My Drowning (15 page)

I visited Aunt Addis because she was taking care of Daddy's mother, Nana Rose. Nana Rose had shriveled to the size of a big spider and sat in Aunt Addis's dark front bedroom, propped on pillows nearly bolt upright in the bed, wearing a checked bonnet, as if the sun were very bright. She chewed the inside of her lip and glared out the window, the curtains of which were kept open so she could watch the path at the side of the house. I helped Aunt Addis with Nana Rose's bedpan, helped with the wash, changed the linen, helped Nana Rose in and out of bed. Now and then Nana Rose fixed on me with her eyes and knew me. Aunt Addis told her my name many times.

“Your daddy is a sorry son of a bitch.” Her thin, long hand with the sharp fingertips dug into my shoulder. She had slid out of bed and decided to speak according to whatever laws
were at work inside her head. “I know. He's my son. And he's as sorry as that goddamn daddy of his.”

“Hush, Mama,” said Aunt Addis.

“Don't tell me what to do.” Nana Rose arced a hand weakly toward Aunt Addis and caught her across the cheek with the softest of slaps. Nana Rose often slapped Aunt Addis like this, and sometimes she could manage a pretty good lick; Aunt Addis blinked, her jaw working. One day she would slap Nana Rose back, I thought.

When you have a bad dream, make sure you eat something before you tell the dream to anybody, or else it will come true; Mama said this too. Like the bad dream where Alma Laura was drowning and could not reach the top of the water. Or the dream I had so often, where Mama stepped down into the river, the skirt of her slip floating up around her legs, and the cold like a sharpness in the air. When you had a bad dream, you were supposed to eat something before you told the dream. But when you have a good dream, you should tell it before you eat anything. Then it will come true. Mama took me to the porch, early in the morning. The sun had begun to color the edge of the horizon; we stepped onto the porch that faced the chicken yard. This was years later, after Nora married and left the house. I was the oldest daughter now. Mama whispered, “I dreamed Carl Jr. was alive.”

Or the dream I had, later, that I was Frog Taylor's daughter and June Frances's sister; or the dream that Bobjay drowned in a flood; or the dream I still have sometimes, that I hear a knock on the door and open it and there is Alma Laura, prim and neat in a sweet conservative dress, almost as
old and stooped as I am. She holds the end of her string of pearls the way I do my diamond brooch. She grins as big as the full moon, and I invite her into the house. We have fresh sweet tea with lemon and I show her my garden. As usual, Alma Laura never speaks. She has grown to a handsome old age, her skin still strong and clear, her lids not quite as drooped as mine. But my hair is darker, she has more gray. We tour the garden and return to the kitchen. There, we step back and study each other. We are prosperous. We have lived to be old and comfortable. Alma Laura smiles with serene satisfaction. Vanishing then, always, after that moment of perfect contentment. Sometimes the dream continues past that point, and I am looking everywhere to see where Alma Laura has gone.

Or a hundred other dreams I could think of, that I would have wanted to come true, at least in bits and pieces, if I could have found someone to listen before I ate.

Mama said, when you see a blue bird make a wish, and if you see a red bird next, your wish will come true.

We were walking in the woods along the shore of the pond or the bank of the river. I heard the hollow echo of birdcalls over water. We were following Mama, and she walked faster than we. She carried a bamboo fishing pole over one shoulder. We were small, Nora and Carl Jr. and Otis and me. Carl Jr. carried me part of the way. We were headed to go fishing with Mama, who was hungry for fried perch. We walked so fast the branches whipped back at our faces.

Mama came to the riverbank and stripped her cotton dress over her head. When I remember this, it is suddenly
too much like my dream. She wore the white cotton slip and in the heat the sides of the slip clung to her damp thighs.

She laid down the bamboo pole and reached into the can of worms she carried, that Nora and Carl Jr. had picked out of earth they had spaded in the backyard. Mama pulled out a fishing worm that stretched and popped in half. Over her head, a whir of wings, flew a blue bird that flashed through the clearing. See a blue bird, make a wish, Mama said, and closed her eyes.

When she opened her eyes, she glanced hopefully around, not at the river where the fish swam but at the branches of the trees. She jammed the steel fishhook through the fleshy part of the worm, and the worm curled and writhed along its free end. See a blue bird, she said, and kept glancing at the trees, and then glided toward the edge of the river in her battered, black shoes. She arced the bamboo pole and the worm in its agony soared through the air with a plop into the dark river. See a blue bird, Mama said, but I don't remember whether she did. She stood shadow-dappled in her soft slip, cool in the summer afternoon, fishing in what must have been the river and not the pond. Somewhere, I think, she is still there.

