Plantation

by Dorothea Benton Frank

  “Jesus Christ! What are you telling me?” Gambling? We’d get to Frances Mae in a moment, but gambling? My brother, the hot-shit lawyer, a gambler?

  “You know the poker machines at the gas stations?”

  “No. I mean, it’s not something I would notice.”

  “Yeah, well, I never noticed that I had this addictive personality either. First, it was football. Hell, everybody bets on football.”

  Not in my world, but that wasn’t the time to point that out.

  “You couldn’t stop, right?”

  “Right. Some weekends I’d win thirty thousand dollars! I mean, it’s a great feeling! You know?”

  “I think that’s what junkies say, Trip.”

  “Thanks, Caroline. Thanks a lot!”

  “Hey, stupid! Somehow I’m gonna help you figure this out, okay? But don’t expect my approval. Now, about Frances Mae . . .”

  “Yeah, Frances Mae. Okay—consider my options. A gal like Rusty Perretti—gorgeous, sexy, smart as a whip, cultured . . .”

  I reached out and put my hand on his arm and said, “Trip? God forgive me for this, as much as I hate infidelity and believe it’s sleazy, I don’t think there’s anyone on earth who would blame you. Whatever you decide to do, I’ll support you. But don’t run around on Frances Mae indefinitely. It’s gross and Rusty’s too nice a gal to drag her into some triangle deal, you know?”

  “You’re right, but it seems that I’m already addicted to Rusty.”

  “Give it a rest, bubba. Frances Mae catches you? She’ll clean your clock.”

  Thirty-six

  Holy Moly

  TRIP and I rode the river for almost an hour before returning home to drop me off at the dock. He all but chewed the ears off the side of my head with the details of his situation before bringing me back.

  I had decided to work in the garden before it got too hot. I could think things through when I worked in a garden. While I walked to Mr. Jenkins’s toolshed, I couldn’t take my mind from Trip’s situation. He was in damn serious trouble. He told me that he had used the interest from his portfolio at first, then the principal to cover his debts. Wisely, he had not fully apprised Frances Mae of this. I didn’t blame him for that. He was broke and half a million in the hole. He didn’t need her hysterics on top of his debt. He needed a solution. One thing we were in agreement on was that a solution wouldn’t come from Frances Mae. And I thought I had problems?

  From the neatly lined shelves of garden supplies, I grabbed a pair of gloves, a paper bag for cuttings, a water bucket for cut blooms, and a pair of clippers and walked across the damp grass to Mother’s rose garden. The bushes were filled with buds. I started pinching them off with a fury and tried to think Trip’s problem through. He didn’t have a lot of choices.

  Apparently the fellows who ran the receivables department for the organization that collected debt and paid winnings were a humorless but diversified lot. Their other businesses were drugs and murder. They had been prudent to cut him off from sporting events. If he couldn’t come up with fifty thousand dollars in one week, they said they were going to hurt him. Not good. I had to help him.

  Even if I had five hundred thousand dollars to give him, which I didn’t, would it really solve his problem? No, it would not, I decided. This was larger than my resources and frightening. Damn frightening. I’ll think of something, I’d said to him when I jumped off the boat. This was not going away—it had to be solved. Fast.

  I must have removed a hundred buds and cut fifty flowers to take into the house before I was aware that someone was standing behind me, watching. I turned to see Millie, standing under a live oak. What was she doing?

  “Millie!” I called out to her. “Good morning!”

  She started toward me and when she reached my side, she said, “You tell me. Is it a good morning?” She stared at me with eyes that held a thousand years of worry. “You want to tell me?”

  Although I doubted she would have anything in her repertoire to solve this and even though I had sworn silence to Trip, I took a deep breath and told her everything I knew. She would have seen it in her tea leaves anyway. And, she was outraged.

  “What kind of crazy damn fool is my boy messing with? Gambling? I got a mind to beat his behind! Switch him till he can’t sit!” Millie paced back and forth, muttering to herself. “Lord, don’t he know he got children to raise? And that Frances Mae, all right, she ain’t no kinda nothing but a canker sore to live with, but he took an oath before God and that ain’t for him to rearrange when the mood strike! This ain’t no good. No good a-tall. Can’t let the Ajogun have my boy. No way. No how.”

