not having been able to come when Mrs. Marsh died, and for Bessie to say she’d wanted to go to Mrs. Nell Kendrick’s funeral, “but there was just no way, ma’am.”
Sarah agreed. “Both coming together like that. Strange it should happen so.”
“The ways of the Lord.” Bessie shook her head.
“Mm.”
“Still, I don’t know,” Bessie tempered, “both of them being so old. Mrs. Nell was rich old, and Ma was poor old, and that evens their ages, you might say. In numbers Ma wasn’t as old as you, Miss Sarah, but she was wore out. Hadn’t happened the cow dragging her, it’d been something else. She was ready.”
Although the tomato odor was so strong as to be stench by now, Sarah said, “Don’t they taste good in the winter? Open a jar and whatever you’ve got on hand becomes a meal.”
“Yes’m,” Bessie said curtly, with a cook’s concentration as she tested the consistency of the tomatoes. “Now.”
“Let me help you.” Sarah left her chair, and the two women worked quickly with a dozen scalded jars. They did not talk at all until they were done, by which time Sarah as well as Bessie had sweated through her clothes.
“I’m going to leave everything to clean up later,” Bessie said. “Got to get out of this kitchen.” So saying, she led them through the kitchen doorway, carrying a straight chair in either hand. In the back yard she set them under the leafy chinaberry tree near the well. Upending the dried-out draw bucket to dislodge a cluster of dead chinaberries, Bessie dropped it into the well with a clatter and a bang, letting it sink and cool before giving it more rope and drawing water from the coldest depth. She offered the first dipper to Sarah, who drank it gratefully. Bessie then drank two dipperfuls, wiped her mouth on her apron, and joined Sarah in the shade.
“Where’s Eugene?” Sarah asked, building upon their work intimacy.
Bessie laughed. “Eugene sounds like somebody I don’t know, but Gene is in the woods with his traps. Not your woods, ma’am, I hasten to add. Him and old Crawford still like to seine for fish and kill animals.”
Sarah nodded absently, as if all men did and she understood it to be so. “Is Leon off with them?”
“Oh, no’m. Leon don’t go. Not that Gene ever asked him to, but Leon wouldn’t step on a moth if it was a gold piece. Don’t know where Leon got to, actual fact. Since Ma died, he’s broody, roots around by hisself ofttimes. Thought first he was up to boy mischief, but I reckon he’s too young for it, if they ever be.” Bessie winked at her guest.
Sarah made herself smile. “Jane’s boys are always asking for him, wanting him to come spend the day.”
“I spect he misses them too,” Bessie admitted. “No young’uns near here to play with.”
“Set him on the road one morning to catch a ride over,” Sarah suggested. “Lot of wagons back and forth from now to November. We’ll take care of him and send him back safe and sound, as we’ve done before.”
Acknowledging this reminder of favors done, Bessie said, “No fear you wouldn’t. He was fat as a pumpkin after staying with y’all that time.”
“I’ll take him today if he wants to come,” Sarah offered.
“Reckon not,” Bessie responded drily. “Another time maybe.”
Knowing that most women enjoy gossiping about themselves and that Bessie had few opportunities, Sarah took a deliberate chance. “What are you intending about Gene?”
Bessie frowned. “Don’t know how you mean.” Before Sarah could admit defeat and get up and go, Bessie said, “Yes, I do. Well, I’ve got kind of a problem.” Sarah waited, not daring to look encouraging. “Thisaway: put a man and woman together and you-know-what is going to happen, no matter their ages. I reckon anybody can figure that far. Ma used to say he coveted the farm. Maybe he did, but it’s not only that. Sometimes he’s more man than I want on the place, and others he’s like a young’un I must take care of. I know how to manage him, and he’s been good, sure enough has.” She sighed impatiently. “I got to make up my mind. He’s after me to let’s get married. I’d find it hard to tell another woman, but you know the past and won’t blame me: I’m going to have his young’un by the end of the year.”
Sarah could have shouted, she could have sung, but she put on a sympathetic frown as she appeared to consider the problem. “You’re in something of a fix.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Bessie tried to smile and grimaced instead. “One young’un the wrong side of the cover is enough for a woman. Another and I’d be done in this county. Every man with the itch would be scratching hisself at my door thinking I had to let him in.”
&nb
sp; There followed a contest of silences. Sarah let hers lengthen almost to rejection before commenting, “Maybe marrying is best.” A moment later she added, “We did what we could, Bessie, but I never thought it was enough.”
“I didn’t expect you to dance for joy and hitch me to your grandson. As for him, another might have denied the whole thing.”
“If you marry Gene,” Sarah said, “you won’t lose us as friends; I promise you that.” She paused, knowing that she must take the next step boldly or not at all. “You’ve never been anywhere, Bessie, except Highboro. That’s everywhere to us in the county but nowhere to the rest of the world. How would you like to go to Savannah and you, and Gene get married there?”
“Leave my farm?” Bessie looked alarmed. “I never slept a night away from it my whole life.”
“I don’t mean for good,” Sarah amended. “I said it wrong. I mean like taking yourselves a wedding trip.”
“You’re talking like we’re rich, Miss Sarah. Gene has made a difference on the farm, but we’re just getting by and barely.” Sarah waited, and the words came that she wanted Bessie to say. “It’s a pretty notion though.”
Sarah had seen excitement behind Bessie’s surprise, if only for a moment. She spoke firmly. “You must make up your mind to marry Gene or not; but if you do, I’ll give you and him fifty dollars to make a trip to Savannah for your wedding.”
“Who’d look after things here? Leon couldn’t go with us.”
“You wouldn’t want him either, a time like that. I’ll send Otis to take care of your stock. He’s the best of our older men. He can sleep in the barn, or if you don’t want him to, he can come back and forth every day.”
Bessie laughed and declared with more truth than she knew, “You got it all figured out!”
The Legacy of Beulah Land Page 14