The Handsome Road (27 page)

“I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I must have dropped a ten-dollar note on the street.”

“Well now,” murmured Gilday. “Ain’t that just too bad.”

“I’ll get it somehow,” Ann said breathlessly. “I’ll bring it to you tomorrow.”

Gilday shook his head with lingering enjoyment. “Ain’t it a shame, now. You know, this is the last day to pay them taxes. That statement you got says six o’clock today, plain as writing can be.”

Ann’s eyes went to the clock on the wall. “Mr. Gilday,” she urged desperately, “it’s half-past four. To drive from here to Ardeith in a carriage takes two hours. It would be two hours back. I couldn’t possibly bring you that ten dollars before six o’clock.”

“Well, well,” said Gilday. He leaned back in his chair. His fingers began to play with the watch-chain across his middle. “That paper says six o’clock today, right out in the English language.”

Corrie May would not have thought it possible for a face to get whiter than Ann’s already was. But her skin got like chalk. Gilday smiled insolently. He jiggled his watch-chain.

Ann gripped the edge of the desk. “Just what does that mean?” she asked.

“Well now, we got orders to put tax-delinquent property up for sale.”

“The Ardeith sugar land—for sale—for ten dollars?” The words came out almost like a scream. One or two of the other men, who had been listening with a mild interest, began to chuckle.

“That’s the government’s orders,” said Gilday. He had twined the chain about his thumbs and was rocking back in his chair.

Ann was taking off one of her gloves. She drew her wedding ring from her finger. “I suppose you’ll allow me ten dollars for this?” she asked.

The ring clattered on the desk. Gilday picked it up. He turned it in his thick fingers.

“Why, it’s got writing in it,” he remarked. “Such little bits of letters. Wonder could I read ’em.” He held the ring up to the light. “Why sure, I can read ’em. ‘Denis to Ann, December 6, 1859.’ Such little writing, now.”

There was a pause. Ann’s ungloved hand gripped the desk. Corrie May saw that it was reddened as though with work, and where the ring had been was a streak of white.

“You sure this is real gold?” queried Gilday.

“Of course,” Ann returned with more scorn than she had yet let herself display.

Gilday flung the ring back on the desk. “Oh now, I tell you. We’ve been really weighted down with this junk. Everybody wanting to give rings and breastpins instead of money for taxes. If it was old-time gold money, now, we’d know. But how’re we gonta tell which of this stuff is gold and which ain’t? We got no time to be pouring acid over everything. I expect, tell the truth frankly, I wouldn’t be able to allow you more’n five dollars for this thing.”

“You—” said Ann, and she swallowed the last word into violent silence.

Gilday waved his hand. “Not me. The United States.”

Ann stood up straight. “Yes, I know,” she said slowly. “The United States.” She took a deep quiet breath. “The United States.”

Gilday twiddled his thumbs in his watch-chain. Dawson nudged one of the others and they both grinned with amusement. Cockrell tilted a bottle and refreshed himself with a drink.

In Corrie May’s head an idea exploded. It was like stars and songs and banners of victory. She could feel a quiver of joy run through her.

She opened her portemonnaie. Slowly and deliberately, she extracted a ten-dollar bill.

“Here it is,” she said. “Put on your ring.”

For the second time that day Ann looked at her, this time incredulously. Corrie May put her arm around Gilday’s neck. With one hand she patted his thick greasy hair, and with the other she tossed the bill into Ann’s insufficient pile.

Gilday began to ask “What’s the idea?” But Corrie May paid him no attention. She said clearly to Ann,

“You take it. I got plenty more where that came from.”

For a second Ann did not move. Then, very slowly, she picked up her ring and put it on. As though weighing the Ardeith sugar land against her own humiliation she closed her fingers on Corrie May’s ten-dollar bill. Without looking up she said,

“Thank you. I’ll send it back to you.”

“You needn’t bother,” Corrie May returned casually. “You need it more than me, I reckon.”

“What’s the matter with you?” Gilday exclaimed. “That’s my money.”

“Shut up your noise and sign that receipt,” Corrie May ordered in a low voice. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

Gilday frowned, puzzled, then gave her a one-sided smile as he obeyed. Ann put the receipt into her purse. She looked at Corrie May.

“You are very kind,” she said with a strained attempt at graciousness.

“You’re welcome,” said Corrie May.

Ann picked up her glove. She turned around and went out.

As the door clicked shut behind her Gilday burst out laughing. “Gee, baby, that was funny,” he exclaimed to Corrie May. “I didn’t get the idea at first. But did you see her droop her feathers?”

