by Ninie Hammon
“Was you one of them little boys always hanging around here, had a crush on Annie?”
It was Dusty’s turn to blush. Now we had a matched set of red faces.
We should be shouting, “Clang, clang, clang!” at a railroad crossing.
“Well, as a matter of fact,” he eyed me over her head and grinned, “I did have a crush on Anne. But so did every other little boy in the neighborhood. The line was real long and I was the scrawny little guy at the tail end of it. I’m Dusty, Bobo. Now, do you remember me?”
“I ain’t never seen you before in my life, son.”
She fixed her gaze on his badge. “You come here to investigate the theft?”
Bobo had made another mental leap, bounding from one idea to the next, a cognitive kangaroo on steroids.
“Theft?”
“Yeah, theft. Somebody come in here in broad daylight yesterday and stole the mirror right off the wall in my bedroom.”
I tried to stifle the laugh but it got away from me and came out my nose in a decidedly unfeminine honk. It sounded enough like a sneeze that I rolled with it, coughed into my hand a couple of times and tried to rearrange my face before I spoke.
“Actually, Bobo, Dusty came by to pick up the artwork, the pictures I found on the walls up in the attic.”
“Well, that’s right thoughty of him, but is that all?” She looked at Dusty dubiously. “You ain’t going to do nothing ‘bout an illegal alien and a stolen mirror?”
He shook his head.
“Some sheriff you are.”
Dusty suffered a sudden coughing fit, too.
Something must be going around.
“Wish I could help you.” He shrugged his shoulders in mock helplessness. “Sorry.”
Bobo turned and hobbled toward the kitchen. “I got to go baste a duck!”
As soon as she was out of earshot, we both burst out laughing.
He looked toward the doorway where she’d disappeared into the kitchen and shook his head. “Your grandmother’s a piece of work!” There was the same admiration in his voice I heard in Julia’s.
Suddenly, I understood what Mama meant when she told me once that the neighbors glamorized Bobo’s craziness, talked about how “entertaining” it must be to live with her.
They didn’t have to clean up the pile of rotted food behind her dresser.
Dusty turned back to me. “If she’s your only source of information about your past, good luck! Isn’t there anybody else who was here, some other relative who could help you fill in the blanks?”
“Nobody I can find.”
That wasn’t entirely true. I didn’t know where he was, but I could have found him if I’d really wanted to. I could have located him with just one phone call—to my brother, Joel.
When the two of us had been in Louisville together settling Mama’s affairs, Joel had suggested I get in touch with Jericho, his father, my step-father.
Dear, sweet Joel was always trying to be helpful. He may not have been the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he knew intuitively how to care for people, how to love them in ways I couldn’t have learned from a mountain of books with a lifetime to read them.
We’d been sitting on the deck of Mama’s townhouse, watching the wide, glassy Ohio River flow past in no hurry to get from Cincinnati to Memphis. He was drinking hot tea just because I was. I don’t think he liked it at all.
“Daddy doesn’t come around much, but I talk to him on the phone sometimes,” he says, sipping the hot liquid and struggling not to make a yuk face.
Physically, Joel is as much his father’s child as I am our mother’s. Bobo’s hair, Mama’s and mine—all platinum blonde. There are Scandanivian limbs back there somewhere on the family tree. Joel’s hair is red, a light auburn shade; Jericho’s had been the color of a four-alarm fire. Joel has red freckles, too, like Jericho’s, the same cornflower blue eyes, even looks like him—with a firm, square jaw and a lock of hair that always hangs down over his forehead. Jericho Johnson had been a dashingly-handsome man.
“When was the last time you saw your dad?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s been awhile.”
Translate that: The man hasn’t spent time with his son in years.
“But I’ve got his phone number; I wrote it down and kept it safe. He gave it to me and said I could call him on it. It’s a cell phone. I used the number to tell him about Mama.”
Tears spring to his eyes and I reach over and pat his arm.
“I called him ‘cause I knew he’d want to know she …” His voice breaks, he puts his head in his hands and his broad shoulders shake as he cries. I get out of the chair and kneel on one knee in front of him.
