by Tamara Bundy
I figured the doctor’s eyes were getting old. Nobody says I take after Mama. But when he said that, I smiled. And I might have even blushed. He held his hat in his hand by his chest when he bent down, but moved it toward his head, like he was tipping it to me when he stood back up.
“Now, if’n ya lovely ladies will excuse me, I’ll go have a look at the patient.”
As he left I saw Eddie standing by the back door, watching. Usually, he has lots of questions when people aren’t signing around him. Since he just stood there watching, I knew he was worried.
Mama knew it, too. “It’s okay,” she signed. “Sorry to worry you. Grandma is okay now.”
Eddie nodded and went back outside, but something told me he didn’t believe Mama’s words any more than I did.
“What happened to Grandma?”
Mama looked toward Grandma’s room and then back toward me. She answered in a voice just barely above a whisper. “She woke up confused today. Didn’t know where Daddy—your grandpa—was. When I reminded her he died five years ago, she took the news hard, like she was learning it for the first time.” Mama’s voice choked. She stared at Grandma’s bedroom door like she was lost for a moment. Then she nodded her head. “It’s good we’re here, Alice. It’s so good we’re here.” She walked over to the window to watch Eddie in the backyard.
When Mama first told us we were moving to Georgia at that family meeting back in Columbus, I told her right away I didn’t want to move. No, I told her I wasn’t gonna move.
Ever.
But just when I was working on my best arguments to convince Mama why we shouldn’t move, she took my hand in hers like she was really holding on to me and said in a voice I could barely hear, “It’s the right thing to do. It’ll be okay. I promise.” Then she lowered her head to rest on our hands and when she lifted her head, I saw tears in her eyes and that’s when I knew we were moving to Rainbow.
There are a few things I just can’t handle. Broccoli and poison ivy, for sure. But worst of all is my mama crying. Up till last year, I was okay with Mama crying—I mean, it’s not like I liked it or anything, but it didn’t hurt me on the inside. But lately, when Mama’s eyes get all misty, my own eyes decide they have to get misty, too. And I hate that.
And now, standing in Grandma’s kitchen, with Mama about to cry, I still didn’t want to be in Rainbow, but I knew we were probably stuck here.
Even more than that, I knew I didn’t want my mama to cry.
I walked over to her and hugged her around the waist. She bent down and kissed the top of my head. “What would I do without you, Alice Ann?”
Mama sniffed a few times and then seemed to remember where I’d been. “How’d your walk with the dog go today? Did he let you walk him?”
“Nah. He only likes Miss Millie walking him. So we all walked together again today.”
“How was that?”
My conversation with Miss Millie came back to me and I said to Mama, “Did you know that Miss Millie had a mother who was a slave and a brother who was killed for protesting about how bad black people were treated?”
Mama tilted her head to look at me. “Well! It sounds like you two are doing a lot more than walking a dog. Miss Millie has sure been through a lot.”
“She has . . . ,” I added like I was an expert on her by now. “She gave me this today.” I reached in my pocket and showed Mama the rock.
“This was her brother’s,” I said. “Doesn’t it look like there are diamonds running through it?”
Mama smiled. Real big. “It’s beautiful,” she said, and then she asked, “Do you know when her brother was killed?”
I thought back to our conversation. “It was 1906.” I was proud of myself for remembering.
Mama nodded. “So Miss Millie thought this rock was worth holding on to for more than sixty years, but she gave it to you today. That means this rock—and you—must be pretty special.”
Not sure if it was the heat, the emotion or the pride I was feeling right then, but my cheeks burned and my eyes stung as I squeezed that rock tighter.
chapter 10
When I got to Miss Millie’s house the next day, she was sitting exactly where I left her at her picnic table and I started to worry that maybe she was getting Grandma’s forgetful disease. But then I saw she had on different clothes from the day before. She still wore a man’s button-down shirt, but it was a different color. Miss Millie’s hair looked newly braided, too.
