My Drowning

by Jim Grimsley

  We never had any doubt Corrine would live. When she was hungry, she roared. When she was wet or uncomfortable, she roared. When she wanted to be washed, she roared. When she needed any attention of any kind, she roared: she opened her mouth, her face flushed red, and a sound came out, like the whole fury of a storm wrapped up in a baby and stuffed into her lungs.

  She was born on the lip of summer and when time came to work in the fields, we carried her with us. The job of watching her and tending Madson and her fell to Joe Robbie and me; we sat at the edge of the field, in shade if I could find it.

  Mama, Otis, and Nora worked. Sometimes they worked in green tobacco and sometimes they picked cotton. A couple of times Mr. Allison called them for strawberry picking or whatnot. Mama hated to pick strawberries because squatting so far wore her out.

  For picking cotton, Nora and Otis stayed home from school, and we all woke up before dawn. We ate cold biscuit from the night before, and drank sweet coffee. Carl Jr. and Daddy dressed for logging at the same time, so we were all shuffling around the house pulling on clothes and running fingers through the tangles in our hair. Mr. Allison picked us up in his truck. He drove us to the fields with the other white family that worked for him, the Hollands. They were not as low as we were, but they were pretty low, and their girl Nina, who was my age, had as few dresses as I did, all as thin and faded as mine. We went to work right away while Mr. Allison went to fetch the black families from Holberta.

  It galled Mama that he picked us up first. She stayed mad all day, muttering as her hands darted among the cotton bolls.

  Some days I watched the babies and Joe Robbie, and some days I picked cotton, when Nora wanted a rest. I picked in the row ahead of Mama so she could make sure I pulled only the bolls that were ready. The work came hard, and my body hurt from stooping down, from pulling the bolls, from the heat. Mostly the low of my back ached from the odd angle. I wanted to rest sometimes, but Mama drove me forward, telling me to get a move. I picked the cotton and dropped the bolls in my canvas sack that dragged the ground. I stooped slightly forward. The pain increased.

  Once I said my back was hurting, and Mama answered, “You ain’t even old enough to have a damn back.”

  Nora moved neatly along her row. Her body had rounded a little, I could see the difference when she leaned forward, when she planted a hand in the low of her back. Sometimes, when she straightened, the young black boys watched her. I could see the look in their eyes, one that reminded me of Uncle Cope, or even of Daddy.

  I mimicked Nora in the fields. I pressed my hand into the low of my back and tilted my face up to the sun. I tied my straw hat below my chin with the same knot.

  Every week, when the farmer paid us, Mama collected all the money we earned and kept it in the bosom of her dress. I think it was the only reason she wore a brassiere. It would be years before I thought of this as money I had earned.

  At night, following the long day’s baking in the field, Corrine continued as my burden. I changed her diapers and washed them in the pot. I bathed her and powdered her dimpled ass. I carried her to Mama for nursing and watched as Mama’s expanding breast sank onto her face. I kept her baby dresses clean.

  We didn’t have much clothing for a girl, and most of that was what I had worn. When she heard about the new baby, Daddy’s sister Addis gave us a box of stuff from her twins that died, and I was dressing Corrine in clothes from the box.

  “Did you get that baby something to wear?” Mama asked, sitting on the porch in the cool of evening. “She ought not to go around so ragged.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I gave her a bath.”

  “Well, she needed it. Where did you get that little outfit on her?”

  “Out of that box from Aunt Addis.”

  Mama shook her head so that her chin shook from side to side. “I hate we have to use that stuff.”

  “There’s some good dresses,” I said. “And the underwear is real clean and there’s a lot of it, for later.”

  “You know them younguns died.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Your Daddy says Addis didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  I waited. She reached for her snuff can and laid some of the fragrant stuff under her tongue. This gave her voice a slightly muffled sound.

  “But Tula is her sister, and Tula told me she thinks Addis killed them babies. She thinks Addis smothered the both of them with a pillow. It was that Jenny woman put her up to it. And I think that’s why she give us this whole box of stuff, because what she done worries her.”

