“Got a pretty stomach,” he would say almost to himself as he traced her body like a blind cartographer feeling a relief map. Lena laughed and thought of her gynecologist, Dr. Sharon, who addressed all her patients as “Boo.” She had said the same thing as she examined Lena the last time. “You got a pretty stomach, Boo.”
Lena laughed when she remembered Dr. Sharon’s routine questions about premenopausal symptoms on her last checkup: “Any soreness of your breasts, Boo?” “Any vaginal dryness during intercourse, Boo?” With Herman around, her breasts were always a little sensitive. And just kissing Herman made Lena as wet as a sixteen-year-old girl slow-dragging in the dark for the first time at a basement party.
She thought of old men and their stories of old women sitting in tubs of hot water and alum to tighten up loose and overworked vaginas. Lena would hear the jokes as she passed a cluster of men her father’s age chuckling at the bar. “And when the preacher got up to the pulpit the next morning, he said, ’Ummmmphhh-uuhhhhhhu.’”
Herman reminded her of those old men sometimes.
He had an old-timey way of talking, of saying things that she had only read in books. He said “cipher” or “figure” for add. He called a purse a “satchel,” and pants of any kind—even her panties—were “britches.”
And although he understood the inner workings of a computer better than most experts because he had actually been inside one, Lena would still hear him say to himself as he figured the amount of pig iron he would need for his blacksmithing: “Nought from nought leaves nought.”
Lena had never heard Mr. Renfroe refer to his penis as his “Georgia jumpin’ root.” Still, Herman’s speech continued to remind Lena of her gardener.
Walking through her grounds with Herman by her side, his arm draped over her shoulder, Lena would come up on Mr. Renfroe and stop to chat a bit about a fungus on the roses or a new clematis she had seen in a magazine.
“Eee-bah-ning, Lena,” the gardener would say.
“Good evening, Mr. Renfroe,” Lena would reply.
“Good eee-bah-ning, Mr. Renfroe,” Herman would echo politely.
Herman would stoop down beside them and examine the plant in question, then stand and offer Lena his own seasoned advice.
She wanted to ask Renfroe, “Did you hear that? Did you see that? Did you?” But she knew he hadn’t heard or seen anything. Only she had.
By the end of summer, Mr. Renfroe had cut down drastically on his time out at Lena’s. She was his only client, and he had continued to work there only because it was such fun, though he saw from week to week how much she was doing on the property with her “friend.”
Mr. Renfroe had finally demanded to know who was building all those trellises for moonflowers, who was turning the compost piles before he and his assistant could get to the job, who was planting that old-fashioned shooting star primrose all over the property. Just who was her new yardman?
“I got a friend who’s real handy,” Lena told the old man honestly. “And he enjoys doing things around the place. He hasn’t messed up anything, has he, Mr. Renfroe?” she asked, trying to hide the talons she was going to use to rip the old man to shreds if he criticized any of Herman’s work.
“Naw,” Mr. Renfroe admitted. “He done okay. And some of that stuff, like the trellises, is fine workmanship!”
Lena retracted her claws and just beamed at her man’s compliment. Lena knew where this conversation was going. She had been down this road before with James Petersen.
James Petersen had seen things: Lena dancing in the moonlight. Lena sitting naked in the sunlight with her feet stretched out in front of her just chattering away. He had caught her a couple of times running from the direction of the barn, laughing and glowing, as if someone were right on her tail.
He had seen all this, but he hadn’t said a word to anyone.
To begin with, whom would he have told? If his brother Frank Petersen had been alive, maybe, but Frank hadn’t liked hearing anything that even sounded like it was against Lena, and there was no one else with whom to share it.
Anyway, what would he have said? “I keep catching Lena talking to herself and singing to herself even when her lips aren’t moving. I saw Lena dancing naked out on the main deck of her house. I’mo say that?” James Petersen muttered to himself time again as he moved about cleaning Lena’s house and considering what his duty was as her only in-house guardian.
