The Handsome Road (25 page)

He was still looking past her as though at Ulster county up in York state. There was a long silence. From beyond the window she could hear the blurry voices of Negroes on the courthouse lawn. After awhile Gilday began to speak, though his eyes still looked past her.

“There was thirteen children in our family and my mother raised four of them to be grown up. Seemed like there was always a kid dying at our house. And did we have to work! By the time I was nine years old I was getting up at four in the morning to tend to the stock. It was so cold. My God, them winters. The milk used to freeze in the pail sometimes. You ever try to walk with chilblains, Corrie May?”

“Chilblains?” she echoed. “What’s them?”

“I thought not. That’s why I came South in the first place. I had to get away from them winters. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I ain’t talked about it in quite a long time.”

“No, go on,” said Corrie May. She was surprised at how low and intent her voice was.

He stood up. His fists in his coat pockets, he strode over to the window.

“First I helped tend to the cotton on a plantation in Virginia,” he continued, still without looking at her. “The man that owned the place didn’t live there much, spent his time mostly in New York or traveling around Europe. He was mean as hell. Always borrowing more money than he could afford and raising cain with us overseers because we couldn’t make big enough crops to pay his debts. Too mean to spend a dime for fertilizer and he was starving his land mighty near to a desert. So pretty soon me and another fellow could buy a piece of land he had to sell cheap. There was one stretch in Virginia and another up across the Maryland line. We raised niggers for the market. Just put ’em there and made ’em grow what they’d eat, and we could sell all the little niggers that got born. We were doing right well, too, only I got to playing around with speculations and when the crash came in ’57 I lost what I’d made. So I had to go back to overseeing cotton. Worked for a planter in Georgia. Then in the summer of ’59 this here Colonel Sheramy that lived out at Silverwood needed a cotton overseer and I came to work for him.”

“You worked for Colonel Sheramy?” she exclaimed.

A crooked little smile flickered across his mouth. “Not for long. He had a daughter. She took a disliking to me.”

“Why—you mean Miss Ann Sheramy that married Mr. Denis Larne?”

“The very same. I looked at her hard or something and she was too refined. My Lord, the way those people fixed up them doll-babies they called women, making out they was too flimsy to pick a flower and God knows keeping ’em too stupid to do much else. I met her at the gate one day and she was on a horse. Blazing summer and me half dead from being in a cottonfield since six that morning and no chance for even a drink of ice-water till night, and here she comes, prancing down the avenue cool as a waterfall and looking past me so goddamn superior. I started bowing and scraping like I was supposed to do, and looked her over and started noticing her corset. She wasn’t more than seventeen or eighteen inches around. I thought about my mother slopping around with nothing tying her waist but her apron-string. I looked up the road after her. And then the next thing I knew I was even losing my job, her having complained to her brother that the new overseer wasn’t properly respectful.”

Corrie May clasped her hands in front of her and leaned across them. “Go on. I remember when she got married.”

“Hell,” said Gilday, “so do I. I spoke to her on the wharf. She didn’t like that either. I rode down on that same boat, only I rode below decks. I thought about the things I’d been seeing happen all my life and about the lucky people who just thought we shouldn’t mind because we were used to it. And I said, ‘Gilday, some day there’s some bastards gonta pay for this.’” He turned around. “And Corrie May, now I got my chance to make them do it.”

She stood up slowly. “It’s mighty right you are. I know, because at that same time I was thinking the same things you were. I worked for that woman.”

“You,” he said. “You got more sass in your left thumb than she’ll ever have.” Then he grinned. “Well, now I’m down here. They can call me any pretty names they like. I’ll get in a lot of good stealing before I’m done. Damn it, Corrie May, ain’t it our turn?”

“Yes,” she answered quietly. “I reckon it’s our turn.”

Corrie May walked over to where he stood by the window. Gilday turned and put his arm around her. She looked up at him, his thick untidy hair and his shrewd little eyes and his lecherous mouth, and his jaw set square like that of a man who knew just what he wanted and was damn well going to get it. For the first time in her life she wanted to speak and was aware of the clumsiness of her vocabulary. For she had no illusions about him. He was a lowdown sneak, and there wasn’t a soul in the parish who wouldn’t be better off if he were dead, and yet he had what she had known all her life she needed, that completely frank determination in his dishonesty and that certainty of knocking aside anything that stood in his way without remorse or pity. She felt herself pushed toward him by a force so much vaster than herself that she could not even pretend to resist it. It was a feeling compounded of awe and admiration and wondering discovery.