Clarence barked and snorted, but only for a few seconds. Soon he was sniffing me again, and he must have recognized my smell because he stopped on his own without Miss Millie needing to say Hush or anything. I wanted to reach out and pet him, but stopped myself. Even though I wasn’t scared of him anymore, I wasn’t yet sure how he felt about me.
“Everything okay over at your grammy’s house?” Miss Millie asked.
“I guess.” I tried to sound happy, but I think she could hear the sad sticking to my voice like my hair was already sticking to my neck.
The day before, I made it through talking to Mama about Grandma thinking Grandpa had just died without me crying. I made it through hearing the doctor say there’s not a dang thing he can do for Grandma without me crying. And hardest of all—I even made it through hearing Mama cry last night when she thought I was asleep, without me crying.
So when Miss Millie asked me if Grandma was okay, imagine how surprised I was to find my eyes getting all misty. And before you know it, I was telling her everything and those dang tears were flowing like a fountain.
Miss Millie sat there nodding her head as she reached in her shirt pocket and fished around for a hankie she pulled out for me so I wouldn’t flood her backyard. Every now and then she would say, “Poor baby,” and I wasn’t sure if she was talking about Grandma, Mama or me, but it didn’t matter, ’cause it made me feel better.
I stared at the hankie she gave me, noticing the initials MM and real pretty lace all around. It struck me as something so ladylike for someone wearing a man’s shirt to have.
“Can you keep a secret, Alice-girl?” Miss Millie asked after my tears decided to stop.
I nodded my head quick to tell her I could.
Miss Millie looked at the ground like she was embarrassed about something. “I . . . I . . . kind of figured your grammy was having a problem when her garden was never watered and the plants started dyin’. She’s always so proud of that there garden and I knew she wouldn’t let it die on purpose. So I kind of been waterin’ it from time to time.”
Right then and there you could have knocked me over with a feather. ’Cause all of a sudden I remembered Grandma saying what she said about Miss Millie being in her yard and thinking she was up to no good, when all this time she was up to good, keeping her garden from withering up and dying. Didn’t that beat all? I sat there with my mouth open for all to see, like I was waiting for the words to fall out by themselves.
Miss Millie sat there also waiting for those words to fall out, with this look on her face that reminded me of what my face must look like when I’m waiting on Mama to scold me for something.
Finally, my words decided to fall.
“You mean all this time, you’ve been watering her garden?”
“I’m sorry . . .” Miss Millie looked hurt and a little embarrassed. “I probably shouldn’t a gone over there, but—”
“That’s the nicest thing I ever heard,” I interrupted. “It’s the nicest thing in the world!”
Miss Millie smiled then. It started in her eyes and found its way to her wrinkled mouth. But just when the rest of her face was showing an out-and-out smile, she turned it off like she had an on/off happiness switch inside her. I could tell, though, she was only pretending to be fed up with the whole conversation because her eyes were still smiling.
“Oh, fiddlesticks! Stop carryin’ on with such nonsense. No need to nom
inate me for the Nobel Peace Prize ’cause I kept your grammy’s tulips alive. And no need to tell her what I done.” She turned away from me, but not before I figured out she was blushing. Yep. I didn’t think it was possible, but Miss Millie was honest-to-goodness blushing.
I just stood there shaking my head, taking it all in till Miss Millie picked up the leash and put it around Clarence. “This here dog is wonderin’ if we’ll stop blabberin’ long enough to take him on a walk. Ready?”
And from that moment on we didn’t even try to have me walk Clarence by myself. It was always kind of understood that I was walking Miss Millie . . . who was walking Clarence.
. . . . . .
Miss Millie suggested we change our walk a bit that day and all of a sudden we were walking by the cemetery.
I mean no disrespect to the dead when I say that I don’t like cemeteries. It’s just a fact.
