by Ninie Hammon
“She’s Jericho’s little girl, not mine, and Jericho’s not here.” That’s my mother’s voice. “She’s not supposed to be here until tomorrow. Jericho gets her on weekends and today’s Friday.”
The officer speaks slowly, the way you explain something to a small child. Or a drunk.
“Ma’am, I told you, we got a call from somebody who almost ran over her. She was just wandering down the roadside over by the trailer park.”
The other officer takes up the story. “She wouldn’t talk to us, wouldn’t say a word. We took her back to the trailer park and the neighbors said she was Little Dove’s and Jericho’s daughter. But Little Dove wasn’t home. She’s too little to be out wandering around, and your husband’s her father.”
“So why is this my problem? I told you Jericho’s not home, and I’m not that kid’s mama.”
“But ma’am, she has to stay somewhere, and her father—”
“She’s fine right here; we’ll see to her.” That’s Bobo’s voice. I can’t see her from where I’m standing but she sounds mad. "I'll see to her. Thank you for your trouble. It was right nice of you …”
I turn back to Windy. She’s so much smaller than I am, I squat down to be closer to her eye level.
“Windy.” Nothing. “Windy!”
The vacant look vanishes, and her eyes suddenly focus, like she was sleepwalking and my voice woke her. She starts to tremble, looking over her shoulder like somebody might be behind her.
“Annie, it was dark and I came in quiet so nobody saw me, and then … then I hid.”
“Hid where? Who were you hiding from?”
She starts to cry and I hear Bobo’s footsteps on the stairs. When she sees Windy, she shakes her head and mumbles under her breath. I catch words like “unfit mother” and “neglect.”
“Honey, we got to get you cleaned up,” she says to Windy. She turns to me. “Run upstairs to Windy’s room and get her some clean clothes.”
She takes Windy’s hand and leads her into the bathroom off her bedroom where there’s a big, claw-foot bathtub. I go looking for clothes. The morning sun has barely cleared the trees across the street, but already the third floor is stifling hot. It’s August; the temperature will top out this afternoon at over 100 degrees, and the big old house has no air conditioning.
I open the armoire where Mama keeps clothes for Windy to wear when she’s here—old, worn-out, hand-me-downs I have outgrown. It’s empty. I search the dresser and find a lone sundress with faded pink-and-yellow checks, with pink tie straps and a sunflower on the front. All the other drawers are empty. I can find no underwear, socks or shoes, and Windy’s too little to borrow anything of mine.
When I get back downstairs, Mama is standing in the bathroom doorway, leaning against the door frame. Bobo has Windy in the tub and is washing her hair.
“Jericho gets home, he’s taking her right back over to her mother’s.”
Just then Joel wails from the playroom. There’s a baby gate across the doorway, and he’s standing at it, holding onto the bars like a prisoner at his cell door.
“Mama, up!” he cries and holds his chubby arms out. Mama smiles and starts for the playroom.
“I don’t think I’d carry that baby down them stairs right now if I was you.” Bobo voice is stern. She pours water out of a glass over Windy’s hair to rinse it.
“What are you talking about? There’s nothing wrong with me.”
Their eyes meet. After a second or two, Mama drops her gaze, turns toward the playroom and walks a little unsteadily toward Joel.
“Come on, Sweetie. Mommy’ll hold your hand, and we’ll go downstairs. And you can go outside and play in the sandbox.”
“Ox!” Joel squeals.
She lifts him over the gate, sets his feet on the floor and takes his hand. He’s two years old, but unstable on his feet, still lurches like he’d just learned to walk.
When he sees me, his face is bathed in an angelic smile. “Na-nee! Na-nee!” He has just learned to say, “Annie.”
Mama holds firmly to the banister each step down the stairs.
Bobo helps Windy out of the tub. She’s scratched and bruised, but that’s nothing out of the ordinary. She always comes here with marks on her somewhere. What is strange is her silence. She doesn’t ever have much to say around Mama, but with Bobo and me she’s a little chatterbox.
“Honey, what’s the matter?” Bobo asks as she towels Windy’s long black hair dry. “Why was you out walking all by yourself?”
