In the bright light of the bedroom, there’s nothing to be read in it. Too old. Too long gone. She finds a slip of paper in the back that tells her just how old. Tuesday, 3rd Day August, then a 1 and half of what must be an 8, with the rest of the date faded away. Sold to Mister Bascombe Wade of Willow Springs, one negress answering to the name Sa … Water damage done removed the remainder of that line with the yellowish and blackened stains spreading down and taking out most of the others as well: Law … knowledge … witness … inflicted … nurse. It’s all she can pick out until she gets to the bottom for the final words: Conditions … tender … kind.
She’s staring at the name and trying to guess. Sarah, Sabrina, Sally, Sadie, Sadonna—what? A loss that she can’t describe sweeps over her—a missing key to an unknown door somewhere in that house. The door to help Baby Girl. She thinks. Samantha, Sarena, Salinda—them old-fashioned names. Sandra Bell? Sapphron? She’d once met a woman long ago called Saville. She runs them through over and over until her head aches. The paper, itself, means nothing to Miranda. All Willow Springs knows that this woman was nobody’s slave. But what was her name? And what had been written here so that John-Paul hid it away? Law. Knowledge. Witness. Inflicted. Nurse. Conditions. Tender. Kind.
Miranda goes out to the balcony to take in deep breaths of fresh air. She gazes east through the top of the trees, letting her mind clear itself with the endless blue sky. She closes her eyes and runs her fingers over the crumbling paper, and all she sees is a vast gray wall. She tries again and fails. She scolds herself for not knowing better: a gift is something that’s given, not demanded. Miranda begins scrubbing floors and thinking, Samarinda. Washing out cabinets and thinking, Savannah. Clearing fireplace ashes and thinking, Sage Marie. Making her supper, she throws a few crumbs of cornbread to her rooster, can you tell me, Cicero? The dishes get dried until they shine—Samora? Over and over until she goes to bed to get down on her stiffened knees and pray to the Father and Son as she’d been taught. But she falls asleep, murmuring the names of women. And in her dreams she finally meets Sapphira.
It wasn’t quite a full moon, but it was extremely bright coming into the bedroom and it spilled across your body, highlighting even the tiniest hairs on your chest. Your right arm was thrown across your face as if protecting yourself from its rays. I’d been lying there for hours, and I wondered why it didn’t wake you up since you were a much lighter sleeper than me. Then I thought about how tired you’d looked that evening, a resigned tired that came from being confused and unsure, and it made my heart ache. Could it be I wasn’t as careful at the table as I thought? Trying to hide the fact that I wasn’t looking straight into a plate, my water glass, the curve of a spoon. Perhaps you wondered why even the clock face was covered. But I would rather have you confused than risking your life in the middle of The Sound. I didn’t want to lose you, I didn’t even want to think about losing you. The bridge would be finished in a few more days—you just weren’t bred with the type of patience found in Willow Springs. Time, for its own sake, was never a major factor here. The crops, the weather, the seasons—they all controlled behavior much more than your elaborate digital watch.
I took it off the night stand to peer at the time: 2:14 A.M. If I pressed a certain button, I’d get the readings for the large cities all over the world—even Beijing, you were once so proud of telling me. But it was the same moon they saw in China, wasn’t it? Just the other side of the moon. It was bathing the floor in patches of luminescent cream that eventually washed up along the dresser to the bottom edge of the mirror. I lay there staring at that mirror for a long time. When the moonlight had cut it in two with a jagged diagonal line, I quietly got up and removed the sheet. My heart was pounding, but I was more determined than afraid. Whatever I saw, I saw. And if it was a monster reflected back at me, I was still going to stand there and face it. Hallucinations are simply not real. The mirror could take in my head down to the top of my stomach. I, the mirror, and my reflection were all bathed in that brilliant cream. My face was no longer distorted; in fact, along with my neck, breasts, arms, and midriff, it was perfectly smooth. Where were the welts? Right there on my arms, shoulders, and chest when I looked down my body, but nowhere to be found when I took in my mirrored reflection. So the mirror was never to be trusted. Trust only your natural eyesight. Only what you literally see is real.
