The Plant Page 14

  Is breathing Zenith addictive? I suppose it must be, but it doesn't feel like a harsh, governing addiction (“governing” may be the wrong word, but it's the only one I can think of). Not like the cigarette habit, in other words, or the pot habit. People say pot isn't addictive, but after my junior year at Bates, I know better—that shit almost got me flunked out. But I repeat, this is not like that. I don't seem to miss it when I'm away from it, as I am now (at least not yet). And at work there is the indescribable feeling of being at one with your mates. I don't know if I'd call it telepathy, exactly (Herb and Sandra do, John and Roger seem a little less sure). It's more like singing in harmony, or walking together in a parade, matching strides. (Not marching, though, it doesn't feel that structured.) And although John, Roger, Sandra, and Herb have all gone their separate ways for the weekend and we're all far from the plant, I still feel in touch with them, as if I could reach out and connect if I really wanted to. Or needed to.

  The mailroom is now almost completely empty of manuscripts, which is a damned good thing, because it's now almost completely full of Zenith. Z has also overgrown the walls of the corridor, although much more densely in the southerly direction—i. e. toward the rear of the building and the airshaft. Going the other way it has curled its friendly (we assume they're friendly) tendrils around Sandra's door and John's facing hers, but that's as far as it had progressed as of four o'clock this afternoon, when I split. It seems reasonable to assume that the Barfield woman was right about the garlic and the smell—which we mere humans can no longer detect—is slowing it down, at least in that direction. South of the janitor's closet and the mailroom, however, the corridor is well on the way to becoming a jungle path. There's Z all over the walls (it's buried the framed book jacket blow-ups down that way, which is a great relief), and large hanging bunches of green Z-leaves. It has also produced several dark blue Z-flowers, which have their own pleasant smell. Sort of like burnt wax (a smell I associate with candles in the Halloween jack-o-lanterns of my youth). Never seen flowers growing on an ivy, but what do I know about plants? The answer is not much.

  There's a window reinforced with wire mesh overlooking the airshaft, and Z has begun to overgrow this as well, all leaves (and flowers) turned out toward the sun. Herb Porter says he saw one of those leaves snatch up a fly that was crawling over a pane of that window. Madness? Undoubtedly! But: true madness or false? True, I think, which suggests some unpleasant possibilities to go with all those pleasant smells. But I don't want to deal with that this weekend.

  Where I want to go this weekend is Paramus.

  Maybe with a stop at my local OTB for good measure.

  I probably shouldn't say it, but God! This is more fun than Studio 54!

  From the journals of Riddley Walker

  4/4/81 12:35 A. M. Aboard the Silver Meteor Question: Has Riddley Pearson Walker ever in his life been so confused, so disheartened, so shaken, so downright sad?

  I don't think so.

  Has Riddley Pearson Walker ever had a worse week in the twenty-six years of his life?

  Absolutely not.

  I am aboard Amtrak's Train 36, headed back to Manhattan at least three days early. No one knows I'm coming, but then, who would care? Roger Wade? Kenton, perhaps? My landlord?

  I tried for a plane out of B'ham, but no seats available until Sunday. I could not bring myself to stay in Blackwater—or anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line—that long. Hence the train. And so, to the sound of snores all around me, and in spite of the swaying motion of the car on the rails, I write in this diary. I can't sleep. Perhaps I will be able to when I get back to Dobbs Ferry sometime this afternoon, but the afternoon seems an eternity away. I remember the narrative intro to that old TV show, The Fugitive. “Richard Kimball looks out the window and sees only darkness,” William Conrad would say each week. He went on, “But in that darkness, Fate moves its huge hand.” Will that huge hand move for me? I think not. I fear not. Unless there is fate in John Kenton's ivy, and how can fate—or Fate—reside in such a small and anonymous plant? Crazy idea. God knows what put it in my head.

