Eden

by Olympia Vernon

  The ticking of the locket had stopped. Daddy was crawling off of Mama, his one arm reaching for the wall and resting it in the same fingerprints that she had left while waiting for him in the darkness. He let out a breath that settled in Mama’s ears, somehow reminded her that she was a big woman and the need for him to hold her was out of the question now. The sheets told the story: the slow, gliding sound of them running up to the clot of blood in her breasts, over her protruding stomach. She was somewhere in that room pulling the sheets up on her with one tear falling from her eyes the way a woman is raped and left to her sorrow.

  Daddy was sound asleep now. And Mama’s hands were sliding beneath the covers to touch the rolls of fat there: she was counting them over and over again to see if one of them had gotten lost since she last touched them. I knew the pattern of her movements. I had seen her drag the bed across the room and push it against the wall where the moon didn’t touch her body. And how she’d stand in the window for hours, naked, pacing the floor, looking down at herself to see how her stomach felt in the moonlight.

  Her feet landed solidly on the floor. When the air returned to her lungs, she lifted herself from the bed and lit a match. The reflection of the tiny light scurried beneath the door. The candle was lit now. She put it down on the dresser and brushed her crawling hair. The more she brushed, the heavier her cry. And before she knew it, she was at the edge of the bed again going through the pages of Deuteronomy. It was always Deuteronomy when she made love to Daddy for God. When she did it for herself, it was Ecclesiastes.

  I held my pee.

  chapter

  three

  It was Saturday morning. Aunt Pip’s house was surrounded by magnolias. The petals were open, wide. The yellow parts had fallen onto the white, and they lay exposed like a woman’s vagina at birth. Commitment Road was only a few miles from town, but there was a peace about it. It was safe to cry there. It was silently trapped by the earth.

  Aunt Pip had been asleep all morning. The habit of her slow breaths touched the fabric of the pillows as her face turned sideways, her throat rising into a pattern of stillness, the white sheet pulled over her waist, her toes pointed, erect.

  When she awoke, she found her way to the back room, where an old piano sat next to a square window. She stood with her back arched, her hands tapping lightly on the black and white keys.

  “Put your hands on my shoulders while I play,” she said. “Listen.”

  I felt her bones under my fingertips. She played wildly. I held on to her body as she shifted from me, the piano. It was so beautiful. The music filled the house. She moved into her notes with her hollow body pressing harder on the keys that were weak and required more agony from her fingers to move them along.

  “Water,” she said, “a tall glass.”

  I went to the cupboard and noticed a doe through the kitchen window. Her coat was the color of toffee after a child had played with it for hours. She moved toward the fig tree in the backyard and stroked her fur on the leaves. We looked at each other, the doe and I, staring each other in the eyes, as she turned away from me with her lungs pushing the breath from her belly.

  “Maddy,” said Aunt Pip, “the water.”

  Her arms hung from the side of the piano. I passed her a cold glass of water and she drank it; the lump in her throat rose as the water went down like a warm, sunlit river. The doe slowly made her way around to the piano room window. Her eyes were more piercing, lonely, full of something that was forced upon her—her vision.

  “It’s cold in this house,” said Aunt Pip. “Light the stove.”

  Although it was springtime, her body was of a private temperature. I peeled a sheet of newspaper from the funnies. I had always been afraid to light a stove. Big Mama knew just how little to turn up the eye, just when to light the fumes.

  “Be careful, now,” said Aunt Pip. “That thing liable to set hell on fire if you touch it the wrong way. Be tender with it.”

  The stove was old. Three of the knobs were missing and turned by way of a hairpin stuck inside the veinlet. Only one worked properly. I found a box of matches next to the sink and held my breath before turning the knob. It clicked as I struck the match against the side of the box. The flame was blue at first, then it turned into a sweet-potato orange; I had done it.

