My Drowning

by Jim Grimsley

  ALMA LAURA

  ALMA LAURA was born in the house near Moss Pond, months later when the memory of the monster had faded. Mama swelled and sat as before, chewing biscuit through the long day. At the end of Mama’s time, Nora left school to take care of her.

  Alma Laura emerged from my mother’s shrieks into the midwife’s hands in midspring. Miss Rilla, the midwife, called us into the house near midafternoon, telling us we had a new baby girl this time. We saw our new sister in Mama’s bedroom lying in the cradle. Blankets swathed her pink china face. My heart ached from the first moment I saw her, and she filled an emptiness in me, as if I had been expecting her. As if she were returning from a long journey. She was my baby sister, my own true love, and she erased the hard memory of Madson’s coming. When Mama allowed her to suck on a tit, I felt the warmth all through me.

  Even that very first day of her life, I sat by the cradle and watched her sleep till the shadows were long and dark. I sat so long and quiet I scared Mama and she screamed for Nora to take me away. I kissed Alma Laura’s burning red forehead and hardly felt Nora’s fingernails digging into my arm.

  She was sick from the beginning. I could rarely stop thinking about her, I dreamed her at night. In the dream I remember her breath was like fire, and when I lay near her I inhaled the heat into myself, as dry as she. Someone moved the cradle to the fireplace and we slept there, she in the cradle and me kneeling beside her. The house was more silent than it had ever been, we were alone. The wind scoured the house, and I tucked the thin blankets around her. We were out of wood. I hollered for more. But the fire burned faster and I could find nothing to keep it going, and the cold soaked through the floorboards, my socks hardly helped at all and I could not find my shoes.

  From dreams like this, I wakened into the cool of a spring morning, the wee hours before dawn, with the baby crying and Mama crying as Daddy cursed them both.

  Mama moved to a pallet in front of the fireplace with the cradle beside her. Uncle Cope snored in the kitchen on his big bed. Daddy got his rest.

  EVERY POSSIBLE WAKING minute I spent with the baby. I held the pins while Nora changed the diapers. I was strong enough to push the pins through the diaper when Nora held the diaper for me, except once I stuck her thumb with the pin and she slapped me sharp across the face. It hurt and I cried, but I really did not blame her, and she trusted me enough to let me try again. We changed the diapers neatly. I stroked Alma Laura’s wrinkled forehead while she kicked her legs.

  Sometimes I sat on the floor or on a stool and cradled her burning body against mine. She was hot as a coal, her face scarlet, her dark hair curled, plastered to her tiny face. I had no images, no fantasies that she was my child, that we were together anywhere but in our kitchen. I simply held her and felt her life. A raging love coursed through me.

  “A shitass girl,” Daddy said, “and this one too puny to live.”

  “She’s fine, Willie. She’s gained some weight. Nora and me both think so.”

  “Puny,” spat Daddy, “a runt. Look at her.”

  “She sucks at me till I’m sore,” Mama rubbed her elbow over her blouse, “she’ll get bigger.”

  “You should have had a boy like I wanted.”

  “You got plenty of boys.”

  Daddy sucked snot and ended the conversation. He looked down at the baby in my lap, watching both of us with equal detachment. Carl Jr. said, “Her face is bright red, like Aunt Tula. Ain’t it?”

  “Tula do look like that, don’t she?” Daddy grinned. His teeth were dark-edged. “We should have named her Tula.”

  SHE BURNED. I held her and she burned. I was hopelessly in love with this baby, I held her but she scorched me everywhere I touched her, her tiny mouth and hands, her damp cheeks. Mama held her to suck, Nora and I held her, she slept. Hardly more sound than a whimper, now and then.

  I sat by her cradle. During the day the strong sun that fell through the front windows surrounded her in a haze of gold. She tossed her head back and forth in sleep. Mama hardly disturbed her, and Alma Laura ate less and less. Mama stared down at her, blinking and distracted. I held my breath. Mama’s shadow passed away.

  “We need a doctor,” but Mama’s voice was flat. “We need a doctor for that baby.”

