“Lenora was at the party,” I said. “She’s still as well dressed as ever.”
“Did she look ravishing?” There was a slightly caustic edge to the question.
“She may still be the ‘Best Dressed,’ ” I said, “but I was wondering why the ‘Most Popular Girl’ at Eudora High wasn’t there.”
“It’s simple, Ben. She and her husband were not invited to attend.”
I was surprised to hear this. I knew that Eudora “society,” such as it was, was a small, intimate group. Surely Elizabeth would be included.
“I think you know my husband is Richard Nottingham, the state senator,” Elizabeth said. “Richard is known to be the political kingmaker.”
“I did know that,” I said.
“Well, then, put it together. L. J. Stringer never sits down to dinner with anyone more important than himself. Some people say that Richard will be the next governor,” she said.
“And what do you think, Elizabeth?”
“He certainly wants to be governor. But I… I don’t want to leave Eudora.”
We had reached Jenkins’s store now. “Thank you for walking with me, Ben. And for our talk. Now I have boot laces to buy.”
To my disappointment, she didn’t invite me in with her. But Elizabeth leaned in and lightly kissed my cheek, then disappeared into the store—the same one where my mother had collapsed when I was just a boy.
Chapter 41
MY MOTHER USED TO SAY, “When you’re truly in love, you see the face you love in your coffee cup, in the washstand mirror, in the shine on your shoes.” I remembered those words as I sat at my regular table at the Slide Inn, sipping a cup of strong and delicious chicory coffee.
Miss Fanny brought my breakfast of fried eggs, creamy salty grits, a slice of cured ham, and buttermilk biscuits, but I only had eyes for my coffee cup, and Mama’s words haunted me. I couldn’t stop thinking about Elizabeth. Yes, Mama. I see her face in the surface of my coffee.
Elizabeth.
If I were not feeling so lonely and abandoned by my wife, would I be having these feelings? Probably not. But I was feeling lonely and abandoned, and worse—aroused.
Elizabeth.
My reverie was broken by Fanny’s exclamation as she looked past me and out the window.
“That boy is like to drive me crazy, late as he is. Look at him, running up here like his shirttail’s on fire!”
A gangly colored boy of about sixteen was headed for the café in a big, sweaty, arm-pumping hurry—such a hurry, in fact, that he almost dashed in the front door without thinking.
Then he saw Fanny and me staring at him. He remembered his place, ducked his head, and went around back.
Miss Fanny went to meet him. Through the window to the kitchen I saw the two of them in serious conversation, the boy gesticulating wildly.
I waited until Miss Fanny came back out front, then lifted my finger for more coffee. She brought the tin pot over to me.
“What’s the trouble?” I said.
“Big trouble,” she said quietly. “Seems like there was another hangin’ party last night.”
I kept my voice low. “You mean… a lynching?”
“Two of ’em,” she said.
Chapter 42
I TOOK ANOTHER SIP of coffee and noticed that my hand was shaking some. Then I folded my napkin and headed back through the kitchen as if I intended to visit the privy. On the way I detoured to the side of the room where the boy stood over a sinkful of dirty dishes.
“What happened, son?” I said. “Please, tell me everything.” At first the boy just stared at me without speaking a word. Fanny came up behind us. “It’s okay, Leroy. This here’s Mr. Corbett. He’s all right to talk to.”
At last the boy spoke. “You know who is Annie?” he said. “The one cook for Miz Dickinson? She got a girl, Flossie, little older than me?”
I didn’t know who he was talking about, but I nodded so he would continue.
“Well, it was that Mr. Young,” he said, “Mr. Jasper Young.”
I knew Jasper Young, who owned the hardware and feed stores. He was a quiet, grandfatherly man who exercised some influence behind the scenes in Eudora.
“What does Jasper Young have to do with it?”
“I can’t say.” The boy stared down at his dishes.
“Why not?”
He shot a look at Miss Fanny. “Lady present.”
“Aw, now, come on, Leroy. Not one thing in this world you can’t say in front of me!”
He wiggled and resisted, but at last he turned his eyes away from Fanny and fixed them on me.
“Mr. Young want some lovin’ from Flossie. She didn’t want to go along with it. So he… he force the love out of her.”
What an incredible way to put it.
He force the love out of her.
The rest of the boy’s story came quickly.
Flossie had told her mother of the rape. Annie told her husband. Within minutes, her husband and son, crazed with rage, broke into Jasper Young’s home. They smashed china and overturned a table. Then they beat Jasper Young with their fists.
A neighbor summoned a neighbor who summoned another neighbor. Within an hour, no more than that, Annie’s husband and her son were hanging from ropes in the swamp behind the Quarter.
“Where are they, exactly?” I asked the boy.
“Out by Frog Creek.”
That was not the place I’d visited with Abraham, but I knew where it was.
I practically ran all the way back to Maybelle’s. I didn’t ask if I could borrow the bicycle, I just climbed on and rode out the old McComb Road, toward the swamp.
Toward Frog Creek.
