Lovesick (13 page)

10

They did not hang Butcher, despite the fact he was convicted of the murder of two women and the attempted murder of a third. In fact, at his sentencing trial, Miss Virginia—now Mrs. Clayton Claiborne II, took the stand to plead for his life, told the judge that as a Christian, she prayed that mercy be granted him. In the years after he was sentenced, Butcher wondered whether this was a kindness from her because she knew that would be what Mona would have expected—forgiveness for what had happened, for their plan that had gone so terribly wrong. Other times, he wondered whether she wanted him merely to live out his life imprisoned like herself.

The murders were big news in the paper for the next year, until Margaret Mitchell's book about the South was published, and a fictional Atlanta became the focus of the nation. After that, only the curious stayed at the Plantation House Hotel, and it rapidly fell into disrepute, replaced by the more upstanding Georgia Terrace just around the corner. In fact, by the time the movie of
Gone with the Wind
premiered in the city, only journalists from second-rate newspapers dared stay there.

Butcher did not work in the kitchen at the Georgia State Prison, even after he had been there for more than twenty years and was too old to do the hard labor imposed on prisoners. Food had lost its taste, its texture, its beauty for him. He could have been served cardboard or sawdust or sand for all he cared about it. The early days were rough for sure—he was beaten more than once, sometimes for no reason, sometimes by people who told him he should never have dared put his hands on Wadena Chastain. He never fought back, would have welcomed it if they had bashed his skull in.

But he didn't die. And after a while, he decided if he wasn't going to die, that if they weren't going to kill him, then he might as well live—wanted to see if he could hang on longer than her. Did not want to give her the pleasure of his death if that is why she had sent him there. He read snippets about her through the years, about the sale of the Plantation House Hotel, read about Claiborne's failed attempts to win an office in the Senate, read about the publishing of each new Miss Virginia cookbook.

And then one day, there it was. On the front page of the
Journal
: “The Passing of a Lady” under a picture of Virginia as an old woman. Inside, there was nearly a full page detailing the story of her life—how she, as a young widow, won a baking contest in the 1930s, how she had married the owner of Mystic White Flour and served as its representative even after she sold the company when her husband died, how she had over time become a symbol of all that was gracious and true and gentle about Southern womanhood. They even included a short piece written by Jocelyn Hind Crowley, who had known Virginia ever since those early days and had written her official biography:
The Lady in the Mirror.
She wrote in glowing terms of Miss Virginia, not just in regard to her dozen cookbooks, which had influenced a generation of Southern women and homemakers, but about the woman herself who she claimed was the epitome of style and charm. Jocelyn Hind Crowley also detailed how, after the death of Clayton Claiborne II, Virginia sponsored cooking competitions for girls throughout the South that awarded college scholarships for winners and runners-up. In the days before integration, she even funded scholarships for colored girls. When Jocelyn Hind Crowley had written about this in Miss Virginia's biography, she said Miss Virginia had told her, “Some things can never be made right, but we must each attempt to do our part.”

Surrounding the page was an assortment of pictures taken from various Mystic White flour campaigns with Virginia in an ever-advancing array of extravagant white hats. But it was the first picture that drew Butcher's eye. A grainy picture of her taken all the way back in 1935, when Virginia wore a white straw hat, the crown formed of interwoven strips of satin ribbon. Butcher cut the picture out and taped it to the wall next to an old advertisement that he had pasted there years before. And every day from then until he died, they were the first things he saw each morning, the last things before he closed his eyes. They reminded him of the price paid for dreaming.

The Brambles

1

Freddie Bramble tips the cup of steaming coffee into her saucer to cool the first sips, making sure not to spill any drops on the cloth Jewel has laid out for supper. Though Mr. Odom's bus is not due until after 4
PM
, Jewel has already set the table.
Too early,
thinks Freddie. In fact, the vase of pink peonies and antirrhinum have already begun to wilt a bit. But that is Jewel's way. Always in a rush. Always in a hurry to get to what comes next. The next task. The next meal. It is commonplace that she will announce what is for lunch while they are finishing breakfast, what is to be made for supper while they are eating the noon meal.

