Tina Mcelroy Ansa

by The Hand I Fan With

  “I’ll be at the stables, James Petersen!” she shouted as she headed back down the road to her Wagoneer.

  She had to take it slow and easy, but she was able to turn the four-wheel vehicle around and drive all the way back to the pecan trees by the stables. Two of the tall trees had toppled over into the clearing where she usually parked her car.

  The storm was striding the earth with a vengeance. Ahead, Lena could see lightning striking the surface of the Ocawatchee River, sending up sparks and electricity into the stormy night air. She had never seen so many lightning strikes. Thunder crackled all around her as she climbed down from the high seat of the big Jeep and headed for the stables.

  She could hear Keba kicking and whinnying inside, and she rushed on to the wide swinging doors of the structure, cracking the stormy darkness ahead with the beam from her big flashlight.

  Keba was already lying on her side in the pile of new clean straw that Herman had laid the day before. Lena had watched him do it. Keba lay with her head up listening and crying. Lena stopped right inside the door and said a little prayer.

  “Help me, Lord. Help me, Herman.”

  Then, lighting the battery-powered lantern she had brought with her, she went on inside toward the whining horse.

  “Hey, Keba, girl, how’s it goin’?” she said, trying to sound upbeat and assured like Herman. “Looks like that time, don’t it, girl? Well, it’s going to be just fine. Better. I’m here and your baby’s almost here. And that’s the truth, period.”

  Lena put down the lantern and pulled off her rain gear and tossed it in a corner. She looked just like Herman as she rolled up her shirtsleeves and knelt down beside the big struggling mare. When their gazes met, Lena was sure she saw terror in Keba’s huge bulging eyes.

  Right then Keba’s water broke, sending torrents of blood and fluid flooding the brick floor where Lena knelt.

  She turned from the prostrate mare and said to herself, “Lord have mercy, Herman. I can’t believe you left me with this mess on my hands.”

  Then, she turned back to the task at hand and went to work examining the braying animal, pulling some blankets down from the shelves behind her, speaking soothingly to the mare. It was a daunting task.

  Shit, I can’t do this, she thought five or six times. Her heart was racing so.

  “Oh, Keba, I don’t want to let you down,” she said to the struggling mother. “But I don’t think I can do this. I don’t think I could do this on a good day, Keba, and this sho’ ain’t no good day.”

  Lena thought of her mother and her grandmother and her Grandies and all the women who had been through this ordeal to bring a child into the world. “Oh, Mama in heaven, help me! Help your child!” she cried. “Mary, you had a baby in a stable. Help me!”

  As she knelt in Keba’s blood and water, Lena heard something heavy slam against the roof of the stables, and the thought crossed her mind, “Maybe, if I calm down some, this storm will do the same thing.”

  She took deep slow breaths, and placing her hand on her heart, she willed it to slow down and stop ramming against her chest.

  The wind did seem to settle down a bit outside, and she tried to calm herself further by recalling Jesus in raising the little daughter of Jairus from the dead. We don’t need hysterics and lamentations here. We need faith. Believe!

  Then, she thought of Herman. Herman sitting in a field of wild gladioli covered with yellow sulfur butterflies. Herman lying naked next to her in bed with his hand over her matchbox. Herman astride Goldie exploring her land. Herman astride her.

  Each image of the man she loved rent her heart but also calmed and centered her. Each time she saw him in her head, all big and strong and sexy, all up and through her property and her house and her soul for the last year, she recalled his love and his wisdom and his gentleness. Surveying the birth scene before her in the barn, she repeated, “Don’t worry ’bout the mule goin’ blind, Lena, just hold him in the road.”

  So, that’s what she did. She called on all her powers of faith and belief and love and gratitude and did the work before her. She called on all that Herman had told her and taught her and shown her since he had shown up a year before and concentrated on Keba and her predicament.

  Then, like a breeze, Herman was right there at her shoulder. She thought she could feel the heat of his breath on her neck inside her shirt collar.

  “Take it easy, Lena, baby, take it easy,” his voice whispered in her ear. Then, “Shoot, Lena, you can do this. Now, you gon’ hafta get her started, but don’t you worry, ’cause then, Keba gon’ take over and yo’ job be almost finished.”

