“What happened to her?”
Her eyes opened wide. She thought she had seen something: “She dead.”
Fat seemed to grow tired of looking for life and began to plait her weak hair, one strand over another. “My daddy too.” She paused, her thick fingers rewinding the one braid that seemed to crumble.
“I hated telling doctors what was wrong with me,” she said. “Men like to tell you how much you ain’t perfect.”
I remembered my grandma’s words, how she told me about the man in the white coat, how he had made her uncomfortable and that she was too afraid to tell him his fingers were in the wrong place, cutting the wrong part of her. This is what killed her babies to come: embarrassment.
I stepped away from the tree. “Want me to help you?”
A faint smile came over Fat’s face. Her fingers fell from the last braid, and she relaxed them on her stomach. “You can’t wash out a killing,” she said. “When you get grown, get saved. ’Cause the end come quick. And it ain’t a matter of time and clocks no more. You be dead.”
She did not look uncomfortable. Her skin was spotless now, the eyebrows emerging into a shadow over her eyes. She walked toward Aunt Pip’s house. “Let’s go,” she said. “Pip be waiting.”
chapter
twenty-two
The windows and doors were open. I was in a place with no calendars. Everything I had endured was somehow seeping upon me, and the mothers and grandmothers and daughters of breast cancer were gathering themselves around me, circling the wooden floor that housed my naked body.
It was no dream now.
A long vertical mirror reflected the shame that I felt for having a full head of hair, eyebrows, two growing breasts, nipples— all the elements that Aunt Pip herself had been through. I looked upon her. The breeze from the windows flaring against her breastbone where half of her fat was missing. I removed the covers from her pelvis and lay beside her, feeling where the bones connected in the encyclopedia, those I had studied many times when I wondered where the alcohol of my father’s body was going. Her own bones had grown brittle and timid. I lay there upon the last nipple, sucking it as the curtains flared away from us. Her small hands enclosed me.
“My milk is gone,” she said.
I took her lips in my hands and kissed them. “Sleep,” I said before walking back into the bathroom and sharpening a razor that had been sitting there on the porcelain face bowl, flat. The shutters of the house tapped. Rain was forming in the clouds. A sudden howling of thunder echoed over Pyke County, past my house and other houses of bastards and backsliders like Diamond and past Fat’s place, where she was somewhere waiting for Aunt Pip to wither away completely.
I pressed the razor against my scalp. The hairs of my head were falling down over my shoulders. No man would rape me because of it. No cancer would enter my breasts and take my voice, nothing left for the doctors to rid me of. Or put the lumps from my body in glass jars like the flesh of Willie’s brain.
Piles and piles of hair landed on the floor.
Now I was plucking the hairs of my vagina. The white bulbs at the base of them were circular. With each strand of hair, a pain echoed through my abdomen. And the women and grandmothers and daughters of breast cancer danced around me: their eyebrows gone and their breasts gone and their scalps bare, dancing with tears coming down upon their bareness.
A mother, both breasts missing, stood behind her daughter. She grabbed hold of other daughters and grandmothers as they picked me up and swung me into the dance. They danced until the thunder came down and the rain. God had begun to cry. But it wasn’t because we had upset Him: they had blessed the earth.
They wanted to show me the center. I ran with them, through the front door, until I could no longer feel my footsteps. I saw all things: the tiniest cricket being born, an ant standing on all fours as the rain fell upon it, the unfolding of the magnolias, no longer dead but alive, Fat crying inside her hands, Aunt Pip lying on the mattress with her vertebrae stitching itself back into the muscle, erected.
Beautiful women they were. They smiled and took my hands in their hands. The rain came down on us as the blues darkened and turned into charcoal. They took me there to the center. As we approached, I found myself running alone into the forest, falling hard onto the ground. The journey weakened me. The experience weakened me.
