They grew impatient and began to get louder, Nate growling first, then the howling going up in levels like the engines of passing cars, speeding fast and faster. But she couldn’t move. Her legs throbbed with tiredness, her arms felt weak, as if they were asleep, and she told herself to get up—milk trickled down into her armpits, her breasts pulsing by themselves to let it go. Scared by her body—she couldn’t move, and the babies’ howling wasn’t like dogs, steady ribbons, but it rose higher out the window, faster in their vibrating throats, pinning her down even harder to the floor, where milk found cracks and ran. All that noise catch in moss and leaf, she thought, and nobody ever hear. I cain move. We die—I cain do it.
She didn’t know the door had opened, didn’t even hear it through the piercing spirals of crying, but a hand came past her eyes, cutting through the square of muddy light from the window. Aint Sister shoved her hands under Calvin’s back and then Nate’s, flipping them over like pancakes to let each know that someone was there before she picked them up.
“You got fever in you breast,” she said, feeling Marietta’s forehead and hard-swelled chest. “Milk fever. Stop all that cry and moan—you ain kill em. You ain bad mama. You sick. Feed em. No, fever ain in the milk—in you. Let it out.”
By the time she and the others were cutting the dry cornstalks down in the fields and turning over the earth, they needed her milk only in the morning and when she came back at night, because they stayed with Aint Sister, who gave them warm grits during the day. Her breasts still tried to feed them more. She kept pushing cloth into her shirt, standing in the corner of the truckbed on the way home. Laha put her arm over Marietta’s shoulder, and Marietta bit her lip at the aching points inside her shirt.
Nate would be screaming, outraged, when she neared Aint Sister’s porch, but Calvin was always silent, in shock, it seemed, that she had gone away that morning. They attached their lips to her so hard she almost cried. Nate looked off to the room while he nursed; Calvin stared at her, and she worried that she had hurt him forever that day she let them scream. But he stayed quiet, and Nate stayed loud, and she saw that they were becoming themselves. Nate was all mouth, Calvin all eyes. And both hungry all the time. When the sky stayed silver in late fall, there was nothing to do in the fields and no tourists passing on the highway. The wind blew through the stands. Marietta sat with Aint Sister in front of the fireplace, watching the boys pull themselves along the floor.
“This October—last time Mr. Tally have snap bean,” Aint Sister said. “Mary tell me. I know you don have money. What you fe do winter?”
Marietta looked at Aint Sister’s neck, shadowy-thin under her chin in the darkened room. But she could see that Aint was testing her with the tilt of her head and mouth.
“They big and hungry as you was,” Aint Sister said into the fire. “Look fe they get into thing so soon. What you think you feed me?”
“Go in the creek with Johnny and them, get oshter. I got net, too.” She caught Nate by the armpits and turned him back on his belly.
“Them two need more than oshter. You owe Pearl for them diaper, too.”
“She know I pay her back.” Marietta waited. “What you think, Aint, what you axing me?”
“I give you few chicken, you get egg fe them two. And you need fe plant garden, in spring.”
“Work in somebody else field, I ain’t feel like work my own. Greens come up every year.” Marietta caught Nate again, but Calvin bumped his head on the chair leg. She picked him up, wrapped her fingers around his head. “I rather fish stead a clear field.”
When it rained and cold blew against the newspaper, rippling and cracking through the night, she stayed inside all day, and when the sky was clear and cold, she left the boys with Aint Sister and went to the creek, carrying buckets. Big Johnny, Little Johnny, Laha’s Jerry and Willie, they skimmed past in their boats; sometimes she found them tonging oysters near the waterway. White people came in the afternoon to buy oysters from Pearl, sometimes all the way from McClellanville.
She pried the rough shells loose from rocks and roots near the channel after the tide had gone out, walking up and down the creeks throwing the net. She threw over and over, learned how to tuck it against her shoulder, take a piece in her mouth, and fling it with the same sweep Aint Sister used to scatter corn to the chickens.