“Joel. Listen to me. It’s Ok.” I rest my cheek on his arm. “Mama knew you were on your way, Joel.” He looks up, tears streaming down his freckled cheeks. “Honey, she knew you loved her and that’s all that matters.”
Joel will probably never forgive himself that Mama died before he made it to the hospital to tell her goodbye. Her fault, not his. If she hadn’t hidden her illness for months, we’d all have been more prepared to deal with it.
He wipes the tears off his cheeks with the back of his hand like a little kid. “You think so? You think she knew?”
“I’m sure she knew.” I get up, walk to the railing of the balcony and look out over the river. Joel picks up his train of thought where he left it.
“I could call Daddy for you, tell him you’re trying to remember. Or you could call him. I bet he’d help if you asked.” His face is earnest, kind and innocent. He has never suspected that I loathe his father. In fact, he probably doesn’t even know why Mama and Jericho broke up. He was a toddler at the time and I’m sure Mama never told him she’d caught Jericho in bed with another woman, that she found out he’d slept with everything in a skirt for 50 miles in every direction.
“Thanks, Joel, but I don’t want you to call him.” He looks puzzled. “I’m sure he’d help, I just don’t want to bother him. Bobo can tell me everything I need to know.”
“I didn’t know you forgot everything. You never said.”
“Well, I remember you: Joel the Mole, lives in a hole, slides down a pole.” I pick up a pillow off the empty chair and bop him over the head with it. “I remember what a pest you were when you were 2.”
But Joel still looks serious, disturbed that something isn’t right in my world.
“I didn’t talk about my amnesia because what was there to say? The fact is, I can’t remember anything that happened to me before the car wreck that killed Windy. And I’m just not willing to live without a childhood anymore. I want to remember it—to remember changing your diapers!” That coaxes a smile out of him. “I’m going back to Goshen to live in the house with Bobo and I’m going to stay there until I get my memory back.”
Joel lifts his head and stares into my eyes and in that moment, by some trick of the evening light on the planes of his face, he looks just like Jericho looked the last time I saw him 25 years ago. I have to stifle a shudder.
Nope, I have absolutely no desire to see Jericho again, wouldn’t look him up if he could download all my memories into my brain like a file off the Internet.
“My step-father, Jericho, might be able to help me remember,” I told Dusty, hoping he couldn’t hear the coldness in my tone. “But I don’t know where he is anymore.”
“Well, I remember Bobo, even if she doesn’t remember me. She’d stand out on the front porch and watch us playing under the willow tree. Sometimes, she’d invite us into the kitchen and give us cookies. Unless your mama was … not feeling well. You know how your mama was.”
A chill ran through me.
“Actually, I don’t. What are you saying about my mother?” I didn’t mean for it to come out defensive, but it did, and I watched him back up.
“Oh, she was a sweet lady, just didn’t like a bunch of kids underfoot,” he said. “I remember her as large and in charge, if you know what I mean.”
; He grinned at me. “And with a handful like you to raise, I’m sure she needed to be. Now, about those pictures. I kind of need to get on the road.”
I was instantly embarrassed for keeping him too long.
“They’re upstairs in the studio. I’ll go up and get them.”
“You have a studio? You’re an artist? Well, duh, you wallpapered an attic with your pictures as a kid. It figures.” He looked up the stairs. “Can I see it?”
“Well, sure, but it’s not really a studio yet; there’s nothing to see. My easels get here with the rest of my stuff tomorrow.”
I turned and started up the stairs ahead of him, acutely aware that I was offering the sheriff a behind-home-plate view of the butt-less wonder in tight jeans.
“My order from Ikea—a big, all-purpose storage unit, some bookshelves, and a couple of loveseats won’t be here until Monday or Tuesday of next week.” I opened the studio door and made a sweeping gesture that took in the whole room. “All this clutter will one day be in order so I can work.”
“Storage unit, bookshelves, loveseats … sounds like you’re not planning on saying goodbye to this place anytime soon.”
