Eden

by Olympia Vernon

  The sky was growing dark. I was sitting at the kitchen table when Daddy came home with a wad of money in his hands. The look in his eyes was a tip. The money wasn’t good. It had tainted him.

  “Where your mama?” he asked.

  “She went to church,” I said. “They’re trying to find Diamond a donor.”

  “Why?” he asked, puzzled. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He needs a kidney.”

  He laughed so high and so above himself that he almost fell on the floor. “That’s what he gets,” he said, holding his stomach. “He shoulda paid me my money.”

  “A man can’t help what he needs,” I said.

  He paused.

  “Where’d you get that money?” I asked.

  He walked over to the window and looked out into the empty backyard. He stuffed the money in his pocket. Suddenly, he asked: “What size foot your mama got?”

  “Nine.”

  “Okay,” he said, taking a pick from his back pocket and picking his Afro. “I gotta run. Hattie Mae car quit on her up the road a piece.”

  He paced the floor a moment. He had been in the same space Mama had been, picking up the glass-trapped lizard. In his laughter, he shook the green, watching the tiny bones in the neck, the winding tail, triangular. “Look how small the neck is,” he said. “If I squeezed my fingers just hard enough, I could paralyze it.”

  He then went into the backyard to search for the red gas can. I followed.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

  He had this big, wide smile on his face, as if he had gotten over on Mr. Diamond and the rest of the white men.

  “Tell me what’s the matter with you,” I said.

  He looked up at me. “Ain’t got time right now, Maddy,” he said, laughing from his gut, setting his eyes on where the hog pen used to be. “Tell Pip I didn’t mean nothing that day. Just checking on her.”

  “Where’d the money come from?” I asked.

  He patted me on the head, the red gas can at his feet. “Nothing,” he said. “Don’t go worrying yourself over me none. Your mama need something decent on her feet.”

  He grabbed the red gas can. “I gotta go,” he said. “Hattie Mae be waiting.”

  “You can’t spend what you don’t have,” I said.

  “Ah,” he said, closing his eyes to the air, “but I do. I got hope now, and ain’t no man in the world gone take it from me.”

  He stepped down off the back porch.

  “Not this way,” I said.

  He kept walking, disappearing around the corner of the house.

  Midnight had come. I lay down in the hallway, listening to Mama read from the Book. She’d pause and start up again, waiting for Daddy to walk through the door. She stopped reading and sighed heavily. The faucet leaked. She began counting the number of times the water hit the basin. One. A pause. Two. A short pause. And thereon until she became familiar with the pattern. This noise kept her company until she forced herself to start over from the beginning. One … Two …

  The numbers embedded themselves in my memory. She was teaching me subconsciously, the way she’d taught Daddy. The rhythm opened my mouth. I began to count with her, stressing each vowel sound of the numbers.

  A motor passed by on the open road. She stopped counting and opened the kitchen door. The rumbling moved farther away from the house. She didn’t move. She stood there holding her stomach.

  One … two … a long pause … What was she waiting on? Did she not remember the dark cavity of space between her legs that kept her in bed for a whole week? She said that she had gone to use the bathroom and her panties were stained in the middle part, a yellow cream leaking from her vagina. She said that her stomach was hurting; the bird’s nest had become infected. She sat up in bed with a bottle of vinegar, pushing it up through her stomach. When Daddy came home, he denied ever giving her a disease. He said that she had caught something from the misses, something had crawled inside her as a punishment for not wearing underwear. She took his word but left the house in the middle of the night, holding her ribs until she reached Jackson, Mississippi.

  Surely she had been there before, in the hospital with the machines, although she hated doctors. She had been there in a white room, metal stirrups holding her feet, as a man in a white coat was pulling the yellow cream out of her and placing it on a square piece of glass, looking at it under a microscope. She herself had been diagnosed that night. The morning after, she opened her purse to pull out a handkerchief and the pills of penicillin rattled under the force of her arm.