  “If you’re asking me for money for a doctor, I ain’t got nothing to pay one with,” Uncle Cope declared. We were sitting in the kitchen. Uncle Cope gouged a biscuit with his thumb, pouring syrup inside. “I ain’t got nothing till the first of the month when I get my disability.”

  “That baby needs a doctor. That’s all I know.” Mama walked aimlessly back and forth, peering over the edge of the cradle.

  Early in the morning we woke to Mama’s wailing that the baby was cold, the baby was all cold, and I ran out there to see for myself. Alma Laura lay still and quiet, a small gray shadow in the light from the kerosene lamp, a gray lump of something twisted on itself, and I dropped my hands and refused to touch her, though I could not stop looking.

  When she died, there was a lot of fuss, people running around. The deputy sheriff came to look at the body and make some papers. Then the man from the funeral home took away Alma Laura in a car.

  She lived three months, three days.

  We buried her deep in the ground. Daddy’s family bought a small pine box and we took her to the same place where the baby boy was buried, the municipal cemetery in Kingston where Daddy’s family owned space. I rode in the truck with Aunt Tula and Uncle Bray. At the graveyard was a big tent with chairs under it, beautiful folding chairs of deeply polished wood, and we sat on them in front of the box where Alma Laura would sleep. We buried the lump of her in the box, somewhere in that dark hole beneath. Men were preparing to lower Alma Laura into the ground as we walked away. Daddy and Carl Jr. carried Mama away from the grave, each taking her by one arm, as she moaned and hung her head.

  At night, when I woke, Alma Laura floated beside me in the air. I was neither afraid of her lightness nor in doubt of her presence. I lay on my side and studied how she hung there, how light. I never tried to touch her, I had no need to do so. It was enough that she returned, that she floated in such a peaceful way.

  I passed a birthday. Nora reminded me of the day when it came; no one said anything before. At supper, Mama patted me on the head and served me a syrup biscuit.

  “I saw Alma Laura last night,” I said.

  “You what?”

  “I saw Alma Laura. She came to my bedroom.”

  Mama’s eyes focused to sharp points, and the fury of her hand crashed against my head. She grabbed me by the hair, slapped me across the face until I was dizzy and my nose ached, then threw me across the room like a sack of sugar. I landed with a bump against the sink, and froze there.

  Mama blew out breath like a bellows. “You ain’t seen a thing.” The fierceness of her eyes withered me, and I shivered. “Say it again. Say it.” She waited for a moment, and I shook my head to signify I would say nothing.

  They left me alone and ate dinner. Because Daddy had not come home yet, the beating was not worse. When he came home, late, Mama served him pinto beans and biscuit, speaking in a sullen voice about Joe Robbie’s doctor appointment.

  I hid beyond the doorway till I was sure Mama would not tell. Then I withdrew to the bedroom and sat on the bed by the window.

  AT NIGHT ALMA Laura continued to appear at my bedside, happy and gurgling, toes curling in the air. I told no one. I was old enough to have a secret now, and it made me more conscious of myself.

  That she came to me made me feel special. I understood that she knew I always loved her best, better even than Mama who offered her tit.

  That I had become more conscious of myself deepened everything, through every moment of the day. Everything I saw became clearer, and the days began to make a river of themselves, running under everything else. In my mind was a chain of memories, and I began to accumulate a past. I began to think, this week we have more food than last week. I began to think, I wonder if next
winter we will be as cold as we were last winter.

  Alma Laura grew, and I watched her progress when she was with me, and I never wondered how she could be here if she were really dead. I grew. I opened my eyes wide and studied my home. No one had to tell me, this time, when Mama became pregnant again.

