The Moonflower Vine

by Jetta Carleton

  The crunch of wheels on the sandy road broke into the silence. “There’s Miss Hagar,” said Mama. “I thought it was about time.” We followed her out to the yard. “Maybe she’s heard something about Mr. Corcoran. Hoo-hoo!” she called.

  Her friend drove up in a creaking hack, sitting tiny and erect, feet together and knees apart, under a black umbrella. “Ho!” she said to the horse. The horse came to a stop with a long sigh of relief. His knees went slack, the back caved in, and the neck sagged slowly, like a licorice stick in the heat. When his nose touched ground he began contentedly to nip grass. “Howdy,” said Miss Hagar.

  She laid her pipe on the seat. She could never bring herself to smoke in front of my mother. “Are you hot any?” she said, grinning around her hard little yellow teeth. We said we were.

  “Any news?” said Mama.

  “Ain’t anybody heard ary word since yesterday. They said he was about the same. Some bad.”

  “Poor old thing.”

  “Goddamighty, I don’t see how he lived at all.”

  “Neither do I. Guess they haven’t caught the boy yet?”

  “Not yet. Somebody said they seen him down around Osceola the other day. Others says he’s around here somewheres.”

  “My, I hope not,” said Mama.

  “He ain’t nothin’ to worry us.”

  “No, I guess there’s not any more harm in him. Him and his daddy just had something to settle among themselves. Makes me feel a little juberous, though, knowin’ he might be around here somewhere. Ain’t you awful nervous up there by yourself?”

  “I ain’t a-skeered of him.”

  “I reckon I oughtn’t to be, the poor boy. Jake Latham called up this morning. Some of them are goin’ over there tomorrow and do some work.”

  “I heered. Hell, I went over there the other day myself and laid by a patch of corn for him.”

  “Why, that was nice.”

  “It don’t take no whole gang of folks, what little crop he’s got. I got a idy Jake wants to show out a little. I hope you told ’em to go to the devil.”

  Mama smiled. “Well, we told them we wouldn’t be able to come tomorrow. It’s the girls’ last day.”

  “I thought it was. You wouldn’t want to be workin’ over there all day, the last day they’s home.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You prob’ly got plenty to do without that.”

  “Yes, we’ll be busy.”

  “Prob’ly too busy to cook for yourse’ves!”

  “Well, we’ll be busy, all right.”

  “That’s what I figured.” Miss Hagar paused, and her rough brown face, normally as expressionless as an oatmeal cookie, took on an eager shine. Her mouth pulled into an embarrassed smile. “I want to invite you folks up to my house tomorrow to eat dinner with me!”

  “What!” said Mama, forgetting her manners in her astonishment. In all their acquaintance, Miss Hagar had never entertained.

  Miss Hagar jerked her head toward the back of the wagon. “I’m a-fixin’ to make ice cream for ye!”

  We looked, and there in a wet gunny sack lay a chunk of ice, a luxury for Miss Hagar. She had driven all the way to town to buy it.

  “My goodness!” said Mama.

  “I got a old hen in the coop, fixin’ to dress her in the mornin’. And I’m gonna bake a cake!”

  “Why, Miss Hagar!”

  “It won’t be as good as you’d make for yourse’f, but maybe ye can eat it.”

  “Why, you shouldn’t do all that, just for us.”

  Miss Hagar beamed. “Aw, hell, it ain’t much.”

  But it was quite a bit, and Mama knew it. Miss Hagar must have studied and planned and saved for this event all summer. “I don’t hardly know what to say, Miss Hagar. We’d like just awful well to come. But you see—” She hesitated, and the smile wavered on Miss Hagar’s face.

  “You already got something planned?”

  “Ye-es, I’m afraid we have—”

  “Oh.”

  “Mr. Soames found a bee tree down by the creek, and we thought we ought to go cut it.”

  The smile revived. “Well, that hadn’t ought to take all day. If you go down there first thing in the mornin’—”

  “Well, of course we could do that—” Mama stopped, hoist on a genuine quandary. Miss Hagar plainly set great store by the honor of our presence, and she had never asked for anything before. Mama looked around at us, her face woeful. Then she turned back to her friend. “I’m awful sorry, Miss Hagar, but I just don’t think we can come.”

