by Alan Rodgers
She said that like her mother ought to know just what that meant, and Emma did know, of course, because everybody down home in the Delta knew there was a song called Judgment Day. But Lisa hadn’t ever gone down home, and Emma couldn’t figure where she could have heard of such a thing.
“Don’t you ever sing that song, child,” Emma told her daughter. “I don’t care why you think you need to. I don’t want you dreaming about it, neither.”
As if there was any way the girl could stop a dream.
“Yes, Mama,” Lisa said, obedient as ever, no matter how her mother asked a thing no child could deliver.
“It isn’t right, you growing up like this,” Emma said. “We’ve got to set this house in order.” And that wasn’t right, because the house was tidy as could be, no matter how the stink of Lisa rotting overwhelmed the air. “You need a normal life, child. School and play, Girl Scouts in the afternoon. You need to go to church on Sundays, and get right with the Lord.”
Lisa laughed when her mother said those words, get right with the Lord.
“I’m serious!” Emma said. “If we were home I’d take you to a revival tent!”
Lisa laughed and laughed, and after a while Emma started trying to think about the churches here in Harlem, and wondering if there was any of them that weren’t full of politics and welfare, and maybe it really was time to find religion.
But then Emma realized how wonderful it was to hear her daughter laughing, to see the girl’s dead-eyed face alive with sunshine and delight, and the thought of church got lost in the beauty of the afternoon.
By the time Emma found it again it was too late for any preacher in the world to help them.
Because everything went to hell early the next morning, and by the time the dust had settled nothing was the same. It started when Emma gave her girl a kiss on the cheek, early in the morning. It never really ended.
“I love you, darling,” Emma said, and she stooped and braced herself to give her putrefying girl a kiss. And she did it, too — but when she did it went all wrong. Big oozy flakes of the girl’s cheek came away on Emma’s lips, and before she could make herself be still Emma screamed and screamed again. It was too much, too damn much, and the faith that’d given her the courage to tell Mama Estrella to go away the day before evaporated in a binding moment made from terror —
And Lisa looked so hurt.
So hurt.
Then Emma got a grip on her heart, and she made herself be silent as she wiped the liquefying flesh away from her lips.
“We need to do something, baby girl,” Emma said.
“I know, Mama.”
Emma bit her lip and tried to think, but all she could think was how they had to clean her daughter up. The moment she had that thought she knew it was trouble, that it was the worst thing she could do. It ran against common sense, cleaning up a girl who’d begun to fall apart!
Emma shook her head and went back to the kitchen for more coffee.
Lisa followed her.
“I’m scared, Mama,” Lisa said.
Emma bit her lip. She wanted to wail, or shout, or — something. She wanted to find God and ring his ears for letting her daughter fall into such a state.
She really did.
And as she thought that blasphemy, the last bits of her faith slipped away from her so quietly she didn’t even notice.
She bit her lower lip.
“I’m frightened too, child,” she said. She kept trying to think. Rot was about germs, wasn’t it? And germs hate heat, and they hate disinfectants.
That was no help at all. What was she going to do, boil her daughter? Pickle her in rum?
And that was when it came to her, the terrible idea that she never should have thought.
Alcohol.
There was rubbing alcohol in the cabinet, wasn’t there? Emma stepped into the bathroom, opened the cabinet, and found a half-empty bottle of rubbing alcohol.
Not enough. Half a bottle of alcohol wasn’t enough to wash a girl falling apart with the rot. They needed more — a whole tub full of the stuff. “You wait here in the closet, baby,” Emma said. “I’ve got to go to the grocery.” She stooped, kissed Lisa’s forehead — and felt more tiny fragments of Lisa’s skin flake away on her lips.
They tasted like cured meat.
Emma tried not to think about the flavor, because the more she thought about it the more she wanted to get sick, but whether she thought about it or not the taste of preserved meat followed her all the way to the store.
And home again to Lisa, huddled and crumbling in her closet. Lisa was asleep there when Emma got back.
