She took a deep breath, wiped away the trail of tears on her face with the flat of her hand and laughed at herself as she squared her shoulders and picked up the tin box and put the recipes inside. She took them out into the light of the kitchen and sat in a shaft of sunlight full of dust beams at the table there and looked over the woods and stream out back and the spot where her grandmama’s ghost said her mother had burned her birth caul. She slowly lifted the top of the box and rubbed her thumb along the edges of the stack of cards fitting neatly inside.
She flipped past BRUNSWICK STEW and went on to the next card. Across its top it proclaimed:
“Dear Lena,” then,
EGG BREAD, with the ingredients listed below.
And right behind that card in an unusual display of conventional organization, Nellie had placed a white card with the heading CORN BREAD DRESSING FOR TURKEY OR HEN
Nellie’s voice rang throughout all the recipes.
On the card for her yellow layer cake, she informed Lena, “Flour three round nine-inch cake pans. You know how to flour a cake pan.” In another recipe, BISCUIT BREAD, she wrote, “Now, you know how you’ve always seen me roll out biscuit dough and cut out biscuits with the cutter. Well, do the same thing, round the whole thing out on the edges and put it in a well-greased skillet to cook slowly and brown on both sides.
“Serve it right away hot with some butter and Alaga.”
Lena had forgotten how strong her mother’s voice was.
Slowly, bit by bit, her mother came back to Lena in her mind. At first, she remembered Nellie’s delicate long throat right in the front where she stroked it from her chin to her chest when she was thinking or ignoring someone and “looking down that long country road” the way she did.
She saw her mother’s short slender legs and thin ankles. Then, she remembered her full breasts the way they had looked inside the bodice of a sexy summer sunback dress.
The ideal of “mother” was still Nellie to Lena.
“Lord, I’m worried about my child,” Nellie would say regularly to her friends Mary and Carrie. She chided Lena for doing too much, for being there for everybody. And she ain’t even got no husband or no babies of her own, Nellie would think.
“Lena, baby, you know nobody’s any prouder of you and your accomplishments or what you do for folks than I am. But, Lena, I’m worried about my child.”
Lena had just smiled at her mother’s reference to her: “my child.”
Although all the children in the McPherson family knew they were loved, with Lena it was different. She was the baby of the family. And even when her brothers were alive, Nellie only referred to Lena as “my child.” Raymond and Edward weren’t even offended by it. They seemed to use the phrase as much as Nellie. Looking up at Lena approaching, Raymond would tell his mother, “Here comes your child, Mama.”
Lena was her mother’s special child, and Nellie was worried about her. But then, ever since her only daughter’s special birth, Nellie had always felt a bit of unease about Lena’s safety and stability and future. Nellie had just written off most of Lena’s strange comments and insights to her being “a high-strung filly” the way Jonah always said.
But even a mother could see that an unusual child like Lena could only do so much. Nellie had given up on trying to talk about it to Jonah. Especially after their sons died so early, Jonah wouldn’t believe that Lena couldn’t do any and every thing in the world.
But Nellie knew there were limits.
“Lena sho’ must be a big help to you now that she ’un got her education and all,” a new customer would say to Nellie as she sat at the front of the liquor store watching Lena walking around the other side taking inventory with her new computer.
“A big help???” Nellie would retort. “A big help? Shoot, Lena the hand I fan with. I don’t know what we did before she was here.”
Nellie said it all the time. That Lena was the hand her mama fanned with.
Once, Lena had heard a woman down at The Place, she thought it was little skinny Willie Bea, tell her friend next to her at the counter, “You don’t understand. You still have your mother.” Lena had turned away and cried.
But now Lena just smiled to herself at the memory. Although Nellie was dead, Lena knew she still had her. She hadn’t for a number of years, but she regained her mother sitting in the house on Forest Avenue reading the recipes Nellie had written down just for her.
She thought of what Herman had told her.
“People got t’ love ya in their own way, Lena.”
