Quite a Year for Plums (8 page)

We're really happy for you, Roger,” and she gave Roger a little hug and sat down at her place to watch him eat. “Ethel's my own flesh and blood, Roger, but …” She reached over and squeezed Roger's hand as if she were feeling for lumps in dough. “Now tell me all about it.”

“She doesn't stuff birds, Eula,” Roger explained, “she paints birds.”

“Paints them?” said Eula. “Seems like most birds look pretty colorful already—redbirds, bluebirds, jaybirds—now there's a pretty bird, a jaybird. Of course you've got your drab sparrows in the fall, they could use a little extra color…. She paints birds, now that's something new to me—and very interesting.”

“She paints pictures of birds, Eula,” Roger said. “Mostly marsh birds. She paints the birds and the plants and water around them.”

“Oh!” said Eula, covering her face with a napkin. “Pictures of birds! What was I thinking of? Roger get some of this good squash casserole, Lucy told me ten, but I made fifteen. The library will never miss it. Pictures of birds! Well, I declare! Just like Audubon!”

Lucy and Hilma were making cheese straws for the library fund-raising picnic. “You didn't worry when Roger was married to Ethel, Hilma,” said Lucy. “Roger actually began his heirloom pepper research in the early years of his marriage. And Ethel certainly never encouraged him in his music.” Lucy paused, remembering “little hands that held me tight, just wave good-bye tonight.” “And yet he kept picking and fiddling.” Lucy screwed down the handle of the
cookie press and extruded a row of crimped cheese straws. “And although Ethel is my dear friend, I can't imagine a worse woman for a man to be married to,” she added.

“But we were used to Ethel” said Hilma.

“And so will you get used to the bird-watching woman,” said Lucy, snapping off a cheese straw with a flick of the wrist. “You will meet her at the library picnic, and she will say something wise or kind, and you will come to like her.”

“You said ten, I made fifteen, but then Roger came for lunch, and I gave one to Gawain, you know how he can get sometimes, so there's thirteen.” Eula stood back modestly and wiped her hands on her apron. The casseroles were neatly lined up on the scrubbed kitchen table in desperately miscellaneous containers, everything from dented stainless steel and chipped-up spatterware to the last one, in a porcelain potty with two ears. Lucy wasn't sure how they would fit in with the rather elegant setting, a brand-new “plantation” house lent to the library for this occasion. But she said, “They smell so good, Eula.”

“That's the nutmeg,” said Eula. “I always add nutmeg to squash casserole, it does a little something. Yes, I will say, I'm pleased with them. Roger was very complimentary, but then I always love to feed Roger. He told me about this little bird-watching woman he met down at the Dumpster, she paints PICTURES of birds, he tells me, like Audubon.”

“He's throwing himself away,” said Meade. “The
finest man I know is putting his heart into the hands of a woman who never held anything more precious than a pair of spyglasses.”

“I imagine she puts those spyglasses down now and then” said Lucy, and there was a thoughtful pause.

“She's not from around here, but I'm sure she's a fine woman,” said Eula. “I know Roger wouldn't take up with anybody wasn't nice; well, there was Ethel, but Roger was young then. Plus Ethel's not so bad, she's just a hard woman, needs to keep to herself.”

“My God, is it a house or a funeral parlor?” gasped Meade. The house was massive, dark red and purple brick, with many glittering windows. But the towering Corinthian columns looked oddly insubstantial, as if they were made out of Styrofoam. Eula dug in one of the flutes with her thumbnail; it did not leave a dent.

Steve, the librarian, looking harried, helped them carry the casseroles around back, where card tables covered with white linen were arranged in a kind of courtyard between two wings of the house. “Wait until you see the inside,” he said ominously.

Eula cupped her hands around the casseroles and fretted that they would be cold, even though Lucy had assured her that they would be reheated before serving. “PICTURES of birds, PICTURES of birds,” she kept reminding herself.

Meade stood imperiously on the steps, overseeing all and thinking. He is throwing himself away, and I
will be required to look her in the eye and say something pleasant.

And Hilma went to work layering cheese straws on a silver platter and repeating Lucy's words to herself: “You will meet her at the library picnic, and you will like her.”