Years later my daughter dropped a comb and reached for it, and I said, without even stopping to think, “Step on it.” My daughter looked up at me but her hand had not yet touched the comb, so I said, quickly, nudging her foot with mine, “If you drop a comb you have to step on it before you pick it up, or else somebody will lie about you before the day is done.”

She smiled at me as if this pleased her somehow, and
stepped on the comb. An image of my mother flashed across her face, as if all the similarities of their facial bones were suddenly lighted. She faced the mirror and combed her carefully tended bangs.

Never hang a calendar before the new year begins, or else the family will have a bad year. I never remember a calendar in our house, though Mama repeated the saying to anyone who would listen in the days before a new year dawned.

When you rode in a car and you saw a black cat run across the road, you drew a cross on the window to send away the bad luck. Mama applied the rule to every cat, not only to black ones. She licked the tip of her finger and drew on the window, leaving a smear that she could see.

If you dreamed someone died, then pretty soon there was bound to be a wedding close by, but if you dreamed about somebody who was already dead, it was sure to rain.

We were visiting Uncle Bray and Aunt Tula; they had come to fetch us in Uncle Bray's truck. We would sleep at their house tonight, and tomorrow we would take Grandaddy Tote to his brother's funeral. We had eaten chocolate cake, fresh tomatoes, butterbeans that I helped to shell, potatoes mashed smooth with a fork. Uncle Bray had a son named Reno but he was not Aunt Tula's boy, and when they were all in the room, they hardly looked at one another. Reno slept in a room in the barn, and that night he took Carl Jr. with him to sit up drinking. The rest of us were sleeping all over the house, some in the living room on the rug, and extra bodies in all the bedrooms. Nora, Corrine, and I had a pallet of our very own, at the foot of Aunt Tula's bed, where Aunt Tula, Mama, and Madson also slept. We were excited
that we could sleep in our clothes and that we could see right under Aunt Tula's bed to the enamel slop pot she stored there, for when she had to pee in the middle of the night. When I took off my shoes I set them on the pedal of the sewing machine and Aunt Tula saw me and frowned and moved them, and I thought she was angry because I was not supposed to touch the sewing machine, but she only said, “You shouldn't lay your shoes where they're higher than your head, or else you won't be able to sleep.”

If you stepped over somebody, you had to step back over them right away, or else they'd die soon. I stepped over Otis, and Mama made me step back. Nora stepped over Carl Jr., and Mama smacked her across the legs with the fly swat and pushed her over Carl Jr. from the other side. Corrine stepped over Delia, and Mama led her across the baby again, holding her chubby hand.

Once one of my sons stepped over another, and the saying ran through my head, a crazy sound, if you step over somebody they'll die soon, but I said nothing to my son.

But with my daughter I would have spoken the words, I thought. I would say the words my mama said to me, no matter how stupid they sounded. It would not have been that I meant to say anything, the words would have flown out of my mouth. Like the thought of my drunken husband when I am standing at the kitchen sink now, damp on the front of my blouse.

I loved my mother with all my heart and soul. In the years that followed the winter in Holberta, I loved her with an intensity like nothing else I had ever known.

By the time we moved to the house in Piney Grove, where we would live until the war ended and Nora eloped, Mama
had borne eleven children, nine alive and two either stillborn or dead soon after birth; and Joe Robbie died before his eighth year. Mama had worked in the fields every spring, summer, and autumn I could remember, and the labor and the birthing of children stooped her, drew deep lines in her face, caused her eyelids to droop. She had grown larger with the years, and now the fat of her calves hung down over her ankles. Weathered skin swelled over her cheeks.

Alma Laura and I watched her. It was Alma Laura who told me when Mama was pregnant again.

Once I had walked past Mama and Daddy's room on a Sunday afternoon, and as I stepped on the creaking floorboard at their door the jarring sent the door open a crack. I could see Daddy's pale hairy butt flailing up and down and round and round, and Mama laying there with her nightgown pulled up, lolling in the bed like a lake of herself, tongue flickering against her lower lip. I heard a step behind me and ran out the front door quickly. But the image of Daddy somewhere inside Mama stayed with me.

