Tina Mcelroy Ansa

by The Hand I Fan With

Worn out from weeping, Lena walked back to her house and stripped out of her clothes—wet to her panties—at the back door. Lena felt chilly in the house and thought she would never feel warm again without Herman. She sat naked at the shiny breakfast room table, the wood of the shiny benches cool against her butt. Recalling the first time she and Herman had fallen back onto the table, knocking a tall vase of daffodils and yellow roses to the floor, and made love there, Lena rubbed her hand across the slick surface. She lay her face, still wet with tears, against the table’s top and thought for a moment she could detect their scent.

  But it was gone as soon as she sensed it.

  Lena suddenly shivered and thought of going to get one of Herman’s big cotton sweaters that she loved to wear. Herman’s clothes!

  Stumbling and bumbling, she ran to the closet and saw all his things there in her house, some lying on top of her freshly laundered things, some still smelling like him.

  Lena was so happy to see something of her man still in her possession, to touch and smell, that she sank to the floor and burst into tears in the doorway of the closet. Each time she collected herself, she broke down again, until she was spent and drained. She finally gathered her strength and walked in.

  She entered slowly, stealthily, quietly, and buried her face in the cotton and wool and silk of Herman’s things, still full of his smell.

  Then, right before her eyes, Herman’s clothes began to disappear, dissolving just the way Herman had. She could hardly believe it was happening.

  “Oh, God, don’t do this,” she said, feeling anger amidst her grief.

  She started grabbing the clothes off the shelves and hangers and hooks, holding them in her arms as tightly as she could, as if her will could keep them real, solid, there with her. It could not. They all disappeared: his boots by the back door, his rain and outer wear hanging in the laundry room, his undershirt on the back of the chaise longue, his jeans and leather belt hanging on a hook behind the bathroom door. She raced around the huge house looking for just one sock or undershirt that Herman had worn.

  By noon, all of Herman’s personal belongings had vanished, even the white shirt she was wearing. Lena was desperate. She could not even find one of his short hairs among her rumpled sheets.

  Lena knew she couldn’t perform any kind of ceremony without some personal artifact of his. And other than the things he had built around the property—the gate, the signs, the carved-seat chairs, the trellises, the altars—there was not a shred of physical evidence of him.

  Lena was willing to try anything to get Herman back.

  She began seeking out ghosts for help: burning white candles, calling out Rachel’s name in her pool room until blue and gray and purple forces swirled around the room so fiercely that waterspouts appeared in the pool.

  But she received no answer.

  Lena thought of other ghosts she could turn to.

  “Let’s see,” she said shrewdly as if she were planning how to get some money together quickly for a business deal, “there’s Mama, Daddy, Grandmama and Raymond and Edward. There’s Granddaddy Walter, even though we never met. And my baby aunt who died. We already know each other. Then, there’s Frank Petersen.”

  She ticked the names off until she had to note that just about everyone she cared about was dead.

  “I’ll ask my dead baby aunt where Herman is,” Lena said, forgetting how the infant’s ghost, in a photograph over her Grandmama’s bed, had terrorized Lena when she was three until her grandmother moved the picture to the attic on Forest Avenue. “I’ll ask her how I can get hold of him. She will know, and she’ll know how to get him back, too.”

  She raced to the velvet jewelry case in her dressing room and put gold hoops in all four holes in her ears. She had read that gold improved one’s sight for ghosts.

  Thinking of her best friend, she said, “Oh, God, I wish I could get my hands on Sister. She could really help me.”

  Sister had always told Lena, “White women may go crazy quietly in their homes. But black women, little girl, like to get out in the street and go crazy.”

  Sister was right.

  Lena put on dry clothes, grabbed one of her suede jackets hanging by the door and a khaki wide-brim hat hanging there, too, and made her stumbling way to her car. It was storming seriously outside, and she was just about soaked again by the time she passed the wooden sign Herman had made to try and protect her.

