New Mercies (23 page)

“Oh, this rapscallion would climb a tree to make a dishonest dollar, even if there was a twenty-dollar gold piece lying right on the ground,” the nephew said.

Holland grinned and reached across the table for my hand. Surprised at the gesture, I brushed the crumbs off my fingers and shook his hand and told him I was pleased to meet him—and unlikely to require his services, as I had perfect confidence in Mr. Sam’s.

“You may change your mind if you want an attorney familiar with any laws passed since the War of the Rebellion—you know, the war that was won by the Yankees.” He winked at me, then said, “I must watch myself, or these jaspers will lynch me late some evening.”

“Why sir, we do not do such things in the dark of night,” said Wash, looking offended. “But we may do it in the daylight.”

Mr. Sam told Holland that we had been talking about Magdalene Lott.

“The goat lady,” Holland said.

“No, Magdalene Lott lived next door to the goat lady,” I said, correcting him. “Amalia Bondurant was the goat lady. My aunt.”

Holland reddened. “I beg your pardon. I am only recently arrived from Chicago and not used to the country ways in Natchez.” I noticed then that he was wearing a lightweight wool suit instead of a seersucker or linen one.

“Country,” scoffed Mr. Sam. “As you can see, Miss Nora, my colleague lacks the breeding of a real Natchezian. But then we do not expect much of carpetbaggers.”

Holland explained to me that his people had been one of the first families of Natchez but had lost their fortune after the war. “So my grandparents took my father to Illinois when he was a good-size child.”

“And we had hopes this son”—Mr. Sam nodded at Holland—“would be as fine a man as the father was a boy. But in that, we were sadly disappointed.”

Wash leaned across the table to me and said that Holland had come back to claim the family estate.

“And we didn’t even have goats,” said Holland. “Seven chimney spires and a cistern were all that was left of Holland Hall. I have had to sink so low as to practice the law.” This appeared to be oft-repeated bantering. He waved to the waiter and asked for a dish of oatmeal and toast. “None of your beaten biscuits. Up north, we confuse them with sawdust. Both burn.” He turned to me. “God Himself wouldn’t eat them.”

Holland spotted the biscuits in front of my plate then and glanced up at me with an apologetic look. Mr. Sam picked up the basket and said, “Why, Holland, here’s you your order of crow.”

The biscuits made the rounds again, and the old doctor took
one, covered it with jam, and popped it into his mouth. He chewed and swallowed, and then as if he had not been interrupted at all, he continued the conversation of a few minutes earlier. “Bayard very plainly told me after Miss Amalia rejected him that he would get even with her, and I expect in the end he did.”

“More than fifty years later?” I asked.

“Oh, here time means nothing,” Holland said.

“At the rates you charge for your services, I would say that’s not worth denying,” Mr. Sam told him.

I ventured that Bayard Lott sounded like an awful person.

“Oh, when Bayard was in bad temper, he was as mean as Miss Amalia was good, some say the meanest man the sun ever shone on. He cuffed Miss Maggie around, whipped her bloody as a pig,” the doctor said, forgetting he had asked us not to speak of her. The table was very still, and he added quickly, “As a figure of speaking, that is.”

“Miss Amalia told me that Miss Magdalene was not born for luck,” Mr. Sam said.

“We weren’t none of us born for luck,” the nephew said, standing up and bowing to me. “The rest of you can talk forevermore, but those of us who have had to make our own luck must put in our day’s work.”

“In their daddy’s bank,” Mr. Sam said in a loud whisper.

The nephew pulled his elbows to his sides and looked hurt. He said petulantly, “Listen at him. You’d think
he’d
made his own way in the world.”

As the conversation deteriorated, the men pushed back their chairs and stood up, taking the napkins from their shirts and
wiping their mouths. One by one, they bowed to me and excused themselves.

“Come along, Doctor. Let’s not drag out our leaving,” Wash said.

The doctor wobbled a little as he took his first step. “They’re expecting me in the barbershop for a shave and a shoe shine. I still keep my schedule, although I’m no better than a cracked plate.” He took Wash’s arm, and the two left the room, the doctor’s cane tapping on the hard floor as he went along.

“He’s as slow as a terrapin crawling in the shade, but he gets there,” Mr. Sam said when only he, Holland, and I were left.

