Love and Lament (5 page)

When they got there, carriages were already parked solid half a mile west of the courthouse. Cicero found a colored boy to mind the horse, then they began walking, the crowd getting thicker as they approached. They took their time, Cicero limping along with his peg leg and walking stick. The courthouse looked to a small girl like a castle, its cupola rising in three layers from the roof; but its pillars and pediments sent a sterner message than the turrets and arches of fairy tales—justice was the center of the county, not silly romance. And today there was punishment and revenge in the air, and the excitement frightened her.

They began walking north. Throngs three and four people deep lined the wooden sidewalks along the two blocks of downtown and spilled into the road. Mary Bet asked her father to lift her up on his shoulders so she could see, but he was crippled and she knew better than to ask.

Then shouts arose and people said he was coming. Mary Bet worked her way through the sea of legs until she was at the edge of the street, and she could hear iron wheel rims grinding, hoofbeats drumming closer. And right then came two men mounted on big black horses, one of the men wearing a metal star on his jacket, and behind them a cart pulled by a mule. In the cart sat a man in a black suit and a wide-brimmed hat. His face was shaded so that Mary Bet could not see his eyes, but he seemed to be squinting into the sunless sky. She shivered when he looked in her direction. It was the Devil again, Mary Bet felt certain. But then she was not so sure, because his hands were bound together
in his lap. She watched him as he swayed, perched on a long yellow pine box.

Some people yelled out mean things, but most watched and talked and laughed, as if they were at a parade. Mary Bet felt a shivering tingle run all the way from the back of her neck to the base of her spine. Maybe he
was
the Devil, and he wouldn’t die from the hanging. People said he’d come from the west, from Tennessee, where he’d been a preacher, and he’d gotten a job on a farm up near Silkton. But he wouldn’t do what the farmer asked him to, and when the farmer told him to leave, he took a hand ax and chased him out to a field. Then he chopped him until he was dead.

Mary Bet could see this man wasn’t the same as the preacher in the road, because he had lighter hair and he was shorter and thicker. But the Devil could change shape, and it could be that he was after her for killing the crow. Now she was back with her family and they were caught up in the crowd as it followed the bad man’s carriage. She took Myrtle Emma’s hand—Myrt was her favorite now that Annie was dead. Myrt scolded her for running off.

Her father chuckled and said, “I thought they’d taken you to Gallows Hill.”

But Mary Bet didn’t think it was funny and she blushed. She was guilty, and if she didn’t mend her ways she would end up just like the bad man. “Do they ever hang girls?” she asked her sister.

Myrtle Emma laughed and said, “What a silly question, Mary Bet. Of course not. They don’t hang women either, unless they’re very very bad.”

“What do you mean?”

“I guess if a woman killed somebody, she could be hanged, but I don’t want to think about it.”

“Neither do I,” Mary Bet said, but she did think about it. She knew that Shackleford Davies was guilty of murder, as well as robbery and incest. “What’s incest?” she asked.

“Hush now,” her sister said.

“I don’t want to go to the gallows,” Mary Bet said, for she was worried now that they would follow the crowd. It was sure to be a long walk, and she did not want to see a man hanged from a rope.

Myrtle Emma laughed again and lifted her sister up by her armpits so that she was looking straight into her face. “You’re as good as pie,” she said. “You’re never going to the gallows, ever.”

She wanted to tell her sister about the crow. But she was afraid. Perhaps Myrtle Emma already knew and had forgiven her, or perhaps the family had met and decided it was not her fault after all. She was still the baby, and always would be.

Myrtle Emma took her father’s hand and said, “Can we go to Pfifer’s?”

Cicero slowed and looked at his children, his beard like a buffalo’s, and said, “Isn’t it too early for ice cream?”

“We should go now before all that crowd comes back,” Myrtle Emma suggested.

“That’s a right smart idea,” he said. “I promised your mother I wouldn’t take you to any hanging, and here we were going along like we were off to the circus.” The crowd surged by.

And then they were heading back into town, Mary Bet riding like a possum baby on Siler’s back. There were other people who didn’t want to go see the hanging. Her father stopped and talked with several men wearing nice clothes, jackets and ties, not like the farm people in tattered clothes who had been surrounding them. But there had also been nicely dressed people who wanted to go see that horrible ugly thing. Why would they want to?

