“Two, three, six months, my dear; there’s no hurry,” said the man whose exacting wife made him an easy mark for a soft smile and a teary eye.
Taking heart, Frankie suggested that, since Bonard had not enjoyed possession of the quarter share of the mill he had been promised and that everyone agreed he had more than earned, his spirit might rejoice in heaven if that share was now settled upon his earthly dependents.
Annabel had anticipated just such a request and forbidden her husband to listen to the widow’s sly importuning. And so, even before Frankie completed her plea, Blair Saxon was shaking his head as if there were bees inside it. “No, no, no, my dear. My wife, Mrs. Saxon—you understand.”
Morning, noon, and night Annabel advised and bullied both of them. If Frankie had resented her before, she now loathed her as much as she dreaded a future under her rule. If only, she thought, forgetting the embroidery in her lap, Priscilla were to be trampled by runaway horses, struck by lightning, etherealized by her own goodness—anything!—oh, anything to hasten her into the fold of that Blessed Shepherd she was forever bleating about.
“Mama?”
“What?” She was startled to see her daughter before her.
“You were dreaming.”
“You’ve stopped playing.”
“I went to answer a knock at the door. It’s Mr. Betchley from the sawmill wanting to see you. I asked him to wait in the hall.”
Glad of any distraction, Frankie dismissed her daughter and invited the caller to take a chair in the little alcove parlor generally reserved for her use. He took his seat; he cleared his throat and looked around at the room he’d never seen. When she sat, he rose, and then reseated himself. Clearly nervous, he smelled of whiskey just taken, but his redness of face was, due to agitation of mind, not drink, she surmised from the experience of her husband’s toping. She smiled in a manner intended both to put him a little more at ease and to remind him that she was a lady.
He worked his hands and swallowed and frowned at the floor, like an anxious suitor. What would her answer be if he were? She studied him without altering her polite expression, enjoying the sensation of having someone uneasy before her. He had put on a suit for the occasion and was freshly shaved, but dark pinpoints of bristle still showed through the barber’s dusting of powder. His short, uneven fingernails were black; his hands looked as hard as pine bark. She knew his reputation as fighter, worker, and lover and felt something of his vitality as he sat quiet and seething before her; but he was crude, and coarseness in a man did not appeal to her. Deciding that they would become ridiculous if they continued to sit in silence, she said, “Is it something to do with the mill, Mr. Betchley?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he admitted in almost guilty relief that she understood him. “It is that—about that I have come. Your husband, Mr. Saxon—” He stopped.
To avoid another silence Frankie put on a warmer smile. “I believe you and he used first names. His death does not cancel your friendship, I hope.”
He looked at her suspiciously. “Well, Mrs. Saxon—Bonard and me talked a lot of times about the mill.”
“That does not surprise me.” Frankie wanted to laugh, but she kept her voice sympathetic. Country men were as wary as creatures in the brush; in spite of a town layer Eugene Betchley was still country. A pale discharge began to slip from his left nostril, but he did not notice it.
“What I mean—me and Bonard pretty much ran the mill. No disrespect to Mr. James Davis either.” He paused again, but Frankie did not move to help him. “I know Mr. Davis has been showing you through the books—as much as a blind man can. Him and Mr. Blair Saxon from the bank.”
“Yes, they have,” Frankie agreed, watching the gradual accumulation of snot on his upper lip. “I understood my husband was a true partner. It turned out that he was not, and they—Mr. Davis and Mr. Saxon—have been explaining to me how things were arranged. That has progressed to my becoming really interested in knowing the way the mill operates, and so they explain more things to me, one thing leading to another, you see. It’s easier to comprehend than I’d have believed, not nearly as difficult as embroidery or crochet. Of course, Mr. Davis could not actually show me, but he knows what’s in every ledger. I seldom have to correct him as we go through them. He has a wonderful mind.”
“Yes’m, wonderful. He doesn’t have to be told much, or more than once. He’s got the memory, as they say, of a Mississippi mule.”
