Jordan County (14 page)

and Hector would lie with his fists clenched under his chin, too frightened to relax for fear his eyes would accidentally open and he would see the monster thing with the fleshless head and nothing but shreds of meat on its bones.

Emma indeed had a way with children. But it was his grandmother who dominated the majority of these remembered scenes. He was with her most, and she was the one who bought and taught him to wear the tight serge knee-breeches, the hightop button shoes and ribbed black stockings, the hard round hat like a truncated cannonball fitted into a rim, the wide black satin bow tie that rode up under his chin and made his throat hot. Other boys of good family were dressed more or less this way on Sundays and on special occasions, but this was Hector’s everyday wear. Mrs Wingate smelled of orris root and sachet, and he never dared to ask her why he was not allowed to dress like other boys.

She took him with her in the carriage when she rode out for her weekly inspection tour of the plantation. Emma sat on the jump-seat facing rear, holding a parasol over their heads in fine weather when the hood was folded back, and Samuel the coachman, Emma’s husband up on the box, wore a plug hat and drove with his elbows high and wide, as Mrs Wingate required. Hector watched and admired her; he could hardly take his eyes away from her long, fine-bred face with its layer of rice powder, the way she smiled and spoke with her mouth awry to hide the gap where a front side tooth was missing, the blue-pink cameo at her throat (it was said to resemble her mother) which her father had presented to her for Confirmation in Missouri forty years ago. Her hair was almost white now, but that was by a certain magic he could not understand — she put bluing in the water when she washed
it. Collectively these things made her seem like a queen to Hector, and the plantation was her kingdom. It had
POSTED: NO HUNTING
signs nailed to trees and fence posts along its boundaries, and the tenants standing beside their plows at the turnrows removed their hats with a sweeping gesture, like subjects of her kingdom, when the carriage came abreast. The manager, big and hale, with a shovel beard and an enormous rat-colored hat, rode alongside on a sorrel gelding that broke wind steadily, a rapid series of backfires in rhythm with its stride. Mrs Wingate seemed not to notice this, but it embarrassed Hector.

On every such trip, if the fair weather held, they got out of the carriage to inspect one of the tenant cabins. Each had a vegetable patch out back, as Mrs Wingate required, and there was always a woman standing in the doorway, barefoot, usually with a punched dime worn on a string around her ankle, more naked-looking in a one-piece cotton dress than she would have looked without it. She rode a child on one hip and cried, “Hush up, sir! Hush up, sir!” at the invariable flop-eared hound that came belling from under the gallery as soon as the carriage stopped, and for some reason the dogs all had yellow eyebrows like a pair of inverted commas, one on each side of its forehead. Inside the cabin there was a special odor compounded of many things, most of which remained anonymous, though among them Hector learned to identify coal-oil, corn starch, and stale bread, vanilla, lye soap, and old newspapers. Wooly-headed children, their eyeballs and teeth standing out incredibly white, looked at him in a solemn, not unfriendly way, but when he or his grandmother spoke to them they hung their heads or hid behind their mother. The woman would follow them through both rooms, her bare feet making a hissing sound against the floor planks. She called Mrs Wingate ‘Old Miss,’ saying “Yessum, Old Miss” or “Noam, Old Miss” depending on which was applicable. Hector never heard one of them say anything else; apparently it was all the vocabulary they had. Riding home in the carriage, he felt
as if he were returning from a visit to another world. “Someday all this will be yours,” the grandmother said from time to time. It made him feel uneasy.

Mrs Wingate also took him to town with her on shopping expeditions. Sometimes she would let him get out of the carriage and go into one of the stores with her. She was a meticulous shopper; her life was a long war with Bristol tradesmen, every purchase being preceded by a skirmish. She could not abide having a clerk suggest an item. “Never mind, sir,” she would say. “I know what I want. Just show me what I ask to see, and that will be sufficient.”

