When Mary Bet was no more than six years old, she’d found her mother’s jewels, hidden beneath the lift-out tray in the leather sewing box. There on red velvet lay the pearl earrings, the diamond necklace, the sapphire pin, the opal ring, and the cameos. Sitting
at her mother’s dressing table, her feet not touching the floor, she took out the opal ring and tried it on her finger, admiring the rainbow colors in the light that streamed across the table. Her mother came in and quickly removed the ring from her finger and told her she had no business snooping in grown-ups’ things. Mary Bet had come to think that her mother was ashamed of laying up any treasures on earth.
Myrtle Emma had insisted that her sisters each select something. O’Nora had taken the necklace, but Mary Bet said she didn’t want anything. It seemed wrong for O’Nora to take jewelry without offering some of her silverware, and she told Myrt so. Myrt explained that the silverware would stay in the family until O’Nora left, and anyway you couldn’t break up a set of silver.
Now Mary Bet looked at Myrtle Emma’s jewelry—she thought of it as Myrt’s, even though it was hers now—in the same leather box with the false tray. She tried on the opal ring again and felt no pleasure in its shifting colors. She wondered how her mother had come by it, but thought her father would either not know or not want to think about his departed wife. When her mother caught her trying on the ring, it wasn’t just shame and anger, but covetousness too; her mother had secretly loved her jewels and hadn’t wanted to share them.
Why was there a curse over her family? Was there any holy way to undo it? She prayed on it daily. She decided that it couldn’t be her fault, not entirely, since the first Siler had died before she was born. She wanted to ask her brother what he thought, but he had become so distant with her she was afraid to say anything more to him than “your pants are hemmed” or “Daddy wants you to chop some wood” or “supper’s ready” or “will you be home for supper?” He had been morose since Myrt’s funeral, an event that had seemed unreal, a joke being played on their family.
And then it was September and Siler would be going back to Morganton soon, and Mary Bet would start up school again. Then the President was shot, and every night for a week Cicero said, after the blessing, “And, Lord, please help our President in his time of need.” Once, he added, “He has already suffered enough—,” paused, and said, “He’s had such tragedy in his life. Amen.” It seemed to Mary Bet that the suffering of the President—his little girls dying, his wife becoming an invalid—must be of a greater magnitude than their own. If he could prevail over such hardship, then of course they could too. Yet to lose so many—eight of her ten family members, and all her grandparents—was there not some reason for it?
“Daddy,” she asked, looking from her father to Siler and back, “do you believe in curses?” She signed, but Siler just shook his head, a scowl darkening his handsome features. Her father looked at her as if he hadn’t understood, and he speared another bite of pork chop with his fork. “I mean could a family be under a curse for some—”
“I understand your meaning,” he said, then inserted the bite and began chewing, and Mary Bet thought perhaps her father was dismissing the idea as foolish, the way Siler was. After a moment, Cicero said, “I don’t believe the President is cursed.”
“But anybody—”
And Siler put his fork down and began gesticulating rapidly and noising words that sounded almost like glossalalia again. “She means
us
,” he said, his raised finger sweeping around the table. “Are
we
cursed. It’s nonsense.” He waved his hand in front of his face. “God can’t curse anybody, because there isn’t any God! People get sick and die because of germs, and it’s just bad luck.” His dark eyes gleamed in rage as he leaned forward, his hands tensing after they’d pulled words from the air, as though seeking something to throw.
“That’s enough, son,” Cicero said. He’d never learned the signs the way everybody else had, but Siler understood him well enough.
“There is too a God,” Mary Bet said, feeling her face flush. She felt sorry for her brother and afraid of him, as though the Devil might jump out of him and get her.
“Of course there is,” Cicero told her, “and he loves us and watches out for us, and we can’t question why he does what he does. We just can’t understand it.”
She smiled through glazed eyes at her father, then glanced at Siler, who was intent only on finishing his food. Her father smiled back at her, his cheeks sagging and his once-clear gray-blue eyes now murky, and he looked as though there were more he might say on the subject. But he too returned his attention to his plate and Mary Bet felt suspended over a void with no ceiling or floor—what if they were to die too? Her father was sixty, and had come back from the edge of death already.
