Tina Mcelroy Ansa (41 page)

“Um, that woman cut everywhere but on the bottom of her feet,” Nellie would say with heartbreaking empathy as she stood in The Place with her flawless skin and her high-heeled pumps.

Lena had hardly been able to look at the victims without feeling the original pain of the knife wounds.

She didn’t want to wind up like one of those women, with scars on her face from fighting over a man, even a man like Herman.

Even Cliona from Yamacraw, who made her young cousin drive her out to the river again in late summer to see about Lena, seemed to sense Lena was worried about her safety.

“Lord ham mercy, Lena, what in the world done happened to you?” the old woman inquired as they sat on a teak bench under the trees by the driveway drinking some decaffeinated iced tea. “You look fine, but can’t nobody get a hold of you. You dodging a creditor or somebody, baby? You don’t need no protection, do you? Ain’t no man’s other woman after you, is she?”

Lena just smiled as reassuringly as she could and shook her head.

After that, Lena seemed to see knives and recall fights everywhere.

There was a woman who had been coming to The Place ever since
Lena was a child who was supposed to have a shiv still in her stomach from an ancient lovers’ quarrel.

Lord, she thought as she sat on her bed rubbing the chill bumps from her arms, is that how you got it planned for me to end up?

But Herman calmed her fears when he came over to the bed and took Lena in his arms. “Lena, you know I wouldn’t let no harm come t’
you,”
he said.

Lena could not help herself. She had to work hard not to let Herman become her Savior, her Emmanuel, her Jehovah, her Redeemer. But right then she just sighed in relief and put Anna Belle right out of her mind.

M
r. Renfroe had been the McPhersons’ trusted “yardman” for decades.

But before Lena knew anything, Herman had turned into
her
yardman.

She even started going around her house taking care of business or cooking Herman a little “som’um-som’um,” shaking her shoulders and singing about her yardman like Alberta Hunter.

“Now, my ice man is a nice man, ’cause he brings me ice every day. And he says I ain’t got to worry. I ain’t never got to pay.

“My wood man is a good man, ’cause he loves to keep his baby warm. And when his wood don’t burn to suit me, then he takes me in his arms.

“My coal man is a old man almost ninety-two. But that old man sho’ knows what to do!!”

Herman was her nice man, her good man, her old man.

As he took her grounds under his capable hand the same way he had done with the horses, Lena found she had to improvise:

“Now, my yardman is a hard man, steady, sweet and young. And when his tool don’t satisfy me, then he does it with his tongue.”

Herman
was
her yardman. He noticed everything on and around her and her property. Lena once saw him stooped down in the grass studying an insect alit on a cane of a descendant of the St. Luke’s Hospital roses. He must have squatted there for seven or eight minutes before he backed off from the bug and turned to call Lena.

“Hey, Lena, baby, come here,” he called. When she joined him, he took her arm and guided her up to the rosebush. “Look at this dragonfly,” he said. “Don’t you have a dress like that?”

Lena looked down at the blue-black dragonfly still as a drawing on the tip of the rose stem, its gossamer wings thrown back in a show of pride, and chuckled.

“You don’t miss a trick, do you, Herman?”

“Well, I thought I remembered you wearin’ it or seein’ it or som’um.” He tried to sound casual, but Lena knew he liked to walk through her closet and touch her beautiful clothes as much as he liked sitting up on an impossibly high limb in the pine trees, his feet dangling like a boy’s, outside her glass shower watching her suds and rinse herself.

After that, when they danced together on the deck in each other’s arms in the moonlight, Lena often wore the tight black Todd Oldham gown with the long gossamer sleeves she had bought for some charity ball or another just for the pleasure of hearing him say, “You look as pretty as a dragonfly in that dress, Lena, baby.”

Herman, with his ghostly observant eye, was the one who started her to keeping a serious gardener’s journal. She came in on him in her office sitting by a window in the fading light of a late day in summer writing in a book of fragile handmade vegetable paper one of her godchildren had sent her. It had sat for ages on one of the bookshelves there. She turned on a lamp near him, but only one.

“What you writing, Herman?” Lena asked, intrigued. Other than some figuring and ciphering, as he called it, Lena didn’t think she had ever seen him write.