There was a hole there. Landy Collins had measured it perfectly. I knew that when I had seen him talking to Mama, he was taking down Aunt Pip’s measurements: the weight of her body upon death, the length of her shoulders, as he had done Willie.
I was as Fat had been: I had stopped looking at him as help. But instead, as a man.
And he was not in the business of pleasure. He was a casket maker, a carpenter of death. I, among others, was his Eve, and he was the man who had written my name down in the books of young girls, fools.
The hole was deep. I crawled over the edge of it and waited for the lightning to come down. My nude body flattened against the earth as if I had been born from that same center.
Lightning struck. Before I could see any farther into the hole, I noticed a young flower slowly being swallowed by the rainwater. It floated atop the surface of the hole, way down deep where the roots were unnoticeable. It hadn’t completely sprouted but was still green and managed to keep its head just above the rising water.
As I looked out into the forest, I saw a woman’s eyes. Only a woman’s eyes could glow like that. She was not a part of the others, the other women who had flung me to the ground with their energy. Her eyes were even deeper.
The lightning struck again, and there at my feet was a wooden coffin, sacredly positioned across from the hole, noticeable.
I heard footsteps again.
When death is near, any sound will do. Something to grab your attention besides the deep, tranquilized breathing, the whistling of wilted magnolias, the ax of a woman who believed that God’s voice had come to her in the middle of the night, telling her to chop down what was already dead. Because the blood of a hanging had rotted it from the inside out.
“Who’s there?” I asked, listening to the footsteps leave the forest.
I walked over to the coffin and opened the lid. The mud of the forest saturated the earth as I ran my fingers along the edge of the coffin, a death basket soon to be filled by a disease, a woman soon to die in a woman’s way. That bald head of hers fitting perfectly into the skull part of the coffin where every sin that she’d committed went down with her. The bones sinking into the pine and creating a stir for the undergrounders, those who must be buried because the flesh had an odor to it. Landy had built it perfectly. A perfect coffin. I lay down inside it with my back against the bed of it, closing the lid. I lay there thinking of how I was the blessed one. How many of the living had the chance to lie where the dead must lie? How many would choose to?
“We must listen to the dead,” my grandmother always told me. “Listen to them. They have a story to tell. You will never be where they are unless God changes time and time changes Him.” She’d sit up with the sun shining down on her. “And that will never happen.”
The footsteps were reemerging in the forest.
I opened the lid of the coffin. “Who are you?” I asked.
She said nothing. Suddenly, I saw her eyes again. They were heavenly. The glow from them was too bright for a dark world. “Who are you?” I asked again. “Say something.”
As the women had not been a dream, neither were the eyes of this woman. I crawled out of the coffin and closed the lid. As I walked through the woods, the eyes disappeared. Who was she? Where did she come from? “Wait!” I yelled.
She turned around once more and walked clear out of sight.
I ran back to the house. When I opened the door, Aunt Pip was sitting in the dark.
“Where have you been?” she whispered.
The moon exposed my nude body. “The forest.”
She turned without saying a word about my flesh: “Jesus.”
“Maddy,” said Aunt Pip, “I need you. Come lay next to me.”
Before I made it to her, she broke down on the pillows, crying so loudly that the love in my heart hurt as it had when I had stood behind her at the piano. “Don’t cry,” I said, taking her head in my bosom. When the light lit up my scalp, she looked at me in the strangest way.
“Christ be the glory,” she said as I took her hand and ran it across my head.
“This is your love,” I said.
She cried so pitifully. Cancer inside a woman’s body was a caterpillar, green like the caterpillars of a naked woman who bathed outside in the nude, green like Mama’s hands. Aunt Pip was the dead. As much as I loved her and hated for her to die, she was the dead.
“My milk is gone,” she whispered. “I swallowed my Father and now I’m paying for it.”
I held her. “You’ll get it back someday.”
The white of her eyes glowed through the darkness. “Go,” she said, trying to push me away from her. “Get one o’ them mason jars out of the kitchen. Tell Fat to put me some milk in there.”
