Love and Lament (24 page)

“All right, then,” Cicero cut him off. “Just leave out what you pick, and I’ll sort it and set your pile over by the door.” He went inside and it was not until that evening that he told Mary Bet the new arrangement he’d made with Able. “I don’t know why I should feel guilty over it,” he said. “It seems a fair arrangement, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, Daddy,” Mary Bet said, though she was thinking of something Joe Dorsett had said to her that afternoon. He was nineteen
now, she eighteen, and he told her he had decided their secret engagement had gone on long enough; they should get married next year and he wanted a firm promise. He was saving up his money from his job at the chair factory to buy her a diamond engagement ring on credit at McAdo’s jewelry store. She was not sure whether she wanted to give Joe her firm promise.

“Able’s mother was a house girl for your grandmother Margaret,” Cicero said. “He’s a good worker, but he thinks I owe him an entire banana tree just because I—”

“Daddy, I don’t care about your banana trees and your workers. It’s all you ever talk about. Bananas bananas bananas. I don’t want to ever see another banana.” Mary Bet stopped, aghast at the words that had flown from her mouth. “I’m sorry, Daddy. I didn’t mean to—” She put her napkin to her mouth, afraid she might say something else she’d regret.

Cicero sat there in silence, his hands on the table for support, his napkin dangling from his shirtfront. He nodded and smiled, but his eyes looked sad and faraway. “I guess I do go on,” he said.

“No, Daddy, I had no right to speak up to you. I’ll go to my room.”

“Then I’ll be left alone.”

“In peace.”

“I don’t want that,” Cicero said. “You know I don’t. You’re all I have left. You and—well, everybody thinks I belong in the loony bin, just for growing tropical fruit.”

“Someday—” Mary Bet started, then wondered if this was a good time to bring it up. But perhaps a better occasion wouldn’t come along for some time. “Daddy, Joe Dorsett wants me to marry him. When I turn nineteen.” She sat still, listening to the sound of her voice in the silence, looking at the remains of supper on her plate.

“Well, is that what you want?” Her father’s voice had gone very quiet and steady; he looked old, more like her grandfather Samuel than he ever had.

“No, Daddy,” she said. But she was thinking how romantic it would be to go away on a honeymoon with Joe, off to the seashore.

“I don’t see how he could provide for you. He’s a good talker, but I don’t know if he’ll ever amount to much. What’s his rush? He ought to get himself an education so he can take up something, like the law or medicine. I wish I had studied law, but the war came along and then there was no money for going off and studying.”

Mary Bet nodded politely, then stood and began clearing away the dishes. She was afraid if she sat another moment with her father she would not be able to hold her tongue; she was already burning with anger at him and shame for her earlier outburst. But her father seemed lost again in his own business, that glasshouse of his that was picking his pocket like a flimflammer, and consuming every minute of his waking hours and seeping into his dreams as well. There were times when she honestly wanted to go out there and leave the doors open and put out the fire so that the banana plants would die. Then maybe her father would quit his obsession with getting rich on some fantastical scheme that made him a laughingstock around town. People kept coming to the Alliance, but the new store up the Greensboro Road was cutting into his business. Cicero was not keeping up with the latest pills and powders and housewares, and Mary Bet worried about what would become of him when he had to quit.

Over the next few weeks, the banana plant that Able had tended and harvested as his own developed the rot. Cicero saw Able bending over and carefully cutting away the brown spots near the base of the tree one morning. He said, “It’s no use. You might as well let it go. Get what fruit you can off it. You can keep it all. I should’ve just let you have all of it anyway. I’ve brought this on myself.”

“I don’t know what make it do like that.”

“Of course you don’t, Able. I’m not saying you do. I can tell you what makes it rot like that. It’s a banana tree, and it’s not meant to
grow in North Carolina soil. Look outside there and tell me how many such trees you see growing. Do you see any banana trees?”

Able looked at his boss and shook his head. “Nawsuh,” he said, taking on his most subservient tone. “I don’t see any banana trees.”

