by Jim Grimsley
“When a man’s mama dies, he’s all alone,” said Daddy, drunk, beside the stove.
Mama slammed the empty flour tin across the room. “I haven’t eaten a mouthful this morning. Not even one biscuit.”
“Get my sister to pray for you,” Daddy whispered.
“You got to get some money.”
“Get some money your own self.”
“You done spent all mine. I give it to you and you spent it. I know what you bought too.”
“You best hush.”
“I don’t want to hush. I want you to get up from there.”
Daddy took a deep breath and leaned back against the wall again. Mama wheeled and backed away, the thin dress clinging to her hips and buttocks. She walked with a rolling motion, on the sides of her feet. Her toenails glittered a scaly yellow, the feet swollen and freckled. I stared at her feet as she passed me.
Calm settled onto Daddy when Mama retreated and the room settled into temporary peace. In my imagination I was peeling potatoes. In my lap lay a bowl with potatoes freshly scrubbed, and me peeling them one at a time, the brown peel unraveling and dangling to the floor, the white potato gleaming in the bowl. For supper. Boiled potatoes. The smell would fill the house.
Aunt Tula said, Your daddy had a peaceful nature when he was a boy. I mean a real little one. He wasn’t one of those would tear off the wings of flies or the legs off spiders or anything like that, he wasn’t the kind to drown kittens. Not when he was a boy. But a change came on him. I don’t know why. He started carrying around the playing cards with the pictures of the naked women on the back. I saw the pack of them one time, on his dresser, and I looked. Your daddy fouled his mind with that kind of nasty stuff when he was a teenager and it warped him from the sweet-natured boy he had been. When your daddy was a teenager, he started to run with the lowest kind of drunk trash. All the boys in our family ran with trash.
“Make me a cup of coffee,” Daddy spoke the order in a flat voice and looked at me. He offered his white mug toward me, gripped in his hairy red knuckles.
Coffee boiled on the stove. Nora had gone to school today, so it was my turn to stay home. I took the best potholder and folded it twice. I poured coffee carefully because Daddy got mad if I spilled. The thought of his yelling voice raised the hairs on the backs of my arms. Spooning sugar, I stirred.
“I loved my mama,” Daddy declared, as I carried the cup to him.
He splashed coffee on my hand, taking the cup. I kept quiet about it because Daddy hated it if you complained. One of his pet peeves with Mama remained that she complained so much. I tried to back away but he looked me up and down. “Get me a biscuit.”
“There’s no biscuit,” I said.
He cuffed me sharp across the jaw. It didn’t hurt much, it was for show. “I said get me a biscuit, girl.”
“It ain’t no biscuit in the house,” Mama screamed, and I ran off before Daddy could swat me again. “It’s no biscuit because it’s no money. We got not one cent. And the Jarmans froze us on credit. Pretty soon it won’t be no coffee and no sugar, neither one. So you set there and holler at the younguns like a jackass.”
At Joe Robbie’s funeral, two years before Nana Rose’s, Daddy had stood like a creosoted post in his dark hat and borrowed suit, and gazed at the husk of Joe Robbie in the casket as if he were vapor or a passing breeze. He had shaved but not neatly and from where I was standing a patch of beard was visible beneath his chin. Beside him, clinging to his arm, Mama heaved and sobbed.
At Nana Rose’s funeral, I scarcely remember my daddy at all, until the end, when Aunt Tula whispered in my ear that he was crying. I remember Uncle Bray’s hand, his two nub-fingers bright pink at the ends. He kept me by him and Aunt Tula, and I pretended I was their daughter as Nana Rose’s casket hovered over the open grave. The coffin hung as if floating in the air. Later, at home, I would hear Mama say to Aunt Tula, “Willie was all tore up. He was sobbing like a baby, he wet my dress across the shoulder, and he was shaking. I never seen him like it.”
“He did love his mama,” Aunt Tula echoed in a hollow voice. “Where is he?”
“Over to Roe Yates’s house, buying liquor.”
