All the Forgivenesses

by Elizabeth Hardinger

  Sometimes I thought about my Bible stories from back home, though I’d forgotten some of the names and things, and Mama never talked about them no more. One day it dawned on me—when Mama used to hallelujah the Lord, it was when she was with Grandma Sweet and the aunts and her friends. I wondered, would things have been different if we hadn’t have moved like we done? But then I’d been taught not to have idle thoughts like that. My aunt Birddella always said, “If wishes was horses, beggars would ride.”

  The spring of 1915 was when Alta Bea got her diploma. Seemed like after high school was over, she calmed down some. Wasn’t nobody teasing her no more, I reckon. She’d growed to be a tall one, not pretty but the kind of a woman people called handsome, and seemed like she wasn’t fidgety all the time. All she talked about was going to college, and how maybe in college, school would finally get hard enough to where she would like it. I couldn’t hardly picture what college was even like—it was hard to imagine growed people setting and doing sums. But Alta Bea, she talked about it like it was Heaven on earth, and she couldn’t hardly wait to get there.

  That year Dacia turned nine, Opal got to be six and a half, and the twins turned five. William and Buck had growed into men, and they kept on hiring theirself out whenever they could. They wasn’t home in them years but once in a while. As for me, I turned fifteen.

  That was when Mama come up pregnant again. Her rash come back permanent, she started having the bloody runs, she wouldn’t hardly eat, and seemed like she didn’t hardly sleep. She never got out of bed again. It happened fast, seemed like.

  Chapter 6

  Daddy limped out of the bedroom. He looked in my direction and motioned with his head toward the bedroom door. As he crossed the front room, a high-pitched sound come out of his throat, like a kitten mewling, but he never said nothing. He grabbed his hat down off the hook and left the house. After he clomped down the steps, I went into the bedroom.

  Dacia was setting at the foot of the bed. Mama had her eyes closed.

  “You finally ready to have the baby?” I said to Mama.

  She shook her head and pointed at the bed next to her, and I set down. I leaned over and touched the back of my hand to her cheek. Hot.

  She sucked in her chest and let out a breath. “Lord’s coming.”

  “No, he ain’t,” I said.

  She frowned, and a twinge went over her face.

  “You’re just having a baby,” I said. “You done it six times before.” Lord forgive me, I forgot Timmy.

  “You’re just having a baby,” Dacia said.

  Mama’s face wrinkled, and she coughed for a while. It made me breathless. I petted her arm. Pretty soon she rasped out, “Help me up.”

  I reached around her and tried to scoot her up in the bed, but she was deadweight. Didn’t have no strength in her arms or legs, seemed like. So I took aholt of Daddy’s pillow and stuffed it low behind her back, and it raised her up a little.

  She set there and caught her breath. I seen she had a crack in her lower lip. I dipped my finger in the dish—the butter was half melted by now—and dotted her lips with it. I touched the cracked place two times. Her breath was light on my finger.

  She closed her eyes. “Now listen.”

  “Wait, Mama, wait for the doctor. Daddy—he—” Truth was, I didn’t know where Daddy’d went, but I wanted to think he went for the doctor. I wanted Mama to think so, too.

  “Listen,” she said again. “I need.”

  “What, Mama? I’ll fetch it.” This from Dacia. She petted Mama’s feet.

  I started to get up, but Mama raised up her hand and half-pointed at me. “The children.”

  “I know, Mama.” I closed my eyes for a minute. I knowed what she meant—I was to take care of the children if she died. I felt wroth—I wanted to say, “Who you think’s been looking after them all this time?” That shames me, but it’s the truth.

  A sound come out from between her lips, a kind of buzz. “Cold. I feel cold coming up my legs.”

  “You want more covers?” Dacia said.

  I started to fold the quilt over Mama’s feet, but she gathered up all her strength and set up straight.

  “You can’t count.” She was trying to holler, I could tell, but it come out more like braying. “You can’t count on him.”

  “I know, Mama.”

  She fell back. “Lay down with me.”

  “She means me,” Dacia said, and I said, “No, she don’t.”

  “Quit it,” Mama said.

