He led them to the summer kitchen, the smokehouse, and the granary. After he had gone, they reached up with brooms for the spiderwebs drifting over them in the dark smokehouse. “What Mr. Ray and them fe do with this?” Mary said.
“Just fe look, probly,” Pinkie said.
Marietta kept the trash in a neat pile so they could pick it up later. Mr. Thomas had warned them several times about throwing weeds and garbage in the wrong places. They moved on to the granary, which was locked. He had given Pinkie a long metal skeleton key, black with age.
The heavy wood door pulled open, and inside was a tiny stairway hugging one wall and two small boxlike rooms separated by an iron mesh. The one room was behind the mesh; the other was open to the doorway where they stood. Mary said, “What kind food they kept in here? What don’t beena fell through that gate?”
Marietta brushed her hand over the mesh, trying to remember where she had heard someone describe this. Keep she in box, somebody sit outside box and talk. Aint Sister had said it, told her about somebody who was in this room. She looked at the rough brick wall and the heavy iron, drawing in her breath. “Africa woman keep here,” she whispered, her heart racing. “Keep she in box, make she stay here until she won’t run.”
“Sister, she granma,” Pinkie said. “That right. You great-great gran. Sister tell me once.”
Marietta wheeled around and ran outside, breathing hard to clear the too-fine dust of feet tramping on the earthen floor and walking in circles. She didn’t see Mr. Ray or Mr. Thomas, no one, and she began to run again around the fading azaleas and down the lane.
The boys carried tomato cans of water from Aint Sister’s pump to the porch, where they watched the sheets of water slide off the wood. She felt their arms around her legs, the automatic comforting pats that made her smile; they had begun to copy the way she tapped them without thinking whenever she held them. When Aint Sister came outside, Marietta said, “I come home early, feel fever. I take em home for give you rest.”
When she chopped with her hoe at the dirt clods left by the plow, the same way she did at home now in the first light, she imagined the Africa woman, silent as she was, listening to the others’ voices as they moved up and down the rows. After the fields were leveled and perfect, Mr. Thomas instructed them to make sure that the trenches were deep enough, fifteen inches apart. He left and returned throughout the days, sometimes standing in the shade of the trees along the road to watch them.
“Please remove your shoes and listen carefully,” he told them the next week. “This is traditionally done by women, who have more skill in the manipulation of the feet. I am not certain that this method will be successful, but I would like to try it because it is accurate and guests should always enjoy chancing upon the sight. It is meant to be very graceful.”
They took the seed rice and dunked it in a barrel of thick mud. He hovered over them closely, and Marietta could see the tiny red bumps where he had shaved. “Now the rice is to be clayed, so that mud adheres to each grain. Then it will be spread in the sun to dry. This will prevent the rice from floating on the water when we flood the fields, which we will do if Jerry and Willie have proceeded correctly.”
He stopped, distracted, and Marietta felt the wet earth near the barrel rise between her toes; she didn’t understand why their feet had to be bare, and she felt ashamed of her long toes, which he stared at absently for a moment. They stood awkwardly there, with their dresses tied around their hips the way he had showed them, and pushed down at the bulges of cloth near their thighs.
He said in a soft voice, “There is a plantation called Cypress Gardens near Charleston, and several others in this general area. But this attention to historical detail will make your place of employment the most-visited in the state.” He looked up abruptly. “Please follow my instructions.”
He asked them to remove mud and rice from the barrel and tread on it with their feet, to dance carefully by pushing the wet rice and rolling it under their soles. They scraped their feet at first, and Marietta felt water behind her eyes for some reason; she could barely breathe when Pinkie’s feet trod the mud delicately, and she kept her eyes down and open for a long time to lessen the pressure of the tears. Her feet blurred into four, moving below her.
“Take your time,” Mr. Thomas said. “We will master this process gradually, as the guests should be able to observe you frequently. Tomorrow we will clay more rice in this manner, and I will schedule the guests’ visit accordingly. When we’re finally finished claying the seed rice, we shall plant it.”
