Property (Vintage Contemporaries) Read online

  “I wonder how you know when you have so little society.”

  “I copied it from a paper my aunt sent with the lace.”

  “It’s very becoming,” he said.

  There was a time when I was moved by compliments, but that time is long behind us, as we both know. Still he manages to work up some feeling about what he imagines is my ingratitude. “I’m sorry to vex you by remarking on your appearance, Manon,” he said. “You are free to leave, if you’ve no business of your own to discuss with me.”

  I stood up. What business might that be? I wondered. Perhaps he’d care to have a look at my accounts: on one side my grievances, on the other my resolutions, all in perfect balance. I allowed my eyes to rest upon his face. He brought his hand to his mustache, smoothing down one side of it, a nervous habit of his. It’s always the right side, never the left. Looking at him makes my spine stiffen; I could feel the straightness of it, the elongation of my neck as I turned away. There was the rustling sound of my skirt sweeping against the carpet as I left the room, terminating thereby another lively interview with my husband.

  MY MOTHER ALWAYS slept with a servant in the room, a practice I disdain in my own house. I had Sarah bring up a pallet and put it next to her baby’s box. At first I thought I would place the screen so that I wouldn’t have to see her sleeping, then I decided to block off an area for the chamber pot, as I was even less inclined to witness her at that activity. “I hope you don’t snore,” I said, as she was struggling with the screen.

  It was hot in the room and I was vexed by the stupid business, the unnecessary panic, the stamping and bellowing of the men who had already descended upon our dining room, where they were displaying their rifles to each other and gulping down his best whiskey. Their voices washed in under the door, droning and raucous by turns. There was much bandying about of Joel Borden’s name. They consider him a fop and a dandy, too interested in the next gala party to attend to his own crops. He is in the city more than at his own house, and the result is that his negroes are loose in the countryside.

  I bade Sarah brush my hair while I waited for them to leave. It relaxes me and gives her something to do. She was looking gloomy, no more pleased than I was to be shut up in close quarters. A fly buzzed around, landing on the mirror and crawling over our reflection. “Kill it,” I said. She dropped my hair and took up a swatter. When she had smashed the thing, she wiped it away with a bit of rag. No sooner was this done than another came buzzing in at the window, skittering madly across the ceiling. “Finish my hair,” I said, “and then fill the trap.” She took up my hair, which was already damp with perspiration, and began braiding it. I looked at her reflection, her face intent on the task, a few drops of moisture on her forehead. She’s an excellent hairdresser. I watched her long fingers smoothing back the waves at my temple; she watched her hands too, looking for any gray hairs to pull out. My hair is thick, wavy, too brassy, in my opinion, though Father always called it his golden treasure.

  When she was done, she pinned the braid up and my neck was cool for the first time all day. We could hear the chairs scraping downstairs, the heavy footsteps and laughter as the men went out on the porch, then the shouting as they mounted their horses and clattered off on their mission. Behind that racket a dense stillness announced the long night ahead of us.

  “Do you know anything about these runaways?” I asked her. She was filling the base of the trap with sugar water.

  “One of them is brother to Delphine,” she said. She looked up over the glass to see how this information affected me.

  Were they coming this way in the hope of help from Delphine? I thought. What if she was foolish enough to let them into the house? But she wouldn’t do that; she would be too afraid of the dogs. That was why my husband had closed them up with her and sent Sarah to hide with me. “Did he tell you to stay with me?” I asked. “Or was it your idea?”

  For answer all I got was one of her smirks.

  I WAS DREAMING. There was a fox. As I approached the animal it opened its mouth as if panting and a high-pitched scream came out. I woke up inside that scream, which was in my room, a shriek so loud and harsh I thought a woman was being murdered outside my window. I remembered Delphine in the kitchen, the runaway negroes. I sat up, breathless, ready to leap from the bed, but before I did, the scream moved rapidly, past the house, swooping away in the direction of the cabins.

  “An owl,” I said.