“Lisa?” Emma said. She pulled the clothes aside and looked into the closet. Lisa was curled up in the corner of the closet with her head tucked into her chest and her hands folded over her stomach. “Lisa, are you awake, honey?”
Lisa looked up and nodded. The whites of her too-small eyes were dull yellow. “Mama,” she said, “I’m scared.” She looked afraid, too. She looked terrified.
Emma bit into her lower lip. “I’m scared too, baby. Come on.” She put up her hand to help Lisa up, but Lisa didn’t take it. She stood up on her own, and when Emma moved aside she walked out of the closet.
“What’re you going to do, Mama?”
“I’m going to give you a bath, baby. With something that’ll stop what’s happening to your body.” Emma said. “You get yourself undressed and get in the bathtub, and I’ll get everything ready.”
Lisa looked like she didn’t really believe what Emma was saying, but she did as her mother asked all the same. When Emma got to the bathroom with the shopping bag Lisa had her nightgown up over her head. She finished taking it off and stepped into the tub without even turning around.
“Put the stopper in the tub for me, baby,” Emma said. She took a bottle of alcohol from the bag, carried it to Lisa.
And something down in her heart started shouting at her, telling her she was about to make a terrible mistake.
A terrible, terrible mistake.
But that was silly, wasn’t it? Silly. Lisa was sick and she was falling apart and Emma had to do something, didn’t she? Something, anything to save her?
The voice in her heart said it was better to do nothing, but that had to be wrong, didn’t it?
Had to be.
And so despite the best counsel of her heart Emma doused her daughter in spirit liquor.
Spirit liquor.
The old word, the real word, for the alcohol in liquor is spirit. The reason we use that word is lost so far back in time and drunkenness that very few recall it, but it’s no mistake — there’s magic deep in alcohol, and not just intoxication.
Lisa was a dead girl made live by necromantic sacrilege, as magical as anyone who’s ever walked the earth. When Emma washed her in that spirit liquor she made a mistake she never stopped regretting.
“This may sting a little,” Emma said. “Hold out your hand and let me make sure it doesn’t hurt too much.”
Lisa extended her hand, and Emma poured the spirit on her.
“What does that feel like?”
“It doesn’t feel like anything at all, Mama. I don’t feel anything anymore.”
“Not anywhere?”
“No, Mama.”
Emma shook her head, gently, almost as though she hoped Lisa wouldn’t see it. Not feeling anything? That was dangerous. The whole idea frightened Emma.
“Close your eyes, baby. This won’t be good for them even if it doesn’t hurt.” She held the bottle over Lisa’s head and tilted it. Clear fluid streamed out of the bottle and into the girl’s hair. After a moment it began to run down her shoulders in little rivulets. One of them snaked its way into the big open wound of Lisa’s belly and pooled in an indentation on the top of the cancer. For a moment Emma th
ought something horrible would happen, but nothing did.
Emma poured all ten bottles of spirit liquor onto Lisa. When she was done the girl sat in an inch-deep pool of the stuff, soaked with it. Emma — who still didn’t realize the awful thing she’d done — thought the girl needed to soak awhile, so she left Lisa in the tub and went to the kitchen to make another pot of coffee.
Poured a cup, sat in a chair at the kitchen table, and opened a magazine she’d bought three months ago and never got the chance to read.
Took a cigarette from the pack she kept on the shelf above the kitchen table, lit it, smoked. It’d been two months since she’d had a cigarette, and the pack was very stale, but Emma didn’t care. She needed a cigarette, and stale cigarettes were better than none.
After twenty minutes Lisa screamed. In the middle of her scream she abruptly went silent. Emma bolted out of her seat, rushed to the bathroom —
“Mama,” Lisa said. Her voice was so still and quiet . . . it gave Emma a chill. “I’m melting.”
She held out her right hand, and Emma saw Lisa’s too-thin fingers — they looked like wet clay soaked in water. Milky fluid dripped from them.
