Nancy Culpepper (24 page)

“Mezhie!” Nova squatted next to her. She pulled the bonnet strings from her sister’s mouth and removed the bonnet from her head. By then Artemisia was thrashing, quietly during the prelude, then building to a crescendo.

“Mezhie!” Nova began to moan herself, her voice rising until she was bawling like a cow, moaning with the deep anguish she often felt for her sister.

Artemisia’s thrashing reached symphonic proportions, and after an eternity she began the slow subsiding, the diminuendo, the hush of her music. With a sorrow that squeezed her soul, Nova remembered how Artemisia had ached to learn the piano. But there had been no one to teach her after Mrs. Bledsoe took palsy.

For months, no word came of the inheritance, except four short notes asking for more donations. Mrs. March suggested one or two dollars per month, each, for expenses for the lawyers to press their case to the Supreme Court. They needed five hundred dollars for their trip to Washington. Any month now, the results of the case might be known. The sisters sent in what donations they could afford, and they waited, with growing apprehension, for news. Although Early Otto could not send in his own membership dues, he had already made plans to buy some acreage and livestock as soon as the inheritance arrived. Early Otto believed firmly in the Edwards claim, and he itched to gab about it more freely, but he kept his word and didn’t reveal to Bealus that the sisters had applied. Artemisia, drained by the sheer effort the dream of riches required, decided that all she wanted out of the estate was a piano, and she spoke incessantly of it to Nova and the mailman.

Bealus said to her, “I heard you talking about a pi-anner. Is that what your sweetheart’s bringing you? I imagine we’ll see him hauling it up the road any minute now.”

“I never said any such thing,” Artemisia said, every notion of music plunging into hiding.

“You’d come nearer a-building one out of kindling sticks yourself,” Bealus said.

Later, when they were sorting dress pieces to start a quilt top, Nova sought to reassure her sister about Bealus’s ways. “Nobody would ever hope there could be a piano if we didn’t have this reason to believe,” she said.

“I’m just weary with a-waiting,” Artemisia said. “Purely weary.”

On a bleak December day, when the weather had begun to turn and the leaves had fallen and hog-killing day was imminent, a letter arrived from Mrs. March, apologizing for the long silence. She was writing from a hotel in Birmingham, Alabama. “I have distressing news,” Mrs. March wrote. One of the principal lawyers employed on behalf of the claimants, she explained, was in prison, having been indicted for fraud—charges not related to the claim. “This development means that we cannot proceed at present. However, our organization is not dissolved, and we hope the claim can go forth soon, when we can replace Mr. Worth. Meantime I know you have been very eager to complete your genealogy, which would need to be done before any claim could be verified. The regular fee of any genealogist is twenty-five dollars, but I’m prepared to do the work for you for ten dollars each—since your trees will be the same. I have a special interest in your line, because the information you have given is similar to other records of Edwards claimants who can trace their interest back to our Robert Edwards, shipwrecked sailor. Please let me know if you want me to get up your family tree for you, so that when the case resumes you will be represented and can take possession of your share of the estate more quickly.” Mrs. March enclosed two family-tree forms to be filled out with what names they knew.

The sisters were despondent, and no amount of coming Christmas cheer would raise their spirits. Nova was afraid that Bealus was expecting something extraordinary to come of all the money he had given her. She knew he had little cash to spare. And yet she and Artemisia needed more, so that Mrs. March could verify their connection to the original property owner in New York. The sisters’ disappointment was like the emptiness left by a stillbirth.

They heard from Mrs. March a month later, the day the hogs were killed. She had been called to Memphis, on urgent business. She wrote, in handwriting, “We are proceeding with claims. Mr. Jack Hopkins has joined the team, and all preparations are being made for the journey to Washington. Please let me know if you decide to have me go ahead with your family tree. There is much work to be done on your family record, but I feel sure we can take care of you, in case of further success. But please keep your business on this matter strictly to yourself, as you know
some
people do not want us to have success. Refuse to show anything or talk to strangers and outsiders.”

Nova squeezed Artemisia’s hand silently as they read over this letter for the fourth time. It was late at night, and Artemisia’s garret was chilly. Their hands were raw from handling sausage and chitterlings and other hog parts all day. Two butchered hogs hung in pieces out in the smokehouse, while a hickory fire smoldered beneath them.

