Jordan County

  When I got down at seven-twenty Snooky was downright purple in the face. He didnt say anything or even help me into my coat, just followed me out to the car. The porch light glistened on his hair, the part like a streak of white light down the middle. The car was a cut-down Essex with writing all over it, even under the fenders: Chickens here’s your coop. Fragile, handle with care. Shake well before using — things like that. He had on his yellow slicker and there was writing on that as well: Oh Min! This end up. Yes we have no bananas, and so forth. I wont go into details except to say we drove up to Rosedale to a dance and didnt get home until almost four-thirty. By that time we werent speaking. The last thing I said to him when he kissed me goodnight on the steps (he tried to put his tongue in my mouth, among other things) was, “I dont care if I never see you again!” I meant it, too. He left, racing the motor down the block the way he always did when he was mad.

  It had happened before, more or less exactly, but this time he really scared me. He didnt call for nearly a week. Then he did and we were married in April, during a cold-snap. Our wedding night was in Jackson, at the Robert E. Lee Hotel. He had a bottle of real champagne; it was his daddy’s, left over from before the war, but we couldnt get the bellboy to bring ice (there was some kind of convention going on, Baptists or something, all with their names on little squares of cardboard pinned to their lapels) so Snooky tried to cool it by holding it under the cold-water faucet in the bathroom. It fizzed all over the place when he popped the cork out. I drank almost half of it, luke warm like that, the first alcohol I ever really tasted except the sugary bottoms of Daddy’s toddies when I was little, and next thing I knew I was standing under the shower, dripping wet, and all in the world I had on was a horrible nigger-pink bedspread wrapped around me and the wave had come out of my hair and I was bleeding. It was awful. Whats more, Snooky didnt understand at all; he kept yelling for me to come back to bed. “Come on back to bed!” he kept yelling. He had been drinking whiskey too, and finally he stumbled into the bathroom (like a fool I was so flustered I forgot to lock the door) and tried to wrestle the spread away, the only stitch of covering I had. I was more than a match for him, though, even in my condition. He fell and bumped his head on a corner of the washstand, then sat on the cold tiles, rubbing his head and mumbling over and over, “Some wife. Some little wife. Some little wife I got.” It was horrible, watching him squat there, naked like that, mumbling. His hair had always been smooth before, glossy as patent leather, but now it stuck out all around his head, like spikes. Then all of a sudden a solemn expression came over his face, as if he was about to pray or something, and he turned and threw up in the toilet with his chin hooked over the seat. Mind you, I had to stand there, watching, because I was afraid if I went back into the bedroom he’d recover and follow. He just kept on heaving, heaving, long after he was empty. It’s no wonder I got disillusioned early.

  I sometimes think I married him just to get him out of my system. Not that I didnt admire him; who wouldnt? He was so much older, twenty-four to eighteen, and such a sheik. He played the ukulele, wore wider-bottomed trousers than anyone, had a car and all those things. Also his folks had money, lots of it, and Daddy had lost our money on the market years ago. I knew if I didnt marry him I’d regret it all my life. Then too, everyone kept saying he could ‘handle’ me, get me ‘tamed’ as Daddy said. That was what I wanted, after what had happened between my parents; I wanted what my mother didnt have.

  A while back I said she died but thats not true, or at least it’s only true in a manner of speaking. What she did was she ran off with a man. It was an awful shock — I was terribly impressionable in my teens. It gave me an absolute horror of anything vulgar, and of course almost everything was vulgar in those days. I didnt understand at all but now I think I do. She wasnt bad. It was the times, the war being over, women doing the shimmy on dining-room tables, bobbed hair, short skirts, all that. And the truth was Daddy was lovable but dull, and not only dull but soft; he couldnt handle her at all. So I married Snooky and you know how that turned out, from the very first night in the Robert E. Lee Hotel.

  He wasnt like they said. He was hard on the outside, all right, but soggy inside. I’d suspected it all along, but of course I had to find out for myself. Well, I found out soon enough. He turned to whiskey round the clock, what they call a night-drinker. His daddy sent him up to Keeley several times though it never really took. Then one afternoon I came home from playing bridge and found him in the living room with a hammer — killing flies, he said. You should have seen it, what he did to all my lovely things; the silver service from Aunt Agnes was mashed down to little wads of tin. So then I signed a paper and they put him in an institution. He didnt stay long, less than a year, but by that time I had the divorce. He soon married again; I heard she gave him a hard time, some Yankee who pronounced her final g’s and all the r’s. It served him right. Soon he left her and married another — a California one this time; I hear she’s just as bad if not worse. Not that I care. I dont care. He can do whatever he likes, provided that check comes through on the first of every month. I gave him my youth; if we didnt have any children it wasnt my fault.

  There now; I’ve talked about it and made myself all sad. Life is sad and there’s no good in men. Feel those tears. I guess youd better get up now and go; I think thats daylight peeping through the shade.

