He’d go with me to visit Daddy in the nursing home. Be there to put his hand on my back. Daddy is sick with a disease I don’t wanna mention because I don’t want you to try to relate to me or say your grandma had it. I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. And because of this disease Daddy is still dying of, Daddy never knew My Man’s name. But before Daddy forgot how to talk, he said he liked My Man. I sat next to Daddy and he said, “He’d do anything for you, if you asked him.”
And then My Man wakes up in the morning with that Asheboro girl’s head on his chest. And I get so sick thinking about it. And then they go to the zoo and look at the seals swimming in the water. They stop and ask an elderly but energetic couple to take their picture. One of those nice couple pictures you see all the time, where they stand together smiling, his hand on her waist and her hand placed on his stomach, as if she’s holding him back. My Man is so handsome. They tell the nice old lady to take a couple of pictures because they want a seal behind them in it. My Man makes a joke. He’s good with all sorts of people. I hope they don’t get the seal in the picture.
Next thing I know I am half way under my sister’s bed, just laying here with my eyes closed. Maybe I am meditating. It’s nice down here, like being in a coffin.
I heard a story once about getting buried alive. They accidentally buried the man face down and he woke up and clawed and clawed at the coffin. Clawing to hell in a way. And his ghost came to his best friend’s bedside for three nights in a row telling him to come and dig him up. When they finally did and they dug him up and saw how afraid his dead face looked in the eyes, they buried him right side up. And from then on caskets was made with a rounded top to them.
I thought about that story when we were at Aunt Ginny’s wake the other day. And I thought, I’m glad they are burying her right side up so she’ll be looking towards heaven. Or at the Second Coming when she sits up, she’ll just be able to step right on out. She looked so pretty in the casket and I felt bad I never went to visit her more than I did when she got real bad down in the bed. Her hip bone had pushed through her skin. Her legs were stuck in fetal position. But she fit in the casket so I guess they broke them to get her in there right. I didn’t ask.
My sister has all of Daddy’s little model airplanes he built. She’s got them in special shelves in her living room. The old fucker says we could sell them for good money and Sister went behind my back and gave him some to sell. That burned me up so bad. That fucker kept the damn money and bought a new gun for the first day of dove season.
That couple on Chestnut Street got Daddy’s chopping block he was so proud of. That he got when the butcher uptown closed. He loved that damn thing. Mama hated it ’cause it took up so much room in the kitchen. Right there in the middle of the kitchen. That’s where they pinned me down to make me swallow medicine. And that’s where we ate watermelon. Daddy would take our hands and show us, make us feel where the wood had worn down and got deep, where the meat had been cut up the most. We don’t really know the folks who have it. I mean like who all they came from. They got it when the bank took the house after Daddy got sick and we went bankrupt. Don’t know how much Mama sold it for. I bet for not enough.
I smell that Sister’s started frying the pork chops. I push myself out from under the bed and look at myself in the mirror again before I head down the hall. My sister is making what I liked to eat when I was little. Mashed potatoes and then you put some peas in the middle and call it “eggs in a basket.”
I’m opening a can of Le Sueur peas when she says to me, “You know I thought you and that nice looking guy you were always so close to in high school would make a good couple. You and him.”
She flips a pork chop. “He always played that guitar so good. What did he play, that “Hotel California” song at all the home games?”
“Exactly.” I pour the peas in the pot. “That’s basic. The Eagles.”
“He’s moving back soon, you know? From grad school to work on his daddy’s tree farm,” she says. “As pretty as you are. I know he’d love to go out with you. Slim pickings round here.”
This is the first time my Sister has ever talked to me like this, pushing some man on me.
I finally tell her I’m writing a letter to My Man. I haven’t told no one. I’ve taken all summer to do it. I’m afraid to send it. I don’t want it to be the last time I talk to him.
“What all does it say?” She reaches in the cabinet for plates.
“What’s in my heart,” I tell her. “How every time I dream about him I wake up crying.” I can feel myself starting to fall to pieces.
“Maybe it’s better if you let it ride, let it play itself out.” Sister puts the plates on the table and puts her hand on my arm. “He’s already seeing someone else, Sister. I mean it’s been what, like, almost a year?”
And I fall to pieces right there in the kitchen floor. And my sister’s there, picking me up, telling me it’s time for me to be taking care of myself. “We don’t need no man,” she says. She’s wiping my face with a warm dishrag. “We’re strong, Sister,” she says.
And that’s when the old fucker walks in and asks me if I ran off my meds again and if I need money for the damn refill. If I was that tight for money he’d fucking throw me some dollars since I can’t seem to get myself together to get them myself.
So I end up sitting at the table because, like Sister said, we are strong and I do need to eat the favorite meal from my childhood she’s made for me. I need to be healthy so I can carry a child someday, to be a mama someday.
Sister asks the blessing. She thanks God for earlier today when she went to see Daddy and he saw her and was able to say “Baby girl.” She asks God to protect Mama when she’s closing at the liquor store in Rich Square. Mama works three part-time jobs to keep Daddy in that nice home. I’m trying to find a job, you know, but it’s hard ’round here. And Sister asks God to be with me too. That’s it. Just for God to be with me.