  “Oh.” The little brown cookie face settled into inscrutability as before. “Well, it was just a idy.”

  “And a good one, too. I’m so sorry, Miss Hagar.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Any other day we’d have been so glad to come.”

  “Glad to!” we echoed.

  “But I don’t know—tomorrow bein’ their last day and they ain’t home but such a short time…” Her voice trailed off, and we stood in silence, humbled by Miss Hagar’s mute disappointment.

  “Reckon I won’t see you girls no more,” she said. We said we guessed not. “I’ll say goodbye to ye, then.”

  “Can’t you come in awhile?” said Mama.

  “No, I’ve got to get home and do the chores.” She picked up the reins, the horse gathered himself together, and the hack creaked on down the road. The little chunk of ice wept steadily into the dust.

  Mama watched her down the hill. “Poor old thing,” she said. There were tears in her eyes.

  “Mama?” said Jessica. “We could change our minds. We don’t have to cut the bee tree.”

  Mama turned and looked at us, and her dim brown eyes swam with tenderness. “Yes, we do,” she said.

  As we turned toward the house, a magnificent uproar arose from the barn lot—a whoop and a holler, the vroom! of a motor, and a great squawking of hens.

  “Mercy! What’s all that racket!”

  It was Soames, chasing chickens again in my little car.

  “Stop that!” Leonie yelled.

  Soames slammed on the brakes, spun the car around and roared toward the fence, coming to a halt six inches away.

  “You stop that!” she yelled again.

  “I’ve stopped.” He sat grinning like a fiend, naked to the waist and looking all of a piece with the small open car, like some mechanized centaur.

  “I could just spank you!” Leonie said. “You’ll make Grandpa’s hens stop laying.”

  “Aw, Mother, they like to be chased. They think it’s some new kind of a rooster.”

  “You’ve always got to fool around. You ought to be up on that roof finishing your job.”

  My father drove into the lot at that moment, causing another stir among the chickens. Soames jumped out and helped him carry the ice to the smokehouse, where they bedded it down in a washtub.

  “There now,” my father said, “as soon as you womenfolks get the ice cream ready, we’re ready to start cranking.”

  He sat down on the well curb and fanned himself with his hat. At seventy-two he still had most of his hair—very fair hair turned gray and looking much as it always had. His face was still lanky and severe, but the laugh lines had deepened around his mouth. He had mellowed. He let us sleep now till six-thirty. An indulgence. “My-o, look at the windfalls,” he said. “You girls haven’t been on the job.”

  We ran to the peach tree in the corner of the yard and picked up the clingstones. They were soft and heavy, and the juice ran down our chins as we ate. Soames went back to fondle the car. It was a red MG, which I had bought the minute the British devalued the pound. There weren’t so many around in those days, and Soames had never seen one before. It was his darling. In the evenings he drove it into Renfro, the nearest village, and parked on the square, where the little girls converged on him in hysterics of admiration. Ol’ six-foot Soames and an English car were quite a combination.

  “Can I have it again tonight, Aunt Jo?”
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  “I don’t care. Just so your girl friends don’t stick up the dashboard with their bubble gum.”

  My father aimed a peach pit at two bluejays squabbling in the tree. “Get out of there!”

  “Wait’ll I get my slingshot, Grandpa!”

  Soames bounded out of the car and fired a stone into the branches. The jaybirds scattered toward the orchard, screaming Thief! The peach leaves settled into place again, fixed in the still air like geranium leaves in pale apple jelly. Beyond the orchard the sun grazed the treetops on the Old Chimney Place. Shadows began to flow across the yard.

  “Let’s go down to the creek!” said Leonie.

  “Not now!” said Mama.

  “I think I’ve got a fish on my line—a big catfish!”

  “But you wouldn’t get back in time. The moonflowers are going to bloom.”

