Dessa Rose Page 10

  Rufel curbed her temper now and turned to look at the baby. He lay on his back in the bedding-stuffed basket that served him as a daybed. She patted his chest and made soothing sounds at him before turning back to Annabelle, who had not moved during the pause. “After you put away the nappies,” she said carefully, “change the baby and bring him into the bedroom. Don’t forget to wrap him up.” He would be all right until Annabelle came back for him.

  Clara quieted under the expectation of eating and Rufel retraced her steps to the bedroom. She sat Clara in the crib while she unfastened the bodice of her dress, loosening her milk-plumpened breasts. Annabelle came in with the nappies but Rufel ignored her as she picked up Clara and sat in the rocker. She leaned back in the chair, allowing Clara to accept her nipple, and, feeling the muscles in her back and pelvis loosen, relaxed under the baby’s deep pulls at her breast. Clara liked to explore, her fingers wondering at Rufel’s dress, her underthings, tracing imaginary patterns across Rufel’s skin. Often when she finished, Clara would lie with her head resting under Rufel’s bosom as she explored herself, her fingers, her nose. The baby let the milk gurgle in her throat and smiled around the nipple when she saw Rufel watching her, in perfect charity with the world. Rufel smiled, too, holding her quietly, barely rocking, now and then smoothing wisps of hair from the baby’s face as she continued to nurse.

  Clara finished and Rufel burped her, talking gently to the child, who was now so sleepy she could barely keep her eyes open. Rufel laid her in the crib and settled herself once more in the rocker. Annabelle had come back so quietly that Rufel had scarcely noticed her. Now she handed the infant to Rufel and waited, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, for Rufel’s dismissal. The girl would now stay—except for sneaking off to look at those danged magazines, which not even Ada seemed able to do anything about—until Rufel told her to move. “Bring his basket in here,” she told the girl, turning away from her. “You can go sit in the parlor when you finish that.” It would be a relief to have someone around with a little conversation and initiative. She glanced at the colored girl, still asleep, on her back now, and quiet, as she gave the baby her other breast.

  The new baby suckled with insistent shallow pulls. “Your mammy will have a time when she start nursing you,” she chided him, speaking aloud as she often did when she nursed the babies alone. Sometimes this one stared at her with eyes as bright as new brown shoe buttons and almost lost in the brown folds of his face. Rufel had taken the baby to her bosom almost without thought, to quiet his wailing while Ada and the other darkies settled the girl in the bedroom. More of that craziness, she knew; but then it had seemed to her as natural as tuneless crooning or baby talk. The sight of him so tiny and bloodied had pained her with an almost physical hurt and she had set about cleaning and clothing him with a single-minded intensity. And only when his cries were stilled and she looked down upon the sleek black head, the nut-brown face flattened against the pearly paleness of her breast, had she become conscious of what she was doing. A wave of embarrassment had swept over her and she had looked guiltily around the parlor. Annabelle was settled in a corner, oblivious to everything but the page of the journal in her lap; Timmy, she realized with relief, had slipped out soon after breakfast. No one would ever know, she had assured herself, and, feeling the feeble tug at her nipple, he’s hungry and only a baby. Lulled as she always was by the gentle rhythm and spent by the drama of the morning’s events, she had dozed—and awakened to the startled faces of Ada and Harker. Their consternation had been almost comic. Ada had stuttered and Harker had gaped. In the pause Rufel had recovered her own composure, feeling somehow vindicated in her actions by their very confusion. She had confounded them—rendered Ada speechless. Still, she had felt some mortification at becoming wet nurse for a darky. She was the only nursing woman on the place, however, and so continued of necessity to suckle the baby. Whatever care she might have had about the wisdom of her action was soon forgotten in the wonder she felt at the baby.

  The baby had lost what Timmy called his bird look, the grayish sheen over his skin that Ada said was common to newborn darkies. His color had been blotchy, pale patches of nut-shell brown, darker patches of chocolate, red, even green. “That why they called them colored, mamma?” Timmy had laughed. He was as fascinated with the baby as Rufel, taking an interest in him that he had never shown in Clara, wanting to measure him, to watch when he was bathed or changed, to wake him if he were asleep, to hold him if he were awake. She herself liked to watch the baby as he nursed, the way he screwed up his face and clenched his fist with the effort, the contrast between his mulberry-colored mouth and the pink areola surrounding her nipple, between his caramel-colored fist and the rosy cream of her breast.