At the market she would not allow her grandson to accept a wiener from the butcher, as he saw other boys do when they were with their parents. “No, Hector,” she would say. The butcher stood by, hands folded respectfully into his apron. “How do we know what they use to stuff those things? Wait till we get home where we grind our own.” It was the same with lady fingers at the bakery. “Dont you know they make those things with the leavings?” And the baker, too, would be standing beside her, listening. Though the tradesmen never allowed it to show as long as she faced them, whenever Mrs Wingate turned her back, even for an instant, Hector saw that they looked at her with cold hostility in their eyes. It lasted only as long as her back was turned. As soon as she faced them again the look was gone, replaced by one of deference and even solicitude. They were afraid of her; they hated her but they were afraid of her. Hector saw that and it made him proud that she was his grandmother. It was almost worth the loss of the wieners and lady fingers which went to other boys and which, after a first time, neither the butcher nor the baker ever offered him again.

There was a period every afternoon when he had time to think of all these things, an hour after dinner — the midday meal — when everyone went to take a nap, each to his own room. Hector would lie in bed in his underwear, thinking about ‘life’ and the world outside. If a thing occurred in the
morning he would watch without deduction, saving all analysis for naptime; ‘I’ll think about that this afternoon,’ he would tell himself, watching and storing impressions. Sometimes he invented stories, modeling them on the ones his nurse had told him, except that where she had made herself the princess in distress, he saw the events from the position of the hero with the sword. In time he even learned to look with the eyes of the dragon, who after all had his side too, and that was better yet.

Sunshine, beating against the outer wall, was strained through the shades, lending the bedroom a false, thin-gold twilight. The only sounds were the buzzing of flies and the muffled breathing where Emma lay on her pallet with the quilt drawn over her face in even the hottest weather. Her feet stuck out at the bottom, black on top but with soles as pale as his own; the long toes stood apart like fingers on a hand, ready to grab, and the nails were crusted yellow-gray, like little oyster shells. When he lay there that way, awake when everyone else was asleep, it was like living a secret life that no one shared.

He had never been really alone, out of arm’s reach of someone assigned to watch. But now — cautiously, lest Emma stir and wake and catch him — he began to slip out of the room, to move about the upstairs hall while everyone else lay profoundly relaxed in sleep. They slept with their doors ajar for coolness: he could see them. His mother, her hair spread fanwise on the pillow, lay flat on her back with her arms flung akimbo, as if she had fallen out of the sky. Sometimes she talked in her sleep, a fitful murmur that could not be deciphered though Hector thought it was probably addressed to her husband and her mother, the quarrel continuing through sleep. His grandmother, sleeping with her face toward the door, on guard like a good soldier even in slumber, clasped both hands to her chest in an attitude of prayer that made her resemble a tombstone angel tipped sideways off its pedestal. She wore a nightcap frilled with lace, the drawstring tied at the nape of her neck, and in sleep she still held her mouth twisted bitterly to hide the gap left by the missing
tooth. Hector stood in the hall, opposite first one doorway and then another, looking at the sleepers. This way he was not only living a secret life, he might indeed have been the only person left alive on earth — a small figure, barefoot, wearing knit one-piece drawers-and-shirt with a slash in the seat and a row of bow-knots down the front because Mrs Wingate believed that buttons were uncomfortable and should never be used on underwear. His light brown hair, which caught the glimmer from the windows at the end of the hall, was cut Dutch fashion with bangs across the front, the sides clipped squarely along the line of his jaw. His nose was snub; he had it from his father. His eyes were blue-green, or rather, chameleonlike, depending on the color of his clothes, they seemed to change from blue to green and back to blue again. They bulged and glistened. This, taken in conjunction with the damp, slightly gaping mouth, gave his face a somewhat imbecile look when he was thinking, though at other times it had a small-boy sweetness. His voice was high and reedy, like Mrs Wingate’s.

At the rear of the hall, to the right of the staircase, there was a door he had never seen anyone use. He wondered about it; it was like a door in a fairy tale, enchanted and forbidden. Then one day he tried the knob and it turned with a dry click. The door came open. Unlike any other he had ever seen, however, this door did not open into a room; it gave directly upon a flight of stairs, the first step flush with the sill and the others leading steeply toward a high dim dusty rectangle of light. He stood there, looking. Then, since naptime was nearly over, he went back to bed and lay thinking about it until Emma roused and got him dressed for their afternoon walk. He did not mention his discovery. This was one thing he would keep to himself.