“Don’t talk like that,” I said.
“Fat’s got all that milk,” she said. “She can afford to. Fat’s a big girl. She’s top-heavy. Tell her to squeeze herself up and bring me some o’ that fine milk God gave her.”
I peeled her hands from my skin. “I can’t do that, Aunt Pip,” I said. “Please.”
She grew quiet. She looked at me as if she had never seen me before. Death was on her. She knew that death was on her as much as the fear in a hog’s eyes when it knows that a man stands behind it with a knife in his hands—to kill it.
“I ain’t nothing without my milk,” said Aunt Pip.
She paused in her agony and held me while God sent thunder and lightning through the clouds. I lay there thinking about the forest and the coffin and the woman’s eyes guiding her into the forest where I could no longer see her tiny shoulders curving outward from the pine.
chapter
twenty-three
Several days later, I woke to find the empty mason jar from my house sitting on the front porch. Mama had been there, quietly guiding her footsteps on the boards, just below the window. She had been there, indeed, her body carrying the scent of juniper, arousing the balance of wind behind her.
Aunt Pip was no longer eating. In the morning hours, I removed the covers from her legs and oiled them. Her skin was becoming dry, cracked. And her mouth was always covered in a white line of foam. She was dehydrated. I dipped my fingers into a water-filled cup and let the fluid drip into her mouth, turning her head in the direction of the ceiling for it to flow down her throat.
The air began to penetrate the room. You cannot imagine the silence. Not even a barking dog with rabies to pierce the clouds, no tractors or white men in the green field beside us, the propellers of a faraway plane in the sky. Nothing. Just the rotation of an antique fan sending its wind upon the covers.
I lay down on the floor next to her bed, waiting for the moment when she would turn around to scold me or demand for her urine to be dumped. Something. The movement of an arm, a foot, her swatting a buzzing fly from her ear with a fragile hand.
Cancer had come into Aunt Pip’s house and taken it over. Everything was cancerous: the roof, the walls, the kitchen sink, the piano. Everything inside of her house. And no human born of any character known was strong enough to witness it and not have it touch them somewhere deep down inside. Deep where the faces of disease go and hide from the flesh. A place where the dead go and leave the living to their deaths.
I knocked on Fat’s door.
“What is it?” she asked.
She looked into my eyes and turned away. Never minding my bald head, she started for the bedroom. The walls were so thin. She fumbled around a little while before her fat broke onto the bed. She cried and cried and told God to get out of her house if He couldn’t stay: “You bring life in here,” she said. “But you always take it away.”
She lay on the wooden bed, holding on to the sides of the mattress as if nothing in her life had been pleasing. As she closed her eyes, a tear rolled down the side of her face. “You always think you can do it till the last days come.” She held up her fists and shook them like God was in the room but wasn’t listening to her.
“I know I shouldn’t be mad at Pip,” she said, “but I am. I told her about all that running around and wearing them thin clothes in the wintertime.”
She rocked herself back and forth on the bed. The pattern of her thoughts depended on how much the bed squeaked from the weight of her body. She’d mumble something, then stop. Mumble, then stop. The bed squeaked. The louder the bed, the louder she’d become. “Lawd,” she said, getting on her knees and pulling me down with her, “please don’t take my Pip. I always tol’ you that if anybody went first, let it be me. Not Pip. Please don’t take my Pip, Lawd.”
The hole in her mouth grew wider as she walked over to the window and looked at her work: the ax was still in the tree. She then went over to a wooden drawer and pulled out an envelope. Her hands were touching the surface of it now, and when she laid it down, I saw the numbers in the upper left-hand corner and the four letters that I would never forget: MDOC.
A storm was brewing in the clouds. There was no thunder or lightning. The sky was the color of a wild mushroom, drifting over Pyke County in growing darkness.
