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Authors: Bailey White

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“Looks like broccoli, some onion peelings, lemons,” said Eula.

“My chickens don't eat lemons,” said Louise. “Oranges or grapefruits either.”

“Oops, he didn't close the gate—yellow hen's out! Headed for your turnip greens, Louise. Watch out, here they all come!” With a grateful surge the little flock of chickens flowed out the gate, then separated, running up and down the garden beds, scratching, pecking, and making the little chortling sounds of delighted chickens.

“Oh, Louise, they're scratching all the mulch off your beds,” said Eula, flapping her hands helplessly in the air. The man and woman went to work chasing the chickens, clapping their hands, whooping and laughing. He beetled about with little mincing steps, concentrating on one chicken at a time, lunging forward, doubling back. The ties of his green robe flapped in the breeze. She was more graceful and made chasing chickens look almost like a dance, tracing wide loops with her arms, leaping and swooping.

“Louise, they're stepping in your raised beds,” said Eula.

“How much did they pay to spend a month in that house?” said Ethel. “They could run a bulldozer over that garden and you'd still come out ahead.”

An arrangement had been made with a Realtor to rent out Louise's house during the winter and spring months. “Enjoy the serenity of country living,” the Realtor's ad had said. “Wake to the joyful sound of a cock crowing in the barnyard, gather your own organic vegetables from the garden out back, enjoy romantic evenings by the fire in this antique country home. Convenient shopping in nearby Tallahassee.” Even after the Realtor's commission had been deducted, Louise got nearly three hundred dollars a week.

“If that watermelon had been ripe, those chickens would have never left that yard,” said Eula.

Finally the man and woman eased the last hen back into the chicken yard and latched the gate. The chickens resumed their methodical and sedate pecking and scratching, and the man and woman leaned on the fence, side by side, watching.

“Now, I understand that,” said Eula. “There's something peaceful about watching a flock of chickens pick through garbage.” The woman slid an arm around the man's waist and snuggled up against him. The hem of his robe rucked up and exposed the white backs of his knees.

“Look at that,” said Louise. “He's cute.”

Then the woman nudged the man provocatively with her hip, laughed a throaty laugh, and they sauntered back down the garden path arm in arm.
forgetting the garbage bucket. In the chicken yard, a rooster grabbed a hen by the top of the head and mounted her. There was some squawking and flapping, but it didn't last long; the rooster jumped off and instantly resumed his arrogant posture, and the hen stood up, wobbled, growled, bristled her feathers up with a shudder, and went back to her delicate picking at the watermelon rind.

“I'm just as glad he didn't see that,” said Eula. “Roosters is too rough.”

“Aunt Eula won't leave them alone,” Ethel said to Lucy. “At first she just watched them out the kitchen window. Now she's started feeding them. Gingerbread and a beef pie yesterday. Today she's baking bread.”

“How do they seem to like it?” asked Lucy. “I mean that drafty old house, for city people, I don't know.”

“Listen,” said Ethel, “watching a chicken eat a green watermelon makes that woman horny. She never puts her clothes on.”

“What's that he's got?” said Eula. “Looks like a piece of a big red 9.”

“That's a ‘g’,” said Louise. “It fell off the Sunoco sign, ‘Regular—$1.09.’ That's the ‘g’ out of Regular.”

“Look a there,” said Eula. “Now he's got a 8.”

“That's a piece of a B,” said Louise. “The fat part of aB.”

The man was standing out in the yard. He had a screwdriver in one hand and a crowbar in the other.

On the ground were piles of sheet-metal scraps, broken pieces of furniture, a tangle of bent wire panels, bits of boards with peeling paint, and a collection of letters and words—parts of wooden and metal signs, single letters and numbers from track signs, and strips of yellow and orange plastic tape with a variety of warning messages:
DO NOT ENTER DO NOT CROSS DANGER BURIED PIPELINE STOP DIGGING FIBER OPTIC CABLE BURIED BELOW DO NOT PANIC LOOK OUT PAINT AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
. He kept picking up different things from each pile and turning them around in his hands. Every now and then he would lay a wooden spindle or a section of wire bedspring gently on the ground and walk around it. Sometimes he shifted one piece and laid another piece under it. Sometimes he stood with his hands on his hips and stared at his piles of stuff.

