Quite a Year for Plums
Page 8
“If that watermelon had been ripe, those chickens would have never left that yard,” said Eula.
Finally the man and woman eased the last hen back into the chicken yard and latched the gate. The chickens resumed their methodical and sedate pecking and scratching, and the man and woman leaned on the fence, side by side, watching.
“Now, I understand that,” said Eula. “There's something peaceful about watching a flock of chickens pick through garbage.” The woman slid an arm around the man's waist and snuggled up against him. The hem of his robe rucked up and exposed the white backs of his knees.
“Look at that,” said Louise. “He's cute.”
Then the woman nudged the man provocatively with her hip, laughed a throaty laugh, and they sauntered back down the garden path arm in arm. forgetting the garbage bucket. In the chicken yard, a rooster grabbed a hen by the top of the head and mounted her. There was some squawking and flapping, but it didn't last long; the rooster jumped off and instantly resumed his arrogant posture, and the hen stood up, wobbled, growled, bristled her feathers up with a shudder, and went back to her delicate picking at the watermelon rind.
“I'm just as glad he didn't see that,” said Eula. “Roosters is too rough.”
“Aunt Eula won't leave them alone,” Ethel said to Lucy. “At first she just watched them out the kitchen window. Now she's started feeding them. Gingerbread and a beef pie yesterday. Today she's baking bread.”
“How do they seem to like it?” asked Lucy. “I mean that drafty old house, for city people, I don't know.”
“Listen,” said Ethel, “watching a chicken eat a green watermelon makes that woman horny. She never puts her clothes on.”
“What's that he's got?” said Eula. “Looks like a piece of a big red 9.”
“That's a ‘g’,” said Louise. “It fell off the Sunoco sign, ‘Regular—$1.09.’ That's the ‘g’ out of Regular.”
“Look a there,” said Eula. “Now he's got a 8.”
“That's a piece of a B,” said Louise. “The fat part of aB.”
The man was standing out in the yard. He had a screwdriver in one hand and a crowbar in the other.
On the ground were piles of sheet-metal scraps, broken pieces of furniture, a tangle of bent wire panels, bits of boards with peeling paint, and a collection of letters and words—parts of wooden and metal signs, single letters and numbers from track signs, and strips of yellow and orange plastic tape with a variety of warning messages: DO NOT ENTER DO NOT CROSS DANGER BURIED PIPELINE STOP DIGGING FIBER OPTIC CABLE BURIED BELOW DO NOT PANIC LOOK OUT PAINT AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. He kept picking up different things from each pile and turning them around in his hands. Every now and then he would lay a wooden spindle or a section of wire bedspring gently on the ground and walk around it. Sometimes he shifted one piece and laid another piece under it. Sometimes he stood with his hands on his hips and stared at his piles of stuff.
“Something don't look right to him,” said Louise. “He needs something he ain't got.”
“What's he doing with all that stuff?” said Eula. “A piece of a screen door, a mashed-up bunch of wire, a pile of run-over sheet metal. They come all the way down here from Kansas City Missouri to pick up junk off the road.”
“He's making something out of it,” said Louise.
It was early evening, and the woman was in the kitchen mixing up salad greens when Louise knocked on the door.
“It's for him,” Louise said. She held her mouth tight and ducked her head down to one side. She was holding an old rusty sheet-metal sign, an advertisement for a defunct brand of dog food. The paint was faded and rust had eroded some of the letters, but you could still see a puppy with big round eyes and a round tongue and the words “Full-OPep” arching over his head. “Thought he might could use it for the letters,” said Louise.
There was a moment of awkwardness—tentative greetings mingled with bewildered gratitude: “Hi, well, thank you very much, I'm sure he'll… Just put it over there, he's not …” Then the man came into the kitchen. He took the sign out of Louise's hands, held it up to the light, and whistled. He sat down and held it in his lap. He took a rag from the kitchen sink and wiped the dust off the arching letters. Then he looked hard at Louise.
