You did what you had to, Gandy. Forget her. You have enough t’ worry about gettin’ your own life in order, facin’ the ghosts of Waverley again, deciding how to provide for a family of eight. Agatha’s been on her own a long time. She’ll make out fine.
But no matter how many times he reiterated these thoughts, he could not evict her from his memory.
On the afternoon of the second day the train carried Gandy and company into the town of Columbus, Mississippi, which had been a bustling cotton-trading center on the Tombigbee River before the war. The old cotton chutes were still there, like curved tongues waiting to drop bales again from the empty warehouses along the river onto the riverboats that were dying a slow death beside the railroad tracks, which carried everything faster, cheaper, safer.
“When I was a boy,” Scott told Willy, “I used t’ like t’ watch the slaves load cotton on the riverboats just like you watched the cowpokes load cows on the train.”
“Here?”
“Sometimes here. More often at Waverley. We had our own warehouses and the riverboats pulled right up t’ shore t’ load.”
The comment released a torrent of questions. “How far away is it? How long before we git there? Can I fish in the river right away? What color will my horse be?”
Scott chuckled at the boy’s excitement, which mirrored his own, as his first glimpse of Waverley grew closer.
They bought supplies at Sheed’s Mercantile store. Old Franklin Sheed looked like a dried apple doll with white whiskers. He squinted at Scott from behind corrugated eyelids, withdrew a pipe from his mouth, and drawled, “Well, blezz man soul. LeMaster Gandy, i’n’t it?”
He extended a hard hand and clasped Scott’s.
“Sure is, though nobody’s called me that in a long time.”
“Good t’ see ya again, boy. Y’all back for good?”
“Don’t rightly know, Mr. Sheed.” Realizing Willy listened, he added, “I hope so. Brought my friends here t’ see the old place.” He introduced them all around, ending with the boy, upon whose shoulders Scott rested his hands.
“Well, it’s still there,” Sheed said of Waverley. “Nobody messes with it, ‘cept a few o’ the old slaves used t’ work for your daddy. They’re still out there, keepin’ trespassers off the place. Be s’prised t’ see you after all these years.”
Something good happened inside Scott, clasping Franklin’s hand. His roots were here. Folks remembered him, his people, his heritage. He’d wandered for so long, lived among strangers who cared little about his past or his future, once he parted from them, that coming back to a place where his name was remembered gave him an immediate pang of nostalgia. And here was old Franklin Sheed, who’d sold Scott’s father cigars and his mother cotton cloth for the very diapers she’d used for his brothers and himself.
“What’s it been now, since your folks passed on?” Franklin wondered aloud. But before Gandy could answer, a pinched-up octogenarian in a tattered gray bonnet limped in with a black cypress cane.
“Miz Mae Ellen,” the store owner greeted her, “y’all remember Dorian and Selena Gandy’s boy, don’t you?”
She lowered her head and peered at Scott for a full ten seconds, resting both hands on the head of the cane.
“LeMastuh, is it?”
“That’s right, Miz Bayles.” He grinned down at the withered woman, remembering how much taller she’d been the last time he’d seen her. Or had he only been shorter?
“Used t’ feed you peaches when your mama came t’ visit me at Oakleigh.”
“I remember, Miz Bayles.” His grin remained. His eyes teased. “And some o’ the tastiest molasses cookies anywhere this side o’ the Mason-Dixon line. But y’all never let me have more than two, and I used t’ stare at the rest on the plate and swear I’d get even someday.”
Her laugh filled the store like the gobble of an old hen turkey. She rapped her cane on the floor, then shot a sly glance at Jube, standing nearby. “And I used t’ look at that face o’ his and think t’ myself, that boy’s too handsome for his own good. He’ll end up in trouble over it someday.” Her shrewd eyes pinioned Scott again. “Did you?”
Scott’s dimples deepened to disarming depths. “Not that I recall, Miz Bayles.”
She glanced from Jube to Willy to Scott. “So you married up again, did you?”
“No, ma’am.” Scott gestured toward Jube, then looked down at Willy. “These are my friends, Jubilee Bright and Willy Collinson.” The others were browsing throughout the store so he didn’t bother to introduce them.
“Willy, is it?” She studied him imperiously.
