“Don’t you call her that,” I snapped.
“Why?”
“She don’t deserve it, Malachi. You forget what she puttin’ us through?”
He told me he didn’t forget, but I didn’t believe him. He got all soft when he said that she was still his Birdie. Well, he could keep his Birdie for himself. What I wanted to say was maybe if he’d been paying more attention to her before Carver, he might’a known that she was kissing on boys and making a ruination of her life and Carver died because of it.
I didn’t know how he still got any softness left for her. Mine was all buried and bones. It made me think of when I was a child and digging and playing and finding a small rock with marks on it—like the imprint of a lizard. A fossil. That lizard had been a living, breathing being, but it was long gone by the time I found it. But that old, faded outline was proof that it had once been there. My fingers found the dent I’d just made on the wooden table and I rubbed it. Was this proof that I was here? But I didn’t want to be.
“She done walked on by me. Where she been all this time? She should be helping—” I gripped the handle of the pot so hard I felt the pale on my knuckles. The next mark I’d make would be on that girl’s backside, not on my table.
“Dee, give the girl a break. She just needs some time.” Malachi flattened some of the empty boxes with his feet.
“Time? What you talking about she need time?” I broke my words up so he knew I was serious and about to let him have it. “She done—”
“Is that the Reverend Malachi Evans?” A wrinkled-up voice came through the screen door and interrupted my spat-out words.
Malachi turned and started for the door. He took big steps, and even though his back was to me, I knew he wore his wide preacher smile.
“Grannie Winnie,” he said with his arms flying up like a praise Jesus.
He opened the door to an ancient, miniature woman dressed in her funeral best. The old lady walked in and Malachi offered his hand. The woman took it with both of hers with her cane dangling on her arm. She pulled him down for a hug and a kiss on the cheek.
When she released him she kept his hand and looked up into his face. Her skin was almost gray compared to my husband’s rich brown. “You done growed up. I can’t believe you remember me.” She patted his hand.
“How could I ever forget you, Grannie Winnie?”
“Oh, you a good boy.” She pulled him down. “Here’s another kiss.”
I remembered him telling me about her. I pulled some numbers up in my head and I figured up that Grannie had to be close to a hundred.
She got my husband close and put her hand on his head and shoulders and back and muttered words that sounded like she was praying a blessing. Malachi was accustomed to this, but I found it a bit foolish—like them ladies think they something special to bless my husband. She released him after several moments.
“I know’d what you’re thinking, young man.” She tapped his hand again and motioned to the nearby chair. Malachi helped her sit and pulled up another to sit with her. “Your grandmama was somewhere ’round a year older than me. That makes me ninety-nine years young—one hundred real soon.”
Then she threw her head back and laughed out loud. She act like she got freedom by the tail with a laugh like that. Where’d she capture that? But if she was born in the North, she had been born free. Though I knew she’d still seen a lot but different from all the old southern biddies.
How was it that she came visiting but nobody else had? And someone as old as her couldn’t have walked all the way here from town. If she knew, shouldn’t others know? Shouldn’t the church body have come to welcome us?
“I can’t say as I was sad when I heard that Ruthie passed. She in glory and I still stuck here in this in-between place.” She looked over at me and twinkled when she burst into laughter. I tried to bubble over with her, but I knew it came out forced. It was like she knew it too. “Well, ain’t you pretty and plump.”
She looked back to my husband. “I like a plump girl. Make her look like she cared for. I was always bony myself. Never had much food.”
She called me a girl. An almost warmth for the woman came into the corner of my stomach. Malachi knew better than to say a word about my being plump, but it wasn’t the first time I heard it from an old lady.
“That’s my bride, Delilah.” Malachi looked at me like he done fell in love with me all over again, but I was still thinking about being called plump.
“What was your mama thinking calling you after a harlot like Delilah in the Bible?” the old woman asked.
“My daddy named me. He wanted a boy called Samson but then I came—he said Delilah was my rightful name.” I fed her the story I’d repeated so many times. Too many times.
