Love and Lament (16 page)

CHRISTMAS CAME AND
the family was back together again for one brief week. Siler cut down a cedar in the woods south of town, and they decorated it with strings of cranberries and popcorn, chains of paper angels, and candles on wire fasteners, with paper doilies to catch the drips. When the candles were lit, Mary Bet was in charge of making sure the tree didn’t catch fire.

Siler told them that he had a special friend, a girl from Wilmington whose father was in the railroad business. He seemed more outgoing, less brooding than before, but Mary Bet could never seem to find him alone to talk as they used to. He had started smoking cigarettes, and he came in late at night and stumbled up the stairs—no one knew where he’d been or what he’d been doing.

Myrt was faring well with her students up in the mountains—she was also playing piano in the Baptist church out there, volunteering twice a week at the colored school, and had joined the Women’s Auxiliary Charitable Committee which put her in charge of distributing food and clothing to the needy families of Watauga County. “And there are a lot of needy families, I can tell you,” she said, her eyes popping wide.

Just when they had begun to seem more like family than visitors, it was time for them to leave, and Mary Bet and Cicero were alone again in a house that seemed even emptier than before. Another term at school went by, Mary Bet going to the four-month public school, then switching in the spring to the Thomas Academy. She had just turned fourteen when they got an important letter from Boone. Myrt wrote to say that she was doing well, and that she had made a good friend at church and they went on long walks together, sometimes taking a picnic up to a waterfall with gentlemen friends. She had decided to stay on for most of the summer because of her church job, but would be home for all of August. “P.S. I got kicked milking the cow here at Mrs. Henderson’s. It cut my leg pretty badly, but the doctor says I’ll be fine in no time.”

Her letter the next week began by saying that her leg was better but that she felt stiff and sore, “especially in my neck. I hope I’m not coming down with the flu.” Four days later another letter arrived: “Dear Daddy and Mary Bet, I hate to have to tell you this, but my condition has not improved. I’m stiff all over. I can’t chew good, so I have to drink soup through a straw. The doctor here said it could be lockjaw and that I should write you to come up, if you can. I’m feeling out of sorts and I hate to bother you. I don’t think it’s serious, but I am rather blue and my arms are awful sore and they’ve begun twitching and my neck is worse, like my collar is too tight, even when I’m not wearing one. Please pray for me and come if you can. The weather here is real nice. Mrs. Henderson brought me a
bouquet of daylilies to cheer me up. I’m too tired to write more. Love, Myrt.”

Mary Bet wanted to travel up to the mountains with her father, but he told her she should stay at home and take care of the animals. She said, “I’m not afraid of seeing Myrt, Daddy. I’d a sight rather see her like that than in a box.”

Cicero looked at his youngest child, nearly a young woman now, and he could not bear to see her unhappy. She had never ridden on a train, nor been anywhere beyond Raleigh—to see the Reverend Billy Sunday preaching on the sins of pride and anger—and he supposed he had neglected to attend to her broader education. He prided himself on being fair-minded.

They were waiting at the depot at sunrise when the telegram came from Boone: “Mr. R. C. Hartsoe, Hartsoe City, N.C., I regret to tell you your daughter Myrtle Emma died this morning at 3:30. Please advise us your wishes in regards to arrangements. Yours in sympathy, Mrs. Eulalia Henderson.”

Cicero stood in the station agent’s office, staring at the cruel little device that had received this coded message and the typewriter upon which the agent had written it. The agent, a short man with a bristly mustache, said he hated getting messages like that. Cicero nodded and said, “I thank you. It’s my cross to bear, and I don’t complain.” He went out, the telegram dangling from his hand, looking up and down the platform and seeing nothing.

“Daddy, I’m right here,” Mary Bet said, waving. “What are you looking for?” She saw the distance in his eyes, the piece of paper he was holding, and she knew.

He looked so small and lost in his hopeful blue seersucker suit and boater—they were supposed to be on an errand of mercy, of cheering-up. He came and put his arms around her, holding her for what seemed could never be long enough. She buried her face in the warm, cigar smell of his jacket, gripping his wide middle, the
end of his gray beard entangling with her dark hair, and the world ceased and there was no sound but her breathing. The pain she felt was for him—there would be time later for her own private pain.

She glanced at the
WESTERN UNION
headline, an epitaph to the typing below. “Will we go to get her?” she asked.

He shook his head and said, “I don’t know. What should we do?” He looked around. Presently, people began coming over and shaking his hand and telling him how sorry they were, and they said the same to Mary Bet: “I just can’t believe the tragedy yall’ve endured,” one lady said. “The Lord must need your people something terrible.” Another, older lady said Myrtle Emma was an angel who was too perfect to stay in this world for long. But most just said they were shocked and sorry, and a few of them kept standing there as though protecting Mary Bet and her father from the grief that was stalking them.

“I think we should send a telegram back,” Mary Bet told her father.

Alson Thomas, the same who had played cards with her grandfather, happened to be standing there and agreed. “I’ll send it,” he offered. “Shall I tell them you’re on the way?”

Mary Bet looked up at her father, but he stood mute and immovable, a breeze lifting the ends of his sparse hair and beard. “Yes,” she said, “the train’s due any minute. Could you tell Mrs. Henderson we’ll be there by suppertime, as we’d planned?” She took the telegram from her father and handed it to Mr. Thomas. He glanced at Cicero for confirmation, and then came the rumbling of the train from far down the track, tremoring up from the ground into the concrete platform. And Mary Bet heard the rattling of the wheels and the huffing of the steam before the engine came into view.

