The center spread in his American History book was a relief map of North America. On it he traced the Mississippi River from its source to a point where it made two sharp curves, like an S laid on its back, and that was Bristol (or at any rate it might have been, for the river had many such double bends); “Thats my home,” he said, placing the tip of one finger on the lower curve. The map showed none of the man-made boundaries, only the natural formations, rivers and their tributaries, like lengths of string, and mountains like brown wrinkles on the page. It was strange, being able to point to this one spot out of all that veined and crinkled mass of brown and white, and tell someone “Thats my home” as if he owned it, river and all. He did not say it with any real conviction.
Christmas of 1892, when Hector was fourteen, he came home for the holidays for the first time in two years. He brought two classmates with him. They were out of Maryland, city boys from Baltimore, and when they had not understood what was said to them, they did not say Sir? or Maam? after the usage taught in Mississippi; they said Pardon? which would have made people think them abrupt and rude if they had not had such good manners otherwise and such expensive clothes and luggage. The highlight of their visit was the Christmas trip around the plantation. They went with Hector and Mrs Wingate in the carriage, and more than anything they were impressed with the way the tenants approached their mistress with their hats off, bobbing their heads and showing their teeth and saying, “Crissmus giff, Ole Miss: Crissmus giff! En you too, Little Mars: Crismuss giff!” and the way Mrs Wingate took silver dollars from a canvas sack on the seat beside her, handing them out one at a time with a stern expression and calling each of the Negroes by name as he stood bobbing and grinning above the hat he held in both hands like a basin.
“You wouldnt have believed it,” the Maryland boys said afterwards. “It was like something out of the Middle Ages. It really was.”
That was the way they told about their visit when they got back to school in Virginia. They had gone down there half expecting to find it one big swamp; they admitted now that they had had misgivings. But they had been wrong and they wanted to make amends. Life in Mississippi — “the Delta, they call it, though it’s not all the way down at the mouth of the river” — was fascinating (that was the word they used, back in Virginia) and Mrs Wingate was “a lady of the old school, one of the few that are left.” Others listened while the travelers told about life on the plantation, especially the silver dollars distributed from a sack — “like something out of the Middle Ages. It really was” — and Hector’s stock went up. They had never called him anything but Sturgis, yet now they began to use his first name and even abbreviate it. They called him Heck, a devil-may-care sort of nickname. It was almost as if he had made the varsity. Classmates who formerly had cut him dead now nodded to him on the quad. There was nothing really effusive about it, but all this was quite different from anything he had ever known before.
Also, now that it had brought him this, he began to see in his homeland values he had never sensed before. He saw it with new eyes, the eyes of strangers, and in a different light. It was indeed romantic, he saw now, where formerly he had thought of it as just the opposite. The Negroes, the overarching trees, the river, all the things he had taken for granted while he lived among them — even the giving of silver dollars out of a canvas sack, since that apparently had impressed the visitors most — now had an enchantment lent by distance and praise, and Hector told himself that when he got back home he would appreciate them. He would study them in this new light. Even his grandmother, whom he already admired to what he had thought were the limits of possibility, acquired an added value now that the Maryland boys had defined her singularity — “a lady of the old school, one of the few that are left.” In her case, too, he told himself he would make a reassessment; he would appreciate her even more when they were together again.
It did not work out that way, however. They were never together again. The fever intervened.
Mrs Wingate wrote to him once a week, and that was how he learned of its return. First there were just a few scattered cases, nothing really unusual for the time of year. Then there were more, and more, until at last it had become an epidemic. He no longer had to wait for information from the letters. News of fever deaths was featured in all the papers. Yellow fever was general all down the Valley, and though it was not as serious as it had been fifteen years ago, in the season of Hector’s birth, it was serious enough.
Then there was a week when no letter came. He told himself it was nothing. The authorities had quarantined the mails, or railroad workers had refused to handle anything out of the delta, even letters, or she was too busy to write. He told himself all these things and more, doing everything he could to keep one certain thought out of his mind. Then, when it passed from a notion to a conviction, he told himself not to think about it at all. It would work itself out; any day now he would get a letter in his grandmother’s angular script explaining the lapse. What he finally got was a telegram signed by the family doctor, which put an end to wondering:
GRANDMOTHER FATHER DEAD BUT MOTHER WILL LIVE
I THINK. DO NOT COME HOME TIL EPIDEMIC PAST.
He had not believed Mrs Wingate would ever die. Sitting in the dormitory cubicle, the sheet of yellow flimsy in his hand, he could hear her speaking to him the way she had done through his childhood, telling him of Irish wheelbarrow laborers in the oldtime levee camps and of the two classes of people, the havers and the wishers, teaching him how to tell time with his dead grandfather’s watch and how to blow his nose and tuck his shirttail, the long, involved, tortuous sentences grinding on, the convulsive syntax causing the language to turn back on itself like a snake devouring its tail. But she was dead now: dead, and so was his father: both were dead and probably buried, and he would never see them again. He kept saying it over and over in his mind, in order to accustom himself to thinking of them in the past tense.
