She picked up the lamp to blow it out but noticed his eyes. They were closed like most mornings, but the crevice in his skin between them looked to be not as deep. Tingles rose to her scalp. He had lost some of his worry. She feared he was dead. She widened her legs, steadying herself in his dirt.
Above his shoulders, clothed in his overalls’ denim straps, she held the lamp. Her hand shook, making the light play on him as if it was a bare foot and him a freshly plowed plot of land. “Harold,” she said and watched for his rise and fall.
When it came, it was tiny, like a fluttering of a fledgling bird. Sarah dropped to her knees. He smelled of whiskey, saturated like the air in her kitchen used to be, full of grease from fish fried crispy on Sunday nights with Mattie. But that air was beloved.
She shifted the light back to his eyes, buried amidst the hair that began claiming his face the night Emerson Bridge was born. “Harold, it’s Sarah, wake up.” She shook his shoulder and felt the bones of him, there at the surface like a fish coming up for air.
His eyes peeked open.
Sarah felt every nerve in her body at the edge of her skin. He was alive. He was not leaving her alone. He could find work again. He might not be able to climb poles or work with the telephone wires, but he could drive the truck for someone or how about sitting in the office like a woman and answering the telephone, even become a Hello Girl like the job he had gotten Mattie.
He moved his right arm from near his chest like he wanted to reach for her, maybe even pull her to him and kiss her. Not since the night after they buried Mattie had they lost themselves in their grief with a kiss that told each other they were not alone. Sarah leaned in towards him, but he opened his hand, and there was that letter, his hand shaking so, the paper gave a slight breeze. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“They got it wrong,” she told him. “You can work. Just need to get you through this bad pneumonia and a little cleaned up is all.” She began brushing aside his hair. It had grayed more than she’d realized. He was only thirty-nine.
He ground his forehead into the straw. Pieces of it broke loose and flew to the floor.
“All right, maybe not at Southern Bell no more. But what about odd jobs? Like helping that Mr. Dobbins on his farm.” Sarah knew she was talking fast, too fast, but could not stop herself. “They them got a little cross, the kind they say Jesus died on, right there on the living room table by a big Bible. They go to church. He’s one of them good Christian kind of men.”
“Sarah,” Harold said, his voice cutting through like a knife. “I said I’m sorry.” His eyes no longer carried the white hue of life but now showed the color of egg yolks, the yellow that eggs become when she used to beat them when she had eggs too for them to eat.
He tucked the letter back in against his chest, closed his eyes, and curled back up with himself.
She knew the words by heart. Dear Mr. Harold Creamer, We regret to inform you that your employment with Southern Bell Telephone Company has been terminated. We appreciate your 19 years of service, however, we no longer can hold your position for you. They signed off with Kindest Regards. But Sarah didn’t know what was kind about letting a man go and putting him and his family at risk of losing everything they had.
Sarah got up off her knees. “Reckon they stayed with you as long as they could. You was hit and miss, for sure.” At first, after Mattie died, for their boy’s sake, he worked steady and used his money for the household. But, over the last two years, his work had begun slowing down like a clock needing to be wound again. Most of the little money he made, he drank.
She thought of Emerson Bridge. “Don’t trouble yourself none,” she told Harold. “I’ll carry it, I will.” She blew out the lamp.
…..
Inside the chifforobe, on the bottom shelf and wrapped in a baby-blue blanket, lay something Sarah had never wanted to disturb. Three months shy of seven years had passed since she had folded it and placed it inside for safekeeping. But this morning, Sarah picked up the bundle, held it like a child, and laid it on the bed, where her fingers unwrapped it, revealing the rayon crepe, six yards of it in midnight blue. This was Mattie’s material. Sarah had used it to make Mattie’s burial dress. She had bought extra, tucking it away like some people keep their husband’s first love note or their child’s first tooth.
She let herself touch it. It was soft. She pressed on it, felt it collapse to a thin nothing. But when she released it, it sprang back to the shape it once had known. “Mattie,” Sarah whispered.
Mr. Dobbins’s wife used to give Sarah four dollars over the cost of the material for each dress Sarah made her. But a year ago, she stopped buying from Sarah, saying her husband made her start buying store-bought dresses only.
This was Sarah’s only fabric, and there was no money to buy more.
She brought the cloth to her face and imagined it as food on their boy’s plate, grits and scrambled eggs, hot biscuits, slices of loaf bread and Treet, spoonfuls of pork ’n’ beans, even a box of Hydrox cookies. She would take three dollars now for a dress and add in a dollar and a quarter for the material, so $4.25 tops, and she would be glad for it.
This cloth was fancy. Mrs. Dobbins liked fancy. She liked a collar at her neck, a simple one, an inch and a half in width that laid flat, leaving a respectable “V,” yet giving her neck plenty of room to display her pearls. Mrs. Dobbins liked her pearls. She would look at the neck first.
This would be a dress, not of promise, as the others had been, but of hope. Mrs. Dobbins would want this dress. She had to.
…..
Harold stood at Sarah’s back. She could smell him. It was late afternoon, and she sat at her sewing machine in their bedroom, pedaling Mattie’s cloth through. She had Emerson Bridge’s supper, the second pear, waiting for him on a plate on the kitchen table.
