The Plant

From the journals of Riddley Walker

4/4/81 12:35 A. M. Aboard the Silver Meteor Question: Has Riddley Pearson Walker ever in his life been so confused, so disheartened, so shaken, so downright sad?

I don't think so.

Has Riddley Pearson Walker ever had a worse week in the twenty-six years of his life?

Absolutely not.

I am aboard Amtrak's Train 36, headed back to Manhattan at least three days early. No one knows I'm coming, but then, who would care? Roger Wade? Kenton, perhaps? My landlord?

I tried for a plane out of B'ham, but no seats available until Sunday. I could not bring myself to stay in Blackwater—or anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line—that long. Hence the train. And so, to the sound of snores all around me, and in spite of the swaying motion of the car on the rails, I write in this diary. I can't sleep. Perhaps I will be able to when I get back to Dobbs Ferry sometime this afternoon, but the afternoon seems an eternity away. I remember the narrative intro to that old TV show, The Fugitive. “Richard Kimball looks out the window and sees only darkness,” William Conrad would say each week. He went on, “But in that darkness, Fate moves its huge hand.” Will that huge hand move for me? I think not. I fear not. Unless there is fate in John Kenton's ivy, and how can fate—or Fate—reside in such a small and anonymous plant? Crazy idea. God knows what put it in my head.

My reception in Blackwater was warm only from the McDowells—my Uncle Michael and Aunt Olympia. Sister Evelyn, sister Sophie, sister Madeline (always my favorite, which is what makes this hurt so much), and brother Floyd all cold, reserved. Until late Friday afternoon I put that down to the distractions of grief, no more. Certainly we got through the painful rituals of the burial all right. Mama Walker rests beside my father, in the town graveyard. In the black section of the town graveyard, for there the rule of segregation holds as firm as ever, not as a matter of law but due to the laws of family custom—unspoken, unwritten, but as strong as tears and love.

Out my window I see a full moon riding serenely in the still-southern sky, a silver dollar pancake of a moon. So my Mama called it, and tonight it has gone full without her. For the first time in sixty-two years it has gone full without her. I sit here writing and feel the tears sliding down my cheeks. Oh Mama, how I weep for you! How yo littlest chile, de one dem white boys used to call little ole blueblack, how dat chile do weep! Tonight I is a Stephen Foster fiel' nigger fo sho! Yassuh! Mama in de col' col' groun'! Yes ma'am!

Estranged from my sisters and my brother as well. Where will I be buried, I wonder? In what strange ground?

Anyway, it came out. All the bitterness. And the hate? Was it hate I saw in their eyes? In my dear Maddy's eyes? She who used to hold my hand when we went to school, and who used to comfort me when the others teased me and called me blueblack or bluegum or L'il Heinie on account of the time in first grade when my pants fell down? I want to say no and no and no, but my heart denies that no. My heart says it was. My heart says yes and yes and yes.

There was a family gathering at the house this afternoon, the last act of the sadly prosaic drama that began with Mama's heart attack on the 25th. Michael and Olympia were the nominal host and hostess. It began with coffee, but soon the wine was circulating in the parlor and something quite a bit stronger out on the back porch. I didn't see my brother or any of my sisters in the house, so checked the porch. Floyd was there, drinking a little glass of whiskey and “memorating” (Mama's word for reminiscence) with some of her cousins, and Orthina and Gertrude, from her book-circle (both ladies decorous but undoubtedly tiddly), and Jack Hance, Evvie's husband. No sign of Evvie herself, or Sophie, or Madeline.

