Plantation (28 page)

“Ah, come on, Millie.”

“Girl? You done gone on and become a fool? You was born with a silver spoon, no, a
gold
spoon and that’s a curse! People gone hate you and don’t even know you. So they gone hate your boy or try to hurt you through him. Frances Mae’s spirit is eaten alive with jealousy, like a cancer working on her every waking minute.”

“How am I supposed to deal with that, Millie?”

“Be your daddy’s daughter and claim your rightful place. Show your mother who you are. Better yet, show yourself who you are!”

“What in the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Don’t you cuss at me, girl, or I’ll spank your bottom! You ain’t too old to turn you over my knee!” Millie’s eyes flashed.

I said, “Sorry, Millie, but just what would you do?”

“I think I’d take a long look in the mirror, and think about the woman you want to be. Not the one you are today, but who you intend to become. Then, I’d bring my boy down yanh as much as I could. Children can help grown-ups heal, you know? Yes, they can.

I think I’d be taking stock of my whole life, Caroline.”

She looked at me as if she knew everything, all my fears and doubts about Eric, my insecurities with Richard, my avoidance of questioning the direction of my life.

“Well, you’re probably right, but looking too close is also a loaded weapon, Millie. You taught me that.”

“Yes, it is. But wasting time is a sin. You can live your life like an ostrich in the sand, but I don’t recommend it. No, I don’t.”

“Maybe I should call Frances Mae.”

“Leave her be and go find your brother.” She raised her eyebrows to me.

Suspicious? Of what? Ah! I saw! Without Millie telling me 2 2 0

D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k anything in words, she was suspicious that I had only chinked the iceberg. Good Lord, I thought, how much more could I take?

It was one o’clock. Mother and Trip and I were dressed and ready to go out on the courses. Well, actually, Mother and Trip were.

They both wore the classic Lowcountry shoot-a-gun ensemble—

olive trousers, cotton turtlenecks, and hunting vests. Twins except that Mother had wrapped an Hermès scarf around her neck. I had on jeans and a chambray shirt. We walked over to the barn and stables together. This would be the first time I’d shot a gun in years.

When Mother opened the door of the hunt room, it sent me tumbling back in time. I stepped inside the tiny room and looked around in amazement. The walls were a virtual gallery of framed photographs from years ago. Me on my first horse, holding a tro-phy I had won at a show, grinning with no front teeth. Pictures of Trip, me, Mother, and Daddy, all of us decked out in English gear and other pictures of us dressed in Western. Strings of ribbons, cracked with age, stretched across the paneling above the pictures.

My paint-by-number renditions of Flicka and Black Beauty were still there, hanging next to each other by the door. The old couch had the same upholstery it had when I was a girl and used to nap there under an afghan while Daddy worked at the desk on the opposite wall. Sometimes, he would be reading the latest issue of
Field & Stream
and I would fall asleep. Another memorial to our past. It pulled my heart and a sentimental sweetness consumed me.

“Caroline? Go say hello to Jenkins. He’s probably in the tack room.”

“Of course! I can’t wait to see him!”

Trip looked sheepish. Mother and I shot him a look with the psychic message that he was still a big dumb ass to even think that Mother would sleep with Jenkins.

“Honey, he’s as spry as ever! Just last week he was out spraying all the fescue for mold. Week before that he was planting sorghum like a madman.”

When Mother starting talking fescue and sorghum, she became P l a n t a t i o n

2 2 1

Miss Lavinia. She was in her milieu when she got around the barn, possessed with a heightened vitality. Maybe because she felt Daddy’s spirit lurking in the shadows. God knows, I did.

Their last project had been to convert the old rice fields into eighteen rounds for sporting clays and bird hunting. They had adored going out there with friends to whoop it up. Maybe she thought that riding the buggy with her girlfriends paid tribute to Daddy in some way.

I had to admit it, Buddhism aside, shooting sporting clays was a lot of fun. Skeet was for sissies. I mean, you stood in one spot, yelled
Pull!
—and the pull boy would release a clay disc into the air from either the left or the right. You would aim your gun slightly ahead of the arc of the bird and fire. Pull! Pow! Crack! Big deal.

