The Legacy of Beulah Land

by Lonnie Coleman

  Josephine would not move from the bedside, but the others, including Zebra, followed Sarah to her office. Zebra was asked to repeat what he had told them of finding the boy. Rolfe listened and said, “He’s alive because he’s young. The cold was a bad thing for him in that condition.” He looked from Sarah to Benjamin. “I’d say he was beaten and left to live or die as he would.” Mabella brought in coffee and poured it out. When he had been given a cup, the doctor continued, “My counting is two broken ribs, a broken finger—I think he was thrown and fell on his left hand and side, for the wrist is sprained. The eyes are swollen shut but not put out, as I first feared. Four loose teeth, one or two of which he will lose. You saw the cuts on his back and legs. They might have been made by a piece of leather harness, considering where he was found. I’ve done what I can, but he’s going to hurt considerable and for a long time. I don’t like to soak a child with laudanum. If he doesn’t get pneumonia, he ought to come around. I’ll be back this afternoon—unless you want me to ask Dr. Platt to come. I know he generally sees you-all. He sent me because he—was on another case.” Sarah, who had never favored Platt, shook her head. Rolfe finished his coffee and stood. “If he wakes, somebody be there.”

  “Somebody will,” Benjamin said. He thanked the doctor and led him out of the house, seeing him on his horse and away. Returning to Leon’s room, he found his grandmother. Gray daylight now came in at the windows, and the lamp had been extinguished. Mabella tiptoed about, and after a little argument replaced Josephine at the bedside, her eyes never leaving the child’s sleeping face. Benjamin stood for a minute at the foot of the bed with Sarah, but when he turned to go, she followed.

  In the hallway, they met Casey. “Josephine just told me.”

  Benjamin said, “I’m going to the farm to find out what happened.”

  Sarah nodded. “I’d better stay with Leon.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Casey said to Benjamin, who looked surprised but made no objection, and half an hour later they trotted their horses into the farmyard, where they found Bessie emerging from the barn. She stared at Benjamin suspiciously as he swung down from his horse. “Zebra hasn’t showed up. I had to milk the cow, and I can’t find Leon.”

  “He’s at Beulah Land.”

  “So he ran away to you!” Her tone was both exasperated and relieved. “He slept in the barn last night. He’s been wanting to ever since me and Gene got married, and last night we let him.” Neither man spoke; Casey remained on his horse. “Well, what did he tell you?” Bessie demanded. “You can’t believe what young’uns say; they make up things to excuse themselves. Slipped off, and me beginning to worry! He don’t always turn up for breakfast. Boys go about their business same as men do, both expecting you to be there when they come. All this time at Beulah Land without asking! Sly—wait till I get my hands on him—”

  “Nobody is going to lay hands on him again,” Benjamin said.

  “I sure don’t have to get your permission—”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “I know he misbehaved himself and got corrected for it. He threw coffee all over Gene and said a mean, ugly thing. Gene’s put up with a lot of his sass, but I told him he’d better take him to the barn and—I reckon he’s repeated to you what he said. Actually accused Gene of killing Ma!” Misreading Benjamin’s astonishment, she went on. “Actually said that! And me an eyewitness to the very accident that killed her.” She slapped her side in disbelief.

  “It was Gene that beat him?”

  For a moment she looked defensive and tried to cover it with a show of anger. “Ben, don’t tell me how to raise my young’un!”

  “He’s mine from now on.”

  “He is like mad-itch! What have you done with him?” She frowned at the bare ground as he then told her the injuries the doctor had diagnosed. “Like I said, him and Gene had a set-to, and I have to say Gene was in the right.”

  “Is Eugene at the sawmill?”

  “Where else would he be this time of day?” Benjamin got back on his horse Jupiter and turned him into the main road, Casey behind him. Bessie ran after them. “You send him home when you get him well! Idea you saying he’s your’n! He ain’t! I had the care of him till you took a notion you’d like to have him—and you wouldn’t have if your woman hadn’t been dry! You hear me, Ben Davis?”