  The sound of Herman’s old country voice in her ear, the feel of his ghostly breath on her neck made her very heart melt.

  Lena took a deep breath and turned to get a good look at him. He was there! He was still wearing his light green shirt and old work pants. He had his old black boots on. And his beat-up old hat was set back far on his head. He was just a vapor, but it was enough for her.

  “Oh, God, Herman, I’m so glad you’re here,” Lena whispered, nearly breaking down on the stable floor.

  “Lena, baby, I’mo always be here fo’ ya. I tol’ ya that.”

  Then, Herman smiled at Lena and turned his ghostly attention back to the horse. Keba seemed sedated by Herman’s voice.

  “Come on, Keba, it’s gon’ be all right,” he said. “Everybody’s here that needs to be here.”

  Lena looked around the stables and saw that everyone was there. Her whole family was around her.

  “Hey, Lena, you old pop-eyed fool, you can’t do this,” her younger brother, Edward, chided. “You better go get some help.”

  “Don’t pay him no attention, Lena,” Raymond said reassuringly. “You can do this. Edward don’t know what he talking about. You can do this.”

  Keba made a kicking motion, and Lena saw something emerging from the mare. Lena was thrilled until she realized it was the hind portion of the colt. “Shit,” she muttered.

  But she heard Herman’s voice at her ear. “Oh, Lena, it ain’t no big thang, baby. You know what t’ do. We talked ’bout the time I delivered that colt. ’Member?”

  “Uh-huh …” Lena said uncertainly.

  “Well, what ya think?” Herman prodded. “You know ya can do it, Lena.”

  Lena’s mother was as encouraging as Herman.

  “Look at my child,” Nellie said from way off in a comer of the stable. She was dressed to kill in an all-seasonal cream and caramel wool Chanel suit with ropes of gold chains and pearls around her neck and waist. Lena heard the click of her low-heel cream and white spectators on the stable’s brick floor as she stepped back farther into the corner.

  Nellie looked beautiful. In death, she had more than “kept her color.”

  Lena knew Nellie wouldn’t get much closer because her mother was delicate and had a weak stomach. And looking down at herself covered in the mare’s blood and mucus and such, Lena knew this was no place for weak stomachs.

  Jonah appeared and put his arm around his wife. He looked good, too.

  “Look at her, Nellie, delivering that colt. Shit, probably gon’ be a thoroughbred racehorse. Probably gon’ win the Triple Crown or something. Damn, my baby girl lucky!”

  Lena’s first-grade teacher, Mrs. Hartwick, was there, too, her face and body unravished by the cancer that had taken her away from this world in her sixties.

  Lena smiled when she saw Nurse Bloom, dressed in her spotless white St. Luke’s Hospital uniform and cap, cheering Lena, the pretty little special baby girl, on.

  “I was there when you were born, Lena, and I’m right here now in case you need me. Kinda feels the same way in here it felt in your delivery room. Things are alive out here at your place.”

  Dr. Williams was standing next to Nurse Bloom, just as he had at Lena’s birth. And it made her feel better knowing a physician was around.

  The next time Lena looked up, she saw a small light-skinned woman with fluffy white hair
and a bright red scarf tied around her head standing over in a corner trying to look around somebody’s shoulder. She was such a nice, gentle-looking older lady that Lena couldn’t believe her first thought was, I bet that’s Anna Belle.

  Lena took a deep breath, lay her head against Keba’s extended belly and reached her right hand up into the mare’s birth canal. She almost fainted when she felt the live colt inside its mother’s womb.

  “Jesus, keep me near the cross,” she prayed.

  She panted a few times as if she were the one having the baby, grabbed the colt above the tail, and tried to give it a little turn.

  It was not easy to do. The colt, eager to enter this world, squirmed and thrashed about in its mother’s belly, making Keba snort and cry with each kick. She was ready for this baby to be born, too.

  As Lena got her hand inside Keba up to her armpit, the baby started and kicked back, grazing Lena’s forearm.

