Quite a Year for Plums

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

  “Seeing you up there on that marble stage in front of all those people, singing those same songs Melvin used to sing, I might just faint away.”

  Roger kept trying to time the spurts of the roaring to gaps in her conversation, but Eula was so excited about the Florida Folk Festival she couldn't stop talking. “I told Tom we had to get there early, get us a good spot up front,” she said, while Roger revved up the saw with several sharp bursts. He heard “… little green plums …” and something about a red blanket, and she kept talking through the steady gnawing scream, and by the time the limb fell out, she was going on about Melvin and Tom.

  “… although Tom was his own son and you weren't even hardly a son-in-law—whoa, that was a big one, Roger, watch out. Tom just never had his heart in it, rather be outdoors. You're the one had a finger on that silver thread, Roger, Melvin always used to say that.”

  Roger had come into his music late in life. It wasn't until he was eighteen years old and courting Ethel that Ethel's uncle Melvin had begun to teach him to play. Melvin was a hard man in some ways, with dark parts of his life and secrets that no one talked about. But he was sweet in his music, and he patiently taught Roger his distinctive five-fingered picking style so thoroughly that by the time Roger learned that most people use only three or even two fingers, it was too late. “You was already rurnt!” Melvin told him.

  Roger untangled a few twiggy branches stuck in the tree and climbed down with the chain saw. “You was already rurnt!” said Eula, brushing sawdust off his shoulders. “That was the way his daddy taught him to pick, Menominee style, he called it. He was so proud of you, Roger. You had a finger on that silver thread.”

  Eula and Tom were in the backyard adjusting the carburetor on his oldest truck.

  “I was standing down there looking at those little green plums and thinking,” said Eula.

  “I said straight slot, not Phillips,” said Tom.

  “ ‘Just look at those little green plums,’ I told Roger. ‘By the time these plums are ripe, you'll be up on that marble stage picking and singing for thirty thousand people.’”

  “I'm surprised you let him up in that tree with a chain saw,” said Tom. “He could have cut off some of those precious fingers. Now get in and crank it, and keep it running this time.”

  “I told Roger we'd be there early, Tom,” said Eula. “I told him to look out for a red blanket, a bright red spot among the thousands, and there we'd be, giving him encouragement to carry on.”

  “Since when did Roger ever need any encouragement to carry on?” said Tom. “I never knew Roger to stop till he got to the little piece of corn bread a-laying on the shelf. Now slack off on it.”

  “Well, he always did have—”

  “I don't want to hear about that goddamned silver thread,” said Tom, coming out from under the truck hood. “What gets me is, the Florida Folk Festival, ‘Folk/ well, hell, Roger ain't folk. Roger's a Ph.D. doctor, a damned peanut expert. Just because he had the spare time to sit and listen to Daddy, and room in his head for forty-eleven verses of ‘Frog Went a-Courtin’,’ that don't make him ‘folk.’ ‘Folk’ means you got your roots in poor soil your grandaddy wore out with cotton and a mule. You work with your hands, close to the dirt. Roger's family in that big house up there looking down on the rest of the county, just because the house burned down a generation ago, that don't make Roger ‘folk.’ Roger sits in front of a computer making spreadsheets all day and telling peanut farmers what to do with their land— he ain't all that different from his granddaddy, only Roger does it with education instead of money, it amounts to the same thing, and that ain't ‘folk.’ Now cut it off.”

  What could be closer to the dirt than peanuts, Eula thought, but she said, “He knows the words and the music, Tom, that's all they're after.”

  “And don't forget about that silver thread,” said Tom, slamming down the hood of the truck and wiping his hands on a greasy rag.

  “Women being murdered and thrown into rivers by jealous lovers,” said Delia, “and cuckoos and card players all mixed up, and houses filled with chicken pies. I don't know how Roger remembers the words, since there's no logic to it.”

  Delia and Lucy were headed down State Road 41 to the Florida Folk Festival. Lucy was driving and Delia was idly looking for birds in the woods and fields beside the road. The lavish spring flowering was finished, and rural north Florida was at its early summer best. The old live oak trees looked almost silly in their new green.

