My Drowning

by Jim Grimsley

  I HAD ALREADY been driving, visiting places. I had found the wreck of the house in the Low Grounds, the place in Holberta, the Little Store at the end of Moss Pond. After Otis’s story, I went to Smithfield to check my birth records and saw, duly recorded, the fact of my birth, the date I had always known as my birthday, and no evidence of anything unusual. But his story set me driving more, and searching for memories wherever I went. I drove along county roads in Johnston County, I drove the streets of Potter’s Lake where I lived with Bobjay. I drove the roads around Moss Pond and walked through tangles of branches that hid the wreck of the old mill. Then I climbed the path to Moss Pond itself, and I stood at the edge of the water.

  Paper cups and rusted beer cans tangled in the weeds at the bank. A big, pillowy sanitary napkin wrapped around a branch. The surface of the water, pitch black, shuddered like skin. I stared down into it and waited. But no memory would come. I had felt drawn to this place, and I had come here and found nothing.

  Kneeling, I slipped my hand into the water, warm at the surface then cold beneath, with a feeling of thickness and weight as if it were syrup. My hand vanished entirely, I could not even see its shape.

  I closed my eyes. All the dreams were there, all those echoes of whatever real event had happened so long ago. Locked in some patch of my brain was a memory of every moment of every dream. Hidden as well was the actual memory of my mama and the river, or creek, or whatever body of water had drawn her down into it; hidden despite all the remembering I had done. Had she tried to drown me? And the memory had gotten twisted in my head? She had remained an enigma for me, maybe for all of us, you see; and even at this end of my life, even after all the remembering, I could still gain no clearer image of her.

  SHE REMAINED A mystery through all the years that followed Nora’s marriage. When I was gone, Corrine took over the work in the kitchen, with Delia to help her; and by then Carl Jr.’s daughter had turned up, and Mama raised her too, like the rest. After a while Mama never got pregnant herself again, that was the only change I can point to. But by then her daughters were having babies, and she had grandchildren.

  When I brought my own children to visit her home, she gaped at them as if they were monkeys in a zoo. She made them kiss her on the cheek, that same tired, wrinkled patch of skin; giving me some sugar, she called it. She asked them whether they loved their grandma. She looked from them to me as if she would never have dreamed I could produce such offspring. She treated all my sisters the same way.

  She made a special dinner, during one visit; she had no choice, by then, but to cook herself. She boiled a whole pig’s head and baked fluffy white biscuits and boiled cabbage and cooked white rice. The biscuits steamed in the crisp autumn air, each arranged on the plate like the postcard of a mountain. In the old days we would have thought so much food a feast, and Mama and I set to eating with relish; she was pleased with herself for having laid such a table. She and Daddy stuck their forks into the white fat hanging from the side of the pig’s head, tearing off strips, savoring the taste. I sliced whatever lean meat I could find for my children, who stared at the pig’s head through the meal. The littlest sat almost at eye level with the pig. They chewed biscuit as fast as they could and hurried into the yard as soon as they could get free. Mama pretended not to notice the puny appetite they showed.

  I ate more than I would have, sucking the white fat from inside the skin the way I would have done when I was a little girl. Mama and Daddy and I sat there, probably the first time we three had ever eaten alone. They hunched over their plates with their elbows propped on the table. They chewed in quiet. For the first time in my life, I could feel them as old and harmless and even benign.

  Outside, one of my kids had stepped in a chicken turd and another was making fun of him. It might have been Otis and Nora from a thousand years ago. We glanced out the door at them and then at each other. For a moment there was warmth between us. I have never had another moment like that. For that instant I was safe to love them, and I did.

  LEAVING THE POND, I drove to the Holiness Church and sat there for a long time. The congregation had prospered to the point of bricking up the old building and adding better stained glass to the windows, milky smears of green and gauzy brown; but I could recognize the old building where June Frances and I had played in the yard after Sunday School.

  Horns blared behind me, and trucks wheeled into the dirt yard in front of the new gas pumps at the Little Store across the road. A lot of people were standing outside the store, sipping Pepsi out of bottles. I walked over there to buy myself a chocolate drink; I could already taste it as I headed toward the store.

  Men jumped out of the trucks with rifles and shotguns. “Who seen it?” one man hollered to another; both men needed a shave and one was missing part of three fingers.

  “Avery Taylor,” the other man answered.

  “That Piggy’s boy?”

  “That’s who it is. He seen this creature down at the bottom of the pond, is what he said, not far from the mill. And you know, Piggy don’t let that boy drink nor sniff no pussy, so he keeps a pretty clear head.”

  The fellows all agreed that it was so, and I slipped past. As I was headed into the store, I heard one of the men snicker and ask, “Why did they name that boy Avery, do you reckon?”

