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Bailey White's
QUITE A YEAR FOR PLUMS
“Suffused with White's distinctive sensibility and wit.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A romp…wonderfully funny.”
—The Raleigh News & Observer
“Classic Bailey White—deftly drawn characters who can turn a Southern phrase like nobody's business.…Have yourself a taste.”
—Southern Living
“As always in White's world, it is the minuscule that matters most and the threads of eccentricity, friendship, ruin, pluck and longing that move us most profoundly.”
—The Miami Herald
“The pulse and hum of nature…course through this novel like a clear stream.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“As sweet and surprising as a Vidalia onion pie.”
—USA Today
“Quite a Year for Plums is a generous, often hilarious, rendering of simple pleasures bursting with joy and down home joi de vivre. … [Bailey White] is a national treasure.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Bailey White
QUITE A YEAR FOR PLUMS
Bailey White lives in south Georgia. She is the author of the national bestsellers Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Sleeping at the Starlite Motel She is also a regular commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered.
ALSO BY Bailey White
Mama Makes Up Her Mind
Sleeping at the Starlite Motel
Copyright © 1998 by Bailey White
Vintage Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
White, Bailey.
Quite a Year For Plums : a Novel / by Bailey White.
p. cm.
1. Title.
PS3573.H452V43 1998
813′.54— dc21 97-41124 CIP
eISBN: 978-0-307-48996-8
www.randomhouse.com
v3.0
FOR ALBERT,
WITH MUCH GRATITUDE, ADMIRATION, AND AFFECTION
CONTENTS
LIST OF CHARACTERS
1. AGRISEARCH
2. TOTAL CARE
3. UNMARRIED WOMEN
4. A NICE DAY
5. TOSSING FLOWERS INTO THE SWAMP
6. 1914 GENERAL ELECTRIC FAN WITH COLLAR OSCILLATOR
7. BIRDING
8. FOUR CHICKENS
9. LIBRARY PICNIC
10. EARLY MUSIC
11. ASHES
12. IMPASSIONED TYPOGRAPHER
13. THE AMERICAN LIVESTOCK BREEDS CONSERVANCY
14. IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER
15. BETTY SHEFFIELD SUPREME
16. VECTORED BY THRIPS
17. THE DYING HOUSE
18. NEW SUBDIVISION
19. LOOKING FOR PEROTE
20. IMPASSIONED TYPOGRAPHER II
21. ONION SANDWICH
22. THE SILVER THREAD
23. THE ANVIL OF EXPERIENCE
24. QUITE A YEAR FOR PLUMS
CHARACTERS
Roger—a plant pathologist specializing in foliar diseases of peanut
Ethel—Roger's ex-wife, a schoolteacher
Louise—Ethel's mother
Eula—Louise's sister; Ethel's aunt
Tom—Eula's son, a forester. He is divorced from his wife Judy, who lives in California with their son Andy.
Andy—Tom's son. He spends summers in Georgia with his father and his grandmother Eula.
Hilma—a retired schoolteacher who taught with Ethel during her last ten years in the classroom
Meade—Hilma's best friend, also a retired schoolteacher
Gawain—an old forester
Lewis—an ornithologist studying the endangered redcockaded woodpecker
Delia—a wildlife artist visiting the area to study and paint local birds
Bruce—a vacationing typographer
Jim Wade—a collector of electric desk fans
Lucy—a nematologist
1. AGRISEARCH
The spring edition of Agrisearch came out with a picture on the front page of Roger standing in the middle of a field holding a peanut plant in each hand. In the distance you could see the irrigation rig behind him, and then the uneven line of trees at the back of the field. The caption said, “U. of Ga. plant pathologist Roger Meadows compares a peanut plant stunted and damaged by the tomato spotted wilt virus (left) with a healthy plant.”
For some reason the picture had come out amazingly good in every respect. The frail, sickly plant on the left looked almost weightless, as if it were just hovering between life and death in Roger's tender grasp, while the robust plant on the right seemed aggressively healthy, its dark leaves outlined sharply against Roger's white shirt. The hand holding this plant was slightly lower, as if it were all a strong man could do to support the weight of such vigor.