“I wasn’t s’posed to be home, and I knew Mama’d be mad so I was quiet. I hid in the dark where they couldn’t see me. But I could see them.”
The phone rings downstairs. After the third ring, Bobo figures out Mama must be outside and can’t hear it so she rushes into her bedroom to answer the extension.
“Put her dirty clothes in the hamper,” she says over her shoulder to me, “and help her get dressed.”
It doesn’t take long. There’s nothing to put on but the sundress and I tie the straps on her shoulders.
“Let’s play Barbies. You want to? You can have Superstar Barbie. Joel’s outside so he won’t bother us.”
When we get into the playroom, I change my mind.
“No, let’s play babies.” I hand her a baby doll and a blanket. “You can make her bed right here. Play like you have just one baby but I have twins …” I keep talking; Windy nods and doesn’t say much. When she does talk, she sounds like a wind-up toy.
Bobo comes to the door of the playroom. She has taken off her apron and changed into a Sunday dress. “That was the church. Selma didn’t show up to work at the bake sale, and they need me. I’ll be back before supper.”
Windy and I play with baby dolls for a while, then switch to Barbie dolls. The temperature rises in the playroom as the sun climbs higher in the sky.
“Annie, lunch is ready,” Mama calls from the foot of the stairs.
Windy and I go down through the cool, dark parlor, grateful to escape the heat on the second floor. By midafternoon the whole house will be sweltering. The ceiling fans in all the rooms on the first and second floors move the hot air around and make it bearable. But there’s no fan in the kitchen; when the afternoon sun fries the backyard on its way down the western sky, the kitchen is the hottest room in the house.
Windy hangs back, fearful, and I try to be especially bubbly and charming to keep my mother’s attention off her. Joel is in his high chair, smearing grape jelly on the tray. Mama has set out two plates with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and two glasses of milk. Windy doesn’t like milk and Mama knows it. If she doesn’t drink it, Mama will punish her. But when Mama’s not looking, I’ll drink it for her.
“You having a good time playing dolls?” Mama asks me. She never talks to Windy.
She turns and sets an empty glass down on the kitchen counter by the stove, next to a bottle of bourbon that only has about an inch left in the bottom. When she turns back around, I notice that her pale blue eyes look funny. I can see no color at all—just round black spots on the white—like the eyes of a fish.
I chatter on and on about nothing, Joel picks up a piece of bread and concentrates on poking a hole through it with his finger, and Mama wipes the countertops with a washcloth, making a stab at cleaning the kitchen.
“Can we play in the sprinkler in the backyard after lunch?”
“We’ll see.”
Mama pulls the black plastic bag full of trash out of the kitchen garbage can, cinches the bag closed with the pull ties and sets it by the back door to take outside to the big cans by the garage.
As Mama puts the new bag into the can, I see a stricken look suddenly appear on Windy’s face. Mama has her back to us and I mouth, “What?”
She just sits there, horrified, like a rabbit as a car bears down on it.
And then I smell it. Mama opens the storage closet across from the cellar door to put the box of trash bags away and she smells it, too. At first she thinks it’s Joel’s
diaper. He’s not potty trained yet. She steps to his chair, leans over him and sniffs. Then her eyes go to Windy, and as recognition dawns, a look of such raw revulsion appears on her face it terrifies me.
Windy has messed in her pants again. Except there are no pants. She’s wearing no panties under her sundress.
She grabs Windy by the arm and almost dislocates her shoulder yanking her out of the chair. Windy has had diarrhea. There’s a puddle where she was sitting, and when Mama pulls her out of the chair, it smears across the seat and runs down her legs onto the floor.
“You little Indian maggot!” Mama screams, her voice harsh and shrill. It startles Joel, and he begins to cry. “You filthy little vermin; you’re not fit to be around human beings.” She’s holding Windy by the arm the way you’d hold a dead mouse by the tail. “And I have to clean your crap!”
Suddenly, the diarrhea hits Windy again. As it pours with a gurgling sound down her legs, Mama screams, “No! Stop it! Don’t …”
She looks around frantically, trying to figure out what to do with the erupting mess. Her eye falls on the empty garbage can. She yanks Windy off her feet and plops her down into it. Windy’s so short the can comes up past her waist.