“It doesn't hurt to plan,” says Jewel. Freddie agrees, but knows too often Jewel gets caught up in the whirlwind of her own campaigns and forgets to pay attention to the details right in front of her. Like the flowers. Freddie would have left them in the icebox in the container of water they came in from the florist, then taken them out just before they went to fetch Mr. Odom. That way they would still be fresh. Now, they will be lucky if the tablecloth isn't littered with petals by the time dinner is served.

She lifts the saucer to her lips and sips the sharp, bitter coffee. “I hope you don't do that in front of company,” Jewel chastises her whenever she catches her holding the saucer to her lips. “It is so common.” Freddie doesn't care. At forty-eight, she is old enough to drink her morning coffee the way she likes. Saucer first, followed by the remainder in the cup. It takes patience. It centers her for the day. She likes how the delicate pattern of intertwined chrysanthemums, dogwood blossoms, hyacinth, and geraniums appears like magic when she drains the black liquid from the bottom of the saucer—a mystical garden buried beneath a murky swamp.

The cup and saucer are two of her prize possessions, purchased years ago when she and Jewel were on a trip to Charleston. She had seen the set in the window of an antique store on King Street and knew instantly it was something she wanted. The saleswoman, who tried to impress them with her genealogy—as if it made working as a sales clerk in a store somehow more respectable—was reluctant to show her the cup, which came with a matching teapot and twin cup and saucer. Freddie wondered at first if the woman thought she couldn't afford it, but knew she was dressed respectably enough. Still, she couldn't help but notice how the saleswoman hesitated, warning Freddie that it was Chinese porcelain, hovering over her as Freddie held the cup in her short, thick fingers.

“Look at you. You can't even get your finger through the hole in the handle,” mocked Jewel. “Talk about a bull in a china shop.” The saleswoman couldn't resist a snicker, which only made Freddie more determined to have it. She knew it wasn't her dress or her hat that had caused the saleswoman concern. It was Freddie herself. A bull in a china shop.

As she sets the saucer back onto the table and lifts the steaming cup to her lips, the sugary tang of a Miss Virginia lemon curd pound cake fills the house. Jewel has planned an elaborate dinner for Mr. Odom's first night.
Too fussy,
Freddie thinks for someone she has never met in person. However, she knows Jewel wants to—needs to—make a good impression on Mr. Odom. Nine years Freddie's junior, Jewel is not young, though she jokes that she plans to “be like Jack Benny and stay thirty-nine forever.” It is apparent to Freddie that while she may act like a girl, Jewel is rapidly losing all vestiges of youth. Her hips have widened, her bosom has gone slack. Her hair has begun to go gray, though she covers it up with a blond rinse from the beauty parlor. She wears too much rouge to give a blush to her cheeks. The makeup has begun to crack in the crevices around her eyes. Freddie thinks it a sad game and wonders if the only person Jewel is trying to fool is herself. She isn't young. She is plain as a paper sack. She has a tendency to prattle on about the most trivial things. None of which is a quality men desire in a wife. And since Mr. Odom is coming all the way from Athens, Georgia, with the prospect of marriage, it would be disappointing to discover that she couldn't cook. So, Freddie forgives her the meal and the opportunity to show off—roast pork and mashed sweet potatoes. And the Miss Virginia pound cake. She knows Jewel is merely doing what she thinks she must to hold up her end of the bargain.

They have been cleaning for days in anticipation of Mr. Odom, oiling the heavy dark furniture, ironing linens, polishing silver. These are not tasks that Freddie minds, however, for the results are so immediate and gratifying. Now, as the cool, late-winter sun filters through the lace curtains in the dining room and across the foyer in the parlor, the house has a soft luster, a satisfying glow to it. Freddie enjoys the morning light on the front side of the house. In the summer, she will take her coffee out on the veranda that circles the entire house like a wide brim on a hat. From here, as she sits in her rocker, she can survey a good, wide expanse of the property—seventy-eight acres in all—planted mainly in tobacco, cotton, and corn. She likes to walk the fields, loves the order of the rows. Many mornings, she will pull on her brogans, a pair of men's khaki workpants, and an overshirt as she inspects nature's progress. She would have enjoyed walking on a bright blue morning such as this, but the brogans have been put away in safekeeping in expectation of Mr. Odom's arrival. As Jewel reminds her, they have to project the correct image for him.

