Tomato Girl

  I reach for the doorknob. My hand shakes.

  What if the hall is too dark for me to see? What if I step on the baby?

  I take a deep breath, open the door, and step into the hall.

  Oh, God. Mama, please. No!

  Red. There’s too much red.

  On the floor, and the wall, all over her gown. Nothing but red.

  I’ve never seen so much blood. Ribbons spill from Mama’s wrist. She sits on the floor, her head and shoulders propped against the wall. Pieces of glass lie on the floor. She holds a large piece in her hands, uses it to cut a deep gash across her other wrist. Blood sprays from her new cut.

  “Mama!” I don’t know what to do. There is too much red.

  I hurry, grab Mama’s hands, make her give me the piece of glass. She doesn’t want to let go, but I pull hard, until her fingers give. While taking the glass away, I cut my hands.

  Mama tries to reach for other pieces. I have to gather them up so she can’t get them. My bleeding hands are soon full of glass.

  Baby Tom lies facedown on the floor in a puddle of formaldehyde, but I have to leave him there for now. I’m holding too much glass to pick him up. I’m afraid I’ll cut him.

  My legs take me back to the bathroom. I need to think fast. I throw the glass into the sink and grab all the towels I can carry.

  I kneel beside Mama, press the towels on the places she’s cut. I press hard, try to get Mama to help. “Please, Mama, hold the towel. Why, Mama, why did you do this?”

  “The baby wouldn’t stop crying, Ellie. I couldn’t listen to him cry another night.”

  “Oh, Mama. What am I supposed to do? Tell me what to do?” There is blood on my hands and my nightgown. I keep pressing, but don’t know how to make the bleeding stop.

  Mama’s eyes open and close. Her skin is pale and cold.

  “He doesn’t love me, Ellie. I just wanted him …”

  “Wanted him what, Mama?” I press a clean towel over each of her wrists. Red soaks the towel.

  “I just wanted him to stop crying.” She winces.

  “He’s not crying now, Mama.”

  “He’s not?” Mama shifts her head as if to listen.

  “No, he’s not.” I crawl on my knees and pick up Baby Tom. He’s stiff, slippery, and cold, like a rubber doll left out in the rain. He smells bad, like the formaldehyde.

  “Here, Mama.” I place Baby Tom on her chest. My bloody hands leave prints across his tiny back. “He’s not crying, Mama.”

  A weak smile crosses her lips. Mama’s eyes flood with tears. “You’re right, Ellie. He isn’t crying.” She swallows hard. “He isn’t crying anymore.”

  There is too much blood on the floor, on the towels, on the front of Mama’s gown.

  I stand up to leave Mama and Baby Tom. I have to go downstairs and call for help.

  Mama cries, “Don’t go, Ellie. Don’t leave me alone.”

  I remember crying those words in the middle of the road the day Daddy went away. I know how bad it feels when someone leaves you alone.

  “I was never going to leave you, Mama. I’m sorry about packing my suitcase. I just wanted Daddy to come back for me. I didn’t want to leave you. Not ever.”

  Mama’s eyelids flicker, then close.

  FORTY-THREE

  DREAMS

  MY EYES SEARCH OUT cracks in the ceiling. If the roof splits open, I’ll see stars.

  I stare without blinking, practice widening the cracks with my eyes. The white plaster crumbles. Dark rafters fall away.

  I see a black sky dotted with stars.

  If I find Mama’s face, I might sleep again.

  I DREAM OF a baby with blue veins. He’s like a worm trapped inside a jar. A girl’s hands put him there.

  Mine.

  IN THE KITCHEN, there is spilled flour, onion peels, a vat of lard on its side. No tone on the telephone, the bill unpaid.

  I knock over a chair, a coffee can.

  Upstairs, Mama’s body slumps on the floor. No noise, no breathing. She doesn’t move.

  Her wrists split open. She is all bled out.

  I’m the girl they found standing on the table. The girl who traced the cracks in the wall with her mother’s blood.

  A COLORED WOMAN tends to me. I sleep in her house, but I’m not her kin. She brings me food in a wooden bowl and teas with powders in them.

  I hear a man in the next room. He reads aloud the book of Job. His boots tap on loose floorboards.

  God the Father.