“Well—for God’s sake,” said Corrie May. She spoke slowly. “You—Mr. Gilday—I mean, what’s your first name?”

“Sam,” he said, smiling down at her.

“I think you’re kind of wonderful,” said Corrie May.

He began to laugh again. This time she could feel his laughter, a deep quivering mirth in his body. “You and me,” he said, “we’ll have a fine time.”

“You’re mighty right we will,” said Corrie May.

Chapter Ten

W
hen Gilday offered to take a house for her Corrie May felt a thrill that ran from the back of her neck down to the end of her spine. The balconied home of the Durhams, in front of which she had watched the soldiers pass on that long-ago spring day when the war was young, had been advertised for rent. Steamboat trade was scant, and property taxes had climbed to such heights that the Durhams could no longer afford to keep up their residence.

Gilday said he’d take it if that was the one she wanted. She drove her buggy to the house and sat looking up at its graceful front, and she trembled with pleasure. That she, Corrie May Upjohn from Rattletrap Square, should live in one of the palaces that had given Dalroy its famous designation! But when she went in and looked around she was disappointed. From the outside the house looked pretty grand with its wide galleries and long windows, but inside—why, even in the parlor the walls were just plain white, with only a tiny border of painted vines under the ceiling. Corrie May asked Gilday if she couldn’t fancy it up a little bit, and he said sure, go right ahead; he thought like her it was too simple.

So she went to work, gleefully. In the front rooms she put up wallpaper with a design of red and purple roses climbing over a golden lattice, and in the hall blue paper scattered over with gilt bouquets tied with long pink bows. She draped the windows with red velveteen hangings looped back with gold cords, and hung pictures of cupids flying about among wistaria-laden arches. She hung a gilt-framed mirror over the parlor mantelpiece and placed a red plush sofa between the front windows. To spur folks’ appetites she hung pictures of fruit and fish in the dining-room, and set up cabinets containing knobby tumblers of pink glass and a set of chinaware painted with ponies.

Gilday paid for everything, half with satisfaction and half with amusement. He enjoyed seeing the pleasure she got from spending money. “This sure is marvelous,” she exclaimed breathlessly to him over and over, and he laughed and pinched her cheek. “Go right ahead, baby. Ain’t I said it was your turn?”

Yes, it was her turn, Corrie May said joyfully to him and to herself, and she bustled up and down, laying a green carpet on the stairs and placing long vari-colored candles in the sockets. But though she gloried in her grand house, this glory was faint compared to that she found in buying clothes. At first it was hard to realize she could walk right into the shops and turn over bolts of goods with the assurance of a great lady. At first she went in timidly, murmuring, “If it ain’t too much trouble, sir, I’d like to see some poplin, please sir,” and shivered when the salesman’s glance informed her she was not the type of customer he had been used to waiting on. But times were hard, the shops needed customers more than she needed clothes, and it did not take her long to find it out. It was only a little while before Corrie May learned to walk in confidently, flirting her train and tossing the stylish false braids pinned in loops to the back of her head, and say, “Tarletan? Huh, I’d as soon wear mosquito netting! Ain’t you got none of these shot velvets I been hearing about?”

She loved seeing the salesmen cringe before her demands. She loved seeing some woman who had been rich come into the shop attended by her brother or an old servant who had remained faithful in spite of the times—for these days it was hardly safe for a lady with the look of resentful gentility upon her to venture unprotected into the street—and carefully choose a few yards of cheap percale, while she herself flung down her rolls of greenbacks in payment for satin. And how she enjoyed bossing the dressmakers! They mildly suggested that one did not decorate brocade with embroidery nor have street-dresses made with long trains; Corrie May demanded, “Look here, you, who’s paying for these clothes?” There had been a time when they would have told her they were too pressed with previous orders to accept hers, but not now. Their old customers were staggering under the weight of carpetbagger taxes and they were grateful for any customer who could pay. They made her gowns as she wanted them, and though they might shiver at her taste they eyed her portemonnaie stuffed with bills and held back their protests, even when she demanded that they work all day Sunday to finish a bonnet. Corrie May reveled in it all. She gathered up her florid skirts and swept out to her carriage, singing to herself, “It’s my turn! Now I’m walking up the handsome road!”