Freddie knows that will not be a problem. If he is not impressed with her or with Jewel, he is certain to be impressed by the house and the farm. It is a beautiful home, one of the best, most stately in the whole town of Morris. The house itself is now over a hundred years old, built back before the Civil War. Though not as grandiose as some of the plantation homes she has seen in Charleston or Georgetown counties, Freddie knows it is nonetheless a striking example of Antebellum architecture with its deep porches and balconies, its broad columns posted like sentries along the front—a rarity for this part of the low country. She and Jewel have lived here twenty years, since 1933, when they bought the house and farm at auction. The previous owner, grandson of Milford Deegan, who had built the house, had not been much of a farmer or businessman, and gone belly-up almost immediately when the Depression hit. That in itself wasn't unusual, but the young Mr. Deegan must have taken it worse than most, for rather than seeing how he could get out from under the pile of debt with which he had saddled himself and his young wife, he decided it was easier simply to hang himself in the barn. His wife, who they said found him when he didn't come in for the noon meal when she called, walked into town straightaway and told the sheriff that she needed someone to come out to “help him down.” She buried him in the family plot, a small, fenced area barely visible from the porch. She had selected a double tombstone—one side with his name and
BELOVED HUSBAND
inscribed underneath; her name on the other, along with an engraving that read
DEVOTED WIFE.
The only thing left blank was the day of her death. After the funeral, she fell into a stupor, until relatives had her put away in the State Hospital to help end the gossip and speculation. She had died there, Freddie supposed, lost, forgotten, so devoted to her husband that it drove her mad.

“Out of sight—out of her mind” is what the real-estate agent told them when they had driven down to look at the farm. The house had already fallen into a bit of disrepair, and the fields lay fallow except for those a few tenant farmers laid claim to, figuring they had as much right to plant on a dead man's land as not. No one wanted to buy the place because of its unpleasant history—not that people were buying much of anything in those days, but Jewel had come into her inheritance from her first husband, Mr. T. L. Landry, and they needed to put some distance between themselves and Rockingham, where Mr. Landry's death had brought its own share of unpleasantness. So, with hard cash in hand, Freddie was able to negotiate a deal that was a bargain, even in Depressionera real estate, and the house and the farm, located on the outskirts of Morris, became their new home. Over time, the town forgot the dead young farmer and his institutionalized widow. In fact, they forgot about the Deegans altogether. And the farm became known as Bramble Farm.

Many in the town think of the two sisters as spinsters, even though both have been married—in fact, Jewel has been married twice. It may be because no man has ever lived on the farm with them in the twenty years they have owned it. It may be because they both prefer to use their family name since their married names might carry a degree of recognition, infamy, even scandal. In Rockingham, Jewel's first husband, Mr. Landry, a man twice her age when they married, suffered a horrific accident when a meat grinder that someone had carelessly stored on one of the overhead shelves in the kitchen fell and cracked his skull open. He lingered for several miserable days in a delirium, but finally died from what the doctor determined was an internal brain hemorrhage. His life insurance policy left Jewel with just over $50,000. When Jewel had married her second husband in 1938, Mr. Arthur Potts, she had moved with him to his home in Charleston until he succumbed to a tragic fall from a ladder while he was hanging Japanese lanterns for a party to honor a visit from Freddie. Mr. Potts had left Jewel almost exactly the same amount in his insurance.

