Plantation

by Dorothea Benton Frank

  Mother came in the room with a glass of juice for me.

  “Well, Caroline, you must say that you got your money’s worth out of your plane ticket.” She leaned against the dresser, smiling victorious.

  “You could sure say that.” I stopped folding and packing and took the glass, draining it in one long gulp. “Thanks. I needed something to drink. You look nice.” I put the glass down on the end table. Mother was wearing a pale blue wool crepe suit with matching pumps. She smelled like gardenias.

  “Don’t do that. You’ll make a ring.”

  “Sorry,” I said, and quickly put a tissue under it even though it was dry as a bone. Once a mother, always a mother, ran through my brain. In the next moment, a swell of emotions filled me and I felt myself choking up. “Mother?” She was looking at pictures of all of us that decorated the dresser in little silver frames.

  “Hmm?”

  “I don’t know, I just . . .” I couldn’t help it. I started to cry.

  “Caroline! What is it? What’s the matter? Come here, child!” She came and put her arm around me! I was so surprised by that, I wept and wept. We sat on the end of my bed. “Whatever has happened?”

  “Nothing! Everything!”

  I cried the tears of a thousand years of holding back, of denial, of feeling unloved, out of place, out of sync, of things I couldn’t identify. I stretched out across the bed and she rubbed my back until finally I got a hold of myself. The next thing I knew, Millie was in the bedroom doorway.

  “You been gone too long, girl, that’s what’s the matter with you,” Millie said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “you know, we might be a screwed-up family, but we are still a family. And I do love y’all. Except Frances Mae. Mother, am I required to love Frances Mae?”

  Unknown to me, Mother had cried silently with me. I hadn’t seen her eyes wet since my father died. But my question made her smile and even laugh a little. “No, Caroline, you don’t have to love Frances Mae and neither do I. She is—what is it the young people say? Ah, yes, pond scum!”

  “Mother! Pond scum? Oh, my God!”

  “Now, let’s dry our eyes and go to church and pray for forgiveness for the wretched things we say about her.” She stood up, took the tissue box from the dresser, and offered it to me.

  I took one, wiped my eyes, another to blow my nose, and almost laughed. “Mother? This is all highly unusual, you know. I know how you feel about church and religion.”

  “Wait till you lay eyes on the reverend!” Millie said. “I hear tell he looks like one of them fellows on Baywatch!”

  I turned to Mother, who was reapplying her lipstick, gauging the depth of her lascivious grin.

  “He’s hot, all right. Who knows? Perhaps I’ll find religion.”

  “That’s how we know she’s old,” Millie said in a whisper to me, “getting worried about Judgment Day.”

  “What’s that, you old fool?” Mother said.

  “She said you want to take him down to the river for a baptism,” I said, giggling.

  “All right, you two. That’s sufficient! What time is your plane, Caroline?”

  “Six this afternoon,” I said.

  “Well, wonderful! Perhaps we can squeeze in a round of clays after all!” She stopped and looked at me. “Brush your hair, darling. You look frightful! I’ll be downstairs waiting for you.”

  When she left the room, Millie turned to me and said in a whisper, “I think this one’s over fifty.”

  “Well, thank God for that.”

  In my opinion, the reverend in question was no more than a peacock. Every widow in the congregation had shortened her skirts for him. I sat in the back row with Mother, Miss Sweetie, and Miss Nancy, listening to and watching them remark in gestures and giggles about his various attributes. His sermon about sins of the flesh couldn’t have been any more useless than it was on those three. No, they clucked like schoolgirls and preened like bathing beauties. After church, in the yard, I was introduced to him by Miss Sweetie, who dragged me to his side.

  “Reverend Moore? I’d like to introduce you to Caroline Wimbley, Lavinia’s daughter from New York City!”

  I reached out to shake his hand. “Levine,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you, Reverend. Great sermon.”

  “Thanks. Please call me Charles. Did you say Levine?” he said, raising his chin to look down at me. “I’ll bet there’s a story there!” He smiled at me and I glared at him. Just what in the hell did that mean? Stupid ass.

