Quite a Year for Plums

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

“Just tell us one thing, Mama,” said Ethel. “Who cleaned out this icebox? It wasn't you, so who was it?”

  “Oh,” said Louise, “that was him. He does all that in his spare time.”

  “How long is he going to stay, Louise?” Lucy asked again.

  “5:35 a.m., tomorrow morning, they'll swarm through this house like fire ants, through the cracks in the doors and windows they'll come in like mist, their little hands and feet will be all over everything.”

  The next afternoon Roger stopped by to see Eula on his way home from work. She was standing at the sink, looking out into Louise's garden in the dusk.

  “How is she?” asked Roger. “5:35 came and went this morning. I thought about her on my way to the methyl bromide alternatives meeting in Morven.”

  “Fine,” said Eula. “These things slip away from her, Roger. Next thing you know, she'll have out that alarm clock and have figured out another time. That man keeps her busy, he's all the time got her out there putting junk together, keeps her mind off it somewhat, and keeps her from wandering off, although Tom doesn't trust him, thinks he's up to something.” Eula leaned up against the sink, wiping her hands over and over with the dish towel. “See that car? There's another man over there now, talking to him, you can see them over there by the right here, although Louise has let that go, you can't hardly read it with the nut grass coming up between the letters.” A tall man in a suit was looking at the arrangements of junk the typographer and Louise had wired and welded and stapled together. Some of them were lying on the ground. Some were propped up against the chicken-yard fence. Every now and then the man would step back and look at something from a distance or step closer and peer at a letter or a word or a piece of rusty metal as if he expected to be able to read it.

  “Tom doesn't trust him, thinks he's up to something. But you know Tom, he always looks for the worst. Now Tom's mad at Ethel, because she won't take Louise in to live with her, and Ethel's mad at Tom because it ain't really his business, and Tom thinks I'm taking Ethel's side, and, oh, I don't know.” Eula flapped the dish towel in the air. “Just between you and me, Roger, I think she's better off living with a lunatic and a houseful of spacemen than with Ethel, every room filled up with boats, and Ethel like she is, with the men—oh, Roger, I shouldn't have said…oh, Roger,” and she buried her face in the dish towel.

  But Roger said, “It's all right to say. that to me, Eula,” and Eula folded the dish towel into threes and went on. “And here I am, in the middle of it, dodging here and there, trying to keep the peace, worrying about Louise, I feel like I'm skating on the rink of disaster, Roger. Lucy's doing her best, she was over there trying to talk to Louise, but you can't find out anything from Louise, it's just spacemen, spacemen, spacemen. Roger, sit down and have a cup of coffee.”

  “Why don't you try to talk to him?” said Roger.

  “Him?” said Eula.

  “They don't understand what you're doing here,” said Roger to the typographer. “And they're worried about Louise. She's hard to reason with because of the spacemen, and they worry about her.”

  “Reason with?” said the typographer. “Reason?” He pulled out a black capital track-sign R from a stack of letters and numbers. “If ‘reason’ is a rut, then she is the rising sun,” he said, holding up the R in front of Roger with both hands. “If ‘reason’ is a rat, then she is a white rhinoceros. If ‘reason’ is a roach, then she is a raptor. That woman has moved so far beyond ‘reason,’ it's— You want to know what I think of ‘reason’?” he said, and he flipped the R and laid it down beside a splintered piece of drip-cap molding, upside down and backward. It was printed on clear plastic, so it read from both sides. “There,” said the typographer, stepping back and looking hard at Roger. “She taught me that. ‘Juxtaposition,’ that one word, that is the key. She taught me that, and, man, I was in the right place at the right time, and I don't mean here—” He spread his arms at the garden and the two houses and the stretch of road and the field across the road, where the corn was just beginning to tassel. “I mean here,” and he tapped his head. “At last, somebody is looking after me.” He threw his head back and held his hands up to the sky. “Thank you, little spacemen, thank you!”

  Eula and Ethel and Lucy stood in a row at Eula's kitchen sink and looked out the window. The panels of hog wire, the bedsprings, the piles of letters and numbers and words, and the assemblages were gone.

  “He's gone,” said Eula. “Roger went over there and talked to him, and the next thing we knew, he was gone.”

  “Where's Louise?” asked Lucy.

