New Mercies (15 page)

The room, calcimined an off-white, was a respite from the outside heat, despite the fire in the enormous brick fireplace, which was fitted with cranes and ovens. A black spider with a
lid stood in the coals, and a pot hung from one of the iron bars. This was Avoca’s kitchen. Shelves along the walls held gleaming copper pudding molds. Why would anyone take the time to polish them, when there was so much other work to be done on the estate? Neatly lined up on shelves were cake pans and pie plates and serving platters big enough to hold a roast suckling pig. Heavy iron spoons and ladles and meat forks hung from hooks on the wall.

A flour barrel stood on the floor, and above it on a shelf, tin canisters for condiments were lined up. One container the size of a shoe box, marked SUGAR, was fitted with a lock. Perhaps the sweetener was once so precious that the mistress of Avoca—Miss Emilie, it would have been—had unlocked the box and, using sugar nippers, had cut the day’s allotment of sugar from a big cone and given it to the cook.

A woman moved from the end of a wooden table that stood along one wall. In the poor light, she appeared to be only a shade darker than Ezra. Her face was freckled, and her hair was red, streaked with white. I had expected Aunt Polly to be a yard broad and very black, with heavy features, like the jolly southern mammies in magazine advertisements. Instead, she was slender and bent over and of an indeterminate age.

“Afternoon, Miss Nora.” Aunt Polly shuffled forward. “My feets on the drag. I got rusty ankles.” She laughed, a pleasing low sound.

I went to her and took her hands and said we should both sit down, but she shook her head. “I won’t sit just yet.” She turned to a narrow stairway behind the door and called, “Ezra, young miss step by here.” In a minute, Ezra came down the stairs into
the room and stood looking at me. Aunt Polly told me, “Turn go my hands, and I’ll dish up the dinner.”

“Let me help you.”

She gave me a quizzical look. “God from Glory! Miss Nora. You don’t help. Ezra help.” She shook her head at the absurdity of it. “You taken yourself to the chair. I tell Ezra bring a tray to you, but he say you best get out that old house and come on to the quarters for your dinner.”

The two of us looked at each other for a long time, each pretending that Ezra actually had invited me. He’d probably told Aunt Polly that I could go into town and buy dinner for myself. Aunt Polly was the one who had wanted me to eat with them. My feelings for Ezra were unsure, but I liked Aunt Polly.

I pulled out a chair, but Ezra grunted and pointed to the end of the table where Aunt Polly had been arranging the cutlery. Two places along the side had been set with tin plates and spoons, but there was an Old Paris soup plate, a silver spoon and fork, and a white linen napkin at the end of the table.

“Ezra, you get that chair for Miss Nora,” Aunt Polly said. When he hesitated a second, she added, “You heard me. You ain’t blind,” and Ezra went to the chair and seated me.

“Thank you.”

Ezra took my plate to the fireplace and lifted the lid off a heavy iron kettle. Aunt Polly ladled something into the dish, and Ezra set it down in front of me. The stew was made of rice, tomatoes, and okra and some kind of meat. If it were a southern specialty—squirrel, blackbird, hog jowl—I hoped that Aunt Polly wouldn’t tell me.

Aunt Polly removed the lid from the spider and lifted out a
corn bread round and golden as the sun and set it directly on the wooden table, without benefit of plate.

When she and Ezra had taken their places, Aunt Polly bowed her head. “For thy many blessings, Lord, we thank thee,” she said in King James English. My surprise must have shown, because Aunt Polly gave me an amused look. “The Presbyterians is our dear belief. We don’t hold with singing and shouting on Sunday and raising the devil with your neighbor on Monday like the Baptists does. Presbyterians don’t go down under the water for their baptisements, either. Course, black people ain’t scared of God like white folks. You think we do hoodoo, all that tricking and trancing devilment?” She laughed, and even Ezra smiled at that, and the tension in the room disappeared.

Aunt Polly broke the corn bread into pieces and handed one to me. She and Ezra crumbled their corn bread into the stew, which they ate quickly with large tin spoons. When I finished the stew, Aunt Polly offered a second helping. “We got a plenty of it, although Ezra, he sure do murder groceries.”

The stew was very good, and I thought to compliment Aunt Polly by asking for more. Then I considered that they had already spread their fare thin by sharing it with me. So I declined. Aunt Polly got up and, moving heavily, brought a pan of ginger bread to the table, then cut large chunks with a butcher knife, giving me another corner piece. She and Ezra ate the cake with their hands, but as she had put a fork beside my plate, I set the ginger bread in the soup bowl and ate it with the utensil.

