River, cross my heart

by Clarke, Breena

  The streets of Georgetown were the prettiest streets of any in Washington city, maybe the prettiest streets anywhere! Johnnie Mae was convinced of this though she had nothing to compare them to. All she remembered of her hometown in North Carolina was all that there was to it: a collection oi ramshackle buildings connected by a dirt track. But Georgetown—pretty trees, pretty houses! These must be the loveliest, most graceful thoroughfares of any place in the world. And loveliest of all being when the Fontarellis made their rounds lighting all of Georgetown's gas street lamps.

  Clara used to say that she thought the Fontarellis had the responsibility for all the lights in the world. But what they actually had was the concession for Georgetown. The beefy, dark-haired sons and grandsons of Angelo Fontarelli turned on the streetlights at dusk and turned them off at dawn throughout Georgetown. The Fontarellis hired a few colored boys to work for them in Bell's Court and Poplar Alley, but they jealously guarded the rest of their concession. Street by street, lamp by lamp, the big-thighed Fontarellis hooked the pull chains on the gas lamps with long poles. When a pilot was out, they shimmied up like monkeys onto the narrow platforms on the lamps and relit the pilots with a match. Lamplighting time was the signal for the small children to go

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  inside from play, and groups of children on every block would dance along ahead of the Fontarellis to steal a few more minutes outside.

  The occupants of the big fancy houses with elegant gas porch lamps on their porticoes would call to one of the roving colored boys at dusk and toss him a penny to light their lamps.

  Johnnie Mae had seen Washington's streets and they were nowhere near as pretty as Georgetown's. Maybe it was the people. The people of Georgetown were a prettier-looking bunch, she thought. On her way home from Ann-Martha's, Johnnie Mae stopped in front of a large picture window on R Street to gaze at a woman playing a grand piano. She watched and listened. The music floated out the window and filled the street. The woman's body seemed to rise out of the piano bench like a sapling.

  Johnnie Mae stepped forward to get a closer look at the woman's hands. She had once chuckled conspiratorially with Papa as he teased Mama about her hands. "You got hands like a white woman, Alice, all soft and smallish. You must don't do any kind of work. You must be sittin' down on your biscuits rockin' and fannin' all day."

  Mama laughed. "You ought to take a look at my feet. You'll lose ten years off your life at the sight of them. As little sitting as I do between work and home, my biscuits never touch a seat."

  Papa's look shifted when she said this. His eyes rolled away from Johnnie Mae and the conspiracy shifted. Mama's eyes likewise rolled backward over her left shoulder. Johnnie Mae saw these looks pass and dropped her gaze to the floor. "I got feathers for you," Papa said in a quiet voice.

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  What did a white woman's hands look like? Sorting through grown people's conversation and pulling together nuance, innuendo, and gossip, a picture emerged in Johnnie Mae's mind of something to put yourself up against, something small, white, and lissome. From where she stood on the sidewalk, the skin on the woman's hands looked like the small porcelain bisque figurines on Alexis St. Pierre's mantel.

  Folks always say, "You come in this world alone, and you must leave it alone." They ought to know better. Because it isn't so. It's not that way at all. The child comes to life very much attached and stays attached and is mired all its life in a soup of relations. This child struggles to be born. It comes out pushing and pulling with the cord attached and still holding on way up. The child has to pull and push and make a place for itself in and among all the people that are already here.

  When they pulled Clara's body out of the Potomac it didn't look at all like the corpses Willie had seen, except that it was unmoving. The skin was mottled, not smooth and sweet like Little Mama's or even shrunken away and sagging like Big Mama's.

  Willie's pet name for Clara was Little Mama, denoting a thing in her nature that was small, birdlike, and vulnerable. Clara was Willie's second Little Mama. His first Little Mama had raised Willie. She was his sister, Merle, two years older than him, who died of cholera in the year oi the big epidemic.

