The plant - By Stephen King Page 0,57

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