Mary Bet looked at them and shook her head. “It’s too much.”
“Just take it. Zeke won’t know what to do with all that.” He grabbed her hand and gave her two five-dollar and two ten-dollar gold pieces. “I’ll give the rest to Myrtle Emma and Siler.” She looked at the money, still shaking her head, then regarded her grandfather. It seemed wrong to rob him like a vulture while he was lying on his deathbed. But perhaps her father was right, and she thought with greed of all the rest of the money still in the bag.
The funeral at Love’s Creek was sparsely attended, most of those who knew Samuel Hartsoe having long preceded him to the grave, and the others not particularly moved to see him off. Some friends of Cicero’s came and a few distant Hartsoe relatives. Zeke was the only black person in attendance, and after the burial he shook hands with Cicero and his children and, with a forlorn look, said he didn’t know what he was going to do with himself. He came to live with the Hartsoes, occupying a little storage room in the summer kitchen. Cicero told him it would be too cold out there in
the winter but that they would figure something out; Zeke said he didn’t mind the cold at all, that the stove on the other side of the wall would make the room warm as toast. In the end it didn’t matter, because he died a week after Thanksgiving. It was unclear what became of the money bag, or exactly how much was in it.
When they got home the reception had already begun, the house no longer their own. Women from church had laid the dining room table with platters of fried chicken and roast beef, kettles of rabbit stew, pies and layer cakes, casseroles and other dishes that this time would actually be eaten. “R.C.,” one old man said to Cicero, “I’m sorry about your daddy.”
“I am too,” Cicero said, shaking his hand.
When she could slip away, Mary Bet went out to meet her brother, who was making his way on a path between the fields at the edge of town. She knew that he would come this way rather than taking the road, where people would offer him rides that he would have to politely refuse. They met up in a grove of tall trees and didn’t say anything at first, just walked back toward their house. After a while Mary Bet said it was sad about their grandfather.
“He was a mean old man,” Siler said. “He never spoke to me.”
“He told me to read my book, and not be proud.” They walked on a ways, into a glade with shafts of sunlight pouring in like the foundations of heaven. “I saw him playing cards once with Captain Granddaddy. He was scary.”
“He was the Devil.”
Mary Bet grasped her brother’s wrist, and put a finger to her lips. “Hush, Siler. God can hear you.”
“God can’t hear anything,” Siler told her, scowling at the ground as he walked. Then he brightened suddenly and looked up into a shaft of sunlight and raised a fist and uttered something loud and incomprehensible.
“Are you talking in tongues again?” Mary Bet asked.
Siler shook his head.
“Then what did you say?”
“I said, ‘If you can hear this, strike me dead.’ ”
Mary Bet breathed in sharply. Of all people, she thought, her own brother, who had sinned with her, should not test God so, and yet she could not bring herself to chastise him. “You don’t think God punishes us for our sins?”
“He punishes the righteous, and exalts the sinner. Ask Daddy.”
“Daddy says things because of all his sadness. But he knows it’s not true. Not in heaven.”
“I don’t care about heaven.”
“Well, you should.”
Siler nodded and glanced at his sister. “Maybe you’re right,” he said, smiling his half-smile.
WHEN SILER WENT
back up to Morganton, Mary Bet felt a measure of relief. But then Myrtle Emma headed west to her teaching job, and the house seemed forlorn. The night before she was to leave, Myrt saw her sister’s tears and said, “I’ve made up my mind. I’m just not going to go. I’ll find something here.”
Mary Bet put her arms around her sister, as much to hide her face as anything, and said what she knew Myrt wanted to hear. “Don’t be foolish. There’s nothing for you around here. You go on, we’ll be fine.”
And then she was gone and like that they were down to two people, the youngest and the oldest. There was something about the community of three people that was lacking with two—with three nobody had the responsibility for keeping a conversation going at meal times. Now the family was like a two-legged stool. Whatever was she to say to her father, who seemed more remote and older than ever? Was he going to end up as austere as his father? They would pass each other in the house and glance shyly at the other, as
if to say, “I see you, I know you’re here.” Every creak on the floorboards, every cough and scraped chair could only be coming from him, and she wondered if the little sounds she made were as obvious. Did she bother him? Was he just being polite around her for the sake of a harmonious household? She would linger in her room if she heard him on the stairs. During the day she would make sure she knew where he was before she attempted the outhouse.
