Love and Lament Page 16

  “It’s a special homemade tea I got from the Dorsetts.” She glanced at the random pile of books.

  “It doesn’t taste like much,” he said. “I don’t care for it, but I’ll drink it since you made it.”

  “I wish you would, Daddy. It’s good for all kinds of ailments.”

  He sipped at the brew. “Well, I don’t see where it’ll hurt.” He looked out the window again. “That new horse is a funny one. She just stands there watching me like she wants something.”

  Mary Bet got up so she could see from his angle. The horse, a brindle-gray mare, was busily grazing in the near paddock, where she’d been most of the day. “Lila? I don’t think she can see in here, Daddy. Why would she do that?”

  “That’s what I want to know. Why would a horse stand there a-watching me like that? Sometimes I’ll go out there and talk to her, and she pricks her ears up like she’s paying attention to every word.”

  “What do you say to her?” Mary Bet asked, wondering if this was the sort of behavior she should be asking Dr. Slocum about.

  “Well, sometimes I tell her about Susan Elizabeth, and how she would’ve appreciated her. She liked that brindle color on a horse.”

  Mary Bet thought perhaps she should remember to write down what her father was saying. For one thing, he never referred to her mother by her Christian name; it was always “your mother.” But lately he’d slipped sometimes and called her “my wife” or “Susan Elizabeth.”

  “She once told me something that stuck with me.”

  “The horse?”

  “No,” he said, with a little laugh, “though I wouldn’t be surprised. No, your mother told me, long about the time you were born, that marriage was like an old coat that never quite fit right, but she was determined now to wear it anyway. There were places that would never soften, but it was hers.” He opened his hands and looked at them. “I expect she meant marriage in general, since she was only ever married to me. And then our boy died, and then Annie and Willie, the twins. But it was Ila that killed her, I think. She loved Ila more than anything—everybody did.”

  Mary Bet nodded, but she was thinking how little she had known Ila, except near the end. It was Myrtle Emma whom she had loved the most, and before her, Annie. But to her parents the younger children must’ve seemed almost like a second family.

  “I kept having a dream after Ila died. I was back with my outfit, and I had both of my legs. We were marching along some high ridge somewhere, with blue hills rolling off to either side. And that ridge kept getting narrower and narrower, both slopes just falling away. All you could do was keep moving forward.”

  He finished his tea, and said it wasn’t bad once you got used to it. She started bringing him a cup every day, and she thought she did see an improvement in his mood. Once she came in and found him laughing at something he was reading. They sat drinking the concoction—both of them, for she thought him more likely to keep drinking it if she joined him—and talking, as had become their late afternoon routine.

  One day he told her that Mrs. Edwards had taken a fancy to him, which piqued Mary Bet’s interest because she’d heard nothing about it from Clara. Mrs. Edwards had been dropping by the store of late, buying things she couldn’t need and sometimes bringing little gifts. “I expect she’s lonely and wants somebody to pay her court,” Cicero said, “but I told her the ladies I’m interested in are too young to be interested in me.”

  “You did no such thing, Daddy.”

  “Ask Thad Utley if I didn’t. I told her I was interested in creating something new, and that did the trick. She was slam gone.”

  “What did you mean?”

  “There’s something I want to do.”

  “Oh?”

  “I thought I might put a new fruit tree out in the orchard.”

  “Good, Daddy,” she said. “We don’t have but one good apple tree left, and one plum.”

  “Yes, but I’m not thinking about apple or plum trees. I want to put a banana tree out there.”

  “Banana tree?”

  “Yes, I like to eat them, about as much as any fruit, and you can’t get them around here, unless you order them special. Then half the time they’re rotten, and you still have to pay three times as much as you would for the same amount of apples. But, you see, if we had our own tree … And for the cold weather, I’d build a little glasshouse over it, a greenhouse.”

  “For one tree?”

  He chuckled, picturing it. “Maybe I’d put three or four in there. And we’d have all the bananas we could eat, and I’d sell the rest at the store. Make myself rich enough to travel anywhere I want, you too.”

  “Is there somewhere you want to visit, Daddy?”

