by Jim Grimsley
“You’ll be good to your younguns,” I said, watching her. “Like I’ll be good to mine.”
We sat in motion, hands sorting the fragrant leaves, though for a few moments silence and stillness clouded us over. The dimpled baby gurgled, and we smiled and looked down at him. We smiled together with the baby and with each other. We had seldom smiled together when we lived in the same house, not in this tender way, and shyness overcame us both. We worked till sundown.
In spite of the dust, I liked the smell of tobacco leaves, its acrid, sharp edges driving up the nostrils; I liked the dirt of the leaves, except the dust, and the bits of string, the tough stems of the leaves after they were cured. The rough texture of tobacco sticks pleased my hand, and I never got a splinter, though I drew many a splinter out of Nora’s hand, or Burner’s, in the evening when he came home and helped us work.
Nora’s baby, when she let me hold him, smelled warm and sweet, like biscuit dough made just right; and when Burner lifted the baby, himself fresh from the fields, the warm baby smell mixed with the sour field sweat of Burner, and then he laid the baby on a towel and unpinned the diaper where lay a sweet, fragrant baby turd. I loved to hold the baby and wished for one of my own.
I stayed till Mama sent for me. The time was sweet, in the same way time had passed at Aunt Addis’s house. I saw everything more vividly because I never knew how long I would be there. We woke up and started the fire early in the morning, as early as we would have lit the kindling at home; but here in Nora’s kitchen we were alone. We did the dishes side by side, and Nora praised my hands, the shape of them and the texture of the skin. “You have those smooth pretty hands,” she said. “Mine look like I soak them in lye twice a day.”
“They do not.”
“They do too. Look how bony my fingers are.”
“They’re not bony, they only have a few knobs on them.” Her hands had large brown freckles on the back, the same texture of freckle that traced the sunny side of her arms and shoulders. My skin was clean and clear. I asked, “Do you ever hate me because I don’t have freckles?”
Nora laughed. I liked the ease of the sound. “I don’t hate you.”
“I used to think you did.”
“No. I don’t hate anybody.” But she glanced at her shoulders, the dusting of freckles along her upper arms. “I think you’re stuck on yourself, that’s all, but so is everybody.”
“I am not stuck on myself,” I squealed, but for years afterward she would say the same thing, as if it were really true.
“Besides,” she added, “I don’t even mind having freckles any more. Burner likes them.” She blushed and refused to say more, though I was longing to ask what, exactly, she meant.
My first night asleep on the couch, when I had heard Nora’s moaning in the bedroom, I sat up with my heart pounding, afraid for her. Then I heard the rhythm of her whimpering, and Burner’s heavy breath, and I lay reluctantly onto the cushions, though my heart continued to drum against my ribs till they finished. I listened till long after they were done. I hardly slept.
For days when I heard their bed rocking against the wall, the mattress springs creaking and singing, and their giggling or even their harsher sounds, I wondered what this feeling was. I had heard similar sounds in my own house coming from Mama and Daddy, though Mama had never squealed with laughter the way Nora did. I ran my fingers over myself, inside my drawers, where my stuff was getting hairy and changing. Exploring there, I felt warm, as if the surface of my skin shimmered. As I listened to Nora and Burner I was floating in the feeling with them, as if what they were doing was a cloud and I lay enfolded in it.
I have moved toward unknown places in myself at moments like that, lost in the night hours in some strange setting, like that time, sleeping on the lumpy couch in the unfamiliar room in Nora’s house with the scent of cured tobacco flavoring the breezes. What I understood exceeded any words I could provide to describe it, but the slight sense of nausea that overcame me, along with the pounding of my heart, the quickening of the blood in me, sufficed. Here was Nora making the same noise as Mama, and thinking nothing of it, right in the next room. I lay with the sheets pulled to my chin, feeling uncomfortable at the softness of my breasts under my hands.