Aunt Polly turned her head to look at me, and I noticed then that she was blind in one eye. She caught me staring and said, “My old mist’ess—that was Mist’ess Emilie but one—she
so fetched mean. I drop a potato on the floor one suppertime, and it roll under the table. When I goes to pick it up, she say, ‘This learn you to be careless,’ and she stick me in the eye with a fork. I’m still blind till now.”

“She’s six years old then,” Ezra added.

“I’m so sorry.”

“It ain’t your fault. The Bondurants been nothing but good to me. Ezra, you get that coffee.”

Ezra poured coffee from an enameled pot whose bottom was burned black, into three tin cups and set them in front of us, along with a sugar bowl and a pitcher of milk.

“You want sweetening?” Aunt Polly asked. “I mostly takes sugar, but the sweet tooth ain’t craving it just now.”

“Black.”

She and Ezra doctored their coffee and tasted it, then sat looking at me expectantly. Finally, Aunt Polly asked, “What you going to do with the place?”

There was nothing to tell them, since I had not yet made a decision. But I did not want to leave them uneasy. “Ezra probably told you that inheriting Avoca was a surprise to me, and I don’t know yet what to do with it. Mr. Satterfield . . .” I paused to see if they knew who he was, but of course they did. “Mr. Satterfield advised me to look through my aunt’s things for keepsakes. I would like to keep the jewelry and the photographs, and there must be other things that ought to stay in the family.” Then I added, “And the quilt that Miss Amalia made.”

Aunt Polly nodded her approval. “She like that. It choice.”

“Mr. Satterfield said that my aunt took care of you in her will. You won’t have to worry.”

“So she say,” Aunt Polly said.

“Miss Amalia quality,” Ezra added.

“And even if she hadn’t, I would have made arrangements.”

Now both of them stared at me, making me wish the remark had sounded less patronizing. But Aunt Polly, at least, was not offended, because she said, “You a Bondurant.”

“I’m trying to make sense of all this, because it’s awfully confusing. Of course you’re anxious, and I’ll make decisions as soon as I can.”

“Oh, that all right. I and Ezra been here a long time, since long before freedom cried out. We ain’t playing the hog.”

“I know that.”

Ezra drank his coffee all at once and stood up, telling us he had work to do in the garden. Aunt Polly seemed in no hurry, however, and this was a chance to ask her about Amalia. So, despite her protest, I got up and poured more coffee for the two of us.

“My aunt, did she eat here often?” The room was not only friendlier than Avoca but in better condition. With the addition of electrical wiring, plumbing, perhaps a gas line, the quarters would make a very nice house. Aunt Polly had tacked up outdated calendars and magazine pictures, and an old-fashioned sampler, soiled from smoke and grease, was pinned to the wall next to me. Across its top was a crude alphabet embroidered in black, and beneath it were two dancing stick figures with black heads and the words
Wez Free
.

Aunt Polly saw me looking at the needlework and grinned. “Miss Emilie, she done the letters when she’s a girl and throw it out for a rag. But I keep it and finish it off when freedom come. Miss Amalia help me with the words.”

“It’s extraordinary.” The little piece of needlework was filled with life, so different from the samplers with which I was familiar, ones with formal patterns and dirgelike verses.

“I help Miss Amalia with her quilts all her life. We make a plenty of them. Miss Amalia, she love her needle. She say maybe so someday you finish her quilt tops.”

“Ezra asked me about quilting. I don’t know how. It was never anything that interested me.

“You learn by me. There’s nothing brings peace like quilting. Maybe you need it.” As if her remark had been presumptuous, Aunt Polly added quickly, “You ask if she eat in this kitchen, and I tell you she done it from the time she was a little thing and had the world in a jug.”

“What about in her later years?”

Aunt Polly looked at me a moment, wondering about the question. “Sometimes.”

“It’s cozier here in your kitchen than over there in the house.”

“Miss Amalia like the big house. Never did she ever live no place else.”

That was as much of an entrée as Aunt Polly was going to give me. “I thought she and Miss Emilie lived in New Orleans, where my father was born.”

Aunt Polly regarded me suspiciously. “I mean for a real home. She
visit
New Orleans, just like she visit New York and over there on the other side of the ocean. She meet the queen of England. You know that?”

Everyone in Natchez seemed to. “Avoca’s such a lovely place. She must have missed it when she was away. After she lost her mother, she would have been glad to get back here.”

