“Well, I never been poor before!” Mabella wailed.
Sarah patted Josephine’s arm. “Josephine, you are a comfort. Mabella, if you don’t stop that sniveling and blow your nose, I’m going to feed you to the hogs.”
It was important for them to go to church that day, and they did so in good style: the Todds in the four-seat rockaway, and Sarah, Benjamin, Bruce, Fanny, Leon, and Lauretta in the six-seat barouche. Sarah understood that if they did not present themselves, half the town would come to visit, some to express genuine sympathy and others to gloat, for however correct their words on the occasion, their eyes would give away their satisfaction at seeing the mighty fallen. All the family members mingled freely; they talked freely; they hid nothing, thereby disappointing a few, disarming others.
Annabel said to Leon, “I suppose you will now be in a great hurry to marry my granddaughter, seeing how poorly you’ll all be situated. Well, I don’t know that it mightn’t be wise to postpone thinking about it. Fanny may look like a rich heiress to you, but the money is only behind her, on my side and her stepfather’s, if you understand me. How well he has done for himself—”
Overhearing, Sarah moved to join them. “Annabel, some of my happiest daydreams have been of doing you bodily harm.”
“Auntie Sarah, you are shocking!”
“So you always say when I allow myself to speak the truth.”
“I’m only telling your great-grandson that he mustn’t expect anything particular in the way of financial consideration if he marries into what must now seem to him great affluence. And how are you bearing up to adversity?”
“Tolerably.”
Annabel sighed with exasperation. “You make me tired, always so inhumanly accepting. Once, only once I’d like to see you curse your fate and vow vengeance.”
“Don’t be silly, Annabel; you’re only trying to sound interesting.”
Annabel continued, “I’m glad that ‘silly’ notion of mine about Blair and Bruce came to nothing. He’s well out of it, and she mustn’t expect another such offer. My guess is she’s cut out to be an old maid like sister Doreen. I’ve news for you. Judge Meldrim has found a place for our dear boy in an excellent law firm in Atlanta! He goes in a week to continue his reading and studying. I shall miss him, but what does my sacrifice signify?”
“I wish him well,” Sarah said.
Annabel was looking at her narrowly. “You’ll have to convert all those bonds and securities.”
Sarah took Leon’s arm and led him away. Ann Oglethorpe and Priscilla Davis nodded from a distance but attempted no more intimate approach. They did not look unhappy, and they did not lower their voices as they speculated with Eugene Betchley on the mysterious ways of the Lord.
Of those expressing their concern for her, none spoke more truly than Elizabeth Cooper. “Miss Sarah, if there’s anything we can do, ask. You’ve been good to us, good friends and good neighbors. Anything we’ve got except our rascally boys is yours for the asking.”
Smiling, Sarah thanked her. “It’s the boys I wanted.”
Lauretta, who did not often attend church services, had today insisted on coming, not liking to miss a dramatic occasion. Sarah heard her saying to Eunice Hightower, “I may be compelled to return to the stage to earn my bread. I daresay there are some who have not forgotten my name—”
At last they were free to go home for Sunday dinner, which the Todds enjoyed with them, Josephine not finding it yet necessary to put them on lye hominy for sustenance. Mabella had defiantly made three chocolate pies.
Their problems were real enough, however.
The cotton gin would have to be rebuilt before next summer. This year’s cotton was lost because they had stored it to wait for the price to rise. They had also engaged to store part of the ginned and baled harvest of other farms, and that must now be paid for. The factory too would have to be replaced. Meanwhile, there were those to pay who worked at Beulah Land and those to support who would not be working at the cotton factory. Roscoe came immediately to offer any help he could. They decided to use the workers to clear the destruction and to begin rebuilding. Sarah and Benjamin converted bonds and securities to working currency to meet immediate obligations, and Roscoe arranged further credit for them at two banks in Savannah.