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  From the beginning, Willie had felt a quality of awe in Clara's presence because she was so much like Merle. Well before she'd got of an age to favor anyone, he knew she was Merle come again. There was a quality to her breath, a scent he'd smelled the first time he held her, that was like Merle's. He seldom talked oi these feelings with Alice, who was so protective of the child. Once he had said, "She's so like Little Mama, like Merle, like my sister." Alice had nodded and said, "Do you think so?"

  Early in the marriage, Alice had been concerned about Willie's feelings for Merle. Someone told Alice the story of how Willie had been found the morning after Merle died with his head resting on her breast. Merle's white shift was crushed in his fist. Folks say it's not good for a person to rest their head on a dead person's chest. If you do you can never be free of them. They'll carry a bit o{ your spirit away with them. Of course, some folks so love their people that they want to be carried away with them and just as surely they put their head onto the dead's chest and pray to go along. That's what Willie had done. So devastated to be left again, he'd begged Merle to take him too. He got so mad with her still body that he punched her and twisted her shift in his hands. But Merle didn't move a muscle. Willie lay his head on her chest and fell to sleep. Drifting off, he was sure she stroked his brow and said, "Willie, Willie, Willie, Bab Bruh."

  Neighbors came by in the morning and pried him loose from her. Mai Packing finally had to break Merle's arm at the elbow to free Willie's head. Ma Tibo, an old crone who had a reputation for conjuring, said Willie would be tormented for-ever. She said he'd always be dreaming of Merle because she'd died with her hands wrapped around him.

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  In Clara's first winter she had been so sick — the croup was bad that year—that Alice and Willie despaired of keeping her. The night of their worst fear for the child's life, Alice had stood up from the bedside with a look and said, "Now is the time — now. If you've got a prayer in you, it's time to pray." Willie had knelt by Clara's bed with one knee down and the other up — not wanting to crouch below the side of the bed, not wanting to leave the sight of Clara's small brown face in so much billowing white covers. She looked for all the world like the photograph of Merle they'd taken at her laying-out in Big Mama's shack.

  Willie had only that one photograph of Merle. Her face was perfectly composed, as in sleep. Maybe there was a jinx on his seed that made his womenfolk weak and slippery and liable to slip away? He'd come to think oi women like little chicks, soft and fragile, not able to stand much handling. Big as Big Mama had once been, she had shrunk to a chick and finally slipped away. Then Little Mama lay down one day, saying, "It's just a little sickenin'." She never got up. She shrunk to a chick and slipped away like Big Mama.

  With Clara gone, Willie's heart had become a barn with several stalls: Big Mama, Little Mama, and now little Clara. Thoughts about any one oi them gave him a pinging feeling in the chest. There was a sore place there you could practically put your finger on.

  Bringing Clara had been easy for Alice compared to bringing Johnnie Mae. With Johnnie Mae it had been painful and frightening. All the bossy women had been around her. The midwife and her stepmother, Flora and Bessie and Lula—all

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  of them had talked shrilly and harshly. Only Lula spoke soothingly, and she had stopped when she got scared at the sight of all the blood. And when the big pain came and had built up and broke over her like a torrent, it made her tremble all through. Her whole body quivered and she had pushed Johnnie Mae nearly all the way out on the one big push. She had felt blood gush from between her legs and the smell and sound and feeling of it sickened her. Compared to that, Clara had slid out.

  What a shock to Alice when Johnn
ie Mae had learned to walk and suddenly was moving away from her mother. It was as if a part of Alices body had suddenly had the power to detach itself from her torso. And Clara had done so, too. Clara had moved away and learned to walk and run. And now she was moved away for good, coming back in waves of feeling and thought.

  The first time Alice drifted into sleep after the drowning, her head lolled on her right shoulder as she sat in a chair in their bedroom. Willie walked the floor, polishing the wooden floorboards with his heels. He looked at his sleeping wife and saw a child's quiescent face. He pitied her that she would wake and recall that her baby was drowned—snatched to the bottom of a river that seemed to care little about what it had taken from them. The river had flowed on despite its transgressions and continued to do so.