Aunt Pip was in a coma now. Her muscles were relaxed, her arms and legs limp from dehydration, no food. Fat ran some hot water into the metal bedpan after thoroughly cleansing it of urine with vinegar and lye soap. She sat at the foot of the mattress with Aunt Pip’s legs in her lap, holding them up and scrubbing the bed dust from them. Fat was not as rough as she once was. Something had changed her, an odd occurrence of magnetism. Her eyes were drawn to a distant corner of the room, listening to the pace of her breathing in the silence.
I was at the head of the bed, holding Aunt Pip’s face in my lap. Her skin was warm. I lightly touched the bone that had been pressed against the kitchen window, the lower jaw connecting with the upper, the sharp teeth placed vertically together. Inside her mouth lived a tongue that would no longer be used. There would be no more of her birdlike voice, emerging from her stomach to say something, anything, that made her upset. Nothing of her lying on her back on the wooden boards of the porch to reach for the darkness behind her. Or the quiet laughter that erupted after Fat had blown a line of smoke up her nose.
“Look at her,” said Fat, rubbing the bottom of Aunt Pip’s feet with oil now.
She looked at her intimately. Two women who had carried each other through the rumors. An adulteress and the widow of a hanged man. Their language was hidden beyond the house walls, their secrets, the unknown photo of the children playing in the face of a rubber hosepipe.
Fat stood up from the mattress; the thumping of her feet was heard in the kitchen, stopping at the window. Her hand was on her chest now, pounding beneath her blouse to keep herself from crying. It did not work for when the pounding stopped, she broke out into a stream of tears.
“Lawd,” she whispered, “I ain’t got nothing or nobody. My folks got burnt out. My chiren gone.” She was no longer shouting out her words. “I know I ain’t got no business being mad at the sick. But I just can’t help it.”
She mumbled, then stopped. The patting continued.
Why couldn’t death have been as simple as pulling the yellow strand of hair from Mama’s forehead? What did God do with the missing breasts of women? Did the doctors keep them in a room of radioactive machines to study it, one woman’s disease after another? I was on my feet. My legs were weak beneath me. I lifted my arm and studied my own growing breast, just like Mama had done. I couldn’t afford to lie down the way the models had done in the books. Because I knew that a lump was a lump. It did not matter
if I was comfortable enough to feel it. Anything inside of my body that wasn’t supposed to be there would show itself to me; it would throw me off balance, eat me.
There was nothing there. Only flesh.
And when I turned to cover Aunt Pip’s body, I noticed a moving muscle beneath the covers, traveling up toward her middle part. My hand crawled on the bone of Aunt Pip’s leg. She had lost weight rapidly. It was different to see what the cancer had done, but to touch it. The face was already a perfect thing. What could a woman’s face lose that wasn’t there in the beginning? The face was designed in the stomach, the pulse of the abdomen vibrating in its chain-saw rhythm, chiseling the skull into a triangle, a pyramid, a coffin. But this I had missed altogether. Nothing is solid except the moment a child notices, through some odd event, that what she had failed to recognize was what she was destined to become.
There, upon the map of my hand, was the green lizard from the mason jar. I touched it and brought it close to me. Mama had been there over the window, quietly sitting the mason jar on the porch, reaching inside the open window to lift the covers from Aunt Pip’s abdomen. And there it was, the lizard that had been there all the while since, lying in wait, hiding beneath the covers for the breath to leave Aunt Pip’s body.
I let it go. And it crawled back to her abdomen, its tail curled lazily on the tip of her vagina.
chapter
twenty-four
Fat was in the kitchen picking up private things when the gravity of the porcelain doll pulled me to it. Nothing was happening slowly anymore. I stood near the mantel, listening to the howling of the mad animal.
The doll sat next to the record player, her body chipped down the center, the fractured hole in her ribs exposed. I stuck my finger down her throat and felt the coldness of something. I pulled it out of her mouth.
It was a photo of my birth.
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