Tina Mcelroy Ansa

by The Hand I Fan With

  Shoeing horses seemed to take all day, and Lena was ready for a break long before Herman stopped swinging his hammer onto the anvil. Lying across the bales of fresh hay, Lena began to fall asleep to the rhythm of the hammer.

  But she came awake when Herman took Baby’s last hoof down from the hoof stand and turned to her.

  “Hey, Lena, baby, you got a silk stockin’?” he asked with a smile playing up under his mustache.

  “A silk stocking?” Lena was more than intrigued. She could only imagine what Herman’s nineteenth-century mind was thinking of doing with one silk stocking and her in the barn. Now, Lena was happy and grateful that none of her plans to fuck other men in the barn had ever come to fruition.

  Talking to Herman as they cleaned the barn, lying with him in the sweet hay, she felt like his woman from his time. She felt like the woman in the play The Drinking Gourd making secret, intimate plans among the hay of a barn, looking to the night sky, plotting their escape. The only difference: She and Herman would be looking south, not north.

  “Uh-huh, yeah. A silk stockin’,” he answered, shaking his big handsome head free of sweat as he untied the red cotton kerchief from around his throat to mop his brow. Then, he stood back in his legs like a sexy country woman and stretched.

  “If anybody in this here town got a silk stockin’, Lena McPherson, it oughta be you!” Herman laughed, pleased with himself for knowing his woman.

  “Yeah, I got a silk stocking. Got more than one, as a matter of fact,” Lena said. The idea of the silk stocking and the barn was making her hotter and hotter. She felt as if she weren’t wearing panties. “What shade stocking you want?”

  “Yo’ choice, Miss Lena.” Herman loved playing with his woman so much he couldn’t resist the temptation she always offered.

  Back in early summer, when Lena was still going to work three or four days a week, she would walk through the bedroom dressed in thigh-high sheer hose with black lace garters holding them up, a soft satin champagne bra with one wide satin strap hanging down on the vaccination mark on her arm, and champagne-colored silk bikini panties trimmed in the same black lace of the garters barely covering what Herman delighted in calling her “matchbox.” She was wearing gold-toned mules and holding her braids up by the back of her hands, checking the gold clasp of her forty-five-inch-long string of pearls from Tiffany looped around her throat twice and hanging to her breasts. Herman couldn’t stop himself from chuckling and shaking his head in admiration.

  “Damn, Lena, baby, you look like the very Whore a’ Babylon in that outfit.” He stroked his mustache and rubbed his hairy jaw in the kind of appreciation that made Lena strut through the house.

  Now Herman knew what Miss Cora, the pretty little brown woman who had taught him to read from a stolen copy of the Bible more than a hundred years before, was trying to say about the kind of woman who could make a man commit murder. Herman would do anything for this woman, Lena, standing half-naked in front of him. This woman who swathed herself in the most luxurious fabrics and materials Herman had ever seen and wanted to pamper the rest of the world in the same way. She wanted to swaddle the world in bolts and bolts of satin, silk, fine linen, cotton and cashmere. To make it comfortable so everybody could get along, get along with their lives in grace, not scuffling and struggling along. He knew it was Lena’s dream. He had seen her dreams, had tried at one time to embed himself in her dreams before he became real to her. He knew her inner thoughts, even the ones hidden from herself.

  “The Whore of Babylon, indeed,” Lena managed to say in an offended tone before she turned away from Herman, threw back her shoulders and laughed. She felt like the Whore of Babylon.

  He fully expected her some night to do the Dance of the Seven Veils and take him to a level of pleasure he had not yet experienced in life or death.

  Lena knew it was true, she was turning into the kind of woman she had admired and feared since she was five years old. The kind of woman who felt no compunction at all in standing in some public place like The Place or the street corner outside or the Piggly Wiggly supermarket—or in a churchyard cemetery, she imagined, even though Lena had never seen it happen there—and hitting the front of her vagina—bap, bap, bap—with the flat of her palm to make a point.

  “Girl, let me tell you one thing, this is mine”—bap, bap, bap—“and I’m the one that decide who it go out with.”

  Or,

  “Yeah, but he ain’t had nothing like this”—bap, bap, bap—”before!”

