Quite a Year for Plums

by Quite a Year for Plums (retail) (epub)

  At the driveway Meade boldly stopped the car, and they craned their necks to see the bird. It was a cast-concrete eagle, presenting its ruffled chest to passersby, wings outstretched, head to one side.

  “Well, I never,” said Hilma. “It's an eagle. Imagine an eagle, just sitting there year after year, in that awkward position.”

  “Pretension is what it is,” said Meade.

  The next day when Hilma and Meade drove by, there was another post, topped by another eagle. They faced each other across the driveway.

  “Two eagles!” cried Hilma. “I have seen pictures in National Geographic of a tree full of eagles in one of those wild western states, but it certainly wasn't presented as something you would see every day.”

  “I think we should call on them,” said Meade.

  “But our thoughts are not kind,” said Hilma, “so our good wishes would be insincere.”

  “We wouldn't express good wishes,” said Meade. “You would bake them a little cake, and we would merely say hello.”

  A thousand-year-old tree, thought Meade, looking at the redwood siding on the wall under the little porch—and felled for such a house as this.

  Everything matches, thought Hilma, noticing the two gleaming brass light fixtures flanking the door and the pair of urns planted with juniper on the top step.

  “Oh! Hi!” said the young woman in the doorway. There was a confusion of introductions, then a mingling of gratitude and apology for the cake.

  “How nice!”

  “… just a simple banana nut cake.”

  “… my favorite, and Bob will be so…”

  “… not enough nuts, and my oven, I don't know…”

  “Won't you come in—Justin, get the dog, Justin, Justin!” But it was too late. A big black and white dog with a pink nose bounded into the room, over the back of the sofa, and into the kitchen, where it skidded on the linoleum, crashed into the refrigerator, and then started snuffling through the garbage pail. From the yard a little boy called, “Here, boy, here, boy,” and Hilma pressed herself up against the redwood wall as the dog dashed back out.

  “101 Dalmatians” the woman explained.

  “One hundred and one?” gasped Hilma.

  “You know how it is with kids,” said the woman. “Now come in, I'll take your coats, please sit down.” The room was long and low, with pale blue wall-to-wall carpeting and knotty pine paneling. A big plate-glass window looked out into a thicket of myrtle and rows of planted slash pine. The woman flipped a switch on the wall, and the logs in the fireplace instantly burst into flames.

  Meade stretched a hand out to the fire, but a glass panel across the fireplace opening prevented any warmth from entering the room.

  “We like the rustic look, but we were concerned about safety, with kids and all,” said the woman, “you can never be too careful.”

  “Oh no,” said Hilma, gazing with rapt horror at the logs, wreathed in flames but never consumed, “you can never be too careful with small children.”

  The door opened just a crack, and the little boy squeezed into the room. A black and white snout appeared for an instant on either side of his legs, then between them as the dog shoved and squirmed to get in.

  “Justin,” the woman said, in a warning tone.

  “We noticed your eagles,” said Meade.

  “That's how we knew someone lived here,” said Hilma hurriedly, “and so we came to say hello.”

  “Those are exact replicas of the eagles at a certain castle in England,” said the woman. “I can't remember the name, but we saw it on ‘Masterpiece Theatre.’ And believe me, they were not cheap.”

  “What's this?” the little boy called from the kitchen.

  “That is some delicious banana nut cake,” said the woman in a shrill, cheerful voice, “that these nice ladies have brought us, Justin. Wasn't that nice of them?”

  “I hate food with nuts in it,” said the little boy, trailing away down a dark hall.

  “I have set up a bird-feeding station,” said the woman, and she pointed to a cedar bird feeder in the shape of a barn, and a white plastic bird bath. “Now that we live in this wooded area we want Justin to learn to appreciate nature.”

  “Oh,” Hilma began helpfully, forcing her attention away from the mesmerizing fire. “You should be seeing finches, chickadees, chipping sparrows and white-throated sparrows, tufted titmice, and this seems to be a year for the pine siskins.”

