Jefferson turned a switch somewhere and indirect lighting brightened the room somewhat. Nelson seemed oblivious of it. Jefferson nodded at a couch against the inner wall of the conservatory. We went and sat on it, he at one end, me at the other. Across the room Nelson sat and watched the wrestling match and drank whiskey among his dogs.
“Been with Mr. Jack more than sixty years,” Jefferson said. “Fourteen years old, graduate eighth grade, going to be a carpenter.”
Jefferson stood suddenly and walked over to the table by Nelson’s chair and made himself a drink and one for me and brought them back. He handed me mine and remained standing, holding his in both of his still-strong hands, looking out at the dark rain beyond the conservatory glass.
“Always like tools,” he said. “Like to make a miter fit snug. Like things square.”
He looked around the conservatory slowly. “Started working for Mr. Jack’s father on this room. Apprentice. But I was good at it, even then, and Mr. Jack’s father he say, `Boy, you a hard worker. Need a boy to work ‘round here.’ He say, `You want to work for me?‘ and I say, `Sure enough, Mr. Nelson.’ And I worked here ever since.”
He was looking at the darkness again, and through it probably, back down the corridor of his past.
“Cheryl Anne,” I said softly.
“Sure, you right. She Mr. Jack’s daughter. Mr. Jack, he a hand with the ladies. And maybe Miss Abby knew it, and maybe she didn’t, but nothing come of it, ‘cause Mr. Jack, he don’t never embarrass her, you understand? He maybe have a fling with a lady, but it always a lady of breeding and position, nobody gonna embarrass Miss Abby.”
“Miss Abby was Jack’s wife?”
“Yessir.”
Jefferson shook his head. Across the room Nelson fumbled together another drink for himself.
“Bertha come here to work in the kitchen. Not a cook, just to peel vegetables, and wash up, that sort of thing. She from Batesburg. She come over on the bus every morning, go home on it every night.”
One of the dogs wandered across the room as we talked and jumped up on the couch and turned around three times and lay down between us. Jefferson patted her head absently.
“She don’t look like much no more, but she look like something then all right. And she had that thing, you know, Mr. Spenser. She… she had a wiggle. She… hot, you know?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“And Mr. Jack, he can’t keep his hands off her.”
“It wasn’t his hands got him in trouble,” I said.
“Yessir. And when she have the baby, Mr. Jack was ashamed. He felt real bad about it and he didn’t want Miss Abby to know, and he don’t want anyone else to know either. So he give her some money, and he say it is a secret, and long as it stayed a secret, he’d keep giving her the money.”
“Hundred bucks a month,” I said.
Jefferson shrugged.
“Those times that a lot of money to somebody like Bertha Voss,” he said. “And she gets married to Hilly Rankin and she lets him think it’s his kid. So it worked out that it stayed secret.”
“Except she told her daughter,” I said. “And she told her to be proud of who her father was and she told her how rich her father was and the daughter always remembered that, and always hated that he wouldn’t acknowledge her, and for reasons that probably have to do with her being crazy, she took the legitimate daughter’s name and history.”
“Yessir.”
“And when she was forty-three years old and broke, she remembered about how rich he was, and she came to him for money.”
“Yessir.”
The hokum noise of the wrestling match on the television made the silence in the rest of the vast atrium seem somehow more intense. Jefferson went and got two more drinks and brought them back and gave me one. Jumper Jack never stirred. His gaze remained fixed on the television screen.
“Did he pay her?” I said.
“Don’t even know who she is,” Jefferson said. “Or he says he don’t. Hard to say what Mr. Jack know and don’t know anymore.”
“You pay her?” I said.
“Did for a while. Then no more.”
“Why’d you stop?”
Jefferson shook his head softly. “Ain’t no money,” he said.
“Jack too?” I said.
“Mr. Jack never had as much as everybody think,” Jefferson said. “And he spend what he got.”
Jefferson smiled thoughtfully, thinking back over the spending.
“Bought cars and horses, and whiskey and food and presents for Miss Abby and Miss Livvie, and he spent a lot on women. Mr. Jack always say he didn’t waste none. He say he didn’t get cheated. Horse players die broke, he say.”
“So he’s broke?”