  I reacted first and laid myself in between Mama and the wall, spooning her, and I put my arms around her. Dacia, she reached over and pinched my thigh, but I never moved. She give me an evil look, and her nine year old.

  “Pray for me,” Mama whispered.

  “And say what?” My voice cracked.

  “Come soon, Lord. Come soon.”

  “I can’t say that. I ain’t gonna say that.”

  From the front room there was a bump, and one of the twins cried.

  “Go see to that,” I said to Dacia.

  “You ain’t my mama,” she said.

  “Please, girls, please,” Mama said, mostly breath.

  Dacia growled like a pup and give me a dirty look. Then she slid off the bed and left the room.

  Mama murmured. Her shoulders slumped down, and she just shrunk into herself. She moaned ever little bit. I felt like I was about to fall in the crack between the bed and the wall, and I scooted her and me both toward the middle of the bed. Through her nightdress and mine I felt the heat she was giving off. I couldn’t tell if her fever was worse than before. Seemed like it.

  Slowly it got dark as we laid there. In the night, I thought I heard a sharp sound, like the echo of a bird’s cry from a far-off river, but I couldn’t quite make it out, and it didn’t last but a few seconds.

  * * *

  I woken up again when Mama’s moaning all the sudden stopped. A strip of yellow light glowed at the edges of the window curtain. The sun was fixing to come up. I’d never aimed to fall asleep, and her so sick in the night.

  Now I was grateful her pain was easing up. I whispered, “Thank you, Lord,” and I scooted closer to her. Lord help me, I still thought she was having the baby.

  I felt a crick in my neck, and I rooted around in the pillow till it laid better.

  Directly a sound come out of Mama’s throat like a dry gourd clattering in the wind, and the hair on my arms rose up. I felt the need to relieve myself—I always feel that way when I get chilled—but I ignored it.

  I put my mind in a place to where I could whisper to her, “Wait, Mama, Daddy’s coming with the doctor.”

  Again the rattle come. I squeezed my pillow with both hands and closed my eyes shut. My teeth started clicking. That sound coming out of her, it wasn’t right. I was only fifteen year old, but even I knowed it wasn’t right. Mama’d asked me to pray for her, so I started to. But I never got no futher than “Lord—” I couldn’t say no more. That sound she was making, it wasn’t right. My mouth filled up with drool.

  From the front room come the sound of hip bone against bare floor—one of the children turning over and sliding off the pallet. A sigh, and I knowed it was one of the girls settling herself back down. I hoped it wasn’t Dacia. If she woken up, she was like to get up and run into the bedroom and start jumping on the bed and bounce Mama around and get her out of breath. Dacia’d no more listen to me than she’d fly to the moon.

  Then Mama let out a jagged breath you could hear the water inside of. I laid there shivering and waited. I pressed against her so she would know I was there. I never shifted to look her in the face—I told myself she couldn’t see me nohow. Seemed like I was counting ever breath I took in.

  Don’t you do this to me come out of me. Looking back, I don’t know if I said it out loud or just prayed it in my mind, or if it come out of my very skin and bones, or if it come out of the air around the bed or out of the walls or out of the wooden box she kept the good linens in. I don’t
know who I was talking to, but don’t you do this to me was in that room, sure enough.

  My teeth was chattering now, and I felt bile in my throat, oily. Where I was, where my mind was, was someplace to where I couldn’t let loose a tear.

  The house was quiet. I waited a long time. “Don’t you do this to me,” I said, or I heard. But I knowed.

  I told myself I didn’t care if I wet the bed, I wasn’t going to leave her. But directly I couldn’t hold it no more, and I wrapped my shawl around me and crept out to the backhouse. It’s something I’ll never forget, the feeling of my water—burning hot—as it passed out of me that morning, like I’d been wading waist-deep in a river colder than I ever been in before.

  When I come back it was done. Mama, she was in Glory.

  * * *

  William and Buck, they was thrashing wheat twenty or thirty miles away when Mama died, and they rode back home two to a horse. Got there in the afternoon and went looking for Daddy.

  It must have been Opal went over and told Alta Bea and them late in the day. Pretty soon they come over bringing short ribs and noodles, a tomato pie, and two loaves of bread. Alta Bea’s father helped carry the food, but he never come in the house. I heard Dacia say, “Mama’s went to Heaven,” when Alta Bea and her mama walked in.

