The first thing Roger saw on Saturday morning was a dead broad-headed skink, a fine big male, sunk to the bottom of two gallons of peanut oil on his side porch. It was lying on its back in the fish cooker, its little front feet crossed peacefully over its pale belly.
“She has left me for the birds of the southern hemisphere” Roger said to himself, “and now this.” He stood for a minute in his nightshirt, looking at the dead skink. “Got in, couldn't get out. Drowned in peanut oil,” he said. He fished the skink out with a stick and threw it in the bushes where a cat would get it. It was a sad start to the day.
“He put her on the airplane to Australia on Friday afternoon and then he had to go right home and give that fish fry for Dean Rufus Routhe,” said Meade.
“Poor Roger,” said Hilma, “having to entertain agricultural scientists and fry fish with a broken heart in the setting sun, all the time thinking about Delia, three miles up in the sky and halfway around the world, never to return”
But “never to return” had a rather melodramatic ring to it. Knowing Delia, it would not be anything as deliberately final as that. Her mind would settle on first one thing and then another, and it would be merely a series of whims that would gradually draw her farther and farther away from Roger and the brief south Georgia part of her life. Still, everyone had the feeling that Delia was gone, and would stay gone.
Hilma was the first to call Roger up and invite him for a meal. It was very strong, clear chicken soup, twice cooked, she said, toast, a salad, and a delicate custard for dessert. The kind of food that might be prepared for an invalid, Roger thought.
The subjects of Delia, all species of birds, and the entire southern hemisphere were scrupulously avoided, and Hilma feigned an extraordinary interest in the career of Dr. Rufus Routhe, who was retiring as dean of the plant pathology department. Roger noticed a pale spot on the wall where Hilma had taken down a Menoboni print of crested flycatchers, as if she thought a picture of birds might cause him pain. She encouraged him to talk about peanuts, the hard summer of work ahead, and his duties in the next year as president of the southern division of the American Phytopathological Society. Roger told her about a new peanut cultivar, ‘Georgia Routhe/ named in honor of the retiring dean, which had shown some resistance to TSWV. “Peanuts in the U.S. are usually named for scientists,” he said, “but in Australia they are named for artists.”
Hilma's eyes flew to the pale spot on the wall, and she began rattling dishes and talking wildly about Dean Routhe, until at last Roger stopped her and said, “You really don't have to be this careful, Hilma.” After that she put down the dishes with relief and seemed to relax, and for the rest of the evening they talked quite comfortably about the courtship display of the superb lyrebird (“excessive,” said Hilma), Delia's character (“flighty,” said Hilma), and love.
“I don't quite understand the demands of that kind of love,” said Hilma. “All those feelings were so long ago, the opportunities were so limited then, and we had different rules.” But, she said, she had noticed how so often it left its victims ragged and spent, and she wondered why sensible people allowed themselves to begin, knowing where it would lead.
“There is no beginning to love,” Roger said. “It just creeps over you.”
“Oh,” said Hilma, “like brown rot on a plum tree in the dark winter months, and by the time you become aware of it, the leaves are out and it's too late to spray.”
“Yes,” said Roger, “just like that. Now let me help you hang your flycatchers back on the wall.” And Hilma got him a chair and fetched the Menoboni print from where she had hidden it in the closet.
The next morning Roger had to get up at 4:30 and drive all the way down to Attapulgus to hoe out the alleys in the peanut test plots there and then turn around and drive in the other direction all the way up to Plains to mark ailing plants and collect leaf and flower samples. He had a rattlesnake scare in the morning, and he ran into a wasp nest in an aluminum gate in the afternoon and got stung twice. Meade had invited him to supper, but when he went home to change clothes, Eula was standing in his yard holding three chickens by the feet, two big red hens and a rooster.
“Roger,” she said, “you didn't know it because you was up there at UNC, but when Melvin was killed by his own Allis-Chalmers tractor I found a lot of comfort in chickens.” The chickens slowly spun in her grasp, their wings limp, their beaks open in an expression of wonderment and resignation. “Rhode Island Reds, Roger,” said Eula. “I thought Dominick-ers would be—well, they might bring back memories, Roger, and I hate to see you sad.” She thrust the chickens’ trussed-up feet into his hands and hugged him tight, mashing a strangled squawk out of one of the hens. Then she quickly turned away, got into her car, and drove off in a hurry, so that Roger wouldn't see her tears.
Roger made a waterer out of a jar and a dish and a toothpick, spread newspapers on the floor of his back porch, and then turned the chickens loose, washed his hands and face, and arrived at Meade's house a half hour late, drugged on antihistamine, with the grit of dried sweat under his clothes, and the sand from the Plains peanut fields in his shoes, worrying about regulations regarding livestock within the city limits.
Meade sat him down on the sofa, made him comfortable, and then stood in front of him waving a silver serving spoon in the air. “Roger,” she said, “you must hammer out your life on the anvil of experience!”