“You done said you was sorry,” she told Harold and thought he would leave, but she heard no sound towards that. She heard his breathing, labored and full of phlegm.
He began to cry. They were big sobs, not the quiet kind that could be mistaken for a runny nose. These were from way down where lies were no longer welcome.
She turned towards him, his head lowered and his body shaking all the way down his arms. They used to be a strong man’s arms. Now they looked small. A quiver of sadness began in the pit of her belly and shot up to her face, which became hot and full.
She rose from her machine, closed the door to their room and got into their bed. She slid towards his side. It felt cool, even cold, through her housedress. “Come to bed,” she said and raised the covers with her hand held high.
He did not move.
“That other,” he said and tried to clear his throat. “I’m sorry about that other.”
“I am, too,” she told him and wished the sun wasn’t leaving. He stood just out from the window, where a curtain, yellow with red flowers, had begun to dull in the fading light. At the sun’s peak, it would shine through the flowers and set them to spinning. The flowers that afternoon were dead still.
“Come to bed,” she said.
“It wasn’t but one time. I want you to know that.”
She did know that. “Come to bed.”
“I’m filthy.”
“I am, too.” She reached for his hand. It felt crusty. She pulled him towards her until he lay beside her, clothes and boots and all. She moved her mouth towards his and found his lips as soft as a woman’s. No longer were they buried in hair.
He cried harder.
Sarah ran her fingers over his skin and felt it covered in tiny bumps. In various places, she saw cuts. He had shaved. Was it for her, because he was staying? Or for God, because he was leaving?
She brought his head to her bosom. Her body shook with his.
It took a while for him to get his words out, but in time, he said, “Reckon you could ever find it in your good heart to forgive me?”
Sarah knew the big word to him was “forgive,” but to her it was “good,” regardless of wh
at he had put with it. She wrapped her arms around his head and pressed him into her. She thought she could feel her heart coming up through him. “Yeah, I can,” she told him. “I sure can. But I know you can’t never forgive me back. And that’s all right.”
“You don’t have nothing to be forgiven for,” he said.
I don’t want him, I don’t want him, I don’t want him, cycled through Sarah’s mind. Emerson Bridge was just a baby the night she’d screamed those words, but, still, he surely could have heard. “But I do. If I just hadn’t said I didn’t—”
“I love you, Sarah,” Harold told her, his head now lifted, his eyes straight on her. “I said I love you, Sarah, Sarah Creamer.”
His words ran a stitch to her. “I love you, too, Harold, Harold Creamer.”
The sun took itself from their room. It was as if it had visited, eked out a presence and said, Hey, don’t forget me.
But the words they had just said to each other stayed, and it came to her that, until that very moment, she didn’t know her husband any better than the day they had said their “I do’s” to a stranger and were pronounced man and wife. What had defined them as a couple were the words they had never said. But now that they had said them, for the first time, she felt alive with him.
…..
Harold’s head began moving above Sarah in short jerks to the left and holding and then to the right and doing the same.
“Harold, what is it? What you seeing?”
But he did not answer her.
Darkness had come full on now. Sarah rolled out from under him and lit the kerosene lamp beside the bed. She cast the light about the room but saw nothing.
She brought the light to his face. His eyes were wide and bouncing. She had not seen them that open since he had looked at Mattie. “Is it Mattie?” she asked, her heart picking up its rate. “She coming for you?” Sarah had heard that the dead do that.
His eyes bounced to the right, towards the chifforobe.
Sarah directed the light there. “Mattie? Sister Mattie, is that you? It is, ain’t it?” Sarah thought she could smell potatoes being peeled. “What she look like? She still little and pretty like a china doll? You said that one time, that she was little and pretty like a china doll.”
Harold’s eyes were bouncing again.
Sarah pictured her own fingers. They were fat like cornbread pones.
His eyes came back around, and this time stopped on her. On her, Sarah. She waited for them to move on, but they did not. He began to nod his head like he was agreeing to something. She watched his eyes fill.
Sarah felt light-headed. She had been hoping that death would continue to be a spectator in his life, sit around like it was watching him connect a telephone line. But she knew now there was no more watching.
She blew out the light and made them both naked. She brought his head to her chest and felt his eyelashes stroke her. They were soft like a baby’s.
“Tell her I love her, too. And miss her, too, would you?” She thought she smelled catfish frying and heard grease sizzling, it popping up and hitting her hand and Mattie rushing over and wiping it off. But Sarah never minded being marked like that. She wished she could be marked again.
Around his back, Sarah wrapped her arms and pressed so hard, her muscles shimmied. “Don’t leave me, Harold. I don’t want to be the only one of us left here.”
She felt him clutch her, too, their bodies hugging the way they did before Mattie had come into their lives. She imagined him inside her like that first time in that automobile in the woods when she believed he loved her.
“You ain’t,” he said. “The boy. You got the boy. Our son, Emerson Bridge.”
“But he’s—” Sarah said.
“He’s yours.”
