1903
T
HE MONTHS AFTER
Siler’s death were among the hardest Mary Bet thought she’d ever be able to endure. If there is more grief to come, she told God, I will not survive, and when she thought she might not be able to stand waking up and going to school one more day she pictured her father, more bent now, but still walking to his work. She thought of him sometimes as a gray statue carved from a lonely mountain, bearing the wind and the rain. We go on living because we have no choice, she told herself, because there is nothing else for us to do.
Several weeks before the monument that was to grace the courthouse grounds arrived in Haw County, the Winnie Davis chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy held a contest to elect a speaker who would represent Hartsoe City at the unveiling. The event promised to be the biggest gathering in the county since the hanging of Shackleford Davies.
“You ought to enter that contest, R.C.,” said Oren Bray one morning at the Alliance.
“What contest?” Cicero said, not looking up from the clipboard where his monthly tabulations ran in neat, hand-ruled rows.
“Why, to speak at the unveiling. Looks like you’d want to represent Hartsoe City, with your name and all. Course, they’s other Hartsoes could do it, but none with your learning and eloquence.” Oren spat into a pewter cup he kept on his lap, then tilted his chair back until it leaned against the wall beside the stove.
“I don’t know about that,” Cicero said, judging the amount left in the flour bin by shifting its contents until it was level, then pulling back and eyeballing the whole. “I don’t know about any contest.”
At home Mary Bet said that her teacher had announced the Confederate Monument Oratorical Contest for the unveiling in June. One child and one adult would be invited to deliver an address in Williamsboro. “She told me I should submit an essay.”
“Oren Bray told me the very same thing,” Cicero said. “Maybe that way we’d both be up there at the podium. Wouldn’t that be a sight?” He reached over and touched her arm, and the rare feeling of his hand on her sleeve warmed her. She knew he’d forget about the essay contest, but that it didn’t matter. She would write something and show it to him, and then remind him to do the same, and in this way they could work together on a project that was not just for getting through the day but for a loftier purpose, for giving voice to their thoughts and beliefs, even if destined only for the scrapbook that now had three names on its inside cover—O’Nora, Myrtle Emma, and Siler. She would later look back and wish that she had urged her father not to give the contest another thought.
She forgot all about it until some weeks afterwards when Clara told her that she had composed an essay called “The Spirit of Liberty” and wondered if Mary Bet would read it and tell her if it was
good enough to send to the D.O.C. organizing committee. Mary Bet read it and said that not only was it good enough to submit to the adult category, but that she couldn’t possibly write anything as good so there was no point in trying.
“You’re just saying that,” Clara told her.
“No, I mean it. I don’t have the knack like you for making things sound clever.”
“Of course you do. You’re just being modest.”
Mary Bet smiled at her friend and kissed her on the cheek. They’d walked out to Love’s Creek so Mary Bet could put fresh flowers on the graves. “No,” Mary Bet said, “I have a gift, I’m sure I do because everybody does. I don’t know quite what ’tis yet.” At the foot of Siler’s grave she placed the last of the hothouse roses she’d bought with the weekly dimes Cicero gave her for her few needs beyond food and clothes. He was not one for appeasing or communing with the dead, though he didn’t mind his daughter doing so, provided she spent her own money.
“I should visit my grandmother’s grave,” Clara said.
“Then take one of Siler’s roses,” Mary Bet said. “He doesn’t need but one.”
“No, I couldn’t possibly,” Clara responded. “My granny won’t care. She didn’t even like roses. She said they were mean, because they’d prick you.” The girls laughed as they made their way between the stones. “I don’t much like cemeteries,” Clara said.
“They won’t hurt you atall,” Mary Bet told her. “They’re peaceful and green.”
“Do you think the people here will rise up someday and go to heaven?”
“You know I don’t believe that, Clara. I know it’s just their bodies, and their spirits might not be here now. It’s a place to come and think about the people you loved. All these people around us—they could laugh and talk and walk just like us.”
They stood a moment at the wide polished granite marking Clara’s grandmother. “My mother didn’t like the idea of sharing a grave,” Mary Bet said. “So Daddy’ll have his own.”
“They didn’t want to be side-by-side for all eternity?” Clara asked. She started to laugh, then stopped herself. “I didn’t mean disrespect.”
