My Drowning

by Jim Grimsley

  “I know,” Miss Jenny said, and turned, and vanished, her long shadow trailing behind her.

  Out the window, while rinsing my saucer in the pan of cold water, I studied Miss Jenny as she grasped the yellow-feathered chicken by the neck and twisted the body through the air. Through the window I heard the crack of bone and then the chicken’s garbled cries as it circled the yard in a final run, head flopped over to one side. I had never watched a chicken die.

  Miss Jenny scalded the chicken and plucked it clean, so fast it was hard to believe, the smell of wet feathers clinging to her hands and filling the porch. Aunt Addis gutted it and cut it up for the frying pan. For Nana Rose she boiled a short thigh till the meat was nearly falling off the bone, adding a dumpling to the thin broth, and when she had cooked this bland stuff, a good while ahead of our supper, she set me on a tall chair to feed the old woman. Mostly Nana Rose lay back on the pillow, wheezing for breath and accepting the food I offered into her mouth when she felt it against her lips. When she chewed the dumpling, a line of meal strained through her lips and down her chin. I wiped this away, and she opened her eyes. Glaring like a hoot owl, she said, “I guess Miss Princess couldn’t be bothered to feed me herself.”

  “I wanted to do it,” I lied, and this answer confused her to the point that she closed her eyes again, and reclined on the pillow.

  “I wish the Good Lord would go on and call me,” she murmured, as I settled the spoonful of chicken meat and broth to her lips. She sucked greedily and gummed the food.

  When she had eaten and drifted someplace between sleeping and waking, her breath moved haltingly in and out with a sound like the rasp of my washrag on the plaster walls beside her bed.

  I brought firewood for the cookstove and buckets of water from the pump outside, while Aunt Addis cooked our supper. The smell of frying chicken made my mouth water, impossible to think of anything but the food to come. Miss Jenny hefted the ax by the woodpile and split kindling with strokes as strong as Otis’s. Her arms, relaxed, hung veiny and thin, but when she swung the ax, firm muscles tensed. She caught me watching and I turned away.

  At supper I ate the drumstick, handed onto my plate by Aunt Addis, her mouth set into its thin line. We ate in the kitchen with Miss Jenny, listening to Nana Rose’s snores. Aunt Addis, watching me eat from beneath partly lowered lids, paused to listen to the sound. “She’s resting good today. She’s had her three little naps.”

  “Her breathing sounds better,” Miss Jenny agreed.

  “It’s some more potatoes if you’re still hungry.” Aunt Addis turned to me as if by accident.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, and she dished them out, listening to Nana Rose again.

  Miss Jenny said, “It’s not every day we fry a chicken. You better eat good.”

  “I didn’t have fried chicken in a long time. Mine is good.”

  “Here’s you the neck to gnaw on,” Aunt Addis speaking gruffly, but with the tiniest smile at the corners of her mouth. “Then you can boil the water to wash these dishes.”

  I sucked at that chicken neck till the bones were as clean as Aunt Addis’s kitchen windows. Then I stoked the fire and boiled the water for dishes, as I had been told.

  Aunt Addis had a particular way of washing dishes, beginning with the glasses, then the plates and saucers, then the spoons and forks and such, then the pots and pans. Always do them the last, she said, because they dirty the water. She stood near me while I washed to teach me what I should do, like scrubbing between each fork prong and cleaning the backs of the plates as well as the fronts. Sharp-tongued as she was, she kept her patience when she was teaching me; not like Nora, who criticized the least thing I did. At the last I scalded the clean dishes with more boiling water from the kettle, pouring the water carefully over each plate, to kill the filth, as Aunt Addis described it. Boiling water kills all kind of filth, she said.

  Nana Rose woke with a fever, and we piled blankets on her till it broke. Aunt Addis sat by her bedside with a lapful of cross-stitch, and when she caught me watching she gave me a swatch of cloth and set about teaching me the simple stitches. Always run the front stitches one way and the back the other, she said, to keep it neat. At first I worked clumsily with the needle and almost jabbed it in my nose trying to thread it, but later, mimicking the precise movements of Aunt Addis’s deft fingertips, I got better. I practiced in the light from the kerosene lamp at Nana Rose’s bedside.

