by Jim Grimsley
When she opened her eyes, she glanced hopefully around, not at the river where the fish swam but at the branches of the trees. She jammed the steel fishhook through the fleshy part of the worm, and the worm curled and writhed along its free end. See a blue bird, she said, and kept glancing at the trees, and then glided toward the edge of the river in her battered, black shoes. She arced the bamboo pole and the worm in its agony soared through the air with a plop into the dark river. See a blue bird, Mama said, but I don’t remember whether she did. She stood shadow-dappled in her soft slip, cool in the summer afternoon, fishing in what must have been the river and not the pond. Somewhere, I think, she is still there.
Years later my daughter dropped a comb and reached for it, and I said, without even stopping to think, “Step on it.” My daughter looked up at me but her hand had not yet touched the comb, so I said, quickly, nudging her foot with mine, “If you drop a comb you have to step on it before you pick it up, or else somebody will lie about you before the day is done.”
She smiled at me as if this pleased her somehow, and stepped on the comb. An image of my mother flashed across her face, as if all the similarities of their facial bones were suddenly lighted. She faced the mirror and combed her carefully tended bangs.
Never hang a calendar before the new year begins, or else the family will have a bad year. I never remember a calendar in our house, though Mama repeated the saying to anyone who would listen in the days before a new year dawned.
When you rode in a car and you saw a black cat run across the road, you drew a cross on the window to send away the bad luck. Mama applied the rule to every cat, not only to black ones. She licked the tip of her finger and drew on the window, leaving a smear that she could see.
If you dreamed someone died, then pretty soon there was bound to be a wedding close by, but if you dreamed about somebody who was already dead, it was sure to rain.
We were visiting Uncle Bray and Aunt Tula; they had come to fetch us in Uncle Bray’s truck. We would sleep at their house tonight, and tomorrow we would take Grandaddy Tote to his brother’s funeral. We had eaten chocolate cake, fresh tomatoes, butterbeans that I helped to shell, potatoes mashed smooth with a fork. Uncle Bray had a son named Reno but he was not Aunt Tula’s boy, and when they were all in the room, they hardly looked at one another. Reno slept in a room in the barn, and that night he took Carl Jr. with him to sit up drinking. The rest of us were sleeping all over the house, some in the living room on the rug, and extra bodies in all the bedrooms. Nora, Corrine, and I had a pallet of our very own, at the foot of Aunt Tula’s bed, where Aunt Tula, Mama, and Madson also slept. We were excited that we could sleep in our clothes and that we could see right under Aunt Tula’s bed to the enamel slop pot she stored there, for when she had to pee in the middle of the night. When I took off my shoes I set them on the pedal of the sewing machine and Aunt Tula saw me and frowned and moved them, and I thought she was angry because I was not supposed to touch the sewing machine, but she only said, “You shouldn’t lay your shoes where they’re higher than your head, or else you won’t be able to sleep.”
If you stepped over somebody, you had to step back over them right away, or else they’d die soon. I stepped over Otis, and Mama made me step back. Nora stepped over Carl Jr., and Mama smacked her across the legs with the fly swat and pushed her over Carl Jr. from the other side. Corrine stepped over Delia, and Mama led her across the baby again, holding her chubby hand.
Once one of my sons stepped over another, and the saying ran through my head, a crazy sound, if you step over somebody they’ll die soon, but I said nothing to my son.
But with my daughter I would have spoken the words, I thought. I would say the words my mama said to me, no matter how stupid they sounded. It would not have been that I meant to say anything, the words would have flown out of my mouth. Like the thought of my drunken husband when I am standing at the kitchen sink now, damp on the front of my blouse.
I loved my mother with all my heart and soul. In the years that followed the winter in Holberta, I loved her with an intensity like nothing else I had ever known.
By the time we moved to the house in Piney Grove, where we would live until the war ended and Nora eloped, Mama had borne eleven children, nine alive and two either stillborn or dead soon after birth; and Joe Robbie died before his eighth year. Mama had worked in the fields every spring, summer, and autumn I could remember, and the labor and the birthing of children stooped her, drew deep lines in her face, caused her eyelids to droop. She had grown larger with the years, and now the fat of her calves hung down over her ankles. Weathered skin swelled over her cheeks.
