Chloe (31 page)

February 1930

H
er nerves jittering, Chloe walked into the McCaslin bank with its polished maple, brass fittings, and deep green carpet. Over the winter, she’d taught herself how to drive and had come alone. She needed advice and plenty of it. After smiling at the teller and his one customer, she walked through the gate into the bank office area and halted. The door was open; Roarke McCaslin in sober gray sat at his father’s desk. Awareness pulsed through her.

She cleared her throat. “Welcome back, Roarke.” Jamie had talked of nothing else but Roarke’s return a week ago. But she hadn’t seen Roarke since last November. After all their years apart, how did he still have the power to make her react to him?

With an impersonal expression, Roarke rose and motioned for her to come in and sit. She followed his invitation and perched on the chair in front of his desk, afraid of letting him know how the sight of his stony face unnerved her.

“What may I do for you, Chloe?” His voice gave nothing away.

They might have been strangers! All the polite words she’d practiced became molten lead. Chloe leaped up and snapped the door to the office shut and whirled to face the stubborn man once and for all. “I’m tired of us acting like we’re strangers until we decide to rip up at each other.”

The truth of her words slicing through him, Roarke stared at her. She still wore mourning for her father. The black made her look paler, more vulnerable.

“Kitty won’t answer my letters.” Chloe plumped back down into the chair. “Your parents won’t talk about her. And no one knows or will tell me what’s wrong with your mother.” Chloe leaned forward. “Roarke, you have to be my friend again, or else.”

He wouldn’t be cornered. “I’m supposed to make everything right for you?”

She repressed the urge to throttle him. “I don’t have the patience for this. What’s wrong with your mother?”

Her quick change of topics ripped the scab off this particular wound. “Cancer. She doesn’t want Jamie to know so she is keeping it as quiet as possible.”

Chloe blanched. “Dear God, no.”

“Don’t faint on me.”
I hate sitting here saying this to Chloe. God, are you listening? Are you there?

Shock registering, Chloe pressed three black-gloved fingers to her unrouged lips. “I can’t say how sorry I am, Roarke. How long?”

“No one knows.” He picked up his pen and gouged his blotter with it.

“That’s why you came home.” The hope that he’d come for any other reason died another nasty death.

“Yes.”
That and insolvency.

Looking up, she studied the ivory crown molding and calmed her jangled nerves. “If you need me for anything, I won’t fail you.”

“Thank you.” For the first time, his tone was honest. Suddenly he wanted to tear off the mask he’d worn since the raid at Seicheprey. He wanted to be honest with Chloe, with someone.

“It will hit Jamie hard,” Chloe murmured. “And Bette. She’s become very attached to your mother.”

He couldn’t risk letting down his guard yet. “What do you need from me, Chloe?” His tone sharpened.

She longed to give him a personal reply. But no, she’d given her promise to Drake and wouldn’t renege for any reason. No more lies or half truths in her life. “Advice,” she replied briskly. “I’m worried about our croppers. They’re going to need seed next month and I don’t have the money to buy it and loan it to them against the crop.”

She was here on business then. He glanced up and saw only her lips, remembered how soft they’d felt against his so long ago. He gripped his pen tighter. “What is the balance in your savings account here?”

“Don’t you know?” She looked up, wide eyed.

His mouth curved into a reluctant smile. “I don’t memorize the balances in all our accounts.”

She sat back, suddenly feeling lighter. But why, she didn’t know. Her savings account wasn’t heartening. “We have a few hundred dollars and the first installment of property taxes comes due in June.”

“That I knew.”
I was already thinking of how to help you. Old habits die hard, I guess.
But he’d come up with exactly nothing.

“All Daddy’s property and money were swallowed up by his debts to banks in Baltimore and Washington. I have some jewels I can sell, but friends have written me, saying that they’ve tried to sell items and have been offered ridiculously low sums.”

Roarke tried to see from her gloved hands if she still wore Drake’s engagement ring. He couldn’t. He knitted his fingers in front of his vest. “Supply and demand. Many are selling. Few are buying.”

She clutched a black handbag in her lap. “I need help or my croppers will have nothing to plant this spring.”

