Those Bones Are Not My Child (84 page)

“Mama’s trying to make peace with you, Marzala.” Gerry draped the towels over Zala’s shoulder and hugged her.

“We’re not at war.”

“Yes, well …”

Gerry held the door and Mama Lovey came in and stepped immediately into the tub.

“My girls,” she said, pressing the flowers to Zala’s breast. When they leaned to kiss her, she complained, “I’m sweaty,” extending her face all the same. She turned and held on to the shelf of jarred gooseberries.

“Then get out of these clothes.” Gerry lifted Mama Lovey’s dress, ordering her to raise one arm, then the other, pulling the dress off, the black slip clinging to it.

Zala set the bouquet on the shelf between the crock of spearmint
soap and the box of Gloria Brand Unlimited labels Kofi had not put back properly. With the back of her wrist, she shoved the cardboard lid down on the honey labels and continued lathering the sponge as Gerry stepped back into the kitchen, leaving the two of them alone.

“Like my beads?”

She sounded like a little girl. Even as a younger woman when she’d asked “How do I look?”—really meaning it, her generation taught that to spend much time in the mirror would bring you to a bad end, and so her mama and other women really needed Zala’s eyes, because they didn’t know what they looked like—she’d sounded more grown than now, turning around with little steps in the zinc tub, lifting one hip, then the other, to show Zala. On a narrow, soft strip of leather around her hips were small, oval brown beads strung at intervals between knots. Zala examined the knots, disc-shaped open rosettes, a knot Zala did not know, and smiled in answer.

“You’ll stay?” Mama Lovey held her arm out as Zala soaped it, moving close to the tub to do her armpit, then run the sponge down her side, turning her mother around, casually lifting her breasts to soap her stomach, then patting her thighs for her to squat and open her legs.

“With the bees, the chickens, and the garden and fields, we could eke out a living. Haying alone can carry us into the autumn. You think about it,” she said, patting Zala’s shoulder when she knelt to tip the kettle into the dipping gourd. “And you talk to Geralanna little bit, hear?”

“You want me to talk Gerry into staying?”

“You talk to her a little bit,” Mama Lovey repeated, and turned and caught hold of the shelf. She bent her head as Zala sluiced the suds from her neck down her back, guiding the water over her buttocks and patting Mama’s behind to again squat, the way Mama had done to her years ago.

“Stay at least till Kofi’s ready for that Benjamin Mayes School,” Lovey added. “The boy’s got his heart set on going for science up there in Atlanta.” She smiled over her shoulder at Zala.

How could they go back to Atlanta? And how could they not?—it was home. Zala moved her head like a swimmer with water in her ears. When she thought of Atlanta, it was the media mob that she pictured. Sonny strapped in a chair, the wire from the clip-on mike snaking around his throat and down his back. Her son a memorial object, a hope
symbol, a boy come back from the dead, with the malignancy still plaguing the city and the authorities still hoaxing them all. And the killers, would they know the connection between the couple that had picked Sonny up near Ashby and held him somewhere outside of the perimeter? Was there a connection between themselves and the old man who’d stropped the boys about the legs till they dropped to their knees and called him Master? Would they come to silence him? Kerosene sloshed against the side of the house? Or Kofi’s worse fears, a bomb thrown through the window?

Her mama took the damp towel from her and washed her face. Zala dried one foot and one leg and Mama Lovey threw down the face towel and stepped out, leaning on her daughter’s shoulder. Zala dried her other leg and foot, massaging the bottom with her knuckles.

Lovey held her arms out and Zala wrapped the big towel around her, then hugged her. How small her mother had become. Friends of the Twins used to say “adorable,” and Zala had never been able to see it before.

Zala squirmed to make her mother let go. But her mother did not let go.

“Don’t be cross with your poor ole mama, she doing the best she know how.”

“I know it.” Zala kicked the kitchen door open with her heel and steered her mama through.

Zala went around the house twice, smiling to herself and only once remembering to feel the clothes on the bushes. The sun was on the rim, so they had at least three hours before the trip to the fields. When Zala looked toward the kitchen window, Gerry was leaning over the table unrolling the map. Mama Lovey must have called her, and when Gerry turned, the map snapped to. Zala thought she heard it, but it was the banner pinned to the side of the Girard truck flapping in the breeze.

