Stephen King - The Plant

Evvie held up the cash money and said, “There's over eight thousand right here! Won't Jack yell when I tell him! And I bet this isn't all. I bet—”

Then she saw Sophie was no longer looking at her, and no longer smiling. Evvie turned her head, and Madeline did, too. The color left Maddy's cheeks, turning her rich complexion dull.

“And how were you going to split it?” I heard myself ask in a voice that did not sound like my own at all. “Three ways? Or is Floyd in on this, too?”

And from behind me, as if he'd only been waiting for his cue, Floyd himself said: “Floyd's in on it, little brother. Oh yes indeed. Was Floyd told the ladies what that box looked like and where it was apt to be. I saw it last winter. She left it out when she was having one of her spells. But you don't know about her spells, do you?”

I turned, startled. From the smell of the whiskey on Floyd's breath and the dark tinge of red in the corners of his eyes, the tot I'd seen him drinking on the porch hadn't been his first of the day. Or his third, for that matter. He pushed by me into the room, and said to Sophie (always his favorite): “Evvie's right—there'll be more. That box is the most of it, I think, but a long way from the all of it.”

He turned to me and said, “She was a packrat. That's what she turned into over the last few years. One of the things she turned into, anyhow.”

“Her will—” I began.

“Her will, what about it?” Sophie asked. She dropped the papers she'd been studying to the coverlet and made a shooing gesture with her slim brown hands, as if dismissing the whole subject. “Do you think we had a chance to talk to her about it? She shut us out. Look who she got to draw up her death-letter. Law Tidyman! That old Uncle Tom!”

The contempt with which she spoke struck me deep, not because of the sentiment but because of the simple fact that I'd seen Sophie and Evelyn and Evvie's Jack laughing and talking with Law Tidyman and Law's wife Sulla not half an hour before. Best of friends, they'd looked like.

“You don't know how she got these last few years, Rid,” Madeline said. She sat there, her lap all but overflowing with her mother's keepsakes and gracenotes, sat there defending what she was doing—what they were doing. “She—”

“I might not know how she got,” I said, “but I know pretty damned well what she wanted. Wasn't I there with the rest of you when Law read her will? Didn't we all sit around in a circle, like at a goddamned seance? And isn't that what it was, with Mama talking to us from the other side of her grave? Didn't I hear her say in Law Tidyman's voice that she wanted that there—” I pointed to the plunder on the bed. “—to go to the town library and to the high school scholarship fund? In her name, if they'd have it that way?”

My voice was rising, I couldn't help it. Because now Floyd was sitting on the bed with them, one arm around Sophie's shoulders, as if to comfort her. And when Maddy's hand crept into his, he took it the way you take the hand of a frightened child. To comfort her, too. It was them on the bed and me in the doorway and I saw their eyes and knew they were against me. Even Maddy was against me. Especially Maddy, it seems. My schoolyard angel.

“Didn't you see me there, nodding my head because I understood what she wanted? I know I saw you-all nodding the same way. It's now I must be dreaming. Because it can't be that the folks I grew up with down here in this godforsaken map-splat of the world could have turned into graveyard ghouls.”

Maddy's face sagged at that and she began to cry. And I was glad I had made her cry. That's how angry I was, how angry I still am when I think of them sitting there in the lamplight. When I think of the tin box with its Sweetheart Girl cover set aside, its insides all turned out. Their hands and laps full of her things. Their eyes full of her things. Their hearts, too. Not her, but her things. Her remainder.

“Oh you self-righteous little prig,” Evelyn said. “And weren't you always!”

She stood up and swept her hands back along her cheeks, as if to wipe away her tears... but there were no tears in those flaming eyes of hers. Not this evening. This evening I saw my brother and three sisters with their masks laid aside.

“Save your accusations,” I said. I have never liked her—regal Evelyn, whose eyes were so firmly fixed on the prize that she never had time for her littlest brother... or for anyone who did not think the stars pretty much changed their courses to watch Evelyn Walker Hance in her enchanted walk through life. “It's hard to point fingers successfully when your hands are full of stolen goods. You might drop your loot.”

“But she's right,” Madeline said. “You are self-righteous. You are a prig.”

“Maddy, how can you say that?” I asked. The others could not have hurt me, I don't think, at least not one by one; only she.

“Because it's true.” She let go of Floyd's hand, stood up, and faced me. I don't believe I will ever forget a single word of what she said. More memorating, God help me.

“You were here for the wake, you were here for the reading of a dead-letter her own son wasn't good enough to write, you were here for the burying, you were here for the after-burying, and you're here now, looking at things you don't understand and passing a fool's judgement on them because of all the things you don't know. Things that went on while you were up in New York, chasing the Pulitzer Prize with a broom in your hand. Up in New York, playing the nigger and telling yourself whatever different it takes for you to get to sleep at night.”

“Amen! Tell it!” Sophie said. Her eyes were blazing, too. They were a demon's eyes, almost. And I? I was silent. Stunned to silence. Filled with that horrible, deathlike emotion that comes when someone finally spills out the home truths. When you finally understand that the person you see in the mirror is not the one others see.

“Where were you when she died, though? Where were you when she had the six or seven little heart attacks leading up to the big ones? Where were you when she had all those little strokes and got so funny in her head?”

“Oh, he was in New York,” Floyd said cheerily. “He was employing his fine arts degree scrubbing floors in some white man's book-publishing office.”

“It's research,” I said in a voice so low I could barely hear it. I felt all at once as though I might faint. “Research for the book.”

“Research, that explains it,” Evelyn said with a sage nod, and put the cash money carefully back into the tin box. “That's why she went without lunches for four years in order to pay for your schoolbooks. So you could research the wonderful world of custodial science.”

“Oh, ain't you a bitch,” I said... just as though I had not written many of those same things about my job at Zenith House, not once but several times, in the pages of this journal.

“Shut up,” Maddy said. “Just shut up and listen to me, you self-righteous, judgmental prig.” She spoke in a low, furious voice that I had never heard before, had never imagined might come from her. “You, the only one of us not married and with children. The only one with the luxury of seeing family through this... this... I don't know...”

“This golden haze of memory,” Floyd suggested. He had a little silver bottle in his pants pocket. He drew it out then and had himself a nip.

Maddy nodded. “You don't have the slightest idea of what we need, do you? Of where we are. Floyd and Sophie have got kids getting ready to go to college. Evvie's have gone through, and she's got the unpaid bills to prove it. Mine are coming along. Only you—”

“Why not ask Floyd to help you?” I asked her. “Mama wrote me a letter and said he cleared a quarter of a million last year. Don't you see... don't any of you see what this is? This is robbing pennies off a dead woman's eyes! She—”