by Jim Grimsley
The Children’s Altar
Smoke from Papa’s cigarette swirls in the light in the place where he had stood.
When you have all come inside Amy closes and locks the door. Allen hurries toward the bedroom but stops. Mama is a motionless figure on the floor. You see a coil of white, part of her dress, then an arm, a lock of her hair, her upturned face, Allen standing beside her silent.
Seeing him, she stirs.
By then you stand next to him, and behind you is Amy, and Duck leads Grove by the hand, and you wait there, watching her rise.
A dark streak glistens under her nose. Red streaks a little place on her dress. She whispers, “You younguns go back to the living room,” her voice so weak it hardly reaches you. You eye each other and stay. Breath shivering into her, she leans up on thin arms, a swirl of the smoke twining round her and light filling her hair. She says, “I don’t want you to see me like this”; she chokes, coughs into her hand. At last she stands and pushes past you into the bathroom. She closes the door. Behind the rush of water down the sink you can hear her voice, a chant.
The others listen, watching each other. But you run into the living room, lie down on the couch and stuff your fist in your ears. The dark couch smells of tobacco, the upholstery scratches your face, but you press against it hard to hide from the light. You see only the colored shapes that dance against your lids when you close your eyes too tight.
Footsteps echo in the next room.
Amy says something too low to hear.
The sound of the wind rises as the water stops.
Pale shadows move on the TV screen, that no one thought to turn off when everyone went outside. It gives you an odd feeling that the people on the television shows have been moving the whole time, playing to an empty room. You go to the window, where you search the yard. Wind lifts the dry light leaves off the ground. No one walks in the fields but Queenie, a white blur nosing this way and that among the cornstalks.
“Can you hear me, stupid?” Amy asks. “Help me clean up this mess in the kitchen. You don’t need to keep watch. He ain’t coming back for a while.”
“I was looking out at the yard,” you say.
“You don’t need to daydream, you need to help me.” She adds in a whisper, “I don’t want Mama to see the kitchen like this. I got some of it cleaned up already, but there’s still snap beans all over the floor.”
In the kitchen you pick up pieces of boiled bean and potato with your fingers. Finding the mop in the pantry, you wet it and mop the floor, Amy directing you to this or that spot she says you’ve missed. She washes all the pots and bends them back into shape. She washes potatoes too, and starts to peel them as you rinse out the mop and put it away.
Your brothers stray into the kitchen one by one and watch the two of you. Amy sits Grove in a chair and makes him show his arm, which Duck swears is all right. He didn’t hurt it again while Allen was looking after him. “It was already hurt before that,” Amy says, and tells him to hush talking so loud.
They sit at the table listening to the wind rush against this almost empty house, pouring over and under and around the joined boards and making them groan, as the light pales again, the clouds thickening.
Amy drops the brown peelings in the grocery bag that is full of trash. She washes the potatoes till they’re white as the skin over her knuckles.
Mama is a rustle two rooms away, a soft hiss of cloth.
Soon the bedroom door opens.
Mama has brushed her hair and pulled it back tight through a red plastic barrette shaped like a butterfly. Her dress is a fresh one, white, patterned with blue flowers. She still wears the sweater Allen brought her, and stands silent over the trash bag picking out the pieces of grass caught in the yarn. She favors one leg. On her cheek a small bruise swells, and her cut lip puffs out a little. “You cleaned up real good in here,” she says softly.
Amy whispers, “I turned off the oven too. The chicken didn’t burn or anything.”
Mama nods almost shyly, keeping the bruised side of her face in the shadow. “I knew I could count on my girl. Maybe with him gone we can eat us some dinner in peace.”
“I hope he stays gone forever,” Allen says.
“I hope he drives his truck off a bridge,” says Duck.
“We all hope so,” Amy says.
Mama only cleans her sweater, and then, nudging the trash bag with her toe, says, “That’s enough mean talk. Danny, take the trash out and burn it. You boys go in the living room and straighten up in there. Amy and me got work to do.”