She caressed her haul of cards and said to the empty room, “This my mama right here.” She suddenly felt the peace she had felt as a child when her mother would answer, “This my baby right here.”
She cried over the recipes one more time, each one with its greeting, “Dear Lena.” Then, she collected them all along with the ice cream churn, the silver meat grinder and an old gray dishcloth she remembered seeing her mother sling over her shoulder in the kitchen, and left the house happily haunted.
24
HORSE
With Herman around, Lena found happiness everywhere.
She had always wanted to make love in the straw in the loft of her barn.
In the fifteen years she had lived by the river she had planned such liaisons with men who had piqued her interest one way or another. One was a professor of history at Morehouse College she met at an awards luncheon given there for her. He showed up at her house for a casual Sunday brunch dressed in a three-piece suit. And besides the unattractive images of his past that Lena saw flash before her eyes, he seemed intent on remaining fairly well dressed and fully clothed for the entire visit.
She had invited another perfectly good prospect over for a midweek picnic lunch. But they didn’t even make it to the barn, let alone the picnic Lena was anticipating. She had really planned this one. Talking on the phone with Sister, planning the menu, choosing her ensemble for the afternoon: a black cotton sweater over a black lace teddy and wide-legged white silk crepe trousers and white deck shoes.
“You know, something that can go effortlessly from barn to bed,” Sister had said on the phone with a laugh.
Lena thought she had made plans for every contingency. She had stashed away toys, some feathers, a big fluffy comforter, Handiwipes, towels, a bottle of her best champagne, two hurricane lanterns for when it got dark (for she hoped to be in there fucking ’til the sun went down), and the green wicker picnic basket filled with strawberries, raspberries, kiwi slices and tiny hors d’oeuvres in a cool pack.
But her date, the owner of a gas station and garage in the next small town, got mad at the very suggestion that they have a picnic in the stables.
“Oh, so it’s like that. You gon’ ask me out here to eat in the barn with the horses and animals.” He was really insulted.
Lena had tried a bit to explain, but she got kind of angry herself having to explain that she was trying to seduce his black ass. The whole thing ended badly, with him jumping in his souped-up Mustang and roaring off down her dirt road not long after noon, upsetting her horses grazing in the nearest field of clover.
Herman, on the other hand, was proud and honored that Lena wanted him in what he called “varied and divers” places and ways.
It was in the barn that Herman had learned that Lena enjoyed oral sex. Not just getting it—he had learned that the first night he touched her—but giving it, too. He was as pleased as he could be at the discovery.
The first night they made love in the barn, when Lena scooted down to the end of the big striped blanket and began playing with the tip of his penis with the tip of her tongue, Herman had looked down and laughed in genuine surprise and amusement.
“Well, well, well,” is what he said as she took his hard brown penis into her mouth, picking a few pieces of straw off first.
“Shucks, Lena, you do that?!”
He threw his big head back and chuckled, then moaned in such delight that it spooked the horses beneath them.<
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“Lena,” he said between moaning and sucking his teeth and clutching her braids, “you som’um.”
Lena had a generous-sized mouth and Herman’s engorged penis, he noticed, fit neatly into her mouth.
“Your pleasure is my pleasure, Herman,” Lena said as she let his penis slip from her lips.
Later, as they lay sweaty and sated in the straw, he told her, “Lena, you couldn’t even hardly pay a ’oman in Middle Georgia to suck yo’ dick when I was ’live, and here you are, the one woman in all creation I woulda dreamed of doin’ it. And you lookin’ forward to it. Lena, you som’um, baby!”
“Do me again, Lena, baby,” he had leaned down to her ear and whispered. She reached up and gently pulled his neck and shoulders down for one long embrace and a luscious kiss. Then, feeling as strong as a horse herself, she went back to sucking his dick.
When she and Herman made love there in the stables the first time, Baby, Goldie and Keba below them whinnying from time to time in their freshly cleaned wooden stalls, he teased her by becoming what he was to her at the beginning—a puff of wind.