Then, a week after he was shot, the President died, and at the dinner table Cicero said the blessing and added, “And, Lord, we pray for the soul of the President to rest in peace, and we pray that you protect the new President. Amen.” Mary Bet translated for her brother. Siler flashed his dark eyes and said nothing.
“That’s three killed,” Cicero said. “All in my lifetime. The world is not what it was.” He looked at his children. “But I will not complain. I lay at the gate of heaven and was spared.” Mary Bet signed this as, “Daddy isn’t complaining,” but Siler, watching his father’s lips, had drawn his own meaning and scoffed audibly. Since his son was to leave in two days, Cicero let it go.
After Siler went back to school, it seemed that the house itself was grieving. Mary Bet began having more people over for dinner and supper, and she started holding tea parties and regular musical gatherings. She formed a sewing circle that met every Wednesday evening when Cicero was out at his lodge meetings. Her mother
had never looked on entertaining as more than an obligation: dining at other people’s houses meant acquiring social debt. So there was not much pattern for Mary Bet to draw on, other than her sisters’ occasional informal gatherings.
One of her school friends, a tall, fair-skinned girl named Clara Edwards, played the piano well enough to read through Myrt’s old songbooks, and while she played the other girls gathered around and did their best to read the words and pick up the tune. Though Mary Bet had little of her sister’s ear for music, she liked blending her voice in with others.
Sometimes they would have boys over, as long as Cicero knew them and as long as there was no dancing. “Of course not, Daddy,” Mary Bet said, though she didn’t know why no dancing was allowed, and it was some time later that her father mentioned her mother’s disapproval of dancing. There were formal dances with chaperones, and Mary Bet took part in these, though without any great enthusiasm, for she felt ungraceful, and she decided that dancing was, after all, a silly pastime—yet, she did enjoy watching it. She assumed the role of eccentric among her friends: at her house they could play checkers and charades, but not cards; they could dip snuff and talk about having babies, as long as no boys were present, but if somebody said “I swear” or told a funny story about a drunk person, Mary Bet informed the speaker she didn’t think it was funny at all. She didn’t care what the social consequences were, though the usual consequence was that the new person either reformed or dropped out of Mary Bet’s circle. Her friends also talked about sex and what it would be like—the most any of them had done, or admitted to doing, was kissing a boy on the lips—and though these discussions always embarrassed her she was too curious to try to stop them.
One day after church Joe Dorsett came calling with a posy of wildflowers, ones she’d mentioned she needed for her scrapbook.
She showed him the book, its red leather cover embossed with a flower wreath and the word “Remember,” and then the blank brownish-white pages, some of them holding keepsakes. He was respectful as she turned the leaves and explained why there was a tuft of horsehair for O’Nora, the rider, or an orange maple leaf for Myrt, who loved the fall. It was nice having a boy in the house, with his heavy boyish smell and breath and his smooth girlish cheeks. She liked the spray of freckles across his upturned nose and his fuzzy upper lip.
“I know a way to talk to spirits,” he said. Then, seeing the skeptical, disappointed look in Mary Bet’s eyes, he added, “I’m not sure if it really works. A colored woman told my sister, and she told me. But she said it wasn’t safe because it was unholy. You have to get in a circle and hold crossed hands with a candle in the middle and something that belonged to the dead person.”
“I don’t believe in séances,” Mary Bet said. “Nor transmigration of souls. I don’t think we should try to speak to the dead, or fly around at night. What if we couldn’t get back into our bodies?”
“We’d die, I reckon,” Joe said. They were sitting on the sofa together in the living room, Cicero out reading in his smoking room. Joe leaned over and kissed Mary Bet on the cheek. The suddenness of it annoyed her more than the kiss itself, and she instinctively wiped it away. Yet she enjoyed the attention; she couldn’t help giving him a coy smile. “When they get the telephone line in,” Joe said, “my daddy says we’re going to get our own telephone.”
“I don’t believe it,” Mary Bet said.
Joe looked at her, started to protest, then said, “I don’t either. He says things that don’t always turn out to be true.”
Mary Bet shook her head and smiled. She liked the way his eyes danced when he was thinking of something, and she had the sudden desire to run her hand over his spiky brown hair with its whorling cowlick—she thought it would feel as stiff as a shoe brush.
