It's All Love

by Marita Golden

  His “calls” to her during meetings and visits and errands and conversations roused her to the point where she couldn't do anything but drop what she was doing and answer him.

  He was the familiar breeze that intruded on her business. He was the waves of heat that made her fan like one of the ladies at church and made her want to drop her clothes right there in the bank. He was the frog in her throat that prevented her from accepting the Businessperson of the Year award held at the new Dupree Hotel.

  Some days he'd call her on the phone at the Candace offices. When she placed the phone to her ear, Herman would blow into it, sending a swirl of his breath down the tunnel of her ear canal, leaving her breathless. Sometimes he was the short in the electrical system that plunged the windowless center rooms into darkness and threw out the whole computer system for the week. So everybody had to go home.

  The few times she tried to ignore the calls and continue with the business at hand, he would start messing with her. No one else in the business meeting seemed to notice the gentle breeze that suddenly stirred up one of Lena's giggles. It would lift the braids from her neck ever so slightly and brush across the short curly hairs of her kitchen. It coiled itself around her leg like a vine and spiraled up her leg in tiny teasing tendrils.

  She could ignore Herman's calls, but she couldn't ignore his touches.

  “Ms. McPherson, am I doing something amusing?” Mr. Potter at the bank asked one morning. It was soon after Herman had arrived, and Lena was squirming and giggling in her seat.

  She had meant to regain her composure, sternly rebuke Herman in her head for interrupting a meeting that might lead to a home and good credit for one of her mother's friends’ daughter and husband, and return to the meeting to finish up business. But Herman slipped up under her dress and inside her pink-flowered silk panties, making her grab the arms of the big oxblood leather chair and guffaw right out loud in the old banker's face. The sudden laughter sounded like something that Sister used to do in college and still did if something struck her funny enough.

  Mr. Potter, whom Lena noticed for the first time had a bald head that was shaped just like an egg, large end up, laughed a little too, just to make things a bit more comfortable in the glass-enclosed bank office with the understated gray and maroon drapes pulled discreetly around for the private business of finance.

  “Oh, I did say something amusing, didn't I?” he said.

  The breeze wiggled under her deep-rose satin bra that Herman liked so much and pushed one of the wide straps off her shoulder, tickling her there. And the meeting, for all practical purposes, was over. As Gloria used to say when recounting some story of sexual mischief to Lena when she was a girl, “Sugar, church was outlU”

  When Lena got to her car, Herman was sitting up in there in the passenger's seat dressed in a new cotton shirt and jeans she had bought for him, right proud of himself. She tried to be furious with him.

  “Herman! How could you do that to me in there?” She spoke to what appeared to be the interior of the car even before she looked around to make sure no one was nearby watching.

  “Good God, Lena, ain't you gladt’ be out a’ there!??”

  “Stop it, now, Herman. You trying to make it seem like you were doing me a favor.”

  “Wasn't I?”

  “No, you were doing yourself a favor. You just want somebody to rip and run with. You just want me to go out playing with you.”

  “Uh-huh,” Herman readily agreed.

  “So, you admit you were just looking out for yourself. Not me?”

  “It's the same thang, baby.”

  “Herman, that was an important meeting? Lena knew he had to know what was going on in there.

  “You just holdin’ up the weight of the world, huh, Lena?” Herman said. “Lena, baby, those people ain't in yo’ hands. They in God's hands. And you ain't God.”

  He didn't say it harshly or even judgmentally Herman just stated a fact as he saw it. He thought it was something that Lena already knew. But he immediately regretted saying anything.

  Lena wanted to be angry to cover her hurt feelings, but when they got to the next corner, she had to slam on the brakes to keep from ramming into the side of another car moving legally into the intersection. Herman didn't miss a beat as Lena was thrown a bit against the steering wheel of the car, straining her seat belt. He reached out his strong solid arm across her breasts, clutched her forearm and held her safe from impact.

  “Hold the baby,” he said and smiled at her as the car rocked to a standstill. Lena grabbed her chest. And her arm crossed his.