“Do they?” Frankie laughed. “I like that, Mr. Betchley, without knowing quite what it means.”
Again he looked at her suspiciously, and she resumed a more formal attitude. A woman of her level did not make jokes with a man of his.
He set his face to pursue his purpose. “Bonard and me had done a lot of thinking about that mill and a lot of talking.” Again he halted.
“Yes, Mr. Betchley?” she encouraged him.
“He would have brought me into things if he’d gone on living, as we all expected. I promise you that.”
Frankie felt herself at a loss. “I’m certain he had the highest opinion of your abilities, Mr. Betchley, and the highest expectation for your prospects. But perhaps Mr. James Davis is the one you should be talking to.”
“Mrs. Saxon, are you familiar with the cotton mill across the creek from us?”
Thinking at first he meant the cotton gin, she blushed, and then her mind corrected itself and she replied, “I’m aware it’s there. I cannot say more than that.”
His face hardened as if to match his thoughts. “The boy that runs it has a lot of ideas; I can tell you.”
“Abraham Kendrick?”
Suddenly aware of a tickle under his nose, he grabbed it with his fingers and blew, wiping his hand on his trouser leg. “Him. He’s got his mind on doing things big.”
“I’ve never heard Mr. Benjamin Davis say so, or in fact anything about it.”
“He might not have. No, ma’am. But he’s the owner, you see, or one of two owners along with rich-nigger Elk—” She felt that she should make some objection to his attitude, but she was beginning to be interested, not in what he had so far said, which meant little to her, but in his intensity. He was a man with something on his mind, and in a way she did not yet understand, she was involved in it, or he thought so. “That boy with his Yankee-nigger way of talking wants to make it a bigger cotton mill.”
“Does he?” Frankie waited, and when he did not continue, said, “Well, why not?”
“Rich niggers means hungry whites,” Eugene said as soberly as if he were repeating Bible wisdom.
“I don’t see what you expect me to do about it, Mr. Betchley; I declare I don’t.”
“Nothing, ma’am. That’s for me. But you can put me in the way of a stick to fight him with.”
“How?”
Frowning at the floor again, he said, “You say you’ve heard Bonard speak well of me.”
“I have.”
“He trusted me.”
Frankie nodded without conviction.
“I want to do what he’d have done. I can do it, Mrs. Saxon, if you’ll— Mr. James won’t listen to me. He says I’m out of turn and shooting at logs I take to be gators. The cotton mill can’t grow without land. Well, Bonard owns the land on the good side of them. Other side is swamp fit for nothing but snakes and mosquitoes.”
Frankie looked at him searchingly. “I’m afraid you’re wrong, Mr. Betchley. I too thought my husband owned a share in the sawmill, but I discover that he did not—to my distress, I confess.”
“I’m not talking about the mill itself. I couldn’t say about that, not knowing; I took it all to be family. I mean across the creek. Bonard owns the land next to Beulah Mill, and I’ve come to buy that land from you. I’ve got cash money, and I’ll pay you what Bonard paid and a tenth more to boot. I figure that will be a good profit on your sale.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Betchley, there’s some mistake—”
“Thirty dollars an acre he paid. I know because he told
me so, the way he told me a lot of things and to keep them to myself. I’ll give you thirty per acre and a tithe of that, making three hundred and thirty dollars.”
“I never heard of such a thing!”
Misunderstanding her, he said, “A lot of money, Mrs. Saxon. Nobody will offer you more.”
She rose from her chair and stood waiting in a way he could not misinterpret. He flushed more deeply and got to his feet. In an effort to resume courtesy, she thrust out her hand, but he looked at it with such surprise that she withdrew it just as he was deciding to take it. They stared at each other.
“Good night, Mr. Betchley. Thank you for coming.”
He nodded stiffly and left without another word.