  Lena was turning into the kind of woman who slapped her pussy—bap! bap! bap! Like that. Lena had seen women do it. Bap! bap! bap! Brazen Broadway Jessies slapping their crotches with the palms of their hands flatly, solidly, so that the gesture actually made a noise—bap! bap! bap.

  Standing over the hot anvil in the entrance to the barn still sweating from the exertion of shoeing Baby, Herman got mock serious. “May I have the silk stockin’, please, ma’am?”

  Lena got mock serious right with him.

  “Yes, sir! You certainly may,” she shot back, and hurried off to the house to get the stocking.

  She kicked off her muddy boots at the back kitchen door, dropped her soft yellow leather work gloves on top of the shoes and hurried through the house—a house that now smelled like food, candles, flowers, her, Herman and their love. There was also the alive, fresh scent of the river inside the house because all the doors and windows now stood open to the breeze off the Ocawatchee. The air-conditioning had not been on since July.

  “I hate that unnatural cold air blowin’ on me, Lena,” Herman finally admitted when Lena saw him all stoved up with a sweater on inside. “But it make you comf’able. So, I’m all right.” He said it seriously.

  Lena went right to the controls and with a sharp snap, turned the cold air off for good. Then, she came back, slipped in behind Herman on the sofa, and pulling his broad back into the fork of her legs, she massaged him until he was sweating.

  Catching sight of herself in her grandmama’s cheval glass, Lena had to laugh at how comfortably Herman had her dressing now: loose soft jeans, one of Herman’s undershirts and a white long-sleeved Egyptian cotton shirt she had paid nearly five hundred dollars for.

  “Well, at least it holds up well to washing,” she had heard James Petersen say one day when he took the shirt out of the dryer after having seen the price tag.

  Herman was of the same thrifty mind. “Ain’t no need to waste nothin’ just ’cause you got so much,” Herman said when some of their apparel was ripped from their lovemaking or their adventures in the woods. “Shoot, gimme yo’ sewin’ basket, Lena, baby,” he said, just assuming she had one. “I’ll catch up them tears myself. I ain’t no fancy sewer like yo’ mama or yo’ grandmama. But I can fix those few thangs up.”

  Then, Herman would sit down and sew the ripped shirt or the busted seam or the torn hem. Afterward, Lena would find a shred of cloth or pieces of thread on the arm of the sofa where he had sat and sewn. If they were from his clothes, she always put them away in a small peach and purple and rose trunk-shaped box along with a knot of his nappy hair she had found on his pillowcase.

  Lena entered her bedroom and stood in her walk-in closet staring at the bank of built-in drawers and customized racks for the longest time. She didn’t move until she heard Herman’s voice rising from the barn.

  “Lena, what’s takin’ so long with that silk stockin’?” he wanted to know.

  “Here I come,” Lena yelled back, but she didn’t move. She stood mesmerized by the sight of all the things she owned: dresses, lingerie, slacks, bustiers, boots, scarves, gloves, hats, blouses.

  “I ain’t gon’ never buy these many clothes or this much shit ever again in life,” Lena said to the many and varied denizens of her dressing room. Now that she thought about it, she had made all kinds of changes in her dress. She just couldn’t wear a bra anymore.

  “Oh, just let these bad boys flop,” she had said in disgust and heat frustration in early summer when
it was so hot already in Middle Georgia that she didn’t want to wear any clothes at all. And Herman had told her any number of times with sincerity in his voice, “Oh, Lena, baby, I love yo’ titties just like they are. If they floppin’, then I like that.”

  “Lena!” Herman called again from the stables, concern beginning to show in his voice.

  She remembered the silk stocking she had been sent for and hurried back outside with it streaming behind her like Herman’s colors.

  “Now, the true test of how good a job I did on this here hoss’s shoe work is did I finish up the job by film’ down the hoof smooth enough,” Herman explained as Lena handed him one long black silk stocking. “When I run this here stockin’ over Baby’s hoof here,” he said, dropping the hosiery over the foot he had lifted to the shoeing stand, “see, it just slide right off.”

  He was rightfully proud of his work. Lena was, too.