It was difficult in his grandmother’s case, for he could see her as clearly as if she were with him now in the cubicle, the mouth held a bit awry to hide the tooth-gap and the hair that was white because of the strange alchemy of bluing. But when he tried to think of his father he found that he could not shape the face. He could recall it in outline; his father had begun to get fat and his face was redder, too. But when he tried to fix the features, they faded and there was only the blank oval. He tried to remember words that his father had spoken to him, something, anything at all, but there was nothing. Then, as he had done before, he told himself not to think about it. It would work itself out in time, he told himself.
In mid-June there was an exchange of wires: SCHOOL IS OVER CAN I COME HOME NOW? and then the answer: FEVER STILL EPIDEMIC. DRAW ON BANK FOR FUNDS. It was Signed MOTHER. So he went to Baltimore, returning the visit of the Maryland boys. He wrote home, telling where he was, and waited for an answer. For two weeks there was nothing. Then in the third week he got a letter, and when he saw the envelope his heart gave a leap. It was addressed in his grandmother’s hand. But when he tore it open and looked at the foot of the single sheet (Mrs Wingate had always written at least three pages) the signature said Mother. It inclosed a check for a hundred dollars and instructed him to return the following week. That was all it said.
Previously the trainride had been one of the best things about coming home for the holidays. This time it was different, partly because there were no other young people on the train, but mainly because he was riding toward his first realization of death; he could not believe in his grandmother’s death until he saw for himself that she was gone. He wired from Memphis and the carriage was waiting at the Bristol station, just as always except that Samuel was alone. During the ride to the house he observed that the town was expanding eastward toward the Wingate property. At last they were there, and when he saw that the house had not changed, that it even had a new coat of paint like the old one, he realized that he had expected to find it dilapidated, as if the epidemic would leave a path o
f destruction like Sherman or a cyclone. But the driveway gravel had been raked as neatly as ever and there were not even weeds in the rosebeds. Then, going up the steps, he saw Mrs Wingate’s shawl folded over the arm of her rocker on the gallery.
The shawl was what did it, brought it into the open. When he saw the shawl he began to suspect, quite consciously, that this was all a hoax, an ugly joke prepared and staged to test him, to show him how much his grandmother meant to him. And now that he had begun to suspect quite consciously, it seemed to him that he had never believed in the absence of letters or even in the telegram that followed. She was not dead: they had only told him that. The feeling, the conviction grew as he entered the house. Upstairs, when he stopped with one hand on the newel post and peered through the twilight of the upper hall, into Mrs Wingate’s room where the only light was what filtered between slats of the drawn blinds, he saw that his suspicions were true. She was propped up in bed, asleep, wearing one of her quilted jackets and a nightcap with frill as stiff as icing on a cake. Her hands rested outside the covers, the fingers half curled into fists. She lay so profoundly motionless that for a moment he thought they had saved her body, had postponed burial all these weeks until he got there to see her before she went down into the grave. Then, as he stood watching, her hands twitched in sleep, the rings glinting.
She was not dead: they had only told him that. But as he started forward, intending to waken her, he saw that she had indeed been sick. She was thinner, and even in that dim light he could make out new lines in her face. He looked at her carefully, closer now. Somehow the sickness had reduced her stature; her feet were a long way from the footboard. Then, without any preliminary flicker, the eyelids lifted. She was awake, looking at him, and her eyes had changed too. But it was only when she spoke to him, saying his name with the different inflection, that he saw his mistake. It was his mother.
The fever had wasted her, the ash-blonde hair gone to gray and the body under the counterpane was like a loosely tied bundle of sticks. She was convalescing now, allowed only the morning hours out of bed, but already she had assumed charge of the house. She had wanted the whip hand for so many years that as soon as it was hers she would not delay using it, not even for the fever. When she had passed the crisis and they told her Mrs Wingate was dead (she already knew about Sturgis, though they had moved him into the room where Hector dreamed of bears; she watched through the doorway while he died, and unlike the news of her mother’s death — though it was true she was sicker at the time — it seemed not to affect her one way or the other) her reaction took the form of a violent impatience that would not be quieted until she was moved into the dead woman’s room across the hall. The ravages of fever had caused her to resemble Mrs Wingate, or at least had heavily underlined a resemblance formerly made vague by the span of years between them, and she took pride in this, doing all she could to emphasize it. As soon as she was able to sit up in bed she began to wear the dead woman’s clothes; she even held her mouth awry, irked and bitter-looking, though there was no gap to hide.
People were considerably taken aback at this manifestation of what they thought was grief and respect for the dead woman. They had rather supposed there was bad blood between them; they had not realized she loved her mother so. “It just goes to show,” they said. “You never miss the water till the well runs dry. You cant tell about people, no way in the world.” This was because they did not understand. What they called manifestations of grief and respect, and even love, was in fact the celebration of another victory, one by which all her others paled in comparison. She had not only outlived her enemy; she had assimilated her personality, her looks and character and actions, to the extent that the world would never know she was gone, much less miss her.