Artemisia said, “We can’t stop now.”

In the autumn of 1932, Nova fell ill and was confined to her bed. For some time, she had felt lassitude and loss of verve, which she blamed on disappointment about the inheritance, for nothing of substance had been learned. A knot that had been in her breast for a year had grown larger, and another appeared under her arm. At first she thought the knot would go away, but when the second one formed, she was filled with dread. A poultice did not shrink the knots. Nor did prayer, although Artemisia scoured the Bible for pertinent passages. Nova hadn’t called attention to the knots, but Bealus found one. The discovery made her worry that he might suspect she had hidden some secret pleasure from him. She had withdrawn her intimacies. She thought perhaps he would take the knot as a sign of some betrayal, but he did not accuse her. So she decided the knots were her punishment for hiding the secret of the inheritance, for wheedling his dollars and quarters out of him in such an un-Christian way. Bealus didn’t suggest having the doctor until the knots began to sap her strength, like pregnancies requiring extra nourishment. Artemisia said they were mad-stones, the same as sometimes found in deer stomachs and used for divination.

“Mad-stones are harder than this,” Nova said. “And I can’t divine a thing from them but suffering.”

When the pain began, she couldn’t help gather the corn at harvest. Her older daughter, Betsy, quit school to help cook for the men. She did the patching and some of the housework.

Artemisia, suffused with melancholy, sat by Nova’s bed. “If we heir that fortune, we can carry you to a famous clinic, and they can fix you.”

Artemisia continued to meet Early Otto every day, waiting for news of the inheritance, but little came. They had sent in their twenty dollars, most of it earned by peddling dried-peach fried pies to ladies in town. Mrs. March had finished the family trees, establishing their straight line to the shipwrecked sea captain, and the court dates had been delayed.

When she felt she might be dying, Nova said to Artemisia, “I want you to ask Bealus for anything you need. Bealus will take care of you. And Betsy will help.” Nova had difficulty swallowing, and her speech was broken into uneven phrases.

“I’ll be all right,” Artemisia said. “When we heir the money, we’ll be all right. I can set up housekeeping. I’ll buy myself a mansion and new pots.”

“Keep after the fortune,” Nova said. “Don’t let Bealus . . .”

She fell asleep, and Artemisia tucked Nova’s hand under the quilt, out of the draft.

When she knew for certain she was dying, Nova said to Bealus, “I want you to do one thing for me. Just one thing I ask and that is all.”

“Anything.” Bealus was half-crazed, primed for reckless promises.

“You’ll be needing a wife. I want you to marry Mezhie.”

Bealus jumped, as if he had been kicked in the face by a mule.

“I don’t want her to go to the asylum,” Nova said, her voice a harsh whisper. “I don’t want her to end up by herself and no family.”

“I can take care of Mezhie,” Bealus said. “She can live right here— but
marry
her? I couldn’t think it.”

Nova said, “You need her to take care of the children. If she’s in the house, sooner or later there will be temptation. It won’t be right. So you have to marry her. The mad-stone’s working now, and I can foretell the future. I can tell you I’m going to die, and I have to make plans: what to do about you and what to do about Mezhie. So I figured it out, and that’s it. That’s what you have to do. You’re a man, and if she’s under your roof and you have no wife, you’ll want her.”

“But—”

“She’ll love you, even though she doesn’t know it now, and she’ll remind you of me. You won’t know the difference after a while.”

In the end, Nova resigned herself to the Lord’s care, and when the pain made her scream, she imagined she was having one of her sister’s fits, sharing with her that excruciating agony she had witnessed so many times and which now, for far too long, she kept expecting to turn into oblivion.

Out of Christian duty, Bealus Renfroe meant to honor his wife’s dying request—in his own way—if he could figure out a suitable plan. But his fear of Artemisia throttled him. His grief was at odds with his sense of honor. A man wanted to bring out a certain amount of frenzy in a woman, it was true. But not unconsciousness and a slathering tongue caught in the strings of her nightcap. Artemisia’s fits frightened him with their supernatural depth. Her spasms reminded him of a religious exercise in the old days when penitents fell over from the church benches and jerked themselves senseless, until they lay stiff as boards.