  “It stand for ’Leave Lena ’Lone,’” she remembered Herman saying. She traced each letter with the tips of her fingers and crumbled against the wall of rosebushes to wail some more.

  “Oh, Herman, why you have to leave me? Lord, take me, too.”

  When she got in her little Mercedes, she took a deep breath. Even though he was rarely in the car, the interior smelled to high heaven of Herman. His sweat, his saliva, his oils, his funk, his musk, his semen. She threw her head down on the steering wheel and sobbed.

  She cried so deeply and heartily that she began to feel relieved. She cried the way she had cried when she was a child, with all her heart and soul.

  All the way into town, to 455 Forest Avenue, Al Green sang on the CD player.

  Don’t look so sad, I know it’s over

  But Life goes on and this old world keeps on turning.

  Lena didn’t think she could bear to continue listening to the heart-rending voice of the now-preacher singing a country boy’s song, her country boy’s favorite song. But she couldn’t make herself turn it off. It made her feel still connected to Herman.

  Let’s just be glaaaaddd

  We had this time to spend together

  There is no need to watch the bridges that we’re burning.

  By the time she crossed the wooden bridge over the river, she barely had strength to shift gears. When she got to 455 Forest Avenue in Pleasant Hill, little Chiquita was at the piano working on her music and saw Lena through the window coming around the side of the house. Chiquita cheerfully opened the door for her with a big, wide grin.

  Lena calmed herself enough to give the tiny girl with the big low butt a quick hug and say in a near normal voice, “I just came by to get something from the attic,” and hurried on up the stairs.

  Chiquita gave her a funny look. Damn, Miss Mac look bad! the teenager thought.

  Lena’s pretty face was bloated and puffy from crying, her big brown eyes were red and swollen.

  Chiquita watched Lena disappear up the steps and went on back to her music, promising herself she would call Lena the next day to make sure she was okay.

  By the time Lena got to the last flight of steps leading to the top floor, she noticed how hot it was already up there in April. She felt a little dizzy. The attic was where she had loved playing as a child among the boxes and relics of decades of her family’s life.

  When she got to the top of the stairs and into the hot dark dusty attic, it was silent and empty except for some building materials. She had forgotten where she had told the carpenters to store her family belongings—including her dead aunt’s picture. There was nothing to do but turn around.

  Lena slipped out the house without anyone seeing her face tear-stained, her hair barely contained in their braids, her hopes dashed, her heart broken.

  Lena felt she had no one on earth to turn to. So, she headed for church. She didn’t know how long it had been since she had driven to St. Martin de Porres. Her car seemed to drive there under its own power. She sat in the parking lot awhile waiting for the torrential rain to let up a bit, but it seemed only to get heavier. As she climbed the cement steps in the downpour, Lena felt like a ninety-year-old woman who had watched all her loved ones die before her. She didn’t think she had the strength to go on by herself.

  Now that Herman had vanished, her heart, her soul, her special powers, had seemed to evaporate with him. And she wanted to throw herself down in a pool of mud that she could slowly sink into and die.

  Her soft suede jacket was soaking wet against her skin, and heavy drops fell from
the ends of her long fat braids. It was chilly in the church, but Lena didn’t feel the cold. She felt numb, the way everyone said her father was after his mother died. Lena had heard Nellie say over and over after Grandmama’s funeral, “Jonah, he just numb.”

  Candles flickered in their Mary-blue glass holders on the side altar. Lena sat nearby with her head resting on the back of the pew and heard a rustling noise at the back of the church near the entrance like the ringing of delicate golden chimes. When she looked up, she saw a procession coming down the center aisle of the church. A family procession. Leading the way was her Grandmama. Right behind her was Nellie, and gently holding her mother’s elbow as if it were a monarch butterfly was her father, Jonah. Then came her brothers, Raymond and Edward.

  They were only there for a second, but Lena did see this ghostly congregation clearly. And she felt better for the sighting.