  As miraculous as the cross-stitch and the housecleaning was the fact that Aunt Addis troubled to teach me anything. Adults hardly ever paid attention. Aunt Addis spoke in the same rough tones and harsh words as Mama and Daddy. But underneath was something else, some part of her that watched me as if I were a tender shoot pushing up through the ground in springtime.

  I practiced until time for bed, when Miss Jenny entered Nana Rose’s bedroom for the first time, bringing quilts and a feather pillow for my pallet. I slept on the floor in Nana Rose’s room, by the side of the bed where she could see me, in case she needed help to pee in the night. That first night she never waked to ask for help, but all night murmured in dreams about her children, Sudie, Tula, Wainright, Alice, Cope, and Willem Carl, my Daddy. Those were the names I knew, but there were more. At dawn she called me out of sleep, “Girl, get up here and help me out of this bed before I bust.”

  After I helped her back in bed I carried the slop pot carefully out the back door and picked a path through patches of gray dirt, avoiding the dewy grass. I dumped Nana Rose’s pale piss into the sitting hole and returned to the house. Nana Rose had begun to snore again, but in the doorway stood Aunt Addis, watching in her housecoat.

  I WALKED WITH Miss Jenny through the woods to Aunt Tula’s house, to help carry fig preserves that Aunt Addis sent. The jars made a pleasant rattle in the potato sack bundled in my arms. I had drunk a glass of buttermilk and eaten half a hoecake for the walk, since Miss Jenny said I looked too scrawny to carry much. We walked through the woods along what Aunt Addis and Miss Jenny called the Dry Path. When I asked, Miss Jenny allowed there was a path called the Wet Path, too, shorter but crossing the wetlands where Miss Jenny preferred not to walk. We picked our way carefully so as not to jostle the jars of preserves.

  Aunt Tula received us on the back porch as if she had been expecting us. She sniffed each jar of the sweet figs as if she could determine the quality of the contents using only her nose. “It’s got a pretty color this year.”

  “It come out pretty good.”

  “Uncle Bray loves his fig preserve,” Aunt Tula said to me, “I can’t keep enough in the house.”

  “Addis done real good this year. He’ll like these.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing. Mine didn’t come out worth a hoot.”

  She packed us up with a whole pound cake, a mess of collards, and jars of sweet pickle to take to Aunt Addis. She had plenty of eggs she could have given us, the hens were laying good, but we thanked her and said no. We had enough to carry. So Aunt Tula made us each three fried eggs, for lunch. She fried my eggs exactly like I wanted, with the yolk a little runny but thick at the bottom, and I sopped the yolk with cornbread.

  “You never seen such a mess of eggs from such a pinched-up bunch of chickens.” Aunt Tula dipped her fork into her own solid yolks. “The roosters is going around all puffed up about it.”

  “We’re getting about the same eggs as ever,” Miss Jenny said.

  “Addis’s chickens is some good layers,” and I noted that Aunt Tula laid a slight stress on the word “Addis’s.” Aunt Tula sighed, the bottom of her chin quivering. “How is my mama?”

  “She’s right quiet this last couple of days.”

  “She still running fevers?”

  “Twice, three times, lately. She don’t seem so bad to me, even when she’s hot, though.”

  “She eating?”

  “We get something down her every now and again.”

  “You ought to see to it that she eats. Keep up her strength.”

  T
his had the effect of quietening Miss Jenny, and pretty soon after that she rinsed her plate in the pan of water by the window, and I did the same with mine. Aunt Tula rose from her own seat.

  “Bray would sure love to visit with you-all, if he was here.”

  “You tell him I said hey. All right?”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  Aunt Tula looked me up and down. “Ellen, you never had so much meat on you. Addis feeds you pretty good, don’t she?” Again, stressing the word “Addis” for effect.

  “Yes, ma’am, Aunt Addis is a good cook.”

  “That sorry mama of yours can’t hardly keep food in the house. It’s a good thing you come up here to see us, ain’t it?” She studied me while I blushed.

  Miss Jenny tugged me by the collar toward the door. “We got to go, girl.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You stay with your Aunt Addis for a while, you’ll get fat as your mama,” Aunt Tula, fixing her eyes on me again, said sharply.

  “We work Ellen too good for her to get fat,” Miss Jenny announced, very loudly. “Ellen is a good worker, too. Come on, girl. We got to tote these sacks down that path.”