  Alice shifted her body slightly in the chair as Willie watched her, and a mewling escaped her lips. She cried in her sleep, and the sight of her and the sound from her wracked him and he sobbed loudly between her whimpers.

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  The pool of women Willie had known was small — Big Mama, Little Mama, Ma Tibo, and some other Evas and Coras and Maes. None was a dimpled woman. Alice was the first woman he'd seen with dimples in her cheeks. Her dimples were the punctuation to her more generous smiles. They were there when she released her lips and cheeks from tight politeness—when she forgot cares or remembered delight.

  Willie liked to place his fingers into the grooves of her dimples. He wore an expression o( surprise often. It was his habit to appear to discover and then express wonderment and delight in the manner he had of lifting his brows and brightening his eyes. So many things surprised him—Alice's dimples for one.

  When three weeks had passed since Clara died, Willie sat on the side o{ the bed, stroking Alice's hand. She lay flat, crossways on the mattress, looking at the ceiling. She had been sitting upright on the side of the bed and had finally, simply, laid herself flat. A tear followed, one more and an-other slowly down her cheeks. She stopped crying as Willie stroked her arm gently, rising higher, going higher up the arm with each downward motion and return. Eventually, he lay down next to her.

  Willie thought of how this lying together gazing into the distance was like it had been with him and Merle. When they were out at Big Mama's cabin after she had died, they would pass the long summer evenings gazing up at the sky and remarking on the stars. They counted breezes and tried to identify the sounds of night creatures. Merle would marvel if she were here now, listening to Georgetown in the black dark. If Merle could hear these sounds—like the ooga, ooga of passing automobiles or the clip-clop of horse hooves on the cobblestone

  streets—she wouldn't know where she was. As tired as they were, Merle and Willie would lie together and talk on into the night. And he could still remember exactly how Merle's voice sounded and how her breath smelled and how she looked to him. He could remember everything about Merle.

  Alice stopped crying. As Willie stroked her, her breathing deepened and the nerves along her spine tingled slowly and gently. Her body remembered a certain pattern of response— his fingers on her arm and her nipples tingling and just be-ginning to harden. His breathing slipped a notch deeper — a reverberant interior rumbling. The reverberation traveled through him to her—through her flesh. Alice began to move softly against the mattress. Willie became urgent quickly. As soon as she quickened and gasped a little, he climbed over top of her and pushed her down into the mushy mattress. The mattress offered no resistance and swallowed them up in its softness.

  When they were done and finished, they lay flat on their backs, eyes turned up to the ceiling. Everyday, ordinary tiredness drained out through their backs and was absorbed by the mattress. Neither was yet sleeping, but Willie knew he would soon be if he continued to lie still. He turned over onto his side and studied Alice's profile. He marveled at how still she was and knew that she was trying not to stir the bed. She was trying to let him know she didn't want any more lovemaking. But a man can always let his wants be known, and a good wife like Alice would let him do it as long as he was kind and gentle. He lifted his hand quietly and rubbed it over her body, more like a doctor checking for infirmity than a husband. He was surprised to realize that his wife did not feel like herself. Her skin seemed to have lost its soft springy cushion of flesh.

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  Lord knows she'd never be considered a fat woman, hut Alice Bynum was no string bean either. She was a gently filled-out woman — pleasingly plump, as they say. But now, the pillow below her waist had disappeared. This was the spot he'd always loved to rest his head on when he'd done it and was glad. This spot was where he'd first felt the baby Clara quickening. This flesh had become tight and cold. His wife's soft, bouncy bottom was lost now, too, and was as flat as a pancake. She'd not been eating much, not resting much, and not sitting down enough. Alice's grief had her in a stir. The flesh on her upper arm—which used to pinch up teasingly when he played with her, coaxing a smile from her busy face — had melted away. Her full, dimpled face appeared to be getting thin, and even the places under her eyes were darkening. He thought that a better man would leave this woman to her grieving. But the touching and stroking had got his nature up again and he knew she wouldn't resist him. He went ahead and did it again, though a better man would have left this woman alone.

