Eden

by Olympia Vernon

  Fat settled in the tub. She wrung a pink towel out in her hands, letting it slide over the thick piece of meat between her legs. She pulled the towel toward her and smelled it before dipping it back into the water, rubbing behind her ears. Her back was in loaves from behind. Three layers of meat that hung over the porcelain like the fresh slaying of cattle.

  “New Orleans,” she said, laughing.

  My foot got caught in a briar patch. It was then that I realized I’d left the bedpan far behind, seeing the metal in some uncomfortable position of the woods, the paleness of the sky beaming around it. I slowly pinched the spikes of briars at my ankles. I untangled them and discovered a thin line of clotted blood going up my leg, resembling the perforated edge of a sharp instrument.

  Fat was still laughing alone.

  It seemed she wanted to be disturbed, almost waited for someone to walk up behind her and put his hand under the body of warm water and touch her life. That’s where it was indeed. Everything. The blood of her husband. The intimate hairs plucked from her vagina by the age of water, the alphabets. Perhaps even the whistle of the star-shaped handle flooding the rubber hosepipe to intimidate her by force.

  I left the bedpan in the woods and returned to Aunt Pip. She was sitting up with a postage stamp in her hands—the American flag. I noticed an opened letter beside her; it was from the doctors in Jackson, the machinists.

  “Go on up to Fat’s,” she said, her head turned, frozen like the mouth of the ceramic doll. “She get lonely this time o’ day.”

  * * *

  The sky was bare. Only a blue that came and went upon the stretch of the land. As I walked toward the house, I smelled the soap from Fat’s inner thigh. It was a scent that rose into the air like a woman beater after the curtains went down.

  She was there in the porcelain tub yet pushing the pink towel between her legs. The bathwater moved over the curves of her skin. Her breasts sagged to her waist, full breasts that could have covered the earth. She looked up at me, startled.

  “Child,” she said, “you walking up in this yard like you read the Bible on your back.”

  “Huh?” I turned away from her breasts.

  “You know what they say,” she said. “If you read the Bible on your back, you got nerve.”

  The caterpillars were falling on the ground. They had eaten holes in the hanging tree leaves. Tiny holes that were brown around the edges.

  “If you say so,” I said.

  “What wind blew you this way?” She sat up with her back against the tub and draped the pink towel over its border, her nipples hardened. I remembered the pictures in the National Geographic, how the babies’ lips curved outward with those same hardened nipples in their mouths.

  “Aunt Pip sent me to keep you company.”

  “I’ll be,” she said, smiling. Her face was in the clouds, her nipples swelling away from the flesh of her breasts. “I love her for it.”

  The green caterpillars glided across the aluminum like the lizard that found its way on Aunt Pip’s window. Green and unaware of its greenness.

  She wiped her face. “That Collins boy ain’t seen you nekked yet, is he?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” she said, lifting her arms from the water and holding them out to me. “Come here.”

  I walked over to her, my white dress about me.

  “Where this come from?” she asked.

  “Mama made it for me.”

  She paused and pulled the dress up to my waist. “Lawd, Jesus,” she said, laughing. “This child got on white underclothes.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” I asked.

  “It’s a sin to be that close to yourself,” she said. “You ’posed to wear black drawers to keep them eyes off o’ you. You letting the whole world in your business.”

  Her words were strong as she pushed me away from her and further into the green. I couldn’t imagine this woman saving letters from a dead man.

  “Get me some more hot water from the house,” she said.

  The elastic in my panties was wet from her fingertips. I walked backward, watching her wipe the thick bush between her legs; it looked like a bird’s nest when she lifted her bottom out of the water.

  She trusted me enough to go inside. But I was afraid to touch anything, because it would come up later. If something was missing or fucked with, she would blame me. I knew because I had seen the distrust between us. I heard the rumors about black women who stabbed their sisters because they didn’t trust them with their men. About high-class Mississippi niggers who went to prison for killing a brother, a daddy, an uncle, a best friend for hanging around their house too long. My grandmother used to read the obituaries of the dead. “It’s the heat, baby,” she’d say. “It’s Mississippi.”

  The house felt cold. I didn’t know if it was because of the shade trees hanging over the house or that she lived alone. Cold like Miss Hattie Mae’s house after her husband had died. Two widows. Two dead husbands. There was a drawing of Jesus on the refrigerator. She had used a red Crayola to lay His body flat on the paper. Her hands were heavy, the red sunken into the paper where the thorns stuck out of His head. She had pinned Him down with a magnet that read: “A lonely bitch is the only fool I know.”

  The pot was boiling over on the stove, the handle hot. I opened the drawers and the cupboards, searching for something to lift it with. She had boxes and boxes of powdered milk. Other than that, the kitchen was empty. Nothing of the good in her life. Just that one picture of Jesus pinned to the refrigerator and trails of powdered milk pressed across the floor and the smell of juniper floating through the house.

  “The rag’s over the oven,” she yelled.

  When I made it back to the tub, she lifted her fingers again, saying: “Pour it on in here, girl. Don’t be scared.”

  “I don’t wanna burn you,” I said.

