My Drowning (2 page)

Daddy did no work on the farm. Daddy refused to go with the loggers and earn more money. We ate biscuit and meat grease half the week, till Friday when there was sometimes money. Then we had meat in beans, and maybe rice. Daddy had quarreled with the man who owned the land, about money. I knew about the fight. But it was less important to me than Mama's dreams about the dead baby boy.

We awoke the night before with Mama moaning. Maybe this is the reason for memory. She was shuffling in the hall, screaming, and Daddy ran behind her yelling at her. I had never before heard fear in my Daddy's voice. Mama called out that she saw the dead baby's ghost again, that it wouldn't leave her alone. And she kept crying and screaming till Daddy beat her to shut her up, and then led her, exhausted, back to bed.

Mama told me the dreams that day, when Nora and Otis were in school. The baby boy lay under the house, crying. At first he sounded like a cat, but then she could hear him scratching at the floorboards, and she knew he was trying to get into the house, wanting to get warm again. She told me this and stood at the window watching the shed, wanting to see through the walls.

She told me she had seen the baby's ghost before, floating
in the air above her bed. She described it as if some angel had wrapped it in swaddling clothes.

MOST DAYS WE
ate biscuit for the noon meal. In this we were luckier than the ones who went to school. They got nothing to take with them to eat and could expect nothing much when they returned home. In the afternoon Mama made beans, if we had beans. If we had an onion, she cut up an onion into the beans. If she had managed to save a dollop of bacon drippings from the weekend (if there was bacon), she spooned this into the pot. For meat we ate fatback, souse meat, pig's feet, when we could get it, from the Little Store or from an aunt or uncle. Mama ate lard in the biscuit sometimes, syrup others. She gathered wood for the fire when we ran out during the day. She made a slow job of it, and sometimes she required the better part of an afternoon to find enough. While I was too little to carry wood, it was my job to watch Joe Robbie and fetch what he needed. Even in my earliest memories I am tending him.

Daddy wandered in and out of the house. He played with the mule harness, pretending to repair it. He walked into the field with his straw hat in his hand.

We owed the landlord money. Mama loved to say so, to me and Joe Robbie. We owed so much money, she said, Mr. James would put us off the land. Daddy refused other work. She looked out the window at Daddy's spidery figure in the field. He won't go to work to save his neck nor mine, she said. His neck nor mine. She was prone to repeat words, as if she were her own echo. Her sentences trailed off, as if the words were thin and would soon die away.

DADDY STOOD IN
front of the Christmas tree and blinked, as if he did not know what it was. The fire roared at his back. His shadow hugged the flames, his arms crossed behind him.

He carried a tobacco plug in his mouth. In a minute he would spit. But for the moment like a cow he chewed, a rolling motion of the jaw. Dreamy-eyed.

I was with Nora. Carl Jr. squatted by the fire between Daddy and us. Nora and I hovered at the edge of the heat.

Daddy spit into the fire, the embers hissing. “So your mama wanted a goddamn tree.”

Sitting on the floor, Carl Jr. rolled a cigarette on the floor. “It's nothing wrong with a tree, Daddy. The littlest ones never had a tree.”

“She's shaming me.”

“No Daddy, that ain't right.”

After long silence, in the face of Daddy's blank stare, Carl Jr. swore under his breath and walked out of the house. Chill swept from the back door. Nora took me into the kitchen, deep into the shadow.

“She's rubbing my nose in it. I know what she's doing.”

Has he killed the fox already? Or does this happen before? Does he go hunting after Carl Jr. cut the tree?

So many pieces to the memory. If I place them in no particular order, no one should wonder why.

I WAS SUPPOSED
to want a doll. Where this idea came from, I fail to recall. But the desire for a doll became, at some point, a condition of my being, discussed when we looked at the dog-eared copy of a two-year-old Christmas catalog someone gave us. Nora pointed to the pages of dolls. “See how Ellen is looking at these. You want you a doll like this, don't you, honey?” She pinched my elbow as if she were being very clever to guess this wish of mine.

Gaping at the page, I attempted to discern which were the dolls, and guessed, and pointed.