“Goodbye!” Petey mimicked from the other side of the room. “Hello, goodbye.”
“Well, hello yourself … ?” Dusty looked a question at me.
“Petey.”
“ … Petey. You’re certainly looking green today.”
Our eyes met.
“And it’s not easy being green,” we said with the perfect unison of a Greek chorus. I smiled and Dusty chuckled. It was a warm, comfortable sound.
“So, you’re an artist?”
“Sort of. I write and illustrate children’s books.” I leaned over and picked up a Filbert book off a stack of them on the floor. “Sir Filbert Wellington Frog, III.” I handed Dusty the book. He turned it over in his hands, examining and admiring it.
“You’re a published author?”
“Let’s keep this in perspective here. I write about a little green frog, not a great white whale.”
“Can I keep this? Will you autograph it for me?”
“Well sure, I guess.” I was flustered, a permanent state of being, it seemed, whenever the sheriff was around. “Let me find a pen.”
I scratched around on the desk, looking for a writing utensil and finally located a Sharpie. That would do. Dusty handed me the book and as I struggled to think of something to write on the jacket, he picked up the stack of kid art on the roll-top desk and began to go through it picture by picture.
“Iseewhatyoumeanaboutmonkeysinapaintfight.”Heheldup a page that was a riot of unrestrained color. “There are others here,” he held up one that showed a family and a house, and another that was obviously a person’s face, “that are more realistic. But I know Karen. Even the paint-fight art will tell her something.”
Karen. Dr. Carlson was a woman.
Why do I feel like somebody just shoved the business end of a sledge hammer into my belly?
I handed him back the autographed book. I’d played it safe, just wrote my name and the date. He took it, gathered up the stack of drawings and started for the stairs.
“I’m not going to tell Karen these drawings are 25 years old, just that I got them out of the attic of a house where two little girls lived.” He paused and granted me that grin again. “I guarantee she’ll see things in those pictures we can’t see.”
The parlor that had been bright and cheery when we went upstairs a few minutes earlier was now shadowy gloom.
“The day I got here, I asked Bobo why she kept all the drapes drawn and she said—” I started to tell Dusty about her “I’m practicing being blind” remark but Bobo finished my sentence for me. She was sitting in the platform rocker in the semi-darkness.
“I don’t want nobody looking in, that’s why.” Her voice was quiet and somber. “Ain’t nobody’s business but ours what goes on in this house.”
She stood slowly and hobbled toward me, ignoring Dusty as if he weren’t there at all.
“Most of the time, I don’t remember much. And what I do remember is all cloudy. Price you pay for being around so long.”
She paused, her gaze fixed on me; her rheumy eyes appeared remarkably clear and focused. Then a look came into them and I froze. It was the same look I’d seen in my mother’s eyes in the moments before she died.
“But sometimes I do remember, sometimes the clouds clear away and I can see it all, everything.”
She took my arm and squeezed with remarkable strength.
“You don’t want to see it,” she hissed. “You think you do, but you’re wrong. Don’t go digging ‘round in what’s dead and buried, Annie, ‘cause you can’t un-know the truth. Once you see it, you’ll have it in your head forever. And it’ll haunt you—like it done your poor mama, haunt you ‘til the day you die.”
She loosened her grip and let go, turned without ever acknowledging Dusty’s presence and started up the stairs.
“There’s a long ole trail a’windin’ to the land beyond the sea … “
Dusty and I stood together, listening to her mournful hymn as we watched her climb the steps. I couldn’t speak. My mouth had gone suddenly dry and my tongue stuck to the roof of it like I’d been gargling peanut butter. Dusty stared at the spot where she disappeared at the top of the stairs for a moment, then looked back at me.
He wasn’t smiling anymore.
“I’ll send these pictures over to Karen today and I’ll call you when I hear what she has to say about them.”
Then he fit his Stetson in place on his head, opened the big oak door and was gone.