  His brow suddenly furrowed and he smacked a fist into his open book. “By God, child, you’re missing the point.”

  She sat back as if struck. He had no right nor cause to talk to her that way. She’d only asked him where he wanted to go—the fact that he’d taken it as a way of getting at the root of an outlandish idea made her even more upset. He wasn’t as crazy as he seemed—very well then, he could do whatever mad thing he wanted. She could see him watching her, adjusting his tone to fit her reaction.

  “What I mean to say,” he said, rubbing his beard between a thumb and two fingers and pretending to be lost in thought, “what I mean is that the money is not what interests me. It’s the idea. Growing a tropical fruit here—I know it could be done. It just takes somebody to do it. Why not me? Then if we were successful—why, we could do just as we pleased. You can’t make it rich by tending a store.”

  “We have plenty,” Mary Bet said. “All we need.” Cicero laughed at this, his whole face relaxed now that he could see it was not his idea that was being challenged.

  Mary Bet wanted him to know that she was happy for his enthusiasm, as long as he didn’t expect her to devote herself to his project. “Daddy, I know you can do whatever you want.” He’d kept his store when others failed during the panic; twice he’d been elected president of the Columbus Lodge; he’d represented Hartsoe City at the Confederate Monument unveiling. And she was sure there were other things she didn’t even know about. But what came to her mind was Grandpa Samuel and his broken waterwheel, lying on its side in the grass and weeds.

  “You’re right about that, baby girl,” he said. And the way he said it, straightening himself a little as he did, his wise old confident voice, coming from that shaggy buffalo head, now gray, made her believe him.

  When the weather was warm, he sent off to the United Fruit Company in Boston for six dwarf Cavendish suckers. It seemed crazy to him that the plants had to go all the way from Honduras up to Boston before coming down to North Carolina, but headquarters was the only port where the company was willing to consider transacting this kind of business. It took him five letters to convince the sales department that he really did want the underground stems of the plants and to negotiate a price. He was certain that the back-and-forth had to do with the company’s fear of competition—they’d never had such a request from North Carolina, a fact that made him proud. To convince the company he was not cutting into their market, he said he was only interested in conducting some experiments with the local soil; any resulting fruit was for his family’s consumption. “How do you know they won’t send you something that’ll die before it gets here?” Robert Gray asked him down at the store one day.

  “That’s a risk I’ll have to take,” he said. “Besides, the United Fruit Company would never do a thing like that.”

  “Maybe not,” Robert said, “but they could say the plants were healthy when they sent them.”

  Thad Utley grinned through tobacco-stained teeth and said, “You can always feed them bananas to the hogs if they don’t turn out good. That’s what I do with my peaches.” He leaned forward to spit, nearly turning his tilted chair out from under him.

  “I’ll take it under advisement,” Cicero said. “You boys just wait till I’m rich and famous. You’ll be lining up t
o join my company. I might let you pick a bunch or two.”

  The suckers arrived as scheduled at the train station, packed in two wooden crates the size of big coffins. Cicero and the four Negroes he’d hired unloaded the crates onto two luggage carts, the stationmaster attending the process with great concern. Bystanders looked on with amusement. “Why, he’s lost his mind, same as his father,” was one comment. “No, he just likes bananas.”

  Cicero was too busy to notice. “Watch how you make that turn now,” he said. “The whole thing’s liable to topple.”

  “I didn’t think bananas could weigh so much,” the stationmaster said.

  “It’s the soil,” Cicero replied.

  “Well, as long as you don’t spill it all over my station.”

  The men loaded the crates onto a heavy two-horse drag and proceeded down the Greensboro Road—newly laid with planks—into town, then across the river and up the hill to the Hartsoe place. They drove the cart right up beside the orchard, where Cicero had dug a half dozen holes, two feet deep and two feet across, spaced three feet apart in two rows. The journals he had been reading were unclear as to the optimal spacing of banana trees; the configuration he’d settled on meant a greenhouse two hundred and thirty-four square feet, which would give the trees room to spread at the top. He thought he could get by with just a glass roof and windows; still, it was a lot of glass, enough to cover two bedrooms. But if his grandfather could build the first house in the county with glass windows, he could build the first with a glass roof.

