Jordan County Read online

  The three of them would sit at meals, Mrs Wingate at the head of the table, the two young people halfway down the polished walnut that reflected them foreshortened on its surface like two ghosts, facing each other yet seldom looking at each other, any more than they looked at the older woman at the head. Esther was more swollen every day with the unmistakable burden which her mother continued to ignore, and Sturgis was like a hostage held in an enemy camp or a recently captured animal crouched in a cage and darting sidelong glances, uncertain whether it is about to be fed or be eaten. He stayed in the house no longer than was necessary; he would leave immediately after meals, folding his napkin and stuffing it awkwardly into its ring while he mumbled something about a carload of feed to be consigned or a batch of invoices waiting to be tallied, and would return as late as possible every evening. His original misgivings, the fear called up when he received the note with the unreadable W stamped into the wax, turned out to have been well founded. Now, though, he was more or less inured. Sometimes it seemed to him that he had never had another life, much less an enjoyable one. No longer pointed out as a young man on the road to success, he had abandoned the Pat-Mike jokes and the dialect songs; he no longer tipped his hat and cocked his eye at the girls who, with or without their mothers’ encouragement, admired him from the boardwalk; all that was behind him, far away. Life was no joking matter now. There was little to smile at, and the corners of his mouth turned sharply down.

  The child was born in mid-September, neap tide of the long hot summer of fever, in an upstairs bedroom while Sturgis and Mrs Wingate waited in the downstairs parlor. They did not speak, for even now, while it literally was taking place directly above her head, Mrs Wingate continued to ignore the birth just as she had ignored the pregnancy, and there seemed nothing else to talk about. The room was quiet behind the minute, rhythmic clack of her knitting needles. From time to time, at intervals more and more closely spaced, they heard groans and smothered cries from the room above, as if someone were being tortured up there, a suggestion of thumbscrews and the rack, the boot and the iron maiden. But Mrs Wingate paid it no mind; she went on with her knitting, and Sturgis continued to cross and uncross his legs, careful not to wrinkle the crease in his trousers. He had been awake since before daylight, when Esther woke him with news that the water had broken. After going for the doctor, sockless and with his nightshirt hurriedly tucked inside the waistband of an old pair of pants, he came back and put on his best suit and a clean white shirt, freshly polished shoes and a black silk tie, as if for an extra solemn funeral. It had seemed to him the proper, highborn thing to do; yet now, sitting in the parlor with his mother-in-law, he saw that she had contempt for him for dressing so; ‘Irish!’ she seemed to say. When the doctor came downstairs at last and told them the child was born, that Sturgis had a son and she a grandson, Mrs Wingate folded her knitting and went out to see after her roses.

  Sturgis went upstairs. Esther (she was still called Little Esther and it was fitting, for she was never more than an inch over five feet tall and after the birth of the child she dragged one leg with a limp which, though barely noticeable, subtracted a bit more from her height. Later, in her old age, that was what put her finally into the wheelchair) — Esther, then, lay in the big four-poster, the baby swaddled in flannel beside her. Her face was swollen, the lines of strain clearly marked, but now that the fright and exertion were past, the pain alleviated, there was a peculiar glint in her eyes. This was final victory; this was better, even, than the night when she saw the barely waning moon beyond the grain salesman’s shoulder and felt the buggy seat buttons against her back.

  When he came into the room she turned toward him and raised her head clear of the pillow. “What did she say?”

  “Her?” Sturgis paused. “Nothing. She went out to look at her roses.”

  Esther was quiet, considering this for a moment before she smiled, apparently satisfied. Then she turned back a flap of the flannel and Sturgis saw his son, the face like an angry fist, livid and toothless, eyes tight shut, and a hand alongside the face like an old man’s hand in miniature, with tiny perfect fingernails, trying to clench but unable. “I named him for father,” she said, watching her husband. “Hector Wingate Sturgis is his name.”