  “It’s all right,” she said, staring through my white dress with a look of curiosity. “You done had your period yet?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “How old?” She signaled for me to stop pouring. I put the pot down on the grass and stepped back.

  “I don’t know.” I grew angry with her. But it was rude to walk off from a Negro in Mississippi. She would have slapped the shit out of me for leaving her there in the middle of a question.

  “Well”—she laughed, her wisdom teeth missing—“you best stay away from that Collins boy. Men know the smell o’ blood.”

  Black women in Pyke County believed that once a girl’s period came on, she was getting too grown for her body. And that men could tell her pores were open, like pregnant women who weren’t allowed in the cornfield because the snakes could smell their breast milk, strangle them.

  Fat sat up in the tub. “You ever seen a man before?”

  “My daddy.”

  She shook her head. “No, child. A man besides your daddy. A naked man.”

  “In the Bible.”

  “Did he move when you touched him?” she asked, her eyes larger this time.

  “No.”

  “Well,” she said, “that’s not the kind o’ man I’m talking about.” She sank back down into the tub, her chin on the edge of the water. “I met one man in my life who came this close to Jesus.” She held her thumb and index finger an inch apart.

  Justice Bates. A hanged man. A dead man. She loved him still, her eyes all lit up, her cheeks rising into a mountain.

  The breath from Fat’s stomach rippled the water. “I know they call me crazy,” she said. “But I don’t care. Don’t nobody know but Jesus.”

  She crossed her legs and stretched them across the side of the tub to support herself. There were spiders on her thighs—cobwebs and spiders that went up from the fur between her legs, up to her navel in a winding narration. The cobwebs were lighter than her skin, leaving the hole in her navel the shape of an unpicked Afro.

  “How come you stay locked up at Pip’s all the time?” She rose from the water and looked up at the caterp
illars, turning the tub over on the ground. The inside was dark, sooty.

  “I want to ask you something,” I said.

  She stood over the tub, walking the bottom of the porcelain with her fingertips. “All right,” she said.

  “What’d you do with him?”

  Her thoughts lifted her face to the early beginnings of the afternoon. “I burned him,” she said, “so I know what it feel like to be naked with him again.”

  Before I knew it, she was turning the corner of the house, beckoning me to follow, her face on a fixed gaze of nostalgia.

  Once inside, she sprinkled baby powder on her breasts. It came out in a large cloud. She left the room for a second and returned with a pair of panties in her hands, lowering them before pulling them up, over her thighs. “I know what you did at the church,” she said. “You gotta be the craziest cow I know to do some shit like that.”

  She walked back down the hall, shortly thereafter shuffling through the drawers. The tiny green lamp next to the velvet couch was shifting forward, unbalanced. Her powdered footprints made tracks across the floor; the pattern of her perfectly round toes like an enlarged grain of sugar.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “Where’s you running off to?” Her voice grew heavy. She came from the room dressed in a thin-laced gown, holding up a joint.

  “Aunt Pip’s probably waiting on me,” I said, watching her light the joint as she sat on the velvet couch.

  She pulled me close to her, saying: “Close your eyes.”

  “What for?”

  “Just close ’em!”

  I did. The heat from her body made me nervous as she blew smoke into my nostrils. I thought I’d never stop coughing. When I opened my eyes again, she was rolling across the wooden floor with her hands on her belly.

  “I’m leaving,” I said.

  “Fat say try,” she said. “Go on. Try!”

  The faucet dripped into a loud, solid thump in the hollow sink. It grew louder as I looked at her on the floor like that, laughing at me and running her fingers over the hairs in her head. She had been burned beneath her arms.

  “What you laughing at?” I asked, unable to stand up.

  I hated her for not tightening the faucet. My head was about to float away from my body. Nothing but the sound of that water pounding deeper into my scalp, the hellish laughter that came from Fat, Moses above me—holding the Ten Commandments.

  “It won’t hurt you,” said Fat, sitting on the velvet couch now with her shoulders calming down from the laughter.

  I reached for her hair, but the closer I got, the more her head leaned forward. She pulled a small picture from the cushions, stared at it, and put it back.

  I lay down on the velvet, my head spinning. “You ever mind what they say?” I asked.

  “Nope,” she said.

  Immediately, she jumped off the couch, her large, snail-shaped body making its way to the mailbox. She grabbed the envelope and ran back toward the house with the letter in her hands. Her pace picked up, the closer she got to the front porch. I wanted to take her breasts in my hands and laugh about the largeness of them.

  “I knew he’d write,” she said. “It’s that time of the week.”

  She pulled hard on the joint until the tip of it turned a bright orange. Then she opened the envelope, shriveling the white paper on the floor.

  “Read it,” I said.

  The handwriting was childlike, familiar. “I’m too excited,” she said, as if it was the first she’d ever gotten. “You read it.”

  “I can’t.”

  Everything was blurry: the images strewn together, the faucet thundering into an outburst every second, her hips in that gown, my wanting to put her breasts in my hands to let one of those doctors in Jackson, Mississippi, check them for cancer.

  “I’ll read it myself, then!” she yelled.

