Wild Midnight (16 page)

The upstairs room of the meeting house was bare and serene, filled only with Windsor chairs set in a circle. About twenty people, mostly middle-aged, the women in soft spring tweeds and the men in business suits, were assembled there. The sprinkling of young people, some in jeans and T-shirts—the modern-day version of Quaker plain dress—stood in groups talking, welcoming newcomers. Several came to Rachel at once, introducing themselves, asking about her work in Draytonville, inviting her to drive up to Charleston meeting when she could.
 

Promptly at ten o’clock, at a seemingly invisible signal, the members of the Quaker meeting all sat down, and silence descended on the meeting. Rachel sat with her hands clasped in her lap, waiting for the “centering down” that she knew would come. But she was unable to resist looking around the group to see if she could find the clerk of the meeting, who would signal, after an hour of silent worship was over, that the meeting should rise.
 

As a birthright Friend accustomed to silent worship from the time she was old enough to sit in meeting, Rachel was used to slipping into her thoughts easily. Yet she was always aware, as she was this bright sunny morning, that not everyone would find Sunday worship in this manner understandable—no ministers, preachers, organ music, singing, or structured forms of assembly, only each person worshiping in silence the way he or she chose to do.
 

Except, she thought, feeling restless, this morning she couldn’t seem to get started. She really didn’t know why she’d come to Quaker Meeting when she hadn’t attended at all since Dan’s death. That terrible loss had driven her away from everything that was comforting and dependable. It had been a bitter decision to take up Dan’s work months ago, perhaps a form of revenge to turn her back on the Friends’ committee that had funded it and declare that she was only a hired worker.
 

She was failing miserably at centering down, her thoughts drifting, and she had to do something about it. There was no need to come to Meeting just to sit there.
 

Ah, but you must think about it, a small inner voice warned her. And face the fact that you are confused and afraid.
 

What she had seen in the mirror in D’Arcy’s bedroom when the sisters were dressing her had been a revelation not without a sort of horror. She had deceived herself about Dan’s death, that the terrible loss of her young, handsome husband and his love left her in a void with nothing happening. Because something had happened.
 

The Quaker way is to so order the inner life that outward pressures can be adequately dealt with.
The words did not comfort; if anything they forced her to an agonizing questioning.
 

At the bottom of her terrible confusion was what had happened in Draytonville the night before she left. She didn’t want to admit that her defeat and humiliation at the hands of Beaumont Tillson had so frightened her that she didn’t want to go back. She, Rachel Goodbody Brinton, did not want to face the consequences of her own mistake.
 

But it had been her fault, she told herself resolutely. She had let a very skillful appeal to her passions overwhelm her. She could no longer argue that there had been something more—the note and the money he had left was proof of that.
 

If she could accept that to err was human, and go back to Draytonville and take up the work of the co-op once more, knowing that she could live with her folly, then she was on the road to putting her life in order. More, she realized sadly, than it had been this past year. Certainly better than it had been since she’d lost her husband over a year ago and had given herself over to bitter despair.
 

She would go back, Rachel vowed, looking around at the solemn faces bent in silent worship. She would begin again. She could do no more than that.
 

Chapter Nine

D’Arcy had declared they would leave Charleston early Sunday afternoon for the drive back to Draytonville, but inevitably, last-minute problems requiring her attention intervened. Monday was Sissy’s first day back at her exclusive girls’ school, Ashley Hall, after the long spring vacation, and like most teenagers she had left most of her preparations until the last minute. In the midst of the chaos the phone rang for about the thirtieth time.
 

“Oh, damn, everybody who was at
Rigoletto
last night has been ringing the damned thing, inviting us to dinners and cocktail parties all next week. They’re having
fits
when I tell them you’re not staying. Even old Burmah Huger”—D’Arcy pronounced it “Yew-gee,” low-country style—”out on Isle of Palms. Lord, I thought she was dead! Wanting to invite us to tea and meet her old prissy son, who’s fifty if he’s a day. She already knew your mama and my mama went to Wesleyan together, and that’s all it takes to give you the seal of approval.”
 

