Serving him, she warned, “You’ll pop like a cotton boll one of these days. Hope I’m not around to see you do it.”
“I don’t care,” he said, and found a place under a tree where no one else was sitting.
If the day was less joyous for Leon than he had anticipated, few present saw any difference between it and Fourth of July celebrations of other years. It was true that Sarah had taken little pleasure in parties since Casey’s death, but her sense of hospitality was strong, and only Benjamin and Jane knew that her heart was less than whole. After the successful presentation of the memorial statue to their glorious Confederate dead, Annabel was inclined to enjoy herself. There was much to cheer her. Frankie was looking “very poorly,” Annabel whispered, further confiding to intimates her “hope that we are not to lose her.” James’s daughters by his second marriage were still unreconciled to their father for desecrating their mother’s memory. Prudence, Annabel’s remaining daughter-in-law and “child of my beloved friend Maggie’s sensible first marriage,” was unexpectedly and uncomfortably pregnant again. Annabel had the satisfaction of believing she had bested Sarah today in their running conflict; and she had succeeded in giving her “frank opinion” to all members of the family gathering who had not managed to avoid her on their apparel, looks, state of health, and the handling of their parental, marital, and financial concerns. She took further satisfaction in the flattery of Blair Three, who, unpopular with other children, played the part of “Grandmother’s boy,” as Annabel persisted in calling him, ever at her side when not engaged on her errands and commissions.
As was usual, Sarah had flung her net wide enough to include such non-family favorites as Tom and Elizabeth Cooper and their five sturdy sons. Roscoe and Luck and Abraham were there, although not Claribell, whose shyness was indulged by her being allowed to stay at home from big gatherings. Roman and Pauline were there from the school and had quarreled about geography, although Pauline spent most of the day sitting in a chair between the graves of her brother Floyd and her life’s friend Selma. As the day passed, the Negro members of the reunion wandered to the Glade to pay calls on Nancy and finding themselves diverted by her company as most did, remained. Nancy also had her share of white visitors; the older ones having valued her one way or another since she was born a slave.
After the big eating—there would be a lesser one later in the afternoon consisting of watermelon, tea, and cake—there was a general breaking up into groups. The younger children were dragged indoors by mammies to endure their naps. The men and older boys drifted away to the barns, and then to the woods, where they might go to sleep on the ground as they talked, waking to swim, returning finally to the big house in high spirits, bearing on their shoulders watermelons cooled in the creek. The older girls and women were made comfortable with fans and opened beds and gossip as they took their afternoon rest. Frankie had managed a quick plea to Benjamin when the men began to separate themselves for their exodus. “For pity’s sake, take your father with you—I must have an hour of peace!” Alarmed by her agitation, he did so, placing an arm around James’s shoulders and steering him along after the others.
Frankie did not, however, seek refuge with the sweating, fanning, giggling, yawning women who crowded the resting rooms. After Sarah had done her duty as hostess, leaving Jane to answer the further needs of their female guests, she excused herself and slipped onto the shadier side porch for a quiet hour. Heavy wisteria vines made the place almost dark, and she had pulled up a rocking chair to sit down before she discovered Frankie in the one beside hers.
“My dear Frankie—”
“You wanted to be by yourself,” Frankie guessed.
“No.” Sarah faced her chair toward the younger woman as an indication that her company was welcome.
“I get no privacy myself, and you must find little.”
Sarah smiled politely. “We may, if we like, sit without saying a word.”
“I only want to be away from James.”
“He is surely a loving husband.” She did not intend the statement as a reprimand, but as a withdrawal.
“Yes, ma’am, he is,” Frankie replied in a whisper.
“Not many wives would complain of that.” Sarah began to rock her chair in the way Nell used to soothe herself to sleep after eating. Her eyes were closed when Frankie said despairingly, “I have made such mistakes, Miss Sarah!”
“We all do that.”
“You never have.” Frankie evidently wanted comforting, but Sarah had never trusted her, and decided to keep her peace. “I always made wrong decisions,” Frankie continued presently. “When I consider that—” She shook her head. “I might have married Benjamin and lived here untroubled all my days.”