“People call you that?”
“I go by Deedee.”
Before she had the chance to disapprove of my nickname, Malachi changed the conversation and I went back to unpacking.
“What you doing here all alone?” Malachi asked.
“I was the one who told Marlene to write you and ask you to come home, but she didn’t tell me it was gonna happen so fast. We ain’t had a good preacher here for a good long time. Sometimes the men take their turns, but more often we just fellowship on the Lord’s Day with a meal and singing.”
“Church building was looking pretty rough and dirty. Don’t look like anybody has been in there for a long time.” Malachi shook his head.
I listened to Grannie Winnie, interested, while I unpacked. I wanted to hear this. It bugged me that we arrived in Malachi’s hometown without so much as a casserole brought over. Nobody came to see us. In Montgomery ain’t no new family settled into a new house without everyone chipping in.
“You’re right about that. I ain’t happy about it neither.” Grannie Winnie nodded.
“Where is everyone?” Malachi used his sincere voice. “Nobody even came to say hello.”
“Listen, son.” She waved her hand at him. “People are nervous and a little upset over old stuff.”
“What? But I’m from here.”
“But you left.” She put a finger up like a mother would to a child. “You remember how those last few years went? All you talked about was getting away from this place—even though you was engaged to my Marlene. Then one day you was just gone—just like that—and in a few years everybody else in your family was gone too.”
My ears just about turned to horns when she said that he’d been engaged to Marlene. I eyed him and I knew he felt it, and when he looked over I raised my eyebrow so high it just ’bout lifted off my forehead.
“It wasn’t just like that, Grannie. I’d applied to all sorts of colleges; everybody knew that. Marlene knew it. Besides, that was a long time ago and I know she’s married and has kids now. She isn’t still mad over old stuff like that when we were little more than children ourselves. And I wasn’t the only one to leave either.”
“No, you weren’t. But everybody wants you to know that you need to earn their trust back. They don’t want that old Malachi back who always thought he was better’n everybody else.” This time Grannie’s eyebrow rose.
Malachi sighed through his nose and his shoulders slumped like a little kid who just took a scolding.
“Marlene’s husband, Titus—and the other men ’round here— aren’t too sure about you, Reverend. When you made something of yourself in Montgomery with your big church, we got wind about how you was fixin’ up your neighborhood and helpin’ with that bus boycott.” Grannie clicked her tongue. “All good things—but it made people ’round here feel like you just too good for ole Sinking Creek folks.”
Malachi nodded and I wanted to throw something at him. He don’t need to feel bad about doing good in Montgomery.
“Listen, I know people build high walls around here toward outsiders. Mama and Daddy were the same way. But I will earn their trust back.” He was straight-backed again.
There he go again, not staying down too long. He done the sam
e over Carver. Just bucked up so fast it made me mad.
“How’d you get here, Grannie? You didn’t walk all the way over here.”
“Marlene.” She winked. “Don’t worry, Reverend, things will get better. Just will take some patience—and a couple of doses of prayer.”
“You don’t have to call me Reverend, you know.” Malachi took Grannie’s hand.
“’Course I do. Listen here, sonny.” She slapped him playfully, then got serious. “I got this distant cousin in Montgomery and she wrote me ’bout your burden.” My arms grew weak and I set down the pan I was holding. “I was so sorry to hear about your boy. Ain’t natural to bury your child. Just ain’t natural.”
She looked over at me and her old eyes looked more tired than they had a minute ago. “Deedee, I know it don’t feel like you ever gonna get through this grief, but you just got to see every break of day like God’s gift to you. I know it hard.”
She knew that, did she? My face was too numb to make the expression I was feeling. People always said that and it just made me want to box their ears. I bit the inside of my mouth so hard I just about tasted my bitter blood. It wasn’t because I couldn’t think of nothing to say. It was because I got too much to say—I got inside of me so many words and feelings that if I let them start coming out now, I couldn’t promise they’d ever run out.