Chapter 43
I CAME UPON A VISION of horror, all too real. Two men, one young, one older, naked and bloody, dangling from ropes. Already the smell of rotting flesh was rising in the morning heat. Flies were on the bodies.
On the ground beneath the stiff, hanging bodies, amid the cigar butts and discarded whiskey bottles, sat a woman and child. The woman was about thirty-five years old. The boy was no more than four. He was touching the woman’s face, touching the tears on her cheeks.
The woman saw me and her face furrowed over in rage. “You go on, now,” she shouted. “They already dead. You cain’t do no more to hurt ’em.”
I walked closer and she drew the boy to her, as if to protect him from me.
“I’m not going to hurt anybody,” I said. “I’m a friend.”
She shook her head fiercely. No.
I wanted to comfort her terrible sobbing, but I stayed back. “Are you Annie?”
She nodded.
Now that I was close to the dangling bodies, I saw the welts left by whips, the bloody wounds covering almost every part of their bodies. The older man’s arm hung down from his shoulder by a few bloody tendons. As the younger man slowly twisted, I saw that his testicles had been severed from his body.
My voice finally came out choked. “Oh, I am so sorry.”
I noticed a pink, rubbery thing in her hand, something she kept stroking with her finger as she wept.
She saw me looking. “You want to know what it is? It’s my Nathan’s tongue. They done cut his tongue out of his head. Stop him from sassin’ them.”
I looked up. Blood was thickly caked around the older man’s mouth.
“Oh, Jesus!”
“Ain’t no Jesus,” she said. “There ain’t no Jesus for me.”
She wept so terribly I could not hold myself back. I knelt by her in the clearing.
For a moment all was quiet, but for her sobbing.
Then a noise. A rustling in the underbrush, a crackling of twigs. I saw birds fly up in alarm.
Someone was there.
No doubt about it.
Someone was watching us.
And then out came several people, some men but also women, black people from the Quarters come to cut down the father and son who had been murdered.
Part Three
&nbs
p; SOUTHERN FUNERAL FAVORITES
Chapter 44
COULD ANYONE POSSIBLY PEDAL a bicycle as slowly as I did going back to Eudora?
I looked all around me. Although my little town still looked much as it had when I was a boy, now it was stained and tattered almost beyond recognition.
Now the whole place was poisoned by torture and murder. The proof was still swinging from that oak tree out by the banks of Frog Creek. I thought about going to the police, but what good would it do? And besides, it would raise the question of why I had gone out to the scene of the lynchings.
“You all soakin’ wet,” Maybelle said as I trudged up onto her porch. “Set here with me and have a lemonade.”
I put myself in a porch rocker and prepared to be disappointed, but the lemonade was cold, sweet, delicious.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Maybelle said. “You had a visitor while you were gone. Senator Nottingham’s wife.”
“Elizabeth? Did she leave any message?”
“No, she said she would stop by again. But that reminds me, I know how much stock you put in getting the mail, and you did get some today. I put it in the front hall.”
On the hall table was a square, cream-colored envelope with my name written in Meg’s delicate hand.
I took the stairs two at a time. Inside my room, I removed my jacket and settled into the chair at the window for a good read.
Dear Ben,
I know I ought to be ashamed for not having written sooner. The girls have done very little else but remind me. They have pestered me about you night and day. But I’ve been busy doing almost all the housekeeping, because Mazie had to go up to Trenton on account of her sister has been “ill.”
Do not worry about me. Other than sore muscles from wringing out the wash and from scrubbing the floors in the house, I am in good physical shape.
These opening lines filled me with joy. My wife was still my wife. My fears were unjustified. The letter sounded so much like her—the teasing complaints, the emphatic descriptions, even the hint that she regarded Mazie’s sister’s problem as nothing more than a love of the grape.
Later on, when I reflected on this moment, I wished I had stopped reading at that point.
Ben, I might as well get to the point. I have suffered and wept many nights over this. Finally I have reached my decision. There is no reason for me to delay the pain for both of us, and pain there will surely be when I tell you what is in my heart.
I think it would be best for all involved if I move back in with my father.
I read that last sentence again… and again…
I doubt this will truly come as a surprise to you. You know that we have not been in love, as husband and wife must be, for some time now.
My hand was shaking now. The paper began to rattle and my eyes burned.
I rested my head back against my chair. “I’m still in love, Meg,” I said out loud.
I have prayed much about this matter, and have spoken to my father about the situation.
I should have known. Meg had consulted the one god in her life, the almighty Colonel Wilfred A. Haverbrook, U.S. Army, Ret. No doubt the colonel had agreed with her that her husband was a miserable failure.
I know that my decision may strike you as a terrible mistake on my part. Yet I believe it is the only correct solution to our dilemma. We must be honest with each other and ourselves.
I think it best if you do not come home at this time. I will be in touch with you by post or wire, as I begin the steps necessary to bring about a most painful but inevitable result.
Cordially, your wife
Meg
I have often heard the expression “It hit him like a punch in the stomach,” but I had never felt it myself. Suddenly I knew exactly what it meant. The letter struck me a blow that caused a physical ache so sharp I had to bend over. Then I sat up. Perhaps I’d missed a word, or an entire sentence, and reversed the meaning of the thing.