I went looking for them, worried that they might not be all right. Upstairs, from the room at the end of the hall where Mama slept alone for the last dozen years since Pop died, I finally heard their voices. There was murmuring; there was also low laughter. I went down there, my footsteps muffled by the thick hall runner, doing a little memorating myself—on Mama's bitter complaints about that thick runner and how it used to show the dirt. Yet she never changed it. How I wish she had. If they had heard me coming—just the simple sound of approaching footfalls—everything might have been different. Not in reality, of course; dislike is dislike, hate is hate, those things are at least quasi-empirical, I know. It is my illusions that I am talking about. The illusions of my family's regard, the illusions of what I myself had always believed they believed: brave Riddley, the Cornell graduate who has taken a series of menial jobs, work for the body while the mind remains free and uncluttered and able to continue work on the Great Book, a kind of fin de siecle Invisible Man. How often I have invoked the spirit of Ralph Ellison! I even dared to write him once, and received a kind, encouraging reply. It hangs framed on the wall of my apartment, over my typewriter. Whether I will be able to continue on after this is anybody's guess... and yet I think I must. Because without the book, what else is there? Why dere's de broomhandle! De can o' Johnson's flo' wax! De squeegee for de windows and de brush for de tawlits! Yassuh!

No, there must be the book. In spite of everything, because of everything, there must be this book. In a very real sense, it's all I have left.

All right. Enough crybaby stuff. Let's get down to it.

I've already written here about the reading of my Mama's last will and testament on the day between her wake and her burial, and how Law Tidyman, her lifelong friend, allowed most of it to stand in her own words. It struck me passing strange then (although I did not put it down, being tired and grief-struck, states of remarkable similarity) that Mama would have asked Law to do it, old friend or not, rather than her own son, who is now considered one of the best lawyers of any color, at least on this side of Birmingham. Now perhaps I understand that a little bit better.

In her will, Mama wrote that she wanted “all cash, of which I do have a little, to go to the Blackwater Library Fund. All negotiable items, of which I do have yet a few, should be sold by my executor at top price available within the twelvemonth following my death, and all proceeds donated to the Blackwater High School Scholarship Fund, with the understanding that any such resulting scholarships, which may be called Fortuna Walker Scholarships if the Committee would so honor me, should be given without regard to race or religion, as all during my life I, Fortuna Walker, have believed Whites to be every bit as good as Blacks, and Catholics almost as good as Southern Baptists.”

How we chuckled at that nearly perfect microcosm of all her wit. But there was no chuckling this afternoon. At least, not after my sisters looked up from where they sat on her bed and saw me standing shocked in the doorway.

By then I had seen all I needed to see. “Anyone a step over puffick idiot'd know what that was about,” Mama herself no doubt would have said—more memoration. And what I saw in my dead mother's bedroom will be printed on my memory until memoration itself ceases.

Her dresser drawers were open, all of them. Her things were still in the top ones, although many of her blouses and scarves slopped over the edges, and it was clear that everything had been stirred about and pawed through—a puffick idiot could have seen that. But the things which had been in the two bottom drawers had been pulled out and lay scattered in drifts across her rose-colored rug, the one which had never shown dirt because nothing dirty was allowed in that quiet room. At least not until last evening, that is, when she was dead and unable to stop it. What made it worse, what made them seem to me so much like pirates and plunderers, was the fact that it was her unmentionables lying there. My dead mother's underwear, scattered hell to breakfast by her daughters, who in my eyes made Lear's look kind by comparison.

Am I unkind? Self-righteous? I no longer know. All I know is that my heart hurts and my head is roaring with confusion. And I know what I saw: her drawers opened, her slips and underpants and righteous Playtex girdles spread across the floor. And they on the bed, laughing, with a red tin box on the coverlet in the middle of their circle; a red box with its Sweetheart Girl cover taken off and laid aside. It had been full of cash and jewelry. Now it was empty and it was their hands that were full of her greenbacks and heirlooms. How much might their trove have been worth? Not a huge amount, but by no means paltry; some of the pins and broaches could have been costume stuff, but I saw two rings whose stones were, according to Mama herself, diamonds. And Mama didn't lie. One of them was her engagement ring.

It was perhaps a minute before they saw me. I said nothing myself; I was literally struck dumb.

Evelyn, the oldest, looking young in spite of the gray in her hair, with her hands full of old tens and fives, put aside by my mother over the years.

