My Drowning (8 page)

Mama muttered as she descended from the porch and crossed the yard. She headed into the woods behind the house.

She walked far enough to stand out of sight of the house, and we stopped short of her. She stood in a patch of sun falling down from on high, a dappling of her arms and of the dress she wore. Her hands rose up. It was as if they were separate things and they were rising away from her. She never made a sound.

Mama rises out of the river gasping, throwing water from her hair. Her breath rises up in trails of steam. The surprise of seeing her move so freely still echoes in me now. Her large, flat breasts lift, the yellowed bodice of the slip clinging to the high flesh. She says something, I can't remember what it is, something about the cold. But she addresses someone above my head, not me. Someone else is here, I can't remember who
.

I was seeing this again in my vision as Nora and I shivered in the cold shadow of a tree. Mama stood in light, but it was as if she were drowning again, throwing up her arms as she sank into the golden sun.

She steps ashore. She is standing over me, shivering and dripping, and I can see the outline of her heavy belly, her rolling thighs. I am so in love with her, every part of me aches. She scoops me up, and her arms are strong but soft; I burrow into them. I weigh less than the wet slip
.

But this time she does not set me onto the riverbank, gently, as before. She glares at me coldly, as if I am some fish she has dragged off the end of her line, and she takes me by the shoulder and flings me high, end over end, into the middle of the river, and I sink into the cold, and I am falling forever, and I never look down
.

Mama made no sound in the sunny woods. Her hands sank slowly to cradle her belly. After a while she headed back to the house. When she passed Nora and me, hidden behind a tree trunk, she had no expression at all on her face.

DEPUTY FLOYD TALKED
to Daddy for a long time, on the front porch, and Mama waited in the kitchen. She had paled and hardly moved. We waited in the kitchen with her. Daddy closed the door when he went outside and now spoke in hushed tones; we could hear his voice but not his words.

“He's going to jail,” Mama said, and twisted her hands in her skirt.

But the sound of the voices remained cordial and clear. I retreated to the corner, out of sight. Joe Robbie sat with Alma Laura and me. I felt safe.

“I won't have anybody,” Mama whispered.

“How are we going to eat?” Otis asked.

No answer followed. Mama touched the doorknob once, but Nora said not to open it. After a while Deputy Floyd drove away and Daddy came back inside. He fixed his eyes on
Mama, and they glittered. “Haden says they picked up Cope in Luma. Got him in the jail. He's headed there now to bring him back to Kingston. He says they ain't going to mess with me, so you can wipe that look off your face.”

“Cripple bastard,” Mama said, and a tear streaked her cheek.

He looked at her and blinked. They were looking each other eye to eye. For once they did not say anything.

WE VISITED UNCLE
Cope in Johnston County prison. Mama refused to go. She was getting big with the new baby and swore it would be a hex to be in a prison.

I had gotten the prison confused with the war, somehow. I was certain that all the people I saw there were soldiers, that this was the army, these strangely dressed people behind the cage-shaped windows where we talked. Daddy sat with Cope and asked him what it was like in prison, and I wondered if Uncle Cope would go to the war with the rest. Daddy and Cope talked about the Japs, as they often did; but I was nervous because I feared the Japs might lurk somewhere very nearby.

Uncle Cope said the food was good and the people were nice. He was talking to his own daddy, my grandaddy Tote, and to my daddy, and to their sister Tula. They stood closest to the window and the rest of us were bunched behind, and because I was little, I could only glimpse a patch of the bald of Uncle Cope's scalp. But I could hear his voice, sometimes. “They treat us real good. They got us making things. I can read books if I want to, but I don't want to. I think I'm going to learn how to make license plates. You can pass the time right well. You-all don't worry about me.”

I searched for the faces of the enemy, the slant eyes, the yellow skin, of which I had heard so much on the radio. But the sad faces in the room were all the same color as mine, some browner, some more freckled. When the time was up someone lifted the little ones to kiss Uncle Cope's cheek. I was barely old enough and large enough to escape brushing my lips against his pale cheek. I could almost taste the clammy skin.

