“There is Mrs. Malcolm's lovely house and garden, out on old 19,” someone was saying. “A nice setting for a picnic, although she does have all those pets; that weasel-like creature that smells so bad and those big yellow dogs that…”
It was clever the way the red capital V for Victor outlined the head of the rat in the caught position; although really, Hilma thought, Victor was much too strong a word for such a small death.
“… birdseed flung all over the carpet, and then the MICE of course…”
Little inverted serifs at the top of the V formed the two ears of the rat, and two little red dots for…The eyes are the windows to the soul—that is true, Hilma thought. It is hard to tell what someone is thinking when you can't see the eyes. At this very moment, for example. Heather Bell might be watching, her eyes hidden in the shadows of hair, and thinking—
“—Roger's old home place, Hilma?”
“Hilma?”
And suddenly all around the table her guests were straining forward in their chairs, watching her and waiting, their eyes alert and expectant, their knuckly fingers clutching their teacups.
“Roger?” yelped Hilma.
“It was a John Wind house, one of his finest,” said Mary Bell Geeter, “circa 1840, originally very similar to the Mash house; the porches were added.”
“The picnic, at Roger's old home place?” said Hilma, feeling very vague. “But there's no house there—just the chimney.”
“But we were saying, Hilma, that it should be different this year, after this bitter cold winter. We should have a real picnic, outdoors, to celebrate spring,” Lucy explained patiently.
“Such a gorgeous setting, and so much history there, the ancient avenue of oaks, the hill, and that chimney rearing up against the sky” said Lucille Sanders, who was writing a romance story.
“What about toilets?” said Heather Bell. There was an embarrassed pause as people came to grips with this suggestion, and then everyone began talking all at once about rain.
“Rain!”
“We must think about rain of course!”
“We must plan in case of rain!”
“We will have portable toilets,” said Lucy, “and tents set up on the hill. There will be room for everyone to take refuge in case of rain. The next step is to talk to Roger, and if Hilma would …” Once again the bright eyes turned to Hilma, then the writers’ meeting was over and helpful guests began gathering up dishes.
“Oh no!” said Hilma. “Don't bother! I'll clear all this away!” There were last-minute trips to the bathroom, and Hilma waited with dread for the horrified cry. But it never came, and finally everyone stood at the door sorting out their coats and saying good-bye.
“The tents could go here on this flat place,” said Lucy, pacing off a distance. “And the toilet off there, behind the sasanquas.” Roger was poking around the base of the chimney with a stick, worried that the tramp of so many feet might loosen the foundation and bring it tumbling down at last, and Hilma was standing at the top of the hill, looking off toward Perote.
“What do you think, Roger,” asked Lucy, “Port-O-Lets where your grandmother's formal garden used to be, and people trooping around up here, eating congealed salads off of paper plates?”
“There were guests here when there was a house. Why shouldn't there be guests now that the house is gone?” said Roger.
“It's like gold that has been passed through fire to purge it of its dross,” said Lucy. She stood looking off into the open pine woods, where the dogwoods and plum trees were in full bloom. “It feels like hallowed ground.”
At least there would be a nobler race of rats here, Hilma thought, filled with the health and vigor of the great outdoors, foraging for their own food and making nests out of twigs and sweet grass—not nasty, nearsighted town-dwelling rats, scuttling inside walls, scavenging and scrounging and at last lying dead and undiscovered in traps with their eyes wide open.
But suddenly Lucy and Roger were asking her something about acid soil and columbines. “… Hilma?”
“Columbine?” said Hilma.
“The lime leaching out of the mortar might sweeten the soil in that spot,” said Lucy, and then Hilma saw the little columbine growing up by the chimney.
The next writers’ group meeting was held at Heather Bell's apartment, all white Sheetrock and high-gloss polyurethane. No danger of coming up on a little unexpected death here, Hilma thought, although she had been startled by a black and white photograph on the cover of a magazine in the bathroom showing a woman wearing a very short black skirt and over-the-knee black socks, sprawled across the curb of a busy city street as if she had tripped over her own thick-soled, high-heeled shoes. She was lying there, propped up on her elbows, glaring at something or someone unseen off to one side with angry eyes, her dark black lips screwed up in some kind of taunt or insult. Maybe someone had pushed her.