Corrie May did not answer. She had begun to stare at the closed door.

“I couldn’t have sold more than a few acres of that land anyway,” Gilday was chuckling. “Only she didn’t know it.”

Corrie May slipped off the arm of his chair and stood up. “I reckon I better go get my dress,” she said.

“All of you,” Gilday reminded the others, “be sure to come around to our house Tuesday night. It’s going to be some party.”

Corrie May went out. On the courthouse steps she stood still a moment. She saw the Ardeith carriage, with Napoleon in the coachman’s seat, go around the corner. Corrie May doubled her fists under her chin. She did not feel at all as she had expected to feel. She had resented Ann so deeply for so many years; she had thought when she threw that ten-dollar bill at her that her own reaction would be one of unmarred triumph. But it wasn’t. She felt ashamed of herself. For the first time in her life she had deliberately done something mean and horrid, and for the first time since she had begun her association with Gilday she had discovered that she could not make herself be like him. She stood on the steps uncertainly, until she remembered she was going to the dressmaker’s. She tried to recapture her earlier pleasure at the thought of her gown and its train edged with peacock feathers, but her whole party seemed suddenly like something that just had to be gone through with whether she felt like it or not.

Telling herself not to bother about what was over and done, she got into her own carriage and started for the dressmaker’s. But she could not rid herself of the wish that when for the first time she had had a chance to act like a great lady, she had had the grace to act like one.

Chapter Eleven

1

L
ying back in the carriage while Napoleon drove it along the bumpy road to Ardeith, Ann covered her face with her hands and pressed back the sobs that rose with little shoots of pain into her throat. “I am not going to cry,” she told herself angrily. “It doesn’t do any good. And they’d enjoy it so if they knew I was crying.”

But she was so tired that fighting any sort of physical battle was too much for her, and her tears slipped between her fingers and ran down her wrists. Though she was used to it by now there came times, like this, when her desperation swept over her as though she had never felt it before. She was so tired! She was so tired cooking and scrubbing floors and doing the laundry and hoeing the vegetable patch; cutting up an old petticoat to make a dress for her little girl, raveling a shawl to knit gloves for Denis, covering a frayed hem with a flounce from another dress so she herself would not be ragged; hoarding for taxes and having Negroes elbow her off the sidewalks and hearing the tax-gatherers make obscene remarks at her as she passed. She was so tired of this whole battle to maintain decency and self-respect in a world where those qualities seemed to have no more existence. It was hard to remember that there had actually been a time when such things were taken for granted. Her memories of those lost years had withered up, like old flowers in an attic; it was almost as though that vanished world had never existed at all.

As soon as she could get her hands on so much money she must send ten dollars to that girl. Ann shivered as she recalled her, wondering how Corrie May, who had always seemed like a nice little thing, could possibly have descended to her association with that wretched creature Gilday, and wondering even more what she herself had ever done to merit the sneering condescension with which Corrie May had flung the money on the desk. She had given Corrie May work out of pure kindness, and she could not recall ever having spoken to her in an impatient voice, yet Corrie May had not offered that bill in the manner of one prompted by the gratitude the poor ought to feel for those who had befriended them. Her first impulse had been to throw it on the floor. Then there had swooped over her the knowledge of her own helplessness, and Gilday licking his lips at the prospect of offering the Ardeith sugar land for sale, and her children with nobody but her to care what became of them. So her hand had closed on the money, though while she heard her voice saying “Thank you” her mind was crying out, “But what did I ever do to make them hate me so?”

Heaven only knew where she was going to get ten dollars. The tax had taken the last dollar she could scrape up, and she had no prospect of more until she could sell this fall’s cotton. But she could not have it ginned without pawning something to pay the gin-tax, unless Jerry could take it down to one of the secret gins the Ku Klux members were erecting in the swamps. Secret ginning was done at the risk of their lives, but unless they could dispose of their cotton heaven knew what they were going to live on. It was next to impossible to get any money from the pawnshops these days. Hugh Purcell had dug up some of the silver his mother had buried during the war, and he had been offered fifteen cents apiece for the spoons. Most of the Ardeith silver was still underground; it was not worth digging up.

The carriage had reached Ardeith. Ann gave Napoleon the key to the gates and he climbed down and unlocked them, led the horse in and locked the gates again. In old times the gates of Ardeith used to stand hospitably open from one year’s end to the next, and when she first ordered them fastened after the invasion the day Virginia was born the lock was so rusty it had required oil and effort to make the key turn. But now, with the countryside swarming with marauders and half the food-crops stolen before they were ripe, Ann always kept the gates locked and carried the key on her chain. She looked around at the weedy yard. She used to be proud of the grounds, but now she simply could not do anything about them. She had nearly broken her back pulling up enough summer weeds to keep the avenue clear.