He let her bring in one of the barn cats for company, and she invited friends over for dinner, and sometimes in the evening as well. He went to his Columbus Club and his church committee meetings and his county road commission meetings. But as the weeks went by, it was mostly Mary Bet and her father, and they settled into a routine that, if not perfectly happy, was not exactly unhappy.
One night, after Mary Bet had brought her father his evening cup of tea—always with honey and a curl of sassafras—and was sitting down to mend his shirt while he read his newspaper and biography and Bible, in that order, he said, “I’m not feeling too good, Mary. I think I’ll go on to bed.”
She glanced at him, thought of how peaceful it would be in the parlor without his rustling and belching and reading aloud passages about Hannibal or Jefferson, which was like coming into the middle of a story for one minute and then leaving, and then she thought how quiet and lonely it would be without his voice on such a cold, windy autumn night. Then she felt a panic of guilt and terror. “What is it, Daddy?” she said, trying to keep the urgency out of her voice.
“Just feeling a little poorly, a little sore in my bones. Rest’ll cure me up.” He rose with a groan, smiled at her, and made his way to the stairs. She noticed age spots she had not seen before, and his hair, what little was left, seemed as white and sparse as dust.
“You’re losing weight,” she said.
He straightened to his full five feet eight inches and patted his belly. “Well, I could stand to.”
“I’ll get you some more tea,” she said. “I’ll bring it up, and your oatmeal.”
“Thank you, baby girl,” he said. “Put a thimble of brandy in the tea if you don’t mind.”
She looked at him, then down. He knew how she felt about drinking, how her grandparents had preached the evils of liquor until she couldn’t stand the sight of it. She was allowed her moral high horse as a kind of eccentricity, and Cicero’s own modest indulgence went on unobtrusively, the bottles secreted on a high shelf. That he would ask her to dose his tea must mean he was very sick indeed.
In the morning, he told her to stop in at the store on her way to school and report that he was feeling unwell and likely would not be in. He had never missed a day from illness that she could remember. “I’m going to get Dr. Slocum directly,” she said.
Cicero raised himself on his elbows and said, “I won’t have that man in this house. Not on my account. You hear me?” Then he sank back and made such a rattling cough he had to roll onto his side to clear his throat.
Mary Bet fetched a pink-and-red afghan she’d knitted, and draped it over him. He was shivering and she felt his forehead and found him clammy and warm. “I’ll stay home today, Daddy,” she said. “I’ll make you chicken soup and soft-boiled eggs on toast.”
“No, you don’t. Essie’ll tend to me.”
“She’s afraid of sickness. I’m not,” Mary Bet said.
“You run along,” he managed, then lay there, his eyes closed, his mouth open so he could breathe.
She went down to the pantry and found an old bottle of swamp-root tonic and poured a spoonful in a teacup. To this, she added a spoonful of Valentine’s meat juice. She put the kettle on the stove. Then Essie began lumbering up the back steps. “What is it, child?” Essie said, letting herself into the kitchen. “Why you not at school?”
“Daddy’s taken sick.”
“Law. Is it the typhoid?” Essie’s veiny eyes opened wide, lighting up her sagging face.
“I don’t think so,” Mary Bet said, calming herself in the process.
“You bednot go up there,” Essie replied, her brows relaxing. “We better call the doctor.”
“He doesn’t want the doctor. Maybe some ox gelatin.” Mary Bet was pleased with herself when Essie agreed.
When the tea was ready, Mary Bet took it up to her father and sat at his bedside for three-quarters of an hour until he began stirring. She went back down and reheated the tea, then came and woke him and helped prop him up on pillows so that he could drink. He wrinkled his face. “That doesn’t taste right,” he said.
“I added some meat juice to give you strength,” she told him. She didn’t mention the tonic, and she watched him until he had drunk the whole cup.
The next day he was worse. Though he would not want to see the doctor and she was only thirteen, she had to do something. She decided that her father wouldn’t even know whether or not Dr. Slocum was there, so she sent a neighborhood boy to fetch him. Dr. Slocum arrived, dressed in his suit and overcoat and carrying his black medical bag.
