The conflict between the two was surely, they decided, coming to a head. Never friendly, relations had deteriorated to the trigger point of danger. Because of their color, the convict laborers had been provisionally accepted by the factory workers, who knew that shackles prevented contact more intimate than a few suggestive remarks. They felt sorry for them and were inclined to disregard if not condone verbal approaches to their females. The new situation had, however, altered an old one. Whereas before there had been few words between the white sawmill workers and the cotton-mill hands, the whites were beginning to copy and enlarge upon sallies made by the convicts they despised. In brief—white men were shouting crude invitations across the creek to any tolerably comely female who came in view. Soon or late, and sooner than later, Roscoe feared, there would be a fight, possibly a killing.
They talked of ways to avoid confrontation. Davy and Abraham had already spoken to Eugene without effect. He smiled his frozen smile at Davy and said that human nature was beyond him, and what could anyone do? Abraham, he merely stared at until Abraham went away. Roscoe would not approach the lumber camp. Benjamin was reluctant to do so, having ordered Eugene away from Beulah Land at the time of his intrusion with Mrs. Oglethorpe. The dilemma was resolved in a way Benjamin only later guessed had not been happenstance.
Frankie, with little aptitude for what she considered the inconsequential concerns of her own sex, was not popular with them and tended to drift at such a gathering. Benjamin encountered her during a rainless half hour sitting on the surround-bench of one of the old oak trees, alone. “Isn’t it damp for you?”
“No matter,” she said quietly.
He sat down beside her. He had been a little surprised at her joining them today, for although she was often invited, it was understood that when she came it would be without her husband. In recent years she seldom went anywhere in the social way. Most of her acquaintances were resigned to her neglect of them. Of those at Beulah Land only Leon and Bruce continued to call at Frankie’s house in town. It appeared to Benjamin that Frankie had deliberately cut herself off and that she showed the effects of a too constant reliance upon her own company. She was like a rope pulled tight—he marveled that she held, even as he waited for her to snap. To try to dissolve her gravity he said, “You choose not to loosen your stays and rest with the other ladies.”
“I use stays no more, and nothing is more boring than to lie down in a communal bedroom with snoring women.”
He laughed to encourage her. “I have never done so.”
She did not laugh with him, but she seemed to relax, he thought. “Besides, I require little rest.”
“You work too hard.”
“I like to know what is happening.”
The opportunity was too clear to ignore. He began to explain the fears they felt of trouble between the sawmill crews and the factory people. She listened carefully, nodding but making no comment until he had finished, whereupon she said, “I was against hiring convicts, but it has worked well enough, I’ve had to admit. There is no friction between them and our whites; they ignore each other. I’m surprised at the white men annoying your women. They do not do so in front of me.”
He assured her that it happened often, that even Luck had been challenged when she came and went to the factory to see Abraham.
Suddenly her face softened, and she put a hand on his. “Poor Ben—you who so easily should understand the appeal of the dark ladies! I’ve shocked you.” She patted his hand briskly and withdrew hers to her lap. “There is always bad feeling between your factory and our sawmill. If it weren’t this thing, it would be another. The only solution, I expect, is for you to go somewhere else, or for us to. I believe Eugene was wise and farseeing that time—I should not have sold you the land you needed to expand. Then you’d have moved, and we’d all be easier in our skins. By now, moving for either of us would involve a good deal of money. I’ve thought about it, I’m ready to admit.” She paused a long time, and when she spoke again, it was as if reluctantly. “I think I know a solution, but Eugene is against it and would need a great deal of persuading.”
“Tell me.”
She outlined a plan by which the cotton factory would buy the land presently occupied by the sawmill. The sawmill would move to a new location on the other side of town, down the railroad tracks. A short sidetrack might be laid from the main tracks to the new location so that the shipping of lumber would be simplified. The plan interested Benjamin and he said so. He would consult his partners if she would talk further with Eugene. Did she know, he wondered, who owned the land she had in mind as a new location for the sawmill?