  This is what happened when she prayed out loud. She did not know that she was not only talking to Jesus, but she was talking to me too. I knew that Mr. Sandifer’s wife had, indeed, paid her for the work at her house. But that she’d spent the money: she paid Jesus up. And the yellow cream that had come from her vagina was the disease of a cowardly man, an inconsiderate man.

  The moon shone through my bedroom window. It formed a straight line across the tips of my toes. It seemed that people in Pyke County ignored the fact that they could touch what they loved. I looked at it, the moonlit bar across my feet. What if the moon had been a physical thing? What would I have done with the moon in my hands? These thoughts, among others, captured me. I was a child who wanted to eat what I could not feel; things without normalcy, like Daddy’s alcoholism, listless things like Aunt Pip’s breast cancer, the moon.

  A car pulled up in the yard, a calm machine of little noise. This time it was Jesus. Daddy said something in the darkness. And Jesus let him go. Before he entered the house, Mama rushed back to the couch and opened the Book.

  Daddy walked through the door.

  “Faye,” he said, “I got something for you.”

  Her head was still in the Book. She spoke softly. “What is it?”

  “Close your eyes,” he said.

  She seemed unsettled. “Jesus killed a man, Chevrolet,” she said. “What you tryin’ to do? Get yourself locked up in Missi’ppi State?”

  He never told her what he’d learned at the penitentiary: Jesus had killed no one. But this was her fear. Somewhere deep down, she thought that Jesus would cut Daddy’s throat at the vein and she’d find him hanging from a tree in the front yard: fear that she would become a widow like Fat or Miss Hattie Mae or that the world would somehow blame her, as the world had blamed Eve.

  “Come on, baby,” said Daddy. “Close your eyes.”

  As she did this, he placed a cardboard box on her lap. I lay on my stomach, watching him verify that her eyes were closed. “Okay,” she said.

  He pulled out a box cutter from his back pocket and gave it to her. “Here,” he said.

  She pushed the lever up on the side of the knife and cut the box open. It was a pair of new shoes. “Lawd, Jesus,” she said, measuring them against her feet. “I can’t wear some’n so fancy, Chevrolet. Got enough bunions already.”

  “How come?”

  Mama shook nervously. “’Cause,” she said.

  “What’s wrong witchu?” said Daddy. “You wanna wear hand-me-downs for the rest o’ your life?”

  “Quit that, now,” she said. “Maddy hear you.”

  “She know!” he yelled. “The whole town know. Them boys on Factory think I ain’t got no pride for myself.”

  He was drunk. “My wife on the Pyke County hill yes-maamin’ and no-maamin’ for the rich. That’s why I can’t get paid on time. The white folks think I’m free-willing!”

  She looked down at the shoes. “I ain’t got time for this, Chevrolet,” she said. “I been out all day prayin’ for a kidney.”

  Daddy took a seat beside her. “How you ’spect to do that?” he asked. “Ain’t no doctor this side o’ Mississippi gone put a nigger’s piece inside o’ Diamond.” He laughed. “Which one o’ you’s puttin’ out?”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” said Mama. “We used numbers. You never know with numbers.”

  “Crazy,” said Daddy, “every one of you. Taggin’ yours
elves like cattle.”

  Mama sat quietly for a moment, then whispered: “Where the money come from?”

  He grew angry again. “You need some’n decent to walk around in,” he said, pointing to her feet. “You’s flat-footed. All your shoes got lead in ’em.”

  “Chevrolet,” she whispered, “the money.”

  He stood over her and picked up the shoes: “Jesus.”

  Mama said nothing. He had said this name so many times that she couldn’t tell the difference anymore. She picked up the Book and began reading again. Her silence hurt him. His face was disturbed with the pain he had caused her, a pain that not even liquor could have numbed. He tried to touch her. His touch shook her body, the impact going from her arms to her hips like a woman who bathed outside in the nude.

  “Faye,” he said as he dropped the shoes beside her and put his hand over her face.

