Tina Mcelroy Ansa (54 page)

Even well into her forties, Lena had still felt she had time to have a child, to get pregnant, grow large, eat too much, and deliver a pretty little healthy baby girl.

Now, on the cusp of menopause, Lena looked at her flat unmarked stomach in the mirror and felt remorse, shame, guilt at not having brought her own sweet little girl into the world. Lena could see her fat little bottom and her cute little handmade dresses that she would create on her mother’s old Singer sewing machine.

Lena could hear herself say, “Hold still, baby, just one more minute so Mama can get this hem straight.”

“Didn’t you ever want no children, Lena?” Herman had asked her back in September as they lay in a shower of leaves under the chinaberry tree.

Lying next to the man she loved more than life itself, whose child she would gladly die to bring into this world, the question stung her to the quick, bringing sharp salty tears to her eyes.

Herman looked truly baffled at her reaction and took Lena in his arms before her tears had a chance to overflow down her face.

“Oh, baby, don’t ya weep,” he soothed her as he rocked her on the grass against his solid chest.

“Every ’oman ain’t got ta have a baby out a’ her own body,” Herman said casually, looking down at Lena’s wiggling feet.

“How many babies have you had out a’ your own body, Herman?” she asked tightly.

Lena felt like Sarah speaking to Abraham, sitting there with her old self talking to Herman with his near-140-year-old self about having babies.

“Well, baby, you ain’t got to have a baby out yo’ own body to know how it feel to have a baby, to be a mama or a papa.”

Lena had heard that platitude so many times that she wanted to spit at the sound of it coming out of Herman’s mouth. Herman heard her suck her teeth.

“Lena, one a’ the reasons my pa run off to Flor’da was so he wouldn’t have to spill his seed all over the place, wherever somebody told him to. He taught me and my brothers to be careful ’bout where we planted our seed ’cause that was our legacy to the world. And we couldn’t just plant it. We had to cul’ivate it and care for it, too.”

He paused and looked at her.

“I don’t mean to be just givin’ you words, Lena. I know it’s a rock in yo’ heart, not havin’ no children of yo’ own, Lena, baby. And I ain’t pretendin’ I knows how ya feel. I ain’t no ’oman.

“I just want ya to know I feels wi’ ya.”

Lena felt his empathy and love flood over her as if he had just made her come.

“Lena, baby, the end of yo’ menses ain’t nothin’t’ weep ’bout,” Herman said. “It’s a might powerful time when a ’oman’s menses, monthly cycle, ceases. Almost as powerful as when they start. More powerful, really, ’cause you know so much more then.”

Lena just sniffled. Herman kept talking.

“Shoot, all those womens you got altars to ’round here. Most of they menses had stopped when they did they best work. And see how powerful they was.”

As with so many women, menopause just seemed to sneak up on Lena.

Miss Naomi, who continued to come to The Place long after most of her cohorts were in nursing homes and graveyards, told Lena early one morning over breakfast at the front of the grill how menopause sneaked up on
her.

“Lena, I had just had me a
good
piece of tail the week before, so when my period was late, I said, ’Lord, you mean to tell me you let me get this far in life,’ I may have even been close to fifty, ’and here I come up pregnant? Lord, ham mercy.’

“When I went to the doctor’s office, he laughed right in my face.”

Lena, premenopausal, on the cusp of the symptoms of irritability, mood swings, missed periods and hot flashes for a couple of years, had felt as if life had laughed in her face.

But she had Herman, and now she had her children to care for. She was happy.

I
n creating the shelter for her children, Lena gradually moved happily back into the life of the town, and gradually, the town welcomed her back in.

Nothing big, nothing intrusive, nothing that she didn’t want to do. She did not ever intend for Mulberry or anything else except Herman to swallow her up again.

Her love notes at Christmas had softened so many hearts and sparked so many tears that forgiveness could not be stopped. They had hurt her feelings, but she had forgiven them. She had hurt their feelings, and they had forgiven her.