“Oh, bless your heart, child.” The old lady looked right at me like she done heard my thoughts. She stood with help from Malachi’s shoulder. With her cane she walked to me.
I stepped back. I didn’t want her touching me. I didn’t want nobody touching me. But when she get up close to me, I got nowhere to go and she grabbed my hands with a grip that startled me. “I know you’s hurting, but it’ll get better, Deedee.”
When she patted my hand my anger bloomed. I felt Malachi looking at me and thought that he probably said some prayer to keep me from opening my big mouth to my elder. Mine and Grannie Winnie’s eyes stayed fixed for a spell until I saw some of my sadness reflected in her eyes. I couldn’t tell no more if I was looking at her or a reflection of myself.
“Can I get you something to drink, Mrs. Rivers?” I added emphasis to her name. “I just got water.”
“Sometimes water is all there is, honey.” She let go of my hands but not my eyes. “Call me Grannie Winnie. Everyone does.”
I wasn’t everybody, I thought when another knock came to the door. Grannie Winnie turned away and yelled, “Come on in,” like it was her house.
The spring pulled on the screen door and almost a dozen ladies poured into my house. Most of them was carrying a dish with a pot holder over their hands. One lady got one of those Betty Crocker cake boxes—did Betty Crocker’s show come in on the television all the way out here in the middle of nowhere? My sister Deborah and I debated about Betty Crocker’s four-minute cake. She didn’t like it, but I didn’t bake a cake any other way no more. It made me miss Deborah.
“Everybody, this is your new reverend’s wife, Delilah Evans— please call her Deedee so’s we don’t think on that harlot woman every time we says her name. Deedee, this is everybody—or some of them, anyhow.”
She sure didn’t mince no words, did she? “Hi, y’all,” was all that came out.
So they had shown up after all. The ladies lined up and shook my hand and told me their names. I don’t remember any of them in a minute but for Marlene. She got skin half as dark as mine, straight soft-looking hair to her shoulders, and a voice that even when she just talking sounded like she was singing. She was tall and had big bosoms with a small waist.
I sucked in my own waist when she stood in front of me with her hand out toward me. This was the woman my husband walked away from? Now look at what he got instead.
She handed me a stack of newspaper clippings. I raised an eyebrow and looked at her. Then she said in a nice cool, even voice that they were coupons for groceries at Coleman’s Grocery. That was a nice thing to do, but I feel like she got some nerve assuming we would depend on coupons.
As soon as the line was through, Grannie Winnie was back in charge using her cane to direct everyone. She told them all what to do. And I just watched and didn’t know where I fit into all of it. They brought in a bunch of cleaning sprays and rags and cleaned all my new corners full of old dust I hadn’t gotten to yet. I’d done the same for other folks back home but never thought I was ever going to be the kind of person who needed the extra help. They washed my baseboards, and when I looked around and saw the flats of their feet as they kneeled, cleaning and chatting with each other, I was humbled. But felt so alone.
But what I didn’t like was that the husbands of these women were still staying away. They weren’t so sure about Malachi yet.
Over the next two hours I just couldn’t find nothing to say to all these ladies. There was some sense of home when you got help, but everything was still so different that it don’t feel like my life or like I’m here in the middle of it. I just kept running my finger over the dent I’d made in the table to remind my own self that I was here.
EMMA
The rain whispered its burden to me before it stopped. Dampen this old dirt. Fall on these buried seeds and be used. If it fell on me, would I grow? Could I break open like a seed in the hopes that something new would spring forth? What goodness water held, but it still had to break the seed before it said grow.
How many seeds had I sown in my lifetime, and how many had just remained as seeds and died without growing? Did they resist the water? Did they fight the submission to it? Or were they already dead when I folded them into the damp soil? Water could do a lot, but I didn’t think it could bring anything back from death. Sometimes too much water caused a seed or a young plant to die. They’d done their part and cracked open, grown, and submitted—and died when the water ceased to be good to them.