  THESE DAYS, WHEN I remember Alma Laura, I remember her the way she was when she finally stopped visiting me years later, after I had eloped with Bobjay. I was pregnant with my first child. She had been with me my whole life till then, always silent, sitting quietly beside me, as if her presence in my sight contented her. She grew as I grew, a little behind me. Sometimes, when she was not with me, I would see her walking in the distance, usually at the edge of woods or in some empty building near whatever house we lived in. She moved from house to house when we did, not like the ghost of the baby boy, who never found us again after we moved away from the Low Grounds. When I met Bobjay, at a fair in Onslow County, Alma Laura was silently walking beside me, faded in the yellow light of the midway. When I eloped, she watched from the edge of the yard as Bobjay carried me away. In my new house near Rocky Mount, she followed me from room to room. She shared early mornings, late afternoons, times when she could find me alone. Her presence was so familiar, by the last day I saw her, I hardly noticed her at all. I was pregnant, so swollen I could hardly move. Alma Laura sat with me in that little kitchen. She wore the same peach dress I was wearing, much thinner than me, and she smoothed down the skirt once. Then she walked to the door. She turned to me and smiled, and I knew she was leaving. The thought came very clearly in my head. She slid out the door and walked off through the yard into the woods. She stood at the edge of the woods for a while; I suppose she was looking back at me. She vanished into the woods and never came out. I never saw her again.

  UNCLE COPE

  UNCLE COPE LIVED with us, off and on, for as far back as I can remember, whenever the rest of his family had enough of him. Uncle Cope liked his liquor and, even on crutches, ran around with the Saturday night crowd of good old boys who hung around the pond. My daddy was famous among his kin for putting up with almost anything, and he appreciated Cope’s mean streak, which was the reason Cope always left the metal frame bed he owned in our kitchen, no matter where he might be living himself for any given week of meals.

  He had been crippled for as long as I could remember, from falling off the back of a truck and crushing one of his legs to splinters, a time when he was drinking moonshine with Roe Yates and his crowd, a story Uncle Cope loved to tell. “I like to scraped half my back off, sliding down that road,” he would say, and then threaten to show the scars that covered his back. “If I hadn’t been drunk, I’d have died. But I passed out before the shock could kill me.”

  Uncle Cope retained one remaining visible tooth on the upper part of his mouth, at the front, hooked and long. He’d kept a few more of his lower teeth and several of his upper back teeth too. Like Daddy and Mama, he dipped snuff, Tube Rose or Black Mariah, which lent an orange cast to his teeth and tongue. Daddy chewed tobacco but Uncle Cope’s teeth ached too much for that. He watched with envy whenever Daddy spat the dark tobacco juice.

  We woke one Sunday morning to find the deputy sheriff in the kitchen doorway talking to Mama. It was early fall with the weather neither hot nor cold. Mama’s thin nightgown hardly hid her large breasts but she had partly wrapped a blanket around herself, and faced him with her hair loose on her shoulders. I watched from the hall. To me she seemed suddenly very beautiful and young, standing in the shadow of the tall, broad man. The deputy took off his hat. His pistol hung from his hip. His pants were tight and his thighs were a funny shape, thin at the knee but fat at the hip.

  He asked Mama a question. “I ain’t seen Willie since last night,” Mama answered, “and if Cope ain’t here, I reckon he’s with Willie.”

  “You sure you telling the truth? They ain’t neither one of them in this house.”

  “I’ll swear on the Bible if you get one.”

  “So if I was to come in that house, I ain’t going to find Willie Carl laying up in that bed?”

  “Lord, I wished he was. What you looking him for?”

  “I ain’t looking for Willie, I’m looking for Cope.”

  “What for?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t. Now look. If they ain’t here, I got to go.”

  “Well, you better go on then. And you tell Willie to get back here when you see him.”

  “Yes, ma’am, Miss Louise.”

  I crept to the corner of the kitchen, quiet like an egg. Alma Laura was with me. She had begun to appear during the day now, mostly near me but sometimes not, mostly in corners or shadows but sometimes not. Madson tugged Mama’s skirt and she lifted him to wave good-bye to the deputy, who made a lot of noise going down the steps. His handcuffs rattled, his keys jingled, and his holster flapped at his pocket. He was driving a black-and-white car with a light on the top, and he peeled out of the driveway in a cloud of dust. I was disappointed he never turned on the light.

  As soon as his car was gone, Nora got busy in the kitchen, and she kept me busy with her.