  Even Mr. Renfroe and Rick, the lone remaining stable hand, were curious about this mystery man of Lena’s who knew how to do everything from shoe horses to repair her computer.

  Mr. Renfroe was truly curious to discover if he was truly deserving of Lena. Rick just wanted to meet the man who shod his horses with such care and expertise. The horseman didn’t have a silk stocking to slide across the hooves of the animals, but he could see the hooves were as smooth as silk. “I’d like to talk to the man,” Rick told Lena.

  It made Lena think of the joys of conversation.

  “Herman, don’t you ever want to talk with someone else besides me?” she had asked him.

  Herman stopped sweeping the brick floor of the stables and chuckled, “You mo’ than enough, Lena, baby.”

  Later that night, Lena found reason to question that when she woke with a start.

  At first, she thought it was the meteor shower she could still see performing through the skylight over her bed. She and Herman had fallen asleep in each other’s arms well after midnight with the sky nearly ablaze with the collapsing stars.

  She reached over and felt Herman sitting up in bed with her.

  “Som’um spookin’ the hosses,” was all he said. And Lena felt chills for the first time since Herman arrived.

  He got up, put on a loose pair of pants and went outside to investigate. He stayed so long that Lena began to really become worried. Then, she heard his bare feet on the tiles of the pool room next door coming back, and she breathed a sigh of relief. She fully expected him to say as he usually did when she heard some different sound that he would investigate, “It ain’t nothin’ but spirits in the woods, Lena. That ain’t scary. It’s just life and death.”

  But he didn’t.

  When he returned he was as pale as a ghost under his dark brown skin. He looked slightly disheveled, as if he had been in a fight. “What was it?” Lena finally asked. “It was Anna Belle,” he said flatly.

  “Anna Belle?” Lena asked as she slowly wrapped her fluffy red terry-cloth robe around herself.

  “Well, she was in the form of a cat. But it was Anna Belle all right.”

  “Anna Belle?” Lena asked again, thinking, Who the hell Anna Belle? Am I supposed to know this Anna Belle?

  “Shoot,” Herman said, trying to hide the fury still in his heart, “Anna Belle the one tried to hit you in the head wid that loose plank the first day you come into my room down at yo’ place.”

  “Anna Belle??!!” Lena asked with the same intonation she had heard women use at The Place since she was four or five years old and started paying attention to the women in her life other than her mother and grandmother.

  “Yeah. Down at yo’ place. All you felt was the energy and the anger a’ the blow. I stopped the lick from actually landin’. That was when I first knew, really knew, I was gonna be real. When I stopped that blow.”

  “Anna Belle’s blow?” Lena asked evenly.

  “Uh-huh. That’s who was just spookin’ the hosses,” he said. Lena could hear him trying his best to sound casual through his rage. She assumed it was rage. Lena had never seen Herman angry before.

  “Anna Belle?” she asked again, still trying to comprehend what he was saying.

  “Yeah, Anna Belle. I still can’t believe she didn’t realize everythang involved if she had killed you the way she was swingin’ that piece a’ wood.”

  “You’re telling me some other woman spirit tried to take my head off with a plank of wood …?”

  “Uh-huh,” Herman said as he carefully peeled an apple he had chosen from the bowl on the bedside table, keeping the shiny red skin in one piece.

  “Down at The Place?”

  “Uh-huh,” Herman said again as he held the apple peel above his head and dropped it on the table in front of him. He looked at Lena and then smiled down at the “L” the curl of apple skin made on the surface of the mudcloth table covering.

  “See,” he said. “Even the spirits of fruit know you s’posed to be mine.”

  But Lena didn’t want to hear anything about any spirits of any apple peel. She didn’t want to hear about any other spirits at all. Lena knew that there were ghosts and hants and spirits in the woods surrounding her house. Right now she wanted to know about this Anna Belle.

  She had never really considered any woman in Herman’s life, alive or dead, who could arouse such passion over him. Lena knew she was passionate over him, but some other woman?

  She felt jealousy and anger rising in her throat like bile.