“Life at Beulah Land is not so simple as that,” Sarah said drily.
“One mistake after another, each pointing to the next,” Frankie insisted, “when all I wanted was to be one of you. I know you will think it wrong to talk this way.”
Sarah considered excusing herself to consult with Josephine but saw it would appear deliberately unkind. If she was to remain, however, she could not allow the younger woman to pity herself so indulgently. “Maybe you went about it too determinedly,” she suggested briskly. “We are easy, you know. If we have a fault, and I do not own that we do, it is that we are easy. Love us and we surrender everything. Only, no one may try to manage us, or say what we must do, for we are stubborn and proud. My Casey understood that so well.” Mention of Casey was natural for Sarah, for he was always in her mind, but it was the first intimate reference she had made to Frankie, and Frankie caught it quickly.
“What a thing,” she said, “to have loved a husband so. I’ve cared for neither of mine in that way.”
“I think I know why you chose Bonard,” Sarah said calmly, “but why James? You might have arranged things with Annabel. She’s contrary, and she’d have made life difficult, no doubt, but she adores your children, and she prides herself, God help us, on her duty.”
From the shadows of her high-backed chair it was possible for Frankie to study her hostess. “I’ve felt now and again that you understand about your grandson and me, Miss Sarah. That we have been more than once-upon-a-time childhood sweethearts.” Sarah sat still but made no acknowledgment of confidential communication. “I married James Davis because he wanted me to, and I had to marry someone. I’d discovered that I was to have Benjamin’s child.”
“My dear Frankie!” There was compassion in Sarah’s voice as well as distress. “If there is anything—”
“No, ma’am, nothing. Only, I wanted you to know, and I feel better for telling you.”
Sarah remained quiet and began to rock her chair again. “I have perhaps been unjust but, if there is a way, shall try to make amends.”
Frankie rocked her chair in rhythm with Sarah’s, as if to confirm the new bond between them. “I remember a talk we had long ago, Miss Sarah, about Bessie Marsh. Benjamin had asked me to marry him and told me Bessie was pregnant with the child that turned out to be Leon. Do you recall how indignant I was, what extravagant demands I made? Well, I am paid out for it.”
“I hope you do not think of it like that,” Sarah said uncomfortably. It was one thing to feel sorry for the woman, but she could not quell her long distrust of her, and she did not want to enlarge the intimacy that had been foisted upon her.
“I despise myself.”
“My dear, please.”
Misinterpreting Sarah’s troubled look as one of chagrin, Frankie went on. “There are mornings I wish I had died in the night.”
“Do not say anymore!” Sarah pleaded.
Frankie would not be stopped. “Who would care? I least of all. You cannot understand how detestable it is to accept the attentions of a man you do not love. Not love him? I hate him with all my heart when he touches me, and that is every hour of every day. Yet I must keep silent, be compliant, somehow endure—”
“Poor James!” Sarah exclaimed.
Fran
kie drew back as if she had been struck. “You pity him?”
“Poor lonely man!” She looked as if she would weep.
Controlling herself with effort, Frankie said, “May I ask why, madam?”
“So many reasons and none that I may tell you. If only Casey were here! I need him more and more—”
They were interrupted by Mabella. Her ears attuned to trouble, Sarah heard her before she arrived, excited to tears. “Miss Sarah, you got to come! Josephine has took the big butcher knife to Mercy—Miss Annabel’s girl she brought? Hasn’t cut her yet, but she’s got her up on a kitchen stool and won’t let her down till she prays forgiveness for pinching the icing off the angel cake!”
