Roses (6 page)

“Miss Mary, you talkin’ to yourself again.”

“What?” Startled, Mary squinted up at her housekeeper.

Sassie Two was standing in front of her. “You talkin’ to yourself again. And where are your pearls? You left here wearin’
’em.”

Mary felt at her neck. “Oh, I left those for Rachel—”

“For Rachel? Oh, Lawsey, that does it. Miss Mary, you comin’ in outta this heat.”

“Sassie!”
All at once, Mary’s mind cleared. The past dashed to pieces in the clarity of the present. She was herself again, and in
charge. Nobody told her what to do, not even Sassie, who was family and had the right. Mary pointed her cane at the housekeeper.
“I will come in when I’m good and ready. You and Henry go ahead and eat. Kindly fix me a plate and leave it in the oven.”

Showing no offense at Mary’s attempt to put her in her place, Sassie said, “Well, what about some iced tea?”

“No iced tea, Sassie. Bring me a glass of Taittinger’s from that bottle we keep in the refrigerator. Get Henry to open it.
He knows how. On second thought, bring the bottle. Ice it down in a champagne bucket.”

Sassie’s eyes bulged. “Champagne? You want
champagne
in this heat? Miss Mary, you never drink alcohol nohow.”

“I am today. Now go on and do what I say before Henry perishes of hunger. I heard his stomach growling like a caged tiger
in the car.”

Shaking her wiry gray head, Sassie retreated and returned with a tray bearing the commanded items. She set it down loudly
on the table next to Mary. “Will that do?”

“Splendidly,” Mary said. “Thank you, Sassie.” She looked up at her housekeeper with a swell of profound affection. “Have I
ever told you how much you mean to me?”

“Not near enough,” her housekeeper said. “Now, I don’t care what you say, Miss Mary, I’m comin’ out here to check on you ever’
so often, so you better be careful what you say to yourself if you don’t want no secrets let out.”

“I’ll be sure to guard my conversation with myself very carefully, Sassie. One other thing. Was Henry able to get the lid
to Mister Ollie’s trunk open?”

“He did.”

“Good.” Mary nodded in satisfaction.

When Sassie had gone, she poured the flute full of champagne and brought the rim to her lips. She hadn’t imbibed anything
stronger than a few sips of champagne on New Year’s Eve since she was a girl. She knew better. Alcohol had the power to take
her back to times and places she’d striven nearly all her life to forget. Now she wanted to go back. She wanted to remember
everything. This would be her last chance to return to the past, and the champagne would take her there. Sipping calmly, she
waited for the arrival of her magic carpet. After a while, she felt herself spinning back into yesterday, and her journey
had begun.

H
OWBUTKER
, T
EXAS
, J
UNE
1916

I
n chairs ranged before the desk, Mary Toliver, age sixteen, sat with her mother and brother in the funereal atmosphere of
Emmitt Waithe’s law office. A smell of leather and tobacco and old books reminded her of her father’s study at home, now closed
with a black ribbon strapped across the door. Tears sprang to her eyes again, and she clasped her hands tighter, lowering
her head until the moment of grief passed. Immediately she felt Miles’s consoling hand covering hers. On the other side of
her brother, dressed completely in black and speaking through a veil covering her face, Darla Toliver gave a little exclamation
of sympathy and said with annoyance, “I declare, if Emmitt doesn’t come soon, I’m sending Mary home. There’s no reason for
her to have to sit through this so soon after burying her father. Emmitt knows how close they were. I can’t imagine what’s
keeping him. Why can’t we simply tell Mary the contents of the will when she’s up to it?”

“Perhaps it’s mandatory for a legatee to be present on these occasions,” Miles said with the formal wordiness he’d taken to
using since going away to college. “That’s why Emmitt insists she be here.”

“Oh, fiddlesticks,” Darla said, her tone unusually sharp toward her son. “This is Howbutker, darling, not Princeton. Mary
is a minor recipient of your father’s will. There is not the least necessity for her to be here today.”

Mary listened to their dialogue with half an ear. She’d been so emotionally removed from them since her father died—from everyone—that
Miles and her mother often discussed her as if she weren’t in their presence.

She still could not believe that she would wake up tomorrow and the day after that and all the tomorrows to come in a world
without her father. The cancer had taken him too fast for her to adjust to his imminent death. It had been devastating enough
to lose her grandfather five years before, but Granddaddy Thomas had lived to seventy-one. Her father had been only fifty-one,
too young to lose all that he had worked for… all that he loved. For most of last night, she’d lain awake in her room and
wondered what would happen to them now that her father was gone. What would become of the plantation? Miles wanted no part
of it. That was common knowledge. He desired only to become a college professor and teach history.

Her mother had never cared much for Somerset and knew very little about its operation. Darla’s interest lay in being the wife
of Vernon Toliver and the mistress of the mansion on Houston Avenue. To Mary’s knowledge, she had rarely ventured outside
of town where the plantation began and stretched for acres and acres beside the road, almost clear to the next county. Dallas
lay beyond and Houston the other direction, cities where her mother loved to take the train to shop and stay overnight.

Many Junes had come and gone, and her mother had never seen the fields starred with thousands of cotton blossoms ranging in
colors of creamy white to soft red. Mary never missed a one. Now only she was left to thrill at the sight of the blossoms
gradually giving way to hard little bolls until August, when suddenly—here and there upon the sea of green—could be spied
a white fleck. Oh, to watch the whiteness spread after that, to ride out on horseback as she often did with her father and
Granddaddy Thomas into that white-capped vastness billowing on its green undertow from horizon to horizon and know that it
belonged to the Toliver family.