D’Arcy shoved a pile of Sissy’s laundered bras and slips at Rachel as the telephone rang again. “Take these up to her, will you?”
 

When Rachel came back down D’Arcy was waiting for her at the foot of the stairs.
 

“It’s Bob Furman. He wants to know if we’ve left yet and if he can speak to you. Good grief, this is the third time this morning, Rachel, why don’t you say something to him? Why don’t you just give him your telephone number, or at least an address in Draytonville where he can write you? He’s the
nicest
man, and good-looking—you just know you blew him away last night or he wouldn’t be wearing out my telephone this way!”
 

“D’Arcy, I’m all packed.” Rachel put her suitcase on the polished parquet floorboards of the downstairs hall. “If we don’t start soon, it will be dark before we get to Draytonville. And if you don’t mind, I’d rather not talk to him.”
 

D’Arcy pointed to the receiver still off the hook and lying on the mahogany table in the hall. “Just pick it up and say good-bye then.”
 

“I’d rather not.” Rachel sighed. “D’Arcy, listen, I don’t want to be rude, but it will be impossible for me to come back to Charleston to visit with you. I wish I could in some ways, but it doesn’t serve the interests of the farmers’ cooperative or the work I’m doing for them to take these ... social vacations away from Draytonville. I don’t think I can mix the two worlds. The one I’m in right now is so different,” she said softly.
 

“But honey,” the blond woman cried, “aren’t you just hiding out down there? Rachel, stop me if I’m saying things I shouldn’t, but haven’t you been running away from things since your husband died? Bless your heart, I know you’re dedicated to all kinds of helpful projects and all that, it’s part of what you believe in, but being so young and pretty there must be something else you want out of life!”
 

“Oh, D’Arcy,” Rachel murmured. “You don’t understand. Even if I wanted—” She looked around the elegant hall, trying to put her thought into words. “Even if I wanted to come back to all this again, I can’t get away from Draytonville now. The co-op is something I’m committed to, and we haven’t achieved a tenth of our goals outlined in our original grant. People don’t really believe in us—I expected the support of the churches and they backed away because there’s been some talk, well, you know—all you have to say is that a cooperative for poor people is a socialist idea and somebody will label it communist. I think we’ve gotten over that initial reaction, but most of Draytonville is sitting back, waiting to see how we do. And then there are ... other problems.”
 

There was no need to tell D’Arcy her cousin was the main difficulty Rachel and the cooperative both faced. By the look on the other woman’s face she could see that D’Arcy understood Rachel, yet didn’t believe her.
 

“Rachel darlin’, I hear what you’re saying, and I just think you’re
nuts
! But you have to do what you’re committed to, I guess.” She sighed, turning back to the telephone. “Right now I think I’m committed to breaking poor old Bob Furman’s heart.”
 

It was dark when they finally drove out of Charleston and turned onto Highway 17 southbound, but the soft evening air was still fragrant with the scent of flowers from the city’s gardens and the ever-present salty sea wind.
 

D’Arcy was tired, Rachel could see that, but mysterious business in Draytonville took her back down to the coastal town. And she planned to spend the night at Belle Haven, returning to Charleston the next morning.
 

Rachel would have been happy to doze as D’Arcy sped the big limousine southward, but the other woman had lapsed into a strained, unhappy mood. Feeling that she might have been the cause of it, Rachel made an effort to listen to D’Arcy’s restless chatter with more than her usual attention. But she couldn’t help thinking it would have been easier if D’Arcy hadn’t returned to one of her favorite subjects—her cousin Beau Tillson.
 