There were rarely enough fish or oysters to sell, though. She got a piece of bacon, an onion cut in tiny pieces to simmer with oysters and make stew. Grits. Eggs from the chickens, who lived in the old shed Laha’s Jerry came to straighten and hammer tight. He said, “Egg good for them two. And keep you from wander so much.”
“I throw the net now,” she said, smiling at him just like she had shown her teeth to Sinbad’s friends.
“I know you do,” he said, throwing back his head a little and laughing with her.
But they still wanted milk, after the soupy grits or soft-cooked egg. Nate clawed to be fed first, anxious and impatient, then pushing to get down and roll over and over on the floor. So when Calvin was in her arms, she held him longer, his hands kneading at her breast, touching her face, staring at her lips and eyes.
She sat in front of the fire for hours, sometimes hearing shots ring through the woods. Rosie said that the white man and his friends were hunting ducks, driving up from Charleston. “That man ain from here,” Marietta said, buying sugar. “He voice different.”
“He from Birmingham,” Pearl said. “Got house in Birmingham, one in Charleston. Got three car.” The shooting echoed in the silent trees, and the birds flapped like newspaper in the wind.
What had they done in winter before, she and her mother? She rocked in the heat of the fire, trying to remember, putting on more wood. The boys slept, woke, stared at her. When Aint Sister came that afternoon, Marietta got up as if in a dream, leaving the boys asleep on the bed, and went outside to chop more wood. The ax slid back and forth, and she remembered: Her mother and Aint Sister sewing and shivering, four layers of skirt above their feet, which stayed on the hearth. And Marietta had gone to school in the back of Big Johnny’s truck, crowded coat to coat with Laha’s kids and Little Johnny and the rest, their breaths floating below her nose. If the truck broke down, they stayed home, sitting by the fire. She remembered the woodstove at school, burning some legs and far from hers, and the dark blackboard like a huge window into the night. The teachers, different faces that made them read from books, correcting each word. Marietta reading silently in the back, all day, trying not to lift her head.
She built the fire outside in the shelter of a tree at the edge of the yard and dragged the old iron washpot Aint Sister had lent her when the boys were born. “Watch you put enough water in,” Aint Sister called from the porch now, her sweater wrapped to her neck. “Don be lazy.”
Marietta dumped bucket after bucket into the pot and fed the fire. She took the soaking diapers from the washtub on the porch and added the soap and bleach to the iron pot; when the water boiled, she stirred with a stick, poling down the cloth that bubbled to the surface.
After they hung on the line strung across the porch, she went back inside, where the boys banged spoons and pushed empty cornmeal bags across the floor. “Where they come from, them bag?” Marietta asked, frowning.
Aint Sister whirled around from where she bent at the fireplace. “I see you,” she said suddenly. “Think this hard time. Think you so hungry, sadmouth too much. I make something fe you now. Sit.”
“I beena sit, sit too much,” Marietta said angrily, leaning against the table. “I can hear stand up.”
The boys looked up at their voices, and their chins gleamed with spit when their mouths hung open.
“Way back, gone time hard fe die. Hoover time.” Aint Sister shifted the ashes at the edge of the hearthstone. “No work, no food. Coffee? Take corn and burn in fire, cut off the burn and boil. Make black water you fe drink, keep you warm. Take grits and burn em in pan, add water and grits tea come. Brown water.” The ashes breathed in heaps
.
“Nothing fe eat. Nothing. Slavery time, make hoecake, my mama say. Put the corn and water cook on you hoe in the field. Hoover time make ash cake. Here.” She thrust out a tin plate with grayish mounds inside. “Knock off ash and open. Then you taste hard time. And fill you stomach with hard time.”
The cake was gritty and hot. The boys crawled toward her, eyes on the food because they always wanted what she ate now, and she broke off pieces of the mealy lump. “Here,” she said, and Nate’s lips closed around the bite. “And here,” she said, pushing some into Calvin’s, the bottom two teeth white in the darkness of his open mouth. “Aintie teach you bout hard time. I already learn.”
“Heh! We eat with stick! Eat flour bake in some pan with nothing fe mix. Flat flour. So many hungry no possum left in the wood, no meat. Fish, only fish till I never want fe see a tail. You mama, too, hate fish after she grown.”
