Tina Mcelroy Ansa (53 page)

It was difficult for her to stop giving. She had so much. But now it didn’t feel so like an obligation, so like a boulder on the small of her back pressing down insistently, constantly.

Suddenly recalling the story Peanut had told her every Saturday when she was little, she wrote it down and sent it to him. She even sent Cliona from Yamacraw a pretty card with a note inside saying Lena was sorry she had yelled at her and that she loved the crazy old woman. She did not know how her little notes would be received, but she sent them in love.

Looking at her snow-covered estate made her happy she had. The
ice hanging from verdant spruce and fir limbs made her think of all the folks who were not as cozy as she and her man. Snuggled in front of the big fire in the Great Jonah Room with the ten-foot-tall Christmas tree over by the French doors, Lena couldn’t stop thinking of the folks in the world, in Mulberry especially, who didn’t have simple shelter during this unusual cold snap.

It surprised her now that she was not still through with the town of Mulberry and its people after her rage a month before. But with each day, the grace of forgiveness seemed to shower her with peace.

There was no way she could greet the birth of the Prince of Peace without making peace with her people. And the thought of anyone, especially those she held dear, being out in this weather with no warm dry place to call home made
her
go all cold inside.

That’s when the idea for the shelter popped into her head.

She jumped up from her toasty seat still wrapped in a soft cable-knit cashmere throw she had bought for Herman for Christmas and snapped her fingers.

“Herman, I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before,” she said. “The house on Forest Avenue would make a perfect shelter for my children!”

The very idea of her little ragtag throwaway teenagers, who stood on cold street corners braced against the wind, who slept in alleyways and deserted buildings, who did anything to keep from going back to situations they had fled, residing in the big, cozy two-story brick house on Forest Avenue where she grew up warmed her heart
and
lit a fire under her.

Lena didn’t wait for the beginning of the year to put her plan in motion.

“Shoot, I wish I could have gotten them in there for Christmas,” she said to Herman as she dashed about her home office, writing faxes and making calls all over town. Lena called the women of Candace. She called her lawyers and her banker. She called an organization she knew would be perfect to help run the place. She made calls about
home furnishings at a good price and industrial-sized kitchen appliances at cost.

And Herman just smiled at her excitement.

“Folks sho’ gon’ be able to pay fo’ they Chris’mas this year,” he teased as faxes came into the house from plumbers and carpenters and electricians with estimates and plans.

Lena laughed, too. “Daddy used to say, ’Money make iron float!’ Shoot, Herman, what else is it good for but spending?”

The shelter was the first thing she had been truly interested in outside of Herman and her own property in almost a year, and the first thing having to do with the folks in Mulberry since she had stormed out of town the weekend after Thanksgiving.

It did his heart good to see her flurrying about happily and efficiently making plans and phone calls and faxes because she wanted to and not because she felt she had to. She brought the papers and plans to bed with her along with snacks for the both of them. Leaning back on Herman like a strong backrest and sitting happily between his legs, they sketched out plans for the house on Forest Avenue, shared their thoughts, figured on her laptop and his adding machine and wrote in their journals late into the night.

Finally, Herman, sounding like Jonah, would say, “All right, now, ain’t it ’bout past yo’ bedtime, baby?”

“One more minute, Herman, one more minute,” she would plead. She knew he loved to hear her beg.

“Uh-uh, Lena, baby, I don’t need no sleep. But you do! ’Specially now you doin’ again.”

Then, he would cut out the power to everything in the room, even the fire burning low in the hearth, plunging the room into darkness and quiet and startling Lena to shivers and giggles. She could not see him, but she could feel him getting closer and closer on the bed. Like a warm mist, he slipped around her, enveloping her until she fell asleep.

Getting the house ready for its new residents, buying furniture,
picking up a couple of her children on the street to go pick out paint colors and wallpaper, made Lena feel like a mama. The last of the McPherson clan was mothering and sheltering in a way she thought she would never get to do.

