by Lynne Hinton
They did not see that her heart stopped beating when her young granddaughter and the little white girl came up together, the young neighbor acting like kin, reaching up and wiping off a tiny bit of strawberry syrup smeared just on the right corner of the old mother’s completed smile, that the woman had fallen and died after nibbling on a fruit pie that finally had used all the sugar in the house and was baked in a borrowed dish that was blue crystal wrapped in a tiny red ring.
No one present put the puzzle pieces of prophecy together or heard the loose tongues of angels until it was too late. No one made the connection between denial and death, pleasure and pain, fate and consequence, until everything had come and gone. The three faces of evil: silence, hatred, and ignorance, merging and intertwining like the start and finish of the Trinity.
Even Ruth did not notice the timing of Miss Nellie’s demise. More than any of her company, she too was caught up in the delight, too blinded by the joy of seeing her one true dream come to pass. She was so filled up with the mounds of food and the delicious looks of appreciation on the faces of her friends that she did not recognize her mother’s choice of death. She was so mesmerized by her pride and the bursting love and the congratulations of the entire community that she refused to pay attention to anything but loveliness.
She did not see the twitches of her mother’s mouth as if she was needing to speak. The lone tear that ran from her right eye. The pitch-black stare toward heaven and angels that never seem to come on time. Even the child who knew her mother as if they shared one heart, one spirit, did not see the lifting of the dying woman’s hand as a means of trying to stop the coming of pain. The coming of pain that was so unspeakable, so unbearable that she would rather die than say its name.
Later, as the weeks passed, after she shook off the afternoon of feasting, Ruth still did not see her mother’s death as a sign because then there was something else blocking her vision. Then she had to fight with the unexpectedness of loss. The grief was like a thick wool veil that dropped heavy before her eyes. She was blind to her mother’s message because at first all that she could see was the satisfaction of a full and righteous dinner and next a life without the woman who had nursed her through every crisis, every shadow, every white-heated day.
After she got finished with the grandness of the banquet that she and her mother had pondered for more than a decade and worked for months to bring about, she could not make herself consider anything more than how she could get along without Miss Nellie. The bereaved daughter could not concentrate on what it all could possibly mean, the lone tear, the unspoken words, the two-fingered cry for help, because she could think of nothing except the tearing in her own spirit.
Ruth had never considered the possibility that her mother would one day die and especially that she would die on that one day. Her presence at the beginning and ending of every morning and night, her hand steadied on Ruth’s shoulder, her sideways glance of approval, the private and generous talks at midnight, the sharing of this now come and gone dream, they had all become a given in Ruth’s life; and now what was given had been taken. It threw her long and hard.
After the party and during the time of death Ruth moved through her mother’s funeral and beyond, like her next-door neighbor moved through years. She was a woman darting in and darting out, watching glimmers of recovery and turning away; but that was all.
She did not think, did not feel, did not sense anything other than the daze of death that can freeze a beloved’s heart. In the beginning, even her son’s plans for college, the dream she attached to all of her joy, the culmination of a lifetime of wanting, even this, when it was brought up by friends and church folk, was not enough to pull her up from her sadness.
Tree and Olivia, now a step beyond childhood, an unnoticed leap from daughters to mothers, searched for ways to mend the rip of grief that had opened up the heart of the woman they both loved. They steadied themselves on what they had already learned in taking care of Olivia’s mother, using all that, plus quiet songs and Bible reading, in trying to take care of Tree’s.
They cooked and cleaned. They spoke in whispers. They straightened Miss Nellie’s sheets and blanket but did not wash them, arranged her closet and drawers. They dusted the furniture and neatly placed her slippers at the foot of the bed. And when Ruth would sleep-walk into her mother’s room the young girls would ease her tired body into the pressed linens and comforting reminders that Miss Nellie had been there, slept there, loved there.
Together Tree and Olivia worked as a single unit caressing Ruth back into life. They searched for the spark within the mother’s eyes and they fanned it with just enough care, blew upon it with just the right amount of lightness; and they moved in and out from house to house like an old married couple, finishing what the other one left standing.
They found ways of talking about Miss Nellie without abusing her memory, urging Ruth to move ahead without pushing her, keeping the grandmother’s spirit alive without becoming morose. And because of their ferocity of tenderness, their unspoiled mercy, and the way they began and ended within one another, life started to breathe and grow once more inside Ruth’s soul.
E. Saul threatened to defer his entrance into college under the guise of making sure his mother was going to be okay and no one but Olivia saw the glimmer in his eyes when he said it. She alone saw he was trying to use the tragedy to ease his desire into being and she did not betray his confidences.
After watching his sister and her friend, however, so selflessly abandon their girlish summer, sacrificing everything to bring Ruth through the storm of bereavement, he decided that what had been prayed by his mother must ultimately come to pass. And finally after bearing the brunt of his sister’s anger and the stares of a stronger Ruth, he promised that he would go to school in the fall.
