Quite a Year for Plums (14 page)

“Eula certainly is getting an education in virology,” said Lucy. “Ethel says all she can talk about is TSWV. Ethel says she's worse than you were.”

“At first she was just excited to be away from home, and she liked the long words,” said Roger. “But now she's started following the discussion. Last week she asked a question about resistant varieties.”

“Tom talked to Judy last night,” said Lucy. “He lost his temper and said something that made her mad, and she told him that Andy's personal growth has been stunted because of the sharp contrast between his two homes. He's using up all his energy making the transition, and doesn't have any left over to develop as a human being, she says. So she wants to send Andy to something called a personal awareness
camp. They only eat the purest kinds of food, and the little children have to sit around a campfire at night and look inward.”

“Good Lord,” said Roger.

“Eula's afraid Andy might not be able to come this summer,” said Lucy. “So give her a chance to talk about it on Thursday.”

That Thursday night was the last of the peanut meetings in Calvary. Roger called Eula and said, “Don't eat any supper tonight. We'll eat at the Pastime on the way home.”

The title of Roger's talk on this last night was “Living with Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus.” “It's important to understand that the risk index is not a cure,” said Roger. “If you take the recommended actions to lower your risk, it doesn't mean you won't get the virus. It just means that your risk of damage is relatively lower.” There was a little talk of a new cultivar, ‘Georgia Browne,’ which had shown some resistance. But the farmers seemed restless and dissatisfied. In the front row a small Donald Duck orange juice can beside someone's chair got kicked over and tobacco juice trickled across the polished concrete floor of the Agricenter.

“It may not be this summer; it may not be for ten more years,” said Roger. “But there's enough virus out there that we have the potential for an explosive outbreak.” Then the meeting was over, and the peanut farmers shuffled around, collecting their coats, swiping their hair back under their caps, and messing up the rows of chairs. Most of them shook
hands with Roger solemnly and some of them nodded good-bye to Eula.

On the drive to Cairo. Roger tried several times to broach the topic of Andy and the personal growth camp. But Eula wouldn't stop talking about peanuts. “Georgia Browne, now that's a nice name for a peanut,” she said. “I wonder why they put that ‘e’ on the end of it. Too bad about the kernels being so small, Roger.”

It was late when they got to the Pastime, and Fern brought them plates piled high with food. “You're helping us clean up,” she said. “If I didn't feed it to you, I'd have to throw it out.”

Eula poked around in the mashed potatoes and made a stab at her pork chop, but her heart wasn't in it. She said, “A peanut ain't just a peanut anymore, is it, Roger?” and he agreed that with the new advanced breeding lines and cultivars there did seem to be more to it than there used to be.

“No matter what you do to fix it, the trouble just keeps on spreading out in front of you,” said Eula.

“Don't hurry, Roger,” said Fern. “I'm just going to turn off the open sign, but y'all take your time. We've got plenty to do in the kitchen.”

By the time they left, the traffic lights had been turned to just blink red, on and off.

“Why, it's that late,” said Eula.

Roger's truck was the only moving vehicle in town, and they rolled slowly down Broad Street, pausing at each blinking light. The pavement was slick and damp. He would sleep for a few hours, Roger thought, and then he would go out and collect
some predawn-darkness dew for his water agar plates, before the morning breezes contaminated it with spores and pollen.

Eula sat quietly, her hands in her lap, looking straight ahead down the gleaming black road. But she was not thinking about Andy eating dates and brown rice in California, or about Tom snarling into the long-distance telephone, or about the beetle man coming up on the porch calling “Ma'am, ma'am,” and Louise hanging back on the steps all scratched up and mumbling about a string to Mars. Instead she was thinking about a field of peanuts in early summer, and about a tiny fluttery thing, almost invisible, flying into all that greenness on little feathery wings, and about the clusters of destruction that were sure to follow.

D
rip it until you have a stream the size of a pencil” the plumber told Hilma, and she sat down primly on the edge of the toilet with her hands in her lap and watched dutifully as he adjusted the trickle by tapping the handles impatiently with his rough red knuckles, first the hot, then the cold.

