New Mercies (26 page)

“The mirror doubles the amount of light in the room,” Mr. Sam said. “Look you.” He used his cigarette lighter to light a kerosene lamp that sat on the table, then set the lamp on the floor in front of the mirror. The hall glowed.

“No such thing. Who’d put a lamp on the floor? Why, it’s like hiding your lamp under a bushel,” Pickett scoffed. “Miss Emilie put the mirror there so she could see if her petticoats showed. You’ll find petticoat mirrors all over Natchez.”

We peered into the bedrooms, where sheets heavy with dust covered the massive beds and dressers. “It smells like a dead Dutchman in here,” Pickett said, holding her nose as she walked into one of the bedrooms. With her free hand, she pulled back the dust cloth that protected a love seat. Mr. Sam held the lamp close to the intricately carved wood, and Pickett exclaimed, “It’s a Belter!” I knew Belter and told her I did not care for the fussy style. In a second bedroom, she announced, “Another Prudent Mallard.”

“Would anybody steal furniture?” I asked.

“No, but they’d burn it,” Pickett replied. “There’s a dealer in New Orleans who would dance a jig to have these things. The least I can do is to arrange to sell them for you.”

As we inspected the rooms, I picked up a handful of items to take with me—a crystal powder box, a handful of tin soldiers, bits of ribbon and lace, a sampler dated 1824, which was beautifully executed but not as interesting as the one in Aunt Polly’s kitchen—and set them at the top of the stairs. Pickett opened a wardrobe in one bedroom and discovered a cache of Amalia’s quilts, which I said I wanted shipped home.

We made a full circle of the hall, until only one room remained; the door to it was closed. I opened it and found a bedroom flooded with sunshine. The rest of the second floor was dark, with only slats of light coming through the closed shutters, but in this room, the louvers were open. Old lace curtains at the windows fluttered like laundry on a line.

“What in the world?” I muttered. Filling almost the entire room was a tepeelike tent. Its peak was too high for the room and had been folded against the ceiling. Ropes attached to the sides were stretched to the corners of the bedroom to hold the canvas structure in place.

“A Sibley tent,” Mr. Sam said. “Now where’d the Bondurants get hold of a Yankee tent?”

The flap was open, and I pointed to a bed inside.

“The tent keeps the rain off the bed—and the plaster from falling on it, too,” Pickett said, pointing to the ceiling, where light came through the broken places. The tent was badly waterstained. “It’s probably the bed Ezra slept on.”

“Ezra sleeps in the quarters,” I said.

“He
lives
in the quarters. He slept here in case Miss Amalia had need of him,” replied Mr. Sam, correcting me.

“To protect her?”

“Oh that, and to administer to her wants. It’s quite common really,” Pickett said. “My nursemaid, Sugar, slept on the floor beside my bed until I was married. I think she’d still be sleeping there if Buckland hadn’t put down his foot.” She sighed. “I do miss her. If I tell Bucky I need a blanket or a glass of water, he gets crabbed and cross and says to get it myself. Sugar was much more accommodating.”

“Sugar’s been dead for some time,” Mr. Sam reminded her.

“Yes, that’s another reason she doesn’t sleep beside me anymore.”

I started to laugh, but Pickett had not made a joke, so catching myself, I said, “If this is Ezra’s room, we shouldn’t intrude.”

“Nonsense. It’s your house. You have a perfect right to go wherever you like. Ezra understands that,” Pickett said. “You won’t want this bed. It’s just an old slave bed—wooden legs with canvas stretched over them. But Ezra does have another one of Amalia’s quilts—or maybe it’s Aunt Polly’s.” She handed a folded quilt to me. “Too bad it’s so worn.”

“Too bad.” I returned the quilt to the bed.

Pickett walked across the room to a wardrobe and opened it. “Nothing much here, either. Just a few clothes.” I looked beyond her and saw a pair of worn shoes and faded shirts and canvas pants, wash-worn and folded.

Pickett picked up a large unframed photograph that was mounted on cardboard. “Is this Miss Amalia? The workbasket
looks like the one you found downstairs this selfsame day, Nora.” She handed the picture to Mr. Sam.

“Oh, yes, that’s Miss Amalia, maybe forty years ago.” He gave the photograph to me.