WE RODE HOME
in Uncle Bray's truck. Aunt Tula and Grandaddy Tote sat in the front, and Daddy declared he was stuck in the back with the rest of the niggers, and laughed at his own joke. I sat between his legs because he made me sit there, and dug his fingers into the space between my ribs. Nora stared at him and me. I felt a strange sickness in the pit of my stomach with him so close. The speed of the truck made a wind that whipped my hair across my eyes, but I sat perfectly still and never made a sound.

We ate at Grandaddy's house near Smithfield. Grandaddy lived with his oldest son Erbert, who hated Uncle Cope as much as Mama did and also refused to visit him in jail. Grandaddy's house was even dirtier than ours, and plainer, with chickens wandering in and out and dropping turds on the floors. But the kitchen overflowed with things to eat, everything from ham for the biscuit to canned vegetables from the summer garden. Nora drank bowl after bowl of clabbered milk and stuffed her face with cornbread. I ate my souse meat and biscuit with the same relish. Nothing had ever tasted so good.

Before we left, with Uncle Bray yawning and Aunt Tula
complaining about prison, Uncle Erbert slipped something into Daddy's hand. It was a paperback book, and I glimpsed a woman with naked titties on the cover before Daddy slid the smooth rectangle into his pocket. He caught me watching. His eyes sparkled.

“All right Willem,” Aunt Tula said, “Get them younguns of yours in the truck and let's get headed home.”

SOMETHING HAPPENED
to Uncle Cope while he stayed in prison. One morning Miss Ruby summoned Daddy to the Little Store to answer a phone call, and when he came back he told us the story. Grandaddy Tote had called him. Uncle Cope was cut up by a Mexican man, and he nearbout bled to death, according to Daddy, right in the prison yard. First the Mexican cornholed him, and then he cut him with a homemade knife. “He couldn't run, because he's crippled.”

“Did they hurt him bad?” Mama asked.

“What does it sound like, Louise? Jesus. They cut him across the stomach. Nearbout spilled his guts out. You can kill a man like that.”

“What is a cornhole?” Joe Robbie asked.

“It's when a man does it to another man in the ass,” Otis explained.

We were in awe, Joe Robbie and I, and we watched one another.

“You younguns shut up asking them nasty questions,” Mama ordered.

But Nora and Otis giggled, and Mama and Daddy hid smiles.

“I'd ruther die,” Daddy said.

“But I'm sorry he got cut,” Mama said, still snickering.

UNCLE COPE RETURNED
to live with us when he had served his time. By then his stomach had healed up and his guts were back in place. I tried to see his behind where the cornhole was, because the word had stayed on my mind ever since I heard it, but nothing showed through his britches.

We had been told to keep our mouths shut about what we heard, but the very first night Otis got mad about Uncle Cope taking the bed in the kitchen again, and he called Uncle Cope a gimp-legged cornhole shit-ass. The whole story was out after that, and Uncle Cope, redfaced, screamed at all of us and waved his crutches till he collapsed on the bed. Because the bed was in the kitchen we could hardly leave him alone, so we blinked as he lay there in a spasm of fury. Otis laughed and Uncle Cope hurled a crutch at him.

Later we would tell the story this way: Mama laughed so hard she went into labor and had Corrine almost on the spot. The truth was close to that; Mama's labor did come on her during the laughter and at once the pains became clear and intense. She told us to find the colored midwife in Holberta and Otis headed toward the community of black people on an old, half-repaired bicycle he used to get back and forth from the Little Store. We still owed the white midwife for Alma Laura.

Uncle Cope's humiliation lay forgotten in the confusion of Corrine's birth. But I remember him, curled up like a ball of spite in his bed, red-faced, glaring at every shadow in the room.