  “Oww!” Lena yelled, but she didn’t withdraw her arm. She could feel the open gash on her arm bleeding inside Keba’s womb. And at the wounding, Keba started to kick back, too, right toward Lena’s pretty face. But something stilled her hind legs. Lena felt it. Probably Herman, she thought automatically.

  “Shoot, we up there now, Keba,” Lena said, resolutely praying to the Mother Spirit. “Let’s do it!”

  She placed her slimy palm firmly on the colt’s hind portions and gave a push, a hard push from her shoulders, and spun the baby around. That’s all it took. She barely had time to pull her hand out and sit back.

  With a rush of birth fluids and mucus, the colt came out front legs first, first one then the other, then the head. The rest of the body, covered with slick, wet chestnut-brown hair, and part of the birth sac followed quickly. The white membrane made the newborn horse look like a ghost emerging. It was all over in less than ten minutes.

  Lena sat back on her heels and went, “Whew!”

  The sound of her relief in the stables seemed to break a spell of some kind, and Baby and Goldie, who had been quiet as nurses during the whole delivery, began kicking in their stalls. They lifted their huge heads in the air, whinnying their welcome to the newborn male colt.

  Lena stood for the first time in over an hour and stretched her weak-feeling legs. She realized she was bone-weary from the events of the last twenty-four hours. Holding onto the stall, she walked over to the wide closed barn doors and swung them open.

  Outside, the furious storm had passed so suddenly, leaving the air wet and warm and still. Crickets were singing a cappella, and from the stable doorway, Lena saw early fireflies on the other side of the river.

  Over her shoulder, the colt—Lena thought his name should be Emmanuel—lay next to his mother on the straw in the corner of the brick stable floor. Lena thought it was a lovely sight, mother and son together. But the restful scene didn’t last long. Within just a few minutes of his birth, Keba’s baby began struggling to his feet. Herman had told her that was normal, but seeing new life stand and walk so soon after birth right before her own eyes stunned her.

  He was wobbly on his thin, new slender legs, legs almost as long as his mother’s and as wobbly as Lena felt. Right away, he had found his mother’s milk and stood nursing while Lena was still trying to catch her breath. And she wasn’t even the birth mother. Just the midwife.

  Lena remembered Herman saying, “Life follow life, Lena,” as he had brushed and babied a pregnant Keba. It made even more sense to Lena now.

  As she marveled at the birth of Keba’s foal, she marveled at the wonder of her own transformation and the gift of her family of ghosts.

  It surprised her just how comfortable she was with all these ghosts appearing and disappearing around her. Some were family. Many were friends. A couple she did not recognize right off, but she was not a bit afraid of or confused by any of them. They all seemed to have a place. And she did, too.

  The specters she now saw all around the stables did not seem to upset the horses, even the newborn, one bit. And she couldn’t remember just when she had become so comfortable with the spirit world.

  “Well, lovin’ me fo’ bre’fast, dinner and supper might have had som’um to do wid it,” Herman’s voice said at her ear. Lena raised her hand and touched the ear where his words still echoed.

  Feeling the love and strength and warmth she received from this community of ghosts, she felt she would never again want to keep these gentle spirits at bay.

  When Lena went outside and stood under the night sky, the wind, just brisk now, was pushing the clouds away in a rush, exposing a golden moon. She saw the Virgin in the sky and thought of Herman. Automatically, she reached for a fence post, feeling she was about to break down again, but she found she did not need the support.

  Softly, sweetly, she felt Herman right there next to her, gazing up at the stars along with her. Not in the same way he had for the last year, real and solid, ready to slip his hand inside her panties first chance he got, but next to her all the same.

  “How I do, Herman?” she asked.

  “You done fine, Lena, baby,” he replied, his spirit leaning against the wooden fence post, sinking into it, becoming a part of it. “But then, I’m always proud a’ you.”

  They stood there in the cool, wet night air together, and it felt good. Not the way it had felt when Herman was real, but good.

  “Herman,” Lena said finally. “It’s not ever gonna be the way it was before, is it? You’re not ever gonna be here like all this past year, are you?”