  “Turn it up, Maddy,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She pulled up a chair. It was clear that she had more strength. But she walked behind that chair with her backbone into it like she was a toddler taking a step for the first time. Arms outstretched, she reached for the sink, and the distance seemed farther than a game of tag when the winner felt it safe to turn around and look for the finger at his back, the urgent moment of time that became a cruel hoax to a runner who was a penny’s waist from the finish line but never won the race.

  “I’m tired, Maddy,” she said. “I’m just tired.”

  She moved her reflection over the aluminum foil that Big Mama used to patch up a hole so the dishwater wouldn’t leak out. She rested her elbows on the edge of the sink and looked deeper into her reflection. Her disfigured, drained flesh sank into the creases of the aluminum foil; she grew tired of looking at herself.

  “Maddy,” she said, “I think I want my chair now.”

  The morning hours were hardest. I separated the pills for her. Some were for pain. Others were supposed to treat the cancer. She hated taking pills. They reminded her of the titty machine. The doctors had given her articles, pamphlets, that included methods of dealing with the sickness with a healthy attitude, in exchange for death, suicide, depression.

  “It’s ten till nine,” she said.

  “Is the pain worse?”

  “Pain is pain,” she said, crouching over the blood in her breast.

  The doe was beginning to make her way back to the kitchen window. The back door had a large rectangular windowpane. It was dirty. The images were blurry on the other side: the fig tree like a giant mushroom, the shape of Connecticut. Aunt Pip watched the doe through the mouth of her glass as the pills melted down upon her liver.

  “She’s been hanging around all morning,” I said.

  She ignored me. “Go up the road and tell Fat to send me a feel-good.”

  I stood there a moment.

  “Do as you’re told, child,” said Aunt Pip.

  I hadn’t realized that I regarded Fat as simply the widow, a thing of consonants and vowels strung together through havoc, not as a woman who had right enough to be called by her first name, a woman who moved in her own company.

  My legs shook beneath me as I stepped off the front porch. I looked up at the sky, back down at my shoes. There were trees, rows of honeysuckle on the sides of the road. I’d walked the same path with Big Mama, her telling me that when she was young she jumped on anyone’s spine that had a curve it. “It was good luck,” she said. “It was simply for good luck.” And the master in the field, the rapist, who let his grandkids, children her junior, tell her what to do.

  It had rained overnight. Occasionally, I turned around to view the shape of my footprints in the mud, the strange pattern of holes and earth water along the way.

  The walk seemed long.

  I plucked a small branch of honeysuckle from one of the bushes and peeled back the yellow part, with the elephant-shaped tusks at the end. The juice oozed out slowly as I glazed my tongue with it. It was sweet.

  Fat’s house was smaller than Aunt Pip’s. There was an ax in the large oak tree where her old man Justice Bates had been hanged. The woodpile on the front porch looked old, stale, like it had been gathered winters before. It was stacked orderly like a man had come out of the woods and used his strength to save her the trouble, as if she had almost frozen last Christmas and wasn’t going to let it ever happen again. The front yard was uncultivated, only spears of grass here and there. Nothing kept or proper about it. Just a piece of land that needed a woman’s touch, her hand underneath its surface.

  Out of three steps leadin
g to the front porch, the middle one was loose. I jumped to the top one to get close enough to the door. My heart pounded. Finally, I knocked. Fat had a low, childlike voice. She had been reading aloud. I knocked again.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  “Maddy.”

  “Who?”

  “Maddy,” I said. “Aunt Pip sent me.”

  She removed a tube sock from where the doorknob was supposed to be. She put one eye to the door before opening it. There was a long, flat braid going down the center of her scalp, the broken edges crawling behind her ears, close to her neckline. “Is she ailing or something?”

  “She sent me for a feel-good,” I said.

  Fat was beautiful. Big Mama said that if a human being had a shadow to his eye, he was the devil. But Fat’s eyes were solid; they were perfectly centered like the belly of a curved alphabet.