“Your aunt Amalia, was she born for luck?” Holland asked. The waiter had brought Holland’s breakfast. He sprinkled brown sugar over his oatmeal and covered it with cream, but he left the toast unbuttered.

“She was richer than I’d thought.” I caught Mr. Sam’s stern look and added, “That is, if she counted her riches in something besides money. It appears she was a contented woman. She took what was offered her, which was not much in these last years, and she made do.”

“Take tarts when tarts are passing,” Mr. Sam said.

“What’s that?” asked Holland.

“Miss Amalia’s mother used to say that. You take you your happiness where it’s found, and you got to recognize it when it’s passing by. Now, that’s not worth denying.”

“ ‘Take tarts when tarts are passing,’ ” Holland repeated. “I should not have had them pan up the oatmeal.”

“My boy, my boy,” Mr. Sam said. “You won’t find tarts at the Eola.”

__________

Promising not to go poking about Avoca again without him, I made an appointment with Mr. Sam for midafternoon. Then both men rose as I walked out of the room.

Pickett, dressed in a summer frock the color of dark blue plums, was standing just outside the door to the dining room, and I found myself glad to see her. I would repeat the breakfast table conversation to her.

“What’s news?” she asked.

“Men are worse gossips than women, and they don’t know it.”

“That’s not news, but I love you for saying it.” Picket glanced into the dining room and added, “You must be a suffragette or something. They’d never allow me to sit at their table.”

“They wouldn’t allow me, either, if I hadn’t just done it. They were too polite to turn me away.”

“That’s the ticket. Any fine day now the people of Natchez will march into the twentieth century—behind you and Holland Brown. I see you did not need me—or Odalie—to introduce you.” Pickett raised an eyebrow, which I ignored, but that did not stop her. “If you are interested, Holland is an uptown man, and he is eligible, of course. Mr. Sam says he’s divorced and came to Natchez for a fresh start. It has to be the first time since Between the States that anybody’s done that.”

I told her I wasn’t interested in meeting anyone.

“We’ve already put you on the spot about men,” she said, then changed the subject. “I’ll be just frank. I apologize for Odalie. She has the nerve of a brass monkey and the ignorance of an egg. If I had known she’d be so odious to you, I’d not have
invited her. She ought to be in the booby hatch, although there’s no law against being nasty.”

“Odalie didn’t mean to be rude,” I said.

“Oh, she meant it entirely. I purely blame myself for inflicting her on you.”

“Well, don’t.” I changed the subject again and told Pickett I’d spent the day before at Avoca.

“So I have heard.”

“Nothing goes unobserved here. You probably know I had dinner at a drugstore last night, too—a peanut butter sandwich and something called ‘a New Orleans eggnog.’ It’s not bad.”

Pickett frowned. “Why would you eat there?”

“You’ll probably hear about that, too.”

She shrugged and told me she had come to give me a tour of Natchez. Pickett gestured at a smart Essex Terraplane convertible parked in front of the hotel, then asked if I had sandals and a hat.

I went to my room to change shoes and grab the braided hat from Natchez Under-the-Hill, then returned to the lobby, where Pickett was waiting with Mr. Sam. “We were talking about you,” Pickett admitted. “Mr. Sam says you met Magdalene Lott at Avoca. I hope you were careful, because you’d not hardly be safe alone with her.”

I replied that Magdalene seemed harmless.

“The most lethal women in the South seem harmless enough.” She winked at me. “I do not include myself—or you.” She made it sound as if we were coconspirators.

Ezra was there, I told her.

“Poor Ezra. Lord, I wonder what will become of him and Aunt Polly.”

There was an edge to Pickett’s voice, as if she were asking a question, not just wondering out loud. So I said, “They won’t be put off the place.”

“Of course not. But we do worry about our people. Northerners don’t always understand our ways.” Pickett thought for a moment and then asked, “Does that mean you’re staying on in Natchez?”

“No. It just means I won’t kick two old people off the place.”

“You see, I told you she is becoming a Natchez girl,” Mr. Sam said.

Pickett kissed him on the cheek and told him, “I intend to show Nora about Natchez, or what’s left of it, at any rate.”

“It would be my joy to accompany you. I must needs be at my work, of course, but perhaps . . . ,” Mr. Sam said by way of inviting himself along.

Pickett ignored the hint. “What a pity. Another time.” She took my elbow. “So long, darling Mr. Sam.” She steered me outside, and when we reached the curb, she said, “He very plainly wants to go. I hope you won’t mind if we don’t include him. Men can be so tiresome, you know—almost as tiresome as women.”