“You do,” she said.
When the exact acreage was made clear, he acknowledged that it was his. He and Sarah had acquired it after one of their richer harvests and left it untenanted because it was rocky and nearly bare, unfit for farming and unpromising for grazing livestock. They’d not bought it but taken it in a swap for a farm they owned in a remote part of the county, thinking one day to sell it in lots if the town grew that way.
“I see no obstacle. I’ll certainly talk to Leon and Grandma about it.”
“Leon?”
“We make no decisions without him now.”
Saying she would present the advantages of the move to her husband again, she rose. “We mustn’t be seen sitting together for so long. The others will begin to stir and wonder, perhaps be jealous.”
Together they walked toward the house. “It’s beginning to sprinkle again,” he said.
“Is Nancy jealous?”
He forced a laugh as if she had meant a joke. “When are you going to allow Fanny to marry Leon?”
“I do not forbid her. So you think I grudge her winning so easily what I was denied.”
“No one denied you anything. You chose Bonard and left me with a sore heart.”
“Has Leon been complaining to you?”
“We talk. He hopes; but it seems Fanny won’t come to the point.”
“It’s nothing to do with me, you see.”
“She would agree if you encouraged her.”
“I’ve no stomach for matchmaking.”
“The match is made. Only the timing is in question. Fanny won’t set it because she is reluctant to leave you and her sister. Why don’t you all come?” he suggested exuberantly, cheered as he was by the possibility of settling the problem of the factory and the sawmill.
“Eugene too? I can’t see Miss Sarah welcoming us, to say nothing of your faithful Nancy—even if she is not jealous. Is it because you give her no cause?”
“Frankie, don’t,” he said.
“I am a shocking woman. Doesn’t everyone say so?”
When she went home at the end of the day, she was able to report to Eugene that his plan was working out as he had foreseen. They went upstairs together, and at her door he said, “You’ve done well. Do you want me to come to bed with you?”
“My reward?” She shook her head.
He smiled. “I could pretend you are Fanny.”
Leaving him in the hall, she entered her room and slid the bolt.
13
The porch was a comfortable sitting height from the ground, and Leon’s feet touched earth while the rest of him was supported by the porch. He lay flat on his back, face covered by a wide-brimmed straw hat, ragged at the edges from a summer’s use in the fields and sweated to softness. He might have been dead, so still was he except for the slight rise and fall of his chest. It was the end of day, the end of August, almost the end of summer, and he was aching tired. He’d picked two hundred and sixteen pounds of cotton that day, a good amount for any man; the record day’s pick was two hundred and forty-four pounds. He didn’t usually pick, but it was the peak of the harvest and every hand was useful. After weighing the yields and entering a sum against each picker’s name in the record book he carried in his hip pocket, he had come to the porch to wait for his father, instead of accompanying Daniel and Bobby Lee to the creek to wash and
cool off. Benjamin had taken a buggy into town after noon dinner, according to Nancy, who always knew where he was, and he had directly joined his grandmother in the office on returning a quarter hour ago.
A few feet from Leon, Hellfire was washing himself. He was now grown but in Mabella’s phrase “had yet to fill out.” Up went a hind leg like a salute. The sudden bolt-upright rigidity always made Leon laugh, and as if remembering this, the cat paused, flicked his ears, and gazed at the young man disapprovingly. He did not like to see him asleep and usually woke him when he discovered him so. Slowly he lowered his leg without washing it and shook his head. Walking deliberately over, he began to sniff delicately at Leon’s curled fingers. As he woke from the shallow sleep of fatigue, Leon thought it must be night until he recognized the straw hat’s sweaty smell, a little like that of boiled peanuts.
“That tiger’s about to eat you up.”
He removed the hat and raised himself on an arm to see Sarah and Benjamin looking down at him from the office doorway.
“Scat.” Hellfire hightailed it off the porch and around the house.