At six o'clock people began to arrive, dressed to the teeth in raw silk and linen and dark fall suits, the women relentlessly cheerful, the men sweating and smiling bravely. They had each paid fifty dollars to eat a bit of chicken, a scoop of squash casserole, a few string beans, and a dish of ice cream, and to get a peek inside this house that had been a-building for over a year now. The courtyard was filled with the chirps, cackles, and squeals of a crowd of people determined to have a good time. And then, at the top of the steps, there was Roger.

“Oh,” said Hilma, and cheese straws began slipping dangerously close to the edge of the platter.

Delia stood behind him, dressed in white and tan and looking rather drab and solemn.

“Well,” sniffed Meade, “she doesn't look like much.”

Perhaps because of his years of walking in densely planted fields of tobacco and peanuts, Roger had a graceful way of moving through a crowd, gently slipping between the people as if they were sticky, floppy leaves that he must not bruise. Delia followed in his wake less gracefully, her head lowered and her arms stiff at her sides.

She's nervous, thought Lucy. And they were a frightening sight: Hilma, frozen with her platter of
cheese straws, looking stricken, Meade drawing herself up regally, and Eula clutching a squash casserole and saying, “Oh, here's Roger! Don't he look just like himself?”

The introductions were awkward and stiff; Hilma couldn't manage to shake hands because of the cheese straws, and Meade, straining to strike the bird theme right away, told Delia she looked just like an English sparrow in her white and tan. But unfortunately everyone's mind instantly settled on other aspects of the English sparrow—an introduced bird, not native to North America, often thought of as a “nuisance” species—and there was an uncomfortable pause. Only Roger knew just what to do. He took the squash casserole out of Eula's hands and gave her a hug, he gave Meade a tiny kiss on the cheek, and then he stood with an arm around Hilma's shoulders and talked easily about this house: Eula's son Tom had sawed 6,000 board feet of heart pine for the flooring and wainscoting, the doors were solid mahogany, and the windows had been milled at an old variety works in north Alabama. The house's owner, who had made millions of dollars selling funeral insurance in Atlanta, was something of a sportsman, and Roger had heard that the walls of one room, above Tom's wainscoting, were covered with murals of hunting scenes. Lucy, sensing that Delia might be feeling as if she had fallen into a nest of snakes, suggested that they move through the crowd back to the house. “We will give ourselves a tour,” she said brightly. “Delia can tell us what she thinks of the painting.”

“I’m afraid it won't be quite like what I do,” said Delia feebly.

“I should think not,” said Meade in a loud voice. “Coots, gallinules, and rails are hardly sporting birds.”

“Although Tom has shot coots,” put in Eula. “Kind of a fishy taste to a coot—not as bad as an anhinga though—now that's a nasty bird to eat. We only ate them once. I don't know what you call an anhinga where you come from, but we call them a snake-bird,” she said to Delia.

“I just call them anhingas,” Delia gasped simply.

Inside the central hall it was dark and cool. The walls were painted a “hunter” green, and the bright new pine wainscoting and flooring had been darkened with a layer of walnut stain. Everywhere was the smell of new wood and plastic and the gleam of high-gloss polyurethane. A few people came and went from the bathrooms upstairs and downstairs, saying “Ooh” and “Aah” and “What a house!” and “Isn't it just beautiful?”

Roger scouted ahead and found the “media room” with the murals, and they all gathered in the doorway and gazed inside.

On the wall behind a giant television an ostentatious dawn was breaking, and all around the room, much larger than life-size ducks and geese were frozen in flight behind computers, fax machines, and telephones. The paint had been ponderously applied, and the birds had a heavy, almost static look. Labrador retriever dogs with thick red tongues
splashed in dry-looking water, and huge, square-jawed men in tiny boats on garishly colored lakes and marshes aimed guns at the stationary birds. “SHOOT ME” was the unmistakable theme of the artwork; and where the painter left the theme, the taxidermist took it up and drove it home: sticking out from the mural on metal rods were real ducks and geese that had indeed been shot and were now gathering dust in full flight.

No one said anything for a minute. Then Roger whispered, “Good God,” and Eula said, “Just look at them, poor things, all that flying and not getting anywhere.”

“They look so—well, dead,” said Lucy.

Meade began examining a giant white and black goose flying over the fax machine, its withered orange feet dangling into the paper tray, its glass eyes gazing desperately at the big-screen television on the south wall. “This bird is NOT in Peterson's!” she declared shrilly.