“She hate fish cause my daddy love fish more than she, love water more than she,” Marietta said, the boys pinching her legs. “Cause he die for fish.”
“She hate fish long before she see Freeman,” Aint Sister said, shaking her head. “But you keep hold fe you story. You keep hold. Go on.”
Marietta went to the shelf for the bag of rice. The only sound was the popping fire and the boys’ babbling—ya-ya-ya and ba-ba-ba. Aint Sister got up and paused beside them. Marietta knew she was touching their heads. “Look all that hair,” she whispered to them, and Marietta spoke louder so she wouldn’t have to turn around.
“Look, nappy till it burn you hand you try and comb it,” she said, hard. “Nappy as they mama hair. Blueblack till they look African.”
“Marietta, you don…”
“They not you family. You family dead out now, remember? This Freeman Cook family, he blood take over. Don’t look like you, don’t think like you. Blueblood. My family.”
She stared at Aint’s knobbed knuckles around the walking stick. “It dark outside. Best fe take you light,” she said, and the old woman’s lips were a thin line, straight as the scar on Marietta’s palm, where she’d fed the boys her blood. She went and pulled them in to her with sweeping arms, held one on each hip, told Aint Sister, “Watch fe spirit on the road.” She went into the bedroom and stood there in the dark until the steps creaked slightly and the swaying light was gone.
Wild azaleas came in March. Before any light worked its way through the pines and oaks, she heard the morning. Small stirrings, far away, maybe the chickens or a man calling someone far down the lane; maybe one of the boys hunching up in the bed beside her, trying to get away from the wetness at his belly. Sliding out of the damp sheet without waking them, she went outside in the darkness to feed a few grits to the chickens and carry their water. Then she opened their door, so they would be able to find what they could in the yard. She started the fire for the wash. All before light so she wouldn’t have the boys underfoot and stumbling against her legs, trying to catch her ankles when her feet swung past. They hated her to stride back and forth out of their sight, even for a moment. Sometimes she stopped and said to them, “When I ever go and left you? When I ain’t come back?” Their tongues trembled in their mouths they wailed so hard, angry pink tongues curled and shaking.
They heard her when she put wood in the stove, and then they growled. She tried to remember Rosie’s baby Johnny—as he had stirred from his naps, when she was a girl in the stands, had he cooed and smiled, happy to be awake? Nate and Calvin called “rawwrr!” in their impatience to get up.
The grits began to bubble and the fire’s glow faded in the woodstove when the sun made the room light. She put chunks of yellow and white egg in front of the boys, on the oilcloth sheet where they sat, spooned cooled grits into their mouths, then moved them and the oilcloth outside to the swept-bare yard. While she started the diapers and the bedsheet, they were happy, not even looking at her but crawling to the base of the porch and standing to hold on to the board edges. Circling back and forth, moving the pecans and peach pits she kept there for toys, they put them carefully onto the ground, back onto the wood, dropped them into the empty soap boxes and back out. But let her take the ax, the bucket and pick, let her walk to the garden patch behind the house, and without even looking up—she watched them to see—they howled, pawing the earth like bulls, and set off after her.
They had to come. When she set them at the edge of the acre plot, overgrown for years, they crawled right off the oilcloth and into the leaves. Marietta bit her lips and chopped at the slim trees and brush. She carried the wood back to the yard when they fell asleep, and when they woke, resumed chopping and pushing. At the end of each day, their hands were numb with cold dirt and their pants held bowls of dried mud at the knees. They followed her into the field now, dragging right through to plow up the mud in ragged furrows. “You two mules now, huh? Think you help me? I can’t throw no seed in there. But I have for wash you pants every day!” She scrubbed and rinsed in the dark, hung the clothes near the fireplace each night to dry for the next morning.
Turning the soil over with the pick, sliding the hoe edge under the ground and scooping, then breaking the clods, she planned a small plot for peas, one for greens and tomatoes. She could can at the end of summer, like her mother used to. But she’d have to buy new Mason jars, because only one was left on the shelf, and she owed Pearl so much already. When she went to the store, she didn’t linger to talk to Rosie or Pinkie. She let them exclaim over the boys while she bought the few things she could add to her credit. Then she wrapped Calvin in the long strip she’d sewed from a torn dress, tied him to her hip, and picked up Nate, who liked to try and hold the small package.