I laughed, thinking how pleasant it was going about with a girlfriend. “To tell you the truth, I’ve had enough of men for one morning, although Mr. Sam is awfully nice. There’s no Mrs. Sam, is there?”

After we got into the car, Pickett leaned over and confided, “Oh my word, no! He lives alone by himself. Mr. Sam is—how shall I say this?—our Oscar Wilde. Or to put it a vulgar way, he’s
a sissy. He prefers men. That’s not worth denying, as he himself would say. Do you know what I mean?”

I did and felt a need to change the subject. “The houses I’ve seen here are grand. Can we go inside any of them?”

“Only in the spring, during Pilgrimage, when we open our doors to the public. The Buzzard’s Nest is one of them. There’s a fee, of course.” Pickett started the car and pulled into the street. She yoo-hooed at someone and waved as she braked for a touring car that had run a stop sign and pulled into the street in front of us.

“Where does the money go?”

“What money?” She concentrated on the big car as the elderly driver ground his gears and straddled the center line. When he reached the end of Main Street, he crooked his left arm to indicate he was turning right, but instead he made a sharp left turn. “Is it any wonder we lost the War?” Pickett asked as she shook her head at the man’s maneuver. “You were saying?”

“The money you raise from your Pilgrimage. What worthy cause does it support?”

“Oh, us, of course.” She stopped in the middle of the street. “Now, this house is Rosalee. The Yankees took it over for their headquarters during the War. Two old sisters live here now.”

“On what?” The brick mansion with its four columns and long porches needed paint, and the gardens were in ruins.

“These old ladies discreetly dispose of a few antiques, I suppose. If you want to sell Miss Amalia’s furniture, I know someone who would buy.”

“Who?”

“Me.”

“I haven’t decided what to do with it.”

“Oh, I intend to pay you a good price. I’m not asking for a bargain.”

“I didn’t mean—”

Pickett waved her hand. “There’s no need for you to give it away. There is a market for it. Besides, I would love to see inside Avoca.” She glanced at me. “That’s not a hint. It’s a request.”

I told her she was welcome to tour it with Mr. Sam and me.

Pickett pointed out Longwood, a curious eight-sided brick house with a balloonlike cupola, then drove me past great southern mansions named Magnolia Hall, Dunleith, D’Evereux, Auburn, Gloucester. She recited so many dates and occupants that by the time we were finished, the information had all run together in my mind. I would never remember which house was once a tavern or left to a nephew of the owner on the condition he take the uncle’s name.

“I wanted you to see what Avoca would have been like in its day. It was every bit as grand as any of these houses,” Pickett said. “What a pity it is gone.”

“Not completely.”

“Oh, but you couldn’t restore it.”

“No, it’s out of the question. If I sold everything in the house, there wouldn’t be enough to put on a new roof, and a roof is only the start. There’s nothing to do but let it crumble.”

“You wouldn’t be the first heir to do that,” she said. “Would you like to see Miss Amalia’s grave?”

I was embarrassed that I hadn’t even thought about visiting the cemetery.

Pickett drove north out of town on a dirt road lacy with shadows from live oaks. We passed two boys with fishing poles and a black man who was barely visible in the deep shadows of the woods, then turned into a large cemetery. In contrast to Natchez and its mansions, the cemetery was plain, with simple tombstones and only a few monuments.

Pickett turned down a narrow lane and stopped beside a plot enclosed by a low cast-iron fence. Inside were small white marble stones and an enormous rosebush. “That’s a Souvenir de la Malmaison,” Pickett said as we got out of the car. “The roses are as big as coffee cups. The bush came from Avoca in Miss Emilie’s time.”

Miss Emilie’s and Captain Bondurant’s names were engraved on stones at the heads of graves, and there were markers with the names of other Bondurants, the dates going back to the eighteenth century. I would have to ask Mr. Sam about these relatives of mine. No tombstone identified the newest grave; I would order one before I left Natchez.

“No matter what we do in life, it all comes down to your name on a rock,” Pickett said.

“Dust to dust.”

“I should like to think I would make pretty dust.” Pickett shaded her eyes and looked out across the cemetery, then waved to a black man who was standing near an open grave. “You come and get you your Nu-Grape, Jake,” she called, then told me, “He is a favorite of mine.”