“I been waiting to get you,” Perry told her. “Now I got you, I’m going to fuck you, girl. You let me, for I’ll do it anyhow—”
No one before had laid a hand on Luck she didn’t permit or invite. She had been treated with deference and affection by her black family and white acquaintances, and although she knew the racial divisions as well as did every Southern Negro, she had not believed them bone-deep until this moment when the strange, strong white boy let her know he was determined to have her and that he expected her to acquiesce. Breathing as hard as he, she began to shout for Abraham; but Abraham was not there.
Leon was. He had left his men at the new bridge to put away their tools in the factory, because they would be returning on Monday morning to continue the job; and he was riding his own horse back to Beulah Land to join his father and Daniel and Bobby Lee for a wash in the creek before noon dinner, as was their Saturday custom. Davy and Abraham were still in the office working over the week’s figures. Leon knew from a remark made earlier that Abraham was expecting Luck to come for him today in her trap. That was why he became uneasy when he saw Perry ride away and heard him cross the creek. Following only a few minutes later, he found Perry’s mule returning riderless to the old sawmill site. Going faster and directed by Luck’s cries, he soon found and separated the pair. For a long moment the three stood apart from each other, Luck almost retching in her need for air and her relief at rescue. Leon was first to find voice. He said to Luck, “Go to Abraham—tell him whatever you will, but don’t let him come! I’ll take care of this man—” Nodding, still gasping for breath, Luck led her mare and trap back to the roadway and disappeared.
As he paused to see her get clear, Leon was surprised by Perry, who jumped on him from the back and brought him to the ground. They rolled and fought, each trying to overpower the other, and because he was the bigger and stronger, Leon soon prevailed. He beat Perry only enough to be certain his resistance was over, but when they both drew themselves to upright positions, Leon wiping blood from the side of his head where his ear was bleeding, Perry said, “You ain’t taking me!”
Leon grabbed him again and shoved him roughly ahead to the roadway. The mule was long gone, but Leon had his horse. He ordered Perry to mount and, taking the bridle, he began to walk them out of the woods to the main road.
Perry no longer resisted. “Where you leading me?”
“To your boss.”
“Through town?”
“Only way.”
“Everybody’ll see!”
“Don’t you care about that!”
Directly through town they went, with people staring from the sidewalks at the odd sight of Leon Davis leading his horse, which they recognized and on which sat Perry Mitchell, whom some identified as one of the sawmill hands, both young men looking grim and as if they had been in a fight. Turning up alongside the railroad tracks, they were soon at the new mill site. From the office steps where he had finished paying the crews, Eugene saw them coming and waited. The three went into the office without words having passed, and Eugene closed the door after them.
Leon told him what had happened, and Perry made no objection or comment of any kind. At the end Leon said, “He’s your man, Mr. Betchley, and I reckon you had better be responsible for him. I don’t want any more trouble, for we both know how ugly it could get. If you promise to have him out of town by tomorrow morning and promise he’ll never show himself here again, I’ll try to calm our people. I may have to tie Abraham Kendrick to a tree, but if I don’t stop him, he’ll come after your man, and somebody will be killed. If it’s this one, then Abraham will be killed too, with no regard to reason and right. Will you agree to that?”
Eugene looked at Perry, who stood to one side of the office, then back at Leon and nodded. “I’ll see he goes. Now you go.” Leon found his horse at the door and rode away through the crowd of wondering men.
Eugene closed the door.
The boy said, “I don’t know what happened, Mr. Betchley.”
“All hell, it looks like.”
“What must I do?”
“You’ll have to go, like he says.”
“Where? I got nowhere, I got nothing. I can’t go back to no farm, even if they’d have me. You said she’d let me do it, Mr. Betchley, but she wouldn’t. I’d like to kill that Leon Davis. I almost had her. How come he got into it—you reckon he’s been fucking her? Lend me your pistol so I can go kill him now!”
“Do that and you’re in real trouble. They wouldn’t wait to try you; they’d hang you today. Think of something else.”