She had servants too, for though most of the liberated Negroes refused to work, there were a few of the more intelligent class who had sense enough to know the government wasn’t going to support them and were glad to have employment. Not many of their former masters could pay wages for house-servants, but Corrie May could. She paid good wages, too, for she knew they despised her. She who had never bossed a servant before was harder to work for than the patricians for whom having servants had been no adventure. But on Saturdays when they lined up to receive their high wages she distributed the money with gleams of triumph in her eyes. “Times have changed,” she reminded them. “When y’all was slaves the law said your missus had to keep you and feed you whether you did your work good or bad. But now you ain’t slaves no more, and I can fire you if you don’t do just like I say. So you’d sho better be good.”

And they were good. These aristocratic Negroes were as bewildered by the new order of things as their masters.

Corrie May’s life was radiant these days. Besides clothes and servants and a fine house, she was buying other things, more vital. She was buying a sense of her own importance in the world, and she was buying the knowledge that she was beautiful.

That came to her slowly as she turned before her toilet-mirror. She had no more sunburn, and with face-creams and sheltering her complexion was acquiring a pale delicacy; having no more work to do she could rub her hands with milk and polish the nails with chamois skin. She had learned how to darken her eyelashes, and the effect was to make noticeable the fact that instead of being just ordinary blue her eyes were large and dark, almost violet. And now she had leisure to wash her hair and brush it till it had a rich glitter. Folks used to call it “lightish,” but now Gilday’s friends who came to her parties exclaimed, “What beautiful golden hair you’ve got, Miss Corrie May!”

Though it was too late for her to achieve really close lacing, she did discover that she had a good figure, and Gilday said he’d never admired women laced too fine; in fact, he was joyfully astonished at how well she looked when for the first time in her life she put on a really good crinoline. “Maybe it’s a good thing for a girl to work a few years, baby,” he told her. “You develop yourself the way God meant you to be. And,” he added with increasing satisfaction in his own good judgment, “maybe God ain’t so wrong, the way he makes women.”

Corrie May laughed softly. But she could not explain to any man the joy she found in her own discovery of herself. And she could not explain to anybody, man or woman, the glory that descended upon her when she stood before her mirror and knew with the honesty bred in her from a lifetime of facing facts that she was more beautiful than Ann Sheramy had ever been.

It came to her one evening when she came upstairs after passing drinks to several of Gilday’s friends who had dropped in after supper. Gilday was still down in front helping the company to their carriages, for some of them were unsteady on their feet. Corrie May came into her room, and as she dropped her train she saw herself in the long mirror. Her hair caught the candlelight as though it had been brushed with gold and silver, and above the fluff of tulle her shoulders had a shimmery whiteness. With a sudden breath of joy she stepped nearer.

Holding up her arms, she watched the light quiver from her wrists to her shoulders, and noticed the firm strength of her muscles; she turned and looked sideways at her corsage tapering to where it met her skirt and saw how gracefully her figure had developed, so that she carried the great bunch of folds in the back as though it were a pleasant decoration instead of a burden. She looked at her shining eyes and her clear strong profile, observing that air and exercise had given her not only grace but a complexion that had the bloom of a well-nurtured flower. She remembered Ann’s milky delicacy and her soft little skeleton that yielded without resistance to any fashionable corset. And suddenly Corrie May’s pleasure in herself became so intense that it was like pain. A quivering ecstasy went through and through her, and she covered her face with her hands and crumpled on the bed, sobbing in an anguish of delight.

When Gilday came in and found her he was alarmed. He took her by the shoulder and asked her what on earth had happened. “Did one of them drunks say something not polite to you?” he demanded.

“No, no,” sobbed Corrie May. “Didn’t nobody say nothing. I’m just crying because everything is too wonderful.”

Gilday laughed at her. “You’re such a sweet little damn fool,” he said.

She did not try to explain further. Gilday was not much interested in her intimate reactions, and Corrie May was too schooled in reality to expect him to be otherwise. But he liked her, and she worked too hard to please him for them ever to quarrel.

