by Jim Grimsley
Her sickness came and went like a tide. But she, being stubborn and strong even at her age, recovered after every stretch of fever.
But I was telling about Nana Rose’s dreams, and I recall a lot about them. I have been remembering those nights, my long dreamy sleeping in that room, where the dreams continued, waking and shoving logs into the wood stove, waking exactly enough to do so, twisting my hair over one shoulder to keep it out of the upward shower of sparks. Out of balmy darkness I rose from my pillow, opened the grate and checked the fire, golden embers dancing, a shimmering terrain beyond the hot flames, and Nana Rose asleep on the bed with her mouth hanging open and her jowls drooping down. I jammed another split log through the mouth of the grate, it barely fitting, and flames poured upward around the new log, visible till I closed the grate and settled down again. I could not tell if I was waking or sleeping. I lay with the roar of the embers in my ear, and then her voice as she began again, always again: Get me a bucket of water. I want to soak my feet in cool water. My feet is hot. It’s hot up under this house. I don’t know if I ought to tell you anything about myself. I already told Jesus yesterday. Jesus come by and sit on the edge of the bed. And I says Jesus, I says, you sitting there like some kind of a spook. And Jesus was looking at me and all. He got this twitchy smile. Rose, he says, I want to tell you something. Where I go, you coming after me. And then he got on up and went on out.
She quieted, and I pictured Jesus on the edge of the bed, more substantial because her description of him was clouded. His weight bowed down that side of the bed and Nana Rose hung toward him with her jowls, chins, the loose skin on her arms all descending toward Jesus. We were all in the room, and Jesus said he was cold, would I tend the fire? So I got up and tended it as he asked. I was so tired, my arms hung heavy and I couldn’t lift the wood, and after a while I couldn’t breathe, and the light was hurting my eyes. I shoved a log into the fire. Then it seemed like I hadn’t and I shoved another one. Then I woke up with Nana Rose standing over me.
“Jesus is changing everything in me,” she said.
I blinked my eyes and tried to wake up. After a while I whispered, “I’m asleep.”
“Shut up, heifer. Ain’t a drop of water in my glass. Go dip me a cup of water out of that bucket.”
She kicked me with her bare foot and I stood. My feet nearly froze to the floor.
“Jesus is changing things,” she said as I was leaving, in a voice that made me look back at her, at the way she moved her head when she talked, pecking emphatically, like a preacher-chicken. “Jesus is changing things in this house.”
When I returned with the water she looked at me with her buzzard eyes and said, “I’m ready for the kingdom. Are you?”
“No, ma’am, I’m not ready yet.”
“Jesus is changing things in you too.”
I held the cup for her to drink.
“You go to that church with Addis. Don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You like them church people?”
“I do.”
“You pray for your gramama in that church?”
“Yes, ma’am. The preacher, he prays aloud, and I pray along silently.”
“Well, it’s working, because Jesus is changing things in me tonight. Jesus is getting me ready for the kingdom. Glory hallelujah. Add a log to that fire.” She kicked at my feet to move me toward the firebox. “It’s cold.”
“There’s no room for another log in there,” I said. “I just added one. I’m sleepy.”
“You can’t be asleep when the Lord is working.”
“I got to go to school.”
“You can’t be sitting up in school when the Lord is working.”
“Yes, I can. Jesus can work on me right in the school.”
When I turned around her hand was already there and fell across my face, with a weight behind it that seemed awesome since the hand itself appeared frail and fluttering. “Sass,” she hissed, “Jesus don’t need no sass out of your lips, heifer. Put another log in that goddamn fire like I told you, and then crawl your scrawny ass into a corner where you can watch Jesus work. We’re bound to be up all night.”
I found a small length of wood and made a show of doing like she said. Seated at her bedside, she fumbled with the matches to light her kerosene lantern. She had forgotten the electricity again; the electric lamp was already burning right beside her but her eyes had got so dim she couldn’t tell. After a while she gave up with the matches because she failed to open the box.
“Heal my hands, Lord.”
Silence.
“Heal my hands. Show me, Lord.”
