Eden

by Olympia Vernon

  “God made doctors,” I said.

  She laughed. “I know. Doctors and men who’ll never know what a machine can do to a woman.”

  I recalled the first night with her—how she talked about her titty going into a compressor, the doctor sitting on a stool and looking at her lump through a microscope. The big words he used. Words like “malignant” and “benign” and what I’d discovered in the dictionary: “carcinoma.”

  The sincerity of the subject returned to her face, as it had before when her breath annoyed the fly. “A lady I knew,” she said tenderly, “I’d see her at the grocery a time or two, and folks used to wonder why she fed her baby out in the open.” Her hand was over the hanging breast, the one shaped like the head of a swan. “She tol’ ’em babies wadn’t meant to go hungry. And if she could help it, she’d feed hers till the milk run sour.”

  She lifted her leg and pressed her toes on the horizontal edge of the window. The color of her skin returning.

  I thought about my father. He wasn’t drunk when he told me about the cattle, the sour lump coming out of the nipple. A hard lump the color of a white Crayola, the one that I never used because it was already dead.

  “That’s just what happened to her,” said Aunt Pip. “Her milk went sour, and the next thing we knew she was laying up in the cemetery with her titty missing.”

  The disease had fallen into the milk bucket now. In my head, Daddy was picking it up in his hand, measuring it against the earth.

  The air between Aunt Pip’s legs was rising. It wasn’t of juniper or petals from the magnolia tree, but of Mama’s fur; a trail of her life passing through her abdomen, a sweaty odor of a woman with a past for reaching for fallen things.

  “The sun’s coming up,” I said.

  “I know,” said Aunt Pip, getting up from the chair.

  With her face to the rectangular glass window, she took one hand and touched the flesh underneath her arm. She never talked about the lump there or the brick-colored mass that oozed out of her nipple on occasion. She pulled the gown over her head and stood with her body pressed against the translucent glass, dropping it at her feet.

  “You ever wonder where God is up yonder?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, “but I taste Him every time I eat a piece of butterscotch candy.”

  She laughed and turned her face to one side, her cheek in the center of the rectangle, and began to pound her jawbone on the hard surface. She did not do this violently. I believe she wanted to hear the life of a solid bone, something besides the sound of a compressor coming down on her breast to categorize it.

  “It’s still inside o’ me,” she said. The thumping stopped. “They say you don’t know when your life is leaving you. You can’t feel the disease spreading to other places.” She brought her hand down from the swollen hill underneath her arm. “But that’s a lie. I was born perfect. Every part of me in place. I know when something ain’t right. It wakes me up in the middle of the night the minute I forget it.”

  I believed her. Daddy once said that a leaf had come loose from a tree in front of him. And he could feel the spirit of his missing arm rising in the wind to protect him.

  Aunt Pip’s hair was not growing back the way that it had left her. It was thin, dry. She stood with her back arched; her shoulder blades in the shape of a butterfly.

  The next morning, Fat had come through the door with a glass of whiskey in her hands. She took a seat next to Aunt Pip’s bedside. I watched, listened.

  “When I tell you that nigger was wired, he was wired,” said Fat. “He used to say he had balls big enough to throw over his shoulder.”

  Aunt Pip’s eyes widened when she heard Fat speak, her head uncovered. “Yeah,” said Aunt Pip, “I knew that fool was lying when he said he had kin on Prytania Street. We had New Orleans shut down then. And we ain’t never seen the likes of him hangin’ around the place.”

  Fat smiled. “Sho,” she said. “That nigger couldn’t say he didn’t love me. He thought I was crazy as a Betsy bug, but he loved me. That’s for damn sure.” She lifted her skirt to the pubic hairs in her panties. “What’s not to love?”

  They both laughed out loud. Aunt Pip loved Fat. They shared something on Commitment that nobody in Pyke County would ever understand. She and Fat laughed through the hatred the county felt for them, laughing about the men I never knew existed.

  Aunt Pip gradually pushed herself to the wall behind her. “Remember that chocolate motherfucker who kept telling the boys at the pool hall that he wanted my hand?”

  “Yeah,” said Fat, “I remember him. That bastard didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.” She laughed again, holding herself by the stomach. “What was his name? Slim?”

