Quite a Year for Plums (20 page)

Hilma was the first to call Roger up and invite him for a meal. It was very strong, clear chicken soup, twice cooked, she said, toast, a salad, and a delicate custard for dessert. The kind of food that might be prepared for an invalid, Roger thought.

The subjects of Delia, all species of birds, and the entire southern hemisphere were scrupulously avoided, and Hilma feigned an extraordinary interest in the career of Dr. Rufus Routhe, who was retiring as dean of the plant pathology department. Roger noticed a pale spot on the wall where Hilma had taken down a Menoboni print of crested flycatchers, as if she thought a picture of birds might cause him pain. She encouraged him to talk about peanuts, the hard summer of work ahead, and his duties in the next year as president of the southern division of the American Phytopathological Society. Roger told her about a new peanut cultivar, ‘Georgia
Routhe/ named in honor of the retiring dean, which had shown some resistance to TSWV. “Peanuts in the U.S. are usually named for scientists,” he said, “but in Australia they are named for artists.”

Hilma's eyes flew to the pale spot on the wall, and she began rattling dishes and talking wildly about Dean Routhe, until at last Roger stopped her and said, “You really don't have to be this careful, Hilma.” After that she put down the dishes with relief and seemed to relax, and for the rest of the evening they talked quite comfortably about the courtship display of the superb lyrebird (“excessive,” said Hilma), Delia's character (“flighty,” said Hilma), and love.

“I don't quite understand the demands of that kind of love,” said Hilma. “All those feelings were so long ago, the opportunities were so limited then, and we had different rules.” But, she said, she had noticed how so often it left its victims ragged and spent, and she wondered why sensible people allowed themselves to begin, knowing where it would lead.

“There is no beginning to love,” Roger said. “It just creeps over you.”

“Oh,” said Hilma, “like brown rot on a plum tree in the dark winter months, and by the time you become aware of it, the leaves are out and it's too late to spray.”

“Yes,” said Roger, “just like that. Now let me help you hang your flycatchers back on the wall.” And Hilma got him a chair and fetched the Menoboni print from where she had hidden it in the closet.

The next morning Roger had to get up at 4:30 and drive all the way down to Attapulgus to hoe out the alleys in the peanut test plots there and then turn around and drive in the other direction all the way up to Plains to mark ailing plants and collect leaf and flower samples. He had a rattlesnake scare in the morning, and he ran into a wasp nest in an aluminum gate in the afternoon and got stung twice. Meade had invited him to supper, but when he went home to change clothes, Eula was standing in his yard holding three chickens by the feet, two big red hens and a rooster.

“Roger,” she said, “you didn't know it because you was up there at UNC, but when Melvin was killed by his own Allis-Chalmers tractor I found a lot of comfort in chickens.” The chickens slowly spun in her grasp, their wings limp, their beaks open in an expression of wonderment and resignation. “Rhode Island Reds, Roger,” said Eula. “I thought Dominick-ers would be—well, they might bring back memories, Roger, and I hate to see you sad.” She thrust the chickens’ trussed-up feet into his hands and hugged him tight, mashing a strangled squawk out of one of the hens. Then she quickly turned away, got into her car, and drove off in a hurry, so that Roger wouldn't see her tears.

Roger made a waterer out of a jar and a dish and a toothpick, spread newspapers on the floor of his back porch, and then turned the chickens loose, washed his hands and face, and arrived at Meade's house a
half hour late, drugged on antihistamine, with the grit of dried sweat under his clothes, and the sand from the Plains peanut fields in his shoes, worrying about regulations regarding livestock within the city limits.

Meade sat him down on the sofa, made him comfortable, and then stood in front of him waving a silver serving spoon in the air. “Roger,” she said, “you must hammer out your life on the anvil of experience!”

But Roger was too tired and sleepy to think of a reply to this violent piece of advice. Every time he closed his eyes he saw green leaves, as if overexposure had stamped an image of a field of peanut plants on the backs of his eyeballs.

“You do choose the most difficult women, Roger,” Meade went on. “First Ethel, so wild and independent, and then Delia—a gifted artist, but aside from that she was—”

“I don't choose them, Meade,” said Roger, through a confusion of weariness. “They creep over me like brown rot.”