“… and there, in the garden, cushioned on a bed of Spanish moss, safe in his encircling arms—” Lucille Sanders was reading with feeling, a little quaver in her voice.
But someone cried, “Chiggers!” and two or three more people said, “They would be covered with chiggers!” and then everyone was talking all at once about chiggers and Spanish moss.
What had made that woman so angry, Hilma wondered, and who was she shouting at, and why did she keep lying there stretched across the curb in that awkward position, her feet weighted down and almost bent backward by the cruel black shoes?
“… funeral tents and one portable toilet. Roger says the ‘Lady Banksia’ will be in full bloom.”
And with such a photograph in her bathroom, what must Heather Bell think of them all with their teapots and their ‘Lady Banksia/ their Georgia Geeters and their Alabama Thrashes, and their heroes’ encircling arms? Hilma wondered.
“… and if it is a clear day, we will be able to see all the way to Perote,” said Lucy.
Roger was right—the ‘Lady Banksia’ was in full bloom, a spectacular column of roses twining up a pine tree in what had been the front garden. Every now and then a breeze would send a shower of yellow petals down over the writers’ group picnic. It was the middle of pine pollen season too, and when the wind blew a certain way, a shimmering yellow haze could be seen drifting in the air, and every surface was coated with a layer of golden dust.
Crumbling rows of bricks outlined the foundation of the house, and several of the older members were standing on the grassy floor of a front room, gazing through imaginary windows into the hazy distance. Every now and then someone would kick up a bit of china or glass, and little groups would form to try to match its pattern and edge to another piece that had been kicked up earlier.
Lucille Sanders was strolling with Roger along the mossy brick pathways of the old garden, describing to him her idea for her next year's writing project, a sort of romantic gardener's journal—“not about digging in the dirt,” she said, “but about the emotions inspired by a garden.”
“Oh,” said Roger.
“Take these daffodils, for example,” she said, “these dear bulbs thrusting themselves up spring after spring, showing us the patterns of the old garden in which they were planted so many years ago— what memories these bulbs must have, Roger!”
“Well,” said Roger, but he did not have the heart to tell Lucille Sanders on this spring day, with her muse so lively, that these were ‘King Alfred’ daffodils, andl that he had bought the bulbs down at Gramling's and’ planted them himself in November 1995.
“You must always start with the death and work backward from there,” Beulah Hambleton said to Lucy, shading her eyes and peering up at the elegant corbeling at the top of the chimney. “Last year it was the poisoned pin, but this year I feel I want something more violent. I'm always on the lookout for new deaths.”
“Samuel Meadows, Roger's great-great-greatgrandfather, is said to have planted these live oaks.” Mary Bell Geeter was picking thrips out of the punch with a long-handled spoon and giving a lesson i
n local history to several people who stood under the funeral tent, patiently holding out their little glass cups. “But they were actually planted by my distant cousin, the same Harriet Thrash Geeter who brought the first ‘Chandleri Elegans’ to Georgia from Screamer, Alabama.”
Hilma was taking a little walk down the hill in the shade of the oak trees and thinking about bits of a conversation she had overheard outside the Port-O-Let:
“Is Hilma getting—”
“Or is she just a little—”
“So often she seems to be off in—”
“And at her age to be—”
But it wasn't that, Hilma thought. There was nothing wrong with her mind. It was just that sometimes she couldn't stop thinking about certain things that got her attention; and it is perfectly natural after all, for the human mind to cling to things that interest it, like chiggers on Spanish moss.
Then, around a bend in the road she saw Heather Bell, sitting on a kind of seat formed by a loop of grapevine twining up a tree trunk. Hilma was afraid of Heather Bell—her dark gaze, her gloomy silence, and that troubling photograph in the bathroom. But something about seeing her in that vulnerable position, dangling from a tree, her feet not quite touching the ground, made Hilma feel able to approach her quite boldly.
