Hilma crept down the hall, clutching her terry cloth robe to her neck, dreading a bathroom encounter. At any hour of the night she felt she might turn a corner and run into one of these poultry enthusiasts, needing to wash up. Sure enough, just as she reached the bathroom, the door opened. But it was only Delia, holding a bottle of shampoo in one hand and a tiny lamp in the shape of a leaping fish in the other. “It was on the back of the toilet,” said Delia, “but it didn't seem quite safe to me—such a damp place for an electrical appliance.”
Hilma had an uncomfortable bath, not quite allowing herself to settle down into the tub, listening for footsteps, voices, and the rattle of the doorknob. When she got back to the room Meade was sitting up in bed, elegantly dressed in a polished-cotton bed jacket, reading A Conservation Breeding Handbook.
“ ‘The loss of these breeds would impoverish agriculture and diminish the human spirit,’ ” Meade recited. “I do so often feel that my spirit is diminished, Hilma, don't you?” she said.
But Hilma was just feeling damp and frazzled and crowded by knickknacks. “Thank goodness Delia got rid of that fish” she said.
It was 4:15 according to the glowing yellow numbers on the little digital clock beside the bed, but Hilma couldn't sleep. She couldn't stop thinking about Meade and her clematis seeds, rare pigs, and the bathroom down the hall. She had overheard the touching presentation of the Appomattox clematis in the hallway, Meade explaining earnestly about the long walk home, and the bowers of clematis over the 130 years in her family's gardens in Virginia, North Carolina, and now Georgia. Hilma had peeked into the hallway just in time to see Dr. Turner smile and nod and stuff the envelope into his coat pocket while backing up with furtive little steps toward the sanctuary of his own room.
4:29. “… successfully imported from England, and now safely in quarantine in New York!” the proud caption had read. But the pigs had looked so pitiful, Hilma thought, nestled together in their straw bed. It would be a concrete room, she supposed, washed down daily with disinfectants. She imagined them lying there, snorting in their sleep, the snout of one pig thrust up against the bristly flank of its neighbor. Did they dream of the home they had left behind in England, she wondered, the green meadows, the hedgerows, the ha-has? Could they have a way of knowing as they slept in that dark and sunless room that they were rare and precious pigs, and that they would soon see another blue sky and root in the damp earth of another continent?
4:36—now would be a good time, she thought, creeping out of bed and picking her way past the piles of shoes and coats to the door. Surely, at this hour no one else would be—
“Oh!” Delia yelped with something like relief. “Thank goodness you're awake!” She was leaning against the wall by the bathroom door in her flannel nightgown, fiddling with the doorknob and looking so worried that Hilma forgot about the bathroom and they sat down together among a pile of ruffled cushions on a white satin sofa in the hall. Once again Hilma found herself struggling for a comfortable position. She sat up straight, pressing her toes against the floor to keep from sliding off the domed, slippery seat, and tried to concentrate. But Delia wasn't making much sense. It was dark, and she spoke so softly that Hilma could only hear snatches of what she was saying: “… warm lumps, covered up in beds,” she whispered, “… inaccessible thoughts darting around in the dark like bats,” and after a while Hilma began to understand that she was describing an unnatural fear she had of sleeping people, something like a dread of snakes or spiders. “Sleepers,” Delia said with a shudder. “That's why I was so glad to see you.”
But there didn't seem to be much comfort Hilma could give her. People did have to sleep, after all. “They will soon wake up, my dear, and be themselves again,” said Hilma feebly, “like the Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs coming out of quarantine at last.” Then they just sat together on the white sofa until light began to come through the lace curtains, doors opened up and down the hall, and the steady patter to the bathroom began.
Meade lay in her bed and watched the ceiling grow brighter with the dawn, remembering Dr. Turner's ringing words at the conclusion of his talk: “The challenge of today is to maintain this variability for the entire poultry species, and so protect this genetic heritage for the future.” And within the hour the managers of two of the most threatened populations were kissing each other at the supper table, the challenge of today the furthest thing from their minds. Just like life, she thought, snuggling deeper under the covers, people so quickly taken in by the easy pleasures, the flash and strut. So, she thought, drifting back to sleep, is such a versatile word, short and simple, and yet powerful when used as Dr. Turner had used it: “… and so protect…” Dr. Turner had a deep voice, suitable for speaking on the topic of preserving venerable forms of life; and such a fine head of white hair, a strong, expressive nose, almost like a picture of God or Moses. “… and so protect …” she murmured, thinking of the Appomattox clematis that would bloom next year in his garden.