Every day they figured and talked; every night they figured and talked again, Sarah, Benjamin, and Leon in Sarah’s old office. The father and son would sip one glassful each while Sarah consumed two or three of the peach brandy Otis made for her every year. Benjamin was always first to go to bed after yawning and offering no comment for half an hour before doing so. They were all three bone-tired, going to bed so and waking little refreshed. Soon after Benjamin left them, Sarah sent Leon off, saying she wanted to sit alone awhile. “You oughtn’t to be here anyway. Tomorrow night, go into town and court Fanny.”
“Can’t, Grandma.”
“Why?”
“No courting to do. She’s willing and I’m not.”
“Don’t you know the best thing a man has to offer a woman is the chance to help him?”
“Grandma, you’re forgetting something. I was born poor. My name is Leon Marsh Davis. I won’t ask my wife to be poor with me when she’s put me off before now.”
“If you’re thinking about Annabel Saxon and what she said—”
“It’s what everybody would say, Grandma.”
“What matter? At Beulah Land we don’t care what people say about us.”
He kissed her cheek. “Good night, Grandma.”
“Come back here!”
But he did not.
18
Eugene Betchley was triumphant. Everything had happened according to plan and better than he’d foreseen, because he was able to use the advantage of the unexpected. The sawmill in its new position was operating at full production. Shipping was more efficiently done than had been possible from the old Campgrounds, and new orders were coming in every day from the Savannah office. He was even afforded the bonus of selling lumber to Roscoe Elk and Benjamin Davis, which they needed to rebuild the factory and cotton gin and warehouses. He had money in three banks in Highboro and Savannah, and that was power. He was negotiating the purchase of another thousand acres of woodland, and that was power. Having asserted himself over Frankie, he could be certain that everything in the future was in his name alone, not theirs together; and that was power.
“There’s no stopping me,” he said to her.
“You won’t get Beulah Land, which is what you want.”
“Wait and see.”
“You’re trash and always will be; you can’t change yourself.”
“Watch what you say,” he warned her.
“I say what I please, and don’t you forget I can bring you down any time I want to with what I know.”
“Nobody’d believe you. They think you’re crazy, way you drink, way you lock yourself in your room days at a time, way you paint your ugly face and powder your old neck and think you look sixteen. Even Molly believes you’re crazy. You be the one to watch out, for I can have you locked up in the lunatic asylum.”
She laughed, deliberately exaggerating her scorn and confidence until she sounded a little crazy even to her own ears. He left her, and she subsided, frightened.
One morning after the train arrived, Sarah and Leon waited in the post office for the mail to be sorted. Eugene was only one of the dozen or so who waited with them, but he came over, removed his hat, and bowed. “Morning, ma’am. You’re a rare sight except for church these days; and we never seem to have a chance to do more than speak when we meet there. Of course I could come out to see you, but I know not everybody’s welcome at Beulah Land.”
The post office had gone quiet.
Feeling required to say something, Sarah managed only, “As you say, Mr. Betchley.”
“Well, ma’am, no hard feelings—on my side, that is; and I want you to know how much I appreciate doing business with you all for the building you’re engaged in.�
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“There is but one sawmill in Highboro.”
“And it used to be yours.”
“We sold it after the war to James Davis, as you know. It was he who first gave you a job of work there. Am I not right?”
“Yes, ma’am, so he did, and I’ve been ever grateful, for it set me on my way. As my fortunes improved, those of Beulah Land have waned.”
“Wax-and-wane is one of the rhythms of life, Mr. Betchley, like breathing in and out.”
“I hear you-all are having to take help from niggers? I sure hope it’s not so, but you know how people will talk about things.”
“We’re in business with Roscoe Elk and Abraham Kendrick,” Leon said.
Eugene looked at Leon as if he were just discovering his presence. “That’s the way to look at it, as long as you can. His own granddaddy used to work at Beulah Land, one of the slaves, you might say.”
“If you did, you’d be wrong,” Sarah corrected him. “Roscoe Elk was a free man before he came to us.”