“It home. She never left no more after that.” The conversation put Aunt Polly on guard, so perhaps I had moved too quickly. After all, why would she tell me secrets she had kept for more than fifty years?

“What was she like when she was young?” I sipped the coffee, which was bitter with the taste of chicory.

Aunt Polly relaxed a little and pushed her tin plate aside so that she could lean on the table. “Like any other young’un. White chil’en play with the coloreds. Wasn’t no difference. Less you see the fur, the mink skin the same thing as the coon hide. Course she still Young Miss. When she get ageable, she don’t come around so much. She’s off then”—she waved her hand—“places. She wild.” Aunt Polly sucked her teeth, remembering. “The captain, he don’t know what to do with her. She was his favorite and best. Anything Miss Amalia want, why, he wouldn’t say no. He give her the keys to the kingdom.”

“It’s odd she didn’t marry.”

Aunt Polly picked at the wooden table with her fingernail. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

“There must have been plenty of young men in Natchez.”

“Oh, not so many. There ain’t been enough mens for white young ladies in Natchez since before the freedom. We got a shortness of white mens after that.” She gave me a wry look. “That’s what the white womens say. Me, I think we got a plenty of white mens.
I
don’t need no more of ’em.”

I laughed, and Aunt Polly chuckled, pleased with herself. I said, “Miss Amalia was engaged to the man who killed her, to Bayard Lott.”

“Who say that?”

“Mr. Satterfield. Mrs. Long. It was even in the newspaper in Denver. Was she?”

Aunt Polly rose slowly. “I’m wearing out my sittin’ chair. There’s work to be doing.”

I put my hand on her arm. “The two of you are to keep the goat money. You’re welcome to the goats, too. There isn’t room in my suitcase to take them back to Colorado.”

Aunt Polly didn’t laugh or thank me, just watched me, waiting. It sounded as if I were bartering with her for information. Perhaps I was.

“There’s no reason for me to cause trouble. I only want to find out about Amalia Bondurant.”

“Why you trying to know into somebody else’s business?”

“Because she’s my business. She’s my relative, and I want to know why she died.” There was no reason to tell Aunt Polly that Amalia’s death was becoming an obsession with me, that I felt compelled to understand why this relative had lived and died as she had.

“Ain’t no more to it than you already know.” She stared at me so hard with her good eye that I looked away.

“Besides, she left Avoca to me, and I don’t know why.”

“You her only kin.”

“No, her brother Frederick had a child.”

Aunt Polly sat back down and threw up both hands into the air. “Most likely dead. Besides, she don’t like Frederick.”

“I know that Amalia was engaged to Bayard Lott. Surely you know that, too.”

She said, grudgingly, “He was her heartstring long time ago.”

“Why didn’t they marry?”

Aunt Polly stood and picked up the dishes, then placed them in a bucket of water that sat on an iron stove. “The captain buy this old stove. It smoke enough to strangle me. I ain’t used it in fifty year. In this fireplace was fixed up all the meals.”

“You were the cook?”

She smiled. “Still am. I cooks right good.” She poured salt into a little dish, added a dash of water from a heavy iron teakettle, and stirred it with her finger. Then she set it on the table, along with a copper Turk’s cap mold. She dipped a rag into the salt mixture and began polishing the tarnished metal. “I ever did like to see the shine come through. Ezra say I rather shine the copper than eat when I’m hungry, but that ain’t so. I can’t sit without I do something, and that’s the truth.”

“You cooked during the captain’s time?”

She straightened a little and gave me a proud look. “I cook everything. You see that spit over there?” Aunt Polly pointed with the rag to the hearth. “That fit a young calf. I roast turkey, ham, venison, lamb on it. I fix burgoo, scalloped oysters, chicken shortcake—that be Miss Amalia’s favorite. But my specialty my desserts”—she pronounced the word “desserts”—“trifle, floating island, sweet-potato pie. My angel cake the best in Natchez, light as duck down. You can’t mention nothing good to eat that I can’t make.

“See that clock up there?” She pointed to an old timepiece with a pendulum that still swung back and forth. “The captain give it me to keep time on my cakes so’s they don’t get burnt. I don’t have need of it, but I don’t tell Captain that.” She chuckled. “It weren’t nothing to cook for twenty people, sometime thirty,
maybe more. We cook it here and run it to the dining room. The captain call it the ‘batter-cake express.’ ” Aunt Polly smiled at the memory of it. “That’s why the captain buy me. He know I’s a first-rate cook and nursemaid. I’s Miss Amalia’s nursemaid when she’s hardly born.”