I grabbed the letter and read it again.I read it out loud.
Eventually I turned it over and found another message scrawled on the back in pencil, a child’s handwriting.
Daddy, me and Alice miss you terrible, just terrible. Pleas come home soon as you can. I love you, your dauhgter, Amelia.
And that is when I felt my heart break.
Chapter 45
I POURED COLD WATER from the pitcher into the basin, then washed my face with the coarse brown soap, scrubbing so hard I threatened to take the skin off.
Next I took a sheet of writing paper from my valise, along with a pen Meg had given me for the first anniversary of our marriage: a beautiful Waterman pen.
I pulled the wobbly chair up to the wobbly table and uncapped the pen. Immediately I felt all my lawyerly eloquence disappear.
Dear Meg,
As your husband, and your friend, I must tell you that you have some things wrong. I do love you. You are simply wrong to say that I don’t. A separation like this is a rash thing to do, especially considering that we have never even discussed these problems face to face.
I don’t care about your father’s opinion of our marriage. But I do care that our parting will break the hearts of everyone involved—Alice, Amelia, my own heart, even yours.
Before you take any further action, please, my darling Meg, we must discuss this—together, as husband and wife, as mother and father of our two little daughters, as Meg and Ben who always planned to spend our lives together.
Suddenly I came out of my writing trance…
“Mr. Corbett! Mr. Corbett!”
It was Maybelle, hollering from the foot of the stairs. I quickly wrote,
Your loving and faithful husband,
Ben
“Mr. Corbett!”
I put down the pen and walked out to the landing.
“What is it, Maybelle?” I called.
“Mrs. Nottingham is here to see you. She’s here on the porch. She’s waiting on you, Mr. Corbett. Hurry.”
Chapter 46
THERE ELIZABETH WAS, standing on Maybelle’s wide wraparound porch. She had put on another bonnet and seemed even more attractive than she’d been this morning.
She reached out for my hand. “I came to apologize, Ben.”
I took her hand. “What do you mean? Apologize for what?”
I said this for the benefit of Maybelle, whom I could see lingering in the parlor, trying not to be observed.
“Let’s go look at Miss Maybelle’s rose garden,” I proposed. “It’s in full bloom this time of year.”
I made a motion with my eyes that disclosed my real meaning to Elizabeth. She nodded and followed me around the porch toward the backyard.
Maybelle’s roses were actually in sad shape, a few blossoms drooping among a profusion of weeds.
“I’m sorry for this morning,” Elizabeth said. “The way I ran off.”
“You didn’t run, you walked. I watched your every step,” I said and smiled.
“You can still be funny, Ben.”
“Sit on the bench,” I said. “I won’t bite you.”
Smoothing her dress, she sat on the stained marble bench amid the raggedy roses.
Sitting close to her, I was fascinated by her every gesture, word, movement. I noticed the way Elizabeth touched her mouth with the knuckle of her second finger, giving herself a little kiss before coming out with an opinion. And the slow southern musical rhythm of her speech. Lord, what was getting into me? Probably just loneliness. Or was it being rejected by my wife?
“You were surprised I came to see you again so soon?” she said.
“I’m always glad to see you, Elizabeth,” I said. Then added, “Yes, I’m surprised you’re here.”
“I do have an ulterior motive,” she said. “We’re having a luncheon after church on Sunday. Will you come?”
“We?”
“Richard and I.”
“Sure, I’ll come,” I replied.
I caught the faint scent of rose water, and I noted the curve
of her nose, and remembered being very young and in love with that little nose.
“Wonderful,” she was saying. “Come about one, Ben. We’ll have some nice people in. I’ll try not to have any of those you were subjected to at L.J.’s.”
She stood. “I can’t be late picking up Emma from her lesson. She’s quite the little pianist, and I guess I’m quite the doting mother.”
I stood, and we smiled. This time, there was no kiss on the cheek.
But I watched Elizabeth walk away again, every step, until she finally disappeared behind the rooming house porch.
Chapter 47
WASHINGTON, D.C.
That same afternoon, Senator John Tyler Morgan, Democrat of Alabama, stood in the lobby of the Willard Hotel, yelling at the general manager.
“I have never been refused service in my life! That insufferable man in the elevator had the nerve to tell me he was holding the car for an important personage. He told me to get off that car and wait for another car!”
Senator Morgan was so angry that specks of saliva were speckling the lapels of the general manager’s morning coat.
“Senator, I am so sorry for the inconvenience—”
“Not an inconvenience! It’s a goddamned insult! Who the hell was he holding the elevator for, the goddamned president of the United States?”
As he roared this question, the great glass doors of the lobby flew open at the hands of two uniformed guards. In walked Theodore Roosevelt.
He took one look at John Tyler Morgan in mid rampage and the poor little cowering manager. Then Roosevelt thundered, “Unless my eyes deceive me, the man at the center of that ruckus is none other than the senior senator from the great state of Alabama. Good morning, John!”
The famous Civil War general and southern statesman was stunned into silence. No one had called him John in many years.