The absence of things can give a kind of shape to a space, and using his collection of negatives, Roger imagined the inside of her house, silent, light, and spare, without a cheap white fan clicking but not oscillating, without the high scream of an electric blender on Whip, without the ridiculous excess of a hummingbird cake. He imagined her in the house, padding silently from room to room on big bare feet, looking for things to throw away.
Delia had come to south Georgia to make a yearlong study of her special birds—coots, gallinules, and rails—in the spring-fed rivers and swamps and the salt marshes at the coast. But instead of beginning that serious work, she had found herself falling under the spell of a small flock of chickens at a nearby hatchery.
“America's oldest breed of chickens, ma'am, now endangered,” the poultryman had told her, looking sorrowfully at the big black and white birds scratching in the dust. “A hundred years ago every family had three or four Dominickers in the backyard, and now you can count the registered flocks on one hand.” Before she had even settled into her small apartment, Delia had begun a large watercolor painting of a brace of Dominiques and thrown away most of her household goods.
In the early sketching phase she threw out the fan because the clicking disrupted her concentration. But there was something so satisfying about setting that cheap white fan down in the grass by the Dumpster and driving away from it that a few days later, when the work became more difficult, she threw out several electrical appliances. And when she began the feathers, a week of dizzying black and white, requiring such a light touch, delicate but not tentative, she threw out all of her kitchen utensils and most of her furniture. She ate cold food from the grocery store out of its plastic wrap, standing over the kitchen sink, and in the evenings, with her head aching slightly from eyestrain, she walked downtown to the Pastime Restaurant and ordered a vegetable plate.
If the work had gone well that day, she would linger over her greasy beans and new potatoes and then sit peacefully for a while, smiling to herself and enjoying the dense white of the old china plates at the Pastime, the shallow dishes of pickles on each table, and the waitresses, who seemed so different from her, big and loud and friendly.
On other days, she would grip her knife and fork in her fists and stab her food around, and then she would shove the whole thing away and make little sketches of difficult bits of the painting on the back of the place mat. When she got home she would pace around and around her apartment ferociously, and pile up stuff by the door to throw away.
It was on one of these bad nights that she first noticed the picture of Roger and the two peanut plants. She was looking at it when Betty handed her her change and said, “You have a nice day now.” But it was nine o'clock at night, she was stuck on the scaly yellow legs of the Dominique rooster, and when she got home she threw away a telephone and a small space heater. It was not a nice day.
“She's strange,” said Betty. “She's got a gone look in her eyes.”
Then Fern, who was clearing off tables, called out, “Look at this! Chicken feet!” Some were flat on the ground, toeing inward slightly; some were taking a step, walking or running; some were flung up, toes outspread, with threatening spurs. Fern and Betty sat down at the booth surrounded by dirty dishes and examined the place mat, turning it around and around to see the chicken feet.
“Now if she can draw that good, why in the world does she want to draw chicken feet?” said Fern. “Seems like she'd want to be drawing a vase of flowers or a man on a horse.”
“She's strange, I told you,” said Betty.
“You have a nice day now,” Delia whispered the next morning as she sat on her little stool at the hatchery, watching the four Dominiques scratch and peck and strut and wallow in the dust.
“You have a nice day now,” she whispered to herself all afternoon as she sat at her drawing table, staring at her brushes with her hands in her lap.
“You're the one drew them good chicken feet last night,” said Fern, shoving the salt and pepper and sugar jar to one side and wiping down the table with a rag. “I don't know what else you can draw, but you can sure draw some chicken feet, honey. Me and Betty both said that, we said, ‘She might be a little strange, but she knows she can draw chicken feet.’ Now what you want to eat tonight?” And she bunched the rag up in a discreet little wad on the corner of the table and stood there, clutching her pad against her bosom and making little scribbling movements above it with the nub of a pencil. But Delia just sat, seeing her troubled, secret life with the chickens laid open in the bright light of the Pastime Restaurant by this boisterous, big-faced woman smelling slightly of Clorox.