  The Ajogun were the evil spirits who sought to destroy humans.

  “Millie? I’m scared for him.” My chin started to tremble and she looked at me, shaking her head.

  “Come on with me,” she said. “Yanh, let’s clean up this mess. Hang on to your tears, girl. Save ’em for later.”

  Millie and I began to gather the cuttings from the ground and tossed them in the paper bag. When we were done, I followed her back to her cottage. I dropped my things on her front porch, peeling off my gloves and knocking the dirt from them on her banister, watching it drift to her flower beds below.

  “Get in yanh, Caroline!”

  When Millie said get I got.

  Before my eyes even adjusted to the low light of the room, I saw that her altar door was open. Millie wasn’t there but came in minutes, dressed in a white caftan with a red sash around her waist, carrying bowls of herbs. She was going to pray. When Millie prayed, she got answers.

  She began her ritual, lighting candles, shaking gourds, performing a genuflect on the right hip and left elbow and then one on the other side. Between incantations, her jaw was locked in a vise. Her pupils, visible under her half-closed eyes, fluttered, rose, and fell as she swayed in prayer. She was on her knees, arms outspread and going into trance. I hadn’t seen her in trance since I was a little girl and my father died. Maybe she did it all the time. I didn’t know. I just hung back and watched. Her urgency and the depth of her concentration held my rapt attention. A few minutes more passed and she mumbled something incoherent. Finally, she sat back on her heels and dropped her arms. The trance was over.

  It took noticeable effort for her to get up; she extinguished the candles and when she closed the door, she spoke to me. “Gone root your brother for protection and gone send the hag to them men.” She was as solemn as I had ever seen her. “Go on back to the house. When he gets off the river, send him to me. This ain’t the time for no fish and fool. Better he make time for his breath.”

  “You’re worried, aren’t you?” I said.

  “You ain’t? Now, go on and leave me to work. I could use some help but you don’t know enough yet to fill a thimble.”

  I felt a heaviness in my throat, one that blocked my words of apology for being so useless to her. Useless to my brother too. What could I do?

  I worried about Trip as I walked home. What could I do? I could start by taking the roses to Mother and by making breakfast for Eric. Daily needs still had to be met. Jesus Christ in all His heaven! If they snuffed out Trip, the family would have to help Frances Mae raise those kids! That meant me! “Get hold of yourself, Caroline,” I said out loud. And think of an answer.

  I wanted to tell Mother. So much for my oath of silence to Trip. Maybe Mother would read my thoughts about Trip and then I wouldn’t have to tell her anything. Maybe she’d become Sylvia Brown overnight. I doubted it.

  When I opened the back door, there was Eric eating toast, drinking juice, and watching cartoons on the television. It was ten o’clock.

  “Hey, sweetheart!” I said, and went over to kiss the top of his head. “Did you get enough breakfast?”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah! When I saw Uncle Trip’s SUV, I just helped myself. I figured you were out on the boat with him.”

  “Thanks, honey,” I said, and put the pail of roses in the sink. “Is your grandmother up?”

&nbs
p; “Not so far,” he said, and laughed, fully engrossed by the antics of the cartoon characters. “Mom, watch this!”

  I put the roses in a vase and said, “Can’t, honey. Don’t sit so close—you’ll ruin your eyes.” He ignored me. “I’m gonna take these up to Mother. I’ll be right back.”

  Just as in New York, he could not have cared less. All the way up the steps I thought of how natural our transition had been from New York to South Carolina.

  Now this horrible and dangerous business with Trip had been discovered. Well, there had been that regrettable showdown with Frances Mae, but that paled in the light of Trip’s problem. We would figure it out. Millie and I together. Somehow. Maybe Mother too.

  I opened Mother’s door and she was up and in her dressing room. I put the roses on her chest of drawers.

  “Who’s that?” she called from the other room.

  “The Morals Committee, coming to discuss your most recent conquest!” I called back.

  She came through the dressing room into her bedroom, smiling like a twenty-year-old sorority sister who’d just been pinned.