There was no greater joy or glory, and now there was the horrifying possibility that soon it could all be gone. A paralyzing
thought had struck her before morning. Suppose her mother
sold
the plantation! As the new mistress of Somerset, she would be free to dispose of it as she wished, and there would be nobody
to stop her.

The door to an adjoining office opened. Emmitt Waithe, the Tolivers’ longtime attorney, entered full of apologies for having
made them wait, but at once Mary sensed something strange in his manner that had little to do with the delay. Whether out
of commiseration for their grief or something else, he seemed unable to meet their eyes. He bustled about, unusual for a man
of his taciturnity and economy of movements, and appeared unduly concerned about their comforts. Did they need tea or perhaps
coffee? He could have his secretary run down to the drugstore and get Mary a soda—

“Emmitt, if you please,” Darla interrupted in an attempt to settle him down, “we have need of nothing except your brevity.
We’re all about at the end of our emotional tethers and would ask that you… well, get on with it, if you’ll excuse my turn
of phrase.”

Emmitt cleared his throat, regarded Darla oddly for a few seconds, then got on with it. First he withdrew a letter from an
envelope on top of a formal-looking document he’d brought in. “This is, uh, a letter from Vernon that he composed shortly
before he died. He wanted me to read it to you first before disclosing the contents of his will.”

Behind the veil, Darla’s eyes dampened. “Of course,” she said, reaching over to clasp her son’s hand. Emmitt began:

Dearest wife and children,

I have never thought of myself as a cowardly man, but I find that I do not have the courage to apprise you of my will’s contents
while I am still alive. Let me assure you, before its reading, that I love each of you with all my heart and wish, as deeply,
that circumstances could have afforded a more fair and generous distribution of my property. Darla, my beloved wife, I ask
you to understand why I have done what I’ve done. Miles, my son, I cannot expect you to understand, but someday, perhaps,
your heir will be grateful for the legacy I leave you and entrust you to retain for the fruit of your loin.

Mary, I wonder that in remembering you as I have, I have not prolonged the curse that has plagued the Tolivers since the first
pine tree was cleared from Somerset. I am leaving you many and great responsibilities, which I hope will not force you into
a position unfavorable to your happiness.

Your loving husband and father,

Vernon Toliver

“How very odd,” Darla said slowly in the silence of Emmitt refolding the letter and slipping it back into its envelope. “What
do you suppose Vernon meant by ‘a more fair and generous distribution’ of his property?”

“We’re about to find out,” Miles commented, his thin face hardening.

Mary had grown very still. What did her father mean by “many and great responsibilities”? Did they have anything to do with
his last words to her, which she’d taken as the incoherent mumblings of a dying man reliving a terrible nightmare?
Whatever you do, whatever it takes, get the land back, Mary.

“I was instructed to apprise you of one other matter before I read the will,” Emmitt said, picking up another document. He
handed it across the desk to Miles and explained, “It’s a mortgage contract. Before Vernon learned that he was terminally
ill, he borrowed money from the Bank of Boston, offering Somerset as collateral. The borrowed money went to pay off a series
of plantation-related debts as well as to purchase additional land to put under cotton.”

After skimming the document, Miles raised his head. “Am I reading this correctly? Ten percent interest for ten years? That’s
nothing less than robbery!”

“Where have you been, Miles?” Emmitt threw up his hands. “Farmers around here have paid twice that amount for the privilege
of going into debt to these big eastern mortgage brokers and commercial banks. If he’d borrowed against the crop, he’d have
paid a considerably higher rate, but by mortgaging the land, he could get the money more cheaply, if you want to call it that.”

Mary sat motionless, appalled. The land mortgaged… no longer in Toliver hands? Now she understood the meaning of her father’s
dying plea… the desperation of it. But why had he directed it to her?

“What if the crop doesn’t make?” Miles asked, his tone brusque. “Sure, cotton is bringing high prices now, but what if we
have a bad harvest? Does that mean we lose the plantation?”

Emmitt shrugged. Mary, glancing from the lawyer’s grim face to her brother’s flushed one, spoke up for the first time. “The
crops
will
make!” she declared, close to hysteria. “And we’re not going to lose the plantation. Don’t even think that, Miles!”

Miles brought his palm down hard on the chair arm. “God almighty! What could Papa have been thinking, buying more land when
it would put the land we have in jeopardy? Why in hell did he stick us further in debt by buying machinery he felt we had
to have right now? I thought he was such a shrewd businessman.”

“If you’d taken a little more interest in his affairs, you’d have known more about what he was doing, Miles,” Mary said in
defense of their father. “It’s not fair to blame Papa now for decisions you never once offered to help him make.”

Miles looked taken aback at her outburst. They rarely argued, though their differences were many. Miles was an idealist, already
gravitating toward Marxism, which advocated removing property and profit from the master class and distributing it more equally
to the masses. He loathed the tenancy system as it flourished in the Cotton Belt, believing it was devised to keep the impoverished
tenant farmer in bondage to the planter. His father had vehemently disagreed with his view, arguing that the planter system,
fairly managed, freed the tenant farmer to be his own master. Mary stood squarely on the side of her father.