Quite a Year for Plums (16 page)

“A forest fire!” the woman said to Hilma, gazing despondently out her window at Roger's blackened woods. “We could have lost our home!”

“No,” said Hilma, trying to explain, “it wasn't that kind—”

“You should have seen the flames!” said the woman.

“But these woods need fire to keep them healthy. It's—”

“I just kept thinking over and over: ‘Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires, Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires.’ I called 911, I called the fire department. But no one came!”

“But,” Hilma persisted, “it's the exclusion of fire, the suppression of fire, that would be dangerous and bad—”

“Just look at my view!” the woman wailed, and burst into tears, flailing her arms at the window.

“Gone?” said Hilma.

“Both of them,” smacked Meade. “Just the posts are left.” It was a warm day in March and Meade had taken a drive out to Tall Pines.

“Meade, you didn't—” said Hilma.

“Hilma!” said Meade. “What can you be thinking? Ask her yourself next time you go out there to give her a little lesson in fire ecology.”

“I don't know,” said the woman. “I just don't know.”

In the front yard, pieces of the eagles were strewn around their posts: the fan of a tail, a section of ruffled chest, a hooked beak, a glowering eye, crunched and smattered. The bird feeder was empty, and on the steps the two junipers in their matching urns had died perfectly symmetrically, from the bottom up. In the house the curtains were drawn closed, the blue wall-to-wall carpet was tracked up with mud, and on the sofa in the room with the picture window the lit-
tie boy lay, slathered with pink calamine lotion, watching cartoons with drooping eyes. The woman wandered aimlessly around and around the room, touching her forehead gently every now and then with her fingertips.

“Try to look at the bright side,” said Hilma. “Maybe the eagles weren't quite right for here anyway. Maybe they were a little bit…”

“Those were five-hundred-dollar eagles,” the woman said in a pinched, even voice, “exact replicas… .” But she began to sob, and couldn't finish. “I feel so lonely here, and frightened—I thought we would have neighbors, but there's no one but us, then the forest fire, now vandals, this poison ivy, and yesterday that snake on the steps. I don't know, I just don't know.”

“But it was only a white oak snake,” said Hilma. “It's not as if a cottonmouth moccasin had—”

“I don't want to learn the names of snakes!” the woman sputtered, clutching her head with both hands, and Hilma thought it best not to mention that with warmer weather, moccasins would begin to stir at the swampy edge of the rectangular lake, where button bushes had begun to grow again, hiding the tracks of the bulldozers.

Meade stopped the car at the entrance to the driveway. “ ‘For Sale,’ ” she read triumphantly. “The Finest in Country Living was not good enough for them.”

“Poor little thing,” said Hilma. “I wonder if she ever learned her sparrows.”

In the front yard the shards of eagle had been cleaned up, but the octagonal concrete posts had been left at the entrance to the driveway, and a pair of eagle feet still clutched the top of each post with menacing talons.

I
t was in the middle of the February meeting of the writers’ group that Hilma spotted the dead rat. She had set the trap the night before in a dark corner of the room, but the fury of the snap must have catapulted the trap, for now it lay at some distance from the wall, right in the path from this dining table to the kitchen.

“I will get more hot water,” said Lucy, looking into the teapot and beginning to rise.

“Oh no, you sit there, I will…” said Hilma, almost leaping from her chair.

Luckily, all eyes were on Beulah Hambleton, who was explaining the latest installment in her detective thriller. “It will all become clear at the end, you see—it was a scratch from a poisoned pin that did him in.”

It would be so easy, Hilma thought, on the way to the kitchen with the teapot, to just… But when she reached the rat she couldn't bring herself to stoop
and pick it up. Even with Beulah Hambleton in the middle of
Murder from Scratch,
someone's attention might wander. That new member perhaps, Heather Bell, a young technician Lucy had brought from the experiment station; with her powers of observation honed by science, she would be the one most likely to notice the rat. The way she peered out from behind those two sheaves of hair and never smiled or spoke—who could tell what she saw and what she thought about it? A nicely furnished room, a little cluttered perhaps, but cozy, a stream of late winter light filtering through the lace curtains, and an old woman in a rump-sprung wool skirt walking to the kitchen, a Blue Willow teapot in one hand and a dead rat dangling from a trap in the other.