  “I’m sorry, that didn’t come out right. I meant that you were living in New York! It must be wonderful and filled with exciting adventures.”

  In his defense, he flushed a deep scarlet with embarrassment at sounding anti-Semitic. Suddenly, Mother was at my side.

  “Won’t you join us for brunch, Reverend?” Mother said.

  “Oh, I would love to, Miss Lavinia, but I’m afraid I’m already committed. Another time. How long are you staying, Caroline?”

  There was no mistaking the look in his eyes. Boy, was he barking up the wrong tree.

  “I’m leaving this afternoon,” I said, adding, “Charles.”

  “And you’ll be back soon, I hope?” he asked, much in the same tone the Big Bad Wolf would have used on Red Riding Hood.

  “Yes,” I said, hurling him the practiced New Yorker eye that said, You must be kidding yourself!

  “Come along, Caroline! We’ve taken enough of his time. Another time, Charles—we’ll call in advance.”

  We said our good-byes and all the way home Mother went on and on about the reverend’s obvious attraction to me. She didn’t like it one little bit.

  “He liked you, Caroline. Did you see the way he stared at you?”

  “He’s too old for me, Mother—and too young for you! Plus, he’s an ass! Plus, I’m married!”

  “I know, but I’ll bet he’s hot in the sack!”

  “Jesus! I’ll bet they ran him out of his last church for chasing skirts!”

  When we got home, Trip’s car was there.

  “How was church?” he asked as we pulled up to the front of the house in my rental car.

  “I’m never stepping foot in there again!” Mother announced as she hopped out to offer her cheek to Trip for a kiss.

  “Why not?” he said.

  I slammed the door and came around to join them, laughing to myself.

  “Because that minister’s a philandering pedophile!” Mother said as she flounced up the steps and into the house.

  Trip stared at me for a translation.

  “Flirted with me, not her,” I said, deadpan.

  “Ah!” he said and burst out in a great laugh.

  We stood out there guffawing and punching each other for a few minutes until Mother reappeared.

  “There’s not one damn thing funny about it either!” she said from the front door. “Come on in and let’s have Bloody Marys and omelets! Caroline has to leave by four!”

  Her announcement caused another round of laughter. Finally, Mother laughed too.

  “He’s a skunk,” she said, “now, for the love of God, Trip, mix the drinks!”

  He limited the vodka to a mere dash across the top of the glass. I took mine into the kitchen to help Millie.

  “Mother says we have to shake a leg, so I came to help you.”

  “Your mother’s always saying something. If she doesn’t like the way I’m doing things, she can cook it herself! Now, how about that minister?”

  “Major loser,” I said.

  “Go set the table, girl, and I’ll have this out in two shakes.”

  I set the table with Mother’s Herend china, the Victoria pattern, my favorite. We ate our meal in a hurry because we all wanted to get outside. During lunch, Mother and I inquired about Frances Mae.

  “She okay?” I said.

  “Yeah, seems so,” Trip said.

  “Good,” Mother said.

  I didn’t say we belabored the issue of Frances Mae’s welfare, I said we inquired.
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br />   Millie was in the kitchen when I brought in the plates and silver.

  “Great brunch, Millie. Thanks. Trip says Frances Mae’s okay. What do you think?”

  “You’re welcome. That all depends,” she said, giving me a look that spelled out the arbitrary nature of Frances Mae.

  “On what?”

  “Yesterday, I made her some comfrey tea. That should have calmed her down. But that woman got it in her mind that you try and hurt her and that’s all.” Millie stood with her arms crossed across her waist, shaking her head. “She has a sickness of the spirit, Caroline, something like evil. They say the devil protects his own, but he sure enough let her fall in the water.”

  “Millie, I don’t want to take the blame if she has early labor. I did not try to hurt her. She backed away from me when I went to her to try and find a solution to our troubles with each other. She tripped over the bucket and fell. Here, look what she did to my arm. God, Millie, you know me! I would never do anything like that!”

  Millie examined the scratches on my arm and sucked her teeth.

  “Caroline? You got trouble, yanh?”