Alma Laura and I watched her. It was Alma Laura who told me when Mama was pregnant again.
Once I had walked past Mama and Daddy’s room on a Sunday afternoon, and as I stepped on the creaking floorboard at their door the jarring sent the door open a crack. I could see Daddy’s pale hairy butt flailing up and down and round and round, and Mama laying there with her nightgown pulled up, lolling in the bed like a lake of herself, tongue flickering against her lower lip. I heard a step behind me and ran out the front door quickly. But the image of Daddy somewhere inside Mama stayed with me.
I knew from the pig harvest and the seasons of pigs’ lives that if a pig mounts a sow you get baby pigs. It was easy to learn the rest from Daddy’s talk. Now I had seen them through a crack in the door.
Daddy talked about Mama sometimes, him and Uncle Cope or Carl Jr., or sometimes even Otis. “I like it with some rhythm to it, and Louise rolls like a pond, she does,” Daddy told Uncle Cope.
“You shouldn’t talk to your brother about me.”
“You don’t worry about how I talk, you take care of frying that fatback.”
“It’s some cold biscuit, Daddy,” Nora said.
“But it ain’t no fatback till your fat-ass Mama fries it.”
“You just got finished telling me how much you like that big ass of hers,” Uncle Cope grinned.
“I don’t like to look at it. I just like to lay all over it.”
“Mama’s crying,” Nora said, and that only made Daddy and Uncle Cope laugh the harder.
“Your mama is as weak as water,” said Aunt Addis, when we were sitting beside the bed where Nana Rose slept. “Your daddy is common even if he is my brother, and your mama is sorry and don’t lift a finger to goad him. You don’t want to be poor and sorry and common like the rest.” Then she sent me to the kitchen to mix up a pan of biscuit.
“Too much water,” she said, looking down into the biscuit pan, “that’s your mama’s biscuits you’re making, not mine. I want mine,” and snatched the flour sifter out of my hand, tugging my hair in the back so I would remember.
“Mama’s going to have a baby again,” I said; but these days I would have to think about it to remember which baby it was. Aunt Addis looked at me, scowling. “Again?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Lord God. That man is going to kill her. And her sorry enough to lay right down flat of her back and let him do it.”
AUNT ADDIS
DURING THE SUMMER when Mama had sent me to stay with Aunt Addis to help with Nana Rose, I turned nine. At the news that Aunt Addis had asked for me, Nora puffed up jealous like a mad animal. She banged the water dipper on the side of the bucket and flung a handful of biscuit dough onto the pan, raising a cloud of white flour.
“I need you to stay here with me,” Mama told Nora, and what she meant was, Daddy liked Nora’s biscuits better than Mama’s, and Mama wanted Nora there to cook.
Nora shot me a look of pure hate, and later she threw the cat on me again.
I had grown to have a terror of the cats that lived in the woods, under the house, or in the neighbors’ yards. Whenever one of the mother cats had kittens, Nora would find the kittens and throw them on me, on my legs at first, then aiming at my face. I had scratches on my calves and forearms and, once, on the bridge of my nose.
“You go ahead, drag your sk
inny self to wipe Nana Rose’s ass, see who cares,” she said. “Here, say good-bye to this little kitten before you go.”
The screeching thing flew toward me through the air, calico, red, tabby, spotted, black, yellow eyes with slit pupils that terrified me, and with a yowl it smacked into my tender forearms where I had thrown them up over my face, and the claws like needles raked my skin, and Nora laughed. The kitten landed with its four legs splayed out reaching for anything solid. I screamed and knocked it away from me and felt my new scratches and looked at Nora.
We hated each other keenly and simply for a moment. Then I turned and ran.
Once she had tried to throw the mother cat, but it twisted in her hands and gave her a gash of her own, wicked and bloody, along the cheekbone.