“I'm speechless,” he said. “Thank you very very much.”
“It's nothing,” said Louise. “I just noticed how you went for that ‘g’ out of Regular, thought you could use these. It come off my brother-in-law's old store, that's Melvin, Eula's husband, was killed by his own Allis-Chalmers tractor.”
“Oh, I'm so—” said the woman.
“They are absolutely voluptuous,” said the man. “Thank you.”
“Well, I'll be going now,” said Louise, and without another word she did go.
“Where did she come from?” asked the man. He began pacing around the kitchen, holding the sign up as if it were a banner in a parade. “Man!” he said, “Man oh man!”
“She's insane,” said the woman.
“Full-O-Pep,” he said. “Full-O-Pep.” He pushed his salad out of the way. “Look at that toothsome F, that succulent O, that lusty P! Whoa! Look out paint!”
The woman crossed her arms on the table and stared at him. “Bruce,” she said.
“You know,” he said, turning the sign in his hands and covering sections with a napkin. “If I just…”
“Bruce!” she said, but he was rummaging in his tool kit.
“Damn, it's dark,” he said, popping the handle of a screwdriver into the palm of his hand. “If you would hold the flashlight—” but she slapped both hands on the tabletop.
“Bruce, you promised me!” she said.
“He's a typographer,” the woman said to Eula. “When I first met him he was working for several small publications”—she fixed Eula with a significant look—”and I DO mean small.” Between them on the kitchen table a chicken casserole was growing dangerously warm. “The newsletter of the American Gourd Growers Association, Dairy Goat Journal Corn-posters’ Weekly—which meant no money. But he was very passionate about his work, very involved, which is what attracted me to him in the first place.” She flung her head back gracefully and ran her fingers through her hair. “So I got him this great job at Hallmark; sure, I pulled some strings—I have connections in Kansas City—but he truly deserved it. They put him to work on a project for a new line of cards called Feelings—really nice, a soft look, flowers, pastels. I don't know what it was—the expectations, the pressure, the responsibility; it's been very intense for him, and when the project was finished I felt we needed this special time away, just for us, a healing time.” Eula sat with her hands in her lap thinking of ptomaine poisoning and wondering if it would be impolite to interrupt just long enough to slip the casserole into the icebox.
“… sunsets, long talks around the fireside at night, candlelight… But since we've been here I've hardly seen him. He spends all his time making these giant collages out of pieces of junk—signs and pictures and parts of words that don't mean anything.” From the backyard they could hear the rasp of a saw as the typographer hacked a yellow capital Y off a fragment of a billboard advertising yogurt. “Sometimes I think he cares more about letters and numbers than he cares about me,” the woman said in a frail, wistful voice.
“Oh, honey,” said Eula, “you just give him time. He'll come around. Now this casserole—”
“But I want a love that goes beyond the limits of time,” she said. In the backyard the typographer laid the Y against a striped board and stood back.
“Just be glad it's letters and numbers and not cockfighting, which is what my Melvin, God bless him …” said Eula.
“I'll tell you something,” the woman said. “He dreams about typographical styles. He has nightmares about 14-point Eurostile.”
“Tiresome woman” said Ethel.
“She needs something to do,” said Lucy. “Why don't you suggest gardening, Eula? You could get her started with a gift of seeds.”
“But it's artwork,” said Lucy. “As an artist he should get some kind of dispensation.”
“Some art!” said Eula. “Bunch of junk screwed together.”
“He better watch out or Mama will have the spacemen after him,” said Ethel.
“I told Louise not to mention outer space,” said Eula. “If she gets on to outer space, they'll be done took back their five thousand dollars and gone.”
“I got a S for you today,” said Louise, holding out a big black sans serif S. “And some O's. Look a here, this is how they like it.” On the ground she laid out a row of black O's printed on clear plastic. She straightened the row, made a tiny adjustment, checked the angle of the sun, and stood back.
“Who?” he asked, settling the big S into one corner of his assemblage.
