New Mercies (3 page)

Unpacking my suitcase, I hung up the few clothes I’d brought with me, then took off my suit, brushed it, and put it on a hanger. I rolled down my ruined stockings and threw them into the wastepaper basket, then massaged my thighs where the garters had left a ring. Next, I sudsed out my undies in the bathroom sink. I put on the soiled white gloves and washed them with a bar of soap, as if washing my hands. At last, I ran a bath and soaked in it until I was almost asleep. Toweling myself off,
I took a thin nightgown from a silk bag and put it on, turned down the bed, and slipped between the sheets, the damp air in the room pressing down on me like a quilt.

To my surprise, I slept until eight o’clock the next morning, which was not so late, only seven at home, but it was the first time in many weeks that I had awakened feeling rested and almost peaceful, instead of weighted down with failure and guilt. But the demons that were my constant companions would return as the day wore on, intruding when least expected. In the past, they had come at unguarded moments, when I was admiring a hat in the window of Gano-Downs on Sixteenth Street and one evening as I walked past the Shirley-Savoy Hotel and heard a dance orchestra play “They Didn’t Believe Me.” That had been our song. Another time, I was looking out at the park from my apartment window, and the sense of remorse was so engulfing that it almost took away my breath. Perhaps being away from Denver, even on this strange mission to settle the estate of a crazy old lady, would give me a respite. I doubted it, however.

I leaned out the hotel window and looked toward the river. A white man across the street, his foot on a shoe-shine box, talked loudly to the Negro who was using a rag to apply polish to the man’s shoe. The slap of the rag punctuated the words, and a breeze carried the smell of the polish to my room. The air smelled of rain, but maybe that was just the everyday humidity in Mississippi. Rain in Natchez probably did not clear up the air, just added to the oppressiveness. I would look for a drugstore to purchase talcum powder, although it probably would not help
much in keeping me dry. I bathed again, dressed, and put cologne on my wrists and the tips of my ears, stopping to view my short dark hair in the mirror over the bathroom sink. The dampness made it kinky, so instead of combing it into its usual straight, cropped look, I tried squeezing it into curls, rather liking the effect. The waves softened my too-large brown eyes and rounded my face, which was long. The rest of me was too long, as well—too tall, too thin. I had become even thinner in the months since my divorce and then David’s death.

Although it was still the coolness of the morning, the air was oppressive, stifling me in my wool suit. But there was nothing else to wear, since I had wanted to look businesslike for the meeting with the lawyer. Thinking the trip would be no more than a day or two, I had traveled light, bringing only an overnight case and a suitcase, which contained a second suit, two blouses, and a severe black wool dress, proper for a funeral, for surely there would be a service. Staying on in Natchez would require me to shop for something more suitable to wear in this heat. I considered the hat from the day before, a navy blue cloche that matched the suit, but the idea of the wool close around my face was too much, and I left it behind. Besides, the hat would smash my newly discovered curly hair.

Whether my outfit was proper for breakfast was unclear, since I was the only woman in the dining room. There was a hush when I walked into the coffee shop, either because I was a woman or because the word had gotten around that I was the goat lady’s niece. Instead of taking a stool at the counter, where someone might start a conversation, I asked for a table. But no sooner had I been seated and given the menu than a man dressed in rumpled
white linen pants and white shirt, carrying a wrinkled seersucker jacket, got up from one of the tables, where he was breakfasting with several other men in crumpled clothing, and approached me. Did women in Natchez iron?

“Miss Nora Bondurant?” He had blond hair that was almost white and a mustache of the same color, and he held a white Panama hat in one hand. His face was pink, either from the heat or his age, which appeared to be in the mid-sixties.

I raised an eyebrow. For all I knew, he was selling cemetery plots, and perhaps I needed to purchase one. “What is it?” I chided myself for being so prickly. It seemed as if the least little thing offended me these days.

The man ignored my disdainful manner and pulled out a chair. “Of course you are. The hotel sent word you’d got here. I hope your trip was a pleasant one. I am Samuel Satterfield.” He pronounced his first name “Sam’l.”

“Oh, of course, Mr. Satterfield.” I held out my hand. He took the tips of my fingers and pressed them lightly, and I reminded myself not to offer my hand again to a southern man.

“You go ahead and order you your breakfast.” Mr. Satterfield sat down. “I hope there is something that satisfies. We Natchezians pride ourselves on our hospitality and our food. It’s mighty good, I can tell you.”