Perry shook his head hopelessly. “Can’t ask nobody for help but you, Mr. Betchley.”
“Let me study on it.” Eugene took a tin of cigarettes from his pocket, put one between his lips, and after a pause handed one to Perry without offering him the tin. They smoked for five minutes without speaking, Eugene appearing to cogitate, Perry giving him anxious looks as he waited. Dropping the end of his cigarette to the floor of the office, Eugene crushed it out. “I’ve thought of something, but I don’t know if you’re man enough to be trusted.”
“Try me, please, sir,” Perry said humbly.
“If you ever breathe a word, God help you.”
“No, sir!”
Eugene shrugged. “I’m going to give you fifty dollars and a mule. When I let you go, you’re going to vanish like you been wiped off the face of the earth. You’ll ride what’s left of tonight and ride every night, hiding days. Get to Savannah by directions I’ll give you and get the first boat headed anywhere. I can help you there with a note to my lumber office in Savannah.” Perry began to cry, and Eugene looked at him with satisfaction. “Before I let you go tonight, I got a few things for you to do.”
“Anything you say, sir.”
“You mean it about wanting to get even with Leon Davis and all them nigger lovers?”
16
Omitting most of the details and choosing her words with greater care than she was used to doing, Luck still thought it necessary to give her husband a clear account of what had happened. She was calm enough, but neither she nor Davy was able to reason Abraham out of his rage. Far from being grateful to Leon, he resented his being the rescuer and blamed him for not killing the attacker on the spot. Davy finally made him see the sense of taking Luck to Beulah Land while he, Davy, went to fetch Roscoe Elk. They would wait together for Leon to return and tell them how he had disposed of the man.
Sarah insisted on putting Luck to bed. Luck insisted on getting right up again, just as Fanny Saxon arrived, having heard incomprehensible reports of Leon’s walking his horse through town carrying a captive rider, both men bloody from fighting. She had come to discover what had happened but was able at least to tell them that the rumors made no mention of Luck Kendrick.
Luck and Bruce welcomed Fanny and after the first emotional explanations the three young women adjourned to Bruce’s room, where they were to go over Luck’s misadventure a hundred times while Leon and Benjamin, Abraham and Roscoe, Davy and Sarah talked together in the office. Roscoe was first to congratulate Leon on his handling of “the incident,” as he chose to call it, hoping thus to diminish it. He argued that all of them must understand the probable consequences of doing what they felt like doing; for if they responded violently, there would be killing on both sides, and no end to the affair.
They agreed that no good could come of informing the sheriff. He’d only hem and haw, ask impertinent questions and draw wrong conclusions from whatever answers he received. The longer they talked, the plainer it became that Leon had acted well. If the man went away, and if they let him go, Luck’s name would not be in every gossip’s mouth. She had been attacked, but she had not been raped. If the man was accused of rape, he would accuse Luck of enticement, and Eugene Betchley would find it easy to get his men to swear to it. Davy reminded them of the calling back and forth between female factory workers and sawmill crews. There could be silence, if no justice and no forgetting; for even as t
hey went over the affair, present in everyone’s mind was the fact that Sarah Troy had been raped fifty years ago by a black man: Roscoe Elk’s uncle.
They must wait and see if Eugene Betchley kept his word. Sarah said he would because he was self-seeking above all else, and no credit would come to him from a complete airing of the episode. When there are accusations from two sides, both are believed. She would seek him out at church tomorrow and ask what he had done. Meantime, since they were all here and had talked away the afternoon, offending Josephine by ignoring her calls to dinner, wouldn’t they stay for supper? They did, and Fanny was persuaded to spend the night. The stable boy Clarence was sent to town with a note for her mother.
Roscoe and Abraham and Luck set off for home at nine o’clock, after something like a party atmosphere had enfolded them for a few hours. It was one of the graces of Beulah Land that even in bad times they could find comfort there. Everyone was gay, not callously so but as an assertion of themselves and their consideration for each other, as people will sometimes exert themselves to be cheerful after a funeral.