  “Good morning, Mother! she meant to say! Oh, roses! Thank you, dear! Is everyone up?”

  She picked up the vase and turned to go back to her dressing room. There was a black mark on her back, above the line of her slip, between her shoulder blades.

  “Mother! What’s that? On your back?”

  She didn’t stop but called to me over her shoulder.

  “Nothing! Nothing at all but a pesky little mole!”

  I knew it was more than a pesky little mole from across the room. I followed her to her bathroom, where she stood applying makeup under the Hollywood lights that surrounded the large mirror.

  “Mother? Have you had anyone look at that?”

  It was mean-looking and festering, as though she had broken the skin several times.

  “Oh, Caroline, don’t bother about that. When you’re my age, you have things growing on your body you wouldn’t believe, and certainly not discuss! Have you had breakfast? Tell me what you think of Dr. Greer!”

  “Yes, I’ve had breakfast, I think you should not fool around with Eric’s tutors, and I am definitely concerned about this growth on your back! Stand still, Mother, let me have a look at this.”

  The growth was about the size of an irregular quarter, reddish black with small spike-shaped feelers protruding from its edges like a weed that travels as ground cover. I was no doctor, but it looked like all the warnings I had seen for melanoma.

  “Will you quit fussing so? I had the darn thing cut off last year and don’t you know it grew back? Pain in the neck if you ask me, yanh?”

  “Just the same, if this were my back, I’d have it looked at.”

  First Trip, and now this. I was unsure of what to say. Just like Tall Pines wasn’t mine to sell, Mother’s back wasn’t mine either. She pulled her robe—pale aqua, satin finish, appliqued with rose-colored flowers—around her, blustering her discontent with me for being so nosy.

  “I don’t know what’s come over young people today! They think they can say something about anything that pops into their mind! In my day, my mother would have pitched a fit.”

  Still, I was very concerned about it and decided to take some initiative.

  “Mother? You are pitching a fit. However, that thing is coming off as soon as I can make an appointment for you with a good skin specialist. Who’s the jerk who removed it the first time?”

  “A very handsome doctor—tall and dark with the most beautiful eyes!” She squirted hand cream into her palm and began to spread it on her arms. “Want a shot of this? Magnolia! Smells divine!”

  “No, that’s okay.” Mother arched her eyebrow at me. “Thanks anyway,” I said, to preserve the peace. I decided to change the topic to Trip and fish around to see what she knew. “Have you noticed anything unusual about Trip lately?”

  She went to her shoe closet and pulled out the shelf of flats. God, she was so organized. That shoe closet was brilliant! “Mother? Who designed this closet?” It was off the topic, but I didn’t know why I had never thought of using something like this in the scores of closets I had designed.

  “Why, I did! Don’t you remember? Your father always said I should have been a decorator.” She looked at me and smiled. “Like you, Caroline! Who do you think you got all that good taste from anyway, girl?”

  It was the emotional equivalent of a small water balloon being dropped on your head from a window above. I had inherited Mother’s appreciation of space and her eye for design. I’ll be damned.

  “From you, right?” I had to smile with her.

  Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I was overwhelmed with a desire to hug her. And, I did. We stood there for a minute, just hugging each other—the same size, the same blood, the same likes and dislikes, the same crazy taste in men, and I had never realized it. Tears of regret spilled over and streamed down my face. I had a lot of making up to do with my mother and I was going to do it. When we finally pulled apart from each other, I saw that she had cried with me. For women who rarely wept, the tears were flowing too easily these days.

  “Here, blow your nose,” she said, in her characteristic way of half chiding us for being emotional. “You asked about Trip? I’m extremely worried about your brother, Caroline. My heart is so heavy with worry and I don’t know what to do!” She sank to the end of her chaise and dropped her hands in her lap, looking to me for answers. “Is there something going on I don’t know about?”

  “I’m sworn to secrecy,” I said, halfheartedly.

  “Bull poop! You tell me! I am still the mother of this family! I have a right to know if there’s trouble!”

  Bull poop was as close to a curse as had ever crossed her lips, at least in front of me.