  My reception in Blackwater was warm only from the McDowells—my Uncle Michael and Aunt Olympia. Sister Evelyn, sister Sophie, sister Madeline (always my favorite, which is what makes this hurt so much), and brother Floyd all cold, reserved. Until late Friday afternoon I put that down to the distractions of grief, no more. Certainly we got through the painful rituals of the burial all right. Mama Walker rests beside my father, in the town graveyard. In the black section of the town graveyard, for there the rule of segregation holds as firm as ever, not as a matter of law but due to the laws of family custom—unspoken, unwritten, but as strong as tears and love.

  Out my window I see a full moon riding serenely in the still-southern sky, a silver dollar pancake of a moon. So my Mama called it, and tonight it has gone full without her. For the first time in sixty-two years it has gone full without her. I sit here writing and feel the tears sliding down my cheeks. Oh Mama, how I weep for you! How yo littlest chile, de one dem white boys used to call little ole blueblack, how dat chile do weep! Tonight I is a Stephen Foster fiel' nigger fo sho! Yassuh! Mama in de col' col' groun'! Yes ma'am!

  Estranged from my sisters and my brother as well. Where will I be buried, I wonder? In what strange ground?

  Anyway, it came out. All the bitterness. And the hate? Was it hate I saw in their eyes? In my dear Maddy's eyes? She who used to hold my hand when we went to school, and who used to comfort me when the others teased me and called me blueblack or bluegum or L'il Heinie on account of the time in first grade when my pants fell down? I want to say no and no and no, but my heart denies that no. My heart says it was. My heart says yes and yes and yes.

  There was a family gathering at the house this afternoon, the last act of the sadly prosaic drama that began with Mama's heart attack on the 25th. Michael and Olympia were the nominal host and hostess. It began with coffee, but soon the wine was circulating in the parlor and something quite a bit stronger out on the back porch. I didn't see my brother or any of my sisters in the house, so checked the porch. Floyd was there, drinking a little glass of whiskey and “memorating” (Mama's word for reminiscence) with some of her cousins, and Orthina and Gertrude, from her book-circle (both ladies decorous but undoubtedly tiddly), and Jack Hance, Evvie's husband. No sign of Evvie herself, or Sophie, or Madeline.

  I went looking for them, worried that they might not be all right. Upstairs, from the room at the end of the hall where Mama slept alone for the last dozen years since Pop died, I finally heard their voices. There was murmuring; there was also low laughter. I went down there, my footsteps muffled by the thick hall runner, doing a little memorating myself—on Mama's bitter complaints about that thick runner and how it used to show the dirt. Yet she never changed it. How I wish she had. If they had heard me coming—just the simple sound of approaching footfalls—everything might have been different. Not in reality, of course; dislike is dislike, hate is hate, those things are at least quasi-empirical, I know. It is my illusions that I am talking about. The illusions of my family's regard, the illusions of what I myself had always believed they believed: brave Riddley, the Cornell graduate who has taken a series of menial jobs, work for the body while the mind remains free and uncluttered and able to continue work on the Great Book, a kind of fin de siecle Invisible Man. How often I have invoked the spirit of Ralph Ellison! I even dared to write him once, and received a kind, encouraging reply. It hangs framed on the wall of my apartment, over my typewriter. Whether I will be able to continue on after this is anybody's guess... and yet I think I must. Because without the book, what else is there? Why dere's de broomhandle! De can o' Johnson's flo' wax! De squeegee for de windows and de brush for de tawlits! Yassuh!

  No, there must be the book. In spite of everything, because of everything, there must be this book. In a very real sense, it's all I have left.

  All right. Enough crybaby stuff. Let's get down to it.

&nb
sp; I've already written here about the reading of my Mama's last will and testament on the day between her wake and her burial, and how Law Tidyman, her lifelong friend, allowed most of it to stand in her own words. It struck me passing strange then (although I did not put it down, being tired and grief-struck, states of remarkable similarity) that Mama would have asked Law to do it, old friend or not, rather than her own son, who is now considered one of the best lawyers of any color, at least on this side of Birmingham. Now perhaps I understand that a little bit better.

  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, 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 plunderers, 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 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 archeologist. 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 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 keepsakes 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 seance? 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 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 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.