The Plant (26 page)

In her will, Mama wrote that she wanted “all cash, of which I do have a little, to go to the Blackwater Library Fund. All negotiable items, of which I do have yet a few, should be sold by my executor at top price available within the twelvemonth following my death, and all proceeds donated to the Blackwater High School Scholarship Fund, with the understanding that any such resulting scholarships, which may be called Fortuna Walker Scholarships if the Committee would so honor me, 195

should be given without regard to race or religion, as all during my life I, Fortuna Walker, have believed Whites to be every bit as good as Blacks, and Catholics
almost
as good as Southern Baptists.”

How we chuckled at that nearly perfect microcosm of all her wit. But there was no chuckling this afternoon. At least, not after my sisters looked up from where they sat on her bed and saw me standing shocked in the doorway.

By then I had seen all I needed to see. “Anyone a step over puffick idiot’d know what
that
was about,” Mama herself no doubt would have said—more memoration. And what I saw in my dead mother’s bedroom will be printed on my memory until memoration itself ceases.

Her dresser drawers were open, all of them. Her things were still in the top ones, although many of her blouses and scarves slopped over the edges, and it was clear that everything had been stirred about and pawed through—a puffick idiot could have seen that. But the things which had been in the two bottom drawers had been pulled out and lay scattered in drifts across her rose-colored rug, the one which had never shown dirt because nothing dirty was allowed in that quiet room. At least not until last evening, that is, when she was dead and unable to stop it. What made it worse, what made them seem to me so much like pirates and plunder-ers, was the fact that it was her unmentionables lying there. My dead mother’s underwear, scattered hell to breakfast by her daughters, who in my eyes made Lear’s look kind by comparison.

Am
I
unkind? Self-righteous? I no longer know. All I know is that my heart hurts and my head is roaring with confusion. And I know what I saw: her drawers opened, her slips and underpants and righteous Playtex girdles spread across the floor. And they on the bed, laughing, with a red tin box on the coverlet in the middle of their circle; a red box with its Sweetheart Girl cover taken off and laid aside. It had been full of cash and jewelry. Now it was empty and it was their hands that were full of her greenbacks and heirlooms. How much might their trove have been 196

worth? Not a huge amount, but by no means paltry; some of the pins and broaches could have been costume stuff, but I saw two rings whose stones were, according to Mama herself, diamonds. And Mama didn’t lie. One of them was her engagement ring.

It was perhaps a minute before they saw me. I said nothing myself; I was literally struck dumb.

Evelyn, the oldest, looking young in spite of the gray in her hair, with her hands full of old tens and fives, put aside by my mother over the years.

Sophie, counting through official-looking papers that might have been stock certificates or perhaps treasury bonds, her fingers speeding along like a bank-teller ready to cash out her drawer for the weekend.

And my youngest sister, Maddy. My schoolyard guardian angel.

Sitting with her palms full of pearls (probably cultured, I grant you) and earrings and necklaces, sorting through them, as absorbed as an archeol-ogist. That was what hurt the worst. She hugged me when I got off the plane, and wept against my neck. Now she picked through her dead mother’s things, the good stuff and the trumpery, grinning like a jewel thief after a successful heist.

All
of them grinning. All of them laughing.

Evvie held up the cash money and said, “There’s over eight thousand right here! Won’t Jack yell when I tell him! And I bet this isn’t all. I bet—”

Then she saw Sophie was no longer looking at her, and no longer smiling. Evvie turned her head, and Madeline did, too. The color left Maddy’s cheeks, turning her rich complexion dull.

“And how were you going to split it?” I heard myself ask in a voice that did not sound like my own at all. “Three ways? Or is Floyd in on this, too?”

And from behind me, as if he’d only been waiting for his cue, Floyd himself said: “Floyd’s in on it, little brother. Oh yes indeed. Was Floyd told the ladies what that box looked like and where it was apt to be. I saw 197

it last winter. She left it out when she was having one of her spells. But you don’t know about her spells, do you?”

