by Jim Grimsley
Even after June explained the idea to me, I never called my daddy “Papa.” The word rang too gently in my head. When I talked to June about her daddy I referred to him as “your papa.” But my own I named my daddy, always, when I talked about him, which was not often.
But I learned many other courtesies from June. I learned to eat with one hand in my lap, never switching the fork from one hand to the other, as I used to do at home. I learned to keep my elbows off the table and to sit up straight, never hunching over the plate. Eating soup without slurping or blowing across the spoon took me longer, because I only got to practice at her house when there was soup, or at Aunt Addis’s when there was chicken stew. At my own house, I slurped and sucked and blew in order to eat faster, so I would get enough before everything disappeared. At June’s house, Piggy ate politely or else his papa cuffed him across the jaw. At my house, the boys ate like hogs at a trough, and the girls hardly better. A person had to use both hands in order to keep up.
June Frances taught me that ladies wear gloves nearly all the time, a fact that I had noticed the few times I had ridden into Kingston to Kress’s five-and-dime; June’s own pair of gloves had been stained with yellowish cat piss and had a smell, but they impressed me anyway. She allowed me to wear them, and I put them on after she assured me they had been washed in the new wringer-washer. The fabric felt smooth and soft on the calloused skin of my hands.
“I got the stain when I tried to chop cotton with the gloves on,” June confided. “Mama made me pull them off and the cat peed on them at the end of the row. They belonged to my mother’s sister Bethany, who is loose and takes up with every kind of man.”
From June I also learned about the behavior of girls with men and boys; and in this case, some of what I learned made me feel better about my own mother and family. A girl was not supposed to associate with boys until a certain age. In my own family, Nora, who was at this age or older, was still not allowed to date boys, talk to boys, or receive letters from boys, and when I told this to June, she seemed impressed with Nora’s virtue. “You can’t even have any kissing cousins,” June explained, and I replied that we did not. “A man cannot be allowed to see a woman naked, even your brother,” she added, and I added nothing to this, because I knew my daddy liked to watch Nora wash off in the tub.
“If a boy tries to kiss you, what would you do?”
“If it was Cob Granger, I would let him.”
“Cob Granger is as handsome as pictures of Jesus,” June agreed. “But what if it was somebody else? What if it was Piggy?”
We giggled into our palms, because we both thought the idea of Piggy doing anything like that was ridiculous. “I would turn my face away so he couldn’t reach my mouth,” I answered. “And if he reached for me, I would back off.”
I AM IN the present again. The moment hurtles toward something out there, unseen. The illusion that the past still exists, that I can travel in it, surrounds me, but I know that the images of June and me are false ones. I am more real than they are, I tell myself so.
The reassurance helps, because this morning I found Mama in the kitchen of my house, stooped over, looking at the refrigerator, maybe hoping to pour herself a glass of milk. At once I thought to myself, you are dead, you cannot be here.
But she pulled the refrigerator door open even wider; the cold spilled out in tendrils of mist that licked up and down her body. She inspected the food in my refrigerator slowly, the carton of orange juice, the milk, the packages of boiled sandwich ham, the box of cheese. Mayonnaise, relish, mustard, a jar of salsa left here by my grandson, who likes it. Fresh vegetables and fruits. A freezer full of meat bought on sale and wrapped carefully. Canned biscuits, too, so that I would never have to mix another batch unless I wished. My mother inspected every corner of the refrigerator, opened every cupboard, peeped behind every door. I held my breath.
When she left I sat down at the table. She disturbed nothing, she left the kitchen neat. Around me, laid out in tidy squares and smoothly curved shapes, my clean kitchen gleamed.
I remember no expression on her face. I have been sitting here at the table trying to think whether she wore any. Was there disapproval? Could there have been envy? Maybe she was proud that I have achieved this much in my life, that I have a clean kitchen and enough food for months? Even a tiny bit proud would satisfy me. But I do not remember any expression at all.