  I heard a rustling sound in the corner of the room, which gave me another shock until I recalled that I was not alone. The moonlight made a bright swath across the floor, ending at Sarah’s pallet. I made out the white contour of her shift and the light of her eyes watching me steadily. We looked at each other without speaking while my heart slowed to a normal pace. Her baby made a muffled cry and she turned to take it up in her arms.

  “Has he come back?” I asked.

  “ ’Bout an hour ago,” she said. “You was asleep.”

  I fell back on my pillow. There was a thin breeze pressing the net lightly toward me. I loosened the front of my shift to have advantage of it. When I turned on my side, I looked down to where Sarah lay, the child curled up at her side, her wide eyes watching me, and I thought, She has been watching me like that this entire night.

  AT BREAKFAST HE was ravenous. I ate a piece of bread with Creole cheese and drank a cup of strong coffee while I watched him shovel in ham, hominy, potatoes, eggs, and griddle cakes. Everything was hot enough for him. When he had finished, he wiped his face with his napkin and called for more coffee. Then he launched into the story of his evening adventure.

  The fugitives never came anywhere near our house. As the patrol had reasoned, they made for the bottomland in the hopes of sneaking onto a boat and getting to New Orleans. The patrol was nine armed men on horseback and a pack of hounds. They picked up the trail after an hour or so, and in the next spotted one of the negroes climbing a tree. They left a few dogs to keep him up there, then went after the other two. These were eventually discovered hip-deep in mud at the river’s edge.

  They let the dogs at one, which must have been quite a spectacle, as the dogs got stuck in the mud too and had to be hauled out with ropes. The second fugitive took advantage of the confusion to get to the water, where he floundered about because he wasn’t a good swimmer. Two members of the patrol went down and shot him. The one in the mud was finally pulled out like the dogs and gave up pretty readily, so they tied his hands behind his back, threw the rope over a tree limb, and went back for the one the dogs were guarding. He had tried coming down from his perch only to get one foot nearly chewed off, and was so scared they had no trouble talking him down. They put him on a horse and went back for the one they’d left tied up. Before they saw him, they heard him screaming for help. Lo and behold an alligator had discovered him and he was running around in a circle trying to keep from being eaten for dinner. The alligator got so agitated it attacked the horses, so they shot it too. And that was what Joel Borden got delivered to his door in the middle of the night, one dead negro, one with his foot nearly torn off, one just scared to death, and a dead alligator.

  As he told this story, he laughed at his own wit; it had been an exciting night. Sarah stood at the sideboard listening closely, her eyes on the butter dish. I put a bland smile on my lips and kept it there, sipping my coffee during the irritating intervals of his phlegmy laughter. When he was finished he looked from Sarah to me, including us in his genial pleasure.

  “I thought Joel’s negroes were armed,” I said.

  “No,” he replied. “They weren’t.”

  Sarah gave me a darting look. “Wasn’t one of them Delphine’s brother?” I asked.

  His good humor evaporated. He looked from Sarah to me and back again. “All you women do is talk,” he said.

  As this was his first truly humorous remark of the morning, I indulged in an unladylike snort of laughter myself.

  “Eben Borden,” he said to Sarah. “Yes, he was one of them. He
’s the one nearly lost his foot to the dogs, and when Borden’s overseer is through with him, his foot will be the least of his troubles.” He laid his hand across his chest, wincing from a sudden pain. “So you and Delphine can quit poisoning me,” he said. “I saved her damn brother’s life.”

  Sarah’s face was a mask. She glanced at his cup, then took up the pot to refill it.

  “You women should think about what would become of you if I wasn’t here,” he said, gazing suspiciously into his half-full cup.

