The Legacy of Beulah Land

by Lonnie Coleman

  “You’re silly.”

  “I bet I’m right.”

  Fanny, done tying her sister’s hair, pushed her toward her bed. “Say your prayers so I can blow out the lamp.”

  Edna May knelt beside her bed and bent her head over folded hands. “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to take. God bless Mama. God bless Fanny. God bless Leon on his birthday, and you might as well bless Marvin and Garvin Cooper.” She hopped into bed as she said, “Amen,” and pulled the sheet over her. “I don’t ask Him to bless Papa and Theodore any more. Is that wicked?” Without answering, Fanny blew out the lamp and got into her own bed. “I don’t know why you don’t kneel anymore and say your prayers out loud.”

  “I’ve told you: I like to say mine in bed to myself.”

  “Do you have secrets you don’t want me to hear?”

  “Maybe. Go to sleep.”

  “I’ll bet they’re about Leon. Well, I have secrets too, and I’m going to tell them to myself right now while you’re telling yours to yourself.” When her sister made no reply, Edna May said rapidly, “All right, I’m asleep! Good night, dear Fanny!”

  “Good night, Edna May.”

  Down the hall a door opened and Frankie’s words—Fanny guessed she had gone into her husband’s room—were like a mockery of the words the sisters had spoken. “Good night! Good night! Wake up, Eugene, and say good night!”

  When he answered, Eugene’s voice sounded harsh and sticky with sleep. “Shut your mouth and get to bed, old woman.”

  “Old? You wouldn’t say so if you’d seen me dancing with this one and that one—”

  “I don’t give a shit who you dance with.”

  Frankie laughed triumphantly. “Got the sore head like a sick rooster, have you? Because you couldn’t go to the party. You couldn’t go because you weren’t asked, and you weren’t asked because they don’t like you because you’re common!”

  “Get out!”

  “Common! Oh, they’re genteel and aristocratic out there. Everybody loves everybody and speaks so nicely. Nobody wanted to leave—that’s why we’re so late. You never heard so many goodnights. Kept saying ‘Good night’ and not going, ‘Good night,’ but standing in the door or on the porch or from their buggies, hoping they’d be made to stay a little longer. Nobody wanted to leave ever.”

  “Get your drunk face out of mine.”

  Her laughter was pitched high and spiteful. “You’re not good enough for Beulah Land! You’re only good enough for Bible-toting old buzzards like Priscilla Davis and her ma, and you’re good enough for them only when you wear your Sunday God-face!”

  “Go to bed, bitch.”

  “Call me that, you murdering devil!”

  There was the sound of a slap Fanny had known was coming and had waited for. She began to slip out of bed, but hesitated when Eugene’s voice came again, low and controlled. “I told you. Now, go.” Doors opened and closed, and there was silence.

  As she eased herself back down, hoping that her sister had not heard, a whisper said, “Can I get in with you, Fanny?”

  “Yes.”

  Edna May eased herself under Fanny’s sheet and lay trembling. “He makes me call him Papa, but I’m glad he’s not. He’s not, is he?”

  “No.” Fanny patted her arm. “Sh. Sh.”

  The younger girl’s trembling gradually ceased, and soon she breathed evenly in sleep, but Fanny lay long awake.

  8

  The telegrapher at Highboro’s train depot was still in his twenties, and as he received the message from Savannah for Sarah Troy of Beulah Land, it provided him with no meaningful intelligence; but when he showed it to Gideon Trim, who had been station-master since, as people never tired of saying, Hector was a pup, the old man exclaimed, “Rotten bananas!”—an expletive he had long used to indicate that urgent action was of the essence. The message was: Expect Mrs. Ward Varnedoe afternoon train. Mr. Trim himself delivered it within the hour.