Sophie, counting through official-looking papers that might have been stock certificates or perhaps treasury bonds, her fingers speeding along like a bank-teller ready to cash out her drawer for the weekend.

And my youngest sister, Maddy. My schoolyard guardian angel. Sitting with her palms full of pearls (probably cultured, I grant you) and earrings and necklaces, sorting through them, as absorbed as an archeologist. That was what hurt the worst. She hugged me when I got off the plane, and wept against my neck. Now she picked through her dead mother's things, the good stuff and the trumpery, grinning like a jewel thief after a successful heist.

All of them grinning. All of them laughing.

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—”

Floyd stepped up. His eyes were deadly flat. He held up a clenched fist. “You say another word like that, Riddie, and I'm going to break your nose.”

There was a moment of tense silence, and then from down below Aunt Olympia called up, her voice high and jolly and nervous. “Boys and girls? Everything all right up there?”

“Fine, Aunt Olly,” Evelyn called back. Her voice was light and carefree; her eyes, which never left mine, were murderous. “Talking over the old times. We'll be down in a wink. Y'all stay close, all right?”

“You're sure everything is okay?”

And I, God help me, felt an insane urge to scream: No! It's not okay! Get up here! You and Uncle Michael both get up here! Get up here and rescue me! Save me from the pecking of the carrion birds!

But I kept my mouth shut, and Evvie shut the door.

Sophie said, “Mama wrote you all the time, we knew that, Rid. You were always her favorite, she spoiled you rotten, especially after Pop died and there was no more holding her back. You got plenty of how she saw it.”

“That's not true,” I said.

“But it is,” Maddy said. “And do you know what? The way Mama saw things was pretty selective. She told you about all the money Floyd made last year, I've no doubt of it, but I doubt if she told you about how Floyd's partner stole everything he could get his hands on. Hi-ho, it's Oren Anderson, off to the Bahamas with his chippy of the month.”

I felt as if I'd been sucker-punched. I looked at Floyd. “Is that true?”

Floyd took another little nip at the silver flask that had been Pop's before it was his and grinned at me. It was a ghastly grin. His eyes were redder than ever and there was spit on his lips. He looked like a man at the end of a month-long binge. Or at the beginning of one.

“True as can be, little brother,” he said. “I was rooked like an amateur. I think I'm going to be able to sail through without getting in the papers, but it's still not a sure thing. I came to her for help and she told me how she was broke. Never got over putting you through Cornell is what she said. How broke does that on the bed look to you, little brother? Eight thousand in cash... at least... and twice that in jewelry. Thirty thousand in stocks, maybe. And she wanted to give it to the library.” A glare of contempt closed his face like a cramp. “Jesus please us.”

I looked to Evvie. “Your husband Jack... the construction business...”

“Jack's had a hard two years,” she said. “He's in trouble. Every bank within fifty miles is carrying his paper. How much he owes is all that's propping him up.” She laughed, but her eyes were frightened. “Just something else you didn't know. Sophie's Randall is a little better off—”

“We keep even, but get ahead?” Sophie also laughed. “Not likely. Floyd helped all of us along when he could, but since Oren double-crossed him...”

“That snake,” Maddy said. “That fucking snake.”

I turned to Floyd, and nodded at the little flask. “Maybe you've been taking a little too much of that. Maybe that's why you didn't mind your business a little better when you had a little more business to mind.”

Floyd's fist came slowly up again. This time I stuck out my chin. You get to a point when you just don't care anymore. I know that now.

“Go ahead, Floyd. If it'll make you feel better, go on ahead. And if you think twenty or even forty thousand dollars is going to bail y'all out, then go ahead with that, too. More fools you be.”

Floyd drew his fist back. He would have hit me, too, but Maddy stepped between us. She looked at me, and I looked away. I couldn't bear what I saw in her eyes.