  “The oldest songs have evolved away from all reason and the words have just become part of the music,” said Lucy. “You're not supposed to look for logic.”

  Delia sat for a while with her hands in her lap, watching some mockingbirds chase a sparrow hawk. They drove through the little towns of Jasper and Genoa. There was not much traffic. The rest of the thirty thousand people going to the Florida Folk Festival were on the interstate.

  “Will Ethel be there?” asked Delia. “I'm afraid of Ethel. She's so quick-witted and strong, and she calls me ‘that little bird woman.’ ”

  “Ethel is staying home with Louise,” said Lucy. “Ethel doesn't see the charm of folk music. She saw too much of her uncle Melvin and Roger, struggling along in those early years with fiddles and banjos and harmonicas.”

  “Roger never struggles,” said Delia.

  “He doesn't appear to struggle,” said Lucy, “because he handles his suffering so gracefully.”

  But Delia was looking through her binoculars at a kingfisher on a fence post and didn't seem to hear.

  “Sit down, Mama, you're making me nervous with those tomatoes,” said Ethel. She was gluing the pieces of a broken chair back together in Eula's kitchen, and Louise was leaning on the sink, pushing Eula's first tomatoes back and forth on the windowsill.

  “Where are they gone?” asked Louise. “Eula told me, but I forgot.”

  “They're all down in Florida listening to Roger play ‘I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground’ to a throng of thousands,” said Ethel.

  “And Melvin will play The Waxful Maid,’ ” said Louise.

  “Melvin's dead, Mama,” said Ethel. “Been dead.” “Eula told me that, but I forgot,” said Louise. “Yeah, well, your mind was on other things,” said Ethel.

  “Roger had his finger on that silver thread,” said Louise. “That's what Melvin always says.”

  “We can never forget that, can we?” said Ethel.

  Then Louise sat in a chair and clasped her hands together on the kitchen table and began to sing. “ ‘Down on her knees before him, she pleaded for her life,’ ” she sang in a husky voice, way too low to manage anything like a tune. “ ‘But deep into her bosom he plunged the fatal knife.’ ”

  “What do you want for lunch, Mama, fried tomatoes or okra and tomatoes? I'm cooking,” said Ethel.

  But Louise had a finger on that silver thread. She couldn't stop. She sat straight up in the chair, and with such an intent look in her eyes that they almost seemed to cross, she sang, “ ‘Oh, Willie, my poor darling, why have you taken my life? I've always loved you, Willie, and wanted to be your wife.’ ”

  “Jesus, Mama,” said Ethel.

  “‘I never have deceived you” sang Louise,” ‘and with my parting breath, I will forgive you, Willie, and close my eyes in death.’ ”

  “Thank goodness,” said Ethel. “Now tell me what you want to eat, tomatoes or okra.”

  “I am reminded of maggots,” said Meade, “when you turn over a rotting carcass with a stick and see the mass of maggots squirm.” And from the high point at the entrance to the Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center where Meade and Hilma were waiting, the crowd did have a squirmy look, milling around with small movements. A cluster of about five hundred were clumped around the food tents eating fried dough and Polish sausages; a little wriggling knot of a hundred or so crowded together at the crafts exhibit watching an old man weaving a split-oak basket and an old Seminole woman sewing bits of bright cloth together on a treadle-powered sewin
g machine; and another undulating crowd with ever-changing edges nudged itself up against the row of portable toilets.

  “Or aphids,” said Hilma, peering through her balled-up fists at the swatches of color.

  “Maggots!” said Meade, and then Delia and Lucy arrived with two folding aluminum chairs. “Just in case we might need to sit down and rest,” said Lucy, using the tactful “we.”

  “Maggots?” said Delia.

  “I would like to sit down,” said Hilma, sinking gratefully into a chair. “You are so wise, Lucy.”

  “Now where is Roger, do you think?” she asked, and they all shaded their eyes and peered down into the crowd.

  “ ‘Consumed by that which it was nourished by,’” said Meade.

