by Deb Spera
After lifting the receiver, I dial Sarah’s number—she was always more malleable than Molly—but there is no sound on the other end. I’ve done something wrong but don’t know what. The instruction manual lay in the drawer of the coffee table. I turn to the table of contents and find the chapter that explains how to place a call. I was supposed to wait for the tone before dialing the number—simple enough.
“Mother,” my husband calls out from the dining room, causing me to jump. Edwin’s come through the back door and kitchen without me noticing. The man is stealthy, that’s all I can say. Early in our marriage he took great delight in sneaking up on me. He stopped when I took equal pleasure in pouring cold water on his head in the early mornings while he slept. I tuck the number between the pages of the book just as he enters the room to find me, receiver in hand. He has a layer of dirt over his whole being. Tassels from cornstalks cling to his shirt and pants.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Learning to place a call,” I say. “I’m practicing with Lonnie. Good gracious, Edwin, you’re filthy. Go up and bathe while I get supper on the table.”
“Teach me later,” he says.
“Who are you going to call?” I ask.
“You, while I’m at market.”
Before he leaves the room I remember. “Edwin, would you go and look in the attic? Something has died up there, and I’ve forgotten to shut the window.”
He murmurs his consent and climbs the stairs, his footsteps fading in the distance.
3
Mrs. Oretta Bootles
I am an old Negro woman, too old to carry a crying white child across town and through the thicket of cypress that leads into Shake Rag where we live. I ran best I could the whole way. This child’s eat up with worms worse than I ever seen in a body that still has a soul. She is up against the day.
There was redbirds in the yard all this morning before I come to work and then in the Coleses’ oak trees, too—like trouble following me. One lighted on the porch rail and looked right at me while I did the breakfast dishes. I fretted all day over what they mean to tell us. Right after Miss Annie left the kitchen I got down to dealing with the good Lord for fear of what must be coming.
“Father,” I told him, and pointed so He knew I meant business, “you know I rub rough, but I’m tenderhearted and I ain’t ready to lose my husband. Even if You want to call him, I won’t step aside. You got to go through me if You want Odell. Keep him safe and I will do whatever You command.”
Not two weeks ago I spied a tremor in Odell’s right hand. He said it was nothing, but I know how seeds shoot into the sun to get full grown. Something has took root in my husband, and I won’t have it. Preacher says it’s wrong to bargain with God, but Jesus is the one started the bargaining. John 3:3 says, “Jesus answered and said unto him, verily, verily I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.” That’s what the Bible says clear as bells on Sunday morning. You believe in Me and you get eternal life. He don’t give eternal life first. He makes you a deal. Up to you whether to take it or not. Access the Savior, then be saved. No matter what the price, the promise will keep. Everybody wins if the promise is big enough. That’s what the Bible says, and that’s what I always believed—until now. Now I fear my promise and the child in my arms will be the death of us both.
* * *
I had my first presentiment right after Mama got sick, and I became Miss Annie’s full-time maid. I can’t speak as to why I never had one before—only know I’ve had them regular ever since. I was working for Miss Annie by myself when I was seventeen and she was twenty-eight years of age. She had four little ones then. Molly hadn’t come along yet. She had her hands full with them children. Mama had taken to the bed for almost two months. Mr. Coles told her she missed too much work and she needed to move on out. He said I’d do fine in the main house, that the room off the kitchen would suit me, but Mama didn’t like that notion and she had Miss Annie’s ear.
Miss Annie said no to Mr. Coles, that it weren’t right to move Mama after all them years of service to the family. So Mr. Coles backed down and let her have her way. Still, he charged Mama ten dollars a month to live on the property she served as a slave on. Times change but people don’t. Black folk is fine to do the work long as they don’t have an opinion.
Mama taught me everything she knew. I can cook and clean and iron. I know my way around a garden. I can pickle and can anything you can eat. I know where to dig for dandelion greens, and how to cook ’em so they lose the bitter. I can name the healing power in every plant, and I know everything there is to know about babies. I been changing diapers since I knew how to walk. Me and Mama helped birth half the colored children in the county, and then Miss Annie’s children, too. I mopped Miss Annie’s brow when she screamed. I was so scared the first time. Never seen a white woman give birth. Took me by surprise to find we got all the same parts. By the time Miss Molly come along, I was delivering babies to half the town, white and colored alike.
After I took over running the house for Miss Annie, I’d go home every night to help with the feeding and cleaning of Mama. We had ourselves a system. My brother, Willie, worked the cotton fields all day and then come home to help me. I’d clean out the chamber pot and clean Mama off best I could while Willie’d start the woodstove and I’d cook what we had. Sometimes we had us a nice rabbit Willie caught in the fields, or fish he caught over on the Edisto.
Mama was sick as could be. Her legs and feet got to be so big she couldn’t stand on them for the pain. She thought she could cure it, said it was gout, but it didn’t never get better. No matter, every day and night we’d talk. She wanted to know the happenings of the day, news of the boys and their schooling. I was skittish running that house without Mama. Even from her sick bed she helped me, but no matter what she said my soul was burdened and my sleep was troubled. Mama would sing or rub my head. She’d talk about the seasons and how life fit into them perfect. Everything passes is what she was saying. I know that now. She’d talk ’til I could get myself calm enough to rest ’fore sunup. It’s a frightful thing not to sleep for worry but she could always soothe me.
