Quite a Year for Plums (9 page)

That night she slept a dark and peaceful sleep, and in the morning when she went outside, for the first time that year she heard the thin quavering song of the white-throated sparrow. She stood still for a minute, breathing easily in and out, and suddenly she thought of the concert of medieval music, and she remembered how at the end of each piece the young musicians had looked up at the audience with amazement and delight, as if they themselves could not quite believe that they had actually made music with those little buglike instruments.

I
don't think this is a very good idea,” said Hilma, clutching the edges of the boat. But even though it was her own mother's ashes they were about to sprinkle in the bay, no one listened to her.

“Over there,” called Meade, “in sight of that line of trees. She loved those little coastal oaks, didn't she, Hilma?”

“Sasanquas were her favorite tree,” said Hilma, but already Ethel had done something with the tiller and a rope she held in one hand, and the little boat was nosing toward a muddy shoal of black muck pocked with fiddler-crab holes and little piles of gray mud.

Ethel had built this sailboat for herself during the summer with the help of a boatwright she had taken up with from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It was a beautiful little thing, a New Jersey melon seed, with poplar strakes so thin that Ethel could pick the boat up in one hand and the mast and sail in the other and
walk to the edge of the water. Hanging in its sling from the ceiling in Ethel's living room, it had looked so beautiful and delicate, like a rose petal, that Hilma had agreed to go along with this wild adventure. But now the boat seemed so very tippy, and the icy water so very black, and the rope that Ethel tugged seemed dangerously tight, and the boat shot through the water with such silent speed that it almost took Hilma's breath away. Plus, for some reason the memories of her mother were flooding back, and suddenly she could almost see her sitting in her chair by the bird window in their old house on just such a fall day as this fifty years ago and saying, “Oh, Hilma, look, the sasanqua is in bloom!”

Ethel was talking about estuaries now, their amazing fecundity, and how 98 percent of all ocean life begins here, so appropriate for sprinkling the ashes of the dead; and Meade was clutching the tin box between her knees and leaning out to one side so that for a second a thin sheet of green water came sliding over the rail. Suddenly Hilma turned loose, held up both hands in the air, and shouted, “Stop!” Ethel instantly turned loose of everything, and amazingly the little boat did stop, and wallowed there among the waves as if it did not have the first notion of forward movement. They both stared back at Hilma, Meade with a look of consternation, Ethel looking concerned, and Hilma felt the hot tears on her cold face and she almost snatched the tin box from Meade. The boat tipped and slued, Meade said, “Good heavens, Hilma, what ails you?” and Hilma covered her face with her skirt in shame, and
thought, an eighty-year-old woman sobbing on the high seas.

“Sasanquas were her favorite tree,” she said at last, and Meade said, “But sasanquas are such a common, ordinary tree!” But Ethel said kindly, “We'll go back,” and she did something with a rope and called out cheerfully, “Duck!” And then the sail swept back across the boat, and suddenly the water was rushing by again and the green land drew closer and closer.

“I was so embarrassed, Roger,’ said Hilma. “We had driven all that way, and Ethel navigating that little boat so expertly through a stormy sea. Meade was disappointed. Ethel too, although she didn't say so.”

“It wasn't a stormy sea,” said Roger. “It was a ‘light chop.’ And both Meade and Ethel loved it, you know they did. It was an adventure.”

They were sitting in Hilma's living room with a little fire in the stove, the first of the fall. Roger had brought gifts suited to this season of transition—a bundle of kindling and a bunch of his last roses. This is more like it, thought Hilma. These small comforts—a pot of soup on the stove, the smell of the roses and the kindling, and a dear friend on the sofa wearing wool socks; not that black water and mud riddled with fiddler-crab holes, and Meade scrabbling at the lid of the can with her fingertips, about to fling the ashes of a loved one against that cold, gray sky.

But now Roger was talking about sasanquas. He was remembering the sasanqua in the garden at his old home place, a pink one, very fragrant, and the lit
tie seedlings that would come up all around it in the spring. Being at the far end of the garden, it had survived the fire, and now there was a little grove of sasanquas. He made a point of going out to see them in November when they bloomed, and if Hilma would like it, one sunny day they could take her mother's ashes and sprinkle them in the sasanqua grove.