  The men worked all day getting the plants into the ground, packing the holes with chicken manure, and watering them with a piggin relay. “I hear bandana taste like sweet potato with molasses,” one of them said. “Yaller-skin taters on trees,” said another, mopping his brow with a tattered cloth. The quietest of the workers, and also the strongest and hardest working, was a broad-chested man named Able. Cicero retained him to come back every week and help with the watering and fertilizing and weeding. He’d worked for Cicero before, and prior to the war his parents had been owned by the Cheeks, Cicero’s mother-in-law’s people.

  Within a few weeks, green shoots began breaking the ground. Cicero and Able kept up their weekly routine. “Shore this ain’t corn?” Able asked.

  “You wait and see,” Cicero said. “Come next summer, we’ll have all the bananas we can eat.”

  Able shook his head and kept working. The only comment he would make about the new crop was that it was growing fast as corn and the leaves were bigger than any he’d ever seen. At the end of one day he looked at the plants, now knee-high, and said, “Look like big green ceegars.” If he had any doubts about the worthiness of the enterprise, he kept them to himself.

  At the end of another day Cicero saw Able looking at the plants and he asked him, “Able, you must think this is the foolhardiest thing you’ve ever seen.”

  Able smiled broadly. “Nawsuh,” he said.

  “I reckon,” Cicero probed, “if I said I was planting magic beans so I could climb up to the clouds you’d keep working, just as long as I was paying you.”

  Now Able leaned on his hoe and took up a serious expression. “Nawsuh, Mr. Hahtsoe. ’F you said they was magic beans, I’d do de work fo free, long’s you gimme some of dat gole you fine.”

  “So you’d partner with me on a long shot, but for something as homespun crazy as bananas you want your money up front?”

  “Thas right, yes, suh.”

  “Well, I appreciate your honesty, Able. I never was a gambling man like my father-in-law, who was happy to gamble away his house if he was so inclined. But I’ll make a deal with you that won’t cost you a thing.” Cicero looked at Able, and Able tapped his hoe against the ground, as though considering the soundness of the earth around him. “If this crop turns out nice and healthy, and you stay with it—at the same rate I’m paying you—I’ll let you have all the bananas off one tree.”

  Able thought about it for a moment. “That mighty kindly of you, Mr. Hahtsoe,” he said. “Which tree you sayin’ is mine?”

  “I won’t tell you that, or else you’d pay more attention to it than the others. Not that you’d mean to. When the time comes, I’ll pick out a nice one for you.”

  “All righty then,” Able said. He grabbed up his tools and started back to the shed, but before long he stopped. “Mr. Hahtsoe?” he said, turning around. “What if only five of them trees is any good?”

  Cicero was amused. “I didn’t know you were such a shrewd man of business, Able,” he said. “I expect you’ll be wanting to set up a shop in town one of these days. I’ll tell you what,” he said. “If only four trees make it, we have the same deal.”

  Able wiped a rivulet of sweat from his cheek with the back of his hand. He nodded, “I preeshate it, Mr. Hahtsoe. I shore do.” He shambled back toward the shed, and Cicero wondered what was in the man’s mind, whether Able really did appreciate the gesture, understanding that to Cicero it was a kind of bargain with God.

  Work on the greenhouse and adjoining fireplace began nearly as soon as the banana plants showed themselves. Able said he doubted they’d need such a house for some time, that a few warm blankets would suffice since there was no tree on earth could grow high as a man in six months. “It’s not a real tree,” Cicero told him. “It’s more like corn. Just like you thought.”

  The first frost came early that year, the third day of October. The house was framed, with spaces for huge windows on all sides and even bigger windows in the ceiling. Cicero had decided, after consulting with all the carpenters he knew, as well as a professor of architecture at the university, to put in skylights instead of a glass roof, which, the professor said, would surely collapse without a steel frame. The work was held up by the unforeseen difficulty of maneuvering ladders and lumber and workmen around the precious banana plants, which had grown to more than six feet tall and stood like a half dozen tightly wrapped pale green soldiers. There was great excitement about when they would begin to bud and leaf out, and Cicero was as worried as an expectant father, chewing through unlit cigars as he went from one worker to another trying to encourage him to work faster.