“Daddy?” she said, tugging at his hand. “Mr. Thomas is going to telegram we’re on our way.” Two whistle blasts tore the air, and the
huff-
chug
-huff-
chug began to slow as the engine showed itself
at the end of the track, its plume of steam and coal smoke trailing. She suddenly did not want to go, did not want to ride the train as if it were a hearse. The harsh smell of burned coal filled the air and she said, “Daddy, I don’t want to go off up to the mountains. Let’s stay here.”

“I’ll wire them up there if you want,” Mr. Thomas offered. “Make arrangements to have her sent home.” He stood there in his old Confederate slouch hat and farmer’s worn boots, looking from Mary Bet to her father. He and Cicero were fast becoming the old generation; the new world with its factory towers and whistle blasts and telephone wires was wiping away the old-timers’ world. The war had once been their common bond and brotherhood, and now, a generation later, it didn’t so much matter—what mattered was how good you were at spotting an opportunity and taking advantage of it. The newcomers seemed to be the ones making the money in Haw County, while men like Cicero and Alson—one in the town, the other in the country—saw their day slipping past, no longer heralded nor much regarded.

“What say you, R.C.?” Alson asked, a sympathetic smile creasing his sun-leathered face.

Cicero took hold of Alson’s hand and shook it. “Much obliged,” he said. “I don’t seem able to think clearly.” He’d once looked down on these farmers his father-in-law had gambled with in his declining years, yet he saw now that Murchison as a drunk was no different from himself—furious about the railroad and the change of fortune it brought. How was Captain Billie any different from men like himself who thought the new stores and hotels and mills were too much too fast? Hadn’t he himself just this week cursed a buggy driver for nearly running him down, and he didn’t even know whom he was cursing? He felt his daughter pulling him along the crowd gathering for the morning train. But he and Mary Bet were going the opposite direction, following Alson Thomas to
the station agent’s office. He helped Alson compose the message, paid the agent, then shook Alson’s hand again, and he and his only daughter took a hired buggy back home. “I think if I didn’t have your hand to hold on to,” he said, then stopped himself. They rode on in silence.

“It’s all right, Daddy,” Mary Bet said. There would be time later for crying. She pictured the mountains and how beautiful they must be this time of year. From Myrt’s letters she knew they rolled like giant blue waves off into the sunrise and the sunset, and that there were pink and white dogwoods in bloom and mountain laurel. She had a favorite picnic spot “with a tumbling waterfall and a symphony of soft colors and the mountains all behind like the voice of God.” Myrt had a way with words, and someday, Mary Bet told herself, she’d see what her sister had been talking about.

They got halfway home before Mary Bet said, “Daddy, shouldn’t we wire Siler’s school and let him know?” So back they went to the depot, her father still clutching her hand.

Then they were headed home again, and morning sunlight was flickering through the trees and the smells of breakfast made Mary Bet’s stomach rumble. They’d had a cold breakfast before they left the house at dark earlier in the morning, thinking they’d get something hot on the train. That was when they still had Myrt. But hadn’t they known all along? By then, of course, Myrt was already dead. Mary Bet wanted to tell her father this, but he was sitting quietly beside her, no longer holding her hand, lost in his own thoughts as the buggy jostled down the muddied ruts of the Raleigh Road.

He said, “I’ve tried to live an honest life, and yet I’ve made my bed in the darkness. I’ve—” He stopped talking and looked at his daughter. “Myrtle Emma was—she was the most considerate child I’ve ever seen. She never thought of herself, only of how she could help other people. I didn’t have anything to do with that—that’s just
how she was. God didn’t have any need for her in heaven. I’m sorry if that’s a blasphemy, but it’s what I believe.” They rolled past the old Murchison house, still prominent among the newer dwellings.

“She took care of me when I was sick,” Mary Bet said, picturing her sister getting in the bed with her when she had chills. Cicero nodded, but he seemed preoccupied by his quarrel with God.

“What an utter waste,” he said. “What was the point of all her reading and practicing?” The carriage wheels rolled on. “Life’s hard, Mary Bet. You either work hard, or you feel guilty for not. There’s no real rest. Until the end.”

“And then we rest in heaven.”

Cicero shook his head. “I don’t know. I think maybe our cells just decompose, and that’s it.”

“Don’t say that, Daddy. Of course there’s a heaven. And everybody’ll be there, and it’ll be nice.”

“Don’t be a fool!” he snapped.

They rode the rest of the way in silence. But when the driver pulled the buggy up at their gate, Cicero said, his voice catching, “I’m a fool, baby girl. The biggest of all.”

“No, Daddy,” she said. And she helped him down and paid the driver, and they went back inside.

CHAPTER 10

1901–1902

M
ARY BET
’
S MOTHER
had not been much on jewelry, or finery of any sort. There were a half dozen pieces worth something, most of them inherited from her own mother. She’d left them all to Myrtle Emma, her oldest surviving daughter. O’Nora hadn’t cared, or at least said she hadn’t. It had seemed thoughtless to Mary Bet that her mother’s last will would give Myrtle Emma the jewels, O’Nora the monogrammed silver, and Mary Bet the family Bible, as though she’d decided that Myrtle was the beauty, O’Nora the ambitious one, and Mary Bet (nine at the time) the keeper of family history. She’d said nothing about her clothes or anything else, and O’Nora—her mother’s same size—had helped herself to a few dresses.