Later by decades, in Nora’s room in the hospital while she was dying, the memory of that particular moment returned to me. I could feel the closeness of the room, the bent spring of the couch jabbing against my shoulder blade, and my hands floating over my breasts, cupped around them, squeezing slightly. The headboard of the bed stopped hitting the wall. In the quiet aftermath of the ruckus they’d made, their murmuring voices lifted like a cloud; I could hear only the sound and none of the words, but the sound had a lightness to it. Their togetherness left me suddenly hollow and lonely.
MY FINAL MEMORY of Nora is this: When Nora was a little girl she had a blue-flowered dress with white buttons, none broken. On the day she died, she remembered that dress, last of all, before slipping away from us. Wearing the dress, Nora had stood taller, lighter, pretty as a cloud passing overhead and somehow spritely. Where did it come from, such a pretty garment? The answers lie buried somewhere in me, lost, but I have the impression that someone sewed the dress for Nora when she started school. Can I remember back as far as that? Mama’s sister Rhonda was famous for sewing, but known to be stingy with fabric. Daddy’s sister Tula had pedaled a sewing machine herself now and then, sewing a shift for Mama or a plain skirt for herself.
Nora put on the dress while Mama watched. The clean blue fabric slid across Nora’s freckled back. Mama slipped the dress over the shoulders and adjusted it to hang. “That nearbout fits,” she said, and smacked her lips. A moment later, without ceremony, she pulled the dress off Nora again, leaving Nora to shiver in her dingy drawers, her bony backside poking out.
On the first day of school Nora wore the dress. She washed her hair and let it hang clean around her face. There was no ribbon to tie it back and the barrette she prized so much was the wrong color for the dress. She walked around the kitchen in the dress as if the fabric were fragile. She sat carefully in a clean chair, smoothing the skirt over her knees. When she came home, she carefully hung the dress on a nail in the bedroom, smoothing out the skirt.
Because she had few good dresses, she wore it often, and began to come home with an expression on her face I had never seen before. Fear. A setting of the lips into a frightened line, and a slight flaring of the nostrils. She looked around our house as if she had never seen it before. Sliding the dress off her shoulders, she flung it into the corner on the floor.
After that, she wore the beautiful dress as if it were nothing. She might wear it to school two or three days in a row, and the fabric quickly lost its newness and faded from boilings in the laundry pot. When she outgrew it and I grew bigger, the dress became mine, and I wore it to school the same as Nora had. Even in its faded state it was far the prettiest dress I had ever worn, and I buttoned each button carefully. I never threw the dress in the corner when it was mine. On laundry day I followed it anxiously from washboard to rinse water.
On occasion I caught Nora watching me, since she knew what I was up to. Sometimes she scrubbed that dress extra hard on the washboard, hoping the fabric would wear thin and finally shred in her hands.
When I outgrew the dress, a year or so passed before Corrine grew into it, and I dressed her in it with a feeling of reluctance. By then most of the color was gone and the fabric had grown dingy with age and wear. She wore it to play in the yard and soon it was as gray as the dirt around the house. She ripped the bottom of the skirt on the bobbed-wire fence around the Allison’s cow pasture when we went fishing in the river near there. I hemmed the skirt and shortened it for Delia when she needed a play dress of her own. The buttons had remained intact all that time, except one that broke when Corrine used the dress to whip Madson and the button chipped on a corner of the chest of drawers.
Last I remember, Delia wore the dress into the chicken yard, the dr
ess already tight across her shoulders, and hanging on her without shape or color, as she ran barefoot through the chicken turds.
So it all came back to me, that day in Nora’s room in the hospital, sitting among her children amid the evidence of her good adult life, her strength fading on the bed, and I was there to hear her say, “I love my blue-flowered dress,” in the softest voice; I was there to smile and remember the dress, exactly the one she was talking about, all those years ago, when it was the most beautiful piece of cloth that she or I had ever seen. Her children all wondered what dress she meant, and I told them; I gave them the gift of their mother as a little girl, and I remembered how I loved her then, when she was small and the dress was bright. I understood what memory was for, then. She and I remained there, those little girls lost in the river; we are together even now as I am remembering, and she is dead, and we will be there when I die, forever. I was glad to have come to sit with her while she faded, because now I could love her again. She lay with her wisps of hair arranged on the pillow, and we watched her die. We waited all night. Nora, who heard nothing by the end, finally added, in the most peaceful voice, “It has the prettiest flowers on it.”