But I don’t know how to be no good mama, she wanted to say. She knew those words, though, would give him no peace of mind. Or Mattie, either. And didn’t they both need peace of mind? “Mine,” she told him, “yes mine,” and felt every drop of blood rush to her head.
…..
When Harold stopped breathing, Sarah lay beneath him in his silence. She took big breaths, lifting him high and feeling his weight come back to her, until she became dizzy and thought birds fluttered in her head.
She pictured Mattie hovering over them. A thin light ringed her face. It was true. She was still little and pretty like a china doll. And her dimples, they cradled the sides of her mouth. Sarah had always said they could hold a whole lot of happiness. She had used only three and a half yards of Mattie’s cloth for Mrs. Dobbins’s dress, which left her with two and a half, not enough for a dress for herself. But, still, she had some of Mattie’s cloth.
Sarah started to call her husband’s name, call him Harold, but, instead, she said, “Harry. Go to her, Harry,” said it out loud and let his name carry.
Then she withdrew her arms from him, brought them down along her side and cuddled them up under herself.
She felt him become as light as a piece of thread.
…..
Just before first light, Sarah covered Harold’s body with the sheet that had covered them. She would like to have pulled the covers over her, too, but she had a boy to feed.
On her body, still naked and warm, she placed her housedress, wrinkled and cold, and returned to the sewing machine and Mrs. Dobbins’s dress. She only had the collar to finish. She would wake Emerson Bridge in time for school.
They no longer had a telephone. It had been disconnected for lack of payment. She would use Mrs. Dobbins’s telephone to call about Harold and would put as much of Mrs. Dobbins’s money towards the burial as she could.
She began to pedal, her feet working in a rhythm that soon brought the dress home. One day she would buy Emerson Bridge a bicycle, and he would pedal it with a full belly.
She hung Mrs. Dobbins’s dress on a hanger on the nail on the back of the door and retrieved her lamp, which she held just out from her creation, there at the left shoulder where the sleeve crested. With her fingers on the seam, she moved in concert with the light, down the curve of the armpit, then down the side of the dress, checking to make sure there were no skips in the stitching, either from gathering in too tight and bunching up or in going long and making holes. Sarah needed them to follow like school children, lucky enough to line up on the Monday after Easter Sunday to march around the classroom and show off their new outfits, the girls in dresses made by mothers who let them go to church and sit on pews and answer the altar call to get saved.
The stitches followed.
She started down the right side. At the waist, she found a hole the size of her finger and removed the stitches on both sides of the opening, catching up under the loops with a needle and pulling them free. If it had not been this dress, she would have done as her mother had taught her and removed only one inch on each side. But it was this dress, Mrs. Dobbins’s dress, and it had to be perfect. She removed four inches back and four inches forward and fed the material through again.
She returned the garment to the hanger and ran the light over it again, and not just over the place she had repaired but over the entire dress. One more time.
And then out loud, she said, “Please. Let it be good enough. Please.”
MARCH 13, 1951
Sarah stood by Emerson Bridge’s bed and watched for his rise and fall. When it came, his tiny breath, she drew it in. His papa was alive when he had closed his eyes the night before. But as soon as she woke him, he would be in a world where his papa was no more. And left only with her. How could she bring him and his dimples into that?
She lowered her head, crossed her arms longways down the front of her body and squeezed in her shoulders. She thought of the smallest place she could tuck herself. The flour bin that no longer held flour. No, the food warmer, the bare food warmer, on the woodstove for biscuits.
“Mama?” she heard. “You cold?”
He was awake. She felt a rush in her nose, a stinging.
“No, hon, I’m just r
ight. You? You cold?” The heat from the fire in the woodstove did not reach his room. She would put an extra blanket on his bed that night.
He pulled the sheet up over his face. Maybe he would go back to sleep, and she could steal away to Mrs. Dobbins and sell the dress. But what if he woke and found his papa in the bed down the hall behind a closed, hard door?
She had to wake him fully.
She wanted to hear him say his name. Harold had wanted her to name him, but she had thought it was his place to. He returned home from work one day, saying he had found a name on a road sign in the southern part of the county, while he was out on telephone company business. The road was Old Emerson Bridge Road. “Because I hope he gets to grow old,” Harold had said. She had never wished that more than now.
“What’s your name, hon?”
He pulled the covers higher.
He wanted to sleep. Maybe if she closed his door, he would stay in his bed. She looked that way now, but Harold’s body lay only ten feet away. She couldn’t risk it. “Hon?” she said.
But he said nothing.
She’d heard Harold say the words “I said” when Emerson Bridge didn’t do what Harold had asked him to, like go to the road to get the mail or go out to the clothesline and get him a work shirt.
Sarah took a deep breath. “I said What’s your name?”
His fingers came from beneath and wrapped around the covers. Slowly, he revealed his face, the growing light rushing onto it. On his upper cheek, she saw a small cut and a longer one on his chin. And all about his skin, bumps, tiny and red, lay scattered like polka dots on swiss fabric.
He had shaved. Just like Harold had. They’d done it together. They’d done it while she had sewed the afternoon before.
She tried not to shake all over.
One Good Mama Bone Page 3