She and her children—proud and happy to have a permanent address—decided to name the shelter “455 Forest Avenue.”

The house had stood empty for nearly six years.

A couple of months after Jonah’s and Nellie’s deaths, when Lena realized that her life was pulling her more and more toward her own house out by the river, she had tried to rent 455 Forest Avenue. But even the new couple, their four children, one dog and two birds didn’t last a month.

Mrs. Robinson came to Lena after two weeks and said plainly, “Ms. McPherson, we can’t stay in that house.”

Lena immediately understood the look of controlled panic in the woman’s eyes. She had felt that way some nights herself as a youngster waiting for God knew what to come to her in her sleep, to lead her down dangerous paths in the waking hour, to pounce on her whenever.

It seemed so wasteful to have a beautiful house standing empty when so many people yearned for shelter, but she and the other three families who tried to live there soon discovered that the house only wanted Lena.

Now, as Lena made plans for the runaway shelter, she didn’t worry once about the physical, mental or spiritual safety of the young people who would live there. Four fifty-five Forest Avenue seemed to welcome and accept the teenagers in a way it had never done before.

The young folks filled the six second-floor bedrooms. And the construction crew created six more private rooms in the basement. The kids complained when they moved the big heavy pool table out and built the rooms and two baths there. But Lena gave the pool table to St. Martin de Porres for its rec room and teased, “If ya’ll want to play pool, take your little asses to church.”

The first time Lena entered the house after the young folks, supervisor and counselor had moved in, she just stood in the warm foyer of the house, threw her head back and laughed. She breathed in the new life that ran through the house, from the second floor to the first, down to the remodeled basement, and up to the unfinished studios in the attic

The only demons in the house seemed to be the two-legged kind who raced up and down the stairs two at a time.

“Hey, Lena,” they called as they passed, “nice house.”

It
was
a nice house.

The children had already put their stamp on everything. Lena noticed that the beautiful hat and coat rack she had bought for the wall near the door was loaded with every kind of coat and wrap imaginable. And one of the children—probably Damon, who prided himself on his muscles—had brought in enough wood for the two fireplaces to last the final two months of winter.

The young people used the official front door of the house that her family never used. She saw their heavy shoes and boots, caked with ice and slush, dumped outside the door on the porch like forgotten playmates.

Demons don’t stand a chance in
this house
, Lena thought as she heard an altercation over creative differences break out in the music room. Lena had added a synthesizer to the baby grand piano, and the enlarged music room became the most popular room in the house.

In the big yellow kitchen, next to a schedule of house duties, the young folks had hung coffee mugs on the wall near the stove with a resident’s name on each cup. When she saw a large copper-colored mug with “LENA” written on it, Lena felt as if she had been given a kindergartner’s handmade Mother’s Day card.

“Now you can come have your tea with us some mornings,” little Chiquita said when she saw Lena studying the cup and fighting back tears.

Lena found she had to work hard not to let the shelter for teenagers
take over her life. But with Herman waiting for her back out by the river, there was only so much time she was going to put into anything else.

Lena tried to keep everything as low-key as possible, but the shelter was big news in Mulberry. And there was plenty of talk. Four or five folks who hadn’t learned their lesson at Thanksgiving felt called upon to comment.

“What?! You mean to tell me that she gon’ turn that beautiful house over to some dirty homeless people!??”

“Not even grown homeless people, I hear. Teenagers!”

“That’s what I hear.”

“Oh, you got to have heard wrong.”

“I don’t think so. I heard it from someone who saw the papers turning the house over to ’the children of Mulberry.’”

“Giving it to the homeless children!!!??”

“Homeless and runaway teenagers.”

“Teenagers??! Shit, that’s worse. Well, I be.”

“Can’t get over it, can you? I feel the same way. And I’m sitting up here can’t afford to pay my apartment rent month to month, and she going ’round giving big old beautiful houses away to the homeless, of all people.”

“Hell, those folks—and teenagers, too—don’t know nothing ’bout taking care of no house like
that!
And she know it.”