“Come on in here with us.” Benjamin held the door open and Leon followed, sprawling in the chair he usually took when they were there together. “Eugene has finally said he’ll talk about selling.”
Leon studied his father’s face briefly. “It took him a while to make up his mind.”
Sarah shook her head as if to rid it of gnats that plagued them so in August. “I never liked Frankie’s acting the go-between.”
“You’ve just never liked or trusted Frankie,” Benjamin told her.
“No more do I now,” Sarah admitted, “so I’m glad Eugene has come into the open. Not that they won’t have their heads together.”
“They’re married,” Benjamin reminded her, “as well as running the sawmill business together.”
She thought about it. “There’s something I don’t understand.”
“Well,” Benjamin said to Leon, “he’s ready to talk, and he wants to do his talking with you.”
“Me?” Leon was astonished, for although he was part of their business discussions as well as the day-to-day operation of the plantation, he had never been singled out for such responsibility.
Sarah said to Benjamin, “Frankie’s told him the way we do things. I can see why he wants Leon to come to him. He’s afraid of me and he can’t abide you. He also hates colored people—I don’t know why, but white trash like him always do—and he won’t consider selling his old site to Roscoe and Abraham. Won’t deal with them at all, so it’s up to us.”
Leon said slowly, “Him and me aren’t friends either.”
“No, but he imagines he’s superior to you,” Benjamin said.
Sarah said, “You’re to go see him tomorrow morning. That’s the message your papa brought home from Miss Frankie.”
Leon sat thinking about it as Benjamin said, “You listen to what he says, and we’ll talk about it when you come home. You won’t have to settle anything on the spot; he knows that. On the other hand, you can surely tell him as much as we can.”
“Yes, sir.” Leon looked from his father to Sarah. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Let’s go to the creek,” Benjamin said.
“Wish I could go with you,” Sarah said.
“Well, you can’t,” Benjamin told her, and the three smiled for the first time.
The next morning Leon saddled a horse and rode to the sawmill. He had never been there, only observed it from the other side of the creek. He’d seen Eugene irregularly but often during the years he was growing up, could indeed remember to the month his age when he was able to say to himself, “Now I’m as big as he is.” With the memory of the time the man had beaten the young boy almost to death, they were wary of each other, and when they met briefly at church or on Leon’s visits to Fanny, tensely watchful.
At a little distance he saw Theodore Betchley talking to three men who were trimming a cypress log. One of the men stopped and motioned, and Theodore looked up. Leon removed his hat and waved it, but the boy made no return gesture, only said something to the men, whereupon one of them laughed and spat and, detaching himself from the little group, came to meet Leon. “If you’re looking for the office,” Perry Mitchell said, “why, it’s yonder.” He pointed. Perry worked shirtless in the heat, freckled back and shoulders running with dirty sweat and smudged with his own hand marks where he’d slapped mosquitoes and rubbed their bites.
Through the open doorway Eugene saw Leon approaching, but they proceeded formally. Leon knocked; Eugene called, “Come in,” without getting up from his chair at the flat table he used as a desk. He was alone.
Entering, Leon said, “Miss Frankie told Papa you’d be expecting me.”
Eugene pretended to suddenly recollect. “Yes, so she did. Take a chair if you want to.”
Leon sat down facing the man at the table and keeping his hat on his lap. “You’ve talked over an idea she put to Papa about moving the sawmill to another place.”
Eugene smiled; the smile set, then disappeared as quickly as it had come. “She thinks we ought to accommodate you, but I can’t see doing it unless you make it a whole lot to my advantage. Let me hear how you tell it.”
Leon and Benjamin and Sarah had discussed the plan often during the last few weeks, and it was easy for Leon to review it simply and clearly. Eugene studied his hands folded on the table, opening them, flexing fingers lightly, scratching resin off a thumbnail, frowning, appearing to consider, his expression now doubtful, now bored and amused, not at Leon’s recital but as if he remembered something that had nothing to do with the topic under discussion, so that Leon sometimes had the feeling he might not be listening. But then the hands folded themselves again; the older man nodded and sighed and shrugged.