In the evening, she could watch the spring sky through the trees just after she came home. It lightened to white against the oaks, turning their edges to black lace like the gates she remembered, and she let the boys fall asleep on a blanket beside her, watching them root face first for a while and then grow still, their behinds high in the air.
If it was cold, they stayed inside. Calvin was fascinated with her fingernails, her earrings, and especially her boots. He picked mud from the leather. He tried to walk in them. He clicked his fingernails against hers, holding her hands firmly. He touched her teeth. Nate snapped splinters from the lightwood and tried to push them into the boot toes. He wouldn’t sit in her lap, but Calvin would fall asleep pressed to her stomach in the rocker, his mouth blooming a wet flower on her shirt, his chest tight against her ribs. She could drowse, too, and then wake, feeling ashamed that she didn’t want to put him down and wash the dishes. It seemed that she needed the touching more than they did; she rubbed her fingers across the backs of their necks without thinking until they ducked away in irritation.
When Aint Sister came to find her cuddling one that way, she would say, frowning, “You one a them kind—I never think you be a touchy mama. Way you so wild, I think you be push-away mama.”
Marietta’s face grew warm. “I like for hold em. My mama never hold me,” she said without thinking, and she remembered when she was very small, trying to climb into her mother’s lap and the heel of a hand blocking her way. “You too big—go on, I need fe rest,” her mother would say. Then when she was older, leaving the heated skin of her mother for the cool wood floor.
Aint Sister said, “So? Some mama never do. Seem like it go skip a family—the one what never beena hold when they baby want fe hold they own baby too much. Baby gon push away cause he cain breathe from he mama dress front,” she frowned at the sleeping Calvin.
“He like it, he climb up here. Nate not so much.”
“Be careful,” Aint Sister said. “You spoil em, make em baby too long. They be two-year-old soon.”
“Mama never touch my hair, nothing,” Marietta whispered.
“You mama never meant fe have baby. She too sickly, too old. But she love you. She feed you. And you in the tree? She always hear talk from Rosie and them bout that, but all she say, ‘Marietta like tree.’”
Every night she scolded Marietta for not teaching the boys to fall asleep in the bed, on their own, but Marietta needed to feel them pushing against her legs and tugging on the dirty dress. Then she sat on the porch like old people, watching the black.
Dropping the clay rice into a small hollow made with her bare heel, she dragged her toes across the soil to cover it the way he told them to. “I can’t believe how rhythmic it is,” one of the women visitors said from the road. Marietta followed Mary’s white-flashing heel and Pinkie’s bobbing head, not looking back at the small group, thinking about the peach-tree blossoms, the slurping creekwater, sliding pine needles. Stan’s eyes peering up at her, questioning. Sinbad’s hand at her neck, his fingers pushing through her hair. She jabbed her heel down and pressed the dirt over the rice as if in a dream, giving in to the whole night then, the lips under her ear and hands on her back, fingers deep in her muscles. They were all silent, Pinkie and Mary, too, and she thought they all dreamed of something as they floated and rocked across the long field.
Then she rocked Calvin in the dark when he woke from bad dreams; swaying in the chair on
the porch, night and the woods quiet except for a falling branch or rustle of leaves, she stared out at the moonlit clearing. His short arms were thrown straight across her shoulders and his breath came fast and disturbed if she tried to stand. She liked it, almost, being so tired and dazed each morning, standing behind Mr. Thomas when the tide flood rose in the creek and water seeped over the trenches and her footprints. Her boots were heavy, rubbed comforting at her ankles when she and the others went back to the yard.
They sat in the shade and wove baskets during off times, though Mr. Thomas said he had already collected antique fanner baskets to be used much later when the rice was harvested. Marietta and the others piled their baskets at home, waiting for summer when Aint Sister would try to sell them. The tourists stopped to watch a few times, but there weren’t so many people for Mr. Ray. Mr. Thomas wanted to stay in the rice fields each day, but now he went into the house all the time, and Mr. Ray was beside him, talking loudly.