D’Arcy rambled on as the big car ate up the miles with a childhood tale of how she and her cousin as small children had taken a leaky small boat, a bateau, out on St. Helena Sound, and then had gotten caught in a violent thunderstorm. They had swamped, but clung to the boat until they got to a sandbar in the marshes where they’d spent most of the night. Early the next morning they’d returned to the big house at Belle Haven, a mosquito-bitten and bedraggled twelve and seven year-old, feeling like heroes—only to find no one even knew they were gone.
 

“It’s strange down here,” D’Arcy said morosely. “I swear; you read William Faulkner and how people rot when they’re isolated too long—well, don’t think it doesn’t apply to all the damned Beaumonts. Clarissa didn’t know where in the hell we were and wouldn’t have cared less. She was the world’s worst excuse for a mother. Lee Tillson was off somewhere whoring around, that was his answer to everything—women. And Eulie had gone home. She’s got a family of her own to tend to, or did back in those days. And there that house was, sitting out in the marsh just like it’d been for the last two hundred years or more, like it didn’t give a damn, either, what kind of humanity crawled in and out of it or lived or died.”
 

“D’Arcy, things have changed,” Rachel said softly. “Draytonville’s not as isolated as it was once. Jim Claxton showed me where big developers are building condominium complexes right next door to Belle Haven. He even says the state legislature is considering a four-lane highway.”
 

“Oh, yeah, Jim Claxton,” D’Arcy said with unusual bitterness. “Good old Jim, he helps everybody. He’s just a dirt-poor sharecropper’s son, did you know that? Jim Claxton helped the wrong woman once, he got married to her. And then she went off and left him with two little kids.” Before Rachel could say anything she went on, “You don’t know anything about this country down here, you’ve just been here two or three months, and you’ve got to be either born here or live here for fifty years before people will accept you. But I’m telling you that what you see on the surface of these little towns isn’t what’s there at all. You’d be surprised as hell if you knew.” Then she said abruptly, “You know who Loretha Bulloch is, don’t you? That good-looking minx who follows Til Coffee around?”
 

“She came to plant tomatoes.” Rachel was remembering a slender young black woman with sultry eyes.
 

“Stuck right to him, didn’t she? And Lord, how it drives him crazy.” D’Arcy gave the steering wheel a vicious twist as she turned off the highway onto the Draytonville road. “Have you seen their little boy, about eight years old?”
 

“They have a child?” Rachel asked. She tried to remember what Loretha Bulloch looked like in greater detail and couldn’t. No one had said a thing to her, especially not Til.
 

“It’s his child, his and Loretha’s. You take a good look at the boy sometime—big like his daddy, and good-looking and bright, like Til.”
 

Rachel said absently, “Yes, Til is a very intelligent person.”
 

D’Arcy made an impatient click between her teeth. “Oh, mah God, Rachel—I mean
bright
, like light-colored. It’s a word the black people use, I didn’t make it up. Til’s half white. You’d fall right out of your seat if I told you who his daddy was.
 

Rachel stared into the darkness. Big, handsome Til Coffee was dark but not very black. But not very light either. It was something she wouldn’t really notice.
 

“She hates him,” D’Arcy said emphatically. “She won’t let him near their boy. That’s why Til came down from Chicago. I can tell you the story, honey, but you’d never believe it.”
 

Rachel opened her mouth to say something, then closed it without a word. It was gossip, and there was no comment she could make anyway. They had passed through Draytonville, the Polar Bear Drive In—the busy corner on the highway and the town’s main social center—closed and dark for Sunday night.
 

“You have to be careful about choosing your friends,” D’Arcy went on. The Lincoln bumped smoothly as she turned off onto the dirt road that ran to Rachel’s house. “God knows you need friends down here, you just can’t live in this godforsaken end of the earth without meeting people and having some sort of friends. But you’ve got to be careful.”
 

D’Arcy drew the automobile up under the live oaks of the front yard and left the motor running, and Rachel got out to retrieve her suitcase from the car’s trunk. When she walked around to the driver’s side D’Arcy had rested her elbow on the open window. Her pretty face looked downcast.