Eden

by Olympia Vernon

  A pregnant woman sat next to me. Her face was flat, as if she had been thrown from a car and it had crushed the bones. She dug into the mouth of her purse and pulled out a set of sketches. She looked at them with a cunning smile, hiding them behind her hands. When she exposed one of them, I saw a baby caught in the tubes. The baby was a girl. Her eyes were closed, and the tubes of her mother’s intestines were wrapped around her throat. I had felt this way before. There were times when I dreamt of this: a baby wrapped in the tubes of her mother’s stomach. Because something had happened to me that I could not explain: there was only the scent of milk on my breath, from a distant breast, from a woman other than my own mother—for I could not have imagined it otherwise. The pregnant woman began to rub her belly. The baby was inside her stomach, she said, kicking her for not feeding him this morning. “That’s what he do,” she said, talking to the cat-eyed boy beside her. “He got his daddy in ’im.”

  I thought of how very innocent Willie was: his mother tucking him in her blouse on the drive, until his lips were fixed on her nipple. And his father beside her—the three of them rising in midair, crashing through the windshield, into the trees. And the coroner telling Mama that the mother’s hands were permanently cradled because at the end of her life she had taken a woman’s instincts into the ground with her.

  The pregnant woman pulled her shirt out of her pants and sighed. As it slowly began to come up, I saw the long dark line on her belly, the stretch marks spreading on the brink of her flesh like cobwebs. What sound was made when doctors cut a woman from the stomach? Was it the sound of a knife going into a garden watermelon, sharp?

  The words came out so very quickly. “Can I touch your stomach?” I asked.

  The activities of the visitors seemed to come to a pause. None of them looked directly at me, except for Mama. Her eyes were laced with embarrassment. Not Daddy’s. He said nothing.

  “Go ’head,” said the pregnant woman. “I don’t mind.”

  She took my hands and pressed them on the side of her belly. The baby was warm inside of her. Her hands were cold, but the fetus had heated up her ovaries and sent a flame throughout her swollen body. “Feel ’im kicking?” she asked.

  “A little,” I said, unsure of whether it was the baby or her hunger that I felt.

  She changed the positioning of my hands. “What about now?”

  I smiled. “I can’t feel him at all now.”

  “He gone back to sleep,” she said. “He mad.”

  She pulled her shirt back down and answered a question set to her by another pregnant woman on the back row. “Nine months,” she told her. “Big, huh?”

  They began to converse back and forth. She was at a prison in her ninth month, a baby she had carried for almost an entire year. Why spend it here? I thought. Especially when those months would never count. And she’d have to use her fingers to tell people how old he was.

  “I’m just starting out,” said the other pregnant woman. “This thing got me all swole up!”

  The metal door opened. A guard came out and stood next to it, his arms beside him. The two pregnant women stopped talking. The nine-month one held the cat-eyed boy’s hand beside her. It was their turn to go. She reached behind her for the backrest and pushed herself up from the chair. She walked toward the door, her crushed face poignant.

  She coughed.

  And I looked on the floor for her baby to fall out.

  * * *

  I had fallen asleep on Daddy’s shoulder when the buzz of the metal door woke me. It was a guard leading Mama to the other side. “Can I go, Daddy?”

  “No,” he said, “wait with me.”

  The nerves in his nub circulated from his heart to his chest, his shoulders, up to his neck. He had worn a pin-striped oxford. The smell of Mama’s perfume was saturated inside the fabric. Her life depended on cutting the long arms out of it and sewing the sleeve just below his nub so no one could see how far the blade had cut him. Although it did not matter to him, he loved her for it. He loved the way she folded her arms when something puzzled her, pressed the babies’ bottoms with her hands to see if they were wet. Deep down inside, he loved her because he could not completely change her.

  The noises in the prison were worse than thunder passing through a dark cloud. The ticking of something hard on the metal bars, men yelling out to the cart driver for a trade, the wheels of the cart slowly halting at each cell to pass out the trays of food.

