One Good Mama Bone

by McClain, Bren; Monroe, Mary Alice;

  She laid the sacks on the kitchen table, opened the box, and picked up the money, one hundred dollars in ten-dollar bills. One hundred dollars. Twenty dollars a dress. And there was the promise of more dresses to make, if the ladies were pleased. She thought she would scream and jump into the air, but all she did was pull her chair back from the table and sit in it, her body folding forward. Why do you love me like you do? she whispered and could feel her fists so tight, her fingernails cut into herself.

  The smell of ambrosia from the luncheon returned to Sarah’s nose, the tangy citrus of oranges and the coconut, shaved into tiny, tiny fingers. Emerson Bridge’s had been tiny. The first time he wrapped his around her thumb, she felt a spark of heat rise through her that she knew was life itself.

  He was going to the show with Mr. Thrasher and should be back by now, but she’d not seen him in the yard. With all this money, she could buy him a Christmas present now, a real one. Perhaps a bicycle. She could pay for it outright and not even think about layaway.

  She jumped to her feet. “Emerson Bridge!”

  She heard nothing in return. She went to the porch door and called his name.

  He did not respond.

  She went to the lot and to the barn but did not see him.

  Snowflakes were falling all around. Most were as big as nickels, some like quarters. A quiet was setting in like no other. She felt something stir in the pit of her belly, something that made her run and run fast to the house, where she made her way to her boy’s room. She stood in the doorway but did not see him.

  But she heard him. Sounds, quaking ones, coming from under his bed.

  She laid herself flat on the floor and looked through the tassels on the bottom of his bedspread. There he was, his small body heaving. She slid her hand towards him and touched the outside of his arm. “What’s got you all torn up, sweet boy?”

  From his hand, fisted as hard as a grown man’s, he released a piece of paper, twisted like a candy stripe.

  Sarah brought it out into the open air and hurried to smooth it against the floor. Some words in bold hovered above blank lines. She read out loud, “We hereby acknowledge that the 1952 Fat Cattle Show & Sale is a terminal event and that the steer we enter will be sold afterwards as a market steer.” She didn’t know the word “terminal,” but she knew “market” as in supermarket.

  “I got to kill Lucky, Mama,” he said.

  Sarah stretched her hand towards him, the tassels off-white and dirty, splayed against her upper arm. “No sir,” she told him. “You don’t, we don’t. We don’t have to do this. We don’t have to do this at all.” Her words came fast.

  “But we do, Mama. We need the money.”

  “We don’t need nothing that bad,” she said, as her fingers tore the paper into as many pieces as her fingers would allow. And then she slapped the pile, scattering all the tininess across the wide, wide floor.

  The world was becoming white and the noise of the day, softening around the mother cow and her calf. Each sought refuge beneath a tree that had long ago grown in the midst of cotton, the farmer allowing it, even praising it for its courage. The mother cow on one side of the fence, her calf on the other, both nestled under the arms of limbs stretching tall and wide.

  I need to be put somewhere by my lonesome, left in some pitch-black space that I’d make smell so bad, you’d have to cover up your nose with blankets as thick as you could stand. But even that wouldn’t wipe out the wretched smell of me. You’d have to stick your nose in mud, Mama Red, in the hopes that somehow that stench would evaporate on out of here. But it won’t, no ma’am. It’ll only start sinking down to the lowest room in my mama’s Jesus’s hell that’s already got my name on it. Yeah, right there on that bottom of the bottomest door, my name’s already written out. Clementine Florence Augusta Sarah, it says right there on it.

  How could I not have known? Mama Red, how?

  The heart ache I brought on my boy and almost on you. I was so desperate to feed him and be a good mama, I was about to … I ain’t going to say. Some words don’t need to be spoke. Like fences that don’t need to be up. This one right here, between you and your boy, it’s coming down.

  Mine’s coming down between me and my boy, too. That man that came to see me yesterday, that Billy Udean, I’m scared he’s going to find out or either already knows about Emerson Bridge and try to take him from me. Ain’t seen his truck back over there, though. But now that I say that word “scared,” let it be out with us, you wouldn’t be, would you, girl? You wouldn’t be scared at all. You’d just do whatever you had to when the time come. There you go again, teaching me.