He could not help but see the stripped-away despair in his mother’s eyes, the stretched but still desperate need for her son to leave Smoketown and make something of the Love name; and so he vowed that he would study subjects that were dignified and important and with careful attention to fulfilling their dreams, he would make his mother and his dead grandmother proud.
The months then from May to August passed gently and without event. Tree and Olivia spent the summer growing up in ways that only living in love can teach. They learned to make pies and jellies and how to save scraps and turn them into soup. They earned a little money begging chores from their neighbors, cleaning jars for canning, sorting through cluttered closets, collecting rags; and they combined their nickels and pennies to pay for goods and bills during the weeks that Ruth couldn’t work.
They woke up early, beginning their errands without complaint; and they fell asleep just as the sun was dropping, their days and their nights filled up with living a woman’s life. They laughed at the changes in their bodies, the loosening of their longings; and in between the hours of cleaning and earning pay, they dreamed great dreams for themselves.
They discovered that the push to grow up suited them, that they no longer needed the play and carefree days of childhood. They recognized the responsibility that was being placed upon both of them; but they realized that they actually preferred it to being little girls. Though they both missed Miss Nellie and the unsullied ways she nurtured them and even though they worried for Ruth and grew weary with Mattie, they found that the summer of a mother’s grief was actually a welcomed passage of life.
E. Saul paid close attention to the changes in his sister and her friend. And he went about his own passage. He prepared for a life at college by selling all of his farm tools, digging up the bulbs and seeds of his childhood and selling them to farmers, and finally taking a job in a white lawyer’s office, cleaning the shelves and filing away papers. And Ruth, watching the heartfelt determination of her son and the swift and easy maturity of her daughter, eventually pulled herself away from the grave and had, by the long days of July, discovered that she could spend an entire evening without the spill of tears.
&n
bsp; On the inside looking out and on the outside looking in, all appeared to be well at the edge of Smoketown. The adolescence of two girls, the closing up of the wound of grief, and the emergence of a young black male scholar. But the evil had begun and while no one was measuring except an old woman who lived alone in the dark and abandoned forest, just in the midst of what appeared to be healing, it wrapped its second layer around bursting hearts.
* * *
Roy had been gone so long, more than two years, that Olivia had stopped sleeping with the light on. She quit biting her fingernails and was able to look a person in the eye without suddenly becoming anxious and turning away. She was more at ease around others, made better grades in school, and began to think of herself as lucky.
Even with the death of Miss Nellie and even with the imminent departure of her good friend, E. Saul, she felt light and slight of burden. Mattie remained bound to her bed, demonstrating an occasional flicker of life; but Olivia had even loosened her desperation that her mother not die. She had become convinced of her own skills and resources and was no longer afraid of being left alone.
She assumed that her brother would not return to Greensboro, to their house on the edge of Smoketown. His friends were all in the war, overseas, making heroes of themselves. Tootsie’s Billiards closed when Red Foster got shot by a jealous husband. So Olivia, though spending most of her time with her best friend next door, cleaned out all of his clothes and moved into his room farther away from their mother who refused to die. She had not, in more than a year, considered that Roy would come home. Having laid that burden down, she never thought to warn anyone about him.
It was a solemn drive though not quiet for the young man as he hitched a ride from Fayetteville. Straight across sandy flat roads and into the dry foothills of the piedmont, the driver talked. A born-again Christian, he tried to get Roy to confess his sins and claim the promise of eternal life. Roy would not participate in the reading of a flimsy leaflet the driver pulled out of the glove compartment and would not even look at the man who drove him home. He kept his eyes on the road ahead of him acting as if he were the one doing the driving while the Bible-spouting pickup man begged, pleading for his redemption.
Roy got out at the main road, about six miles from his mother’s house. Opened the door while the car was still moving and walked away to the words of the driver, “Christ be with you, brother.”
Roy did not turn to the man who was unable to name the burden he felt while the sullen teenager rode beside him. And the driver pulled away, more relieved than Roy now that the shared journey was over.
For six hot miles the young man walked on common paths and wondered what he had done in coming home. Wondered what voice had beckoned him. And he stirred up familiar dust with the toes of his shoes, recognized farms and farmers and cars that passed; but he could not name the thought that brought him back to Smoketown.
Caked with the sweat and dirt of an August Carolina, Roy stepped into the house that sheltered his boyhood, went to the kitchen and found a bottle of booze. It was old, uncapped, high on a shelf near the door. It was where he always remembered the liquor to be. And he stood without a chair and reached for what he hoped might be left.
After two glasses he went into the room where his mother lay the day he had left. And as if nothing had passed between them, no time, no space, she twisted in the same position on the bed. Her body a fixture in the sheets.
He stood at the door just staring at her. Incapable of pity and certainly of love, he just watched. He thought how easy it would be to kill her and how that might just be the only kind thing he would ever do. He thought how she was nothing to him. How he heard stories of men who cried at the graves of their mothers. Tough, mean men who folded into babies when they would hear a song about somebody’s mama, recalling a tender moment.