  Lucky for us she had waited a couple of years to smother them, because now we had a lot of baby clothes.

  “Your Aunt Addis is crazy. She never did get married to that man, the one that had them babies with her, and it broke her mind. Just like it was a watch and she wound it too tight. That’s what Tula says. That’s how Jenny got hold of her. Tula used to would tell me everything, when your daddy and me first got married. But now we don’t hardly talk, because we don’t live over on that side of the pond no more.”

  At night, I was the one who put Corrine to sleep in the cradle near Mama’s bed. I never sang to her or told her stories; we are not like that, Corrine and I. For her I felt little of the devotion with which I might have tended Alma Laura, and, since I still had Alma Laura with me, I never changed that affection for something I might spend on Corrine. I tended Corrine because it was my work.

  She thrived without anyone’s particular affection, a fortunate trait. She drank Mama’s titties dry. She basked in the summer heat, with flies walking on her eyelids, on the edges of her lips. On a blanket in the shade she kicked her legs and gooed. She laughed at thunder and lightning, she kicked at raindrops with her feet. I saw her upset only once, when a green tobacco worm crawled onto her foot. She frowned as if it stank and cried for a while, out of indignation, after I stripped it off. Mostly she lay on the blanket and took in everything, the hard work, the clatter of the mule harness, everybody’s talk around the water truck. The hard months of summer passed easily for Corrine, because she grabbed for what she needed and grew on what she got. She passed scarcely even a day of sickness.

  SOMETIMES ALMA LAURA watched us. I never saw any envy in her face, any sense that Corrine possessed something Alma Laura lacked. Once or twice I wondered if Alma Laura thought I might abandon her, now that I had a real baby to take care of. But I never detected such fear.

  Alma Laura walked with me in the fields. She was no help with the cotton; my bag never filled a bit faster because of her. Her hand on my sore back muscles gave me no sensation at all. But she waited with me while I worked, sitting in the shade in the space between the cotton rows. About the only help she could be was to warn me about snakes and such.

  She had kept growing as if she were still alive. She was always wearing the dresses I used to wear, and when she appeared in one, I used to wonder if it was also still hanging in the closet or folded in a box in the back room of the house. In the summer she went barefoot, like the rest of us. Wherever she was, she was always clean. I had a nice straw sunhat, though, and she never had one.

  I practiced never to speak to Alma Laura, because Mama would look at me like I had head sickness. Mama told stories about a fever that would dry a man’s brain inside his skull, which was how her daddy had died, she said. She checked me for signs of it, sometimes. Because I talked odd, when I talked, she explained to Nora. There was something about me that wasn’t right.

  I TALKED TO Corrine. I told her things she needed to know. First, that there are boys and there are girls, and she was a girl. I showed her the place between her legs and informed her that I also had a place like that. When I had to pee, that was what I used. But boys used something different, and because of it, everybody liked boys better in our family. Daddy especially liked boys better, but Mama liked them better too. Carl Jr. could come and go as he pleased, but Nora had to stay at home all the time. Nora and me were the only ones who had to tote the water and carry the d
ishes; nobody but us did both. Corrine would find out more about the differences with time, and so would I. Whatever I noticed, I promised to tell. Nora, for instance, was starting to get titties. I told her many other things, simple, to help her out around the house. I warned her you had to watch out for Uncle Cope’s crutches because they were very hard, and if he put one on your foot he could break a bone. Joe Robbie found that out. She would also need to learn about Joe Robbie, because when she got older she would be the one to wipe his spit. Joe Robbie was bigger than me but folded up to where you could fit him in a wagon. The county woman promised us a wheelchair if the war ended, but the way things go for us, you never know. I told her you needed to get near the table come biscuit time, and when there are beans, you better grab a bowl and hide it somewhere before all the dishes get gone. You are the littlest one, and nobody will look out for you when everybody is the same hungry. Also, she couldn’t expect this hot weather to keep up, because after it was hot it got cold, and after it was cold it got hot again, like that, in circles. So it would get cold soon and just wait. I explained about Uncle Cope and the cornhole, and about the county prison and the war. The war was hard, because of Europe and the Japs, but I got through the lecture. I told her there was extra meat in the beans when Daddy sold ration coupons and how Carl Jr. tried to enlist but he was barely sixteen. I told her Otis had a mean temper, worth watching out for, because one time he came after me with a shovel. I told her about the dead baby boy, but not about Alma Laura, who was my secret. I explained fatback and bacon and the difference. I explained getting credit at the Little Store. I explained that black women in Holberta made gardens for tomatoes but our mama didn’t. There were more and more things as I talked, not less and less, the way you would think.