Amy slices potatoes as Mama opens cabinet doors, handing you the book of matches. The trash is light and doesn’t hurt your shoulder. Mama says, “Be careful in the wind,” and you nod, while in the living room your brothers turn up the sound on the TV, and Amy, with that serious look on her face, asks Mama to teach her how to light the pilot on the stove.
OUTSIDE THE wind carries you to the trash pile and you run like you’re not supposed to, picturing yourself a stream of wind over the fields, soaring above the treetops and curling into the clouds, higher and higher till you fly where the air is clean and perfect. You run under the clothesline and past the johnny house, picking your feet high off the ground like a prancing pony, imagining you make no noise running even on the dry grass. Your face streams with cold, your hands are quickly numbed, the wind cuts like knives through your sweater and shirt, so cold it tickles and you want to laugh. At the barrel where you burn the trash you fumble with the matches, sparks popping onto the backs of your hands. A small flame wavers on the edge of the bag, a blue flower. You hover over it and protect it from the wind with your hands.
In the top of the bag under the potato peels you pick out margarine wrappers and a wad of tissue that will burn fast. You lay them near the little fire. Now you become a witch and a master of fire, and this bag of trash is a city you mean to level. You stand beside it, arms folded, watching the city walls strip away under the fire, hearing the voices of the tiny people calling for mercy; but you shut your ears to their cries, you are big as a mountain compared to them, and you’re angry as God when Moses struck the rock with his staff; you don’t pity them for their crying. At the center of the burning you imagine your father’s face, letting the flames catch hold of the edges and curl the flesh inward like this paper, till it burns him and blackens him to the eyes, which split open in the heat and spill tears over the trash, hissing like rain in the flame.
You look up at the clouds, an even sheet of gray.
You picture snowflakes falling into the fire.
The trash burns quickly. Smoke pours into the clouds. You feel the heat on your face and lean toward it, staring down into the white heat where the bag and the cardboard have turned to ash. The city has vanished. Even the fire master can’t make fire without fuel. At the end a gray shape wavers in place of the bag, that collapses when you poke it with a stick.
The wind whirls ash into your hair. The cold washes the last traces of the fire’s warmth from your face. You have turned to stone in the cold. You are white like the pictures of statues you have seen at school, and smooth all over, and cool as if you are frozen. Nothing touches you or makes you feel. You don’t know how long you have stood here perfectly still, and really, you might go on standing here all day, if you didn’t hear the sound of a truck passing on the road. In front of the house it slows down. It sounds like Papa’s truck. You run to the corner of the house.
The truck is green, not blue like Papa’s. The truck is green. It passes the house.
You go back to the house without dreaming any more dreams.
THE KITCHEN windows have fogged with the heat from pots on the stove, and Amy stands on a kitchen chair learning to make brown gravy in an iron skillet. Beside her, Mama watches, sipping coffee. The coffee spoon makes a brown stain on the white of the towel where it rests.
“Did you watch till the fire was out?” Mama asks.
Amy says, “It took him long enough for that trash to bur
n twice.”
“The fire just now went out,” you say. You open a new grocery bag beside the sink. The bruise on Mama’s face is larger, darker-colored, shining in the light from the window.
Even with the television playing, the house seems quiet now, and the sound of the wind outside only makes the inside seem safer and warmer. Mama locks the back door after hurrying down the porch to hook the screen. The front door is locked and bolted. Your brothers sit in a line on the couch watching the parade on TV. Duck says he bets that stuff on the floats ain’t even real. Allen says be quiet and watch it. Grove sits between the two of them, cradling his arm.
“Grove’s arm is hurting him worse,” Amy says quietly to Mama, and Mama answers, “I expected it would.”
She goes to Grove and leans over him, touching the swollen place carefully. You watch her and touch your shoulder the same way, but you say nothing.