“You with the quotes,” she said softly. “Always with the quotable quotes. Well, here's one for you, Mr. Uppity: 'He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune. ' Francis Bacon said that almost three hundred years ago, and it was folks like us he was talking about, not folks like you. Not folks that take twenty or thirty thousand dollars to get educated, then have to do research in floor-polishing. How much have you given back to your family? I'll tell you how much! Nothing! And nothing! And nothing!”

She was standing so close and spat each nothing so hard that spit flew from her lips to mine.

“Maddy, I—”

“Shut up,” she said. “I'm talking now.”

“Tell it!” Sophie said happily. It was a nightmare, I tell you. A nightmare.

“I'm getting out of here,” I said, and started to turn away.

They wouldn't let me. That's like nightmares, too; they won't let you get away. Evelyn grabbed me on one side, Floyd on the other.

“No,” Evvie said, and I could smell booze on her breath, too. The wine they were drinking downstairs. “You listen. For once in your stuck-up life, you just listen.”

“You weren't here when she got funny, but we were,” Maddy said. “The strokes she had affected her mind. Sometimes she went wandering, and we had to go find her and bring her back. Once she did it at night and we had half the town out looking for her with flashlights. So far as I could tell, you weren't there when we finally found her at two in the morning, curled up on the riverbank fast asleep with half a dozen fat copperheads down there not four yards from her bare feet. So far as I know, you were up there in your New York apartment when that happened, fast asleep yourself.”

“Tell it,” Floyd said grimly. All of them acting as though I live in the Dakota, in a penthouse, instead of my little place in Dobbs Ferry... and yet my little place is nice enough, isn't it? Perfectly affordable, even on a janitor's salary, for a man with no vices and no hostages to fortune.

“Sometimes she messed herself,” Maddy said. “Sometimes she talked crazy in church. She'd go to her book-circle and rave half an hour about some book she'd read twenty years ago. She'd be all right for awhile... she had plenty of good days until the last few months... but sooner or later the nutty stuff would start in again, each time a little worse, a little longer. And you didn't know about any of it, did you?”

“How could I?” I asked. “How could I, when none of you wrote and told me? Not so much as a word?”

That was the one shot of mine that went home. Maddy flushed. Sophie and Evvie looked away, saw the treasure scattered on the bed, and then looked away from that, too.

“Would you have come?” Floyd asked quietly. “If we'd written you, Riddie, would you have come?”

“Of course,” I said, and heard the terrible stiff falsity in my voice. So, of course, did they... and the moral advantage passed away from me. For tonight, most likely for good, as far as they are concerned. That their own moral stance was at least partly an excuse for reprehensible behavior I do not doubt. But their anger at me was genuine, and at least partly justified—I don't doubt that, either.

“Of course,” he said, nodding and grinning his red-eyed grin. “Of course.”

“We took care of her,” Maddy said. “We banded together and we took care of her. There was no hospital and no nursing home, even after she started to wander. After the riverbank adventure I slept here some nights; so did Sophie; so did Evelyn and Floyd. Everyone but you, Rid. And how did she thank us? By leaving us a worthless house and a worthless barn and four acres of nearly worthless land. The things that were worth something—money that could pay off the credit cards Floyd uses for his business and give Jack a little more breathing-space—those she denied us. So we took them. And you come in, Mr. Smart Northern Nigger comes in, and tells us we're ghouls stealing the pennies off a dead woman's eyes.”

“But Maddy... don't you see that if what you take isn't what she wanted to give, no matter how much of a tight place you're in or how bad you need it, that's stealing? Stealing from your own mother?”

“My own mother was crazy!” she cried at me in a whispered shriek. She pistoned her tiny fists in the air, I think expressing her frustration that I should continue to balk over a point that was so clear to her... perhaps because she had been there, she had seen Mama's craziness at its fruitiest, and I had not. “She lived the last part of her life crazy and she died crazy! That will was crazy!”