“Maybe they shouldn’t plant anything,” he said in sudden disgust. Couldn’t anything go right? “Commodity prices have dropped through the floor. Neither tobacco nor cotton will bring much this year—again supply and demand. People without money don’t buy cigarettes. If people aren’t buying clothes, factories won’t buy cotton to spin into cloth—on and on. Tariffs have killed trade internationally.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.” She released her purse and it slid to the floor. “Good heavens, Roarke. What should I do?” For weeks now, singly and in groups, both black and white croppers who worked Carlyle land had stopped at the back door of Chloe’s cottage, voicing worries about the coming crop. Underlying all these had been, “You’re the Carlyle. What are you going to do to keep us going?”

“Everyone’s depending on you,” Roarke said grimly, hunching over his desk.

Chloe looked up surprised. “How did you know?”

“People stop in, just to chat. But everyone knows your daddy supplied the money that kept everyone working their acres. People are worried about that and whether this bank can keep going. Banks are closing all over.”

“What should I, can I, do?” She leaned forward, resting one hand on his desk.

“Let’s keep talking,” Roarke said without much hope. “Maybe something will come to us.” Her face only inches away tempted him.

Moving to the edge of her chair, Chloe had never felt less capable of answers. Without thinking, she repeated something her Granny Raney used to say, something she’d been thinking of these past few weeks: “‘People got to eat.’”

At that, Roarke’s eyes suddenly sharpened. He nodded thoughtfully, then grinned. “Chloe, I think you’ve got the germ of an idea.”

On the next sunny but cold Sunday, still in mourning, Chloe donned one of her plainer black dresses and hats. Then, without powder or rouge, she set out on foot for church and to launch the plan she and Roarke were counting on. Also dressed soberly for church, Bette met her at the end of the lane.

“Honey, I’m not going to our regular church today. Where’s your grandmother?”

“She has a bad headache,” Bette replied. “Where are you going?”

“To the Baptist Church over on the river.”

“Why?”

Many reasons.
“Because that’s where Granny Raney went to church.”

“You mean you live in her house so you gotta go to her church?”

That was as good a reason as Chloe could come up with now for her daughter. She smiled and offered Bette her hand. In the weeks since Chloe had moved into the cottage, her daughter had become her friend. Not yet her daughter, but Chloe accepted what she was offered gratefully. “Coming?”

Bette took her hand and they walked to the church, only a mile down a rutted field road and across the churchyard. Inside the white-clapboard church, they sat in the rear. Many heads swiveled back to gawk at them. No doubt people were tallying up all that Quentin Kimball’s wild daughter had to repent of. Chloe ignored them and Bette concentrated on swinging her feet back and forth as she sat on the high pew.

Preacher Manning had been young when he had officiated at Granny Raney’s funeral. Now he was in his middle years, still wiry and black-haired. He looked her straight in the eye and she felt his welcome. Then the preacher’s text made her tingle with unexpected joy. “‘Give and it shall be given to you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For the measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again.’” He preached on giving rather than receiving. It gave Chloe new heart, confidence that her plan was right before God.

The congregation shuffled to its feet to sing the closing hymn. Sudden recognition made Chloe’s breath catch in her throat. The Baptists sang out loud and robust, “‘Just as I am without one plea, But that thy blood was shed for me . . .’” Granny’s tremulous voice sang along in Chloe’s memory, the song she’d been humming in her mind all across the Atlantic.

“‘Waitin’ not to rid my soul of one dark blot . . .’” Chloe started singing. “‘Just as I am though tossed about with many a conflict, many a doubt . . .’”

Bette stared up at her and joined in, keeping up with her mother. “‘Just as I am Thou wilt receive, pardon, cleanse, relieve . . . Because thy promise I believe . . .’”

Chloe suppressed laughter as many heads turned to her, obviously waiting for her, the woman who painted her lips and danced the Charleston, to walk forward at this invitation to sinners. Well, after all, why not? She stepped into the aisle. She had much to repent of and something important to say.

“I don’t understand what you were thinking,” her mother scolded Chloe roundly later that afternoon. They sat together in the indigo-and-white parlor at Ivy Manor. “What do you mean,
giving
our croppers seed? You’ll bankrupt us and we’ll lose the land.”

