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Stranger Here Below

Page 15

by Joyce Hinnefeld


  On the morning of her last final exam, the one for Dr. Wendt’s class, Mary Elizabeth’s daddy showed up on campus and called up to her room.

  She gave him a brisk hug, then asked why he’d come so early. “I thought you weren’t coming for me until tomorrow,” she said. “I’ve got my last final today, in just a couple hours.”

  “We had to take your mama to the hospital again, Mary Elizabeth,” he said. “I’d like you to come home today.”

  She packed her bag quickly and left a note for Maze, and her daddy waited in the car while she went to take her exam.

  Later, riding next to her father and flushed with the awareness that she’d done very well on Dr. Wendt’s exam, she thought of saying something about her application to the University of Chicago. But first she asked about her mama. He’d found her in the church basement three days before, her daddy said. Twisting and gagging at the end of a knotted piece of clothesline rope.

  By the time Mary Elizabeth saw her mama, she’d been released from the hospital and moved to the county home outside Stanford, known to everyone in the area as the Colored Home. She was visited there every day by her childhood friend Clarisa Pool. Clarisa had never married, and she lived now in a little house in Stanford and worked as a nurse at the hospital in Richmond; that was how she’d found out about what had happened to Sarah Cox since their childhoods together along Black Pool Road, outside Stanford.

  Since she didn’t have a car to get over to see her mama, Mary Elizabeth stayed with Clarisa for most of the Christmas break. George Cox drove over when he could; there was a lot to tend to at home, he said. After services on Christmas day, which Mary Elizabeth declined to attend, he drove to Stanford with a sweater for Mary Elizabeth and a necklace for her mother.

  Mary Elizabeth opened the gift for her mother, then fastened the necklace around her neck. “Isn’t it pretty, Mama?” she said. But Sarah gave no sign of noticing.

  The Colored Home was not quite as awful as Mary Elizabeth had expected; it was clean and bright with sunlight, and in every room there were at least a few people who were alert enough to be playing cards or telling stories, though the storytellers generally seemed to be speaking to themselves. Clean as it was, though, every corner smelled of old age—that kind of half-sour, half-sweet, on-the-edge-of-rotting smell that, Mary Elizabeth knew from helping care for the frail old mother of one of the white women she’d cleaned for the summer before, makes no distinction based on race.

  Sarah Cox was a good thirty years younger than any of the other folks in that home, but you wouldn’t have known it to look at her. Her hair, which she had always carefully braided and then pinned discreetly at the nape of her neck, had gone frizzy and streaked with gray, and her skin was dry and ashen. She was thinner than before, which hardly seemed possible, and the first time Mary Elizabeth saw her she had to step outside the building and cry.

  She seemed not to know her daughter. Each time they visited, Clarisa Pool would push Mary Elizabeth toward her mother. “Here’s your girl, Sarah,” she shouted. “Here’s your beautiful girl come from college to see you.”

  Sometimes Sarah nodded ever so slightly before she turned her glassy eyes back to the handkerchief that she held in her lap, knotting and unknotting it, over and over again.

  On the last day of Mary Elizabeth’s Christmas vacation, standing in the hallway outside her mama’s room, her daddy told her that her mama would be staying there for a while. “I can’t take care of her on my own,” he said. “I’m afraid to leave her in the house by herself.” He wouldn’t listen when Mary Elizabeth offered to stay home to care for her. He held up a hand to stop her. “You’ve got work to do back at Berea,” he said. She said nothing about her application for the University of Chicago scholarship, untouched for weeks now.

  Later, when Clarisa Pool got off work, she came to help feed Sarah her dinner. When she and Mary Elizabeth had gotten Sarah settled for the night, they walked back to Clarisa’s house through a bitter wind.

  “What in God’s name has happened to her?” Mary Elizabeth blurted out, choking through a sudden rush of tears.

  Clarisa stopped and looked over at Mary Elizabeth curiously. “You don’t know much about her, do you?” she said.