  “Where my baby at?”

  Startled, Rufel looked up. The colored girl had risen on one elbow in the bed and was watching Rufel.

  “Why—Why—” Rufel said, rising from the chair thinking, Finally. About time this girl woke up. “He right here,” she said smiling, bending her arm so that the girl could see him better. The movement dislodged the baby’s mouth from her nipple and he started to cry. She started toward the girl, rocking the baby in her arm. “Here’s your baby right here.” She could see the girl’s body stiffening, her hands fumbling at the covers as she tried to rise from the bed. “Annabelle,” Rufel called shrilly, “Ada! This girl starting up again.”

  Sutton’s Glen was not the largest property in the district—no one really knew what that was. Much of the land along the Witombe River (thought to be some of the best in northern Alabama) was undeveloped, owned, it was rumored, by various eastern interests that expected to make a killing when the market was right and so refused all fair offers for the land. People pointed to the sparse settlement in the neighborhood as proof of this allegation, implying that their own residence in the area had been achieved through the hardest work.

  There had been, over the years, a few attempts to cultivate cotton on a large scale along the river (generally forgotten when the “stranglehold of eastern interests” theory was expounded), but none had survived beyond a few seasons. Worms two years running were said to have proved the undoing of several; rust, a malnourishment of the stems and leaves that often plagued cotton, the undoing of others. Travelers on the Great Road between the river port at Iverton, on the south, and Double Springs, the county seat to the north, might see an occasional white frame house in the dells or on the hilltops that dotted the rugged landscape; more often the dwellings were log huts of one or two rooms. Even these were not numerous. Most of the holdings in the county were small, some no more than forty or fifty acres. Sutton’s Glen, with almost two hundred of its five hundred acres cleared for cultivation, was thus a substantial property.

  The Great House at the Glen sat some six miles from the Road in a small meadow above Ives Creek, and was known in the neighborhood for its fancy cook-stove (the first in the neighborhood with a removable ash-box and a built-in tank said to keep gallons of water hot) and the fanlight and double windows that graced its front—Not that many in the neighborhood had seen the House close up. There was bad blood between Sutton and several of his neighbors, though few now remembered the ins and outs of the original quarrels. Whatever the initial fault, Sutton’s high-handed manner in these disputes—it was rumored that he had once tried to whip a white man off his place—had served to alienate most of the neighborhood. Sutton had never encouraged visits, anyway, and had always eschewed the harvest “bees” and the house and barn raisings that provided most of the opportunities for socializing in the area. The charitable, mostly women who thought Sutton a handsome, albeit mysterious, figure, called him reclusive, and wondered that his wife put up with such habits. Others, and these were in the majority, declared the Suttons would-be swellheads, victims of “planter fever”: that flashy House, they muttered, and passel of niggers in a region where there were few slave holders and few of those who owned more than two or three slaves, all that land planted in c
otton when any fool could see this was corn country. Sutton had stuck it out longer than most, so popular wisdom ran, but the hill country did not take kindly to cotton culture—nor its people to the “hoity-toity” ways of those who planted it.

  The Suttons were seen so seldom that folk in the district could go from one season to the next without giving them so much as a thought. They bought provisions in Iverton, bypassing, so it was claimed, Barton’s Emporium at the tiny crossroads hamlet some nine miles from the Glen, to make the longer trek into town for even the smallest purchase. Few now recalled the last time they had attended the occasional church services held by itinerant preachers at the crossroads store. Now and then, a hunter or traveler on the Elmira-Dexter track, which ran within five miles of the Glen, might notice woodsmoke curling above the trees in that general direction, and mention this at one or another of the neighborhood gatherings. Even such comments as this had ceased, over the years, to draw much response.

