He answered on the first ring. “Hello.”
Age… and grief… had dealt a blow to the voice she remembered, but she would have recognized it anywhere, anytime. The years dropped away, and she stood once more on the porch of Warwick Hall, gawking at the young driver of a spanking new Pierce-Arrow as it spun to a halt before the steps. The sun flashed off his blond hair, his bronzed skin, his white teeth. “Hello,” he said in a timbre as rich as the sunshine, and her heart fell at his feet.
“Hello?” Percy repeated.
Lucy let out her breath, then, holding the sound of his voice close in her ear, gently replaced the receiver.
PART III
Chapter Forty-nine
In Kermit, Texas, Alice Toliver answered Rachel’s call.
“Mama, this is Rachel.”
“Have we come so far that my only daughter feels it necessary to identify herself to me when she calls me Mama, Rachel?”
Rachel felt the usual twist of her heart at her mother’s injured tone. “I’m sorry, Mama. It was only out of habit that I identified myself.”
“I haven’t been a habit to you in a long time, Rachel. What’s up?”
Rachel sighed quietly. “I’ve called to let you know that Aunt Mary is dead. She died a few hours ago of a heart attack. I just received word from Amos.”
In the suspended silence, Rachel could clearly hear her mother’s thoughts: So, Rachel, you are now where you’ve always hoped to be, where your children will be after you are gone, while Jimmy, like his father and his father before him, reaps nothing. But she spared her daughter her mental reaction and asked, “When’s the funeral? I’m sure your daddy would like to go.”
“I won’t know until I meet with the funeral director tomorrow. I’m having the company plane pick me up in the morning. I… was hoping we could all fly out together.”
“Now, Rachel, you know how I felt about your great-aunt Mary, and so did she. It would be the height of hypocrisy for me to show up at her funeral.”
I don’t want you there for Aunt Mary, Mama, but for me, Rachel wanted to cry, aching to feel her mother’s arms around her, comforting her as she did in the old days when they had been close. “Amos asked that I convince at least Jimmy to come with Daddy. He feels Aunt Mary would want them at the reading of the will.”
A long pause. “You mean your great-aunt had something to leave them? Cotton prices haven’t been good this year.”
“I’m assuming that’s the reason he’d like them to be there. Amos expressed it as her last regards to them.”
“Well, her regards won’t make up for what she promised your father, but we’ll take what we can get. If that means a trip to Howbutker, then we’ll be there.”
“You too, Mama?”
“I can’t let those two go off alone. They might wear the same underwear twice.”
“I’m so glad you’re coming. It’s been so long since I’ve seen every-body.”
“Well, whose fault is that?”
Rachel reached for another tissue. She tried to stifle the sound of her grief, but Alice must have heard with her maternal ear. Her tone was several degrees warmer when she spoke. “Rachel, I know you’re hurting, and I feel terrible that I can’t offer you sympathy for your loss. But you know why….”
“Yes, Mama. I know why.”
“I’ll go wake your father. It’s Thursday, you know.”
Rachel remembered. Thursday was the day that Zack Mitchell’s grocery store, where her father had worked as a butcher for thirty-six years, stayed open late. Since he was required to man the store until nine o’clock, he was allowed a longer lunch break, and he habitually took a nap during the extra thirty minutes.
“Bunny-hop, I’m so sorry,” he said when he came on the line, and at the sound of his voice, she broke down completely. Its consoling, reaching-out quality had the same effect as the times he’d held her after an argument with her mother over her strengthening ties to Houston Avenue. He’d never taken sides, and to give her mother her due, she’d not tried to turn him against her. “Bunny-hop” was the name he’d given her when she was learning to walk.
“Are you better now, honey?” he asked after a moment’s wait.
“Yes, Daddy, it’s… that I miss you and Mama and Jimmy so much, especially now. Mama may have told you that Amos has asked you and Jimmy to attend the reading of the will. I really would like for us to fly out together in the company plane tomorrow morning. We can pick you up at the Kermit airport.”