  “Oh, Louise is right back doing her regular doings,” said Eula, “lining up her letters, winding up that alarm clock, talking about the little hands and feet, you know Louise.”

  “Not raped and strangled?” said Ethel.

  “Oh, that was just Tom, all that raping and strangling talk,” said Eula.

  “Tom!” shouted Ethel. “Where are you? I was right and you were wrong, Tom!”

  “What did Roger say to him?” asked Lucy.

  “Roger just got him to talking,” said Eula. “Seems like that man we saw here in the rented car wanted to have an art show, just our typographer's artwork, in Kansas City, says Roger, a something, a juxtaposition of his work, something.”

  “A retrospective,” said Lucy.

  “That's it,” said Eula. “So next thing we knew, he had it loaded up in that van, and him and all of it gone back to Kansas City.”

  They stood together at the sink and looked out the window at Louise's garden. Nutsedge had obliterated the commanding right here, with its sharp, bold serifs, the rye grass was withering in the late spring heat, blurring the 023456789, and the remaining raised beds were billowing mounds of blue-green grass.

  “Look at that,” said Eula. “It's just a shame the way Louise has let that garden go.” She sighed. “Once that Bermuda grass gets away from you, there's almost nothing you can do.”

  21. ONION SANDWICH

  Get Roger to do it” said Dr. Vanlandingham, and immediately heads nodded all around the table and the meeting moved on to more important business: planning for next month's Ag Showcase. When Roger got back from the Georgia Peanut Growers meeting in Eufala a week later, an oil painting of an onion sandwich was in his office leaning up against the wall on the floor behind his desk.

  “I don't know, Roger,” his secretary said. “Dr. Vanlandingham left it here, said you would know what to do with it.”

  The sandwich was on white bread, thick-cut slabs of white onion, with blobs of something nearly white glistening around the edges. Roger and Mrs. Eldridge stood and looked at it for a minute.

  “That has to be mayonnaise,” said Mrs. Eldridge. “It must be a Vidalia onion,” said Roger. “Otherwise nobody could eat that much onion in a sandwich.”

  “It is a Vidalia onion,” said Mrs. Eldridge. “That's what the problem is.”

  “What is the problem?” asked Roger.

  “You'll have to ask Dr. Vanlandingham,” said Mrs. Eldridge. “All I know is, it's a Vidalia onion sandwich, and that's the problem.”

  “We are not hanging that painting in the Vidalia Onion Storage Lab,” said Dr. Vanlandingham emphatically. “This is a scientific institution, not an art gallery. With your experience, Roger, we thought you would be the best one to deal with it.”

  “I don't have any experience with onions,” said Roger. “I should think Alex Montgomery or Auburn Brown would be the ones—”

  “Your experience with women, we mean,” said Dr. Vanlandingham impatiently. “We decided you should be the one to return it to her and explain tactfully how unsuitable it would be to hang a picture like that in a controlled-atmosphere storage laboratory.

  “Why can't you hang it somewhere else, where Dr. Vanlandingham won't be offended by the frivolity?” said Lucy. “On the wall of an office, or in a reception area.”

  “That's the problem,” said Roger. “Mrs. Johnson's husband was one of the early Vidalia onio
n growers; he made a fortune in onions, and left nearly a million dollars to the storage lab. His wife painted it herself and presented it specifically to hang there in his memory.”

  “It's a terrible painting,” said Delia, backing away from it with distaste.

  “There's definitely something wrong with the mayonnaise,” said Lucy. “It looks almost curdled, as if she added the oil too quickly.”

  “I don't know anything about mayonnaise,” said Delia. “It's just a terrible painting. I don't blame Dr. Vanlandingham.”

  “But I like the idea of it,” said Roger. “A portrait of a sandwich.”

  “Why, Dr. Meadows!” Mrs. Johnson greeted Roger at the door. “My husband used to talk about you. What was it—tobacco, soybeans …”

  “Peanuts,” said Roger, “but we all knew Mr. Johnson there at the experiment station. We are all so sorry—” But Mrs. Johnson began to welcome him in a flustered way, almost snatching his hat off his head and bustling him into the next room, where she plumped up sofa cushions and straightened little things on the table. Then she disappeared into the kitchen and began rattling ice cubes and calling out questions about tea, lemon, and sugar in a voice so cheerful it was almost shrill.

