New Mercies (4 page)

We agreed to meet in the afternoon, and Mr. Satterfield walked me to the door of the dining room. “Enjoy your time among us. As even Yankees know, Natchez in its day had more millionaires than anyplace in America outside New Orleans,
and you will not see finer homes anywhere in the country. These days, there is still wild excitement here about the houses, but not much about business.” He bowed a little as we parted. Having learned my lesson, I did not offer him my hand.

Not everyone knew Natchez had once been an affluent city. Before I received Mr. Satterfield’s telegram, I did not know there was a Natchez. Other Yankees didn’t, either. The ticket agent at Union Station in Denver had told me there was no such place as
Matches
, Mississippi.

“Natchez,” I said, correcting him, as I pulled out the Western Union envelope.

He examined it. “Oh, never heard of it.”

Since I’d seen little of Natchez on the taxi ride the day before, I decided to walk around and take in some of those finer homes. It certainly would be more interesting than sitting under a fan in my hotel room.

The Mississippi sky was a cool blue, but it was hot outside nonetheless. The humidity wrapped around me like a damp coat as soon as I went through the front door of the hotel, reminding me that I would have to find something more comfortable to wear. Turning east, I walked up Main Street through the business district, looking into the store windows. The dresses displayed in the first shop were chiffon and linen, printed with gaudy flowers—not my style. All the stores seemed to carry the same brightly colored clothes, however, so I went inside a shop whose windows were filled with headless, armless mannequins. I asked the clerk if she had a tailored summer dress. After some
looking, she found a plain short-sleeve rayon frock that fit me. I purchased it, along with two cotton skirts and blouses, and a pair of canvas shoes, which would be more suitable than my good slippers for poking around Avoca.

“You will take an out-of-town check, won’t you? I’m staying at the Eola,” I said, and the saleswoman nodded.

After paying, I picked up my dress boxes by their little string handles and started to walk away. I had almost reached the door, when the clerk called, “Wait! Wait!” She pronounced the word as if it had two syllables—“Weigh-it! Weigh-it!” She waved my check in the air. “Slow down! Halt!” she added, although the first outburst had stopped me. The clerk rushed through curtains hung in a doorway in the back of the store and returned with a woman who appeared to be the owner. Holding the check in front of her mouth, the clerk whispered frantically. The only word that I understood was
goat
. When she lowered the check, the clerk was biting her cheeks to keep from smiling. My aunt must have been ill-served in places like this. Then I realized that Amalia Bondurant probably had not been inside a dress shop in years—perhaps ever. In her more affluent time, she would have summoned a dressmaker to Avoca.

“You’re from out of town?” the owner asked. She stood in front of a corset in a glass display case.

“Yes.”

“And you’re here . . .” She waited for me to complete the sentence.

“Yes. I’m here.”

“Oh.” When she realized that she was unlikely to get more information, the woman took the check from the clerk and
examined it, then said, “If you don’t mind my asking, are you kin to Miss Amalia?”

“Is there something wrong with the check?” I set down the boxes. “Because if you’re concerned that it might not be good, I wouldn’t dream of taking these things.” Natchez, like the rest of the country, surely was suffering from the Depression, and my purchase might be the best sale the shop would make all day, possibly all week.

The owner looked me up and down, taking in my suit, which was expensive, and said, “Oh, no, ma’m. It’s fine. You come back and see us.”

That was unlikely. “Thank you.”

Back at the hotel, where I had gone to deposit my purchases, a man in shirtsleeves, smoking a cigarette, rose as I crossed the lobby and accosted me. “You Nora Bondurant?”

Instead of answering, I waited for him to identify himself.

“Bill Kilpack,
New York Herald
. I’ve been covering the Bondurant murder. And I was just about to leave town, when I heard you were here. I’m glad I didn’t go, you betcha, because I’ve got a couple of questions for you. You haven’t talked to anybody else, have you?”

“No, and I’m not interested in talking with you.” I tried to get around the man, but he blocked my way.

“You’re her closest relative. How come you let her live like she did?” He took a final drag on his cigarette, then put it out in the sand of a standing ashtray next to him.

“I didn’t know her.”

He took out a pencil and wrote a few words in a notebook.

Annoyed with myself that he had tricked me into saying
something he could quote, I said, “There’s nothing more to say to you. Please let me pass.”