I put my clothes in a bag, including my only shoes that I was saving for school and my blue skirt that I liked, and I sat on the edge of the front porch till Uncle Bray came to pick me up in his truck. Behind me I could hear Nora crying and Mama cursing and Corrine screaming about something I couldn’t understand. I was going to stay with Aunt Addis. The thought made me breathless.
When Uncle Bray pulled into the yard, I ran to get in the truck with my bag in hand, and I sat there while he visited with Mama a minute before driving me away.
Aunt Addis and Aunt Tula lived close enough to each other that it was easy to walk from one house to the other, at least in daylight, but also far enough to keep them separated. The path from Aunt Tula’s ran along the north end of Moss Pond for a little while, then meandered toward Spike’s Creek Road where Aunt Tula lived. You could walk the distance from one house to the other in half an hour. Whenever I went there, Uncle Bray would take me home to his house, and Aunt Tula would fill me up with bacon biscuits and homemade cornbread and then set me walking on the path. Watching me eat, Aunt Tula would shake her head and say, “Look at this poor youngun eat. You know she doesn’t get nothing to eat at her house.”
“It’s a wonder she’s got a scrap of meat on her bones,” Uncle Bray agreed.
“My brother is as sorry as there is. Drink you some more tea, honey. It’s sweet, ain’t it?”
“She loves that tea.”
“I can’t get enough sugar to make it like I really like,” Aunt Tula patted her hair, “because of the war.”
The walk through the woods frightened me sometimes, because I traveled alone and usually carried a bag of something or a jar of something from Aunt Tula to Aunt Addis, plus the sack of my clothes. The woods had an eerie quiet; one hardly hears a quiet like that any more. “Did you like your walk?” Aunt Addis would ask, laughing when I hurried across the yard to the back door.
“There was something following me at the last part,” I panted.
“Hush that mess. There’s nothing out there to follow you.”
“Aunt Addis, I swear there was. I could hear it coming behind me.”
“The only thing you heard was yourself, all worked up to a pitch. Now come on in the house.”
“I was scared that monster came back and was going to get me.”
“Lord have mercy. You listen to that mama of yours too much. There’s nothing got nobody in these woods since I don’t know when. Now come on in the house, I said. Your Nana Rose was asking about you. And I got a peck of things for you to do around here. What’s wrong with your leg?”
“Otis chopped it with the hoe.”
“Well, mercy. Let me see.”
A long dark scab traced the side of my kneecap and along the bone the skin was red and flamed. “Your brother did that?”
“Yes, ma’am. Him and I were fighting and he got the hoe after me. And I busted him on the head with a rock.” I sighed. “He called Mama a fat sow and I told him he ought not to talk about Mama like that, and we was at one another pretty quick after that.”
“You and Otis are always fighting.”
“He ought not to call Mama names. I can’t stand it.”
For a moment she stood looking at the knee, hand soft on the top of my head, a warm pressure, one of the few times I can remember being touched.
She fed me a slab of cornbread smeared with white lard and a cold cornmeal dumpling in pot liquor, delicacies such as I only dreamed of in my mother’s kitchen. I wolfed down whatever she set in front of me, and she watched with her mouth set to a thin line. “Don’t your mama feed you, child?”
“We ain’t eat nothing but biscuit with meat grease since Monday.”
“Watch how you talk.”
“There hasn’t been any food since Monday.”
“That’s better. Why not?”
“Daddy can’t work because he hurt his back.”
Aunt Addis sputtered. “The only way your daddy hurt that back was hunched over your mama.” She glared at me and said, “Now, you get to scrubbing the baseboards in your Nana Rose’s room. Get right down on your hands and knees.”
I swallowed the last of the buttermilk that cooled my belly and gave me such a warm feeling underneath my ribs. It was the most delicious buttermilk and cornbread and at the end of the few minutes I had eaten enough food to make me swoon. I stood up burping and headed for the back porch to find the white enamel pan for baseboard washing. The burp brought the slightest smile out of Aunt Addis.
I scrubbed till my elbow ached sore, bending down as best I could with my bad knee. I wore out one cloth and Aunt Addis fetched me another. “There’s germs all over this room.” She watched me at my work for a minute, tying an old rag around her hair. “If we don’t keep it clean, a sickness will come on Mama that will take her for good.”