Sonny and Spence were standing up in back, Junior leaning over to talk to the medical students. Spence seemed to be supporting Sonny, one arm behind the boy’s back, the other crossed in front of Spence and holding the boy’s arm, as if he were in the middle of telling about the beatings and might drop to his knees. She was only imagining it, for Spence let go of his arm and they were looking at each other, talking,
smiling, Spence’s hand moving up the boy’s back to massage his neck. But from where she stood by the fence, she could see Sonny stiffen.

Zala turned away and went into the house through the sleeping porch. A neat pile of books was on the table with a transistor radio. Lengths of fabric were piled neatly on top of Gerry’s suitcase. A half-painted, carved calabash was on the floor. Gerry’s diary, covered in a cloth made from baobab and still smelling of cream of tartar, was in the hammock. Exhausted, Zala looked at the small pillow and almost climbed in. She knew Gerry and Mama Lovey had left a place for her in the middle of the big bed so they could have one ear apiece: “Come to Africa,” “Stay in Epps.” Zala continued through to the foyer, smiling at the snaggle-tooth piano no one played anymore. She trailed her fingers through the fringe of the mud cloth, then made her way into the bedroom and took off her clothes.

There was a bright yellow-and-orange bubba for her to put on. And at the foot of the bed where she climbed in was the Bible opened to the Book of Daniel. She crawled into her place on her hands and knees as she used to when she was pregnant and took naps in the afternoon. She eased down on the freshly laundered sheet and fell asleep dreaming of her children running across a wide savannah, a baobob silhouetted against the red sun, the legs of the gazelles a blur.

They followed Lovey into the green, the fields that would become in Indian summer acres of tall golden grass. The children, spread out, were doing swim strokes in the dusk-shaded field, Sonny joining in at the last. Spence squeezed Zala’s hand and they rushed to keep track of Kenti, who turned her head expertly each time she brought her arm around past her ear, marveling at the bone-and-socket action of her shoulder. The elder Girard brought his knees up high, his elbows held out level over the grass. Like Lovey, he let each step twist his body at the waist, his knees cutting a path, her hips leading the way. The student workers closed in on either side. Those who’d lingered in the aloe garden brought along a sprig for study and became Lovey’s right flank. The others, who’d stayed awhile in the going-to-seed garden of phlox, forget-me-nots, foxglove and flaming hearts, became her left flank.

Lovey came to a halt seven feet from the big bushes at the end of the field and turned the sprig over in her hands. The high grass that had
swayed freely and parted for them was now tangled and snarled by renegade vines that had weaved their way from the honeysuckle-covered shapes ahead.

“Parboiled in potash,” she said, “it dissolves like starch to a transparent glaze. Good for inflamed joints.” She handed it back. “Draws out the fever and the ache.”

Zala squeezed Spence’s hand. Lovey had applied glutinous poultices to Sonny’s wounds, and Sonny was nodding in recognition. The two looked up at the moon, turned to the fields behind them, the cabin’s chimney gleaming in the night, and exchanged sly smiles, increasing their pressure on each other’s hands. Lightning bugs lifted, flashed, then sank down low again in the grass, faint telegraph signals all around them.

“Or you take ordinary salt,” Girard was saying, “and heat it up in a black iron skillet, stir in apple cider vinegar, and you got you something almost as good.”

“You soak the rags in it,” one of the students spoke as she wrote, “then you wrap the rags around the inflamed joints.”

“Thank you.”

Girard brushed the brim of his hat with four fingers, his outdoor version of removing his hat when addressing a female. “Good for horses and people too.”

Lovey, with meticulous care, was parting the grass as though combing the hair of a tender-headed child. When she put her hands together like a diver, the children followed suit. They shoved off through the green, Lovey directing attention to the base of a bush up ahead.

“SNAKE!”

Junior threw out his arm to halt Sonny and Kofi. Lovey threw up her arms to stop the shouts and the sprints. In the murmured conversation were two votes for killing the snake, wrapped round a tangle of saplings.

“Why kill it, unless you plan to eat it?”

“
Eat
it?” Kofi backed away from Junior, looked at Bernard, then looked back at the thick, moist coils of brown wrapped round the stalks. There were bright orange diamonds on the snake’s back. Sonny moved up close and hunkered down the way Aunt Gerry did sometimes when she wanted to think hard. Kofi kept his distance.

