Quite a year for plums” everybody kept saying, but that didn't begin to describe the plum crop of that early summer. A rare combination of favorable factors had contributed to it, the fruit scientists said: a warm early spring had brought out the honeybees when the trees were flowering, then in March and April it had rained twice a week as the little plums grew, and finally at fruit swell the weather turned hot and dry, discouraging brown rot. Now in June heavy laden limbs drooped and cracked off, and in every household people were eating plums and baking cakes with plums, cooking up plum jam and plum jelly, or just raking up mounds and piles of rotten plums, and getting stung by yellow jackets. Drunken birds whopsided from eating fermented plums staggered across lawns. Then an unseasonable heat wave came through, in early June when no one was prepared for it, and standing over hot stoves boiling down plum juice, everybody started remem bering stories about the tragedy of 1903. when five people in Perote had died of heat exhaustion.
“My father always said how peaceful Mr. Loomis looked, lying there flat on his back in the bed in the front room under the open window, dead as a stone with the thin sheet pulled up to his chin,” said Meade. Her father, just a little boy then, had been the one to find the body of Mr. Loomis, a timber baron who had made a fortune shipping longleaf cants out of Carrabelle to be resawn in the Netherlands. “People knew how to die back in those days,” said Meade.
Hilma didn't know if it was just the heat, or if it was Jim Wade's endless tinkering with a fan he had brought to blow on her while she made plum jelly, or what it was exactly that was making her irritable. “They didn't know how to die any better than we do,” she snapped at Meade. “They just told it better.”
“There's something about a fan, blowing on a dead person,” said Jim Wade, staring contemplatively at a little pile of worm gears. “When you think how the fingers that turned on that switch at bedtime will never again …” Meade's father had never mentioned a fan in his many tellings of the story of the Loomis death; just the thin sheet pulled up to Mr. Loomis's very prominent chin had stuck in his mind. But now as she looked at the bucket of plum seeds and plum skins and the jelly bag dripping plum juice into the bowl in Hilma's sink, another part of the story came back to Meade, something that she had almost forgotten, because over the years the thin sheet had become the hinge of the story: her father had been taking a bucket of plums to old Mr. Loomis.
Meade sat down heavily in Hilma's kitchen chair and rested her chin in her hands. “A bucket of plums” she whispered.
“Honey, at the plums!” Eula said to Ethel, flapping her apron in delight. Andy and the plum crop had come on the same weekend, and it was almost more than Eula could stand. She kept running back and forth between the jelly pot on the stove and the backyard, where Andy was practicing breathing through a snorkel. Roger had promised to take him to Ammonia Spring to swim with the manatees when he got back from his phytopathology meeting in Austin, Texas, and every waking minute since he had arrived yesterday afternoon, Andy had been stalking around the house with a bright pink and purple face mask on, making moist snorting sounds. Eula kept looking for the ravages of the brown rice and date diet. He was thinner, she thought, but then he was taller too. She hadn't really been able to get a good look at his face.
“Look at the plums under that tree, Ethel, did you ever—” But Ethel had set down the boxes of quart jars on the kitchen table and run out into the yard. She grabbed Andy up in both arms and hugged him too tight, knocking his face mask crooked. When she finally turned him loose he had to pick his ears out from under the rubber straps and get another grip on the snorkel with his poor stretched-out lips. “I'hh ynh uh ahhys wryds wid Roger,” he said, and Ethel squatted down in front of him, held him by both arms, and peered in eagerly through the face mask at his bugged-out eyes and his stretched-flat nose. “You're going to Ammonia Spring with Roger, I heard that,” she said, and she hugged him again, more carefully this time.
“Just because nobody ever saw a manatee eat somebody alive, they think they never do it,” Tom called down. He was painting Cool Seal on Louise's roof, but the tar was so hot and runny it wouldn't stick.
“What are you doing up in the air, Tom?” called Louise. “Come down from there.”
“You're dripping on the azalea bushes, Tom,” called Ethel.
“They're vegetarians, Daddy, they don't eat people. I read it in Ranger Rick,” called Andy.
“Yeah right,” said Tom. “Did you know that a living giant squid has never been seen by human eyes? But that don't mean they're not down there.”
“Human eyes,” said Louise.
“Here I am sending my only son out to Ammonia Spring and you're going to come back with both your legs gnawed off,” said Tom.
“I'll be all right, Daddy,” called Andy, and he wrapped his lips back around the snorkel.
“Well, all I can say is, rub some spit around in your mask to keep it from fogging up, so you can see them when they start coming after you,” said Tom.
Roger's seat mate had talked quite brightly during the first half of the flight, sipping ginger ale and telling him about the meeting she had attended in Austin, something to do with funding for community colleges. Then, “And what took you to Texas?” she asked. Roger said, “It was a meeting of plant scientists“—only that, but next thing he knew she had fallen asleep and was slumping over onto his shoulder, drooling a little, with her hand flopped against his thigh. He tried to squirm out from under her, but he was trapped in the window seat with nowhere to go; every time he shifted she just snuggled closer. She would be embarrassed when she woke up, he knew that. Two seats up and across the aisle he could see Lucy sitting in the exit row, reading a paper about parasitic wasps and cereal leaf beetles quite coolly, with all the space in the world. Finally he gave up and just stared out the window at the black night and the little twinkling lights of towns down below.
“We are beginning our descent into …” said the voice. “Please—” and suddenly the woman sprang upright, clamped both arms across her chest, and stared wildly at Roger and then at the seat back in front of her.
“You're all right,” said Roger. “You just fell asleep, that's all.” He helped her get her bag out of the overhead compartment and watched her scamper down the aisle away from him, teetering on her high-heeled shoes. He gathered up his briefcase and he and Lucy walked together through the little airport and out to his truck in the parking lot, and then drove off down the lit-up streets of Tallahassee. They talked for a while about a genetically engineered bac-ulovirus they'd learned about in Austin; it had been very effective in controlling cotton bollworms and tobacco budworms in field tests. Then they talked about the heat and the plums and the trip to Ammonia Spring.
“Meade can't stop thinking about the five deaths in Perote in ‘03/ said Lucy.
“I wonder how many dozen quarts of jam Eula has put up?” said Roger.
“I wonder if Andy has once turned loose of that snorkel since he's been here” said Lucy.
They drove past the shopping centers on the edge of town, and the new subdivisions with their fancy entrances, and the last Publix Supermarket, lit up in a blaze of light like the promised land. Then suddenly Lucy said, “You're a good man, Roger.”
But Roger couldn't think of anything to say to that, and they just drove on in the dark without talking anymore, past the cotton fields and the peanut fields and the woodpecker woods to home.