  “Millie! I didn’t—”

  “No, chile, that ain’t the trouble. The trouble is you don’t know where you belong. Nobody yanh knows your boy. People love bad talk. They love to say something bad about you when you seem so lucky.”

  “Ah, come on, Millie.”

  “Girl? You done gone on and become a fool? You was born with a silver spoon, no, a gold spoon and that’s a curse! People gone hate you and don’t even know you. So they gone hate your boy or try to hurt you through him. Frances Mae’s spirit is eaten alive with jealousy, like a cancer working on her every waking minute.”

  “How am I supposed to deal with that, Millie?”

  “Be your daddy’s daughter and claim your rightful place. Show your mother who you are. Better yet, show yourself who you are!”

  “What in the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Don’t you cuss at me, girl, or I’ll spank your bottom! You ain’t too old to turn you over my knee!” Millie’s eyes flashed.

  I said, “Sorry, Millie, but just what would you do?”

  “I think I’d take a long look in the mirror, and think about the woman you want to be. Not the one you are today, but who you intend to become. Then, I’d bring my boy down yanh as much as I could. Children can help grown-ups heal, you know? Yes, they can. I think I’d be taking stock of my whole life, Caroline.”

  She looked at me as if she knew everything, all my fears and doubts about Eric, my insecurities with Richard, my avoidance of questioning the direction of my life.

  “Well, you’re probably right, but looking too close is also a loaded weapon, Millie. You taught me that.”

  “Yes, it is. But wasting time is a sin. You can live your life like an ostrich in the sand, but I don’t recommend it. No, I don’t.”

  “Maybe I should call Frances Mae.”

  “Leave her be and go find your brother.” She raised her eyebrows to me.

  Suspicious? Of what? Ah! I saw! Without Millie telling me anything in words, she was suspicious that I had only chinked the iceberg. Good Lord, I thought, how much more could I take?

  It was one o’clock. Mother and Trip and I were dressed and ready to go out on the courses. Well, actually, Mother and Trip were. They both wore the classic Lowcountry shoot-a-gun ensemble—olive trousers, cotton turtlenecks, and hunting vests. Twins except that Mother had wrapped an Hermès scarf around her neck. I had on jeans and a chambray shirt. We walked over to the barn and stables together. This would be the first time I’d shot a gun in years.

  When Mother opened the door of the hunt room, it sent me tumbling back in time. I stepped inside the tiny room and looked around in amazement. The walls were a virtual gallery of framed photographs from years ago. Me on my first horse, holding a trophy I had won at a show, grinning with no front teeth. Pictures of Trip, me, Mother, and Daddy, all of us decked out in English gear and other pictures of us dressed in Western. Strings of ribbons, cracked with age, stretched across the paneling above the pictures. My paint-by-number renditions of Flicka and Black Beauty were still there, hanging next to each other by the door. The old couch had the same upholstery it had when I was a girl and used to nap there under an afghan while Daddy worked at the desk on the opposite wall. Sometimes, he would be reading the latest issue of Field & Stream and I would fall asleep. Another memorial to our past. It pulled my heart and a sentimental sweetness consumed me.

  “Caroline? Go say hello to Jenkins. He’s probably in the tack room.”

  “Of course! I can’t wait to see him!”

  Trip looked sheepish. Mother and I shot him a look with the psychic message that he was still a big dumb ass to even think that Mother would sleep with Jenkins.

  “Honey, he’s as spry as ever! Just last week he was out spraying all the fescue for mold. Week before that he was planting sorghum like a madman.”

  When Mother starting talking fescue and sorghum, she became Miss Lavinia. She was in her milieu when she got around the barn, possessed with a heightened vitality. Maybe because she felt Daddy’s spirit lurking in the shadows. God knows, I did.

  Their last project had been to convert the old rice fields into eighteen rounds for sporting clays and bird hunting. They had adored going out there with friends to whoop it up. Maybe she thought that riding the buggy with her girlfriends paid tribute to Daddy in some way.