“No, I don’t reckon you do, even if you could see out these godforsaken fogged-up windows. There’s a draft in here that would kill a mule. You can’t caulk up these windows. It still gets in. You might as well chop that tree down. This one too—it won’t last. It’s all a waste.”

Cicero went over to the long worktable where they separated the arms into clusters and small bunches, and he took up his butcher knife. He came up to the tree where Able was working and grasped the nearest leaf, a man-size green leaf with brown blotches around the edge. Able opened his mouth wide. He shook his head. “They get like that sometime,” he said, the beginnings of panic in his voice. “It don’t mean it’s gone to the bad.”

“It’ll be gone soon, though,” Cicero said. He leaned over and began hacking at the base of the leaf, tearing it down to the fibrous stem. He kept chopping and chopping, but it was too tough to give way easily to such a small knife. “I need an ax,” he said. “Or a sword.” He stood up to catch his breath, a wildness taking hold of him that felt liberating, like being dunked in the Rocky River by the Reverend Lassiter when he was a boy in knee pants. “A machete would be perfect, like they use in the tropics. Do you have one?”

“I’ll get one tereckly,” Able said. “Wait right there, Mr. Cicero. Don’t strain yourself with anymore choppin’ till I’m back.” Able hurried out and around to the back of the house. Instead of pausing to knock, he let himself in and walked right into the parlor and called out for Mary Bet.

She was upstairs getting herself ready for school. She came to the head of the stairs, holding the unpinned part of her hair up, took the comb from her mouth, and called down, “What is it, Able?”

“It’s your daddy,” he said. “He done gone crazy.”

Mary Bet jammed the hairpin in so that her braid held, and came tripping down the steps and followed Able out to the greenhouse. Her heart beat high in her chest, because she had known all along that something like this was going to happen. Something bad. When they were inside the greenhouse, they could not at first see Cicero. The banana tree at the far end was stripped of leaves to head height, the detritus lying all around the base of the plant. They heard a groan and one of the leaves moved. Then they saw the prostrate figure of Cicero beneath the leaf—a long emerald chrysalis, the human caterpillar a bearded old man in stained white shirtsleeves. “Daddy?” Mary Bet cried out.

She went over and pulled the leaf off her father and took the green-smeared knife from his hand. “Are you all right?”

“Of course I’m all right,” Cicero replied. “Can’t a man take a nap in his own house?”

“Let’s get you up and inside,” Mary Bet said. She and Able came around and, grabbing him by his armpits, hauled him to a sitting position.

“I can do this myself,” he complained. “I’ve done it since I was a boy. You needn’t fuss. You should all try sleeping beneath a banana leaf—it’s refreshing. I’m going to tell Doc Slocum to recommend it. Might even try experimenting with an infusion.”

When he was on his feet, he looked around at the leaf litter and, shaking his head, said, “That’s not a pretty sight.”

“I take care of it fo you,” Able said.

“I’d appreciate that,” Cicero said. “I can always count on you, Able. I think I’ll go in and dress for work. Mary Bet, why aren’t you in school? Aren’t you late?”

“No, sir,” she said, “I’ll be fine. Don’t you want some breakfast? Essie’ll be here right away.”

“I’ve had my coffee and tomato juice. That’s all I require. Why is everybody acting so softheaded?”

“We were just worried, Daddy.” Mary Bet nodded to Able as she slipped her arm through her father’s and walked him back out of the greenhouse and toward the summer kitchen. “You’ve been under a lot of strain.”

She saw that he got upstairs to his room, and then she waited in the parlor, pretending to get her books together until she heard him come down again. “I’ll walk with you this morning, Daddy,” she said.

That afternoon she went to meet Joe as he was coming back from the factory. The steam whistle from the sawmill shrilled at four o’clock. She had thought of so much to tell him she could hardly hold it all in her head and she’d had to write it down during Miss Birdsong’s French class, which was unfortunate since it was Miss Birdsong who had encouraged Mary Bet to attend this extra year of school so that she could help teach the younger students and decide if she wanted to go into teaching herself. She was thinking of this and of what she’d written in Miss Birdsong’s class about how her father had begun acting like her grandfather Samuel, when she realized she was a block past the old Buckner house and nearly in view of the chair factory.