The next day the Coastal Plain Experiment Station was putting on the Ag Showcase. Booths presenting information on different agricultural topics had been set up on the grounds: “Red Imported Fire Ants: Friend or Foe?,” “Animal Waste Awareness,” “Bio-control of Musk Thistle.” Food was being served from portable carts, and staff members were giving tours of the soybean and corn variety tests, the oldest pecan cultivar trial in the world (1921), and the new
controlled-atmosphere Vidalia Onion Storage Lab. The public was invited, which meant that there would be a lot of questions about potted geraniums and what to do about those big green worms on tomato plants.

This was Dean Routhe's last Ag Showcase, and all morning he had been flapping around the Bermuda grass germ plasm plot and the Vidalia Onion Storage Lab like a lanky old crane. Dean Routhe was not the kind of scientist who should be turned loose in a crowd; he was apt to frighten people by suddenly blurting out bits of abstruse information. No one quite knew what to do. After all, a peanut cultivar had been named for this man.

“Get him in there with Roger,” said Dr. Vanlandingham desperately, and so, by midmorning Dean Routhe had settled down in the booth on Predictive Models of Peanut Diseases, where he kept hurling out random remarks about agronomy, entomology, and the virtues of matrimony.

“Men need wives!” he cried out in a high, carrying voice, interrupting Roger's little talk about the future of Georgia's peanut crop. Roger faltered, then soldiered on.

“—the entomologists studying the thrips vectors—”

“Men need wives!” called Dean Routhe.

“—the virologists comparing TSWV with other, better-understood diseases,” Roger continued stal-wartly.

“Look at this!” cried Dean Routhe, springing up out of the shadowy back of the booth. “My hair was
red when I began my work here at the CPES in ‘59!” He clutched a few strands of white hair with both hands. “But my wife died in ‘65, and within a year it turned snow white!”

“—and my own work with—”

“Men need wives!” said Dean Routhe, clapping an arm around Roger's shoulder and glaring out at the stricken crowd. Roger could feel the old gnarly fingers trembling against his back. A few people hastily replaced the pamphlets and peanut brochures they had taken from the shelf, and very quickly everyone scurried off to the next booth, “Our Friend the Dairy Cow.”

“Dean Routhe,” said Roger, “maybe you would like to—”

But Dean Routhe was busily pulling up two chairs. “Roger,” he said, “sit down.” And they both sat down and faced each other across their knees.

“Roger,” said Dean Routhe in a deep, throbbing voice, “she's left you. She's gone. GONE.” He paused. “But you must not sit back and moan and pine. You've got to have a fearless heart, Roger, a FEARLESS heart!” and he thumped his own rickety chest so hard that Roger tensed up and leaned forward slightly.

“Roger,” said Dean Routhe, “it's like falling off a horse. The best thing you can do is just get right back up in that saddle again. Back in the saddle again.”

Outside, a new crowd had begun to gather. Some in the front were leafing through the pamphlets on the plywood shelf in a businesslike way, but they kept sneaking glances into the dark interior of the
booth, and at the back of the crowd people were staring in at Roger and Dean Routhe, their mouths hanging slightly open.

“Dean Routhe,” Roger whispered.

“Oh, quite so, quite so!” said Dean Routhe, scrambling to his feet and addressing the crowd. “You listen to this fine young man,” he said to a pretty, frightened-looking red-haired woman in a black John Birch Society T-shirt. “You ask him any question about the plants in your home or in your garden or on your small farm. Nematology, the rusts, myco-toxins—why, this man is an expert on late blight of potato!” he said, and he grabbed Roger by both arms and thrust him forward. “What this young man doesn't know about foliar diseases of peanut wouldn't fit into a teacup! A TEACUP!”

In the late afternoon a little stage was set up in the middle of the millet trials for a musical performance, and a half acre was roped off for dancing. Roger played the banjo; Tim Bannister, his entomologist counterpart in the TSWV research, played fiddle; and a couple of paid musicians from Tifton played guitars. In the cool of the evening, after the sun went down, people began to dance on the smooth turf of the Bermuda grass germ plasm plot. Dean Routhe had taken hold of the notion that the harvesting of crops was inherently violent, and he kept accosting people and saying, “Everything you eat has been attacked by someone!”