  Losing a loved one, a family member, is like losing a tooth. After a while, those teeth remaining shift and lean and spread out to split the distance between themselves and the other teeth still left, trying to close up spaces. In this way, Johnnie Mae, her mama and papa, and her aunt Ina shifted themselves to close the spaces created by Clara's absence.

  Johnnie Mae peered over the lip of the big pot at the back of the stove. A few minutes before, she had filled it with water. The water was still. She looked at it awhile and stepped back. Ever since she'd been helping her mama in the kitchen — which had been since the earliest time she could remember— she had never been allowed to stare at a pot on to boil without hearing the admonition "a watched pot never boils." The women of her family said it so regularly that Johnnie Mae thought it must be a sort of prayer needed to get the pot to boil—an assurance to the pot that no one would peep at it if it would just go ahead and boil. No one she knew had ever been watching at the very moment the water started boiling. One

  always had to turn away and give the pot its privacy. Often Johnnie Mae had seen her mama lost in reverie over a pot on the stove for rice or com or bathwater or water for cleaning the face and hands or the hush-hush place between her legs. Mama would turn her head to some other task, and when she turned back, the water would be moving.

  The yellow gingham-check curtains at the two windows looking out on the backyard rustled gently. It must have been human breath that stirred them since the late afternoon air was tight and unmoving.

  Just back home from her Saturday half day's work, Alice sat wide-legged on a chair with a pan between her knees, catching string beans. A mound o( slender, green fingers lay on the table. Alice slit the two sharp ends oft with her nail and snapped each crisp bean into three pieces — some long ones into four. The odd one that would not snap was consigned to the waste.

  u Cut that piece of fat meat in half, Johnnie. I want to have some for the black-eyes tomorrow." Alice didn't look up from her work; she spoke out of the corner oi her consciousness that automatically gave out directives to her daughter. Her eyes remained on the mounting pile oi beans in her lap.

  Johnnie Mae picked up the thick, long-bladed knife they used for rough slicing, hacking apart chicken, and gutting. It was a heavy knife that had darkened with use and kept a musky odor o{ metal and blood. The wooden handle was buttery smooth and had been part of the collection of utensils, crockery, pots, and pans that Alice's mama had left when she died.

  "Keep your mind on what you're doing. That thing will

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  take your fingers off," Alice said each time Johnnie Mae picked up the kn
ife.

  "Yes, ma'am," she answered. It was an absent answer. Johnnie Mae's ears conveyed her mother's directives to her hands automatically. Anyway, it was not as if she didn't know the steps for cooking string beans. Johnnie Mae knew her mama was just running through a mental checklist.

  Alice had the habit of performing each task as if it were, in the time span she was engaged in it, the key to eternal salvation. An essential part oi her existence depended on tasks being done well. Each chore was reduced to a series of efficient steps. "Go on and get your work done. Then, you'll have time to sit down" she was fond of saying. To Johnnie Mae there never seemed a time when all the work was done.

  When Alice and Ina worked together in the kitchen, their hands crossed and recrossed each other while they chattered. Picking or prodding or slicing, they punctuated their tasks with laughter and tooth sucking and gossip. When she worked with Johnnie Mae, Alice didn't talk or laugh much. Her instructions were gentle commands, but there was no chatting. Part of her idea about work was setting an example for her daughter. Alice was forever saying that a child should keep her mouth closed and her mind on her work.

  Clara's voice had been a constant chattering undercurrent in the kitchen. Clara always had questions and comments nobody was interested in. Now, without her, the kitchen was too quiet. Johnnie Mae wondered if her mother was saddened by the quiet, and she wished she could run off at the mouth like Clara used to. But she couldn't find a way to break the silence.

  "Go out to the yard and rinse off these beans, Johnnie," Alice said as she rose and flicked bits of beans off her apron.

  Out behind the house, Johnnie Mae held down the top of the hydrant and sloshed clear water over the string beans. She emptied the beans from pan to colander and back, rinsing out the grit that settled to the bottom of the pan.