6
It was customary to pay extra attention to those recently bereaved and to make them little gifts, at the same time respecting their grief and pointing a hope for the future. After his wife’s death, James received from thoughtful spinsters and widows many a cake and custard, enjoying them when they were worthy but reflecting little on the dreams that had been baked into them. He did not bother to respond when Annabel, critically nibbling a pinch of crust from such a gift, observed, “I don’t imagine you will care to marry again, having tried it twice.” Whatever his private thoughts, he had never confided them to his sister, and he was not about to do so now.
James was comfortable in the house he had acquired along with his second wife. Old Tenah, whose cabin was at the bottom of the kitchen garden, continued to cook and clean for him, while her simple nephew Enoch possessed wits enough to guide him about the town. He required no guide at the sawmill, familiarity as well as smell and sound telling him where he was and guarding him from dangerous work at hand. If during his hours at home he was lonely and sometimes deviled by lust, still he managed; and he had begun to wonder if Frankie Saxon considered him very old. He was fifty-three to her thirty-two, not such a difference as there would have appeared had she been nineteen to his forty. He remembered, of course, that she had once been courted by Benjamin, but that was long ago, and they had both married others. Advantage was on his side: she was poor and loved ease and had two children to provide for.
He had never seen her, but he knew she was beautiful, and not merely from having been told so. Her scent was to him the womanliest fragrance; her hands were shapely and supple to his touch; her voice, of the middle register and nothing out of the ordinary, had come to sound unique to his ears, no matter what others might be speaking in a room. On a recent stop at the barber’s, James had asked that particular care be taken with the trimming of his hair and beard and wanted to know exactly how gray he was. He was told, “Hardly at all; a man of thirty would be proud to look so fine.” James could not see the mockery in the eyes of the barber when he gave the answer he knew was wanted, and cheered himself by supposing that, although a friend or relative might flatter to console, this man of scissors had nothing to gain or lose by telling the plain truth.
Of those who had taken special notice of him since he became a widower was Sarah Troy. Herself a widow, she had no design other than to comfort an old friend and onetime neighbor. Indeed, James’s father had proposed marriage to her long after James himself had made her daughter Rachel his first wife. On the first Sunday in March, James was engaged to have dinner at Beulah Land following church services. So too were Frankie Saxon and her children, and James had ordered a four-seat rockaway from the livery stable to convey them into the country and home again. As they left the church, Enoch driving, they made a touching appearance to some who observed them, for was not the middle-aged man still in mourning for a wife and had not the black-appareled woman beside him recently suffered the loss of a husband? If the sight of them brought a sweet pang to some hearts, however, it did not to Annabel Saxon’s as she watched them from the churchyard. More deeply in thought than she had been at any time during Mr. Quarterman’s sermon, she put on her gloves and took them off and put them on again, until her husband Blair, who seldom ventured a complaint, said to her, “Whatever are you doing? Come on, I’m hungry.”
Frankie had thought much of her conversation with Eugene Betchley, but without mentioning it to either James or the senior Blair Saxon, although she saw them frequently. She did not know why she hesitated when she was determined to ask for a more detailed and precise accounting of her husband’s affairs than she had yet been offered. They had appeared to be open with her, but neither had made mention of what might, what must by right be hers. All they spoke of was “the estate,” and she had assumed that it consisted of nothing more than the house and the land it stood on. Perhaps there was other property. If Eugene Betchley knew what he was talking about, and however crude he was the man was no simpleton, that property included half the land now used by the sawmill and ten acres across the creek from it beside the cotton mill. Poor she might be, but not a pauper to beg scraps at the back door. She would wait for the right moment to ask her questions.
On the seat behind James and Frankie the boy and girl gossiped of teachers they loved and hated and tried to sing a song that had recently gone the round of their school fellows; but when their disagreement over the wording of a verse became a quarrel, they were silenced by a sharp glance from their mother. Blair said he saw a rabbit, though it was gone when Fanny looked where he pointed. If he’d had a rock he could have hit it, he boasted. Fanny told him he was wicked to want to do such a thing, additionally so on a Sunday. Blair pulled a long face in what he thought was a semblance of the Reverend Quarterman, and when she ignored him, untied the sash of her dress, whereupon she jabbed an elbow into his middle and he whined, “Stop it.” This brought another look from their mother, who said, “Fanny, dear.” Blair smiled at her and Frankie reached to pat his cheek before facing front again and saying to James, “My boy is such a comfort. I look to him to make our future. We are turning in.”