  “And this woman, this Anna Belle …”

  “Lena, if I hadn’a reached up and stopped her hand when I did … Well, I can’t think about it. As it is, she gave you a right big goose egg on yo’ forehead. The doctor and hospital machines couldn’t see it, but I could. I remember wantin’ to kiss it and make it better,” he said as he leaned over and kissed her gently on her brow.

  But Lena was determined to ask her questions. “I didn’t walk into that exposed plank down in your secret room or imagine that I had been hit? And this woman, this Anna Belle, tried to hit me in the head hard enough to kill me!?”

  Herman nodded his head silently. Then, he said, “Womens over there talk about how hard it is to find a good man even on the other side.”

  “And this woman is still around?” Lena asked, looking over her shoulder even though she commanded herself not to. “This woman who tried to kill me???!!” Lena insisted. He cut the peeled apple into quarters and ate them.

  He had picked up the bowl of apples that Lena tried to always keep full of fruit for him—scarlet and green and yellow apples, rough-skinned pears, black-skinned plums, honey tangelos, tasty tarty kumquats—and sat down on the bed. But he seemed to find it difficult to sit still.

  “Lena, ya got to understand, she wa’n’t tryin’ to kill you so much as to make you dead,” Herman explained as he fingered his palm-sized buck knife.

  “Kill me. Make me dead. What’s the difference?”

  “Big difference to her. It wasn’t the killin’. It was the havin’ you on her side—dead. Anna Belle had been watchin’ me get closer and closer to you and to the livin’. Everybody had seen it. Couldn’t help but watch. And she didn’t think it was fair. That you had a body and a pussy and was livin’ and everythang that you had on your side.”

  “Not fair?!” Lena was incredulous. “Not fair???”

  “Uh-uh. As a matter a’ fact, when she swung that plank at you, that’s what she said: Tight fair, gal!’ I’m surprised you didn’t hear her.”

  “And you just calmly sitting there peeling apples in my bed telling me all this, huh? You weren’t going to mention this, Herman? This wasn’t ever gonna come up in conversation?”

  “Shoot, baby, the way I feel ’bout it is don’t trouble trouble ’til trouble trouble you.

  “Besides, Anna Belle knew what she was up against in you, Lena. Baby, you the one. You the ’oman. Everybody livin’ and dead that know me know that.”

  Lena wanted to reach over and just sink into this man. But she didn’t. She was still scared.

&nbs
p; “Well, it looks like trouble’s troubling us, huh?” she said. “I repeat, you just calmly sitting there peeling apples in my bed telling me all this?”

  He stopped his paring and turned to her.

  “Lena, at some point you got to finally understand that thangs ain’t all like it seem here on earth, here with the livin’. Ya’ll ain’t got a clue. Ya just don’t know ’bout everythang.”

  Maybe not, Lena thought, but it seemed she had a fight on her hands with Anna Belle. And Lena did know about fights. She had seen fights of one kind or another all her life. Although she had never been in one herself, she certainly knew the drill from The Place.

  Call someone out of her name, date someone’s man, talk about they mama, steal someone’s job, purse, song. And your next step better be pulling off those big gold hoop earrings and snatching off that wig because a fight would be about to ensue.

  Lena had even seen a nun fight, but she had never witnessed a ghost fight, and she didn’t look forward to being a participant.

  “Anna Belle had done had her eye on me fo’ fifty or sixty years,” Herman continued. “And even before that, when she was ’live in Mulberry.”

  “Well, good God, Herman. If I got some woman—dead or alive—out there ready to waylay me with a two-by-four to my skull, what should I do? Start carrying a knife?”

  Shoot, Lena was scared.

  She recalled all the women over the decades downtown at The Place and at juke joints all over the lower South who had threatened to “sharpen this knife all over” some other woman’s face. She had seen the scarred women themselves, the victims of these big brassy, bodacious women and their smaller sneaky, sprightly sisters, with ropes of keloid around their necks and crisscrossing their chests and down their arms and hands.

  “Um, that woman cut everywhere but on the bottom of her feet,” Nellie would say with heartbreaking empathy as she stood in The Place with her flawless skin and her high-heeled pumps.

  Lena had hardly been able to look at the victims without feeling the original pain of the knife wounds.