  A woman carrying a toddler on her hip came and sat next to me. She flopped him down on her lap and rubbed the back of her neck, looking through her purse for something familiar to give her attention to. The toddler started to cry. His hollering vibrated through the walls. The push cart stopped for a second. Then the toddler, looking around, pushed his mother in the chest with his fat fingers. “All right, now!” she said, flipping him over on her lap to remove the heavy diaper from his bottom. She held his feet closely together. Daddy turned his head.

  “He too big for diapers,” said the woman, talking to me with her mind on her work. “But I work late. Ain’t got time to pottytrain. He gone learn like his pappy learned.” She smiled. “Pull it out and go!”

  A few visitors laughed. But Daddy seemed upset with her. She sensed his eyes on her. She was a big woman like Mama. Her face was not flat but round. The weight of her body made her tired. Her words were shifted, each of them growing harder to pronounce as it emerged from her chest, asthmatic-like. She didn’t care that Daddy watched her. People had probably been staring at her all of her life. “What you want?” she asked Daddy.

  At the same time, she pulled the toddler back to her bosom.

  Daddy said nothing. A woman hadn’t talked to him that way since my grandmother died. He pretended not to hear her and watched as a muscular-bodied man put his face to the rectangular window. His neck, the dimensions of his head were wide.

  A guard walked up behind him, calling out his number. He turned around, and the shackles on his feet and hands added to the thunder of noises. There was a commotion. One, two guards running toward the prisoner, rushing him. “’Ey!” said the number. “’Ey, you motherfuckers! Get off me! ’Ey!”

  Even the toddler stopped crying. More guards came to keep him quiet. A man in prescription glasses lifted a hypodermic needle through the small window. The prisoner called out, “’Ey!” Last I heard were the shackles rattling on the floor carrying deadweight.

  The woman beside me picked up her purse. “There go my visit,” she said. The toddler was on her hip again. She walked up to the rectangular window and shook her head. “When we get back home,” she said, looking at the toddler, “we gonna find you a new pappy!”

  She walked away. And there, where her feet had once rested on the cold floor, was a picture of Jesus, lying on His side, His penis covered by a loincloth. Jesus was a man, indeed.

  The nine-month woman came back, holding the cat-eyed boy’s hand. She looked on the floor for the picture.

  “Here it is,” I said, passing it to her.

  She looked at it and shook her head. “That’s how He lay when the hole in His side be hurtin’ ’im,” she said, leaving the prison.

  Mama had returned from her visit with Uncle Sugar. She was beginning to change her mind. Her hands were around her throat gently. The other visitors were listening. A couple of them laughed.

  Daddy kneeled beside her. “We done come all this way,” he whispered.

  He finally calmed her down and convinced her to let me go. She turned and looked at me. “Come here,” she said, wrapping her hands around my strong face. Then she turned away from me. “Now, go.”

  And I went, holding on to Daddy’s good arm. The buzzer sounded as the door locked behind us. We were led to a row of cubicles. The windows were much smaller now, tubular and thin. And underneath their shapes was a bracket of holes where the visitors put their mouths up close to talk. An old woman was in the first cubicle, her throat stretched up toward the holes, telling a number that she wante
d him to cut his beard. The judge would think that he was some kind of animal with uncut hair on his face. Another woman, middle-aged, lowered her head, the eyes of her number on the other side watery. A man, his hands flat on the counter, praying for Jesus to let his son remain untouched. Another one, in a wheelchair, a plastic tube going through his nose, as if he had swallowed ammonia. His hands were flattened clear up to the knuckles, his spine crushed at the neck, the thin unmoving legs. Finally, I recognized the eyes that had been hanging over Mama’s bedpost in an oval locket.

  Daddy sat down, my hands on his shoulders. Uncle Sugar didn’t have the eyes of a rapist. My grandmother had told me many times that the devil had a shadow to his eyes. His were different from the others. They were solid.

  For a short while, he and Daddy were quiet, until Uncle Sugar spoke through the triangular holes. “How’s it been?”

  “All right,” said Daddy. “I can’t complain.”