Followed by the fumbling sound of the tips of her fingers on the matchbox.
She sat down. I closed the grate. One moment the fire was dancing in reflection on her throat, on her cheeks, the next the room dimmed as the fire lowered. I stood up from the pallet. I turned off the lamp. Now we rested in the dark except for the bit of light from the stove grate. She sat on the edge of the bed.
“Turn that light back on.”
“Jesus wants it off, Nana Rose.”
“He don’t want no such. You don’t know what he wants.”
“Well, he was right here when I was turning off the light and he didn’t stop me.”
She had begun to sober up from her drunken awakening, her certainty that the time for the transformation of all things had finally come. Awake, she understood the world was not changing so fast after all. Her voice quavered with a tentative warble. “Jesus is still working in me tonight. Amen.”
“Amen. Good night, Nana Rose.”
“Go to sleep then, goddammit.”
She stayed on the edge of the bed for a long time, and I watched her in the dark. When she began to shove her feet under the covers, I slipped over to her and helped her, bracing her back against the pillows, then lifting her legs the way Aunt Addis did, wrapping my arms around both. I settled the covers around her, and she lay back, and the rim of her eyelid caught firelight as if she were crying. Or else her eyes were tired and watery. I went back to bed.
“Goddamn whore hound,” she hissed. Then we slept.
We dreamed together again. Her voice carved a channel through my head.
Night merged into night. We were always waking in the wee hours of the same morning, visiting the same moment, Nana Rose rising over me, kicking my shoulder, spilling the water or drinking it so I would have to rise to fetch more.
She dreamed with the voice of Paulie, and I heard the rhythm of it like a current in the midst of a river, Paulie speaking about herself. You’re not right. Your head’s not right. You know it? Paulie don’t read and write. Sister learned how, but Paulie is stupid. Uncle Mack rides me on the mule when we come back from Kingston. My bottom is red. I got welts on my bottom, my dress is stuck. Paulie down in the woods. Down yonder. I can see the mule, and Uncle Mack on the back. Uncle Mack on the mule. Paulie in the dust, following in the dust.
SOMETIMES AUNT ADDIS heard the commotion and stood out of bed. She might come in the room where Nana could see her, but often she stood in the shadow. She watched and listened as Nana told about Jesus, about Paulie’s walks, about Willem and the girls. Sometimes she covered her ears as if the words hurt going in, but she never stopped listening. As if she were waiting for a sign.
“I hate you,” Nana declared, trying to spit at Addis during a bath. “I hate you, lousy bitch whore,” but she was bone dry, she failed to collect even a drop of spit, and so she was making the dry spit sound and hunching forward pathetically, and this enraged her, as Addis scrubbed her face with a wet cloth. She balled up her fists and struck Addis in the eyes, and Addis dropped the cloth and backed away, momentarily blinded. She knelt on the floor with her hands on her eyes, and Miss Jenny came to fetch her without a word. Nana Rose sat stubborn and half-bathed on her pillow till Addis could see again and came to finish the bath.
She had blacked both Addis’s eyes, and we watched the purple bruises spread over the
next few days. You never saw such black eyes in your life, the color of glistening violet tar. It was as if Aunt Addis were making the bruises spread by an act of her own will, to purple and darken out of spite. I caught her studying them in the mirror in the front room. Touching the dark edges tenderly with her fingertips.
“I had me a bruise or two in my life,” Nana shrieked. “There’s not a woman alive hadn’t had a bruise or two. You needed your share, that’s what.”
NANA ROSE BELIEVED she was broadcasting on the radio. The wind howled that night and stirred all the curtains in spite of the fact that the windows were closed, in spite of the rags we stuffed in the cracks. Close to Christmas but not Christmas yet. My mother had said I must go home for Christmas Day and besides, Nana had recovered from another fever and looked fit to live to a hundred or more. She sat higher on the pillows as if she were rising over the bed. She believed she was the voice on the radio, “Coming to you live from Goldsboro,” she muttered, “spacious skies and apple pies. It’s a war on honey, that’s what. Coming to you over the air waves from Goldsboro, North Carolina, what more could you want than music?”