When Leon stopped talking and waited a full minute, determined to say no more until the other responded, Eugene cleared his throat importantly. “I can see some advantage to me about the shipping, since most of my lumber goes to Savannah for the office there to reroute. But let me tell you again—I can’t waste my time moving unless you-all at Beulah Land are prepared to make it worthwhile. Way I see it, I’ve had this land many years, since not so long after your ma died. Everybody knows where to find me; a blind mule could bring a load of pine without nobody leading him. Then too, I hate the notion of giving up my place here to niggers’ use, and that’s how it’s going to look unless I got something mighty big to show. You want them to take this over and us to go. Well now, Mrs. Betchley is on your side, I reckon you know.” He laughed indulgently. “Have to admit it. She’s more on your side than mine in this matter. Makes me feel plum lonesome. But while Mrs. Betchley is on your side, she’s also got a quick eye for the passing of money, as maybe you’ve noticed. Just how much you figure your pa and old Mrs. Troy are willing to turn loose?”
“You’d better tell me what you have in mind about that,” Leon countered.
“Then you’ll say yes or no?” Eugene smiled at him mockingly.
“No, Mr. Betchley. I’ll go tell them, and we’ll talk it over, and I’ll come back.”
“Oh.” Eugene looked sly. “I thought me and you was going to do this negotiating ourselves, you such a grown man and all. But I see, you’re just the—” He opened his hands and turned them palms up. “No offense meant, naturally.”
Leon’s face burned enough to show beneath its weathering. “We generally agree on what to do.”
“That’s good.” Eugene affected reassurance. “That’s just fine.” He looked around the rough office like a man who hates to think of leaving a place he’s used to. “Lot of trouble for me, and it’d have to wait a month till I get out some hurry-up orders. Let me put it square to you. The sawmill gets that piece of land up the railroad tracks, so we’re out of everybody’s way and your niggers can expand their business or just use my old property—all this here—for a watermelon patch if they want to, though I don’t reckon they’ll be doing that. Anyway, you, they, whoe
ver—takes my place over and I take that land of your papa’s; but an even swap’s not to my advantage, way I figure it. I got to have me something more. Let’s say—I get yours; you get mine, and you-all give me five thousand dollars to sweeten the sadness of leaving.”
Leon had cautioned himself not to react openly; even so, he sat blinking in surprise for a few moments. “You mean that, Mr. Betchley?”
“Sure do.” Eugene’s voice was firm. “Unless you want to offer me more?”
“That’s a lot more than anybody could say it’s worth, Mr. Betchley.”
“Well, ‘anybody’ ain’t doing the bargaining—Mr. Davis.”
Leon turned his hat on his lap. “You’re asking two hundred and fifty dollars an acre for a worked-out creek bank.”
“No, you’re the ones doing the asking; I’m doing the answering. I’m talking cash money, not a promise to pay. Unless you want to put up a piece of Beulah Land against the price. That might make a further talking point.”
“Beulah Land is not for sale, Mr. Betchley.”
“There, you see? I know how you feel, though you wasn’t exactly born to it. People get attached to a place a stranger mightn’t see as all that valuable, get their own ideas as to what it’s worth. You go talk to the boss man and the boss lady, then come back and see me if you want to. I don’t much care either way.”
Leon nodded grimly and rose from his chair. “Good day to you, Mr. Betchley.”
Eugene put on his smile. “I’ll expect you when I see you, Mr. Davis.”
The sight of a Davis, or anyone from Beulah Land, at the sawmill had been unknown for so many years the men paused at their work to watch as Leon walked his horse out the way he had come. There was no sign of Theodore, but Perry Mitchell stopped work and leaned lightly on his saw, eyes on the horse and rider.
The Legacy of Beulah Land Page 42