UPSTAIRS IN THE Taylor farmhouse, June led me to the back of a closet where there was no wall. Inky blackness filled the space beyond, a blackness so palpable you could squeeze it with your hand.
“There’s a coffin back there, somewhere,” June announced, giving me a significant look.
“Is not.”
“Is too. It is the coffin of Jacob Brown, the man who once owned this farm. He was my papa’s cousin.”
I stared into the black space, from which, suddenly, a dusky odor emerged, or I thought it did, like the smell of a dead bird, the musk of decay.
“He died of a mysterious disease,” June intoned, “and the family buried him here, out of sight in the attic, in order to keep the germs from getting into the ground. The germs from dead people are stronger than most other kinds of germs.” She leaned into the blackness. The closet was already dark, I could hardly see her. “We should go look at it.”
“I don’t want to go in there.”
“All right,” June tugged her skirt from under her thighs; she always pretended a hard time getting comfortable. “We can sit here then. But sometimes cousin Jacob walks around.”
“He does not.”
She nodded, and I watched the outline of her head in the murk. “Yes, he does,” she whispered, and she made it sound almost sad. “One time I woke up and he was behind me and he had his cold, cold hands around my neck.”
“You’re a telling a story.”
“You shouldn’t call people a story like that. I woke up and he put his cold, cold hands around my neck, and he began to squeeze, and I could not breathe, but I knew who it was and I gasped, ‘Jacob,’ at the last second and was saved.”
My heart had begun to pound, and I could have sworn, for a moment, that I felt icy fingers wrapping my own throat. This was her best story yet. I leaned even farther forward, and June gave me a little shove, and I squealed, “Stop it, June.”
“You don’t have to raise your voice.” She shushed me dramatically. “Listen, there’s something out there.”
We both listened. June scooted over next to me and hid her face behind my back. “It’s just like before,” she muttered against my back, “when he tried to kill me by choking me.”
But there was nothing to be heard except the distant radio. Till suddenly I heard a voice I knew.
When Frog Taylor called us downstairs, we scrambled out of the opening to the attic, and June hurtled down the stairs like a hound after rabbits. I heard my daddy and changed back into my church dress before I went down myself. “My wife needs her at home and so I come on up here.”
“Well, we would have brought her home soon.” Frog’s voice rose to a high pitch of politeness. “Albert was planning to run her there in the truck before he laid down for his nap. Won’t you, Albert?”
Mr. Albert had laid a toothpick on his lower lip and looked my daddy up and down. “Yep.”
“Well, I can walk her on home now.”
“We can give you both a ride.”
Daddy fixed his eyes on me. From across the room I became afraid of him and wanted to hang back. I wished he would say yes to Mr. Albert and let him drive us home in the truck. But Daddy smiled at me and said, “Your mama sent me to get you, baby doll. She needs help with them younguns.”
I nodded and then took a deep breath. “I had a good time, June Frances. Thanks for asking me to come.”
She dipped her head, like a chicken going after corn, suddenly shy again.
“That was mighty sweet, won’t it?” Frog smiled at everybody.
Daddy gathered me to him with a look and we left
then, and Daddy never did answer Mr. Albert’s question about the ride. We set out walking down their driveway, through the gray dirt of the front yard. Sweetgum balls from last autumn rolled underfoot. Daddy set a brisk pace down the road, and sometimes I had to trot a little to keep up. We headed along the road and then along a path through the woods, one I had walked with Addis once or twice. Soon we were all alone walking in the woods with warblers, sparrows, jays, and whatnot screeching overhead.
“You worried your mama.” He looked at me piercingly as he squatted on his heels rolling a cigarette. “You know it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“She didn’t know nothing about you going to eat with the Taylors.”
I looked down at the ground, but I could still tell he was watching me.
“You’ll have to get a whipping,” he said. He looked at me for a long time, and I felt as if my bare skin were knotting and tightening. He licked out the tip of his tongue onto his lower lip. Then he smiled and lit the cigarette and smoked it.