  She ignored him as she spoke out loud from the Book. He walked to the far end of the kitchen table and stared at her. Her voice echoed throughout the house. His drunkenness no longer disturbed her. After he realized this, he walked over to the faucet and silenced it.

  chapter

  sixteen

  Mama’s flesh was like stone. She was naked on the covers of her bed, her feet turned inward, her toes stiff and useless. The body that she had been so ashamed of was out in the open, spread across a row of doves flying up through the covers in rows of threes. Her legs were open; the scars on them from work took the shapes of giraffes, elephants, and four-leaf clovers that patterned themselves underneath her thin hairs. Her fat was solid now, not loose. Hard. The side of her thigh, her hip, was as if no human being had ever touched it. It was loveless, as thick as the dust of Mississippi. The nest of fur between her legs was tangled and sat straight up from her pelvis, dark. And when her breasts came down beside her, the nipples stood erect with a hint of pink the color of Pepto-Bismol. What mattered most to her, the looseness of her arms, was even, at this point, as straight as a piece of wood with no curves at all. She lay in bed with her eyes unbatted, her hands at her side, the palms open and without movement.

  I went to touch her face. “Mama,” I said, “what’s wrong with you?”

  She didn’t say a word, just stared into a dark place. A tiny bird landed in the window. Even in its size, it carried the shape of Mama’s large body. The small feet that perched it into place, its ankles going up to its full belly where it seemed to have looked pregnant, the fragile neck.

  A sheet of paper was pinned beneath her shoulder. I reached for it. “No,” she said. The hand that she had once used to love me was tightly wrapped around my wrist, its grip hurting the bone.

  “What is it?”

  She let go of me and almost instantly went back to her position, lifting her chin only a little higher to land evenly on the pillow. “They took her milk,” she said.

  These words rested on her tongue so heavily that her mouth remained open, the odor of her life coming up through the cracks of her teeth. When the bird began to chirp, she rolled over on her side with her eyelids low.

  “Who?” I asked.

  She was so very distant. The sheet of paper lay beneath her, opened.

  “Men,” she said.

  When her throat stressed these syllables, it forced a hollow breath of wind to toughen her lungs. The base of her neck, the dip there, was pulsating. The nerves in her body, the elephants, giraffes, and four-leaf clovers had been pushed from her legs, up from her abdomen to her throat. They were sitting there underneath a widespread tree, nesting on their roots, their hind legs, waiting for her to let them go.

  “What are you saying, Mama?”

  My questions seemed like broken thoughts of ignorance. Every time she widened the air in her mouth, her stomach rose. There was no glass in her throat, only stone. And when the bird flew away, she showed no emotion at all. It was as if a small thing had come and passed to confuse her with its noise.

  “This is why, I tell you,” she said, quickly lifting herself to grab me by the arm. “Sit down with time.”

  Everything came from men, the instinct of being a woman, because they had supposedly created me, doused me with their knowledge so much that I’d been walking around with their words, their acts of boredom, in the passage of time.

  “I do.”

  She hurriedly let go of me, her crawling hair landing back against the pillows. Her hands remained curved as if she still had my bones in them.

  “No,” she said, “you too green.” She straightened out her fingers and rested them on her stomach where she’d begun touching the rows of fat. “I wish I could keep you in glass. Just look at you and save you from the world.”

  “The misses came for you this morning,” I said.

  She gave little emotion, although her eyes opened and appeared curious. “What you tell her?” she asked.

  “I told her you were sick,” I said.

  “Sick,” she said. “You don’t stop cleaning house ’cause you sick.”

  I wanted to tell her how the misses looked, her pink face relaxed to the nerves in her lips, how she seemed not to care because there was a Negro girl in the backseat holding her fingers upright. And the rustle of the tires in the driveway, slow and weak as its driver, shallow.

  Daddy came walking through the front door. We had studied his routine, a stop near the kitchen window, a look out at the vanished hog pen. “Maddy,” he said, “come go with me.”