“Something don't look right to him,” said Louise. “He needs something he ain't got.”

“What's he doing with all that stuff?” said Eula. “A piece of a screen door, a mashed-up bunch of wire, a pile of run-over sheet metal. They come all the way down here from Kansas City Missouri to pick up junk off the road.”

“He's making something out of it,” said Louise.

It was early evening, and the woman was in the kitchen mixing up salad greens when Louise knocked on the door.

“It's for him,” Louise said. She held her mouth
tight and ducked her head down to one side. She was holding an old rusty sheet-metal sign, an advertisement for a defunct brand of dog food. The paint was faded and rust had eroded some of the letters, but you could still see a puppy with big round eyes and a round tongue and the words “Full-OPep” arching over his head. “Thought he might could use it for the letters,” said Louise.

There was a moment of awkwardness—tentative greetings mingled with bewildered gratitude: “Hi, well, thank you very much, I'm sure he'll… Just put it over there, he's not …” Then the man came into the kitchen. He took the sign out of Louise's hands, held it up to the light, and whistled. He sat down and held it in his lap. He took a rag from the kitchen sink and wiped the dust off the arching letters. Then he looked hard at Louise.

“I'm speechless,” he said. “Thank you very very much.”

“It's nothing,” said Louise. “I just noticed how you went for that ‘g’ out of Regular, thought you could use these. It come off my brother-in-law's old store, that's Melvin, Eula's husband, was killed by his own Allis-Chalmers tractor.”

“Oh, I'm so—” said the woman.

“They are absolutely voluptuous,” said the man. “Thank you.”

“Well, I'll be going now,” said Louise, and without another word she did go.

“Where did she come from?” asked the man. He began pacing around the kitchen, holding the sign up
as if it were a banner in a parade. “Man!” he said, “Man oh man!”

“She's insane,” said the woman.

“Full-O-Pep,” he said. “Full-O-Pep.” He pushed his salad out of the way. “Look at that toothsome F, that succulent O, that lusty P! Whoa! Look out paint!”

The woman crossed her arms on the table and stared at him. “Bruce,” she said.

“You know,” he said, turning the sign in his hands and covering sections with a napkin. “If I just…”

“Bruce!” she said, but he was rummaging in his tool kit.

“Damn, it's dark,” he said, popping the handle of a screwdriver into the palm of his hand. “If you would hold the flashlight—” but she slapped both hands on the tabletop.

“Bruce, you promised me!” she said.

“He's a typographer,” the woman said to Eula. “When I first met him he was working for several small publications”—she fixed Eula with a significant look—”and I DO mean small.” Between them on the kitchen table a chicken casserole was growing dangerously warm. “The newsletter of the American Gourd Growers Association,
Dairy Goat Journal Corn-posters’ Weekly
—which meant no money. But he was very passionate about his work, very involved, which is what attracted me to him in the first place.” She flung her head back gracefully and ran her fingers through her hair. “So I got him this great job at Hallmark; sure, I pulled some strings—I have connections in Kansas City—but he truly deserved it. They
put him to work on a project for a new line of cards called Feelings—really nice, a soft look, flowers, pastels. I don't know what it was—the expectations, the pressure, the responsibility; it's been very intense for him, and when the project was finished I felt we needed this special time away, just for us, a healing time.” Eula sat with her hands in her lap thinking of ptomaine poisoning and wondering if it would be impolite to interrupt just long enough to slip the casserole into the icebox.

“… sunsets, long talks around the fireside at night, candlelight… But since we've been here I've hardly seen him. He spends all his time making these giant collages out of pieces of junk—signs and pictures and parts of words that don't mean anything.” From the backyard they could hear the rasp of a saw as the typographer hacked a yellow capital Y off a fragment of a billboard advertising yogurt. “Sometimes I think he cares more about letters and numbers than he cares about me,” the woman said in a frail, wistful voice.

“Oh, honey,” said Eula, “you just give him time. He'll come around. Now this casserole—”

“But I want a love that goes beyond the limits of time,” she said. In the backyard the typographer laid the Y against a striped board and stood back.

“Just be glad it's letters and numbers and not cockfighting, which is what my Melvin, God bless him …” said Eula.

“I'll tell you something,” the woman said. “He dreams about typographical styles. He has nightmares about 14-point Eurostile.”