  Daddy is not here.

  MY BED DRIFTS over drowsy seas. The colored woman kisses my brow good-night.

  She tucks a quilt under my chin, a quilt patterned with stars. To keep from drowning, I swallow a fistful.

  The stars melt on my tongue.

  A HAND SHAKES my shoulder. The same woman leans over me. Her gold-brown eyes are wet with tears.

  I remember now.

  “Clara?”

  She found me before the ambulance came.

  “Wake up, child, you can’t stay in this bed. We got to bury your Mama.”

  I SOMETIMES THINK all my days from now on will seem as far away and fitful as my dreams.

  I remember Mama’s funeral in bits and pieces — the navy blue dress Clara ironed and pulled over my head, following a dark car to the cemetery, standing over Mama’s open grave, the minister taking my hand to toss the first fistful of dirt.

  Dressed in black suits, Mama’s tall brothers stood beside me and stared at the open grave. One folded his hands the way Mama sometimes did. His slender fingers laced together like hers. The same bent thumbs curled inward.

  Mary Roberts came, too. She tucked a white handkerchief in my fist and said, “Don’t cry, Ellie. Please don’t cry.” Miss Wilder stroked my hair and blinked back tears. I’d never seen her so lost for words.

  Sheriff Rhodes brought Daddy. As soon as I saw him, I struggled to break free, but Jericho held me close. Clara’s cool hands smoothed my face. “Not yet, child. Not this day.”

  As Mrs. Roberts sang the last hymn, I searched for Daddy’s face in the thin crowd. Sheriff Rhodes was leading him away, toward the sidewalk lined by parked cars.

  “Daddy!”

  He turned, and his sad eyes met mine. Daddy smiled, tried to wave, but the shackles held his hands down. Sheriff Rhodes nudged him forward.

  I dropped to my knees.

  Daddy grew smaller and smaller, then disappeared like a drop of rain.

  “YOU REMEMBER A LITTLE BIT, don’t you, child?” Clara’s voice brings me back to the kitchen.

  I nod. The eggs on my plate have grown cold. I’m not hungry and want to go to sleep, but Clara won’t let me stay in bed. “I remember, but I don’t want to.”

  Clara puts the iron down on the board and leans over to hug me. “I know, Ellie. I know.”

  “You came for me, Clara? The night Mama …” I can’t finish the sentence.

  “Yes, honey.” Clara sits at the table and sips coffee. “Sheriff Rhodes stopped by, told me he found your daddy and that girl he run off with. I asked him if you’d be all right. He said not to worry, you was fine for the night, but could I be ready in the morning to go to stay with you and your mama until he contacted relatives or a social worker. I told him ‘Of course.’ So I packed my bag with clean underclothes and what have you, then settled down to feed Easter — at least, I tried to feed him. He wouldn’t hardly eat for me. That worried me, but Jericho said that bird just missed you.”

  Clara drinks more coffee. “I went on to bed, but couldn’t sleep. Easter kept scratching on the bottom of his box, even in the dark. Everybody knows a bird roosts when the lights go out, but Easter wouldn’t go to sleep no matter what I did. Later in the night, my wrists burned. They burned real bad, like scalding water had been poured on them. I could hear Easter in his box, flapping like something wild. And then I knew. I saw the blood,” Clara says, pointing to her forehead. “I saw it in here.” She looked at me with tear-filled eyes. “I came, but Lord,
it was too late. Too late. Child, I’m so sorry.”

  “But you brought back Easter, Clara. Why didn’t you bring Mama back?”

  Clara shakes her head. “I told you before. I can only bring back them that want to live.”

  “But why, Clara?” I don’t understand. “Why didn’t Mama want to live?”

  “Some people are born sad.” Clara leans forward as if she wants to make sure I’m listening. “You can’t change the way a person is, Ellie. Not when it is deep inside them. You can only love them just as they are. A sad person is hard to love sometimes, but they need it most of all.”

  I remember the times when Mama looked out the windows with tears in her eyes. When I asked her why she was so sad, she’d said, “The rain makes me lonely.” I would have given anything to make the rain go away, to reach through the clouds and paint the sky blue again.

  “Did you see Baby Tom? When you came to the house?” I ask Clara.