“I'm not supposed to talk about it,” said Louise. “But this is what brings them down; O's and A's and some others, set out east to west.”
“Hey,” he said, “whatever. I like it.” And carefully he laid the row of O's above a black and white picture of Marilyn Monroe with her lips pursed. Then he put an arm around Louise's shoulder and they stood together, just looking. “Whoa!” he said, and he grinned so wide that his cheeks shoved his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Smokin’!”
“Mistral!” the typographer blurted out, kicking off the covers. “Brush script! No! No!” He moaned and thrashed his head from side to side. Out at the chicken house, one of Louise's insomniac roosters, awakened by the moonlight and the odd cries from the house, rose up, flapped his wings once, and crowed.
Quietly the woman untangled a blanket from the tumbled covers, crept into the living room, and sat in the dark, hugging her knees.
The typographer was out in the backyard, aimlessly walking up and down the chicken yard, picking at the dried brown twigs of vine that clung to the fence. From the ground Marilyn Monroe looked up through Louise's O's, and from the house ostentatious sounds of leaving could be heard—suitcases being flung and dragged across the floor, impetuous footsteps, doors slamming.
“Hey,” said Louise. “Today's the day. I got you some A's.”
He looked at the A's, but he didn't snatch them up and try them out in different positions, slipping them around from place to place and muttering.
“She's leaving me,” he said.
Louise looked around furtively. From the front yard they could hear a car door slam. “Let me tell you something,” said Louise.
The woman appeared in the door, her pocketbook on her arm. “Take me to the airport?” she called in a flat, tight voice.
“I'll give her one thing—she sure knows how to leave him,” said Ethel. “A few hours of framming and banging and slinging things around, and then vroom! she's gone.” It had taken Ethel over a year to leave Roger, counting the months it took to root cuttings from his grandmother's night-blooming cereus.
“I imagine they'll have to do it all over again when they get to their real home,” said Lucy. “This leaving was just for show.”
“And all because of him screwing numbers and letters and pieces of junk together,” said Eula, remembering Melvin's pickup truck coasting silently away from the house under cover of darkness, dozens of fine little wire pens stacked in the back, and then the next morning the dreadful silence and the blood-spattered clothes.
“I imagine it's not just that,” said Lucy, “I imagine he was not with her in spirit. It was not a marriage of true minds.”
“She's a hard woman,” said Eula. “High-strung.”
The typographer was leaning up against the kitchen counter drinking whisky, and Louise was making an arrangement on the kitchen table—bits of string, twists of tinfoil, and the letters from a Scrabble game.
“They call it ‘Mistral/” he said. “Syrupy, sappy, insouciantly casual, the George Hamilton of script typefaces—buttoned-down, fetching smile, tan, and oh-so-nice.”
“This is my string,” said Louise. “The numbers and letters get their attention and the string brings them on down.”
“They take Bodoni,” said the typographer, “one of the great typefaces of all time”—he brandished the bottle at Louise, who watched him keenly, her eyes squinted—”and what do they do? They make ‘outline’ Bodoni. It's like seeing ghosts. They take Gill Sans, a vital, workhorse face—and what do they do? They shorten the uppers, they enlarge the counters, they round off the angles, they make it soft and slack. They castrate it!”
“They come in just as quiet,” said Louise. “They just slip in. You don't even know it.”
“Insidious is what it is,” said the typographer. “We are losing the great typefaces of three centuries, and no one even notices it!”
“You lay your letters down right,” said Louise. “Then they come in like water. They come in like air, they seep down from the light. No hole is too small for them little men. When the air is sticky like this? And bristly feeling? You feel that? Come on outside” Louise grabbed the typographer by the arm. “Come on. You'll see it.”
It was the end of the unseasonable warm spell. A little breeze was just beginning to stir. It would rain before morning. The warm, damp air felt thick and claustrophobic, trapped as it was between the cold that had been and the cold that was to come.
“You see that light?” said Louise. “You see that?” In the south, over the cotton field across the road, the sky glowed rose and gold where the lights of Tallahassee lit up the undersides of the low clouds.