I knew from the pig harvest and the seasons of pigs' lives that if a pig mounts a sow you get baby pigs. It was easy to learn the rest from Daddy's talk. Now I had seen them through a crack in the door.

Daddy talked about Mama sometimes, him and Uncle Cope or Carl Jr., or sometimes even Otis. “I like it with some rhythm to it, and Louise rolls like a pond, she does,” Daddy told Uncle Cope.

“You shouldn't talk to your brother about me.”

“You don't worry about how I talk, you take care of frying that fatback.”

“It's some cold biscuit, Daddy,” Nora said.

“But it ain't no fatback till your fat-ass Mama fries it.”

“You just got finished telling me how much you like that big ass of hers,” Uncle Cope grinned.

“I don't like to look at it. I just like to lay all over it.”

“Mama's crying,” Nora said, and that only made Daddy and Uncle Cope laugh the harder.

“Your mama is as weak as water,” said Aunt Addis, when we were sitting beside the bed where Nana Rose slept. “Your daddy is common even if he is my brother, and your mama is sorry and don't lift a finger to goad him. You don't want to be poor and sorry and common like the rest.” Then she sent me to the kitchen to mix up a pan of biscuit.

“Too much water,” she said, looking down into the biscuit pan, “that's your mama's biscuits you're making, not mine. I want mine,” and snatched the flour sifter out of my hand, tugging my hair in the back so I would remember.

“Mama's going to have a baby again,” I said; but these days I would have to think about it to remember which baby it was. Aunt Addis looked at me, scowling. “Again?”

“Yes ma'am.”

“Lord God. That man is going to kill her. And her sorry enough to lay right down flat of her back and let him do it.”

DURING THE SUMMER
when Mama had sent me to stay with Aunt Addis to help with Nana Rose, I turned nine. At the news that Aunt Addis had asked for me, Nora puffed up jealous like a mad animal. She banged the water dipper on the side of the bucket and flung a handful of biscuit dough onto the pan, raising a cloud of white flour.

“I need you to stay here with me,” Mama told Nora, and what she meant was, Daddy liked Nora's biscuits better than Mama's, and Mama wanted Nora there to cook.

Nora shot me a look of pure hate, and later she threw the cat on me again.

I had grown to have a terror of the cats that lived in the woods, under the house, or in the neighbors' yards. Whenever one of the mother cats had kittens, Nora would find the kittens and throw them on me, on my legs at first, then aiming at my face. I had scratches on my calves and forearms and, once, on the bridge of my nose.

“You go ahead, drag your skinny self to wipe Nana Rose's
ass, see who cares,” she said. “Here, say good-bye to this little kitten before you go.”

The screeching thing flew toward me through the air, calico, red, tabby, spotted, black, yellow eyes with slit pupils that terrified me, and with a yowl it smacked into my tender forearms where I had thrown them up over my face, and the claws like needles raked my skin, and Nora laughed. The kitten landed with its four legs splayed out reaching for anything solid. I screamed and knocked it away from me and felt my new scratches and looked at Nora.

We hated each other keenly and simply for a moment. Then I turned and ran.

Once she had tried to throw the mother cat, but it twisted in her hands and gave her a gash of her own, wicked and bloody, along the cheekbone.

I put my clothes in a bag, including my only shoes that I was saving for school and my blue skirt that I liked, and I sat on the edge of the front porch till Uncle Bray came to pick me up in his truck. Behind me I could hear Nora crying and Mama cursing and Corrine screaming about something I couldn't understand. I was going to stay with Aunt Addis. The thought made me breathless.

When Uncle Bray pulled into the yard, I ran to get in the truck with my bag in hand, and I sat there while he visited with Mama a minute before driving me away.

Aunt Addis and Aunt Tula lived close enough to each other that it was easy to walk from one house to the other, at least in daylight, but also far enough to keep them separated. The path from Aunt Tula's ran along the north end of Moss Pond for a little while, then meandered toward Spike's Creek
Road where Aunt Tula lived. You could walk the distance from one house to the other in half an hour. Whenever I went there, Uncle Bray would take me home to his house, and Aunt Tula would fill me up with bacon biscuits and homemade cornbread and then set me walking on the path. Watching me eat, Aunt Tula would shake her head and say, “Look at this poor youngun eat. You know she doesn't get nothing to eat at her house.”