The Beguiled Page 6

  With these thoughts I continued on my homeward journey and reached the school without further incident.

  “Even if our boys didn’t have other problems on their minds right now,” said Edwina Morrow as we stepped out of the cart, “you might not want to bring them to the school in force to arrest our prisoner anyway. A force of healthy soldiers might be more dangerous for the school than one wounded one—no matter which side each is on. Men are men, I’m told, no matter what their uniforms. Isn’t that the way you think, Miss Martha?”

  “I have no set way of thinking,” I said. “I am an empiricist like John Locke whom you have studied lately in your philosophy. What we will do with your Yankee ultimately depends entirely on what we need to do.” Then I went in to have a look at the stranger in my living room.

  Matilda Farnsworth

  I suppose in any parade somebody’s got to do the leadin and somebody’s got to follow. If Miss Martha was born to be an organizer, I suppose it ain’t her fault. She’s been a good lady most of her life, that’s got to be admitted. She’s always been good in time of sickness, for instance.

  In her Daddy’s time when the quarters were filled and the place was being worked—like it ought to be today if there was a man around to see to it—in those days it was always young Miss Martha who helped her Daddy tend to the sick in the quarters. Her Mama was generally always ailin herself and her brother and sister were too young for anything but foolishness but little Miss Martha from the time she was about ten would be out there in the quarters every morning with the jugs of calomel and root tonic that she wasn’t hardly able to carry, and the roll of bandages and the scissors in her little apron pocket, and her Daddy going along behind her laughin fit to kill as she dosed them sick niggers and bandaged their cuts and bruises and gave them all kinds of advice on how to care for themselves.

  I was in the kitchen then—I always been in the house and my mother before me—but my man was in the fields and what I couldn’t see out the back door he would tell me about at night. Sometimes some of those sick hands wouldn’t take so willingly to Miss Martha’s treatments, so her Daddy would always have my Ben standin by to hold them down while she poured her medicine into them.

  Her Daddy always depended on my Ben to be his right-hand man since we never had any regular overseer on this place. It was big enough all right for a hired manager, but ol’ Master always liked to take care of everything himself, or liked to think he did. That’s the reason, some folks around here will tell you now, Farnsworth went to seed.

  It’s true I guess, what they say, that for the last hundred years or more the men in this family ain’t been much account. From the time the first of them lived on the Tidewater, it’s been the Farnsworth ladies who’ve been mainly in charge of hangin on to the family money and property.

  They had a lot of it, I guess, back in the days when they lived in the big place on the James River, but then one of the men folk got into some kind of trouble and scandalized the neighborhood and so Miss Martha’s Grandma decided they better come out here and make a fresh start. Well I guess the land wasn’t good enough for their roots, or their roots were never deep enough for the land, because the Farnsworth money, and the name too, I guess you could say, has been slippin slowly away ever since.

  Miss Martha’s Daddy was a good and kind man but he’d rather go hunt quail or fox or read a book or just watch the sun set over the rim of his whiskey glass ’stead of payin any attention to his crops or fences. And his son, Robert, was just like him, or maybe even worse. Master Robert didn’t only sit and watch the money flow away, he threw it away as fast as he could on cards and horses and whatever other kinds of sportin and high livin he could find for himself.

  Course this was a while after he grew up. When he was younger he was much more settled and obedient—to his Mama until she was gone and then to Miss Martha who started to keep an eye on him. Miss Martha and Master Robert were very close when they was children. They used to ride together and go on picnics in the woods together and sometimes they’d just sit long hours on the porch playin checkers or dominos, or sometimes just sit there and talk the whole afternoon away.

  Then all of a sudden Master Robert grew up and got wild. He spent all his time runnin to parties and gamblin halls from Washington to New Orleans and never came home at all except now and again for a night or two to talk his Daddy out of some more money, and then off he’d go again, before morning, and we wouldn’t see him for maybe another six months or maybe more.

  His Daddy didn’t see anything much wrong in it. As a matter of fact I heard ol’ Master say one time it was a good thing for the boy to get away from his sisters for awhile. It would maybe make a man out of him, ol’ Master say.

  Well the last time Master Robert came home was right after his Daddy died and he didn’t stay long that time either. Now I don’t want to talk about any scandals in this family but I will say that Master Robert and Miss Martha had a terrible argument that night. Miss Martha was beggin him to stay to home but he wouldn’t listen to her. I won’t repeat everything I heard that night, but that was the meat of it. I wouldn’t have been listenin at all except the noise of it carried down to the kitchen and woke me up and I heard little Miss Harriet cryin and went up into the hall and found her sittin on the floor outside Master Robert’s room. They was all weepin that night, the three children weepin. I’ll tell you that was the first time I ever heard Miss Martha weep. And I don’t ever expect to hear it again.

  Master Robert left the next morning before his sisters were out of bed, takin everything of value he could cram into his saddlebags, includin all the money there was in the house and a lot of his Mama’s and his sisters’ jewelry. And as far as I know nobody in this house ever heard from him again.