  Benjamin and Casey did not talk about Bessie as they followed the road that would bring them to the mill before it entered Highboro. Casey spoke of the frost that lingered on the fields, although the sun was well up. The clay road was hard and rang with the horses’ hooves because there had been no rain for a week and the temperature had remained near freezing. At the sawmill Bonard told them they would find Eugene stacking lumber and invited them to stop in the office where it was warm when they had done their business with him. Turning a corner amid the stack of lumber, they saw Eugene at a little distance, watching half a dozen Negro men setting freshly cut planks in overlapping triangular formations to be seasoned by the weather. Benjamin stopped and called: “I want to see you private, Eugene!”

  Eugene nodded but continued to watch the Negroes a minute longer to be certain they kept to their regular rhythm of walking and carrying and stacking. Strolling over, he handled the club familiarly, not in a threatening way but out of habit, his fingers busy with it as a musician will touch a silent instrument. “What you want?”

  “You beat my son.”

  “I reckon you mean Bessie’s oldest boy.” He cocked his head back and said it a little rudely but without challenge. “I hit him a time or two for being uppity.”

  “Doctor says you might have killed him.”

  “Doctor?”

  “He’s at Beulah Land where he’s going to stay.”

  Eugene shrugged. “Nothing to me. Between you and Bessie. You want him? I don’t. Got my own, one I made. I don’t ask another man to do it for me. Tell you: maybe I’ll talk Bess into selling him to you. What you say to fifty dollars? A month, I mean, for as long as you want him. You can get a good nigger for fifteen and the best for twenty, but you’d want to pay more for your own flesh and blood, I reckon, if he’s yours as you claim.”

  Benjamin gave no warning word, but his face was warning enough, and Eugene deflected the blow with a quick swing of his club. Casey stood aside but alert. The Negro workmen froze in their tracks as Benjamin leaped upon Eugene, bearing him to the ground. The two struggled and rolled, their clothes collecting leaves and wood shavings until they came to a rise of ground and could roll no more. On their knees then, facing, each strove to overpower the other. They looked an even match at first, neither able to land a solid blow, their hard grunts and red faces the main evidence of conflict. They were not practiced fighters. Benjamin hadn’t struck another in anger since he was a boy, and Eugene was used to getting his way with one blow of fist or club without his opponent’s fighting back. Eugene had dropped the club, but it rolled slowly after them, and he stretched an arm to reach it. Benjamin saw and kicked the club away, pressing Eugene to the ground and setting one knee on his chest. He then quickly straddled him. Eugene kicked up, but Benjamin’s thighs held him down. Eugene grabbed Benjamin’s head and cracked it against his own, trying again to buck free of his rider; but Benjamin clung and presently began to deal blows that found Eugene’s face and neck. Eugene strained to break free as he was beaten on the face, but he grew weaker and presently gave up resisting, whereupon Benjamin continued to land blows on him until Bonard arrived and wrenched him off the man beneath him, who was now senseless.

  “What in hell? How come you pick a fight with my best man? What’d he do? Godalmighty, Ben, that man is worth money to me!” Bonard turned to the little crowd of Negroes who had gathered to stare as the hungry might gaze upon food. “One of y’all come and help me get him to the office yonder!”

  Casey guided Benjamin back to their horses, and Benjamin slumped against Jupiter until he could breathe more evenly. Then he carefully set foot in stirrup and swung hims
elf onto the horse. Casey got back on his, and they rode away without looking back.

  Leon was able to eat nothing that day, but a bowl of gruel Josephine made from the stock of a wild turkey Daniel had shot. That night Benjamin kept a log burning in the fireplace and slept in a chair beside his son’s bed, waking when Leon began to cry protests in a dream. Dropping to his knees, he roused the boy with sounds of comfort.

  “Pa?”

  He touched the boy’s forehead with his lips. “I’m here.”

