Jordan County (10 page)

The sheriff and Hoskins brought him into the cell, walking on either side of him, their hands supporting his elbows. His shaved head glistened like mahogany. He was thin, slight and frail between the florid sheriff and the husky deputy, and his slit trouser-legs flapped about his ankles. His eyes glittered, the pupils contracted in the sudden light. His teeth looked false, too white to be true and too large for his mouth, which was drawn in what appeared to be a grimace or even a smile though it was neither; it was fright. Roscoe followed them into the cell; Dr Benson and I and the district attorney watched from the rear wall. Luke Jeffcoat, who had stood beside the
chair and watched them come in, stepped forward now and took over, beginning the running commentary, the oration he supplied with every job. He spoke with the full-mouthed accent of the old-time stump orators, sometimes addressing the condemned man, sometimes the witnesses.

“All right,” he said. “Here you are for that last fast ride they promised you in court. Dont be troubled in your mind; youre in good, professional hands.” He led him to the chair. “Have a seat,” he said with grave formality; he even made a shallow bow, one hand out, palm up. Then he secured the straps at the wrists and ankles, going onto his knees for these last, and the larger strap across the chest. “Now dont you be trembling, son. Sit up straight and tall and take it cool, so when I tell all your friends how you stood it theyll be proud. Do you have anything to say?”

He stepped back, waiting, but there was nothing. Then he secured the plated cap and the hood. As he worked, the snakes tattooed on his arms seemed to writhe. “Ive had them all kinds,” he said. “Some moaned and groaned. Some didnt. But they all went, every man jack of the lot, the way youre going. So dont you fight it; dont fight back … Hey there!”

The switch clicked and for a moment there was that deep, pulsing hum and that odor of burning.

“Yair!” the executioner cried. “One quick bump on the road to glory and he rode right out of this world never knowing what hit him. Yair. Steady, folks; we’ll hit him again. Not because he needs it, no, but because the law says do it and the law’s almighty. Yair!”

There were footsteps hurrying through the door of the cell, and as I came forward with the stethoscope we heard the young district attorney being sick in the hall. I leaned over the chair, then straightened up and pronounced the prisoner dead.

This was in the middle Twenties, back before the flood. Snooky said he was coming by to pick me up a little after seven, but you know Snooky; he says one thing, then he does another. Only this time he came early. “Well, just tell him he can wait,” I said, all soapy, and Buster went downstairs and told him. He told Buster, “Tell her if she’s not down by seven, sharp, I’m long gone.” So Buster came back up. Poor Buster: all those stairs. He was the houseboy, as you may have gathered, gray-haired, well past sixty, and though his bottom lip hung slack from feeble mindedness, he was very good at building fires, carrying messages, and such. He died two years later. I was just getting out of the tub; he had to talk through the door. “Tell him I’ll do my level best,” I said, and Buster went back down.

Snooky was sitting talking to Daddy; Daddy had just come in. Mother had been dead three years that month, October. He was still long-faced and of course he had those wisps of cotton all over his clothes, the way they always do that time of year. He’s a cotton man. Buster stood there, dignified in his white jacket, till Daddy came to a pause in what he was saying. Then he delivered the message. “Looks like youve bout got her tamed,” Daddy said, but Snooky didnt say anything; he just sat there looking determined, or anyhow his notion of determined. Buster waited to see was there any answer. When there
wasnt, he went back to the kitchen with Louiza. She was his wife and she looked after him all those years until he died. You know how Negroes talk; “I slept true to that man,” she used to say. All the same, she remarried within the month, a strange coal-black lantern-jawed man almost seven feet tall if he was an inch, and moved straight up to Memphis. After cooking for us for eighteen years, seven days a week, she barely took the time to say goodbye. Thats how they are, thats typical; there’s never been a one of them had ulcers.