“That snake there,” Bernard was saying, “he’ll kill himself if he thinks we fixin’ to.”

“Bite hisself,” Sheena added, “bite that bush, spit on everything he see, try to kill the whole world.”

Sonny wrapped his arms around his legs and watched. The snake hadn’t moved. The orange lozenges were now as brown as the rest of him, the brown looking more and more like the stalks. The rough scales seemed to smooth out too. Sonny rested his chin on his knees and studied it the way Grandaddy Wesley had taught him on outings to the zoo. If he blinked, the snake would have him convinced he was seeing things. If he looked away and then back, the snake would have vanished, only thick stalks in its place and doubt in his mind.

“No good for eating or for medicine either if he poisons himself,” Girard said. “But there are ways to kill a snake. Ways and ways. You got the right idea, son,” he called over to Sonny. “Got to be his match ’fore you can beat him at his game.”

“The oil’s good for lumbago,” Lovey said, leading the group away to a gap in the bushes. “Careful here, the way gets rugged.”

The students conferred amongst themselves, wondering aloud if they might not apprentice themselves next to a snake-oil huckster. Maybe there was something to the elixirs and tonics peddlers stumped the rural section beyond the Tombigbee.

Kofi followed his grandmother through the hedges and over the stones, on the lookout for snakes and other dangerous things in the overgrown brush that led to the woods. The girls were behind him, turning their ankles, Old Man Girard telling them to stay on the path. Kofi then realized there was order to the wild woods. The stones were arranged in footpaths. So long as he stayed on the stones, the briars and thorns couldn’t scratch him.

“Good for worms.” Lovey pointed to a plant with freckled leaves but kept moving toward the line of trees. “Good for dogs and people too.” Over her shoulder she raised her voice in Girard’s direction. “Miss Erma would’ve passed those gallstones if she’d’ve put herself on a tea regimen, Titus.”

“Told her so,” he answered.

“Not everybody can be told something,” she answered, pointing out something else to the students. “This here’s good for bad nerves,”
she told them when they trotted to catch up with her. “Not like it is now. Too much slick on top.”

Kenti examined the bush. The leaves were thick, shiny tongues going “ahh.” The berries were dishwater gray. The twigs were sticky white with cobwebs in the crooks.

“In a few days,” Lovey said, “when the stems are softish and everything goes pale, it’s good. Time, see? Just one more instance of that law of life, time. Right now, it’s poison. In a few days, good medicine.”

“Like fish,” Junior said, calling over to Sonny, who was wandering toward the path to the creek. “Some kind of fish can be good to eat most of the year. But don’t try it when they pregnant.”

“A pregnant fish.” Kenti came to a stop to picture it, and Cookie plowed into her.

“Take a look here.” Girard motioned them around a low, sprawled-out bush, but Lovey did not come back to lecture. She had her elbows close to her sides and was moving flat-footed and fast through the trees. Girard snapped out his handkerchief and broke off a switch. When one of the students, drawn by the musk, reached for it, he snatched it away.

“This stuff will hurt you. You’ll itch and stay itchy, lose your sense of smell, and that’s only the half. I don’t know the scientific name for it. Could be related to dumb cane, but I call it the family plant—won’t see some without you see a lot congregating around.”

“Its use?” Pencils poised, the students studied the held twig.

“If you’re ever in a fix with tracking dogs on your tail, do yourself a favor and stomp around in this bush before you run on. I don’t care how high your odor is, the dogs come this way will forget all about you. They stick their muzzles in the family plant and they’ll be walking backward barking at the moon.” He chuckled and moved on, an anecdote about a man on the chain gang lost as the children outdid each other being wild dogs, coyotes, and wolves.

Lovey had cleared the trees and had broken into a run. Zala took one strap of the gathering basket. “And to think that I worry whether I can possibly leave this poor old woman to manage by herself,” Gerry said with a laugh. Elbows tight against her sides, fists pumping like pistons, Lovey was running flat-footed through the fields toward the wildflowers, the children racing along. Titus Girard, huffing and chuckling, brushed his brim as he went past the two women.

“I think it’s time to count the cattle and gather the cowries, my sister,” Gerry said.