  Now where has Tom gone off to? thought Eula. He had helped her spread out the red blanket, but then he had started talking to a man about a junk car, and since then such a crowd had gathered, she was afraid he would never find her again. There was a family with two babies on her left, and a young couple on her right smelling so much like coconuts that it made her sneeze, and beyond them in front and behind all she could see was people's faces and backs and towels and blankets and quilts covering up the hillside. Several blankets that she could see were red, and that worried her. What if Roger looked out in a weak moment, seeking the comfort of a friendly face, maybe if he got lost for a second after “I wish I was a lizard in the spring” and could only find the faces of strangers on red blankets, he might falter. But then suddenly there was Lucy, sitting down beside her and offering her a bottle of drinking water, and she began to feel better.

  “Tom went off with a fat man with a tattoo on his arm,” Eula told her, “talking about car engines. It might have been a mermaid or a submarine. But Tom has been talking so bad about music lately anyway, and Roger's peanut work—spreadsheets and not being close to the dirt, I'd rather he did have his mind on carburetors than music.”

  Then Lucy invited Eula to come and sit with her and Hilma and Meade “so you won't be all by yourself if Tom doesn't come back.”

  But Eula didn't quite like the idea of sitting with Meade. She could have such a cold look sometimes, and a sharp way of speaking. Way across the hill, at the far edge of the crowd, beyond the crawling babies and rowdy teenagers and hot pregnant women flapping the tails of their shirts up and down and entire families on quilts eating meals out of Styrofoam containers, Eula could see Meade sitting up straight in a chair. She was gazing placidly down into the woods by the river as if she would not be surprised to see a prince dressed all in white and gold come up the banks of the Suwannee and take her away in a glass carriage.

  “No,” said Eula, “I'd better wait here for Tom on this red blanket.”

  The spray was not turned on in the fountain, and there was just enough water in the pool for the frog to swim easily. Every time she thrust forward with her back legs, long streamers of eggs would flow out behind her, shining black dots encased in clear gel. There would be the smooth thrust and an angled glide, the undulating streamers of eggs would swirl, and then the frog's back feet would relax gently and the streamers would settle peacefully in spirals and loops. It had to be the most graceful egg laying in the world, Delia thought. She squatted by the fountain with her arms on the lip of the pool, mesmerized by gleam and shine and glide.

  “Mama, come see!”

  “Look at this frog laying eggs!”

  “Oooh, gross!”

  “Come look, there's two of them!”

  But Delia didn't hear the voices of the people who strolled past the fountain, and she didn't hear the amplified voice as it drifted through the park from the Old Marble Stage:

  “… from up in Georgia …”

  “… in the tradition of…”

  “… please welcome …”

  She just squatted there with the glistening colors in the spring sunlight and the bowl of bright water, sunk under the spell of this elegant fecundity.

  “A good generator and starter, good compression, he wants a hundred dollars for it,” said Tom. “In Jasper.”

  In spite of all the red blankets, Roger had spotted her right away, Eula thought. He had given her a little smile and a wink. Even from that distance she had been sure of it. Why in the world is that old woman crying over “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground”? She guessed everybody sitting around her had wondered that. It was probably just the excitement, being far from home and all by herself among so many strangers, and the memory of Roger, just a boy in those days, with a full head of hair, and the way Melvin would get that light look in his eyes when he came in, and how Roger would listen so hard and then nod and say “Yessir,” and try out something new. They would sit so close their knees would almost touch, not really ever singing and playing much, just going over and over one little thing or another.

  “I'd have to haul it, it don't run, he told me that up front. It's a parts car. The steering sector alone would cost me over a hundred dollars out at Jack's.”

  Melvin was sweet in his music, Eula thought, and she was glad it was dark on this long ride home from the Florida Folk Festival, and that Tom was talking about cars.

  “Talking! And slurping on that blue drink!” said Meade. “During the music! I can only hope that from that distance Roger didn't notice. If I could have found a stick, I would have beat them with it.”

