The Undertaker's Daughter (13 page)

“Mud, sweat, and tears, that’s how I built my business,” she was fond of saying.

She strongly believed in advertising and marketing. While walking the sidewalks of Main Street, she thought of adopting the color red. Sure, she loved red; it was cheerful, rich, and aggressive, but more important, it was always terrifically noticeable. It soon became clear that Agnes had stealthily encroached upon the consciousness of the town; no one would ever again see her dressed in any color but red.

The farmers of Jubilee began to spread the word that Miss Agnes had a knack for recommending fertilizers that achieved results. She talked a blue streak about the benefits of Harvest King
or “Prolific—the fertilizer with extra producing power!” She reeled off the alchemy of the marriage of fertilizer to soil.

“At first,” she said, “only a few listened. But then, as the results began to show, boy, honey, didn’t I start to sell it!”

During the planting season she sold fertilizer to farmers on credit until their crops came in, and she carried their account without charging interest. She was better than a walking, talking Visa card.

Miss Agnes’s business grew to such an extent that she waved good-bye to stenography and eventually to Dun & Bradstreet. She became the first female fertilizer dealer in the state and one of the first women in the country to own and operate her own dealership. Her reputation spread past the borders of Jubilee into the county and throughout Kentucky and Tennessee. She moved offices three times, outgrowing each one until she settled into an office and two warehouses on North Main Street. She acquired enough space from which to sell well over five thousand tons of fertilizer a year, which she did easily.

Business was good, but she still lived in the room in the house on Ninth Street. Elvis Perry filled her thermos full of coffee each night and gave her scraps of bread with which to feed the birds. She saved every penny she earned, for she was driven by one purpose, one notion that occupied her every waking hour. From her window she could see the corner of Winter Street and the side lawn of the antebellum mansion that she coveted.

Miss Agnes was resolved that one day she would own the most beautiful home in Jubilee and regain the status her family had held before her father’s downfall. She would not have just any home, but a home that was unique to Jubilee, a house with a story built into its foundations and a historical past. She continued to work late into the evening, six days a week, and on many
Sundays she heard the church bells ringing from her office desk. Comforts that she could easily afford were not a part of her life, and she scrimped and saved as if she remained the pauper she had been.

Some in Jubilee, old friends, couldn’t quite give her the credit she was due—not yet. Her reputation was not restored; in fact, they thought the Agnes Davis they once knew was verging on eccentric: the red clothes, behaving like a man with all this fertilizer business, riding around in that farm truck. No, Miss Agnes was failing miserably in the eyes of Jubilee’s social elite.

In the early 1950s, in a splendid moment of synchronicity, the man who owned the mansion was ready to sell and Miss Agnes was at last ready to buy. She wrote a check for $40,000—then slipped another forty grand in cash under the table. This scandalous sum would remain a secret.

Miss Agnes had purchased not only a house, but also a piece of Jubilee’s history, and indeed the country’s.

M
ajor Richard Bibb, a Revolutionary War officer, was one of the wealthiest men in western Kentucky and was said to be of unimpeachable character. Also a Methodist preacher, he owned a vast amount of land and almost one hundred slaves. In 1821, a year after he built a new town home for his wife, Major Bibb drew up a list of his slaves and the value of each, from $600 to $50.

One frosty day eight years later, Major Bibb, an old man, stood in the wood-yard with his hands uplifted and a Bible and a hymnal placed on an upturned barrel beside him and asked a blessing upon his slaves who were gathered around him. He read a chapter from the Bible and led them in a hymn. The old man
had congregated his slaves so that he could publicly say good-bye to the twenty-nine of them who were going to be set free. They were to be transported in wagons to Clarksville, Tennessee, where they would board a steamboat to New Orleans and then a sailing ship to Liberia.

He wanted to send all of his slaves to Africa, but didn’t want to send any away who had family members who belonged to other masters. This act of conscience occurred thirty-two years before the nation fought its first battle in the Civil War.

Richard Jr., the eldest of the Bibb sons, became a merchant. The youngest son, George, became a U.S. senator and secretary of the treasurer under President Tyler. Unlike his brothers, John—or Jack, as he liked to be called—was not ambitious. He moved to Frankfort, Kentucky, became a member of the bar, and practiced law for two years before retiring. Jack was past eighty years old when he began giving his lettuce to his friends. How long he worked on his lettuce or how he perfected it is not known, but everyone agreed that Mr. Bibb’s lettuce was the finest they had ever eaten. People simply called it Bibb lettuce because Jack gave it to them.