But for Hangman, there were no tender moments. No memories to keep, no stories to tell. It wasn’t even that he hated her, thought she had treated him unfairly. There was only nothing; and sometimes he thought that was worse.
When the young black girl came into the house late in the afternoon before his sister had returned from her trip into town, Roy was not thinking of evil. The sun was high and relentless. The air, drained of lightness. But he was not angry from the heat. He was not remembering his mother or Candy or his sister or living on the edge of sorrow. He was not ciphering the cruelty of his own heart nor the damage he could do to the heart of a child.
He was drunk, sitting at the kitchen table playing with matches, toying with a flame, enjoying the danger of fire, seeing how long it would take before his skin would burn and blister.
She walked in as if it were her house, eased, innocent, and was startled at her neighbor’s return. The look on her face, the fear, the surprise, it pleased him. It was the way he thought everyone looked at him. So to see it so clearly, so uninhibited, locked, took hold, fortified what he had always believed about himself.
“Hello, little Tree.” Roy smiled and blew out the match that was burning in his hand. He had no plans of harm.
“Roy, I didn’t know you were home,” Tree stammered. “Is Olivia around?”
She felt uncomfortable and it showed in her voice, in the flight of her eyes.
“No.” He smiled, pausing for a moment to enjoy the reaction his homecoming had provoked.
“But why don’t you come in here and sit at the table with me and wait for her?” He pushed the chair out from under the table with his foot.
“Just tell her I came by.” Tree had her hand on the knob of the door.
Roy jumped from his seat and moved between his next-door neighbor and her exit. He had not liked the way she arrived, comfortable and entitled, nor the way she was trying to depart, much too proudly and quickly.
“I said come and sit with me at the table.”
And though he did not mean to press so deeply into the young girl’s shoulder, he pushed her from the door into the chair at the table.
“I just want to talk. You can talk, can’t you?”
And the girl nodded slowly.
“What grade you going in this year?” he asked, trying to lighten his voice and sound interested.
“Eighth,” she said without facing him. The fear began to dry her throat. She thought she heard something, high-pitched and delicate, but she couldn’t make it out.
“Eighth? My, but haven’t you grown up?” He studied her, remembering her when she was smaller, less mature, thinking about his sister and how they had been friends for so long, how Olivia never bowed to the disapproval of the white children once she got to school.
“I probably should get home. E. Saul will be waiting. He’s leaving this weekend for college.” She moved as if she was going to stand up.
“Sit down.” His voice was angry and loud. “We’re having a conversation. Aren’t we having a conversation?”
The fury in Roy’s voice startled Tree and she slowly dropped into her seat across from his.
Something changed. He could feel it. She could see it. She tried to think of something to say, something to lessen his focus on her, something to help her exit. But whatever had come apart in his mind was quickly unraveling in front of them.
“You don’t walk away from someone when you’re talking. Didn’t you learn that in that farm school you niggers go to?”
He took a drink. Tree froze. She could not think of how to leave.
“So E. Saul’s going to college, huh? That’s just perfect,” he said and downed another swallow.
When he turned the bottle up to his mouth, Tree focused on Roy and noticed his hands. They were not so strange. Not so different seeming. They just looked like hands. Fingers gripping and releasing. Knuckles tight and tall. Palms wet and slippery. Nails curved and smooth. And although they were white, she knew at the moment that he put down the bottle and grabbed for her neck that they were the father’s hands that she had never been able to find.
There was that thought, a slight fluttering
of wings leaving the air around them, and then nothing else.
It was not much of a struggle for Roy. When she screamed the first time and he slapped her, she did not make another noise. It was, in fact, almost too easy for him. He held her down, slammed her head into the floor, pinning her beneath him.
In only a period of a few seconds, even before he was sure of what he was going to do, he tore her open, and forced all of himself, the bitterness, the shame, the hatred, the anger, all of it he tried to cram into the young girl.
When he finished and rolled off of her, he glanced up to find his mother, having awakened and left her room. She stared at him, recognized him and what he had done, and then she fell back into the hallway.
Roy threw the empty bottle across the room, turned toward his mother’s shadow, then down at the trembling, crying girl. He stood up, kicked her, and walked out the door.
Mattie’s feeble attempt at resurrection was of no consequence. She left her bed because she smelled smoke, a familiar push to rouse her from her grave. She got up thinking of river water and birth. By the time she arrived at the door from the hall into the kitchen, her son’s madness had ruptured, the spirit of a little girl had already slipped away; and she was too old and too sick and too late to do anything to stop it.
She recoiled at what she saw, lost herself in an evil she helped create, and did not regain consciousness until Olivia stood over her, shaking her with tremendous force, demanding to know the truth.
Mattie however knew nothing, especially nothing about a thing as deep and pure and penetrating as truth. She dropped her head and closed her eyes, her daughter cursing her to hell. And with that, a final and permanent choice of death for the weary woman and the snap in Olivia’s mind, the evil wrapped its way around the third and final time.