Siler stood straight, until she was clinging to his neck, her pink dress up over her knees, and she no longer felt like a possum baby. “Pigback,” she said, but he had shaken her off and she had to walk. And then they were in Pfifer’s, where the floor was all tiny white and black tiles, and there were fans high up in a white pressed-tin
ceiling. And they sat in a big wooden booth and ordered fancy ice creams. All five of them—her father, Myrtle Emma, Siler, O’Nora, and herself.

“Don’t tell your mama about this,” her father said, winking at her. Then, “You want chocolate this time?”

She shook her head and said, “Vanilla.” Which made him and the others laugh, and she blushed. She thought she should be more grown up next time, but she liked the eggy-sweet taste of vanilla. And when the cone came she forgot that she was embarrassed, and she licked it to a smooth ball like Siler did, except without the slurping noise, because her mother said it was rude but that Siler couldn’t help it. Her father was talking about the price of milk and how corn and wheat and cotton were falling dangerously, and she thought it had to be one of those things that grown-ups worried about. Maybe somewhere corn and cotton were falling, but she could see out the window that they weren’t falling here. She closed her eyes quickly and thought, “Please, God, don’t let corn and cotton fall, amen.”

Siler tried to follow what the others were saying. He was the only boy at the table, Tom having stayed at home because he was grown up and had a job, and Ila because she was visiting with her fiancé. O’Nora said that if the farms failed the factories would fill in. Cicero tilted his head in that funny way that made everybody laugh and said, “How does a ten-year-old girl know more than the idlers down at my store?”

Mary Bet was sure it was something O’Nora had heard at school, and now Siler wanted to know what it was. Cicero turned to Myrtle Emma, who could spell with her hands faster and knew more signs than any of them, and she translated. Siler nodded and smiled his thin-lipped half-smile, as though he understood everything, whether he did or not.

Market day was ending with ice cream, when it could’ve ended with a hanging. Mary Bet was bursting to tell everybody how happy
she felt. She wanted to tell about the crow and the bad man and how cold it had been, but how after they had turned back to the confectionary the sun had started coming out and it had made her feel safe and hopeful. Her mother had recently stopped tucking her in at night and kissing her forehead and saying, “I love you, darling.” Her father still called her “baby girl” sometimes, when he was in a happy mood. She wanted to say that she loved her family and her place in it, and that she loved being alive on such a nice day with friendly people all around. Finally, she said, “This is a nice outing after all.”

Her father laughed and pinched her cheek a little and said, “Yes it is, but you oughten tempt fate.” He rapped his knuckles on the table, and she picked her father’s hand up in both of hers. It was heavy and warm, mottled and bristly on the back but worn smooth as a river stone on the palm. If only she could protect it from danger and worry—and anger, too—then she would feel safe.

ALL THROUGH THAT
summer and fall and well into the next spring, no one was sick in the Cicero Hartsoe family. Ila’s wedding was fast approaching, was, in fact, only two weeks away when she took to her bed with a fever. When it was clear she was not going to make a quick recovery, the wedding was put off a month. Robert Gray’s son visited every day to see how his bride was faring. She would smile and lift her head from the pillow, and take his hand in hers. Mary Bet combed her hair out for her the way she had for Annie. Though she had never felt as close to Ila as to Annie—for Ila was a grown woman with her own concerns and more often than not away in some village teaching poor children how to read—she did admire her oldest sister. She had long jet-black hair, the same color as her own, and Mary Bet had decided to let her hair grow down to her waist, if her mother would let her.

It was at this time that Mary Bet’s mother, perhaps feeling that her purpose in life was over (her childbearing days past, and
child-rearing nearly so), took to sitting on the porch in a rocking chair with not so much as a pot of snap beans to occupy her hands. She would stare down toward the little valley the creek made just north of the house, as though she could see fairies playing there.