  Leonie squinted at the sun and looked across at the vine. “Ah, the shade isn’t near over there yet. We can make it if we hurry.”

  “Now, Leonie, it’s later than you think,” I reminded her.

  Somebody always had to say it. Leonie’s bad timing was a standing joke. Like all zealots, she wanted so passionately to do whatever it was she wanted to do that time must certainly accommodate her. In this unshakable belief, she missed trains and burned dinner and never knew how a movie started. They couldn’t even get her off to the hospital when Soames was about to be born. She insisted they had all day. She went right on tying bows on the baby basket—she wanted everything to be just perfect—and set out for the hospital in her own good time, and Soames was born in the front seat. Leonie never learned.

  While she was arguing with us, idly, by habit, the shade crawled across the yard and up the front of the smokehouse. I went over to look at the vine. It swarmed over the smokehouse roof and into the walnut tree, a thicket of heart-shaped leaves and long tight pods. All this had come from the brown pebbles dropped in the earth in spring, seeds as hard as a nut and so protective of the life within that you must saw them with a file to let it out.

  Out of the corner of my eye I caught a movement. I turned quickly. Nothing stirred. The vine hung immobile. But I knew. It was beginning. I called to the others. They hurried across the yard, my mother snatching up the folding stool as she ran. She sat down to watch the show. My father squatted on his heels beside her. Little by little we stopped talking. The silence grew intense. Now, the next instant, the flowers would begin to open.

  “There!”

  “Where?”

  “No, I guess not. Not yet.”

  The watch resumed. Soon, now, a stem would tremble, a faint shudder run through the vine, sensed more than seen. A leaf twitched. No, you imagined it. But yes, it moved! A light spasm shook the long pod. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, the green bud unfurled, the thin white edges of the bloom appearing and the spiral ascending, round and round and widening till at last the white horn of the moonflower, visible for the first time in the world, twisted open, pristine and perfect, holding deep in its throat a tiny jewel of sweat.

  “Oh, look!”

  “There’s another!”

  “Three of them—four!”

  The vine stormed to life, and the blooms exploded—five, twelve, a torrent of them, tumbling their extravagant beauty into the evening air.

  “Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four—twenty-four of them! Mama, you were right!”

  “I never saw so many at one time.”

  “It’s a good year.”

  “How beautiful they are!”

  “And gone so fast.”

  “But so beautiful now!”

  The big spendthrift blooms extended themselves, stretched tight as the silk on parasols. In the dusk they would glimmer weakly, limp and yellowed as old gloves after a ball. But not now. Now the starred blossoms burned white against the dark vine and filled the air with the sweet, faintly bitter scent of their first and last breath.

  We lingered, hoping for one more tardy bloom. But that was all for today. The lights had come up. The performance was over. We turned, smiling at each other, feeling lighter in some way, shriven and renewed. The blooming of the moonflowers was a kind of miracle, and like all true miracles it had the power of healing.

  2

  We ate our supper in the yard that night. As we gathered at the table, my father said, “Bless this food, O Lord, to its intended use…. Bless our loved ones, wherever they may be, and grant, O Lord, that we may follow in the paths of righteousness…” What he meant was that he was grateful for the good smells and sounds of the summer evening, for the star impaled on the lightning rod, for fresh tomatoes from his garden. But he would have felt it pagan to state his pleasure in such plain terms. He said it in his own way, and no doubt the Lord can translate; He must have a lot of it to do in a day’s work. “…and at last gather us to Thyself in Heaven, our Home. We ask it in Christ’s name. Amen.”

  There was a slight shuffle as we waited the decent interval between Amen and the passing of the bread.

  “Now fill your plates,” said Mama, “and don’t forget to save room for cream.” She seemed to feel it a nicety to call ice cream merely cream.

  Nobody saved any room. But after the ham and tomatoes and sweet corn, we ate most of a gallon of peach ice cream. Leonie poked around in the freezer. “Jessica, come on now, there’s still some left.”

  “Okay, dump ’er in here,” said Jessica.

  “You’ll make yourself sick,” said Mama.