In the smothered light under the trees little Denis was playing with Napoleon’s boy Jimmy, both of them seemingly oblivious of the heat. As she got out of the carriage Denis ran up and summoned her to see a house they were building out of sticks and some boxes. Denis was barefooted, and he wore a suit of plaid gingham she had put together from the skirt of an old dress. It did not fit him very well, for her sewing was clumsy and Denis was growing fast. But even in makeshift clothes Denis was an attractive child, prettier and sturdier than his little sister Virginia. Virginia had always been a delicate little thing, with a sober air about her as though she already knew she had been born into a stricken world. So far Denis knew nothing about the world except that he enjoyed it. He looked very much like his father, and he had the older Denis’ gift for accepting what he saw without too many questions. Ann guessed already that Denis would never think deeply about anything unless he had to, and she had found forced thinking so painful that she could not help hoping he would never have to. She admired the toy house, and then asked him, “Did you write the copy I set for you?”

“Yes ma’am,” he assured her virtuously. “I copied it ten times and put it on your bureau like you told me.”

“As I told you, darling.”

“Yes ma’am.” Denis sighed. Ann brushed her hand lingeringly over his tumbled hair. Probably she corrected him too often. But there was so little she could salvage out of the ruins for her children that such economically gratuitous subjects as good English had assumed unprecedented importance in her mind.

Nobody was in the hall as she entered. Ann stood there a moment looking at the dust on the chandelier and along the scrolls of the staircase balustrade. She and Cynthia did as much as they could, but there was so much they could not do. Napoleon and Bertha and mammy had stayed devotedly with them, but Napoleon had to spend most of his time supervising the few fieldhands she could afford to hire and mammy was too old to do much. There was no way for herself and Cynthia with only Bertha’s help to accomplish the tasks that used to occupy thirty servants. They had taken up the rugs and rolled them up with tobacco leaves in the attic, for it was easier to sweep bare floors, and the non-essential rooms they had locked up, since dust gathered more slowly if the doors were never opened. The house had the air of a neglected old man. As she went upstairs Ann ran her hand along the balustrade and looked at the dust on her fingers. “The poor can be clean!” she said bitterly under her breath.

In her own room she locked the door and rested her head a moment against the bedpost. A basket of worn clothes stood on her bureau next to Denis’ writing-lesson, but she hardly glanced at it; after her visit to the courthouse her nerves were still twitching so that she did not feel capable of anything. But she roused herself to change her dress, for it was the only one she owned fit to wear on the street. As she took an old summer percale out of the half-empty armoire she marveled at what had become of all her things. Her racks of shoes, her piles of petticoats and chemises, dresses and shawls and bonnets, her dozens of pairs of stockings—they had simply fallen apart and disappeared, most of them, patch and remake them as she would. It had never occurred to her in the old days to buy clothes for durability. Nobody had warned her they were going to have to last forever.

While she was buttoning her dress her free hand reached toward the top shelf of the armoire. She hesitated, moved her hand down and reached up again to take the bottle of Bourbon standing there. A dozen times she had resolved to stop keeping whiskey in her room. The temptation to drink it was too strong when it was there under her hand and the door was locked. But what, in God’s name, she asked herself angrily as she half filled the glass on her washstand, were you to do when your body and soul were screaming for relief? The liquor supply of Ardeith seemed inexhaustible, and in these despairing days she had often wondered how she would have gone on without it. Whatever they preached about liquor, these moralists who had never been made to face what she was facing, it did give you a strange courage and it did provide release on nights when you were too tired to sleep.

The sun was gone, but though the room was smoky with twilight the heat was still oppressive. The whiskey seemed to flow just under her skin and create a furnace within her to meet the heat outside, and it began to bring also the sense of peace she wanted. But not for long. There was a knock on the door.

She did not answer and the knock was repeated. She heard Cynthia’s voice calling her. Ann roused herself, irritated. Cynthia was eighteen. Everything about her was sharp. She had a cutting voice and irregular features and a figure that was all angles—except for her clear skin there was nothing pretty about her—and she moved fast and had no delicacy of manner whatever. Sometimes Ann did not like her, though she always admired her.

“Ann!” Cynthia called again.

Slowly Ann got to her feet. “Yes? What is it?”

“Open the door.”