“You know what you’re doin’,” she told me, and though I knew she wouldn’t lie, I couldn’t help but doubt myself.
One night Mama talked me to sleep, and deep in the night I felt myself sinking into the bed like a heavy weight was sitting atop me—so heavy I couldn’t breathe. When I was able to push the feeling away, smoke filled my nostrils. I saw our house on fire with flames rising up the walls all around us. I reached for Mama, but she weren’t next to me. I could hear Willie crying my name above the noise and fumbled to him ’til I found his hand in the black. We stretched out across the room ’til we found Mama and caught her around the waist. We had to pull on her to get out. She kept yelling, “Save the mirror! Save the painting!” We got her to the yard, then Willie turned, and before I could stop him, he run back in—straight into hell. I thought he was lost forever.
I woke in the dark that night with such a start and such a cry that Mama put her rough hand on my brow to calm me. I spoke of the dream and she said, “Child, don’t say that! The Lord brought us up to this point. I got a full cupboard, a few dollars in my pocketbook and we don’t owe nobody nothing. Anything happens, we’re fine.”
Next day I was dressing Buck, when I heard the fire bell ringing and the call for help. I ran to the window and yelled down to the yard boy, “Whose house is it?”
He hollered back, “It’s your house, Miss Retta, it’s yours!”
I tore out of that house and ran through the field quick as my feet could move. I saw smoke rising and black folk yelling—passing buckets of water down the line from the well. When I got to the woods, I was out of my mind, screaming, “Where’s Willie? Where’s my brother?”
I found him sitting a far piece behind the house, on the edge of the wood. S
itting on the ground covered with soot. He was a mess of snot and tears, rocking back and forth like a baby in need of comfort. In his arms was Mama’s mirror and her painting of a boat out to sea. He got them both, but Mama was gone. I wasn’t there to help save her.
* * *
I don’t know what the redbirds mean to say, but if this child is a clue, I’ve got work to do. She’s curled up like a bug under a stone in the sling harnessed between the fig and peach tree just to the side of my house. Odell put that up for me in need of ways to be useful when my mourning got bad. There’s times I rest in it, but not near as much as I want. I give her a shove so she rocks while I carve off the bark of a pomegranate bush out by the woodpile with my old butcher knife. I got to make worm tea, and pomegranate bark works best in the first step of healing.
The second step is to stir the bowels. Not much fruit around for that. Apples are wormy in these parts. After three years’ time, those trees still ain’t back to normal since the infestation. But the figs will do. This child is starving, her body eating itself. If I feed her wrong she could turn for worse. Then I got a dead white child on my hands. Jesus, I know it’s a sin to worry about a dead child when I got a live one, but the trouble I bring on my house is enough to kill a body.
After I finish my gatherings I come ’round the front of the house and see Mabel marching down the lane in the dust. I know she wants to see if the talk she heard on her walk home from work is true. Lightning bugs bounce around her in the dusk. She is a Christian woman who knows her verse, but she’s got no sense. I try not to judge but it ain’t easy. I put my hand up to Mabel before she reaches the corner and hold it there ’til she lifts her head, then I holler out, “I can’t visit right now, Mabel, you go on home.”
She hears the child crying. I can see by the turn of her head. She’s weighing what she ought to say with what she wants to say, but I don’t have time for her foolishness. She don’t know what it is to be inside my skin.
“Retta?”
“Go on home, Mabel, I can’t talk right now.”
I expect more will come knocking, but I can’t think about that right now. Odell’s gonna be home soon, and what I have to do needs more than the two hands I got.
There’s a hymn that lifts me when the burden gets too great. I sing it as I cart the wood through the screen door, past the sitting area and into the kitchen. I sing it while I the light the kindling and stoke the fire. “Oh, my Lord, oh, my good Lord, keep me from sinkin down.” I sing it low like a lullaby when I step outside and scoop the child from the sling to carry her inside. She clings to me like a spider newly born. “I mean to go to heaven, too, keep me from sinkin down.” I sing it as I steep the bark in the boiling kettle, me swayin’ with the child in my arms. “I look up yonder and what do I see? Keep me from sinking down.”
The child whimpers.
“Shhhh, shhhh,” I say. “Look up, look up at the angels.”
She lifts her face to the roof of my house like she’s seen some distant memory. “I see the angels beckoning me. Keep me from sinking down.” I hear the bells of Odell’s wagon before he comes through the yard half past the hour—those old mares breathin’ like they climbed a mountain. And, oh, Lord I sing. I sing for Odell and his crippled leg, I sing for myself, an old woman with a child dead and gone, and I sing for this little one who ain’t got nothing. Nothing at all.