  I told her to close the door when she took a bath. I told her to keep a towel close by. When she was big she would need to be careful of these things. She would need to wait until the sisters were ready to go to bed to undress, and to keep close to me and Nora. If Mama had any dreams or talked in her sleep, it was best to cover your ears with the pillow. Sometimes Daddy gets mad when she wakes him up, or else he just wakes up mad himself, and then they fight in the wee hours. Then you have to sleep as best you can. Mama says never stare at a full moon. If you have to pee, nobody is going to walk out in the yard with you. We keep a slop pot on the porch, but it’s always full.

  I was conscious, the whole time, that years of telling her things were yet to come.

  THE SNAKE’S TOOTH

  WHEN WORD CAME a monster had been sighted in the woods around White Lake, about an hour’s ride from us, Mama shook her head over the mess of snap beans Aunt Tula had brought from her garden. “Snake never bites you twice in the same place. But that monster is a-coming back here. You mark my words.”

  “I declare, woman.” Aunt Tula fanned her face with a church fan showing angels leading children across a bridge. She fanned and snapped long green beans. Tips and middles. The sound was crisp and the motion clean. “Snap, don’t twist, Nora. You waste, that way. And Louise, hush about that monster. Ain’t nobody seen him since that colored woman.”

  “It eat her dog’s head,” Mama swore.

  “Nobody seen it.”

  “Mr. Jarman seen it. He come up here and told us, didn’t he, younguns?”

  We nodded our heads. I was trying to snap a bean too, but my fingers lacked the schooling. I studied the bowl in Aunt Tula’s lap. I studied her slim fingers, Mama’s fat one’s. Don’t twist.

  “It’s a snake I heared of,” Mama nodded her head, “will bite you and latch on with its jaw, and won’t let go of you till sundown.”

  “It ain’t no such thing.”

  “A snake like that killed a man near Luma. They was talking about it at the Holiness. It latched onto his throat, and he couldn’t draw one breath.”

  “You will tell a lie,” Aunt Tula remarked.

  “I believe it happened like they said at the Holiness.”

  “You don’t even go to the Holiness.”

  We sat there in the late evening. We had worked a day, then Aunt Tula brought the sack of beans. If we helped her snap them we could have some, and new potatoes.

  “Willie says you-all are moving again,” Aunt Tula noted evenly.

  “That’s what he says.” Mama sighed and studied the ends of snap beans in her lap. “It’s a shame we can’t keep this house.”

  This was news to the rest of us, except Nora, who never looked up from her work.

  “Willie is having a hard time, ain’t he?” Aunt Tula spoke as if Daddy were having it by himself. “But that’s probably a sweet little house you’ll be moving to.”

  “Ain’t much to it from what I can tell.”

  “There’s some pretty country around Holberta. That’s a nice little piece of road down there, and you can see right to the pond.”

  Mama said, “These beans is a good size.”

  WE MOVED TO a shack near Holberta, where everything was worse. The house boasted no paint, only gray, weathered planks. Some of the windows had no glass and we nailed grease paper to keep out the rain. The back door hung on one hinge till Carl Jr. found an old hinge in the yard and nailed it in place. The stove flue was busted in the middle. We made brooms from broomstraw and swept, clouds of dust, but there was always more to sweep.

