Lena noticed other folks in the Piggly Wiggly looking around and staring at her with their heads cocked to the side. An old man appeared at her shoulder, his head cocked to the side. “Now, don’t tell me. I ain’t heard that song you humming in a long time, but I know I know it. Don’t tell me. Is it …?” And the old fellow tried and tried to remember, sighed, drawing a blank, and looked to Lena for help.
But the only help she could give the old man trying to name that tune was to hold her knees together and try not to burst into laughter right there in his face. She finally had to leave her half-full shopping basket by the fresh-seafood counter and run out of the supermarket with the music and her laughter trailing behind her.
Until she got the voice under some kind of control where it only sang when she and Herman were alone, she just resigned herself to being embarrassed by the siren’s song, even during Mass when her stuff sang along with the choir.
Herman sometimes called her vagina her “box,” shortening the McPherson family name “matchbox.” He also called the plain brown acoustic guitar that he played in the evenings his “box.” She knew the difference, but she pretended she didn’t. Both boxes made beautiful music.
“Hey, Lena, baby, hand me ma box,” he’d say out on the deck stretched out on a chaise longue by the fireplace. She would get up, ignoring the guitar propped up against her chair, and walk straight over to him.
“Okay,” she’d say, “here it is.” And she’d stand with her stuff in his face. Boldly.
He would look up and grin, and pulling her down into his lap like his guitar, reach between her legs and strum her instead of his guitar strings.
“Uh, uh, uh, Lena, baby, you gettin’ so ’omanish,” Herman would say with a deep laugh as her pussy began to fill the outdoors with song.
Lil Sis didn’t have a Jessye Norman or Chaka Khan voice. But she could still sound good.
Her matchbox sang all kinds of beautiful love songs. Songs that sounded like Ellington classics, like R&B standards, like Southern Baptist camp-meeting hymns, like Gregorian chant. But as Herman told her one morning when they woke to her music, “Yo’ pussy don’t sing no blues, do it, Lena, baby?”
Sometimes in her sleep with Herman riding through her dreams, Lil Sis would sing. And often both Lena and Herman would awake in the middle of the night to the music of her vagina just humming away.
Over the summer, Lena got her vagina’s voice under control a little bit. She had to. The sound of it singing through the inseam of her cream-colored jodhpurs spooked Baby and Goldie as she and Herman rode the trails and paths of her grounds.
There was something about Lena and Herman getting together that brought out the music in them both.
Herman sometimes called her vagina his “Mulberry bush” and sang to her when they made love.
“Here we go ’round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush. Here we go ’round the mulberry bush so early in the mornin’.”
Lena couldn’t help but laugh at the childish words in Herman’s very grown-up deep voice.
“Here we go ’round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush. Here we go ’round the mulberry bush so early in the mornin’.” All she had to do was hear the tune in her head to start grinning.
Lena laughed all the time now, her brown eyes twinkling at Herman’s black sparkling ones from across a room. She didn’t have to give a thought to keeping a pleasant look on her face at all times and at all costs the way her father had insisted his entire family do when she and her brothers were growing up. At the family dining room table in the middle of a meal, Jonah would feel called to teach his children important lessons of life.
He taught them that the art of making conversation at the dinner table and the skill of keeping a pleasant look on your face were the most crucial lessons in life you could learn. Besides knowing to keep your elbows off the table.
“Mabel, Mabel, big and able, keep your elbows off the table,” Jonah or Nellie or somebody enjoying the meal would intone at least once a day. Lena was happiest when she was the one who caught her brothers breaking the rule. She would chant it over and over, dancing and squirming in her chair, getting louder and louder, until her grandmama would lean across the big wide table in her direction as if to pat her on the cheek and say softly, “That’s enough, baby. That’s getting on Grandmama’s nerves.”
Lena had always heard from Gloria down at The Place that you were to keep other things off the table, too.
“Don’t fuck on the same table you eat off of.”