  “Well, I don't know,” said the woman. “So far I've only been seeing these little brown birds, and a few black and white ones.”

  “The floor of the summer house at West Dean Park,” Meade said suddenly in a loud voice, “in the southeast of England, is paved entirely with horses’ teeth.”

  Then there were a few awkward moments of silence before Hilma began talking about the weather, “very cold for the time of year,” and before long Hilma and Meade gathered up their coats and said good-bye.

  On the ride back home Hilma kept thinking of Mr. and Mrs. Wyman, an old county family. “Those were such magnificent woods in the Wymans’ day,” she said at last. “An open stand of virgin longleaf pines.” The Wyman boys had sold the longleaf trees for saw timber in the seventies, when the price was high.

  “And now that it's had twenty years to grow up in second-growth loblolly and hardwood thickets, it's called a ‘wooded area’ by an ignorant fool of a woman who doesn't know a bald eagle from a tufted titmouse,” said Meade. “ ‘A certain castle in England,’ ” she hissed, “ ‘little brown birds.’ ” Meade abhorred imprecision in conversation. “I can only hope that she had her tubes tied after the birth of that child.”

  “Oh, Meade,” said Hilma. “Ignorance is not an inherited trait. But it is a shame about those woods.”

  “They were such cute little old ladies,” the woman said to her husband that night. “One of them was sweet, she brought some kind of bread. The other one was odd, she would just say the strangest things. But they loved the eagles.”

  “You shouldn't blame the poor little family with the eagles. It's not their fault,” said Roger. Although he took his tea plain, he knew that Meade would not stop until she had laid down a cloth and set out the sugar bowl, cream pitcher, spoons, napkins, and cake, and he waited patiently with his hands in his lap. “It's the Wyman boys who should be ashamed, the way they clear-cut those woods. It broke my heart seeing those logs coming out of there, four-hundred-year-old trees some of them, truckload alter truckioaa* Kogefs own tamily place was across the road from Tall Pines. Now it was one oi the last fragments of what had once been a vast forest of longleaf pine trees stretching across the Southeast from Virginia to Texas, all cut down and sold for timber to make way for roads, farms, and towns. “Some beautiful boards came out of those trees though,” said Roger. “ ‘The forest that built America,’ they call it.”

  Meade poured tea into his cup through a little silver gimbaled strainer and sat down with a sigh.

  “Streetlights, Roger! Paved roads, concrete eagles, surly children, unruly dogs, fires that spring up out of nowhere and put out no heat. What are we coming to in this world, Roger, woods that go unburned, covered with second-growth scrub and idiots?”

  But it wasn't a question that could be answered and Roger sipped his tea in silence.

  “Remember the Wymans’ house?” Meade went on. “A square-hewn dogtrot, 1850s—a fine, simple farmhouse. No pretension there.”

  “Yes,” said Roger, bracing himself for what was sure to come in this well-traveled conversation. “I remember the house.”

  “Those Wyman boys didn't care enough about it to fix the roof, but they didn't let a month go by without paying that fire insurance premium,” said Meade. “And by the time the fire truck got there, it was too late.”

  “Every board in that house was heart pine,” said Roger, “cut off that place. The whole house was made out of kindling wood, Meade, nothing could have stopped that fire.”

  Meade set her teacup into its sauce
r with an emphatic click. “Nothing could have stopped it, but what started it,” she said, “is what I want to know.”

  “Now, Meade, you don't—” said Roger.

  “Fire insurance!” said Meade. “Insurance money paid for those paved roads, insurance paid for that bulldozer, insurance paid for those shallow people to live their small lives in a place where they have no business to be.”

  “Oh!” said the woman in the doorway. “How nice to see you—um—”

  “It's Hilma,” said Hilma.

  “Right right right, now I remember, such a pretty name,” said the woman, “and where's your friend?”

  “Meade!” said Hilma, with a start. “Meade was busy with other things today. But I've brought you a little book that might help you learn the names of your birds.”