Now, trap was a lot more interesting because the clay birds flew away from you just like real birds would—a much greater challenge overall.

But sporting clays was the ultimate of all nonkilling sports that required a gun. The rice fields had now become a golf course of sorts. Instead of eighteen holes, it had eighteen rounds. Each round was designed for either trap or skeet, but the fun of it was that you were never sure where the trap house was, and Jenkins moved them from time to time so that even Mother was surprised.

In between the rounds were areas planted with specific plants to attract quail and turkeys. Quail nest on the ground in sorghum and bicolored hespediga, whose pink blossoms held seeds that quail love. The problem was that the deer loved it too, so there was this constant battle to keep them out.

I opened the door to the tack room and the perfume of leather and saddle soap hit me full force. It was a drug. Jenkins wasn’t there, so I went through to the barn. Old Jenkins had fitted out the quail buggy with a pair of mares and was just waiting like always for someone to arrive and say how great that was. And, it was.

He stood there with his back to me. White hair, slightly stooped, wearing the same type khaki pants and shirt he had worn 2 2 2

D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k all my life. Starched and pressed. No one would mistake Mr. Jenkins for anything less than a gentleman.

“Mr. Jenkins!” I said. “How are you?” My heart filled to overflowing, remembering episodes with him from when I was a child.

“Better now that I see you, Miss Caroline, better now.”

“How are my pecan trees doing?”

“Chile? We got more nuts ’round yanh than we know what to do with!” He smiled wide, revealing his strong teeth, and his dark eyes twinkled with merriment.

“You mean my sister-in-law and her brood or the actual fruit of the pecan trees?”

He laughed now, and picked up the reins to lead the horses and buggy outside.

“Yeah, good to see you, Miss Caroline! You bring some life with you!”

Jenkins helped Mother and me onto the buggy and then climbed into the driver’s seat with Trip. We were all settled on the red leather benches and soon we were on our way out to the first round. When we arrived minutes later, Trip jumped off and offered me a twenty-eight gauge, over- and underbarreled shotgun.

“This will save your shoulder,” he said.

“Hang on, Hoss, you got a twelve-gauge!” I said. “An unfair advantage, suh!” The smaller the barrel, the smaller the shot, the harder it was to hit the target. I hadn’t forgotten everything.

“Bubba? Lemme remind you that a ding is as good as a kill!”

“She is slick!” Trip said.

“Worry about your own shoulder,” Mother said, and jumped off the buggy like a teenager at the first stand. “I go first. Rank has its privileges.”

“Is the target sequence marked?” I asked.

“Hell no, that would take all the fun out of it. Jenkins mixed them up between dove, quail, pheasant, and even rabbit. You never know what’s coming!” Trip said this, clearly getting excited him-P l a n t a t i o n

2 2 3

self at the prospect of killing clay. Man, he had some serious aggression issues to work through.

“Be quiet, you two! I’m trying to concentrate!” Mother said.

We stood back and waited. Mother took her first shot at the clay disc, which released from her left, and shattered it. She shot four more, one overhead, two from the right, and one low one.

Five for five.

“As you can see, son, if I had wanted to blow your brains out last week, I could have. Your mother is still a crack shot!”

“Somehow, I don’t feel all that much better,” he said. Trip took his turn. He got three of five. “Damn. Sorry, Mother.”

“It’s all right, I’d say damn too if three out of five was the best I could do,” Mother said.

I stepped up to the stand and held my breath, fixing my aim through the sight. I got two out of five. “Tell me again why we’re doing this?” I said.

“Tradition, Caroline, it’s what we always do,” Mother said.

I wasn’t sure I liked this particular tradition, but I was positive I understood the value of ritual. Everybody was entitled to a space of their own in which they could shine. This was Mother’s and she had proved her point well.

“Yalk! Yalk! Yalk!” Trip said, making a turkey call as we walked back toward the buggy.

“Give it up, bubba, even I know you can’t shoot turkey until April first.”

“Can’t take the Lowcountry out of the girl,” he said.

I waited until I was sure Mother couldn’t hear us. “Hey, Trip!”

He turned back to face me. “Kiss this, bubba,” and I pointed to my backside. I let him think he was right.

