Love and Lament (2 page)

There was at that time an innkeeper named Captain Billie Murchison who lived in the center of Murchison Crossroad. Captain Billie was Mary Bet’s other grandfather. The fact that he owned and occupied the house of Samuel’s father, John Siler Hartsoe, was to some minds an offense that Samuel stored silently in his heart—that his own father would sell his house, the first in the county to
have glass windows, to a loud, boorish upstart like Billie Murchison, and sell it for a song, had to rankle.

It was in Murchison Crossroad that the stagecoach heading west from Raleigh intersected with the stage from Guilford Courthouse heading south. Captain Billie bought the house he turned into a stage stop from John Hartsoe in 1842, when he was twenty-eight years old. The war was but a minor interruption to Captain Billie’s business, which prospered even more afterwards.

Likewise Samuel Hartsoe’s gristmill, which lay a few miles south of the village. His one surviving child, Mary Bet’s father, Cicero, joined up with the Haw Boys, Captain Billie’s militia. He did not particularly want to fight, nor did many of his acquaintance, but when it became clear that his future standing in the community might depend on military service to his state, he enlisted.

He came back early from the war with a wooden stump beneath his right knee, and was happy to have come home with so much. He married Captain Billie’s youngest daughter, Susan Elizabeth Murchison, who was one year his senior, and they had nine children: Tom, Siler, Ila, twins Annie and Willie, Myrtle Emma, Siler (after the first Siler died), O’Nora, and, finally, on a hot June day in 1887, Mary Bet. By the time Mary Bet was fifteen, nearly all her family had died.

Cicero had earned himself a captaincy just before being wounded, but he insisted people call him Mr. Hartsoe, or just R.C., instead of Captain Hartsoe. “I didn’t do a thing as captain but get myself shot,” he said. He stumped quietly back to the general store he had operated for his father before enlisting, and, against his father’s will, offered credit to farmers trying to get back on their feet after losing their slaves and their able-bodiedness. In a few years he had prospered so much that he was able to buy the store from his father and build a fine house on ten rolling wooded acres. The place already had a nice little two-room cottage, which he spruced up
and made into an east wing of his two-story clapboard house. He bookended the house with two common-bond brick chimneys, and embellished it with hip roofs, four-over-four sash windows, and expansive porches with chamfered posts, spindle brackets, and an intricate balustrade. It showed what he had accomplished, while others around him were failing.

Samuel’s wife died two months before Mary Bet was born, but her other three grandparents were still very much alive. As were her parents and seven of their eight other children. Their second, Siler, died of typhoid when he was ten years old. Annie, their fourth, contracted the disease when she was eighteen. Mary Bet was five at the time, and her earliest memory was of Annie, who had been a second mother to her, lying in bed too frail to get Mary Bet a glass of milk. If she could get the glass of milk, Mary Bet thought, then she would be all right.

“She’s susceptible,” her mother said. For Mary Bet the word became shrouded in the somber rituals and attentions of the sickbed; to be susceptible was to be so ill that one could only lie in bed from morning until evening, waking just enough to drink chicken fat soup held to your lips by your mother or your sister (because Essie the maid was superstitious about typhoid fever, even though the doctor said it was not contagious). Then the clammy sheets would be changed and the chamber pot taken out, and Mary Bet would come in and comb Annie’s long, light brown hair so that it lay flat across her pillow. She would do this quietly with great attention and devotion, the rhythm of her hands through the silky hair soothing and mesmerizing her as she looked from the hair to her sister’s face, the broad almost comical nose and the deep lovely eyes and the soft skin now pale and unanimated save for a wispy smile, so that she felt she could go on combing and combing the entire day. Then her sister would take a sharp breath, which meant she was asleep, and her mother would tell her they needed to let her rest.

Sometimes Mama would sit in a rocking chair and read aloud from the Bible or a book of Illustrated Stories, and Mary Bet would lie on the brown braided rug and disappear into the sound of her mother’s voice as it opened the door into a world where girls drank tea and went to boarding school and wore pink taffeta gowns at costume balls. Her mother thought it wrong to waste time on such frivolous literature, but she made an exception for a sick child. Susan Elizabeth did not believe in coddling her children, and was not affectionate with them past the age of five or six. She wore plain dark skirts with few ruffles, a high collar, even though they were no longer fashionable, and no jewelry, and she sat in her rocking chair, stern knees together, eyeglasses on the end of her flared nose, her voice unwavering when the story got to the place where the girl was reunited with her father who’d been lost at sea.

After two weeks Annie developed a rash and the doctor said her condition should start to improve if she kept her strength up. But they couldn’t get her to take much nourishment. She lay in bed now, her eyes half-open, staring at the muslin curtains waving in a late spring breeze. Mary Bet still combed out her hair every day, but it had become brittle and lost some of its color. More of it came out in the tortoiseshell comb, and Mary Bet was afraid to keep combing. Annie seemed unaware of her presence, or of anything except the curtain.

One week Annie was so racked with coughing that the doctor worried she would break her ribs, and he gave her a daily spoonful of laudanum, which made her sleep so deeply and peacefully she looked to Mary Bet like a pale, blue-skinned angel, her pulsing temples the only sign she was alive. It became a room of dreams, filled with the spicy aroma of camphor plaster and their mother’s low voice, turning the Psalms into word pictures.

After they found blood in the chamber pot, Mary Bet was not allowed to go back into her sister’s room. She saw people going in
and out—the doctor, her mother, and one or two neighbor women. And then one Sunday morning she heard her mother crying and she knew that Annie was in heaven. The undertaker came and moved her onto a wooden cooling board and drew a sheet up over her face. Mary Bet wanted to say good-bye, but they were already taking her out and her mother wouldn’t let them stop and pull the sheet back. Mary Bet could see Annie’s yellow nightgown through the little holes in the cooling board.