It was also mighty heavy. The menu included biscuits and gravy, hotcakes and ham, scrambled eggs and brains, and squab—squab for breakfast? I ordered a bowl of Shredded Wheat and coffee. Mr. Satterfield, who had left an unfinished breakfast behind, told the waiter, “Boy, you bring me another plate of ham and eggs, eggs over easy now, not too hard. And the lady’ll want
a basket of beaten biscuits. I expect she’ll like them.” After the waiter left, Mr. Satterfield raised his eyes to the ceiling and said, “That bakery way upstairs, they beat the dough with a rolling pin till it blisters, beat it thirty, forty, fifty minutes. That’s your beaten biscuit, and you can’t find it nowhere better, South or North, than at the Eola.”

I didn’t argue. Nobody I knew in the North would spend the better part of an hour pounding biscuit dough.

The waiter poured coffee for us, and Mr. Satterfield added a generous amount of cream and sugar to his, then stirred the liquid and took a sip, holding the cup by the bowl instead of the handle. He added more sugar and sipped again, satisfied. “I had coffee in one of your Yankee cities, and it tasted like Borax. They brought it to me in a mug. No saucer, no place to set your spoon, excepting the tablecloth.” He shook his head at such a breach of good manners. “You’ll like our coffee.”

I tried mine, and I did.

“There’s talk you went out to Avoca last night.” He chuckled. “Lordy, Miss Nora! I apprise you it’s no place for a young lady in the daytime, and purely dangerous after dark, with all those trees and bushes. It bears down on a person some days. You could have broke your neck on that porch, or maybe stepped on a nail and got yourself a good case of the lockjaw.” He gave me a chiding look, as if I were a child.

“From your telegram, I’d assumed I would stay there.”

“You did?” His face fell. “Then I most certainly did you a wrong. I ask you to excuse it. If I’d known you were arriving yesterday, I would have made arrangements myself for you to stay here at the hotel. I am delighted you found it on your own.
The Eola’s a real nice place, rightly priced. I see they gave you the rate for a traveling man.”

This did not seem much of a town for secrets. He probably knew I’d thrown away my stockings, too.

When the waiter set down our breakfasts, Mr. Satterfield passed me the basket of biscuits, which were the size of silver dollars. “Here’s you your beaten biscuit. Taste it and tell me if you’ve never had better.”

After chewing the biscuit, which tasted like a thick cracker, I admitted that I hadn’t tasted better, because I’d never tasted beaten biscuits before—and hoped never to again. Uneeda, the cracker company, didn’t have to worry about southern competition.

Mr. Satterfield looked at my meager breakfast and shook his head but didn’t comment. Instead, he poured syrup on his ham and eggs and on top of a white mass that he told me was grits, then began to eat. “The will is dull business, and we can commence to discuss the particulars at my office. Right now, you and me ought to get acquainted.”

“You knew my aunt.”

“Oh my, yes. A lovely lady. Tragic end. Just tragic.” He pursed his lips together. “I blame myself for not seeing this coming.”

“Were you friends?”

He considered the question while he cut into an egg and let the yoke spread into the grits. “All the old families in Natchez are friends. Breeding wouldn’t let ’em be otherwise.”

“Even if they lived with goats.”

“Ma’am?” Mr. Satterfield jerked up his head and looked at me, decided that was a joke, and laughed. “Miss Nora, we have our
peculiarities here in Natchez. And Miss Amalia had as many as anyone, more than most, I’d say. We tried to help her. That’s the truth. But she was mighty proud, wouldn’t allow anybody about the place except for Ezra and Aunt Polly. They did for her, but at the end, they did not do a very good job of it. Course, it wasn’t their fault. Course it wasn’t. They thought Miss Amalia could protect herself. Many’s the time she run off somebody with a shotgun. She knew how to use it, yes. She could shoot like a man, ride like one, too, once upon a time.” He shook his head. “She wasn’t always queer, mind you. Why, after the War, she was thought to be the most desirable young woman in Natchez. I thought so myself.”

I frowned, wondering how old a woman had to be in Natchez before people stopped referring to her as “young.” “The war ended in 1918. My aunt must have been nearly sixty by then.”

Mr. Satterfield wiped his mouth with the bottom of the napkin he had tucked into his shirt front, and he looked at me as if I were pulling his leg. “Why, you Yankees! I don’t mean the Great War. When we talk about the War, we mean the War Between the States.”