“Look at the mess you’ve made! You’re a disgusting little Indian pig!”
Joel is frightened, crying hard now, holding his sticky little hands over his ears. Mama takes a step toward him when the bubble and splatter sound of diarrhea launches a new cloud of putrid stench into the air.
“Aaaggghh!” Mama shrieks a cry of inarticulate fury. “You nasty rat!”
She turns and grabs the plastic garbage bag, pulls it over Windy’s shoulders and cinches it closed around her neck so that nothing but her head is sticking out. Then she grabs hold of Windy through the plastic and lifts her, bag and all, out of the can. She takes two steps to the open storage closet, tosses Windy onto the floor with a thump and slams the door shut.
She puts out her hand to steady herself on the door frame and surveys the disaster in her kitchen. A crying toddler and an 11-yearold are both staring at her with wide, frightened eyes.
“What are you gawking at?” she snarls at me, then brushes past me and fumbles around trying to unhook Joel’s tray so she can lift him out of the chair.
I realize how unstable she is.
“Let me do it, Mama.” I pull the tray away and pick up the frightened little boy. He wraps his arms tight around my neck and presses his sticky face against my shoulder.
“Go get him cleaned up. And be careful! Don’t step in that crap all over the floor.”
I make my way around the puddles of diarrhea on the linoleum and take Joel into the bathroom off the parlor. I wash the jelly and peanut butter off his hands and face and out of his red curls. He immediately stops crying, and his sunny smile reappears between his chubby cheeks.
“I rudge jew,” he says happily. I think that means “I love you.”
I carry him back into the dining room and stop at the kitchen door with him perched on my hip. Mama is on her knees on the floor wiping the puddles of lumpy brown liquid with a handful of paper towels.
“It’s time for Joel’s nap,” she says when she sees me. “Give him a Sippee cup of cold water—I’ve got some in the fridge—and put him to bed while I clean this mess!”
I edge around where Mama is cleaning, go to the refrigerator and get one of his cups out. I say nothing. What is there to say?
When Joel was born, Mama and Jericho converted the big walk-in storage closet next to their bedroom into a temporary nursery. Mama and I’d put up a fire truck wallpaper border in it to make it cozy, even though Jericho had said it was stupid to waste it there, that it wouldn’t be long before Joel was in his own room upstairs. But Joel hadn’t matured like other babies. He couldn’t walk until he was 18 months old, didn’t say a word until he was almost 2.
Now, at two, he still can’t say more than a handful of words, and he’s way too big for the baby bed. But Mama keeps him in the nursery anyway. She doesn’t think he’s ready to be in a room by himself. And his continued presence in the room next to theirs has been added to the long and ever-growing list of things Mama and Jericho fight about.
It’s relatively cool in Joel’s room. A big honeysuckle trellis covers the back wall of the house, shading the bedroom window from the scorching sun. I turn the fan in the bedroom ceiling on high, then sit down in Bobo’s antique spindle rocker and snuggle with Joel while he slurps on his cup.
Taking care of Joel is the greatest joy of my life. I look after him so well, in fact, that Jericho calls me a “half-pint Mama.” My mother doesn’t like it when he says that. I love to rock Joel to sleep. He’s so warm and soft in my arms, a giant baby doll with chubby little arms and legs and curly hair that tickles my nose. Usually, I sing to him, but today I have no voice. He falls asleep quickly anyway. Bobo says none of her babies were as easy as Joel. I lay him down in his bed in the nursery and leave his door open to keep the room as cool as possible, though the heat doesn’t seem to bother him; neither does noise. Once he’s asleep, even Jericho and Mama’s fights don’t wake him up.
Then I go upstairs to my bedroom and sit on the edge of my bed. I can’t distract myself anymore with Joel, can’t back away from what happened in the kitchen like you back away when a fire’s too hot. And the image of Windy with the garbage sack tied around her neck gobbles up my whole mind.
She’s downstairs in that hot closet—in a plastic bag! She must be melting. I can’t let her stay down there like that! But what can I do? How can I help her?