“Drag hunting, fella told me about how they do it in Aiken,” Marietta heard him say when they passed. “It’s real English, people would love it. Hounds follow this fox-scented bag. We’d have to cut better trails through the woods and get some horses, but think of the money it could rake in!”
In the afternoon’s hot quiet, Marietta’s head nodded over her basket. “You sleep, heh?” Pinkie said.
“Calvin keep me up at night.”
“He get new tooth?” Mary asked.
“Wake up cry from dream.” She turned the basket around.
“Spirit hag he, heh?” Pinkie said. “Put broom cross you door, salt by where he sleep.”
“Nate don’t wake too, don’t feel hag ride he?” Mary said.
“Nate sleep past thunder, wind, cry,” Marietta said. “But Calvin sleep light like me.”
He woke again and again, threading his cry into the night, and she had to pull him close in the bed; if she let him fall from her chest back to the sheet, he woke again. She finally listened to Aint Sister and Pinkie and sprinkled salt on the sheet, pepper at the bedroom doorway. She laid the broom at the front door. And he did sleep through the night, but probably because she lay awake now, making sure her arm pressed his, seeing her own spirits.
She could smell the dust of the granary when they sat and made baskets. The dust kept rising, forming shapes, when she had to pass that doorway, and the mud of the rice fields stamped into faces below her boots and her hoe blade. She asked Aint Sister about the Africa woman, if her spirit walked, if she was the hag who rode Calvin, but Aint Sister just shook her head now. “Only man spirit here,” she said.
Marietta wondered how she had seen the man on the landing, smoking a cigar. Aint Sister had been born with a caul, she could see haints and spirit wanderers, but Marietta was afraid to ask her any more. She wanted to go into the House and look for the photo of Aint Sister; she was sure that her grandmother Christmas, maybe her mother October, and even the Africa woman were there, too.
But Laha left them each day in the yard, when she walked to the back entrance of the House. The kitchen was hers; no one else ever went inside. The wide piazzas had doors, and Marietta didn’t know where she could approach the House safely. It was May now, the rice was shooting up, and they would have to hoe the baby weeds that had sprouted along with the rice before the second flooding of the fields.
She had seen only two guests this week, two men, and Mr. Ray was smiling too much again, saying to Mr. Thomas when they walked the grounds, “We better pack em in this summer, damnit. The advertising better pay off. My wife and boy are coming next month, and I damn sure don’t want to be alone in the house with them and no paying guests. I got a lot of money in this, Thomas.”
He and Mr. Thomas left in his car, and Marietta stood up quickly. “I’ma go round back and ax Laha for drink,” she said, and Mary looked up.
“We suppose for bring drink, you know that,” she said.
“Mr. Thomas say nobody in kitchen not train,” Pinkie said. “Only Laha train.”
“I know,” Marietta said, and she hurried around the back, where the lawn led into paths and benches set where people could see faraway dips of blue water between the trees.
She slowed when she came to the back door, open and drifting smells of dinner. Was that Laha talking to herself, or was she talking to someone else? Mr. Ray say he wife and boy come next month. Marietta pressed against the wall. Laha began to sing softly. Laha sing, she lonesome. She only hear she voice.
Marietta slipped past the kitchen. The hallway was wood, with a long narrow rug down the center. She had no idea whether the photos would be on the second floor, but then she stopped, pressed herself against the wall and thought. When guest come, they want see some history first. They like for see photo soon. She tried to walk toward the front of the house without creaking the floor.
The living room—a chandelier with dangling pear-shaped drops, thick dark drapes framing the glass. She could see the small shapes of Pinkie and Mary down the sloping lawn. Laha always told everyone that she cleaned the house in the morning, just after breakfast, when the guests were usually out. But once she started dinner, the biggest meal, she never came out of the kitchen because she had so many pots going. Marietta breathed in the thick, slightly dusty drapes, but she didn’t see the Africa woman rise before the wall. She stay in field, Aint Sister say. In field or in she house. Why she haint round here now? Why she come see me? Marietta went out of the living room and toward the front door. They want see history first.