Lisa stood up in the tub, and slime drizzled down her butt and thighs. She glared up at Emma, and her shrunken little eyes turned hard and mean and angry, and she screamed again.
Where before she’d screamed in terror, now her scream was murderous rage, and Emma was certain the girl was going to kill her.
“Mama,” she shouted, and she launched herself at Emma. “Stupid, stupid, stupid Mama!” She raised her fist up over her head and hit Emma square on the breast, and hard. Harder than Lisa’s father’d ever hit her, back when he was still around. Lisa brought her other fist down, just as hard, then pulled them back and hit her again, and again, and again.
Emma couldn’t even move herself out of Lisa’s way. She didn’t have the spirit for it.
For a moment it didn’t even look like Lisa beating on her. It looked like some sort of a monster, a dead zombie-thing that any moment would reach into her chest, right through her flesh, and rip out her heart. And it would eat her bloody-dripping heart while it was still alive and beating, and Emma’s eyes would close, and she’d die.
“All your stupid fault, Mama! All your stupid, stupid fault!” She grabbed Emma by the belt of her uniform skirt and shook her and shook her. Then she screamed and pushed Emma away, threw her against the wall. Emma’s head and back hit too hard against the rock-thick plaster wall, and she fell to the floor. She lay on her side all slack and beaten, staring at her daughter, watching to see what she’d do next.
Lisa stared right back at her, her shriveled eyes and cracking lips contorted in a mask of rage. For a moment Emma thought the girl would kill her —
And then something happened on Lisa’s face.
Her expression shifted — crumbled, almost. Suddenly she looked all slack and beaten, and her legs dropped out from under her, and she fell to the floor.
She started to cry. Sob, sob, sob, big gasping tortured bleats, broken and pathetic and so sad it like to break Emma’s battered heart. The sound of it melted Emma’s terror, and after a moment turned it to tenderness.
And what could she do?
What could she do?
She crawled to Lisa’s side and put her arms around her.
And held her for the longest time.
Mama Estrella
“It’s okay, baby,” Emma said. “Mama loves you.” One of her hands brushed across the open cancer in Lisa’s belly, and Emma felt an ominous electric throb. She wanted to screech, to flinch away, but she knew that if she did that it’d be like pushing Lisa away, so she clenched her teeth and made herself be still. Lisa’s little body heaved with her sobs; her back pressed painfully against Emma’s bruised breasts. “Mama loves you.”
Emma looked at Lisa’s hands, and saw that the flesh had all crumbled away from them. They were nothing but bones, like the skeleton one of the doctors at the hospital kept in his office.
“I want to die, Mama,” Lisa said. Her voice was all quiet again.
Emma squeezed her, and held her a little tighter. I want to die, Mama.
And Emma thought, She’s right, she’s right, my baby needs to die, and because her faith had left her she couldn’t see how false that was. Mama Estrella is right. It’s wrong for a little girl to be alive after she was dead.
“Baby, baby, baby, baby, I love my baby,” Emma cooed. Lisa was crying even harder now, and she’d begun to tremble in a way that wasn’t natural at all.
“You wait here, baby. I got to call Mama Estrella.” Emma lifted herself up off the floor, which made everything hurt all at once.
Emma went to the kitchen, lifted the telephone receiver, and dialed Mama Estrella’s number. As the phone began to ring Emma wandered back toward the bathroom, watching Lisa, trying to save her memory forever.
The girl lay on the bathroom floor, shaking. The tremor had gotten worse, much worse, in just the time it’d taken Emma to dial the phone. As Emma watched it grew more and more intense, till finally Emma thought the girl would shake herself to pieces.
As Mama Estrella finally answered the phone.
“Hello?”
“Mama Estrella?” Emma said, “I think maybe you better come up here.”
Mama Estrella didn’t say anything at all; the line was completely silent. The silence felt bitter and mean.
“I think maybe you were right, Mama. Right about Lisa, I mean.” Emma looked down at the floor and squeezed her eyes shut. She leaned back against the wall and tried to clear her head. “I think . . . maybe you better hurry. Something’s wrong. I don’t understand.”
