“We’ve come on particulars, Mrs. Troy.” Sarah sat behind her desk, not for its position of command but because she felt easy there. “We have come to hear an explanation of yesterday’s event.”
As host and hostess looked at them with surprise, Benjamin said, “I should think it is rather for you to explain, if explanation is necessary, since the men who interrupted the wedding were from the sawmill.”
“Stacy Winn was hurt bad in the attack you made on him.”
“I’d like to believe it, but I doubt it. Tell him next time he tries such a thing I’ll crack his skull and have him thrown into jail.”
The visitors looked at each other. Ann Oglethorpe commented, “You see—ever a violent man.”
Sarah asked, “What is your concern in the affair, ma’am?”
“Dedication to justice. And however reluctantly I allow it to be so, I am connected with your family.”
“A matter of mixed feelings for all of us.” Sarah opened her hands in front of her on the desk top, telling herself she must not sit with them clenched.
“You do not deny that you attacked Stacy Winn?” Eugene said.
“I don’t know the names of the three ruffians, but if he was one of them, my son and nephew and I routed them after they set off their explosions. Yes, certainly.”
“The explosions you refer to were, so I have been informed, but innocent firecrackers. Were they on property of yours?”
Sarah said, “You must know, Mr. Betchley, the incident occurred at Elk Institute when we attended the wedding of Luck Elk to Abraham Kendrick.”
Ann Oglethorpe said, “And what of the savages you unleashed against the poor men?”
“What can you mean?” Benjamin asked softly.
“The town knows.” Eugene shook his head as if to dismiss any attempt at subterfuge. “Last night and this morning they’ve talked of nothing else. People are stirred up. It would not surprise me if something was to happen like happened over in Washington County last summer.”
Sarah spoke sharply. “Do you mean the Negro they lynched for shaking his fist at a white man who tried to cheat him out of a bale of cotton?”
“They’ve got to be shown they can’t go against us,” Eugene said levelly.
“Or our women.” Ann Oglethorpe looked directly at Sarah.
Seeing Benjamin rise in his chair, Sarah lifted a hand in a cautioning way. “I want you to understand this, both of you,” she said, “and tell the people in town. No Negro touched those three jackasses yesterday. The fighting, such as it was, was between them and my grandson, joined by his son and one of his nephews. If, as you indicate, there has been such a thorough airing of the affair in town, surely Mrs. Blair Saxon and her grandson, who were at the wedding, will have already told you what we are telling you now.”
Another look was exchanged by Eugene Betchley and Ann Oglethorpe. She said, “They were able to observe nothing, for they were unconscious, from shock and disgust I should imagine.”
“So they were,” Sarah remembered. “Very well—your own granddaughter, ma’am, and your stepdaughter, Mr. Betchley.”
With a grimace Mrs. Oglethorpe replied, “They will say what you say, I’ve no doubt.”
“There were hundreds of witnesses,” Sarah said.
“Niggers.” Eugene nodded his head. “Everybody knows their oath ain’t worth a chew of tobacco.”
Mrs. Oglethorpe said, “If your involvement was innocent and no Nigras were in it, why wasn’t the fight reported to the sheriff? That it wasn’t points to bad conscience. We talked with Sheriff Farrow before coming this afternoon. He knows exactly what everybody knows, no more, no less. I suggested that since none from Beulah Land attended church this morning, which is your usual habit although Sundays only, he had no opportunity to question you about it. I believe he is considering an arrest.”
“On what charge?” Benjamin asked. “That of defending our friends against intruders? And at what you, Mrs. Oglethorpe, must regard as a sacred moment, the exchange of vows between a man and woman in marriage.”
“Don’t you speak of sacred moments! I’m surprised the Lord doesn’t strike you down as you utter the words.”
“Let us all be calm,” Eugene reasoned. “We have come on legitimate duty, that of asking for and listening to your explanation of what appears to be behavior that can have no defense.”
Controlling himself, Benjamin said, “We have stated the facts. I do not offer them as explanation or defense.”
“What you call facts don’t satisfy me, and I don’t think they will the town.”