“Now what you want to eat tonight, honey, your regular?” asked Fern in a louder voice, and she snatched up the rag and went away, leaving Delia staring at the red glowing letters spelling e-m-i-t-s-a-P against the black window.
“You some kind of a chicken artist?” asked Betty at the cash register, but it alarmed Delia to be called any kind of artist at all with the painting going so badly, and fumbling in her pocketbook for the correct change, she said, “Well, no, not now, I guess, although—really, no.” When she looked up with her two pennies and a quarter, there it was, that nice day with the magnificent white clouds and the line of trees at the back of the field and the bald-headed man with the kind face holding those plants so carefully.
“You have a nice day, honey,” said Betty.
For the rest of the week everything she tried to paint came out dense and muddy. It was ridiculous to think that she could make out of black paint, water, and white paper those shimmering barred feathers, where the black and the white seemed to switch places with every blink of the eye, and one night at the cash register when Betty asked, “So how are my chickens coming?” Delia took a deep breath and held it, and then covered her face with both hands. Fern put down her stack of dishes and thumped her on the back hard, several times.
“Why, I know chickens ain't easy, honey, they ain't got no shape to them.” She peeled several napkins off the to-go stack and poked them in between Delia's clenched fingers. “I know what,” she said, and she closed her eyes and sucked on her lip thought fully. “You go home and sit down and paint you a little house. Put a flower garden out front, paint you a little man out there in it with a hoe. If you want to put a bird in it, put a bird in it,” and she clapped Delia on the back to comfort her. “Just don't paint no chickens in there.”
Then Betty came bustling out of the back with a big white frozen lump wrapped up in plastic. “Here,” she said, “you take this home, it's a hummingbird cake.”
They were such kind gifts, the little man with the hoe and the frozen cake, and Delia wanted to smile and say something grateful, but the black and white that kept flashing in her head made her woozy and she didn't trust herself to speak. She stood there at the cash register, staring at the picture of the peanut field, her eyes aching from the black and white and her arms aching from the frozen cake, while Betty and Fern glanced back and forth furtively.
“Honey,” Betty said at last, “that's nothing but Roger in the spring Agrisearch with his spotted wilt work.”
“Thank you so much,” said Delia, “for everything. It's so kind of you, I shouldn't really, I can't…” And before Betty could say “Have a nice day,” she had left her $4.95 on the counter and was gone. The cake must have weighed ten pounds.
“Little studies,” she called them. A stick and a leaf, a single pinecone, a striped gourd, an acorn beside its cap, nothing bigger than five by seven. “They'll do me good,” she told herself with forced cheerfulness.
and she slid the unfinished chicken painting into the middle of a stack of new paper and taped it up. Every morning she sat at her table under the light, painting tiny single things on cheap paper, and every afternoon she gathered them up, looked them over, and threw them away.
Sometimes people are uneasy when they meet strangers at Dumpsters beside country roads, miles from a town—the dark woods in the background, th
e sinister-looking shiny black bags, frightening glittery things in the sand, the closest building a deserted church on a hill around the bend—so Roger stood back to give her a comfortable distance and waited while she squatted in the mud, lining her little paintings up against the flange at the base of the Dumpster.
When she finally stood up and turned around, she looked so sad and troubled that Roger had to stop himself from stepping forward to comfort her. She just stood there for a long time, staring at him, and then all of a sudden she smiled and laughed out loud and said, “Have a nice day!”
5. TOSSING FLOWERS INTO THE SWAMP
Icertainly hope there are not ticks,” said Hilma, trying to keep her feet on the rungs of her chair. Her suggestion for the new adventurous Thursdays in May Evenings had been to eat chilled food in her backyard, where her night-blooming garden was just coming into flower—Datura, four-o'clocks, Nicotiana, and moonvine in a round bed. But Meade had taken Ethel's suggestion about the rising sap literally. “The smell of pine sap will open your mind,” she had said.