And I saw that the fine welts spread over my body had changed in color and texture. They were like clear water blisters, softened and jelled. I held my arm up in the moonlight and touched one. It started to move. A pulsing motion as if it was breathing. And then ever so slowly, it began to sink under my skin and disappear. I grabbed the edge of the dresser to keep myself from trembling as my stomach started to heave. With my left hand braced against the dresser, I touched another welt. The same thing happened, but I did not scream. Not with you there behind me, not with those watery welts pulsing like a living heart before slowly sinking under the surface of my skin.
I wasn’t asleep. The room was too bright, and the mattress kept shifting slightly. It wouldn’t have bothered most people, but I was normally a light sleeper—and times like this, I could hardly sleep at all—so each turn you made would momentarily jar me awake. I didn’t roll over and ask you what was wrong, because you would have lied. Just like your grandmother was lying about a special cleaning polish under the covered mirrors. Why, I didn’t know. And there was more than that going on which was being kept from me. I was supposed to look at those dark circles under your eyes and those awful welts on your body and believe that you were well? That you would think me so stupid angered me. What scared me was that you might know it was some terrible illness; and if that was, indeed, the case, why weren’t you sharing it with me?
It must be something very serious to keep you awake like that. I watched you get up and uncover the mirror. And you just stood there, staring at yourself—thinking what? You’d bring one arm up to your face and then another, turning them over slowly. Your body suddenly went rigid, and it stayed rigid when you got back into bed. You lay on your stomach with the pillow crushed between your fists and just shook. One of the hardest things in my life was not to reach over and hold you in my arms when you started crying. But you were trying to muffle the sound, so my comfort was not what you wanted. I didn’t know what you wanted, or what you even needed, but I knew what I was going to do. It was an issue of priorities. I’m getting up at daybreak, I thought, and I’m going to repair that boat. I’m going to put the oars into the oarlocks and begin to row across The Sound. That much I can do for her. And at the point in time when I can feel those oars between my hands, whether I make it or not won’t be the issue. And if the boat begins to sink—I looked at my hands lit up by the moonlight—I’ll place them in the water and start to swim. Yes, I would begin to swim. And at that point in time, finishing would not be the issue.
Miranda opens door upon door upon door. Door upon door upon door. She asks each door the same thing: Tell me your name. And her answer is to have it swing open so she’s facing another. She feels the weight of her years with each question, the heaviness of each ache, each sorrow, she had learned to step over in order to get the strength to go on. They all build up on her shoulders, bending her back and buckling her legs, until she’s forced to open yet more doors with nothing put pure will. ’Cause her fingers done gave out long before, cramped and trembling; her arm stopped obeying her to lift itself up in its joint a hundred doors ago. And when she feels that even her will done run out, that she just can’t turn another knob—to reach out and do it—she finds herself in a vast space of glowing light.
Daughter. The word comes to cradle what has gone past weariness. She can’t really hear it ’cause she’s got no ears, or call out ’cause she’s got no mouth. There’s only the sense of being. Daughter. Flooding through like fine streams of hot, liquid sugar to fill the spaces where there was never no arms to hold her up, no shoulders for her to lay her head down and cry on, no body to ever t
urn to for answers. Miranda. Sister. Little Mama. Mama Day. Melting, melting away under the sweet flood waters pouring down to lay bare a place she ain’t known existed: Daughter. And she opens the mouth that ain’t there to suckle at the full breasts, deep greedy swallows of a thickness like cream, seeping from the corners of her lips, spilling onto her chin. Full. Full and warm to rest between the mounds of softness, to feel the beating of a calm and steady heart. She sleeps within her sleep. To wake from one is to be given back ears as the steady heart tells her—look past the pain; to wake from the other is to stare up at the ceiling from the mahogany bed and to know that she must go out and uncover the well where Peace died.