I wanted the catalog, the bright colorful pages. I wanted to have it in my lap and to turn the pages. I wanted to touch each of the pictures, like someone blind, learning each object by touch. The catalog was enough for me, I had never seen anything like it. But Nora talked about a doll, Nora pointed her finger at a picture of a doll, and soon even I was convinced I must want one.

Joe Robbie wanted a cowboy pistol. I wonder, now, if his desire were as fabricated as mine. Like me, I think it would have pleased him simply to have the catalog, to look at it. But Nora kept that for herself.

THE DEAD BABY
slept under the Christmas tree. His bed of swaddling clothes lay hidden behind the thick branches at the
back, but if you looked close you could see it. Through the shadowy cedar branches the pale baby hand sometimes appeared. He lived in this house now, he would never leave. Maybe Mama whispered this to me, or maybe I dreamed it. The baby boy had come to stay.

Mama still saw him, but after a while she stopped talking about it, except to Joe Robbie and me. She no longer woke in the night to see the baby floating above the bed. She no longer heard his crying in her dreams. Now she saw him in more ordinary ways. Sometimes he lay on the couch in a rectangle of sun, stretching like a cat. Sometimes he looked down at her from the high kitchen shelves where she hoarded Daddy's coffee and sugar. Sometimes he hid under the bed or in the back of the closet behind Daddy's boots. But over the days near Christmas, he made a bed of his burial clothing in back of the Christmas tree, and I was so convinced her story was true I could see him there myself.

What did the dead baby dream of? Did he get cold? At night, after we were asleep, did he warm himself by the shadow of the fire? Did he ever appear outside? Would he ever speak?

Was he my brother still? Was he here and under the ground at the same time?

If Daddy threw the tree in the yard, the dead baby would have to move again. I was afraid he would start sleeping in my room.

When school stopped for the holiday break, Nora and Otis stayed home all the time. During the cold days before Christmas we sat by the stove in the kitchen, all of us, hungry, while the wind rattled the windows.

Nora took me with her when she searched for wood. The memory of one such day returns in a vivid way. All the coats, even the hand-me-downs, hung on me like sacks, but I wore both my pairs of overalls and my dress, and two sweaters, one of them with the sleeves rolled up. Socks covered my hands. I had Otis's old hat on my head.

The wind struck like a knife across the yard, and I was afraid it would blow me off the porch. Nora gave me her hand. We kept our mouths closed. Her coat was too tight to button so she held it closed with her other arm. We walked close together in the wind. The steady thwack of Otis's ax resounded behind us as he, in another part of the yard, split more wood for the fireplace and the stove.

The world spread out flat and wide, colored ash and clay. The sky, a pale blue, almost no color at all, swelled endless and empty over us. Fields yielded to a bare rim of trees. Wind spoke with a voice, pressed like a hand. We offered no sound to compete with it.

In the yard Nora let go of my hand and adjusted the scarf against her ears. We searched methodically in the woods nearest the house, Nora avoiding the places she had already scoured. I held the smaller stuff. Some good branches had fallen in the wind; we needed to search only a little way into the woods. Nora dragged the biggest pieces she could. We delivered the wood to Otis under the woodshed and crossed the fields for another load.

By then we were nearly frozen ourselves, and we returned to the house.

Beans boiled in the pot on the stove. The smell made me
weak to eat. Nora tasted the beans for seasoning and threw in salt. We shivered in front of the stove.

Gathering wood kept us busy till dark. The weatherman on Carl Jr.'s battery radio predicted a cold, cold night; we needed enough wood to keep the fire roaring. The sky layered with clouds and then the bottom of the clouds flattened.

Carl Jr. came home with a bag of groceries.

I was standing with Nora in the yard when he headed toward us, near sunset. The grocery sack nested in the crook of his arm. Nora took the groceries inside, and Carl Jr. stayed to help Otis with the wood.

For supper, because of Carl Jr., we had hambone in the beans, and chunks of lean and fat to savor, and fried fatback. We crowded around the table. Nora made the biscuits, smooth and brown, fluffy inside.

That night we set the lanterns around the Christmas tree and sat in front of the fireplace. We had never done this before, and I expect, therefore, that this memory comes from Christmas Eve. We never burned so many lanterns. The tree cast eerie shadows in the dark.