* * *
I was the first of my kin to move away from the plantation and take up property here on Hunter Lane. After Mama died, none of us belonged on that place no more. That time was gone, and we needed to move along with it. Pretty soon everybody got to moving over near us and quick as we could turn around there was nine decent houses nestled back in the woods with twenty-two children runnin’ ’round—everybody raising a family ’cept me and Odell. Each year that went along with no child weighed on us. But we kept on. Odell would be up before dawn, and I’d have his saucer of coffee and biscuits waiting before he headed to the railroad station. He’d spend the day shoveling coal as a fireman for the trains that run from Branchville to Columbia and back. He was a big, strong man. Worked physical labor sixteen hours a day, longer right before he was hurt. After he’d leave, I joined the womenfolk along the lane heading out to do the white lady’s cleaning and wash. Every colored woman on the street had a job washing and cleaning for white folk. “Shakin rags,” was what we called it. Got so everybody in town started calling our neighborhood “Shake Rag.” It stuck.
Odell and me married after Mama died. We was writing letters the whole fall before she passed while he worked at the railroad over in Williston. That summer his mama come over and asked me and Mama to write Odell. Said he was down in the mouth and homesick as could be. So I wrote and he wrote me back. We told each other a little something about every day, just news around town, nothing more. One letter he wrote said, “Dear Oretta, O, O, O, how I love the letter O. Your friend, Odell.”
Then one day shortly thereafter, he surprised us all and come home for a family dinner on a Sunday afternoon. It was a pretty day. The leaves was just dippin’ into the candy colors they change to before they let go of their branch. It was a party with everybody bringing something to add to the table. After we ate he stood up and said to Mama, “Miss Sally, I aim to marry Retta. I took off work for two days, so we could get it done tomorrow.”
Mama turned and looked at me, and my blood ran so hot I jumped out of my chair and said, “No, you ain’t marrying me tomorrow, Odell Bootles. That ain’t how it’s done!”
“How’s it done then?” he asked.
“You got to ask me first.”
“You know I love you.”
“No, I do not know that.”
“Well, I write you every day, don’t I?”
That’s when it come on me that I loved him, too. But I couldn’t say so with all them eyes on us, even though now I suppose they all saw it in me even before I did. I said yes finally, but I told him he needed to put in for work on the Branchville line. I wasn’t raising my babies away from family. Said when he got that done, we’d marry.
Afterward, Mama said to me, “Child, you might have missed your boat.” But I knew Odell in the heart and he knew me the same way. He wanted what I did.
* * *
By the time Odell’s put up the horses and fed them in their stalls, I got two cups of worm tea in the child. She minds good, but when she sees my husband coming through the door, she starts fresh with her crying.
She screams, “I’ll be good,” so loud Odell backs out the screen door and waits on the porch.
“Hush now!” I say and she does. When I go out to Odell, he’s leaning sideways on his wood crutch.
“What’s happenin’ here, beautiful woman?” he asks.
What’s happening? How can I answer that question? Even if I open my mouth to try, I can’t.
“Fill the washtub. I’ve got to get this child in it. She’s got fever.”
Few things make a man feel like a man after he’s stopped being able to find respectable work. It don’t matter that Odell is afflicted—he helps me. Whenever I got a need, he stands up. He’s the strongest man I know. He helps me pull the washtub through the front door and onto the rug I braided myself. Together we haul it across the floor and into the kitchen, where I pour the boiled water in to mix with the cold. The child scoots up against the corner of the sofa like we’re about to boil her alive. Can’t be too hot or too cold. Too hot and it will drive her fever up, too cold and it could shock her heart enough to stop it. Odell fetches the soap.
“I’ll get you supper after I get her clean,” I tell him.
“Don’t you worry ’bout me,” he says, and goes for more wood.
When I undress the child, I see how bad off she is. Her ribs and bones jut out so far they look like they could pop straight through the skin. She is covered in bruises and ringworms.
“Mercy,” I hear
Odell whisper as he steps through the door, one arm full of wood. We look at each other across the room, and I fear that one word will take all I got left in me. He stokes the fire with birch wood and goes back outside, where I hear him settle on the porch swing, close enough to come should I need him. I lift and carry the child to the washtub and lay her in the water. She’s so weak and tired she can’t lift her head—just lies there looking up at the angels. Night is upon us, and the promise of death will not break until the day is done.
“Nothing’s going to happen to you while Miss Oretta’s here. You understand me, child?”
She nods her little head and whispers, “Mary. I’m Mary,” then closes her eyes while I scrub her clean.
I scrub her head and under her arms, between the toes and where she was attached to her mama. I hold her steady while she stands and squats so I can clean along her bottom. She holds on to my shoulder to keep from falling over. I scrub all that is in and behind her ears and when I’m through the water is so thick with dirt and tiny creatures, you can’t see to the bottom of the tub. If she survives the night, I know I got to do the same tomorrow.
I put her in a cotton nightgown; I keep extra in a suitcase under the bed. She sets on a chair while I tie up the bottom so she can see her feet when she walks. I put her on my lap to comb the knots, as big as fists, out of her hair. She lets me comb without a whimper. The slop jar sets on the floor at my feet. We’ll need it. When Odell comes back through the door she pushes up against me like she could climb straight through my old bones.
