“This ain’t misery, Maddy,” Aunt Pip said. “We’ve got till Sunday and every other weekend until school is out. You have to do this. You have to because you want to. Otherwise, you’re no good for me. I need somebody to be good for me.”
She coughed from her lungs, holding on to me. Her bones were so light that I could have picked her up and carried her anywhere in the house she wanted to go. “It’s the machines,” she said. “Them doctors put my titty in the system.”
Her bones were unencyclopedic. Yeah, I had seen the pictures of mammals and milk going up through the stomach. But nowhere had man put into image what happened to a woman’s body after the milk in her breasts had spoiled.
This is the way that it was in the beginning. Aunt Pip had gotten caught in the tubes of my grandmother’s stomach, and a midwife had to run and pull her out. And when she came to be, she was given to my great-grandmother to raise. Big Mama had been raped by a white man in the cornfields of Pyke County, Mississippi. She had known what it was to lift a baby’s shoulders because her own had been lifted. She was given the duty of lifting Aunt Pip’s shoulders because she knew that her daughter didn’t have it in her to sleep with a lost baby, the smell of near death on her, reminding her of how close they had both come to dying, mortality.
Aunt Pip’s scalp was naked. The veins sprouted into a small muscle underneath her scalp, as if someone had traced a route to California on there with the sharp lead of a no. 2 pencil. The world was a cruel place to be at death, especially when the town of your birth had condemned you into the shape of a harlot, unworthy of the hand of God to release you from the thing that diseased you.
“It’s handling me, Maddy,” she said with her head over the toilet, tears flowing. A thin line of saliva hung from the porcelain to her mouth. “Lawd, help me.”
Her body was fragile. The bones felt like powder. To touch them was to bruise them. A tear formed on my inner eyelid. The water came up from the pit of my stomach through the cartilage of my entire body. And were it to slip from my eye and join hers, it would have caused her own to fill even more so with tears.
She vomited a stream of liquid. The saliva around her mouth was as I had seen in cattle, the mouth wide open to a position of uncertainty, the tongue coated white like the body of grease on a newborn baby.
A dog barked in the distance. The sound of its vocal cords was sharp, as if something had hit her. The bark turned into a cry that floated across the earth and landed on the surface of a distant thing.
Up high, the magnolia tree stood away from the window. The petals of alabaster flowers were beginning to sprout. The coming heat had rotted them into a limp brown state like the upper torso of an old woman reaching down to retrieve her husband’s house slippers.
Aunt Pip wiped her mouth. “Jesus,” she said.
When her hand landed on the porcelain, she noticed the veins of her wrists spreading up to her palm like a baywood tree. This is when the curiosity of her anatomy caused her to forget, in a childlike way, the existence of her crying. Her face was drawn downward, her mouth open.
“Look,” she said. “I have a ditch in my bones.”
At which point I felt the two tiny vertical bones of powder. They were underneath the baywood tree. She took my index finger and hard-pressed them. I ran it southward until I could no longer feel them. They had invisibly found themselves in a motion of blood and muscle going up to her elbow.
“No,” she said, “this here.” Between the powdered bones was a gap wide enough for a fingernail to run through it. I held her wrist in my hand and satisfied her.
“Yeah,” I said, “I feel it.”
I wanted to tell her the truth, not that I’d felt a ditch in her bones but what Daddy had told me when I was just nine years old. Nine was important. Three multiplied times three: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Daddy gave me what he called “the reason why titties got so sick.” He said that when he used to milk cattle, sometimes the mama cows would get so loud and heavy that you’d have thought the devil got clean inside of them. He said he’d go to squeezing their titties and they’d go to kicking and screaming until a hard lump came out of them. It was leftover milk that the calves didn’t drink. It was wasted, spoiled and sour. It had hardened inside their titties and created a grown, painful lump of cancer.