James Petersen hadn’t yet spied “The Man,” as he called him, but James knew he was there. Practically moved in, it looked like. The housekeeper had washed enough of Herman’s shirts and jeans and brightly colored cotton underwear; fallen over enough of his big work boots; dusted around enough of his dissected handiwork to know that there was a man around. A man who felt comfortable in his surroundings.
“But then, who wouldn’t be comfortable out here?” James Petersen asked the empty house. It was what he said about his position at Lena’s with his own stone house and his own hours when someone remarked on his good luck. “I’m quite comfortable with my situation.”
“Yeah, fine workmanship, Lena,” Mr. Renfroe had repeated, waiting as James Petersen had for her to say something, then continuing.
“Yeah, like to meet the man sometime. Talk to him face-to-face ’bout the work he done. Yeah, sure would like to meet him.”
But Lena just said, “Um,” stroked her throat and looked down that “long, long country road” the way her mother had when she no longer wanted to discuss something.
Although she relished her privacy, Lena missed the old man being on the property so much.
For years, she and the old gardener had moved among the vegetable plants and weeping willow trees and ivy and yew and hibiscus bushes together for a little bit practically every day. But after her parents’ death, she had had to get Mr. Renfroe some help of his own because she no longer had the time to be of any assistance to him.
She couldn’t remember all the great-looking animal-print ManoloBlahnik high-heeled mules and Charles Jordan pumps she had ruined trying to squeeze some gardening in on the way to work.
Before the spring when Herman came, she just didn’t have time for gardening or any of the things she had enjoyed most of her life. Over the last decade, it had happened so gradually, so slowly, that she hardly noticed that her life revolved around doing for others.
“Shoot, I don’t even have time to turn my own compost pile or cut flowers in the evening,” she had complained to herself for years.
Now, when she walked with Herman on the grounds, he’d even look at her every now and then and say, “Time, baby.”
The long daylight hours of summer somehow agreed to continue on through the shorter days of early fall. For Lena, Herman had all the time in the world. And she felt that she had all the time in the world. Sometimes, he even seemed able to stop time. One day in September, he took her back to the berry patch where he had taught her how to really pick blackberries. When she saw where they were headed, she said, “Herman, it’s too late in the summer for those blackberries now.”
“Yeah, baby, but not fo’ us,” he said as they rode up to the massive mounds of vines covered with juicy purple-black fruit. He jumped off his horse, picked the biggest juiciest berry Lena had ever seen and coming back to where she sat on Baby, said, “Open yo’ mouth and close yo’ eyes.”
At Herman’s sweet shy insistence, they had even made love one night in August under a big full moon and the stars of the Southern Crown in the furrows between the rows of Silver Queen and Golden King corn growing in a high area near the river to enrich the soil and ensure a good harvest.
Herman paused in licking her breasts and rolling her hard nipples gently, carefully, between his strong teeth to say, “Well, we sure as shootin’ gonna have us a splendiferous harvest at this rate.”
Between moaning and kissing the crown of Herman’s bushy head under the tassels of the sweet white corn, Lena had to agree. She knew a good harvest was ensured as soon as she lifted
her head from the rich black loamy soil where she lay naked on her back and watched Herman slowly sink his thick tight penis deep into her wide-open purple and pink vagina like an ancient handmade farm tool sinking into the earth. Herman had not had to change shape or form or essence at all to make them both groan as he rested in her a moment—a long moment—then pulled out as she sunk her short nails into his clenched firm butt, and he sunk his into the rich dirt around her.
In the grip of a sweet, soul-rattling orgasm, their eyes met, and they smiled at each other. Then, they both fell back to the earth.
Even Mr. Renfroe remarked on how rich Lena’s garden soil was becoming.
From the first, Herman just wouldn’t allow her not to have a full garden on her property.
“Good God, Lena, you got soil like down on the muck in Flor’da, and you ain’t even gon’ plant no beans!?”