  “That’s it!” said Aunt Pip, snapping her fingers. “I told that nigger that if he didn’t tie his shoes, I’d kill his ass quick as the day is long.” She tapped Fat on the arm, pointing through the window past the tiny lizard that lay there. “You should’ve seen that fool running out through the field yonder.”

  “Lawd,” said Fat, “if I’d seen it with my own two eyes, I believe it woulda been over for Fat. I mean over.”

  They laughed out loud. The house was growing warm. Springtime was coming and the magnolias were restless. I was thinking about the letter from Uncle Sugar that Mr. Diamond had long since delivered, the one Daddy spoke about the morning we saw Jesus. And why Mama hadn’t yet opened it; it lay at the foot of her bed, next to the pages of Deuteronomy.

  “Ooh,” said Aunt Pip, snapping her fingers, “I wanna go to New Orleans. Hell, I oughta just take my black ass to the pool hall ’n’ give them niggers a piece o’ my mind!”

  She then looked down at a small oval mirror next to her bed and pushed herself back against the pillows again, her face pained.

  Fat noticed her embarrassment: “Pip,” she said, “you don’t wanna go down there nohow. That place all ate up with crabs!”

  Aunt Pip closed her eyes. “Well,” she said, “that’s bad for somebody, ain’t it?”

  Fat grew silent then. “You been wearing that lipstick I give you?”

  “Every now and then,” said Aunt Pip.

  “Damn, Pip,” said Fat. “Why you think I give it to you? All you wanna do is lay up in this house and give up on yourself.”

  “I can’t help it sometimes.”

  “You can’t help it?” said Fat, laughing. “The Pip I know ain’t got shit to do with help. She stubborn as a mule.”

  “I’m coming out o’ it.”

  “You better,” said Fat. “I’m going crazy in that house all by myself.”

  This is why Pyke County had branded her. They’d heard it through the grapevine that she wrote letters to a dead man. Her dead husband, Justice Bates.

  “All right, Fat,” said Aunt Pip, pulling the curtains back. “I’ll try.”

  “Give me that sunshine I’m used to,” yelled Fat. “Go ’head!”

  Aunt Pip rehearsed the lines. “Give me a pig foot and a bottle of beer.”

  Fat laughed so hard her laughter got caught in her throat and she coughed. “That’s what I’m talking ’bout. Billie’s blues.”

  “Don’t get me started, girl.”

  “Before the day is over,” said Fat, “I’m gone have to call the law!”

  She stood up and lifted her skirt again and kneeled to the floor, her ass in the air. Her face was magnetic, heroic.

  She and Aunt Pip smoked wrinkled cigarettes the rest of the evening, talking about New Orleans and how they were going back someday, while they were alive.

  chapter

  eight

  The following morning, I was on Aunt Pip’s front porch watching her through the window, the curtains flying into a cloak over her. She looked like the pictures inside the encyclopedia, the small drawing of a fetus before it had fully developed, the thumb inside its mouth.

  Mr. Clyde was in the vast field next to the house, talking to Mr. Diamond. They stood in the green, shaking and
nodding their heads, pointing to the cows on the opposite side of the road. I could vaguely hear them over the distance. They stood like white men. Their faces diagonal to each other, turning sideways when the subject matter was important. And leaning back against their vertebrae, putting pressure on their vertebrae with an air about them.

  All the white men in town knew one another. Mr. Clyde, Mr. Diamond, Daddy’s boss, Mr. Sandifer, other white men. We’d be going up to the grocery store and they’d all be outside talking about the differences between Chevys and Fords. I wished my daddy could just sit around in his pride, debt-free, and shoot the breeze about something so trivial as miles to the gallon. White men had it easy. They worked just enough to call themselves men and went home and laid across their flatironed sheets with their long legs propped up on the bed rail, chatting and kissing the cleanliness from their white wives. A black man didn’t have time to be gentle with his woman. He had enough stress already. Staying alive was stressful. Going to work and having to call a white man “mister” was stressful. Waking up with that black skin and that nappy black head that showed to the roots, those rough black hands that they couldn’t do nothing about, was enough stress to break him, no matter how much man he thought he was.