As February turned into spring, so much was forgotten and forgiven. March came in like a lamb, warm and gentle long before anyone in Middle Georgia expected it to be.

Keba was so round and swollen and heavy with foal that she could barely move herself out of the stables and into the sunshine in the exercise area. But Baby and Goldie were actually cavorting in the
pastures and meadows around Lena’s house in the early balmy weather every chance they got.

Lena and Herman, too. They went for morning walks, watching the wind move through the fields of tall wildflowers like a solid creature, bending down swaths of grass. They’d climb up on the fence to watch Baby and Goldie frolic and roll around in the clover. Then, Lena or Herman would climb down and go back to the stables to visit Keba.

“Life follow life, Lena,” Herman said one day as he patted Keba’s fecund stomach. “It’s gon’ be excitin’ when this here colt decide to come. Life foliowin’ life.”

Then, Herman and Lena went on in the house and sat at the table in the kitchen, drinking glasses of his favorite banana-orange juice.

Herman always insisted that they clink their glasses together in a toast.

“We need to mark this moment a’ bein’ together, Lena, and give thanks fo’ it,” he’d say.

It wasn’t anything formal like a toast at a wedding reception. But it was just as heartfelt.

“To us,” Herman would say with his eyes shining.

If they were outside, he would pour a splash of his drink on the ground and add, “Fo’ all the brothers and sisters who went down.”

They were a couple, a real couple, even though one of them was a ghost. They sat there like an old married couple, their feet touching under the table, and discussed the day, what they were going to do in the yard and on the grounds, how Keba was coming along with her pregnancy, what the vet said when she came out to see her, what things were like in the settlement when he was a child.

In February, Lena and Herman made love every single day. Lena kept count. He just could not seem to get enough of her. In the night, she would stir to feel Herman pulling her body to his. Then, all through March, with winter’s back completely broken, they lay in bed under the stars and snuggled and loved each other tenderly.

Some nights, he couldn’t seem to hold her close enough. And she’d have to say, “Herman, I can’t hardly breathe.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, baby,” he would say. But he’d have to give her one more squeeze before he let her go.

Lena had let go of a few things herself. She remained a silent partner in The Place, but she sold Candace outright to the women through some creative financing.

Relinquishing those acquisitions and their control felt so good and freeing, Lena decided to turn some other things loose. She packed up Nellie’s antique fountain pens each in a long narrow wooden or velvet pen box and wrapped them up in stiff, shiny forest-green paper sandwich style like something from Tiffany, so each gift-wrapped package seemed to spring open the moment someone pulled the end of the pale green grosgrain-ribbon bow.

Months before graduation, she gave a pen to a graduating Mulberry girl to take off with her to college or a job or life. She tucked a little check in there, too. Then, she set up a fund to continue the tradition.

With the vast majority of her contemporary clothes out in the world on other black women’s backs doing some good, she took a look at the beautiful vintage clothes that had belonged to her mother, Mrs. Williams, Miss Zimmie and her other Grandies. She funded a new wing of a local black museum and set up a permanent exhibit called “Women of Color in Mulberry,” that preserved and cared for the clothes while allowing the public to enjoy them.

“Right is right,” Lena said at the exhibit opening.

So often since her parents died, she had wondered what she was going to do with the pens and so much else she had when she herself died. Now Lena felt like Oseola McCarty, a washerwoman in Mississippi, who never married and never had a child. She had saved $150,000 over her lifetime and gave it all to a scholarship fund for local black students when she was eighty-three years of age.

“For the children,” the newspaper article had quoted Miss Oseola.

Now, Lena felt so much like a mother she wanted to cry.

When Lena and Herman surveyed her linens and china and flatware and crystal, they looked like a bride and groom checking out their booty. Lena had never noticed before that folks had been giving her gifts every year as if she were getting married. But she was not in the business of collecting, she was lightening her load.

New and recent brides in Mulberry weren’t the only recipients of gifts from her storerooms. Folks starting households of all kinds received beautiful never-used items that would become heirlooms in their families.

It felt good for Lena to give and to forgive.

