I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots

by Susan Straight

  Her father’s feet. She had a pair of shoes, but when she wore them one day, the women all took in breath—everyone laughing except Aint Sister, who was angry. “Take them boot off,” she shouted. “They not fe you.”

  The worn black boots were her father’s, hidden, but she’d found them years ago in the shed that had long since fallen down. She kept them under the porch, taking them out every now and then to play with when she was small; one day last year, she had put them on for fun, and they fit. She walked around the yard in the boots, felt her toes where they should be, felt the soft front-foot bend with her steps. But when she’d walked down to Rosie’s house, where her mother and the other women were shelling cowpeas, and said, “I got shoes for fit me,” her mother got up and went inside the open doorway. The hissing of all the mouths made Marietta lift her chin and say, “They good enough for go in the field when the man come around.”

  And she wore them when it was time to dig potatoes and pull beans and hoe rows of corn. She jabbed her long hoe blade as fast as Pinkie and Mary, kept her lips together so her throat was sealed and moist, and she didn’t have to stop for water like the others, who were always talking and singing. Standing in the truckbed on the way home, she smiled at the other women’s canvas shoes, the little white rings in a line where the laces were gone; she tipped the loose top circles of the boots against her shins.

  Picking up the net, she tried to pull it into a shape, remembering how the men flung the circles out onto the water. A few times, she had hidden in the trees and seen them standing by the creek. Their voices and laughter carried through the woods, and she crept to the edge to watch their arms fly out and curve, fingers splayed against the sky while the net floated in a perfect bell. But most of the time, they were out on the boats far past the waterway, or they went in the creek at night, when the mullet were running.

  If they saw her, if she showed herself and asked what she could do, Big Johnny and the other men said, “I ain have Rosie and Sister holler for me cause I keep you out here and you suppose to doing somethin else. Get on back where you missin from. Go on to the highway.”

  Girls could sell the fish in the evening when the men brought them back; sometimes Laha’s girls stood near the highway with strings of fish while white people from the farms or towns down the road came to buy something for dinner. Pearl laid the fish and crab and shrimp out in big pans in her store, and before dark white men might go inside and come out with paper-wrapped packages.

  The net was a heavy bundle in her arms; she had seen the holes in it when she stretched it out, but she didn’t know how to mend them with sharpened palmetto slivers like Laha’s father, Joe Pop, did; his hands would hold the net pattern out on the wall or porch before him. She threw it toward the water as hard as she could, and it fell in a knotted lump on the surface. Her face hot, she looked back into the trees before dragging the tangle back. The dragonflies smashed into each other, tapping sharp.

  She arranged and flung the net again and again, and finally it floated into some kind of circle, settled on the water, and sank; she felt the sharp jerk on the wrist circle that attached it to her, and her heart jumped. Now what? She waited a few minutes and then pulled, hoping the net would be full of shrimp. How long should she let it sink? She had never gotten close enough to the men to hear about which tide, or where she should stand in the creek; sometimes they stood in the small rowboats, sometimes they stared at the creek, looking for the spot. The shrimp, scuttling along the bottom, the fish who were darting past now—the net cradled them all tighter and tighter as she pulled gently, and then the heavy-soaked mesh appeared on the bank, empty.

  Flinging it out over the shivering water again and again, pacing up and down the bank, farther toward the marsh and the waterway, she made her hands finish stiff and bending backward in the air as if she were praying and shouting like the women did in church, welcoming spirits of love into their chests. She left her hands in the sky for long minutes, the sun hot on her throat and under her chin, and she dragged the net until cords of pain ran from her elbows up into the sides of her neck; then, angry, stalking back to the trees and slapping the net against a trunk, she lay on the damp ground near the water. The net slid to the base of the tree, sounding like a heap of just-washed clothes she had taken from the tub, and she felt furious water rise in her eyes and nose. The pole stood nearby; it hadn’t even trembled. The man’s furry bug didn’t work on creek fish, and the net had so many holes that anything living in water swam through, twisting past her and going about its business. She pulled up the hook and lure to throw them onto the net. No one would show her how to mend the net; they’d just take it, saying it belonged to somebody and they’d see who. Even if that man didn’t want it, they’d laugh and say, “Best be mend clothes. Take learnin for use the net. I give Rosie some fish and shrimp for you mama when I come back.”