After his examination, Dr. Slocum announced, “Bad case of influenza. He needs plenty of rest and liquids. A cup of water alternating with a cup of broth every hour.” How could he rest with all that drinking? Mary Bet wondered. But for the next five days she arranged for both Essie and her sister Elma to tend to her father while she was at school, then in the afternoons she took over the job herself. She wrote letters to Siler and Myrtle Emma and wondered if the matter were urgent enough for a telegram. Dr. Slocum said not, and the nearest neighbors—the Dorsetts, who lived across the road and down near the creek—agreed that the flu was not
usually a matter of grave concern, but they were new in town and didn’t know her family history.
The oldest Dorsett boy, named Joseph, began coming over with gifts of food from his family. They were from Salisbury and they were fond of canning. They sent over cucumbers in brine, jars of green beans and kraut, apple jelly, pear and strawberry preserves, and dried peaches. Their new garden and orchard promised to be just as fruitful as the one in Salisbury, while Cicero’s garden was going to weeds now that Siler was away. Joseph was fifteen and he told Mary Bet he hired out at fifteen cents an hour and would happily do whatever needed doing, including putting in a new garden in the spring.
“We don’t need any help,” Mary Bet told him, annoyed with this new boy’s impudence. She didn’t like the way he regarded her with half-closed eyes, as though sizing her up and finding her lacking. He was red-haired and freckled, and stood with his hands on his hips like a grown-up, but what she disliked most was the defiant way he tilted his head back, his chin out. It was uncannily like Siler, yet he was loud and broad-chested, light-haired and short—an anti-Siler if ever there was one.
“I’m plucky,” he told her.
“Is that so?” she said.
“Yep, everybody says so.” He handed her the jar of damson preserves his mother had sent. “This is good for colds, and hiccups.” She took it and thanked him, and as she was closing the door on him, he asked, “How is your father?”
“Better, thanks,” she said.
But just as he seemed to be recovering from influenza, Cicero came down with something that at first seemed to be a relapse. He went to bed in the middle of the day with a high fever and woke up after midnight, his sheets soaked and his head “swimmy.” He called out for Susan Elizabeth, and Mary Bet awoke and came into
his room and stood by the old four-poster bed where she and her siblings had been born and where her mother had died, the bed that Captain Billie had provided as a wedding present. “Susan,” he said, “is that you?”
“No, Daddy, it’s me, Mary Bet.” She stood holding onto one of the turned wooden posts at the foot, afraid to look him in the eyes. The post was loose from when her father had twisted it, anguished over his dying wife and his inability to help.
“Mary Bet? I can’t see you.”
She came around and felt her father’s face and held her kerosene lantern up to where she could see him. He stopped turning his head side to side and stared up at her with wide, terrified eyes. “It’s just me,” she said, quietly, trying to keep the fear out of her voice.
What was he seeing?
“It’s my leg,” he said. “Take it off, for God’s sake.” He lay back. After a while he sat up and said, “They’re coming over that rise yonder.”
She had the thought that if he just went ahead and died she could bear it better, and then she felt so ashamed she thought she might faint right there. She set the lantern on his bedside table and went to pour him a glass of water. Somehow he had gotten himself out of bed to use the slop jar, which she took as a good sign. She watched as he drank the water—his eyes were red, the lids swollen; and when he sank back onto his pillow he was racked with a coughing fit that bent him double and had him clutching his ribs and then his throat, inarticulate with pain and delirium. She didn’t think she could stand to see him like this, nor to wait all night before summoning the doctor.
Her father kept no chairs in his room, except the toilet chair, so she went and sat on her mother’s cherrywood quilt chest, determined to stay there until morning’s first light. As soon as she sat down, her father roused himself from his layers of fevered
half-dreaming and said, “I’m sorry, Susan. I never meant any harm.”
“It’s all right, Daddy,” Mary Bet said.
“You’re a good wife,” he said, then lay back, breathing heavily and coughing to clear his throat. He drifted back into a restless sleep, and after a few minutes Mary Bet got up, took a quilt out of the chest, and curled up on the floor to wait until morning.