The picture, printed in sepia, was faded, but Amalia’s face was clear. She sat on the steps of a gazebo, a book in her lap, the workbasket beside her. Behind her, chickens pecked in the dirt near a stable, and a man—Ezra perhaps—held a horse by its bridle. Next to him stood a woman wearing a turban and a calico dress, but she had turned her head as the shutter opened, so her face was out of focus. The woman might have been Sukey Pea, and perhaps Ezra had kept the photograph because it was all he had left of her. The moving blur could be the way he remembered her, a kind of whirlwind in his life.

“Is this Ezra’s wife?” I asked.

“Did he have one? I’d not heard of it,” Pickett said.

“Oh, you wouldn’t have. That was a long time ago, about the time this picture was taken, most likely. But I remember her.” Mr. Sam chuckled. “She was nice and soft-goin’, with a backside that looked like she had melons stuck in her hip pockets. I guarantee you she was wild. She did not walk a chalk line.”

“She did not what?”

“She wasn’t faithful,” Pickett explained.

“Miss Amalia told me Ezra was a punkin head to jump the broomstick with her.” He laughed.

Without my having to ask, Pickett explained, “ ‘Jumping the broomstick’ means they got married. That was how they did it in slavery days.”

“I thought Miss Amalia’d run the both of them off the place
when they got married. Wasn’t nothing happened on Avoca without her say-so, and she figured if Ezra, who was her especial favorite, did as he pleased, the others would, too, and it bothered her mind. Of course, that marriage didn’t last long. Sukey Pea mistreated Ezra terrible, and Miss Amalia joyed when Sukey Pea ran off with some brutish fellow. It didn’t surprise anybody. Sukey Pea was a prodigal. She flirted her skirt at every man who passed, and fornicated up salt crick.”

“Why, Mr. Sam!” Pickett said.

“I beg pardon.” He took the photograph and held it close to his face to hide his blush.

Pickett said, “How can you say such a thing even about a colored woman, Mr. Sam? You’re just like a possum. The longer you live, the less sense you’ve got.”

“The longer I live, the plainer I see things,” Mr. Sam retorted, handing back the picture. “I can’t be positive certain whether that’s Sukey Pea, but it might could be. She never did stand still. Ezra didn’t study anybody after she left, just stayed on with Aunt Polly to take care of Miss Amalia.”

I put the photograph back into the wardrobe, knowing that Ezra would be aware that we had snooped. But he would not say anything to me. As Aunt Polly had told us, he was saving on his words, and as Pickett had said, he probably believed I had the right to snoop.

Ezra’s chamber was the most interesting of the upstairs rooms, the only one that still contained life, and I wanted to spend more time there. But Pickett and Mr. Sam had started down the stairs. When I reached the hallway below, Pickett was holding her wristwatch to the light. “Nora, we’ll meet here at
nine tomorrow to commence our work. Mr. Sam, would you be a darling and take her to town? I must scoot.”

I said I would walk back into town after visiting Ezra, and I waved to Mr. Sam as he drove away slowly, the car straddling the center of the road. Only after he disappeared did I remember that he had not taken my box of plunder with him. So I turned back to go to Amalia’s room, and I noticed then that the three bottles Pickett had left on the porch were gone. Perhaps Magdalene Lott had snatched them. I glanced around the yard, then looked beyond it to the woods, but I saw no one.

Magdalene had been bold enough to enter Amalia’s room, and next time, she might steal something. So the box would have to go with me. I picked it up, adding the things from upstairs—the toys and fabric scraps and an opera program for
The Marriage of Figaro
at the New York Opera House in 1877 .1 was surprised that I wanted so little from this house.

Walking along the path of scattered shells, I wondered if Amalia had liked opera. I did not care much about opera, and David—I had discovered just last year—had actually disliked it. In our ten years of marriage, we attended only one opera, the opening-night performance of
Camille
at the Central City Opera House. That was only a year ago, and we went not so much to hear the opera as to support the restoration of the opera house.

Central City once had been a prosperous mining town, but when I knew it, the only activities were kids selling ore samples to tourists in the summer and old men sitting on benches, speculating about the price of gold. The Central City Opera House,
which once drew famous performers from New York, had been turned into a movie theater, but then it closed, and the roof was caving in. The interior was filled with fallen plaster, broken chairs, and pack-rat droppings. A group of Denverites, including Mother, decided to restore it, bringing culture to Colorado and economic development to Central.