  Within two years of the Christmas Eve death of the hard-faced man who had failed his heritage and turned bitter, who was not yet a grandfather and never suspected how soon he might have been if he had not got into the wrangle with the tenant who gave his life the violent end he apparently had been seeking, the Wingate dining room was the scene of one of those reduction-and-growth periods which recur at more or less regular intervals in family histories and which sound, to the disinterested listener at any rate, like a too-simple problem in elementary arithmetic. The room itself did not change; the Wingate silver and crystal continued to gleam on the sideboard and the dark-faced servants continued to circle the candlelit table as lesser planets revolve about the sun. What changed was the people themselves, by addition and subtraction. There were three: then the father was dead and there were two: then the daughter married and there were three again: then the highchair was brought down from the attic and there were four.

  Hector grew up under the guidance of the distaff side of the family. His father, whom his mother called John and his grandmother called You, was seldom there during the waking hours; he was like a visitor, or at best a boarder. Hector had only an impression of a high-colored face and hurrying legs that ended in button shoes. This was his father, he knew, and the younger woman was his mother. But the one he respected, the one he felt closest to, was the gray-haired one at the head of the table. She commanded the servants and owned the house; ‘My house’ she called it, where the others just said ‘home’ without a pronoun. They were afraid of her; he could tell, and he admired her with a child’s admiration for strength, just as, conversely, he disliked the others with a child’s dislike for weakness. She had a way of making the others not only look small but feel small. He could tell that too.

  There was a tension in the house, a three-way pull, for the younger two were by no means united against their common enemy. Even before he learned to speak he felt it. By the time the highchair was returned to the attic and he was allowed to sit on a regular dining-room Chippendale chair, with the unabridged dictionary for a chock, he had begun to store in his memory those otherwise unrelated scenes and scraps of conversation which, contiguous to nothing, would remain with him always, though with an air of unreality, like thoughts of a previous incarnation or happenings in dreams. Once, for instance, when the word Irish came up (who had said it was no part of the memory, though in later years he was to wonder) his mother staged one of those fits of rebellion which even Hector knew would lead only to defeat but which she could no more resist than he could resist scratching when he itched, if only to irritate the itching. She turned sideways in her chair, addressing Hector though it was clear that the words were for her mother’s benefit.

  “You must never be ashamed of your Irish blood,” she told him. As she said this she looked across the table at her husband. He did not return her glance; he kept his eyes down, both hands busy with something on his plate. So she turned back to Hector. He too was looking at his plate. “The Irish had as much to do with building this country as anyone.”

  “Indeed,” his grandmother said promptly, and as usual the calm clarity of her voice made it seem louder than her daughter’s, though in fact it was lower. She addressed Hector too, holding a sliver of chicken poised on her fork. “Indeed they did. Never underestimate the Irish. I can remember my father saying it: ‘Never underestimate the Irish. They never underestimate themselves.’ He knew them well, you see. In the olden days our levees were built by Irish wheelbarrow laborers hired at fifteen cents a day because the planters along the river would not risk their valuable Negroes at such work. It was entirely too dangerous.”

  The fork continued along its short arc to her mouth and returned to the plate with a slight click,
loud against the silence. She smiled as she chewed, but narrowly, and her eyes had no share in the smile. When Hector looked toward the other two he saw that his mother was glaring at the opposite wall and his father still kept his eyelids lowered as if he were studying the food on his plate. Mrs Wingate had more to say on the subject, however. She took a sip of water and continued.

  “Yes, indeed; nor was that all. For I also remember hearing my father say that in those oldtime levee camps whenever anything happened to one of the laborers, anything drastic I mean, such as having a load of logs fall on him or getting bitten by a cottonmouth or kicked in the head by a mule, since there was no one to claim the body, not a soul who cared — for of course none of them had any people, in spite of the fact that many of them had crossed the ocean together to get away from the potato famine back in ’47; they never had any sense of family, such as the Jews had or even the Chinese — the poor fellow was buried where he fell, and thus became part of the levee. It meant one less barrowload of dirt for the others to haul. Yes. So you see, Hector, your mother is right and you must never forget it. Give the Irish their due. For even now, long after they are dead and gone, their dust and bones are part of the sod that made the levee and are helping to keep the river off our land.”