  Herman had sounded just like her mother, her father, her grandmother, her brothers, and everyone else who had ever loved her all rolled up in one when he said that. When she was little, riding the hump in the middle of the front seat of the green family woodie, her family always made sure that her pretty little face would not ram into the big wide dashboard of the station wagon. Whenever the car came to a sudden stop, somebody in the car would reach across her with a protective arm and flat hand pressed against her tiny chest and say, “Hold the baby”

  Herman's gesture evoked all the love and protection she had felt as the baby of the family and reminded her just why she loved this man. She had to struggle to remember just what she had been so furious with him about in the first place. And by the time they got home, she and Herman were laughing and playing together.

  As his sabotaging tactics escalated with the coming of summer, Herman felt he had to explain to Lena how he felt.

  “Baby, it ain't that I ain't got enough t’ do to fill my time while you away. It's just that ya missin’ out on so much stuck in those meetin's and speakin’ lunches and ‘do good’ visits of yo's. I want you here wid me. I can't deny that. I can't he'p it.”

  It wasn't that Herman was always up under her. He had slipped quite happily and unobtrusively into life at her house by the river—at his own pace and seemingly with his own agenda. Sometimes Lena would have to go look for him. She'd find him busy over some project like building a new trellis off the bedroom deck for her grandmama's moonflowers or repairing a loose board on the deck steps. Or sometimes he'd be taking a dip in the waters of the Ocawatchee.

  “Hey, Lena, baby, you miss me?” He didn't give her a chance to be coy. “Hey, Lena, baby, you miss me?” Just like that. He allowed her little or no guile.

  “Yeah, Herman, I missed you,” she had to admit, stepping out of her high-heeled shoes into the dirt or the water with Herman.

  And he'd smile, satisfied.

  She'd often come home and find Herman browsing through her bookcases. He was insatiably curious about some things like the environment, architecture, and the human body. Others, such as sports, television, or transportation, he could care less about.

  Herman would sit for hours staring at the pieces of the toaster or the microwave or her boom box that he had disassembled in his rampant curiosity.

  “Now, how this thang work?” Lena would hear him say to himself as she tried to go to sleep on the green-and-white-striped sofa in her office and still remain close to Herman as he explored some appliance.

  “You okay over there, Lena?” he'd ask, looking up from his work from time to time.

  Electrical advances and laser discs were no reach for him. All Lena did was turn him loose at her computer, and he educated himself about most of the basic scientific advances since his death. He had a quick mind for a man dead a hundred years.

  He told Lena he had seen most of these things in his wanderings, but he had seldom had the opportunity to really explore and learn the intricacies and workings of a computer or a silicon chip or a toaster to his satisfaction.

  Lena had watched him with sheer wonder and pride. First, he took the front off the computer and, with the half-frame magnifying eyeglasses Lena had bought him from the drugstore resting down low on the bridge of his wide regal nose, examined the inner workings. Lena had heard him say so many times to himself as he hunched over his work, “Lo
rd, if I ‘a had just one lens out of these little cheap set of spectacles, I coulda turned the world upside down.” And she believed him. He seemed to be able to do just about anything.

  He let his gaze rest on the circuit board, lifted tiny plasticcovered wires and examined connections. Then, after an hour or so, he picked up a tiny tool from the shammy bag her computer consultant had left there and closed the machine back up. Lena thought he was through, but Herman was just beginning.

  “Hey, Lena, you don't mind if I go in fo’ a look, do you?” he asked her as he rolled back from the computer table in her new ergonomic work chair.

  She was snug on the overstuffed sofa.

  Humpph, I don't mind nothing you do, she thought to herself. But she didn't even get a chance to say it before Herman sat up straight in the comfortable chair, closed his eyes, and became a mist that entered the computer through the disk slot in the same way that he sometimes became mist and entered her.

  Lena was always amazed at the knowledge that he brought from the turn of the century. But then, Herman was an amazing man.