  Sarah had not seen her sister since Lauretta married the Union commander Colonel Ward Varnedoe after the war and went to live in Maryland. They corresponded irregularly; that is, Sarah wrote promptly when she received a letter from Lauretta, and Lauretta wrote when the spirit moved her. They had mentioned visiting each other but never done so. The message struck Sarah as peculiar on two scores: its formal wording and the fact that Lauretta had never before announced that she was coming to Beulah Land but simply arrived, more often than not in dramatic, not to say melodramatic circumstances more suitable to her career upon the stage than her life off it. Distracted, Sarah ate little of her noon dinner and was on the front porch ready to go to Highboro long before Leon brought the buggy around, followed by Wally with a wagon for Lauretta’s trunks. It was May and hot, and Leon would not trot the mule, there being no need to do so, though he was aware of Sarah’s impatience. As it was, they were half an hour early. Leon urged her to spend the waiting time in the comparative coolness of the drugstore across the tracks from the station, but she would not, pacing back and forth before the station loungers, all of whom knew from the telegrapher why she was there.

  “Thirty years, Leon! Will I know her? She’s eighty-six, my sister! Impossible. Day before yesterday we were girls in Savannah, living with Aunt Pea on Broughton Street. Lauretta in love with that Shakespeare actor—Savage was his name, Douglas Savage, yes—at the playhouse on Chippewa Square. Lord, how quickly it goes. Do I look all right? You’d say so anyway, but Bruce would tell me. I hope I’ve warned you sufficiently what to expect. She hasn’t a sane or sensible bone in her body—or used not to have. Perhaps life with the Colonel has sobered her, though I doubt it. He was a good man, though a Yankee. Everyone said she was the pretty sister and I the plain, and so she always took what she wanted, and I was left with what she didn’t want. Oh, how I used to mind all that! And what does it matter, a lifetime ago? Yes, I must steel myself to seeing a very old woman. She is two years older than I, you know, and I must not show it if I am shocked by her appearance. I’m glad I didn’t bring Jane and Bruce, just you. It would have looked smug. I have so many and she has no one, now the Colonel is dead and gone. No child, no grandchild—hence, naturally, no great-grandson as I have.” She patted his chest. “Call her Grandma; it will make her feel welcome. No, don’t; call her Miss Lauretta and flirt with her a little. That will make her feel more welcome. I don’t know that she likes men, but she likes them to like her. Oh, saints and sinners, give me strength, for here it comes!”

  Yet even as the train slowed and stopped with its usual discharge of steam and creaks and clanks, Sarah had a sense of anticlimax, as if she did not really expect Lauretta to be aboard. The feeling was reinforced when no passenger came down the steps that had been set ready. But then as they waited, Sarah clenching Leon’s arm, the doors of the baggage car slid open and a coffin was lowered respectfully to the baggagemen on the platform. Sarah did not breathe as she moved forward, with Leon’s hand now gripping her elbow to support her. Even the loungers stirred, some of them rising from the wooden crates they sat on. Was this then to be poor Lauretta’s last “curtain call”? There was a large label on the coffin, and as her eyes registered the words, Mrs. Ward Varnedoe in care of Beulah Land, Sarah fainted. Because there was no bench, Leon eased her down where she was. Presently she came to and saw his anxious face above hers. She must be, she was lying flat on the splintery floor of the station platform alongside the coffin—sister by sister. She moaned with the thought. Then behind Leon’s face, another pair of eyes gazed at her curiously. “Can it be you, Sarah? Why are you lying there like some creature in the slums of Baltimore overcome by drink? Get up and kiss me, for I surely cannot bend down there to you.”

  Sarah recovered abruptly, using Leon’s arm to rise, then turning upon Lauretta. “How dare you!”

  Lauretta blinked. “You never greeted me like that before. Aren’t you glad to see me?”

  “I thought yo
u were in there!”

  “Why should I be? They do say Sarah Bernhardt sleeps in hers, but I simply carry mine with me because at my age I never know when I’ll need it. Who is this young man?”

  “Leon Davis, my great-grandson.”

  “Mine too then. We share, although you’ve always had odd ideas about that sort of thing, haven’t you? Howdydo, Leon; you may call me Aunt Lauretta. And this—” She waved her hand toward the black-as-coal woman who was officiously supervising the unloading of trunks from the baggage car. “This is Pearl, my own rarest Pearl who takes care of me, arranges my life, who was, in fact, the one to insist that we come and sent you the telegram. Surely you got it?” She laughed. “How could you have thought I was in there? Leon, is she getting queer? Pearl! Tell him gently with the hatbox—there are butterflies inside!” To Sarah she explained, “Gauze on black straw; you’ll see; very pretty.”