I watched the corner for the baby boy to emerge. I dreaded that only Mama and I would be able to see him. Mama sat in her chair with Joe Robbie in her lap, his soft legs dangling. She smoothed his hair.

I am remembering, I am looking back. I am trying to see clearly, but I do not even know that what I am seeing is true. How can the memory of so small a gesture be genuine? The movement of my mother's thick, blunt hand through Joe
Robbie's hair repeats itself. Why have I remembered that?

Maybe because of jealousy, because I wanted to sit in her lap myself.

The radio played Christmas music, news from other places, a radio drama about Christmas. I remember nothing specific about these, except the fact of the radio in the dimlit room. Carl Jr. kept it by his knee, and adjusted the antenna when the station faded.

Daddy came in the back door and let in the cold and slung a dead fox across the kitchen table. Daddy's sharp eyes raked mine. For a moment I was very cold. I stood near the table at eye level with the dead fox. A pink tongue trailed out of its mouth. The gray-brown fur hung flat against narrow ribs. Through the hole in its skull, a dark jelly oozed.

“You can't leave it there,” Mama said.

“I'm going to put it in the back room, it's cold back there.” Daddy blinked at her.

“You been out there all day and that's what you killed.”

“It wasn't anything else to shoot.”

Mama stirred the fox leg. “You been drinking. I know it.”

“I ain't.”

“I can smell it.”

“I don't give a good goddamn what you can smell.”

They fell silent. They were both watching the fox.

“What you planning to do with it?”

“I might get it stuffed.”

Mama touched her index finger to the fox's paw. She stood like that in the glimmering lantern light. Her mouth worked on words. “Well, get it off the table then, and let me get you some supper. Carl Jr. bought some groceries.”

“Did he?”

“Yes, he did. We had us a right good supper, didn't we, younguns?”

The sound of general assent followed. Carl Jr., sullen and silent, remained behind at the fireplace. He adjusted the tuning knob on the radio, turned the volume louder.

“You ought to look at this fox I shot.” Daddy raised his voice a little, clearly to reach Carl Jr.

“Right now I don't want to look at no dead animal I can't eat.”

“You little son of a bitch. Come in here and get this fox and take it to the back room. And open that window back there so it can stay cold.”

Carl Jr. after a while rose, stretched his legs, rounded the corner, grabbed the fox by the hind legs and looked across the table at Daddy. “I sure wished it was a rabbit.” He sauntered to the back of the house, the dead fox swaying from side to side.

Daddy ate his supper methodically, chewing the pork lean with relish, spooning beans onto his plate, sopping the bean broth with biscuit. He drank a glass of clear whiskey, smacking his lips and shaking his head. Mama boiled coffee for him, and he spooned the sugar in heaps.

“Santy Claus comes tonight,” he sang. He pulled the lantern toward him and lifted his Prince Edward tin from his pocket.

I remembered that I was supposed to want a doll.

“Hush and don't get these younguns' hopes up.”

“If Santy Claus don't come, it means they ain't been good.”

“Nora, get in here and boil water for these dishes.” Mama stamped off in a rage. Joe Robbie, sitting on a pillow near the
fireplace, asked, “Will Santa Claus bring me a toy?”

“Santy Claus ain't bringing nobody around here nothing,” Daddy said. “He don't know how to find this house.”

Mama slammed the door behind her. The tree shivered. I slid next to Joe Robbie, leaned on his skinny shoulder. For once, he neither hit me nor pinched me. We soaked in the heat of the fire, without having to fight the larger ones for a place. The crackle and hiss of burning wood offered comfort.

Out in the world a dog howled, an owl crooned. We pulled the curtains closed as we always did at night. We feared strangers peeping in, tramps walking on the road. We feared the monster who lived in the woods around Moss Pond, who walked among the houses at night, according to stories we had heard. The curtains left a gap in the middle, enough for the width of an eye.

“These is good beans. Did you cook them?”

Nora had pumped more water and lugged the bucket through the kitchen door. “Yes, sir.”

“Your mama can't cook.”

“Otis, you better pump another bucket of water and bring it in the house. That well is going to freeze tonight.”