  The room was very bright. A plate-glass window looked out on an elaborate bird-feeding station, with a little fountain of spray, flagstones interplanted with maidenhair fern, and a clipped hedge of red-tipped photinia so tall and thick you would never know Madison Drive was just on the other side of it. It all looked very cool and peaceful, like a picture in a magazine. Roger felt uneasy about leaning back on the pale, shimmery pillows with their silky tassels, so he sat up on the edge of the sofa trying to keep both feet off the white rug. He tried again:

  “Everyone at the experiment station is so sorry about your husband, Mrs. Johnson, and—” But Mrs. Johnson began pouring tea from a yellow pitcher nervously, filling one glass half full and then pouring a little bit into the other glass, and then going back and forth between the two of them as if she couldn't quite make up her mind. A splash of tea slopped onto the rug, but Roger got it quickly with his handkerchief. If she wouldn't even listen to the condolences, he wondered, how in the world was he going to get around to the return of the onion sandwich?

  “Mrs. Johnson,” he said.

  “I've just been painting all these sandwiches,” Mrs. Johnson said gaily. “I can't help it. I just keep painting and painting.” The walls of the room were lined with paintings of sandwiches in pale frames. The paint looked thick, almost as if it had been daubed on with the back of a spoon, which made the sandwiches appear dry and inedible. There was a tomato sandwich, a cucumber sandwich, a Bibb lettuce sandwich, and what Roger took at first to be a worm sandwich, but on looking more closely, he saw that the worms were clumsily painted bean sprouts.

  “I'm running out of sandwiches!” said Mrs. Johnson.

  And Roger sprang in: “That Vidalia onion sandwich,” he said, “that you gave Dr. Vanlandingham for the lab—we want to thank you, but—”

  “I mean, a grilled eggplant sandwich, OK, with some arugula sticking out around the edges” said Mrs. Johnson. “But who ever heard of a squash sandwich? Who ever heard of an okra sandwich?” Even though neither of them had drunk a sip of tea, she began making dashes at the tall, full glasses with the yellow pitcher, and Roger gave up.

  He moved an enormous Menoboni bird book off the table onto the white rug, he took the pitcher out of Mrs. Johnson's hands and put it back on the tray, and then he slid the whole thing over to the other side of the table, out of reach. “Mrs. Johnson,” he said, leaning forward earnestly with his elbows on his knees, “please sit still and let me say this to you.”

  And as if she had been stricken, Mrs. Johnson did sit still, bolt upright in the light blue tufted upholstered chair and stared at Roger with a frightened look. He could see little dimples forming in her chin, and suddenly he remembered Mr. Johnson's big blunt hands, with the tufts of bristly hair on the knuckles, and how he would stand too close in a way that felt intimate and threatening all at the same time and say, “Lemme tell you the one about…”

  “A controlled atmosphere storage lab is not …” and “The director of the lab feels …” and “A portrait of an onion sandwich, while it might be …” Every one of his carefully rehearsed phrases flew out of his head, and he sat and stared through the glass top of the table at Mrs. Johnson's tense, dry-looking feet. All the strings in the tops of them were stretched tight, as if she might be about to shuck off her thin gold shoes and make a mad dash for safety. The silence seemed strange in that bright room, which she had managed to fill so successfully with noise, and for no reason at all, Roger thought of the little squirming legs of a fat toad-frog on its back in plowed dirt, where Mr. Johnson, touring the onion germ plasm plot, had tossed it right in front of the blades of a disk harrow.

  Then Mrs. Johnson said, “My husband was not a nice man. Dr. Meadows. I don't know if you knew that or not.”

  Experience with women, Roger thought, has gotten me into this. But he told the truth. “Yes, Mrs. Johnson,” he said. “Everybody knew that.”

  “It always seemed odd to me that he became famous for such a mild, bland onion,” said Mrs. Johnson.

  “The ‘Georgia Sweet Onion King,’ ” said Roger. “No, it didn't fit him.”