Whenever she saw Addis she began to shriek, “Whore strumpet, dog pussy strumpet,” in a piercing voice that left her gasping and red-faced. More and more of her care fell on me, especially during the holidays; the last time Addis tried to feed her, Nana stabbed at the back of her hand with a fork and almost broke the skin.
But on Christmas Eve night she sat up on the pillows and forgot the radio, forgot Jesus on the side of the bed, and called for a bowl of chicken and rice. Addis brought it to her and Nana Rose stroked her still-dark hair with a gnarled hand, till Addis moved away.
When I die you don’t even have to bury me, you can just haul me to a ditch. Do you hear me? I got a hold of some liquor tonight, and I can feel it in my blood. Did you know I had me a drink of liquor? I can see my time coming, and nothing but a common whore to bury me. You heard what I said. Don’t look at me like that. You are a whore. You are common. You and that friend of yours, laying up in that room wrapped up in Satan. You have Satan to thank for what you do. When my heart stops beating I hope you can hear it. I know you got that skinny youngun listening. That runt sitting up all night listening to my heart fluttering, waiting for it to stop so she can run wake you and you and that friend of yours can have a party because I’m dead. I know you. I know what you goddamn want. Whore hound. Sneaking around this house like you’re somebody. When I die you can drag my body to the ditch. You can throw me in the pond, you can drive me down to the bridge and throw me in the water right there. Nobody cares what happens to me when I die. I won’t be buried in no church like decent folk. You can save yourself the trouble of a funeral. You can haul me down to the river and throw me in.
THE DAY AFTER Christmas Miss Jenny stripped all the beds, including the one Nana Rose was lying in, and she boiled all the sheets in the washpot, and rinsed them, and wrung them out, and hung them on the line. She started at dawn and worked through to dusk.
“I know what she’s trying to do,” Nana hollered, trembling with a new fury.
Aunt Addis stood perfectly still with her arms folded against her stomach, looking out the window near the bucket of water in the kitchen, listening to Nana’s voice reverberate on the plaster walls.
“She’s trying to kill me.”
Outside, sheets unfolded like sails on the line.
Someone must have seen, because the story spread around. Everybody knew what would happen if you changed the sheets between New Christmas and Old Christmas. We had no neighbors within sight of the house, but someone must have seen. Because soon the story reached every lip of the pond that Jenny and Addis put a hex on the old woman by changing the linen.
“My own baby girl, she wants me dead.” Nana sat weakly against those pillows with her tongue hanging partly out, as if she had lost control of it, and she took desperate, gulping breaths, each labored as though it might be her last. “Whore hound. Strumpet. What are you looking at?”
But when the women lifted Rose out of the bed, when they changed the very sheets beneath her, she never made a sound. She sat in the chair tight-fisted with fury, but she never said anything, as if she knew she had better start saving her breath. They changed the sheets and made the bed and lifted her tenderly into the nest of it. Her mouth worked as if she wanted to spit again, but she knew it useless to try.
They moved through the house with the clean sheets cold from the winter line. Nana chewed the inside of her lips with her gums and stumps of teeth.
I fed her. I bathed her. Addis no longer dared. I spooned soup into her mouth and wiped it. I lifted her head and sponged her face with a cool cloth. I listened to the rasp of her breathing day and night, while she fell slowly back against the pillows.
No longer waking in the night, we slept, like shipmates riding a river, buddies on a raft. She no longer called me names or spoke to me at all. I had dissolved into her notion of herself, somehow. The hand that held the soup spoon was as good as her own.
When she died, late one night, I was holding her hand and then, the next moment, she was no longer where she had been. Her hand became a weight, and I lay it onto the quilt.
As if she knew the very moment, Addis came into the room and pulled me back, away from the bed, and then she walked up to the edge of it, alone.
Then Miss Jenny came in and stood at the other side of the bed, and I knew with certainty then that Nana Rose was dead, because she would never have let Miss Jenny stare at her like that.
IN THOSE DAYS you hardly ever saw the flowers at a funeral that you would expect today. For Nana, I hardly remember a bloom, though surely there was a spray of something, lilies maybe, or something else from the season. Something for the top of the casket.