“What a nice seat you have found,” she said.
“Here,” said Heather Bell, shifting over to make room. “You can sit down too.” When she smiled and pushed her hair behind her ears, Hilma could see that she really had a pleasant face, with a generous jaw and appealing-looking crooked teeth.
It was a surprisingly pleasant seat, springy and ample, with the trunk of the vine forming a backrest. “Why,” said Hilma, swinging her feet happily, “I feel that my mind could almost soar in this spot.”
“This is a beautiful place,” said Heather Bell.
“And how nice a home is when there is no house there,” said Hilma.
They dangled together for a few minutes, quite companionably. Then Heather Bell asked, “What is it they are all looking for up there on the hill?”
“Oh,” said Hilma, “years ago there was a town over there, miles away, and on a clear day it was said that from the upstairs windows of this house you could see the white buildings of Perote. Now, of course, the house is gone, and the town is gone too, just a crossroads and a few mobile homes.”
“But people still look for it?” asked Heather Bell.
“Oh yes,” said Hilma, “on clear days like this, a few people still look for Perote.”
20. IMPASSIONED TYPOGRAPHER II
He's cooking the rabbits that ate the R out of RIGHT HERE,” said Eula. “That's what you smell.” It was a warm day, the kitchen windows were open, and from Louise's house next door the smells of thyme and garlic and meat slowly cooking in wine wafted across two side yards and part of a garden.
“He's a good cook,” said Ethel, “I'll say that for him. I just hope they don't both get tularemia and die.”
“I just hope he doesn't accidentally shoot himself—or you or Louise either, Eula,” said Lucy. “He probably never held a gun in his life before this.” They were talking about the typographer from Kansas City, who had stayed on and on and on at Louise's house after his wife had left in a huff, wearing strange clothes and behaving oddly. At first Louise had visited him shyly, taking little gifts of letters and numbers, but then she had begun helping him with his assemblages, putting together collec- tions of wood and metal and plastic junk mixed in with random letters and bits of phrases from roadside signs. Gradually Louise had moved back into her house, and now, in the spring of the year, there they were, Louise and the typographer, living together quite cozily, cooking, eating, working, and shooting rabbits, happy and content in a way that nobody could quite understand.
“Louise did the shooting,” said Eula. “He was sleeping out there to keep the rabbits out, between the R and the I, flat on his back on the bare ground, every night, drenched with dew, then the rabbits came in when they were gone hunting for letters on the road, and ate the tail off that R, and Louise got out the gun and shot two of them.”
In the middle of Louise's garden, the typographer had flattened a section of raised beds and he and Louise had sown garden cress to spell out the words RIGHT HERE in capital letters. Beyond the words, in an undisturbed raised bed, the numbers 0 to 9 in rye grass ran west to east.
“What does it mean,” asked Lucy, “’RIGHT HERE 023456789’?”
“Oh, you know Louise,” said Eula. “She thinks the time is right, spring, and something about this full moon and the letters and numbers, the spacemen are coming down this week, she says.”
“And what about him?” said Ethel. “Is he waiting for the spacemen too?”
“Oh, him—spacemen wouldn't surprise him. When we were skinning those rabbits, that man told me …” said Eula, and she put down a bowl of beans on the table and beckoned Lucy and Ethel to the window, where they leaned against the sink and looked out into Louise's garden. “Skinning those rabbits, he told me where he used to work at his last job the rabbits all wore clothes! Little outfits! Shoes! Hats! Little blue coats!”
“Hallmark cards,” said Lucy.
“Oh,” said Eula. “Well, he don't care about the spacemen, any more than he cared about that wife that left him and flew back to Kansas City. He's just in it for the letters.”
“Look at Tom out there trying to talk redneck to him,” said Ethel. The typographer was watching Louise fasten a rusty piece of corrugated metal to a panel of hog wire, and Tom was standing back, slouching a little and looking grim and uncomfortable.