William Toliver cleared his throat. “Uh, Rachel, honey, there are several problems with that suggestion. First, don’t you think it would be a little tense sitting in close quarters with your mother feeling as she does? Secondly…” He seemed to have heard her audible sigh and rushed on before she could protest, “I won’t be able to get out of here until day after tomorrow at the earliest. I can’t leave Zack holding the bag.”
“Why not? Don’t you think these circumstances warrant the consideration you’ve earned from Zack after all these years?”
“Beggars can’t make demands, Rachel, and we’re going through midyear inventory.”
Rachel blew out a breath in aggravation. Her father wouldn’t have made demands anyway. He’d never been one to assert his due. “Promise me you won’t let Jimmy dig in his heels and refuse to come. I want to see him, Daddy. He’ll make us all feel better.” She’d especially missed her snaggletoothed, freckle-faced little brother this year. Jimmy had thought of Aunt Mary as what God would look like if He were a woman, and to him she had been an omnipresent deity that had hovered on the edge of his family’s lives as long as he could remember.
“I’ll try, honey, but your brother’s twenty-one. I’ll let him know you want him to come.”
When there was nothing more to be said, Rachel hung up with her father’s words Beggars can’t make demands still echoing in her ear. Maybe that was soon to change and Aunt Mary had left him enough to tell Zack Mitchell what he could do with his inventory. Extra cash had been tight this year. Everybody thought Aunt Mary was rolling in money, and some years she was. But profits depended on weather and markets and costs of labor and expenses, and often in the farming business wealth was determined by the value of land rather than the amount of money in the bank—realities of which her mother was well aware.
Rachel could hear her now in one of the endless arguments she’d overheard between her parents: You just wait, William. When Aunt Mary kicks the bucket, there’ll have been the worst drought in farming history or three months of rain or a cotton surplus or a hike in energy costs—anything to eat up her profits so that there’s nothing left for you to inherit—nothing but that blooming land and the Toliver mansion, which she’ll leave to Rachel. I’m sorry to say it, but I curse the day you got it into your head to take her a second time to see your great-aunt.
Privately, Rachel disputed her mother’s claim that the trip to Howbutker in 1966 had triggered her passion for all things Toliver. She believed its seed had been planted long before that, even before she was born. She’d simply never been aware of its existence until the day she discovered a tiny shoot growing beside the garbage bin next to the alley behind her house….
RACHEL’S STORY
Chapter Fifty
KERMIT, TEXAS, 1965
She found the sprout in March when the West Texas wind was still heavy with sand and most days looked like the yellow meat of an eggplant. She inspected it squatting on her haunches in the way that had inspired her father’s nickname for her. It looked different from the coarse, spiky weeds and nettles and cockleburs that somehow managed to thrive in the Bermuda grass of the backyard. Light green and tender, it captured her awe so that she thought about the exposed little seedling all through supper and the dishes and homework and went out to cover it from the frost before going to bed. The next day, she hurried home from school and made a fence of rocks around it to protect it from the careless garbagemen and her father’s deadly lawn mower.
“
What you got there, Bunny-hop?”
“I don’t know, Daddy, but I’m going to take care of it until it’s full grown.”
“Wouldn’t you… rather have a puppy or a kitten?” he asked, and she heard an unfamiliar note in his voice.
“No, Daddy. I like pets that grow from the ground.”
It turned out to be a vine that snaked over the rocks and produced a dark-skinned butternut squash. Her father explained that it sprang from a seed that had escaped from the garbage sack and sprouted where it fell. By the time of its fruition, Rachel had heard him say to her mother, “Don’t be surprised if we’ve got ourselves a little farmer.”
“As long as it’s not the cotton-growing variety,” her mother responded.
One Saturday morning shortly after her brother was born, her mother took her to Woolworth’s to buy “something special, but within reason,” she qualified. Rachel did not hesitate. She knew her heart’s desire and searched out the seed rack in the hardware section of the store. When her mother joined her, she had already selected five packets of vegetable seeds whose glossy covers promised perfectly developed produce.