  It’s good to see our boys playing in the snow. That snowball Emerson Bridge just made—did you see it? I got a rock in my room that I practice with. I’m going to practice some more, and one of these days real soon I’m going toss it to him, and he’s going to toss it back. You just wait.

  I’ve missed playing. Me and Mattie liked to play. When we planted potatoes that first time, me and her got on our knees in the dirt, and I started digging a hole with my hand and said, “This is our baby,” and I picked up a potato slip and told her, “And, look, we’re putting her to bed.” I laid her in just as soft and brought up her covers, that was the dirt, to just below her eye. That’s how you plant potato slips, eyes up.

  Mattie went to digging her own hole. “We got two babies, look, Sister Sarah,” she said and put her one in and covered her up good. Harold hollered over that we weren’t putting in them slips deep enough, but me and her kept on. We were putting our babies to bed.

  That right there, Mama Red, that was the best of us. Like me and you, girl, the best of us, here together under this big tree, that fence coming down and watching our babies play.

  DECEMBER 25, 1951

  On Christmas day, inside the Creamer house at noon, in a room the woodstove made exceedingly warm, Sarah Creamer and her boy sat at the kitchen table, a feast before them of fried salmon patties, milk gravy she’d made from the grease, boiled white rice and green beans, seasoned with not one, but two pieces of fatback. Sarah had splurged with Mildred’s money, this she knew. But it was her boy’s first Christmas without his father.

  “You want some more, hon? More beans and rice and gravy? And what about another salmon patty or two?”

  She watched as her boy’s dimples pushed his cheeks closer to God. She didn’t always think of Mattie when she saw him, but this day, she did. Harold, too. They would be proud. She was providing nutrition for their son, not just Mattie’s and Harold’s son, but hers, too, and she was as happy for that as the present she had for him hiding along the side wall of her room. Sarah rose into air, saturated with the smell of good frying grease, and filled every empty space on his plate.

  “You eat, Mama,” he told her, and she realized she’d barely taken a bite.

  She slid her fork under a mound of rice, topped with a good blanket of gravy. But when she brought the food to her mouth, she yawned and shook her head to try to wake herself up. Only a few hours sleep in three days was telling on her, and she only had two of the five dresses to show for it. “Staying up waiting on Santy Claus last night must have made me sleepy, hon.”

  He looked towards the hallway. A grin came across his face. “I want to give you your present now. Can I?”

  She’d planned on giving him his after they’d eaten, but she found herself grinning back and saying, “If I can give you yours, too.” She said it as if she was a schoolgirl, and the only problem before her was where to draw the lines in the dirt for hopscotch.

  He ran towards his room. She loved getting his pine cones from the yard. Last Christmas he’d filled a paper sack with them and placed red berries from the holly bush on top. Harold had laid off his liquor that day and joined her boy and her at the table for this exact meal.

  “Close your eyes, Mama!” he called from down the hall, and she shut them tight the way she did the bins on the woodstove to keep flies off her leftover food.

&nb
sp; “Okay, open them!’

  She flung them wide and saw in his hands, a present that appeared to be a box the size of a man’s cigar. It was wrapped in Christmas paper of blue and white.

  “Merry Christmas, Mama!”

  The present was as light as a biscuit. She removed the paper, full of horses and sleighs filled with people who looked to be having a good time. The box carried words written in bold along its side. “Miles Nervine,” she read out loud.

  “To help you get some sleep. You put them in water and let them fizz, Mr. Drake said.”

  “Mr. Drake?”

  He giggled. “I ran there yesterday when you went to town. He wrapped it for me and everything.”

  “Thank you, hon.” She had hoped to keep her tiredness from him. But she had failed.

  “Take one now,” he whispered in her ear.

  She didn’t want to disappoint him, but she had to shake her head. “Got to keep on with my sewing, hon. But I appreciate it, and, when I can, I’m sure going to take me one, I am.” She slid her chair back from the table. “Now, you close your eyes.”