She was too young to attend the funeral. But she was allowed to go to the burial, and she stood between her mother and her sister Ila, her bony knees locked, while her father threw a handful of dirt on the coffin. She wore the black tulle dress that Ila had made, and she held Ila’s hand and wished she had stayed home after all, because everybody was crying.

The earth was open and raw-smelling as it swallowed her sister. But there was no evil in sickness or in dirt, just the terrible hollow feeling of grown-ups not knowing what to say. The Devil had no part in it, because God had taken Annie. Yet Mary Bet could feel him lurking, watching, somewhere along the edges of the churchyard, over where the green trees rustled in the wind.

CHAPTER 2

1893

C
ICERO WAS BACK
at work in his store the following day. Hartsoe’s offered seeds and medicines and dry goods and candies and housewares of all sorts, and he pulled all the bottles and gallipots of medicine down from the shelf and threw them into a wooden flour barrel that served as a wastebasket. He didn’t mind if the glass broke and the medicine spilled. Men came in for their usual twists of tobacco and took up seats near the Franklin stove to watch the proceedings. They said not a word.

He kept the lycopodium, which worked on cuts, and some castor oil, and Bellingham’s Stimulating Unguent for the hair and whiskers, which his brother-in-law Crabtree Murchison liked. He looked in the wastebasket and saw an unbroken bottle of swamp-root tonic, which he himself had used on occasion. He pulled it out and put it back on the shelf. “The rest is quackery of the vilest sort,” he said, “and I’ll not have it in my store.”

Thad Utley, a fat overall-wearing man with stained teeth as crooked as old headstones, said, “You’re right, R.C. Them nostrums never did me any good. Old Doc Slocum said—”

“You can tell your Doc Slocum to go to the Devil,” Cicero cut in. “He’s no better than any of this.” He gestured at the pile of glass and rubbish in the barrel.

“R.C.,” said Robert Gray, “why don’t you take the day off? The world will get along without you for one day. You’ve suffered a terrible blow.” Robert Gray was a retired lawyer who dressed in a suit every day of the week.

“No, sir,” Cicero said. “I’ve never taken a day off, and I don’t aim to.”

“You never heard of a vacation?”

“I don’t care to vacate.” Cicero had worn his black suit to work, but was now jacketless, sleeves rolled up, suspenders bulging over an impressive middle-aged paunch. He smoothed his mustache with a thumb and finger and regarded his cronies—over beside Thad sat Oren Bray, a farmer with a growth beside his nose that looked like a second, melted nose. His face was as shriveled as a dry peanut, and he wore his usual gray pants and jacket with the letters “C.S.A.” stitched onto the collar. Cicero never wanted to see his own uniform again—his wooden leg was enough of a reminder. And yet he pitied other men’s bondage to the past.

“I’m feeling aggrieved is all,” he said. “Willie’s taken sick, and if he has the typhoid I don’t know how Susan Elizabeth can stand it.”

“Has Dr. Slocum seen him?” Robert Gray asked.

“That damn foo—no, he hasn’t, nor is likely to. I could treat him better myself with what I just threw in the trash.” Cicero grabbed the broom and began sweeping just to have something to do. He stopped and scanned the neat shelves, those not stocked with medicine, as though to see what needed ordering. Hardware, candles,
ropes, coffee, flour, beans, biscuit meal, twists of Red Meat tobacco, yellow boxes of Arm & Hammer soda, barrels of molasses, bolts of cloth, gunnysacks of animal feed from his father’s mill. The men behind him had gone quiet. From next door came the metallic banging of the smithy who rented his place from Cicero; one door over was the livery that Billie’s son Crabtree had been operating since closing his curio shop—he, too, rented from Cicero.

“I reckon things could be worse,” he said. But he didn’t believe it. The grief he felt was like pain—it was exhausting. He had just enough energy to get dressed and come to work and throw away the old bottles in a fit of anger, with none left over to talk to his friends. He spent the morning in the back of the store, and after going home for his midday dinner he went to bed complaining of stomach trouble.

MARY BET COULD
see him, her father, standing at the mirror in his room after Annie’s funeral. He was holding a small glass down at his side, the amber liquid glinting in the late afternoon light from the window, and he was making strange faces at himself and pulling on his chin so hard she thought he would pull his beard out. It was the long mirror with beveled edges, set in the walnut wardrobe. He suddenly jabbed a finger at the mirror and said, “I hate you.” He turned and glanced out the window toward the pasture, then looked back in the mirror. “I could kill you. Why don’t you, then? Shut up! No,
you
shut up!” He walked away from the closet, and once more turned back to look at himself, shifting the glass to his right hand. He threw the glass against the mirror.

She would sometimes try to remember what had happened after that, and it was like trying to remember a thing that hadn’t yet come to pass. As if her memory was what had called it into being. Or as if she had buried the memory beneath layers and layers of other dreamlike memories, where she could later retrieve it, if she
could remember the way back. There must have been a shower of glass, a terrific and horrible shattering noise, and perhaps she ran off and hid beneath the house in the dirt where the dogs lay on hot days. She was sure, though, that he had broken the mirror, because she returned to his room once and saw the blank space in the wardrobe, and later she had come back and seen a new mirror, exactly like the first, and she had thought, “Nothing happened at all … but I know it did.” And she thought that seven years was a long time to have to worry about bad luck—she would be twelve years old, and a lot could happen in that time.