Tina Mcelroy Ansa (34 page)

“Yeah, Herman, I missed you,” she had to admit, stepping out of her high-heeled shoes into the dirt or the water with Herman.

And he’d smile, satisfied.

She’d often come home and find Herman browsing through her bookcases. He was insatiably curious about some things like the environment, architecture and the human body. Others, such as sports, television or transportation, he could care less about.

Herman would sit for hours staring at the pieces of the toaster or
the microwave or her boom box that he had disassembled in his rampant curiosity.

“Now, how this thang work?” Lena would hear him say to himself as she tried to go to sleep on the green-and-white-striped sofa in her office and still remain close to Herman as he explored some appliance.

“You okay over there, Lena?” he’d ask, looking up from his work from time to time.

Electrical advances and laser discs were no reach for him. All Lena did was turn him loose at her computer, and he educated himself about most of the basic scientific advances since his death. He had a quick mind for a man dead a hundred years.

He told Lena he had seen most of these things in his wanderings, but he had seldom had the opportunity to really explore and learn the intricacies and workings of a computer or a silicon chip or a toaster to his satisfaction.

Lena had watched him with sheer wonder and pride. First, he took the front off the computer and, with the half-frame magnifying eyeglasses Lena had bought him from the drugstore resting down low on the bridge of his wide regal nose, examined the inner workings. Lena had heard him say so many times to himself as he hunched over his work, “Lord, if I ’a had just one lens out of these little cheap set of spectacles, I coulda turned the world upside down.” And she believed him. He seemed to be able to do just about
anything.

He let his gaze rest on the circuit board, lifted tiny plastic-covered wires and examined connections. Then, after an hour or so, he picked up a tiny tool from the shammy bag her computer consultant had left there and closed the machine back up. Lena thought he was through, but Herman was just beginning.

“Hey, Lena, you don’t mind if I go in fo’ a look, do you?” he asked her as he rolled back from the computer table in her new ergonomic work chair.

She was snug on the overstuffed sofa.

Humpph, I don’t mind nothing you do, she thought to herself. But she didn’t even get a chance to say it before Herman sat up straight in
the comfortable chair, closed his eyes and became a mist that entered the computer through the disk slot in the same way that he sometimes became mist and entered her.

Lena was always amazed at the knowledge that he brought from the turn of the century. But then, Herman was an amazing man.

He told her that in life he had been an inventor of sorts. “Now, I ain’t no book-educated man. But don’t need t’ be. I’m that kinda person that been shown a lot in life.” Then he paused and added, “In death, too, come t’ think of it.”

What he mainly invented were tools. Lena smiled so broadly at the information that Herman found himself smiling, too, even though he had no idea why they were amused.

“You
would
invent tools, Herman,” Lena said in answer. “Something useful and needed and able to make things easier and faster and better and smoother and fresher and more level. Sometimes, when you touch me, Herman, I feel useful in your hands.”

With a smile, he pretended to tip an imaginary hat and bow his head to the side in response to her compliment.

Just watching him handle a simple awl or a small appliance like a coffee grinder, Lena had known that Herman was an inventor.

She had watched him from her bedroom as he discovered a box of Tampax in one of her bathroom drawers. He leaned right there against the counter’s edge and read the entire sheet of information and instructions for the superstrength tampon. Then, he took one out of the baby-blue cardboard box and, looking again at the instructions he had laid on the countertop, tore open the thin smoking-paper wrapper and examined the tampon minutely until it was just a fluffy puff of cotton, some thread and strips of white cardboard.

“Umm, right clever,” he chuckled and said to himself.

Herman even had a knack for finding and excavating artifacts of tools on her property. Century-old knives—blades made of gray and black stone and flint; handles of creamy-hued animal bone and deer and squirrel skin—fashioned by southeastern Indians. Small intricate red clay pipes made by Africans and African Americans before and
after the Civil War to smoke the wild tobacco in the woods during a brief respite. A nearly airtight earthen container of rice with the imprint of the creator’s small slender hands inside.

Lena was always amazed at what Herman could find or accomplish in any given stretch of time. He never hurried or fretted over schedules and dates. He managed time the way he talked about it.

