Plantation

by Dorothea Benton Frank

  “Oh, all right. Tell them to deliver this afternoon,” I said. “Did the Colony House call back?”

  The Colony House in Charleston was one of our favorite restaurants. When Ray Smiley, the owner, found out about Nevil’s accident, he called immediately to offer to bring all the food and waiters. I accepted his gracious favor and asked him to have the chef call me regarding the menu. When the fellow called the first time, I was appalled by his proposal. He must have thought he was Craig Claiborne or somebody with all the foie gras and Gougette and pike mousse he proposed. No, no! He had probably taken a summer course in Paris. God only knows. His name was Ashley. Any man named after a river could probably cook fish and simple things, I figured, so I said, “Ashley, darlin’? You are so, so sweet to plan something so grand for my Nevil, but I am afraid I was thinking of something less complicated, like little pieces of goose liver and apple on toothpicks and some hot cheese puffs people can just pick up from a tray. And maybe some little whitefish fluffed up in a tiny pastry shell.”

  “Leave it to me, Miss Lavinia,” he said, “just leave it to me.”

  I had decided that he had understood the subtlety of my message so I said, “Fine. Just call me when you have it all together, all right?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I will.”

  That was at ten in the morning. Now it was noon and I was famished—toast would settle me, I decided.

  “Yanh’s the menu,” Millie said, handing me a legal pad when I came into the kitchen.

  “Roasted turkey with a creamy dijonnaise on small rye bread rounds with a cranberry confit garnish, roasted tenderloin of pork on wild rice blini with a mélange of apple to finish, Angels on Horseback with a citron dipping sauce . . .” On and on it went with one highfalutin dish after another. It tried my patience, it truly did.

  “Millie? I can’t deal with this! Yanh! Gimme your pencil!” I started crossing things out and making changes. “Get this Ashley on the phone, please, and tell him the turkey’s fine, but just mix up a little mayonnaise and mustard and use regular cranberry sauce on the top. Tell him pork’s fine too, but use those little pancakes and just applesauce on top! Angels on Horseback? Does he think I never broiled bacon on scallops? Tell him a lemon butter sauce with that, please. God in heaven! Every chef thinks he’s an artist! Isn’t that the truth?”

  This made Millie chuckle and if there was one thing we needed it was a chuckle.

  “You doing all right, Miss L?”

  “As well as can be expected,” I said. “Did the florist call?”

  “Go look in the living room,” she said, “they been arriving since eight o’clock this morning.”

  As much as I adore flowers, these were flowers I never wanted to see. Indeed, the room overflowed with baskets, sprays on stands, glass vases and bowls—all of them filled with exquisite flowers; every surface of the room and all over the floor were flowers for my Nevil. I began to cry, the tears just came upon me in a rush of I don’t know how many feelings. That I missed Nevil, that I didn’t know so many people cared about us, that the sheer number of arrangements shocked me and I had had just about all the shock one woman could take.

  I began taking the cards from their holders to see who had been so generous. Miss Lavinia, If I or any member of my family can be a comfort to you, please call on us. You and the children are in our prayers. Strom Thurmond. The next one was from Fritz Hollings: My dear Lavinia, Petesy and I are so very sorry and send you our love and prayers. Fritz.

  That was nice, I thought, because after all, Nevil and I had entertained for our two senators during every campaign I could recall and truly, we had become the dearest of friends. Truly we had. Why, just last year, Strom’s wife brought me all the sheers from their town house in Georgetown, D.C., when I was searching for fabric to decorate the pontoon in honor of Princess Anne and Capt. Mark Phillips’s wedding. We covered the rails in white festoons and wrapped greens all around it. We flew the American flag and the flag of the motherland. She rode with me, drinking champagne to the music of “Rule Britannia.” She was such fun.

  On and on the note cards went. I wondered through my tears if all these people would attend the funeral. It occurred to me that I hadn’t checked the newspaper for Nevil’s obituary, which had been written by Moultrie.

  I was suddenly overcome by the strong odor of so many sweet scents that I thought I would actually fall to the floor. Rather than risk breaking my hip, I opened the French doors to the verandah and went outside to collect myself.