When I got down at seven-twenty Snooky was downright purple in the face. He didnt say anything or even help me into my coat, just followed me out to the car. The porch light glistened on his hair, the part like a streak of white light down the middle. The car was a cut-down Essex with writing all over it, even under the fenders:
Chickens here’s your coop. Fragile, handle with care. Shake well before using
— things like that. He had on his yellow slicker and there was writing on that as well:
Oh Min! This end up. Yes we have no bananas
, and so forth. I wont go into details except to say we drove up to Rosedale to a dance and didnt get home until almost four-thirty. By that time we werent speaking. The last thing I said to him when he kissed me goodnight on the steps (he tried to put his tongue in my mouth, among other things) was, “I dont care if I never
see
you again!” I meant it, too. He left, racing the motor down the block the way he always did when he was mad.

It had happened before, more or less exactly, but this time he really scared me. He didnt call for nearly a week. Then he did and we were married in April, during a cold-snap. Our wedding night was in Jackson, at the Robert E. Lee Hotel. He had a bottle of real champagne; it was his daddy’s, left over from before the war, but we couldnt get the bellboy to bring ice (there was some kind of convention going on, Baptists or something, all with their names on little squares of cardboard pinned to their lapels) so Snooky tried to cool it by holding it under the cold-water faucet in the bathroom. It fizzed all over the place when he popped the cork out. I
drank almost half of it, luke warm like that, the first alcohol I ever really tasted except the sugary bottoms of Daddy’s toddies when I was little, and next thing I knew I was standing under the shower, dripping wet, and all in the world I had on was a horrible nigger-pink bedspread wrapped around me and the wave had come out of my hair and I was bleeding. It was awful. Whats more, Snooky didnt understand at all; he kept yelling for me to come back to bed. “Come on back to bed!” he kept yelling. He had been drinking whiskey too, and finally he stumbled into the bathroom (like a fool I was so flustered I forgot to lock the door) and tried to wrestle the spread away, the only stitch of covering I had. I was more than a match for him, though, even in my condition. He fell and bumped his head on a corner of the washstand, then sat on the cold tiles, rubbing his head and mumbling over and over, “Some wife. Some little wife. Some little wife
I
got.” It was horrible, watching him squat there, naked like that, mumbling. His hair had always been smooth before, glossy as patent leather, but now it stuck out all around his head, like spikes. Then all of a sudden a solemn expression came over his face, as if he was about to pray or something, and he turned and threw up in the toilet with his chin hooked over the seat. Mind you, I had to stand there, watching, because I was afraid if I went back into the bedroom he’d recover and follow. He just kept on heaving, heaving, long after he was empty. It’s no wonder I got disillusioned early.

I sometimes think I married him just to get him out of my system. Not that I didnt admire him; who wouldnt? He was so much older, twenty-four to eighteen, and such a sheik. He played the ukulele, wore wider-bottomed trousers than anyone, had a car and all those things. Also his folks had money, lots of it, and Daddy had lost our money on the market years ago. I knew if I didnt marry him I’d regret it all my life. Then too, everyone kept saying he could ‘handle’ me, get me ‘tamed’ as Daddy said. That was what I wanted, after what had happened between my parents; I wanted what my mother didnt have.

A while back I said she died but thats not true, or at least it’s only true in a manner of speaking. What she did was she ran off with a man. It was an awful shock — I was terribly impressionable in my teens. It gave me an absolute horror of anything vulgar, and of course almost everything was vulgar in those days. I didnt understand at all but now I think I do. She wasnt bad. It was the times, the war being over, women doing the shimmy on dining-room tables, bobbed hair, short skirts, all that. And the truth was Daddy was lovable but dull, and not only dull but soft; he couldnt handle her at all. So I married Snooky and you know how that turned out, from the very first night in the Robert E. Lee Hotel.

He wasnt like they said. He was hard on the outside, all right, but soggy inside. I’d suspected it all along, but of course I had to find out for myself. Well, I found out soon enough. He turned to whiskey round the clock, what they call a night-drinker. His daddy sent him up to Keeley several times though it never really took. Then one afternoon I came home from playing bridge and found him in the living room with a hammer — killing flies, he said. You should have seen it, what he did to all my lovely things; the silver service from Aunt Agnes was mashed down to little wads of tin. So then I signed a paper and they put him in an institution. He didnt stay long, less than a year, but by that time I had the divorce. He soon married again; I heard she gave him a hard time, some Yankee who pronounced her final g’s and all the r’s. It served him right. Soon he left her and married another — a California one this time; I hear she’s just as bad if not worse. Not that I care. I dont care. He can do whatever he likes, provided that check comes through on the first of every month. I gave him my youth; if we didnt have any children it wasnt my fault.