And so there they were on a cool late May evening, two old women sitting in chairs in the middle of a thousand acres of longleaf pine woods. Meade had not wanted to bring anything but the chairs—“The idea is to be unencumbered”—but Hilma had brought dishes of custard in a canvas bag. “You can't enjoy being unencumbered if you are hungry,” she said. They would stay until dark, breathing the piney air and watching the lightning bugs come out.
• • •
He stood on a little rill and looked across at them through his binoculars. It seemed odd, two women sitting in the middle of the woods in rocking chairs. But then, he spent so much time in the woods himself, studying the intricate and complex behavior of one rare and elusive little bird, that almost everything about people seemed odd to him, the things they said and did, the clothes they wore, the shoes they put on their feet.
Two rocking chairs, not matched. One had a cushion, one had a straight ladder back. They were eating something white with spoons. Two old women in the middle of the woods in rocking chairs. He would have to ask Gawain about it.
“Must be Meade and Hilma” said Gawain. He and the ornithologist were looking at a map of a large tract of woods, Gawain's 600 acres of mixed loblolly, longleaf, and slash pine, and Roger's neighboring 350 acres of almost pure longleaf. Tiny circles indicated the biggest redheart trees, irregular loops enclosed areas of extensive longleaf reseeding, and dots marked the location of woodpecker activity—blue for an inactive roost cavity, red for a roost in use this season. Gawain was an expert on controlled burning, and these endangered woodpeckers were a fire-dependent species.
“They go and sit in the woods every Thursday afternoon?” the ornithologist asked.
But it was hard to get any conversation with Gawain off the subject of fire in the woods. “Take this area of young longleaf, February of the year 1978, those seedlings hadn't been sprouted four months, Roger put a cool fire through there, now that's the finest stand of young longleaf in the county. We just have one word for it, ‘fire,’ but fire is a billion things, Lewis, and in the hands of a knowledgeable forester, it can be a delicate and precise tool.” “These old ladies, they—”
“Two old-lady retired schoolteachers,” said Ga-wain, “but they understand the uses of fire, both of them.”
“Here comes a man through the woods,” said Meade, “with a pair of spyglasses around his neck.” It was the last Thursday in May; the bracken fern was almost four feet high, and sitting in their rocking chairs, Hilma and Meade were almost concealed by greenery.
“Maybe we should call out,” said Hilma, “so he won't come upon us unexpectedly and be startled.”
Meade raised a hand above the ferns. “Hello! Hello!” she called out. But the man was not surprised. He walked right up to them and stood there for a minute, clutching his binoculars with both hands, his head thrust slightly forward.
“We can't offer you a seat,” said Meade. “We didn't expect you, and we only have these two chairs.”
But even in the middle of a thousand acres of open woodland Hilma felt the responsibilities of a hostess, as if this strange young man in his worn canvas boots were an uncomfortable guest needing to be put at ease. “My name is Hilma and this is my friend Meade” she said. There was a pause. “What is your name?” Hilma prompted.
“Oh,” he said, adjusting the focus on his binoculars with convulsive little thrusts of both thumbs. “Lewis.”
“And,” Hilma went on, “with those field glasses you must be making a close observation of something. I would be interested to know what that might be.”
“Oh,” said the young man, and as if he had just been given life, he began to move and speak. He squatted down at their feet and then stood back up and looked up into the trees and pointed in the distance to things they could not see, talking all the while about red-cockaded woodpeckers: their nesting habits, their complicated social structure, their need for open longleaf woods, and his own cooperative-behavior study showing the role of helper males from previous generations in raising each year's new fledglings. “… the healthiest RCW population outside of the Apalachicola Forest,” he concluded.
Meade and Hilma listened intently, leaning forward in their chairs. “Why,” said Hilma, “I never! I have only seen a red-cockaded woodpecker once in my life when Roger pointed, and you have learned all these things by—”
“By steady application and diligent study,” said Meade reverently. She admired thorough work of all kinds.
By now it was nearly dark, the lightning bugs were out, and the dew had begun to come down.