Sitting off forgotten in the far edge of the garden, it’s covered with almost a hundred years’ worth of rotted moss and tangled creepers that done come up and died over and over to form a rich bed for the deep green patches of ground holly circling its base. A few scattered runners of wild ginger done taken root among the holly, them double pairs of heart-shaped leaves twining themselves up along the hewn stones toward the mouth of the well. The mortar is crumbling, the stones worn smooth by the weather and time, but the wooden lid is still bolted tight. Miranda has to lean on the crowbar to undo the first set of rusted spikes that John-Paul pounded and cemented into the holes he drilled by hand. She’s thankful he ain’t thought to cement the whole thing over, it woulda taken her a sledgehammer then. The work that took him days, takes her hours, each spike coming loose with the determination it was put in with. A tearing, scraping sound as the metal threads give way, splintering the wood and dusting her arms with dry flecks of cement. Using the loosened board ends for leverage makes the second set easier, the third easier still, until the lid flies off, tumbling end over end, ripping and bruising the slender ginger vines as it crashes to the ground.
Miranda’s pulse is racing for a good many reasons as she grasps the edge of the well and peers down. A bottomless pit. Foul air hits her in the face, but she holds on waiting for it to clear. Then, taking a deep breath, she looks down again, squinting her eyes to try and find the surface of the water. It’s slimy and covered with floating pools of fungus when she finally makes it out. There ain’t much chance of seeing through to the bottom, of even seeing her face, ’cause the sunlight is swallowed long before it reaches that far. Look past the pain. But there ain’t nothing down there and this looking is straining her eyes. Something she’s not doing right. Refusing to let go of the edge, Miranda closes her eyes and stands there, her feet tangled in the ground holly, her stomach pressed against the heart-shaped ginger. And when it comes, it comes with a force that almost knocks her on her knees. She wants to run from all that screaming. Echoing shrill and high, piercing her ears. But with her eyes clamped shut, she looks at the sounds. A woman in apricot homespun: Let me go with peace. And a young body falling, falling toward the glint of silver coins in the crystal clear water. A woman in a gingham shirtwaist: Let me go with Peace. Circles and circles of screaming. Once, twice, three times peace was lost at that well. How was she ever gonna look past this kind of pain?
And then she opens her eyes on her own hands. Hands that look like John-Paul’s. Hands that would not let the woman in gingham go with Peace. Before him, other hands that would not let the woman in apricot homespun go with peace. No, could not let her go. In all this time, she ain’t never really thought about what it musta done to him. Or him either. It had to tear him up inside, knowing he was willing to give her anything in the world but that. And maybe he shoulda, ’cause he lost her anyway. But she wasn’t sent out here for that—the losing was the pain of her childhood, the losing was Candle Walk, and looking past the losing was to feel for the man who built this house and the one who nailed this well shut. It was to feel the hope in them that the work of their hands could wipe away all that had gone before. Those men believed—in the power of themselves, in what they were feeling.
And now there is that boy. Miranda looks down at her hands again. In all her years she could count on half of her fingers folks she’d met with a will like his. He believes in himself—deep within himself—’cause he ain’t never had a choice. And he keeps it protected down in his center, but she needs that belief buried in George. Of his own accord he has to hand it over to her. She needs his hand in hers—his very hand—so she can connect it up with all the believing that had gone before. A single moment was all she asked, even a fingertip to touch hers here at the other place. So together they could be the bridge for Baby Girl to walk over. Yes, in his very hands he already held the missing piece she’d come looking for.
Miranda fights back a heavy inner trembling. She needed George—but George did not need her. The Days were all rooted to the other place, but that boy had his own place within him. And she sees there’s a way he could do it alone, he has the will deep inside to bring Baby Girl peace all by himself—but, no, she won’t even think on that. Her head was already filled with too much sorrow, too much loss. No, she’d think on some way to get him to trust her, by holding her hand she could guide him safely through that extra mile where the others had stumbled. But a mile was a lot to travel when even one step becomes too much on a road you ain’t ready to take.
