Love and Lament (7 page)

For weeks no one could coax a word from Mary Bet. She was afraid to speak, afraid that the Devil would come and take her away if she opened her mouth to say anything. It seemed there were crows everywhere that summer—squawking somewhere in the distance, flapping their black capes up to roosts on high dead limbs, perched in the trees outside her window, clicking and jabbering like crazy people, watching her and waiting. She talked
mostly with Siler, using her hands in the way he and her mother had taught her. “Make it go away with your slingshot,” she told him. But he only laughed and patted her head, telling her it was bad luck to shoot a crow.

One morning Cicero asked her, “Would you like to go back and stay with your grandparents for a time?”

Mary Bet shook her head. “No,” she said, “I want to stay here.”

Cicero nodded. “Well, child,” he said. “I’m glad to hear your tongue still works.”

She talked incessantly after that, to anyone who would listen, including a stray puppy she found behind a neighbor’s house and gave to Siler. She talked about the weather and her sewing and the book she was reading that featured a girl who lost a silver dollar her mother gave her and had the hardest time finding it. There was nothing she wouldn’t talk about if you got her going, until Cicero wondered if she wasn’t talking so she wouldn’t have anything else in her mind to trouble her. Perhaps that was a good thing.

The next spring, her oldest brother, Tom, got married; Captain Billie rapidly declined; and Cicero expanded his store to the rear. For now that his wife was dead he could not simply abandon his children and go rambling around the countryside.

Captain Billie no longer got out of bed at all. He would sit up and shout orders as though he were drilling the Haw Boys on the front lawn. Margaret hobbled up the stairs three times a day with a tray of food. In his final week he said he craved nothing so much as a final taste of Tennessee sour mash whiskey, which Margaret refused to supply him.

Finally, she broke down and went to Cicero’s store and asked him for a small bottle. Nobody but moonshiners sold liquor in Hartsoe City, but Cicero had a few bottles he kept hidden in the back of his store—gifts from customers who were cash poor. He gave her one as a present. She got home with her package and slipped the little
flat bottle from its paper sack, the label with its wicked handwritten script spelling out ruination in honeyed words.

She twisted off the top, breaking the seal and releasing the sharp yeasty sweet smell of the whiskey. She wrinkled up her nose in disgust, pouring a small glassful, for she had no idea how much constituted a proper drink. Thinking she’d put in too much, she considered returning some to the bottle. It would be easier to pour it out, but that would be a waste. She put the glass to her lips and tasted it. Sherry wine on special occasions was the strongest stuff she’d ever had, and since banning all liquor from her house she had not even touched fruitcake moistened with rum.

The whiskey was warming at the first sip, sliding down her throat like a golden spike. She smacked her lips and took another sip—the taste of men and drunken revelry filled her with a satisfying revulsion. She understood at last why men drank it so greedily, but as to why they became slaves to it (and some women too), she could not fathom. It seemed such a pointless thing to devote one’s life to. She held it up to the window so that it caught the late afternoon light like water and took one more little gulp, shivered, and carried the rest up to her husband.

Captain Billie, propped up like a grimacing mummy with bristly gray eyebrows and beard, reached a feeble, shaking hand out for the elixir. His once-bulging midsection was deflated now to a shriveled pouch. Margaret had to wrap her hand around his as he drew the glass to his lips. Then he shook his head and pushed her hand away with murmured protest. He touched the liquid to his lips, then stopped. “Get thee away,” he said, and tossed the glass down on his quilt that his mother had made for them as a wedding gift. The stain spread quickly over the green-and-yellow-check pattern.

He died that night with Margaret sitting beside him in the bed, the quilt drying over the end of the footboard. She sat beside him
until he no longer felt warm, and then she went and roused Crabtree. It was just after one in the morning.

Margaret no longer wanted to stay in the house, so she sold it, paid off the back taxes and penalties that her husband had made a religion of ignoring, and went to live with Cincinnatus’s wife and children in Fuquay-Varina, where nobody knew that he had never enlisted in the war because he didn’t believe in fighting. Crabtree moved away to Slocum, and a family from Elizabethtown bought the old house and painted it and fixed it up so that it was hardly recognizable anymore as the old Murchison place. But Mary Bet would remember it all her life.

Her brother Tom got pneumonia early the next year and died, just before their grandmother Margaret, who did not survive her husband by so much as a year. All that were left now were Cicero and his youngest son, Siler, and his three youngest girls.

Cicero let his beard grow long, though it was no longer the fashion, so long that he tucked it into his shirt front. He went to work every morning except Sunday and came home, feeling older and more bent over nearly every day. His friends told him to take another wife. “Don’t know one that’ll have me,” was his response. “Not with my luck.”

Her family was diminished, but even so, the next three years were among the happiest in Mary Bet’s life, and it seemed as though they could go on living that way for a long time.

CHAPTER 5

1897–1899

A
S THOUGH AFRAID
their baby sister might die young, Myrtle Emma and O’Nora doted on Mary Bet as they would a cherished plaything, dressing her up in their old Sunday clothes, or taking her temperature if she had the slightest bit of flush to her face. Sometimes Myrt gave her a plaster of camphor left over from Ila’s illness. She would smear the fragrant oily paste on Mary Bet’s bare chest, then drape a fresh sheet lightly over her, and Mary Bet would lie on her pillow inhaling the nasal-clearing, hot, piney scent and feel as if she were floating in the clouds. Her sisters would wait on her until she grew so restless she got up and ran downstairs and out into the fresh air.