She went over to his house one evening for supper. She knew his brothers and sisters, but she’d never met the old man they called “Daddy Roderick,” a wizened little man with skin so tight around his skull you could see the blood vessels keeping him alive. He sat at the table with a red crochet shawl around his shoulders, while Joe’s mother cut up his food and fed him. “Daddy Roderick just celebrated his hundred and third birthday,” Mrs. Dorsett told Mary Bet. “He fought in the War of 1812.”
The old man coughed, sounding as if he were strangling. Mrs. Dorsett gave him a sip of warm water. “I never did,” he said, his voice like dry leaves scraping across a porch.
“You said you did,” Mrs. Dorsett rejoined.
“Well, then I was tellin’ a tale. I met the president Jackson.” His thin, cracked lips curled at the edges. “And I won the rabbit contest wonst.” He said nothing more the rest of the meal, but sat quietly eating the spoonfuls of chopped ham mashed into buttery sweet potato that Mrs. Dorsett fed him. Joe later told Mary Bet that he thought Daddy Roderick was his great-grandfather, but he might’ve been his great-great-grandfather. He didn’t know for sure.
He started coming over regularly, asking Cicero if he and Mary Bet could go out walking together. They walked all over town, up to Stroud’s feed mill on the Greensboro Road, out past the brickyard and lumber yards to the east, and in the west they’d pass the yarn factory and then the washboard factory. Beyond the washboard factory there was a big farm owned by a New Yorker who came there just to hunt, and there was a copse of huge, ancient hemlocks where they would stand and listen to the birds that sheltered there in the evening. And Mary Bet would let Joe kiss her on the mouth, and she kissed him back and held his arms. He told her he aimed to marry her when he was old enough. He would be eighteen in two years, and he thought they could get
married then. Mary Bet only nodded, though in her heart she knew she would not leave her father to marry Joe Dorsett when she was seventeen.
ONE OF CICERO
’
S
two horses grew thinner and was weakened by ringbone and glanders, and by the summer it was clear he was not going to recover. The day finally came when Cicero knew what he had to do. Because there was no point in paying the boneyard man to kill an animal that had no meat on him, and because he didn’t want to wait until he had to take a twelve-hundred-pound animal out of his stall in parts, he went out to his wooded lot and dug a big hole. But after leading the horse out there with his Winchester lever-action, he unchambered the cartridges and guided the horse back to the pasture, then went inside and told Mary Bet he thought he would call on the boneyard man. “Might be worth a dollar after all.”
“Do you want me to do it for you, Daddy?” Mary Bet asked.
“No, I’ll see to it this afternoon.”
“I mean do you want me to shoot George?”
“Why would I want that?”
“It won’t bother me the way it bothers you. You’ve had him longer than you’ve had me.”
“I couldn’t ask you to do that.”
“You’re not asking. I’m telling you I’ll do it. I’m as strong as O’Nora ever was, and not afraid.”
He considered. “All right, then,” he said. “You go out there and see if you fare any better than me.” He looked at her as though expecting her to change her mind, but she got up and went over to the corner where he’d leaned the rifle. “Mind yourself now,” he said.
She opened her hand for the cartridges, which she tucked into the pocket of her skirt. Then she went out to the porch to put on her riding boots. Now she wished she hadn’t made any such offer.
She was just as scared of failing her father as of shooting the horse. And what if she were to miss, or just wound him?
She moved quickly, worried that if she paused to think for even a moment she would lose her courage. She led the horse out of the fenced part of the yard and down to the woods. If only Siler were here to do this thing for her father—why did she have to be left alone to take care of him? The air was heavy with the summer smells of honeysuckle and fungus, things growing and dying. They headed out toward the woods, the horse chuffing along at her shoulder. He nuzzled her hair, the rubbery lips seeking something sweet in the smell of her hair soap. She reached into her pocket and pulled out half a carrot and gave it to the horse. She tightened her mouth and kept on moving, the horse crunching the carrot beside her.
The hole was ready, the fill-dirt piled high beside it, a shovel stuck in the ground at the edge. She stood George on the upper lip. He backed up a few steps and she had to haul him forward into place again. She imagined herself as Siler—he would only want to do the job right and quickly. He would think, “The horse doesn’t know, it’s just impatient.” She levered one cartridge into place and slid another behind it, though she was sure it wouldn’t be needed. It was strange how calm she felt. She dug her feet in, studying the ground behind in case the kick should knock her back.