I could see the flames and smoke as soon as I passed the stores at the bridge junction. A handful of people had already started working with three large vats of tar being melted over the open fires—and they were feeding the flames with the chopped remnants of my boat. In the early light, they all looked like specters behind the wavering air from the bubbling tar. They ignored me while measuring and cutting planks, sorting through piles of nails. I finally understood the phrase blind fury. A dozen trees felled by the hurricane and they used that boat. Deliberately used it. I stood there with my fists clenched, the blood pounding in my head. Where to strike out first?
“The weather’s cleared, George, so we’ll be speeding things up.”
I was too angry to even look at Dr. Buzzard. He took me off to one side, but I didn’t want to hear anything about their plans. I could have smashed each one of those fools, and I wanted nothing more than to get the hell off of that island. It was like he read my mind.
“Your way,” he said gently, “woulda been suicide. Our way, that same boat is certain to get you over.”
“When? Next month? I don’t have that much time.”
“Boy, you got more time than you think.”
“I’m sick and tired of being called a boy—and of being treated like one. If it was going to be suicide, it’s my damn life. You had no right to do this.”
“It’s your life, but it wasn’t your boat. And I guess folks figured they had a right to do with their property what they wanted. But then you got some rights in this matter too. You got the right to hear why even if you had gotten across, it wouldna done you or Cocoa a bit of good.”
What do you do when someone starts telling you something that you just cannot believe? You can walk away. You can stand there and challenge him. Or in my case, you can fight the urge to laugh if it wasn’t so pathetic: the grizzled old man with his hat of rooster feathers and his necklace of bones, shifting his feet and clearing his throat as he struggled to provide me with the minute details. I had stopped listening after the first incident about some woman named Frances who Junior Lee used to live with, because I was thinking that since my one hope for deliverance from the acute madness of this place—a madness exemplified by his story—was in front of me, going up in smoke, I would do the only thing left for me to do: help work on that bridge. Snakeroot. Powdered ashes. Loose hair. Chicken blood. I would work until I dropped to get you out of there. It seemed as if he was finally finished, and I thanked him for telling me all of that, anxious to get away from him and start. He put his hand on my forearm.
“I told Mama Day that this wouldn’t do no good. I’m really sorry, George.”
“Not half as sorry as I am.”
“Naw, I’m doubly sorry. ’Cause I know how serious this thing is that you can’t believe.”
No, I think it was when I managed to walk into the kitchen with Grandma’s back to me at the sink. It seemed she had never let that water stop running or her voice give out from the countless choruses of “No Ways Tired.” She had a lovely voice, a clear soprano, which was becoming hoarse and cracked. But glancing over her shoulder at me dropping into the chair, she never stopped singing as she came over and cradled my head to her chest, stroking my hair before gently lifting my chin. Reflected off the clear brown of her irises, I finally saw my face in a mirror that could never lie—the sunken cheeks, the deep black circles under my eyes—flooded with a pity so intense it would have been cheapened by tears.
When I left at dawn you were sleeping, and when I returned late that evening, you were asleep again, but I was relieved to see that the welts had disappeared. I was filthy and my swollen knuckles were caked with tar, so I tried to bend over to kiss you lightly on the side of the forehead without touching you, and there was the most awful smell. At first I thought it was coming from my own body, but it was worse than sweat. A kind of rotting sweetness that hangs in the air when you pass a pile of garbage on a hot day. I frowned and put my hand on your forehead in spite of the tar. No high fever, just barely warm. You murmured and turned over fully on your back, your arms spread out, so I could see your entire face. She couldn’t have looked like that this morning. I turned up the kerosene lamp. Yes, it was still the face of a cadaver. It had always been long and thin, but you seemed to have lost five pounds in the course of a day. Your cheekbones pressing hard against the sunken flesh that was turning a sickly pale, the purplish black circles blending almost perfectly with your closed eyelashes. My throat tightened at the thickness and beauty of those lashes, the one remaining feature that I could recognize.
Mama Day Page 34