But with Herman, she threw caution to the wind. They made love on the shiny long picnic table in the breakfast room. They merged and loved on the big oval dining room table with the intricately carved base. They enjoyed each other aslant on the shaky drafting table in Lena’s workroom. They screwed on the small round kitchen table near the sunny window overlooking the stables and the side garden. They even made love on the redwood picnic table near the deck down by the river. It was at night, but Lena did feel risqué making love buck naked in the open since more people than a little used the river during Cleer Flo’, boating, even water-skiing some weekends as if it were a northern lake resort.
In the first days after they met, as they drifted on the surface of the swimming pool, Herman pointed to the wooden door with a single window in it and asked her, “What’s that?” Lena just smiled and led Herman to the cedar-lined sauna tucked into the corner of the pool room where they made love until they nearly passed out, surrounded by billows of hot eucalyptus-scented steam, lightly tinted the same green as the woods near the riverbank after a soaking overnight rain. Lena assumed that was Herman’s doing. It looked as if he had taken a sharp Crayola forest-green crayon and traced the edges of every object in the sauna.
Lena almost had to give up meetings altogether after Herman learned she was ticklish and that he could become a true spirit and really sneak up on her without her realizing it. “Damn, Lena, you don’t use hardly none a’ yo’ powers.”
She feigned mild indignation, but she actually loved feeling the tip of his finger brush across the tip of her nipple as she spoke with some banker about extending a customer’s credit. Sometimes he would just slip into her as she told Miss Julia Mae what ingredients to put in a poultice for her frail sunken chest. Suddenly, Lena would feel the tip of his tongue brush the tip of her clitoris and barely be able to keep from shrieking. Lena would come to herself sitting in Miss Julia Mae’s chilly dark living room panting and gasping and glowing while the wiry old lady scrambled about trying to fan her and get her a glass of water from the kitchen at the same time.
Lena tried to be stern and irritated, but the sound of Herman’s laughter—”Haw, haw, haw”—in her ear made her throw her head back—her cheeks all flushed; her eyes all bright and sparkling—right there in Miss Julia Mae’s living room and laugh, too, at her joy.
Herman acted like it was his job to make Lena happy.
He was happy or at peace almost all of the time. It made Lena giggle to see the things that irritated him. He’d cut into a big juicy-looking lemon and discover little pulp inside.
“Shoot, Lena, old thick-skinned lemons. I hate ’em. We need some a’ those good old ones we used to pluck from the trees down home in Flor’da. Lena, they was so juicy all you had to do to get the juice was to prick ’em. Didn’t even have to cut ’em. The juice would come skeetin’ out! That’s what we need fo’ this lemonade.”
He’d continue with the task because Lena would have mentioned wanting some ice-cold lemonade to take down to the river with them. When she protested that the tart-sweet drink was fine, he just frowned his doubt and shook his head slowly. Herman wouldn’t be satisfied until they drove around and found a farmer’s stand where the vendor had procured some real Florida lemons.
“I want it to be just right fo’ you, baby.”
And he meant it. He was pleased to please Lena so much and so naturally that she didn’t even notice how much he was for
her, how much she enjoyed the loving attention, how much she had wanted just that kind of open, joyous, generous loving in her life.
Herman seemed finally to be the only one who didn’t constantly want something from her.
“Don’t you ever want anything, Herman?” Lena would ask. “Besides me, that is.” And she’d smile, bite her bottom lip with her top front teeth and giggle a deep sexy giggle that rubbed up against the side of Herman’s penis.
Herman would wait awhile, long enough for Lena to giggle again so he could feel it, then he’d shrug his heavy shoulders and say, “All I want is to make you happy, sugar. That makes me happy. As far as I’m concerned it makes the whole world happy.”
Lena was his whole world. That said of anyone else would have made him sound obsessive or smothering. But Herman was none of that. Lena was the focus of his revived life force, she was the only reason he was still hanging around Mulberry and life, and that was just fine with him. Lena thought he must have left his ego somewhere between this world and the next as he floated around for a hundred years.
