Nancy Culpepper (23 page)

The third picture was two attractive women in sailor middy blouses and hats with upturned brims. Their faces were plump ovals. They stood arm in arm in front of a rough-hewn picket fence, and the shadow of the photographer fell on the grass beside them. It was winter—the grass stunted, the trees leafless. There was a barn in the background, with a tree shaped like a Y nearby. The women stared into the face of the camera with the intensity of predators. The woman on the left had her mouth open in a smile—even, pretty teeth. The other one smiled without opening her mouth. Nancy located the two women and the handsome man in the group photo; he was flanked by the middy-bloused women, and his arms embraced their shoulders.

Jack could enlarge these pictures for her, and she would study them for clues, like the guy in
Blow-Up,
a movie that had seemed so sophisticated and profound when she was young. She was aware that in her work as a historian, her habit was to re-create the past by dwelling on a pink button loose in a box, an old washed-out photograph of an unidentified man posing on a stump. Her mind leaped around, as if it were a magic wand and she could make these images come to life.

2

In the spring of 1929, two women, sisters, were toiling in a tobacco patch in western Kentucky. They were suckering dark-leaf tobacco— pinching off the sticky buds, smearing the gum on their aprons. Bealus Renfroe had sent them out to work after breakfast in the still, blazing air. Nova, his gangly, high-spirited wife, kept a careful eye on her sister Artemisia, who had a habit of banging her head on a fence post when she began to grow agitated. Nova had learned to say soothing things to calm her sister, even though Nova herself was full of fire much of the time. But her sister’s horizons were restricted. Artemisia didn’t go to the store or visit anyone except family.

At midmorning, the mailman, Early Otto Kilgore, arrived, his Model T stirring a cloud of dust for half a mile. Early was his true name, not a nickname, and he was often true to his name—early with the mail, which was most often only some tradesman’s plea. His horn blared, and the sisters heard him holler, like a farmer summoning field hands. They ran down the tobacco rows and jumped over a stile, their hems dragging, to see what surprise Early Otto had brought. He handed Nova a thick envelope from a cousin, Joe, who had moved to Calloway County. She ripped it open, while Early Otto remained, his engine bleating, to learn what news he had brought. Joe’s letter was brief, but his voice leapt off the tablet page like that of a revival preacher ranting of glory. Nova read the letter aloud. “ ‘Look at this, girls. Read the enclosed pamphlet careful. Pay attention to what Mr. Alonzo Green says, for he has researched it. He says our fortune is coming. If we can prove we are Edwards. That’s easy, for you know that our great-grandmother was a Edwards. That makes us legible to get in line to heir a fortune. I figure a million dollars!’ ” Along with the printed pamphlet, Joe had sent two application blanks for membership in the Syndicate of Edwards Heirs.

“Don’t neither one of y’all tell this to Bealus,” Nova said, after glancing through the pamphlet, fancy-printed in tiny type. “We’ll study on this and surprise him. He would never let us join up. It says here it costs a dollar for more information.”

Early Otto seemed to know something. He nodded, with a silly smile, and said, “You can count on me, gals. I won’t breathe ne’er a word.”

“Mezhie, don’t
you
tell Bealus!” Nova said.

“I won’t tell
no
body,” said Artemisia, who thought of herself as Artemisia, even though she would deign to answer to Mezhie.

As they made their way back to the tobacco patch, Artemisia said, “We ought to been rich ladies.” She smoothed her gummy apron. The tobacco made a stain like a thousand squashed roach bugs.

“Life used to be better in the old days, I’ve heard tell,” Nova said. “They always told how Mammy married beneath her, even though everybody liked Pappy.”

“She used to have fine things—a peacock and a silver brush.” Their mother, long dead, had china dishes and a Hoosier pantry and a shelf filled with books—stolen by a bachelor cousin who had an abnormal interest in Latin and physiognomy.

They studied the document later, the next chance they had of being alone in the crowded household. That night, Nova crept up to Artemisia’s room, a sweltering nook in the attic. Nova was always afraid her sister would have one of her spells and fall down the stairs, but Artemisia stubbornly retreated to her little garret, where she hoarded her few possessions (especially prizing her tooth cup and hair combs). Artemisia had read the fine print in the pamphlet.

“Look, Nova, they’ve quoted Ezekiel,” she said. She read aloud, “ ‘Thus saith the Lord God: Remove the diadem, and take off the crown: This shall not be the same, exalt him that is low and abase him that is high.