“Mary Bet,” Myrtle Emma said, for she was now the oldest at seventeen, “you get back in the bed until I say.”

“You’re not my mother,” Mary Bet replied.

“But you’re not well enough to be out. You’re sensitive.”

Mary Bet smiled prettily at her sister, because she didn’t like to contradict her, but really Myrt had nothing to worry about and she ought to know better since she was almost a grown woman. Mary Bet felt her own forehead. “I’m fine,” she said.

“But you’ll get your dress dirty.”

“It’s O’Nora’s, and she doesn’t mind.” It was the smallest possible lie—Mary Bet couldn’t remember any such permission, but it sounded like something O’Nora would grant. O’Nora was a tomboy who still climbed trees at thirteen.

“It’s yours now, Mary Bet. You have to learn to take care of your things.” Myrt was quoting their mother and talking in a bossy way—both habits that annoyed Mary Bet.

“I don’t need anything nice,” Mary Bet said. She shook her head so that the coiled braids Myrt had fixed for her swished against her neck.

“Don’t say that, dearest. Don’t ever. Everybody needs nice things.” Mary Bet looked up and saw that her sister’s eyes were glistening; it made her own eyes water. Pretty soon they were both laughing at their foolishness and swinging each other around and around, hand in hand, and Mary Bet wondered if she would ever be as tall and lovely as Myrtle Emma, who could play the piano as if she were playing a harp, her long slender hands flowing gracefully over the keys. She had a narrow waist and a pronounced bustline, and though she claimed her eyes were bug eyes, Mary Bet thought her face was beautiful. Mary Bet had often admired her when she was dressing, and Myrtle Emma said, “You’re going to have a right smart figure. I can tell.” Which made Mary Bet giggle—but she thought that Myrt must be telling the truth, for why would she fib about that? O’Nora could only look from one to the other of her sisters, shake her head, and say, “I’d rather be strong than pretty.” The irony was that she was the most naturally beautiful of all Cicero’s children, with snapping blue eyes, sharply
defined cheekbones, perfect skin, and dark reddish hair that she kept bobbed and unadorned.

O’Nora liked to go out hunting with Cicero and Siler. She rode horseback with them, wearing a baggy pair of Tom’s old riding britches she’d altered and not minding the looks she got from neighbors and farmers. In an old hunting jacket and with her hair tucked beneath a slouch hat, she sometimes went unnoticed out to the cut fields, where she used her father’s sixteen-gauge over-and-under to bring down doves and quail. She was a better shot than her father, nearly as good as Siler, which kept him in a nervous state of concentration during their outings.

Mary Bet wanted to be like both of her sisters. But she was afraid of horses and guns, and she thought she would never play as beautifully and look as elegant as Myrtle Emma. She didn’t know what she was good at. Siler was good with sums and good with his hands, which everybody thought was wonderful since he was not likely to succeed as a professional man. He could mend tables and chairs and he had made a three-legged stool with tools his father had bought from old man Hartsoe. Mary Bet admired what her brother and sisters could do, and she thought that when the time came she would prove good at whatever needed doing. Her mother had taught her to sew, but though she was the best in the family at mending she did not feel particularly proud of such a talent.

“I’ll never be as good as you and Myrt,” Mary Bet said to O’Nora one day after O’Nora had told her she was planning on going to South Dakota to become a missionary to the Sioux Indians. “I’m not brave like you, nor pretty like Myrt.” They were sitting together in the parlor after Sunday dinner listening to Myrtle Emma play and sing from a book of sacred songs; the windows were open to the sighing of trees and the twittering of birds in their early summer nesting frenzy. Cicero was leaning back in his leather armchair—the only thing he’d bought for himself since
he’d started a family—asleep with his mouth open. Siler was out hammering something in the work shed.

“You’re pretty aplenty,” O’Nora told her, and Mary Bet was grateful she hadn’t just laughed. “And you’re brave enough. What do you need to be brave for?”

“So I can go work with the Indians.”

O’Nora appraised her sister, a skeptical look on her face. “Is that what you want to do?” Mary Bet nodded. “You want to go out to a reservation where it’s hot and dusty in the summer and so cold in the winter you can’t feel your toes? And there’re Indians everywhere?”

“I’ll go if you’re going. You oughten to be alone.”

Now O’Nora gave a little laugh. “I won’t be alone, silly. Who’s going to take care of Daddy if we both go?”

“Myrt and Siler, I reckon,” Mary Bet said. She could feel a sly smile cross her face—the whole thing sounded absurd. Surely O’Nora would never go clear across the country to South Dakota.

“Suppose they get married and move out?”

Mary Bet shook her head and turned away, and when O’Nora realized her little sister was upset she took her hand and turned it over and, studying the lines on her palm, told her she was going to have a long life and two love affairs and three children.

“Do you think Myrt’ll get married and move away sure enough?” Mary Bet asked.

“Myrt’s a flirt,” O’Nora said, loudly enough that Myrtle Emma looked up from her music to where her sisters were giggling on the sofa. But whether or not she’d heard, she was still in the world of her song and Mary Bet knew she wouldn’t stop until it was over.

Mary Bet wanted to ask O’Nora, “Will I ever be good at anything?” but it was vain to worry so about oneself. Just be good, she told herself. Just try to be good at being good, and, as Captain Granddaddy said, God will take care of the rest. “I think I’ll be the
nicest,” she said out loud. But O’Nora was reading a book now and was too gone in the story to hear anything.