But then Bealus slowly opened his mind. On a spring afternoon, Artemisia rounded a corner of the house, unaware that he saw her. Her mouth was moving, as if she were pantomiming a conversation; she threw her hands up in surprise, although she hadn’t seen him. She was deep into her pantomime. He saw that she was pretending to talk to her sister. He recognized the way the two sisters chattered together. She was taking both sides of the conversation, going back and forth. He recognized Nova, her expressions, her modest “Aw, pshaw!”—as well as the flirtatious dips and tosses of her head, her hand brushing the wings of her hair. Artemisia was playing both parts, as though she had two personalities, as though she had Nova in her.

He didn’t reveal that he saw her at her game. He had believed Artemisia to be a stray mooncalf, possessed by enigmatic visions. Now he saw that Nova inhabited her, and memories of Nova rose unbearably in his mind.

When he went to Artemisia in her garret, he meant to do so tenderly, without impertinence or dishonorable intention. He wanted to know if Artemisia had any liniment.

“I didn’t know where Nova kept the liniment,” he said. “She always had liniment. She rubbed my sore back with liniment.” His tongue caressed the word, drawing it out long.

“I’ll show you the liniment,” she said, catching her nightdress around her feet, holding it up as she descended the stairs. With the lantern, he went ahead of her, half turned to catch her if she stumbled.

Bealus observed her gathering the hem of her nightdress, squatting to fetch the liniment from a cupboard it shared with the bluing and the starch. She held the hem bunched around her feet. As she searched for a rag, her hair fell across her eyes like a shadow, and she seemed to peek from behind it, wary of him, but perhaps beckoning. He was aware that his trousers were held up by only one gallus.

“I’ll tear you a rag,” she said, poking into another cupboard for an old shirt, which she ripped in half. She tore out a sizable swatch and handed it to him, and he touched it, without taking it from her.

“She’d have done it for you,” she said. “She would have reached where you can’t reach. Where’s it sore?”

He guided her hand behind his dangling gallus toward the small of his back.

Pulling up his shirt, she rubbed circles on his back with the liniment-soaked rag, and its strong smell, like turpentine and cloves, washed over him, a fragrance that filled him with Nova’s presence. Her sister’s touch was delicate and steady, not like a person who might suddenly slump to the floor and begin to thrash and drool. He saw how steady she was, how nimble her knuckles.

She eased his soreness, and they left the kitchen.

“Thank ye,” he said to Artemisia as she ascended the steps to her garret. In the dark shadow at the top of the stairs he could imagine he saw the ghost of Nova.

In six months, they announced their betrothal. He believed her fits had slacked off, although he was in the fields most of the day and couldn’t witness her behavior. She seemed to hold an aura of beatitude when she was around him. No one in the household reported any spells. His brother’s wife, Ethel, ran the house, and Artemisia answered to her, until Bealus told Ethel that from now on Artemisia was the lady of the house and everyone would answer to her. Bealus knew the gossip throughout the community of Locust transcended mere talk of Artemisia’s spells. It was that she lived in his house. Nova had known what would happen, and she had told him what to do. Nova was right. The preacher married them in the parlor, in front of the portraits of his parents on the wall. Bealus stood with Artemisia where he had stood with Nova fifteen years before, and where Nova had been laid out so recently, holding a lock of his whiskers tied with a baby ribbon. During the marriage service, Bealus felt a wave of emotion stir through him—like the giggles, but not mirth. Grief. He told himself sternly that it was not appropriate to feel grief on his wedding day. “I do,” he said, his voice husky.

Artemisia was filled with surprises. Where she once scurried meekly, she began to behave more forthrightly—deliberate and unhurried. She presented him with the choicest samples of fried hen and squirrel, and she prepared hot, bubbling cobblers from the Indian peaches that grew along the creek. And, to his amazement, without any coaxing from him, Artemisia repeated what Nova had done to arouse ripples of pleasure, with the same little flourishes, her tongue alive and slithery on him. He imagined a comfortable swirl of mating snakes—not an unpleasant thought, for he admired snakes. He did not mention snakes to her, though, for he knew she would be frightened. He had grown to appreciate her timidity, so different from Nova, yet he knew she harbored Nova’s capacity for uninhibited delight. She continued to act out her conversations with her sister, and he half-believed she was in communication with her, for her gestures included so many of Nova’s passionate and spontaneous mannerisms.