“Lord, I can just imagine what that place gon’ look like in two or three months.”

“My people. My people.”

“Lena McPherson must a’ lost her mind.”

“Jonah and Nellie, especially Nellie, must be turning over in their graves.”

Everybody was silent for a moment realizing that Jonah and Nellie had no graves.

“Well, ya’ll know what I mean.”

“Lena McPherson just giving away her inheritance. And how many a’ us got one of those?”

Lena could hear them just as well and just as clearly. But she didn’t let it bother her now. She knew it was just people being human, like Herman said. And after a while, she was able just to tune the voices out.

Being with Herman for almost a year had sharpened Lena’s senses to a right sharp edge. Conversations being conducted in the next county came through to Lena’s senses now just as clearly as radio signals. It had taken her a while to learn to filter out the extraneous talk and thoughts and feelings that swirled around her. Herman had helped a bit at first to straighten out the din in her head.

“Ya hear
that
, Lena?” he’d ask, forcing her to block out all other sounds except the snatch of conversation he was talking about. He even helped her to hear and heed her own voice when it spoke in her head.

Herman was such a blessing to her.

He said things that made her shiver with love and lust for him. Sometimes, there was an element of sadness mixed in, too.

“I love you so much, Lena,” he would say out of the blue. “If you had any children, I’d love them, too.”

It made Lena want to weep. Just thinking about children and her age and the changes even Herman with his prodigious powers didn’t seem able to stop, made her want to question why she was put on this earth.

God, I can’t believe I just let my line end here, she would think. My DNA ends when I die. Oh, God, what kind of little foolish fool was I not to have a child.

It was what she had thought when she examined the semen at the tip of Herman’s penis. She had imagined that she could actually see the sperm, quick and alive, darting about searching for a fertile egg.

“Lena, baby, don’t worry ’bout the mule goin’ blind. Just hold him in the road,” Herman would tell her.

She always winced a bit at the statement. Not because she resented him gently chastising her for worrying needlessly—she didn’t
do too much of that anymore—but because the old saying conjured up pictures of Herman’s accident and death.

As they lay quietly together after lovemaking, Lena couldn’t resist reaching out and running the tips of her fingers over the faint scar and indentation on the side of Herman’s head where the mule’s hooves had landed. She would lean over and kiss the mark hoping to heal it and make it better the way she would whenever children came to her with their scrapes, cuts, bruises, boo-boos and hurt feelings.

Lena said the same soothing, healing things as she rubbed and kissed the little grimy, swollen spot: “Aw, she hurt herself” or “Aw, he got a
bad cut
here” or “Aw, they don’t love her like they should. They don’t give her
nearly
enough attention. She’s hurt for real. Come here, sugar.” “Heck, I might just have to get in my car and take this baby to St. Luke’s Hospital.”

Most of the children had never heard of the private black hospital where Lena and her brothers were born, but they could tell from their Auntie Lena’s voice that it must be a special place.

The small children loved it, snuggling in closer and closer to Lena’s body, feeling better and better, throwing a look that said, “See, this is how you supposed to make it better. Auntie Lena know.”

Lena was one of those on earth who understood that it was as bad to be a childless mother as a motherless child. Whenever her children on the street would ask when she planned to have some children of her own, Chiquita, one of Lena’s favorite children, would always pipe up, “You can be my mama anytime, Miss Mac I’ll be your little girl.” Chiquita didn’t care that someone among her cohorts would always chide, “Big old rusty girl like you don’t
need
no mama no more.”

Lena thought many times it was a wonder that children liked her at all. Folks made her sound like such a fussy old maid.

“Now, Lena ain’t got no children, don’t be going over there getting on her nerves.”

Or “Child, you got any idea how much that dress Lena got on
cost??!! Don’t be getting your old dirty hands all over her. Lena don’t want those old sticky kisses!”

Or “Naw, you can’t go home with Auntie Lena for the night. She ain’t got no children. Messing up her house. Going in her refrigerator a million times. Naw, stay your butt home.”