Next day, as soon as Emma was breathing in muffled groans beneath the quilt, Hector went directly to the door and opened it. He stood holding the door ajar and looking up the dusty flight of stairs, gathering courage. Sunbeams filled with dust-motes slated the rectangle. It was like looking up out of a well.
The stairs were steep; he took them a step at a time, pausing with both feet on each step as if waiting for the echo of his footfall. When his head came through the opening, on a level with the floor of the attic, what he saw was like nothing he had ever seen before. The place was cluttered with discarded furniture, broken or outmoded, stacked aimlessly among trunks of wornout clothes. He saw cracked mirrors, a row of damaged chamberpots, and other things he could not identify, including a canvas fencing jacket with a heart sewed on the left breast and a screen-wire mask like an empty face. This was the overflow of half a century; no Wingate ever threw anything away; the conglomerate litter included articles the first Hector had brought from Ohio fifty years ago, ten years before the house itself was built. Dust was everywhere, velvet underfoot, coating everything with its soft insistence, mouse-gray in the shadows but gleaming like old silver where sunlight struck it. On the opposite wall, suspended from nails by their collars, his dead great-uncles’ army uniforms dangled side by side like hanged men. Their buttons (CSA) were tarnished, and so were the gold-braid bars and loops at the collars and cuffs and the two swords leaning against the wall beside two pairs of boots with their tops flopped over.

When he had lain in bed, thinking, it had been like living a secret life, and that was good. Then when he had roamed the upper hall, looking at the sleepers on their beds, it had been like being the last person left alive on earth, and that was better. But now in the attic, barefoot in the velvet dust, it was as if no one had ever lived at all, or if they had lived they had not merely died, they had been abolished, abrogated; and that was best. He had a world all his own, like a polar explorer on a wide cold waste no man had ever seen before or a balloonist alone in the high far ether with nothing but clouds below. If he had had any notion of what he intended to do up here, it was forgotten. He only stood and looked at the clutter, at the overhead beams and rafters crisscrossed with sunbeams lanced from the front and rear mansard windows and the louvers set into the gables at each end. When the time
was up he went back down and lay in bed waiting for Emma to waken.

“Look here, boy,” she said when she came to rouse him. “How you git the bottoms of yo feet so potty black?”

But he would not tell her. “Maybe it was Dobby Hicks,” he said, his face innocent. The attic was his hideaway, his secret kingdom, and he refused to share it with anyone. Returning from their walk an hour later, he would look up at the high windows, rose-colored in the sunset, and think how what was behind them was his and no one else’s, a secret place that no one knew about.

There was more to life than this, however. There was Bristol as he saw it when he sat beside his grandmother in the carriage and Emma balanced the parasol over their heads. Bristol had come a long way since the days when flatboatmen swaggered down the stageplanks with blood in their eyes, heading for the grogshops and calling for the bully of the town. Two main streets ran eastward from the levee almost half a mile to the depot, intersecting the railroad at a point where, coming from the north, it bent west in a long curve, its parallel silver threads describing an arc subtending the town, bounding it on the east and south as abruptly as if the ramp had been another levee or a fortified wall in the Middle Ages. Outside the ramped, twin-thread arc lay cottonfields and random cuts of timber; within it, shops and hostelries, saloons and one-story false-front offices were clustered near the river; the rest was residential. The streets were lined with trees, live oaks older than the town, whose overarching branches touched from opposite curbs to form a tunnel, cottonwoods that filled the air with fluff, black-trunked magnolias with blooms like exploding stars and boat-shaped leaves with waxy tops and fuzzy undersides, chinaberries with delicate lavender flowers and later with fruit that fermented in the sunlight and made the robins so drunk they tumbled to the ground and were gathered in sacks and baskets, themselves like fruit, to be cooked into pies. Hector saw these and others whose names his grandmother taught him, sycamores
with shaggy bark that peeled of its own accord to show an underskin as smooth and white and shapely as the naked arms of women, pecan and walnut and hickory, the wisest three, which never put out their tender shoots till spring had come to stay, silver-leaf maples and weeping willows and poplars that shivered in the slightest breeze, redbuds whose limbs were sheathed with purple flame like the bush Moses saw burning in the Bible. This had all been forest before the white men came, and even today whoever grew up in Bristol grew up in their shade, breathing the springtime perfume of their blossoms. The days were sleepy and quiet for those who moved along the leafy tunnels, but even Hector, detached as he was, could sense the teem of life below the surface.