“I guess he’s going to have to drink him a bit to get over the funeral.”
“I guess he is.”
But even Aunt Tula kept quiet when she heard Daddy’s heavy footfalls across the porch. Aunt Tula without Uncle Bray was a tad more timid than with him. “Evening, Willie.”
“Evening, Tula. You come over here to check up on me?”
“No, Willie, I come to see how Velma Louise and the younguns is doing.”
“Well, you better not be checking on me. I don’t need no biddies messing in my life.”
“Me and Tula was having a cup of coffee and talking about your mama’s funeral.”
After a while, Daddy said, “I had me a drink of liquor.”
“Did you?” Tula asked cleverly.
“I might have me another one.” He slurred, blinking slow like a lizard on a rock.
“I don’t doubt it,” Tula said.
“Get me some coffee,” Daddy said to Mama, who sighed and stroked the hair along the back of her neck as she rose.
“Sit down,” Tula said, and Daddy, who was weaving badly in the air and changing the position of his feet abruptly from time to time, dropped his weight into a nearby seat. He blinked again, as if the change in perspective surprised him. Now he and Tula were on a level.
“Mama’s dead.”
Tula’s chin quivered. “I know.”
“You remember when we was little, how good Mama was?”
“Yes, I do.”
They looked at each other. I froze in my spot and watched. Something incandescent passed between them, as if time were dissolving on them before my eyes, and for a moment the brother and sister lit up from inside, the boy and girl who had begun inside these two. I can see their faces now as clearly as I see the veins on the back of my hands. I am glad I was old enough to remember.
“We ain’t got nobody,” Daddy said.
“We got Daddy.”
“He ain’t no good.”
“Hush, Willie.”
“I miss Mama.”
“Well, you never came to see her.”
“I still miss her.”
“Well, you should’ve came to see her. She would have liked it.”
Tula’s admonition died on the air, and Mama moved toward the table. The moment faded. Tula looked at her hands and Daddy wiped his eyes. “My mama’s dead,” he stated in a flat, dull tone. “I miss my mama.”
“Well, you wouldn’t feel so bad about it if you had come to see her before she died.”
IN THE PRESENT
ONE SUNDAY I woke early and hoped Mama would let me go to church. It was April, after the war was over, and we had been working in Mr. Taylor’s tobacco beds, leaving Mama so tired she would want to stay in the bed till way past dawn.
I woke before Nora, rising to stir the ashes in the stove, kindling a small fire that would make a bigger one, then hurrying outside with the water bucket. The well stood at the side of the house, where I primed it and pumped it while the sky washed lighter. The wind cut through me, so early. Across the fields it lashed, stirring up dust.
Sunday morning had a special feeling, even at this hour. For me, the feeling grew out of the possibility that Mama might let me out of the house today, that I might be able to put on my good green check dress or even my new blue skirt and white blouse, and attend church. When Mama gave permission, I left as soon as breakfast dishes had been done, or mostly done. Daddy never said no, only Mama.
In the remaining dark I carried the slop bucket off the back porch and down the path to the outhouse. Careful that the bucket not splash its muck on me, I pressed the lid firmly and tried to ignore the tendrils of stink that drifted upward from it. Each step I placed carefully, feeling the ground with the bottoms of my feet. The smell of the blooming honeysuckle along the path clouded thick in
the air, densely swollen, a smell I would always remember from that path, because of the way it mixed with the mess in the pot and the odor of the outhouse. I heaved the slops into the outhouse pit, the sound framed with someone’s rooster crowing, from a shack further back in the woods where colored folks lived.
I washed my hands by the pump and headed indoors.
Nora had heard me and stood in the kitchen tugging at her dress where it bound her across the ribs. Her breasts were slightly flattened. “You get a bucket of water?”
I nodded and drew a second bucket without being asked. Nora stoked the stove.
“You’re all on fire to get to that church this morning, ain’t you?” Nora asked.