Mary Bet clapped a hand to her mouth, then caught her friend’s wrist, and they both burst into laughter. “We should stop, we should stop. ’Tisn’t right to laugh.” They both went silent, then burst out anew in gales of mirth, sucking in breaths as if they were about to expire. Clara fell to her knees at her grandmother’s grave, and Mary Bet dropped along beside her and draped an arm around her shoulders. “Should we say a prayer?” Clara nodded, but her shoulders kept heaving up and down, so Mary Bet said, “Maybe we better not right now. I don’t think it would take.”
That night she wrote an essay; in it she listed all the good traits she could remember about her brothers and sisters, and her mother too. She read it over and decided it was too personal for the contest, so she crumpled it up and threw it in her wicker wastebasket. She retrieved it, flattened it out between her book of English poetry and her cherrywood desk, and then placed it in the scrapbook. Until she could give it to a daughter—that’s how long she would hold on to this book; and if she never had a daughter, then until she died.
She asked her father if he’d written anything. He said he hadn’t given it much thought, things being kind of busy down at the store.
“Well,” said Mary Bet, “don’t neglect it too long. Or you’re liable to miss out.”
He gave her a droll look, but stopped himself from smiling, knowing she might take it amiss. They’d lately drifted into the kind of relationship old couples have. Instead of flaring into resentments and recriminations, they would hide what annoyed them, knowing that their time together was probably limited to a few more years.
Sometimes Cicero raised his voice to Mary Bet when she forgot to pull out the stove dampers on a cold morning, or broke a saucer. “How can you be so careless?” he’d snap. Instead of apologizing, she’d look straight at him with a punished expression, then get down on her hands and knees and pick the shards up. For hours afterwards he’d mope about in a sheepish way until she forgave him. Though he never asked for her forgiveness, she learned that they would both feel better if she offered it. “I’m a stupid old man,” he’d say. “You mustn’t mind me.”
“No, Daddy,” she’d reply, coming over and putting an arm around his shoulder. “I
am
clumsy, and I don’t know why.” And in this way, she would end up entreating him to forgive both her and himself.
She hid things from him. She saw him thumbing wordlessly through her scrapbook one day, so she removed it from the living room and tucked it in the bottom of her trunk. She no longer told him when she was feeling sick, because it only upset him. So she lay in bed at night worrying about herself and hoping she wouldn’t die before morning. She’d stopped telling him about her jaunts to the cemetery, for he looked old and sad even when she described the flowers and the beauty of the day. And what about Joe Dorsett—would her father not be angry if he found out she was engaged? Their dinnertime conversations revolved around church and school and the characters that came into Cicero’s store and the sewing projects Mary Bet was occupied with and what household items they needed to restock.
Thus it was Mary Bet who was surprised to discover that her father had been hiding things from her. When the winner of the essay competition was announced in school and her teacher read out her father’s name along with that of eleven-year-old Clyde Fore, Mary Bet was at first confused. Her classmates came over and congratulated her and asked if she and her father had helped each other—all she could say was no. She took her time walking home
at midday, then went up to her room and buried her face in a book about a girl growing up in the mountains. Someday, she thought, she was going to see Grandfather Mountain.
At dinner she sat quietly eating, while her father asked if she’d seen to his britches that needed letting out and when she was planning on boiling the silverware. She told him pants and silverware would be done that very afternoon. She ate some more, glancing up at his face and waiting. Finally, she could stand it no longer. “Well?” she said.
“Well what?”
“Don’t you have something to tell me?”
“What about?” He stifled a belch, then picked his teeth with his little finger, a habit that had crept back after the death of his wife.
“Your winning essay.”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you.” He smoothed his beard with one hand while tonguing up bits of stray food on his lips. “I entered that contest and now I have to read at the unveiling. I wisht I hadn’t, though. Fellers I don’t even know came up to me in the street a-wantin’ to shake my hand. One of them said ‘so the good luck’d rub off.’ I said, ‘I don’t want my good luck rubbing off. I don’t have that much on me, that I know of.’ ”
“Daddy, you could’ve at least told me you were writing something.” She could feel tears coming to her eyes, and she couldn’t understand why but she was furious at her father and upset with herself. He was a stone visage, he was Grandfather Mountain himself, sitting there eating his canned corn and beans as if she were some mouse that perched at his table nibbling scraps.