Scott waggled Willy’s shoulder. “’Member your manners, boy.”
Willy extended a hand. “Pleased t’ meet you, ma’am.”
“Humph!” she snorted, shaking his hand. “Don’t know why you should be—dried up prune like me, doesn’t feed a boy more’n two molasses cookies at a time. But I have a grandson, A.J., and he’s the one you’d like t’ meet.” She jerked a thumb at Scott. “You have this rascal bring you by someday and I’ll introduce you two.”
“Really?”
She poked Willy in the shoulder with the tip of her cane. “One thing you got to learn right up front, boy. Wrinkled-up old ladies don’t say things they don’t mean. They never know when they might drop over dead an’ leave confusion behind.”
Everyone laughed. Then Scott allowed Miss Bayles to make her purchases ahead of him. While she did, he inquired, “Y’all still live at Oakleigh, Miz Bayles?”
“Oakleigh is empty,” she replied with stiff pride, carefully counting out her money from a leather pouch, then snapping it closed. “I live with my daughter, Leta, in town now.”
For a moment Scott had been carried back into the past. Miss Bayles’s revelation reminded him that Waverley wasn’t the only grand mansion left derelict by the war. The turn of the conversation had put a damper on the subject, and when Miss Bayles turned with her purchases in hand, Scott politely tipped his hat.
“Greet Leta for me,” he requested. “I remember her well.”
“I’ll do that, LeMaster. My best t’ Leatrice. I remember her well, too.”
Leatrice’s name brought a resurgence of expectation to Scott. It remained within him as they bought ham and grits and flour and lard—enough food to feed a family of eight for several days. The good feeling stayed with him while they rented rigs at the livery—where again Scott was recognized and greeted enthusiastically by his given name—and while they set out for Waverley through the familiar Mississippi countryside.
Heading northwest, they rode through thick stands of oak, hickory, and post pine that opened into vast tracts of depleted cotton fields, few of which had been seeded in the last fifteen years. They passed Oakleigh, which appeared as only a faint white blur at the end of a long lane, half choked with underbrush and scuppernong vines.
The sky was clear but the breeze held a bite. The tips of the pines stroked the evening sky the way an artist’s brush passed across a canvas, painting it the hue of a fading wisteria blossom. The carriages traveled upon a gravel road worn smooth by years of mule-drawn wagon wheels that had ground it down to fine silt. The scent of the earth was moist and fecund, unlike the dry, grainy scent of Kansas. Neither the sound nor odor of shifting cattle was anywhere to be heard or smelled. Instead, Gandy’s senses thrilled to the sweet melodic trill of an occasional mockingbird rising from a thicket, and the scent of vegetation decaying now during the brief hiatus between growing seasons.
“Waverley land starts here,” he said. Willy’s eyes grew disbelieving as they rode on and on still farther.
“All this?”
Scott only smiled and held the reins loosely between his knees. They entered the last mile, the last half mile. Then ahead, on the right, a black iron fence appeared. As they approached it, Scott slowed the rig. Beside him, Willy looked up. Then his eyes followed the path of Scott’s.
“Somebody’s buried way out here?” Willy asked.
> “My family.”
“Yours?” The boy glanced up again.
In the back seat Jube and Marcus turned to glimpse the cemetery.
“Who?” Willy asked, craning to watch the gray headstones slip past.
“My mama and my daddy. And my wife and our little girl.”
“You had a little girl?”
“Her name was Justine.”
“And what’s that?” Willy asked, pointing to a wooden structure on their right.
“Why, that’s the bathin’ house. Inside is the swimmin’ pool.”
“Wow!” Willy raised up off the seat in excitement. Scott pressed him back down. “Y’all can see it later.” He went on quietly, “And this...” Scott turned left into the drive directly opposite the pool house—“... is Waverley.”
The sight of it brought a leap to Gandy’s heart, a thrill to his blood, even though, like Oakleigh, the house was glimpsed through snarls of vines and thickets of cedar and gum trees that had encroached upon the long lane, rendering it impassable. In its prime, the lane had been meticulously maintained. But today Gandy was forced to rein in after traveling less than a quarter of its length. In the early evening shadows the choking vegetation seemed to lend a menacing note to their reception. The overwhelming catlike smell of the gum trees seemed offensive, as if warning all mortals to keep away.