Was that me? When the rainy season came, had I just let too much of myself drown in my pain?
For two days it had rained, but this morning a faint glow came from the sun. It was past the tops of the trees—on the other side of the woods. It made me think of him. The boy. The mother. The daughter. I couldn’t get them out of my mind, and even in the sliver of quiet that I knew these days—only at sunrise—I found visions of their faces. Sometimes they shone in the tin bucket before the pumped cold water washed them away. I saw them reflected in the pond behind the house. I saw them on the other side of my rain-stained windows.
Johnny came from around the porch and he was startled when he saw me. I hadn’t known he was awake yet. I hadn’t seen him when I gathered the eggs from our chicken house, though, and assumed he was still asleep. Because he had cousins visiting, he wasn’t going to work with John and had even shirked some of his chores. It embarrassed me.
“Where were you?” My voice thinned the damp air around me. I looked to see if his cousins were with him. They weren’t.
“Roy’s. His cows got out.” Johnny responded in English to my Pennsylvania Dutch. A habit he had developed since he spent too much time with Arnold. He didn’t look at me as he walked past. He pulled off his wet and muddy boots in even heavier silence before he went inside without another word.
The next few hours passed like walking through the haze of the fog lifting from the wet ground. The rain moved away. The birds proclaimed the wonders of the spring day. A rainbow rested itself amid the blue sky. My personal drought had settled in, however. Everyone had rushed outside once the breakfast dishes were done and gone about various chores while the younger children played in the yard and chased after my poor chickens.
Even though it wasn’t Monday—laundry day—I washed a load of bedclothes and towels we were using at a speed I’d never known, since several of Berthy’s children still wet the bed. As I was pinning up the last of the laundry, I heard tires roll over the still-damp gravel driveway. I left my place at the wash line and walked around the house.
A shiny green automobile idled in the drive. I squinted from the sun’s glare. My sister-in-law str
ode up without hesitation and opened the passenger door. Before I had time to consider this, my father-in-law, Aaron Mullet, heaved himself out of the vehicle. My mother-in-law, Polly, was next, followed by a girl of around nineteen and then one of John’s younger brothers, Paul.
I was too shocked to smile and walk toward them, so instead I watched as my sister-in-law shook everyone’s hands, except she hugged our mother-in-law. Did she know they were coming?
John’s parents had moved to another Pennsylvania settlement out east several years ago to be close to their other grandchildren. They didn’t visit often, but when they did it often came unannounced.
“Meh sint doh,” Polly’s voice called toward me as she caught my gaze.
Yes. She was right. They were here. The small crowd walked toward me and my thoughts rushed around. Four more people to feed. How long would they stay? Why didn’t they tell me? Where would they sleep?
John walked out of the barn and our eyes met for a long moment before he turned away and greeted his parents. It was clear John was as surprised as I was and his shoulders sagged.
He would retreat even further into himself with more visitors. Even though it was because of his sin, I found myself hurting for him.
I knew I should move forward, but I used their momentary distraction with the others to take in a long, deep, wooded-air breath.
“Emma.” Aaron thrust his large hand out to me. “John always says his frau loves surprises, don’t you?” he called over his shoulder as John walked our way.
“That’s right, Emma, isn’t it?” John said so convincingly I nearly believed him as he caught my gaze again.
For a moment I saw the memories of past surprises play over his mind and through his eyes. Sometimes they lingered in my mind until either the blush of passion arose or the burden of our distance wiped them away. This time my father-in-law’s laugh pulled us both back to the present.
I watched as John and Aaron walked away to the barn. Aaron believed his arrival was a surprise, but I knew better. John’s forgetfulness was getting worse the more he drank. His gentleness toward me was diminishing like dampness whisked away in a May breeze. And anytime he was gentle, I was filled with my own regrets and in my guilt I pushed him away.
The Solace of Water Page 5