But suddenly, with her soup spoon in her hand and the last bright roses of summer in the middle of the table, Hilma realized why all this talk of sprinkling made her uneasy: there was a comfort, after all these years, in having her mother's ashes with her, sitting right where they had come to belong on the top shelf of the cupboard beside the cream of tartar.

“It's not the sasanquas,” she said, and she tried to explain it to Roger. Her mother, so long gone, and yet… And he did seem to understand; he had read somewhere that in other parts of the world people carry their ancestors’ bones around with them for generations.

“And I guiss the ashes are bones really,” said Hilma. She had looked into the tin once, years ago, and had seen that they weren't ashes at all, but little white chips of something you might scatter in a chicken yard to boost the calcium levels of laying hens.

“Comforting! That's ghoulish!” said Meade.

“Not as ghoulish as you could be if you put your mind to it,” said Ethel. “Not as ghoulish as making an infusion of the ashes and then drinking off the liquid in the hopes of taking on some of the powers of
the deceased. You might try that if you want to be ghoulish.”

“Roger said he read that in some parts of the world people keep their ancestors’ bones for generations,” said Hilma. “They carry them around in richly embroidered cloth bags.” Actually, Roger had not mentioned the richly embroidered bags, but Hilma thought embroidery might carry some weight with Meade, who did very fine crewelwork.

“Oh, Roger,” said Meade. “Roger would say anything to make you feel better about not doing what you should have done years ago.”

They were sitting in Ethel's living room, which had become more like a workshop since the boatwright had come down from New Hampshire. The furniture had all been shoved against the wall to make room for a table saw and a band saw, the bottom half of a dory hung over their heads, and their feet were buried in pine and poplar shavings.

“My,” said Hilma, trying to steer the conversation away from the subject of her mother's ashes, “boatbuilding is such a fragrant craft, isn't it, Meade?”

But Meade was thinking. “These bags,” she said. “Did Roger say what would be depicted in the embroidery?”

“Oh,” said Hilma, thinking fast—“birds.” And she began making up ancient traditional designs off the top of her head. “Birds, and they are always depicted with one foot lifted off the ground, symbolizing departure from this life. There's stylized vegetation in the background, palm trees, and those big floppy-leafed things, because these are tropical peoples.”

Ethel had put down her sandpaper and was smiling at Hilma with admiration. “ ‘Peoples/ that's good, Hilma.”

“Satin stitch for the plants in cotton, and then the birds in the foreground would be heavy silk or wool to stand out,” said Meade. “The bag would have to be a sturdy linen or canvas to last the generations, with those rough bones rattling around in them.” Ethel handed her a scrap of sailcloth and she snatched at it lengthwise and on the diagonal. “And French-felled seams, of course. You don't want the ashes sifting out and leaving little trails through the house.”

“And the birds,” said Ethel, “certain birds would not be appropriate—buzzards, for example.”

“She loved the first birds of the fall,” said Hilma. “That first flock of robins, on a foggy morning, gobbling up the dogwood berries. How about that, Meade, the dogwood berries would be fun, little red French knots, and the satin-stitched breasts of the robins in a different red.”

“I can't embroider a foggy morning,” said Meade.

“Oh, fog is very difficult,” Delia said earn-estly, “in painting too, although Robert Bateman is famous for it.”

“I don't need to see ‘bird art,’” Meade had insisted sharply, but Hilma had talked her into this visit with Delia, and now here they were, surrounded by crates and boxes and half-finished paintings and drawings, with books and art-gallery brochures spread around the room, talking about birds and depictions of fog in art. Delia had served them soggy saltine crackers out
of the box. There was no furniture, and the only china Hilma could see was a row of mugs on the win-dowsill that Roger had collected from various phy-topathological meetings. But Meade had not made one comment about the lack of civilized domesticity. And on the way home she only talked about Menoboni and Robert Bateman's fog, and never mentioned Delia's odd little habit of pacing around and around two of the wooden crates in the middle of the room in a sort of figure eight, her hands clamped under her arms. Now Meade had an abstracted look in her eyes that Hilma remembered from twenty years ago, when she had taken on the job of cross-stitching the Christian symbol of a fish on twenty-eight kneeling cushions for the altar rail of the Episcopal church, and at the end of ten months they saw that instead of the simple oval and triangle Christian symbol, she had sewn twenty-eight different species of indigenous fish, all recognizable by little stitched details of form and color: warmouth perch, crappie, bluegill, large-mouthed bass.