“Time
, baby,” he said two or three times a day.

It was Herman’s answer to many things.

“Time.”

He said it with such assurance and peace, sounding like a down-home preacher comforting a grieving widow.

It was his answer to everything she complained about.

“Herman, I don’t think these carrot seeds are ever going to sprout.”

“Time, baby.”

Or,

“If these folks and accountants and everybody don’t stop pulling me every which way …”

“Time, Lena.”

And even when the answer exasperated her, she always found herself later agreeing it was the right answer, the only answer. “Time.”

“Now, where did you hear about laser surgery?” Lena had asked one hot day in June as they sat on the cool grass of the riverbank.

“Shoot, baby, where you think I been fo’ the last hundred years?” Herman asked back with a laugh.

“Dead!” Lena said with an intentionally dumb wide-eyed expression on her face.

“Well, there’s dead and there’s dead,” he said, looking at her over his half-frame eyeglasses.

When Lena paused, pretending to consider what he said, Herman got a bit indignant and asked, “What part a’ me seem dead to you?”

Lena laughed. “Not one single part,” she said as she fell into Herman’s lap and seemed to sink right into him as if she were falling back into the waves of the sea or a pile of crisp autumn leaves.

“How old were you when you died, Herman?” Lena had asked in late May as she lay back on the office sofa with his head in her lap.

“I was just a few weeks shy of markin’ my fortieth birth date when I died,” he answered matter-of-factly.

“Why, Herman, you’re not even forty!?” Lena squealed. “Lord, my baby’s pig meat.”

Herman looked at Lena with a sly smile, chuckling at her brazen-ness and pride, and went back to tinkering with the sauna control box in his hand.

Herman tinkered around Lena’s place so much that her household started functioning so much more smoothly, cheaply, efficiently, that even James Petersen took notice. The toilets used less water, the shower and taps, too.

And it wasn’t just in the house that Herman made his ghostly presence felt.

Herman showed Lena things on her property. Stones washed down from the mountains by Cleer Flo’. Trees budding out of season. Relics from previous civilizations and peoples. Jewelry made of animal bone and feathers. Unusual markings on Baby’s stomach Lena had never noticed before. Gossamer silver snakeskins discarded by growing reptiles. Lena began to walk on the very earth differently.

It amazed her how easily she forgot the busy little town of Mulberry.

When she walked now she felt Herman’s arm resting lightly around her shoulders, her shoulder tucked perfectly in his armpit like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. She was actually taking time to see,
really see
, the earth she was walking on.

“Ya gotta cherish this piece a’ earth we been given, we been born to,” Herman said as they walked so far afield on her property that she couldn’t even see the tops of her chimneys. “The trick, Lena, baby, is to cherish yo’ own little piece of earth, but not to get
tied
to it. ’Cause it ain’t nothin’ but a piece a’ dust, like us, our bodies, that’s gon’ come and go.”

When he found a chinaberry tree on her land, Herman was as excited as if he had created it himself. He came and got her in her home office and brought her right to it.

“You know what we used the root a’ the chinaberry tree fo’, Lena, don’t ya?” he said as he smiled a smile that Lena wanted to just lick off his face. He pretended to wait for her to answer as he kicked at the knot at the trunk of the tree just above the rich dark ground.

“Yeah, they used this root to make a potion to make ya hot. Our folks and the Indians used it in ceremonies and rituals. And other folks just used it.

“Guess
we
can pass on this one, huh, Lena?”

Looking around at a squat prickly bush, he continued the lesson since he had her outside.

“And look a here, Lena. This what we call ’China briar.’ My ma usta make a kind a’ mush out a’ the root. A bread, too. China briar was one of the first thangs I remember ever eatin’.”

Herman showed Lena all kinds of things. He explored her hundred acres of property as if it were a tidy little backyard.

While Lena was away at work in town, he uncovered treasures and mysteries that Lena had never even thought about being on her land.

One Sunday morning after they had made love, eaten grits and salmon croquets, made more love, gone swimming and lain on her river deck to dry in the sun, Herman took her for a walk. She had wanted to grab a piece of pie or fruit before they left, but Herman wouldn’t let her.