So the rat lay, right through Mary Bell Geeter's family history detailing the union of two prominent families, the Georgia Geeters and the Alabama Thrashes, and on into a discussion of the annual writers’ group picnic.

In spite of being stone dead, Hilma noticed, the rat had quite an alert, almost expectant expression, its little bright eyes thrust wide open by the blow, its little gnarly front feet clutching the corners of the trap.

“There is Mrs. Malcolm's lovely house and garden, out on old 19,” someone was saying. “A nice setting for a picnic, although she does have all those pets; that weasel-like creature that smells so bad and those big yellow dogs that…”

It was clever the way the red capital V for Victor outlined the head of the rat in the caught position;
although really, Hilma thought, Victor was much too strong a word for such a small death.

“… birdseed flung all over the carpet, and then the MICE of course…”

Little inverted serifs at the top of the V formed the two ears of the rat, and two little red dots for…The eyes are the windows to the soul—that is true, Hilma thought. It is hard to tell what someone is thinking when you can't see the eyes. At this very moment, for example. Heather Bell might be watching, her eyes hidden in the shadows of hair, and thinking—

“—Roger's old home place, Hilma?”

“Hilma?”

And suddenly all around the table her guests were straining forward in their chairs, watching her and waiting, their eyes alert and expectant, their knuckly fingers clutching their teacups.

“Roger?” yelped Hilma.

“It was a John Wind house, one of his finest,” said Mary Bell Geeter, “circa 1840, originally very similar to the Mash house; the porches were added.”

“The picnic, at Roger's old home place?” said Hilma, feeling very vague. “But there's no house there—just the chimney.”

“But we were saying, Hilma, that it should be different this year, after this bitter cold winter. We should have a real picnic, outdoors, to celebrate spring,” Lucy explained patiently.

“Such a gorgeous setting, and so much history there, the ancient avenue of oaks, the hill, and that
chimney rearing up against the sky” said Lucille Sanders, who was writing a romance story.

“What about toilets?” said Heather Bell. There was an embarrassed pause as people came to grips with this suggestion, and then everyone began talking all at once about rain.

“Rain!”

“We must think about rain of course!”

“We must plan in case of rain!”

“We will have portable toilets,” said Lucy, “and tents set up on the hill. There will be room for everyone to take refuge in case of rain. The next step is to talk to Roger, and if Hilma would …” Once again the bright eyes turned to Hilma, then the writers’ meeting was over and helpful guests began gathering up dishes.

“Oh no!” said Hilma. “Don't bother! I'll clear all this away!” There were last-minute trips to the bathroom, and Hilma waited with dread for the horrified cry. But it never came, and finally everyone stood at the door sorting out their coats and saying good-bye.

“The tents could go here on this flat place,” said Lucy, pacing off a distance. “And the toilet off there, behind the sasanquas.” Roger was poking around the base of the chimney with a stick, worried that the tramp of so many feet might loosen the foundation and bring it tumbling down at last, and Hilma was standing at the top of the hill, looking off toward Perote.

“What do you think, Roger,” asked Lucy, “Port-O-
Lets where your grandmother's formal garden used to be, and people trooping around up here, eating congealed salads off of paper plates?”

“There were guests here when there was a house. Why shouldn't there be guests now that the house is gone?” said Roger.

“It's like gold that has been passed through fire to purge it of its dross,” said Lucy. She stood looking off into the open pine woods, where the dogwoods and plum trees were in full bloom. “It feels like hallowed ground.”

At least there would be a nobler race of rats here, Hilma thought, filled with the health and vigor of the great outdoors, foraging for their own food and making nests out of twigs and sweet grass—not nasty, nearsighted town-dwelling rats, scuttling inside walls, scavenging and scrounging and at last lying dead and undiscovered in traps with their eyes wide open.

But suddenly Lucy and Roger were asking her something about acid soil and columbines. “… Hilma?”

“Columbine?” said Hilma.

“The lime leaching out of the mortar might sweeten the soil in that spot,” said Lucy, and then Hilma saw the little columbine growing up by the chimney.