  “It hardly ever makes sense what people do,” said Mrs. Johnson. “Look at me: here I am with all this onion money. I could go out of this house right now, go down to Thomasville to Mason's Antiques and buy that little desk he's got in there for twelve thousand dollars, then I could go right over to Travel Time and buy a ticket on a cruise ship to Scandinavia, four meals a day, all summer long, and when I came back I'd have more money in the bank than when I left home. But what do I do? I sit in this house all day and paint these goddamned sandwiches.”

  “What's wrong with that?” said Roger. “Why should you buy a twelve-thousand-dollar desk and eat four meals a day in Norway if you'd rather be here painting pictures of sandwiches?”

  “Well, just look at them!” said Mrs. Johnson, and she flung herself around in her chair and glared back at the pictures. “Just look at these terrible sandwiches! Who could eat a sandwich like that?”

  “But,” said Roger, “pictures aren't always supposed to be … I mean, if you enjoy it, why—”

  “Enjoy it?” said Mrs. Johnson, and she stood up out of the blue chair. “Enjoy it?” She glared down at Roger. “I hate painting these sandwiches!” She leaned slightly forward from the waist and covered her mouth with both hands, so that for an instant Roger thought she was going to throw up on the white rug, but instead she burst into tears and just stood there on her tense, tight-strung feet, sobbing and sobbing.

  For just a minute Roger felt a flurry of exasperation with Dr. Vanlandingham for his high-minded notions about frivolity in the Vidalia Onion Storage Lab. But then he recovered himself. Nothing could have prepared him to deal with this very strange unhappiness, expressed in oil paintings of gloomy sandwiches, but the one thing he did know for sure was that this room was not suitable for such grief, with its silky fringes, its polished woods, its Boehm porcelain camellias under glass domes; and he took Mrs. Johnson by both shoulders and led her out the French doors and down the steps to the birdbath, where they stood knee-deep in maidenhair ferns. There was a flurrying exodus of birds. A tufted titmouse hit the plate-glass window with a pop and fell to the ground, where it sat a little lopsided in the liri-ope, trying to regain its bearings. Roger's pants were soaked up to the knee by the little misting sprayer, but he didn't see how he could move Mrs. Johnson, so he just stood there while she sobbed into his tea-stained handkerchief, patting her on the back from time to time and watching the water fill up her little gold shoes.

  22. THE SILVER THREAD

  No one could get Meade to understand what an honor it was that Roger had been asked to play the banjo on the Old Marble Stage at the Florida Folk Festival in May. It was the oldest and largest music fe
stival of its kind in the U.S. This year an estimated thirty thousand people would gather on the banks of the Suwannee River to commemorate Florida's musical heritage.

  “Riffraff!” said Meade. “They will all be wearing halter tops and eating cotton candy.”

  “You can't keep thirty thousand people from doing that, Meade,” said Hilma.

  “Just try to ignore the people and concentrate on the music,” said Lucy. “Gamble Rogers, Doc Watson, and Vassar Clements have all played at the Florida Folk Festival. Will McLean played ‘Hold Back the Waters of Lake Okeechobee’ on the very same spot where Roger will stand.”

  But still, Meade didn't like the sound of it. The whole state of Florida seemed like nothing more than a glorified sandbar to her, barely above sea level, and what good there used to be of it now ruined by development. “But Roger is not from Florida!” she kept saying. “And he's not ‘folk’!”

  “Still,” said Hilma, “surely you will come with Lucy and me and sit on a blanket on the side of the hill in the May Florida sunset and see Roger down there on the stage singing and playing for all those people.”

  “Why?” said Meade. “When I can sit in the comfort of my own living room and have Roger sit in the Windsor chair without arms and play ‘Trouble in Mind’ anytime I like, and then have a nice visit afterwards, with something good to eat—why should I sit on the hard ground in the hot sun breathing the bug spray of thirty thousand Floridians, Roger a tiny speck in the distance. From that far away you probably can't even make out the words.”

  “There is a sophisticated amplification system,” said Lucy. “You'll be able to hear every note.”

  “And besides,” said Hilma, “think of Roger. I'm sure it would reassure him to know that you were sitting somewhere out there on the hard ground with the riffraff, listening to his performance.”

  “Oh,” said Meade, “well.”

  “I don't know if I'm gon’ be able to stand it, Roger,” Eula called to Roger, who was up in the middle of her plum tree, pruning out dead limbs with a chain saw.