  Clara nods. “I made sure Miss Julia’s baby got placed in the grave with her. I figured from the smell of him, she’d been keeping him in the jar that broke?”

  “Yes.” I feel ashamed that I hadn’t told Clara about him, but it is good to know Baby Tom got buried with Mama. I don’t want to think of her alone.

  “Most women lose a baby, they put that baby in the ground, say good-bye. That’s too hard for your mama. She had to keep him, couldn’t let him go ’cause it hurt her so bad. A person got to know when to let go, you hear me?”

  I don’t say anything.

  Clara puts her finger under my chin and turns my head until our eyes meet. “I said, do you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I’m glad you understand that, ’cause now that your mama is in the ground and your daddy in jail, you have some letting go of your own to do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Honey, this is hard for me to tell you, but sometimes it’s best to just spit out the truth plain and simple. With your mama gone and your daddy locked up, the judge had to make a decision about you.”

  “About me? I don’t …”

  “About where you live, honey. You can’t stay back at your house alone. The judge has say over where you go. He tried to get your mama’s kin to take you, but they said no, least not until your daddy’s trial is done. So the judge, he ordered that you go to a foster home.”

  “But Clara …”

  She spoke over me, her voice steady and firm. “Miss Emily is a good woman, and she’s going to take good care of you. She’ll be here in a spell, so you best eat your eggs and wash up.”

  I push Clara’s hand away and stand up. “I don’t want to go, Clara. I don’t want to leave you and Jericho.”

  “I know, Ellie, and believe me, Jericho and me would love to keep you. But you know well as me that colored folk can’t keep a white child. Nobody is going to allow that, are they?”

  “But what about Daddy? I can’t leave Daddy. He needs me nearby.”

  Clara stands up and wraps her wide arms around me. “Miss Emily doesn’t live too far away. And child, you listen to me. You weren’t the one who left. He was.”

  Deep inside, I know what Clara says is true. “Daddy told me to take care of Mama, but I didn’t know how, Clara. I let Mama die.”

  “No, Ellie, you did the best you could. Your daddy left you a job too big for one little girl. That was his job, and he’s the one who didn’t do the right thing. Not you, honey. Not you,” Clara says, holding me tight.

  “THAT BIRD IS GONNA die if you don’t feed him.”

  “I don’t care!” I yell at Clara.

  “I didn’t bring that chicken back from the grave so you could starve him.” Clara unties her apron and puts it on a hook by the kitchen door. “I got laundry to hang,” Clara says. “Miss Emily is a good woman. I ain’t never lied to you, have I? She coming to pick up you and that bird, too. But if you don’t want him, so be it.” She picks up a basket filled with damp clothes and walks outside.

  I squat on the floor and look at Easter. Most of the green has grown out, replaced by white feathers. He’s lost so much weight in the days since Mama died, he’s almost half the size I remember. Clara feeds him every few hours, but she says he won’t eat right for her.

  “That bird knows who his mama is,” Jericho says as he steps into the kitchen. “He ain’t going to live unless you want him to. Clara be right about that.”

  Jericho opens the door and goes back outside.

  I stare at Easter. He flaps his thin wings and pecks at my fingers. His little black eyes stare at mine.

  My heart feels like a fist that can’t open. I think of everybody I’ve lost. I don’t want to love this chick. If I love him, he’ll just go away or die.

  Clara walks back inside. “You going to feed that bird or not? He ought to eat before his car ride.”

  “I’m not taking Easter with me. You can keep him, Clara.”

  Clara slams her basket down. “I got enough trouble without a half-starved chicken running around my feet.” Clara cracks the screen door and yells to Jericho, “Brings me an ax, old man.”

  “An ax? Clara, what do you need an ax for?” I ask.

  Clara stares at me. “I aim to kill this chicken and eat him for supper tonight.”

  My eyes fill with tears. “No, you can’t do that!”

  “And why not, child? I tell you the bird won’t eat and needs you to feed him. You won’t feed him, won’t take him with you. Now, I am an old woman and don’t need a chicken to tend, and he won’t eat for me now no how. Why should I let him starve to death in my house? I’m not going to let him suffer.”

  Jericho walks in, a rusted ax in his hands.