And the old fucker says “Amen” real loud like he’d been waiting for it to be over.
Jeopardy comes on and there’s a whole column on the Black Plague. I am good at history.
And when My Man found out the old fucker liked history too, he said, “Look honey, here’s something you can talk to him about. Here’s a way to get to know him a little better. Do it for your sister.”
I thought how wonderful and sweet and caring My Man was to say that and I say to the old fucker, “You wouldn’t think it but I know a lot about the Black Plague.”
The old fucker swallows the damn mouthful he has in and says, “Oh yeah, let’s see who gets the most answers right.”
And I don’t want it to be a competition. I don’t want it to go like that. So I say all I remember from the Black Plague was from where I was in the hospital and as high as I was on straight morphine injections in that port they ran through my arm straight to my heart, that documentary was the only thing I could understand. That when women found out they were sick, they would sew themselves up in their own death sacks made of cloth or burlap or whatever medieval thing was around so they wouldn’t spread the disease to their loved ones. They’d tell their family, “As much as I fight to get out, don’t let me.”
And then I get up and say, “There is a charge for the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge for the beating of my heart, see it still goes and there is a charge.” I’m pointing at my scars on my arms, standing at my sister’s dinner table.
Sister just looks at her plate with big eyes.
The old fucker gets up from the table and says, “Some people just need to get their ass whooped.”
I help my sister clean up. If that old fucker really loved my sister, he’d help her clean up. He’d help her get some tires riding to the next county, raining like it is. If he loved her, he’d give her that ring she wants. But he thinks our family is white trash and I think this because when our daddy was first in the nursing home and Mama didn’t know how to deal and Sister came home and found her so drunk she
was throwing up on herself in the bathtub, knowing that everyone around here knows our family needs prayers, that old fucker took advantage of my sister and put her reputation on the line and asked her to move in with him and his fourteen-year-old daughter when my Sister’s twenty-four years younger than him and had never lived on her own. Also I had a nightmare one time that he made her pregnant and then he had to marry her.
I dry and put up the last plate and go and grab my wallet off the damn end table and sling the dollar bills I have at the old fucker on the recliner and say, “Here’s some money for condoms.”
“Some people just need a real good ass whoopin,” he says to my sister in the kitchen. He’s looking at the dollars on his gut.
The night me and My Man had sex on a Civil War battlefield we decided we’d name our daughter after it. It was a battlefield we’d never heard of, with the most pretty name. But I won’t say that name. I don’t want to jinx it. It’s something only me and My Man know.
I’ve been writing about the future daughter we’d have. We always said she’d have my hair and his eyes. I’ve been writing about me and him raising her. Me sitting on the toilet watching him bathe her. Him telling her to hold her head back so the soap doesn’t get in her eyes.
The first time I met My Man in real life, I had to find him in an antique store walking behind armoires and gun cabinets. He was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Next time I saw him, I read him a poem I wrote for him. We were sitting in his truck, on top of a bridge, and I told him, “Let me be your shaman.”
A few weeks after we broke up, I won’t sad yet because I have been told that I compartmentalize things and he texted me referring to the shaman line. I texted back what? I didn’t remember what I had told him. And I’m ashamed of that.
I am standing in my sister’s living room and American Ninja Warrior is on. No one can make it past the spider crawl. The old fucker has not picked the dollars off his gut.
I know it makes my sister upset that me and the man she loves don’t get along. I told her at Sunday lunch I am trying to make peace with them being together but it’s very uncomfortable for me. My mama was there and she overheard me and she said her and my sister could have been really rude to My Man after he gave me herpes but they didn’t. “Something you’ll have to live with for the rest of your life and might have effects on your children.”
My sister is saying something to me from the kitchen. I think she’s telling me to stay in. I’m not really paying attention to her because that hole in my mouth is hurting me. It almost always hurts after I eat. Food gets caught in it and I got to dig it out with my tongue or it’ll get to tasting funny in my mouth. I haven’t told Sister about that because that would be another thing she could hold against me. Another reason how I don’t take care of myself. And if I can’t take care of myself, I’ll never be able to raise a family.
My keys are in my hand and I just run out the house. I drive to where all my family is buried. I ain’t been out there in months.
It’s still light out enough for me to see all the corn fields around the cemetery. I think more than any other crop, corn can really change a landscape ’cause it grows so tall. Look over it one day and you can see a house at the edge of the field, look another day and the house is gone. But this corn here looks strange. Just like tall stalks that ain’t been cut down yet. They don’t even have any ears on them. It’s like they never growed. They never got enough rain during the summer. And I feel bad for that farmer.
I pull the weed and my piece out my glovebox. I got the piece because the color green reminded me of all those green glass vases Aunt Ginny had in her sunroom.
I get out the car and go see where Aunt Ginny is buried. The grass on top of her looks like golden brillo pad from where it ain’t growed in with the other grass. But I know it will someday and she won’t always be covered with a brillo pad carpet. And I ain’t even high again yet.