“You think she has money hidden out there in that big old place. What’s it called, Avoca?”

He knew perfectly well what it was called.

“What’s ‘Avoca’ mean, anyway?”

It meant a shady, restful place filled with friends. The name had been in a book that was among Father’s things, which Mother had shown to me just before I left Denver. “I wouldn’t know.”

“What about that Lott woman? You going to help her out?”

“Please get out of my way.”

Mr. Kilpack chewed his pencil, which was pitted with bite marks. He was short and square, and his forehead was moist. There were rings of sweat under his arms; I was glad to see that the heat and humidity made him as uncomfortable as it did me. “Don’t be so short with me, lady. I wouldn’t let my worst enemy live in a pigsty like that.”

“Goats.” I could not help myself. “She lived with goats, not pigs.”

“You southerners got no heart, if you ask me.”

“Did someone ask?” Would I have to knock down the man to get to my room? Just then, a woman interrupted.

“My dear, shame on you for being late. And they say we southern girls think we’re on time if we’re only an hour behind!” The woman, with Titian hair and dressed like one of the mannequins in the shop windows, only with head and limbs, put her arm through mine and drew me away. “You’ll excuse us, won’t you?” she said to the reporter, and without waiting for his reply, she yanked me down a long hall with peacocks on the
wallpaper, past potted palms, to the restaurant, where she took one of my parcels from my hand. “Oh, you found Miss Sabra’s store. She has the yummiest clothes, just precious. I trade there myself.” The reporter followed a few steps behind.

The woman held on to me until we reached a table in the corner farthest from the door. Then she turned back to the reporter, and with a dismissive wave of her hand, she called, “Be going about your business. Don’t you disturb us, you.” There was a hint of iron in her voice, and the man went back to the lobby. We watched as he picked up a cardboard suitcase covered with hotel stickers and started for the door. The woman said, “That horrid little man is not a gentleman.” She smiled at me. “Honestly, you must think I’m fuzzed-up for grabbing you up like that, but I had to rescue you. I just hate those disagreeable reporters. They’re such tartars, asking their nasty questions, writing queer things about us. I’d like to break their bones. From what they print in the newspapers, you’d think we spend our Saturday evenings hunting up old ladies so that we can chop off their heads with our little axes. Or guns. Miss Amalia was killed with a gun. And, of course, her head was let be.”

A waiter came to the table, and the woman ordered a “New gray ape.” “Two?” she asked, looking at me. It took me a minute to realize she had asked for a Nu-Grape.

“A Coke.”

“A new gray ape and a Coke-Cola,” she told the waiter. She took off her gloves and adjusted her hat, which was straw and had a brim, making me wish I’d stopped in a millinery as well as a dress shop. “You are dying to know who I am, I know, and why I have kidnapped you. I’m Pickett Long. I was on my way
into the hotel when I saw that man accost you, and I thought you needed a friend. I hope you don’t think I’m too bold.”

“No, of course not. I’m grateful you did.” In fact, I was delighted Pickett Long had taken me in hand.

“I already know who you are.”

“Is there anybody in Natchez who doesn’t?”

“Oh, now don’t be too critical of us. We are a small town, and it is nice to know that we look out for one another, although in Miss Amalia’s case, we were purely derelict in our duty.” She paused while the waiter set down our drinks. “But I have a reason to know you. I’m Sam Satterfield’s niece. He told me you had gone out to Avoca last night, thinking you’d be staying there. They could most likely eat you at Avoca, but they surely could not sleep you out there.” She stopped talking long enough to roll her eyes. “I hope you don’t try that again very soon. I told Mr. Sam, ‘You don’t know a thing about ladies and never did, and that is why you have been a bachelor all your life.’ Oh course, that’s not the only reason.” She raised her Nu-Grape and said, “Welcome to Natchez,” then took a sip. “Avoca must have been a terrible surprise for you.”

“Something like that. Deserted except for the caretaker.”

“Ma’am?”

“Ezra, the caretaker.”

“The servant, you mean. He belongs to the place.”

