One Sunday Mary Bet came from the Dorsetts’ with some dried herbs and flower parts in an earthenware bowl and set them in the kitchen. She strained hot water through a tablespoon of the
mixture—dried bugbane stems, passionflower vines, the leaves and flowers of skullcap, and a little ginseng root—and took the tea in to her father, who was in his sitting room, a heavy book in his lap, staring out the window on a gray, blustery March afternoon. “I brought you some tea,” she said. “With lots of honey in it, just the way you like it.”
He nodded, glancing at her as though he hardly recognized her. “You could set it there,” he said. She put the cup and saucer on the low table that held his ashtray and books, then took a seat and picked up a book and began idly reading about Charles VI of France, the Well-Beloved. Her eyes roamed the page: he was called the Mad; he suffered bouts in which he tore his clothes, broke the furniture, had fevers and convulsions, didn’t recognize his own queen; he thought he was made of glass; he was locked away … She put the book down and looked at her father.
He took a sip of the tea and made a face. “What is this?” he asked.
“It’s a special homemade tea I got from the Dorsetts.” She glanced at the random pile of books.
“It doesn’t taste like much,” he said. “I don’t care for it, but I’ll drink it since you made it.”
“I wish you would, Daddy. It’s good for all kinds of ailments.”
He sipped at the brew. “Well, I don’t see where it’ll hurt.” He looked out the window again. “That new horse is a funny one. She just stands there watching me like she wants something.”
Mary Bet got up so she could see from his angle. The horse, a brindle-gray mare, was busily grazing in the near paddock, where she’d been most of the day. “Lila? I don’t think she can see in here, Daddy. Why would she do that?”
“That’s what I want to know. Why would a horse stand there a-watching me like that? Sometimes I’ll go out there and talk to her, and she pricks her ears up like she’s paying attention to every word.”
“What do you say to her?” Mary Bet asked, wondering if this was the sort of behavior she should be asking Dr. Slocum about.
“Well, sometimes I tell her about Susan Elizabeth, and how she would’ve appreciated her. She liked that brindle color on a horse.”
Mary Bet thought perhaps she should remember to write down what her father was saying. For one thing, he never referred to her mother by her Christian name; it was always “your mother.” But lately he’d slipped sometimes and called her “my wife” or “Susan Elizabeth.”
“She once told me something that stuck with me.”
“The horse?”
“No,” he said, with a little laugh, “though I wouldn’t be surprised. No, your mother told me, long about the time you were born, that marriage was like an old coat that never quite fit right, but she was determined now to wear it anyway. There were places that would never soften, but it was hers.” He opened his hands and looked at them. “I expect she meant marriage in general, since she was only ever married to me. And then our boy died, and then Annie and Willie, the twins. But it was Ila that killed her, I think. She loved Ila more than anything—everybody did.”
Mary Bet nodded, but she was thinking how little she had known Ila, except near the end. It was Myrtle Emma whom she had loved the most, and before her, Annie. But to her parents the younger children must’ve seemed almost like a second family.
“I kept having a dream after Ila died. I was back with my outfit, and I had both of my legs. We were marching along some high ridge somewhere, with blue hills rolling off to either side. And that ridge kept getting narrower and narrower, both slopes just falling away. All you could do was keep moving forward.”
He finished his tea, and said it wasn’t bad once you got used to it. She started bringing him a cup every day, and she thought she did see an improvement in his mood. Once she came in and found
him laughing at something he was reading. They sat drinking the concoction—both of them, for she thought him more likely to keep drinking it if she joined him—and talking, as had become their late afternoon routine.
One day he told her that Mrs. Edwards had taken a fancy to him, which piqued Mary Bet’s interest because she’d heard nothing about it from Clara. Mrs. Edwards had been dropping by the store of late, buying things she couldn’t need and sometimes bringing little gifts. “I expect she’s lonely and wants somebody to pay her court,” Cicero said, “but I told her the ladies I’m interested in are too young to be interested in me.”
“You did no such thing, Daddy.”
“Ask Thad Utley if I didn’t. I told her I was interested in creating something new, and that did the trick. She was slam gone.”
“What did you mean?”
“There’s something I want to do.”
“Oh?”
“I thought I might put a new fruit tree out in the orchard.”