  I regretted not hearing the words or listening to her speak them. All I remember is the smell of her fur when she walked back and forth on the floorboards. The faucet, the heat rising up from the lightbulb, the machines, Mama ironing out the wrinkles in Daddy’s clothes, Billie Holiday’s shoulders, the circumference of a circle, Auschwitz, Willie Patterson, death, my death, Landy Collins, the faucet, the sound of a woman’s voice, Hitler, so many other things that I could not remember to save my life.

  The sun was going down over the field.

  “I’m gonna marry Landy Collins one day,” I said.

  Fat turned to me, her head sideways. “You can’t marry him.”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause,” she said, “that nigger got a ol’ lady in New Orleans.”

  “That’s the biggest lie I ever heard.”

  “That’s what I hear tell,” she said, blowing the smoke from her lungs. “He like ’em young.”

  I laughed.

  “I hear she pregnant for him too!” said Fat.

  I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. The velvet was getting cold, my body was going numb. And Fat’s constant reading of the letter was putting me to sleep, her hand occasionally digging back into the couch to pull something out, hide it again.

  chapter

  eleven

  The sound of the chain saw ricocheted off the bark of the trees. Landy Collins had been in the forest all afternoon, cutting down a row of pine trees for the next death. Occasionally, he would stop working, as if listening to Fat count aloud the number of times she’d struck the large oak.

  I was sitting on the front porch when Aunt Pip came out to join me. She sat on the steps of the house with her head up, stretching her arms out in front of her, then on her stomach. “I got the world in there,” she said.

  She wore her blond wig and a fake diamond from her jewelry box. An ant began to crawl up the side of her foot; she killed it. She then opened her gown and slid her fingers down over the lizard-shaped scar, the heat climbing around it. Her eyes were closed now, the occasional wind whistling around the corners of the house. The diamond had begun to make a lump through her gown; she kept her hand there over the lizard’s backbone.

  She laughed out loud, her voice like a mountain. “You think Eve told Adam what to do?” She did not wait for an answer; her laughter stopping now, controlled. “I had a dream I swallowed the bastard.”

  “Adam?”

  Her face was calm.

  “Yeah,” she said, “I ate my Father.”

  She turned around and reached for my hands, as she had the morning she vomited the things from her stomach into the toilet. “I know,” she said. “It ain’t the soup carrots. It’s my Father. He in there somewhere fooling around with me.”

  “Don’t keep things from me,” I said, moving to the edge of the porch.

  She listened as the chain saw got going again. “Hear that?” she asked, making fists of her hands. “That’s what it be like all the time. Cutting at you from the bone. Chipping away at you. Chipping away at you.”

  “Everyone keeps things,” I said. “Nobody gives anything away.”

  Her voice fell into a whisper: “Except green things.” Her hand was away from her breast. “Don’t take nothing green from nobody. Green things die.”

  She was not demented. For when I watched her bathe herself, her chin was still above the water. I heard that a demented woman practiced drowning. She forced her head under the water and waited for her nostrils to fill up, and when she came up coughing, she knew what it was to be yet alive.

  “My titty still sick, Maddy,” said Aunt Pip.

  I turned around to face her. There was no sadness about her. “What are you telling me?”

  “I’m telling you that I ate my Father,” she said. “I opened my mouth and let the sins of the world in my body and even He couldn’t fix it. And now I’m paying for it.”

  The little bit of hair that had grown back would be lost again. She would soon find herself facing the machine once more, the compressor coming down on her breast, the doctors using their tools to radiate it.

  “
I’m going to the piano room,” she said.

  She got up to go back inside the house. She was naked underneath her gown. The split between her thighs thickened as it went inside her body like a lump of earth. Like mine before the hair grew on it.

  I could hear Fat sweeping the dust from her front porch. Her screen door slammed against the boards of the house each time she went inside to get something. I pictured her resting on the wooden pillars of her house, as if she knew the maximum amount of strain to put on them.

  Landy Collins was out there in the woods, debating the age of the trees, how far the blade would go. I called out to him.

  “Landy,” I said. The sound of my voice echoed through the forest. I discovered a cricket propped up on its hind legs. I picked it up between my fingers and watched the torso against the shade of my brown penny loafers. The cricket fought to get away from me.

  “Maddy?” asked Landy, calling out from his work.

  I put the restless cricket back on the ground and stood there, watching it blend back into the leaves of the forest. “Here I am.”

  He was deep in the woods with his hands on his hips, as he stood spread-eagled looking up into the hovering sky. As I approached him, I noticed his shoulders stretching out the blood in his arms.

  “I would’ve stopped by,” he said, “but it was nice and early when I drove up, and I didn’t wanna disturb you and Miss Pip.”

  “No matter.”

  He smiled with the shine of goat’s milk in his teeth. His head moved forward, out into the air with his skin still dry from the blinding heat. He began to lean down over a tree that had already been cut down. The rings were scarlet red, fresh. He traced the years of the tree with his thick fingers and looked up toward the sky, one eye closed.

  “What sent you this way?” he said, propping his foot up on the bark of the tree. His shirt was thrown on the earth; the hair on his chest formed a tornado, the tail of it hidden inside his navel, picking up below his abdomen.