He glanced at her, then stopped his chewing. He swallowed. “Baby girl,” he said. “What in the world?” For now she had her head turned away, a napkin at her eyes. “I reckon I beat my own daughter in a contest, and I was too foolish to know how much it meant. I’ll tell them I’m not interested.”
She shook her head, even more angry with him. “No, Daddy. I just—I thought we’d work on it together.”
“Oh,” he said. “I see.” He sat up and looked out in the yard at the swaybacked gray he’d bought to replace George. “I thought I’d surprise you. Then, when I won, I thought I’d really surprise you. I’m ashamed.”
“No, Daddy, don’t say that.”
“Yes, I’m an old fool and I had no business in any such nonsense. I shouldn’t have listened to Oren Bray.” He stood up and pulled his napkin from his collar.
“No, Daddy, I’m glad you won. Read me what you wrote, please.”
He stood a minute, shifting his gaze from the window to his daughter, then down to the green beans still on his plate.
“Please?” she said.
He sat back down and finished the food, feeling a little silly for his theatrics. “I’ll read it directly I come home this evening. And you tell me if it’s worthy of reading at the courthouse. If not, I won’t.”
Mary Bet told her father she knew she’d like whatever he’d written and that she’d be as proud of seeing him up there reading in front of all those people as if he were preaching in church. She rapped her knuckles on the underside of the walnut table and touched her joined fingertips to her chin as though she were resting her chin a moment, a habit her father noticed but never commented on. She imagined that, if he gave the matter any consideration, he thought of her as a strange little creature, a child of odd rituals and quixotic temperament. Yet she knew that love did not require complete understanding.
THEY TOOK THE
carriage to the unveiling and had to park a half mile away from the courthouse, so many other vehicles were there. They joined with the crowds heading east, everyone turned
out in their finest suits and dresses. Cicero tapped the ground with his new, brass-capped hickory walking stick, a birthday gift from his fellow lodge members. His hand kept going to the breast of his jacket, wherein his speech was folded.
They went up to the dignitaries’ platform, behind which rose a three-tiered grandstand festooned with red-white-and-blue bunting. The mayors of both Hartsoe City and Williamsboro were there, as were a number of commissioners and postmasters, the county school superintendent, three preachers, eighty-seven-year-old Mexican War veteran Lane Womack, and one-armed Major William London. But the highest-ranking member of the entire assemblage was the chief justice of the state supreme court, who had graciously agreed to deliver the keynote address.
Mary Bet had never seen so many people. There were boys up in trees and on top of buildings all the way up Main Street for two blocks to where downtown ended and the houses began.
A thirteen-piece band from Silkton led the parade, coming up the Raleigh Road, circling three-quarters of the way around the courthouse, then heading north on Main to the edge of town. They were followed by Colonel John Hatch, chief marshal of the parade, on his tremendous black mare, leading a group of carriages occupied by civic leaders from around the county. Then came the Raleigh fife-and-drum corps, composed of Confederate veterans, almost all of them with gray beards, some on horseback, one limping proudly along, a well-worn drum draped around his neck. Just after the Masons, who rode by in gold-trimmed purple robes, came several groups of schoolchildren, including a final group of twenty—one for each company that had served in the war. A group from the Moses P. Archer School for Negroes marched along in smartly pressed homespuns, and a black contingent that had been on the periphery surged forward, watching as the school leaders carried flags of the state, the nation, and the Confederacy.
Sally Lenora Horton, president of the Winnie Davis chapter, told the crowd that she wasn’t used to speaking before such a big group, which remark received so many sympathetic chuckles that her next sentence was inaudible, as was most of her speech anyway, though stray bits were relayed through the crowd. She said the monument under the white covering before them honored the county’s eighteen hundred and seventy-three veterans. And that was about the same number of letters she and the women of the local chapters had had to write to get the monument built. A big cheer went up. Then she introduced the four winners of the essay contest, two each from Hartsoe City and Williamsboro. Clyde Fore spoke first, reading his speech so quickly and quietly that he was back in his seat before anyone thought to clap. Then came a ten-year-old girl from Williamsboro, who spoke of her grandfather’s bravery at Sailor’s Creek in Virginia.