  There were other scenes more frightening still, in which the participants figured singly or in pairs. Hector was in the parlor with the two women, the younger one’s voice growing more and more shrill and bitter, launched on the flood of another of those arguments she knew she would not win, and suddenly, though he never knew what prompted it — the violence of what followed abolished any memory of what had gone before — she caught him fiercely to her chest, squeezing him breathless, and screamed beyond his shoulder, full in the older woman’s face: “I’m your mother! She’s not your mother; I’m your mother!” Terror overcame him, partly at not being able to breathe, but mostly because of the violence in her voice. He kicked and bit and lashed out with his fists: “Let go! Let go!” “For shame. For shame,” his grandmother said. But that was all.

  Worse by far, however, were the scenes between his parents late at night in the room adjoining his own. This wife had contempt for her husband: Hector saw that by daylight and heard it at night. She had married expecting deliverance; she had thought he would take her away or join her in revolt. Yet he had knuckled under more abjectly than she herself had ever done — he had joined the opposing conspiracy, the cabal. Hector would hear her in the night, in the adjoining bedroom, her voice rising and falling, hissing with fury: “I know why. I know why all right!” She repeated her sentences this way, to italicize a word or rearrange a phrase for emphasis. “You want her money; thats what you want! Do you know what you are? Youre a scoundrel. An underbred scoundrel: thats what you are!”

  Hector would lie there, clutching one corner of the pillow, frightened by the fury in her voice, the way it shook and trembled until sometimes he could not distinguish the words; all that was communicated was the naked fury, the frustration. His nurse slept on a pallet beside his bed. She heard it too, that choked, furious voice, and she was frightened, too, he thought; he thought he heard her sobbing and he saw her shoulders shake. But one night, worse than usual, when he slid down onto the pallet to hug her back, to comfort and be comforted in an extremity of fear, he discovered that she was not sobbing as he had thought. She was not even frightened. She was chuckling; she was laughing, and her shoulders shook with the effort to suppress it, keep it quiet. She was enjoying the frantic bedroom monolog, the white folks’ nighttime trouble, the recriminations and the bitterness. This frightened him, too, though in a different way. He got back into bed, alone, and lay there hearing his mother’s voice with the nurse’s chuckling for an undertone, until at last his father’s snores came through the hissing and his mother snorted and stopped and went to sleep.

  He was troubled with nightmares. Somewhere in one of his grandfather’s books he saw a drawing of a grizzly. It stood beside a log on an empty plain, looking out at him, man-tall, taller, with eyes too small for its face. In the background there was a mountain, dead-looking, with snow down one slope and on its peak. He had never before seen snow, much less a bear. When he first saw it he was so frightened he dropped the book and ran. It had a fascination for him, though, and from time to time he peeked at it again, always clapping the book quickly shut to keep the bear locked in. Finally he told his nurse about it, calling the bear a pig.

  “Less see,” she said. But when he showed her the drawing she laughed and shook her head. “That aint no pig, child. Thats a bar,” she told him. Her name was Emma. He held tightly to her apron string, peering around her shoulder. “They eats little boys,” she said gravely, frowning at him. He hid his face. “But dont you fret, child,” she added, patting the back of his head, stroking the cowlick where the hair stood stiffly up; “Emma aint ghy let no old bar git her boy. No sir she aint.”