When the weather changed up, though, before she had put the seeds into the ground, the rain came in through the roof in two places, swirled around the wood blocks holding up the porch, came down the chimney and made the fire smoke. And it got into their lungs, so that one night they had fever. They didn’t cry or babble, just whimpered, and she held one in her lap, the other in her arms, feeling the heat right through her clothes. They were like hot sweet potatoes against her fingers, their eyes swollen with pain, and she had nothing to give them. All night she rocked them in the chair, the fire low and gold, and she put water on their faces and necks.
They were still and heavy in the cloth wraps when she walked to Pearl’s early in the morning. “I need lison molasses,” she told Pearl, and Pearl said, “I can see that fever. But I ain got no lemon. You need fe boil it with lemon juice. You go fe see Aint Sister.”
She whispered, “Don, don, don,” against Calvin’s cheek all the way there, her lips hot against his skin. “Heart don mean everything mouth say. Don hold you mad, let it kill any glad. Don get straight wood from crooked timber.” She whispered up the lane: I crooked, I Cook. Hold mad cause it make me strong. Then she stood on the porch and knocked.
“Fever get em,” she told Aint Sister, looking down at the bent headscarf.
“Go on and I come,” Aint Sister said without looking up.
The bed felt hot, too, pulling in their heat and burning, so she lay on her back on the kitchen floor, her head on a pillow, and held them against her shoulders. Their breaths roared heavy in her ears, and when Aint Sister came in, their cheeks were sealed to her neck with sweat.
“Never see Rosie and nem floor like this no more. Ain like they don know how fe keep it clean.” Aint Sister’s voice was brisk. “You beena sweep it out with clear sand, like you should.” The wide gray floorboards were smooth and slick under Marietta’s back.
“You never say something bad bout Rosie to me,” Marietta said slowly. “Never talk about nobody, only me. Always tell me what for do, tell me I wrong.”
Aint Sister’s forehead jumped. “You old enough fe hear talk now. You old enough fe talk about other people. You learn child can angry and pout, but woman say thing, hear thing, go on.”
“I don’t like she-she talk,” Marietta said.
“Ff-ttt. No she-she talk, just people say thing fe p
ass some time.” She stopped. “Listen how they breathe. Have whooping cough you don get up and do what I say.”
Marietta laid the boys on the bed. “Watch for they crawl off,” she said.
“Tell me watch? Go to the water, look fe little crab run in he hole. That one.”
“Fiddler crab?”
“That one. Tide coming back in now, so you fe go quick-quick.” She turned to the stove and took a root, wrapped in cloth, from her dress.
Marietta ran down her old path to the creek, the bucket banging against trees, and then she hurried along the creekbank to the marsh. The pluff mud clicked in the sun, glistened with millions of tiny ripples and holes and scurryings. She was alone by the water now, a bucket and stick in hand like always, with the slapping quiet of something gliding into the creek. She hadn’t been alone for months, breathing without watching someone, and she’d dreamed of sitting here to listen. Now she couldn’t for fear she wouldn’t find enough of the crabs; the water trickled into pools at the edge already. My boys, she thought. Sit with pole, throw out net with me. Listen with me. She started over the mud and bog carefully, looking for streaks of silver across the black-velvet mud that would show her the crabs.
The house was close and still. Aint Sister boiled the crabs in the big pot and Marietta heard Calvin draw in air and bark. “They start the cough,” Aint Sister said. “But we almost ready.”
She added the water from the boiled root and strained the liquid through white cloth into a cup. It smelled foul, but Marietta took it into the bedroom. “Bring some for Nate,” she said. “He never wait for nothing.”
When they woke in the night, she rocked Nate in the rocker and Aint Sister rocked Calvin in the straight chair, her tiny back curled over him. They tested the fever with their lips until the hot faded and left cooled, sticky foreheads.
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