Opening night was the highlight of Denver’s social season, and everybody dressed in Victorian costume. David and I made the rounds of the secondhand shops on Larimer Street, Denver’s skid row, where we purchased a fine beaver hat and a black cloak lined with white satin for David. Then we found an antique velvet dress the color of the blue time, which was what we called the late afternoon, when the distant mountains turned blue. As we were dressing that evening, David presented me with a necklace—a gold chain with a drop of two aquamarines a few shades lighter than the dress.

We rented a little Victorian house on the Casey, a promontory just below Central, for the weekend, and after the opera and the festivities were over, the two of us, me twirling a lace parasol, David carrying the beaver hat, which had begun to smell, walked the dark streets to the Casey. Neither of us was tired, and the rented house, long boarded up, had a peculiar odor of rot and rodents. So we sat in rocking chairs on the porch in the moonlight and talked. When I shivered, David put his opera cloak about my shoulders.

He lighted a cigarette; then, holding it between the fingers of his right hand, he pointed out the star formations. Far below us, smoke curled up from a chimney, and I told David the old joke about the houses in Central, which were built on such steep
hillsides that when the housewife on top threw out her stove ashes, they flew into the chimney below and thus worked their way from house to house, all the way down to the bottom of the mountain.

Then David said, “I read about the man the Casey was named for—Pat Casey. Do you know about him? He struck it rich here.”

“Hmm,” I muttered, my rocker creaking. I knew all about Pat Casey, but there was no need to spoil David’s story.

“Pat was illiterate and dumb as a clothespin. He carried a big gold watch, which he’d pull out from time to time. It was strictly for show, because he couldn’t tell time.” David rocked back and forth while I chuckled.

David flicked his cigarette over the hillside, and we watched the sparks scatter in the dark as it bounced from rock to rock. “Pat showed up at one of his mines and called into the shaft, ‘How many of youse are down there?’ A miner yelled back, ‘Five.’ Pat scratched his head, then said, ‘Well, half of youse come up for a drink.’ ”

David’s rocker stopped, and without turning his head, he shifted his eyes to get my reaction—a gesture he often made when he said something funny—and I laughed. “You’ve probably heard that story before,” he said.

“Never so well told. I didn’t know about the watch.”

David reached over and took my hand. “Could you have lived up here in those days, do you think?”

“Probably not. I’d have hated not being able to take a bath for weeks at a time and having to carry water and use an outhouse. And I couldn’t have slaughtered an ox for food. It’s much
nicer to go to the butcher at the Piggly Wiggly and have him do it for me.”

“You sell yourself short.” David’s seriousness surprised me. “You could deal with almost anything, if you had to.”

“Well, so far I haven’t. And with any luck, I’ll never find out.” It struck me then how easy my life had always been. The Depression, which had devastated so many people, had barely touched us. “What about you? Could you have been a pioneer?”

David lighted another cigarette as we sat in the dark and looked at the lumps of mountains across from us. I was glad for my husband’s cape around me, because a wind blew down the Casey. There were occasional sounds from up the hill—drunken shouts mostly. A motorist switched on headlights, and a car started down Eureka Street in Central. I leaned out over the porch and watched as it made its way along the twisted street far below. It reached Black Hawk and stopped, then turned onto the Denver road.

David took a long time to answer the question. “There’s something awfully appealing about being self-sufficient. Every male wishes he could be a caveman.”

“Pioneers and cavemen aren’t exactly the same thing.”

“Perhaps they are. Living in a cave is a lot closer to settling the West than taking the trolley to the office and sitting in a chair reading legal documents.”

David seemed to be working out something. He snubbed out the cigarette on the porch floor, then picked up the hat and stroked the beaver pelt. I put my hand to my throat and rubbed my fingers across the aquamarines.

“Sometimes it’s all so pointless. Last week, I listened to two
women with more money than God argue over which one got the diamond brooch and which the emerald ring. And I knew damn well that neither woman cared. One just didn’t want the other to get her first choice.”

“You’re being unfair.” I reached for his hand, but he was still holding the hat. “You know that’s not what you do. You help people through difficult times, and you let lonely old women know that somebody cares. Whatever you say, you really do care.”

David dismissed my remarks with a wave of the hat. “Maybe they’d be better off if I told them to go on home and stop feeling so sorry for themselves.”