Quite a Year for Plums (11 page)

“Insidious is what it is,” said the typographer. “We are losing the great typefaces of three centuries, and no one even notices it!”

“You lay your letters down right,” said Louise. “Then they come in like water. They come in like air, they seep down from the light. No hole is too small for them little men. When the air is sticky like this? And bristly feeling? You feel that? Come on outside” Louise grabbed the typographer by the arm. “Come on. You'll see it.”

It was the end of the unseasonable warm spell. A little breeze was just beginning to stir. It would rain before morning. The warm, damp air felt thick and
claustrophobic, trapped as it was between the cold that had been and the cold that was to come.

“You see that light?” said Louise. “You see that?” In the south, over the cotton field across the road, the sky glowed rose and gold where the lights of Tallahassee lit up the undersides of the low clouds.

O
ne thing we can be sure of,” Meade said, “that man does not have a single viable sperm in his entire body.” The man was the evening's entertainment at the annual conference of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy. He had a cowboy hat clamped on his head, high-heeled snakeskin cowboy boots, and very tight jeans, the blue paling with stress across his thighs. He was singing “The Tennessee Stud.”

Viable sperm had been a recurrent topic at many of the day's meetings, in which the preservation and promotion of endangered breeds of livestock had been discussed. A representative from one of the genetic storage banks for the ALBC had presented a program on fertility evaluation; and Dr. Albert Turner, a renowned professor of animal science, had given a moving talk on the evolution of poultry breeds, pointing out that while the fancy exhibition
fowl and the industrial-line egg and meat producers are in no danger, many of the fine old utility breeds from “the Golden Age of Animal Breeding” are almost extinct.

Roger, Delia, Hilma, and Meade had driven across the state to attend the conference because Delia's painting of Dominique chickens had been bought to hang in the ALBC offices in Pittsboro, North Carolina. Meade had grumbled at first—her interest was in heirloom plants, not livestock breeds. But since she had arrived she had thrown herself into the spirit of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, and kept comparing everything to “life.”

“Isn't that just like life?” said Meade. “The flashy ‘exhibition fowl’ thrive and prosper while the venerable old utility breeds are neglected and forgotten.”

The country singer had lurched off the stage in his high-heeled cowboy boots and his tight pants, and Meade, Delia, Roger, and Hilma were eating ham sandwiches in the conference-center lounge and discussing Dr. Turner's interesting speech. The tables were shoulder-high, and they had had to scramble up to sit on tall stools, rather like chickens struggling for purchase on a roost, thought Hilma, who couldn't quite figure out where to put her feet. At the next table, she noticed, the president of the Wyandotte Club of America and the manager of a small flock of New Hampshire Reds were perched quite gracefully on their stools, smoking cigarettes and drinking whisky and reading excerpts aloud to each other from a 1922 issue of
Reliable Poultry Journal

“But I like the exhibition chickens,” Delia admit-
ted guiltily. “The spectacular patterns, the flowing tail feathers, the glowing colors.”

“You are young, my dear,” said Meade. “Someday you will come to appreciate the old and basic things in life.”

“Like Meade's old clematis,” said Hilma, “a sweet little thing, although I agree with you, Delia. The modern ones you see in the plant catalogs are so spectacular, all striped and frilled in those velvety colors.”

“ ‘New and improved,’ it always says,” said Roger. “ ‘Hybrid Pride, blooms as big as saucers.’ ”

“Meade calls them vulgar flowers,” said Hilma, almost scornfully, and suddenly Meade felt all alone, as if she had been abandoned in the exalted position Dr. Turner had set up in his speech. Even the serious poultry breeders at the next table had forsaken their noble posts as preservers of a genetic heritage, she noticed, and begun to kiss each other, their elbows rumpling the cover of
Reliable Poultry Journal.
Meade felt in her pocket for the envelope of the little “Appomattox clematis” seeds she had decided to present as a gift to Dr. Turner. The clematis had been grown in her family's gardens since 1865, when her grandfather had gathered the seed along the road on his long walk home. It was a climber, with little nodding flowers in a delicate shade of pale blue, with a slight, powdery fragrance.