“ ‘I will overturn, overturn, overturn it, and it shall be no more, until he come whose right it is, and I will give it him. Ezekiel 21: 26–27.’ ”

“It’s only right,” said Nova. Then she whispered hoarsely, “Just think, how we’ll surprise everybody.”

“ ‘Dear Miss Artemisia and Mrs. Nova,’ ” Artemisia said, as if she were reciting a monologue or acting in a play. “ ‘It is our pleasure to inform you that you have heired a million dollars; enclosed is our check.’ Do you reckon it’ll be more than that?”

A period of watching and waiting began. Within a month, the sisters completed two application blanks and mailed them in with a dollar apiece, saving postage by placing everything in one envelope. They had to filch the dollars from the egg money, but they compensated by denying themselves a second egg at breakfast. No one noticed their sacrifice. The household was large—with Nova’s three children, a couple of Renfroes and their wives and several other children, as well as a hired hand who slept on a pallet on the back porch. The human swarm made some secrets easier, but Artemisia’s attentiveness to the arrival of the mail was inescapable. Bealus teasingly accused her of waiting for love letters. “She’s slipping around, hoping for some bowlegged, lovesick goof to carry her off,” he declared with a wink. He kept up his teasing, and the sisters let his suspicion stand as a convenient cover. Early Otto was in on their secret, revealing that he was an Edwards heir himself. His great-grandmother was a cousin to their great-grandmother.

A letter arrived. A Mrs. March wrote to Nova and Artemisia personally, on stationery from a hotel in Nashville, explaining that the organization subsisted on donations, a dollar or two a month. And for their claims to be represented in the courts, they each had to send a twenty-five-dollar membership fee. “I can also work up your family tree, which you will need in order to be represented,” Mrs. March wrote. “But we don’t need to worry about that yet.” She wrote informally, in a zestful, cheery tone, on a typewriter. The sisters’ disappointment was palpable, and for days they drifted on a cloud of gloom. They yearned to join, but fifty dollars was out of reach. The tobacco crop might not bring that much, and the cash would go for the necessary store goods. But a seed had been planted in their minds. For weeks afterwards, while ironing or canning peaches or hoeing, or even while ensconced in the two-seater meditation shack behind the house—whenever they could snatch private moments—Nova and Artemisia entertained themselves by imagining Mrs. March in a hotel, writing letters on her typewriter and researching people’s family trees. They created a picture of a widow in silk, who moved in society but was down-to-earth and chatty, having once been penniless. Artemisia said, “Mrs. March loves March flowers, and a hired hand totes flowers up to her room every day. And she plays the piano in the grand hotel lobby.”

Artemisia’s enthrallment with the fortune had been a corrective, Nova observed. Lately, her sister had not had any of the fits that had started several years before, after she got a lick on the head from a wagon tongue that knocked loose and flipped backwards. Her fits were like those of dogs in August, when the heat crazed them and caused them to dance in circles and froth at the mouth. The Renfroes, who had been good enough to take Artemisia in because she and Nova were inseparable, wouldn’t acknowledge that there was anything wrong with her. It was just temperament, they said. “She sure has got a wild temper.” “She knocks herself out sometimes just a-busting her head on a wall.” “What makes you that way, Mezhie?” Bealus and his brothers scolded her after her spells. But Nova wouldn’t join in. She believed that her sister had a demon she had to get out of her, that she had to slam her head on something in order to release the offending spirit. Artemisia never seemed to remember the falling and flailing and frothing. When anyone mentioned mad dogs, she changed the subject.

“Beware of false rumors about this case,” Mrs. March warned. “People are trying to horn in or discredit the true claimants. Don’t speak of this to outsiders!”

Mrs. March wrote that it would take a long time to get the case to the Supreme Court. She begged for patience—and another dollar or two donation to keep the effort going. The sisters were desperate with longing, their frustration tangled like yarn, spinning out in knots. The potato crop came in short, with nothing extra to sell. In the fall, the children needed shoes. A calf died.