Excluding the twenty-nine slaves who were shipped to Liberia, many of Major Bibb’s remaining slaves settled on the two plots of land bequeathed to them, located farther north in the county, and called both Bibbtown. One afternoon one of the descendants of Bibb’s slaves walked into Miss Agnes’s office to buy a bag of fertilizer. As was her custom, she began a conversation, and she soon learned his history. He became a loyal customer and one day presented her with a black cauldron that had hung from the hearth of Major Bibb’s cookhouse. Miss Agnes took the pot home and hung it in the hearth in her kitchen, the same hearth that had been its home for well over a hundred years.

N
ow that she finally owned a big, fine house, Miss Agnes set about indulging in her passion for collecting antiques with which to fill it. Diligently she planned the remodeling and decorating of her new home in much the same way that she began her business. She researched, quizzed people about, and breathed antiques. She became the kind of creature who found more solace in objects than in people. Then, here they came, seeping out of the woodwork, knocking on the door, stopping her in the street. The people who had ostracized her suddenly swarmed to her like annoying little bees. Now that she lived in the most beautiful house in Jubilee, now that she was a connoisseur in antique furniture, everyone wanted to be her friend again. Completely transparent in their intentions and not at all concerned by that, they smiled at her, flattered her, and even stepped aside for her squat, red-clothed figure as she walked around the town square.

But Miss Agnes had settled scores inside her, where it mattered. The people who’d turned their backs, the people who controlled the social hierarchy and moral views of Jubilee, were like the dead to her.

When my father first met Miss Agnes, her brother had been dead for only a year. His death followed a long illness and was difficult. Urey’s wife and Miss Agnes exchanged letters in which thanks were expressed for Miss Agnes’s generous gifts of money, presents, convalescent equipment . . . anything he or his wife required. I wondered afterward, had Urey still been alive, if she would have been as taken with my father. Whenever the three of us were together, I felt she treated him like a son, although I think he also reminded her of her brother when he was young and healthy.

No matter how busy my father was at the funeral home, he made sure she was safely home each evening. This unlikely pair, the handsome new funeral director and Jubilee’s most eccentric established character, formed a strong alliance. A day came when they realized a closer relationship existed and a pact was made. My father had not only found his ally, he had found a friend in the deepest sense of the word. The unspoken agreement in our family was that when my father was with Miss Agnes, he was all hers.

Now there were five of us—five females who claimed ownership of the man who spent equal time with the dead and the living. My mother appeared to tolerate this arrangement, with no resistance to sharing her husband. I never heard her complain to my father or anyone else regarding the demands that the woman in red made upon him. My mother’s acceptance set an example to us, the children. Miss Agnes was now a curiously remote part of our family.

 CHAPTER 5 

I
first met Miss Agnes on Halloween when I was six. I’d badgered my father to paint my face green with his mortuary cosmetics. I wanted to be the Wicked Witch of the West.

I stood in the kitchen in my underwear and undershirt. I often got dressed in the kitchen as it somehow came to be the room in which either Belle or my mother caught me as I walked through on my way somewhere else.

My father answered, staring out the window well clear of the kitchen traffic, “You can’t have a painted face. You’re going to have to wear the mask that came with the costume.”

“But I can’t breathe in it! It makes my face sweat!”

“I’m taking you somewhere tonight before you go trick-or-treating and you can’t go with me with a painted face.”

“Oh! Where’re we going?”

“First, we’re going to take Belle home, then we’re going to meet a special friend of mine.” He looked at his watch.

Belle stood by, holding one of my Sunday dresses.

“Come on now. I gots your best dress ready.” Belle held it up at arm’s length.

“Gosh, Belle, there’s such a lot of starch in this dress. You could kill somebody with the hem on this thing.” She raised a sea of crinolines over my head and shimmied it down my body. “It itches like crazy.”

“Hush up. You’s goin’ to meet a fine lady.”

“What lady? And what makes her fine?”

“I don’t know, she jest fine.” Clap. Clap. “Put these here shoes on. Your mama cleaned them today. Look how they shines.” Clap. Clap.

“Are Thomas and Evelyn going with us?” I held on to Belle’s arms and stepped into the patent leather shoes.

“No,” my father said impatiently. He was ready to go. Being overly punctual we always left fifteen minutes earlier than the time he originally appointed.