  Inside the store I smelled pickle, salted crackers, black pepper, all the old smells that had soaked into the boards. The woman behind the cash register was nobody I remembered, though she smiled at me in a friendly, if mostly toothless, way. She stood next to the jar of bubble gum and atomic fireballs.

  “Hello,” she said, “what can I do for you?”

  I opened the Pepsi cooler and lifted out a Yoo-hoo. “Looks like you got some excitement,” I noted.

  “This boy seen a monster at the pond,” she said. “Everybody is just all upset about it.”

  “A monster?”

  “It’s been a monkster around here for years,” spoke another voice, and that was when I saw old Miss Ruby, little and twisted, sitting by the coal stove with a blanket wrapped around her.

  I opened my chocolate drink and stood by the stove with her. Miss Ruby looked me up and down. “I believe I know you,” she said, and when I told her who I was, she patted my arm, delighted she had recognized me. “You know all about this place, then.”

  “I’d sure never have believed they’d see that monster again.”

  “It was always here, the monkster was,” Miss Ruby said, “it was here when you were a little girl, and it was here when your daddy was a little boy.” The strain of seeing had become too much. She closed her eyes. The exertion of lifting her head caused her to shake a little, and I knelt in front of her, to look at her face.

  “It’s hard to see the little ones when they get old.” She lifted her hand as if she might touch me. Stringy blue veins shuddered inside fragile skin. She forgot me and settled back. “When they told me they seen the monkster again, I told them, take me down to the store. I want to be there to see everything. Nothing brings people around here together like that monkster does.”

  She blinked, trying to sit upright, though her eyelids were heavy and drooping and she was nearly falling asleep. I remembered begging to charge a sack of beans and having Miss Ruby watch me fierce and sharp-eyed, without pity, answering no. My heart hardened at the memory but I stood there a moment longer, till her breathing deepened and she fell asleep.

  I took my chocolate drink. The woman behind the cash register waved and grinned. One of her teeth was shaped like Idaho. “You better not drive in them woods where that monster can get you.”

  “I’ll stay on the main road,” I said.

  “You reckon it really is a monster out there?”

  “I don’t know. That boy might have seen something up at that mill.”

  “I don’t even like to go up there.”

  “You know it’s haunted, don’t you?” I asked.

  “No!”

  “It sure is. Old Man Oneal Jarman,
who was Miss Ruby’s father-in-law, killed his wife up there. He was widowed, and he took a young wife, and she tried to run out on him, and he killed her at the mill, back when they were still grinding corn. And then he put her body on the millstone, he ground it up with the corn and put little bits of her body in the corn and the flour for nearly everybody around here, and everybody ate little bits and pieces of his wife. My mama used to tell that story.”

  “Oh, glory to God,” she said, her mouth hanging open.

  So much information had stupefied her and she sat there with her shoulders slumped as I headed for the door. Outside, trucks were heading off in all directions, though a knot of folks waited by the gas pumps for fresh news of the sighting.

  “You used to live around here?” the woman asked, as I reached for the doorknob.

  “Yes, I did. A long time ago.” I let the door close behind me and headed across the gravel. The people by the gas pumps were describing the monster to one another as if they had all seen it, and telling stories about how their daddies had seen it too, years ago, and maybe it had been seen even earlier before that, back in the old-timey days.

  The voices quieted and the wind picked up as I trudged to my car. I drove away and have not been back there since. It occurred to me later that if Avery Taylor, June Frances’s nephew, had taken to seeing things, he came by it honestly, since June Frances was prone to imagine more than she saw. It also occurred to me that, if Avery had actually been near the mill that day, it might have been me he saw there, through the tangles of branches, searching in the pond for my own ghost.

  We buried Otis shortly after that. He had died as peacefully as he could, and Naomi laid him to rest in a casket the size of a small barge, dressed in his best black suit and thin black tie, with a Bible tucked between his hands and his stomach, riding there like a dinghy on a swell. I stayed after they closed the casket and removed the flowers to watch them lower the casket into the ground. Everyone else had gone, but one of my children stayed with me; everyone thought we were crazy, I guess, and Naomi never would speak to me afterward; but I stood there till they got his casket in place, and put the top on the vault, and began to shovel in the dirt. Otis’s funeral was the very last funeral I meant to attend, except my own, and I stayed there till he was covered with dirt and the flowers heaped over him again. He was drowning in the flowers, I thought, and for some reason that made me smile. I took my daughter’s arm and smiled at her. Relieved, she led me to our car and drove me home.

  Many thanks to the Ucross Foundation, which provided support

  during the writing of this book.

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  WORKMAN PUBLISHING

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 1997 by Jim Grimsley.

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places,

  and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination

  or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is

  intended or should be inferred.

  E-book ISBN 978-1-56512-785-2

  ALSO BY JIM GRIMSLEY

  Winter Birds

  Dream Boy

  Mr. Universe and Other Plays

  Comfort and Joy

  Boulevard