Tom Cooper was gentle, unlike his rackety sons, and having observed Frankie’s sadness, spoke of it to his wife Elizabeth. Elizabeth thought about it and later spoke to Tom. Between them they conceived a plan to cheer their old acquaintance. Elizabeth had heard of the days he and the other farm boys of the neighborhood played collective swain to the pretty visitor from Savannah, Miss Frankie-Julia Dollard. Elizabeth reminded Tom of the evenings he and Hobart Kenning and Frederick Shields and John Baxter had serenaded Frankie and Jane on this very porch at Beulah Land. Might they not today re-create something of the kind to remind the sad woman of happier days? Tom would not sing, and the others were absent, but the Cooper sons, Jesse, Jacob, Marvin, Garvin, and Jeremiah, were enthusiastic songsters and loved any occasion of showing off. They were therefore easily persuaded to surprise Mrs. James Davis after the second eating of the day when, full of watermelon and cake and tea, the ladies lolled on the porches, the gentlemen at their feet, all waiting for the spirit to move them to get up and go home. That was the moment Tom chose to give the signal to his chorus.
Quick as hares they surrounded a startled Frankie and burst into the jolly bounce of one of her old favorites, “Glendy Burk.” Alas, the response was not that intended. Frankie recognized the song and recalled the earlier occasions she had listened to it enraptured; but for whatever reason—the contrast of her circumstances then and now, the difference in her age now and then, the feeling that she had been severely snubbed that day by Sarah Troy, whose support she had thought finally to achieve—all perhaps combined to release in her heart an agony of grief that was not to be expressed except in high and hideous wails. The song ceased; the abashed chorus was led away by their mother to be reassured. Everyone at once offered excuses and explanations, no one listening to those of anyone else. The general and thorough commotion accomplished one result, the breakup of the gathering. Weary, Sarah did not try to stop them but let them go, only making certain they carried plates or baskets of the remains of the day’s feast with them so that they would not have to prepare their own suppers. Their going, however, required some time, for there were horses to be harnessed to wagons and buggies and ten dozen last confidences and promises to be exchanged and lavish expressions of gratitude to be made their hostess.
Not until Frankie was being handed into her buggy by her husband did it occur to her to take Fanny with her, but suddenly she could not face even the ride alone with James. She called Fanny; Fanny came. “You must come home today. I cannot spare you any longer!”
The child protested that she was to remain another week or two. Sarah and Bruce and Benjamin added their pleas that she be allowed to stay. Her clothes were not ready. “She has plenty at home and the ones here may be sent after her,” Frankie replied. There was no dissuading her from having the company of her daughter. So, after a little time was granted to gather the most urgently required personal familiars, Fanny climbed into the buggy, Frankie yanking her up and settling her firmly between herself and her husband. Away they drove, only now it was Fanny’s crying that rent the air. Leon could not bear to be part of the scene but looked down upon it from a limb of their oldest magnolia where he knew he would not be joined because the climb had already proved too difficult for his cousins.
Sarah retired to her room. The Todds went to their own house. After checking the barns, Benjamin returned to the big house to find Leon alone on the front steps. He sat down beside him. “It was a full day, wasn’t it?” Leon did not answer but stared off down the carriageway. Moving closer to him, Benjamin said, “Eat too much barbecue and got a bellyache?” Leon shook his head. “Just got nothing to say for yourself, that it?” Benjamin sighed easily and relaxed his elbows against the steps behind them.
Suddenly Leon burst out, “I don’t ever want to leave Beulah Land!”
Benjamin put his arm around the boy and hugged him hard. Leon felt his fear and unhappiness dissolve as he let himself go slack against his father; and when Benjamin spoke, Leon understood that the words were for both of them. “This is home.”
15
Mindful of Fanny’s distress at going home, Sarah took Luck to town to see her when she and Bruce made the next ritual visit to the Oglethorpe house. As usual, grave questions were put to Bruce by her maternal antecedents, to which she gave dutiful answers that had been earlier provided her by Sarah. Bruce then was given a religious tract to admire while her elders conversed.