  “Okay, he’s got money trouble.”

  “Well, that explains something at least!”

  I decided I could learn more by saying nothing—a technique I learned from good old Richard. I sat on the end of her bed and waited.

  “That boy has been bleeding me dry. He must owe me a hundred thousand dollars! Is it Frances Mae’s family? Is it drugs? What’s going on, Caroline?”

  “He’s a gambler, and not a lucky one.” There. It was out.

  “How unlucky is he?”

  Mother seemed amazingly calm, so I decided to divulge the facts.

  When I told her the entire story, she clasped her hand to her heart and yelled, “Great God!”

  “Mother, please don’t get upset! It won’t help solve this one bit!”

  “He was going to throw me out in the street and sell my family’s land to cover his gambling debt? What kind of a hooligan have I raised? Your father would have him horsewhipped!”

  “Mother! Calm down! Gambling is an addiction! It’s an illness! He needs help!”

  Mother began to pace the room, thinking out loud. “We’ve got to put a stop to this.”

  “His creditors have already done that and fortunately our good governor happens to be having all the poker machines removed from the state on July first. Obviously, Trip needs to join some group for gamblers and get some one-on-one help too.”

  “Call Richard, Caroline. He’ll know what to do. Call him right this minute! Use my phone—it’s right there!” She raised her chin in the direction of her end table, as Mother never points.

  I flopped back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. I’d rather have had to call Beelzebub himself. I got up and looked at her. “Let me give this some thought for a bit. Go see Millie. She’s working her roots.”

  As I closed her bedroom door, I heard her call out, “Don’t tell me what to do! I’m still your mother!”

  It called to mind that sign that reads: THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES. She meant well and I knew it.

  I had betrayed Trip’s confidence, but I realized that keeping it would mean possible death, as in finito, at the hands of thugs! Between Richard, Trip, and Mother’s neglect of that mo
le, my daddy must be flipping out in his grave.

  Thirty-seven

  True Colors

  I called Miss Sweetie as soon as I left Mother’s room. I asked her to find out the name of the best dermatologist and plastic surgeon in Charleston. It took two minutes for her to call me back.

  “You want Jack Taylor. He’s the head of dermatology at the Medical University. If she needs a plastic surgeon, tell her to go to David Oliver in Savannah. He’s the only one I’d trust my skin to! Not that I’ve had anything done, of course.”

  Just her eyes, chin, breasts, armpits, ears, forehead, and whatever else she could think of. She and Miss Nancy nipped and tucked on an annual basis. They were the Co-chairs of the Quilt Club.

  “Of course. David Oliver?” I was writing as fast as I could.

  “Yes, Oliver. Actually, he’s an ENT, but a genius. No bargain, but an exquisite talent. Caroline? I’ve told Lavinia time and time again to wear a long-sleeved shirt when she gardens, but you can’t tell her a thing! Has to wear those tank tops to get herself all tanned and for what? This?”

  “I know, Miss Sweetie, I know. I’ll call you just as soon as we’ve seen a doctor. Say a little prayer for Mother, will you? And would you call Miss Nancy?”

  She said of course, she would pray like crazy, and we hung up. It would be Monday before we could see Dr. Taylor. I felt a growing urgency inside my heart.

  I walked right out the front door, headed for Millie’s cottage. Something made me stop at the bottom of the steps and look down the avenue of live oaks, toward the road. I saw my past in a flood of comings and goings under their umbrella of shade—driving fast, whirling a trail of dust, in the soaking rain with mud splattering our car, going to school, coming home from a date, leaving to return to New York, the day the men came for Daddy’s body. Like a movie in my head, I could see my great-grandmother, twelve years old—Olivia—planting the thirty-odd live oaks with her mother, Elizabeth Bootle Kent, right after the Civil War. That every generation of my family in America had enjoyed their shelter. It was a moment of pause and reflection, striking me in a place I could not name because it brought confusion to what I wanted to believe rather than what I knew to be true. I fought to hold back the thoughts, but the thoughts came at me full force—the recognition that these were not merely Mother’s trees or the road of my ancestors, but that it was my path to home. My home. Where I had every right to be.