Using old-time and Native American techniques of planting in nothing but hills of rotting compost from Lena’s kitchen, Herman grew so many ripe, sweet, juicy watermelons that he loaded some in the back of Lena’s dark green Wagoneer for folks downtown at The Place.
Perfectly round, nearly blue-skinned Cannonballs; long pale Charleston Grays; round, sweet Sugar Babies; oblong lime-striped Crimson Sweets.
A couple of her teenaged children from the corner, thrilled to see Lena for a change, trooped in with her with the melons on their shoulders and placed them on the counters and in empty sinks and half-full soda coolers.
Coming into The Place, Lena warned, “Be careful. You know, liquor and watermelon’ll kill you,” and old men and women looked up to make sure somebody as young as Lena was repeating such an old-timey belief.
Then, as quickly as she had appeared at The Place, she was back in her Wagoneer and gone.
“Guess she gone back out there by the river with her ’friend,’” Peanut said as he watched everybody’s face fall when they realized she had disappeared before anybody got a chance to say anything to her.
Herman, Lena discovered, was tied not only to their own cultivation. He would eat out the woods in a minute if what he wanted was not being grown in the garden. One day he stopped during their walk and looked over in the direction of a dark damp cluster of poplar trees nearby. Taking her hand in his, he led her to the trees and stooped down at their trunks by a stand of dark brown mushrooms.
“Those toadstools, Herman?” Lena asked as he picked one, turned it to the light and smelled it.
He just smiled and popped it in his mouth.
Lena held her breath and waited for some kind of ghostly allergic reaction, but none came, and she, satisfied of their safety, started selecting the safe mushrooms Herman pointed out from the poisonous varieties.
Herman never said it in so many words, but Lena knew she was being drawn closer and closer to the earth. And she knew that it was somehow Herman’s doing. The further she pulled herself away from the things of the world—her possessions, her businesses, her shoes, her dependents, her visits, even her gifts and acts of kindness—the nearer she drew to the peaceful, serene spirit of the world itself.
“You need to be mo’ like Mary and less like Martha,” Herman would tell her gently when she still went off to take care of somebody. “Choose the better part, baby.”
When Lena didn’t come to church four or five Sundays in a row, folks there began to sound the alarm. Church folks were the first to notice that Lena McPherson was slacking off!
Lena would have been stunned if she had known people in Mulberry were saying that. That she was slacking off. She felt just the opposite.
“You want to come join me for Holy Communion, Herman?” Lena asked him one morning as she was heading to Mary and Martha’s grotto down by the river with a bottle of champagne, half a biscuit Herman had made that morning, a few tiny Sweet 100s tomatoes from the kitchen garden and a little honey from the field hive.
“It’s all communion, baby,” Herman had called back to her as he headed for the barn with brush and pail in hand. “It’s all good.”
26
DOWNTOWN
When Gloria came up on Lena sneaking out of the grill side of The Place at five in the morning, Lena jumped as if a strange ghost had brushed up against her.
“Um, um, um,” Gloria said. “Poor thing. Now they got her sneaking around her own place.” Lena was so surprised, she nearly dropped the bulky cardboard box she was carrying on her hip like a country woman toting a baby. She laughed as if she had been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.
“I’m just trying to get a few things out of here before everybody gets in and catches me,” Lena explained sheepishly. Her box was filled with a bottle of old brandy, some papers she needed and her father’s small adding machine for Herman.
“Um, um, um,” Gloria said. “Got the nerve to be trying to have a life of her own. Lena, girl, you know you ’un tore your drawers with this town now,” Gloria laughed in her slow Mulberry drawl as she helped Lena lift the box onto the bar.
It was something Lena had often heard the still-sexy manager say when she felt somebody was in serious trouble.
“Lena, this town just now beginning to see that you feeding them out of a long-handle spoon! And, girl, they don’t like it one bit. A few folks ain’t even noticed yet ’cause you done took such good care of them before. It ain’t hit ’em all yet. But enough of them talking.”