  DOES SARAH THINK about what would become of her if he were gone? How could she not? What would become of me must be her next question, as she belongs to me. She can’t doubt that I would sell her; I would sell them all. I imagine it sometimes, selling them all and the house and the land, settling his debts, which are considerable. He has loans from his brother and three banks, and he has used the house as collateral for repairs on the mill. He has what my father called “planter’s disease”; he keeps buying land when he hasn’t the means to cultivate it. If the price of sugar falls again this year, it will hurt him, but he won’t have the sense to stop planting to meet the shortfall. He doesn’t know I can read an account book, but I can, and I’ve been looking into his for some time now. He might pull through this year if the weather is good and the price stable, but this combination is unlikely, as good weather means a better crop for everyone, which will drive the price down. I never speak to him about such things.

  Though his ruin entails my own, I long for it.

  Often I’m grateful that my father didn’t live to see me in this place. If he knew what humiliation I suffer every day, he would be at the door with his carriage to take me home. Our home is lost, but if it were still there, still ours, though it was not half so grand as this one, with what joy would I return to its simple comforts!

  Do the dead see us? Is Father weeping for me in the graveyard?

  If my husband died, I think. If my husband died. But he won’t. Not before it’s too late for me.

  THIS AFTERNOON’S GAME was a more straightforward one, not very original at all. Two strong boys were required to fight until one couldn’t get up. The loser then received a whipping. It was an eerie scene to watch through the glass because there was no sound. Doubtless the boys were grunting and groaning, and he was urging them on, but it all looked as serene and orchestrated as a dance. I watched for several minutes. One of the boys was clearly the better fighter, though the smaller of the two. “Come look through this glass,” I said to Sarah, “and tell me who that smaller boy is.”

  Sarah backed away as if I’d asked her to pick up a roach. “No, missus,” she said.

  “And why not?” I asked.

  “I don’ like that glass.”

  “Have you never looked through it?”

  She looked down, shaking her head slowly.

  This surprised me. The glass is on the landing, pointing out of the only window in the house that faces the quarter. He had it specially mounted for this purpose, to watch the negroes at their daily business, to see if they are congregating. Sarah must pass it ten times a day.

  “I’d look if I were you,” I said. “You might see something you need to know.”

  For answer she took another step back.

  “Or do you already know everything you need to know?” I said, turning back to the glass.

  I was right. The taller boy lay facedown in the dirt, his legs drawn up under him, trying to lift himself up like a baby learning to walk. The victor stood before him, unsmiling, sweating. In the shadow of the tree I saw him, bending over to put down his Bible and take up his stick. As he turned toward the fighters, he said something to the victor, who looked up boldly at the house, directly at me, or so it seemed. I backed away from the window, stunned, momentarily as guilty as a child caught stealing candy. Sarah had passed into my room, where her baby was whining. Why should I feel guilty? I thought.

  WHEN HE WAS courting me, he was mysterious, and I took his aloofness for sensitivity. He was a man who required his linen to be scented and spotless, who could not stay long in the city because the stench from the sewers offended him. When he visited our cottage, I had the parlor scrubbed out and scented with rosewater and vetiver, and my own hair washed with chamomile. He never failed to comment on the agreeable atmosphere in our rooms.

  “If he’s fastidious,” my Aunt Lelia said, when she heard of our engagement, “you’d best have my Sarah. She’s country-bred, used to country houses. She’s the best housekeeper I’ve ever had, though she’s not eighteen. She hates the town because she says the dirt walks in the house every time the door is opened. I will give her to you as my wedding gift.”

  And that was how Sarah came to this house, six weeks before I did, commissioned to ready it for my arrival. My husband was impressed with her and wrote my aunt himself to thank her for this “prize”; his house had never been so well arranged.

  I wonder how my aunt could have dealt my happiness such a blow. Did she imagine my husband was different from hers? Did she think that because I was young and pretty, I was proof against the temptations presented by Sarah?

  Or was she only desperate? I learned later, much too late, that my uncle had lost his head when a free man of color offered to buy Sarah so that he might free her and marry her. The free man was in my uncle’s employ, overseeing the construction of an addition to their house, and he fancied that he was in love with Sarah. My uncle fired the man, who straightway sued for damages. This so enraged my uncle that he had Sarah tied up in the kitchen and whipped her himself, in front of the cook. That was when my aunt began to look for someplace to get rid of her.