I remember going to Rainbow’s cemetery when Grandpa died. ’Course I wasn’t supposed to go to the funeral at all. Mama got a sitter for me and Eddie, who was just a baby. But when the sitter was putting Eddie down for a nap, I decided to go find Mama. Walked straight to the cemetery and right through the big iron gate. But I must’ve turned right when I was supposed to turn left or something ’cause I didn’t find Mama or anyone for a long while—just kept running into tombstones, all scared and alone, until a nice old man finally heard me crying and helped me find everyone.
Last summer, Mama took Eddie and me to “pay our respects” to Grandpa. Eddie drove his plate along the paths of the cemetery. I just held tight to Mama’s hand.
I had no idea if Miss Millie was just walking by the cemetery for a change of pace, or if she planned to pay her respects to any of her dearly departed. Then I had to wonder if she even had any dearly departed.
“Is your brother here?” I asked.
“In Rainbow?” Miss Millie’s voice squeaked a bit. “Alice-girl, I told ya he was killed in the Atlanta riots some sixty years ago.”
“I know.” I didn’t want to spell this out, but I had to. “I mean is he here?”
“No, child. James is buried in Atlanta.”
As we entered the cemetery I noticed that the old iron gate was rusty, like it had seen better days. But then, I guess everyone in the cemetery had seen better days, too.
I was hoping we’d turn around and head home, since James was in Atlanta, but Miss Millie walked on into the cemetery, past the pretty headstones with fancy-lettered names and descriptions of the deceased such as Beloved and Devoted. We walked past the nice fake flowers people put on graves since nothing could stay blooming in the Georgia heat. We had walked past what seemed to me to be the entire cemetery, when Miss Millie finally stopped our walking. She stood next to a white wooden cross that came up out of the ground to about my knees, and smiled.
I moved to see what she was looking at. When I got closer, I could read what was left of a peeling name on the old white cross: Clayton Miller, loving husband and father. 1874–1958.
I looked again at Miss Millie, who now looked like she was trying to decide if she was going to continue smiling or start crying.
“Did you know Mr. Clayton Miller?” I asked.
“I reckon I do know Mr. Clayton Miller, God rest his soul, seein’ as how I’m Mrs. Clayton Miller.”
“So that would mean he was . . . you were . . . Were you married?”
“That’s how it works, girlie!” And as she tried to laugh at her joke, she started coughing that cough again that began down in the middle of her and bubbled out. Clarence and I knew to wait for her to be finished with her coughing fit. While she was wheezing away, I turned back to that cross, like it was going to all make sense this time. There it was, written about Clayton Miller, loving husband and father.
And father?
Like when Miss Millie told me about being little with her brother, there was no way I could conjure up a picture that made her look like anything other than the old lady with all the wrinkles who was standing in front of me now. I suppose that’s why at that moment my brain was refusing to take in this latest detail about her life.
If my brain had windows to let stuff in, I guess when I came to Rainbow all my windows were closed, but now Miss Millie and Mama were giving me more stuff every day to let in, demanding those windows open up. Maybe that’s what being almost eleven feels like.
When Miss Millie finished her coughing routine, I had to ask. “So if you were married and he was a loving father, you must be a loving mother, right?”
“I’d sure like to think I was a loving mother,” Miss Millie told me, her eyes glistening. “Didn’t have him long enough, though.”
I looked around at the other grave markers. “Is he here, too, I mean, in the cemetery?”
She smiled a sad smile as her eyes filled with more tears. “Nah. My boy died long before we moved to Rainbow. God rest his soul. But that’s a story for another day. I just hadn’t visited Clayton for a while and thought it’d be nice and pleasant to stop by.”
Miss Millie held her hand out to the cross and touched it, but not like it was holding her up. But, seeing her smile, I figured maybe it was kind of giving her strength. I watched as her lips moved but I could tell the words weren’t for me, so I was real proud of myself for not eavesdropping again and just staying quiet for a few minutes.