  I had to admit it, Buddhism aside, shooting sporting clays was a lot of fun. Skeet was for sissies. I mean, you stood in one spot, yelled Pull!—and the pull boy would release a clay disc into the air from either the left or the right. You would aim your gun slightly ahead of the arc of the bird and fire. Pull! Pow! Crack! Big deal. Now, trap was a lot more interesting because the clay birds flew away from you just like real birds would—a much greater challenge overall.

  But sporting clays was the ultimate of all nonkilling sports that required a gun. The rice fields had now become a golf course of sorts. Instead of eighteen holes, it had eighteen rounds. Each round was designed for either trap or skeet, but the fun of it was that you were never sure where the trap house was, and Jenkins moved them from time to time so that even Mother was surprised.

  In between the rounds were areas planted with specific plants to attract quail and turkeys. Quail nest on the ground in sorghum and bicolored hespediga, whose pink blossoms held seeds that quail love. The problem was that the deer loved it too, so there was this constant battle to keep them out.

  I opened the door to the tack room and the perfume of leather and saddle soap hit me full force. It was a drug. Jenkins wasn’t there, so I went through to the barn. Old Jenkins had fitted out the quail buggy with a pair of mares and was just waiting like always for someone to arrive and say how great that was. And, it was.

  He stood there with his back to me. White hair, slightly stooped, wearing the same type khaki pants and shirt he had worn all my life. Starched and pressed. No one would mistake Mr. Jenkins for anything less than a gentleman.

  “Mr. Jenkins!” I said. “How are you?” My heart filled to overflowing, remembering episodes with him from when I was a child.

  “Better now that I see you, Miss Caroline, better now.”

  “How are my pecan trees doing?”

  “Chile? We got more nuts ’round yanh than we know what to do with!” He smiled wide, revealing his strong teeth, and his dark eyes twinkled with merriment.

  “You mean my sister-in-law and her brood or the actual fruit of the pecan trees?”

  He laughed now, and picked up the reins to lead the horses and buggy outside.

  “Yeah, good to see you, Miss Caroline! You bring some life with you!”

  Jenkins helped Mother and me onto the buggy and then climbed into the driver’s seat with Trip. We were all settled on the red leather benches and soon we were on our way out to the first round. When we arrived minutes later, Trip jumped off and offered me a
twenty-eight gauge, over- and underbarreled shotgun. “This will save your shoulder,” he said.

  “Hang on, Hoss, you got a twelve-gauge!” I said. “An unfair advantage, suh!” The smaller the barrel, the smaller the shot, the harder it was to hit the target. I hadn’t forgotten everything. “Bubba? Lemme remind you that a ding is as good as a kill!”

  “She is slick!” Trip said.

  “Worry about your own shoulder,” Mother said, and jumped off the buggy like a teenager at the first stand. “I go first. Rank has its privileges.”

  “Is the target sequence marked?” I asked.

  “Hell no, that would take all the fun out of it. Jenkins mixed them up between dove, quail, pheasant, and even rabbit. You never know what’s coming!” Trip said this, clearly getting excited himself at the prospect of killing clay. Man, he had some serious aggression issues to work through.

  “Be quiet, you two! I’m trying to concentrate!” Mother said.

  We stood back and waited. Mother took her first shot at the clay disc, which released from her left, and shattered it. She shot four more, one overhead, two from the right, and one low one. Five for five.

  “As you can see, son, if I had wanted to blow your brains out last week, I could have. Your mother is still a crack shot!”

  “Somehow, I don’t feel all that much better,” he said. Trip took his turn. He got three of five. “Damn. Sorry, Mother.”

  “It’s all right, I’d say damn too if three out of five was the best I could do,” Mother said.

  I stepped up to the stand and held my breath, fixing my aim through the sight. I got two out of five. “Tell me again why we’re doing this?” I said.

  “Tradition, Caroline, it’s what we always do,” Mother said.

  I wasn’t sure I liked this particular tradition, but I was positive I understood the value of ritual. Everybody was entitled to a space of their own in which they could shine. This was Mother’s and she had proved her point well.

  “Yalk! Yalk! Yalk!” Trip said, making a turkey call as we walked back toward the buggy.

  “Give it up, bubba, even I know you can’t shoot turkey until April first.”