  Herman spoke, but it was as if the fence post were speaking. “Naw, baby. Not like it was.”

  What he said broke her heart anew, but he spoke so plainly, so like her Herman, that she had to take the news in the same honest way.

  “I didn’t think so, but I had to ask,” she said. “I know ya did, baby.”

  “You know what, Herman?” she asked, stroking the rough fence post with the tips of her fingers. “What, Lena, baby?”

  “I am much in love with you, Herman.” She didn’t want to start crying again. But she couldn’t stop the tears or the weeping in her soul. Lena reached for Herman and the fence pole for strength and support and held on.

  She heard Herman take a deep breath, then reply:

  “Lena, baby, I am much in love wid you.”

  “I’m still your woman,” she told him.

  She could feel Herman smile.

  “I’m still yo’ man,” he replied.

  They both sighed. Then, Herman moved out of the fence post and into the stables.

  When he had vanished, other spirits came out of the stables.

  The spirit of Mamie, the beautiful amazon of a woman who did Lena’s hair when she was small and taught her how to be nosy, wafted out first.

  “Are you okay, Lena?” the healthy-looking ghost asked. “You know Herman’s being here this past year was a gift. Have you been paying attention to what’s been going on this last year? Then, he still here!!” Mamie smiled and wandered off in the direction of the river.

  Rachel came out of the stables next and walked right on past Lena with a smile and a wave. Lena could smell the deep, salty ocean scent on Rachel’s skin from yards away. Rachel didn’t stop. She went right on down toward the waters, catching up with Mamie.

  Nellie followed. She seemed eager to speak.

  “I told you wrong, Lena, when you were young. About how you could get away with a lot in this life, but you couldn’t get away with acting crazy. And you been trying so hard not to be crazy. I know I told you that folks won’t allow you to be crazy in this world. But life ain’t about what folks won’t let you do. It’s about what you choose to do. I wish I had told you that. If you don’t let yourself be crazy sometimes, baby,” Nellie said, “then you go mad.”

  “I shoulda’ told you that, too.”

  The ghost of her mother looked as if she felt better just having had the opportunity to say that to her baby girl.

  “And, baby, I didn’t know what I was doing when I poured
out your caul water and burned your caul. I just didn’t know. But Mama always loved you.”

  Then, picking her way through the muddy trail in her great-looking spectator pumps, Nellie headed for the deck on the west side of the house.

  Frank Petersen came out of the stables just ahead of Grandmama, who had paused at the barn door looking out on the night. Frank Petersen was walking and looking back over his shoulder like something was after him. His beat-up old felt hat pulled down over his brow made him look like an elegant fugitive ghost.

  “Hey, Lena-Wena, you done good in there. But then, you been doing good for a while.”

  He touched his hand to the brim of his hat and disappeared off into the woods.

  Lena felt as if she were having her own private family reunion, without the fights and petty squabbles and struggles.

  Grandmama sailed over and began speaking as if they had talked that morning.

  “Hey, baby, you look good under all that crying and blood and misery,” the old woman said. She looked good, too. She wore a lovely long lavender gauzy gown like the ones she wore in Lena’s dream.

  “Okay, Lena, I know you been having the time of your life. But that part of it is come to an end. But just that part. It’s got to be, baby. Lena, you can’t say you didn’t get any warning. You just weren’t paying attention.

  “But it’s going to be okay. It’s going to feel okay, too. It just doesn’t seem that way now. But how things seem don’t mean nothing.

  “We think we know so much while we alive, Lena. Deciding stuff, fixing stuff, saving people, settling turbulence. Especially us black women. We think we can fix it all. And we don’t know shit, baby. We think we know this one and don’t give ’em nothing. And we think we know that one, and we give ’em everything.”

  Grandmama’s ghost leaned forward and chuckled a little as if the joke were on her.

  “Lena, baby,” she said finally, “I didn’t have a clue.”

  “What do you mean, Grandma?” Lena asked.

  “When I was ’live, I thought I knew a thing or two. Knew how things oughta be. Thought I knew ’bout life and death, too. But, Lena, I didn’t have a clue.”