The first time he came that night, lying beneath her naked body in the fresh-smelling straw, he turned from Herman the man to Herman a swirl of wind that wound up her legs, around her hips, over her clitoris, up into her like a sweet cramp, through her head and enfolded her skull before exploding in a pouf of wind that lifted Lena and all the straw in the place into the air. Lena settled back down in a shower of straw needles and flakes of Herman that landed like manna from heaven and settled on the straw like sweet hoarfrost. Lena just lay back and yelled, “Whoooooaaa,” because she felt if she didn’t her head might burst open.
As Lena lay there moaning and breathing hard, Herman collected himself back into naked human form, threw his long legs astride her naked hips and slipped quickly—more quickly than he had meant—inside her. As he sucked his breath in and out with each stroke he slid into Lena, he whistled a little impromptu tune that made Lena raise her hips in welcome greeting to each one of his sweet thrusts. As they both came, heaving and bucking against each other, each searching for the other’s mouth, they screamed in such release and joy that it really did upset the horses.
It took a while for every living creature and the one dead one in the stables to settle down. And when they did, Lena and Herman lay back in the sweet straw and spent the night sticky and sweaty all curled up together in the hay.
“Oh, Herman,” she said as she awoke and stretched the next morning, “I’m so sore. I feel like I been thrown by a horse.”
“I always been wild, Lena,” Herman said by way of apology. Then, he stretched her out in the hay and massaged all her sore parts.
Over the entrance to Lena’s back door was nailed a horseshoe that the first horse she owned, the original Baby, had thrown when she was brought onto the property. The horseshoe had gone flying through the air, missing Lena’s right temple by a hair. She had heard it whizzing by her ear. After that, she saw the horseshoe as part of the good luck of the place. Now, Herman seemed a major part of that luck.
He fell right in with the routine of the place with the horses. It had been his idea, in fact, to get Keba impregnated now that he was there to help out.
“Herman, isn’t it too risky with Keba way out here? Suppose we can’t get in touch with the vet?” Lena had asked anxiously. She hadn’t expected to be this nervous, but she had never been through a birth of any kind.
“Just ’bout ten months. Le’s see. It’s May, no June when she gets wid foal. She’ll gi’ birth sometime in April. That’s just ’bout right,” he said. He could see Lena was still unsure.
“It’ll be okay, baby. I seen plen’y horses foal. And everythang was just fine. I ain’t gon’ let nothin’ happen if I can he’p it.”
“Oh, Herman, I’m worried.”
“Have some faith, Lena, baby,” Herman said as close to sternly as he ever was with her.
Now, in late summer, Keba was heavy with foal, nearly halfway through her term, moving more slowly but enjoying the careful friskiness. Lena and Herman loved to curry her after she had been out in the fields and to pat her tight rounding belly.
Waking in the night to go to the bathroom, Lena often found that Herman had slipped out of bed and gone down to the stables to check on the expectant mother. His caring for life was so deep, it was palpable.
Lena was surprised that the horses let Herman anywhere near them, let alone on their backs. At least two of their backs. Baby still allowed no one to ride her but Lena. Not even Rick Little, the stable manager, could safely climb on Baby’s back. Baby was so spoiled. Herman said so.
“Lena, ya’ll done spoiled this hoss so,” he declared as he ran the horses around the exercise rink in the corral.
Equestrian organizations all over the South had tried to rope Lena into putting her beautiful estate with the heated stables on their list of party sites during the riding season. Lena just laughed at the overtures and invitations. She didn’t have time to spend with people she liked and loved, let alone with strangers.
“I love to ride,” she explained to Sister when she gave her friend her first riding lesson. “But I do believe there is something to what they say about horses. Shoot, for me, the horses are better than a whole pack of guard dogs or a bodyguard.” The main reason Lena had been drawn to owning horses was their legendary sensitivity to the presence of ghosts.
And it had seemed to work.
“Shoot, it ain’t the living I got to be worried about,” Lena said, bringing up a subject that she had forbade Sister to discuss any further, “it’s the dead.”
