Tina Mcelroy Ansa (57 page)

She just ran from the empty church sobbing and feeling more barren than when Herman had said, “I gots to go, baby.”

By the time she got onto U.S. 90 heading back home around dusk, it was raining so hard she could barely see the road. And when she
could
see the road, she could hardly keep her little car on it because the wind had whipped up to a lashing velocity.

Lena could tell the river’s waters had begun to rise. As she drove over her wooden bridge, she noted that it was nearly swamped. For the first time in fifteen years, the span didn’t feel all that secure.

“This is a
bad storm,”
Lena muttered to herself.

Lena’s anger at the townspeople and the town at the end of the year had stirred up some trouble in nature. But her devastation at Herman’s leaving was causing real destruction. Lena had cried a river of tears. The flooding of the Ocawatchee proved that. Even her land seemed in danger from the swelling torrent.

She heard Herman’s voice. Not the way she had heard it when he was with her, but now only as a memory from far away.

It was what he had said to her before he began disappearing.

“You can’t be the hand
everybody
fan wid, Lena. Then, you ain’t nothin’ fo’ you’se’f. Shoot, everybody want you. You special,” and then he had laughed at his understatement.

“Everybody want some a’ you, want
you!
Shoot, baby, if I had my way, it’d just be you and me and a couple of those fine horses you got fo’ eternity. That’s what
I want.
But hey, as they say over on my side—and the other side is my place, baby, I do know that—people in hell want ice water. You don’t always get what ya want and most of the time, you ain’t s’posed to.”

Lena cried and carried on for most of the evening, pacing around her house, dark from the storm that was raging like a crazy person outside. Lena carried on until she was sick of herself.

When she did finally fall across the bed, exhausted, disheartened
and lonely, it was early evening, but Lena felt as if she had not rested in years. The fury of the storm raged outside, and she instinctively reached to the bottom of the bed for one of her grandmother’s heavy quilts. When her fingers touched the thin voile swatch at one end, she felt a spark of comfort spread through her body. She pulled the quilt up to her chin, wrapped it about her body and cradled one end in her arms like a baby.

She fell asleep hearing:

W
hen Lena awoke a few hours later in the night, she looked on Herman’s empty side of the bed and began to weep onto her soft blue pillowcase. She could still feel the space he took up inside her, like an echo of his penis, and its absence left a dull ache.

Lena thought at first that sorrow must have roused her, but then she heard a strange sound. She did not think it was the storm, even though it was raging outside. Then, she heard it again. The sound was coming from the stables.

“Oh, God. Keba!” she said, and threw the covers back. “The foal is coming. It’s time.”

She reached over to turn on the light in the darkened house, and with the click-click sound, she realized the storm had knocked the power out. She reached for the phone to call the vet, but there was no dial tone.

Lena had slept in her underwear, socks and shirt. She grabbed her jeans from the bottom of the bed where she had tossed them and
shook her braids around her neck to clear her head. She felt as if her braids were standing around her head every which a way.

“Well, damn, nothing but static,” she muttered as she slammed shut her small cellular phone. She pulled on her jeans and grabbed the flashlight Herman kept in the folds of the handmade quilt hanging from the table next to her bed.

As she ran through the house, she heard the storm moving across her land, sailing down her river, striding into her yard. Looking out the windows and doors, Lena could not tell if the storm was tall and thin, slicing through the woods and the town, or if it was wide and low, barreling through and flattening everything in its path. But she knew it was doing some damage.

“My God, where did this storm come from? It’s gotten so bad.”

When she got to the Great Jonah Room, she could see that the storm was no longer just raging outside. It was now in her house. She must have left the big French doors unlatched because the wind and rain had blown them open and swirled through the room soaking and upending everything all the way to the big stone fireplace.

Water was everywhere. Flowerpots and vases, books and papers were strewn all over the floor. Her silk-covered chaise longue was tipped over and halfway across the room. Quilts and rugs were ripped from the walls along with Lena’s prized photograph of her Grandmama and Granddaddy Walter on their wedding trip.