The vivid memory video stopped abruptly. No warning. It was there and then it wasn’t, like leaving a movie before it was over. I had no idea what happened next, but I did know how the movie ended. Dusty told me about the morning the police brought Windy to our house when they couldn’t find her mother. Windy died that afternoon!
I sat on the edge of my bed, holding the diary written by the child who’d sat in the same spot 25 years ago trying to figure out a way to help her little sister. I desperately wanted to believe that the nightmare sequence I’d just witnessed was as imaginary as the spiders and the dead bird, but I knew that wasn’t true. My memories were real; the diary proved I wasn’t imagining my mother’s abuse. My mind might be churning out hallucinations like Oscar Mayer turning out wieners, but I was certain my mother really had done that to Windy.
Bobo called to me from the foot of the stairs. “Anne, supper’s ready!”
I realized that long shadows had reached out across my room. Time didn’t mean anything anymore. A whole afternoon could pass between one heartbeat and the next; a single painful moment could last all day. I got up off the bed and went downstairs. Bobo was bustling around the kitchen putting food on the table.
“Julia left us a plate of that taco salad she makes with that cheese on the top that’s not really cheese—the stuff in a box, what’s it called?”
“Velveeta.”
“Yeah, Velveeta. I wouldn’t let her put none of them Mexican peppers in it though, those jalapeños--pronounced ja-LAP-a-noes. One of them little things got under my teeth the last time she made it and like to set my whole mouth on fire.”
Bobo was uncharacteristically cheery and it occurred to me that her joviality was probably tied to catching the sheriff and me playing kissy face in my bedroom. But that was a lifetime ago.
“I wouldn’t let her use my good butcher knife to cut up them peppers neither. That hot stuff’s like acid. It’ll eat the sharp edge of a blade quicker’n …” She stopped when she got a good look at my face and the smile drained off hers. “What’s the matter, Anne?”
“I remember what Mama did to Windy the day Windy died.”
The handful of silverware Bobo was holding clattered to the floor in noisy protest. She reached over to the table for support and eased herself down into a chair.
“Tell me what you remember, Sugar.” I could hear the dread in her voice.
“I remember the police
bringing Windy here all bunged up and upset, and you gave her a bath and then went to the bake sale at church. And I remember sitting at the table about to bite into my peanut butter and jelly sandwich when Windy suddenly had diarrhea and Mama put her in a garbage bag and threw her into the closet. That’s what I remember!”
The volume of my voice had risen with every word; by the end I was shouting. An emotion stronger than anything I’d ever felt in my life surged through me with every thump-thump of my heart; a bright white light bloomed in my head like a flare. I had never been so furious!
“Mama put a sick, traumatized eight-year-old child into a garbage bag with her own crap and shut her up in a closet!” In crazed fury, I grabbed a glass off the table and slammed it down on the floor. It shattered like a small hand grenade. “My mother, your daughter, abused …” I stumbled and stuttered, unable to find words graphic enough to describe what she’d done. Abuse was way too tame.
“You didn’t see the look on Windy’s face when she was standing in the doorway of my bedroom. She was terrified. Her mother’d run off and left her and then the police brought her here—and dumped her smack into the middle of a real-life, Technicolor nightmare.”
I grabbed another glass and exploded it on the floor with such force that shards of glass flew out from it like shrapnel. Bobo sat very still, looking up at me with sad eyes.
“What was wrong with Mama? How could she--how could anybody--do something like that? Who was that woman I thought was my mother all these years, that imposter, that monster in a human being suit?”
I grabbed a plate and lifted it above my head. Bobo flinched.
And the rage drained out of me like water out a hole in a bucket. I placed the plate back on the table carefully, my hands shaking.
Annie, I’d like you to meet the Boogie Man. His name’s Mama.
“I’m sorry Bobo,” I whispered, suddenly tired, exhausted. “I’ll clean this mess. Just sit still; don’t move or you’ll cut yourself.”
I walked carefully through the war zone, stepping around the silverware Bobo had dropped. Pieces of broken glass crunched under the soles of my Reeboks. I opened the closet to get the broom and dust pan.