“Wait here,” Gandy ordered, looping the reins around the whip bracket.
He went alone, picking his way through fifteen years’ unchecked growth until he reached the massive magnolia—the one with the widest limb span in the state of Mississippi—that had dominated Waverley’s front yard for as long as he could remember. But his disappointment redoubled at the sight of it, too, overrun by vines and hemmed in by his mother’s precious boxwoods. She’d brought the boxwoods all the way from Georgia as a young bride and had nurtured them lovingly as long as she’d been alive. Their geometric perfection was long gone, for they’d been pruned by nothing but wild deer for years and years, leaving them grotesque and misshapen. Selena Gandy would have been appalled at their present disgraceful state.
Her son scratched his face on the unkempt bushes as he forced his way through them to the front entrance. The marble steps were intact, as was the iron grillework on the overhanging balcony and the ruby-red sidelights of Venetian glass surrounding the massive front door.
But the door itself wouldn’t budge.
He cupped a hand over his eyes and tried to peer inside, but the door faced south, and now in the descending twilight little light came through the windows around the matching north door across the entry hall. All he could make out were the carved lyre-shaped inserts on the insides of the windows. Beyond these, images appeared vague, translucent, as if viewed through a glass of burgundy wine.
He pounded on the door and called, “Is anybody there? Leatrice, y’all in there?”
Only silence greeted him and the sudden rat-a-tat of a woodpecker somewhere in the dense growth behind him.
The back door proved no more hospitable than the front. The two entrances were identical, with twin Doric columns fronting recessed porches two stories high. The only differences were the second, shorter pair of columns guarding the front door and the pair of familiar black wooden benches on either side of the back door. The sight of them brought another stab of nostalgia to Scott. They were thick, heavy, made of bois d’arc wood from the cypress swamps down by the river, bent and looped into the modified fanback design by the hands of slaves long before he himself had been born. It was upon the bois d’arc benches he remembered his mother and father sitting while Delia fed the peacocks.
Leaving the house behind, he followed a track showing evidence of recent use, past the old kitchen, the octagonal ice house, the gardens, the tannery, the stables, toward the slave cabins out back. He smelled Leatrice’s woodsmoke long before he reached her door.
Knocking, he called, “Leatrice?”
“Who dat?” she called in a voice like flatulent wind escaping a bloated horse.
“Open up and see for yourself.” He smiled, his face close to the rough door as he waited.
“Sumbuddy full o’ sass, fo’ sure.” The door swung open and there she stood, nearly as big around as the century-old magnolia out front, her skin as coarse and black as its bark, and, like the tree, looking every bit as if she were here to stay forever.
“What kind o’ welcome is that?” he teased, leaning an elbow on the doorsill and letting a grin slide up his cheek.
“Who... Lawd o’ mercy”—her eyes flew wide. “Dat you, Mastuh?” She had never added the Le to LeMaster, and had always scoffed at the familiar Scott. “Praise mah soul, chile! It’s you!”
“It’s me.” He lunged inside and scooped her up, though his arms reached scarcely two-thirds of the way around her. She smelled of woodsmoke and cracklings and poke greens, and her hug was mighty enough to threaten his bones.
“Mah baby come home!” she rejoiced, shedding tears, praising the heavens. “Lawd, Lawd, he come home at lass.” She backed off and held him by the ears. “Lemme have a look.”
Her voice was like no other in humankind, a deep rumbling bass that could not come out softly, no matter how she tried. She had smoked a corncob pipe all her days, and it was anybody’s guess what concoctions she’d stuffed into it. Something long ago had damaged her larynx and left it able to emit only the grating sound no one ever forgot once they’d heard it.
“Jiss like I thought,” she pronounced, “skinny as a sparrow’s kneecap. What they been feedin’ ya, pot likker?” She turned Scott around by the shoulders, inspected him minutely, then swung him again to face her. “Well, ol’ Leatrice fatten ya up in no time. Mose!” she called without looking back over her shoulder. “Come see who’s heah.”
“Mose is here?” Gandy’s face registered happy surprise as he glanced beyond her shoulder.