Replacing the whiskey bottle in the armoire Ann reluctantly obeyed her. If Cynthia observed that she had been drinking, she did not say so; she had a rare talent for minding her own business. She simply said, “I’m sorry to bother you. But Virginia’s sick again.”

“Again?” Ann sighed. That poor darling was so frail, and the summers were hard on her. “What is it now?”

Cynthia’s face was graver than usual. “It’s not just a little attack, Ann. She’s awfully sick. I came to call you as soon as Denis told me you’d come in.”

“I’ll go to her.” Ann hurried to the nursery. As she went in mammy sprang up from where she was sitting by Virginia’s bed.

“Oh, Miss Ann, I’m sho glad you’s come. De baby been so low!”

Ann bent over the bed. Virginia would be four years old in October, but she was small for her age. Her face was flushed and she was whimpering. At a glance Ann saw that Cynthia had not been mistaken; Virginia was very ill indeed. With a start of fright she put her hand on the child’s burning forehead, murmuring, “Here I am, darling. Mother’ll take care of you.” She looked up at Cynthia, who had followed her in and stood at the foot of the bed. “When did it start, Cynthia?”

“Not long after you went out. She started screaming and grabbing her stomach. She’s been dreadfully nauseated. It must be something she got at dinner.”

“It’s the milk.” As she spoke Ann thought her voice sounded rough as sandpaper. When this heat-wave struck several days ago she had thought yearningly of ice. But she had not seen a piece of ice in so long she had almost forgot there had been a time when she had found it necessary, and there was that land-tax in front of her. Buying ice would have seemed as foolish as buying diamonds. She held Virginia up in her arms and laid her cheek against the flaming cheek of the little girl.

Cynthia went on. “She can’t keep anything down, not even a drink of water. I did everything I knew, but—” her voice lowered. “Ann, I never did see a child in such torment! I’m so glad you came!”

“Stale milk is like arsenic,” Ann said tersely. She let go the child and got up, turning to mammy. “Don’t give her anything to eat. Water in a teaspoon if she can take it. Make a cold compress for her forehead. That might reduce the fever.”

“Miss Ann,” mammy said sadly, “dat water in de pitcher is wawm as my hand.”

“Tell Napoleon to draw some fresh from the well. It will be cooler.” She bent over the bed again. “Virginia, sugar, try to be a good girl. I’ll get something to make you well.” Drawing Cynthia with her she went out into the hall, asking, “Do you suppose there’s any ice in town?”

“Ice?” Cynthia frowned. “Why, I don’t know. I think the ice-boats have been running since the war. But have you got any money?”

Ann shook her head. Twenty-five cents a pound, and the pitchers of lemonade she used to drink on hot days! “I paid the last cent I had to those vultures in the courthouse. But we’ve got to get ice somehow. That child’s poisoned. I wouldn’t give her anything out of the kitchen safe now for a thousand dollars.”

Cynthia held out her hands helplessly. “I never heard a child scream the way she did. Is there anything you want me to do?”

“Take care of Denis. If I don’t get down to supper don’t let him eat anything but vegetables. No milk or meat. And tell Napoleon I want to see him right away.”

She hurried into her own room for her keys and went down the stairs, through the liquor-closet and down into the vault. The big safe at the side stood like an armored sentinel, its dark sides blinking in the light of her candle. Ann unlocked it and turned over the trinkets she still had left. They were not many; she had pawned more than she cared to remember until the pawnbrokers began allowing so little for jewelry it was hardly worth offering. There was the medallion with little Denis’ daguerreotype and baby hair. She had held on to that grimly, but now she picked it up, wondering what it would bring. Not much in these times, but perhaps enough to provide ice-packs for Virginia’s forehead and keep her food fresh until this heatwave passed. Ann slipped out the picture and lock of hair, and leaving them in the safe she locked the doors behind her and ran back upstairs. Napoleon was waiting for her in the hall.

She told him to take anything he could get for the medallion, and buy ice. He shook his head sadly and went off. Ann told Bertha to scrub out the old refrigerator. She went back to Virginia.

The child’s fever was rising. Ann tried to cool her forehead with wet cloths. It was all she could do, and it seemed to be of little use. She thought of a doctor, but she had nobody to send for one, and even if she had, she doubted if he could tell her anything but that food ought to be kept on ice in this weather. The night hung hot and smothering over the house, the sort of night when well people with untroubled minds tossed and mumbled in their sleep. It was murderous weather for a sick child. Ann sat by the bed, or sometimes to ease her own restlessness she walked up and down the room, wiping rivulets of perspiration off her own face with her sleeve.