This had been the coldest winter since records had been kept, with arctic front after arctic front rolling down from Canada. Hilma had always dripped the spigots until the drops almost touched, like beads slipping off a string, but this year that was not enough; pipes had burst and she had had to call this impatient young plumber. Now as she lay in bed under two blankets and a quilt listening to the gurgle of water from the bathroom and kitchen, she could almost imagine that she was visiting some tropical grotto, green with ferns and moss. But then she smelled the rubbery winter smell of the hot-water bottle, and felt the icy breeze creeping under the
door, and saw on the window shelf the little spindly seedlings she had prematurely started in flats, grasping desperately for the thin light that streamed into the bedroom for a few minutes every morning. She had not sterilized the soil, and in this cold weather the seedlings were susceptible to “damping off.” Every morning Hilma would find a few more little plants toppled over, lying on the dirt with the base of their stems pinched and blackened.

“Damping off,” said Hilma, and wondered if she too might not keel over one February night and be found the next morning by Meade or Lucy or Roger, stretched out in her nightgown on the floor, surrounded by trickles of water the size of pencils, and flats of seedlings optimistically labeled for planting out on a fine spring morning: Canterbury Bells, Dame's Rocket, Forget-Me-Not.

“Cheer up,” Meade told her roughly. “You are allowing dismal thoughts to occupy your mind like bad-smelling old men on a bus. You should have sterilized the soil—this cold weather has activated the soil pathogens. Now you must start over. And this time you will enjoy your success more, knowing that you have done your best.”

Hilma sighed. She would have to start over. And as she dumped out all the little pots of soil, she thought how merciless are these tiny cold-weather enemies, and how hard-fought are all the small triumphs of winter.

But the next morning was bright; ice was actually thawing in the birdbath, and the kitchen was filled with the humusy smell of the soil baking in the
oven—350 degrees for one hour to kill the soil pathogens. Hilma was feeling almost cheerful when Meade arrived with the sad news.

“I have terrible news,” Meade announced, standing in the doorway very straight, her hands clasped in an official-looking position just under her chest.

“Oh,” said Hilma weakly, reaching for the back of a chair. She felt breathless; someone has died, she thought, and suddenly she remembered the smell of rosemary and wild azalea that had filled the church at her mother's funeral forty years ago.

“Squeaky is dying,” said Meade in a low, throaty voice.

“Oh,” said Hilma, sinking into the chair. Squeaky was Roger's beloved childhood horse, who had already lived to the incredible age of thirty-five years. Hilma pictured the dead horse lying on its side, flattened against the ground by its own weight, and in the foreground, like credits at the movies, appeared the faces of dear friends who were not dead or dying: Ethel, Lucy, Roger, Mr. Rice down at the birdseed store, even the nice man with the twinkly smile at the library—all still alive and well. It seemed almost as if Squeaky had been sacrificed that others might live.

“Oh,” said Hilma, “poor Squeaky.”

“Poor Squeaky!” snapped Meade. “Squeaky should have died fifteen years ago. ‘Poor Roger’ is what you mean. I'm terribly worried about Roger. What's that smell?”

“Oh,” said Hilma, “I'm killing soil pathogens.” And it seemed as if they were surrounded on this bright
winter day by the deaths of creatures both large and small.

“Stop saying ‘Oh’ in that helpless way, and think of something we can do for Roger,” said Meade, peering into the oven.

“Well,” said Hilma, pulling herself up out of the chair and attempting to rally, “there's always food, and flowers, although that doesn't seem appropriate for a horse that's not quite dead yet.”

“Roger said it could be any minute,” said Meade. “He has put up a little temporary structure around Squeaky. Apparently the horse can't move, and Roger was worried about him standing out there in the cold.”

“A house to die in,” said Hilma.

“We are thankful that he is not in pain,” said Meade.

“How long can it take a horse to die?” asked Hilma. “Especially a horse like Squeaky, who has lived so very long. If he must wait for his whole life to pass in review, it could be weeks, even months.” She pictured Roger growing fat on the endless casseroles and baked hams, and Squeaky standing in his little house, his head drooping lower and lower, recalling the summer of the terrible horseflies, the winter of thrush, the other horses that had shared his pasture and then moved on, either to new homes and owners, or to that permanent home on a spot of low ground way back in the woods, dragged out of the pasture by a tractor with a chain around their necks.