But if horses were true harbingers of spirits nearby, kicking their stalls and neighing wildly, one would never know it by the way those animals seemed to love Herman.
He sat a horse beautifully. Relaxed but regal; in control as Lena imagined Nelson Mandela would ride. And the animals seemed to sense his comfort and look forward to him climbing on their backs.
Sometimes, she and Herman even rode bareback, alone and together. Herman would take Lena’s forearm and pull her up onto Goldie’s back with him. He’d lift her lightly as if she didn’t weigh an ounce. Then, he’d scoot back a bit and settle her in the space over his crotch and pull her back to his chest as Goldie, he and Lena trotted off, her body rolling rhythmically against his with each step the horse took. Riding her land that way, sometimes for miles to the end of her property, in the hollow of her man’s body left the front and inseam of her riding britches wet and sticky. Herman would sometimes stop, lift Lena under her arms and turn her around on Goldie’s back to face him. Then, they would ride off, her face to his face, her breast to his chest, her matchbox to his dick.
Lena had wanted to buy Herman his own saddle, but he just waved the suggestion away with a quick wide-open gesture toward all the beautiful hand-tooled leather saddles on the walls of the stables.
“Let’s use some a’ this tack we got,” he told her as he took his pick.
“Race ya to the bend in the river,” Herman would yell suddenly as they rode, trying to catch Lena unprepared. Then, he would take off racing for the water’s edge.
Herman had no interest in automobiles. Lena had asked him a number of times when they were out driving if he wanted to take the wheel, but he declined each time. He had never driven and had no desire to.
Whenever Lena suggested, “Come ride to town with me, Herman,” he usually shook his head and pointed toward the stable, then down at his own feet.
“Those hosses out there and these ’hosses’ right here all I need,” he would tell Lena in all seriousness. After a while, she would suggest car trips just to hear him say it. “These hosses takes me to and fro, Lena, baby. They takes me to and fro.”
They both loved caring for the horses, truly caring for them.
As Lena curried the horses, lovingly brushing their silky heavy horsehair free of briars and cucabugs and ticks and clumps of red dirt, she’d think of her own times of being �
�curried”:
Tender-headed Lena sitting between her mama’s legs getting her thick heavy coarse hair combed, tears standing in her eyes and her mother’s.
Sister scratching out her head and giving her braids all over her head one night while they looked through old photographs.
Falling under the hypnotic spell of Mamie, the magical assistant at Delores’ Beauty Parlor, with her head thrown back into the steel shampoo sink.
When Lena got to Baby’s strong thin legs, she stopped and smiled. “Thinking ’bout yo’ mama?” Herman asked from the stall next to her.
Herman had a real knack for being able to slip into Lena’s head at those times she wouldn’t feel violated by the intrusion. But then, Herman had a knack for a lot of things.
In life, he had acquired considerable skill as a blacksmith. On hot days in summer, as he struck and struck and struck the white-hot iron anvil shooting red and golden sparks all around him and into the air at the stable doors, Lena would watch mesmerized.
She had gotten Red, one of her boys from The Place, to scour the countryside to find an authentic smithy’s black leather apron for Herman. It was old but still pliable. Lena washed it and cleaned it with love and saddle soap from the supply room. Then, she rubbed it and rubbed it with mink oil until it crushed and recoiled under her hand like her thigh-high leather boots.
While Herman worked over the pounding hot anvil, he wore the apron without a shirt, just the way he knew Lena wanted him to. The sweat beading up on his taut smooth brown skin ran down his chest in rivulets. Lena sat on easy-chair-sized bales of hay and watched Herman work for hours, forgetting any responsibilities she had except to Herman and herself.
The first couple of times she saw him that way, she resisted the temptation to go over to him and touch the tip of her tongue to one drop on his sweaty chest. She wanted to go over and lick his chest and suck his licorice nipples. One day, Herman, who knew what she was thinking all the time, stopped his pounding and called her over to his arms. He enjoyed fulfilling her fantasies.
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