“Good, Daddy,” she said. “We don’t have but one good apple tree left, and one plum.”
“Yes, but I’m not thinking about apple or plum trees. I want to put a banana tree out there.”
“Banana tree?”
“Yes, I like to eat them, about as much as any fruit, and you can’t get them around here, unless you order them special. Then half the time they’re rotten, and you still have to pay three times as much as you would for the same amount of apples. But, you see, if we had our own tree … And for the cold weather, I’d build a little glasshouse over it, a greenhouse.”
“For one tree?”
He chuckled, picturing it. “Maybe I’d put three or four in there. And we’d have all the bananas we could eat, and I’d sell the rest
at the store. Make myself rich enough to travel anywhere I want, you too.”
“Is there somewhere you want to visit, Daddy?”
His brow suddenly furrowed and he smacked a fist into his open book. “By God, child, you’re missing the point.”
She sat back as if struck. He had no right nor cause to talk to her that way. She’d only asked him where he wanted to go—the fact that he’d taken it as a way of getting at the root of an outlandish idea made her even more upset. He wasn’t as crazy as he seemed—very well then, he could do whatever mad thing he wanted. She could see him watching her, adjusting his tone to fit her reaction.
“What I mean to say,” he said, rubbing his beard between a thumb and two fingers and pretending to be lost in thought, “what I mean is that the money is not what interests me. It’s the idea. Growing a tropical fruit here—I know it could be done. It just takes somebody to do it. Why not me? Then if we were successful—why, we could do just as we pleased. You can’t make it rich by tending a store.”
“We have plenty,” Mary Bet said. “All we need.” Cicero laughed at this, his whole face relaxed now that he could see it was not his idea that was being challenged.
Mary Bet wanted him to know that she was happy for his enthusiasm, as long as he didn’t expect her to devote herself to his project. “Daddy, I know you can do whatever you want.” He’d kept his store when others failed during the panic; twice he’d been elected president of the Columbus Lodge; he’d represented Hartsoe City at the Confederate Monument unveiling. And she was sure there were other things she didn’t even know about. But what came to her mind was Grandpa Samuel and his broken waterwheel, lying on its side in the grass and weeds.
“You’re right about that, baby girl,” he said. And the way he said it, straightening himself a little as he did, his wise old confident
voice, coming from that shaggy buffalo head, now gray, made her believe him.
When the weather was warm, he sent off to the United Fruit Company in Boston for six dwarf Cavendish suckers. It seemed crazy to him that the plants had to go all the way from Honduras up to Boston before coming down to North Carolina, but headquarters was the only port where the company was willing to consider transacting this kind of business. It took him five letters to convince the sales department that he really did want the underground stems of the plants and to negotiate a price. He was certain that the back-and-forth had to do with the company’s fear of competition—they’d never had such a request from North Carolina, a fact that made him proud. To convince the company he was not cutting into their market, he said he was only interested in conducting some experiments with the local soil; any resulting fruit was for his family’s consumption. “How do you know they won’t send you something that’ll die before it gets here?” Robert Gray asked him down at the store one day.
“That’s a risk I’ll have to take,” he said. “Besides, the United Fruit Company would never do a thing like that.”
“Maybe not,” Robert said, “but they could say the plants were healthy when they sent them.”
Thad Utley grinned through tobacco-stained teeth and said, “You can always feed them bananas to the hogs if they don’t turn out good. That’s what I do with my peaches.” He leaned forward to spit, nearly turning his tilted chair out from under him.
“I’ll take it under advisement,” Cicero said. “You boys just wait till I’m rich and famous. You’ll be lining up to join my company. I might let you pick a bunch or two.”
The suckers arrived as scheduled at the train station, packed in two wooden crates the size of big coffins. Cicero and the four Negroes he’d hired unloaded the crates onto two luggage carts, the
stationmaster attending the process with great concern. Bystanders looked on with amusement. “Why, he’s lost his mind, same as his father,” was one comment. “No, he just likes bananas.”
Cicero was too busy to notice. “Watch how you make that turn now,” he said. “The whole thing’s liable to topple.”
“I didn’t think bananas could weigh so much,” the stationmaster said.
“It’s the soil,” Cicero replied.