Hilma opened the door of the bedroom just a crack and peered fearfully down the hall. Many of the ALBC members had been housed in this over-
crowded bed-and-breakfast inn near the conference center. Some of the larger bedrooms in the old house had been divided in half, and more small rooms had been created by closing in the ends of hallways and porches. Every flat surface was taken up with porcelain figurines of overdressed shepherdesses and their dogs or little homey items edged in eyelet lace, so the guests’ coats and bags and cases had to be stacked on the floor or in the seats of chairs, giving a cluttered, claustrophobic feeling to the space.

Hilma crept down the hall, clutching her terry cloth robe to her neck, dreading a bathroom encounter. At any hour of the night she felt she might turn a corner and run into one of these poultry enthusiasts, needing to wash up. Sure enough, just as she reached the bathroom, the door opened. But it was only Delia, holding a bottle of shampoo in one hand and a tiny lamp in the shape of a leaping fish in the other. “It was on the back of the toilet,” said Delia, “but it didn't seem quite safe to me—such a damp place for an electrical appliance.”

Hilma had an uncomfortable bath, not quite allowing herself to settle down into the tub, listening for footsteps, voices, and the rattle of the doorknob. When she got back to the room Meade was sitting up in bed, elegantly dressed in a polished-cotton bed jacket, reading
A Conservation Breeding Handbook.

“ ‘The loss of these breeds would impoverish agriculture and diminish the human spirit,’ ” Meade recited. “I do so often feel that my spirit is diminished, Hilma, don't you?” she said.

But Hilma was just feeling damp and frazzled and crowded by knickknacks. “Thank goodness Delia got rid of that fish” she said.

It was 4:15 according to the glowing yellow numbers on the little digital clock beside the bed, but Hilma couldn't sleep. She couldn't stop thinking about Meade and her clematis seeds, rare pigs, and the bathroom down the hall. She had overheard the touching presentation of the Appomattox clematis in the hallway, Meade explaining earnestly about the long walk home, and the bowers of clematis over the 130 years in her family's gardens in Virginia, North Carolina, and now Georgia. Hilma had peeked into the hallway just in time to see Dr. Turner smile and nod and stuff the envelope into his coat pocket while backing up with furtive little steps toward the sanctuary of his own room.

4:29. “… successfully imported from England, and now safely in quarantine in New York!” the proud caption had read. But the pigs had looked so pitiful, Hilma thought, nestled together in their straw bed. It would be a concrete room, she supposed, washed down daily with disinfectants. She imagined them lying there, snorting in their sleep, the snout of one pig thrust up against the bristly flank of its neighbor. Did they dream of the home they had left behind in England, she wondered, the green meadows, the hedgerows, the ha-has? Could they have a way of knowing as they slept in that dark and sunless room that they were rare and precious pigs, and that they
would soon see another blue sky and root in the damp earth of another continent?

4:36—now would be a good time, she thought, creeping out of bed and picking her way past the piles of shoes and coats to the door. Surely, at this hour no one else would be—

“Oh!” Delia yelped with something like relief. “Thank goodness you're awake!” She was leaning against the wall by the bathroom door in her flannel nightgown, fiddling with the doorknob and looking so worried that Hilma forgot about the bathroom and they sat down together among a pile of ruffled cushions on a white satin sofa in the hall. Once again Hilma found herself struggling for a comfortable position. She sat up straight, pressing her toes against the floor to keep from sliding off the domed, slippery seat, and tried to concentrate. But Delia wasn't making much sense. It was dark, and she spoke so softly that Hilma could only hear snatches of what she was saying: “… warm lumps, covered up in beds,” she whispered, “… inaccessible thoughts darting around in the dark like bats,” and after a while Hilma began to understand that she was describing an unnatural fear she had of sleeping people, something like a dread of snakes or spiders. “Sleepers,” Delia said with a shudder. “That's why I was so glad to see you.”

But there didn't seem to be much comfort Hilma could give her. People did have to sleep, after all. “They will soon wake up, my dear, and be themselves again,” said Hilma feebly, “like the Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs coming out of quarantine at last.” Then they just sat together on the white sofa
until light began to come through the lace curtains, doors opened up and down the hall, and the steady patter to the bathroom began.