  She thought of showing them the white man’s insect and sucked her teeth. She’d have to come back tomorrow to her usual spot up the creek, and she’d have fish for breakfast, early, when the sun was only a line at the edge of the water, and her mother was already sitting on the porch. Tonight, only rice. As long as it was hot, when the breeze came maybe, and people were outside waiting for the moving air, she knew all her mother would eat was rice for dinner, grits for breakfast. Sweet yellow with butter and sugar heated into the grains.

  Sugar—that was the something she’d been trying to remember all day. She crossed her arms and put a palm on each aching shoulder. Nothing had rustled in the can after breakfast this morning when she’d brought her mother’s grits into the bedroom. Aint Sister had the seven dollars, and Marietta didn’t want to face her so soon. Rosie would love to give her some sugar, if she could come inside and tell Marietta that the fire in the stove was too low or too hot, that the floor needed sweeping, and why hadn’t she put up fresh newspaper on the walls? Lazy. Aint Sister would come with a tea, someone else with prayers, and they would all peer into the bedroom and stay to talk, poke a finger into the rice bag, stir the greens, and frown. And her mother would call softly from the bedroom to keep them there, words threading the air, her mother anxious for the sweet, low complaints and threats. “He do that again, girl, I swear…” “My washer ain work right for a week and them boy…” “You know she think she grown…”

  Dreaming in the trees… that was how Aint Sister always finished up, when she came back through the doorway from the bedroom.

  The sun was golder when she went toward the path. Her mother would be awake now, maybe back in her chair at the highway, ready to give out a whupping because Marietta had stayed away too long. She was so much taller than her mother now that when she had beat her last, weeks ago, she had hit the backs of Marietta’s knees, those tender grins of skin, with a peachtree switch, whipped so hard that even walking stung. She had swung like she knew these were the last whuppings, and Marietta was afraid at the silence, the lack of instructions and promises for future pain. Her mother breathed so hard and fast that she couldn’t speak.

  She went back to the marsh first and pulled a few bunches of rush, bending her elbow around the long, warm sheaf. To her mother and Aint Sister, she’d say she’d been gathering sweetgrass for them. The women never came to the marsh, where bugs and snakes waited. The men and boys pulled sweetgrass. Marietta started back through the trees, where the moss still hung motionless, always one strand curled off the end of each dangling fall, one strand alone.

  Padding carefully around the edge of the clearing when she reached the house, she waited at the pump to listen. The pump sat on its own little table, a board held up by two thick pieces of wood, and she stroked the handle, which flew away in a dip like the ponytails she saw on those magazine women. The clothes she had hung out that morning on a line strung around the porch didn’t dance; the air was still as a seen rabbit. At the base of the house, she crouched and went hunched below the windows. Her mother wasn’t crying; her breath was high and light as a leaf rocking back and forth
on the wind, zigzagging down to the ground.

  Inside the house, where no light had been all day, the dark was much deeper than the daylight going behind the trees; the air was gray-blue as the inside of oyster shells, and still her mother didn’t stir. Marietta hung her face in the sheet that separated the rooms, watching her mother’s face glisten, the mouth a long sliver and only the cloth below her neck swelling slightly. No breath sounded going in, but rasping harsh it came out, and Marietta was frightened, imagining an angry possum in the night. She pulled back the sheet and picked up the bag of grits from their corner on the shelf. The Mason jar was still full of the reddish tea Aint Sister had told her mother to drink. Tea from the bloodroot, which seeped red blood when you cut it. Marietta swirled the tea—why hadn’t her mother touched it?

  Sugar—there wasn’t any use to cook rice or grits without sugar and butter. She’d make both tonight, just in case, make them yellow as dandelions. No way to get out of having to go to the store, so she shifted the dress back on her shoulders and picked up the sweetgrass.