When my eyes narrowed, she added quickly, “Oh cake! You know what I mean. We don’t have slavery any longer. You Yankees took care of that, although it was only a matter of time before we would have ended the institution ourselves. What I mean is, Ezra was born on Avoca, and he’ll die there. That made
him Miss Amalia’s responsibility. We don’t throw our servants aside when they grow old, and that’s the pure-d truth.” She gave me a stern look, as if over the years I had thrown scads of family retainers onto the dole. “Miss Amalia couldn’t have gotten along without Ezra. He helped her care for those goats, raised them, drove her into town, where she sold the milk. It gave her a modest competence.” She laughed. “That is what the Old South has come to, dear old ladies in hoopskirts selling goat’s milk out of the back of REO cars—and with style, you see. Miss Amalia always wore white gloves.” She glanced at my hands, which were bare, since the gloves I’d washed hadn’t dried overnight. “She didn’t really wear hoopskirts, not on the streets leastways. Who knows how she dressed at Avoca, although I could tell you . . .” Her voice trailed off.

My Coke seemed sweeter than what I was used to, but everything in Natchez was sweeter—the air, the clothes, the talk. Even the dining room smelled sweet from the rose in a tiny vase pinned to Pickett Long’s dress.

“Miss Long,” I said, but she interrupted.

“It’s Mrs., but you call me Pickett, and I’ll call you Nora.”

“Pickett.” The name did not come easily.

“Half the girls in the South are named after dead Confederate generals, as if we needed another reason to keep the Unpleasantness alive, and the other half are named for dead relatives. Pickett’s better than my first name.”

“Which is?”

“Mosby—after John Mosby, of course. Everybody knows him.”

“Oh, yes, I think Pickett is better than Mosby.” John Mosby
must have been another Confederate officer, I thought.

“Everybody does.”

Pickett finished her soda pop and caught the waiter’s eye, making a circling gesture over the glass with her finger, and he brought her another one. “Mr. Sam thinks you ought to see more of Natchez than that rickety old Avoca and the inside of the Eola hotel. So I was on my way to offer my services as tour guide when I spotted you in the lobby.” She leaned forward. “I won’t try to pry any information out of you, but if you have questions about Miss Amalia, I will surely try to answer them. Mr. Sam thought you would be more comfortable talking about her with another lady, although he is the worst gossip that ever lived. He said you’d never met Miss Amalia. I did used to think not knowing one’s relatives was a pity, but Yankees just might be smart to go about their business. There is something to be said for money over tradition.”

She looked at her watch and got up. “Here I am, just piddling about, and I have a million things to do. You’ll come for dinner at the Buzzard’s Nest this evening, won’t you? That’s our little place.”

“How nice of you.”

Pickett added, “It’s just a teensy to-do, with Mr. Sam and one or two old Natchezians. Natchez society antedates the Christian era, you know. Mr. Sam will call for you at six.” She had finished her second drink and was shaking the ice cubes in the glass. “We’ll have something southern. Mr. Sam must have his beaten biscuits.”

Pickett got up in a swirl of chiffon. “Have you had them, beaten biscuits?”

“For breakfast.”

“There’s nothing like them in the world,” she added, then made a face. “Thank God for that little thing.”

My appointment with Mr. Satterfield was for four o’clock. In the lobby, where there was no sign of the reporter, I collected my key, then went to my room, where I changed into the new dress and powdered my nose, which was not only shiny but beaded with perspiration. Then I went back outside and walked up Pearl Street, which ran along the side of the hotel. A few cars were parked in the shade. A mule hitched to an ancient buggy was tied to a fence post, and from inside the buggy came the sound of a Jew’s harp. Two white boys slapped mosquitoes as they sat on the veranda of a white frame house that towered above the street. A few doors farther on, a Negro boy pushed a mower back and forth across a yard, the blades clacking slowly. Nearby, a little girl in a sunsuit perched on the steps of a brick house, braiding a clover chain. The houses were in various states, some beautifully maintained, others run down, although none was as dilapidated as Avoca. From one of the houses came the sound of “Red Wing” on the Victrola. It ground to a stop; then the machine was rewound and, with a
whoosh
, the song started up again.

Three blocks from the hotel, at the corner of High Street, was a mansion larger than any I had ever seen. Surrounded by an elaborate iron fence, its grounds covered an entire city block. The house itself was a massive white structure, two stories high, with a belvedere on top and dozens of green shutters framing long windows. The house looked solid but shabby, although it
was clear that it was occupied. Perhaps the Bondurants had once been welcomed through the front door of that imposing home.