PLENTY
By E.B. Vandiver

The land is flat, swampy, grey-green in the early light of morning, and the doctor drives north, his eyes focused on the road immediately ahead, the hot asphalt feeding at the car roll after roll, the same from one mile to the next.  It's a new road, smooth and pock-free.  It's a suprising road, this deep in.  That it even exists is a miracle, much less the smooth ride it is.

She tries only to breathe.  The hot is fat, moist, sitting heavy and not about to let up.  When he switches on the air conditioning, the abrupt plummet of temperature, the antiseptic smell of the breeze rushing through the vents turns her insides.  She sits shivering against the leather seat she's already made sticky with her own sweat. To the right the blue of a great lake flashes in and out between the oaks.

Over a bridge and a bayou is suddenly yawing out below, a broad gleaming tea bowl so deep and dense it seems to suck in the day's new light like a black hole.  The water is motionless, frozen to the bed. St. Charles Parish. The sign flicks into her eye like a insect, a dot narrowing, then swallowed in the lid.

The car is new, almost brand new. 900 miles, 901, 902.

With each swivel of the numbered white eye, the neat seam of the past year loosens just a little.  She feels it happening: the stitches ripping one after another, threads fraying, the growing breath in the parting.  Now there's the sky, broad, blank as ice. Still the road unspools.

The grey trees that have been stripped, stubbing up broken from the soup like toes, go suddenly lush, bursting green, so voluptuous they bend under their own weight.

He turns off the main highway and begins to follow the levee road.  Tiny matchstick-legged houses, the same holocaust grey as the oaks a few miles back, stand back by just a stretch of twenty feet or less, naked and sorry as ditches.

The road abruptly stops, and they burst onto gravel in a furious haze of dust, stones pinging the shut windows.  The wheels crunch and slow. Besides the houses there's only gas stations, one every few miles, old, swaybacked, clapboard, proclaiming like Christmas, Coca Cola Sold Here!  Marlboros $2.99!  Two or three old men will be standing in the shade of the awnings, baggy jowls working a gumball-size wad of tobacco from one cheek to the other with all the patience of a continental drift. They watch the car too, but slyly, in periphery.

She begins to suspect she is still half asleep; the little houses and the sudden trees and the backs of her knees gathering pools of wet on New Year's Day, rattling in the German car into the world that's gone abruptly green.  It's beginning to feel like the dreams she would have in the hospital, when there wasn't anything he could give her strong enough to make it real.

The oaks knit closer, branches meeting overhead, and the silver light gives way to a dim deep as evening.  The road forks and narrows to one-way lanes.  They veer right, and a barbed wire fence begins. No trespassing signs flash every few feet.  Beards of moss slap the windshield, leaving critters behind, bugs and bigger things that scuttle up and over the roof of the car with rapid feet.

An oyster-shell drive, twisting up through the trees that just get hornier and knottier the further in the road goes.  Once or twice a bird or chipmunk skitters across the way, and the doctor shoves his foot on the brake until it hops the full way across, then guns ahead, engine whining softly.

Then, like a highway accident, the house rears up, bright as lights, stilted like the others, the sad grey houses stretching back for miles, and nearly floating in the mud that sucks at their shoes as they park the car, cut the engine, approach. After days, this, and her head is feathers.

On the gallery, a row of rocking chairs painted green tip back and forth in the breeze.  A deck of abandoned playing cards on a low table slowly fan out, faces fluttering upside.

A woman is behind the screen door, to the far end of the hall, turning her hands slowly in a plaid towel.

"Who've you got for me here, son?"

The voice is dark as pudding, rolling out smooth from the heart of her. The girl hears only the warning in it.

"I've brought you a friend."

"I don't need no more friends."

"Everyone needs more friends, Mrs. Ruth."

He smiles then.  His voice is smoothing out the edges, the sharp annunication, easing slowly into loops, like the woman's.  The door inches open.

"What are you doin' now, bringing in strangers.  Your cousin's not going to like this."

"He doesn't have much choice, does he?"

"Spose not, but all the same it ain't right."

"He hasn't come by yet today, has he?"

"He won't be comin' till noon, same as ever."