We buried her in the blustery winter. It was one time I can remember I ever saw my daddy sober, and so early in the morning, too. The Bakers, my mother’s half of the family, wanted to get an early start for Zebulon and had crowded all on one side of the grave. We said a prayer, and I held onto Carl Jr.’s belt.
Some of the women from church had come; but not many. Mr. Jarman had come but not Miss Ruby. The preacher’s wife had not come. Not all of Nana Rose’s children came either, but Aunt Tula wheeled Grandaddy Benjamin to the foot of a tree and parked him there. She claimed he cried, but I never saw a tear.
My daddy came, pasty-faced and wire-jawed, having scraped the beard off his face but with a wad of tissue stuck next to his Adam’s apple, held in place by a spot of blood. He stood beside my mama, who hardly came up to his shoulder, standing with her legs thrown wide as if she were in the middle of a field. I remember being embarrassed by the sight of my mother standing with her legs wide open like that, with light pouring through her legs in such a way that it was apparent she wore no slip. Standing flat-footed in worn shoes.
THE LAST NIGHT I slept in that room, toward the end of January after Addis and Jenny changed the sheets, the reason I was holding Nana Rose’s hand at the last is this. She dreamed my dream, right before she died. I had been dreaming about Mama walking along in the marsh, heading away from the Wet Path toward a part of the woods where I’d never seen anybody walk before, toward the old mill above the Little Store. Mama waved good-bye and then she was heading down into the water, as if there were steps beneath the surface and she were walking down them. As in the dream same as before, Mama vanished into dark water. “I’ll see you come sunrise,” Mama said, “don’t forget to make the biscuit.”
She said the words and I popped awake. Nana Rose was making the tiniest breathing noise, an easy sound, like waves, and then she said, plain as day, “Don’t forget to make the biscuit.”
The words rang out. Her voice seemed full and young. For some reason I understood what that meant, and I climbed out of the pallet and walked to the bed. I took her hand like holding it was the most natural thing. When she looked at me she died, I saw it, like something going out of her eyes, and that was that.
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A MAN’S MAMA
DADDY SHAVED WOOD with his pocket knife beside the stove. Carving toothpicks, he said. He had been sitting there the whole of February. He refused to get in the truck and go to work in the morning when Mr. Jarman came. Carl Jr. went, but Daddy refused to get out of the chair. We had eaten the last biscuit from the night before. I put sugar in the coffee till it made me sick to drink. Before I walked to meet the school bus I heard Mama and Daddy arguing again. “These younguns has got to eat a mouthful every now and then,” Mama said. “You need to get up from there and go to work.”
“A man’s mama don’t die every day,” Daddy answered.
“A man’s younguns get hungry every day.”
He never answered, when any other time he would have slapped her across the room for talking to him like that.
I could look him in the face for once, and did. I was hardly afraid at all, only curious about his face, because it softened when Nana died. Maybe I had the instinct he would harden again and I wanted to study him in this state. He reared back in the chair once Mama left him alone, and chips of wood floated to the floor from the tip of his knife. His hair was thinning along the top, more so than I had noticed, and the lines across his forehead had deepened in the thick, weathered skin. He was looking down at nothing, the knife and block of wood working in his hands. He pouted, his lips pursed. His teeth were dark and stained, his beard heavy, the flesh of his neck beginning to go stringy. He was tired. He was lonely. I had never seen Daddy this way.
Aunt Tula once told me Daddy used to be a sweet little boy. This is something people will almost always say about a hell-raiser, that he was sweet as a child, but Aunt Tula’s face changed when she said it, and I got the whiff of a girl inside her, stirring restlessly. Your daddy was the darlingest little boy. He was the best-tempered baby, I know, because I had to take care of him. We were standing at the side of Nana Rose’s grave I think, and I had seen Daddy in tears, while Aunt Addis comforted him. Aunt Tula whispered in my ear, patting my shoulder. Your daddy wasn’t always like he is. He had a goodness to him, one time. While he sobbed in a deep, wrenching way over the grave of his mother.