It took her a while battling against galelike winds, but she managed to close the doors. Then, she struggled through the mess to the kitchen. She started to buzz James Petersen on the intercom but remembered all the power was out. Instead, she grabbed a lantern, took a set of keys from the wall inside the pantry and headed for the back door.

Her head was throbbing as she put on her heavy khaki rain slicker hanging in the laundry room. And her stomach was upset. She tried not to pay any attention to the empty peg where Herman’s slicker had hung before he and it disappeared. She knew she would not have the
strength to go on if she started thinking about her man, her friend, her lover … gone.

At the door, she pushed her pants legs into her boots and opened the portal to a raging tempest. Lena, who had come through the Flood of ’94 unscathed, was awestruck by the power of this spring storm. As she ran to the garage, tree limbs crashed down around her. Pieces of loose fencing whizzed past her head. In a flash of lightning, she saw a huge branch fall within feet of her stone grotto to her mother and mothers. She realized that she had been praying since she awoke. All the while, she could hear Keba whinnying and crying in the stables above the babel of the storm.

She breathed a deep sigh of relief when she finally sat safely behind the wheel of her sturdy old Wagoneer.

“I’ll just get James Petersen to drive into town and get the vet. And I’ll stay here with the horses. Keba’ll be okay. She’ll be okay,” she reassured herself as she made her way down the debris-cluttered road. Fallen limbs and uprooted bushes were everywhere.

She had a funny feeling and slammed on the brakes so hard she bucked in her seat. Two seconds later, a tall Georgia pine tree came crashing down in her path just inches ahead of the Wagoneer’s front bumper. And there was no driving around it.

Lena was grateful she was only a few hundred yards from James Petersen’s house.

He met her at the door.

“We can’t go nowhere for now, Lena,” he informed her as he took her wet things and led her to the gas heater logs. “I heard a big crash a couple of hours ago and drove down to the bridge. It’s gone, Lena. Washed away, just like that.”

“You mean to tell me our bridge is gone?!!” Lena was astonished. Even with the force of the winds and rain she had just faced, she could not imagine one of her structures being destroyed by the elements of nature.

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“James Petersen, you mean we completely cut off?”

“Uh-huh. And the water is rising fast, not like the last time. This look different, Lena. Real different. I’m gon’ stay down this way and keep an eye on the waters.”

Lena thought her heart would leap from her chest.

“James Petersen, I think Keba’s having her colt right now. We got to get a vet out here! Now!”

“Ain’t gon’ be able to do it, Lena. Even if we could get a message to Dr. Diehl, she couldn’t get out here with the bridge out.”

“Oh, God, what we gon’ do?”

“We ain’t gonna do nothing. I’mo stay here like I say and watch this water. If it starts rising any more, we gon’ have to move to higher ground, fast! You
and
your man up at the house.”

“Oh, Jesus, so it’s just me and Keba,” she muttered to herself.

“You hear me, Lena? We may have to move
fast!
Now, when it happen, when I say so, I don’t want no Lena talk, I want all us to move to safety. You hear me, Lena?”

But Lena was thinking about Keba having her baby all alone up in the stables. She knew Baby and Goldie were freaked out by the storm, too. She grabbed her slicker and hat and headed out the door before James Petersen could stop her.

“I’ll be at the stables, James Petersen!” she shouted as she headed back down the road to her Wagoneer.

She had to take it slow and easy, but she was able to turn the four-wheel vehicle around and drive all the way back to the pecan trees by the stables. Two of the tall trees had toppled over into the clearing where she usually parked her car.

The storm was striding the earth with a vengeance. Ahead, Lena could see lightning striking the surface of the Ocawatchee River, sending up sparks and electricity into the stormy night air. She had never seen so many lightning strikes. Thunder crackled all around her as she climbed down from the high seat of the big Jeep and headed for the stables.

She could hear Keba kicking and whinnying inside, and she rushed on to the wide swinging doors of the structure, cracking the stormy darkness ahead with the beam from her big flashlight.