Since Clarence was being polite, too—I noticed he wasn’t doing his business in the cemetery—I bent over to pet him for the first time. And would you believe that dog let me? It was like we had a little moment between us, of both of us staying out of the way. For Miss Millie.
His bottom tooth stuck out from under his top teeth and it looked like he was making a face at me on purpose to make me laugh. I patted his head and before I could say Good boy!, he was laying down on the dirty ground, showing me his belly. Next thing I knew, I was plain-as-day rubbing his belly and he was plain-as-day liking it.
Soon enough, Miss Millie was done with her conversation and she turned back to me and Clarence. “Thanks for bringing me today.” She said that like I was the one who brought her here. It made me feel—I don’t know—it made my heart kind of swell.
She and Clarence began to walk away as I stole one last look at Mr. Clayton Miller’s grave marker. That’s when it hit me!
“So if you were married to Clayton Miller, that would make you—”
“Go ahead and say it.” I swear she was smiling so hard she was almost busting her face.
“Millie Miller!” I snorted a snort that would have mortified Mama.
Miss Millie didn’t seem to mind my unladylike laughter. She seemed to like it. “Yep. That’s me. Heard all the jokes. Guess it makes it easier to remember, don’t ya think?”
I giggled as we walked back toward the cemetery’s gate, which seemed even farther away on the way out. I looked again at the big grave markers at the front of the cemetery and thought of the peeling little cross of Miss Millie’s husband way in the back.
“Was the cemetery like the churches?”
“Huh?” Miss Millie had to huff a bit to catch her breath. “What ya mean?”
“I mean, were there separate cemeteries for black people and white people?”
She smiled. “Ah, so ya noticed there was a little difference in the graves, huh? Well, ten years ago, I had to go and get permission to bury my husband in this here cemetery. They weren’t exactly happy about it. But I didn’t give up and they finally agreed to let me bury him here if I took that back space away from everybody. Since then, other colored folks joined Clayton, and today it’s a little more mixed up.”
Mixed up seemed to me to be a good description of that whole separation thing.
When we got back we were both covered in sweat. It was stinkin’ hot, even in the shade. The visit to the cemetery took longer than our usual walks, and I knew I’d better be getting back to Grandma’s,
so there was no sitting for a spell.
But before I left, Miss Millie reached into her shirt pocket again and pulled out something. As she put it in my hand, I saw it was an old picture—kind of cracked-looking, but I could still see who was in it. It was a young couple smiling for the camera. The woman had a familiar long braid down her back, but the hair wasn’t at all wiry and gray; it was coal black and shiny. And she wasn’t at all wrinkly—she was young and pretty. And on her lap was a little guy, maybe two or three years old, and he was smiling up at his mama like she was the best lady on earth.
“Was this your family?”
She nodded real slow like this time she had to wait for the words to fall out of her mouth. “It was my family . . . It is my family.”
In the short time I’d known and walked with Miss Millie, I hadn’t seen her sentimental and she wasn’t going to get too mushy now. She leaned toward Clarence, who was also looking up at her like she was still the best lady on earth, and said, “This here little fellow is my family now.”
I looked again at the picture before handing it back to Miss Millie. She shook her head. “You keep it.”
“But it’s your family. You need it.”
She shook her head once more. “I’ve got that picture and hundreds like it right here . . .” She pointed to her heart. “That’s all I need.” She put her hand on top of the picture in my hand. “Knowing someone else can remember my family, too, means we live on.”
I still had no idea what I was supposed to do with James’s marble and rock or now this old picture.
But I was sure that when Miss Millie gave you a present like that, you had to take it.
So I did.
chapter 11
I never know what Eddie is going to find fascinating, besides of course that dinner plate that keeps him occupied pretty near all the time.
But when I hopped the fence, he noticed right away I was carrying something. Like I said, he’s good at noticing things. Mama says when God takes away one sense, He gives extra helpings of the others, and that’s sure true about Eddie ’cause he doesn’t miss a thing.