Freddie's marriage was the briefest of all. It had lasted only a couple of months—to a young officer she had corresponded with in the VA hospital in Washington, D.C., where he had been shipped after losing a leg in the Allied invasion of Italy. At Jewel's insistence, she traveled to Washington to meet Lt. Jonas Calder, where they were wed while he was a patient in the convalescent hospital. She can still remember the shock on his face when he first saw her. She had not lied to him about her age in the letters, told him that she was a “mature woman,” so he could not accuse her of deceit. However, when he had asked her for a photograph, she denied the request, told him that theirs was to be a “spiritual bond, not dependent on physical appearance or ability.” She had meant to shame him—after all, what could a middle-aged man with only one leg hope to offer any self-respecting woman—and he relented. Yet, seeing him in person for the first time, she could sense his keen disappointment not only in her age, but in her bulk, her distinctly unfeminine appearance. Still, he didn't turn her away. So, every day she would go to visit him and they would discuss the events in the paper, play dominos or gin rummy when he wasn't practicing walking with his crutches. And slowly, a friendship built up between them, and he confessed that many marriages had probably begun from less.

Unfortunately, on the train ride to meet his family in Birmingham, Alabama, Lt. Calder somehow managed to slip beneath the connecting carriages of the train, severing his remaining leg. It was a freakish mishap, and by the time the train had stopped, he had bled to death on the tracks. In addition to his insurance policy, Freddie was also awarded a generous settlement from the railroad and a widow's pension from the U.S. Army because Lt. Calder had been a disabled war veteran. His family in Birmingham contested the disbursements, but since she was his widow and there was no will, there was little they could do. His death was deemed a terrible tragedy. The money was Freddie's money. She did, however, pay for the funeral and agreed to have his body shipped to Birmingham for burial. Lt. Calder's mother had called her horrible names, had refused to let her attend the burial, said she would as soon spit on her as look at her, but took the money just the same. Freddie knew she would.

Jewel taunted Freddie that she was the only bride to have survived marriage without so much as a “diddle,” but Freddie minded the teasing even less than the slurs vented on her by Lt. Calder's mother. What she couldn't erase was the sound as he called to her just as he fell from the train. He had been walking in front of her on their way back from the dining car to their compartment when she—with only the slightest brush of the toe of her shoe—kicked his crutch out from underneath him. She knew he didn't see her do it, was ignorant to the fact that this had been the plan all along, just as it had been with Mr. Landy and Mr. Potts, that they should die so she and Jewel could inherit their money, but just as he fell, he called her name: “Freddie.” And that was all. Then he was off the platform, disappearing into the night. But sometimes in her room, when everything is silent except for the trains passing through town, just before she drifts off to sleep, she can still hear him. That sudden gasp of horror as the world gives way beneath him, his crutch flying away into the darkness, and the desperate, hopeful plea, “Freddie.”

She met Jonas Calder the same way Jewel had met Arthur Potts and T. L. Landry. The same way Jewel has met Mr. Odom—through the personal advertisements, though Freddie would have to agree with Jewel that it has become increasingly difficult for a respectable woman of means to use the personals. In fact, when Jewel had met Mr. Landry, many women were so bold as to send notices to matrimonial bureaus. Freddie thought that too direct. Advertisements in newspapers were perfectly upright and proper, but much more discreet. However, many newspapers dropped the practice over the years, and when they had found Mr. Odom, they had been forced to use a romance magazine called
Heart's Desire.
Jewel had discovered the ads while waiting to have her hair done one afternoon at Lurdelle's Beauty Clip. When Freddie had come to fetch her, she rushed breathless out of the shop to tell her about it. But, as was typical with Jewel, she forgot to bring a copy of the magazine with her.

The very next day they had driven the hour or so to Florence to buy the magazine in a local drug store. And when they had written the ad, they had driven back to Florence to mail the letter placing the ad. They had also opened a post office box there for one year. Jewel was too nervous to do any of this, worried what someone might think when she presented the magazine for purchase or filled out the slip requesting the post office box. Freddie, on the other hand, told herself she did not care, that they made the magazine to be sold, so why not? And women had just as much right to open a post office box as anyone. Besides, that is why they had come to Florence. It was a world away from Morris, and if letters addressed to Jewel had shown up in their mailbox at home, they both knew there would be talk.