  Miss Martha did her best to find him. She wrote letters and hired people to hunt for him in every town he’d ever mentioned bein in. She made trips herself to Richmond and Charleston and a half dozen other places but it wasn’t any use. Master Robert had disappeared just like the earth had opened up and swallowed him.

  I think that was one reason Miss Martha wasn’t too upset, at least at first, when Miss Harriet ran off a while later, chasing after some rakehell friend of Master Robert’s who had come here with her brother a year or two before. I guess Miss Martha figured that Miss Harriet might get together somewheres with Master Robert and at least get back some of the money and valuables. But that didn’t happen and after awhile Miss Martha found out Miss Harriet had taken another batch of money herself.

  Well, I won’t say any more about that poor child. She’s had her share of misery in this house—a lot of it before and more of it after she came home. She was allowed only that one big mistake with Miss Martha, and she’s been made to pay for it ever since.

  Then after the war started, a lot of stories used to come back to us—third and fourth hand stories mostly—about people who knew people who had seen Master Robert at the battle of Manassas or at some officer’s ball in Roanoke or lyin sick in some hospital in Richmond. Miss Martha investigated every one of the reports but if there was ever any truth in them, the bird had always flown by the time we heard them.

  Finally one day last winter—along about the middle of December it was—Miss Martha met a soldier at Mister Potter’s store who told her he had seen Master Robert the previous spring at the big battle they had up there around the Chancellor house. “He looked the same as always,” the soldier said. “’Cept he was dead.” Master Robert wasn’t too popular with a lot of the folks who live around here.

  Well, everybody knows that most of those dead soldiers up there were never buried after that battle because the fires were ragin so hot the generals had trouble gettin the live soldiers out let alone the dead ones. By the time the fires had died down, everybody on both sides had decided to clear out of the vicinity and so as a result, there’s plenty of poor unburied bodies up there lyin naked to the sun and rain, wait
in for the Day of Judgment that’s bound to come for all of us.

  Anyway that same night after the girls were all in bed, Miss Martha hitched ol’ Master’s Arab stallion to the cart, told Miss Harriet and me to get in behind her and started off down the road for Chancellorsville. I sure wasn’t too happy about going off on any winter night’s journey even though at first I didn’t know where we were headed.

  By the time we got to where the Germania Ford road crosses the turnpike, I had a pretty good idea of our destination. That’s near the old tavern where the Fredericksburg stage used to stop and just beyond there is where General Jackson got the wound that killed him and where most of the unburied bones are lyin in the brush. If it hadn’t been so dark and we hadn’t come so far already, I would have jumped out of that cart right then and lit out for home. Miss Harriet felt the same way, I know, and she pleaded with her sister to turn around and go back but Miss Martha wouldn’t listen.

  I guess she must have got some idea of where to look for Master Robert from the soldier she had talked to during the day because she turned on to the Ford road without stoppin and went south toward the old Chancellor house. When we got near to the Wilderness Church and the Fairview Cemetery, she pulled off the road into a field and tied the stallion to a broken fence.

  “Come along, Harriet,” she say gettin out and takin the lantern and the shovels she had brought. “You, too, Mattie.”

  “Miss Martha,” I say, “I ain’t never refused you before but even if the Lord Himself offered to lead me by the hand, I couldn’t walk into them dark fields tonight. Even if my spirit was willin, my feet wouldn’t be.”

  Miss Martha saw how nervous I was so she didn’t say any more. Poor Miss Harriet was scared to death, too, but I guess she wasn’t as afraid of the darkness as she was of her sister so she went trudgin off through that mud behind Miss Martha, carryin that heavy shovel that Miss Martha had given her. Into the darkness they went, through the mist rising from that swampy ground, across a ditch where a wagon was upended and a busted cannon was pointin at the moon.

  If I ever prayed to the Lord in my life, I prayed that night. When their footsteps had faded and the little speck of lantern light was gone, I closed my eyes and prayed. I was afraid of the darkness and afraider still that the clouds would leave the moon and I’d see worse things than I could imagine.

  There were terrible things in that mist—marchin men, led by General Jackson on a black horse, weepin women, ugly birds and bats and other hellish creatures—all movin silently across the fields, with the only sound the wind rustlin through the ruined trees and our poor old stallion whinnyin and stampin in the chill night air.

  Well, the Lord was merciful that night and kept the ghosts away from me. And an hour or so before dawn, Miss Martha and Miss Harriet came back out of the mist and got into the cart and we started home. Whether or not they found Master Robert and buried him, I couldn’t say. I didn’t ask them and they didn’t tell me. In fact, Miss Martha said nothin at all and Miss Harriet cried all the way home. Neither one of them ever mentioned Master Robert’s name in my hearin again.

  A day or so later, Miss Martha sold her Daddy’s Arab horse. She said we had no further use for it and that she needed the money. It seemed to me it might also be because she didn’t want any more males of any kind on the place.

  That same thought had come to me once before right after her Daddy had died and Master Robert had run off. That was the day that Miss Martha brought the dealer in from Richmond and sold all the hands on the place. I stood in the yard that day and watched while the people were bein loaded on the wagon.