“Oh, just jottin’ down a few thangs. How Keba doin’. That she measure seventy-two inches around in her fifth month. What new we been plantin’. Yo’ land takin’ on a whole new look with all we been movin’ around and puttin’ in. Just thought we oughta keep up with it.

“I wrote down ’bout them hummers we saw today, too.”

That morning, as they roamed around her property on their daily adventure, they had stopped to give two ruby-throated hummingbirds room to pirouette, do-si-do, twirl and spin around each other in the air right in front of them. The tiny birds were jousting over a cluster of fiery-red fire spike.

“Look at ’em, Lena. Is it two males? He ain’t givin’ it up w’out a fight,” Herman yelled.

Lena found it fascinating but difficult to watch. She just knew that at any second one of the tiny birds was going to impale the other on the prong of its beak. Lena did not realize she was sinking to the ground until Herman quickly reached out to catch her.

He carried her to a cool spot under a juniper tree by the river and splashed a little Cleer Flo’ water in her face to bring her around. He had to put his hand in his chest and start his heart to beating again. It had stopped when he saw Lena falling to the ground.

“Then, too,” Herman said, “I find, when I read som’um I wrote a while back—no matter what it’s ’bout—I see all kinds a’ thangs I didn’t even know I was recordin’.”

“Um, I used to keep a journal,” Lena said, laughing out loud at her innocence in those weeks right out of college before she knew what her true vocation in life would entail. She really imagined she would have the kind of time in her life to keep up a journal, even intermittently. It suddenly dawned on her that now she could do all kinds of things, had time for all kinds of endeavors.

“Hope you don’t mind me usin’ yo’ journal and pen here,” Herman said as he wet the nib of one of Nellie’s fountain pens on the tip of his tongue, leaving a tiny blue mark there.

Lena smiled as she thought of how her mother would have responded to Herman’s casual bid to use something of hers. When
Lena and her brothers were young, her mother had a way of putting an end to any litany of such requests from her children: “Mama, can I have the rest of your ice cream?” “Mama, can I have the funny papers you reading?” “Mama, give me some of those buttered pecans you toasted. Those the last ones.” “Mama, what you eating? Gimme some!”

Nellie ended it all with one of her trademark tirades.

“Here!” she’d say. “Here! Take it! I can’t have nothing in this house. I can’t have nothing to myself!! Take it! Here, take my kidney! Take my liver! Take my blood! Take my jawbone! Take my gizzard! You want my heart? Here, take it! Take my heart!”

She would just be getting wound up.

“I can’t eat a can of Vienna sausage in this house in peace,” she’d complain.

Nellie overlooked the fact, little Lena always thought, that her mother could make the act of opening a can of Vienna sausages a grand occasion, could make anybody want some, too. Flipping off the tabbed can lid and safely disposing of it in the newspaper-lined plastic trash can. Pouring off the excess juice. Gently shaking the fat little firm sausages out of the blue can onto a pretty flowered plate along with the last of the juice. Then, separating the sausages from standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their little brothers and sisters.

Nellie had a way of making everything look elegant and desirable.

“Uh, Mama, that look
good!
Can I have some?”

Lena knew she didn’t have to tell Herman that he was welcome,
welcome
, to all that she had, all that she felt, all that she could give. With all that he had given her, Lena felt she could joyously say, “Here! Take my liver! Take my gizzard! Take my heart!”

She smiled and said, “You can have anything I got, Herman.”

“You got so many beautiful and useful thangs, Lena, that you don’t even know up in this house. And out in the barn and buildin’s, too. Shoot, it look like you ain’t
never
got to go to the sto’.

“You gotta start payin’ more ’tention, Lena,” Herman said seriously.

He sounded so stern, so professorial, that Lena was a little taken aback and anxious to understand what he was advising.

“Pay attention to what, Herman? My yard? My house? My things?” She knew Herman didn’t care about things.

He didn’t have any attachment for much of what Lena had purchased. Oh, he loved the feel of silk or 100 percent cotton sheets on his bare back, butt and legs. But he was just as happy lying on the rough, heavy, locally woven rug in front of the fire in the Great Jonah Room, as content nestled in sweet-smelling hay that he had just pitched in the loft of the barn, as satisfied stretched out on a bed of leaves down by the river, as fulfilled sleeping between the rows of Silver Queen corn he had planted himself. Happy, content, satisfied and fulfilled as long as he had Lena sleeping next to him.