  “Don’t you break one of these jars.” Aunt Tula gave my ear a tug to help me remember.

  “She didn’t break one coming, and she won’t break one going,” Miss Jenny declared, and eased me away from Aunt Tula’s outstretched hand.

  NANA ROSE’S DREAMS

  AS NANA ROSE sickened more, a change came to Aunt Addis’s house, a cloud of tension filling the rooms. Aunt Addis moved cautiously in the vicinity of the sickroom, and Miss Jenny stayed out of the house whenever she could. Nana Rose perched clawlike in the bed, her body decaying, exuding a sweet smell. But from her eyes and from her clenched jaw radiated the fiercest strength and sharpest hatred. Most of the time she hardly understood where she was or who we were, except that about half the time she recognized Aunt Addis and tried to slap her across the jaw. Now and then, on seeing my face in the lamplight while I was putting lotion on her dry arms, she said, “Your daddy is a goddamn rat-ass son of a bitch. Do you know it?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Don’t let that man mess with you.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Don’t let any man mess with you. Do, you’ll be a whore.”

  “No, ma’am, Nana Rose, I won’t.”

  Once she grabbed me by the hair at the back of the head. She was suddenly as strong as a girl and pulled my face to hers. “You lay down with your grandaddy, don’t you?”

  “Nana Rose, let me go, that hurts.”

  “You answer me, girl. You lay down with your grandaddy, don’t you? Nasty little thing.”

  With her free hand she tugged at my ears, and I squealed and pulled back. She gripped my head tighter and glared at me.

  Aunt Addis heard her shouting and found us, but she had to call Miss Jenny to help her pry Nana Rose’s hands out of my hair. Tears of fright ran down my face.

  “All you young girls are bitches,” Nana Rose shrieked, and she repeated the words for an hour or more while Aunt Addis, Miss Jenny, and I huddled in the front room listening to her hawk-call voice. “My husband took up with bitches all his sorry life.”

  I HELD THE pan full of warm water while Aunt Addis washed Nana Rose’s yellowed hair. Limp strands flecked with suds draped Aunt Addis’s fingers, while Nana Rose, head bowed, stared fixedly into the flower pattern of the rug.

  “I feel old,” Nana Rose muttered.

  Aunt Addis laughed. “You are old, Mama.”

  “I ought not to be.”

  “Well, why not?”

  Nana Rose swung her bony head up and looked Aunt Addis square in the face. “You think it’s funny to make fun of your mammy, don’t you, you dried-up bitch.”

  Aunt Addis swallowed. She rinsed the suds from her fingers and, using a washcloth, dripped rinsewater through Nana Rose’s hair.

  “I hope you get miserable and old like I am.”

  “I’m sure I will, Mama.”

  “With nothing to take care of you except some bony dried-up bitch and her stringbean friend.”

  Aunt Addis carefully dried the strands of hair with a small towel, squeezing out the water. “You ought not to talk so ugly, Mama. I do the best I can.”

  Nana Rose’s voice rose in pitch. “A dog wouldn’t do what you do. That’s why God took your babies.”

  Aunt Addis froze. Long seconds trickled past.

  She finished drying Nana Rose’s hair, then carried away the pan of water. When she was gone, Nana Rose clamped her mouth shut on her mostly toothless gums, glaring straight ahead at the gap between the curtains, the last bit of outside left to her.

  “Open them curtains some, and quit gaping at me, you skinny biddy,” Nana Rose snapped, and she scarcely bothered to glance at me as I raced to the window.

  AT NIGHT, WHEN the house was dark and everyone slept, I lay awake tossing and turning on the pallet, listening to Nana Rose’s dreams.

  “Cope,” she began, “don’t hang off the back of the truck like that, fast as your daddy goes, he’ll sling you out. Cope. Don’t lay all over the truck like that.” Then followed the sound of her lips smacking, a moistness that sounded like a dryness. Light of the full moon spilled across her face. She turned on her side, hair matted on the pillow, and smacked her lips again. The sound of her breathing followed, a bellows, a breeze, and a frightened, strangling sound. “Get him off the road. No, you left some of him. Get all of him. Get all of him off the road. I can’t stand to see him lying there like that.”

  “Paulie,” she called, “Paulie,” and later I learned Paulie was her sister, dead for years.