  But she saw that he had lost his dimples, and she sat back down and opened the box and took out a tablet, while he poured her a glass of water. He was right. It did fizz, enough to almost overflow the glass. He giggled, and she said to him, “Your giggle box is turned over,” as she turned the glass up at her mouth and drank. It fizzed around her teeth.

  She went to her bedroom, where, against the wall, leaned a bicycle, a pretty blue one, which she’d bought at B. F. Goodrich for $43.95, paid for it with money she could have spent turning the lights back on, but they had learned to live without them. With the $12.05 she had before Mildred’s money and the $51.06 left of the $100, she had $63.11 remaining. She needed to repay Mr. Thrasher and Mr. McDougald and Mr. Scarboro. With the land, the steer, the burial and the automobile, she owed $284.50. But she no longer needed all that money to buy so much feed at the FCX.

  She rolled his present across the hallway and into the kitchen, where her boy stood with his hands over his face. The wheels made a wispy sound, and she wondered if he could tell what it was. “All right, open them!” she said and watched as his eyes lit up like they were light bulbs, and good electricity had just hit. “That word says Schwinn there,” she told him and pointed to the long part between the seat and the handle bar, “that’s the make of it and the very best there is.” The sales clerk had told her this. She kicked out her foot towards the back tire. “Them are training wheels. They’re to help you get started.”

  He swung his leg over and straddled the seat.

  A knock came at the porch door.

  “Reckon Santy’s come back?” She scooted that way. It was Mr. Thrasher. She had not yet told him about not doing the steer competition. She had wanted to give her boy a good Christmas first.

  “Mr. Ike!” her boy called out and ran to the porch door to let him in.

  Sarah took a deep breath.

  “Come look what Santy brought me!”

  “Then get ready for number two,” Mr. Thrasher said and stepped into the kitchen, in his hands a present, a box the size of a bread pan but thick like a sheet cake and wrapped in shiny red paper with a big green bow. He set it on the table. “Tear into it!” he said and nodded towards it.

  Her boy caught the end of the wrapping paper and yanked it across the top. He and Mr. Thrasher were laughing. She wished now she’d invited him to eat. They had plenty. She’d added four pieces of loaf bread to the salmon to stretch it. Three nice-sized patties remained on the plate.

  But then her boy’s laughter stopped, and he pushed the box into the plate of salmons and ran out the door.

  “Where’s your manners?” she called after him. “You tell Mr. Thrasher ‘thank you.’”

  But he was outside now.

  “Hey, he don’t have to like it. I sure didn’t like every present I ever got.” Mr. Thrasher giggled, but Sarah knew it wasn’t a true one.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Thrasher.”

  He was trying to put the wrapping back on the box. She read “Pistols” across the top of the gift, “Roy Rogers Pistols.”

  So that was it.

  She went outside and found her boy in the lot with Lucky, his arms around the animal’s neck. “Mr. Thrasher didn’t know, hon,” she called from the fence. “None of us did. It was innocent. Like we all are.”

  The time had come to tell Mr. Thrasher. She motioned for her boy. “Let’s don’t hurt his feelings. Come on back inside and thank him.”

  He kissed the side of Lucky’s face and then returned with her to the kitchen. Mr. Thrasher had restored the wrapping to the gift. Emerson Bridge apologized and thanked the man and held out his hands like he wanted the present back.

  But Mr. Thrasher did not give it. “Everybody don’t want to be a cowboy. I’ll go get you something you like, maybe one of them show halters for your Lucky.”

  “Oh, we don’t need that no more, Mr. Ike. Lucky don’t have to be in that show now.”

  “I was going to—” Sarah began.

  “The Grand Champeen show?” Mr. Thrasher said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I was going to tell you, Mr. Thrasher, I’m sorry. Didn’t mean for it to come out like this.”

  Mr. Thrasher sat down. He made a sound when he hit. His eyes were blinking fast as he kept looking from Sarah to Emerson Bridge and back again.