  PART TWO

  1886

  1

  Annabel Saxon took the occasion of funerals, the most recent being that of Margaret-Ella Davis, to remind the women of the family they were getting older. It was never “we,” but “you.” “You are all getting old,” she would say firmly, looking at Sarah Troy. She might then proceed to tick off on the fingers of both hands the ages of various female relatives, close and not so close, present and absent. Often she ascribed more years to them than they honestly claimed, but if one complained, Annabel fixed the objector with such an incredulous look as to cast the matter into everlasting doubt. On her good days, which predominated, Sarah was pleased to correct her briskly, allowing no “But surely—” no wink, no indulgent concession.

  “Annabel, you are wrong,” Sarah would say. “Your sister is fifty-five. I remember when you were happy to keep her younger than you; but you’ve always been mean about Doreen.”

  “I am the soul of Christian charity,” Annabel assured her.

  “Jesus will be pleased to hear it.”

  Annabel uttered one of her joyless laughs. “Anyway, you are seventy-five. I don’t imagine you will debate that point with me? Nineteen years older than I. A grown woman when I was born.”

  “That event sinks deeper into history with every breath we draw. Is that Miss Kilmer behind the fern? I must ask her about Toby. He’s getting old too and had a sore paw the last time I saw him.”

  Sarah’s seventy-five years compelled her to surrender few of her activities. “I can do anything,” she boasted, although admitting to Jane, “only a little less. I work until I’m tired and rest. Then I work again. It’s something you learn.” She would never think herself old. She’d learned to behave at times as if she was aging, because it disconcerted the young to see her disregard the limitations that time imposes, but even as she remembered to walk a little more slowly, to bend a little less supplely, she could say to herself: “This is Sarah pretending to be an old woman.” Oh, there were days enough she felt coffin-ready, but that was not the same as feeling old.

  One of the activities she vowed never to abandon was what she called her cemetery drill, although she no longer insisted that it be exclusive of children, even male ones. Jane had been an easy convert to leaving their families for a day, suddenly and deliberately, two or three times a year. Such a day was this mild and cloudy one in late January.

  “It won’t rain,” Sarah had assured Jane when proposing the excursion that morning in the kitchen of Jane’s house. “There’s no feel of rain.”

  Jane agreed there was not; and Bruce was all eagerness when Sarah returned to the big house and told her she might go with them instead of attending school. Sarah had admitted Bruce to participation in the cemetery drill two years ago, when Bruce was five. She represented the youngest generation and must be initiated into the meaning of being a woman of Beulah Land. Children are more ready for responsibility than their elders are to share it. And so after breakfast, when the men had gone about their plantation chores, Leon and Davy and Bobby Lee gathered books and climbed into the wagon to ride into Highboro with their great-grandmother and mother and sister-cousin.

  During the passage from home to school the boys veered from mutinous to wheedling, finally extracting from the ladies a grudging permission to join them at noon for an hour when school broke for dinner. Josephine and Mabella and Velma had packed a basket of victuals with generosity and ingenuity. There were ham and pork roast slices between halves of buttered biscuits, watermelon rind preserves and cucumber pickles, baked sweet potatoes to be peeled and eaten from the hand, boiled eggs, sausages stiff in a film of congealed grease, apples and fruit cake and a jar of toasted pecans to be savored with a bottle of blackberry wine.

  After leaving the boys at school (“The insult,” they declared to each other. “Having us carry a note to Bruce’s teacher explaining her absence for the day!”) Sarah drove the wagon to the grove of trees behind the church, where she unhitched the horse. Gentle Minerva would be content to wait, shifting her feet, dreaming of soft summer grass, and dropping perfectly round balls of dung to shatter and steam on the hard, bare ground. Jane collected tools from the back of the wagon as Sarah unbuttoned her sweater and Bruce ran ahead to open and close the double wrought-iron gates between churchyard and graveyard.

  Together they made the first survey of the Kendrick and Davis burying grounds to decide what most needed doing; separately they set to. As the work went forward, each finished bit gave satisfaction. In the two years Bruce had helped her aunt and great-grandmother she’d learned to make a favorite of a particular grave on each visit. Today she elected Benjamin Davis, comfortable in the reminder that her father’s name had first been borne by this man whose date of death was July 17, 1831, and whose stone also carried a legend hardly traceable from the years’ accumulation of mold and ground moss: Over in the summer land. Of what she’d been told of him, she remembered that he’d been crippled by a stroke of paralysis and carried about during the last years of his life by a great slave named Monday Kendrick. That Benjamin Davis had been her father’s great-grandfather. Pitying him as if he’d died yesterday, she made his grave her tender concern.