  They were both nervous. The veins in Uncle Sugar’s eyes were scarlet red, as if he had been up all night deciding what he was going to say, how he was going to approach the meaning of the letters.

  “I’m still a man,” said Uncle Sugar.

  Daddy lowered his voice. “I know.”

  “Them niggers on Factory ain’t crossin’ you, is they?” asked Uncle Sugar.

  “Naw, baby,” said Daddy. “Ain’t no nigger gone punk me.”

  “Not even Jesus?” asked Uncle Sugar. “You ain’t believing them lies, is you?”

  “What lies?”

  “’Bout him killing a man,” said Uncle Sugar. “If you is, you better let go of it. ’Cause Jesus ain’t nothing but a feather. They found that nigger in lockdown with a belt around his neck.”

  Daddy’s face was flushed. He had been giving Mama’s hardearned money to a coward. What was he going to do now? The burden of his life had fallen into his lap. He had become the hog that he’d slaughtered.

  “Hell naw!” he yelled. “Not even Jesus Sanders.”

  Uncle Sugar wrestled with some distant thought. He spoke with more depth. “Your house is your nest egg. That’s where you lay your head at night,” he said. “Don’t ever let a motherfucker steal your nest egg!”

  They had been apart for some time. But they knew each other. Daddy missing an arm, him missing the set of balls that God had given him. But the similarity of blood was deep inside of them, carrying the lead of a victimized bird in their flesh.

  “Don’t worry none,” said Daddy.

  Uncle Sugar moved away from the window. He looked around at the guard behind him, the birthmark that we both shared tattooed between the eyes, a circus elephant. He wore a bright red jumpsuit with the letters MDOC—Mississippi Department of Corrections—stamped on him with a row of numbers beneath it. The men in the cells began to holler, asking the cart driver, other men, for a trade: cigarettes, jungle juice, blow jobs. Their voices rose above the bars of the penitentiary. The metal door opened behind Uncle Sugar and a transvestite walked in. He sat beside him. “Hey lady,” said Uncle Sugar.

  “Shut up, Sugar,” said the transvestite. “You just fuckin’ with me.”

  Uncle Sugar smiled and looked at Daddy for a response.

  The guard walked up behind them. Uncle Sugar’s eyes were glossy under the fluorescent lightbulbs. The hard walls were bridling him. He wanted to say something. He was in a tough place, a cold place where the lights went out at the same time every night and the sun was hidden behind the hard, yard-egg-colored walls.

  His eyes were on me now.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “I taught you how to open your mouth.”

  “Good,” I said, “now I know how to scream.”

  His head came crashing down on the counter. Neither Daddy nor I could see him. We waited for him to rise again. The transvestite began to poke at him, laughing. Daddy’s shoulders grew tense.

  Uncle Sugar began to sigh. When his head came back up to the window, a tear fell from his eyes. “I didn’t do it,” he said. “Laurel Pillar had a diamond in her eyes that night. And I didn’t put it there.”

  He stopped for a moment to look at my face. He thought that I was still the one reading the letters.

  Daddy’s breath fogged up the window.

  “Help me get outta here!” said Uncle Sugar.

  The transvestite laughed at him. “Yeah, lady,” he said. “None of us did it.”

  The circus elephant changed colors. It was no longer scarlet red but violet, turning up between his eyes in a thick mound of muscle, anger. He threw the chair and began to pound the face of the transvestite. The guard pulled out a baton and began beating them. Other guards came and carried them away, in the exact manner they had carried the other number. And the last we saw of Uncle Sugar was his legs giving out from under him, the shackles on his feet rattling on the hard floors like an innocent man in purgatory.

  The wind blew through my hair. I sat in the backseat of the car confused, listening to the wind of the open road. Before long, we were dropping Daddy off at the house and Mama was taking me back to Commitment Road. Once we arrived, she sat in the front yard of Aunt Pip’s house with the motor running. And when she drove off past the field, I remembered that I had forgotten to remind Daddy to get the cigarettes.

  chapter

  ten

  Fat had stopped by the house to tell Aunt Pip that the Lord had given her a sign: forty strikes a day on the oak tree would relieve her of the evil done to Justice Bates. This way she could sleep at night. And the devil would leave her alone. She pounded away at the large oak tree in her front yard, counting aloud the number of times she made contact with it.