Afterward, instead of beating me, he stood, and we walked down the path. I followed behind him at a careful distance, several steps, but not enough to be conspicuous, like I was trying to run away. We walked the long way, across Piney Creek onto the dry side. Daddy kept ahead of me and only looked back at me one time, when we were in sight of the African Methodist church. Some black children were playing in the churchyard near a juniper tree, and Daddy eyed them, then turned to me. Beard darkened his lower face. His teeth gleamed. Clouds and tree branches were moving behind his head, as if he had put them there. Then he turned and we walked again, without hurry.
We neared the house on the pond side, out of the woods, and Daddy stopped there, under a birch tree, to take off his belt.
He fixed his eyes on me. His voice lowered flat and toneless. “You move a muscle, I’ll give it to you twice as worse.”
He moved around me with the belt. I stood there while he lashed me across the legs and arms. I hardly felt any thing while he was whipping me with the soft leather, though I knew he had cut my legs with the belt. I was too afraid to feel anything, because he was still there, moving around me. I hurt later, when he was finished. Beginning as he faced me, looping the belt through his everyday pants. I could feel tears sliding down my face and something wet slid down my legs as well, and I refused to look at him for fear he would take off the belt again. “If your mama had of done you, she would of done you worse,” he said. “You ought to be thankful.” He walked away, his dogs setting up a chorus under the house.
LATE AT NIGHT I hear Mama again, shuffling on the clean lino leum. I pull on my robe and tiptoe out of my bedroom, my king-size bed. Even before I round the corner I know she is there.
She has not turned on any light, she has not disturbed anything. But a flux of moonlight traces her iridescent outlines in front of my sink. She has been eating, I am certain of it, and later I will discover that someone has scooped out a new corner of the macaroni and cheese casserole. But now she simply stands in front of the sink, looking out at my flower garden in the moonlight.
All questions freeze on my lips. After a few moments I move into the sitting area from which I can still see her. I look out one window and she looks out the other, and we are faced with the whole garden, the pebble paths and the fish pool and the arbor where I trained wisteria to grow, the climbing tomato plants at the back, the scuppernong vine, the fig bush, and the young, short apple trees, for tonight they all blaze, all the flowers, and every branch bows heavy with fruit or berry, every place I turn. So I am hardly surprised when my mother walks outside, nor am I surprised even when, a moment later, I follow her.
Clouds roll in a high wind, and their mottling across the moon makes it appear the light is moving across my hands, my nightgown, and clinging to my steps. I button the robe at the front in case the neighbors should be watching. Discreet, I move along the slate path.
Ahead, my mother has stopped beside the Japanese maple in its bed of pine straw at the corner of the house. Out here in the dark she seems less substantial, as if she really is a ghost, as if I really might poke my hand right through her, without hurting her at all. But I am reluctant to step too close. I wait, I allow her to lead.
Once, by the hummingbird feeder, she turns and looks at me. I believe it is the first time our eyes meet. A chill sweeps me, and I remember, suddenly, sitting in the open square of blackness in the back of June Frances’s closet on that first Sunday afternoon. The chill reminds me of that, made up of the air over a grave or from inside a tomb. My dead mother watches me for a few moments, then turns, and I follow her.
When I am aware again I am halfway across the bare field in back of the house. I do not so much waken there as regain control of myself, recovering my limbs, stopping my forward march. Mama still walks ahead, nearly across the field as I watch. She never hesitates, like my dream. She heads toward the river. She plunges into the woods in her white slip. Moving forward, through darkness, toward water. I glimpse her face slipping under the water. I have not seen the image so clearly for years. The white round pancake of her face slipping under the water, without expression.
I return to my house when I am sure she’s gone. I lie in bed till dawn, even though I can hardly close my eyes.
I am beginning to understand. In that river I am moving, too.
NORA
NORA LIVED TO be a good age, sixty-eight, old for my family. She collected a little Social Security at the end, as I have.