  Now he began to see the bear in his dreams. In the background was the mountain with snow on its peak, and the bear walked upright like a man in baggy underclothes, taking awkward steps and balancing its big ungainly head on narrow shoulders. Its fur was shot with gray; its tongue lolled wet and red; its eyes were small, with pink whites, bloodshot, and glowed when the way led through shadows. There were others who came to join the first, alike except in different sizes and all ferocious in a lumbering, flat-footed, shaggy, stiff-kneed manner. Always in the dream they were chasing him, tottering after him with their elbows held in close to their sides, limp-wristed, the big paws dangling. They did not run very fast but they never tired, and that was where the terror lay, in just their persistence. They wanted to hug him and there was no place to hide, and they knew it and they kept coming, shaggy and ponderous. He would wake up sobbing just as the bear in the lead, the original bear from the drawing, was about to hug him to its chest. But his nurse was always there, bending over the bed to calm his fears.

  “It was the bar, Emma, the bar—”

  “Shh: hush now. Dont you fret. Emma aint ghy let him eat you. Hush.”

  A gangling, limber-jointed woman with amber eyes, she was past fifty and had Indian blood; so she claimed, and apparently she did. She was the coachman’s wife. Though she was a bit ‘touched’ she was esteemed an excellent nurse and had a way with children. She told Hector stories, each one taking up where the one before left off; “Where was we?” was the way they all began. The hero was Dobby Hicks, the guardian angel of Negro character. He was less than five feet tall, she said, dressed in a polkadot tie and a claw-hammer coat with the tail down over his heels, and every time you were about to do wrong he would stand on your toes, looking up at you, and shake his finger in your face, plain to you but invisible to anyone else, and if you didnt mind him you had trouble. She had a collection of charms, ‘mojoes’ she called them, to keep off evil spirits and hants. She kept them in a cigar box, each in its individual tobacco sack tied with different colored string. There were charms for love and charms for hate, powders and unguents bought from hoodoo men, fast-working or slow, depending on how you wanted it, and all infallible. She would take out the mojoes and tell him their names, mostly in what must have been an African dialect, though she did not know this any more than Hector did.

  Every night she put him to sleep with a rhyme that had been used on her as a child, back in slavery days:

  Be quite — go to sleep:

  Eyes shut: dont you peep.

  Hush now or he just moans:

  Raw head and bloody bones!

  and Hector would lie with his fists clenched under his chin, too frightened to relax for fear his eyes would accidentally open and he would see the monster thing with the fleshless head and nothing but shreds of meat on its bones.

  Emma indeed had a way with children. But it was his grandmother who dominated the majority of these remembered scenes. He was with her most, and she was the one who bought and taught him to wear the tight serge knee-breeches, the hightop button shoes and ribbed black stockings
, the hard round hat like a truncated cannonball fitted into a rim, the wide black satin bow tie that rode up under his chin and made his throat hot. Other boys of good family were dressed more or less this way on Sundays and on special occasions, but this was Hector’s everyday wear. Mrs Wingate smelled of orris root and sachet, and he never dared to ask her why he was not allowed to dress like other boys.

  She took him with her in the carriage when she rode out for her weekly inspection tour of the plantation. Emma sat on the jump-seat facing rear, holding a parasol over their heads in fine weather when the hood was folded back, and Samuel the coachman, Emma’s husband up on the box, wore a plug hat and drove with his elbows high and wide, as Mrs Wingate required. Hector watched and admired her; he could hardly take his eyes away from her long, fine-bred face with its layer of rice powder, the way she smiled and spoke with her mouth awry to hide the gap where a front side tooth was missing, the blue-pink cameo at her throat (it was said to resemble her mother) which her father had presented to her for Confirmation in Missouri forty years ago. Her hair was almost white now, but that was by a certain magic he could not understand — she put bluing in the water when she washed it. Collectively these things made her seem like a queen to Hector, and the plantation was her kingdom. It had POSTED: NO HUNTING signs nailed to trees and fence posts along its boundaries, and the tenants standing beside their plows at the turnrows removed their hats with a sweeping gesture, like subjects of her kingdom, when the carriage came abreast. The manager, big and hale, with a shovel beard and an enormous rat-colored hat, rode alongside on a sorrel gelding that broke wind steadily, a rapid series of backfires in rhythm with its stride. Mrs Wingate seemed not to notice this, but it embarrassed Hector.