The Todds were next to leave; and after a last yawning review of the day, Sarah retired, and Benjamin took the path to the house in the Glade to spend the night with Nancy. He wanted Nancy, and he needed to be quiet with her. When Leon went to his room, he passed Bruce’s door and heard her and Fanny talking in the soft tones of self-comfort women use when brushing their hair and making preparations for bed. Closing his own door, he set down his lamp to discover Hellfire asleep on the pillow of the turned-down bed. He picked him up and deposited him on the floor. “Off! God knows where you’ve been; you smell like—you got a polecat for a sweetheart?” Hellfire ignored him, scratching his ear thoroughly before shaking himself and walking under the bed. One by one the lamps and candles of Beulah Land went out, and the world was dark.
Clarence slept in the horse barn, and with his ear trained for arrivals and departures, it was he who first heard and ran to meet the messenger two hours after midnight. At the word “fire” he turned to look toward town and saw reflections of burning in the sky. Running, he caught the rope of the bell used to send them to the fields to work and bring them home for food and rest. “Fire” was the terrible word for the terrible thing all country folk most dreaded, for there was no weapon against it but God’s will. They might fight it, but even as they passed and threw the inadequate buckets of water, flames spread, to die only when there was nothing left to destroy. Any fire was awful; a fire at night brought everyone from his bed, for there was an element of the supernatural about it—flame against blackness suggesting hell to the susceptible, and with always the question of how it had come about. “Struck by lightning” was the most common explanation, but there was often the suspicion of a vengeful hand. Fire killed livestock and sometimes people, destroyed hay and cotton, grain and dry goods. It was called an act of God but feared as an act of the devil. It was the great leveler of men, more evenhanded than democracy and disease, for it accomplished its ends more swiftly.
For those at Beulah Land it held particular horror, for Sherman’s army had used it against them and the neighboring Davis plantation. Before that, the first Roscoe Elk had tried to confound Beulah Land by firing its warehouses in town. And so now, when the field bell rang in the black early morning, they left their beds hastily to hear the word “fire” echo from one house to another. Benjamin came running from the Glade to find Leon already in the horse barn with Clarence and Wally saddling horses. As they rode around the house and away, they passed Davy on his bicycle, and behind them heard the clatter of buggy wheels on the hard road, for Jane had insisted on going with Daniel. Bobby Lee caught up with them on a horse he had simply bridled and not bothered to saddle.
On the road to town they were joined at every crossing by other farmers, all drawn in the direction of the light in the sky. They came first to what had been the old Campgrounds and more recently the site of the cotton factory and the sawmill. The cabins that had mushroomed around the factory buildings were all burned or burning, having caught fire from the factory, which still blazed like the jaws of hell. People ran or stood amazed, some holding each other in thankfulness at being spared, some carrying meaningless things they had grabbed on their way out of burning rooms, a chair, a chamber pot, a picture from the wall. People came and went; although some lingered, others turned away, for there was nothing they were able to do. Even as they wavered, there was a fresh alarm.
“Look!” someone cried, pointing to a distant light. At first it was said to be only a trick of reflection, but as Benjamin and Leon rode to see, word came to meet them that the cotton gin was afire, and that would mean the warehouses adjoining it too.
Waking, Doreen Davis had seen the walls of her room glimmering with shadow light. For a few moments she thought only how pretty it was against the flowered wallpaper, and then she left her bed and stumbled across the hall to throw open the door of her friend’s room. “Where is Pharaoh?” she cried. “The Yankees have come for him, and I must hide him from them!”
It was the old familiar nightmare, thought Eloise, of the killing of her horse, but she hurried from bed nevertheless to soothe her companion. “No, my love, it’s all right—only a dream. There are no Yankees.”