She had thought her mother would be pleased. The entire purchase amounted to fifty cents. But she pursed her lips and frowned. “What are you going to do with those?”
“Plant a garden, Mama.”
“You don’t know anything about planting a garden.”
“I will learn.”
When she got home and her father inspected her purchase, her mother said, “Now, William, let Rachel plant her garden by herself. No helping her. If it turns out well, the full credit should go to her.” Or the failure, Rachel read in the pointed look she gave her father. She could not understand her mother’s displeasure. It was the first time in all her growing-up years that she appeared unwilling to support and encourage her endeavors.
But she did not fail. She carefully read the packets’ instructions and the dictates of gardening books checked out from the library and followed them to the letter. Working each day after school, she hoed up the Bermuda grass in a ten-by-ten plot at the side of the house and flooded it with pans of boiling water to kill the grubs and nematodes. To enrich the soil, she scooped manure from the neighbor’s chicken pen and hauled sand by the bucketful from behind the row of track houses where she lived, to work into the caliche-striated ground. Already she had scoured the garage and dump ground for containers to serve as planters for her seedlings.
“What in the world—?” her mother exclaimed when she saw the mishmash of tin cans and cutoff milk cartons lining the windowsills of her room.
“I’m germinating seeds for my garden,” Rachel explained brightly, to make the unusual frown disappear between her mother’s thinly plucked brows. “The sun comes through the window and warms the soil and seeds sprout and they grow into plants.”
The frown stayed in place. “When you water them, see that you don’t make a mess, Rachel, or that’s the end of the project.”
She did not make a mess, and that spring, she entered her garden as her science project. “Well, I’ll be damned,” the awed science teacher said when he surveyed her handiwork at judging time. “Now do you swear that your father’s foot didn’t help dig this plot? That his hand didn’t pull up Bermuda grass, shovel in compost, and erect this chicken-wire fence?”
“No, sir. I did it all myself.”
“Well, then, young lady, you well deserve the A you’ll be getting. Your folks should be proud of you. They’ve got a farmer in the making.” She was nine years old.
The next spring, her expanded garden was even more successful, producing a bounty for the table that not even the produce from Zack Mitchell’s grocery store could equal in taste and quality. It was that success that decided her father to take her for her second visit to Howbutker in the pivotal summer of 1966. Rachel was never to forget the conversation—or, rather, the argument (rare for her parents)—that she overheard concerning his decision. It was mid-June, and she had gone outside after supper to water her plants from a hose attached to a faucet beneath the kitchen window. Because the swamp cooler was on the blink and the kitchen window was open, she heard her mother demand, “Just what do you aim to prove by taking Rachel to Howbutker, William? That she is a Toliver of the cotton-growing variety? That her interest in tomato plants and okra stems from something she’s inherited?”
“And why not?” William argued. “Suppose, just suppose, that Rachel is another Mary Toliver. Suppose she has the makings of running Somerset once Aunt Mary is gone. Why, that would mean the plantation could stay in the family. It wouldn’t have to be sold.”
Rachel heard the ring of a utensil thrown into the galvanized sink. “William Toliver, are you crazy? The money from that farm is going to buy us a better house. It’s going to ensure that we have a decent old age. It’s going to let us go traveling and buy you that Airstream trailer you’ve always wanted. It’s going to get you out from behind that meat counter so that you don’t have to work the rest of your life.”
“Alice…” William sighed. “If Rachel does have the Toliver blood, I can’t sell her birthright—what’s been in the Toliver family for generations.”
“And what about Jimmy’s, I’d like to know?” Alice’s voice quivered. “What about his birthright?”
“That’d be up to Aunt Mary.” William spoke as if that were the end of the matter. “For goodness’ sakes, Alice, it’s only a visit. This interest of Rachel’s might be a passing thing. She’s only ten. Next year she’s liable to be interested in boys or music or Lord knows what else when she realizes how pretty she’s becoming.”
“Rachel has never been interested in girly things, and I doubt she will ever understand how pretty she is.”