“Thank you so much for the education you have given us,” said Hilma. “You have distinguished our last Thursday in May.” It was difficult to walk through the tall ferns, and Hilma and Meade staggered along with their chairs. Lewis walked a little ahead of them with easy, practiced strides. It had not occurred to him to offer to help with the chairs, but Hilma and Meade didn't notice. On the way to the road he pointed out several nesting trees, marked by the apron of white sap on their trunks, and just as they reached the car they caught sight of a tiny bird darting into one of the holes.
“I feel as if I have been blessed,” said Hilma. “Thank you so much, Mr. Lewis.” She dragged his hand away from the binoculars and shook it warmly.
“You already know Gawain, and these are our friends Lucy and Ethel,” Hilma said to Lewis, with a simplicity that belied the difficulties that had gone into compiling this guest list. Meade had wanted to invite Roger; “I can't imagine such a gathering without Roger,” she had said.
“But if we have Roger, then we can't have Ethel,” said Hilma, “and if Gawain has Roger to listen to him, there will be nothing but talk of fire.”
So in the end they had settled on Gawain, Ethel, and Lucy. “Gawain will make him feel at home, Ethel will entertain him with flash and style, and Lucy will make everything go smoothly.” The party was outside, at Hilma's house—“We will hope that the angel's-trumpet will open”—and the food was all summer food: cucumber soup, sliced tomatoes, a Vidalia onion pie, and a triumphant gumbo Lucy had made out of the first crop of a new nematode -resistant okra.
Lewis stood stiff and uneasy in the shade of the crape myrtle, looking unnaturally clean. His neatly parted hair still retained the grooves of the comb teeth, and sharp folds in his shirt stood out like fins in odd places. On his chest a smooth, flat rectangle showed the position of the piece of cardboard that had been slipped out minutes earlier.
“New clothes?” Ethel asked, and she laughed at him. Lewis fumbled at his chest, missing the binoculars, and stepped into the Nicotiana.
“We found him in the woods,” Hilma said to Lucy. “We had been sitting there for three Thursdays, doing nothing more interesting than looking for ticks, and there he was. He told us about his study, and then, as if by magic, one of the birds flew by, right into its nest cavity. We heard its little squeak.”
Ethel pulled two chairs u
p to the edge of the garden. “We are all people here, Lewis,” she said. She was still laughing. “You are one too.”
“He's a fine old-fashioned naturalist as well as a good scientist,” said Gawain, “with an ability to see beyond isolated details to the great ecological processes at work.”
Ethel sat down on the edge of her chair and leaned forward intently. She had the tiniest kneecaps he had ever seen on a normal-sized person, each one no big ger than a fifty-cent piece, and her shiny brown hair slid against itself like feathers on a bird. “We are supposed to talk to each other, Lewis,” she said. “I say something to you. Then it's your turn.”
The night flowers began to open, and there was a mingling of the clean smell of the moonflower, the jasminelike Nicotiana, and the odd musky fragrance of the Datura, just now beginning to unfurl. It was a pleasant evening to be outside, eating the first Vidalia onions of the year. Lucy, Meade, Hilma, and Gawain sat under the moonflower trellis talking about nematodes, woodpeckers, fire, and this remarkable new friendship.
“I felt almost like Joan of Arc,” said Hilma, “and he was the archangel Michael striding up to us through the green.”
“The diminished population of red-cockaded woodpeckers is just one example of the eradication of fire-dependent ecosystems by the exclusion of fire—his work is making that clear,” said Gawain.
“He needs to watch out for Ethel,” said Lucy, and they all peered around the moonflowers into the garden.
“Oh,” said Hilma.
“Oh, Ethel!” said Meade.
“Well, time for me to go home,” said Gawain.
“That nice fan man, Jim Wade,” said Hilma. “So pleasant and cheerful. Why doesn't Ethel…”
“Because she likes to do the choosing,” said Lucy.
“I am reminded of mating insects,” said Meade.
Quite a Year for Plums Page 3