She told herself she was just lucky. But Lena had lived her life in an efficiently schizophrenic way, using and enjoying the gifts of the caul, on the one hand, and pretending that there was no such thing on the other. It was why she was able to make love to Herman at night, have coffee with him the next morning, then go off to work as if she had not just kissed a ghost goodbye.
While they read or watched a movie or sat staring into the fire or the night, Herman would reach down and pull Lena’s feet onto his lap for a long slow massage for no reason other than he loved her. Lena would just sigh and let Herman do his handwork.
All the while he rubbed, kneaded, caressed and stroked her feet, he cursed and cussed the rows of beautiful high-heeled shoes that Lena couldn’t bear to part with.
“Damned high-heeled shoes,” he’d mutter once in a while as he massaged in earnest. “Those old pointed-toe high-heel mules you like so much is what did this,” he’d say with emphasis as he gently pulled on her toes. “They may make yo’ legs look pretty, but I hate them mules, Lena.”
He caressed her feet until the beginnings of hammer toes on her right foot had straightened out. With the creamy callused palms of his hands he planed along the inside of her feet above the instep to prevent bunions from forming.
“I ain’t gon’ have my baby’s feets hav’ta go under the knife,” he’d mutter to himself.
Sometimes, he would slide the flat of his big hand on up her leg from her instep, over her ankle, past her knee and up the inside of her thigh.
Then, he would touch her all up inside herself.
His touch was one of the first things Lena noticed about Herman. From the first time back in April when they formally met, Lena felt that he wasn’t touching her to get her attention or to punctuate a point or for any reason other than to make contact, to feel his skin on her skin. He touched her on her bare shoulder for no reason, just to touch her.
The skin that touched didn’t matter as long as it was his skin and hers. He told her, “Lena, I was always able to brush yo’ spirit once in a while. Now I’m happy to brush yo’ body, too. It’s a pure-T pleasure.”
It was a pure-T pleasure for her, too.
When Herman came, the whole world seemed to shiver and shift.
Sometimes, just to make her laugh, he would make the earth beneath them move when they came together.
And she would laugh and say in answer to his unspoken question, “Yeah, Herman, the earth did move for me.”
Oh, she loved him so much.
She began to take note of everything he enjoyed.
With a straight face, he would come up to her as she ground strong coffee for him in their kitchen, kiss her on the neck and say, “Lena. Let me take care a’ that thang fo’ you.” Then, forgetting the coffee altogether, he would proceed to “take care a’ that thang” for her right there on the kitchen counter.
Herman had to have his coffee in the morning. Lena thought at first it was the caffeine he was craving. But as she watched him watching her each morning measuring the gourmet coffee she had bought especially for him, putting the beans in the small handheld Braun coffee grinder some other man had given her, grinding the dark aromatic beans fine, fine, fine to nearly a powder, she realized he liked the ritual of his woman making him coffee every morning as much as he enjoyed the black strong brew.
What Herman especially liked was watching her. Lena noticed he always appeared when she was washing herself. As she squatted over the bidet, she would feel him materialize on the other side of the white swinging wooden door. She couldn’t see him, but she knew he could see her through the door. And she began to like the idea of being watched as much as he enjoyed watching her.
She would see him reach forward and pull open the door with a smile of lust and expectation and excitement playing around under his mustache.
Lena found herself as excited by this turn of events as Herman obviously was. His dick was packing the front of his old-fashioned work pants to bursting.
“Damn, baby,” he told her often, “if you don’t stop going ’round here so cute, I ain’t gonna have no pants left.”
Lena would grunt like an old woman surprised at her own still-vibrant sexuality when he talked that way. She reveled in the idea that she was the cause of all his dick-split pants.
Herman loved to watch her slather on the thick white creamy rich lotion she bought from one of her catalog companies. He had even entered one of the bottles of lotion after deciphering the ingredients from the side of the bottle and allowed himself to be rubbed into and absorbed by Lena’s skin.