Lisa made a little sound halfway between a gasp and a scream, and something went thunk on the floor. Emma didn’t have the heart to look up to see what had happened, but she started back toward the kitchen to hang up the phone.
“Mama Estrella, I got to go. Come here now, please?”
“Emma . . .” Mama Estrella started to say, but Emma didn’t hear her; she’d already hung up, and she was running back to the bathroom, where Lisa was.
Lisa was shivering and writhing on the bathroom floor. Her left arm, from the elbow down, lay on the floor not far from her.
Emma took Lisa in her arms and lifted her up off the floor.
“You’ve got to be still, honey,” she said. “You’re going to tremble yourself to death.”
Lisa nodded and gritted her teeth and for a moment she was pretty still. But it wasn’t anything she could control, not for long. Emma carried Lisa to her bedroom, and by the time she got there the girl was shaking just as bad as she had been.
There was a knock on the front door, but Emma didn’t pay any attention. If it was Mama Estrella she had her own key, and she’d use it. Emma sat down on the bed beside Lisa and stroked her hair.
After a moment Mama Estrella showed up in the bedroom doorway, carrying some kind of a woody-looking thing that burned with a low flame and smoked something awful.
Mama Estrella went to the window and closed it, then drew down the shade.
“Water,” she said. “Bring me a kettle of hot water.”
“You want me to boil water?” There was smoke everywhere already; it was harsh and acrid and when a wisp of it caught in Emma’s eye it burned like poison. Lisa wheezed and coughed as the smoke drifted toward her, coughed and coughed and coughed no matter how she hadn’t drawn a breath she didn’t need to speak since she’d died.
“No, there isn’t time. Just bring a kettle of hot water from the tap.”
Then Mama Estrella bent down to look at Lisa, and suddenly it was too late for hot water and magic and putting little girls to rest.
The thick smoke from the burning thing settled onto Lisa’s face, Lisa began to gag. She took in a long whee
zing-hacking breath, and for three long moments she choked on it, or maybe on the corruption of her own lungs. Then she began to cough, deep, throbbing, hacking coughs that shook her hard against the bed.
Mama Estrella pulled away from the bed. She looked shocked and frightened and unsure.
“Lisa, be still!” Emma shouted, and Lisa sat up, trying to control herself. But it only made things worse — the next cough sent her flying face-first onto the floor. She made an awful smacking sound when she hit; when she rolled over Emma saw that she’d broken her nose.
Lisa wheezed, sucking in air.
She’s breathing, Emma thought. Please, God, she’s breathing now and she’s going to be fine. Please.
But even as Emma thought it she knew that it wasn’t going to be so. The girl managed four wheezing breaths, and then she was coughing again, and much worse — Emma saw bits of the meat of her daughter’s lungs spatter on the hardwood floor.
She bent down and hugged Lisa, hugged her tight to make her still. “Be still, baby. Hold your breath for a moment and be still. Mama Estrella loves you, Lisa.” But Lisa didn’t stop, she couldn’t stop, and the force of her wracking was so mean that her shoulders dug new bruises in Emma’s breast. When Lisa finally managed to still herself for a moment she looked up at Emma, her eyes full of desperation, and she said, “Mama . . .”
And then she coughed again, so hard that her tiny body pounded into Emma’s breast, and her small, hard-boned chin slammed down onto Emma’s shoulder.
Slammed down so hard that the force of it tore free the flesh of Lisa’s neck.
And Lisa’s head tumbled down Emma’s back, and rolled across the floor.
Her head rolled over and over until it came to a stop against the leg of a chair. Lisa’s eyes blinked three times and then they closed forever.
Her body shook and clutched against Emma’s chest for a few more seconds, the way a chicken does when you axe it. When the spasming got to be too much to bear Emma let go, and watched her daughter’s corpse shake itself to shreds on the bedroom floor. After a while the tumor-thing fell out of it, and everything was still.