“IT’s Billy McChidrick’s parrot,” Mrs. Bedford explained to Captain Ruffin.
Billy McChidrick had belonged to Malcolm’s father, who had bought him from South Carolina. Nobody knew just how old he was, but when the elder Bedford died, Billy had fallen to Agnes with her part of the estate. She took him to Montrose. He was a rice-field negro, half savage. Long ago he had built a sort of stockade of bamboo cane and split post-oak around his cabin, with his own fruit trees enclosed and three ferocious bloodhounds running loose. Both Hugh McGehee and Agnes knew of Billy McChidrick’s stealing off at night into Natchez, where he could get hold of rum. They knew that he plucked birds alive, and that if he discovered some piece of spoiled meat, he would sit down at once with his jackknife, knocking the maggots off and eating it. Plenty of times they had threatened him with punishment. But a month ago the negroes at the quarters had reported that Billy had punched his plough horse’s eyes out to stop them looking back and putting a ha’nt on him. Not only because of this brutality, but as an example to the other negroes something had to be done. The two punishments most dreaded by the plantation slaves were either to be turned over to poor whites or to be sold down the river to the cane fields. Agnes would not let Billy McChidrick be sold to the poor whites, she could not bear to see him broken like that; and so he was sent off to New Orleans; she cried when they took him away.
“Good-bye, Ole Miss,” he said, half drunk, chuckling to himself, with tears in his eyes.
“Good-bye, Uncle Billy. Don’t lose the quinine I gave you.”
“Yes’m. Hit’s sholy good, anybody’s got um chills, Ole Miss.”
“Good-bye, Uncle Billy.”
“Yas, m’am!”
A week later her brother Malcolm, after a visit to Montrose, came home and dispatched one of his overseers to find Billy McChidrick and bring him to Portobello. This was easy enough, for M. Prudhomme, of Parlange, who had bought Billy, had already returned him to the dealer, with a scorching letter.
Malcolm was telling the Ruffins of how, out of pride, perhaps, Billy McChidrick had so shaved his head and body and greased himself up that in a lot of eleven auctioned off, he passed for much younger than he was. There was nothing new to it. Billy had only remembered an ancient trick of the slave-traders landing African cargoes. And now he was living at Portobello, where he had his cabin apart from the other negroes but not the stockade. Mrs. Bedford had put her foot down about that. She thought it enough to have him shambling about the grounds, wheezing and jabbering at the children, though Malcolm said the children loved him much more than they did their parents. That at least was true of Sallie Bedford’s brother Henry, old Henry Tate, whose tall figure you saw sometimes wandering about the lot. Five years before, he had turned up at Portobello, nobody knew from where. He lived in one of the cabins, and no matter what his sisters did, would have nothing to do with the family or the house. He and Billy used to sit talking for hours. One way or another, Billy McChidrick had brought back a parrot with him from his travels.
A little boy, with a round face and wide gray eyes, came to the door from the back gallery and paused a moment.
“Well, Master Middleton?” Mrs. Bedford asked.
“Aunt Sallie, who’s Mrs. Shaw?”
“Mrs. Shaw? Why, Aunt Sallie don’t know. Come here, honey, you poor little orphan, he’s Aunt Sallie’s pet is what he is. Listen,” she went on, putting her lips to his ear. “Say good-morning, and tell Miss Mary she’s looking well, can’t you?”
“Oh, wife, don’t plague the child,” said Mr. Bedford, winking at him.
“No, Middleton may as well learn right now to make himself pleasant; he can’t just act the way he feels.”
Middleton turned to his uncle. “Uncle Mac, do you know where Mrs. Shaw lives?”
“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.” He made a pass to catch the little boy, who eluded him, bending his small body unconsciously like a flower stem, on his way to Mary Cherry.
“Are you Mrs. Shaw?”
“Why, Middleton,” Valette cried, trying not to laugh at the sight of that look on Miss Mary’s face, like a noiseless snort. “That’s Miss Mary. You know her. You like Miss Mary, don’t you?”
“I love Miss Mary,” the sweet child voice repeated. No one in the family had laughed at him. They sat listening politely for what he might tell them.
But the little boy stood looking at various people, as if to say it was strange they would not know such a simple thing as who Mrs. Shaw was. Then, as another burst of laughter came from the other children outside, he went to take Valette by the hand and drew her out with him.
It was like this every morning at breakfast except when Malcolm had had more to drink than was good for him the day before. Then his wife kept the children quiet, sat watching to see that the coffee in his cup was hot, and talked to him as on any other morning. But this did not often happen.