Conversation was difficult at breakfast. The innkeeper was under the impression that the rare breeds in question were exotic animals and she kept talking on and on about a pink dolphin she had heard about in the Yangtze River. The manager of the New Hampshire flock had not come down to breakfast.
and the president of the Wyandotte Club needed a cigarette so badly that his upper lip kept sticking to his teeth, but the words “Thank You for Not Smoking” were printed on a blue plywood goose screwed to the wall over every door. Delia wanted a glass of water, but only pale coffee was offered, and Dr. Turner, in his rightful place at the head of the table, kept striking his knees against the gatelegs hidden under the damask tablecloth.
“Very, very rare,” the innkeeper said enthusiastically, pouring lukewarm coffee out of a silver coffeepot. “Only about fifty of them left in the world, dolphins are so cute anyway, and a PINK one, I just can't imagine—you all do such important work, saving these poor animals from extinction.”
But the nerves of the president of the Wyandotte Club were too frazzled for more talk of pink dolphins, and he suddenly blurted out in an angry voice, “I am a poultryman!”
“Oh!” the innkeeper yelped, and she hastily set down a platter of quivering poached eggs and disappeared into the kitchen.
There was a tense moment as everyone stared at the eggs, adjusting to the silence. But Hilma took up the platter bravely and passed it graciously to Dr. Turner, saying, “I certainly hope these are not the eggs of a rare and endangered flock.”
“No,” said Dr. Turner, just as everyone began to relax. “I would say that this egg was laid by a White Leghorn hen, crammed into a space no bigger than your two hands. Her beak may have been cut off when she was one day old to keep her from pecking her cage mates, or she might have been fitted at eighteen weeks of age with a pair of red contact lenses.” Then, as everyone sat with their hands in their laps. Dr. Turner explained that hens in such numbers are not able to establish their social order, and have a tendency in their frustration to peck one another to death. The red contact lenses, by filtering out the color of blood, reduce this social stress, eliminating cannibalism, increasing egg production, and so resulting ultimately in a significant improvement in the feed-conversion ratio.
“And it is to this impoverished state that the noble science of avian husbandry has sunk,” Dr. Turner concluded with a smack.
After that there was a little nibbling at pieces of dry toast, but no one felt like talking. At last Roger made a move, pushing his chair back and saying, “Well,” and then everyone got up with relief and hurried back to their rooms to pack.
Hilma stuffed her things into her suitcase and then sat in a chair by the window looking out at the gray day while Meade spread clothes out on the bed and folded them up with tissue paper. There had been something uncomfortable and troubling about the ALBC conference, Hilma decided—those spotted pigs she couldn't get off her mind, Meade's odd remark about feeling diminished in her spirit, and then Delia's strange night terror
s. “Sleepers,” she had whispered with such horror.
Outside in the parking lot, people shivered in the light, cold mist, holding newspapers over their heads and loading bags into the trunks of cars.
“Oh, look,” said Hilma, “there's Dr. Turner,” and Meade stopped her packing. He certainly was a handsome man for his age, Hilma thought, such a noble mien. She watched as he fumbled in his coat pockets. But instead of keys, he pulled out Meade's little white packet of clematis seeds. He stood there looking at it, as if he were trying to remember where it had come from. Meade had begun picking her way carefully through the piles of bags and shoes to the window, but Hilma had the presence of mind to say quickly, “Oh, never mind, it's just some other—” and Meade turned back to her packing just as Dr. Turner flipped the envelope open and shook the little seeds out in the rain.
14. IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER
A great fan,” said Jim Wade, “sixteen-inch, sidewinder oscillator.” He slid the lever to High, and the fan wearily lumbered into action. It took a while, but by the time it got going, Christmas cards were flying across the room, and Ethel could feel tears blowing out of the corners of her eyes. “Now what do you think,” Jim Wade said, “is that the world's greatest fan, or what?”