  The long double windows at the Glen faced east toward the steep, wooded slope that formed the eastern bank of Ives Creek as it snaked through Sutton land. Hills rose behind it, heavily timbered, stretching without break to the far horizon. Often Rufel, as she sat in the rocker by the windows, fancied that sunlight danced briefly at a pane of glass. The tail of a curtain fluttering through an open window in the breeze might catch some traveler’s eye. The Georgian facade of the House would gleam whitely through the trees, as fleeting as a dream, lost from sight as the Road dipped, the river curved, hidden again by the trees. That was Sutton Glen as Bertie had first described it to her in Charleston, his lilting voice holding her mesmerized so that she saw what he saw and loved it, she thought, as he loved. “If you was to take a ride on that river…”

  The daughter of a prosperous cotton factor in the city, whose shyly engaging manner made her generally well liked, Rufel had been expected to do well for herself—not a brilliant match (that would be for her younger sister, Rowena, the beauty in the family, to make), but someone with prospects. She could not, as the saying went, look as high as she chose—her father, Benjamin Carson, was the junior partner in his uncle’s cotton factorage; the firm itself was up and coming rather than established. Still, her father and Uncle Carson would come down handsomely with whomever she chose to marry. The son of some up-country planter come to town for the racing season perhaps, or one of the aspiring young lawyers in the city, a doctor from one of the outlying counties—someone would approach her father soon. If not this season, then the next.

  Bertie had made that “someone” seem as dull as dishwater. They met at the come-out ball of Abigail Sorenson, in Rufel’s only season in Charleston society. The ball had been one of the largest of the year and Rufel and Bertie had literally run into each other in the crush. He had caught his foot on the hem of her gown; she had narrowly missed spilling punch on him. They had both taken the mishap in good part, Rufel nervously good-natured, somewhat awed by the handsome stranger. He had worn no hat, of course, but his bow when he introduced himself gave the impression, even in the press of bodies, that he had just swept one off. When Rufel discovered a small rip at the waistline of her gown, he offered to convey her to her mother. Rufel, who had felt rather lost in the crowd where she knew few people and those only slightly, had been flattered by his solicitude and gratefully accepted. He had chatted amiably as he wove their way expertly through the crowd and, under the gentle flow of his conversation, she had relaxed. She never remembered afterward just what they had talked of as they strolled through the ballroom; he was by turns worldly-wise and boyish, seeming at times no older than she. But he was obviously someone; she could tell that by the way he dressed and his soft drawl.

  He courted Rufel through the rest of the spring, not assiduously at first, he was too well bred for that. But they met often at subscription balls and now and then at one of the large private parties that highlighted the racing season in Charleston. He teased and flattered her, but always with a subtle deference that made her feel older than her seventeen years, and fragile as though she might break from rough handling. In his more serious moments, he told her of the Glen, the mansion he was building above the river, and the virgin land he was plowing. Blousett County boasted no city as fine as Charleston—few areas did, he added with a quick smile. But northern Alabama was not a wilderness or frontier. There were towns and roads. Not many people, he admitted with a wry grin that went straight to her heart: “We have every class but the aristocracy,” laughing and as quickly sobering. That would come, of course—pushing back the shock of brown hair that was wont to curl on his brow. And the Suttons would be part of it; earnest, emphatic on this point. At first she couldn’t believe that he had singled her out, could think of nothing about herself that would attract him. Later, this very circumstance became proof of his love. Under Bertie’s gaze, her rather carroty hair became flame, the freckles across her nose and cheeks, a golden veil. Finally, he had declared himself: She could be the wife of some bumpkin or mistress of FitzAlbert Sutton’s heart.

  Charleston meant nothing to her then. To stay and be married off to some younger son seemed, under the spell of Bertie’s high-flown speeches, a fate worse than death. Mrs. Carson, for whom there was no better reference than to be accepted within the notoriously closed circle of Charleston society, needed little persuasion. Some of the best families in South Carolina had taken up lands in Alabama in recent years and Bertie seemed on easy terms with many of them. More familiar with the vagaries of cotton cultivation, Mr. Carson and his uncle were less enthusiastic. They had hoped to see Rufel married closer to home—to a man of property, to be sure, but one also less dependent on the land than the run-of-the-mill planter. Even had Alabama been the scene of fierce Indian fighting, Rufel would have gone with Bertie. Her father and Uncle Carson had yielded to her mother’s arguments and her own tearful pleas; she and Bertie were married and sailed for Alabama at the end of the spring.