  Seeing her family, her people dead—and she thought gone—proceeding down the aisle of her parish church gave her a sense of peace, the way she felt now when she entered 455 Forest Avenue and felt only serene spirits, safe at home. She remembered Herman’s words—”Shoot, baby, if we s’posed to be t’gether, then we be t’gether fo’ever. This life ain’t it. This ain’t nothin’ but a vapor, baby”—but she was too angry and hurt to take any comfort from them. For a second, she felt that she could almost feel him reaching out to her. But by the time she thought to extend her hand and spirit back to him, the feeling had vanished, and with it her hope of getting her man back.

  She just ran from the empty church sobbing and feeling more barren than when Herman had said, “I gots to go, baby.”

  By the time she got onto U.S. 90 heading back home around dusk, it was raining so hard she could barely see the road. And when she could see the road, she could hardly keep her little car on it because the wind had whipped up to a lashing velocity.

  Lena could tell the river’s waters had begun to rise. As she drove over her wooden bridge, she noted that it was nearly swamped. For the first time in fifteen years, the span didn’t feel all that secure.

  “This is a bad storm,” Lena muttered to herself.

  Lena’s anger at the townspeople and the town at the end of the year had stirred up some trouble in nature. But her devastation at Herman’s leaving was causing real destruction. Lena had cried a river of tears. The flooding of the Ocawatchee proved that. Even her land seemed in danger from the swelling torrent.

  She heard Herman’s voice. Not the way she had heard it when he was with her, but now only as a memory from far away.

  It was what he had said to her before he began disappearing.

  “You can’t be the hand everybody fan wid, Lena. Then, you ain’t nothin’ fo’ you’se’f. Shoot, everybody want you. You special,” and then he had laughed at his understatement.

  “Everybody want some a’ you, want you! Shoot, baby, if I had my way, it’d just be you and me and a couple of those fine horses you got fo’ eternity. That’s what I want. But hey, as they say over on my side—and the other side is my place, baby, I do know that—people in hell want ice water. You don’t always get what ya want and most of the time, you ain’t s’posed to.”

  Lena cried and carried on for most of the evening, pacing around her house, dark from the storm that was raging like a crazy person outside. Lena carried on until she was sick of herself.

  When she did finally fall across the bed, exhausted, disheartened and lonely, it was early evening, but Lena felt as if she had not rested in years. The fury of the storm raged outside, and she instinctively reached to the bottom of the bed for one of her grandmother’s heavy quilts. When her fingers touched the thin voile swatch at one end, she felt a spark of comfort spread through her body. She pulled the quilt up to her chin, wrapped it about her body and cradled one end in her arms like a baby.

  She fell asleep hearing:

  He called me baby, oh baby, all night long

  Used to hold and kiss me ’til the dawn

  But one day I awoke, and he was gone

  There’s no more Baby, Baby all night long.

  37

  STORM

  When Lena awoke a few hours later in the night, she looked on Herman’s empty side of the bed and began to weep onto her soft blue pillowcase. She could still feel the space he took up inside her, like an echo of his penis, and its absence left a dull ache.

  Lena thought at first that sorrow must have roused her, but then she heard a strange sound. She did not think it was the storm, even though it was raging outside. Then, she heard it again. The sound was coming from the stables.

  “Oh, God. Keba!” she said, and threw the covers back. “The foal is coming. It’s time.”

  She reached over to turn on the light in the darkened house, and with the click-click sound, she realized the storm had knocked the power out. She reached for the phone to call the vet, but there was no dial tone.

  Lena had slept in her underwear, socks and shirt. She grabbed her jeans from the bottom of the bed where she had tossed them and shook her braids around her neck to clear her head. She felt as if her braids were standing around her head every which a way.

  “Well, damn, nothing but static,” she muttered as she slammed shut her small cellular phone. She pulled on her jeans and grabbed the flashlight Herman kept in the folds of the handmade quilt hanging from the table next to her bed.

  As she ran through the house, she heard the storm moving across her land, sailing down her river, striding into her yard. Looking out the windows and doors, Lena could not tell if the storm was tall and thin, slicing through the woods and the town, or if it was wide and low, barreling through and flattening everything in its path. But she knew it was doing some damage.