  The largest pane was saved for last. It was to be fitted into the south-facing slope of the roof to catch the most light. Cicero had a scaffold erected around the structure for this delicate operation. The lumber for the scaffold and the greenhouse he had scavenged from his father’s property. Now to set the pane he and his six hired hands walked the glass up the side of the building, resting it on a cushion of blankets spread along the eave while three men went up top to receive it. Then all six men were on the roof, Cicero underneath to shout directions. He reflected that if the roof were to collapse, this would be the time, and he would be crushed beneath glass, under the weight of a crazy dream, and no one would speak of it without a shake of the head.

  The window fit into its frame and held, and the men began nailing the top braces around it.

  There had been two nights of mild frost, during which Able kept the new fireplace going, as well as a smudge pot inside—a cauldron of red-hot coals, ventilated out the unfinished roof. With the building glassed in, Cicero decided to dispense with the smudge pot and take his chances with the fireplace. For the first few weeks, he came out periodically in the night, checking the plants and the air temperature, inside and out, logging the numbers into a little ruled booklet. In the first week of December, the overnight temperature dipped below thirty; inside the glasshouse the air was barely above fifty. Cicero got the smudge pot going again, with Able and another man to tend it in four-hour shifts. They took to covering the roof with blankets at night, and taking them off during the day, and so kept the indoor temperature close to seventy.

  By the middle of the month, all but one of the plants had turned brown. Cicero continued to water and fertilize them, but it became clear that they were dead. The final plant succumbed by the end of the year. It was the one closest to the outdoor fireplace, and Cicero lamented for the thousandth
time that he had not built the greenhouse up against the main house. “I thought of doing it,” he said, “but all the pictures showed them standing alone. I should’ve known better—those were in subtropical regions.”

  Mary Bet had been helping spell her father with his late-night outings, putting on her boots and coat and going out with a taper, and one of their barn dogs would come wagging up to accompany her. “It’s all right, Daddy,” she told him. “We can just move it in the spring, and you can get new plants.”

  He shook his head. “The expense,” he said.

  “We can cut back on sweets and silk and fancy things,” she told him, “and we can sell Charlie—we don’t need but one horse.”

  “No, I’m going to let this experiment go.”

  “How do you know it won’t work if you don’t try?” What she didn’t say was that she wanted more than anything for him to succeed in growing at least one bunch of bananas, so she could say to the gossips and naysayers, just one time—he did something nobody around here ever had the gumption to try.

  Cicero nodded, as though it were the wisest advice he’d ever heard. “You’re right, baby girl,” he said. “One attempt can hardly be called a try.” So in May he sent off for another half dozen plants, and this time he got a head start on the greenhouse, taking it apart piece by piece and moving it to the south side of the house, where there was such good warm light it was a shame, he said, that they’d never taken advantage of it before. He found that by keeping a tighter account of their expenditures—in the same meticulous way he ran the store and observed the greenhouse—they didn’t need to sell the horse. He seemed to have forgotten about their plans to visit the mountains, and Mary Bet felt no need to remind him, or to mention the new Singer sewing machine she’d had her eye on in the Sears catalog.

  Three of the new plants developed brown spots before they were three feet high. They stopped growing and died, and Cicero sent off a letter to the United Fruit Company asking for free replacements. A polite reply explained that it was not uncommon for delicate plants under stressful conditions, or in imperfect climates, to develop a fungus that could lead to mortality. They could not be responsible for what happened to the plants after they had been shipped. Cicero shot off another letter, this one with an angry tone that he regretted as soon as he’d dropped it at the station office. How could they not be responsible, he asked, for plants that probably had a disease before they were sent, or could have developed on the train, which was about as stressful a condition as he could think of. He never got a response, nor did he get one from the next two letters he sent, each more outraged and pleading.