I AM REMEMBERING that morning as if it were the present, even though I am years past any such morning, even though I no longer have a wood-burning stove to stoke or a hand pump to raise the water from the well. I am stepping on the path to the outhouse carrying the slop bucket, I am ten years old, Nana Rose has died, and I have to live at home again, but on Sunday morning if I am good I can leave the house in my nicest clothes and sit in the clean room on the painted pews among quiet, contemplative people who regularly sing songs and pray together. The memory spins through me again: I am breathless during the walk to the outhouse and trying to hold my breath at the same time so I can avoid the smell of the bucket; I am wary of the path, the tricky places where the tree roots raise up without warning like snakes at my feet. I am remembering as if I could walk outside my house now and find the path to the outhouse waiting for me again.
I have been standing at this window with a hand across my chest, squeezing. Suddenly I remember making biscuits that spring morning, wanting so much to get the job done, standing and squeezing out biscuit dough with Nora whispering in my ear, “All you study is that church. I hope you sit in those pews till you rot.” In the present I am only making my own coffee and a slice of toast for my breakfast but my wrists are heavy and I can hardly move for the remembered smell of the biscuit dough, the sweet lard coating my fingers.
“IF YOU WOULDN’T get in such a hurry you could do something right,” Nora said, “but all you study is that church. I hope you sit in those pews till you rot. That place is all you can think about.”
“You hate my biscuits no matter what I do,” I said.
“Well, you won’t change my mind with that bowl of mess you’re working on right now.”
“You could come to church too.”
It must have taken her a moment to understand what I meant. She glanced at me and then back at the bowl. “What do I want to go to any church for? It’s nothing but a bunch of old biddies who don’t do anything but make fun of you if you can’t dress as good as they do.”
“They’re not all like that,” I said. “They sing hymns and tell the stories of Jesus. You should try it.”
“I been to church, I know what it is.”
“Well, you could try it one more time and you might like it.”
She took the bowl of biscuit dough from me and shook more flour into it. She studied the dough as if it were rising before her eyes. I knew she wanted to go. I knew she would refuse. “These biscuits look like mush, Ellen, you need more flour in this dough. I can’t see why I have to tell you that every time.”
I stood there blinking.
“Go wash your hands and wipe off that syrup bucket so Mama can have a sop with her biscuit.”
“You ought not to be so bossy,” I said, but I wet a cloth and wiped off the syrup bucket and then my own sticky fingers.
After that I spared no more time to try to talk Nora into coming to church with me. I concentrated on doing all the work I had to do before Mama woke up. When the water on the stove boiled hot, I used some of it to wash the dishes we had left soaking the night before, and then I filled the bucket again, hauling the water with the handle banging against my thighs as I walked.
IN MY KITCHEN, now, a rage comes on me, a quiet one, but strong enough to bind me across the ribs and rob my breath. As if someone is waiting for me to cook for him, to bring him something, as if one of my brothers or husbands or uncles or my daddy or my grandaddy or the sheriff or some other man has asked me to bring him something that he is probably sitting in plain sight of. Bring me a cup of coffee. Get me a biscuit. Find my suspenders, these pants are baggy. You need to do some laundry so I have some clean clothes to wear. The voices wait at the ready. I have heard them all my life.
I go outside, I shake my head to clear it. I have a little yard and I walk in it, I admire the bloom of my azaleas and scoop up the petals that have fallen to the ground and put them in a plastic bag. My neighbor thinks me crazy for doing this but I hate the sight of flower petals decaying on the ground underneath the flowers that are still alive. I dump the petals behind the shed where there are also piles of decaying roses, dogwood blossoms and even the remains of a few camellias. The smell of the roses overpowers everything, even the honey-suckle. I take a deep breath of it. But still in my mind’s eye I see Nora’s hands working the biscuit dough, a morning so long ago.
WHEN MAMA LUMBERED barefoot into the kitchen, her house-dress already hanging limp on her shoulders, I asked her if I could go to church. Right away, Nora chimed in, “There’s still a whole lot of your work you haven’t done, missy.”
