It was shortly after this that she had found the baby rabbit in the woods behind the pasture. She was back there looking for orchids, mindful not to go beyond the fence to the neighboring pasture where there were bulls. She wouldn’t have noticed the movement at the edge of her vision if she hadn’t been watching the forest floor with sharp eyes. It was just a flicker of white, and she came over and squatted beside a little round burrow in the soft weeds. There was a baby rabbit—only one, and no mother about, nor a cover for the nest. She knew that mothers sometimes left sick ones behind to die. But this rabbit looked healthy enough; its gray-brown fur was glossy, and the white-tipped hair inside its ears was like cotton. It sniffed her hand.
It was alive.
WILLIE
’
S COUGH WORSENED
during the summer, and Cicero finally resorted to asking Dr. Slocum to stop by. The doctor arrived at suppertime, and, after filling himself with biscuits and cold chicken and dumplings, lumbered upstairs to the room that Willie shared with his brother Tom.
The doctor said he thought Willie just needed to eat more and get more fresh air and exercise, that maybe working in a barn all day wasn’t good for his breathing, and that after bathing at night
he should keep the windows closed on account of the night vapors carrying germs into your open pores. He
had
lost some weight recently, Cicero and Susan Elizabeth thought. But he seemed to be eating right along. He was tired a lot, but perhaps he was working too hard. They decided to send Mary Bet to her grandparents’ for a few days, just in case. She liked the old house, and didn’t care that they’d “let it run down,” as her mother said.
It was a narrow frame house with a nogging of rock and brickbats between the inner and outer walls, to protect the original owner, John Hartsoe, from rifle fire. It was not known from whose rifle he was protecting himself in 1803, unless it was rebellious slaves or irate neighbors. The second-floor roof was more steeply pitched than the symmetrical roofs over the front porch and back wing, giving the house an angular, tightfisted appearance. After Captain Billie bought the old place, he repainted it, replaced the sagging roof over the porch, and planted fruit trees all about. Before the war, the Governor’s Guard appointed Billie captain of the local militia, and he formed a unit he called the Haw Boys. Every Saturday they held drills on his property, no matter the weather. Billie himself was too old for fighting, but when war broke out his unit became Company H of the Twenty-Sixth North Carolina regiment.
Twenty-two years after the war, and one week after the birth of Captain Billie’s last grandchild, Mary Bet, the first passenger train came through and stopped at Murchison Crossroad. A café opened up at the train platform, and Captain Billie and Margaret no longer served big meals to hungry travelers. Nobody had time for such things anyway—the train passengers ate on board, or they might get a ham sandwich at the café and take it back on the train. “It was time for us to cut back,” Billie told people. Margaret’s line was, “Not all progress is progress.” Their unmarried son, former postmaster Crabtree, who had been almost single-handedly running the business the last few years, kept it going as a curio shop,
selling postcards and rabbits’ feet and wooden whistles and other little gifts, and he served Brunswick stew to a few loyal patrons from town. Billie got it in his mind that he could’ve sold his property to the railroad and become a millionaire. He decided that the Hartsoes had somehow convinced the railroad to bypass his place and so tricked him out of a fortune.
Mary Bet and her mother arrived on Saturday evening, riding the mile in the top-buggy. Grandma Margaret greeted them and ushered them back to the dining room, where Captain Billie and Uncle Crabtree were sitting. Mary Bet’s other uncle and aunts had homes of their own. She liked the doting attention of her grandparents, and the way her uncle Crabtree would show her doll how to scale fish. She didn’t know that he’d lost some of his hearing—and nearly all his motivation—in a bombshell explosion at Cold Harbor that killed two of his fellow soldiers.
“You’re just in time,” Billie said, rising unsteadily to his feet. He’d already been downstairs to sample the latest supply of Tennessee sour mash—half a dozen jugs every month, four years now after his business had closed. When the county banned the sale of liquor the last year he was in business, he’d declared his property a municipality, appointed himself mayor and his son treasurer, and the whiskey continued to roll in.
Billie was glowing with goodwill and charm. “The boys are coming over in a little while,” he said, “so we’d best pass judgment on your grandma’s chess pie before they get here.”