  “Oh, how nice!” said the woman. “Peterson Field Guides” she read.

  “Southeastern birds,” said Hilma, “Oh, listen,” and she paused. “A white-throated sparrow—such a weary little song—here he is; you'll be seeing him on the feeder, this rather large sparrow with the white patch. See the helpful arrows pointing out significant marks.”

  “Won't you come in?” said the woman. “It's so warm today, I don't think we'll need the fire on, do you?”

  “Oh no,” said Hilma, “certainly not the fire, not today at all. I can't stay, I just wanted you to have the book. Here,” and she opened it to a page of finches, “I have marked the ones you will be likely to see. Your little boy might enjoy making a list.”

  “You what?” said Meade. “Well, I'm sure it's the only book in that house. I know she didn't offer you anything to eat, we certainly never saw a slice of that banana nut cake.”

  “I didn't want anything to eat,” said Hilma. “I thought she could start with finches and sparrows.

  Just standing on the porch, I heard a white-throated sparrow.”

  “With that dog I'm surprised she has any birds at all,” said Meade, “except those eagles, of course, bolted to their posts.”

  It was late in the afternoon, a damp day with an east wind. Roger stood for a minute feeling the wind and the humidity in the air. With a match he lit a little spot in the dry grass beside his raked fire lane, then dribbled a line of fuel oil with his fire torch. With a whoosh the fire swept along the trail of fuel, then leaned with the wind into the woods. Roger stood and watched. The flames burned slow but steady, kept low by the damp air, the wind pushing the line of fire deeper and deeper into the woods. It looked right. Roger walked for over two miles, carefully laying down fire with the torch, stopping from time to time to watch it burn, walking back now and then to be sure the fire had not crossed over his raked path.

  When the fire got a few feet out into the woods, it took off. In open areas, where the big trees were thin, the accumulation of straw was sparse, and the fire burned slow and close to the ground. There had been a good seedfall the year before, and the little longleaf seedlings spread out a cool place with their green needles to protect themselves from the fire. But where the big old trees were thick and filled up the sky with their tops, there was no opening for the little seedlings. There the pine straw lay thick on the ground, a volatile fuel, and in those places the flames licked up into the sky ten feet or more. Smoke rose in towering bulbs, there was a roaring sound, and the tops of the trees swayed and danced in the fire's wind. As many times as he had done this job, Roger still worried. It was a delicate business, balancing fire, fuel, wind, and water. Many times he stopped and watched and worried. But every time the hot spots burned through quickly, the flames sank down again, and the fire crept deeper and deeper into the woods. By midnight he had lit off the whole thing, and he just stood and watched it burn. Behind the flames the ground looked bare, black, and ashy, but it would rain tomorrow, and by the middle of next week blades of grass would begin to show, and in the spring the wire grass, bracken fern, and all the other fire-dependent ground covers of the longleaf pine woods would come up lush and green and sturdy, rejuvenated by this fire. By April only the sooty trunks of the great old trees would show that these woods had burned. Maybe needles on some lower limbs would be browned, Roger thought, peering up into the smoky sky—but maybe not. It was a good fire.

  “A forest fire!” the woman said to Hilma, gazing despondently out her window at Roger's blackened woods. “We could have lost our home!”

  “No,” said Hilma, trying to explain, “it wasn't that kind—”

  “You should have seen the flames!” said the woman.

  “But these woods need fire to keep them healthy. It's—”

  “I just kept thinking over and over: ‘Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires, Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires.’ I called 911, I called the fire department. But no one came!”

  “But,” Hilma persisted, “it's the exclusion of fire, the suppression of fire, that would be dangerous and bad—”

  “Just look at my view!” the woman wailed, and burst into tears, flailing her arms at the window.

  “Gone?” said Hilma.

  “Both of them,” smacked Meade. “Just the posts are left.” It was a warm day in March and Meade had taken a drive out to Tall Pines.