“Well, as long as you don’t spill it all over my station.”
The men loaded the crates onto a heavy two-horse drag and proceeded down the Greensboro Road—newly laid with planks—into town, then across the river and up the hill to the Hartsoe place. They drove the cart right up beside the orchard, where Cicero had dug a half dozen holes, two feet deep and two feet across, spaced three feet apart in two rows. The journals he had been reading were unclear as to the optimal spacing of banana trees; the configuration he’d settled on meant a greenhouse two hundred and thirty-four square feet, which would give the trees room to spread at the top. He thought he could get by with just a glass roof and windows; still, it was a lot of glass, enough to cover two bedrooms. But if his grandfather could build the first house in the county with glass windows, he could build the first with a glass roof.
The men worked all day getting the plants into the ground, packing the holes with chicken manure, and watering them with a piggin relay. “I hear bandana taste like sweet potato with molasses,” one of them said. “Yaller-skin taters on trees,” said another, mopping his brow with a tattered cloth. The quietest of the workers, and also the strongest and hardest working, was a broad-chested man named Able. Cicero retained him to come back every week and help with the watering and fertilizing and weeding. He’d worked for Cicero before, and prior to the war his parents had been owned by the Cheeks, Cicero’s mother-in-law’s people.
Within a few weeks, green shoots began breaking the ground. Cicero and Able kept up their weekly routine. “Shore this ain’t corn?” Able asked.
“You wait and see,” Cicero said. “Come next summer, we’ll have all the bananas we can eat.”
Able shook his head and kept working. The only comment he would make about the new crop was that it was growing fast as corn and the leaves were bigger than any he’d ever seen. At the end of one day he looked at the plants, now knee-high, and said, “Look like big green ceegars.” If he had any doubts about the worthiness of the enterprise, he kept them to himself.
At the end of another day Cicero saw Able looking at the plants and he asked him, “Able, you must think this is the foolhardiest thing you’ve ever seen.”
Able smiled broadly. “Nawsuh,” he said.
“I reckon,” Cicero probed, “if I said I was planting magic beans so I could climb up to the clouds you’d keep working, just as long as I was paying you.”
Now Able leaned on his hoe and took up a serious expression. “Nawsuh, Mr. Hahtsoe. ’F you said they was magic beans, I’d do de work fo free, long’s you gimme some of dat gole you fine.”
“So you’d partner with me on a long shot, but for something as homespun crazy as bananas you want your money up front?”
“Thas right, yes, suh.”
“Well, I appreciate your honesty, Able. I never was a gambling man like my father-in-law, who was happy to gamble away his house if he was so inclined. But I’ll make a deal with you that won’t cost you a thing.” Cicero looked at Able, and Able tapped his hoe against the ground, as though considering the soundness of the earth around him. “If this crop turns out nice and healthy, and you stay with it—at the same rate I’m paying you—I’ll let you have all the bananas off one tree.”
Able thought about it for a moment. “That mighty kindly of you, Mr. Hahtsoe,” he said. “Which tree you sayin’ is mine?”
“I won’t tell you that, or else you’d pay more attention to it than the others. Not that you’d mean to. When the time comes, I’ll pick out a nice one for you.”
“All righty then,” Able said. He grabbed up his tools and started back to the shed, but before long he stopped. “Mr. Hahtsoe?” he said, turning around. “What if only five of them trees is any good?”
Cicero was amused. “I didn’t know you were such a shrewd man of business, Able,” he said. “I expect you’ll be wanting to set up a shop in town one of these days. I’ll tell you what,” he said. “If only four trees make it, we have the same deal.”
Able wiped a rivulet of sweat from his cheek with the back of his hand. He nodded, “I preeshate it, Mr. Hahtsoe. I shore do.” He shambled back toward the shed, and Cicero wondered what was in the man’s mind, whether Able really did appreciate the gesture, understanding that to Cicero it was a kind of bargain with God.
Work on the greenhouse and adjoining fireplace began nearly as soon as the banana plants showed themselves. Able said he doubted they’d need such a house for some time, that a few warm blankets would suffice since there was no tree on earth could grow high as a man in six months. “It’s not a real tree,” Cicero told him. “It’s more like corn. Just like you thought.”