“Still, it does seem queer, having to take help from his grandboy.”
Sarah said, “Maybe the moral is that if you’re ‘nigger lovers,’ as I once heard you describe us, they love you back. Good day to you, Mr. Betchley. The grill is opening, and your mail is waiting.”
“Yes, ma am,” he said, parodying contrition. “Good day to you.”
Elaborations and embroideries of the scene were repeated all over Highboro within the hour, and there were few who did not take Eugene Betchley’s side in the matter, seeing Sarah Troy as arrogant and over-proud. As for the town idlers, he was more than ever their hero. “Gene stands up to ’em,” they bragged.
One afternoon Eugene discovered Frankie in the office. She did not come to it as often as she had the old one. She was at the heavy oak desk he’d recently bought himself, so absorbed in opening drawers and rummaging through them that he was able to observe her for several minutes before she knew he was there.
“Can I help you find something?” he asked politely when she glanced up.
She answered with fair composure, “Why do you lock one drawer?”
“Secrets,” he said, and winked.
“I know your secrets, and the business is ours together.”
“It don’t say so on the papers, you know. What are you looking for?”
“The gun. Now the convict crew is gone, I want to take it home.”
“You don’t need a gun.”
“I might.”
He smiled. “Who’d you use it against? Not that I’m afraid, you understand. You’re the one to bolt your door at night, not me. I just don’t consider you stable enough to have a gun lying around. You might hurt yourself, and everybody would blame me.”
“I get scared when you’re out at night. I’ve heard there are prowlers, and everybody knows you’re gone a lot of the time.”
“I’ve things to do.”
“You can’t get enough of your nigger, can you?”
“I get enough,” he said quietly, “and I won’t let you have the gun.”
“We’re only females and a young boy, alone and niggers roaming free.”
“Practice screaming, in case you need to.”
Like a number of men in Highboro considered otherwise respectable, Eugene kept a Negro mistress. It was a custom discreetly ignored, although many were aware of it. The woman Eugene was currently keeping was named Myrtle. She lived alone not far from the sawmill, and Eugene saw her almost every night for an hour or two. His sexual appetite, always strong, had increased with his recent successes as if it were part of new energy he found himself generating. Myrtle was a plump, bold woman twenty years old, and she boasted of her position to her friends, who were always keenly aware of the changing status of whites in the town. The way she put it was: “White ladies like us-all to do their washing and ironing and clean their houses; reckon it’s just another step to let us do their fucking.” It made them laugh. Eugene found her more satisfying than any woman he’d ever had. As his station had changed, Eugene had learned to observe the common rules of cleanliness, but he was not a fastidious man, and he never bothered to wash himself after bedding with Myrtle. If he saw Frankie on his return at night, she invariably wrinkled her nose and told him, “You’ve got nigger stink on you.”
“Never mind, I won’t be getting it on you.”
On the evening after finding Frankie at his desk he came home at midnight as Leon was leaving Fanny at the door after a town dance they had attended. Eugene waited for her in the hall, and when she entered, commented jokingly, “Didn’t look to me like a very romantic good night between you.”
He had planted himself directly before her, and she made as if to go around him. “Good night, Mr. Betchley.”
He took her hand, which she immediately withdrew. “You never trouble yourself to talk to me. I’m tired of being treated like that, you hear me? You live under my roof, and it’s time you learn some manners.”
“I’m sorry you think I lack them,” she said. “I must go to bed.”
“I haven’t heard any more about you getting married. Have the recent setbacks to Beulah Land stopped your plans?”
“We’ve set no day to marry or you’d know it from Mama.”
He followed closely behind her up the stairs, drawling, “You tell your mama everything, do you?”
“We must be quiet. Mama and Edna May and Theodore are surely asleep.”
Before she could enter her room, he took her hand again, and this time she could not pull away. “Kiss me good night like a good daughter.”
“No, sir, we are not on those terms.”
