Plantation (36 page)

“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 2 8 6

D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k 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 P l a n t a t i o n

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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.

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D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k

“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.

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“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!

“Where’d you find it?”

“Out by where the steering wheel was,” he said. “It was all I could find.”

We got serious when we reached the chapel. It struck me as odd that in the middle of this worst event of our lives we weren’t weeping nonstop. The truth was that the weight of it all—Daddy’s death—it hadn’t really registered.

I had no intention of going in the chapel. Glimpsing my father’s coffin through the door was enough for me.

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D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k

“Okay,” I said, “just go open the coffin and throw it in.”

“Hell no! What, are you crazy? You do it! You’re the oldest!”

“Ah, shit! Shit, Trip!” I knew I was stuck. And, I
had
made that stupid oath to myself in the barn about being nice and all. Damn.

Why did I say that? It was a lot easier to be brave when you didn’t have to. I looked at Trip. His bottom lip was shaking again.

“Ah, shit! Let’s flip for it. Gotta penny?”

“No, I don’t.”

Neither of us had a coin, and we finally decided to do it together, as quickly as possible. I hated being the oldest. It was a pain in the ass.

“On three, okay? One, two, . . .” We ran like lunatics and struggled with the lid to open it. There was nothing inside but a black vinyl bag, so we threw in the finger with the handkerchief, let the top slam shut, and ran like all hell. When we finally got close to the house I stopped and turned to Trip.

“Trip?”

“Yeah?”

“Did Mother really say she was glad I was leaving?”

“Yeah. But, I think she was just upset.”

Upset? That’s no kinda excuse for telling my little brother something like that. Makes both of us feel real damn secure. “God, she makes me mad.” We looked at each other for a minute, knowing there was no good explanation for what Mother had said about me. “Come on. Let’s get showered up and dressed and see if we can help Millie.”

“What about Mother? Are you gonna say anything to her?”

“She can go to hell, for all I care. And, above everything, Trip, don’t let her see you cry at the funeral.”

I told Trip that because if he cried and Mother wasn’t sympathetic to his pain, he’d hurt even more. So would I. A bond was formed between us then, one I hoped would carry us through the trouble I knew in my bones surely lay ahead.

It wasn’t as hard as I would’ve imagined to get through the P l a n t a t i o n

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funeral service. After the finger, what could have been worse? Or maybe I was numbed by the amount of pain I wasn’t allowing myself to feel. I watched, fascinated, as they lowered Daddy’s coffin into the ground. Ms. Blanchard from Charleston started singing

“Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” and it gave me the chills. Boy, she had some pipes!

Then she sang “Amazing Grace” with such a passion that everyone joined in and sang with her. Now that was a killer, to sit at your father’s graveside and sing his soul to heaven with everybody you had ever known. The entire crowd of several hundred people, singing and crying with all their hearts, raised my spirits so high that for a moment I thought God was there right with us, the same God who had forgotten us just days before. I felt so comforted and almost happy for those few minutes.We all stood up for that song, the Edisto River in the background over the bluff, blue against the brown and green grasses of the marsh, all against a sky so clear—hell, if that wasn’t a religious experience, I give up.

’Tis grace has brought me safe thus far,
and grace will lead me home.

Take my daddy home, Lord,
I prayed,
take him right to heaven.

I think that was the first time in my whole life that I believed in God. I had always attended church when Mother insisted that I go, but I had never
felt
anything until that moment. Sure, I had these weird experiences, like
seeing
Daddy’s plane on fire, but there was nothing religious about that. If anything, it felt like a message from hell. A curse of a vision I’d be burdened with through nightmares every time I closed my eyes for the rest of my life.

In that moment, that moment of everyone singing together, something happened to me, something inside of me opened up to the possibilities of a real God. One that would take care of me, would listen, would advise—oh, if that feeling could last, we would all be all right no matter what! Incredible.

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D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k I was on Mother’s right and Trip was on her left. I wore a navy linen sundress and sandals, Trip wore khaki pants and a navy blazer.

His hair was plastered to his head with some kind of hair junk that smelled like bug repellant. I knew it was bad to discover God in one moment and criticize in the next, but it was going to take me a while to adjust to being good and all that.

In plain English, Mother was dressed like a freak, which could be another reason why I didn’t break down and cry through all I was feeling. I was too embarrassed. Her hat was a huge black straw thing with a wide brim and veil that sat on her head like she was the Queen of England. Even though it was a thousand degrees and the bugs were chewing on my ankles and the back of my neck, Mother wore a black linen dress and jacket to her ankles and those damn pearls. She fanned herself with a black and pink fan brought home from some trip and dabbed the corners of her eyes with a thin black handkerchief. She never made eye contact with Trip or me, but once, during the prayers, probably for dramatic effect, she reached out for our hands to hold. Mine was hot but Mother’s was cold and clammy.

I remember that cold and clammy hand because I remember thinking it was like her heart. I didn’t care. I didn’t need her. I was leaving in six weeks. I just kept telling myself that over and over.

Soon, I’d be out of this place and I’d never be like my mother.

Never.

The reception following the burial was unbelievable. I had to admit that Mother had done an amazing job to pull it off in so short a time. But that was her. Appearances were more important to her than the breaking hearts of her children. I knew I’d be angry with her forever.

Trip and I accepted her shallowness that day and held each other’s attention the entire afternoon. The adults all but ignored us. Every time somebody put down their champagne glass, we picked it up, walked away, and drank it. By six o’clock, Trip and I P l a n t a t i o n