“I ain’t dead, girl,” Nana Rose croaked. “I ain’t sleep either.”
“No, ma’am. You aren’t.”
“Goddammit, I know I ain’t.”
A moment later Nana Rose started snoring again, and Aunt Addis left to take down the blinds in the front room. Pretty soon I could see her in the backyard. The blinds hung from the clothesline, as Aunt Addis furiously scrubbed and rinsed.
“It’s a goddamn shame I stayed so long with that son of a bitch,” Nana Rose mumbled when she woke again, spit draining from the side of her mouth, eyes closed but fluttering, as if the lids could not get fixed and still.
My knee ached, and pretty soon bending down opened the cut again and I was bleeding, oozing a little. I ignored it until Nana Rose sat up straight in the bed, glared at me, and pointed one long thin crooked bony finger. “That youngun is bleeding.”
“Shew,” Aunt Addis said. She had entered the door with clean towels and set them in the wardrobe, puffing as she stood. Her eyes came to focus on me. “Ellen. Oh Lord, look at you. I reckon I ought not to have you bending down like this. Stand up and show me your knee again.”
I raised the edge of my skirt.
She took me to the back porch and washed it clean with Octagon soap that stung. “Has there been flies in it?”
“They fly around, but I swoosh and don’t let them crawl on it.”
“Because they can lay eggs right in the wound,” pinching up her nose, “I seen a man with a leg like that, before they cut it off. Maggots crawling around in the leg.” She spoke practically, without a whiff of pity. “So you keep flies out of it unless you want to end up without a leg.”
“No, ma’am, I don’t,” I said, wincing when she spread Merthiolate on it, and thanked her when she cut a clean white sheet-piece from the rag bag and folded it up in a pad to cover the cut.
At the end, patting her own hair back into place, she admired her handiwork, the pad tied to my knee with a clean strip of Nana Rose’s old yellow housedress that she would never again rise out of bed to wear.
“Can you work?” Aunt Addis asked.
In the bedroom, as I sat on the floor by the baseboard, bending my good knee, Nana Rose asked, in her powdery husk of a voice, “When did you put my good dress in that bag of yours? It won’t near ready for rag picking.”
“Mama, that dress was so thin you could poke a finger through it. When I laid it
in the rag bag it fell to pieces by itself.”
“That friend of yours makes the soap so strong it rots cloth.”
Aunt Addis tucked her lips together in a tight line. “That friend of mine has a name. You know it as good as I do.”
“I might know her name and I might not like to say it.” “Jenny,” Aunt Addis said to Nana Rose. “There, see? I said it for you, so now you don’t have to.”
Nana Rose pursed her lips together and then shot a wad of tobacco juice into the spittoon on the floor beside the bed. By then, I had knelt over the baseboards and begun to scrub again.
Later I scrubbed the wall behind Nana Rose’s night table and the night table itself, both stained with tobacco juice that had missed the spittoon. Nana Rose slept peacefully through the trickling of water into the bucket, the rasp of the cloth on the wall. With one hand she clutched the top of the quilt that warmed her, a grip so tight she might have feared someone would come along to snatch down the covers at any moment. Her skin lay fine as tissue along the bones and veins.
After Aunt Addis checked the wall, the table, and the baseboards, I helped her hang the blinds in the front room, where they made the light cool and pale. Aunt Addis had a couch and two chairs in the front room, and a rag rug and two tables, not the same but similar, with a picture of Nana Rose in a frame on one of the tables. I considered this a lot of furniture, and Aunt Addis spent the rest of the day dusting and polishing it, with me to help.
When we were nearly done, Miss Jenny, tall and lean, appeared in the doorway. “You still want me to wring that chicken’s neck?”
Aunt Addis gave me a sharp look. “This youngun needs some meat on her bones, that’s what it looks like to me. Do you think you can eat a piece of fried chicken, Ellen?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am,” I said, and my stomach started to dance.
“Then I’ll kill that yellow-looking one,” Miss Jenny said, “she hasn’t given an egg in two weeks.”
“I don’t know how you think you know which chicken lays which egg.”