Roger's friends were all so taken with the picture that they cut it out of their April Agrisearch and propped it up on windowsills or stuck it with magnets to the fronts of refrigerators.
At the Pastime Restaurant the waitresses taped the picture up on the wall beside the “In Case of Choking” poster. Betty, the cashier, wrote “This is Roger, in Albert Bateman's peanut field” on a takeout menu and taped it up under the picture.
Roger's old friend Meade made a mat for the picture out of faded red construction paper left over from her schoolteaching days. In her enthusiasm for accuracy and information, she penned in down at the bottom the date the photograph was taken; Arachis hypogaea, the scientific name for peanut; and then ‘Florunner,’ the name of the cultivar.
Meade's friend and neighbor Hilma snipped Roger out of the peanut field with a pair of tiny scissors and transposed him onto two color photographs, so that he seemed to hover, artistically stark in Agrisearch black and white, between two lush springtimes—on the left, the bracken fern and longleaf pine woods on the hillside where his family house had once stood, and on the right, the Old Blush’ in full bloom in his backyard rose garden.
Out in the country Roger's ex-wife's aunt Eula stuck the picture up on the refrigerator beside a crayon drawing of the Titanic her grandson had sent her from California. On the white of Roger's shirt Eula printed R-O-G-E-R in proud capital letters, with the final R dipping down out of consideration for the roots of the healthy peanut plant.
“As if anybody in this house doesn't know who that is” said her son Tom.
“Roger has such a kind face,” said Hilma.
“And that well-bred nose,” said Meade. “Men's noses become so important when they lose their hair.”
“They say you should always label your family pictures,” Eula told Tom. “In a hundred years people will forget even Roger.”
“Look a there, there's Roger on the icebox!” said Eula's sister Louise.
“Roger ain't family. Mama,” said Tom. “Just because he picks the banjo with five fingers and married Ethel before he was old enough to know better, that don't make him family.”
“R-O-G-E-R,” said Louise. “They like a word like that, begins and ends with the same letter. But you got that last R so low, Eula, you got to be careful with your spacing, that can throw them off.” For several years Louise had had the idea that spacemen were attracted to certain combinations of letters of the alphabet and certain arrangements of shapes and shiny objects, and this made her difficult to reason with at times.
“It's Roger, in Agrisearch, Louise, with his spotted wilt work,” said Eula in a loud voice.
“Everywhere I go, there I am, me and those two peanut plants,” said Roger. “Fools’ names and fools’ faces.” He a
nd his nematologist friend Lucy were picking his first roses.
“It's just such a remarkable picture,” said Lucy.
“Everybody is struck by it. You look so deep, Roger. What in the world were you thinking about?”
“I was just feeling sorry for the photographer is all,” said Roger. “He had driven all the way down here from Athens to take a picture of red wattle hogs in Sam Martin's new automatic feeder pens, but they couldn't get the doors to open, so the photographer said, ‘Stand out in that field and hold up two peanut plants.’ He had to come back the next week for the hogpens.”
But even knowing that, people still prized their Agrisearch pictures of Roger in the peanut field.
“Just like Roger to be concerned about the photographer having that long drive for nothing,” said Hilma.
“It is a remarkable likeness,” said Meade. “It's his mother's nose.”
“It was supposed to be two hogs, but they took a picture of Roger instead,” Eula told Ethel on Saturday afternoon. But Ethel was looking at the foliage on the roses Roger had brought that morning.
“Roger knows how much I like the pink ones,” said Eula, “so he always brings me ‘Queen Elizabeth.’”
Ethel turned over a leaf and examined the back of it, but there were no spots on the leaves. “Nobody can grow roses like a plant pathologist,” was all she said.