  Mary Elizabeth swallowed her tears and tried to put on the dignified face she knew her daddy would want her to wear. “You mean about her fits? I know all about her fits—I was the one who walked her up to bed every time she started on one,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. It infuriated her to hear this woman, who hadn’t really known Sarah Cox since she was a child, implying that she didn’t know her own mother after all those years of caring for her, struggling, along with her daddy, to keep her bouts of senseless whispering and her jags of crying in her bedroom hidden from the rest of the world.

  “Her ‘fits’?” Clarisa said then, her broad face contorted by a peculiar kind of smile. She shook her head, “No, child, I’m not talkin’ ’bout any kind of ’fits.’”

  Mary Elizabeth looked down at the ground as she walked. “I know she’s tried to kill herself more than once now, if that’s what you mean.”

  Clarisa shook her head again and clicked her tongue. “Law, girl,” she said. “He hasn’t told you a thing, has he?”

  And that day, walking away from the Stanford Colored Home through a blustery wind carrying random snowflakes, Mary Elizabeth learned, for the first time in her life and from an actual witness, about her mama’s younger, happier life. A life of sunshine and music, according to Clarisa Pool, spent running over grassy fields with Clarisa and her brothers, catching crawdads in the creek near their families’ cabins, listening to stories and songs by the fire at night. Like her, Sarah helped her mama in the kitchen, Clarisa said, then waited for her daddy and her big brother, a sweet-faced boy who played the guitar, to get back from the fields.

  But that all changed for Sarah Cox on a sunny morning in 1935 when, walking down to the creek from her family’s cabin, she came across the badly burned body of her eighteen-year-old brother, hanging from a rope tied around a tree limb at the edge of the dirt road.

  “I suppose she didn’t even know what it was at first,” Clarisa said. “They told us later that the only part of him that wasn’t burned beyond recognition was his face.”

  “Who did that to him?” Mary Elizabeth asked, not even feeling the wind that made them hold tight to their whipping coats and scarves.

  “Prob’ly a group of drunk boys from Lexington who’d been down at the bar where he was playin’ that night. Nobody ever caught them.”

  Some time later it would appall Mary Elizabeth, remembering this conversation, to hear herself asking the question she asked next. “Why’d they do it to him—what had he done?” But that was what her daddy had taught her, and everyone else at the Big Hill Christian Church in Richmond. Such things happened, yes. But the Lord looked after those who lived in righteousness and asked for his guidance. Only Negroes who talked back or stepped out of line risked such dangers, George assured his congregation. If they kept to their own and minded their tongues, they would be safe.

  Clarisa seemed unsurprised by the question. She looked over at Mary Elizabeth with a strange, almost pitying, look on her face, then turned and started walking again. “I don’t imagine he’d done a thing,” she said between clenched teeth.

  For the rest of the walk back to Clarisa’s house, Mary Elizabeth gathered her coat around herself as tightly as she could. She wasn’t sure she believed Clarisa Pool. Not her, she kept thinking. Not her family.

  And yet hadn’t she always known, somehow? The tears in Aunt Paulie’s eyes that night in Cincinnati, after the concert. Mary Elizabeth had thought it was because she wished it were her there on that stage, playing. Then the look on her face when Mary Elizabeth had looked into her aunt’s eyes and asked, “Why did you come back here? Why didn’t you stay in Paris to study and play more?”

  Aunt Paulie had put her hand over her mouth and choked back a sob. It fright
ened Mary Elizabeth to see her like that, but she tried not to show it; she was twelve by then, nearly a woman, strong and good.

  “Because of your mama,” Aunt Paulie was saying, whispering it into her hand. “Because of Robert …” She looked at Mary Elizabeth, her eyes suddenly wide, startled, then abruptly stopped. She pulled Mary Elizabeth into a tight hug, then released her and gathered her sweater and bag. “Let’s go,” she said, “or we’ll miss our bus.”

  Mary Elizabeth never asked her what she’d meant that day. She knew she wasn’t meant to ask. Her mama’s brother, Robert, had died when Sarah was twelve, the age Mary Elizabeth was then, and it broke her mama’s heart, her daddy had told her; it wasn’t something they should talk about.

  She wasn’t to ask more questions. She was twelve and nearly a woman. Strong and good. And she was going to play the piano like that man she’d just watched on stage.

  Aunt Paulie died six months later.