Herman tried to make it sound like a casual question as they walked in late March among the budding fruit trees, but Lena’s head snapped up when he spoke:

“Hey, Lena, baby, what you want to do with yo’se’f?”

She had turned loose so much of her business holdings and possessions she realized that for the first time since she went away to college, she was free to choose what she wanted to do with her life.

She didn’t have to ponder Herman’s question.

“Oh, keep my legs wrapped around you for the rest of eternity.”

And that is just what she planned to do.

W
hen Lena woke in her big cozy bed with the huge bentwood headboard, she reached for Herman, but he wasn’t there. It was the anniversary of his coming to her, and, although Herman did not mark too many earth days, Lena suspected he was around somewhere preparing a surprise for her this April morning.

For days, Lena had known something was up. From the way Herman had been going around the property, shoring things up, digging up new garden space, leaving his Herman touch just about everywhere inside and out, Lena knew he had a surprise for her.

She rolled over into the gaping hole her man’s absence left in his side of her wide bed and rubbed her face into his sheets to inhale the scent of him.

“Well, okay,” Lena said as if she had just gotten a much-needed fix.

The night before, she had played with him and tickled him, teased and seduced him, but all they had ended up doing for a while was holding each other and cooing to each other of their love, with Lena’s
pussy singing strains from “He Called Me Baby, Baby All Night Long” while mourning doves cooed on the edge of the skylight over their bed.

But Lena wanted to do more than kiss and touch.

When she had had all the stroking she could stand without exploding, she stretched in Herman’s arms, kissed him and, pulling him into her arms, whispered, “Come on, Herman, I want you inside a’ me.”

He chuckled at Lena’s insistence and said, “Proud to oblige, Miss Lena.” Then, he proceeded to love her as flesh, as smoke, as heat, as steam, as rough hide.

In the dark morning hours under the covers, Lena murmured, “Oh, Herman, you always know what to do for me.”

“Yo’ pleasure is my pleasure,” he assured her. And he made it sound like the words to a song.

Herman’s guitar box was still leaning against the silk-covered mauve ottoman to her big easy chair by the outside doors where he had left it the night before. She had sat inside because the night air had been chilly to her, even after Herman had thrown his cashmere blanket over her legs. But he had stood on the screened porch, serenading her while she dozed.

“I can’t seem to get enough a’ this night air,” he explained as he came inside.

He picked Lena up in his arms as she came awake with an “uhhhmmm.”

“It’s just me, baby. Herman,” he said, lifting her over to the bed and gently placing her down among the lightweight comforters and her grandmama’s quilt.

This morning she put on his favorite red and orange silk robe and went in the bathroom to splash cold water on her face. Then, she went barefoot in search of Herman in the darkened morning. As she passed through the pool room, she looked up and smiled at the stars over her. She recognized the Virgin right away and thought, I’ll have to remember to thank Herman for showing me so much.

He was standing by the kitchen table looking out the back window at the stables and the river, drinking a cup of day-old coffee. She saw he had made her a pot of tea—chamomile, probably, she thought—and thrown a heavy yellow linen napkin over it to keep it warm. He was so deep in thought that Lena went to the counter and poured herself a steaming cup of the tea without saying a word. She took two or three sips, but she could not place the variety. She took another small taste, then put the cup and saucer down with the thought, That tastes odd.

Herman still had not moved.

She looked over his shoulder from where she stood and could see Venus rising in the dark morning sky. That’s what Herman was looking at, she thought.

She started to say, “I’ll make you a fresh pot of coffee, Herman,” but he was so still looking out the window with his big red mug in his hand that Lena hesitated to disturb him.

But the longer he stood there in the morning silence, with his back to her, the more disturbed
she
became.

Her mouth was growing dry, and she felt a little dizzy.

Lena’s eyes suddenly started filling with tears at the sight of his back. He was wearing the same shirt and pants he had worn when she first saw him in her bathroom.

Slowly, she moved toward him.

He felt her approaching and without turning around, he spoke. “I gots to go, baby.”