They had lots of friends and the house was full nearly every evening. The gatherings were hilarious, for the callers were of the group that was stepping high these days—revenue agents and supervisors of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and a lot of Northern men who weren’t even nominally representing the Federal government but who had come down to get themselves elected to state offices—and they brought along girls who, like Corrie May, were stepping high too. Mr. Dawson came with his new wife; her name was Laura, and where he had picked her up nobody knew, but she had contrived to stand him up in front of a justice of the peace one day when he was drunk and now they were married and Laura was putting on highclass airs, and how she did love to be called Mrs. Dawson. Corrie May regarded her with envy-tinged amusement. Gilday was a better patron to have, for he was smarter than Dawson and had twice as much money to spend, but by that same token he was too shrewd to get drunk. Not that it mattered very much. All the folks admired Gilday a sight more than they did Dawson, and they liked Corrie May better than Laura with all her airs.

Gilday said he wanted to give a really big party in August. Corrie May planned it happily: jellies and salads, cakes and cream-custards and liquor enough to make everybody tipsy; and for herself a costume so gorgeous that the planning of it fairly made her dizzy.

For if your imagination had been starved of splendor, this summer of 1867 was really the time to turn it loose. The country was relaxing from war-strain, and to match the excitement of release clothes had gone wild. Dresses were so loaded with decorations they became a burden to carry, and after sixty years of flat-soled shoes heels had shot up four inches high. The vogue for having a wire bulge in the back of the skirt and a bow half a yard wide just below made it almost impossible to sit down, while the new heels made it almost impossible to stand up; a false chignon that weighed a pound pinned to the back of the head produced shooting pains in one’s neck; bracelets were so heavy one felt like a shackled criminal, and the long frilled trains swept up whatever of dirt and cigar-stubs happened to be underfoot. If you followed the fashions you could neither stand, sit, walk nor breathe without aching, and with every garment you put on you looked more barbaric; but the war was over and you had to riot in foolishness lest you remember you were dancing over a million graves. By midsummer bows and flounces had ceased to be enough and there appeared a yet more extravagant decoration, peacock feathers.

You thrust bunches of peacock feathers into your bosom. You banded your skirt with overlapping lines of them, you bought parasols made solidly of peacock feathers, you hung them around the brim of a hat or put one at each end of the strings that tied on a bonnet; instead of a rosette on your slipper you wore a peacock feather, and you put peacock feathers into your hair to nod above your flowing false curls. You bought a breastpin in which a peacock feather was imitated in colored glass stones, you cut bits of brilliant velvet and appliquéd them on your dress in a design of feathers; you had fans of peacock feathers, you embroidered them on your handkerchiefs, you even found them in the designs for bedspreads and curtains and dish-towels.

And if you gave a party in that peacock summer you ordered ice, quantities of Northern ice brought down to Louisiana on the boats, and you had it crushed and colored and packed in more ice to be re-frozen into designs that would turn out of the molds to be peacock feathers melting on the plates.

Corrie May thought that a wonderful idea. Four days before the date of her party she went down to see the head of the ice-company. Could he make up the peacock molds for her? Why of course he could, only the price—

“Damn the price,” said Corrie May. “I’m having fifty-four people at my party and I guess you’d better make up two apiece. And then of course I’ll be wanting more ice for the drinks.”

That would be a lot of ice, the man said doubtfully, for he’d have to send up the peacock molds packed in buckets of ice, and to keep them solid he couldn’t pack more than eight to a bucket.

Corrie May took out her portemonnaie and began counting greenbacks before him. The ice-man eyed the money with eyes that stretched involuntarily.

“Mm,” he breathed. “Times have been kind of hard hereabouts lately. We don’t sell ice like we used to. The boats don’t bring so much.”

“Well, can’t you order me a few pounds special?” she demanded.

“I sure can,” he exclaimed eagerly. “I tell you, ma’am. Suppose I say right now you’ve ordered all the ice I’ll get in from now till next Tuesday, and I’ll order you a hundred pounds extra, special.”

“That’ll be all right, I reckon,” Corrie May returned grandly. She picked up a newspaper from the table and began to fan herself. It was unusually hot, even for August, and though she had come from home in her carriage she felt as wilted as if she had walked. “Only you better make it a hundred and fifty,” she told him. “Looks like we’re in for quite a spell of weather.”