  Lips clicking again, parched as paper. The sound continued, until I finally stood from the warm pallet. We kept a glass of water by her bed. I held the glass to her mouth and dropped a thin trace of water across her lips. She swallowed greedily and her knobby-jointed hands reached vaguely upward toward my hand. She almost woke, almost slept. She drank the water and rested more deeply for a while.

  While we both waited for sleep her words kept running through my head, a thread of connection through all my dreams. Paulie, she said, come close to my bed. You can sleep with me. Crawl under the covers, all right sweetheart? We can eat some chicken liver all mashed up. I killed three chickens for the chicken salad for the Easter supper, there’s three livers. We can boil some rice till it sticks. You can scrape it out of the pot with your spoon and I can eat mine off a saucer, like I like. I want to eat my chicken down by the creek. Paulie, we can go down there together. There’s a good place to hang your feet in the water. I’ll take my children down there one morning. I’d like to drown every one of them. You don’t know I have children, well, I do. I had me eight that lived and four that died, and I am wore out. I can’t chase after butterflies and such today. I can’t run around after dragonflies today. So let’s just sit here cool by the creek. And we did, Nana Rose and I, we sat there beside whatever creek flowed in her mind, and I was aware that I was Paulie to her, that this old woman in the room with me was Nana Rose, in her dream or mine. We sat underneath the shade of a summer day at the riverbank with our feet in the cool water, and I worried that there lurked something under the water to bite my feet, and I suddenly could not breathe, and Nana Rose’s voice went on carrying words into my head, Paulie, sit still, and if you be quiet the fish will come up and kiss your toes. They’re tasting you to see whether they can eat you. But it feels like a kiss and anyway, they can’t eat you, they can’t even bite you good. While the children are off in the woods to play. Willem and Addis and Tula is buck naked. When we come fishing they run around in the woods, and Willem plays just as sweet as the rest. Nana Rose spoke as if we were merely young girls. We sat by the river in her mind. I was aware that I was asleep and lying on the pallet on the hard floor at the foot of Nana Rose’s bed. But while she talked in her sleep, the dream drifted like a water of her through my head; we were both dipping our feet into the dar
k water.

  Finally, her eyes glazed over and she lay back into bed. The rasp of her breathing marked the passing moments, the arc of moonlight across my face on the pillow. I settled down on my pallet, and she did the same on her bed.

  “Someone is here to kill me,” she said later, as I was at the edge of sleep again.

  IN CHURCH, WHICH I had begun to attend with Aunt Addis, we prayed for Nana Rose’s health, including the preacher from the pulpit, at the request of Aunt Addis. Bless this woman with an abundant old age and fullness of health to taste of her sunset years, the preacher said, and this was about the prettiest thing I had ever heard. The prayer left me with a feeling of benevolence, as if I myself had prayed each word, and I was certain that I would not, for instance, draw up all shivery the next time Aunt Addis and I helped Nana Rose onto the bedpan. I dreaded the sight of Nana Rose’s shrunken butt cheeks. The process of tending her had be come a kind of torture for me, because my images of her mixed with dream images and grew powerful. The flat flaps of her breasts frightened me, so stretched and wrinkled and laced with dark blue veins. I looked elsewhere. I concentrated on Aunt Addis’s careful hands as she lifted Nana Rose off the bedpan and cleaned her and pulled down the nightgown around her pale, stringy legs. They had given up on underwear because Nana Rose always grabbed Aunt Addis’s hair and pulled it when Aunt Addis helped her into or out of her drawers, and if Aunt Addis complained about it, Nana Rose slapped her across the face again. Even to the last, Nana Rose had enough strength to give some sting to a slap, if she put her weight behind it. She jarred Addis’s jaw a couple of times when I was there to see.

  WINTER CAME AND the bedroom was cold. We moved Nana Rose into the living room where there was a wood heater, and I slept between the heater and the foot of her bed again, tending the fire through the night. Aunt Addis sent me to school as many days as she could spare me. Sleeping in the front room gave me eerie chills. Firelight moved shadows on the walls and in the room, across the living-room furniture that had been shoved to one corner. Out of familiar surroundings, I would wake in that room with the still-delicious feeling that I was sleeping somewhere I oughtn’t, like falling asleep in a car that was moving, and waking, and wondering where I was.