“It is the only place,” as Sarah reported to Benjamin, “I find myself chattering. This is because I abhor silence with those I do not like. I surprise myself by telling—since there is nothing I want to say to them—about our crops and livestock, Josephine’s progress in preserving fruit and vegetables, Jane’s energy and skill in sewing, and the ailments of all the womenfolk on the place. Nancy would throw herself on the ground and roll with laughter if she heard me detail her gradual but now certain recovery. They once asked me the condition of ‘the ailing Negress’ after they’d paid their peculiar visit to her in the Glade, and I don’t let them forget such Christian concern. I never speak of you. I never speak of any man lest it be thought unseemly. And when I have told them all these things, I discover that no time at all has elapsed since we entered the front door and were instructed to sit down. I always plant myself where I can see the mantel clock without craning or squinting. I never allow us to remain exactly as long as we did on our previous visit. You see why I chatter. I chatter now in the very recounting. Soon I shall be driven to reciting to them the manner in which we dry seeds for next year’s sowing and the way we clear leaves from our wells. I only hope it wearies them as it does me. When we left after eighteen hours, actually thirty-seven minutes, I drove directly to old Mrs. Bascom’s and bought enough candy to give an entire dame school the colic. Then back to spend an hour with Frankie while the girls ate the candy and played together. Frankie is still pale and appears distracted. I wonder if James would let us have her here for a few weeks along with Fanny? Beulah Land is good for everybody. I’ll sound James out. While we were talking in her little parlor, Eugene Betchley came through the living room just next to leave some papers with James, who is at home with a cold in the head. Eugene bowed to us through the arched way as he left the house; and through the window I could see him pause in the yard to observe the children. He stared quite hard. As luck would have it, and I mean no pun, Luck’s hoop went cock-a-loop and rolled into him. He caught it and looked as if he might break it, but then thrust it back at the child when she held out her hand to claim it. He obviously considered it wrong that she should be playing with them in the front yard like that. James does not look well, though I saw him for only a moment. I wish you would go to see him. I know how you feel but go. With every cough—and his cigars make it worse—his ears go purple, almost black, as if with a sudden fever. Maybe we should have all of them here for a month and send them home well again. He usen’t to smoke so, but he says it clears his head. And Frankie confided to me—she is far too confiding for my taste —that he is often deep in claret. He was not ever a man for much drink, to my knowledge. You see what a morning I’ve had? And you talk about the cotton yield!”
It was true, as she had long noted, that Eugene was keeping watch on Frankie. Busy and blameless as her days now were, awareness of his scrutiny was present in h
er mind during the hours she spent at the sawmill each day. She did not, as other women vainer with less cause might have, put it down to a susceptibility to her attractions. She knew what she looked like even tired, unhappy, and grossly pregnant; but it was not her beauty that kept his eyes on her. There was in his look something of speculation and waiting. What, she asked herself, was he waiting for? Had he not got what he wanted in the quarter share of ownership which, she reminded herself, had been denied her own husband while he lived? One man worked for a reward never given because he thought it would come without his asking, while his successor got it on demand as a condition of continuing to do the work he was already paid to do. Eugene Betchley won his way by threat, spoken or implied. Her first husband dead, her second blind, Eugene might watch her as boldly as he pleased, monitor her coming and going as he would, knowing she would not complain.
James’s cold persisted, but it did not lessen his demands upon her. She protested. For his sake, she said, he must hoard his energies; but he would have her and did so. When Benjamin tendered his grandmother’s invitation for the James Davis family to stay at Beulah Land a month, James refused curtly for all of them.
“You are getting to be enormous,” Annabel said to Frankie in August. “Surely it is far too soon. The babe will weigh twenty pounds at birth. Not due till December? By then we shall wonder whether the mother carries the baby or the baby the mother! James, I wish you could see what you have done, you cruel fellow!”
With five children grown and married, James yet remembered enough of their mother’s pregnancies to become uneasy about his wife and to query her closely. She answered sullenly and, he considered, inadequately. When he pressed, she took proud offense, and then she wept near to hysteria, and then she turned silent.
On a hot night in September she sat by the open window of their bedroom praying that it might rain and cool the air, and with equal fervor beseeching heaven to keep James sleeping. Even as she did so, he woke to find himself in bed alone and called her name. When he began to grope about the bed, she said, “I am here.”
The Legacy of Beulah Land Page 30