  There before me, the Edisto rolled downstream. I stood for I don’t know how long and thought about how I was so awfully sad. I guess something in me always knew I would lose Nevil, that he would be the first to go. I had always found his recklessness appealing, never dreaming it would cost him his very life. I thought he’d die a more manly death—maybe a hunting accident. This was a stupid way to die. It made me mad at him for being so thoughtless. Yes, I was hopping mad.

  I turned to see Millie in the doorway, coming toward me with a tissue to dry my tears.

  “I know, Miss L, this yanh is a terrible day for us all. It surely is. Poor Jenkins is beside himself.”

  I gathered myself and took the tissue, blowing my nose, gently, as was my custom. “Tell Jenkins to pull himself together and take all those flowers down to the chapel. The men from Bagnal’s are coming to dig Nevil’s grave and . . .” My lip trembled and I just broke down completely, falling into Millie’s arms. Dig his grave, dig his grave. No! No! Please, God, no!

  We walked back inside together, both of us weeping, trying to stop.

  “Help me, Millie.” There was so much to do and I didn’t have the strength for it. “We have to catalog the cards from the flowers for thank-you notes. Then they have to be moved down to the . . .”

  “Miss Lavinia, you go on and wash your face. I’ll call Jenkins. We gone take care of everything.”

  “Thank you, Millie. Thank you.”

  I walked back through the living room, through the jungle stench of flowers, into my hallway and faced the stairs. I am a widow, I thought. How dreadfully horrible. What would I wear to bury my husband? I didn’t think I had the appropriate ensemble. I ascended slowly, holding the rail, taking each step one at a time.

  Twenty-eight

  Daddy’s Gone

  1974

  I woke up the morning of Daddy’s funeral to the sounds of trucks outside, coming and going. Unable to face the day alone, I ran down the hall to see if Trip was still asleep. His room was empty. As quickly as I could, I dressed and went downstairs to find Millie. I found Mother instead, at the front door signing a receipt for a delivery of cases and cases of booze.

  “Morning, Mother,” I said, from the bottom step.

  Mother looked back at me, sucked her teeth, and turned away to close the door and bolt it.

  “Caroline? Please go make yourself presentable. This day is horrible enough without my child looking like an orphan.”

  “Mother? This is the first thing you’ve said to me since Daddy died two days ago. Don’t you think you could come up with something nicer?”

  Mother turned on her heel to face me. I thought she was gonna cross the hall and slap the hell out of me again. I would not have cared if she had. But she stared at me instead, not knowing what to say. I was furious at her because she couldn’t find anything to say. So we just stood, faced off like two cowboys at high noon, waiting to see who would draw first. In that moment, I decided that this was a real line in the sand, so I crossed it without another word, went past her, through the dining room to the kitchen. Mother had said nothing still, and my fury grew. What kind of a mother was she? What kind of a person?

  Millie was in the kitchen with a bunch of men and women, waiters, I guessed, fixing food on platters for later.

  “Hey, Millie, where’s Trip?” I said, taking a banana from a bowl of fruit.

  “Gone out with the dog to walk. Left early this morning! You sleep all right, darlin’?” Millie said, and
gave me a hug I didn’t want at all. I stiffened. “What you so mad about? I see that look in your eyes. Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  There were too many people in the room to discuss anything, coming and going out of the back door, bringing in crates of food and bags of ice. But, Millie read me like my brains were wrapped in Saran Wrap instead of bone. She always had.

  “Get yourself out to the yard. I’ll be right along. I want to talk to you.”

  When Millie told you to do something, it wasn’t optional. So I went outside and waited. While I waited, I became even angrier with Mother. What kind of a woman would rush her children out of the house with her friends or send them to bed without a single word of comfort on the day they saw their daddy blow up right before their eyes? Hell, I was thirteen, and I was used to Mother turning her love off and on like a soap opera actress, but poor Trip was little! And honestly, Mother’s demonstration of love wasn’t winning any Emmys. I worried now how cold our house would become without Daddy.