Keba was already lying on her side in the pile of new clean straw that Herman had laid the day before. Lena had watched him do it. Keba lay with her head up listening and crying. Lena stopped right inside the door and said a little prayer.

“Help me, Lord. Help me, Herman.”

Then, lighting the battery-powered lantern she had brought with her, she went on inside toward the whining horse.

“Hey, Keba, girl, how’s it goin’?” she said, trying to sound upbeat and assured like Herman. “Looks like that time, don’t it, girl? Well, it’s going to be just fine. Better. I’m here and your baby’s almost here. And that’s the truth, period.”

Lena put down the lantern and pulled off her rain gear and tossed it in a corner. She looked just like Herman as she rolled up her shirtsleeves and knelt down beside the big struggling mare. When their gazes met, Lena was sure she saw terror in Keba’s huge bulging eyes.

Right then Keba’s water broke, sending torrents of blood and fluid flooding the brick floor where Lena knelt.

She turned from the prostrate mare and said to herself, “Lord have mercy, Herman. I can’t believe you left me with this mess on my hands.”

Then, she turned back to the task at hand and went to work examining the braying animal, pulling some blankets down from the shelves behind her, speaking soothingly to the mare. It was a daunting task.

Shit, I can’t do this, she thought five or six times. Her heart was racing so.

“Oh, Keba, I don’t want to let you down,” she said to the struggling mother. “But I don’t think I can do this. I don’t think I could do this on a
good day
, Keba, and this sho’ ain’t no good day.”

Lena thought of her mother and her grandmother and her
Grandies and all the women who had been through this ordeal to bring a child into the world. “Oh, Mama in heaven, help me! Help your child!” she cried. “Mary,
you
had a baby in a stable. Help me!”

As she knelt in Keba’s blood and water, Lena heard something heavy slam against the roof of the stables, and the thought crossed her mind, “Maybe, if I calm down some, this storm will do the same thing.”

She took deep slow breaths, and placing her hand on her heart, she willed it to slow down and stop ramming against her chest.

The wind did seem to settle down a bit outside, and she tried to calm herself further by recalling Jesus in raising the little daughter of Jairus from the dead. We don’t need hysterics and lamentations here. We need faith. Believe!

Then, she thought of Herman. Herman sitting in a field of wild gladioli covered with yellow sulfur butterflies. Herman lying naked next to her in bed with his hand over her matchbox. Herman astride Goldie exploring her land. Herman astride her.

Each image of the man she loved rent her heart but also calmed and centered her. Each time she saw him in her head, all big and strong and sexy, all up and through her property and her house and her soul for the last year, she recalled his love and his wisdom and his gentleness. Surveying the birth scene before her in the barn, she repeated, “Don’t worry ’bout the mule goin’ blind, Lena, just hold him in the road.”

So, that’s what she did. She called on all her powers of faith and belief and love and gratitude and did the work before her. She called on all that Herman had told her and taught her and shown her since he had shown up a year before and concentrated on Keba and her predicament.

Then, like a breeze, Herman was right there at her shoulder. She thought she could feel the heat of his breath on her neck inside her shirt collar.

“Take it easy, Lena, baby, take it easy,” his voice whispered in her ear. Then, “Shoot, Lena, you can do
this.
Now, you gon’ hafta get her
started, but don’t you worry, ’cause then, Keba gon’ take over and yo’ job be almost finished.”

The sound of Herman’s old country voice in her ear, the feel of his ghostly breath on her neck made her very heart melt.

Lena took a deep breath and turned to get a good look at him. He was there! He was still wearing his light green shirt and old work pants. He had his old black boots on. And his beat-up old hat was set back far on his head. He was just a vapor, but it was enough for her.

“Oh, God, Herman, I’m so glad you’re here,” Lena whispered, nearly breaking down on the stable floor.

“Lena, baby, I’mo
always
be here fo’ ya. I tol’ ya that.”

Then, Herman smiled at Lena and turned his ghostly attention back to the horse. Keba seemed sedated by Herman’s voice.

“Come on, Keba, it’s gon’ be all right,” he said. “Everybody’s here that needs to be here.”