“He planted that rose garden just for her,” said Meade, “because she loved them so, and before the ‘Dr. W. Van Fleet’ got to the top of the trellis she was gone.” It was a perpetual conversation, why Ethel left Roger. Lucy and Meade were sitting on stools in Hilma's tiny kitchen watching her poke the stems of ‘Madame Isaac Pereire’ roses into a vase. The heads were floppy, which made them difficult to arrange, but Hilma loved the fragrance, so Roger saved ‘Madame Isaac’ for her.
“And for what?” Meade went on. “That little guitar-strumming nincompoop from Nashville with the wispy goatee, when Roger plays the banjo so beautifully. I will never understand Ethel.”
“I don't think it had anything to do with banjos or roses,” said Lucy. “Ethel is just not domesticated, that's all.”
“I saw it with my own eyes,” said Meade. “She seduced him right off that stage.”
“But we have all reaped the benefits of the rose garden Roger planted for Ethel,” said Hilma, in an effort to stem the tide. “So we should not complain.”
“Because she liked the way he tapped his feet,” said Meade. “And poor Roger, left with nothing to comfort him but the Irish Potato Famine.” For two years after Ethel had left him for the Nashville guitarist, Roger had immersed himself in a study of late blight of potato, and that look of resignation, wisdom, and patience had come into his face that was brought out so well in the Agrisearch photograph.
“ I shall send upon you the evil arrows of famine,’ “Meade quoted grimly,” ‘and I will break your staff of bread’”
“Phytophthora infestens, the Great Plant Destroyer,” said Lucy. “The science of plant pathology had its beginnings in the Irish Potato Famine. It's very humbling to study a disease like that.”
But all this seemed far too gloomy on such a bright spring day, thought Hilma, with ‘Madame Isaac’ filling the room with its fragrance. It was not fair to blame Ethel for the Irish Potato Famine just because she had such a lively interest in a variety of men. “Ethel is a gifted teacher,” she said. “That is an important thing to remember.”
“I will never understand Ethel,” said Meade. They sat for a minute, admiring that complex picture of Roger, looking so serious and thoughtful on Hilma's cupboard door. For all his Agrisearch wisdom and patience and resignation, still, at the corners of his mouth and in his eyes, squinting slightly in the sun, you could see just the beginning of a little smile, as if he had sense enough to realize that he did look slightly ridiculous, standing there to have his picture taken in the middle of a peanut field.
2. TOTAL CARE
Let me call you back, Louise,” Eula shouted into the telephone. “I've got a house full of men here, all wanting to be fed.”
The men waiting to be fed were Eula's son Tom, a forester, and a southern pine beetle expert from North Carolina. Eula's niece Ethel was there too. She often came out to spend Saturday or Sunday afternoon with her aunt Eula in the country.
“You make them sound like baby birds. Aunt Eula,” said Ethel.
“We should be cooking for you, Mrs. Matthews,” said the ridiculously polite beetle expert.
“Oh, just sit down and eat,” said Eula. And there was something about the way she paused for a moment at her place, gripping the back of her chair with both hands and glaring critically down at the laden table, that made it seem as if no one in the world had any business cooking food but Eula Matthews.
There was a dish of fried eggplant, a chipped enamel bowl of sliced tomatoes and Vidalia onions, a squash casserole, pole beans, corn bread, biscuits, and a jar of pickled okra.
“It's too hot to eat meat,” said Eula. “You boys out in those sweltering woods all day, listening to grubs gnawing in those big trees. Ethel, get yourself some eggplant and pass it down to Tom.”
After lunch the men wandered back out, talking about board feet, and Ethel said, “You're supposed to call Mama.”
“I know what your mama wants to talk about, more of those little spacemen coming in the house,” said Eula. She wrung out the dishrag and hung it over the edge of the sink, tugging the corners square. Then she leaned with her arms on the counter and looked out across Louise's neglected garden into the pasture.
“Just look at that Bahia grass going to seed,” she said. Ethel didn't say anything, because when Eula started talking about grass it meant she was thinking about her husband Melvin, who had been horribly killed twenty years ago when his beloved old Allis-Chalmers tractor turned over on him when he was mowing a steep grassy slope. Finally she blew her nose on a paper towel and dialed the telephone.