  As soon as I talked to Millie, I had to find Trip. If he had gone off with Chalmers, our retriever, he had the blues. Trip was one of those kids who never seemed happy and there was no real reason for it—just his nature. I figured he was down at the barn, talking to Ginger. Maybe I’d let him ride her this morning. That would cheer him up. I’d find my little brother and be as nice to him as I could.

  In a few minutes, Millie appeared with a canvas tote bag, walking across the lawn, her stride brisk and determined.

  “I know this ain’t no kinda breakfast, but you need to eat something. I put two ham sandwiches in yanh, two cold cans of Coke, two brownies, and two apples. Go find your brother, get him to eat, and then get on back to the house. Now tell me what’s up, missy. We ain’t got all day.”

  Even though that sounded stern, it wasn’t and I knew it. This day would be harder on Millie than anyone, so for her to show her concern for me by stopping working was generous. I was looking at the ground and the truth just rolled off my tongue.

  “Mother. That’s all. She’s such a bitch.”

  She grabbed my arm and held it hard. “Shut your mouth, you yanh me?”

  “Ouch! She is, Millie and you know it!”

  “I don’t care! It’s a terrible thing to say about your own mother! Girl! You wouldn’t be yanh without her! She deserves better than this from her only daughter! Shame on you!”

  “No, Millie. Shame on her. Do you know that since Daddy died she has said not one word to me or Trip? She never came to see how we were.”

  My eyes filled with tears. Millie let go of my arm and her own eyes began to tear.

  “Oh, Lawd!”

  “She didn’t, Millie. How do you explain that?”

  “Got to be the shock,” Millie said, knowing it was a weak explanation.

  “Right. That’s why this morning the only thing she had to say to me was not how did you sleep, or oh, Caroline, I’m so sorry and we’re gonna be okay—no, the only thing she did was criticize what I was wearing. Nice mother, right?” My jaw was set firm and Millie recognized that it wasn’t enough just to tell me to behave, but that somebody owed Trip and me more. That somebody was our mother.

  “This ain’t her best day, Caroline, or yours. Or mine. I ain’t saying she was right. I’m just saying I ain’t gonna stand for you talking bad about her at a time like this or any other time. It ain’t right.” Millie took me by the arm and led me down to the lawn chairs. “Sit.”

  I sat on the arm of a chair, kicking my heel into the ground over and over. Millie paced. “I’m so angry, Millie. I’m so angry I’d like to hit someone.”

  “I expect that’s normal, but you listen to me and yanh me good. Everybody grieves their loss in they own way.”

  “Oh, brother, Millie!”

  “It’s true! Your mother is withdrawing, you’re angry, and your brother done run off to cry in private. Me? Jenkins? We just keep so busy that we don’t have no time to think about it. But everybody’s got they own style. This kind of terrible tragedy shows who people really are. You want to be the person your daddy thought you were? You can start right now by putting your anger where it belongs—behind you. And be a woman today. Not tomorrow, not when you turn eighteen or twenty-one, but today.”

  “Daddy wouldn’t believe how Mother’s acting.”

  “Maybe so, maybe not. I’ll make you a little deal, okay? You take care of Trip, I’ll take care of you. Jenkins will see about me, and your momma will come around when she’s ready.”

  “Only one problem with that, Millie. I’ve never had a momma; I only had a daddy. I have a mother. Big difference.”

  We looked at each other long and hard. If there was one moment that defined my transition from childhood to womanhood, that was it. Millie didn’t disagree. She just nodded her head and said, “You go on, now. Find your brother. This is gonna be a long day and I need all the hands I can find. We’ll see about Miss Lavinia later on.”

  I didn’t know what that meant, but I took the tote bag, threw the straps over my shoulder, and ran. Trip wasn’t in the barn. I scratched Ginger on the neck, and she snorted, smelling the food in my bag, nuzzling my shoulder. I pulled out an apple and gave it to her.