  Aunt Pip was in the bathroom peeing. The house smelled of urine, as she was becoming less willing to travel through the house to use the toilet. She was getting better, but the therapy had made her tired, slow. A metal bedpan, long and horizontal, lay at the side of her bed. It was here where I watched her in the darkness at night, kneeling down with her dress pulled up to her pelvic bone, reaching for the safe space underneath her vagina, waiting for the pee to come down.

  “Maddy,” she hollered.

  I ran to the bathroom. She put my hand on her stomach. “You feel it?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t feel a thing.”

  She pushed my hand away and reached for it again, going deeper to the left, toward the lung. “It’s sharp,” she said, “like a butcher knife or something other.”

  I shook my head.

  “Sometimes,” she said softly, “it feel like Adam and Eve are plucking away at my insides with a long-handled spoon.”

  She was touching the orange penis of the magnolia as it found its way through the cycle of air and penetrated her in her sleep. This was not unusual. She had begun to find other things to locate, other matters of buried illnesses that she felt remained hidden, locked up in a burrow of disease. “There it is again!” she yelled.

  I was angry with her. Why couldn’t she have been happy that her hair was growing back? What happened to the woman I remembered, the fight in her? To sit and watch her that way, speaking until her throat grew hoarse, rubbing the fabric of the curtains until the edges began to fray. One good day. One bad day. I never knew which came first, only when the sun came up.

  “It’s the carrots from the soup,” I told her.

  This relaxed her. She let out a full breath and patted her chest. “Yeah,” she said, “the soup.”

  I followed her into the main room. She picked up the metal bedpan and smelled it. Every time she peed, it was me who emptied it. But it was never clean enough. The scent of ammonia found its way into her nostrils. “Take it out into the yard and let it air out,” she said.

  The bedpan was cold. I looked at my reflection. My face was loose, the nose in a remote corner, the eyes broken up like someone had cut them out and pasted them to a flat surface, the mouth almost unnoticeable, shapeless.

  I walked around the side of the house. A bucket of rainwater lay still
. And before anything happened, Aunt Pip spoke to me from the curtains. “Not there,” she said, “in the forest.”

  A small stain the size of an erasure drifted through her gown. Had it not been so noticeable, so important, I would have taken it for granted. A small thing to a curious eye.

  My eyes hungered for anything that the world neglected. Like the double-jointed arms of the Mr. Goodbar bully. I had, many times, thought of how I could sneak up behind him and pop his arm from the elbow, pausing the ticking clock in his chest.

  Fat had long made her fortieth strike. She was walking on the other side of the trees. Her feet made the routine of fetching a pot of hot water from the stove, stepping from the porch, and following her already beaten path to the tub that sat on the side of her house. After pouring the first pot, she walked back up the steps of her front porch and came out with a second that had lain on the eye of the stove, waiting for her to reach for it. She added this one to the first. Upon which I heard the sound of the pipes behind her house, her hand twisting the star-shaped handle and pulling the rubber hosepipe from under the fragile house.

  She was naked by this time. Through the trees, she looked like a giant bear, her steps forcing the ground before her to succumb to her weight. There she was. Her large head passing between the pine, her face going upward and away from the field where Daddy and the white men left hours before to wait for a heavy rain to lift the stalks of corn from the earth.

  “Ouch!” yelled Fat.

  Then the pipes under the house started whistling again. Her mountainous body leaned toward the temperature of the tub. She was not pleased and began to press her thumb on the mouth of the sprouting hosepipe. Where had I imagined that sound?

  I stood in the middle of the forest, looking back at where I had first brushed a branch from my path. And it came to me, a light of laughter. It was the children I imagined. The boy and girl over the mantel flinching from the mouth of the hosepipe. Many times I had overlooked them, passed their faces and judged them as ordinary misplacements.