  Now Clarisa was struggling to keep up with Mary Elizabeth, who could hear the heavy woman’s ragged breaths behind her. “I know he thinks it was better for you not to know,” she was saying. “And I could see that, for a time. But you’re old enough to know now. There’s no point in lyin’ about it anymore.”

  Mary Elizabeth hunched her shoulders. The stabbing pain came back, suddenly, as they walked through Clarisa’s front door, then stepped out of their galoshes and hung up their coats and scarves. Clarisa was talking again, the door barely closed behind them before she started. Mary Elizabeth tried not to listen, but she couldn’t tune her out. “Your daddy married your mama when she was hardly more than a girl. He was already a preacher by then, and he had his church over in Richmond.”

  Clarisa paused to take off her glasses, wiped them on her blouse, then put them on again. Maybe that was it, Mary Elizabeth thought; maybe she couldn’t see well enough to look into Mary Elizabeth’s eyes. Which were surely pleading as much as she was pleading inside, for the woman to stop, not to tell her any more.

  “What your daddy said to your mama’s daddy was that he wanted to take her away from Black Pool Road before all that sorrow ate her alive,” Clarisa went on. “And your mama’s daddy agreed to let her go. The truth is, after he’d gone off and studied to be a preacher, your daddy didn’t much approve of your mama’s family, especially on your granddaddy’s side. His sister, your Aunt Paulie, she’d come back from Paris and declared she’d never set foot inside a church again. I imagine your daddy was scandalized by her, but he couldn’t get to Sarah without dealin’ with her. Paulie saw to that.

  “But your mama was nothin’ like Paulie,” Clarisa said then, her voice suddenly soft. “She was shy and sweet all along, even when she turned peculiar and wouldn’t talk for all those years.” Here she paused and looked closely at Mary Elizabeth. “You take after both of them,” she said, “your mama and her mama, and of course your daddy, too. Though every now and again, I think I can catch a little somethin’ in your eyes that reminds me of your mama’s daddy. Poor old Mr. Henry. The sorrow he had to live through, first to lose Robert and then all the troubles with your mama …”

  Mary Elizabeth braced herself for more horrors. Would there ever be an end to Clarisa’s tale? She felt dizzy, and a little sick, and she leaned against the wall to steady herself.

  “Your mama’s heart was broken more than once, child,” Clarisa said, and shook her head. “They say she lost more than one baby before you were born. And then her daddy died, and her mama not long after that. Do you even remember your granny, Mary Elizabeth?”

  “Barely,” Mary Elizabeth whispered. She had vague memories of an old woman in old-fashioned country clothes, a tiny cabin, and a wooden porch with a floor that was painted blue, where she’d played with a china doll of her mother’s. She’d never seen that doll since. That grandmother had died when she was three, and they had never gone back to that rundown row of cabins on Black Pool Road again. After that they visited only Aunt Paulie and her Grandmother Cox in Lexington, both of whom were dead by the time Mary Elizabeth started high school.

  They were still standing by Clarisa’s front door, next to the rack where they’d hung their coats. All Mary Elizabeth wanted was to lie down somewhere and fall asleep.

  “Your granddaddy bought a gun after they did that to Robert,” Clarisa was saying now. “I believe that’s what made your daddy want to get your mama away from there, as much as her sadness.”

  Now she walked further into the house, pausing to turn on a lamp on a table by the door. “So it’s more sad than ever, I guess, to see what’s happened to Sarah. Even with your daddy takin’ her away and givin’ her a nice house and havin’ you, even with all that, she’s still been eaten up by that sadness, Mary Elizabeth. Ever since. But it’s been a long, slow thing. A long, slow thing gnawin’ on her, like some old dog with a dried-up bone.”

  She turned then to see Mary Elizabeth still leaning against the wall by the front door. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I’m just gonna go lie down,” Mary Elizabeth said.

  Put that out of your mind, now, Mary Elizabeth heard a voice in her head say as she collapsed onto Clarisa’s living room sofa. Probably it was her own voice, though she told herself, for a long time afterward, when she continued to hear it—Put that out of your mind—that it was her daddy’s voice. She woke in the middle of the night, tangled in a blanket, sweating. The first thing she thought of was the last thing Clarisa had said to her the evening before: “A long, slow thing gnawin’ on her, like some old dog with a dried-up bone.” For a moment she caught a glimpse of something, maybe something she’d dreamed: an angry dog, inches from her face, its fangs bared.

