Coffee and Jem had made great strides with the potatoes. A good two-thirds of the Brimstones were dug, and by noontime the hands would doubtless be ready to start in on the Hayti yams, which they preferred for the table, and which it was easier to raise as fare for the slaves because the Hayti yams were more prolific and they stored well. Common yams were the most prolific of all, but had rather a pumpkinish flavor. Ira couldn’t abide growing them.
Coffee. Did you dig these?
Coffee was a long-armed, long-faced fellow with Indian blood apparent. Nossuh, Mastah, I use the hoe. That Jem there—he got the old potato hook. I done told him to look sharp.
Well, Jem, suppose you try the hoe instead. Potato hook’s a tricky implement. You’ve hurt a few in this hill. Look there. And there, in the next. . . .
Real sorry, Mastah. They just jump up out of the earth and get themselves tore, fore I know what they’s about.
Hear me, Jem. Do you use the hoe from now on, and give the hook to Coffee. And slow with the hoe. You’ll need to eat the ones you bruise, and they don’t keep long so. That you know.
Jem, wide and black and rubbery as to body, stood grinning weakly in an attitude of shame.
Caution, Jem, use caution. Hear me, now?
Mastah, I surely take care.
Gracious, thought Ira, I neglected to look into the pine straw situation. But there’ll be sufficient, over on Little Sweetwater. We fetched none from there last year. . . . He continued to give the slaves detailed instructions. He had decided that they shouldn’t get into the yams today. There was sun, and the crop would have to undergo a good drying for several hours before the piles were started. There were the floors of piles to be built, the trenches to be dug around the floors; then a few days of sustained drying should continue under pine straw only, before the piles were finally earthed up and barked up.
Ira went on toward the big house (oh Lord, if only he had paint) and stopped a moment at the implement shed, which he unlocked with a key selected from the hefty wad at his belt. He cleaned his budding knife and hung it in its groove. Then, locking up, he walked on around through the narrow carriageway, aiming for the west end of the gallery where he wished to examine some cold frames he’d built. But he was surprised to find a gig under the big oak, with an old black horse tied and eating oak leaves. At first Ira thought that the advent of this horse and rig must have something to do with the surveyors he encountered; they had so few callers these days. Then he recognized the horse as belonging to the Reverend Mr. Cato Dillard of Americus.
He heard a voice— Poppy, she said, and it was Lucy, rising drunkenly from the top step where she’d been sitting. She is grown suddenly ill, thought Ira. An epidemic, perhaps? Some fever has struck? He limped toward her and held out his arms as the girl came swaying down the steps.
Oh, Poppy, and she nuzzled deep into his wide-flung coat. Poppy. It’s Badge.
Lucy— The minister’s horse—
They wrote to him. A colonel did—and—a surgeon. They wrote to him first. Reckoned it’d be easier on— On us.
Where’s Mr. Dillard? Where’s your mother, child? He shook her as if he hated her.
She’s on her bed. They came— It was an hour ago. The letters only reached them last night. Mrs. Dillard is with Mother, and he’s praying up there. He wished me to stay for prayers. I didn’t wish to pray.
Still holding her in his arms, he waited and waited. Finally he could command his voice and make it do what he wanted. He could make it talk and sound like a human being, not like a beast’s whine. Lucy, where did it happen?
Some place up in Tennessee. Chick-a-something. He was hurt on the twentieth of September, and we didn’t know it, Poppy, we didn’t know it all this time, we were in utter ignorance. Why didn’t they tell us? You might have gone to him. So he died of his wounds, just as my dear Rob died in that Yankee pen of his sickness.
...Lucy, are you certain that you don’t wish to pray? I think—it would—be—well—if we both went in to—prayers. Later Mr. Dillard can hold a service for the hands.
It will do no good, said Lucy, but she came quivering along with him. It never does any good. We should know that by now.
...And there sat in a window a certain young man . . . and as Paul was long preaching, he sunk down with sleep, and fell down from the third loft, and was taken up dead.
And Paul went down, and fell on him, and embracing him said, Trouble not yourselves: for his life is in him.