MY DROWNING
I DREAM OF my own drowning, and in the dream once again I fail to distinguish between the past and now. We are walking through the woods toward the pond, headed for Nora’s funeral. I should be older than I am; this thought occurs to me as we follow Mama through the woods. Mama has come to Nora’s funeral too, even though Mama is already dead; but Daddy is nowhere to be seen. We walk together, all of us, Otis and Carl Jr., me and Corrine, Madson and Delia and Hob, the baby whom I hardly knew; sometimes I even hear Joe Robbie’s voice, and I look for him as if I need to pull his wagon and hold him upright in it, like before. We are eating cold biscuits from the sack I carry, and we push our way forward along the path, shielding ourselves from the underbrush.
Aunt Addis joins us at the edge of the woods and picks me up. I am suddenly very small and she lifts me without any effort. She slides her cool hands under my dress and the smooth tips of her fingers brush my legs, my lower back. She slides my dress over my head. I wear a yellow slip underneath, and Aunt Addis adjusts the straps that have slipped low on my shoulders. I stand at the foot of a cypress at the edge of Moss Pond.
In the black water Nora’s body floats, her face partly submerged. Dark fingers of water lap into her nostrils. Behind me stands my family, and when I turn to look at them, Mama keens and sinks to her knees. Sorrow etches her face. But I feel nothing, and turn to study Nora in the water again. The image becomes familiar to me, not simply that this is Nora but that this is Nora at the age when she married Burner Boyette and gave him his first child. She wears a familiar dress, blue-flowered, but larger and simpler than the one she had as a girl.
I step into the water. Hands push me from behind, but whose? I try to turn to see but the hands are pressing me forward and I take another step into the water, so cold; my slip rises in the water, my feet sinking into the mud; and I go forward again, and again, and the water closes over my head, and the slip rises, and my legs, suddenly tiny, have sunk into the mud. I have walked near Nora, the water draining from her lips when she bobs high, her eyes open and fixed on the sky over her head. I wonder how she has become young again like this, and how I have become so small. Suddenly I stumble beneath the water, beneath Nora, and I am drowning, I can feel the water in my own nostrils, I cough and gasp and the water fills my throat. But Nora’s hands lift me out of the water and cold air fills my lungs.
OTIS WAS THE last to die before I was left alone in the family, and before he did he told me the story of the river, and when he told me the events echoed, as if I had heard it all before. On my hearing the story, something akin to a memory un-locked within me, as if what Otis said were the truth and not simply the shadow of one more dream. So I nearly believed him, even if he was lying, and this may have been all he wanted.
Daddy wanted you born dead, Otis claimed, so he beat Mama something fierce when you were in her belly, more than once. If she said she felt sick he beat her, made her work, and took the money from her, bought liquor, drank till he was falling over. So Mama hated you, he said, and when you were born she took you to the pond, and she tried to drown you, and she would have done it, except Nora saved you. You didn’t know that, did you?
Mama hated you, he repeated, with emphasis, she wanted you to be born dead. The idea of one more mouth to feed drove Daddy to distraction, at least in Mama’s mind. He had been all right through the first three children and the ones that died, but now he had given up farming because he hated to work for so little money. So when Mama turned out to be pregnant again, Daddy knocked her around whenever he could. He beat her legs with keen switches, he beat her across the shoulders with a buggy whip, and he set out to work her to death, or to work her till you died inside her. She worked for every farmer around the pond, and every dime she earned Daddy slipped into his pocket, and if she threw up in the morning or acted puny or tried to get out of working, he gave her a beating on top of the sickness. So she trudged off to the fields every day, and me and the rest went with her.
Mama swelled up bigger than ever. Daddy hardly ever worked by then, and if there was any food in the house Mama had sneaked to buy it, till at the end of the summer when you were born we were eating wormy oatmeal and grits bought on credit from the Little Store.