Chapter 9
The rest of my life showed up in a truck on Friday—all the things I had stored at Mama’s. The furniture I’d ordered from Ikea hadn’t come yet, but I could start painting without it. All I needed was an easel, paint and canvasses. I was mixing cadmium yellow, cadmium yellow light and a pinch of burnt umber into shades of gold in the soft north light of the studio ten minutes after the delivery truck pulled away.
In the days that followed, my life gradually defined itself the natural way a stream finds its own path down a hillside. Bobo and I developed a routine. She had breakfast set out on the table every morning when I went downstairs. Nothing elaborate. Grape Nuts in a bowl, two teaspoons of sugar on the top, and a glass of orange juice. She called my choice of breakfast cereal “gravel” when she was in a good mood and “kitty litter” the rest of the time.
Though she literally got up with the chickens, she usually waited to eat with me, gumming her Rice Krispies sans teeth and downing black coffee the consistency of road tar. She worked in the garden or with the chickens until it got so hot she had to come inside. Even the early spring heat was more than she could handle.
And I painted. But I didn’t paint as I always had painted before— an end in mind, a task to finish, a job to be done. I painted with total freedom and abandon. No Filbert illustrations. No children’s art. The images came from some place in me beyond my own awareness and I painted one thing and one thing only, over and over again. Eyes. I didn’t plan it that way; it just happened. And I knew whose eyes they were. Laughs in the Wind was staring out at me from my canvasses.
The first painting was a collage, sets of eyes, all sizes, jumbled together in a haze of warm golden light. All the eyes had the same quality. They followed you. No matter where you stood in the room, they were looking at you.
Another was a doorframe, white paint flaking off. The door was open only a crack and the shaft of light illuminated nothing but the dirty tile floor and dust particles suspended in the air like mini snowflakes. But in the darkness just beyond the light, the eyes shone.
The largest painting, on a 36- by 48-inch canvas, was a lone eye, dark chocolate brown with long lashes and a feather of eyebrow above it. The eye was full of unshed tears, welled up, the instant before they spilled down the cheek, and a lone teardrop hung suspended at the end of an eyelash, pear shaped, ready to fall.
The silver sheen of tears on the black iris mirrored what the eye was looking at. An image, a silhouette, the dark outline of hands reaching out, holding something.
Something, but I wasn’t sure what.
I must have redone that part of the painting half a dozen times. My hand created what my mind’s eye could see, but what I could see didn’t make sense. In my head, the hands appeared to be holding a sack or a bag of some kind.
All the eye pictures were haunting, full of darkness and sorrow and pain. But I didn’t feel sorrow when I looked at them. I felt joy. It was like there was someone on the other side of a glass and we both reached up and touched the glass at the same time, our fingers connected but not connected, separated by an invisible, impenetrable membrane.
Windy was there, in a parallel universe behind my canvasses. And I struggled every day to paint a window for her to enter my world.
Bobo seldom came into my studio. Her initial dislike of Petey had gradually downshifted into genuine loathing. She hated the bird, mumbled under her breath that one of these days Butch the cat would swallow him whole, or “that baby-puke green bird’s goin’ to turn up hung.”
But she happened to stop at the studio door when I was painting the collage. It wasn’t finished. I had the gold background done but only three or four sets of eyes. She stood looking at it for a moment and then recognition dawned on her face.
“You hadn’t ought to wake her up,” she said softly. “Just leave her be.”
I expected the eyes to spark memories, that I’d look into them and see a truth there, fall into the depths of them and the world would begin to brighten, like the room with the dimmer switch, until I could see it all, everything illuminated, everything clear.
That’s not what happened. Nothing happened. The pictures didn’t spark any recollections and neither did anything else. I hadn’t unearthed a single memory since the children on the prairie pouring water down holes in the dirt.
Julia came five days a week, a half day sometimes, a full day others. I couldn’t figure out her schedule and I suspected she set it around whatever Bobo needed. The bank cut her a check every two weeks from the trust Mama set up for Bobo. I didn’t know how much Julia was paid, but whatever it was, it wasn’t enough.