“Damn your satisfaction!”
“I told you he would be blasphemous,” Ann Oglethorpe said with gratification. “Always a violent man.”
“No need to remind me, ma’am. I was the subject of his attack on another occasion at the sawmill that now belongs to me.”
“I thought it belonged to your wife,” Sarah said.
“We are one.”
Ann Oglethorpe frowned more deeply. “You persist then in siding with the Nigras?”
“They have always done so,” Eugene said sadly. “Don’t they own a big share of the cotton mill? Run by a nigger so that other niggers can make better wages than white men and brag about it. I’ve heard them myself.”
Ann Oglethorpe said, “You, Mrs. Troy, will not deny that you were the instrument behind the starting of that school you call Elk Institute, where they teach Nigras to think themselves as good as white people. Before that you taught them here, when it was against state law too. You don’t deny that, do you?”
“Why do you hate Negroes?” Sarah said.
“I hate only their low natures. If the darkies want to raise themselves, they are welcome to try, as long as they do it the way it’s preached by their leader Booker T. Washington: to walk humbly and work hard in the station God has set them down in. I fail to understand how you of all people can love them after what they did to you. Common knowledge declares that Roscoe Elk’s own uncle caught you in the woods and assaulted you when you were a much younger woman. That would have been enough to make any other white woman hate, fear, and despise Nigras the rest of her life.”
“Well, I declare,” Sarah said coolly, “what a memory you have. That was fifty years ago.”
“It’s not a thing I’d like to forget.”
“No,” Sarah said thoughtfully. “I suppose it isn’t.”
“It’s not only my memory but the county’s. The tragedy was shared by every white man and woman in the county.”
“How generous of you all.”
“You offend the Lord by making light of such things!”
“Many things, I’m sure, offend the Lord.”
“For once you speak true.” Mrs. Oglethorpe nodded with vigor. “That woman who brought us in here to wait—”
“My housekeeper?”
Mrs. Oglethorpe looked at Benjamin. “I remember her. She’s the one you let live in your house in my daughter’s place.”
“She kept it better too,” Benjamin said, “even though she was ill at the time. In any event, your daughter had deserted that house a good many years before.”
“If she offered to come back now and be your wife, would you welcome her?”
“I cannot imagine her doing so,” Benjamin said.
“She would do it to save your soul.”
“I could not permit such a sacrifice.”
Mrs. Oglethorpe’s mouth stretched wide in triumph.
As if she had found a solution to a problem that disturbed her, Sarah brought both hands down flat on the desk top. “I am puzzled no longer. You are natural allies. You go to church and you want everyone to behave according to your ideas of right and wrong. Those who do not are to be damned. Well, we at Beulah Land have always followed our own ways, and if you don’t like them, you are at liberty to peddle your opinions elsewhere, but not here. Yours, Mrs. Oglethorpe, are of no consequence. Everyone knows you for a meddling fool.”
“The Lor
d has spoken to me!”
“If He told you to come here, I’ll have to speak to Him.”
“Blasphemy now from the granddam!”
“You, on the other hand, worry me, Mr. Betchley. There are so many things I don’t understand about you. I remember you as a boy who would seine our creek and set traps in our woods. You used to leave creatures to die if they were no use to you. Next thing we knew you were entrenched at the Marsh farm. And old Mrs. Marsh died. She had been my friend, and so was her daughter my friend.”
“We all know why you befriended her,” Ann Oglethorpe said.
“Yes, mainly because of Benjamin’s son, but I liked her too. And now she too is dead. I knew Bessie Marsh well. She would not have done what you accused her of, Mr. Betchley.”
“That’s a shocking thing to say, Mrs. Troy. The truth of my discovery has never been doubted.”
“I’ve doubted it, though there was no way to challenge it.”
Ann Oglethorpe said, “Don’t countenance her, Mr. Betchley. All know you for a good and truthful man of God, as they knew Bessie for a frail vessel.”
Sarah held her eyes on the man who had advanced to her desk. “Don’t make trouble, I beg you. I don’t mean about yesterday’s scuffle. You exaggerate the town’s concern because it suits you to. Why, I don’t know. But if you go further and try to harm us or our people, I will have no mercy on you.”