During the summer of her convalescence and afterwards, when Hector returned to the preparatory school, she extended her activities to include not only the running of the house but also the supervision of the plantation. Mrs Wingate had always watched the crops and checked the books and had weekly conferences with the manager, but Mrs Sturgis did more. She subscribed to and read periodicals on the new diversified agriculture, and in good weather or bad she rode the turnrows in her mother’s carriage, taking the bows of the tenants, a small, bustling woman with a quick eye for a dollar and a sharp tongue for whoever crossed her. She had learned her lesson well and made her plans, and now she used them.
When Hector came home from his second year at the University of Virginia, a rather plump young man by then, wearing Eastern clothes and even a straw boater with a gaudy band and a shiny black, wet-looking length of string that drooped like fishline from its brim to the buttonhole at his lapel to keep it from blowing away, he discovered on his ride from the station that Bristol had indeed expanded eastward. The railroad no longer drew its noose about the limits of the town; a new, more fashionable residential district had sprung up beyond it. Mrs Sturgis had subdivided the West Hundred, a cut of buckshot bottomland where the crops had never been good, and people already were building houses there. Two years later, when he came home from graduation, a bachelor of arts, the new houses extended to within shouting distance of the Wingate house itself.
That was 1898. All down the seaboard, then westward through Atlanta and Birmingham, he had seen brass bands parading and lamp posts strung with bunting and cheesecloth lettered boldly lest people forget to remember the Maine. They were parading in Bristol, too, and when Captain Barcroft, who commanded the local volunteer company now being organized, approached him with the offer of a position as adjutant, Hector accepted. It carried the rank of lieutenant, and he was to be sworn in the following morning. They were expecting marching orders any day, first to Jackson for field training with the regiment — the old Second Mississippi, in which his great-grandfather had fought and died, down in Mexico under Jefferson Davis — then to Cuba.
He did not tell his mother about it until that night when they were alone in the parlor after supper. He tried to make it casual in the telling.
“I’ll be sworn in tomorrow,” he said in conclusion.
Mrs Sturgis looked up sharply from her knitting. “I reckon not,” she said. “This is no time for you to be gallivanting off, playing soldier.” Her spectacles glittered in the gaslight. “Is that how you intend to use a fifteen thousand dollar education?”
“Noam. But I told Captain Barcroft—”
“So?” she said. “Well, you can just untell him.”
When the volunteers entrained the following week at the Bristol depot, amid the hoarse shouts of old men and the fluttering handkerchiefs of the ladies, Hector Wingate Sturgis was not among them.
2
Those who stood on street corners in Bristol that summer after his graduation and saw him drive past — always in a hurry but going no place, an outlander, rakish and modern, sitting ramrod straight with his elbows up, wearing hard bright yellow dogskin gloves to match the hard bright yellow spokes of the surrey — watched him with amusement and even admiration, but with hardly any envy. Their imaginations simply would not stretch to the extent of seeing themselves in his place. For even if, inconceivably, it had been offered them, they would no more have accepted the Eastern education than they would have worn the dogskin gloves or held their elbows so. They watched him. They sniggered as he drove past. They nudged each other. They said, “It’s that Sturgis boy, home from college, a dude. I bet you he’s hell with the ladies.”
The gloves were his own idea; he had brought them home from Charlottesville. But it was his mother who, approving of the gloves, had bought him the surrey and the blooded mare they seemed to require to set them off. He was her chief possession and she intended to be proud of him. She gave him everything he wanted, provided it made him shine in the eyes of the world, and since she intended for him to be actively as well as ornamentally successful, she turned over to him the back issues of the agricultural digests, with critical passages underscored and additional notes in the margins. She was a confirmed reader of
these publications herself, using them to supplement her already considerable practical experience in the field, and now she passed them on to her son.
“Here. Look these over,” she told him. “You might get some notions for improvements on the place.”
Hector took them, not letting the casualness of her tone disguise the importance he knew she attached to them, and dutifully read them from beginning to end. Yet they might almost have been written in Sanscrit for all the good he got. There was one article that interested him, however. It suggested the use of burr clover in rotation with cotton; there were statistical tables and complicated graphs to demonstrate what was called “the nitrogen curve.” Even more important, the margins of these pages were filled with cryptic notes by his mother. But when he told her about it, speaking with an edge of pride at being able to show at least that he had read the periodicals, she said: “Yes, we tried it and it worked fine, every way except financially. Look again.”
He tried once more, this time with a plan for raising beef cattle. But this was even worse. “You must not have read it very carefully,” she told him. “Thats for people with land unfit for anything but grazing.” So he did not try again. The husbandry journals lay in three tall stacks on the floor beside the desk in his room, untouched except by the maid who dusted them every morning.