Ah, it was not, life not in him in the slightest, but only abysmal decay and bad sight and odor, like the cross-bred pumpkin-gourd-cucumbers in that unholy field yonder, nigh to the woods. He was the last: Moses, the youngest, first; then Suthy, the eldest; now Badger, the middle son. Get up from your mounds, you small fry behind that old rusty fence, and join in lamentation, for we’ve only Lucy to help us with the task of weeping.
The Yankees got Moses and Suthy. Yankees now destroy Badge. They got him, with their many cannon and many men, and their quick-shooting breech-loading rifles. Damn the Yankees. Damn them forever, damn them to a hundred hells with their cannon and their money and their blankets and their medicines. God—damn—the Yankees. God damn the Yankees. God damn the Yankees. Amen.
II
Having shared the grief of the Claffeys for some hours, the Reverend Mr. Cato Dillard at last handed his wife into the gig and prepared to drive away. Grief was nothing new to Cato Dillard, whether he suffered his own or witnessed it in that portion of humanity he considered to be within his charge; and he believed that all mankind he had observed since leaving the seminary came within his charge. Excepting, possibly, Roman Catholics. Sometimes he wasn’t even too certain about those. And, of recent years, Yankees. . . .
Veronica Claffey stared sightlessly at the canopy above her bed, and lay unable to read her Bible or to respond to any prayer offered. Lucy was in her own room, also, with the servant Ninny rubbing her ankles. Ira Claffey attended the brief service to which the slaves had been called. The black people’s wail and chanting hung bitterly protracted in the sunlight of early afternoon; the whites wished that the slaves would not manufacture such sounds, but there was no way of hushing them.
The servant Pet came with a withe basket containing corn bread, fried chicken and a bottle of beer to refresh the Dillards on their drive to Americus. Cato Dillard embraced his friend and then drove away without looking back; it was better so.
He wished with recurrent regret that Ira Claffey was not averse to metaphysical discussion, but Ira was averse to it. Ira was one of three men among the parson’s acquaintances who possessed sufficient scholarly background to indulge in such activity. Still Ira always changed the subject as soon as Cato Dillard was well-embarked and as soon as his tiny eyes burnt bright with intellectual zeal and as soon as his eager voice thrummed with a new range and timbre of enthusiasm. Ira’s religion was of a gentle, affectionate, pantheistic variety, and he refused stubbornly to be tricked into any exercise of theology.
I fear the beer may be flat, Ira said in parting. It’s from the only brewing which kept, and this year we can’t spare the grain. What with military levies and all.
Flat or not, it’ll be tasty. Goodbye, my dear friend.
Goodbye, Mrs. Dillard. I can say but Thank You. Goodbye, Brother.
And the dry shivering handclasp saying more.
God bless you, Brother Ira. I’ll pray daily.
Whatever benefit that may bring! Bitterness of the deep and stunning hurt.
I’ll pray, Brother Ira.
And light wheels going away, and the gloom on all hearts.
Halfway down the lane with its magnolias on one side and its small oaks on the other, Cato turned to his wife and began to quote, So we say farewell to our lamented dead, and know only that we shall reassemble on that great day when all shall foregather—some from the East, and some from the West, some from the S
outh— And it may even be that a few shall come from the North.
Muckle wish have I that any should come from the North. Effie Dillard was a Scotswoman. The words of her Rothesay youth came easily from her wide thin lips when she was stirred. She was wearing a faded frilled pink cap and now she lifted her straw bonnet and drew it on over the cap, which act would have seemed astonishing to a stranger. Mrs. Dillard had suffered fever many years before—had nearly died of it, and all her hair was lost. She wore caps, waking and sleeping. No one except a trusted servant had ever seen her without a cap, since she recovered. Not even the Reverend Mr. Dillard.
She was a bony, bent woman with knobs on her shoulders and a face like a yellow witch. Everyone in the region knew that she had a heart bigger than the area of Sumter County itself, and many traded on her accordingly. Her skin was marred by smallpox which she had acquired when nursing a brood of Negroes from whom the rest of humanity fled.
Effie, don’t talk hatred.
I feel it. If I feel it I should utter it.