“You beg and threaten at the same time.”
“I want to be understood.”
Benjamin knew that Sarah wanted him to remain silent, but he could not. “Get away from Beulah Land and never come back.”
Ann Oglethorpe led the way.
When they had gone, Sarah and Benjamin sat for a time without speaking. At last Benjamin sighed with exasperation, then laughed shakily. “You heard them say I’m a violent man, Grandma. Let me kill them.”
“Not today, boy. I know what we must do. I have so little regard for town opinion, or interest in it, I ignore it, and that makes bad feeling. Tomorrow morning I shall put on a pretty frock and drive my buggy alone into town, for only a woman may do what needs doing. First I’ll have a talk with Sheriff Farrow, combining firmness with coquetry in a way that would make any man with his wits about him take a stick to me. But the sheriff is nothing if not stupid, or he wouldn’t be our sheriff. It’s one step maybe above the depot loungers, although the two callings have sometimes been combined. Then I shall put a bee in Annabel’s bonnet. I’ve neglected her, and Annabel is like a child. Unless you give her something to do, she gets into mischief. Later in the week she and I together, perhaps with your aunt Doreen and Miss Kilmer, will pay calls. The name of Beulah Land will be fragrant again, I promise you.”
Benjamin moved around the desk to stand beside her chair. “Grandma, I want you to know something. I never loved you as much as I love you today or had better reason.”
6
Finding it easy to climb the trailing quilt Leon had kicked off in the night, Hellfire picked his way alongside the body until his attention was caught by sudden movement under the sheet. Something bulged where nothing had been. He sat to study it and put out a paw to investigate. Leon woke smiling from his dream, and when he saw Hellfire, his erection began to subside. He drew his knees up slowly under the sheet, which further alarmed the kitten. When its gaze was fixed unwaveringly, Leon slipped an arm from under the sheet and swatted the creature lightly. Hellfire scampered off the bed and away, pausing at the door to see if he was pursued.
Leon got out of bed and stretched, going to the window to look out as every farmer will on rising. He opened both shutters full, feeling the warm sun and air on his hands. Mabella was crossing the yard, her back to him, on her way to the well, and as he looked beyond her and the barns into the fields, he remembered that it was April 8, 1895, and his twenty-first birthday. By gum and by God, he thought with a thrill of anticipation. Turning, he took the slop jar from the bottom of the commode and peed, but heard his name called before he finished. Cutting off his water and clapping the lid on the jar, he returned to the window to see Bobby Lee and Davy.
“Going to swim?”
“Wait for me,” Leon said. They did not yet go every morning as they would in summer, but it was warm enough today, and the water would feel fresh and cold. They would holler when they jumped into it but then brag that it wasn’t so bad after all.
Davy winked at his brother. A minute later Leon joined them, still barefoot, wearing loose cotton trousers, shirt half on and unbuttoned. They were just beyond the stand of sunflowers that screened the privies when Bobby Lee turned on his cousin. Leon tried to run, but they caught him and held him, Davy whacking him across the buttocks with a stick he had appeared to pick up idly on the way. Laughing and shouting the count, they accomplished the ritual, whereupon Leon broke free and the cousins chased him across a field and into the woods and along the old path to the particular creek bank from which the men of Beulah Land had swum for more than a hundred years.
They might hardly have known each other, so few were their exchanges as they splashed and paddled and stroked up and down, across and back. Often on their morning and evening swims they played and shouted; today they were quiet until they were dressing, and Davy said, “There’s going to be champagne at dinner tonight and brandy in the punch for the ball.”
“Well, surely,” Bobby Lee said tolerantly.
“Don’t say it as if it happens every day. I never had champagne and neither have you, and I can’t remember a real ball at Beulah Land before and I’m eighteen.”
“Nearly,” Leon corrected him. “They used to have them in the old days, Grandma says. She met Grandpa Casey for the first time when he came to a ball at Beulah Land.”
Combing his hair, Davy said to Leon, “I reckon you think you’re something getting to be twenty-one.”