  Every roll of the buggy wheels through town and along the road to Beulah Land brought a gush of remembrance or a question to account for a change. Arms open, she embraced every sight, mourned loss and alteration, wept happily to see it all again, as she said, “Like a sleeping princess in a fairy tale who wakes after thirty years to survey my old kingdom!” At Beulah Land there was further marveling, and her embraces were more tangibly completed. Daniel was her own dearest favorite, having guided her “home to Beulah Land” when the Yankees burned Atlanta and forced them to flee. Roman was thanked again as well as embraced, for he had saved her in 1861 (she would never forget that hour) from an angry audience in Philadelphia who accused her of being a Confederate spy. And there were Jane and Benjamin, Bruce and Bobby Lee and Davy to discover and be begged to love her. The house servants were agog, and Mabella thrilled to the soles of her feet, although Josephine, who remembered Lauretta, managed a more measured response.

  The day went swiftly. Lauretta was settled into her room. Pearl attended to the unpacking and pressing of dresses before they were stored in the wardrobe, which, it became obvious, would be inadequate. “I’m so glad you have put me at the front so that I may know who is coming and going. I’d have been bored to suicide looking over the fields at the back. I have never been agriculturally inclined, if you remember.” She asked a thousand questions without pausing for any to be answered. She laced her talk with references to her life in Maryland and visits to Washington and New York, where the Colonel had business and government interests. She mentioned sumptuous feasts that made ordinary fare as flavorless as gruel. “How I dote upon terrapin, though I shudder when I think of the poor things having to be put into the pot alive!” It sounded a rich and glamorous life; and if Lauretta never boasted of social eminence, still there was an assumption of being highly regarded by the world she and the Colonel had moved in. She remarked familiarly that a certain rich recluse whose name everyone knew was “as rare a sight as the wife of the Chinese ambassador.” She laughed over the Colonel’s insistence on her wearing the jewels he had given her, speaking with partiality of a pair of diamond earrings presented to her on their very last wedding anniversary before his death. “As beautiful as they were costly—and every time I shook my head I shook five thousand dollars.”

  The spell she cast over the inhabitants of Beulah Land (all, that is, except Sarah and Josephine and Nancy) continued during the days that followed her arrival. What with their hanging on her stories and the usual traffic and responsibilities of life on the plantation, Sarah had no chance of a private conversation for nearly a week. Nancy had received permission to store the coffin, covered carefully with old quilts and then burlap, in one of the barn lofts. “Before he died, the Colonel chose two that were identical, one for him, one for me. He thought of everything—almost.”

  Sarah asked if she wanted to store her jewels in the office safe, not that she suspected any of the house servants of being light-fingered but because Lauretta had been so fulsome in her references to their cost. “No,” Lauretta said. She had not brought anything really valuable with her, only trifles; this bracelet—she held out her wrist to show it—only rhinestones. No, Sarah might keep her safe for her own jewels and money, of which Lauretta trusted there was an abundance.

  “We manage tolerably.”

  “Tolerably! Beulah Land breathes prosperity.”

  “There is enough, but everyone has his job to do.”

  Lauretta laughed. “You mustn’t expect me to pick cotton.”

  “Oh, that won’t be until August.” She said it without thinking.

  “Well, I’ve come for a long visit. I hope I’m welcome.”

  “You know you are.”

  “You don’t mind Pearl? She’s so good to me, but she is a little bossy.”

  “Nancy and Josephine will keep her in her place. They take no nonsense. Do you have someone reliable looking after your house in your absence?”

  Lauretta’s hesitation was brief. “Oh, I’ve got rid of it. Being alone, you see, everything reminded me of my beloved. It was too much in all ways.”

  “Then where will you live?”

  “I doubt that I shall go back.” Lauretta laughed again. “They call themselves Southerners, but you would not think them so. They can be very sharp in their dealings and cool in their affections. They are not like us.”