  “Oh, Meade,” said Hilma. She was tired, and she couldn't stop thinking about Delia, so captivated by copulating frogs she had missed the whole performance—the setting sun, the marble stage with the river behind it, and Roger up there in front of all those people looking so dignified, playing a dead man's music just as it ought to be played. It was only after a parks official had scooped the frogs out of the pool with a long-handled net that Delia had come to join them. By then Roger had finished and people were gathering up their blankets and their children, and two barefooted men with ponytails and a wet black dog had begun playing Frisbee on the side of the hill.

  “Why do they go to a music festival if they don't care enough to listen to the music?” said Meade, and Hilma said wearily, “Oh, Meade, people hardly ever behave the way we wish they would.”

  23. THE ANVIL OF EXPERIENCE

  The first thing Roger saw on Saturday morning was a dead broad-headed skink, a fine big male, sunk to the bottom of two gallons of peanut oil on his side porch. It was lying on its back in the fish cooker, its little front feet crossed peacefully over its pale belly.

  “She has left me for the birds of the southern hemisphere” Roger said to himself, “and now this.” He stood for a minute in his nightshirt, looking at the dead skink. “Got in, couldn't get out. Drowned in peanut oil,” he said. He fished the skink out with a stick and threw it in the bushes where a cat would get it. It was a sad start to the day.

  “He put her on the airplane to Australia on Friday afternoon and then he had to go right home and give that fish fry for Dean Rufus Routhe,” said Meade.

  “Poor Roger,” said Hilma, “having to entertain agricultural scientists and fry fish with a broken heart in the setting sun, all the time thinking about Delia, three miles up in the sky and halfway around the world, never to return”

  But “never to return” had a rather melodramatic ring to it. Knowing Delia, it would not be anything as deliberately final as that. Her mind would settle on first one thing and then another, and it would be merely a series of whims that would gradually draw her farther and farther away from Roger and the brief south Georgia part of her life. Still, everyone had the feeling that Delia was gone, and would stay gone.

  Hilma was the first to call Roger up and invite him for a meal. It was very strong, clear chicken soup, twice cooked, she said, toast, a salad, and a delicate custard for dessert. The kind of food that might be prepared for an invalid, Roger thought.

  The subjects of Delia, all species of birds, and the entire southern hemisphere were scrupulously avoided, and Hilma feigned an extraordinary interest in the career of Dr. Rufus Routhe, w
ho was retiring as dean of the plant pathology department. Roger noticed a pale spot on the wall where Hilma had taken down a Menoboni print of crested flycatchers, as if she thought a picture of birds might cause him pain. She encouraged him to talk about peanuts, the hard summer of work ahead, and his duties in the next year as president of the southern division of the American Phytopathological Society. Roger told her about a new peanut cultivar, ‘Georgia Routhe/ named in honor of the retiring dean, which had shown some resistance to TSWV. “Peanuts in the U.S. are usually named for scientists,” he said, “but in Australia they are named for artists.”

  Hilma's eyes flew to the pale spot on the wall, and she began rattling dishes and talking wildly about Dean Routhe, until at last Roger stopped her and said, “You really don't have to be this careful, Hilma.” After that she put down the dishes with relief and seemed to relax, and for the rest of the evening they talked quite comfortably about the courtship display of the superb lyrebird (“excessive,” said Hilma), Delia's character (“flighty,” said Hilma), and love.

  “I don't quite understand the demands of that kind of love,” said Hilma. “All those feelings were so long ago, the opportunities were so limited then, and we had different rules.” But, she said, she had noticed how so often it left its victims ragged and spent, and she wondered why sensible people allowed themselves to begin, knowing where it would lead.

  “There is no beginning to love,” Roger said. “It just creeps over you.”

  “Oh,” said Hilma, “like brown rot on a plum tree in the dark winter months, and by the time you become aware of it, the leaves are out and it's too late to spray.”

  “Yes,” said Roger, “just like that. Now let me help you hang your flycatchers back on the wall.” And Hilma got him a chair and fetched the Menoboni print from where she had hidden it in the closet.