She wondered if Joe had gone home early for some reason. It was a cloudy, chilly autumn day, with colored leaves full on the trees and the air sharp with the smell of wood smoke and coal smoke. Mary Bet wrapped her brown knit scarf against the wind on her cheeks and kept walking, studying every face coming the other way.

At the bending and chair factory, a dreary three-story brick building with two chimneys and no windows except on the front and back, Mary Bet stopped and glanced around. She looked up over the barn-style double front doors to the two tall windows on the second floor—they were like sad eyes peering out toward the farm across the road. No more workers emerged from the red-painted doors. Inside on the sawdust-strewn dirt floor were a couple of sturdy carts standing idle at loading platforms, stacks of
lumber, an overhead block and tackle, and some large metal machines whose purpose Mary Bet could not divine.

As she started away from the building, she heard a voice behind her. “Mary Bet!” he called out. She turned around and there was Joe walking toward her, his derby shading one eye and his hands in the pockets of his long corduroy work jacket. He looked as if everything were a little too large for him, including the building itself, and she wished she had not seen him here in his workplace.

“You’re late,” she said. “I thought I’d missed you.”

“I had something to finish up.”

They walked toward the Raleigh Road, past the prison camp and Carter’s rabbit plant, to where the lots became small farms and then, on the Raleigh Road, just houses with gardens and fowl and a barnyard animal or two. “I have something I need to tell you,” she said.

“I do too,” Joe said. Mary Bet waited for him to speak. “I have to find a new job,” he said. He explained that he’d been given the boot for fudging his time card and being late one time too many. “Maybe I should leave town for a while. I have an uncle in Raleigh who works in a glass factory. I’ve told my daddy I might want to go work there sometime.”

“Is that what you want to do?”

“Do you think I should?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think, Joe,” Mary Bet said. “I didn’t—. You know I don’t want you to leave, but I don’t want you to be without a job either. What makes you think you can’t get one around here?”

“If word got out—” Joe hesitated, looking around. They were now at the farrier’s across from the post office, the banging of metal spilling into the street. A black street sweeper came along, gathering the horse droppings into piles for later pickup. The wooden sidewalk began at the undertaker’s, and Joe and Mary Bet stepped up onto it.

“I have to see to my father,” Mary Bet said. “Good-bye, Joe.”

She hurried home to her father to see if he had gotten himself into any more trouble. It seemed that she would forever be looking back on this time as a crucial turning point in her life—the loss of her first sweetheart and the certainty that her father was mentally unstable. She would put it out of her mind until she got home; until then she told herself that her life with its problems was a speck in all the universe, a mote of dust floating in a mill with millions of other dust particles and the thousands of other dusty mills falling through the heavens like leaves in autumn.

When she got home she found the house empty, so down she went to the store. There her father was, closing up the shop as he did every day as this hour. From where he stood, back in the shadows near the storeroom, he looked as he always had when she was young and would come by for a stick of peppermint on her way home from school.

She lifted the hinged counter and went back to greet him. “I just wanted to see if you needed any help closing up,” she told him.

“Oh?” He looked around, glanced at the orange box in his hands, then up to the shelves stocked with big jars and cans and boxes. “I don’t know that I do … did you think I did?”

He’d said the words automatically, as though reaching back into his mind for the proper response, and Mary Bet wondered if at that moment he could even say her name.

That night she dreamed the Devil was riding behind her, somewhere just out of sight beyond a low hill. Home lay a long road ahead, but there was a shortcut through a woods. She looked back and thought she could see his black slouch hat; she tried to push her horse, but it wouldn’t go any faster. She could feel his shimmering presence drawing nearer and nearer, and she knew there was nothing she could do but let him overtake her, no matter how much fear and pain and suffering lay ahead. She awoke in a panic, her own stifled voice echoing in her mind. For a long time, she listened to see if she had disturbed her father.

CHAPTER 15