Quite a Year for Plums (2 page)

But all this seemed far too gloomy on such a bright spring day, thought Hilma, with ‘Madame Isaac’ filling the room with its fragrance. It was not fair to blame Ethel for the Irish Potato Famine just because she had such a lively interest in a variety of men. “Ethel is a gifted teacher,” she said. “That is an important thing to remember.”

“I will never understand Ethel,” said Meade. They sat for a minute, admiring that complex picture of Roger, looking so serious and thoughtful on Hilma's cupboard door. For all his
Agrisearch
wisdom and patience and resignation, still, at the corners of his mouth and in his eyes, squinting slightly in the sun, you could see just the beginning of a little smile, as if he had sense enough to realize that he did look slightly ridiculous, standing there to have his picture taken in the middle of a peanut field.

L
et me call you back, Louise,” Eula shouted into the telephone. “I've got a house full of men here, all wanting to be fed.”

The men waiting to be fed were Eula's son Tom, a forester, and a southern pine beetle expert from North Carolina. Eula's niece Ethel was there too. She often came out to spend Saturday or Sunday afternoon with her aunt Eula in the country.

“You make them sound like baby birds. Aunt Eula,” said Ethel.

“We should be cooking for you, Mrs. Matthews,” said the ridiculously polite beetle expert.

“Oh, just sit down and eat,” said Eula. And there was something about the way she paused for a moment at her place, gripping the back of her chair with both hands and glaring critically down at the laden table, that made it seem as if no one in the world had any business cooking food but Eula Matthews.

There was a dish of fried eggplant, a chipped enamel bowl of sliced tomatoes and Vidalia onions, a squash casserole, pole beans, corn bread, biscuits, and a jar of pickled okra.

“It's too hot to eat meat,” said Eula. “You boys out in those sweltering woods all day, listening to grubs gnawing in those big trees. Ethel, get yourself some eggplant and pass it down to Tom.”

After lunch the men wandered back out, talking about board feet, and Ethel said, “You're supposed to call Mama.”

“I know what your mama wants to talk about, more of those little spacemen coming in the house,” said Eula. She wrung out the dishrag and hung it over the edge of the sink, tugging the corners square. Then she leaned with her arms on the counter and looked out across Louise's neglected garden into the pasture.

“Just look at that Bahia grass going to seed,” she said. Ethel didn't say anything, because when Eula started talking about grass it meant she was thinking about her husband Melvin, who had been horribly killed twenty years ago when his beloved old Allis-Chalmers tractor turned over on him when he was mowing a steep grassy slope. Finally she blew her nose on a paper towel and dialed the telephone.

“Last time they came in, Louise told me they painted the edges of her jalousie windows pale green,” she said to Ethel. “ ‘Louise,’ I said, ‘those little men didn't paint those windows! That glass just is green on the edges.’ But Louise thinks too much, that's what's wrong.” Eula waited while the tele-
phone rang on the other end. “I almost hate to hear this,” she whispered to Ethel.

“Hey, Louise,” she shouted. “I'm calling you back. Yeah, come on over, Ethel's here. Yeah, they're gone back in the woods, come on over. Yeah, bye.

“Unh unh,” said Eula. “I worry about your mama, Ethel, the way she lets her mind get away from her. I put my address on her walking stick just in case she wanders too far, gets lost. She's going to wind up in town under Total Care at Shady Rest, my own baby sister, I can see it coming, Ethel.”

Louise sat up earnestly on the edge of the sofa with her elbows on her knees. “It come in just as smooth,” she said. “The ship was called the
Uncovered Eroticum.
It was one of those convertible-type spaceships, and, honey, let me tell you, the top was down.” She pulled a crumpled foil chewing-gum wrapper out of her pocket and pressed it smooth. Then she laid a black plastic capital J on the coffee table so that the strip of foil stretched out from the top of the J like a flag.

“And then a swarm of little men got out, each one of them smaller than the one before. Eula, you will never believe what those men proceeded to do in my house.”

Eula shouted, “Don't tell me, Louise, I don't want to know that!”

“You should have told them to come over here, Mama,” said Ethel. “Aunt Eula would have fed them up and sent them out in the woods to measure timber.”

“Child,” said Louise, “those little men didn't want to be fed. Food is not what they were after.”