  Mama stalked back and forth across the kitchen, muttering. I had seen this look on her face before, when she threw me across the kitchen over mentioning Alma Laura, and other times, when she lost a child or had a fight with Daddy. “Wake me up so early in the morning,” she spoke in a chain of words, low enough that I could hardly hear, “when I ain’t been able to sleep for wondering where you are, you might be dead, and here comes the deputy sheriff, a-knocking on the door, and me so goddamn tired. I ain’t been able to sleep. For all I know you laying in a ditch somewhere, you been out all night. Me and these goddamn stinking younguns with hardly a mouthful of food. You making biscuits, Nora?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Nora scraped the dough carefully down each of her fingers.

  “I’m helping,” I said, “I’m putting the biscuits in the pan.”

  “Hush,” Nora said, with a careful eye on Mama. “You should work, not talk.”

  “Make sure you rub aplenty lard on the bottom of that pan or else them biscuits will stick.” Mama sighed, pushing hair back. A cloud of gentleness enshrouded her features for the moment. She lifted Madson, kissed his cheek. “My angel boy. Ain’t you my angel boy?”

  Madson gurgled and laughed. He planted his fat hands on her cheeks and leaned toward her. Now that he could take steps on those fat little legs of his, I hated him all the more.

  WHEN DADDY CAME home, Mama met him at the screen door. “Deputy Floyd was here, looking for Cope.”

  “Shit,” Daddy says, stomping through the door, “shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. When was he here?”

  “Early this morning. He woke me up.”

  Daddy sat in the kitchen chair. “Make me a goddamn cup of coffee.”

  The fog of his anger settled over the kitchen. Moving without a sound, I withdrew into the other room, in the shadows. Alma Laura sat with me. We kept perfectly silent.

  “Where were you all night?”

  “Out. Don’t ask me too many goddamn questions.”

  “Where is Cope?”

  “How the fuck am I supposed to know where Cope is?”

  “He’s your brother.”

  “That don’t mean a goddamn thing.”

  “Willie, what happened?”

  “Louise, if you don’t shut your goddamn mouth, I’m going to knock the shit out of you.”

  “Hush, Mama,” Nora whispered.

  “Deputy Floyd is coming back. You mark my words.”

  “Goddammit woman, you better leave me in peace, and I mean this minute. Get your fat ass in that other room before I slap the teeth out of your mouth.”

  “Go on, Mama,” Nora whispered, the note of urgency increasing.

  Mama shuffled into sight. I hid in the corner. Mama paced up and down. Daddy said, “Where the fuck is my coffee, girl?”

  “I’m m
aking it, Daddy. It has to make.”

  Silence. Followed by the sound of his spit dropping into the spit can.

  “Is it any biscuit fit to eat? Or is it just them goddamn horse biscuits your mama makes?”

  “There’s some warm biscuit up here that I made. You want a piece?”

  “Yes. To sop.”

  Nora brought the coffee and the biscuit. Daddy sopped the biscuit in the sweet coffee. I did not have to watch him to see him, I was learning to see him without my eyes. Alma Laura watched me. Mama watched me. I held myself completely still.

  “The good Lord above help me,” Mama said.

  “You better shut your mouth.”

  “Hush, Mama,” Nora said, or at least I heard it in my head. I was not sure whether Nora actually said anything with her voice. She had found herself a corner by now.

  Silence. Mama rocked on her heels in front of the fireplace.

  “Did you do something?” Mama asked.

  “No. I done told you I did not do anything. Cope broke into a little grocery store near Smithfield. They seen him. You know Cope can’t run worth a shit on them crutches.”

  “Was you with him?”

  “No. Shut the shit up.”

  Silence. I edged away from Mama, toward the door that led to the bedrooms.

  “Where are you going?” Mama hissed at me. “You keep your little ass right where you are.”

  It was as if she saw something ahead of us all. I held still again. As soon as I did, she forgot me. She paced again, hands on her belly. “Is they looking for you too? Is they?”

  “Naw.”

  “Cripple goddamn son of a bitch,” she hissed, “I hate that goddamn goose-legged bastard. He needs to take his ass to your daddy’s.”