M i s s L av i n i a ’s J o u r na l
Well, my girl’s gone home. And, she is my girl again. Isn’t it
funny how you don’t know how much you miss someone
until they are about to leave you again? What I would give to
have her here with me! Hell, I’d even give her the pearls. . . .

Twenty-one

Dr. Blues

}

E all had a good laugh and many hugs and promises passed among us before I finally tore myself away W from Tall Pines to return to Richard and Eric. Trip hung around the house to say good-bye, on the excuse that he was going fishing in the late afternoon. Even Miss Sweetie had brought me two jars of strawberry jam to take back. She hugged me with a ferociousness I wouldn’t forget.
Come and see your mother more often,
girl.You hear me? She needs you! I will,
I had promised,
I will
.

Millie gave me her famous look as I packed my car. She stood by the back fender with her arms crossed, feet apart in a stance of defiance, her eyes boring a hole right through the side of my head.

“What’re you doing, Millie? Putting the plat eye on me?”

“Why? You feeling guilty?”

“Should I?”

“Should you?”

2 2 6

D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k Now, what that was all about, I wasn’t quite sure. I just hugged her and finally she said, “Go on back and do what you gotta do.”

All through my plane ride back to New York, my thoughts were of my family in South Carolina. I had been so off the mark about everyone. Trip was obviously unhappy with his marriage, when I thought he was okay with it. Somehow, our argument had renewed our relationship. He was too much of a coward to show the full measure of his contempt to Frances Mae, so he had set me up to do it. I had complied with probably more gusto than he had hoped for. But, it was good. At least Frances Mae would keep her villainous tongue still for a while. I just hoped she didn’t go into early labor.

And Mother? It was the first time I had felt any warmth from her in decades. Or seen her demonstrate any need. In retrospect, she
had
been worried about Trip’s capacity to bounce her from Tall Pines to wherever. I suppose it had always been hard for me to see past her little barbs, but once I did, I saw them for what they were—a bad habit and nothing more.

But, even his
grab for the throne
was some kind of a weird cry for her to save him from himself. Surely, he could not have seriously thought that Mother would allow him to unseat her. Old Frances Mae had obviously exhausted herself licking her fat lips at the prospect of becoming the Queen of Tall Pines, but I knew it would be a freezing cold day in hell before Mother let her within an inch of her tiara. Still, there was something going on with Trip.

My visit had given them confidence. How perverse! Moreover, it had reminded me of who I was. Like I didn’t know?
Be my
daughter!
Well, Daddy? Was that good enough for you?
Change!
Oh, fine, I thought, and resolved to change. That change would demand acceptance of a lot of complicated issues. I knew that.

Mother was only asking for a closer tie with me. Was that too much? No, of course not. What Trip was asking was that I understand his situation and help him deal with it. Then I knew why he had been sending Eric all the gifts—we were all he had, all he had P l a n t a t i o n

2 2 7

that he wanted, anyway. If all it took was to give that thing he married a verbal blast from time to time, well, I hated to admit this to myself, but I could actually relish it.

What of Millie? Good God! Did she truly mean to turn me into a voodoo priestess? Nah. All that hocus-pocus about
the caul
.

On the other hand, who knew? When I had teased her that her spell for Frances Mae was impotent, she had reminded me that the magic had found its place in me when I exorcised her evil spirit with my words. Whatever.

I had to laugh at myself, remembering the way I had told Frances Mae what I thought of her the night she wet the rug, and how the next day I had told her not to just shut up, but to shut
the
hell
up! And, Mother wanting to give her matching mother and child diapers when her new baby arrived. Oh, what a wicked thought!

At Tall Pines I had emerged as the Deliverer? How bizarre!

Me? God! It felt good! It had made me feel really alive! Then it occurred to me that in my marriage I was a bit of a mouse.

If Richard and I had an argument, I
never
raised my voice to him. It wasn’t civilized to raise my voice, he said. But back at home (did I say home?) I had rediscovered this other part of my personality that I’d kept on ice way too long. Well, I thought, now I’m going back to where my life isn’t so crazy. I don’t need to expend all that energy every day, I thought. Suddenly, the prospect of that seemed dull and dreary. But, I missed Eric. Maybe I’d take him down to the ACE to go fishing with his uncle. It would probably do them both some good.