  The well, in the backyard, had half a handle, with a tobacco stick tied on to make the rest. The well was hard to prime, and the walk to the kitchen and up the steps with a bucket of water could take your breath. We had another johnny house, this one a good ways down a path in the middle of some honeysuckle and blackberry bushes. The place reeked of snakes and mice.

  Otis found a book in the johnny house the very first day. He never let me see it, and Daddy caught him with it and took it for himself. But I saw there was some man naked on the front, a drawing, showing everything the man had.

  Across the road, around a curve and through some trees sat the houses of Holberta, a cluster of black families who grouped around Fork Road and Union Road at one end of Moss Pond. People walking to Holberta passed by our house. Seeing we were white, they turned their heads away.

  An abandoned church lurked under trees at the bend in the road, and near it lay a cemetery. Them places were haunted, Mama said, because slaves were buried in the graves and they had slept so restless, they tossed the brick vaults out of the ground, you could walk and see it if you wanted. But it was best to visit over there in the daylight, because in the night it could be dangerous. Even in the day, you should be careful in the high grass, because of whip snakes that could whip around your legs and drag you down and choke you, or tree snakes that could drop down on you from a tree and bite you and kill you. Those were the main dangers, she said. Other than the ghosts.

  Nora, Otis, and me walked to the cemetery near the falling-down church. Part of the steeple was hanging in the branches of a tree nearest the graves, and even though it looked like it had been steady for a while, we kept our distance. But you could see something had torn up the grass around the graves, and these brick boxes were shoved up from the ground. The stone crosses and headstones stood every which way. Deep shade from the oak tree, its branches no doubt full of tree snakes, flowed down to the graves.

  Otis wanted to climb inside the church but Nora said no.

  “Now we live in Holberta with the niggers,” Nora said, “next to a nigger graveyard.” After she said that, we went home.

  Everything was harder there, too. The walk to the Little Store took twice as long, and my arms could hardly hold the boxes by the end; there was a black store in Holberta but we were not allowed to go there. In the mornings Mr. Allison picked us up for the fieldwork with the black families, and that left Mama muttering all over again. She herded us all to the front of the truck, and we sat there around her like a brood of chicks.

  One day, though, she found out that two of the young boys on the truck, Cunning and Arthur, were the sons of Annalea Bates, the woman who saw the mo
nster and rescued her dog’s body. All of a sudden she was all ears.

  “It was a gray thing,” Arthur said. “It had scales and a jaw.”

  “Mama ain’t say nothing about no jaw.”

  “Hush, boy. Who telling this?”

  “Misress Tote, it won’t no jaw. Mama seen this gray thing, what was eating Raeford head.”

  “Raeford were our dog.”

  “And the monster ate his head.”

  “Mama run, but then she went back after the dog. Do you believe that?”

  “Crazy fool,” one of the other women said. “I would have left the dog where it was.”

  “What else did she seen?” Mama asked.

  “Wasn’t nothing much.” Arthur shrugged. “She seen this gray thing. That was all.”

  “It was some tracks.”

  “That’s right. It was some tracks.”

  “It was your Daddy’s liquor, is was it was; that’s what your mama seen,” said the woman.

  “Naw, it was a gray thing eating Raeford head.”

  We cropped tobacco through August, as far toward school as we could. Mama would work longer, if needed. I would certainly have gone to the fields with her to tend the smaller children. But this year I was starting school.

  ONE DAY, WHEN we were waiting for the truck to take us home at the end of the day, Cunning Bates told Otis, “It was a witch hung in that tree behind your house. The Hawfords move because they found out.”

  “My daddy got us this house,” Otis answered. “We use to live down the road towards the bridge.”

  “Your daddy is common. Ain’t no white peoples want to live down here.”

  Otis flushed red and doubled his fists. “You hush.”

  Cunning shrugged. “You can live there if you want to. But it’s not right.” He paused for effect. “Sometime you can see that old witch under that tree, my mama seen it and her hair turn white.”