Lena smiled at Gloria, whose Maybelline mole had disappeared years ago in the bustle of running the business, and said slyly, “I have a friend who says, ’Our folks are smart people. They’ll get the message.’”
“Well, you know what your mama always used to say,” Gloria replied.
Both women chimed in together, “ ’You can show a Negro quicker than you can tell ’em.’”
Then, they laughed good and loud at the memory of Nellie McPherson.
“Come on, girl, sit for a while,” Gloria said. She took a pack of Tareyton cigarettes from her purse as she and Lena settled in on a couple of The Place’s vinyl barstools.
Lena watched Gloria lean on the counter and light a cigarette. Oh, that’s the way a whore smokes a cigarette, she thought. Lena couldn’t help it.
It had always been difficult for her to get an image out of her head once it was there. That was what had made her attempts to exorcise the memories of her childhood demons and ghosts so hard. And that was how it was with an image of Gloria stamped in Lena’s memory from forty years before.
Lena had been playing among the cases of liquor on the floor of The Place one Saturday when she heard her mother chuckle to herself: “Humph, only a whore blows her smoke out like that.”
Lena had clambered up on the counter, using the shelf underneath for a stepladder. She made it to the top just in time to see Gloria take another drag of the cigarette, hold it in a while, then blow it out with her bottom lip, directing the smoke in a wide stream toward her flared nostrils.
“Oh, that’s how a whore blows her smoke out,” little Lena said softly to herself, her tongue playing lightly in the corner of her mouth trying to imitate Gloria’s. She had already disturbed the whole car one Sunday morning as the family drove to Mass by asking exactly what a whore was. So, she didn’t dare say the word out real loud. But she stored away that bit of information with the certainty that she would find it useful one day. Even now, forty years later, she could not break herself of the habit of thinking, Oh, that’s how a whore blows her smoke out, whenever she saw a woman exhale that way.
For years, that’s what people at The Place had thought Gloria was—just a whore with a steady job. Even Jonah, who had relied on Gloria so much, had treated her as if it were her ass that made her valuable. After Nellie just had finally, quietly, flatly refused to keep running The Place for Jonah’s convenience, it was Gloria who kept his business running smoothly—opening up in the morning so he could stay out late and gamble and carouse; staying later and later in the evening while he went about his other business and businesses. Yet, Jonah continued to
have talks with Gloria about what was proper juke-joint employee attire, what she should and shouldn’t wear to work, how she should conduct herself with customers, how not to lean too far over the customers’ plates and drinks.
“Gloria? Shoot, she giving it away out of both drawers legs,” folks would say, summing her up.
But one of the first things Lena did when she inherited The Place at the deaths of her parents was to make Gloria the manager. “One of the smartest things I ever did,” Lena said to herself whenever her mind turned to the business.
When Lena came back from her last year of college, it had amazed her how much Gloria seemed to have changed. Even though she had encouraged and even bullied and embarrassed her father into giving the barmaid more responsibility and an appropriate pay raise, Lena was herself surprised at how quickly and easily Gloria had handled the duties. Gloria even initiated changes and plans she had obviously had in mind for quite some time. And they worked.
It was Gloria who centralized the ordering for both the liquor store and the bar and grill side. It was Gloria who finally and successfully set up a real work schedule that included regular employees, gofers and roustabouts. It was Gloria who reorchestrated the deliveries of beer and wine and sodas and snacks and linens and liquor from the hodgepodge Jonah and his managers had made of it when Nellie had thrown her hands up in surrender.
But even before Gloria proved herself an astute businesswoman, Lena had respected her on many other levels.
Gloria was only eighteen years older than Lena, but the younger woman thought Gloria was as old as the ages. Certainly not because she looked old. But because Lena thought she had lived, really lived, forever.
Nellie had always prefaced just about everything she said about Gloria with the phrase “Considering how long she been out there …”
“Considering how long she been out there, she look good.”
“Considering how long she been out there, it’s a wonder she can get up in the morning and come to work.”
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