It was a 1919 General Electric, three speeds, with copper blades that showed up as a golden glow at the root of the gale. One of the blades had a jagged chipped edge that threw the fan a little off-balance and set up a vibration that caused the whole store to rattle and shake. A pair of Mr. and Mrs. Santa salt and pepper shakers marched with wobbly steps to the edge of their shelf. Ethel caught Mrs. Santa (salt) just as she began to tip.
“Let her go,” said Jim Wade. “Tacky consignment junk. Let her hit that concrete floor and smash into a thousand pieces. People bring this stuff in here, expect me to sell it. And you know the saddest thing, Ethel? I do sell it.” He slid the switch to Medium, then Low, and stood by the fan with his eyes closed.
“I can see this fan in your house, Ethel, on Low, a summer night. I see a tomato sandwich, a jar of capers; the doors are open to the evening breeze, nothing but the sound of crickets.”
But it was December, Ethel was looking for a woodstove, not an electric fan, and in the background chipmunks were singing “Silent Night.”
“Jim Wade,” said Ethel, sliding the switch back to Off. “It was fifteen degrees last night. No one wants to hear about the evening breeze.”
“It's a habit of mine,” said Jim Wade wistfully, “daydreaming in other seasons. Do you daydream in other seasons, Ethel?” But in a far corner of the store Ethel had found a beautiful woodstove, with a nickel-plated fender and a gleaming finial.
“Oh no!” Jim Wade said, swooping in on her, “Oh no!” He stood in front of the stove and held Ethel off with one hand. “A great old stove from the 1890s, you're thinking to yourself? Maybe Birmingham Iron Works, you're thinking to yourself? You think”—he paused dramatically—“made in Taiwan, early eighties—NINETEEN-eighties. See this? Phillips-head screws. Junk! An imitation of nothing that ever existed, designed by tricksters to bring back memories that nobody ever had. Three hundred and fifty dollars, a ridiculous price for a fake stove. And you know what, Ethel? Some woman will come in here wearing a green dirndl skirt and a shirt with red piping on the collar and buy the thing! She'll put an arrangement of artificial flowers on the lid. Flowers on top of a woodstove, Ethel just think about it! Country charm!”
“Oh, Jim Wade” said Ethel. “ ‘Tis the season to be jolly.”
“Ethel,” said Jim Wade, “one thing and one thing only would make me jolly.”
“Don't start, Jim Wade,” said Ethel. “Help me find a woodstove. I want to heat my house with boat scraps.”
“The stove you want isn't here,” said Jim Wade, and he flipped the sign on the Antique Mall to closed and locked the door. “The stove you want is a Columbus Stove and Range model—a Little Bungalow—out at Paramore Surplus.”
Jim Wade turned on the heat in his van and they roared through town, past the Christmas tree on the courthouse lawn, past the Salvation Army woman in her short red skirt prancing up and down in the cold on the corner of Jackson and Broad, past the ten-thousand-dollar display of lights at Flowers Industries, and out onto Highway 84.
“Marry me, Ethel!” cried Jim Wade, turning loose of the steering wheel and slapping the dashboard with both hands. “This spring, in St. Louis, the fan-manufacturing capital of the U.S., marry me!”
“You missed it,” said Ethel. “You should have turned on 111.”
“Got a nice fan out back,” said Mrs. Paramore, glaring up at Jim Wade. “Old Emerson model.” Her stringy, blue-veined feet, in silver lame slippers, were propped up on a little gas space heater, and a pair of Santa Claus earrings swung violently from her weary ear-lobes. Ethel found the woodstove under a pile of tin bathtubs half full of rusty ice water and frozen mosquito wigglers, and bloodied her knuckles untangling it from a pile of copper and iron weather vanes— roosters and trotting horses and a cow and a pig pointing north, south, east, and west.
“Twenty-five for the stove, fifty-five dollars for the fan, firm,” said Mrs. Paramore, clamping her thin lips onto her cigarette and crossing her arms over the skinny blue iron-on Victorian Santa Claus on her sweatshirt. “That's an Emerson.”