An unexpected wind came through the bathroom window, causing one of the medicine bottles to fall from the exposed shelf. It rolled toward Aunt Pip’s feet, across the wooden floor, rocking back and forth. She listened to the roaring of the pills inside a closed space. Her skin was dark from the therapy, the doctors being rough with her.
She touched her bald head and sighed, turning away from the settling pills. “My hair is gone,” she said. “The doctors. They took my lady.” She grabbed my clothes. “Is my hair gone, Maddy?” Her face fell downward toward the vomit that had coated the water like the yellow reflection of pee from a bladder. “Where my hair?”
Her insanity somehow pleased her. It belonged to her. As empty and burrowed as she had become, this was the only thing she was sure of, that she had a right to lose her mind because dementia was as certain as death.
“Somewhere naked,” I said. “It’ll grow again in another time.”
She took these words and repeated them, looking back at the medicine bottle, at her reflection. “In my dreams,” she said, “I sit between Jesus’ legs, and he plait me into two.”
I smiled, watching her hands leave her scalp. She took one finger and poked the vomit that lay restless on the spine of the toilet water. Her reflection rippled from the inside to the controlled edges of the porcelain. “Yeah,” she said. “I get it back in another life.”
I learned to fill her glass with hot water, as it caused the pain pills to dissolve quicker. When she went to undress herself, the other breast was still tattooed with circles where the doctors in Jackson had experimented on her. She said they put round Band-Aids there. They were connected to wires, thin wires that were hooked up to a machine.
She lay on the bed next to the open door, purring through the walls of the house like a baby after a nipple slips out of its mouth. She lay fetally positioned, her toes curled beneath her. The muscles in her legs carried a perfect arch, the calves hardening at her discomfort. I went to drape a wool blanket over her. “No,” she said. “Leave me be.”
At that moment, her eyes were fixed on the dead-end wall. She had covered her head with a pink scarf. She had not yet become used to lying on pillows with a naked scalp.
“Okay,” I said.
What had the doctors done to her strength? It was as brutal as Samson to trust the thing that stole his power. I felt this way. Some part of her had trusted the doctors. One breast was gone without any experiments at all. The other she relied on hope, that God would put the miracle of His faith in a lighted machine, operable by a trained hand of medicine, that would free her from death.
I was sitting on the porch when midnight came down. The widow appeared through the darkness, holding a lantern and something else that I could not see. Her feet were heavy on the earth. Her body made its own noise, as if she was sure of the purpose of her steps, the way the moon hung over the magnolias. She went to the mailbox and put the thing in her hand inside and walked away.
“Appreciate it,” I yelled.
My voice carried, but even this did not stop her, the lantern in her hand leading her back to the house where I’d first seen her finger emerge from the curtains. I brought the package inside: three tubes of fire-engine-red lipstick with a note that read: “Stay alive to enjoy this.”
chapter
two
He told her he would kill her if she didn’t open the door.
Daddy’s drinking worsened. The thoughts set in. He was married to a woman whose mother took his manhood. He loved and hated Mama at the same time. Grandma always said that a drunk man told the truth. During that time when his head was no longer attached to his body, he didn’t care about the world and how
it judged him. He used his memory. He thought of all the things he couldn’t say when he was sober and found the first victim to take it out on. A one-armed man didn’t know shit about staying clean. His muscles, his rules, his lies had been established through his hands. He needed that missing arm for anger, to grab a woman’s throat and strangle the Christ out of her.
“Open this door,” he said as he stood outside the bedroom door and bitched to high heaven that he had had enough of God living in his house, sleeping with his wife, and tonight she would open the door or he would get his rifle, his double-gauge shotgun, and teach her to respect his house, his rules. “I mean it!”
“I’m not for it, Chevrolet,” said Mama. “Not tonight.”
God didn’t live in his bedroom. Anything that came from God made my father angry. Where was God when he lost his manhood? Where was He when Daddy needed a piece of Mama and couldn’t get it? It hurt him to be mean to her. He didn’t want to. I saw it in his eyes.