Rachel heard the decisive sound of a chair scraping away from the table. “I’m going to take her, Alice. It’s only right. If the girl has the calling, I don’t want to keep her from it. She deserves a chance to find out. That’s all I’m giving her.”
“And your conscience a chance to ease itself, if you ask me. By giving Rachel to your aunt, you can make up for taking yourself away from her all those years ago.”
“Aunt Mary has already forgiven me for that,” William said, sounding injured to the bone to the little eavesdropper beneath the window.
“If you take Rachel to Howbutker, you’ll be making a mistake we’ll all regret, William Toliver. Remember I told you.”
That June, outfitted exactly like her great-aunt in a pair of khaki slacks, bush jacket, and straw hat from the DuMont Department Store, Rachel did not miss a day accompanying Mary out to the disputed plantation. She had never seen anything as breathtaking as the row after row of green plants stretching to the end of the world. A feeling stirred way down inside. “This is all yours, Aunt Mary?”
“Mine and those who came before me, those who took the land from the trees.”
“Who were they?”
“Our Toliver forebears, yours and mine.”
“Mine, too?”
“Yes, child. You’re a Toliver.”
“Does that explain why I like growing things?”
“It would appear so.”
Aunt Mary’s short answer further shed light on the reason her father had given her beforehand for making the visit. “You’re a Toliver, honey, the genuine article. Not like Jimmy or me or my father. We all bear the name, but you and Aunt Mary carry the blood.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that you and Aunt Mary have inherited a certain ancestral force that has characterized the Tolivers since they founded Howbutker and built Somerset.”
“Somerset?”
“A cotton plantation. The last of its kind in East Texas… quite a bit larger than your garden at home.” Her father had smiled at her. “Your great-aunt has run it since she was a young girl.”
The visit occurred within the three weeks that the cotton was in bloom, and Rachel stayed rapt with wonder from the sheer beauty surrounding her as she and
Mary rode out among the blossoms on the two gentle mares kept on hand for inspecting the fields. Mary explained that each flower would fall after only three days, turning from creamy white to pink and finally to dark red. She even taught Rachel a little ditty she’d learned in childhood concerning the short life span of the cotton blossom:
First day white, next day red,
Third day from birth, I’m dead.
Mary explained how a cotton plant works… how its miracle unfolds. First buds appear after five to six weeks of the plants coming up, and then these buds become flowers. The flower falls, leaving behind a small seed pod known as the boll. Each boll contains about thirty seeds and up to half a million fibers of cotton. It is the fiber that’s important, the white stuff that bursts out of the boll when it matures and splits open. The value of cotton depends on the length of its fibers, the color, the feel, and the amount of trash remaining in the white heads. The longer the fiber, the more valuable the cotton.
Rachel drank thirstily of Aunt Mary’s knowledge, which it seemed she took no particular pains to have her great-niece imbibe. Nonetheless, she was clearly impressed that Rachel’s interest never wavered, and by the end of her two-week stay, Rachel’s skin, already tinted with the lush Toliver cast, attested to her keeping pace with her great-aunt’s activities in the cotton fields under the hot, languid sun.
“So your father tells me you’re set on being a farmer when you grow up,” Aunt Mary commented when they took a lemonade break on the porch of a house referred to as “the Ledbetter place.” It was used as her great-aunt’s office but looked nice enough to live in. “Why?” she asked. “Farming is the hardest work in the world, oftentimes with very little reward for the effort expended. What’s so appealing about getting your hands and clothes dirty?”
Rachel thought of Billy Seton up the street, who, almost from the time he could walk, so everybody said, had not been without a baseball mitt in his hand. It was no wonder, then, that he went on to play for the New York Yankees, making everybody in Kermit proud. “Born to play the game,” they said, and that’s how she felt about farming. She couldn’t imagine not having a garden. There was no place else that made her as happy. She didn’t mind getting her hands and clothes dirty. She loved the feel of rich, moist dirt, the sky over her shoulder, and the wind in her hair, but most of all she loved the miracle of the first sight of green breaking through the soil. There was no other feeling like it. It even beat the magic of Christmas morning.