13. THE AMERICAN LIVESTOCK BREEDS CONSERVANCY
One thing we can be sure of,” Meade said, “that man does not have a single viable sperm in his entire body.” The man was the evening's entertainment at the annual conference of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy. He had a cowboy hat clamped on his head, high-heeled snakeskin cowboy boots, and very tight jeans, the blue paling with stress across his thighs. He was singing “The Tennessee Stud.”
Viable sperm had been a recurrent topic at many of the day's meetings, in which the preservation and promotion of endangered breeds of livestock had been discussed. A representative from one of the genetic storage banks for the ALBC had presented a program on fertility evaluation; and Dr. Albert Turner, a renowned professor of animal science, had given a moving talk on the evolution of poultry breeds, pointing out that while the fancy exhibition fowl and the industrial-line egg and meat producers are in no danger, many of the fine old utility breeds from “the Golden Age of Animal Breeding” are almost extinct.
Roger, Delia, Hilma, and Meade had driven across the state to attend the conference because Delia's painting of Dominique chickens had been bought to hang in the ALBC offices in Pittsboro, North Carolina. Meade had grumbled at first—her interest was in heirloom plants, not livestock breeds. But since she had arrived she had thrown herself into the spirit of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, and kept comparing everything to “life.”
“Isn't that just like life?” said Meade. “The flashy ‘exhibition fowl’ thrive and prosper while the venerable old utility breeds are neglected and forgotten.”
The country singer had lurched off the stage in his high-heeled cowboy boots and his tight pants, and Meade, Delia, Roger, and Hilma were eating ham sandwiches in the conference-center lounge and discussing Dr. Turner's interesting speech. The tables were shoulder-high, and they had had to scramble up to sit on tall stools, rather like chickens struggling for purchase on a roost, thought Hilma, who couldn't quite figure out where to put her feet. At the next table, she noticed, the president of the Wyandotte Club of America and the manager of a small flock of New Hampshire Reds were perched quite gracefully on their stools, smoking cigarettes and drinking whisky and reading excerpts aloud to each other from a 1922 issue of Reliable Poultry Journal
“But I like the exhibition chickens,” Delia admit- ted guiltily. “The spectacular patterns, the flow
ing tail feathers, the glowing colors.”
“You are young, my dear,” said Meade. “Someday you will come to appreciate the old and basic things in life.”
“Like Meade's old clematis,” said Hilma, “a sweet little thing, although I agree with you, Delia. The modern ones you see in the plant catalogs are so spectacular, all striped and frilled in those velvety colors.”
“ ‘New and improved,’ it always says,” said Roger. “ ‘Hybrid Pride, blooms as big as saucers.’ ”
“Meade calls them vulgar flowers,” said Hilma, almost scornfully, and suddenly Meade felt all alone, as if she had been abandoned in the exalted position Dr. Turner had set up in his speech. Even the serious poultry breeders at the next table had forsaken their noble posts as preservers of a genetic heritage, she noticed, and begun to kiss each other, their elbows rumpling the cover of Reliable Poultry Journal. Meade felt in her pocket for the envelope of the little “Appomattox clematis” seeds she had decided to present as a gift to Dr. Turner. The clematis had been grown in her family's gardens since 1865, when her grandfather had gathered the seed along the road on his long walk home. It was a climber, with little nodding flowers in a delicate shade of pale blue, with a slight, powdery fragrance.
Hilma opened the door of the bedroom just a crack and peered fearfully down the hall. Many of the ALBC members had been housed in this over-crowded bed-and-breakfast inn near the conference center. Some of the larger bedrooms in the old house had been divided in half, and more small rooms had been created by closing in the ends of hallways and porches. Every flat surface was taken up with porcelain figurines of overdressed shepherdesses and their dogs or little homey items edged in eyelet lace, so the guests’ coats and bags and cases had to be stacked on the floor or in the seats of chairs, giving a cluttered, claustrophobic feeling to the space.