  After she had left it on Aint Sister’s porch and run down the lane, she slowed for the crossroad. They would be everywhere, looking and laughing and twisting around on chairs and haunches to see who was coming—oh, just Josephine girl, wild as she want for be. Laha’s kids all up and down the road, playing with boxes and carrying buckets of crab. Joe and Ricky and Tina would see her and shout, “Here come Marietta! Ax her reach in a tree and get me a bird! I seen a lady had a bird in some cage, right on the seat. She have a bird in she car for sing to her.”

  She knew the backs of their heads better than their faces, because she always looked past them when she walked; in school, she had had to sit in the back and study their braids and barrettes and the beads of hair near the boys’ necks.

  They chased two dogs past her, the boys, and the girls held bags of potato chips and gleaming cans of soda. Marietta passed through them quickly, and only Jimmy said something to her. “Hey, Marietta, you so black till I scare a the dark when I see you.”

  Ricky said, “That one too old, boy. You not even funny.”

  The men around the store, sitting on crates and shadows in the creeping brown light, looked up. Big Johnny wasn’t there. She tensed and passed them, but nobody said anything. A cluster of women’s voices swirled through the door, but the men said nothing, not “See Helen’s girl? Got them eye like she mama, seem like they almost green.” Not “Naw, that ain Pearl grandbaby? Where she get them long leg? Her daddy shortest nigger I ever see.” And they didn’t wait until she passed and then say, “Big as a man. Probly whup a boy in the dirt he even look for her. Whup me any day.”

  Inside, the cloudy jar of pigs’ feet and moss-green of pickles waited, and the tin of cookies, the plastic soda bottles that hung from the low ceiling to dangle near her head. Pearl smiled behind the counter, and Rosie, who was her cousin, sat on a chair. “How you mama?” Pearl said.

  “She sleep,” Marietta said. “Aint Sister get my money, and she gone, but I pay you tomorrow.”

  “Bring it day-clean, be fine,” Pearl said, looking at Rosie.

  “Just some sugar,” Marietta said. Pearl measured out a pound of sugar into a paper sack and slid it over the black pocked counter.

  “You don want nothin else?” Pearl said.

  Marietta tasted the salty potato chips, like when she licked the inside of her arm if she cut herself, and she thought of how long the seven dollars might have to last, if the summer kept slow with business. “Just some butter,” she said, and when she held the small mushy cube she said, “I be by day-clean.”

  “You don need no meat?” Rosie said. “Big Johnny ain back, but I bring some butts meat for you mama.”

  “I got shrimp,” Marietta said. “More than she want.” She bumped the door frame with her shoulder, making the bells tinkle.

  Smoke drifted from each house now, wisping through the air, and she hurried back down the lane, cutting through the trees before Aint Sister’s. She looked at the roof of her mother’s house, at the pile of pine needles and moss gathered above the porch; the roof was steep, and sometimes she heard the sliding leaves and needles in the night. She went up the steps and set the bag on the wooden table by the stove.

  Only Aint Sister’s house and her mother’s had the big fireplaces in the kitchen wall, and that was where Aint Sister cooked. She kept her fire banked all the time, had a pot at the edge of the glow, and sometimes something tucked into the ashes that flaked gray and cooked slow. But Marietta’s mother was always hot this year, and when the weather had turned warm, Marietta had cleaned out the fireplace and put scrubbed pots there to keep them out of the way. The bricks were cool to her palm. She took a few pieces of lightwood from the porch and started the fire in the woodstove, thinking that the cooking smell might wake her mother. She put the big cast-iron pot on one burner for rice, and the white-enameled pot on another for grits. Sprinkling salt into each pot, she licked a few grains off her fingers. The washtub was still outside, and she brought it onto the porch before she pulled the clothes from the line. In winter, they would be stiff, but with the air so moist now, they were soft and limp in her hands.

  She sat on the porch step to watch the last slivers of light cut through the trees. The moss moved for a moment, and air passed her neck. She heard the trembling of fire under the pots and closed her eyes, remembering the blue flame of winter in the fireplace, the hot roar they kept going when the wind blew outside and her mother and Aint Sister would sit close to the hearth and tell stories. Her fingers would move slowly, theirs quick as spiders through the blackeye peas, sifting and sorting the dried smooth peas and setting aside pebbles and bits of stem. Aint Sister and her mother cleaned all the peas before they put them in the sack for winter. They bought the barrelful of peas from Laha’s brother, who farmed his land. Her mother couldn’t farm the acre plot behind the house; trees and vines had taken over years ago, begun growing when her father was out fishing. “He hate fe clear and plow,” Aint Sister always said. “Want fe sit out on that water till dark the light.”