  Daddy pulled up in his truck, walking up through the machines. He saw me there on the front porch, his face blank. The white men had seen me too, pointing their fingers at the ground and looking up into the clouds for rain.

  It seemed to me that my daddy had no more pride in himself than to let Mr. Clyde drag him around the county when he wanted to: stop by this white woman’s house, cultivate her garden, work your fingers till the blood comes running down because you’re the nigger whose brother took my Laurel. This is the way that it was. A diseased human being resorted to anything, I thought, even if it meant bowing down to the feet of his worst enemy. If it could get them what they wanted, no matter what that something was; it was worth a try.

  Mr. Clyde’s lips moved. He pointed to a clear spot in the field. Mr. Diamond, who looked at me from afar with squinted, threatening eyes, scratched his scalp and seemed to be compromising with Mr. Clyde. He pointed toward another vacant spot in the field, and they both nodded.

  “Right here,” Mr. Clyde said loudly, bending down to pull up a fistful of brown dirt in his hands. “This is a good place for it.”

  Mr. Diamond cranked the John Deere. He stretched his legs out over the pedals and shifted the gears before looking out below him, into the sky. The seat was high. I don’t think he was really used to the work. Mr. Clyde gave him a few pointers, and he gripped the wheel, maneuvering the heavy machinery into a well-thought-out routine: a little to the edge of the wheel, a quick right, back down through the dirt, gutting the center. Occasionally, he looked back to make sure the land was coming up behind him.

  “Come on here now,” he said to Daddy, raising his voice high over the motor.

  Daddy seemed so small, as if he couldn’t have kept a fly from hurting me. He walked behind Mr. Diamond, pulling a wheelbarrow with his arm, stopping every other step to fill up the holes with cow manure.

  “I gotcha,” he yelled, pausing to pull a leather glove from his back pocket and laying it flat on the ground. He turned it over several times, positioning his hand with it before sliding his fingers through.

  Mr. Clyde stuck his hand into the fertilizer and laughed out loud, talking about how he had found himself a good one. His letters curved in the wind, the sound of his voice widening deeper into the air, as the length of the field stretched it over the green. He marched up to Daddy with his arms swaying, stopping abruptly.

  He said something to him. And all I could make of it was: “Do you hear me?” Daddy looked him in the eyes when he spoke to him, his chest high to him. Mr. Clyde kept his finger pointed in his face for a second, down to the ground, back in his face.

  Right now, Daddy was thinking of the letter at the end of his bed, the numbers in the penitentiary that Uncle Sugar was fighting off. Because they knew that he was a man with no balls. Because they knew of the only penetration he had left in his body, the part leading up to the intestines, the fall of a man.

  “Maddy,” said Aunt Pip, yawning from the window, “who’s out there?”

  “Men,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

  She had heard Daddy’s voice out there. There was something about the experiments of the machines that caused her to rely on instincts, to recognize the sound of a white man coming down on the handicapped. The same way Grandma had known that my father had been cheating and fed his arm to an animal. The same animal that he had beaten, battered.

  Daddy looked down at the pasture, sprinkling the fertilizer and looking back up on the front porch. I smiled at him. That day when he asked me about Aunt Pip, I saw something in his eyes. He held something for her deep inside him. A memory that a married man couldn’t dare share with his wife. One of those loose memories that a man couldn’t control by himself. He needed the object of his memory to clear him of its thought. If only he could see it, if he could just lay his eyes on the thing that captured him, everything would make sense: the alcoholism, the long nights at the pool hall, wanting to make love to Mama only when he was drunk and didn’t care what she looked like. He walked closer to the fence but stopped, the harder the white men came down on him.

  Time went by. The clouds gathered above us. It began to sprinkle, and the water flowed on the rocks with a collective noise that sounded throughout the woods, seasoning the pine trees with an emerging faint mist.

  “Get the clothes off the line,” yelled Aunt Pip, now looking through a shoe box of things. “I smell it coming.”

  I ran around the back of the house barefoot. The moisture slowly seeped into the earth, the rain soaking my hair at the roots.