  CHILD BY FEVER

  Old Mrs Sturgis lived all her life in the house her grandfather built fifteen years before she was born. Unlike most of the houses in the region, which grew piecemeal, room by room being added in flush years on alternate sides of a shotgun hall until they reached the baronial proportions so much hoped for and sought after, this one was that way from the start, a big, soaring structure of cypress and brick, set on pilings to protect its hardwood floors from the high water every spring. It was past its hundredth year when they tore it down, in accordance with instructions in her will, and converted the grounds into a public park — called Wingate Park for her father, Hector Wingate — a grove of oaks and sycamores, cottonwoods and cedars, with graveled paths and occasional benches where Negro nursemaids take their charges to while away the sunny afternoons, the former in aprons and headrags, the latter in prim chambray or belted corduroy, strolling its formal pattern with the precise intentness of figures in a minuet. She had always been public spirited, and this was her final gesture, six months after she died.

  Every year on her birthday for the past quarter-century, first when she was sixty and last when she was nearing ninety, the newspaper ran a feature describing how her plantation had become the residential district of the town, the three thousand acres subdivided and parceled out under her supervision. With the story there was always the same two-column cut of an old lady in a wheelchair, the photograph looking somewhat blurred or out-of-focus until you looked closer and saw that this was because the face was a network of wrinkles. The fixed, archaic expression about the mouth was more like a grimace than a smile, but the eyes behind the octagonal spectacle lenses were bright as agates, even in the newsprint reproduction. Year after year that face looked out from the page, just as it had looked on the hot June day, ten and twenty and thirty years ago, when the itinerant photographer huddled beneath his cloth, palming the bulb, and saw it upside-down on the ground-glass plate. The text itself might change a bit from time to time, successive cubs and editors adding or subtracting particular flourishes, but the caption over the picture was always the same: Esther Wingate Sturgis, it always called her, Mother of Bristol.

  This is not primarily a history of the life of Mrs Sturgis, but since her life was the backdrop against which her son’s was played, overlapping it broadly on both ends — especially the latter; for years before she finally died people were saying she would live forever, baked to durability in the oven of the fever — a proper examination of her life is the best means of looking into many of the questions of his own. Here as always it was a question of action and reaction, hers and his. If a posy we
re needed to decorate a page or point a theme, perhaps the most suitable would be that biblical verse which tells of the children’s teeth being set on edge by grapes the parents ate.

  He was called Hector too; she named him for her father, just as later she would direct that the park be named for him, with his name on a wrought-iron archway spanning the entrance. Hector Sturgis has been dead for better than forty years. Not many people nowadays ever heard of him. Even fewer ever saw him, and no one at all ever knew him. Yet there were those who claimed to know his story: know it so well, they said, that between the time when Mrs Sturgis died and six months later, when the house was razed, they could take you into the attic and point out the rafter beneath which he had brought it to a close: or so they claimed. It had a certain charm for those who told it, or if not charm then anyhow a certain fascination, partly because so little was known and there was therefore plenty of room for conjecture, but mainly because there was a ghost in it. That was what drew them, the lurid element: that and of course the boast of having inside information, being privy to events in the secret lives of the highborn. Actually, however, no matter how they embroidered and invented, his life was as uneventful as most lives are when they can be looked back on, when events have lost their immediacy, when the texture has raveled and the pattern run to gray. There were only three main dates to hang it on — 1878, 1899, 1911: the years of his birth, his marriage, and his death — which is as much as most men have, and more than some.

  So this is primarily a history of the life of Hector Sturgis, and it begins with the time of his birth, or at least with the time of his mother’s marriage. The two dates were uncomfortably close to coincidence, and therefore there was scandal from the outset.

  Townspeople viewed the wedding mainly as a come-down for the Wingates. They knew that Mrs Wingate, so recently widowed, who dressed her daughter New Orleans style, sent her away to school, and taught her that she was somewhat better than anyone else and considerably better than most, had planned for Esther — called Little Esther to distinguish her from her mother, whose name was Esther too — something higher than marriage with the son of an Irish barkeep. His prospects were good, it was true, but after all they were no more than business prospects, which in Mrs Wingate’s eyes was worse than having none at all. The bride was eighteen, the groom twenty-four. The wedding was in early March, a time of bitter cold. The child, a son, was born in mid-September.

  This was 1878, the year of the fever. People should have been sufficiently occupied with troubles of their own. Yet, looking back from the day of the birth, they scarcely needed to count the months on their fingers. It was an event of the kind they had desired so long, giving occasion for them to strike at Mrs Wingate through her pride, through what they called her ‘airs,’ her high-and-mighty ways, that they told themselves they had known it all along.

  “Why, certainly,” they said. “Certainly. I knew it at the time. Who ever heard of a wedding in early March, with real spring weather just around the corner?”

  Esther was an only child, born in 1860, and her father — he was one of four brothers; the other three were single — had stayed home from the war, under the twenty-Negro clause of the Conscription Act, to tend the plantation and look after his wife and daughter and the slaves. Of the three brothers, one was killed at Holly Springs, commanding a horse company under Van Dorn, and the other two survived four years’ fighting in Barksdale’s old brigade in the Army of Northern Virginia. All through the war, while news came of victories and defeats, both in a swirl of glory, and afterwards, when those who had returned formed veterans’ organizations and staged parades and barbecues, Hector Wingate resented the wife and child who, along with the property and slaves, had kept him first from the glory and then from the gatherings.

