Jordan County (11 page)

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.

John Sturgis, who had a sweet Irish tenor, was a member. He wore tall celluloid collars and needle-tip shoes and drove a buggy to and from choir practice, picking up the other members at their homes and returning them when it was over. The buggy was not really his — it belonged to the feed and grain company for which he worked as a salesman — but it might as well have been, and indeed it seemed likely that it soon would be, together with much more; people were predicting that he would own a share in the business before long. He was forever making jokes and he had a sizable repertory
of comic songs in which the characters were immigrant Irishmen whose brogue he could imitate to perfection. With his pale green eyes, his upturned nose a bit knobbed at the tip, his high-colored face and carroty hair, his jaunty manner and whinnying laugh, he was like no one Esther Wingate had ever known. Sometimes when they stood together, singing, sharing a hymnal, his elbow would touch hers. It was like electricity. Sometimes when he took a long note, letting it rise and rise, his face reddening with the rush of blood and his eyes bulging from the effort, she would look up at him, her lips parted in admiration. Then he would break off and smile down at her, his face still red but his eyes no longer bulging, and that was like electricity too.

It was December, the air frosty; the choir members’ breaths floated in front of their mouths as they came out of the darkened church where the stained-glass windows admitted no moonlight though the world outside was flooded with it. On the homeward ride they sang popular songs —
Whoa Emma, The Lost Chord, Silver Threads Among the Gold, I Hope I Dont Intrude
— the voices getting fewer and fewer until at last, the Wingate house being the farthest out, there were only three of them in the buggy, Esther and the rector and John Sturgis. The singing would end, and from beyond Mr Clinkscales, who chatted pleasantly in the middle, Esther would watch the young feed salesman, her eyes narrowed with speculation. Sturgis felt her watching him that way, with narrowed eyes; but though he recognized the symptoms — he had had considerable success in that direction, along with his success at salesmanship — he could not quite believe his luck. Besides, Mr Clinkscales was always there.

He was, that is, until a night two weeks before Christmas, when he tripped and broke his ankle. He was making a genuflection, and when he straightened up, feeling behind him for the step, he missed his footing and toppled backward down the short, carpeted flight of stairs, snatching frantically at emptiness as if for the rungs of an invisible ladder. There
were cries of alarm, a flurry of excitement; Mr Clinkscales lay flat on his back with a look of profound surprise on his face and one foot crooked sideways at an unaccustomed angle. He did not know that he was hurt until he tried to stand. Then he saw the twisted foot; “Look at that!” he cried, astonished, pointing downward. The men carried him back to the parish house, where the women helped his wife prepare a basin of hot salt water to draw the pain. The rector kept shaking his head as if he could not quite believe all this had happened. He muttered to himself, his black serge trouser-leg hitched up and his foot in the hot water: “Five thousand times I must have done that in the past five years, at school and all, but nothing like this ever happened. Nothing like this ever happened,” he kept saying, wagging his head with astonishment and unbelief while the women cooed to soothe him and the men stood in the background with long faces.

So when Sturgis had dropped the others and turned the mare out toward the Wingate house, there were only the two of them in the buggy. The hoofs went clop clop, clop clop, somewhat muffled by the dust of the road. There was a full moon low in the eastern sky. A string of geese went across it, contracting and expanding like elastic — there, then gone, leaving it empty, a disk of burnished gold. Afterwards, at the time of her father’s death and through the weeks of waiting, Esther was to tell herself that it was Providence, their being given the chance to be alone: else why should a man of the church have broken his ankle in the moment of placing himself in the hands of God?

That was a Tuesday. She did not tell her mother about the rector’s accident. Friday evening after supper the coachman drove her to choir practice; Mrs Wingate was indisposed (this was Providence, too, Esther told herself) and when Sturgis brought her home, having dropped the other singers along the way, her victory was complete. The only thing it lacked was that, as she looked beyond the grain salesman’s shoulder, seeing the big yellow moon now barely on the wane, and felt against
her back and hips the little hard round buttons that studded the buggy seat like a handful of pebbles tossed in, Mrs Wingate was not there to watch.

These were their only two times alone. By Tuesday the rector was onto crutches, and ten days later, on Christmas Eve, Hector Wingate, hard-faced now in his middle fifties — he had gotten so he rarely spoke to anyone, and whoever spoke to him risked offense, either given or received — was killed by a Negro tenant following a disagreement over settlement for the ’77 crop. Thus at last he achieved his heritage of violence; it had been a bloody death, if not a hero’s. The tenant was caught late that night, treed by dogs in a stretch of timber east of town, and lynched early Christmas morning. That was the one they burned in front of the courthouse.

In late February Sturgis came to Mrs Wingate and asked for her daughter’s hand. Mrs Wingate was in widows’ weeds; Esther stood beside and slightly toward the rear of her mother’s chair. When the young man had spoken, Mrs Wingate’s first reaction was to turn and look at her daughter. Then she turned and looked at the young man. “When?” she asked, almost in a whisper, who had never before been known to lower her voice for anyone.

“Soon, Mrs Wingate.”

“How soon?”

“Soon as possible.”

She turned again and looked at Esther. “Couldnt …” She stopped and cleared her throat. “Couldnt you wait until your father is decently cold in his grave?”