“I thought it was time,” James said. “There’s a dip in the road a hundred yards before the carriageway. Have you never noticed it?”
“No.”
“I never did when I had eyes.” James raised his voice without turning his head. “What do you want to be, boy—a banker like your grandpa? Doctor, lawyer—or to follow the footsteps of your papa to the sawmill?”
“No, sir,” Blair said. “I hate the sawmill. I feel sticky every time I go there. I’ll be a poet or maybe a senator. I saw a senator one time in Savannah. He looked rich and Mama said he was.”
“And have you ever seen a poet?” James asked drily. The boy did not answer but made motions as if he held a slingshot in his hands and aimed at the back of the man’s head.
The rockaway rolled through the orchard and came in sight of the house at the end of the double row of trees. Frankie was thinking for the hundredth time that it might have been hers, had she accepted Benjamin Davis’s proposal of marriage a dozen years ago—Beulah Land with its fields and woods and houses and people, hers. Instead of which, she was fretting about ten acres of creekside beside a tacky little factory. Leon and Bruce, Bobby Lee and Davy were watching for them and ran to meet them. By the time they came to the porch the others had come out too, Sarah and Benjamin, Jane and Daniel. Although they had been together at church, conversation was lively in a way it seldom was in the shadow of religious duty. The children raced together around the corner of the house as the six adults adjusted rocking chairs in a semicircle to pass the time until Josephine rang the dinner bell. Interrupting the familiar exchanges, Benjamin said as if bursting with it, “Now, Frankie! What is it I hear about Gene Betchley coming to see you and asking to buy the land next to the cotton mill? You must sell it to us, you know!”
The general exclamations of surprise gave Frankie time to collect herself. She had mentioned the matter to no one and considered it unlikely that Eugene Betchley had done so; certainly he would not have to Benjamin Davis. “How did you hear such a thing?”
He shook his head. “You don’t deny it.”
“It’s true he came to see me.
A week ago Saturday.”
“I could hardly believe it,” Benjamin said, and because he laughed, so did the others, although not with amusement. “Yet it is just the sort of thing he might do—think of a scheme and jump before he thought further.”
James said, “He can be clever enough when it suits our book—”
“What did you say to him?” Sarah asked.
“I said I had no notion Bonard owned such a piece of land,” Frankie replied.
“Nor did we, I confess,” Benjamin said. “It came as a surprise to Roscoe and Abraham, I assure you—”
“When did you hear this?” Sarah asked Benjamin.
“I stopped to see Roscoe before church. We both understood the town was holding the rest of the Campgrounds. Did you know about it, sir?” he asked James.
“How in heaven would Roscoe learn of Mr. Betchley’s visit?” Frankie marveled to herself and the air. A door began to open in her mind, but not very far, and she hadn’t time to push it further.
“I knew about the land,” James admitted, “and so did Bonard’s father.” He turned his head to where he guessed Frankie was sitting. “It is part of the estate, ma’am. There are two or three such small acreages to be dealt with in time.”
“I did not know,” Frankie said. “If there are enough of them, I shall perhaps not feel compelled to give up my house.”
“They are of trifling value; I must tell you.”
“To you, sir, not to Gene Betchley,” Benjamin said. “Well! And what do you imagine he hoped to do with it?”
It was Frankie who answered. “He wants to keep you from expanding the operation of the cotton mill.”
“He’s well informed; we’ve only begun to talk about it!”
Sarah said, “Abraham is given to speaking freely and hasn’t a thought that is secret.”
“In any event,” Benjamin said good-humoredly, “I want you to sell the land to me and Roscoe.”
The Legacy of Beulah Land Page 24