  Mrs. Snedeker stayed in the front room with the children, and Alta Bea come into the bedroom, where I was setting with Mama.

  I looked up when she come in, and I said to her, “She told me the other day, said, ‘Bertie honey, we just go and go and go and go, till we can’t go no more.’”

  Alta Bea walked over to the bed and took my hands.

  I looked down at the mound our hands made. “I need help washing her.”

  Her eyes went to the door, like she was about to call someone in. Then she turned back. “Me?”

  “Ain’t hard,” I said. “I watched Mama do it back home. Tiny as she’s gotten, won’t take but two.”

  “Don’t you imagine your father? Or your brothers? Won’t they want to?” She started gently to pull our hands apart, but I held on. “I mean, shouldn’t it be family?”

  “I won’t make you, if you don’t want to,” I said.

  She didn’t say nothing.

  “Would you go fill the dish bowl. Just use what’s left in the kettle.”

  When she pulled her hands away, mine felt like they was vibrating. I slipped off the bed and turned around to face Mama. Alta Bea hurried out the door.

  Mama laid there face up in her nightdress. There was some brown pieces on the pillow next to her head. I figured she must have throwed up in the night. I brushed it away with a rag.

  After a little bit Alta Bea come back with the bowl and set it on the table next to the bed.

  “Help me move her over,” I said.

  I stood at Mama’s head, and Alta Bea moved to the feet. She pursed her lips and took shallow breaths, I reckoned because of the smell. I’d been in the room a couple hours, and I couldn’t smell it no more.

  “A little at a time.” I leaned over and slipped my right hand under the ribcage, and my left hand under the head and neck. Alta Bea did the same with the lower part of the body. Mama was stiff, like they get.

  “Now scoot her this way.” Inch by inch we moved the body to the open edge of the bed, the nightdress trailing along. We might could have pulled on the gown itself to move the body, but it was so threadbare it would have tore.

  “Hold on.” Now I picked up a clean sheet, raised it over my head, and shook it out. The fabric bunched up, and Alta Bea took aholt of it and pulled it free. She picked up the other corner, and together we spread it on the bed, between Mama and the wall. Alta Bea was doing real good. I was proud of her.

  I wiped my forehead on my sleeve. Then I leaned over, took aholt of the nightdress, and tore it down its entire length. In the quiet room, the sound seemed loud, and out of the corner of my eye I seen Alta Bea jump a little. I spread the gown apart and then ripped open the sleeves, too, and laid them like wings on the bed. Mama looked gray all over.

  Alta Bea took a quick look then. I seen her eyes linger on Mama’s stretch marks on her belly and bosoms. The marks was different colors—silver, gray, pink—depending on which baby they was from. They silvered over time. I reckoned Alta Bea hadn’t never saw stretch marks, and I started to explain but the breath wasn’t there to.

  I wet a rag in the bowl and wrung it out—the water made a certain dribbly sound I still remember—and I passed the rag over Mama’s face and neck. Again I dipped the cloth, twisted it, and washed her arms and upper body. Alta Bea stared at the wall next to the bed.

  “Good thing her eyes is staying shut, they’s like to open,” I said, or maybe I just thought it. I washed the belly. The baby was still in there. I petted it.

  I’d already put the cotton in her so Alta Bea wouldn’t have to see me do that. But when I looked up at her, I seen she was getting green. “Can you bear up? If it bothers you—”

  A sound come out of her. It wasn’t a word or a cry, nor an “oh,” nor any other sound I’d ever heard coming from her. “Alta Bea?” I said.

  “I was thinking about—” she said, almost in a whisper.

  I waited.

  She was making tears. “It’s stupid. You won’t even remember, but I . . .”

  “What?”

  “You and I, we were folding sheets outside. I’d brought you a book. It was raining.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I always seem to say the wrong thing, the stupid thing.”

  I did remember—it was the day when she told me I was the only friend she had. “Truth ain’t stupid,” I said.

  She sniffled and swallowed. I heard the click in her throat.

  “You ready?” I said.

  She nodded.