Thus purging your soul? The minister smiled a tired sly smile.
Aye. She gave him the ghost of her own smile.
Mr. Cato Dillard was plump and squat, and loose flesh squeezed out around his short neck in rolls. His hazel eyes lost themselves in chasms of veined wrinkles; they peeked out like twin squirrels in hiding. He was brilliantly far-sighted, literally as well as figuratively, and donned his spectacles only when working on his sermons or when reading tracts aloud to some blind or illiterate sufferer unable to read the tracts himself. He was sixty-six years old and still moved with the bounce of youth. The Dillards had no living children, but five of their eight grandchildren were serving in the army, all alive as yet.
Mr. Cato Dillard had one vanity: the tufts of luxuriant tingling curly silver, growing down past his ears on either side of his firm fat face, and so fluffy that the lightest breeze set them rippling.
Cate, she called him in private, and sometimes in public when she forgot. Now she cried, Cate! in a manner of alarm.
Is something wrong, my dear?
You’ve turned off the road. You’re not bound for Americus. There’s the railroad ahead.
Only bound down this side track on an errand. Briefly.
Where are we bound?
He wriggled guiltily. If you must know, we’re bound for the Widow Tebbs’ place.
Cate, are you daft?
The Cloth can be worn anywhere and remain unsullied. It is my Christian duty. And I might add—yours also, Effie.
Let me out of this gig, man. I’ll not go.
You’ve been before.
On a fool’s errand!
Effie, don’t be difficult. She’s a poor miserable creature, with no great happiness behind her, and only iniquity and grief to make up her present, and flames reaching ahead. But she’s human, and I knew her grandfather well, and as a ruling elder he represented our congregation in the presbytery.
Scarlet is as scarlet does. What charity can you give her? I mean what charity would she accept? Neither the Word nor the practice thereof. She does not know the meaning of repentance.
Perhaps, at one time, neither did Mary Magdalene.
Ah. Touch pitch, I say.
Now, how often do you suppose The Saviour touched pitch? And how severely was He tarred?
Cate, you’re daft.
But Mrs. Dillard gave no further remonstrance—only a reedy sigh now and then, as the little vehicle bumped down the miserable side road.
Over the railway tracks they rocked, the horse snorting when wheels grated on the rails: Blackie recognized the railroad and tossed his head at the notion of encountering a locomotive which always set him to spreading his legs and lifting wild ears. The Widow Tebbs’ place was just beyond—a small house with a sloping roof like the tilt of a water-soaked visored cap. There was a ruined stable, a pig-pen, several miscellaneous sheds; and across a wide dirty yard stood a cubicle structure which had once served as a storage place for corn. That was when Dickwood Tebbs was alive. Nowadays it was fitted out with curtains, lamps, a reedy music box, and definitely a bed. In this building the Widow Tebbs did her entertaining. Her children referred to it as The Crib, as did Mrs. Tebbs’ regular patrons. This collection of buildings was bounded by a fence of split palings, heavy with gourd vines, some sections leaning in and some sections leaning out. A few tattered specimens of poultry fled jabbering as the gig came closer.
To think you’d carry your own good wife to such a spot.
My dear, be benevolent and forgiving. Her eldest’s just back from the battles, and he’s wanting a foot. This is sad poverty, dire poverty.
When they halted before the sagging gate, they saw the flight of something other than poultry: a small brown object which sped under the house like a bunchy high-backed varmint. It was a child, a boy of three or four, dressed in a loose skirt and shirt of filthy material. He traveled on his hands and knees with a speed to baffle the eye. One moment he was crouched, gazing fearfully at the approach of the gig; the next he had streaked between the chunks of stone which supported the old cottage, and had gone into darkness like a rabbit or a pig.
The Reverend Mr. Cato Dillard smiled. That would be her youngest.
Never knowing who his father is or was!
Doubtless none of them knows, save the eldest.
A flat-chested youth of thirteen came out on the stoop and stared warily. Mr. Dillard said, Good afternoon, Floral.
The boy mumbled a reply. He had a head small for the skinny body and long neck on which it was perched. His head was covered with spiny golden hair, kept clipped raggedly close by his mother’s shears. He wore a dirty undershirt, and patched pantaloons were held around his thin waist by a knotted cord.