“Tom's worried about Louise,” said Eula. “He thinks the typographer is up to something—raping, strangling, stealing, although I don't see that in him.” They all three shifted a little closer and peered out the window at the typographer. He was wearing purple short pants with a drawstring waist and a big shirt with giant red and mauve flowers all over it. His toes grappled over the edge of his pink shower shoes.
“Why does Tom wear that cap?” said Ethel. “It's deforming his head.”
“How you doing?” said Tom, nodding and touching the brim of his cap. But he didn't smile, and his jaws were tight.
“Hi there!” said the typographer. He was holding a red-and-white-striped scrap of board from a railroad-crossing sign in one hand and a piece of galvanized guttering in the other. Louise was squatting down,, carefully attaching black letters printed on clear plastic along one edge of the hog wire.
“Tom,” she said, “there's not gon’ be chairs enough for them.”
“Name's Tom,” said Tom, reaching over Louise to shake hands with the typographer. “I was raised right: over there next door. Louise is my aunt.”
“Tom,” said Louise, “the fields is gon’ be glittering with their eyes.” She took off a capital F and replaced! it with an H. She twisted an R and straightened an 1VL No matter how you read it, the letters didn't spell anything. The typographer stood back and shook his head.
“Look at that,” he said. “It's all in the juxtaposition, that's the key. Man, she's got the touch.”
Tom paced around Eula's kitchen, picking things up off the counter and then putting them back down, glowering out from under the brim of his Feed Rite cap.
“It ain't right,” he said, and Eula sighed and began putting food down on the table. “The man is a nut. He's worse than Louise! The touch,’ he says, yeah, right, he ought to know—he's touched worse than Louise, touched in the head!”
“Oh, Tom,” said Eula, arranging the handles of the serving spoons so that they aimed at Tom, “everybody's a little crazy if you get to know them good enough. Take Roger's little girlfriend Delia, always pacing around with that gone look in her eyes, yet a perfectly nice woman, and knows her birds. Your own daddy, my Melvin, much as I loved him, I wouldn't say he wasn't crazy on the subject of fighting cocks. Why, look at Ethel—”
“Whoa, Aunt Eula,” said Ethel.
“Everybody's got that
little side to them, Tom, it's just some of them you see it sooner. He ain't no worse than most.”
“It ain't right,” said Tom, glaring across the butter beans at Ethel. “Your own mama, Ethel, living in that house with a lunatic. You could go over there one morning and find her raped and strangled.”
“And we would never know whether it was the spacemen or the typographer that did it,” said Ethel, “would we, Tom?”
“The Bible says you're supposed to honor your father and mother, Ethel, you're supposed to take care of them when they get old and feeble. You're not supposed to sit back and look on while some nut from the Wild West moves in and eggs her on to be crazier than she already is. You don't know what his intentions are, why he's there, how long he's going to stay. Hell, I don't even think he's paying her any rent!”
“I am taking care of her, Tom,” said Ethel. “I'm leaving her alone.”
But that afternoon when Tom had gone back to marking trees and the typographer had driven off in his van (“Grocery store,” said Eula, “you watch, he'll come back with three bags”), Lucy and Ethel went over to Louise's house.
“How long is he going to stay, Louise?” asked Lucy in a loud voice.
“5:35 a.m. in the morning, Lucy, is when they're coming. We calculated it with an alarm clock,” said Louise, and on the scrubbed kitchen table she lined up three early peas and turned the saltshaker on its side. “Ethel, honey, you ought to come home for this.”
But Ethel was poking around in a container of rabbit stew in the refrigerator. The kitchen had a clean lemony smell. “Look at this—” Ethel stood back and gazed deep into the refrigerator. “No moldy beans, no withered Fig Newtons, no rotten milk. Did the spacemen clean out this icebox, Mama?”
Louise flinched and sucked in her breath. “Don't say that, Ethel!” she snapped. “You don't talk like that! They could hear you, change their plans! You know you can't trust these new clocks from Wal-Mart. Sometimes they tell you the time is right, sometimes they tell you the time is wrong.”
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