The doctor glances in the house, over her shoulder. "What you got out there I'm smelling?  You got breakfast waiting on me?"

"Yeah, yeah, we got something for you, son, and your girl."

Around the veranda to the back, they pass a small walled garden, to an outkitchen standing at the east end of a broad, horseshoe-shaped bower.  Mrs. Ruth points out stools at the counter to the back of the kitchen and piles up two plates with grits, bacon, biscuits and gravy, serves them mugs of steaming coffee and chicory.

The girl eats steadily, the hunger like an unstaunched wound.  She takes a second plate, and her stomach tautens around the edges.  Mrs. Ruth wrenches three oranges through the juicer and sets out a glass, her eyes curious.

Afterward, he takes her up a back stairway to a small room with a four poster bed, a room painted yellow that contains nothing but this bed, that seems to be drowning in the bed and its big downy coverlet that he folds back. He folds back the curtains. He folds like a servant, and is used to handling linen, making it do neat corners and smooth itself out and act as he wants.  She notices this.

These hands too take her shoulders and turn her around and unbutton the sweater, pushing it from her shoulders.  He removes her hat and her pants and her underthings, his hands clean and clinical and good.  She lays back on the bed, naked, her arms at her sides. The air is choked with dust, and when he shifts her hands find the ridge of spine, and the 
slick of his sweat spreads beneath her palms.  The wool of the pants he's left on rubs at her legs, scratching raw.

She wakes hours later to the sound of men arguing. Tongue dried to a formless fuzzy hump, she stares into the yellow peeling ceiling trying to remember where she is.  The voices seem to be coming from below and away, not especially loud, but the consonents reach her through the floor.  Then there is the bang of a door and fast footsteps on the oyster-shell drive. Holding the sheet around her she goes to the window.

A man appears off the porch, moving fast down the drive, carrying a bag. When he reaches the car, he tosses the bag onto the hood and unlocks the driver's door. Even from the second story she can smell his rage.

Then he pauses, gaze panning straight up to the bedroom window.  She steps back automatically, but his eyes follow, and she stops off to the side, curiousity holding her fast.  Just as she is sure he will turn and come back up to the house, he throws the bag in the passenger seat and climbs in after it.  The motor roars to life, and the man and the car disappear around the bend.

The doctor is gone too by the time she makes it down, and gladly, barefoot, she heads out in the afternoon that's just beginning to cool, to follow the levee of the west  river, where there's an old boathouse, now decrepit and rotting through the heavy cypress walls.  The dock has half-collapsed into the water, the boards ripped apart by the force of the current.  The cases des esclaves are just south of the planting fields, the cane that soughs and whispers and greenly waves.  The cabins are laid out in two rows running parallel, with an alley in-between.  Inside the cabins are fire gutted: a sleeping bag or two, bean cans seething with ants.  Graffitti is scrawled across the walls, the biggest and reddest of it: Fuck the Vederes, every niggerloving last one.

Adjacent to the living quarters, the sugarhouse, a T-shaped shack linked to the fields by a narrow set of railroad tracks.  The interior is eerily silent, with the look of an operation abandoned mid-mutiny.  From the burned-out, smoke-scorched whale-oil lanterns to the rusty conveyor, the great boilers and fireboxes, the troughs caked with ancient sugar, the hulking hogsheads in the vast cold purgery, down to the broken centrifugals, the sugarhouse is a repository of ghosts, old voices.

"During harvest," Mrs. Ruth says later when she asks, "they worked the slaves day and night trying to stay ahead of the frost.  You couldn't stop for nothing but to clean out the boilers and the fireboxes and keep going.  Little boys not much older than my Addy & you can almost see  them, standing around the miller to catch the bad-ground cane and throw 
it back to the conveyor.  And working twelve, fourteen hours at a time, you don't think some of them boys didn't die for the sugar?  You get caught in the flywheels, the gears, and you're gone, but they can't stop nothing & got to cast you aside and do the weeping later. Beat the frost.  Everywhere, like a chant, you could hear it in your sleep.  If you slept.  Sugar.  Sugar.  Sugar."

"And afterward, the funerals. But  oh, roulaison!  Hot punch! As much as you could take at once."