  I scoop Easter up in my arms. Tears run down my cheeks. “I’ll feed him, Clara, I will. Please! I want Easter to live.”

  The fist inside my heart opens enough to let Easter in.

  FORTY-FOUR

  CHALK ON THE RIVER

  EMILY RANDOLPH IS a widow with three grown sons and no daughters. One son, Abe, is a doctor in Charlotte, and the other two, Stephen and James, practice law nearby.

  I live with Miss Emily in a blue two-story house with white shutters and a porch that stretches the entire front and partway down one side. She has barns and all the other makings of a farm, but doesn’t raise livestock anymore. There are three tabby cats, though. Two gray and one yellow. The yellow one, Daisy, is due to have kittens any day now. Miss Emily tells me I can choose a kitten to be mine, but I don’t know if I want to just yet. Taking care of Easter seems like enough.

  Each morning, before I join Miss Emily in the kitchen, I carry Easter outside, feed him cracked corn, and refill his water dish. At night, I put Easter inside an old wicker picnic basket lined with straw so he can sleep on the floor beside my bed. I keep a towel over the basket to darken his nest; otherwise, he’d stay awake and peck his way through the basket.

  Jericho came by a few days ago to build a pen in the backyard so Easter can walk around without the cats getting to him. “Next week, I’ll get some plyboard and build him a little house,” Jericho told me. “He can’t be out in the rain but so long; all God’s creatures needs a place to keep dry and warm.”

  The thing that upset me about coming to Miss Emily’s house was leaving Clara and Jericho. I wasn’t sure the judge would let me see them. He said he couldn’t rightly order visitation with people who were not my kin, and not even my own race, but he left it up to Miss Emily’s discretion who visited me. “Of course you can see them, Ellie,” she’d said. “One thing you can never have enough of is love. Clara and Jericho love you, and they are welcome to visit you whenever they like, and you them.” She says Mary Roberts can visit when she comes back from camp, and Mr. Morgan is welcome, too. Even Miss Wilder is welcome to come by when she wants. Miss Emily says her doors are open to anyone who loves me.

  Miss Emily is good to me. She treats me like the daughter she never had. She even says that to me: “Ellie, you are like the daughter I never ha
d. I love my sons, but I always wanted a girl.” She places her hands on my face when she says this, and looks at me as if she is searching for some family resemblance, a curve of cheek or color in my eyes to match her own.

  I just smile. I don’t want to hurt Miss Emily’s feelings, but I don’t want to be anyone else’s daughter. I had a mother. I want her back.

  But that’s between God and me, not Miss Emily. I know she’d bring back Mama if she could. She can’t, so she does the next best thing and takes care of me the way a mother should.

  At Miss Emily’s house, there is always plenty to eat and I don’t have to cook, wash dishes, or do any of the laundry unless I feel up to it. I pitch in when I can and find that work passes time. I don’t know exactly what I am waiting for, but I always have that feeling. Maybe I am waiting for Daddy’s trial to be over and for the sheriff to unlock the cell to set him free. Maybe I am waiting for Mama to walk through the door and braid daisies in my hair. Sometimes I think I will spend the rest of my life waiting for familiar arms to hold me.

  I tried to learn the rules right away so I could stay with Miss Emily, but she didn’t seem to have many, so I did all the normal things like, walk—don’t run—in the house, and don’t touch anything that looks expensive, like her collection of clocks.

  The only thing Miss Emily is particular about is that no one comes to the table without first washing their hands. I wash mine ten, maybe fifteen times a day, so that is never a problem. In fact, Miss Emily says she’d be real happy if I forgot to wash my hands. That isn’t likely. No matter how many times I wash, I see Mama’s blood on my hands. Some stains you can never wash clean.

  My bedroom is on the second floor. Miss Emily decorated it with dried sunflowers and big wicker baskets, then bought some paint and brushes and told me to cover the walls with pictures of my own. “Sometimes picture making is the best therapy,” she’d said. I didn’t want to argue with her, but the pictures inside my head aren’t the pretty ones a girl can paint on walls.

  So I paint pictures of Easter instead: Easter sitting in my doll carriage. Easter eating kernels of corn. Easter standing on the bureau looking at himself in the mirror. Mary Roberts will be surprised when she sees how well I can paint now.