Meade lay in her bed and watched the ceiling grow brighter with the dawn, remembering Dr. Turner's ringing words at the conclusion of his talk: “The challenge of today is to maintain this variability for the entire poultry species, and so protect this genetic heritage for the future.” And within the hour the managers of two of the most threatened populations were kissing each other at the supper table, the challenge of today the furthest thing from their minds. Just like life, she thought, snuggling deeper under the covers, people so quickly taken in by the easy pleasures, the flash and strut.
So,
she thought, drifting back to sleep, is such a versatile word, short and simple, and yet powerful when used as Dr. Turner had used it: “… and so protect…” Dr. Turner had a deep voice, suitable for speaking on the topic of preserving venerable forms of life; and such a fine head of white hair, a strong, expressive nose, almost like a picture of God or Moses. “… and so protect …” she murmured, thinking of the Appomattox clematis that would bloom next year in his garden.

Conversation was difficult at breakfast. The innkeeper was under the impression that the rare breeds in question were exotic animals and she kept talking on and on about a pink dolphin she had heard about in the Yangtze River. The manager of the New Hampshire flock had not come down to breakfast.

and the president of the Wyandotte Club needed a cigarette so badly that his upper lip kept sticking to his teeth, but the words “Thank You for Not Smoking” were printed on a blue plywood goose screwed to the wall over every door. Delia wanted a glass of water, but only pale coffee was offered, and Dr. Turner, in his rightful place at the head of the table, kept striking his knees against the gatelegs hidden under the damask tablecloth.

“Very, very rare,” the innkeeper said enthusiastically, pouring lukewarm coffee out of a silver coffeepot. “Only about fifty of them left in the world, dolphins are so cute anyway, and a PINK one, I just can't imagine—you all do such important work, saving these poor animals from extinction.”

But the nerves of the president of the Wyandotte Club were too frazzled for more talk of pink dolphins, and he suddenly blurted out in an angry voice, “I am a poultryman!”

“Oh!” the innkeeper yelped, and she hastily set down a platter of quivering poached eggs and disappeared into the kitchen.

There was a tense moment as everyone stared at the eggs, adjusting to the silence. But Hilma took up the platter bravely and passed it graciously to Dr. Turner, saying, “I certainly hope these are not the eggs of a rare and endangered flock.”

“No,” said Dr. Turner, just as everyone began to relax. “I would say that this egg was laid by a White Leghorn hen, crammed into a space no bigger than your two hands. Her beak may have been cut off when she was one day old to keep her from pecking
her cage mates, or she might have been fitted at eighteen weeks of age with a pair of red contact lenses.” Then, as everyone sat with their hands in their laps. Dr. Turner explained that hens in such numbers are not able to establish their social order, and have a tendency in their frustration to peck one another to death. The red contact lenses, by filtering out the color of blood, reduce this social stress, eliminating cannibalism, increasing egg production, and so resulting ultimately in a significant improvement in the feed-conversion ratio.

“And it is to this impoverished state that the noble science of avian husbandry has sunk,” Dr. Turner concluded with a smack.

After that there was a little nibbling at pieces of dry toast, but no one felt like talking. At last Roger made a move, pushing his chair back and saying, “Well,” and then everyone got up with relief and hurried back to their rooms to pack.

Hilma stuffed her things into her suitcase and then sat in a chair by the window looking out at the gray day while Meade spread clothes out on the bed and folded them up with tissue paper. There had been something uncomfortable and troubling about the ALBC conference, Hilma decided—those spotted pigs she couldn't get off her mind, Meade's odd remark about feeling diminished in her spirit, and then Delia's strange night terrors. “Sleepers,” she had whispered with such horror.

Outside in the parking lot, people shivered in the light, cold mist, holding newspapers over their heads and loading bags into the trunks of cars.

“Oh, look,” said Hilma, “there's Dr. Turner,” and Meade stopped her packing. He certainly was a handsome man for his age, Hilma thought, such a noble mien. She watched as he fumbled in his coat pockets. But instead of keys, he pulled out Meade's little white packet of clematis seeds. He stood there looking at it, as if he were trying to remember where it had come from. Meade had begun picking her way carefully through the piles of bags and shoes to the window, but Hilma had the presence of mind to say quickly, “Oh, never mind, it's just some other—” and Meade turned back to her packing just as Dr. Turner flipped the envelope open and shook the little seeds out in the rain.