“Don't talk about it, Louise!” Eula shouted. “Have a biscuit!”

“I've got a biscuit right here in my hand, Eula,” said Louise. “If I was hungry I'd eat it.”

“Louise,” said Eula, “you keep letting your mind go off with you like that, one day it's not going to bring you back. You're going to wind up out there at Shady Rest with those quivering idiots.”

A week later the beetle man from North Carolina found Louise wandering around in the woods, all scratched up and hungry, with two days’ worth of redbug bites on her. The beetle man read the address on her walking stick and took her to Eula. Eula ran her a bath, gave her a bottle of Chiggerid, fed her a hot meal, and put her to bed. Ethel came out after school, and Eula's son Tom came in early from the woods, covered with seed ticks.

“She needs taking care of,” said Tom to Ethel in a fierce voice. “She could have been snake bit.” But Tom was standing in the middle of the living room floor in his underwear, glistening with the pine oil he had smeared on himself to kill the ticks, and it was hard to take him seriously.

“This ain't funny, Ethel!” said Tom. “This is your own mama's safety we're talking about!”

“I'm not laughing at Mama, Tom,” said Ethel. “I'm laughing at you.”

“I know what's going to happen, I can see it in my mind's eye right now,” said Tom, and he marched
around the living room rug in little circles on his greasy, high-arched feet. “You just watch: Louise is going to move in here with us, and Mama's going to be stuck with her, listening to all that crazy talk, looking after her like she was a little child, keeping her from wandering off. She's your mama, Ethel, you ought to be taking care of her!” He stopped and stood still in the middle of the rug and stared into space with his eyes wide open. “Yep, I can see it right now in my mind's eye, me and Mama and Louise crammed in here together, and Ethel all alone up there in that nice house on Dawson Street, teaching school.”

“Tom, you don't need an eye in your mind to see that. We can all see that,” said Eula. “Of course she's going to move in here with us. Louise can't live up there with Ethel. A crazy person can't live in town, she'd get out on the street when Ethel's off at school, get run over, kidnapped, I don't know what all, they'd take her up to Milledgeville if they saw her in town, the way she is. Don't you worry about your mama, Ethel, and, Tom, go wash off, you're going to blister yourself with that pine oil.”

“It almost made me cry, Roger,” said Eula. It was the next Saturday. Ethel didn't have a truck, and Tom was at the longleaf pine conference at Wakulla Springs, so Ethel's ex-husband Roger was helping Eula move Louise's stuff. They were on their third load—dump. Goodwill, and now a load Louise said she had to keep. Eula had cleared out the back hall for it.

“My own baby sister, and she can't take care of herself. I felt tears in my eyes, Roger. Of course it could have been that pine oil on Tom, that'll make your eyes water when you're shut up with it.”

“It probably wasn't just the pine oil,” said Roger. “This is something worth crying about. It's going to be hard on you, Eula.”

“Oh, I'll be all right,” said Eula. “I'm just worried about some things. Andy coming from California for the summer and all that spaceman talk, you know how Louise can get raw with it sometimes, a young boy hearing that, I don't know. And then the house—a house begins to go down when nobody's living in it. A house needs people walking around in it, talking, sleeping, putting off heat. And Tom, you know how he can be, and then there's…” But Roger knew she wasn't going to say anything to him about Ethel.

“I just wish it hadn't happened right in the middle of Mayhaw season,” said Eula. “I've got three gallons of berries on the back porch right now.”

Roger stopped in front of Louise's house and they sat for a minute. “One more load,” he said.

“Looks like that porch is already beginning to sag, don't it, Roger?” said Eula.

“This is your home now, Louise,” said Eula. “You've got to get used to it.” But Louise was busy playing with jar lids and jar rings on the kitchen table, laying them out in patterns, ring lid lid, ring lid lid.

“Put a couple of 9's in there,” she said, “and a u-p-s. Where are my big numbers, Eula?”

“And you've got to quit wandering off, Louise,” said Eula. “The UPS man was nice to bring you back today; next time you might not be so lucky. I notice you're still scratching those redbug bites.”

Eula was standing by the stove with a long wooden spoon waiting for the May haw juice to come to a full rolling boil. “Louise, quit rubbing your fingers on the insides of those lids, they've been sterilized. Go get your big numbers, they're on the bottom shelf in the back hall, a couple of 6's, I saw a 9, letters too, capital and small. Roger put them on that low shelf so you can get to them.”