Chloe listened for the brass knocker on the front door. Roarke had promised to visit this afternoon to back her up, but her mother had jumped the gun. “Mother, the country is in a depression.”

“I know that,” her mother snapped. “What has that got to do with you giving sharecroppers free seed! Who’s going to give
us
free seed?”

The knocker sounded and a well-dressed, confident-looking Roarke walked into the parlor.

Her mother glared up at him. “Roarke McCaslin, you must talk some sense into this daughter of mine. She’s giving away seed!”

Chloe drew strength from Roarke’s presence.

“I know, ma’am.” He bowed and then, at Chloe’s nod of invitation, sat down on the blue wingchair by the cozy fire. “Chloe and I discussed the situation at length a few days ago.”

“You approve of this insanity?”

“Ma’am, please let me explain.” Roarke unbuttoned the last button on his suit jacket.

Chloe’s mother humphed.

Chloe realized that Bette and Haines stood, eavesdropping in the hallway. “Mother, I’ve explained it to you.”

Her mother glared at her with a haughty lift of her chin.

“Times are hard, Mrs. Kimball,” Roarke began. “And both my father and I agree that this is just the beginning. There isn’t going to be much of a market for cash crops, tobacco, or cotton. And this county has never boasted large crops of those anyway.”

“But the cash crops are what bring in money,” she objected, red creeping into her wrinkled cheeks.

“They won’t bring in much this year,” Roarke countered. “Commodity prices have all dropped through the floor.”

Motioning for Roarke to stay seated, Chloe stood up and walked over to stand beside him.

Her mother gaped at Roarke. “But President Hoover says our economy will revive again—come spring.”

“He must say that,” Roarke said. “He can’t tell the truth. The country’s already in a panic.”

“But giving away seed.” She held out both hands. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Doing what’s right does,” Chloe said, resting her hand on the top of Roarke’s chair, near his shoulder. She wished he would reach up and take her hand. This still felt risky. “People need to eat. If we buy seed for truck farming, at least, we’ll eat.”

“But that won’t pay the taxes,” her mother snapped.

“We’re hoping that our croppers will share their produce and profits from what they sell in Baltimore and Washington with us,” Chloe said, leaning against the chair and Roarke. Her promise to Drake still held in her mind whether she wore his ring or not. But she’d freed him to let him decide if his circumstances had altered his feelings toward her. Nevertheless, Roarke had the power to draw her.
But I gave my word.

“I announced,” Chloe went on, “this at the River Baptist Church this morning and plan to visit the A.M.E. Church tonight to tell them also. Most of our croppers attend one of the two. I said if we all work together, I won’t have to throw anybody off their land.”

“It’s our land, Carlyle land. If the croppers that are on it can’t make a go of it, they should be thrown off. Besides”— her mother looked disdainful—“do you think they’ll just hand over the money they make to you?”

“They will,” Roarke asserted. “They understand that taxes must be paid and that if Chloe loses the land because she can’t pay the taxes or has to sell because she can’t keep her family fed, the next owner might not be so generous.”

Chloe couldn’t have said it better herself. Confident that they were going to prevail, she rested her hand on his shoulder. Still, she kept her pleasure under wraps, unwilling to give her mother something to use against her sometime in the future. No wonder she was afraid of showing real emotion. And Bette had caught the habit, too.
Dear Father, you’ve got to help me with my girl.

The phone rang and Haines answered it. He stepped into the parlor. “Mr. Roarke, your father, sir.”

Roarke immediately rose and went to the phone. “Dad?”

“Come home quick, Roarke, and pick up the doctor on the way. Your mother is having trouble breathing. She says bring Chloe and Bette, too.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

J
ust after sundown, Chloe soundlessly paced the floral-carpeted landing outside Mrs. McCaslin’s closed bedroom door. Jamie and Bette sat huddled on the top step at the other end of the landing. Their drawn expressions wrung Chloe’s heart.

The door opened. Dr. Benning walked out. “Chloe, Mrs. McCaslin would like to speak to you.”

Chloe stepped close to him. “How is she?” she whispered.

“I’ve had her under an oxygen mask for about an hour and her breathing is better. She can talk for a while.”