“I'm terribly worried about Roger,” said Meade. “He's up at five every morning collecting predawn
darkness dew for his yellow nutsedge rust project, he's giving a seminar five evenings a week on peanut diseases, he has his papers to write—and yet he drives out there twice a day to check on Squeaky. Then there's the dread preying on him of what he must do at the first sign of suffering, and on top of it all, this cold weather, his system weakened by stress, and all the germs he is exposed to in those close classrooms filled with the hot breath of agriculture students.”

“Damping off,” said Hilma irrelevantly, but Meade ignored her and began laying out an elaborate plan: Roger's daily life must be made easier; he must be relieved of all the little household chores—laundry, the preparation of meals, housecleaning tasks. He should come home at night to a bright clean home, a supper warm on the back of the stove, and his bed turned down.

“Oh, Meade,” Hilma protested. “I should think now, of all times, Roger might like to be left alone.”

“He will be left alone,” said Meade. “We will do all these things in the afternoon, when he is at the peanut seminar. Of course we will be gone when he comes home, but his house will have been made comfortable for him.”

“Like hovering elves,” said Hilma, “always ready to spring into service as soon as his back is turned. I think we would make him nervous and edgy, Meade, never knowing when he will find in the privacy of his own home the work of little unseen hands.”

“Roger, nervous and edgy?” said Meade. “Think of all the things Roger has done for you over the years, Hilma; now is your chance to be a help to him for a
change. Now you bake a loaf of bread; I will take some sturdy vegetable soup from my freezer. And try to find your little step stool. We will wash the kitchen windows. Nothing should impede the brightness of the morning sun—sunlight is very important to someone in distress.”

And so the good work began. Hilma spent the afternoon teetering on the step stool in Roger's azalea bushes, washing the outsides of the windows, while Meade washed the insides, tapping on the glass now and then to point out smudges in the corners that Hilma had missed. They set the table, left the supper dished up on a plate over hot water, and drove home in the dusk.

“When you are feeling sorry for yourself, that is just when you should do something nice for someone else, is what I always say,” Meade pronounced. “Now don't you feel better?”

But Hilma just felt a little dizzy, and the tips of her fingers were sore. That night when she pulled back the covers, there was a lizard in her bed, a green anole, stiff and flattened and nearly frozen between the sheets. It didn't seem like a good omen, and she thought of old Squeaky, standing on his four feet in the cold moonlight in his little dying house.

The next day at Roger's house there was a note for them—thanks for the pleasant homecoming—and three containers of stew thawing in the sink, one for Roger's supper, and one each for Hilma and Meade. They swept the kitchen floor, but even Meade did not feel equal to moving on to the other rooms of the house, where papers, folders, and books covered the
floors, tables, chairs, and beds in meaningful-looking stacks.

“Well,” said Meade, and Hilma sighed with relief. That afternoon she replanted her seeds in the sterilized soil, and that night Roger brought her a vase full of her favorite camellia, ‘Magnoliaeflora/

“I know you don't like the fussy ones,” he said.

They talked for a while about Squeaky: Roger said, “We grew up together, and then it seemed like all of a sudden Squeaky was old and I was just middle-aged.” About Meade: Hilma said, “She's never easy unless she's taking care of people.” And about microscopic animals: Roger said that almost every part of every organism is inhabited by a specific nematode, so that if it were possible for the entire earth and its inhabitants to instantly disappear, leaving only the nematodes, the shape of our world would still be visible for a few seconds, outlined by the mass of these invisible creatures. Then Roger said that he thought this would be the last freeze, and that in a couple of weeks it would be safe to plant her seedlings out. There were no lizards in the bed, and Hilma lay between her smooth sheets thinking about the ghost of a gone world, lingering for one second in space and then dissolving into the silvery dust of collapsing nematodes.

The next morning she got up early and drove out to Roger's old home place. Of course there was no use in it, Meade would say, but Hilma wanted to see Squeaky one last time, dying on his four feet in the little house Roger had built for him. It wasn't hard to find. The house was made of slabs of Styrofoam sup
ported by bamboo poles, and it was a blaze of white in the gray and tan of the winter-seared field. It was bigger than Hilma had expected; four horses could have died comfortably in this house, she thought. It had a sloped roof to shed rain, and one window cut out of the front Styrofoam panel so that Squeaky could see out over the field and into the longleaf woods beyond. Inside, the ground was covered with wood shavings. There was a bucket of water and a bucket of feed, just in case.