The plant - By Stephen King Page 0,63

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."
Chapter CHAPTER TEN
"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.