“I’m a mighty loving man.” He clasped her firmly against him. “God, what a pretty thing you are. If you’re getting no loving from that boy from Beulah Land, you ought to be willing to let me show you some—”
“Let me go!”
“A little fight feels good to me. Now, come on, kiss me like I said. I won’t tell your mama; won’t nobody ever know but me and you. Your mama’s too old to want to do it; don’t you feel sorry for me just a little bit?”
When Frankie opened her door, Fanny managed to wrench free. Slipping quickly into the room she shared with Edna May, she bolted the door and leaned against it. She waited and was surprised that there was no sound of voices. A moment later she became aware of the regular breathing of Edna May and was thankful that she had not waked. She listened a little longer but heard nothing from the hallway. As quietly as she could, she began to undress in the dark.
Eugene and Frankie had stared at each other when they were alone, his lips forming the words “old cunt.” But when she made no move toward him, he went down the hall to his own room, entering and closing the door behind him. Frankie closed and bolted hers, but she did not go to bed. She had been sitting by the lamp table with a novel by Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, which she’d found Edna May mooning over recently. She returned to the book, but her mind would not follow it, and after a while she closed it and poured whiskey into a glass.
When the clock struck three downstairs, she was awake. The sound made her feel the stillness of the house and her own aloneness more than ever. She had drunk two glasses of whiskey but was as sober as the day she was born. Leaving her chair, she realized that she was cold and took a winter wrapper from the wardrobe. Possessed suddenly of a wish to examine something she passed fifty times a day without looking at it, she went downstairs.
The heavy curtains had not been closed, and moonlight played through the thin inner curtains of the living room, making it almost as bright as day. She had not brought a lamp, nor did she need one to see the portrait Casey Troy had painted of her sixteen years ago. She saw that she had indeed been a great beauty and remembered what Annabel Saxon said the first day Casey came to the house to make drawings. “We must catch the bloom before it fades.” Frankie had been aware of her beauty all her life and had used it to advance herself, but she’d never had the overweening vanity of most belles. Nevertheless,
it had shocked her to have Eugene ridicule her as being old and ugly. She told herself that she was neither, but without beauty, without youth, what was she and who could love her?
Turning from the portrait, she went into the hallway. It was not bright enough for her purpose, so she lighted a lamp and held it to the mirror glass into which she habitually glanced to check her appearance before leaving the house. Now she studied her face, and her heart turned cold. Annabel Saxon had been right to say her thinness made her appear haggard. It was a mistake to worry about her figure; the face and neck mattered more. She blew out the lamp and stood where she was, tears coming, as if she had to be alone in the dark to cry.
Without design, she went into the living room, noticing this and that, remembering what each item had cost and how pleased she had been to acquire it, finding worth and reassurance in belongings she had not discovered in herself or anyone else. As her hands passed over the surface of things, she came upon Fanny’s sewing basket. On top and used as a weight was a pair of scissors. Taking them up, she looked at them as if she understood for the first time what scissors were for. They were not a large pair, but they were very sharp.
She went upstairs carefully, although she was not drunk and there was no reason for her to creep. Everyone would be asleep. Outside Eugene’s door she listened to the sound of his snoring. Opening the door, she went in and to the bedside. He was sleeping heavily and had thrown the top bedclothes off himself. She could see him quite clearly, the rise and fall of his hairy chest in the partly unbuttoned nightshirt. She rested her fingers lightly on his penis and after a moment felt it respond. As it became warm and began to lift of itself, she was seized by the greatest rage she had ever known and plunged the sewing scissors into his groin again and again as he woke kicking and screaming.
19
“Mercy! Hurts just to think about, don’t it? And him a gent’mum set so much store by his peter.” It had taken Myrtle a little while to grasp what had happened, but then she accepted it readily enough. A practical woman, she passed word to her friends that if they heard of anything, she might be willing to do a little washing and ironing until something better turned up.
The Legacy of Beulah Land Page 45