“Tiresome woman” said Ethel.

“She needs something to do,” said Lucy. “Why don't you suggest gardening, Eula? You could get her started with a gift of seeds.”

“She just needs him to pay some attention to her,” said Eula. “There he is with that pile of junk, no wonder she feels left out.”

“But it's artwork,” said Lucy. “As an artist he should get some kind of dispensation.”

“Some art!” said Eula. “Bunch of junk screwed together.”

“He better watch out or Mama will have the spacemen after him,” said Ethel.

“I told Louise not to mention outer space,” said Eula. “If she gets on to outer space, they'll be done took back their five thousand dollars and gone.”

“I got a S for you today,” said Louise, holding out a big black sans serif S. “And some O's. Look a here, this is how they like it.” On the ground she laid out a row of black O's printed on clear plastic. She straightened the row, made a tiny adjustment, checked the angle of the sun, and stood back.

“Who?” he asked, settling the big S into one corner of his assemblage.

“I'm not supposed to talk about it,” said Louise. “But this is what brings them down; O's and A's and some others, set out east to west.”

“Hey,” he said, “whatever. I like it.” And carefully he laid the row of O's above a black and white picture of Marilyn Monroe with her lips pursed. Then he put
an arm around Louise's shoulder and they stood together, just looking. “Whoa!” he said, and he grinned so wide that his cheeks shoved his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Smokin’!”

“Mistral!” the typographer blurted out, kicking off the covers. “Brush script! No! No!” He moaned and thrashed his head from side to side. Out at the chicken house, one of Louise's insomniac roosters, awakened by the moonlight and the odd cries from the house, rose up, flapped his wings once, and crowed.

Quietly the woman untangled a blanket from the tumbled covers, crept into the living room, and sat in the dark, hugging her knees.

The typographer was out in the backyard, aimlessly walking up and down the chicken yard, picking at the dried brown twigs of vine that clung to the fence. From the ground Marilyn Monroe looked up through Louise's O's, and from the house ostentatious sounds of leaving could be heard—suitcases being flung and dragged across the floor, impetuous footsteps, doors slamming.

“Hey,” said Louise. “Today's the day. I got you some A's.”

He looked at the A's, but he didn't snatch them up and try them out in different positions, slipping them around from place to place and muttering.

“She's leaving me,” he said.

Louise looked around furtively. From the front yard they could hear a car door slam. “Let me tell you something,” said Louise.

The woman appeared in the door, her pocketbook on her arm. “Take me to the airport?” she called in a flat, tight voice.

“I'll give her one thing—she sure knows how to leave him,” said Ethel. “A few hours of framming and banging and slinging things around, and then vroom! she's gone.” It had taken Ethel over a year to leave Roger, counting the months it took to root cuttings from his grandmother's night-blooming cereus.

“I imagine they'll have to do it all over again when they get to their real home,” said Lucy. “This leaving was just for show.”

“And all because of him screwing numbers and letters and pieces of junk together,” said Eula, remembering Melvin's pickup truck coasting silently away from the house under cover of darkness, dozens of fine little wire pens stacked in the back, and then the next morning the dreadful silence and the blood-spattered clothes.

“I imagine it's not just that,” said Lucy, “I imagine he was not with her in spirit. It was not a marriage of true minds.”

“She's a hard woman,” said Eula. “High-strung.”

The typographer was leaning up against the kitchen counter drinking whisky, and Louise was making an arrangement on the kitchen table—bits of string, twists of tinfoil, and the letters from a Scrabble game.

“They call it ‘Mistral/” he said. “Syrupy, sappy, insouciantly casual, the George Hamilton of script typefaces—buttoned-down, fetching smile, tan, and oh-so-nice.”

“This is my string,” said Louise. “The numbers and letters get their attention and the string brings them on down.”

“They take Bodoni,” said the typographer, “one of the great typefaces of all time”—he brandished the bottle at Louise, who watched him keenly, her eyes squinted—”and what do they do? They make ‘outline’ Bodoni. It's like seeing ghosts. They take Gill Sans, a vital, workhorse face—and what do they do? They shorten the uppers, they enlarge the counters, they round off the angles, they make it soft and slack. They castrate it!”

“They come in just as quiet,” said Louise. “They just slip in. You don't even know it.”

BOOK: Quite a Year for Plums
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