  She turned to go into another part of the house, a bedroom perhaps. She shuffled through something. Nobody in Pyke County owned velvet except her. There was a velvet couch aligned with the rest of the objects inside the house: a green lamp next to one arm, a picture of Moses after coming down from the mountain, white-haired. A tiny house that smelled of scented talc and juniper that blended into something that arose when she was privately naked and squirting perfume on the back of her neck, just behind her ears.

  She returned to the door with a brown bag in her hand: “Give her this for now,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She laughed with the wind in her mouth forming a small volcano down her throat. “I ain’t that old,” she said.

  The door closed as I jumped off the front porch; the scented talc and juniper followed me along the way. The wooden sky— moving, suffocating now.

  chapter

  four

  I was back home now.

  “Wake up, child,” Mama said as she pulled the curtains back from my bedroom window. “We need some eggs and cornmeal for supper. Your daddy’s waiting.”

  It was a habit for her. Before breakfast was served, dinner was already on the stove. Between sitting Aunt Pip and taking care of things around our house, I was tired.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You get that girl up yet?” said Daddy from the kitchen table.

  “She’ll be out in a minute,” Mama said. “She just a little sore from the lifting.”

  That was her way of saying it. I was just “a little sore from lifting” the sick. She had run from the responsibility of taking care of Aunt Pip herself. That’s what happened. How much forgiveness did it take for a Christian to actually forgive? Mama was a Christian. Aunt Pip was a sinner. Christians were supposed to forgive sinners, but it didn’t turn out that way. They were sisters. It wasn’t as if God made special rules for such a relationship. Mama was the strong one. She took the shoes to the funeral home when Grandma died. Aunt Pip was the outsider, with only her fur and the guilt of sleeping with married men to keep her company. Neither Mama nor Aunt Pip had insurance. Just the sins of their flesh and the green earth beneath them.

  “On credit or pride?” I asked Mama. The last time I went to the store with her, we didn’t have enough money to buy a sack of potatoes. Mama stood at the counter and claimed that she had a five-dollar bill in her wallet before we left the house. She said that she had seen it with her own two eyes. Roberta Christian and her husband were next in line. They were the only black people in town with some money. Mr. Rye was Miss Roberta’s father. Everyone called him by his first name. He lived across the road from us. His wife had been dead a long time. Neither one of them cared for sinners. After she passed away, I’d see him crossing the road at night to keep Miss Hattie Mae company. He was a deacon in the church, a respected man. His daughter, Roberta, kept her maiden name because she felt it blessed her. She and her husband were blessed enough to help Mama. Instead, they watched her go through her purse looking for a five-dollar bill that wasn’t there to begin with. We were bound to see Miss Roberta again soon, coming over to the house with some gossip about the town folk’s business. Time and time again, Mama let her in.

  Mama paused for a moment. “Credit,” she said.

  Grandma called credit begging and pride what a person lost for begging. She had a reason for it. Laurel Pillar’s daddy, Mr. Clyde, let us come back to the store not long before Grandma died. But Grandma refused to eat anything made, bought, or sold from the store. She said she had spent her life begging white folks for things that were hers to begin with. She ate from the garden behind our house and barely left her bedroom “to keep from ever having to call a white man mister ever again.”

  “But—” Before I could get anything else out, Mama’s hand came flying across the wind. The side of my face stung.

  “This is my house,” she said. “Don’t you back-talk me. If I didn’t find a way to put food in this house, we’d all starve to death.”

  It was the second time she had ever hit me. The first was in church, when I laughed at the shit stain on Miss Hattie Mae’s ivory slip.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, in tears now.

  Her flesh shivered like Jell-O underneath her skirt, like she’d come so close to whipping me, but God stopped her. “I’m gone keep some kind o’ order in this house,” she said. “You best remember who came first in the world.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  At times, I felt so close to her. She was Mama. I talked to her. I loved her flesh like I loved mine. But we were losing each other somewhere. She needed me and I needed her. We just didn’t know how to say it.