“But look at this oil cup!” wailed Jim Wade. “Look at this cheap motor! This is not the fine hollow-core Emerson motor of the twenties and thirties! This is a wartime Emerson!”
Ethel left her money on the counter, and in the parking lot she made a ramp out of two two-by-sixes and heaved and shoved the stove into the back of Jim Wade's van.
“Look at this wrinkle finish!” Jim Wade's voice rang out across the grim fields of scrap metal, car parts, and pieces of houses. “Look at this cross guard!”
“It's an Emerson fan. My prices is firm,” smacked Mrs. Paramore. The Santa Claus earrings snatched and bobbed emphatically, stretching the holes in her earlobes to vicious little slits. “I don't dicker.”
“I swear, Ethel,” said Jim Wade, roaring back down Highway 84, “I should be under the care of a psycho analyst, or at the very least I should be spending six hours a day under a 200-watt bulb reading the short stories of Somerset Maugham.”
“Seasonal affect disorder, that's what they call it,” said Ethel, nursing her scraped knuckles.
“Instead I'm eking my life away down in that store,” said Jim Wade, “selling male-end-only strings of Christmas lights to overweight women dressed in clothes that blink. I'm a danger to myself and others, Ethel. So watch out.”
At Ethel's house they struggled with the stove up the stairs to the strains of “Joy to the World” wafting across the park from the loudspeakers downtown. Ethel began snapping sections of stovepipe together while Jim Wade unscrewed the oil cup on her little Emerson Seabreeze.
“Who but you, Ethel, would know to use Royal Purple?” he sighed. “Look at this”—and he spread his arms and made a slow spin. The elegant little sailboat hung in a sling from the ceiling, and one corner of the room was filled with wood scraps in neat stacks, but the Portsmouth boatbuilder had taken his tools back to New Hampshire early in the fall and Ethel had swept up the shavings and sawdust and put the furniture back. “No garlands of greenery, no stockings hung by the chimney with care, no band-sawed plywood reindeer prancing across the wall,” said Jim Wade, “just the simple, functional home of a capable woman who knows how to take care of an Emerson desk fan.”
“Get your side,” said Ethel, snapping in the last section of pipe, and together they lifted the stove up and settled it into place. Ethel jammed the elbow into the ceramic thimble and stood back.
“Wooo!” she said, crumpling up newspapers and stuffing scraps of poplar and pine into the little front door of the stove. “Give me a match, Jim Wade, turn off that fan!”
Behind the little isinglass window of the stove door the flames flickered and danced. It was cold outside, another freezing night. Ethel had b
rought her plants in, and the warmth from the stove spread the rich loamy smell all through the room. Jim Wade started water boiling for tea while Ethel checked the tightness of the stovepipe joints with gloved hands.
“I will never understand the mystique of boats,” said Jim Wade. “All that business about the lonely sea and the sky and a star to steer her by. To me it just seems damp and cold, with an enormous potential for danger. Was that it, Ethel, that heady feeling that is said to come over us right before a violent death? Because I never could figure it out, to me he just seemed like a bandy-legged little man with a funny-looking saw, he never said anything, and he always smelled like glue every time I saw him. What I want to know, Ethel, is, why did it have to be boats in particular, instead of, say, electric desk fans?”
“It doesn't have anything to do with boats or fans, Jim Wade,” said Ethel. “Stop trying to figure it out.”
The wood scraps were very dry, and the fire had gotten so hot that the stove had begun making rhythmic sucking gulps: whomp whomp whomp.
“Here we are, two lonely people huddled around a pitiful spark” Jim Wade said. “ ‘Earth as hard as iron, water like a stone.’ ”
“I am not lonely, Jim Wade,” said Ethel, closing the vent down hard and snapping the damper shut. “And this is not a pitiful spark. We may see flashover any second now.”
“ ‘In the bleak midwinter,’” said Jim Wade.
“The bleak midwinter has its benefits,” said Ethel. “Just think of the fleas that might have tormented dogs and cats next July, now being killed by this cold snap.”
The roaring in the stove settled down to a low rustling murmur. Ethel and Jim Wade sat drinking their tea and listening to the little clicks and taps and rumbles as the stove adjusted to its heat and the firewood slumped into the ashes.
Quite a Year for Plums Page 9