  He told her that in life he had been an inventor of sorts. “Now, I ain't no book-educated man. But don't need t’ be. I'm that kinda person that been shown a lot in life.” Then he paused and added, “In death too, come t’ think of it.”

  What he mainly invented were tools. Lena smiled so broadly at the information that Herman found himself smiling too, even though he had no idea why they were amused.

  “You would invent tools, Herman,” Lena said in answer. “Something useful and needed and able to make things easier and faster and better and smoother and fresher and more level. Sometimes, when you touch me, Herman, I feel useful in your hands.”

  With a smile, he pretended to tip an imaginary hat and bow his head to the side in response to her compliment.

  Just watching him handle a simple awl or a small appliance like a coffee grinder, Lena had known that Herman was an inventor.

  She had watched him from her bedroom as he discovered a box of Tampax in one of her bathroom drawers. He leaned right there against the counter's edge and read the entire sheet of information and instructions for the superstrength tampon. Then, he took one out of the baby-blue cardboard box and, looking again at the instructions he had laid on the counter-top, tore open the thin smoking-paper wrapper, and examined the tampon minutely until it was just a fluffy puff of cotton, some thread, and strips of white cardboard.

  “Umm, right clever,” he said to himself, and chuckled.

  Herman even had a knack for finding and excavating artifacts of tools on her property. Century-old knives—blades made of gray and black stone and flint; handles of creamy-hued animal bone and deer and squirrel skin—fashioned by southeastern Indians. Small intricate red clay pipes made by Africans and African-Americans before and after the Civil War to smoke the wild tobacco in the woods during a brief respite. A nearly airtight earthen container of rice with the imprint of the creator's small slender hands inside.

  Lena was always amazed at what Herman could find or accomplish in any given stretch of time. He never hurried or fretted over schedules and dates. He managed time the way he talked about it.

  “‘Time, baby,” he said two or three times a day.

  It was Herman's answer to many things. lime.

  He said it with such assurance and peace, sounding like a down-home preacher comforting a grieving widow.

  It was his answer to everything she complained about.

  “Herman, I don't think these carrot seeds are ever going to sprout.”

  “Time, baby.”

  Or,

  “If these folks and accountants and everybody don't stop pulling me every which way …” 1 ime, Lena.

  And even when the answer exasperated her, she always found herself later agreeing it was the right answer, the only answer. “Time.”

  “Now, where did you hear about laser surgery?” Lena had asked one hot day in June as they sat on the cool grass of the riverbank.

  “Shoot, baby, where you think I been fo’ the last hundred years?” Herman asked back with a laugh.

  “Dead!” Lena said with an intentionally dumb wide-eyed expression on her face.

  “Well, there's dead and there's dead” he said, looking at her over his half-frame eyeglasses.

  When Lena paused, pretending to consider what he said, Herman got a bit indignant and asked, “What part a’ me seem dead to you?”

  Lena laughed. “Not one single part,” she said as she fell into Herman's lap and seemed to sink right into him as if she were falling back into the waves of the sea or a pile of crisp autumn leaves.

  “How old were you when you died, Herman?” Lena had asked in late May as she lay back on the office sofa with his head in her lap.

  “I was just a few weeks shy of markin’ my fortieth birth date when I died,” he answered matter-of-factly

  “Why, Herman, you're not even fortyl?” Lena squealed. “Lord, my baby's pig meat.”

  Herman looked at Lena with a sly smile, chuckling at her brazenness and pride, and went back to tinkering with the sauna control box in his hand.

  Herman tinkered around Lena's place so much that her household started functioning so much more smoothly, cheaply, efficiently that even James Petersen took notice. The toilets used less water, the shower and taps too.

  And it wasn't just in the house that Herman made his ghostly presence felt.

  Herman showed Lena things on her property. Stones washed down from the mountains by Cleer Flo'. Trees budding out of season. Relics from previous civilizations and peoples. Jewelry made of animal bone and feathers. Unusual markings on Baby's stomach Lena had never noticed before. Gossamer silver snakeskins discarded by growing reptiles. Lena began to walk on the very earth differently.