I turned, startled. From the smell of the whiskey on Floyd’s breath and the dark tinge of red in the corners of his eyes, the tot I’d seen him drinking on the porch hadn’t been his first of the day. Or his third, for that matter. He pushed by me into the room, and said to Sophie (always
his
favorite): “Evvie’s right—there’ll be more. That box is the most of it, I think, but a long way from the all of it.”

He turned to me and said, “She was a packrat. That’s what she turned into over the last few years. One of the things she turned into, anyhow.”

“Her will—” I began.

“Her will, what about it?” Sophie asked. She dropped the papers she’d been studying to the coverlet and made a shooing gesture with her slim brown hands, as if dismissing the whole subject. “Do you think we had a chance to talk to her about it? She shut us out. Look who she got to draw up her death-letter. Law Tidyman! That old Uncle Tom!”

The contempt with which she spoke struck me deep, not because of the sentiment but because of the simple fact that I’d seen Sophie and Evelyn and Evvie’s Jack laughing and talking with Law Tidyman and Law’s wife Sulla not half an hour before. Best of friends, they’d looked like.

“You don’t know how she got these last few years, Rid,” Madeline said. She sat there, her lap all but overflowing with her mother’s keep-sakes and gracenotes, sat there defending what she was doing—what
they
were doing. “She—”

“I might not know how she
got
,” I said, “but I know pretty damned well what she
wanted
. Wasn’t I there with the rest of you when Law read her will? Didn’t we all sit around in a circle, like at a goddamned séance?

And isn’t that what it was, with Mama talking to us from the other side of her grave? Didn’t I hear her say in Law Tidyman’s voice that she wanted that there—” I pointed to the plunder on the bed. “—to go to the town 198

library and to the high school scholarship fund? In her name, if they’d have it that way?”

My voice was rising, I couldn’t help it. Because now Floyd was sitting on the bed with them, one arm around Sophie’s shoulders, as if to comfort her. And when Maddy’s hand crept into his, he took it the way you take the hand of a frightened child. To comfort her, too. It was them on the bed and me in the doorway and I saw their eyes and knew they were against me. Even Maddy was against me.
Especially
Maddy, it seems. My schoolyard angel.

“Didn’t you see me there, nodding my head because I understood what she wanted? I know I saw you-all nodding the same way. It’s now I must be dreaming. Because it can’t be that the folks I grew up with down here in this godforsaken map-splat of the world could have turned into graveyard ghouls.”

Maddy’s face sagged at that and she began to cry. And I was glad I had made her cry. That’s how angry I was, how angry I still am when I think of them sitting there in the lamplight. When I think of the tin box with its Sweetheart Girl cover set aside, its insides all turned out. Their hands and laps full of her things. Their
eyes
full of her things. Their hearts, too. Not
her
, but her
things
. Her remainder.

“Oh you self-righteous little
prig
,” Evelyn said. “And weren’t you
always
!”

She stood up and swept her hands back along her cheeks, as if to wipe away her tears…but there were no tears in those flaming eyes of hers. Not this evening. This evening I saw my brother and three sisters with their masks laid aside.

“Save your accusations,” I said. I have never liked her—regal Evelyn, whose eyes were so firmly fixed on the prize that she never had time for her littlest brother…or for anyone who did not think the stars pretty much changed their courses to watch Evelyn Walker Hance in her enchanted walk through life. “It’s hard to point fingers successfully when your hands 199

are full of stolen goods. You might drop your loot.”

“But she’s right,” Madeline said. “You
are
self-righteous. You
are
a prig.”

“Maddy, how can you say that?” I asked. The others could not have hurt me, I don’t think, at least not one by one; only she.

“Because it’s true.” She let go of Floyd’s hand, stood up, and faced me. I don’t believe I will ever forget a single word of what she said. More memorating, God help me.

“You were here for the wake, you were here for the reading of a dead-letter her own son wasn’t good enough to write, you were here for the burying, you were here for the after-burying, and you’re here now, looking at things you don’t understand and passing a fool’s judgement on them because of all the things you don’t know. Things that went on while you were up in New York, chasing the Pulitzer Prize with a broom in your hand. Up in New York, playing the nigger and telling yourself whatever different it takes for you to get to sleep at night.”