Doreen drew her to the window. “Look there! Where are the cats? They will be so afraid—”
Edna May Davis was wakened by the high-pitched laughter of her stepbrother Theodore; and when she remembered that Fanny was not in the bed beside hers, she screamed and ran out into the hallway to Frankie’s room. Finding it empty, she raced through the house and onto the porch calling, “Mama, Mama, Mama—” There she found Theodore holding the banisters with both hands and still laughing as he looked off toward the fire. Beside him, Frankie said, “Be quiet! Has everyone gone mad?”
How they came there, they never remembered, but they arrived separately and met in the old graveyard. They had seen the cotton factory burn and known there was nothing to be done about it. Too late to worry about the already leveled cabins, they left Roscoe and Abraham to quiet the people as best they could, and Davy shaking his fists and cursing. Leaving together to investigate the other fire, they discovered that it was theirs too. It was a holocaust. Because of the tightly baled cotton, it would smolder for days, and there was no way to put it out.
Wandering back through the town, they heard talk of their ruin: “Who could have?” “Judgment of God!”—until they were sick of every fearful voice. And so they continued walking, walking here and there and finally to the old graveyard, as if they sought counsel of their forebears. Leon found Benjamin with his arms about the marble angel hovering over the grave of Rachel, the mother who had not loved him and whom he had not loved.
“Pa?”
Benjamin turned and saw him. Opening their arms, they embraced, weeping.
17
Benjamin found himself inordinately regretting the loss of Isaac’s wooden leg, the way people faced with catastrophe will hold on to one inconsequential thing as if it represents all past order. On the death of Isaac, Benjamin had kept his peg leg under a great bell jar in his office at the cotton gin. No one considered it a morbid relic but rather a tribute to the man who had spent most of his life taking care of the gin.
The same questions were asked a thousand times over. Who? How? Why?
Both factory and gin had a watchman, but no one man may bar another bent on evil. It was inconceivable that any who worked in either had started the fires. Then wouldn’t someone in a cabin near the factory have waked in time to give the alarm? Wouldn’t a dog have barked at a stranger? They remembered the bridge Leon and his men had almost completed. A man might have crossed it and been directly before the factory without going through the cabin area. As for the gin, no matter what a watchman swears, he may steal sleep, or step into the outdoors to relieve boredom or to empty his bladder.
If that was how it occurred, then who and why?
Before the night was over, Leon and Ben
jamin had gone from their reunion at the graveyard to Eugene Betchley, and he’d told them he had dismissed the man Perry Mitchell as requested and sent him on his way with the warning never to return. He could have had nothing to do with the fires—and no, Eugene did not know where he had gone; he was a poor worker and would have been dismissed anyhow in another week or two. They might not believe him, but they could not send parties in every direction to find and question the man.
Morning light left no doubt that the fires had completely destroyed factory and gin. There was insurance, but only for the buildings and some of the machinery, and they were the least of the loss.
When Sarah came into the kitchen after the long night, she discovered Mabella crying with ostentatious modesty as she sidled about her duties, but Josephine was dry of eye. “Miss Sarah,” she said, “I dreamed about Napoleon last night. Do you reckon it means something?”
Startled, Sarah took a moment to remember that Napoleon had been married to Josephine many years ago, but she was glad of the distraction. “He must have left Beulah Land with that girl—when would it have been?” Josephine waited for her to study on it. “Two years after the war.” Both nodded.
“I don’t dream about him often, just sometimes. He couldn’t resist a sassy butt, could he, ma’am?”
“No, he couldn’t, Josephine.”
“You reckon he’ll ever come back to me?”
“He’ll be over sixty if he’s alive,” Sarah said doubtfully.
“Somebody’d surely have killed him before now.” Josephine sighed. “That leaves me only the Lord. Is it so, Miss Sarah, what they all say about us going to be poor?”
“I’m afraid so. Is that coffee ready?”
Josephine took the pot from the stove and poured out cups for her mistress and herself. Her kitchen was her kitchen. “Well’m, I ain’t forgot how to cook lye hominy. You can fill a lot of hollow bellies thataway with a handful or two of shelled corn. We been poor before.”
The Legacy of Beulah Land Page 44