“I got som’um sweet fo’ you,” Herman said, laughing and patting a bulge in his pants pocket.

Lena tramped out in her new heavy Timberland boots just like Herman’s and followed him into the woods with a smile on her face. She couldn’t get enough of him.

They walked for a good long time along the river to the east of the house. Lena was becoming winded.

“Maybe, we should have ridden the horses, Herman,” she said.

“Naw, not this time,” he answered over his shoulder.

When he finally slowed down by a big sycamore tree at the edge of the woods, she thought he would take out a tiny copper-colored Gstring for her to prance around in. Instead, he pulled out a pair of work gloves and handed them to Lena.

“Here, baby, I don’t want ya to get hurt.”

Lena thought she could hear someone humming in the distance as he led her deeper into the woods. Then, he held up a bare hand, stopped and pointed up ahead to the biggest circular beehive Lena had ever seen. It hung from the swooping lower limb of a massive live oak tree like mistletoe. Herman smiled at Lena while motioning for her to stand still. Then, he advanced on the golden-colored humming hive.

Herman slipped his bare hand sideways into the bottom of the nest, deliberately, steadily. He only paused a moment with his hand inside the hive, then slowly pulled his hand back out, rotating it slightly to form a cup as it came out. The hive was shaped just like the ones in cartoons she had watched as a child on Saturday mornings in which a hungry old hairy bear would try and try to get that honey. She had imagined that animated honey to be the best, the sweetest, the most golden honey in the universe.

Lena was mesmerized by Herman’s performance. It was like a theater piece, silent except for the lazy-sounding buzzing of the bees. Then, Herman drew her into the act. Looking very serious, he lifted his right hand dripping with thick dark honey and flecks of waxy honeycomb up to her lips. She took two of his fingers into her mouth and lifting her chin, sucked the honey off.

It was as sweet as the cartoon honey. The intensity of the sweetness nearly blew the top of her head off when she smacked her lips.

Herman didn’t just treat her to honey. He taught her how to survive.

“Here, Lena, tie this cotton kerchief ’round yo’ mouth when we out walkin’ in the woods,” he instructed her, “so yo’ breath don’t draw those ’squitas and bitin’ flies.”

And it worked, too. Some days, Lena and Herman looked like
happy bandits loping through the woods or the dirt trails or riding the horses flat out over the rough terrain off the bridle path.

James Petersen back at the house gazing out the kitchen window over the sink would see her head off happily into the woods and chuckle to himself at the sight of Lena outside talking to thin air. “That girl knows she can talk to herself. She got so much on her mind.”

Mostly what Lena had on her mind was ways to spend more time with Herman.

One morning Herman woke Lena even earlier than usual. Brushing her face with the breeze of his kisses, he gently roused her.

“Come on, Lena,” he urged when she dreamily opened her eyes. “Put on some long pants and boots. Ticks are bad this year. I got som’um t’ show you.”

Lena sat on the deacon’s bench by the door in the Glass Hall and laced up her boots over her pants legs. She was laughing to herself at the many pairs of work boots and outdoor shoes she had acquired since Herman came into her life when he blew in and grabbed her hand. He didn’t even bother to ask what she was laughing at.

“Found som’um you might be interested in,” he said with a smile playing in his voice, pleased with Lena’s cozy joy.

He pulled her down the path to the stables, where he had saddled Goldie and Baby for them to ride. Lena always tried to ride behind Herman so she could watch his shoulders and the small of his back as he rode. Herman—with his near-midnight self—astride Goldie—with her near-sunrise self—was a sight to behold, one that Lena never tired of seeing.

They set off across her property heading south and didn’t stop riding fairly hard until they had circled a stand of impenetrable woods and reached a meadow on the other side that looked like something from a fairy tale.

The field was encircled with trailing bramble. Small vines had formed a wall around the dale that was covered with rich juicy-looking spots of amaranth.

Lena could no longer see the river, but she could hear the music of it rushing close by. Pulling Goldie’s reins up, Herman sat back proudly in his saddle as Lena took in the expanse of early-bearing blackberries.