  “Yanh, girl, I ain’t hungry anyway.” I spoke to her in a voice filled with a kind of sadness I’d never felt before. Millie was right. I had to be a woman that day. I’d start by trying to be nice to everybody, I decided. I’d bury my feelings about Mother and concentrate on taking care of Trip. I’d offer to help whenever I could. After those promises, I felt a little better. It didn’t matter what Mother did or didn’t do. I would take care of myself and Trip too. It didn’t matter anymore to me what she thought. I wondered how long my wall of self-protection would stand, if Mother would ever try to penetrate my heart, let me need her. I doubted it. There was no point in worrying about that either, I told myself. Time will tell, like Millie always said.

  I began to walk the old rice fields and the courses for sporting clays, which had just been completed and hardly used. Mother and Daddy liked nothing better than to blow apart clay birds. Now, they would never shoot together again. That seemed impossible.

  I was getting close to the scene of the accident and my heartbeat picked up. The sun was climbing the sky and the day was going to be a scorcher. I could smell the burned ground from Daddy’s crash site, even from my distance of probably hundreds of yards. The scorched air made my eyes sting.

  “Trip!”

  I called his name every few minutes, hoping he would answer. Finally, in the clearing, I saw him coming toward me. His hands were dug deep into the pockets of his shorts and his head hung down. I could see he was upset and had probably been crying. I ran to his side and threw my arms around him.

  “Get offa me!” he said, complaining.

  “Never!” I said. “You’re my only brother and I’m your only sister and we’re in this together! If Mother wants to ignore us, I don’t give a shit.”

  “You don’t?” His big blue eyes were all red and swollen from crying. “Do you know what she said to me this morning?”

  “Nope. Gimme a clue.”

  “She said she was glad you were going away to school and that if I didn’t behave, she’d get rid . . . get rid . . . get rid of me too.”

  Trip began to bawl his eyes out, making baby noises, nose running, gulping sobs.

  “She can’t do that, Trip. She can’t and she won’t.” I put my arms back around him and rubbed his back. “Just let it all out, Trip, let it all out.” I was so angry with Mother now, I wanted to slap her silly. “Why would she say something like that?”

  “She said I was sick in the head, Caroline, that she was gonna send me away to an institution!”

  “Why would she say that, Trip? It doesn’t make any sense at all!”

  “’Cause of this,” he said and reached down in his pocket, pulling out something wrapped in a handkerchief. “I know it’s wrong, I know I shouldn’t
have kept this, but I didn’t want him to be gone and I thought that if I saved this, I don’t know . . .”

  I took the handkerchief from him and unwrapped the object. It was Daddy’s finger attached to a knucklebone. I should’ve dropped it in horror and disgust, but I held it, understanding why he had done this—that if he had this, Daddy wasn’t all gone.

  “How’d she find it?”

  “I was brushing my teeth and I had it sitting on the clothes hamper. She came in to say something to me, saw it, picked it up, and gasped like this.” Trip held his hand to his heart and made a face of horror.

  “Trip? This is serious.”

  “I know! I said I know it was wrong.” He was crying again.

  “It’s okay, Trip, I understand.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah, but you know what? This ain’t Daddy. And, we should bury it with him.”

  “Yeah. You’re right.”

  “And Trip?” He looked up at me and my thought slipped my mind for a moment. “Man! You look terrible!”

  “You don’t look so hot either, you know!”

  “Well, I know, but hey! What I wanted to tell you is that bringing Daddy’s finger home is maybe the most disgusting thing you’ve ever done.”

  “Yeah, I guess it is.”

  “But, it’s not the sickest.”

  “Yeah? What’s the sickest?”

  “The sickest was the time you didn’t change your underwear for a month.” I punched him in the arm and laughed. He didn’t even crack a smile. “Jesus. I’m sorry. Okay, look. Back to Daddy’s finger. If it had been me, I’m not sure what I would’ve done. But I wouldn’t have let it just lie there on the ground either. This is sick, but understandable. Let’s go throw it in the casket.”

  We made our way to the family chapel. I truly thought that this was an award-winning act of mental illness, repulsive in almost every way. The only reason I didn’t think he was totally crazy was that if I had found it, I would have picked it up too! Then, what would I have done with it? Thrown it in the river? No way!