  It amazed her how easily she forgot the busy little town of Mulberry.

  When she walked now, she felt Herman's arm resting lightly around her shoulders, her shoulder tucked perfectly in his armpit like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. She was actually taking time to see, really see, the earth she was walking on.

  “Ya gotta cherish this piece a’ earth we been given, we been born to,” Herman said as they walked so far afield on her property that she couldn't even see the tops of her chimneys. “The trick, Lena, baby, is to cherish yo’ own little piece of earth, but not to get tied to it. ‘Cause it ain't nothin’ but a piece a’ dust, like us, our bodies, that's gon’ come and go.”

  When he found a chinaberry tree on her land, Herman was as excited as if he had created it himself. He came and got her in her home office and brought her right to it.

  “You know what we used the root a’ the chinaberry tree fo', Lena, don't ya?” he said as he smiled a smile that Lena wanted to just lick off his face. He pretended to wait for her to answer as he kicked at the knot on the trunk of the tree just above the rich dark ground.

  “Yeah, they used this root to make a potion to make ya hot. Our folks and the Indians used it in ceremonies and rituals. And other folks just used it.

  “Guess we can pass on this one, huh, Lena?”

  Looking around at a squat prickly bush, he continued the lesson since he had her outside.

  “And look a’ here, Lena. This what we call China briar. My ma usta make a kind a’ mush out a’ the root. A bread too. China briar was one of the first thangs I remember ever eatin'.”

  Herman showed Lena all kinds of things. He explored her hundred acres of property as if it were a tidy little backyard.

  While Lena was away at work in town, he uncovered treasures and mysteries that Lena had never even thought about being on her land.

  One Sunday morning after they had made love, eaten grits and salmon croquettes, made more love, gone swimming, and lain on her river deck to dry in the sun, Herman took her for a walk. She had wanted to grab a piece of pie or fruit before they left, but Herman wouldn't let her.

  “I got som'um sweet fo’ you,” Herman said, laughing and patting a bulg
e in his pants pocket.

  Lena tramped out in her new heavy Timberland boots just like Herman's and followed him into the woods with a smile on her face. She couldn't get enough of him.

  They walked for a good long time along the river to the east of the house. Lena was becoming winded.

  “Maybe we should have ridden the horses, Herman,” she said.

  “Naw, not this time,” he answered over his shoulder.

  When he finally slowed down by a big sycamore tree at the edge of the woods, she thought he would take out a tiny copper-colored G-string for her to prance around in. Instead, he pulled out a pair of work gloves and handed them to Lena.

  “Here, baby, I don't want ya to get hurt.”

  Lena thought she could hear someone humming in the distance as he led her deeper into the woods. Then he held up a bare hand, stopped, and pointed up ahead to the biggest circular beehive Lena had ever seen. It hung from the swooping lower limb of a massive live oak tree like mistletoe. Herman smiled at Lena while motioning for her to stand still. Then he advanced on the golden-colored humming hive.

  Herman slipped his bare hand sideways into the bottom of the nest, deliberately, steadily. He only paused a moment with his hand inside the hive, then slowly pulled his hand back out, rotating it slightly to form a cup as it came out. The hive was shaped just like the ones in cartoons she had watched as a child on Saturday mornings in which a hungry old hairy bear would try and try to get that honey. She had imagined that animated honey to be the best, the sweetest, the most golden honey in the universe.

  Lena was mesmerized by Herman's performance. It was like a theater piece, silent except for the lazy-sounding buzzing of the bees. Then Herman drew her into the act. Looking very serious, he lifted his right hand dripping with thick dark honey and flecks of waxy honeycomb up to her lips. She took two of his fingers into her mouth and, lifting her chin, sucked the honey off.

  It was as sweet as the cartoon honey. The intensity of the sweetness nearly blew the top of her head off when she smacked her lips.