“The Civil War?”

“We say the War of Northern Aggression, or, as the ladies prefer to call it, the Unpleasantness. It’s you Yankees who think of it as the Civil War.”

Actually, I did not think of it as much of anything. The Civil War was not a great topic of conversation in the West, and when we did talk about that war, it was a given in my family—among everyone we knew, for that matter—that the South had been wrong. My information about the war came from my
grandfather Bullock, my mother’s father. He’d been a union soldier, was captured and sent to a southern prison camp. He went home to Iowa when the war ended, but after a couple of years, he sold his farm and moved to Colorado to recover his health. I thought it would be prudent not to mention that my grandfather had fought for the North or that Grandmother had once known Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant in Galena, Illinois.

“Captain Bondurant was a cavalry officer.”

“Who?” I reached for another beaten biscuit. Perhaps I could develop a taste for them. I bit into it and decided that was unlikely.

“Captain Bondurant, your grandfather. In my growing-up time, there wasn’t a boy in Natchez who didn’t want to be Captain Bondurant. Why even old Jeb Stuart couldn’t shake a stick at him.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know anything about my father’s family. You see, he died—”

“In nineteen and three,” declared Mr. Satterfield, finishing for me. “Oh, yes, I know. Struck down in the prime of life by an Oldsmobile autocar.”

“Yes.” I pushed my dish away, wondering how people could eat when it was so hot.

Mr. Satterfield, too, had finished his breakfast and now looked longingly at the beaten biscuits. “If you’re not going to eat them . . .”

“Help yourself.”

“I do hate to see good food go to waste.” He put several biscuits onto his plate. “It’s a pity you didn’t know Miss Amalia better.”

I sighed. “I thought it was clear that I didn’t know her at all, had not the least idea she was a relative until your telegram arrived.”

Mr. Satterfield moved his plate to the side and leaned back. He took out a silver cigarette case, then glanced at me, and I told him it was all right to smoke. In fact, I would have liked a cigarette myself, but I wasn’t sure it was proper for women in Natchez to smoke in public. He lighted it, leaned back in his chair, and blew smoke out of the side of his mouth. “You were a poor fatherless girl.”

“Not at all. My stepfather is as fine a father as a girl could have. Mother remarried when I was five.”

Mr. Satterfield nodded, making it clear that he knew she had.

“After that, she almost never mentioned my father. When your telegram came, Mother wasn’t sure who Amalia Bondurant was. She told me Father never said much about his family, but she did remember that he thought they blamed him for his mother’s death. You must know that his mother died just after he was born, from the effects of childbirth, I would guess.”

Mr. Satterfield looked away, as if childbirth were not a fit subject for the breakfast table. “In her last years, Miss Emilie, your grandmother, enjoyed poor health,” he said.

“Father was sent to New York to live with relatives. When he was old enough, he was shunted off to boarding schools. Mother met him just after he graduated from college. Father was an engineer and had gotten a job in Colorado. Apparently, he never went back to the South. Mother told me he didn’t even have a southern accent.”

“Now that’s a pity. But you can’t blame the Bondurants for
sending him off. Those were hard times. Miss Emilie kept that family together after the War. When she passed, why it caused the awfulest grief. The captain solaced himself at the fleshpots at Natchez Under-the-Hill.”

“Under what hill?”

Mr. Satterfield cleared his throat and added quickly, “He put your daddy with his sister Rose up north because he didn’t know what to do with a baby. After Rose died, young Winship went to military school.”

“He seemed to have been shipped here and there, like a trunk without a label. Why didn’t his sister raise him here in Natchez?”

“Oh, the malaria was bad then, and Miss Amalia was not the sort of woman to raise a baby.” Before I could ask what sort that was, he added, “The Bondurants did what they thought was best for him. There it is.”

It didn’t appear to be the best way to me, but I hadn’t come to Natchez to discuss my father’s upbringing.

Mr. Satterfield snubbed out his cigarette and took out the silver case again. I did not want to listen to gossip about dead relations, so I put my napkin on the table as a sign that breakfast was over. “Forgive me for keeping you from your friends,” I said, gesturing to the waiter. Mr. Satterfield intercepted the check, and I did not protest, familiar enough with lawyers to know it would be buried in the legal bill for settling the estate.