  I smelled his work, the little hours he’d spent at the scrap yard with Mr. Sandifer, the oil in his clothes. He had not been drinking, only smoking a cigar between the hours. He walked down the hall until he finally came to a complete stop in the doorway. Mama’s nude body was a burden to his eyes. “What the hell’s wrong witchu, woman?” he asked.

  Mama did not change her position. “Go with your daddy,” she said to me. Her face was cold and stern.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  When Daddy saw that she was in her own world, not his, he walked over to the bed and shook her. “You done went crazy?” he said.

  She didn’t open her mouth, the contents of her voice kept still by the sharpness of his language. Daddy shook her again, and when she moved his hand away, he slapped her on the thigh. “Come on, Maddy,” he said. “Let’s go to Jolie’s.”

  The sun was coming out through the trees. Although Daddy showed no signs of affection to Mama, I could see her condition on his face, how it bothered him that she had lost herself like that: the silence broke.

  “Why are we going to Mr. Jolie’s?” I asked.

  He looked out past the houses. I had never been to this side of Mississippi. There were Negroes in their yards, the children playing with an antique wheelbarrow. A toddler sat in the dust, near the small limb of a tree. He was privately watching the others. A woman was needling a quilt on the front porch. Her head was into her work. Two boys were sitting inside the wheelbarrow now. As it began to roll, the others pushed the two of them over the legs of the toddler. The woman on the porch put the fabric aside and dusted him off. The toddler’s legs hung in the rearview mirror. He pulled away from the woman and began to rub them. Long after we passed, I could still hear the pain in his lungs.

  “We got a hog to kill,” said Daddy.

  His voice was straightened out by the anger of these words. It was man versus nature. It wasn’t enough that he’d killed our hog in Morgan City. He needed another killing to make sure the dirt was packed down on the enemy.

  “Mama says that if you get blood on you, the ghost’ll follow you home,” I said.

  “What ghost?”

  “From the dead,” I said.

  He laughed as violently as he had breathed when the bones of the lizard’s neck were in his hand. “You don’t have to worry ’bout that,” he said. “A hog ain’t got no ghost.”

  A herd of cows ran toward the edge of a barbwire fence, back again to the earth behind them. He tamed his laughter, saying, “Besides, we take the eyes out.”

  �
�Why?”

  “’Cause,” he said, pushing his knees up to the bottom edge of the steering wheel to guide the truck, “we ain’t got no use for the eyes. Just the meat.” The hair on his head was as strict and tough as wool.

  “But that’s where the blood is,” I said.

  He looked out at the roof of Mr. Jolie’s house, a place I had never been. “Don’t listen to your mama,” he said. “She lonely.”

  Daddy was a man who hid what he desired until it came out in a wind of Pyke County gossip. This was what made him a man, his ability to cover up his goings-on enough to try to protect Mama and me from it, except for the night he slept with Aunt Pip.

  Soon Mr. Jolie’s house was in plain view. Each board was perfectly placed. The rectangular pieces of wood slatted against the square windows, one on top of the other, climbing into a triangle at the mounted roof. The branches of a large oak tree rose above it, into the white sky behind it. When my eyes came down from the oak, I noticed Mr. Jolie’s daughter in the window. She was a quiet girl who rode bus number forty-three. She was as Willie had been, missing a part of her body that made her handicapped to the world and the people in it. One of her eyes was fixed by Jesus. A white spot covered it. Mama said that a blind eye was a blessed eye. It meant that half of the world could hurt you. And the other part, the part you could see out of, you could imagine, dream.

  “Now,” said Daddy, “it ain’t nothing to seein’ a dead hog. The dead can’t hurt you none. It’s the livin’ you got to worry about.”

  The men behind Mr. Jolie’s house hung their arms over the hog pen. They had grabbed their hats so much that they were permanently bent in the middle. Like Daddy, they killed.

  “Come on,” said Daddy as the killers beckoned for us to join them.

  After we’d made it to the hog pen, Daddy put his hand on my head and looked at the other men. “How’s it going?” he asked them.