Roger noticed with dismay that the red-haired woman in the black T-shirt was watching him and
edging closer and closer to the stage, an odd, almost rapturous look on her face, and he played faster and faster, running “The Blind Girl” right up against “Pig in a Pen.” He remembered Meade's remark about the anvil of experience, but all he could think of was the dead skink in the peanut oil, its little toes curled up, its little eyes closed, and its broad jowls, even in death, still tinged with the breeding orange.

Q
uite a year for plums” everybody kept saying, but that didn't begin to describe the plum crop of that early summer. A rare combination of favorable factors had contributed to it, the fruit scientists said: a warm early spring had brought out the honeybees when the trees were flowering, then in March and April it had rained twice a week as the little plums grew, and finally at fruit swell the weather turned hot and dry, discouraging brown rot. Now in June heavy laden limbs drooped and cracked off, and in every household people were eating plums and baking cakes with plums, cooking up plum jam and plum jelly, or just raking up mounds and piles of rotten plums, and getting stung by yellow jackets. Drunken birds whopsided from eating fermented plums staggered across lawns. Then an unseasonable heat wave came through, in early June when no one was prepared for it, and standing over hot stoves boiling down plum juice, everybody started remem
bering stories about the tragedy of 1903. when five people in Perote had died of heat exhaustion.

“My father always said how peaceful Mr. Loomis looked, lying there flat on his back in the bed in the front room under the open window, dead as a stone with the thin sheet pulled up to his chin,” said Meade. Her father, just a little boy then, had been the one to find the body of Mr. Loomis, a timber baron who had made a fortune shipping longleaf cants out of Carrabelle to be resawn in the Netherlands. “People knew how to die back in those days,” said Meade.

Hilma didn't know if it was just the heat, or if it was Jim Wade's endless tinkering with a fan he had brought to blow on her while she made plum jelly, or what it was exactly that was making her irritable. “They didn't know how to die any better than we do,” she snapped at Meade. “They just told it better.”

“There's something about a fan, blowing on a dead person,” said Jim Wade, staring contemplatively at a little pile of worm gears. “When you think how the fingers that turned on that switch at bedtime will never again …” Meade's father had never mentioned a fan in his many tellings of the story of the Loomis death; just the thin sheet pulled up to Mr. Loomis's very prominent chin had stuck in his mind. But now as she looked at the bucket of plum seeds and plum skins and the jelly bag dripping plum juice into the bowl in Hilma's sink, another part of the story came back to Meade, something that she had almost forgotten, because over the years the thin sheet had become the hinge of the story: her father had been taking a bucket of plums to old Mr. Loomis.

Meade sat down heavily in Hilma's kitchen chair and rested her chin in her hands. “A bucket of plums” she whispered.

“Honey, at the plums!” Eula said to Ethel, flapping her apron in delight. Andy and the plum crop had come on the same weekend, and it was almost more than Eula could stand. She kept running back and forth between the jelly pot on the stove and the backyard, where Andy was practicing breathing through a snorkel. Roger had promised to take him to Ammonia Spring to swim with the manatees when he got back from his phytopathology meeting in Austin, Texas, and every waking minute since he had arrived yesterday afternoon, Andy had been stalking around the house with a bright pink and purple face mask on, making moist snorting sounds. Eula kept looking for the ravages of the brown rice and date diet. He was thinner, she thought, but then he was taller too. She hadn't really been able to get a good look at his face.

“Look at the plums under that tree, Ethel, did you ever—” But Ethel had set down the boxes of quart jars on the kitchen table and run out into the yard. She grabbed Andy up in both arms and hugged him too tight, knocking his face mask crooked. When she finally turned him loose he had to pick his ears out from under the rubber straps and get another grip on the snorkel with his poor stretched-out lips. “I'hh ynh uh ahhys wryds wid Roger,” he said, and Ethel squatted down in front of him, held him by both arms, and peered in eagerly through the face mask at
his bugged-out eyes and his stretched-flat nose. “You're going to Ammonia Spring with Roger, I heard that,” she said, and she hugged him again, more carefully this time.

“Just because nobody ever saw a manatee eat somebody alive, they think they never do it,” Tom called down. He was painting Cool Seal on Louise's roof, but the tar was so hot and runny it wouldn't stick.

“What are you doing up in the air, Tom?” called Louise. “Come down from there.”

“You're dripping on the azalea bushes, Tom,” called Ethel.