I believe we were friends when she died, a relief, since she behaved as if she hated me when we were young. She hated everyone then, but especially me. I sat through her funeral while a high wind threatened to rip off my hat, a nice beaded black affair with a veil, something my second husband gave me. I clamped my hand there and tried to ignore the wind. I was thinking we might have to close the lid on Nora after all, the way the wind was whipping that lacy thing at her throat. She reclined there quietly, composedly, with a piece of a smile across her lips. Even dead, Nora could stir up a storm.
When we chopped cotton and when we picked it, I worked near her, and she kept her eye on me. She criticized the way I chopped, she claimed I skipped over patches and left the dirt in big clods. I took it to heart and chopped furiously, finer and finer, till my back and shoulders and arms burned. At times Nora whimpered and pressed her hand against her lower back, and I mimicked the pose. The pressure of my hand provided a bit of relief for sore, tired muscles. But neither of us said much about it, and we rarely complained to Mama, who had her own aches and pains.
We both grew thin as sticks, all those years, till suddenly one day Nora began to blossom into a kind of plumpness that Daddy kept his eye on.
He kept her close by him. She washed his hands at night, and pulled off his boots and socks, and rubbed his feet. She stirred the sugar into his coffee. At times he showed a softness toward her that made Mama arch her back and spit. But Nora never lost her fear of Daddy, and I understood why.
Daddy caught Lyle Yates propped against the corner of our house talking sweet to Nora, and Daddy blacked both his eyes and then raised welts on Nora’s backside with a leather cord. When Mama got upset about it, he gave her a couple of licks to think about, too.
One day, when we returned home from school, Mama glared at Nora from across the kitchen. Her expression became so menacing that Nora stopped midway through the room; she trembled and became very afraid, knowing Mama’s temper. “Your ass is going to get stomped when your daddy comes home,” she hissed.
“What did I do?”
“You daddy is going to break every bone in your nasty body.”
“Mama please,” a flutter in her voice, “what are you talking about?”
Mama drew a letter out of her bosom. “You got this here letter. Carl Jr. told me this has your name on it.”
A desperate longing, like nothing I had ever seen before, consumed Nora. “Give it to me! Oh please!”
Mama shoved the letter back into her bos
om. Nora stood whimpering and my heart had begun to pound. “If this letter is from a boy, your daddy will wear you out.”
“Mama, please give it to me. Please don’t tell Daddy.”
Instead, Mama gave her a smack across the face and wheeled and left the room.
I did the same, leaving my schoolbooks on the table and carrying the water bucket outside. A patch of red spread across Nora’s cheek.
Daddy came home stomping mud off his boots and flapping his work gloves against the porch post. His hands were scratched and dirty and oozing blood in places. He had gone back to logging after a spell of tending fires in tobacco curing barns; the wood fires had to be watched all night. The money was better logging but the work was hard and he always hated it, especially that he scratched his hands up, and tore his fingernails, and blistered his palms. He mustered with the crews at Mr. Jarman’s store, and Roe Yates gave him a ride home every evening.
“Get over here and wash my hands.” He stopped by the water bucket and glared at Nora. When she failed to move instantly, he said again, “Did you hear me? I said get over here.”
Nora moved toward him, arms folded like a shield against her chest. She stood in his shadow and poured hot water into the basin, cooling it with water I had drawn from the well. She took his hands and soaked them in the hot water. “Goddamn, that stings,” Daddy said, and Madson, at the kitchen table, giggled.
“What the hell are you hooting at?” Daddy asked, and Madson shut up right quick.
Nora took a soft washcloth and ran it tenderly over the gnarled backs of Daddy’s hands, one scar from a knife fight in Holberta, another from an accident opening oysters. She scrubbed so gently Daddy was surprised and blinked uncertainly, gazing at the top of her head. All four of their hands were submerged in the soapy water.
From the back of the house we could hear Mama barreling down on us. “Is that Willie?” she shrilled. “Is that your daddy? One of you younguns better goddammit answer me.”
“It’s me,” he said flatly.