“She's sewing,” Hilma almost whispered to Roger. “Some kind of birds on a canvas bag for the ashes. Every now and then she rushes out to the grocery store and buys a loaf of bread and then darts back in and shuts the door. I'm worried about her eyes. At her age it's not like it was years ago when she did the fishes for the church.”

“Art is cruel,” said Roger. “I remember when Delia was finishing the chickens she didn't eat for a week.”

“What have I done?” said Hilma. “Maybe we
should have just thrown them into the water in the first place. The fiddler crabs would be chipping away at them right now and growing stronger shells for the winter.”

“It's finished” said Meade, and with a studied nonchalance she pulled the canvas bag out of a paper grocery sack and spread it on the back of the sofa. There was the tiny sound of breaths being held, then silence, and once again Hilma felt the hot tears on her face.

There was her mother's sasanqua tree in full bloom, the ruffled pink blossoms in satin stitch, the yellow stamens in outline stitch. The arching limbs of the tree were filled with fall birds: robins, chipping sparrows, goldfinches, a palm warbler, a white-throated sparrow, and several redbirds. It was late November and the ground under the tree was littered with pink cross-stitched sasanqua petals. The scene was framed by a window, and Hilma recognized the six-over-nine panes of the odd jib windows in her mother's house, now long gone to make way for the parking lot of the Gateway Shopping Center.

Hilma crept away to the kitchen, and soon Ethel came in and stood beside her, and in the living room Roger watched as Delia and Meade worked it over.

“Getting the sheen on that damned glass was the hardest part,” said Meade. “I tried several things first and had to pick them all out. Featherstitching looked like scum, and a blanket stitch looked like cracks. And I wanted the leaves of the sasanqua to be identifiable, but if I put in too much detail they stood out
too much, so I settled for this little serration, which worked out very well.”

Delia was sitting in front of the sofa on the edge of a straight chair, her elbows on her knees, examining the birds. “The best part,” she said, “from the point of view of wildlife art, is the feet.”

“Oh, the feet were the very devil,” said Meade. “I studied Peterson for hours on those feet.”

“Would you believe,” said Delia, “that many painters, finding them difficult, contrive ways to avoid painting birds’ feet? They have them wading in water, or in less realistic work ‘implying’ feet.”

Meade sat down and said fiercely, “You don't mean that!”

In the kitchen Hilma cleared her throat and blew her nose, and Ethel got down cups and saucers while Roger filled the kettle.

“They're both nuts,” said Ethel, and Roger smiled at her and said, “Yes, they are.”

“We must serve the living, but the dead serve us,” Hilma pronounced happily, pouring out tea.

That night before she went to bed, she slid the tin box into the canvas bag and tied up the drawstring top and set it in the cupboard beside the cream of tartar, with the birds facing out so that she would see them every time she made biscuits.

S
he was carrying two large slices of pale pink watermelon at arm's length. He was following her holding a covered bucket in both hands. It was an unseasonably warm winter day, and she was wearing a sleeveless gray T-shirt and black tights. He was wearing some kind of green cotton robe with ribbed cuffs, and shoes with no socks. The khaki-colored cap crammed onto his head and the big rimless eyeglasses gave his face a studious and concentrated look. They headed out across the garden toward the chicken house.

“Look at the legs on him,” said Louise. “What is that he's wearing?”

“Who would buy such a terrible watermelon?” said Eula.

“They didn't know until they cut it,” said Ethel. “What did they expect, a watermelon in the dead of winter?” said Eula. “They're feeding your chickens
garbage, Louise.” Eula's sink was full of soapy water and dishes, but she wasn't washing anything. She craned her neck to see out the top of the window over the sink.

“Leave the poor people alone,” said Ethel. “They came out to the country for privacy, and here we are, scrutinizing them like poultry inspectors.”