  “Meade, you didn't—” said Hilma.

  “Hilma!” said Meade. “What can you be thinking? Ask her yourself next time you go out there to give her a little lesson in fire ecology.”

  “I don't know,” said the woman. “I just don't know.”

  In the front yard, pieces of the eagles were strewn around their posts: the fan of a tail, a section of ruffled chest, a hooked beak, a glowering eye, crunched and smattered. The bird feeder was empty, and on the steps the two junipers in their matching urns had died perfectly symmetrically, from the bottom up. In the house the curtains were drawn closed, the blue wall-to-wall carpet was tracked up with mud, and on the sofa in the room with the picture window the lit- tie boy lay, slathered with pink calamine lotion, watching cartoons with drooping eyes. The woman wandered aimlessly around and around the room, touching her forehead gently every now and then with her fingertips.

  “Try to look at the bright side,” said Hilma. “Maybe the eagles weren't quite right for here anyway. Maybe they were a little bit…”

  “Those were five-hundred-dollar eagles,” the woman said in a pinched, even voice, “exact replicas… .” But she began to sob, and couldn't finish. “I feel so lonely here, and frightened—I thought we would have neighbors, but there's no one but us, then the forest fire, now vandals, this poison ivy, and yesterday that snake on the steps. I don't know, I just don't know.”

  “But it was only a white oak snake,” said Hilma. “It's not as if a cottonmouth moccasin had—”

  “I don't want to learn the names of snakes!” the woman sputtered, clutching her head with both hands, and Hilma thought it best not to mention that with warmer weather, moccasins would begin to stir at the swampy edge of the rectangular lake, where button bushes had begun to grow again, hiding the tracks of the bulldozers.

  Meade stopped the car at the entrance to the driveway. “ ‘For Sale,’ ” she read triumphantly. “The Finest in Country Living was not good enough for them.”

  “Poor little thing,” said Hilma. “I wonder if she ever learned her sparrows.”

  In the front yard the shards of eagle had been cleaned up, but the octagonal concrete posts had been left at the entrance to the driveway, and a pair of eagle feet still clutched the top of each post with menacing talons.

  19. LOOKING FOR PEROTE

  It was in the middle of the February meeting of the writers’ group that Hilma spotted the dead rat. She had set the trap the night before in a dark corner of the room, but the fury of the snap must have catapulted the trap, for now it lay at some distance from the wall, right in the path from this dining table to the kitchen.

  “I will get more hot water,” said Lucy, looking into the teapot and beginning to rise.

  “Oh no, you sit there, I will…” said Hilma, almost leaping from her chair
.

  Luckily, all eyes were on Beulah Hambleton, who was explaining the latest installment in her detective thriller. “It will all become clear at the end, you see—it was a scratch from a poisoned pin that did him in.”

  It would be so easy, Hilma thought, on the way to the kitchen with the teapot, to just… But when she reached the rat she couldn't bring herself to stoop and pick it up. Even with Beulah Hambleton in the middle of Murder from Scratch, someone's attention might wander. That new member perhaps, Heather Bell, a young technician Lucy had brought from the experiment station; with her powers of observation honed by science, she would be the one most likely to notice the rat. The way she peered out from behind those two sheaves of hair and never smiled or spoke—who could tell what she saw and what she thought about it? A nicely furnished room, a little cluttered perhaps, but cozy, a stream of late winter light filtering through the lace curtains, and an old woman in a rump-sprung wool skirt walking to the kitchen, a Blue Willow teapot in one hand and a dead rat dangling from a trap in the other.

  So the rat lay, right through Mary Bell Geeter's family history detailing the union of two prominent families, the Georgia Geeters and the Alabama Thrashes, and on into a discussion of the annual writers’ group picnic.

  In spite of being stone dead, Hilma noticed, the rat had quite an alert, almost expectant expression, its little bright eyes thrust wide open by the blow, its little gnarly front feet clutching the corners of the trap.