When Lena realized she was slathering Herman all over her still-damp and warm body, she dropped the glass bottle to the floor in ecstasy.
What truly amazed and delighted Lena was Herman seemed to get as much pleasure watching her fully clothed. He would appear in the kitchen and find her standing over the sink eating a piece of juicy melon. When Herman would catch sight of her with the ruby-red juice dribbling out the sides of her mouth and down her lovely planed cheeks, his mind went immediately to the Polaroid camera in the next room. Even with his ghost’s mind, Herman could not preserve the essence of what Lena looked like as she leaned over that sink, her breasts resting insouciantly on the soapstone rim of the basin.
It would make him so hot he would come up behind her and ask her to “Please, ma’am” drop her pants. When Lena obliged, dropping the slice of watermelon into the sink at the same time, Herman would drop his own brand new Levi 501s and deftly slip his dick into Lena, who would lean over the rough sink’s edge a little bit to make sure she had all of him.
Herman reveled in being a part of Lena’s life.
“Who braid yo’ hair, Lena?” he asked one day when he saw her examining her hair where new growth had left her braids wobbly at the roots.
“Sister used to. That would be our excuse to get her away from all those men in her life. She would tell Douglas and the boys, ‘Lena need her hair done. You know I’m the only one who can do it.’ Jesus, before you came, Herman, she was the only family I had. Then, she’d hop on a plane.”
But with Sister out of the country and since Herman had appeared, Lena hadn’t even given her thick burnished hair a thought. When she was ripping and running with Herman outside—digging and planting in the yard, grooming or feeding the horses, jumping in the Cleer Flo’ pond with all her clothes on—Lena just pulled her braids back in a barely controlled ponytail in a gold elastic band. Herman liked her braids like that. He’d walk by her as she studied monthly business records on the computer or as she stood at the sink stringing pole beans the way her father and Herman liked them and pull her hair as he passed.
“Shoot, Lena, this ain’t no ponytail. This a hoss’s tail.” And he would give her hair another sweet soft yank.
He came over and examined the roots of her hair along with her.
“I guess it does need braiding again,” Lena said wistfu
lly. She missed Sister and didn’t look forward to finding a beautician to do it in Mulberry. “Maybe I’ll get Chiquita or one of my other children to do it. Young girls with young, nimble fingers are good at braiding.”
“Well, my fingers may not be young,” he replied, “but I’ll braid yo’ hair fo’ ya, Lena. I’d be happy to.”
“Herman,” she said, surprised and proud. “You know how to braid hair?”
And Herman just nodded his head.
“Damn, Herman, it is the truth, you can do just about anything!!”
He smiled and kind of shrugged his strong shoulders as if it were nothing.
“I’ll do it fo’ you now if you want me to.”
Lena hardly let him finish his sentence. She jumped up and headed toward her bedroom in search of the big red comb she used to scratch out Herman’s thick head of hair, stopping to lean down to give him a quick kiss on the lips just for being so damn wonderful.
He combed and plaited her hair as if he knew she was tender-headed. But as much pleasure as Herman seemed to take in her long thick braids, Lena knew that the sensation could not possibly compare with the joy and erotic pleasure she got from burying her face in his mat of hair. Each time he passed a mirror, he would grab at his hair and say loudly, “I sho’ do need a haircut.”
The first couple of times he said it, Lena jumped to protest.
“Herman, don’t you dare think about cutting your hair! I love the way your hair feels just like it is!”
“Well, if you feels that way,” Herman said slowly as he inspected himself in the mirror, playing with her, “I guess I’ll just leave it alone.”
“I don’t know how you could even think of cutting off that old thick motherland hair. Shoot, look at it.” Lena would pretend to still be a bit miffed with him for considering such a thing.
“Good thang you stopped me, Lena, baby,” he’d continue to tease. “I was ’bout to cut it off right now.”
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