All through the farm community of Locust, word had circulated about the Edwards heirs. Several of the pamphlets had turned up, stirring excitement like a gathering storm. A good number of the community could claim some Edwards kin, but few could afford the fee to support a claim. Nova heard Bealus scoff at talk of the inheritance, and she feigned indifference. Early Otto brought word that he had found proof of his Edwards connection all the way back to New Amsterdam. His grandmother Novella Wyatt remembered her grandmother talking about some land in New York. He had not saved up his fee yet, and his anxiety had affected his driving. He ran into a ditch twice.

Bealus Renfroe was a proud man, a rationalist who thought his pretty wife flighty, but he often indulged her whims—even when her outbursts of passion appeared daresome, unheard-of among the men of his acquaintance. He did not share details of his privilege with the congregation of men behind the barn or at the stockyard, where they routinely reviewed the intricacies of the female anatomy along with wheat prices and the mating habits of bulls. They spoke of women’s bodies in an abstract way. They told jokes. (“They call Bessie a washerwoman.” “Why’s that?” “Her face is long as an ironing board; she’s got a chest that’s flat as a washboard, and a bottom like a wash kettle.”) Bealus, suspecting his wife of some secret, worried that Nova had a loosened flap in her brain and might be in danger of developing the same malady her sister had. He feared Nova’s collapse, even though Nova had never lost consciousness, had never banged her head on a fence post, had never slobbered, even on the pillow. She awoke bright and alert, like a wound-up cock-a-doodle-do, bounding out of bed and romping through her morning work with a fervor that seemed to parallel her energies in bed the night before. They had produced their three children effortlessly (“with our eyes closed,” he said), but despite Nova’s passion, her fertility seemed to have halted in the prime of her productive years. He sensed that this knowledge liberated her. She could dance a jig and bake a cake and set a hen almost in the same breath. But he worried that her infertility might also have the opposite effect; it might work a fever upon her brain.

Still, her lust flooded him, just to think of it. When he was plowing a field with an old mule he called Sidey-o, his mind was dancing with visions of Nova’s soft flesh.

Out of the blue, she had begun to perform special, unmentionable acts upon him—things he’d never been able to get her to do before. She rendered him helpless. Afterwards, she would ask him for a quarter, or occasionally a dollar. She said she was saving the money for a surprise for him and the family. Christmas was coming, she said, although she couldn’t promise the surprise in time. She made the secret seem irresistible, as orgiastic as the pleasures she offered now. Normally strict and thrifty, now Bealus grew easy and profligate. He could give her a few quarters after a trip to town. He could spare a dollar after he hauled turnips to the market, wheat to the mill. Bealus was known around the courthouse square in Hopewell, where he went to trade. Everyone knew he indulged his wife, but he let that be known in such a way that he would be seen as proud and fair and benevolent—like a good master, not a hen-pecked weakling. Of course, he would not reveal the secrets of Nova’s special new gifts, because he did not want anyone else to get any ideas. He plowed the fields in a daze, forked hay to the cows while in a dream. Not since his early youth had such passion invaded his whole being; her new skills caused paroxysms to shout through his being, and in the fields he throbbed until night fell and he could bring a quilt over her head again, holding her until she came up for air.

In a year and a half, the sisters saved the fifty dollars for the two membership fees. It was enough money to provide a year’s worth of store-bought goods for the household. They did without dry-goods such as muslin and sacking. Bealus was not able to buy new overalls or shoes for himself, but he did not complain. He did not know that they were dipping into the church tithe. The sisters sent in their applications just after Christmas, drawing upon some of their Christmas allowance by refraining from buying oranges and nuts for the holidays. To the howls of disappointment, Nova smiled sweetly. “These are hard times,” she said.

Mrs. March sent a handwritten letter, acknowledging the memberships and enclosing receipts.

One early-spring day Nova told Artemisia what she had done to get those dollars from Bealus. Artemisia was an old maid, over thirty, and no man would have her. Nova told her story with great pleasure and animation. When Nova elaborated, in some detail, on what it was like—the proper procedure, the way she built up to the pleasure—she anticipated that Artemisia would simply not believe her. She expected merely to amuse her sister. She had innocently wanted to share her delight and to reveal the source of the savings, but she had not imagined Artemisia’s reaction. Soon after Nova had exhausted her lively description, Artemisia commenced to staring at a knot-hole in the pine wainscoting, as if she were a cat watching for a mouse, and then she began that familiar guttural moan, like an animal trapped in a deep well. She slid against the pine wall into a heap, with her tongue catching her bonnet strings. As she wallowed and began to throb, the bonnet strings curled around her tongue.