  Glancing at the child, Sarah guessed some of her thoughts. The lip scar shone brightly pink as Bruce sweated with the exertion of repairing and resetting a brick border. She never complained of the scar or asked why she wasn’t like other girls. If most of the men and women under the gravestones were unknown to Bruce and a matter of hearsay, many were familiar to Jane as flesh and blood, and to Sarah not merely familiar but family, loved or not but all accepted. She was not unhappily aware that one day she would lie here and that Jane, then Bruce, and those who came after them would perform something like this day’s duty to her own mound of earth.

  Bruce had never asked before: “Why isn’t Aunt Selma here?”

  “She wanted to be with Lovey and Ezra in our cemetery at Beulah Land.”

  Hesitantly, Bruce said, “We owned them, didn’t we?”

  “They were ours, and we were theirs,” Sarah said. “Abraham’s father and mother are there too, and Pauline will be one day.”

  “Why did Aunt Selma want to be with the Negroes?”

  “They never hurt her, so she loved them.”

  Although there was no rule, they generally started at the edges, working apart until the progress of their tasks drew them toward the center, in the way women gradually contract a quilting frame. They might call back and forth a joke or genial complaint, but their exchanges were brief during the first hour or two. There was one grave Sarah avoided until Jane began to work at it, brushing leaves away, pulling a weed, trimming grass as delicately as she would cut a baby’s hair. Without looking around she knew that Sarah was watching and that presently she would speak. “You’re good to be so careful.” Jane would not know she had been tense until she felt her shoulders relax. Bruce had learned not to join them there. Once she had done so; overwhelmed by love, she had touched her great-grandmother, and Sarah had wept wildly. When Sarah spoke behind her today, Jane’s gestures became at once more casual. Sarah joined her in the work, and soon they were chatting about any and everything under the sun except the man whose body lay beneath their hands and out of the sun forever.

  Sarah said, “I think Velma’s going to marry Zadok’s youngest boy.”

  “Hollis?” Jane asked unnecessarily. Sarah nodded. “Freda hasn’t said anything. Is Rosalie happy about it?”

  “R
osalie wouldn’t consider Princess Alexandra good enough for Hollis, but Velma is terrified of her, which is the next-best thing.”

  “I didn’t know they’d ever looked at each other.”

  “Nor I until Bruce told me. Velma told Bruce. I can remember when something that happened in one of the cabins could change our lives, and what happened to us could change theirs. Now we all go on not much caring, though we say we do, but that’s manners. The old feeling is gone. Perhaps it’s better.”

  The day warmed, and Sarah took off her sweater and hung it on an angel’s raised hand. Bruce fetched a bucket of water from the well beside the church, and the three talked as they refreshed themselves. Now and then someone would enter or leave the church. Doreen and Eloise Kilmer came through the gates to greet them, but soon left. Others were content to wave, knowing Sarah did not want company on her workdays at the graveyard. Two who did not come, although they were frequenters of the church, were Ann Oglethorpe and Priscilla Davis. Sarah regularly took Bruce to their house, but there was no ease on those visits, and neither side encouraged closer congress. Mother and child were as cool and correct as oriental envoys.

  The morning’s peace was shattered five minutes after twelve by the panting arrival of Leon and Bobby Lee and Davy, who had run all the way from school. Jane set them to work. Leon went to give Minerva water and hay and talk to her a little, while Bobby Lee drew another bucket of water for drinking and washing hands, and Davy lugged the basket of food to the wide flat stone covering the grave of Edna Davis. When they were two or three, they ate in the wagon or buggy they’d come in. Today they would want the amplitude of Edna’s memorial stone. “She’d be the first to insist on it,” Sarah said as she flung and adjusted the tablecloth. Before they could set out all the dishes and jars, they were joined by Fanny and Blair Saxon, who had evidently followed the other children from school.