  Her mother hadn’t even been able to ride the truck and work for the farmers, Mr. Briggs and Mr. Tally and them, last year. When they came around, Marietta went with the others and her mother stayed inside with Aint Sister, patching holes in clothes and cutting okra into crinkle-edged coins for canning. Marietta thought about Aint Sister’s words today. Her mother shook in the winter, swelled and slowed in the summer, slept in the day and cried out at night.

  Something rustled in the pile of lightwood on the porch, something small, making more noise than fit its little body. She used to jump at every crackle in the leaves, every brush in the branches, when she was small and first in the woods alone. She would freeze until she saw the beetle or moth, the turtle sliding into the water or the bird pushing past a twig. The pile of wood was low now, but she’d have to find heavy logs to chop for winter, when wind screamed across the ocean and sliced to waft through the cracks in the walls. Then her mother would sit near the glow all night, her face the same bright as the lightest of the flames, watching the deep blue heat that wavered at the bottom of the logs. It was bluer than water.

  The rice bubbled white foam under the heavy pot lid. Marietta began to sweep absently, pushing the wood splinters and dust toward the door, thinking that when she asked Mr. Joe Pop to sharpen the ax she could stay and watch his claw-bent fingers knit and mend nets. She could ask him for some cord and say she was making a rope to hold baskets in the stand. She swept the dirt off the porch in a puff and heard Aint Sister’s deep shout thud off the tree trunks, always her words coming before her small, slow form in the dark.

  “You sweep at night!” The words never flew away in the clearing surrounded by woods or in the stand—they hit Marietta and dropped to the dirt; but this time she sounded angrier, even, than when she had taken the seven dollars. “Stop now! Don never sweep at night—you know that!” She grabbed the broom and held it straight through the do
orway like a torch. “That so bad luck I don believe you fe do that to you mama.”

  Marietta’s chest tightened. Aint Sister would wake her mother now with hot tea, and then tell her about the woman, about Marietta’s mouth and the sweeping, too. She had forgotten about sweeping in the dark. So many bad-luck things to remember—following footsteps, salt and red pepper for hags, eggs and ashes and everything that could bring bad luck or make it leave.

  Aint Sister poked at the fire and put the broom in the corner. She stared at the jar of tea, which hadn’t been opened, and took the last, smallest pot off the shelf. “Go get the water, fresh,” she said. “You beena know that, too. She need some tea. And don be linger out there, talk fe them tree.”

  Marietta took the pail outside to the pump. She could find it with her eyes closed, even smell the cool wet metal. The water began to slosh into the bucket and she heard a screech, a long e-e-e-e-e-e shooting through the air. Sharp and long as that car horn, but this was throat, shaky high pouring out of a mouth. She turned and grabbed the bucket—was it one of the wild pigs the boys talked about, with mean small eyes and shining-drooled snouts? Or a hag, riding someone way down the road?

  She ran toward the house and the scream came again, from inside. Aint Sister came out onto the porch then and howled again, her head thrown back, calling ye-e-e-e-e-e louder than church, louder than angry, longer than breath.

  Night

  Rosie only came because she wanted to bring a packet of meat. No one had heard Aint Sister’s call down the long, shadowed road; her voice echoed around the branches and moss over and over while Marietta stood, afraid to go past her to see her mother’s face. Now Rosie hurried back down the road to tell the others, and Marietta stood beside the bed, where Aint Sister sat in the rocking chair and talked to her mother as if she were still alive.

  Her mother’s cheeks were dry now, the shine evaporated, and they looked soft and chalky-yellow as pounded sawdust. Marietta knew they would feel like velvet moss. She made her finger move over the sheet covering her mother’s chest and arms, and the face was peach-skin smooth at her mother’s forehead except for the two permanent frown lines that sliced up from her brows, thin as razor cuts. Aint Sister talked, talked, to her mother and the air outside the window, maybe even to Marietta.