Mama’s voice, when she speaks, fills the rooms in a way that Papa’s never does, loud as he shouts. Her fullness is all of warmth and softness, with no blade edge. She asks if the arm hurts bad, and Grove nods that it does. She asks if it started hurting when Papa was yelling and Grove answers that it did. Papa’s chair, turned toward the television, seems to mock you.
Amy says, “My arm is tired. Come stir this for a while.”
You take her place in the chair and stir with the arm that isn’t hurting, though you are clumsier using it and must go slower. “Stir at the bottom so it doesn’t stick,” Amy says, “and stir all around so it doesn’t make lumps. You better not let it make lumps, either, because I had it going real good.” She sets the table, laying out flowered plates one by one. Mama has set the tea jar in the window. The smell mingles with the other smells. Soon Mama comes back to mix the tea and break ice into glasses. She has brought Grove into the kitchen, the swollen arm wrapped in an elastic bandage. Allen and Duck take their seats too, turning up the sound on the television so they can hear the parade announcers. Amy says, “I don’t see what’s so hot about a bunch of balloons.”
Mama mashes the potatoes with milk and margarine. You throw the greasy wrapper away.
Once, when a car passes outside, everyone looks at everyone else.
Mama says, “He won’t be back for a while.”
She sets the bowls of food on the table, and the pan of biscuits golden on the top, and when she opens the oven door again you watch the chicken and pour tea from the jar, careful not to spill any, while Amy takes the glasses one by one to the table.
Mama says for you to sit down, that you have stirred the gravy half to death, and you find yourself smelling the food and feeling glad you don’t have to eat it when Papa is here. For a moment everything seems peaceful and right. Mama heaps everybody’s plates. You see how she watches all of you, waiting to see if it makes you happy to have this—and even though you could not say it does, you understand she has worked hard, and wanted something better.
At last, because you are hungry, you eat. Mama eats too, chewing slowly because of the bruise. Your brothers tell her how good everything is, and you say the same thing, and so does Amy, and Mama smiles almost shyly. At last she says, “Well thank Amy too, because she sure helped. If she hadn’t thought to turn off that oven, there wouldn’t be a mouthful fit to eat.”
“We’d have us this big old piece of charcoal for dinner,” Duck says.
“We could of cooked one of them birds I killed at the river,” Grove says.
“Did you kill a bird?” Amy asks, and Grove nods, laughing when she shivers and says, “It makes me sick to think about it.”
“There wouldn’t have been two mouthfuls to it,” Allen says. “It was this little old sparrow.”
“And him too little to lift the gun,” Mama says. “Is that why your arm is bleeding again?”
He shakes his head, waving the fork at her. “No ma’am. It started when Papa was shouting. That gun didn’t do nothing.”
“Didn’t do anything,” Mama says.
Through the meal you watch her. She only eats a little. The look in her eyes is like before, strange and far away, frightened now and then. She is continually staring into the living room. When someone speaks, she listens, though nothing she hears changes any part of her expression. The more you watch her the more you feel dread yourself, and even when she tries to smile you feel afraid, though you don’t know why.
Grove says, “I saw a piece of snow while we were running from Papa.”
“He means he saw a flake of snow,” Amy says.
“Amy saw it too,” Grove says.
“No I didn’t.”
“You said you did.”
“No I did not. You said you saw it, and you asked me if I saw it. But I never said I saw it.”
“It fell right under your nose. Mama, is it going to snow?”
Mama looked out the window and slowly nodded. “The way it looks, it’s bound to. It’s cold enough on the ground.”
“I hope it snows all day long and Papa gets stuck somewhere and can’t get home for a week.”
“Your Papa will get home one way or the other,” Mama says quietly. “You ought not to wish bad things on him.”
Duck says, “I hope he don’t keep us awake all night again.”
Mama rubs her forehead. “Nothing we can do about it, son. If he does, he does. If he don’t keep you awake, he’ll keep me awake.”