“We earned this here,” Sophie said, first patting Maddy's back and then drawing her gently away from me, “so never mind your talk about stealing. She tried to give away what was ours. I don't blame her for it, she was crazy, but it's not going to stand. Riddie, you just want to take all your Boy Scout ideas on out of here and let us finish our business.”

“That's right,” Evvie said. “Go on down and get a glass of wine. If Boy Scouts drink wine, that is. Tell them we'll be down directly.”

I looked at Floyd. He nodded, not smiling now. By then none of them were smiling. Smiling was done. “That's it, little brother. And never mind that oh-poor-me look on your face. You stuck your nose in where it didn't belong. If you got bee-stung, it's nobody's fault but your own.”

At the last I looked at Maddy. Just hoping. Well, hope in one hand and shit in the other; even a puffick idiot knows how that one turns out.

“Go on,” she said. “I can't bear to look at you.”

I went back down the stairs like a man in a dream, and when Aunt Olympia laid her hand on my arm and asked what was wrong up there, I smiled and said nothing, we were just talking over old times and got a little hot under the collar. The Southern family at its finest; paging Tennessee Williams. I said I was going into town to get a few things, and when Aunt Olly asked me what things—meaning what had she forgotten when she stocked for Mama's last party—I didn't answer her. I just went on out, marching straight ahead with that meaningless little smile on my face, and got into my rental car. Basically what I've done since is just keep going. I left a few clothes and a paperback book, and they can stay there until the end of the age, as far as it concerns me. And all the while I've been moving I've also been replaying what I saw as I stood unnoticed in her doorway: drawers pulled out and underwear scattered and them on the bed with their hands full of her things and the cover of her tin box set aside. And everything they said may have been true, or partially true (I think the most convincing lies are almost always partially true), but what I remember most clearly is their overheard laughter, which had nothing in it of absconding partners or husbands teetering on the edge of insolvency or credit card bills long past due and stamped with those ugly red-ink warnings. Nothing to do with kids needing money for college, either. The rue count, in other words, was zero. The laughter I overheard was that of pirates or trolls who have found buried treasure and are dividing it up, perchance by the light of a silver dollar pancake moon. I went down the stairs and down the back porch steps and away from that place like a man in a dream, and I am still that dreamer, sitting in a train with ink splattered all the way up my hand to the wrist and several pages of scribbling, probably indecipherable, now behind me. How foolish it is to write, what a pitiful bulwark against this world's hard realities and bitter home truths. How terrible to say, “This is all I have.” Everything aches: hand, wrist, arm, head, heart. I am going to close my eyes and try to sleep... at least to doze.

It's Maddy's face that terrifies me. Greed has made her a stranger to me. A terrible stranger, like one of those female monsters in the Greek fairy-tales. No doubt I am a prig, just as they said, a self-righteous prig, but nothing will change what I saw in their eyes when they didn't know I was seeing them.

Nothing.

More than my book, I find it's the simplicities of work that I long for—Kenton's endless self-analysis and agonizing, Gelb's amusing fixation with the dice, Porter's even more amusing fixation with the seat of Sandra Jackson's office chair. I wouldn't even mind having it off with her again, starring in one of her fantasies. I want the simplicity of my janitor's cubby, where all things are known, normal, unsurprising. I want to see if that pitiful little ivy is maintaining its toehold on life.

Around moonset, the Silver Meteor crossed the Mason-Dixon line. My sisters and my brother are on the other side of that line now, and I'm glad.

I can't wait to get back to New York.

Later/8 A. M.

Slept for almost five hours. My neck is stiff and my back feels like a mule kicked me, but on the whole I feel a little better. At least I was able to eat a little breakfast. I thought the idea I woke with might go away in the dining car, but it has remained clear. The idea—the intuition—is that if I were to go into the office instead of switching trains for Dobbs Ferry, I might feel better yet. I feel drawn there. It's as though I had a dream about the place, one I can't quite remember.

Maybe it's the plant—Zenith the ivy. My subconscious telling me to go in and water the poor little thing before it dies of thirst.

Well... why not?