Margaret scowled at her husband, and Mary Bet caught the look and the fact that it was meant to be unnoticed. “They need their supper first,” she snapped. She smiled graciously at her daughter and granddaughter, determined to continue hosting perfectly as she had for decades in this thin old house that they’d let go to seed until it was in worse shape than when they moved in. She’d covered holes in the walls with photographs of better times, but there were
places where you could reach in and pull out chunks of brick and stone if you cared to.
Mary Bet had never been over during one of her grandfather’s poker games, but Captain Billie was not about to interrupt his greatest pleasure in life for a small child, no matter how much his wife pleaded and cajoled. “If you get liquored up down there,” she warned, “I’ll turn them all out. See if I don’t.”
The men came over after supper. There was Thomas Thomas and his son-in-law Alson Thomas, farmers from out in the country, who came from two different lines of Thomases. Alson tousled Mary Bet’s hair and said, “I’ve got a boy about your age, but no girl. How’d you like to come live with me?” Mary Bet shook her head and half hid behind her grandmother while the men laughed and said what a pretty little thing she was. And there was a man with a big belly and a white beard whose name was Mountain Danny—he had an Irish accent and talked about his preacher father. And, finally, a quiet, baldheaded man named Robert Gray, who never said much, but liked to jingle the coins in his pocket.
The men went down to the cellar, and Mary Bet was sent upstairs to bed. She was staying in her aunt Cattie Jordan’s old room, with pretty tulip-patterned wallpaper and lace doilies covering every surface; she was afraid she might break something after her grandmother told her not to touch Cattie Jordan’s things. She lay there trying to picture a game that only men played. After a while, she got up and went to her open door. She crept out into the dark hallway and sat on the top step, and imagined that if someone came she’d just say she was scared.
The voices of her mother and grandmother rose from the parlor, twisting and intertwining in a way that was peculiar to them, her mother a soft wind against which her grandmother’s high, creaky words were like swift blackbirds sure of their course. Her mother was worried, but tried to sound as if she weren’t, and her
grandmother flung a pitter-patter of sound against the worry, which only made the wind rise. Mary Bet bumped her bottom down a step, then another. From farther below, as though from deep in the earth, came the muffled voices of the men at their game—a gruff laugh, a jolly whoop. Mary Bet had just learned to tie a bow and she tied and untied the green ribbon on the front of her nightgown as she sat there, bumping down one step after another.
When she was at the bottom she got up and swung herself around the newel post, then walked down the hallway, quiet as a cat. She reached up and fingered the latch to the cellar door, opening it a crack and letting in a whiff of dank air tinged with cigar smoke. She slipped in and took a seat high up the stairs so that by leaning over she could just see the men at their table, perched at angles on loose cane-bottomed chairs. A kerosene lamp, hanging from a joist, cast coal-miner shadows across the men’s faces. The pale yellow glow extended not much farther than the table, though she tried to see what was in the dark corners.
“You horse’s ass,” her grandfather was saying, “you surely don’t expect me to fall for that.” He was holding some cards, as were the other men, and there was money in the middle of the table. They were drinking whiskey from glasses that sparkled like gold in the lantern light, and sometimes they’d pour more from a brown bottle. “The Devil’s own medicine,” her grandmother called it, though Mary Bet did not know why. She watched with fascination, not paying much attention to the talk. Then Captain Granddaddy roared, “Goddamn if I ain’t the luckiest son of a bitch since Jesus met General Lee,” and drew all the money toward himself with two big hands.
Mary Bet sat there feeling her face flame, waiting for the Devil to come take her grandfather away. Surely he would hear the cussing and come for his medicine—how foolish her grandfather had been. She thought it possible she herself would be turned to stone
for hearing such a thing. She wanted to leave, but now she was afraid to move and she sat there like a block of ice, hoping that no one, not even the Devil, would know where she was. Her head burned so, it must be close to the furnace of hell already. “God,” she prayed, a tear rolling down her cheek, “I promise never to leave my room at night.”