“I hate him sometimes,” Duck says, but Mama lays her hand across his mouth. Grove says if it snows he’s going to make a snowman with a rifle in the front yard, so Papa will see it and be too scared to come home. Mama says for him to hush too. “Don’t talk about Papa for a while,” she says.
A moment later Grove whispers, “Maybe you can make snow cream.”
Finally Mama laughs, and for a moment her face clears. “I don’t have any vanilla flavoring. You can’t make snow cream without that.”
“I bet Papa would get some at the store,” Grove says.
“I bet he would too,” Mama says.
IN THE living room you watch television with your brothers, listening to Mama and Amy clear the table in the next room. From the sound of Mama’s voice you can tell when she is near the table and when she is beside the sink. You can almost guess the look on her face. “Rinse them good,” Mama says, “and stack them in the sink. But don’t drop any; I’ve been saving them dishes for the longest time.”
“The pots need to be rinsed before this stuff dries on them,” Amy says.
“Leave them to soak,” Mama says. “I’ll wash them and put them away when I feel like it.” She sits in a kitchen chair, near the sink maybe, with the sweater wrapped close round her. You hear the clanging of pots in the sink, and Amy says, “I could wash them fine by myself if I could reach the durn hot water.”
“Don’t say ‘durn,’” Mama says. “What would your teachers think about me if they heard you say a word like that.”
“Oh Mama, I got better sense than to say ‘durn’ in front of my teacher.”
“Better not to say it at all,” Mama says, and stands in the doorway. Grove lies on the couch, head submerged in a vast pillow, a bag of ice resting against his elbow. He watches television quietly though anyone can see he doesn’t like to lie still. Mama asks, “Is that ice melted, honey?” and bends to touch the bag gently.
“It feels okay,” Grove says, though without looking at her.
“There’s more ice if you need it changed.”
“The cold makes it feel good,” Grove says.
“We got to take care of you, don’t we?” Mama says, stroking his forehead.
“He’s spoiled,” Duck says.
“I am not.”
“You are too. Allen Ray lets you shoot the BB gun more than anybody.”
“Don’t talk about that stupid stuff now,” Allen says. “Mama doesn’t feel like hearing it.”
“Watch TV,” Mama says. She kisses Duck’s white forehead. “Is there a good movie on, or is it just football?”
“This
is a western,” Duck says. “And then there’s a monster movie next.”
“I want to watch that, if it’s scary,” Amy says, coming to the door. “We ain’t watching no stupid football.”
Moving toward the window, Mama says quietly, “I wonder why they would show a monster movie on Thanksgiving Day.”
“To give all the regular movie stars a day off,” Duck says, and Grove laughs, and Allen says, “That’s so stupid.”
“I think I’m going to lie down,” Mama says.
“You probably better rest while you can,” you say.
She looks out the window again. You know she is staring at the road. For the moment the only sound is the wind. Grove lays back his head and closes his eyes. Mama checks the kitchen and kisses the top of Amy’s head, for cleaning so well. Amy makes Mama hold her for a moment, and closes her eyes too. “If I could get to the shelf I’d put them away,” Amy says.
Mama strokes her hair. “Leave them where they are and go sit down. You’ve done plenty.”
Mama turns away again, watching the highway a long time. Allen asks her if she sees something but she says no. It rests her to look at the trees and the clouds, she says. Arms folded, she drifts to the bedroom, and Amy helps her put on her nightgown. Amy comes back a little later, closing the door.
You glimpse your mother through the doorway before it closes. She stretches out on the bed, pale as the sheets except for her dark hair. Unconscious of anyone watching, she lies like a child, curled in a tiny ball. Her face contracts as if with some nagging pain even when she closes her eyes. If you called her softly now she would hear you at once, even if you stood in the farthest corner of the kitchen and whispered. Mama never sleeps but that she listens for the least sound.
She lies frightened as something to be sacrificed. She brings her fist up to her mouth. Even after Amy closes the door you can hear her breathing.