“Goddammit, Ann,” he shouted. “You’d better open this door, if you know what’s good for you.”
He paced back and forth across the floorboards with his tall, narrow shadow bent at the shoulders. His rising arm hovered over his head, the Afro that he so proudly restored every morning with a wide-toothed comb. I was afraid to get up and close my door, to tell him that he couldn’t come inside her because he had fucked up. She was a God-fearing woman, and he had fucked up.
“Get on away from here, Chevrolet.” She winced. “You’d better kiss my ass if you know what’s best.”
She didn’t mean it. He knew she didn’t mean it. It happened every so often. She played the strong role and gave him the idea that she had an even thicker backbone than the whores he’d slept with. Everybody saw him with whores. Women who didn’t love their kids as much as Mama loved me. Whores. Women with little or no Christ in their lives. But women just the same.
“Come on, now, baby,” he said.
He worked hard all week. On Fridays, when Mama asked him where the money was, he told her that the guys on Factory took it. In other words, he spent every penny at the pool hall. Factory Road was less than half a mile from the house. Most of the people in Pyke County had died there: an endless list of drunks, petty thieves, hustlers. My daddy just hadn’t had his time. God was not yet ready for him.
“Take heed,” said Mama.
Although he hadn’t hit her in a long time, she knew that if she’d opened the door right away, that lip of hers would be just as bloody and fat as the mamas of the kids at school.
“You hear me?” said Daddy as he kicked the face of the door until the wood resembled a grave digger’s shovel. Chips of wood surfaced. He cursed and swung his fist until he grew tired, breathing heavily like he did the night he walked outside in the nude. The night Mama and I carried him inside the house before the neighbors woke up.
“God don’t like ugly, Chevrolet,” said Mama.
My bedroom door was open. I lay underneath the blanket and watched him; his nostrils were flaring. He paced the floor again and paused a second to look at the damage he’d done. He paced again before stopping to run his hand across the shovel. “He would if he lived in this motherfucker,” he said.
“Quit now,” said Mama.
Daddy tugged at his clothes. He didn’t wear his clothes the same anymore. One of his shoulders was light. He was used to carrying more pride around with him. He started for the top button of his oxford. “Shit,” he said. Mama had practiced with him for hours after his arm was cut off, just as she had with the liquor labels, teaching him how to undo his buttons by himself. Once he figured out what world a man of his condition belonged to, he perfected it. He walked his fingers down his shirt and unbuttoned the oxford.
“Chevrolet?” asked Mama.
The sound of worry was in her voice. He liked to get naked while drunk. A drunk man used his whiskey as an excuse to be yellow. He was a coward. His voice was inside his whiskey. It spoke for him and loved him. Never told him when he was wrong or that his child was right across the hall from him, watching him make a fool of himself.
“Answer me something,” said Mama.
“All right,” he said, with his hand nestled in his lap as if he had been holding a rabbit. “I’m loving me. You don’t love me like I love me.”
He was a child, a little boy with a body of missing fingers. Where was he? What place denied him the liberty of taking off his clothes? The anger inside him crawled into his missing fingers, where the liquor had stretched out the phantom. The spirit of his arm was somewhere inside his anxiety, scratching the hairs on his head.
“I do love you, Chevrolet,” said Mama.
His penis hung over his balls as he pulled the long johns down to his knees. He wanted Mama to see his large dick. It was the only thing he could offer her. He let it go and knocked on the bedroom door with his face lying flat against the wooden surface.
“You don’t want me,” he said.
He cried in front of the door with that big dick in his hand. The bathroom light shone on his naked body. That nub hung from his shoulder like the arm of an octopus. In no time, he’d be whispering in her ear and holding his thing against her ass. She’d fuss a little and tell him to be quiet, to behave himself. Before she knew it, that long piece of Negro’d be sliding between her legs and Daddy’d be saying “Amen.”