According to Otis, I was born before dawn one morning, August 19, which has always been my birthday though I never knew Otis to remember it. I was tiny as a kitten, wet, cold, hungry from the very first moment. After I was born, Mama laid up in bed and refused to nurse me till her breasts were so sore she had no choice. Daddy stared stupefied at the cradle where I lay.
He disappeared after that, and we had nothing. Mama stayed in bed all day at first, then stirred in the house as if she could not quite believe he had vanished. One day she stared at me a long time with hardly any expression on her face. She picked me up and walked with me to the edge of the pond, near the old mill. She set me on the ground without even a blanket under me and then she pulled off her dress and lifted me up and walked into the water. She lowered me to the cold pond. But Nora and Otis had followed, and Nora waded into the water, took me away from her, and ran into the woods. Nora hid with me in her arms, till nightfall. Then she sneaked into the house and laid me in the cradle like nothing had happened.
The next morning Mama started to nurse me, and then Aunt Tula came by and we went to stay with them for a while, including me, and we lived there until Daddy came back. He made up with Mama like the Lord intended, according to Otis, who by the time he died had become a preacher ordained by some church or other.
Had the story he told not resembled my dream, I would have paid no attention to Otis at all. He would have lied for meanness any moment of his life. But he had once told me he knew a secret about me, though he never spoke it.
Even so, there were places where his story was different from any version of my dream. He claimed the drowning had taken place in the pond, but in my dreams I had always seen Mama walking into Holcomb River. He claimed this happened when I was a baby, but in my dream I had always been older. He claimed to have been there, when I remembered only Nora.
“Why are you telling me this now, Otis?” I asked.
“My mama tried to kill somebody,” he said, while his bloated wife, Naomi, rocked back and forth in her chair, at the same time using her thumbnail to dig some food from between her two front teeth.
“That’s some mess you’re making up, Otis,” I stated flatly, with Naomi eyeing me and Otis struggling to sit up.
“I’m telling you the truth,” he wheezed, and sank against the bed, and I folded my hands around my purse and watched him. Pretty soon there was a rattle in his chest and then his tubes filled with this or that and all his machines beeped at once, and the nurses ran me out of there, and he died, I suppose, in his wife’s arms, if she could stand up that long.
/> But after he was dead I heard the words he had said over and over again. I could hardly help but wonder.
By then I had buried them all, there was no one left to ask. Even the younger ones, Corrine and Madson and Hob and Delia, even they had died before me, along with the aunts on both sides, who might have heard some shadow of the tale.
FOR A TIME, while I was sitting with Otis listening to the moist rattle of his chest, it was as if I were sitting with Daddy again, watching him die. Nora and Corrine and I kept watch on him as he lay in the hospital. Everyone thought we meant to be dutiful daughters, but we three understood, without ever speaking the words aloud, that we were keeping an eye on him, to make sure he finally left the world. The boys had died or vanished; but Daddy had his girls to sit with him till the end, while he shrank to the size of a nut inside his own skin, complaining to the last about the way the nurses treated him and repeating his eternal wish for a drink.
He frightened us, even weak, dying, and hardly able to move. One day when I relieved Nora, I found her wide awake, sitting with her back perfectly erect in the chair, clutching her purse against her, staring at Daddy with her eyes wide open as if he were the Moss Pond monster.
Once when Corrine came to relieve me, I whirled at her when the door opened and startled her; she paled at my expression and asked, “Ellen, what’s wrong? Did he do something?”
I shook my head. She understood my fear from the fact that I simply turned toward Daddy, and we stood side by side and looked down at him, him frightened too, wheezing, needing a shave and maybe even with his diaper soiled, needing someone to change it for him, and we watched, Corrine and I.
On the last morning, Corrine and I confused the schedule and both arrived at the same time to relieve Nora; by accident, we thought, until Nora looked at us from the chair. Then we knew Daddy was finally ready to go, and we sat down and waited until he was done. He died with his eyes open and with an earnest wish that one of us would speak to him tenderly to ease his path, a sincere desire that one of his daughters lay her cool hand on his forehead to soothe his way out of the world; but we simply sat there in our straight-back chairs and listened to that rasp, like an old hinge, louder and drier until he died.