  The next morning her daddy arrived to drive her back to Berea. A week after she returned, she mailed her scholarship application, along with Dr. Wendt’s letter of recommendation, to the University of Chicago.

  Put that out of your mind, she thought, remembering the angry dog in her dream. And then, for some reason, she thought of that passage from The Stranger. Un flot de joie empoisonnée. Un flot de joie empoisonnée me montait au cœur. “A wave of poisoned joy rose from my heart.” Who was watching and who was dying at that execution, when the uncle she’d never known was killed?

  Pilgrim and Stranger

  1963

  There was a war, with talk of conscription. There was Mary Elizabeth planning to go off to Chicago; Maze had seen the application on her desk months before. There was Vista claiming Sister Georgia didn’t need her and threatening to leave Pleasant Hill, going out with some divorced man from Harrodsburg. (“Aren’t you the righteous maiden?” Mary Elizabeth said when Maze expressed disapproval.)

  Harris worrying about the future, not even cheered by the dances anymore.

  And she, Maze, could find no helpful answers in the books they told her to read, in the chapel services they expected her to attend, not even when she went back to Pleasant Hill for a weekend and climbed up to Holy Sinai’s Plain with Sister Georgia. Somehow the wind had gone out of Sister Georgia’s sails, too.

  And now, in the midst of all these things, why should Maze finish college just so she could become a teacher? What in the world did she have to teach anyone?

  So one night in February, while her friends were sprawled around the student lounge after one of Dr. Wendt’s fireside lounge discussions, she proposed an idea she’d had for a while.

  “I mean it,” she said. “We could do it. We could move to Pleasant Hill and look after Sister Georgia. We could follow the old Shaker ways—get some chickens and a cow, plow up the old kitchen garden and plant it again, preserve what we grow for the winter. Live off the land, or at least the piece of it that’s still in Sister Georgia’s name.”

  Here she was claiming more than she actually knew; it had never been clear to her who actually owned what at Pleasant Hill. Whenever Vista had asked her about it, Sister Georgia had only said, “The land is God’s. It’s not ours to own.”

  But it didn’t matter what she s
aid, she supposed. They weren’t likely to take her seriously.

  And where did she get such far-fetched ideas anyway? Probably from Sister Georgia, from her stories about the early Shakers. Maze had been listening hard, for a while now, for the true voice of Mother Ann. Late one night the week before, as she’d sat shivering at a loom in the Weaving Cabin, moonlight pouring through the window beside her, it had come to her: They could all go back to Pleasant Hill.

  Vista, Maze knew, would’ve laughed her hard-edged, angry laugh to hear Maze talk in the fireside lounge that evening. Maze could vaguely remember days when her mama hadn’t laughed like that, when she’d seemed happier, when Maze was very young. Her earliest years, back in the mountains, were a blur, but Maze did recall the months when they’d returned to the holler outside Torchlight, the summer Mamaw Marthie died—Vista trying gamely to make a life for them there. But even as a child of four and five, Maze could see the sadness in Vista’s eyes, at the edges of her mouth. The claw of loneliness already dug deep in her heart.

  The last time Vista had seemed truly happy was when they had first come to Pleasant Hill, when they’d first lived there with the Taylors—all that money and all that youth around them. She’d wake Maze up early back in those days, to walk out into a meadow behind the Deacons’ Shop, the heads of wildflowers—asters and goldenrod, a handful of black-eyed Susans—poking through a blanket of early-morning fog. Never mind the long day of work ahead back at the inn; Vista would prance through that wet field like a young girl while Maze ran to keep up.

  But that didn’t last. Before long they were back in the mountains, then living with Sister Georgia, and Vista was spending all her waking hours at work, or at some church meeting, all that effort to fit in in Harrodsburg—the church committees and the choir, the many jobs here and there, the divorced and widowed men who took her to dinner at the country club. Working steadily, constantly, trying anything to dislodge that claw in her heart.

 

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