The next writers’ group meeting was held at Heather Bell's apartment, all white Sheetrock and high-gloss polyurethane. No danger of coming up on a little
unexpected death here, Hilma thought, although she had been startled by a black and white photograph on the cover of a magazine in the bathroom showing a woman wearing a very short black skirt and over-the-knee black socks, sprawled across the curb of a busy city street as if she had tripped over her own thick-soled, high-heeled shoes. She was lying there, propped up on her elbows, glaring at something or someone unseen off to one side with angry eyes, her dark black lips screwed up in some kind of taunt or insult. Maybe someone had pushed her.

“… and there, in the garden, cushioned on a bed of Spanish moss, safe in his encircling arms—” Lucille Sanders was reading with feeling, a little quaver in her voice.

But someone cried, “Chiggers!” and two or three more people said, “They would be covered with chiggers!” and then everyone was talking all at once about chiggers and Spanish moss.

What had made that woman so angry, Hilma wondered, and who was she shouting at, and why did she keep lying there stretched across the curb in that awkward position, her feet weighted down and almost bent backward by the cruel black shoes?

“… funeral tents and one portable toilet. Roger says the ‘Lady Banksia’ will be in full bloom.”

And with such a photograph in her bathroom, what must Heather Bell think of them all with their teapots and their ‘Lady Banksia/ their Georgia Geeters and their Alabama Thrashes, and their heroes’ encircling arms? Hilma wondered.

“… and if it is a clear day, we will be able to see all the way to Perote,” said Lucy.

Roger was right—the ‘Lady Banksia’ was in full bloom, a spectacular column of roses twining up a pine tree in what had been the front garden. Every now and then a breeze would send a shower of yellow petals down over the writers’ group picnic. It was the middle of pine pollen season too, and when the wind blew a certain way, a shimmering yellow haze could be seen drifting in the air, and every surface was coated with a layer of golden dust.

Crumbling rows of bricks outlined the foundation of the house, and several of the older members were standing on the grassy floor of a front room, gazing through imaginary windows into the hazy distance. Every now and then someone would kick up a bit of china or glass, and little groups would form to try to match its pattern and edge to another piece that had been kicked up earlier.

Lucille Sanders was strolling with Roger along the mossy brick pathways of the old garden, describing to him her idea for her next year's writing project, a sort of romantic gardener's journal—“not about digging in the dirt,” she said, “but about the emotions inspired by a garden.”

“Oh,” said Roger.

“Take these daffodils, for example,” she said, “these dear bulbs thrusting themselves up spring after spring, showing us the patterns of the old garden in which they were planted so many years ago— what memories these bulbs must have, Roger!”

“Well,” said Roger, but he did not have the heart to tell Lucille Sanders on this spring day, with her muse so lively, that these were ‘King Alfred’ daffodils, andl that he had bought the bulbs down at Gramling's and’ planted them himself in November 1995.

“You must always start with the death and work backward from there,” Beulah Hambleton said to Lucy, shading her eyes and peering up at the elegant corbeling at the top of the chimney. “Last year it was the poisoned pin, but this year I feel I want something more violent. I'm always on the lookout for new deaths.”

“Samuel Meadows, Roger's great-great-greatgrandfather, is said to have planted these live oaks.” Mary Bell Geeter was picking thrips out of the punch with a long-handled spoon and giving a lesson in local history to several people who stood under the funeral tent, patiently holding out their little glass cups. “But they were
actually
planted by my distant cousin, the same Harriet Thrash Geeter who brought the first ‘Chandleri Elegans’ to Georgia from Screamer, Alabama.”

Hilma was taking a little walk down the hill in the shade of the oak trees and thinking about bits of a conversation she had overheard outside the Port-O-Let:

“Is Hilma getting—”

“Or is she just a little—”

“So often she seems to be off in—”

“And at her age to be—”

But it wasn't that, Hilma thought. There was nothing wrong with her mind. It was just that sometimes
she couldn't stop thinking about certain things that got her attention; and it is perfectly natural after all, for the human mind to cling to things that interest it, like chiggers on Spanish moss.

Then, around a bend in the road she saw Heather Bell, sitting on a kind of seat formed by a loop of grapevine twining up a tree trunk. Hilma was afraid of Heather Bell—her dark gaze, her gloomy silence, and that troubling photograph in the bathroom. But something about seeing her in that vulnerable position, dangling from a tree, her feet not quite touching the ground, made Hilma feel able to approach her quite boldly.