I go sit where Grandaddy is buried. He’s been dead five years now and don’t have a headstone ’cause we can’t afford it. That’s also a bad feeling.
I take a hit and I feel it burn in my throat and when I exhale I feel like ghosts are coming out of me and I know that’s lame and cliché right here at what might be called the emotional initial wound of the story. But almost everyone I know is already dead. Count them with me right here. There’s Granddaddy and Grandma. There’s Uncle Peachy and there’s Aunt Ginny. There’s Great Grandmama. And there’s Mema. And then there’s the ones I never knew in real life but they’re walking in my head. There’s Big Mama and Uncle Perry next to her. There’s baby Stephen who died when he was three months old. There’s Aunt Essie and her brother, my Great Grandaddy who was bow-legged.
At the old home place, I can look at pictures of them when they were young, and look out in the side yard and tell where they were standing. Long before they knew I’d ever be born. And I get Sister’s fancy iPhone and take pictures of them and send them to my phone and I post them to Facebook. But no one knows them like me. They just look at my profile and think, “Oh there she is posting old black and white pics of her family again. I don’t know them but I am going to like the pic anyway because maybe she knew them and maybe she misses them.” And I am sad because no one is gonna know my family’s stories because they were unimportant in the grand scheme of things. They made it through life without killing themselves and that is extraordinary enough for me.
Just like I don’t know how Daddy didn’t kill himself when he knew he was going to lose his mind and end up starving to death because he would forget how to swallow. Mama had to hide the guns in the house. And Daddy somehow was able to go to sleep at night.
Last time I saw him, his feet was swole with fluid from a urinary tract infection and he was barefoot ’cause he’d hid his shoes in another patient’s room. His toenails were longer than I’d ever seen them in my life. His pants were falling off of him and he kept trying to take them off. The calendar in his room had not been turned over to the new month. He’d peed on the blanket on his bed. It smelled in the corner on the floor. The nurse came in and told me and Sister he’d taken a shit right in the middle of the dining room floor earlier in the week. And that he walked the halls at all hours of the night. He wouldn’t lay down to sleep. We brought him candy. We had to show him how to eat it. He said three words. We couldn’t make any of them out. I sat on his bed and looked out the window. I wanted to throw everything I could out of it. Including my body.
I look at pictures of Daddy when he was little on my phone before I go to sleep.
And in my dream world, I’d be leaning against his tombstone right now in this cemetery. I’d feel my backbone ridge into the letters that make up our last name. Then I’d push my shoulder blades out and push them into the stone as hard as I could.
I don’t even know who is gonna pay for his tombstone when he dies either.
I hear some gunshots out back towards town. Folks stole the refrigerator out of the parsonage last week, when the Preacher was visiting the homebound. A girl from Ahoskie shot a man and his son over the weekend. Papers ain’t said why yet. Mama says, “You’ve really got to love this place to stay.”
And I take another hit, pull in deeper now. And I feel all my family out here under me and remember it ain’t my life I’m living, it’s theirs.
There was a time when I couldn’t even get out of bed. I couldn’t even eat or stand up straight. Mama put makeup on my face and when I opened my eyes those people at the end of my bed told me I was a miracle. I could smell all the flowers they brought me, rotting all around me in that tiny little room.
“There is a charge,” the hole in my mouth says. That hit I just took then was real deeper. It’s dark now and the smoke rises up to the moon. This is a good place now. My head doesn’t feel like it’s about to knock against the sky. That’s a reference to a William Carlos Williams poem, about being so filled up with love you don’t know what to do. I could recite it right now, What have I to say to yo
u when we shall meet? Yet—I lie here thinking of you.
If I dug all the way down to Aunt Ginny right now, I could not make myself a baby again in her arms under the earth. I dream of myself as a baby in her coffin arms, in the nook between her ribs and little arm. The baby me in her dead arms. Curls in both our hair.
And Daddy won’t be there to pick me up. If I get back home tonight, he won’t be there reading an auto trader in the living room. And he won’t be there in the morning to give me and Sister bowls of grits, to ask us if the little rats had a dance in our hair last night. To brush the tangles out.
And when we lost the house, me and Sister were cleaning out our bedrooms upstairs and there were so many doll babies we didn’t want to save. “Don’t you want to keep these for your little girls,” Mama said. They told us if we left a mess in the house it didn’t matter. The bank didn’t care. Me and Sister threw our doll babies into the wall. Their heads busted open and we left them like that in the floor.
The last text I sent My Man was thirteen days ago, asking him if he still listened to that Roy Orbison tape I gave him. And how I listen to “In Dreams” now every night over and over because “In dreams I walk with you, in dreams I talk with you.”
But in my dreams My Man looks at me like I’m a stranger. And like I said, I wake up crying.
Because even though when I asked My Man if he wanted me to disappear, he said no. He told me to do what I needed to do. Which was asking about that Roy Orbison tape. And I haven’t heard from him and I know I may never hear from him again.
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