He
never ever
wanted Lena to stop ordering from the catalogs that specialized in silk and satin lingerie—bawdy to demure. But most of all he liked her naked. He was just as excited when she walked buck naked to their swimming hole as when she waited for him on handkerchief-soft white cotton sheets dressed in a black lace bodysuit from Barneys. Herman could take or leave all that Lena had. It was Lena he couldn’t do without.

Lena couldn’t believe her luck one day when James Petersen announced that he was just going to stay out of her house anytime she might be there. He said he was just tired of walking in on her without any clothes on.

“Well, Lena, if you gonna insist on walking around here butt-naked, I guess, I’m just gonna have to stay down there in my own little home and read my books.”

He waited a beat or two for Lena to renounce her hedonistic ways and promise to at least try to remember to throw something over herself. But she didn’t say a word. She was afraid of upsetting a very good turn of events with anything she might utter.

“You and that
new man of yours
that don’t nobody ever get a chance to meet keep this place so clean now. It look better than it did when you wasn’t never here.”

He waited again for her to say something. Lena just held her breath.

“Well, from now on why don’t you just call me when you need me and keep leaving me my lists?” he said. Then he added, sounding a bit like his brother, “Shoot, I can go back to my reading.” He left Lena grinning and pleased with herself.

James Petersen did not say it, but he wanted to go back to his writing as well. One day in the spring, soon after Herman had come, Lena heard James Petersen say under his breath as he picked up a new stack of mysteries she had gotten for him, “Shoot, I betcha I could
write
one of these things.”

“You think you could, James Petersen?” Lena had asked seriously.

“Well, Lena, I done read a million of ’em. And now I not only know how they end before I get there. I can end ’em better than the writer do sometimes.”

That same day, Lena had Toya from Candace bring out a manual typewriter, a couple of reams of twenty-pound copy paper, some pencils and some pads. She left them on the doorstep of James Petersen’s little cottage in a peach crate. Lena guessed that James Petersen wouldn’t want any kind of writing instrument other than a manual typewriter. A computer of any kind was out of the question. He didn’t even like to dust in Lena’s office around her computer.

“I might set something off,” he would explain.

Now in early September, Lena and Herman would stroll down the road past James Petersen’s house and smile at each other as they heard the
tat-tat-tat-tat-tat
of James’ typing.

With James showing up only now and then while she was away, Lena had her privacy
and
Herman. She felt
she
had died and gone to heaven.

Herman stopped writing in his journal and looked at her, long and hard. It reminded Lena of how Frank Petersen used to stare at her before deciding to enlighten her nine-year-old or eighteen-year-old mind. And like Frank Petersen, who always chose to inform her, Herman
smiled and his whole wide face softened. But his voice was serious.

“Lena,” he said. “You need to start payin’ ’tention to everythang you think is important enough t’ give ya some peace or some wisdom or some kinda new tack on the world that might be what you s’posed to see.

“You didn’t see nothin’ in that fight with the hummers this mo’nin’?” Herman hated to sound that way with Lena, direct and incredulous, but time was moving on. As he told her when they were trying to plant some beans before nightfall and the good soaking rainstorm Herman felt coming, “We burnin’
daylight
here, Lena.”

Lena went right over to the shelves by her worktable and selected a thick journal bound in leather with endpapers of hand-painted birds in flight in colors of red and gold. Then, she turned to her mother’s pen collection displayed in a glass case atop Nellie’s marble-topped dresser and picked her favorite—the lacquered Cartier Panther pen.

Settling in a rocking chair with a cotton blanket thrown over her bare legs, Lena opened to the unlined paper of the first page and wrote in the upper right-hand corner:
Tuesday, Sept. 8, Home.

By late summer, when an albino hummingbird got in the screened porch, Lena didn’t panic for one minute as she thought of her dead grandmother’s drained, sweaty face as she raced around the house on Forest Avenue in pursuit of a bird the day before she died. Lena stood watching the trapped ghostly-looking bird swing back and forth in front of an amaryllis bloom for a good long while. Then, she calmly and gently shooed it out the door with a flat straw basket and went right to her journal to record the incident.