  “You act like you don’t know me, Maddy,” she said with her hand over me.

  “I know you, Mama,” I said, louder this time.

  She kept her hand over my face for a second, silently bitching beneath her breath.

  “Now,” she said, “get up and go to Pillar’s with your daddy.” She paused. “You act like I’m a spade sometimes. I ain’t no spade.”

  She turned to walk out the door. “I might act like the devil ridin’ my back sometimes,” she said, “but I ain’t no spade.”

  She didn’t know her own strength. Once, when Daddy hit her, she didn’t move one limb. She just looked at him and held the side of her face. He didn’t know that the universe was inside her womb. The sun rose and set inside her belly.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Those words saved my ass. If you didn’t know what to say, as a Negro child, you always said “yes, ma’am.” Those two words that took a small fraction of a minute to murmur saved me from a lot of shit that could have gone the other way around. When Grandma was alive, she’d be in one room and I’d be in another. But when she called me, I knew to say “yes, ma’am” all the way down the hall and around the corner, so she’d know that I respected her house.

  I brought myself to my feet.

  “Get a move on!” said Mama.

  I pulled my nightgown over my head and placed it on the bed. My nipples were cold and hard like the tips of a Crayola before anyone had ever used it. “I’m coming,” I said.

  “What you doing in there?” yelled Daddy. “I ain’t got all day.”

  Daddy was still banned from Pillar’s Grocery. Mama and I were allowed to go because she had made a scene in front of the store one afternoon. A white man loved to see a Negro beg him for something, anything. Mr. Clyde stood behind the counter eating some buttermilk biscuits his wife had baked for him. Mama begged him, all right. She stood there in front of the “out to lunch” sign, crying for Mr. Clyde to let her in. Grandma was sick and she needed an elixir from the pharmacy located in the back of the store. After some time, he finally let us in. All that begging didn’t do a damn bit of good. Because Grandma refused to take the medicine. The very thought of Mama embarrassing herself out there for a white man’s remedy made her even sicker. No matter who it was for. Grandma died a week later.

  “I’m coming!” I yelled.

  Daddy was outside by now, revving up his truck engine. I pulled up my overalls and grabbed a shirt from
a folded load of clothes. It was landscape green with a hand-painted daffodil on the shoulder.

  “Mind Mr. Clyde,” said Mama as I passed her; she was shelling a load of butter beans at the kitchen table.

  I hated the sound of her voice. “Mind Mr. Clyde,” as if I was to be a good nigger for him, a field hand or something without a language of my own. I didn’t like her taking shit from the white folks, going to their house and cleaning their toilets with her bare hands. She did it for Daddy. If it meant keeping him, she did anything.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  Daddy’s full head of hair aggravated him at times. He would complain about the spiders from the scrap yard crawling around in his head. But he wouldn’t dare cut it. His hair guarded him from the thought of having to look at the contours of his face, the low self-esteem of a man with no insurance.

  I walked up to the truck. His head was turned. “Let me in,” I said, tapping on the window.

  “All right,” he said, unlocking the passenger-side door and returning to fix his good arm for the drive. “Miss Hattie Mae sent some pecans over this morning. Be sure to thank her for ’em when we get back from Pillar’s.”

  “I will.”

  Daddy drove toward Commitment, over five miles away.

  “Why are we going this way?” I asked.

  “Sugar sent me a letter,” said Daddy. “I gave it to your mama. I figured you getting old enough to know what things mean.”

  “Maybe he wants to see you now,” I said.

  “It don’t matter none,” he said. “The government got him.”

  I wondered how many times he’d thought about the rape: Laurel Pillar’s wild, tangled hair drawing a bridge across her shoulders, the castration.

  “Daddy,” I said, “you ever wonder where the dead go?”

  “Naw,” he said. “I don’t have time to wurry ’bout where they go.” He grew silent. “How Pip?” he said finally.

  “The machines made her sick,” I said.