It was after midnight before Eula got the jelly pot washed and the jelly bag rinsed and hung up to dry and the last twenty-four jars set upside down on a white cloth on the kitchen table. But still, she sat up for a few minutes to read her cowboy book and listen for the pleasing little popping sounds from the kitchen that meant the jar lids were making a perfect seal.

It might not be so bad, she thought. Roger said there were people from up north who would pay good money to rent Louise's house during the winter and spring. They would just have to cut a stack of firewood, is all. And Tom had settled down after Eula had a little talk with him. “It's hard to see your own mama go crazy,” she had told him, and since then he hadn't said any more mean things about Ethel. Louise had stayed busy with her letters and numbers, and she hadn't mentioned the
Uncovered Eroticum
since she had moved in.

Eula lay in the bed and listened to the rustles and
woman in the book she was reading, and how she would write poems on strips of paper and tie them onto tumbleweeds and let them blow away. Eula had never seen a tumbleweed, but she could just imagine how it would look tossing across that bare, dry land with the little strip of poem trailing off it like one of Louise's silver foil banners flying off the top of a capital J. In the end, that nice cowboy man Conn Conagher would marry the woman with the tumble-weeds, Eula knew that. She only liked books that had happy endings, so she always peeked, just to be sure.

T
rollope,” said Meade. “That dreary march through chapter after chapter, waiting for Planta-genet to be named Chancellor of the Exchequer.”

It was late April, and Meade and Hilma were arguing about what book to read aloud on their Thursday Evenings in May. It was a ritual they had cheerfully observed since the early days of their friendship fifty years ago, when they had both been new teachers at the old Midway School. But this year they were wrangling.

“You only want to read the Palliser novels because you have an adolescent crush on Phineas Finn,” Meade said.

Hilma sighed. Meade wanted to read
Emma,
although they had already read
Emma
in May of ‘79 and again in May of ‘85. It was true that Hilma had a soft spot in her heart for Phineas Finn, but it didn't seem fair that Meade's love for Mr. Knightley
counted as a loftier emotion than hers for Phineas, more literary in tone.

“You know, of course” said Meade, “that the character of Mr. Knightley is one of the most finely drawn in literature.”

And suddenly Hilma felt sick to death of Mr. Knightley and Emma and Meade and all of the Thursday Evenings in May. “Why do we shut ourselves up in this little room anyway, and read aloud in the month of May, when the ferns in the woods are unfurling, and the lightning bugs are coming out in swarms? We should be doing something daring, with action and adventure,” she blurted out desperately.

“‘And why do we read anyway, when the lightning bugs are swarming?’ I said to Meade, and then she said in that challenging way, ‘Exactly what did you have in mind?’ But of course, Ethel, I didn't have anything specific in mind, just not
Emma
for the third time,” Hilma said to Ethel the next day. They had taught first grade together too, for Ethel's first and Hilma's last ten years. It had been nothing for the two of them to figure out how to make the inside of a shoe box look exactly like the Okefenokee Swamp in a few moments of whispered consultation in a darkened classroom at rest time, so it was natural for Hilma to come to Ethel with the dilemma of the Thursday Evenings in May. “Meade is my oldest and dearest friend, Ethel, but she can be so difficult at times.”

“The sap is rising,” said Ethel. “You are feeling restless, that's all. It's spring. You need a change.”

And she handed Hilma a book off her shelf: Bar-tram's
Travels.

“Come with me on Saturday to the Fountain of Youth,” she said.

“Fountain of Youth,” said Meade to Roger. “Action and adventure. Ethel has taken her off to central Florida, where they are to bathe in one of the springs near the spot where William Bartram ate tripe soup with the Seminole chief Cowkeeper in May of 1774. My oldest and dearest friend will probably be swallowed up by one of those giant central Florida alligators, and all because I didn't want to spend my Thursday Evenings in May reading about the Duke of Omnium's great campaign for the five-farthinged penny.”

“The dangers of central Florida have changed since 1774,” said Roger. “I don't think the alligators will bother them.”

“Still,” said Meade, “ I do hope Ethel will look after her. Hilma is not as strong as she pretends to be.”