  His father, the first Hector, a younger son of an Ohio merchant, had come to the delta in 1835, after the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit cleared the Choctaws from the land. He bought a wooded tract almost five miles square at less than two dollars an acre, cleared and bounded it, grew rich on cordwood and cotton within ten years, and built the fine big house which apparently had been his dream from the start. However, he had little time to enjoy it. Within a year after its completion he died fighting in Mexico, a line officer in the First Mississippi Rifles, near the point of the V his colonel, Jefferson Davis, formed to win the Battle of Buena Vista. His son, the second Hector, Esther’s father, having missed the war for Southern independence, felt that he had failed his heritage. He turned bitter.

  Mrs Wingate, Esther’s mother, was the daughter of a levee contractor who came south from Missouri in 1850, the year of the Compromise. His name was Pollard. The Wingate-Pollard wedding, two years before the war, drew guests from all over the delta, so that afterwards it was remembered as the prime social event of antebellum Bristol. That in itself was not much of an accomplishment, the town being mainly a roughneck place in those days, but there were at least two factors that made it memorable. The bride wore a gown by Worth, delivered by fast packet and overland stage, all the way from Paris, and a visiting Missouri senator, a big, florid man with a snuff-colored beard that grew high on his cheekbones and hands that trembled violently unless he held them clasped and massaged the palms, died of apoplexy the following morning, having amazed the other guests with his capacity for chilled oysters and champagne punch and extemporary stumping. Bride and groom left by steamboat for New Orleans. From there they sailed on a year-long Mediterranean cruise, including a barge trip up the Nile. Then they came home to Mississippi, to the delta, to the fine free life which already had begun to bluster its way into the war that ended it.

  After the war, when her husband had turned bitter, Mrs Wingate, repulsed and estranged, went through a period during which all her love and energy were pent up like a hard knot in her chest. She could feel it there. But then she succeeded in canalizing it by attempting to give her daughter everything she had planned for herself in the days before her marriage soured. Previously she had left the child to a nurse; now she and the girl were seldom apart. She would spend hours dressing her, and later devoted much of her time to planning balls she would give for her daughter’s coming-out, brilliant affairs at which champagne would flow and fiddles play for the young men and women whose hearts would pump the best blood in the delta. When the year arrived for the coming-out, however, Hector Wingate’s violent death and then the yellow fever, which followed soon, delayed it until the girl had indeed come out, though in a manner her mother had never considered, much less intended.

  Esther herself, all through girlhood, had felt as strongly as her mother the resentment her father took no pains to hide. It was directed as much toward the daughter as toward the wife; he somehow held her responsible for her own birth. Like her mother, then, she might have turned to the next closest person for consolation — in this case Mrs Wingate — except that Mrs Wingate turned first; so that, instead of having to seek compensatory affection, Esther was forced into the defensive position of having to avoid being smothered with it. What was more, she knew quite well, with all the wisdom of children in such matters, that the affection was not really for herself, but rather, like an investment made with an eye to the return, was for the benefit of the person who bestowed it. She would tremble with something akin to nausea whenever her mother stroked her with those soft white hands and called her darling every other word. During the interminable fittings, the lessons in elocution and posture and china-painting, she would stand demurely, head bent, plotting for the time when she would be on her own. Her voice was soft, her movements prim; she had learned her lessons in deportment well. But her bright blue eyes, which were no less sharp for being solemn, made her seem wise beyond her years.

  After her fifteenth birthday, when she was sent to a New Orleans seminary, she thought perhaps she had found a chance to break away. But this was not it, or even anything like it. She was as sheltered from the world as ever, the only diversion being secret nighttime talks with other pupils, most of
them as limited as herself. She returned to Bristol with a glut of useless knowledge (she spoke French now, after a fashion, and could read music and even parse a simple sentence with very little assistance) and then set out to win her liberty. She had no idea of how to go about it, but she found a way soon after joining the choir.

  When she came home from two years at the seminary Mr Clinkscales, the new rector, paid a special call on Mrs Wingate. He was young and pink cheeked and persuasive, where the rector before him had been old and rather incompetent and gruff; it was years before the ladies of the congregation recovered from the heady surprise engendered just by contrast. Then too, his predecessor had been struck by lightning while conducting a pauper’s funeral, and this gave young Mr Clinkscales an added attractiveness, as if he were braving danger, like the soldier who snatches up the flag when the color-bearer pitches forward with a bullet through his heart. He had heard that Esther had received voice training in New Orleans, and through her mother he invited her to become a member of the choir. Mrs Wingate was pleased. “My daughter will be glad to serve,” she told him, and she brought Esther to choir practice on Tuesday and Friday evenings after supper. She would sit in the Wingate pew for a while, listening to the singing, the voices reverberant in the empty church, more like demons than angels, and then leave, the rector having promised to see Esther home in safety and propriety.