The card dealing and wagering went on, with the piles of money growing in front of some of the men and disappearing in front of others with an unseen logic. They kept drinking and getting louder and cussing more freely, and Mary Bet grew so used to the words that they no longer bothered her. She thought the men were like big goats with their beards and something always in their mouths, whether it was cigars or chewing tobacco or whiskey, their heads up and bleating when they wanted something they didn’t get. She almost laughed. Suddenly the room got very quiet.
“Son of a bitch did not say that!” Captain Billie drained his glass and poured himself some more, eyeing Alson Thomas the while.
“He did, Captain Billie,” Alson said. “As sure as I’m sitting here.” He exhaled a stream of smoke from his cheroot.
Billie took a big swallow. “Samuel Hartsoe told you if he was in this game he’d snatch my coat?” He shook his head. “That rat-faced black bastard—why, I thought he spent his Saturday evenings counting his gold.” The men burst forth in laughter. Mugs and glasses were refilled. “That old miser’s been trying to figure a way to get this house ever since his daddy sold it to me. He thinks it’s his.”
“Would’ve been, wouldn’t it?” said Thomas Thomas, who was good at pointing out the obvious.
“If his daddy’d wanted to give it to him, he would’ve,” Billie said. “That’s Hartsoe business.”
They went on with their game, the talk and stories getting more descriptive as the room grew more fogged in smoke and the piles
of cash ebbed and flowed. After he’d lost fifty dollars, Robert Gray got up abruptly and left out the back entrance.
Captain Billie became thoughtful. He leaned over and whispered something into his son’s ear. “Fellas,” he said, “how about we break for a spell. Crabtree’s going to fetch a replacement for Robert. I’m feeling prosperous tonight.”
Pretty soon Mary Bet could hear his horse trotting down the road toward town, the soft cool air of early fall breathing through the slant-open cellar window, along with a thinned-out chorus of crickets. The men sat and talked about their crops and their animals and the falling price of everything, except for tools and stoves and painted clocks and other such things that were shipped in from the North—you never saw any drop in those prices. She fell asleep, waking up some time later when she heard the clomp-clomping of two horses. She watched as Crabtree came back into view down below, followed by an old man she recognized as her other grandfather.
Samuel Hartsoe was much smaller than Captain Billie, and he moved with the quickness of a younger man. He wore an old black suit, worn through to the lining at the collar and cuffs. His face was a ruin of etchings, his mouth caved in over teeth he had refused to replace, and his long veiny nose curved down and off to the side as if searching for something of value. He kept a gray beard trimmed tight to his face, yet his white eyebrows raged violently across his brow. From where Mary Bet sat, he looked like a dwarf from a fairy tale, and she thought he must know she was watching. The few times she’d seen him in church he’d given her a stern look and said, “Have you read your book, your book?” and then, “Don’t be proud, proud.” She was scared to say anything, because she wasn’t sure what he had really said—her mother told her he had a German accent.
Not until he was seated did Samuel glance at the other men, and then it was only a quick, indifferent look that took in numbers, not
faces. He removed his hat, nodded briefly to the others, and pushed back his few strands of yellow hair. “Gentlemen,” he said.
“I heard you were in town on business,” Billie said, casually. “Thought I’d ask you to join us.”
Samuel managed a thin smile. “Draw or stud?” he asked. Now he looked like a skeleton in clothes, gripping the table with a claw. Mary Bet knew he ran a mill where corn was turned into flour and grits. She thought of him as rich, but at the same time, in her mother’s words, “as mean as Satan.”
He watched as the cards were dealt around. Captain Billie poured him a small glass of whiskey, but he didn’t touch it. He picked up his cards and clutched them to his chest, shielding them from view with his other hand. When it was Samuel’s turn to deal, Mary Bet was amazed at how nimbly he shuffled the cards, his gnarled hands like a wizard’s. She nearly nodded off, listening to the flipping and flopping of the cards against the rough pine table, but she came alert again when there was a hush in the room.
Her uncle was now asleep on a pile of burlap sacks in a corner, and only Alson and her two grandfathers were still playing, piling more and more money in the middle. Then Alson quit and it was just Captain Billie and Samuel Hartsoe, facing each other over their cards. There was lots of talk back and forth, and then Captain Billie said, “I’m staking my property to this hand, Hartsoe. What about you?”
“Let’s see the deed,” Samuel said.