  This was the story Rufel told herself as she sat in the rocker by the windows, looking at the trees, rocking as she nursed the babies or shelled peas, or simply sat, rocking gently.

  Sometimes she relived her first trip to Montgomery, the ball the Prestons had given at Dry Fork in their honor, their annual trips to the cotton market at Mobile; even the summer after her second miscarriage, when she had “taken the waters” at White Sulphur Springs, became one of a gay succession of amusements that she re-created in loving detail, lingering over isolated images: the great hall at the Glen as she had first seen it from the threshold, held aloft in Bertie’s arms, so wide she’d thought it a room, high-ceilinged, oak-floored, an elegant stairway at its end; sunlight slanting across the black and white tile in the bathhouse at Dry Fork; a steamboat on the river, majestic as a dowager, chaste as a maiden by day, a torrid beauty by night; droopy vermilion flowers planted in the doorway of some rude cabin along the banks of the Black River.

  More often she recalled some scene from her season in society, an oversubscribed luncheon at the Jockey Club during the racing meet, an afternoon musicale in the garden of some stately home, the ballroom at the Sorensons’ (a real one, not the double parlor that served for dancing in the houses of most of her friends), opening out onto a veranda and a garden, barely perfumed so early in the spring, the chill darkness a welcome retreat from the heat and light, the music and laughter of the big overcrowded room. This was how she remembered her courtship, a lighted room, heat, noise, herself and Bertie strolling somewhere in the throng.

  She had not always longed for Charleston, nor missed the company that seldom came. There had been the trips—their anticipation and recollection—and Timmy, born in the second year of their marriage, the ordering of the household; Rufel sketched a little, hooked rugs, sewed. In the days spent with Mammy, her treasured “weddin gif,” she recalled the glittering scenes again and again, knitting them firmly into the commonplace fabric of their days.

  There had been the inevitable disappointments and sorrows. They had never gotten
far enough ahead to complete the second story, never had much luck with slaves, ill health and runaways plaguing them so they never had more than eight at a time—not counting Mammy and whoever was acting as Bertie’s man. There was the continuing unpleasantness with the neighbors over runaways and grazing rights. They resented the fences Bertie put up to protect the cotton fields from the hogs and cattle that habitually roamed at will in the neighborhood. He accused them of harboring his slaves, even encouraging them to run away. Rufel had miscarried twice after Timmy was born, and somehow they had lost touch with the many friends met on excursions outside the county and with her family.

  Rufel never, even in her most private thoughts, referred to the four-year-old estrangement from her family as more than having lost touch. Someday, she told herself, she would write her mother and set the record straight, refute those malicious slanders against Bertie and herself. Perhaps she and Bertie had been a bit free in asking money of her father and Uncle Carson in the first years of their marriage. Even big plantation owners were often short of hard cash and waited upon the harvest to purchase ready-made goods or pay for services. Her mother just never understood how much it took to establish a decent living in these backwoods. Anyway, the loans had not amounted to much; certainly not the exorbitant sums her mother had mentioned in that last hateful letter. Four or five thousand dollars, indeed! And the second story still no more than a Georgian front and an empty, slant-roofed shell, the kitchen barely a lean-to covering that monstrous cook-stove. They could not have borrowed so much in just four years of marriage. And whatever the correct sum, her father must have known that Bertie would repay it as soon as they were on their feet.

  It was all, of course, a stupid misunderstanding, which though hurtful, Rufel would have been ready to forgive, had it not been for the libelous names her mother had called Bertie, scoundrel, wastrel, gambler. All of this caused by Rufel’s request for some trifling sum whose purpose she couldn’t now even remember. Rufel had brooded over that letter in secret. It seemed to reveal a mean and petty side of her mother’s nature that she herself had sometimes suspected but always excused; she could not bring herself to show the letter to Bertie or even mention it to Mammy. To do so seemed somehow to give validity to those stupid charges. In truth, she cared more for the consequences of the letter than for the content of the letter itself. She could not now hope to visit Charleston with her family’s help. But someday, she told herself, when they were on their feet, she would write her mother; she would see the record set straight.