“Last time they came in, Louise told me they painted the edges of her jalousie windows pale green,” she said to Ethel. “ ‘Louise,’ I said, ‘those little men didn't paint those windows! That glass just is green on the edges.’ But Louise thinks too much, that's what's wrong.” Eula waited while the tele- phone rang on the other end. “I almost hate to hear this,” she whispered to Ethel.
“Hey, Louise,” she shouted. “I'm calling you back. Yeah, come on over, Ethel's here. Yeah, they're gone back in the woods, come on over. Yeah, bye.
“Unh unh,” said Eula. “I worry about your mama, Ethel, the way she lets her mind get away from her. I put my address on her walking stick just in case she wanders too far, gets lost. She's going to wind up in town under Total Care at Shady Rest, my own baby sister, I can see it coming, Ethel.”
Louise sat up earnestly on the edge of the sofa with her elbows on her knees. “It come in just as smooth,” she said. “The ship was called the Uncovered Eroticum. It was one of those convertible-type spaceships, and, honey, let me tell you, the top was down.” She pulled a crumpled foil chewing-gum wrapper out of her pocket and pressed it smooth. Then she laid a black plastic capital J on the coffee table so that the strip of foil stretched out from the top of the J like a flag.
“And then a swarm of little men got out, each one of them smaller than the one before. Eula, you will never believe what those men proceeded to do in my house.”
Eula shouted, “Don't tell me, Louise, I don't want to know that!”
“You should have told them to come over here, Mama,” said Ethel. “Aunt Eula would have fed them up and sent them out in the woods to measure timber.”
“Child,” said Louise, “those little men didn't want to be fed. Food is not what they were after.”
“Don't talk about it, Louise!” Eula shouted. “Have a biscuit!”
“I've got a biscuit right here in my hand, Eula,” said Louise. “If I was hungry I'd eat it.”
“Louise,” said Eula, “you keep letting your mind go off with you like
that, one day it's not going to bring you back. You're going to wind up out there at Shady Rest with those quivering idiots.”
A week later the beetle man from North Carolina found Louise wandering around in the woods, all scratched up and hungry, with two days’ worth of redbug bites on her. The beetle man read the address on her walking stick and took her to Eula. Eula ran her a bath, gave her a bottle of Chiggerid, fed her a hot meal, and put her to bed. Ethel came out after school, and Eula's son Tom came in early from the woods, covered with seed ticks.
“She needs taking care of,” said Tom to Ethel in a fierce voice. “She could have been snake bit.” But Tom was standing in the middle of the living room floor in his underwear, glistening with the pine oil he had smeared on himself to kill the ticks, and it was hard to take him seriously.
“This ain't funny, Ethel!” said Tom. “This is your own mama's safety we're talking about!”
“I'm not laughing at Mama, Tom,” said Ethel. “I'm laughing at you.”
“I know what's going to happen, I can see it in my mind's eye right now,” said Tom, and he marched around the living room rug in little circles on his greasy, high-arched feet. “You just watch: Louise is going to move in here with us, and Mama's going to be stuck with her, listening to all that crazy talk, looking after her like she was a little child, keeping her from wandering off. She's your mama, Ethel, you ought to be taking care of her!” He stopped and stood still in the middle of the rug and stared into space with his eyes wide open. “Yep, I can see it right now in my mind's eye, me and Mama and Louise crammed in here together, and Ethel all alone up there in that nice house on Dawson Street, teaching school.”
“Tom, you don't need an eye in your mind to see that. We can all see that,” said Eula. “Of course she's going to move in here with us. Louise can't live up there with Ethel. A crazy person can't live in town, she'd get out on the street when Ethel's off at school, get run over, kidnapped, I don't know what all, they'd take her up to Milledgeville if they saw her in town, the way she is. Don't you worry about your mama, Ethel, and, Tom, go wash off, you're going to blister yourself with that pine oil.”
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