  Sarah heaped food onto a plate. “It’s cold, but I’ll give you all I have.” She set it in front of him.

  He made no move towards it. “Why? Can I ask y’all why?”

  Sarah thought she saw his bottom lip quiver.

  “They wanted to put him in somebody’s deep freeze,” her boy told him.

  “Deep freeze? To eat?”

  “Yes, sir. After the show, they sell them, and then they do something awful. They kill them. But Mama said I don’t have to do that.” Emerson Bridge threw his arms around Sarah’s waist.

  Mr. Thrasher was shaking his head.

  “Hon, how about going to ride your bicycle?” she said and helped her boy take it outside.

  Mr. Thrasher was standing when she returned. “It doesn’t make any sense. Roy Rogers would never do that.”

  “I aim to get a few dress orders from some church ladies in the next few weeks. You’ll get your money back.”

  His eyes went wide. “That sign out beside that steer in front of Richbourg’s back in the spring, it said to come see him in the meat department. I was so gung ho about it all that I was blind to that part.”

  “We all were,” Sarah said.

  He walked to the door and pulled back the curtain.

  Sarah knew he was looking at his father’s place. “Mr. Thrasher, I know what this means to you. And I sure hate that—”

  “Daddy didn’t have cows, but he had hogs he sure killed and we ate like they were a crop.” His voice was low and little.

  As glad as Sarah was for her boy, she was that sad for this man. “Mr. Thrasher, I sure hate that—”

  “We can’t kill Lucky, Mrs. Creamer. Don’t mean to cut you off, but sometimes other things come up, bigger things. And that’s what’s happened here.”

  “But—” Sarah started.

  “But nothing, Mrs. Creamer.” He shook his head hard. “We all love Lucky. We don’t need to say no more.”

  Sarah didn’t know if she’d live long enough to ever understand what line he had to cross in order to feel like a man. To her, he was more man than any man she’d ever known. She wanted to kiss him. And not like she’d wanted to kiss Harold back when she was a girl. She wanted to kiss Ike Thrasher’s heart.

  …..

  Ike put the gun and holster set back in his truck. He had used his last dollar to buy it.

  Emerson Bridge was not on his bicycle. He was talking to a man just out from the house at the edge of an area that was overgrown. Clouds were beginning to gather, but over his father’s house, he thought he saw a touch of blue. He walked th
at way and went to stand in the middle of the road.

  He had dreamed the night before he was holding something made of wire that spanned about a yard in length and a foot wide. But along the two long sides, there were gaping holes every few inches. He tried to fill the empty spaces with little metal cowboy hats he’d cut from a thin sheet of metal. Ike needed to fill them all.

  “It’s not going to be, Daddy,” he said out loud. “But that’s going to have to be all right. I’m letting it go now.” He thought about removing his hat and moved his hands high to do so, but his head would be naked. And his head could not be naked.

  …..

  Emerson Bridge was on his tenth trip down the driveway, the ground slushy from the melted snow, when he heard, “Merry Christmas!” It was a man’s voice, but not Mr. Ike’s. This one was deep like his papa’s had been. Off to his right stood a man he’d never seen before.

  “Look what Santy Claus brought me!” Emerson Bridge called out. “Ain’t it swell?”

  The man started his way. He was about as tall as Emerson Bridge’s papa but skinny.

  “That is swell,” the man said from the garden’s edge. He was smoking a cigarette, held at his mouth like he was pinching it. His papa didn’t smoke.

  “You live over there in that house?” Emerson Bridge asked.

  “Used to.”

  He sounded sad like he didn’t have any friends.

  “I live in that house right there,” Emerson Bridge said and pointed behind him. He did not see his mother at the kitchen sink. Maybe she was asleep by now. “Say Mister, you wouldn’t have any work for me, would you? I’m out of school all week and need to make some money for me and my mama.”

  The man pinched on his cigarette again and then took it from his mouth. “How about everything? I need help with everything.”

  “Swell!”

  The man’s eyes looked to be on Emerson Bridge’s face hard. “You got dimples,” he said.