  “When it comes to business, it’s as well to be a little sharp perhaps.”

  “I have no head for it.” Lauretta sighed. “I am an idealist. You’ve said as much yourself.”

  “Have I?” Sarah said with surprise. Lauretta was fussing contentedly with the contents of a glass slipper on her dresser top. It was full of buttons of many sizes. “I hope, Lauretta, that Colonel Varnedoe provided well for your future.”

  “No one could have done better than he, I suppose.”

  “Do you mean that now,” Sarah said carefully, “you find yourself—a little at sea? Surely he’d have used a reliable firm of lawyers.”

  “Why yes, I believe he did, but who am I to judge? They have not managed well.”

  Lauretta’s fussing with the slipper became pettish. “I cannot find them! I am certain I have two little buttons covered in gold silk, and I want them in the worst way for a—” Her voice trailed off.

  “You’d better sit down and tell me.”

  Lauretta sighed and plumped herself into the chair beside Sarah’s. She smiled hopefully. “You were always quick to see things. I wish I were like you in some ways. I haven’t a penny.”

  “How can that be?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “When the Colonel died, didn’t the lawyers explain everything?”

  Lauretta shrugged. “I never understand lawyers; do you?”

  “Well enough,” Sarah said grimly.

  “There seemed no need to worry, but as time went by, the dividends were not what I thought they would be, and I spent—you would perhaps say too much—after dear Ward died. I was lonely. They had accepted me as long as he was alive, and I never knew they resented me all the time. After he was buried, they began, one by one, to neglect and then desert me. I was not invited everywhere as I had been. I thought at first it was respect for my grief, but even the callers became fewer and gradually stopped altogether.”

  “Had you made no true friends?” Sarah asked.

  “I’ve never made friends with women, you know.” Her eyes hardened with fright and awareness. “And I’m too old to make friends of men. Besides, the wives don’t like it. And men have always—except Ward—taken advantage of me, although they’ve never betrayed me.”

  “One or two perhaps,” Sarah said drily.

  “I don’t hold grudges.”

  “No,” Sarah admitted, “you don’t. I sometimes think it’s because you have a short memory.”

  “Don’t you think that’s best?”

  “It isn’t a matter of choice, I suspect.”

  “Why are husbands taken first,” Lauretta said, “leaving us alone and defenseless?”

  “If the Lord had come right up to you, Lauretta, and
said, ‘All right, I’m going to take one of you; which shall it be?’ what would you have said?”

  “‘Be merciful, Lord, and take us both!’”

  Sarah shook her head. “If the Lord said, ‘One; which?’ Take care how you answer, for they say He can see into every heart.”

  “You are provoking, Sarah.”

  “Tell me the rest of it.”

  Lauretta settled back again. “I saw a chance, or what looked like one, to make a great deal of money. If all had gone well, I should never have had to worry. I might have snapped my fingers at those lawyers and at those detestable Maryland biddies who had dropped me like a stone. Oh, how I should have liked that. I was tempted, and temptation has ever been my downfall. You must understand. This man—”

  “Ah.”

  “Don’t say ‘ah’ in that irritating way. You make me feel silly.”

  “You are silly.”

  “He was not what you think—no gold toothpick, cigars, and flattery. I had to approach him. When I asked if it might be possible for a poor widow to invest a little in the new silver mines he had made mention of—”

  “Not silver mining!” Sarah shook her head. “I thought no one could be swindled with those again—”

  “I tell you; the whole proposition was sensible.”

  “The lawyers, didn’t they advise you?”

  “Lawyers are always overcautious. Mr. Worthington said—”

  “Worthington? Perfection!”

  “I wish you would not try to be funny—”

  “Go on,” Sarah said contritely.

  “There’s nothing to tell. I put up a modest amount, but of course I had to turn stocks into cash to do so.”

  “Then you added more.”

  Lauretta nodded. “Finally, all. I fear a little more than all. Sarah, I owe them seven thousand dollars, they say. Everything is gone. The Colonel should not have left things so that I was allowed to speculate.”

  “No,” Sarah said, “but he loved you, and it would have looked like not trusting you to tie everything up.”