But Roger was too tired and sleepy to think of a reply to this violent piece of advice. Every time he closed his eyes he saw green leaves, as if overexposure had stamped an image of a field of peanut plants on the backs of his eyeballs.
“You do choose the most difficult women, Roger,” Meade went on. “First Ethel, so wild and independent, and then Delia—a gifted artist, but aside from that she was—”
“I don't choose them, Meade,” said Roger, through a confusion of weariness. “They creep over me like brown rot.”
The next day the Coastal Plain Experiment Station was putting on the Ag Showcase. Booths presenting information on different agricultural topics had been set up on the grounds: “Red Imported Fire Ants: Friend or Foe?,” “Animal Waste Awareness,” “Bio-control of Musk Thistle.” Food was being served from portable carts, and staff members were giving tours of the soybean and corn variety tests, the oldest pecan cultivar trial in the world (1921), and the new controlled-atmosphere Vidalia Onion Storage Lab. The public was invited, which meant that there would be a lot of questions about potted geraniums and what to do about those big green worms on tomato plants.
This was Dean Routhe's last Ag Showcase, and all morning he had been flapping around the Bermuda grass germ plasm plot and the Vidalia Onion Storage Lab like a lanky old crane. Dean Routhe was not the kind of scientist who should be turned loose in a crowd; he was apt to frighten people by suddenly blurting out bits of abstruse information. No one quite knew what to do. After all, a peanut cultivar had been named for this man.
“Get him in there with Roger,” said Dr. Vanlandingham desperately, and so, by midmorning Dean Routhe had settled down in the booth on Predictive Models of Peanut Diseases, where he kept hurling out random remarks about agronomy, entomology, and the virtues of matrimony.
“Men need wives!” he cried out in a high, carrying voice, interrupting Roger's little talk about the future of Georgia's peanut crop. Roger faltered, then soldiered on.
“—the entomologists studying the thrips vectors—”
“Men need wives!” called Dean Routhe.
“—the virologists comparing TSWV with other, better-understood diseases,” Roger continued stal-wartly.
“Look at this!” cried Dean Routhe, springing up out of the shadowy back of the booth. “My hair was red when I began my work here at the CPES in ‘59!” He clutched a few strands of white hair with both hands. “But my wife died in ‘65, and within a year it turned snow white!”
“—and my own work with—”
“Men need wives!” said Dean Routhe, clapping an arm around Roger's shoulder and glaring out at the stricken crowd. Roger could feel the old gnarly fingers trembling against his back. A few people hastily replaced the pamphlets and peanut brochures they had taken from the shelf, and very quickly everyone scurried off to the next booth, “Our Friend the Dairy Cow.”
“Dean Routhe,” said Roger, “maybe you would like to—”
But Dean Routhe was busily pulling up two chairs. “Roger,” he said, “sit down.” And they both sat down and faced each other across their knees.
“Roger,” said Dean Routhe in a deep, throbbing voice, “she's left you. She's gone. GONE.” He paused. “But you must not sit back and moan and pine. You've got to have a fearless heart, Roger, a FEARLESS heart!” and he thumped his own rickety chest so hard that Roger tensed up and leaned forward slightly.
“Roger,” said Dean Routhe, “it's like falling off a horse. The best thing you can do is just get right back up in that saddle again. Back in the saddle again.”
Outside, a new crowd had begun to gather. Some in the front were leafing through the pamphlets on the plywood shelf in a businesslike way, but they kept sneaking glances into the dark interior of the booth, and at the back of the crowd people were staring in at Roger and Dean Routhe, their mouths hanging slightly open.
“Dean Routhe,” Roger whispered.
“Oh, quite so, quite so!” said Dean Routhe, scrambling to his feet and addressing the crowd. “You listen to this fine young man,” he said to a pretty, frightened-looking red-haired woman in a black John Birch Society T-shirt. “You ask him any question about the plants in your home or in your garden or on your small farm. Nematology, the rusts, myco-toxins—why, this man is an expert on late blight of potato!” he said, and he grabbed Roger by both arms and thrust him forward. “What this young man doesn't know about foliar diseases of peanut wouldn't fit into a teacup! A TEACUP!”
In the late afternoon a little stage was set up in the middle of the millet trials for a musical performance, and a half acre was roped off for dancing. Roger played the banjo; Tim Bannister, his entomologist counterpart in the TSWV research, played fiddle; and a couple of paid musicians from Tifton played guitars. In the cool of the evening, after the sun went down, people began to dance on the smooth turf of the Bermuda grass germ plasm plot. Dean Routhe had taken hold of the notion that the harvesting of crops was inherently violent, and he kept accosting people and saying, “Everything you eat has been attacked by someone!”
Roger noticed with dismay that the red-haired woman in the black T-shirt was watching him and edging closer and closer to the stage, an odd, almost rapturous look on her face, and he played faster and faster, running “The Blind Girl” right up against “Pig in a Pen.” He remembered Meade's remark about the anvil of experience, but all he could think of was the dead skink in the peanut oil, its little toes curled up, its little eyes closed, and its broad jowls, even in death, still tinged with the breeding orange.