  It began to pour. The rain pounded upon the tin roof, running alongside the edge of the house in thick streams. Daddy and the white men talked loudly over the John Deere. I gathered the clothes in my arms and ran back inside the house.

  As I was closing the windows, I saw Mr. Diamond shift the John Deere; Mr. Clyde was behind him, driving his pickup. Daddy signaled for him to roll his windows down, the fertilizer in his hand drowning. The next thing you know, he was running toward the house. I quickly closed the curtains. The John Deere hummed loudly, a short pause between gears, a higher shift, the sound of Mr. Diamond leaving the field.

  “Listen to that,” said Aunt Pip, closing her eyes to draw a breath. “God is crying.”

  There was a knock at the door. It was Daddy. He shifted his feet on the ground the same way he did when he owed Jesus his money. He whispered her name in a loud, flat whisper. “Pip,” he said.

  Aunt Pip touched the living breast, the head of the swan pointing eastward. “Don’t answer it,” she whispered. “Please.”

  Daddy knocked harder. Although her hair was beginning to grow again, she reached for the pink scarf on the Styrofoam bust, covering it. She had not seen him since Grandma’s funeral, when her hair was down her back, full. Now the cancer had not yet claimed her life, but the experiments had taken her energy, the old energy that he remembered.

  “Maddy,” said Daddy, “it’s your daddy. Open up.”

  “Don’t,” whispered Aunt Pip.

  Daddy shifted his feet again, the shadow of them forming a triangle. “I know you’re in there,” he said.

  Aunt Pip covered her face. She would have died rather than let him see her that way. Her eyes sunken into a hollow, oval-shaped bone.

  It was quiet.

  Then the horizontal boards on the front porch began to moan. Daddy was close to the curtain, his face almost metallic, as if the arrangement of the things in the house would subconsciously speak to him. He stood there waiting for something to announce itself, to please him. He knocked awhile longer before stepping off the front porch and back into the rain.

  “Thank you, Lawd,” said Aunt Pip.

  She opened the curtain a little and saw him running back to his truck, s
hielding the downpour with his arm.

  Aunt Pip eventually went to sleep again. I stayed up with her that night, catching her leg each time it rolled off the side of the bed, putting it back under the covers, so the blood wouldn’t go bad in it.

  chapter

  nine

  Summer was ripe now. The earth was beginning to heat up the Mississippi dust. Time was passing almost rapidly, it seemed. And I was at the end of Commitment Road talking to God when I saw Mama’s car coming toward me, passing the cemetery. When she pulled up, her skin was the color of butterscotch and her mouth was calm, as if Jesus had come down off the wall and answered her something.

  “Get in,” she said.

  “Where we going?” I asked.

  She looked at the triangular roof of Aunt Pip’s house, the open window. “Sugar’s,” she said, as if he was a free man.

  I remembered very little about Uncle Sugar except for what Mama had told me. He liked fast cars and women. Smoked a lot of the feel-goods. Hung out in the cities that other Negroes had to bribe their way into. He was a learned city slicker. He knew a lot about Jesus and hung out on Factory Road just as much as Daddy did. The difference is that he owned Factory. He didn’t take no shit off the Negroes. And he didn’t cry none over money. Everybody’s money was his money. The folks at the pool hall thought he was a superstar. He shared what he had. Bought drinks for the boys and let them get over fifty dollars in the hole before he said anything about it. No, he wasn’t a bully like Jesus. He respected everybody and wanted them to respect him the same. Daddy called him “Sugar.” When he did talk about him, it was always “Sugar this” and “Sugar that” and “Some boys from New Orleans came to the pool hall asking about Sugar and I had to tell ’em what happened to him. It killed me to have to tell ’em that the white folks took him downtown.”

  We stopped by the house to pick up Daddy. I didn’t want to go. My uncle was a rapist. That’s the whole of it. Some white woman got her “hole stretched out by a horse-dicked Negro, and the white folks gave him a number.” It didn’t matter who said it. It didn’t matter how long he was locked up. Once a Negro went down for raping a white woman, it could have been the era of a new millennium, a new century, a decade, he’d always be branded for taking the cleanliness from her. No, I didn’t learn that from those white scientists. I didn’t have to. All you had to be was born black to know that.