But Delia just leaned her head back against the wall. She touched her forehead gently with her fingertips. Then she looked at Hilma and reached out a trembling hand. She said, “I think … I can't…Please …”

“My dear child,” said Hilma, and she took Delia firmly by both arms and led her briskly out of the room, down the hall, and out the front door, where Delia squatted on the edge of the steps and vomited into the new foundation planting of boxwoods.

On the other side of the house the library patrons
began lining up to serve their plates, but Hilma and Delia sat together on the steps for a few minutes. Every now and then Delia would shudder, put her head in her hands, and say, “Whoo!” and Hilma would pat her gently on the back and say, “There now, my dear!”

T
hings were not going well with a watercolor of three limpkins in a buttonbush, and after an afternoon spent pacing back and forth in front of the painting and eyeing it warily, her two hands clutched in her armpits and her teeth clenched, Delia had gone out into her little neglected yard and ferociously snatched up clumps of daisy-type chrysanthemums by the back steps to give to Hilma. But pulled away from their neighbors, the little plants looked scraggly and sparse, unsuitable as a gift for a new friend, Delia thought, and with dirt still under her fingernails she had gone over to the university to hear a concert of medieval music played on period instruments. She had thought that she would be soothed by these small sounds, tweaked and puffed from violas and krummhorns like the music of civilized insects, but the next day when she faced the limpkins once again, she imagined that she could still hear the relentless whine of the hurdy-gurdy buzzing in her ears.

She had been working on this picture for so long that she had felt her style shifting as different areas of the painting neared completion, and now that it was almost finished, the sections began to merge ungraciously, with rattling edges. Delia felt shaky and uneasy, as if she might never be able to paint again, but would instead live a squashed and stunted life, crippled by odd nervous tics, strange twitches, and repetitive gestures.

“She's peculiar,” Meade said to Hilma. “That way she has of walking, as if she's being blown along by a gusty wind and at any moment might veer around and head off in another direction.”

They were picking through the tangle of chrysanthemums Hilma had found on her back steps, their roots wrapped in wet newspapers. “Oh, look!” Hilma had said. “My favorites—the pink single ones.”

“Bare roots,” sniffed Meade, “and in full bloom. They'll never make it.”

“They needed thinning,” said Hilma, taking up her trowel and the little plants.

“How strange,” said Meade, “to leave them here on the steps, without even a note.”

“When they bloom next October we will remember this gift,” said Hilma.

“If they live,” said Meade.

Delia did have an unpredictable gait, Hilma noticed, a sort of gawky meandering saunter. She might come unexpectedly to a complete halt, or she might wheel around and walk backward for a few steps, looking
intently into the sky at nothing at all. It was a cool fall afternoon and they were taking a walk with Roger in the park and talking about bird identification and the concept of “jizz.”

“I love that word” said Roger,” ‘a distinct physical attitude totally apart from any specific field mark, essentially an amalgam of shape, posture, and behavior, in some cases more reliable than rote observation of detail.’ ” He had been admiring the limpkins in Delia's troubling painting. “But that's just how limpkins do!” he had boomed encouragingly. “They hobble around on the limbs of trees just like that, looking frail and gimpy.”

But it wasn't the posture or the attitude of the birds that worried Delia, and well-meaning words of praise just jangled in her head without a purpose and made her wince. “It's not the birds,” she said, and she tried to explain about the clashing transitions and the unpleasing contrasts.

“Remember your chickens,” said Hilma. “You need to sleep on it, my dear.”

But even in her sleep Delia breathed in frightened gasps, and in the morning she woke up feeling dense and heavy. All day she felt an urge to keep herself close together, her thumbs curled secretively beneath her clamped fingers and her arms tight at her sides.

In the evening, after the early sunset, she crept to her drawing table for the first time that day and switched on the light. The dabs of paint she had mixed when she last had a hope that the painting
could be salvaged, and the sponges, razor blades, and brushes optimistically lined up in neat rows now seemed like things that a foolish stranger might have left there long ago. Without even looking at the picture, Delia took it up from the table, and with a pair of orange-handled scissors she cut it neatly into eight little pieces and stuffed them away deep in the trash basket.