  “My God, where did this storm come from? It’s gotten so bad.”

  When she got to the Great Jonah Room, she could see that the storm was no longer just raging outside. It was now in her house. She must have left the big French doors unlatched because the wind and rain had blown them open and swirled through the room soaking and upending everything all the way to the big stone fireplace.

  Water was everywhere. Flowerpots and vases, books and papers were strewn all over the floor. Her silk-covered chaise longue was tipped over and halfway across the room. Quilts and rugs were ripped from the walls along with Lena’s prized photograph of her Grandmama and Granddaddy Walter on their wedding trip.

  It took her a while battling against galelike winds, but she managed to close the doors. Then, she struggled through the mess to the kitchen. She started to buzz James Petersen on the intercom but remembered all the power was out. Instead, she grabbed a lantern, took a set of keys from the wall inside the pantry and headed for the back door.

  Her head was throbbing as she put on her heavy khaki rain slicker hanging in the laundry room. And her stomach was upset. She tried not to pay any attention to the empty peg where Herman’s slicker had hung before he and it disappeared. She knew she would not have the strength to go on if she started thinking about her man, her friend, her lover … gone.

  At the door, she pushed her pants legs into her boots and opened the portal to a raging tempest. Lena, who had come through the Flood of ’94 unscathed, was awestruck by the power of this spring storm. As she ran to the garage, tree limbs crashed down around her. Pieces of loose fencing whizzed past her head. In a flash of lightning, she saw a huge branch fall within feet of her stone grotto to her mother and mothers. She realized that she had been praying since she awoke. All the while, she could hear Keba whinnying and crying in the stables above the babel of the storm.

  She breathed a deep sigh of relief when she finally sat safely behind the wheel of her sturdy old Wagoneer.

  “I’ll just get James Petersen to drive into town and get the vet. And I’ll stay here with the horses. Keba’ll be okay. She’ll be okay,” she reassured herself as she made her way down the debris-cluttered road. Fallen limbs and uprooted bushes were everywhere.

  She had a funny feeli
ng and slammed on the brakes so hard she bucked in her seat. Two seconds later, a tall Georgia pine tree came crashing down in her path just inches ahead of the Wagoneer’s front bumper. And there was no driving around it.

  Lena was grateful she was only a few hundred yards from James Petersen’s house.

  He met her at the door.

  “We can’t go nowhere for now, Lena,” he informed her as he took her wet things and led her to the gas heater logs. “I heard a big crash a couple of hours ago and drove down to the bridge. It’s gone, Lena. Washed away, just like that.”

  “You mean to tell me our bridge is gone?!!” Lena was astonished. Even with the force of the winds and rain she had just faced, she could not imagine one of her structures being destroyed by the elements of nature.

  “Uh-huh,” he said.

  “James Petersen, you mean we completely cut off?”

  “Uh-huh. And the water is rising fast, not like the last time. This look different, Lena. Real different. I’m gon’ stay down this way and keep an eye on the waters.”

  Lena thought her heart would leap from her chest.

  “James Petersen, I think Keba’s having her colt right now. We got to get a vet out here! Now!”

  “Ain’t gon’ be able to do it, Lena. Even if we could get a message to Dr. Diehl, she couldn’t get out here with the bridge out.”

  “Oh, God, what we gon’ do?”

  “We ain’t gonna do nothing. I’mo stay here like I say and watch this water. If it starts rising any more, we gon’ have to move to higher ground, fast! You and your man up at the house.”

  “Oh, Jesus, so it’s just me and Keba,” she muttered to herself.

  “You hear me, Lena? We may have to move fast! Now, when it happen, when I say so, I don’t want no Lena talk, I want all us to move to safety. You hear me, Lena?”

  But Lena was thinking about Keba having her baby all alone up in the stables. She knew Baby and Goldie were freaked out by the storm, too. She grabbed her slicker and hat and headed out the door before James Petersen could stop her.