I SAW THOSE EYES
again, years later, when he caught me bathing when we had moved to another house down the road. Carl Jr. was working on an egg farm and we lived in the house rent free, in front of four long chicken houses full of white feathers and rivers of turd. Uncle Cope had a narrow bed in the back room with the boys, and one day instead of heading into that room to lie down he lumbered into the bedroom where we girls slept. I was naked except for my step-ins and socks, washing in the washpan. He shoved open the door and peeped in. He saw me and ducked his head. I laid down the white bar of Octagon soap and pulled the towel over my breasts, afraid. “Get away,” I said, and Uncle Cope tottered a little on the crutches. His eyes were rimmed with red, a line of fire. He looked me all over with his tongue hanging onto his lower lip. I couldn't breathe. He hung on those crutches like he meant to come in the room. But I said, “You get out of here, Uncle Cope,” and I held that towel against me. After a while, he backed out the door.

I told Mama that he had peeped at me while I was washing, and she slapped me sharp across the face and told me never to mess with that one-leg bastard again.

I had a dream about that look in his eyes. Mama was calling him a cripple cornhole bastard; they were in the kitchen and they were arguing, and she called him a hundred names I couldn't remember, and when I went in the room she was laughing at him and he was curled on the old, big bed, Uncle Cope curled up in a tight little knot with his eyes nearly swollen out of his head.

Later, I warned my own daughter never to be alone with him. I warned her right to his face.

SOMETIMES THE MEMORIES
come even and pace themselves one by one, neatly. Sometimes there are harder places, like rapids in the river, where I am dashed from one side to the other in my little boat. Sometimes there is one thing that I fix on, that I see again and again.

Uncle Cope returned to live with us when he had served his time. By then his stomach had healed up and his guts were back in place. I tried to see his behind where the cornhole was but nothing showed through his britches
.

This much is true, but there is more, rising from inside me, wherever it had been hidden. I can remember the day even more vividly, if I choose to release more of the pictures. He came home on a June Sunday when a storm blew in. He rode the Trailways bus to Kingston where there was a small station, and then he hitched a ride to the Jarman store, and hobbled on his crutches across the bridge. The truck driver threw his box off the back of the truck and it landed near one of the round-eyed gas pumps, propped against the thick gas
hose. Uncle Cope reflected on it, then swung on the crutches up the dirt road.

The gash across his stomach had never been all that bad. The blade had failed to pierce the abdominal muscles, despite the stories, and his guts had always been right where they should be. The wound hurt him some, you could tell that much, as he crept up the road.

Otis and I saw him first. We were playing in the bushes near the road when he came swinging along in the dirt, his good leg pumping and his bad leg flopping. We knew there was a storm blowing, me and Otis were watching the clouds, and playing like we were hunting the Moss Pond monster. Otis had a piece of tobacco stick for a gun and I had a nice shaped branch I had found, which was, to my mind, a machine gun like in the war. The monster was mixed up with the Japanese and we were in the army as well as being expert monster trackers. So to have Uncle Cope appear like that was a natural part of the game, and we shot him several times.

Otis could be fun when he remembered I was half his size. He liked to hit too hard now and then, to remind me I was a girl and weak. He only hit me a couple of times that day. As we got older, he was acting more and more like Daddy and Carl Jr., and pretty soon that side of him would take over. We shot Uncle Cope and ducked down in the underbrush along the road, before he could see which ones we were. He poked that head this way and that, his neck stretching out like a goose. Then he swung down the road toward the house.

“That shit-ass is back,” Otis whispered. “Mama will bust a gut.”

“He's going to take your bed,” I said, because Otis had been sleeping in the kitchen by himself while Uncle Cope was in jail.

“Naw he ain't. He can sleep in there with Carl Jr.”

“That's his bed in the kitchen. Yes it is.”

Otis puffed up and slammed his fist pretty hard into my shoulder. It was to warn me to shut up. I decided it was time to stop playing with him and ran to the house. The pain in my shoulder had nothing to do with it. But Otis said, “Where you going? You're mad at me now, like some sissy pants.”

“No, I ain't,” I shouted, but I kept running.

“Well, I know a secret about you.”

I shook my head but stopped running for a moment. I could see he meant it, and I was suddenly afraid. “You don't know anything I want to know.”

The wind was blowing as I went inside. We had eaten our Sunday dinner of greens and cornmeal dumplings. I had brought water for the dishes and Nora boiled it over the stove, herself drenched in the heat. The sound of a storm coming was welcome all through the house.

Inside everybody was saying hey to Uncle Cope.