Wrapped in Rain(22)
When Miss Ella got to talking about God, there was only one right response. "Yes ma'am," I said halfheartedly.
"Boy!" She grabbed my cheeks, jerked my chin around, and lifted my face to hers. "Don't say, `Yes ma'am,' with your head." She tapped me in the chest with her stiletto finger. "Say it with your heart."
I nodded. "Yes ma'am, Miss Ella."
She let go of my cheeks and smiled with her eyes. "That's better."
When Rex hit forty-five, Mason Enterprises had holdings in every state in the Southeast, had absolutely cornered the liquor market, and Rex was anything but satisfied. At the age of fifty, he leveraged everything he owned and a few things he didn't, generated tens of millions in cash, and began buying up the competition, which he quickly dismantled and sold in small, unrecognizable pieces. With a glass in his hand and a twisted, spider-veined, and bloodflushed smile on his face, he'd tell his competitors, "Sell, or I'll start giving this stuff away and your business won't be worth a dime on the dollar." Rex had a real way with words. The gamble-and tactics-worked, because three years and another hundred million later, he was commuting from his office rooftop to Waverly Hall via helicopter and a twinturbo Cessna. If Rex had one gift, it was making money. Everything he touched turned to gold.
Back at Waverly, Rex had continued dynamiting the quarry, raping the earth. Sixty feet down, the masons blew the top off an underground spring that flooded in and filled the base of his quarry. No bother, Rex pumped the water out via a four-inch pipe to irrigate his gardens and orchards-which spanned about ten acres. Then he built a water tower next to the barn and stuck something the size of a pool on top of it where he held enough water to keep both his orchards and us alive for almost six months.
He did all this despite the fact that he knew next to nothing of houses, shotguns, thoroughbreds, servants, bird dogs, or orchards. But that didn't matter. He didn't go through all that trouble because he knew something about it or intended to. It's what others knew that drove him.
The fifteen-hundred-acre Waverly Hall tract also included a long-since vacant and dilapidated church surrounded by a graveyard. St. Joseph's had been built prior to the establishment of the Episcopal diocese in Dale, Barbour, or Henry County, so when Rex bought the property, he bought the church and graveyard by default. It contained eight pews-all wooden, narrow, and straight up and down. The place might seat forty people squeezed shoulder to shoulder. Scottish farmers had built it before 1800 when people were just grateful to have a place to sit down.
The altar was worn and looked more like a butcher's block than something sacred. A wooden Jesus hung on the back wall, topped with a crown of thorns and white, clumpy pigeon droppings on his scalp, arms, protruding knees, and toes. Rain poured in through the hole in the roof and soaked most everything, including a motheaten, purple, and squishy kneeling pad that lay beneath the railing that framed the altar. The railing wasjust big enough for about eight skinny adults to kneel briefly and then shuffle back to the comfort of their hard and upright seats where the cold rose up through the floor and penetrated their leather-soled shoes and sockless toes. Once flung wide during services to produce a summer draft, all four windows had been painted shut seventyfive years ago and had not opened since.
Rex was required by law to maintain the graveyard in "functional condition," which he did. "My man mows it once a month whether it needs it or not." From day one, the church sat dormant, doors locked, and brimming over with the most religious pigeons, spiderwebs, and rodents Alabama had ever seen. It was the closest we ever got to the inside of a real church. Thanks to the hole in the roof, the church was rotting from the inside out.
Rex had few acquaintances and absolutely no friends, but he routinely entertained business partners who could ill afford not to be nice. During the decade of his heyday, which started in his late forties, Rex employed a dozen full-time servants as well as countless business underlings who scurried like Secret Service men between Atlanta and Clopton, all adding to the perception he wished to create.
When Atlanta magazine wrote its glowing piece about the downtown mogul whose ability to build an empire from absolutely nothing would rival even King Herod," the Atlanta Journal followed it with an editorial that described him as a "squatty, fat man with beady eyes, a potbelly, and a Napoleon complex." The magazine was right. Rex did build an empire from nothing and Waverly Hall had been bought with cash, but the journal pegged him on the head because, when channeled, his combination of inferiority and insecurity, topped with an insatiable jealousy, created a ruthless tycoon who couldn't care less about the people who worked for him or the companies he dismantled.
Not to mention his two boys.
At the end of the day, when all the paperwork had been signed, hands shaken, and deals closed-including the ones under the table that netted the most money-Rex Mason had one driving motivation: obtaining control. And Waverly Hall, like Rex's life, was built in the pursuit of one thing-keeping it. Rex didn't have the slightest interest in other people liking him. All he wanted was their fear. Night and day, his single ulcer-causing concern was how to instigate fear in the competition-and everyone was competition. That included me and my brother. Others' fear gave him power-the power to control every situation he encountered. If I sound like I know what I'm talking about, I've had thirty-three years to consider it.