“Chevrolet,” said Mama.
He lifted his head for a moment, his shadow weaving across the floor. He turned with his back to the door. The vivid money-green tattoo across his chest was carved with a baby pin and blue ink. He walked into the bathroom light and looked down at himself, tracing the tattoo with his fingers, smiling. Oh yeah, he knew how to get inside that bathroom. When he really wanted to get in, he’d whisper her first name: “Faye,” he’d say, “let me in.” He had the courage to put only the first three letters of her name across his chest, FAY, because it hurt too much to finish it.
“Let me in,” he said.
“Hush now,” said Mama.
It was hot underneath the covers. My body sweated; I had to pee. I waited for him to say her first name so I could go pee.
“Faye,” he said, “let me in.”
Slowly, the door opened. The light from their room hovered over my blanket. She held Daddy up and waited for him to prop himself against the dresser. He grunted, pointing one finger at her when she let him go; she had been holding him by the ribs. “I’m gone put my” he hiccupped, falling onto the bedroom floor, “my foot up your ass one of these days.”
Mama closed the door. I could hear their activity, their words.
“Take your drunk ass to bed, niggah,” she said.
Something fell on the floor. It did not make the sound of flesh. What noise I heard could have been anything at all: the open Bible at the foot of their bed, turned to the vocabulary of Deuteronomy, the mason jar that she housed the lizard in, a framed photo of Daddy in blue jeans, many things that carried the same weight but had their own privacy.
I heard Daddy crawling into bed, bitching about the acid in his stomach. He said he’d drunk too much soda pop at the Place, another name for the scrap yard: “Yeah,” he said. What first turned out as laughter ended in a long cry. “What you got for me ’bout as sure as a white man paying me my money on time.”
Mama mumbled something. The fallen thing was now in her hands. She was this type of woman. She picked up lost, broken things and tried to fix them. Her disappointment came when the thing could not be fixed.
“Get that light out o’ my eyes,” yelled Daddy.
In a short while, the locket carrying a small picture of my uncle Sugar, Daddy’s only brother, was ticking against the bedpost where it had been since he’d been locked up in the Mississippi State Penitentiary for raping a white woman. Mama’s voice began to carry through the walls of the house. The sound of the locket grew louder. I visualized her reaching for it, trying to calm Daddy down, grab it from the bedpost so I wouldn’t hear him fucking her.
And so the story went: Laurel asked my uncle to meet her behind the grocery one Friday. Like a fish to water, he went. Negroes had their vision. They said that a nigger didn’t think when it came to a white woman. He got so caught up in that white skin that his dick got so hard that the flies wouldn’t even touch him. That’s what happened to my uncle. He got so excited about that white skin and white hair and white folks’ blood that he took two other men with him to keep an eye on her granddaddy’s place while he got him a piece of Laurel Pillar. Mr. Clyde, Laurel’s daddy, had just come back from attending to his cows on Commitment Road when he caught them; the two who had supposedly been looking out ran off when they saw him coming.
The white folks had their version: Laurel Pillar started to scream. Justice Bates, one of the watchmen, and Uncle Sugar took turns raping her until there was blood from her pussy.
When word got out, Justice Bates was found on Commitment the next morning hanging from a branch in the widow’s front yard. There was feces all over his body. They say the widow screamed so loudly that she lost herself. I knew very little about the other watchman, but Uncle Sugar was badly beaten. The white folks put the dogs on him. They found him hiding out behind the post office and beat him. He was almost blind by the time they finished with him. Daddy said that God gave his eyes back but he lost his manhood when they castrated him. Some say the white folks didn’t kill him because cutting off a man’s balls was far worse than killing him.
It was hard for Daddy to look at Uncle Sugar after that. It had been years before he went to see him. And when the letters came from the penitentiary, he gave them to me to read; I stuffed the language of the letters inside my head. Uncle Sugar was a part of the system now. He was a number.
Eden Page 3