  Miss Harriet saw me and came over. “They’ll be well cared for, Mattie,” she said. “Miss Martha gave orders that they’re to be sold to only the best places. She says she wouldn’t do it, Mattie, but she’s going to start a school here and she needs the money.”

  I wanted to yell out and tell her what I thought of Miss Martha and what her Daddy and Mama would think if they was still alive, but I didn’t. She hadn’t made any deal for Ben yet and I thought maybe there was a chance she wouldn’t if I kept quiet.

  She waited until the very end with Ben. I remember how she looked at me and then at Ben and then at the dealer. I wanted to call to her and say, “Send me away too if you’re going to send Ben,” but I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. There was a pride in me that made me keep silent, a pride almost as strong as Miss Martha’s own.

  Well she didn’t sell Ben that day. She finally sent the dealer away with his loaded wagon and then she went into the house without sayin anything and left Miss Harriet and Ben and me standin there. I don’t know what it was she felt in her heart that day but whatever it was, she repented of it because a week or so later she sold Ben to a farmer over at Locust Grove.

  It was for less money than she was offered on that first day, I found out later from Miss Harriet—not much less but some—and it was to a place nearby so that Ben was able to come and see me now and then until he died. I guess maybe that was as close as Miss Martha could come to kindness when money and her pride was involved.

  My Ben always claimed she held him back that first day for a different reason. He said it was because she was afraid of me—because I knew her better than anyone else knew her, even Miss Harriet. Ben knew about the talk I’d heard that night in Miss Martha’s bedroom, the night before Master Robert ran away. I told Ben about it but I never told anybody else and I never will.

  Maybe she was a bit fearful of me once, but that was long ago. We all change in our feelings toward each other as we get older. I don’t even hate her any more like I used to. I know that she’s the way God made her and I suppose she can’t help it and she can’t change.

  Well those thoughts all came to me on that afternoon the Yankee soldier was brought into this house. I was standing there in the living room watchin poor Miss Harriet tend to him as best she could and askin myself, “What is Miss Martha going to do when she comes home and finds this young man in her house—a good lookin young man who is just about the age that Master Robert was when he went away. Is she gonna tell us to get rid of him or what? Will she make us tote him down to the road and leave him there so’s our soldiers can pick him up when they go by?”

  “Well,” I figured, “she might do that later but she won’t do it right at first. The first thing she’ll do is come stormin in here, blamin and threatenin everybody for the Yankee’s bein here . . . and then she’ll take a good hard look at him and decide that we’ve been tendin to him all wrong and she’ll have to show us how to do it.”

  I remembered Miss Martha in the quarters as a little girl and I knew she’d welcome the opportunity to work on a really sick person. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t want to pass up this chance to practice her nursin once again.

  And I’m not sure I even wanted it that way. I wasn’t so scared of him then, only sorry for him, but I think now I wouldn’t’ve been opposed to Miss Martha if she had decided to hand him directly over to our soldiers on that first afternoon. It sure would have been better in the long run if she had done exactly that, or even if she hadn’t done anything at all but just let him lie there without touchin him. Just gone off and taken us with her and closed off the living room and let him pass away by himself.

  There was the smell of death on that young man. It wasn’t so much his bleedin or his paleness or the way he lay there so still, but a kind of mark on him that I could tell for what it was even if he had been unwounded and was marchin down the road. I was sure when I first set eyes on him there wasn’t nothing on earth could ever save him and it wasn’t going to be any use to try.

  Miss Martha came in then from the porch with Miss Edwina Morrow behind her. There was no use to wonder any more. What was goin to happen, would happen.

  Emily Stevenson

  It was obvious as soon as Miss Martha came in the door that first afternoon that gossipy Edwina Morrow had given her a c
omplete account of how little Amelia Dabney had found the soldier in the woods and brought him home. That sort of tale bearing was about what you could expect from Edwina. It was typical of her to strike out blindly in any way she could, hoping to get as many girls in disgrace as possible. Therefore, I determined to defend Amelia to the best of my ability.

  “The Yankee couldn’t walk, Miss Martha, and Amelia helped him,” I said. “She did find him in the woods, it’s true, but I believe it was not very far inside the woods and I am also informed that Amelia went there with a very good intention.”

  “What intention was that, Miss Amelia?”

  “To collect some mushrooms,” I said, “with which to supplement our table.”

  “Please let Miss Amelia answer for herself, Miss Emily. Were you on a food-gathering expedition, Miss Amelia?”

  Poor Amelia was frightened half to death. She lives in mortal fear of all human authority anyway even when she hasn’t done anything wrong. All Miss Martha has to do is turn her gaze on Amelia and the poor little thing is liable to faint dead away.

  “Well,” she stammered now, “it’s like Emily says. I was gathering these mushrooms. . . .”

  “For the table or your collection?”

  “Well actually both, I guess.”

  “What kind did you bring back?”

  “Well . . . some amanita phalloides . . .”

  “The common name for which is death cup. Any other kinds?”

  “Some amanita muscaria.”

  “That is also a poisonous variety. Any edible kinds, Miss Amelia?”