  The day I arrived here, she was standing on the porch with the others, Delphine and Bam, the butler, who is gone now, and Rose, who was just a child, supposedly of use to Delphine in the kitchen. “Here we are,” he said, helping me down from the carriage. “Your new home.”

  The house is in the West Indies style, flush to the ground with brick columns below and wooden above. The upstairs gallery is wide and closed in by a rail, but the porch below is open to whatever stumbles across the brick floor, lizards, snakes, and every kind of beetle the swamps can disgorge. Casement doors open across the front, upstairs and down, framed by batten shutters that are only closed in hurricanes or at the threat of revolt. I went ahead of my husband to greet the minimal staff. Delphine gave me a quick curtsy and an open, curious look. I asked her name, greeted her, was introduced to Rose, who couldn’t raise her eyes from my skirt. Bam, a lanky, long-faced, dark-skinned fellow, dressed in a coat that was too narrow in the shoulders and short at the sleeves, gave me a formal bow and said, “Welcome, missus.”

  “This is Bam,” my husband said. I nodded, turning to Sarah. I knew who she was, that she was my aunt’s wedding gift. Her appearance was pleasing, tall, slender, light-skinned, neatly dressed, excellent posture. Her hands were folded over her apron. She acknowledged me with something between a bow and a curtsy, but she wasn’t looking at me at all. She was looking past me, with an expression of sullen expectation, at my husband.

  FATHER NEVER KEPT more than fifteen field hands and their families. Each year, depending on his crop, he hired extra hands for the picking and ginning. Cotton is a less finicky crop than cane and doesn’t require the bulk of the harvesting and milling to be done all at once under the pressure of a hard freeze. Cane-growers spend Christmas in a panic and the negroes don’t have their party and holiday until after the new year.

  Whenever Father went to the hiring barn, the negroes pressed around him and begged him to take them on. They all knew they would be better housed and fed on his farm than on their masters’ grand plantations, and that they would have a full day of rest once a week. Our New Year’s party was famous among them, and once hired, they shouted and slapped one another on the back, congratulating themselves on the feast they would enjoy together.

  I remember standing at the window to watch their procession come up from the quarter. The torches were like f
laming birds swooping and soaring over their heads. Father stood on the porch with his basket of envelopes, each with a name on the front and a crisp bill inside. There was much laughter, joking, and singing. When each one had received his gift, Father cried out, “And now for the feast,” and led them to the barn, which was all festooned with greenery, with long tables set out, draped in bright red cloths and laden with beef and pork roasts, chickens, turkeys, bowls of greens and mashed potatoes, all manner of fruit, breads, puddings, pies, candies, and, along the walls, barrels of sweet wine and tafia. I was allowed to go with him and see the bustle as they took their places and began piling their plates. Later, in my bed, I heard the first strains of the fiddles and the scraping and shouting as they pulled the tables to the side and began the dancing which lasted late into the night. In the morning everyone slept late and Father arrived at the table as we were finishing our breakfast. “I believe the negroes enjoyed their festivities,” he would say, sitting down to cold coffee and leftover eggs.

  Father was strict and fair. None of our people could marry off the farm, indeed they could never leave it unless they had some compelling reason, and visits by negroes from the neighboring farms and plantations were strictly forbidden. He didn’t allow them to work garden patches of their own, as he said it gave them a notion of independence and divided their loyalty, so that they might take more interest in their own patch than in the farm. In order to have peace and harmony, he said, the negroes must recognize that the farm is their provider and protector, that it gives them every good thing, food, medical attention, clean housing, heat in winter, friends and family, that it is the place they come from and where they will be valued and cared for until they die.

  He would have no overseer. He had the same driver for fifteen years. He used the whip sparingly and stood by while the driver administered the sentence, for he said it was wrong that any master be seen raising a whip himself; it demeaned him in the eyes of those who stood by.