“Sho’ is,” said the aged black man who emerged out of the shadows and crossed the wooden floor with an arthritic shuffle. “Nevuh goed. Stayed right heah where I belonged.”
“Mose,” Scott said affectionately, clasping one of the old man’s bony hands in both of his own. Mose was as thin as Leatrice was fat. His silver hair topped his head like Spanish moss, and, standing, he listed slightly to the left and forward, as if his spine refused to straighten completely anymore.
“Fifteen years,” the old man mused aloud in a thin, wispy voice. “’Bout time ya was gittin’ back heah.”
“I may not be stayin’,” Scott clarified immediately. “Just came t’ see the place again.”
Mose released Scott’s hand to brace his back. “Y’all be stayin’,” he said, as if there were no question.
Scott let his eyes slide assessingly from Mose to Leatrice. “So you two finally took up together.”
Leatrice cuffed him none too gently on the side of the head. “Watch yo’ tongue, boy. Ain’ I taught ya t’ respec’ yo’ elduhs? Me an’ Mose kep’ de place while y’all went gallyhooin’ ‘roun’.” She turned away with an air of superiority. “’Sides, I wou’n’t have ‘im. He too lazy, dat one. But he company.”
Scott rubbed the side of his head and smiled. “That any way t’ treat the boy who used t’ pick you wild blackberries and snitch roses for you from his mother’s garden?”
When Leatrice laughed the rafters overhead threatened to split. “Set down, boy. I got warm cornbread an’ black-eyed peas. Bes’ get t’ work hangin’ some fat on dem bones.”
Gandy stayed where he was. “I brought company. Think y’all could handle ham and biscuits for eight if I bring the ham and the fixin’s?”
“Eight?” Leatrice humphed and turned away as if slighted by the question. “Like feedin’ eight mosquitoes aftuh what I done feed in de good days. Y’all brung dat Ruby home, too?”
“I did. And Ivory, too.”
“Ivory, too.” Leatrice raised one eyebrow and added, sarcastically, “My, my, dat make four o’ us. Soon we be raisin’ cotton.”
&n
bsp; Gandy smiled. Being tongue-lashed by Leatrice was exactly what he needed to make him feel as if he were home at last.
“I left them stranded in the lane. Couldn’t get into the big house.”
“Key’s right heah.” Leatrice pulled it from between her ample breasts. “Been keepin’ it in a safe spot. Mose, he open up.” She drew the leather thong over her head and handed it to the old man.
But Mose gaped at it as if it had eight legs. “Me?”
“Yas, you. Now, git!”
Mose backed off, shaking his head, eyes bugging as they fixed on the key. “Ain’t goin’ in dere, nossir, not ol’ Mose.”
“What you talkin’ ‘bout. ‘Cose you goin’ in dere. Got t’ open it up fo’ young Mastuh an’ his frien’s.”
Gandy watched the interchange with a puzzled frown.
“Git, now!” the black woman ordered imperiously.
Mose only shook his head fearfully and backed farther away.
“What is all this?” Scott demanded, frowning.
“Place got a hant.”
“A hant!”
“Thass right. I heard her. Mose heard her. She in dere, whimperin’. Y’all go in, ya heah her soon ‘nuff. What ya s’pose kep’ folks out all dese years? Not jiss two old black folk goin’ ‘round checkin’ de doors.”
Gandy’s neck stiffened even as he declared, “But that’s ridiculous. A ghost?”
Leatrice picked up his palm and into it slapped the keys, still warm from her breasts. “Y’all open it up yo’self. Leatrice, she cook. Leatrice, she make biscuits, she make ham. Leatrice, she bring dem ham and biscuits far as de back door.” She crossed her arms over her watermelon-sized breasts and gave one stubborn wag of the head. “But Leatrice don’t go near no hants. Noooo, suh!”
As he picked his way back toward the house, armed with several tallow candles, Scott clearly recalled the child’s voice he’d heard in the house after the war. Was it true, then? Was it Justine? Was she searching for her mother and father somewhere in the lofty, unoccupied rooms of Waverley? Or was it only the product of several overactive imaginations? He knew how superstitious black people were. Yet, he, too, had heard it, and he’d never had a superstitious bone in his body.