She smelled pipe smoke in the next doorway, and there it was—the small room lined with pictures and a few wooden tables with open books. She stared back at the faces.
Most of them were ghostly white, women with furry-looking eyebrows and collars high to their chins. Their hair puffed mushroomlike from their heads, and the men’s mustaches frowned at her, hiding their lips altogether. She circled the room too fast, looking out the window for Mr. Ray’s car, listening for footsteps. Dark faces, dark hands—she whirled around and saw them on the far wall.
Framed in gold, the pictures were in a group, and a hand-lettered card below them said, “The Rice Harvest—1854 to 1894.” Marietta leaned closer to see the faces in the largest photo. Ten or fifteen women, she couldn’t stop to count, stood on a flat boat among piles and piles of rice sheaves. Even in the dark photo, the rice looked golden. The faces were stern, unsmiling, above folded arms.
Where Aint Sister? She scanned the line of faces, looking for a small girl, and found her thin cheeks nearly hidden in the rice. Two pale women, with tiny straight noses and hair braided close to their heads, frowned from opposite sides of the boat, and when she peered even more closely, her stomach pressing against the wooden table, she saw another small face in the rice, darker. The other women were all dark, so dark that their features could barely be seen. Their eyes, of course, but no teeth.
Squinting, she panicked. How I find she? Africa woman? That light girl Aint Sister… how I know who for look? Then she saw the line of white, shaky letters all along the base of the photo. At first, she thought they were string, floating in the water, but now she saw names running all along the bottom. Eva—yes, the pale girl, and Christmas, the other child. She was cold with fear, turning away to look out the window for the car, then trying to find the names again. September and October, standing far apart but exactly the same, yes, the thin cheeks that she saw in Aint Sister, the faces new moons floating against the stalks of rice. Her grandmother, Christmas, a baby girl with her mouth open. And Bina—she couldn’t find the name and she started to shake, looked again and again.
Mary—Africa woman gave name Mary. She ain’t Bina for he. Mary. She looked up from that name and saw a woman whose head appeared to have been cut off above her forehead. Her scarf was so white it disappeared into the sky, and the light shone harshly on the side of her face so that one half was silver and the other half completely night-black, no eyes or mouth, like a mask had been placed over one side. Marietta stared at the
straight lip-corner in the sun, the clenched arms, and when she heard chunking car doors, she slipped on the rug, remembering to run.
The women on the boat—their heels pounding holes in the trenches; her heel slipped on the rug when she hurried down the hallway, sliding to stop before the kitchen. She couldn’t see Laha, so she ran out the back door and brushed the azaleas. She wasn’t even sure why she snatched a branch from the bush near her foot, not even sure why she pulled at the tough wood so hard it ripped into her palm, but when she came around the side, walking, the men were on their way past the tree where Pinkie and Mary sat, staring down at their work.
“You need something?” Mr. Ray asked, his face blank.
“Excuse me, sir,” she said. “I see azalea leaf stay green even when it fall, and I try fe put some in my basket, make different. Azalea and pine needle for color.”
“Fine,” Mr. Ray said. “They need pruning anyway.” He and Mr. Thomas went up the lawn and she sat, shaky, under the tree. Her stomach ached and she lifted her shoulders to let more air inside. “You gon get trouble,” Pinkie said angrily. “Trouble by youself.”
“Trouble made for man,” Marietta whispered, imitating Aint Sister. She looked at the deep green azalea leaves, pointy as knives. “Ain gon fall on ground, gon fall on somebody. See? She always say that, I listen. You tell Aint I listen.” Her hands shook when she picked up her basket.
“Mama,” Nate said. “Big dog.” He pointed down the road. “Dog.” He had been wanting a dog for weeks.
“We visit Pinkie dog tomorrow,” she said.
“Mama,” Calvin said, pulling at her bare feet. “Gran.”
Aint Sister sat smoking beside Marietta. Marietta watched the boys’ faces, their cheeks so wide she could see the edges rising even when the backs of their heads were to her, and she knew they were smiling. Their elbows were ghost-white with ash, their feet pale.
“Where they bury?” she whispered.
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