  “We’ll turn her over now. Hold her as stout as you can.” We managed to turn Mama facedown onto the clean sheet. Then we pulled the edges of the sheet to slide her again to the open edge of the bed.

  I pulled off the ruined nightdress, put a towel across her, and washed the back of Mama head to foot. Alta Bea watched, clearing her throat.

  “We’ll dress her now.” I walked to the peg and took down Mama’s brown skirt and white blouse. They had a smoky smell from the sad iron.

  I’d already split the skirt down the front, and now I laid it on Mama. I slipped my hands underneath the waist and pinned the skirt in front. Then I wrestled the sleeves over the arms—that was hard—and smoothed the blouse over her back. I reached underneath to button three of the buttons.

  I stretched out my fingers to loosen the cramp in my hands. The finger bones popped. “All right, now on her back again,” I said. “Mind the pins.”

  With Mama on her back, I finished buttoning the blouse. Then I got out the needle and thread and started sewing the front of the skirt with long stitches.

  There was a long silence. Then Alta Bea said, “I’m not going to college after all, Bertie.” There was tears in her throat.

  I kept on working. “You ain’t? How come?”

  “It’s Dad. He thinks I’d ‘go wild.’ And he says it’s a waste of money on a girl.”

  Sweat was dripping off me onto Mama’s skirt. I was wore out in body and spirit, and I wondered if Alta Bea had any notion of what I was feeling like.

  “What am I going to do?” she went on. “He told me, ‘You can help your mother around the house, and she has the ladies’ bridge club once a week.’ Bridge club! My God! There’s nothing for me in this godforsaken place. I hate it here! If I don’t—”

  She stopped all the sudden, and I looked up. She had covered her mouth with her hand. “Christ,” she whispered. “Bertie, I’m so sorry, what was I thinking? I’m an idiot.”

  I was finished, so I broke the thread between my teeth and stood up, stretching my back. “There.”

  She put out her hand in front of her, like she wanted me to stop. I knowed she was embarrassed and she wanted me to say something nice, but I didn’t have it in me. “Everbo
dy’s saw her that’s going to, so we can go ahead and wrap her up.”

  She nodded, her head bowed. Her arm fell to her side.

  It was hard and awkward work to wind the sheet around Mama—me and Alta Bea was sweating good by this time—but the two of us got into a rhythm and got it done.

  Before we covered Mama’s face, I took my last look at her. She looked like a dead person, is all I can say. There wasn’t no more pain on her face, which I felt like I had to be grateful for, but she was plainly dead and wasn’t coming back no more. I leaned over and kissed her lightly on the lips and then tucked and pinned the final corners in.

  As we stood back from the bed, out of the corner of my eye I noticed a streak by the door. The bouncing hem of a skirt. There was no doubt in my mind who it was. It shames me how wroth I felt, like she didn’t have no right to be there, and her Mama’s best comfort.

  I stood for a little bit with my hands folded, and Alta Bea copied me. Pretty soon I touched Alta Bea’s elbow and whispered my thanks.

  She turned her face to me, and I was surprised to see tears flowing down. “How can you stand it?”

  I said what Mama’d always said to me. “Got to stand it or bust.”

  * * *

  My big brothers hauled Daddy home from town that night. Found him passed out, they never said where.

  Next morning, sobered up, Daddy wouldn’t allow no church service for Mama, and he wouldn’t wait for no relations to get there from back home neither. I don’t know if they could have, but Daddy didn’t give them no chance to. It was awful hot, but I reckon he could have put her in the ice house Alta Bea and them had. He just didn’t want to, plain and simple.

  He had a preacher to say words over the grave, which was in the graveyard two miles from our place. It was on a rise, like they often is, and from there you could see half the county. It was another hot day, with bright white popcorn clouds sliding across the sky, casting shadows along the ground. From a little ways off you could hear the racket of a steam thrashing machine—a regular knock-knock-knock-knock, an underneath grinding sort of a bellow, and ever little bit a screech—and men hollering. I shuddered. I never could abide big machines. Seemed like somebody would get tore up in the gears or burnt up in the fire or get their leg ran over by them spiked iron wheels. Seemed like when men took it into their heads to do chores with a machine, they felt like they had to do it or die trying.