“I know I have to do everything before I go.” I turned to Mama with an expression I imagined as earnest and appealing. “I promise I’ll do my work.”
“I don’t need you worrying me about no church this morning.”
“Please, Mama, let me, I want to go so bad.”
“I said, don’t bother me youngun, else I’ll take this firewood after you.” She waved a split log at me, standing with the stove grate open and studying the fire. I stepped back by instinct; she had clubbed me on the head with firewood often enough. “I waked up with a headache this morning.”
Nora added, smiling at me, “There’s a whole pot of beans for you to wash up here on the counter. You need to get your ass to work.”
When I neglected to move to the beans quickly enough, Mama cuffed me across the face, a warning sting. The movement startled me and I backed up, blinking, toward the pot of beans.
I washed the beans, swollen from their soaking overnight, and then lifted them out a handful at a time, cleaning out the husks, the dark beans and the ones that were deformed. Nora could not abide a deformed bean in her pot and she was sure to find the very one I let get past me. While I was working she fixed on me like a hawk.
NOW IN MY own home, as I stand over the sink pouring water over a pot of dry white limas, I am thinking, almost out loud, I should not cook the beans because they will give me gas. Anyway, I have much better food than beans these days. I have fluffy clean white bread in loaves, some stacked in the freezer from the recent sale at Food Lion, I have pork chop thawing and sandwich meat, ham and turkey. Not one ounce of fatback or bologna resides in my house. I have frozen vegetables from my garden, and jars of canned tomatoes in the pantry. I have learned to make a pickle or two. Nowadays I can eat beans because I have a taste for them, and today I do. So here I am standing over the mouth of the drain sifting my hands through the heaviness of white beans in water.
I scoop off the husks, the dark ones, the ones that are deformed. I will not abide a deformed bean in my pot. I must sift and sort till I have found every last one.
But the memory of that Sunday morning hangs me up: the drifting nature of the memory, like smoke, so fragrant when you catch it. I stand in my clean white kitchen. I step to the back door, I wipe my hands on a towel and pause where I can see the blooming of the roses beside the shed. I have the smell of beans and water on my hands, and the heady drift of the honeysuckle from the fence. The vivid present brings up the vivid past, and for a moment I am standing again in that dingy kitchen so long ago, my hands in the pot, the pile of beans shimmering in the cracked bowl, the water cloudy.
But I shake my head and I am watching my roses, years later, and I wonder what
connects the two times when at the same moment floods me the fact that I already know. The smell of honeysuckle. Through my backyard, as through that dark kitchen on a long-ago Sunday, flows the smell of honeysuckle in full bloom, the heady thick odor drifting through the kitchen, overpowering even the smell of the half-rancid sausage Nora has begun to fry.
Again I shake my head and this time I have moved toward the roses, I am walking, startled as if I do not know how I could have gotten here.
I am thinking, I want to go to church. I want to sit in the pews with a clean dress. I don’t care if somebody has to go with me. We will sing the songs of church and we will think of the Lord on high and we will pray some prayers. Maybe I will see Aunt Addis and she will sit with me. Maybe Carl Jr. will come with me; he can sleep on the back pew like always. All the while I sort and grade the beans I am thinking about the holy face of Christ that I see in church sometimes. Alma Laura has also seen the face of Christ. His glory hangs over us like a big balloon. Alma Laura will go without me if Mama won’t let me go. I don’t think it’s fair for Alma Laura to be so free when I am not. But Alma Laura would probably see things differently.
“I’m always cold of a morning,” Mama muttered, standing so near the stove she is apt to cook herself.
“I’m done with the kettle,” I said, “you want me to rinse that biscuit pan?”
“I barely got the biscuits made,” Nora said, glancing sideways at me. “You tame your little ass down. Breakfast won’t go any faster because you’re jumping up and down to get to that church.”
Carl Jr. shuffled in, scratching his head. “What’s wrong with Ellen wanting to go to church? I’ll go with her, you know Daddy won’t let her go by herself. If I can get a clean shirt.”