“Never mind, little man,” Leon answered. “We’ll let you be twenty-one in a few years, won’t we, Bobby Lee?”
Bobby Lee put on a doubtful expression. “If we do, it’ll take the whole meaning out of it.”
The ball had been Annabel’s idea. Annabel took vast pleasure in large parties if they were at someone else’s expense; and when Sarah enlisted her help to improve town feeling toward Beulah Land, the idea of a ball to mark Leon’s coming of age seemed an inspiration. Sarah’s fence mending was seen to be serious, and because it offered more than it asked, it was successful. What the townspeople really wanted was to be noticed by the family at Beulah Land—flattered by them, consulted by them, consoled by them. The best way to the hearts of inferiors was to ask a favor of them that was easy to grant. Sarah sometimes forgot it because she didn’t like to believe people so simple. Eugene Betchley and Ann Oglethorpe contended no more, merely picking at old sores and harboring old scores, but no one paid them much attention. What is pride to the advantages of a ball? Eugene had not, in truth, expected to win anything in this challenge over the Negro wedding but had looked upon it as an exercise and a test.
Leon was last to arrive at the breakfast table that had for a month been set up on the east porch to get the early sun; another month and they would avoid it and breakfast on the west porch. Sarah and Bruce and Benjamin had begun, Mabella having already brought a platter of fried eggs, another of fried beefsteaks, bowls of grits and gravy, biscuits, a pitcher of milk and a pot of coffee. As they served themselves and each other, he sat down at his place and lifted his plate, which was turned down on the tablecloth, to discover beneath it three small packages. Smiling but making no comment, he opened the one with the prettiest wrapping, knowing it would be a gift from Bruce. Inside were mother-of-pearl cuff buttons she had commissioned Fanny to choose for her in Savannah when she went there with Luck and Nancy. He admired them and kissed her and opened the next. It was a plain, gold, old-looking wedding ring. He looked at Sarah questioningly.
She said, “For your wife when you marry. It was my ring when I married your great-grandfather Leon. Every time the Yankees came during
the war I hid it in my mouth, ready to swallow if they touched me. I didn’t wear it after the war, and Casey gave me another.”
Blushing with pleasure, he left his chair to hug and thank her. The third present was a gold watch and chain. He opened it carefully and read aloud the wording that was delicately engraved on the inner lid: “Leon Marsh Davis of Beulah Land from his loving father.” The watch was wound and keeping time, but its sound could not be heard even when he held it to his ear. His fingers trembled as he examined it, as if he feared it might melt in his hands. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever had, and when he looked up and across the table at Benjamin, his eyes held tears. Bruce took his plate and served him a large beefsteak and three fried eggs, the tops dark with pepper the way he liked them. Sarah added a biscuit to the plate, and Mabella poured coffee into his cup. They began to eat and talk and laugh, until presently their attention was caught by Davy’s waving goodbye as he sounded the bell from his bicycle and pedaled away to work at the cotton mill.
It was a busy day for everyone at Beulah Land. The men went about the work of the barns and the fields, glad to be out of the way of the women, whose concentration on food and flowers and furniture arrangement was total and terrible. The aroma of cooking mingled with the smell of beeswax and new dresses and the fragrance of blossom. The wide central hallway that stretched from front to back would contain most of the dancers as well as the musicians; but since the weather was warm and there would be many guests, windows and doors were to remain open, that the dancers might use the porches too. Oil lamps had been cleaned and refilled, but candles also were set about to provide further light and cheer.
Sarah told Jane: “I will not bustle about, I’m too old. Let them come to me now.” And so they did for answers Jane and Nancy and Bruce could not give, because no one at Beulah Land other than Sarah had ever prepared for such a large entertainment. There would be eighty or more who would dance and that many again too young or too old to indulge in the refined savagery who would lurk and smirk, gossip and tease and yawn among the potted ferns. The branches of blossoms from the orchard they now set so carefully would shed petals as the rooms warmed with humanity until some became no more than bare limbs sketching air.
The Legacy of Beulah Land Page 37