  “Oh, I don’t think I will. Boy, we sure got it full of vanilla tonight.”

  “Yes, it’s strong, isn’t it. It’s that new bottle I got from the Jewel Tea man.” I suppose there never was a peddler who couldn’t sell Mama something.

  Jessica began to sculpt her ice cream with her spoon. “You’re playing in it now,” said Mama. “You’ve had enough.”

  “There’s still some left in the freezer.”

  “Why don’t you take it up to Miss Hagar?” my father said.

  “Why, that’d be nice,” said Mama. “One of you run up there and take it.”

  Soames and I climbed into the MG, I with the ice cream in my lap, and drove off into the night. It was very dark. Sitting low in the open car, I felt the night tower over us, close in over our heads, and chase after us down the lonely road. I thought of “the business that walketh in the night,” that Gothic notion of pestilence, and I felt goosebumps rise on my flesh, though whether from fright or pleasure I couldn’t tell.

  A little before Miss Hagar’s place, a lane turned off in the other direction, between two rows of cedars. This was Mr. Corcoran’s lane. It led up to the old brick house where he had lived in lonely hostility and where the boy had shot him.

  “What a place for a murder!” I said.

  Soames slowed down. “Let’s go up and have a look.”

  “Up to the house?”

  “Yeah!”

  “There’s nothing to hurt us—come on!”

  He swung around the mailbox into the thick cemetery gloom of the cedars. The small car bounced over the rough road. At last the high brick house appeared in the headlights, blind-windowed, secret and forbidding. We sat there for a moment without talking. The cedars whispered around us. Except for that sound and the small isolated throb of the motor, the silence was intense. In the dark night the crazed boy had come, furtive and deadly. I thought of a door opening noiselessly, a face at the window—

  “Let’s get out of here!” said Soames.

  We skittered down the lane and up the road toward Miss Hagar’s. The thought of her stolid calm was reassuring.

  “I’ll only be a minute,” I said as we reached the house. Taking the freezer, I walked up to the door and knocked. There was no answer. Since the lamp was burning I assumed she must be awake, and knocked again.

  “Who is it?” a small voice said.

  “It’s me.”

  “Who?”

  “Mary Jo—Mrs. Soames’s girl.”

  “Oh! I’m comin’.”
There was a scraping sound, like the moving of heavy furniture. A bolt slid, and Miss Hagar stood in the doorway. A blast of heat thrust outward into the darkness. “My gracious, I didn’t have any idy who it could be!”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Hagar—did I wake you up?”

  “I was just dozin’. Come in, come in!”

  “I can’t stay. We just ran up to bring you some ice cream.”

  “Thanky. This’ll taste good, a night like this. Come in; I’ll scrape it out in a dish.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that.”

  “Don’t you want to wait for the freezer?”

  “We can pick it up another time.”

  “Come in awhile, anyhow,” she urged.

  “It’s late, I think we’ll run along.”

  “Oh, stay—can’t you?” Her hand reached out, as if to pull me in, and as she stepped down onto the doorstone, I saw into the room. A heavy chest sat slantwise to the door, and the windows were sealed with paper. Against the bed stood a hatchet. Miss Hagar was afraid! “Well—I guess I can stay a few minutes,” I said.

  “Here—set down in the rocker—pull it up to the door.”

  The heat in the little room was sickening. I felt myself turn green and mossy like a mullein leaf. Mopping my face, I made conversation, while Miss Hagar sat on the edge of the bed and ate right out of the freezer, gulping the coolness. As I talked, I thought of her lying through the lonely night in this airless house, listening for the furtive sound at the window, the deadly footfall. And I thought of our house on the other hill—wide open, breeze in the curtains, laughter sounding in all the rooms, and lamplight spilling into the yard to make a moat of cheer and safety.

  “Miss Hagar, why don’t you come home with us and spend the night?”

  The little brown face peered wistfully over the ice cream freezer, and I saw her waver.

  “Thanky just the same,” she said. “But you folks like to be by yourselves, and it’s right that you should be.” She said it without a trace of reproach.