There now; I’ve talked about it and made myself all sad. Life
is
sad and there’s no good in men. Feel those tears. I guess youd better get up now and go; I think thats daylight peeping through the shade.

Old Mrs Sturgis lived all her life in the house her grandfather built fifteen years before she was born. Unlike most of the houses in the region, which grew piecemeal, room by room being added in flush years on alternate sides of a shotgun hall until they reached the baronial proportions so much hoped for and sought after, this one was that way from the start, a big, soaring structure of cypress and brick, set on pilings to protect its hardwood floors from the high water every spring. It was past its hundredth year when they tore it down, in accordance with instructions in her will, and converted the grounds into a public park — called Wingate Park for her father, Hector Wingate — a grove of oaks and sycamores, cottonwoods and cedars, with graveled paths and occasional benches where Negro nursemaids take their charges to while away the sunny afternoons, the former in aprons and headrags, the latter in prim chambray or belted corduroy, strolling its formal pattern with the precise intentness of figures in a minuet. She had always been public spirited, and this was her final gesture, six months after she died.

Every year on her birthday for the past quarter-century, first when she was sixty and last when she was nearing ninety,
the newspaper ran a feature describing how her plantation had become the residential district of the town, the three thousand acres subdivided and parceled out under her supervision. With the story there was always the same two-column cut of an old lady in a wheelchair, the photograph looking somewhat blurred or out-of-focus until you looked closer and saw that this was because the face was a network of wrinkles. The fixed, archaic expression about the mouth was more like a grimace than a smile, but the eyes behind the octagonal spectacle lenses were bright as agates, even in the newsprint reproduction. Year after year that face looked out from the page, just as it had looked on the hot June day, ten and twenty and thirty years ago, when the itinerant photographer huddled beneath his cloth, palming the bulb, and saw it upside-down on the ground-glass plate. The text itself might change a bit from time to time, successive cubs and editors adding or subtracting particular flourishes, but the caption over the picture was always the same:
Esther Wingate Sturgis
, it always called her,
Mother of Bristol
.

This is not primarily a history of the life of Mrs Sturgis, but since her life was the backdrop against which her son’s was played, overlapping it broadly on both ends — especially the latter; for years before she finally died people were saying she would live forever, baked to durability in the oven of the fever — a proper examination of her life is the best means of looking into many of the questions of his own. Here as always it was a question of action and reaction, hers and his. If a posy were needed to decorate a page or point a theme, perhaps the most suitable would be that biblical verse which tells of the children’s teeth being set on edge by grapes the parents ate.

He was called Hector too; she named him for her father, just as later she would direct that the park be named for him, with his name on a wrought-iron archway spanning the entrance. Hector Sturgis has been dead for better than forty years. Not many people nowadays ever heard of him. Even fewer ever saw him, and no one at all ever knew him.
Yet there were those who claimed to know his story: know it so well, they said, that between the time when Mrs Sturgis died and six months later, when the house was razed, they could take you into the attic and point out the rafter beneath which he had brought it to a close: or so they claimed. It had a certain charm for those who told it, or if not charm then anyhow a certain fascination, partly because so little was known and there was therefore plenty of room for conjecture, but mainly because there was a ghost in it. That was what drew them, the lurid element: that and of course the boast of having inside information, being privy to events in the secret lives of the highborn. Actually, however, no matter how they embroidered and invented, his life was as uneventful as most lives are when they can be looked back on, when events have lost their immediacy, when the texture has raveled and the pattern run to gray. There were only three main dates to hang it on — 1878, 1899, 1911: the years of his birth, his marriage, and his death — which is as much as most men have, and more than some.