Cicero took it upon himself to try to cheer her out of her spells. “You can’t help it, Sue Bet,” he’d say, “your father had his spells.” It was well known that Captain Billie had run out of his house during one drunken raving, hollering, “Boys, it’s time! Grab your guns!” And once he went outside to feed his chickens in nothing but boots and an umbrella. But that was all before he nearly gambled his house away; since then, he’d reformed. And his earlier episodes had been put down to drink, not actual lunacy. The real craziness in the family was rumored to be buried away on the Hartsoe side.

The spells that had suddenly descended upon Susan Elizabeth seemed to Cicero a case of preemptive melancholia—staking out the blue arena for herself meant that no one else, particularly himself, could indulge in sadness. It also was a way of telling God to pass over this house—there was enough suffering here. “I don’t know what I’ll do if Ila dies,” she said, rocking and staring, rocking and staring. “I just don’t.”

“Hush now,” Cicero said.

“I ought to be doing some needlework,” Susan Elizabeth said. “Something with my hands, but I just cain’t make myself do a thing. Do you have anything I could take?”

“Nothing that works,” he told her. He sometimes wondered if she felt she’d been a disappointment to him, with the Murchison name falling out of favor around town. He’d had to reassure her many times that she was a good wife and that he didn’t care a fig about the reputation of her father, one way or the other. He had an idea. “I might have some Hystoria that could help,” he said.

“What would I need that for?” She gave him a funny look. “My time’s long gone.”

“It’s good for all kind of complaints, not just women’s.” He’d slowly been restocking some of the items he’d thrown out. It was hard to argue with customers—was it, after all, wrong that their faith gave the medicine its power?

“I’ll try it, then,” she rejoined, still looking at him skeptically.

Two spoonfuls a day of the vegetable compound did a miraculous job of restoring Susan Elizabeth to full health, which was a good thing, as Ila needed the mothering care that only she could provide. Cicero had begun to feel assailed on every front. His father-in-law’s affairs had become entangled in outrageous investment schemes—all efforts to become fantastically rich, when what he needed to do was sell half his property just to keep his house. Crabtree would never be able to help, and his other son, Cincinnatus, was struggling to provide for his own family by running a little store in Fuquay-Varina. It would be up to Cicero to provide for his wife’s parents. But he had his own concerns, and he had no interest in spending what little he’d saved to bail Captain Billie out of foolishness. He’d wanted to study law, but he’d waited too long for that; he’d tried writing poetry and found it devilishly hard. Now he just wanted to see more of the world, so he had a notion he might someday close his shop and travel around, selling things from town to town, just like the men who sold him nostrums and household wares.

On the day in May that she was to have been married, Ila asked her mother to read to her from Keats and Wordsworth. The poems soothed her, especially coming from her mother’s lips. Susan Elizabeth was a good reader, even of things she professed were trivial in comparison with scripture. Mary Bet came in and lay on the floor, as she had during Annie’s illness, listening to the restorative words, then stood by her sister’s pillow combing her hair.

That night Ila died. In the morning Cicero went out back to the icehouse, and he put his head into the darkness and howled. He tore at his beard and slapped his face, and he went down on his
knees and moaned in such a pitiful way that his wife came out and knelt beside him. She put her arm around him and said the Lord’s Prayer, until he was mumbling it along with her.

“Why?” he said. “Why am I afflicted so?” Susan Elizabeth could only shake her head and stifle a sob. “Why is misfortune and sadness my perpetual lot? My firstborn daughter before her own wedding to be carried off, and us visited with sorrow again? There is no God.”

Mary Bet, O’Nora, and Myrtle Emma were also kneeling together, in the bedroom they shared, looking down through the open window onto their parents, while in the room across the hall their sister lay unmoving, her face not yet covered. They’d gone in there together and peeked because no one had told them not to, and their father had cast out the doctor from the house and the undertaker had not yet arrived.

“We should go sit with Ila,” Myrtle Emma said.

But O’Nora didn’t want to move; she was curious about things and how they worked. She once watched in fascination as a snake slithered up a holly tree to take the eggs in a bird’s nest, while Myrtle Emma turned away in disgust. Now they watched their mother go over to the well to pump water into a basin, and they heard their father say, “Why am I to be tested so? Why must you torment my family? Have I done something to displease you?”