“Amen! Tell it!” Sophie said. Her eyes were blazing, too. They were a demon’s eyes, almost. And I? I was silent. Stunned to silence. Filled with that horrible, deathlike emotion that comes when someone finally spills out the home truths. When you finally understand that the person you see in the mirror is not the one others see.

“Where were you when she died, though? Where were you when she had the six or seven little heart attacks leading up to the big ones? Where were you when she had all those little strokes and got so funny in her head?”

“Oh, he was in New York,” Floyd said cheerily. “He was employing his fine arts degree scrubbing floors in some white man’s book-publishing office.”

“It’s research,” I said in a voice so low I could barely hear it. I felt all at once as though I might faint. “Research for the book.”

“Research, that explains it,” Evelyn said with a sage nod, and put the 200

cash money carefully back into the tin box. “That’s why she went without lunches for four years in order to pay for your schoolbooks. So you could research the wonderful world of custodial science.”

“Oh, ain’t you a bitch,” I said…just as though I had not written many of those same things about my job at Zenith House, not once but several times, in the pages of this journal.

“Shut up,” Maddy said. “Just shut up and listen to me, you self-righteous, judgmental prig.” She spoke in a low, furious voice that I had never heard before, had never imagined might come from her. “You, the only one of us not married and with children. The only one with the luxury of seeing family through this…this…I don’t know…”

“This golden haze of memory,” Floyd suggested. He had a little silver bottle in his pants pocket. He drew it out then and had himself a nip.

Maddy nodded. “You don’t have the slightest idea of what we need, do you? Of where we are. Floyd and Sophie have got kids getting ready to go to college. Evvie’s have gone through, and she’s got the unpaid bills to prove it. Mine are coming along. Only you—”

“Why not ask Floyd to help you?” I asked her. “Mama wrote me a letter and said he cleared a quarter of a million last year. Don’t you see…don’t any of you see what this is? This is robbing pennies off a dead woman’s eyes! She—”

Floyd stepped up. His eyes were deadly flat. He held up a clenched fist. “You say another word like that, Riddie, and I’m going to break your nose.”

There was a moment of tense silence, and then from down below Aunt Olympia called up, her voice high and jolly and nervous. “Boys and girls? Everything all right up there?”

“Fine, Aunt Olly,” Evelyn called back. Her voice was light and care-free; her eyes, which never left mine, were murderous. “Talking over the old times. We’ll be down in a wink. Y’all stay close, all right?”

“You’re sure everything is okay?”

201

And I, God help me, felt an insane urge to scream:
No! It’s not okay!

Get up here! You and Uncle Michael both get up here! Get up here and res-cue me! Save me from the pecking of the carrion birds!

But I kept my mouth shut, and Evvie shut the door.

Sophie said, “Mama wrote you all the time, we knew that, Rid. You were always her favorite, she spoiled you rotten, especially after Pop died and there was no more holding her back. You got plenty of how she saw it.”

“That’s not true,” I said.

“But it is,” Maddy said. “And do you know what? The way Mama saw things was pretty selective. She told you about all the money Floyd made last year, I’ve no doubt of it, but I doubt if she told you about how Floyd’s partner stole everything he could get his hands on. Hi-ho, it’s Oren Anderson, off to the Bahamas with his chippy of the month.”

I felt as if I’d been sucker-punched. I looked at Floyd. “Is that true?”

Floyd took another little nip at the silver flask that had been Pop’s before it was his and grinned at me. It was a ghastly grin. His eyes were redder than ever and there was spit on his lips. He looked like a man at the end of a month-long binge. Or at the beginning of one.

“True as can be, little brother,” he said. “I was rooked like an amateur. I think I’m going to be able to sail through without getting in the papers, but it’s still not a sure thing. I came to her for help and she told me how she was broke. Never got over putting you through Cornell is what she said. How broke does that on the bed look to you, little brother? Eight thousand in cash…at least…and twice that in jewelry. Thirty thousand in stocks, maybe. And she wanted to give it to the
library
.” A glare of contempt closed his face like a cramp. “Jesus please us.”