Is your mother at home, Floral?
Yes, sir.
Then fetch her, please. And when you’ve done that, come down here to the buggy. I’ve something for you.
The boy ducked through the door, there were mumblings inside and then an exclamation of surprise, then Floral reappeared. He came down the two steps and across the littered yard, walking gingerly and seeking smooth places to set his bare left foot as he came.
What’s ado here, Flory? Cato Dillard spoke with light jocularity which it was difficult for him to muster, faced with the want and degradation he witnessed, faced with the boy’s wizened face and round blank gray eyes. Did you hurt your foot?
Yes, sir.
How did that occur?
Stepped on a damn old nail in a board.
Hush that profanity, child, said Effie Dillard sharply. Now you climb up here on the hub and show me your foot.
With agility, even if in some pain, Flory obeyed. Solemnly he presented the dirty sole of his foot to the woman’s gaze. Effie took her specs from her pocket, examined the wound, and gave an exclamation of disgust. I’ll be bound. That needs green ointment, and I must see to it.
Will it hurt?
Never you mind about that. It’s got proud flesh in it.
Yes, Ma’am.
From his jacket pocket Cato Dillard drew a comfit-case of battered silver; he had carried it since his youth. Solemnly he opened the lid and revealed a hoard of lozenges. These are wintergreen, he said. One for you, one for the little lad— What’s his name, my boy? He went under the house.
That’s Zoral.
Very well, one for Zoral. One for Laurel—
She ain’t to home. She’s over helping tend old Mrs. Bile. Both the niggers is sickly, and so’s the old Mrs.
Save it for her. These are hard to come by.
Well I know. Flory sucked his lozenge with relish.
Where is Coral?
Coral wouldn’t want no sugarplum. He just don’t want nothing since he got himself wounded. Flory had a greedy eye on the lozenge offered for his elder brother.
He might fancy it. Where is he, bubby?
Took the shotgun and gone a-hunting.
What? On one foot?
I done whittled him out a crutch. Flory still eyed the lozenge. Had it all ready for him when the wagon set him down at the door. First thing he says was, I’ll learn you to make gawk at my crippledness, and he took a swipe at me with the crutch. Coral’s mean as sin.
The Widow Tebbs appeared on the stoop, noticeably unstayed but wearing a fringed shawl over an old blue poplin gown which had been obviously a hand-me-down and was too tight for her. Her ruddy hair was wound up in a mass of curl papers. Heavens, said Cato involuntarily, behold the Gorgon Medusa.
Don’t you choose to light, Parson? And Ma’am? Her voice was high of key, nervous as a fledgling girl’s voice . . . she had no great share of wits. Her soft chin was weak, sagging; her bright brown eyes kept up an incessant blinking. Her body bulged, but in keeping with its original construction. A walking fleshly altar to Eros, thought Cato. Nothing could be done with her or about her. Nothing, not from her maiden days which must have ended when she was ten.
Despite the fact that she had a son nearly seventeen years old, she was barely in her thirties. Marget Lumpkin she had been born, and her father once conducted a tannery in Americus. He drove his children from him by fiendish exercise of the most antique and ascetic religious profession. Marget, or Mag as she was more commonly called, was in trouble at fourteen, wife to a slovenly young farmer and mother of his child at fifteen. . . . She had a persistent pitiable fondness for color, whether in flowers or in ribbons; the rougher boys of the town in her young time knew for a literal truth that Mag would lay herself down for the mere gift of a brass button or a spool of crimson thread. Lumpkin was a respectable—even an honored—name throughout most of Georgia, but the poor girl had always loathed the sound of it, when meaner children teased her muddled little brain and called her Bumpkin. Hence she groped for some sort of beauty when she named her scrawny troop of children (three of them fathered by men other than her husband). She named them Coral, Laurel, Floral, Zoral. Dick Tebbs had been dead for ten years, but poor Mag was gone into whoredom long before he died; and he spent his last sullen sickly winters in cutting enough wood to keep The Crib warm while she did her entertaining.