Snakewoman of Little Egypt

by Robert Hellenga

  I stopped at the cemetery on my way home. I had some things to say to Warren, like, “Why did you get me into this, Warren? I don’t belong here with these professor types in their fancy summer dresses and eighteen-year-old girls with PROPERTY OF across their tits and DON’T YOU WISH on their butts. I paid way too much for a stupid briefcase. I don’t know any more about life than Tiffany, with her collection of stuffed animals. I can’t even figure out the difference between the math requirement and the quantitative literacy requirement, or between the diversity requirement and the cultural literacy requirement. The only ones that made sense were the science requirement and the foreign language requirement. I should have gone to the junior college like Mr. Byron said.” Mr. Byron taught biology on the Hill. “I can’t live in a room with someone named Tiffany who’s got twenty pairs of shoes and a shitload of stuffed animals, and a French horn and wants to be an entrepreneur. My room’s smaller than my cell on the Hill. What was I thinking? What were you thinking? I’m a fish out of water. And why did you lie to me? Why did you pretend to be a professor? Did you think you had to be a big shot to impress me? You didn’t have to lie to me. And now here you are at the back of the cemetery, with no flowers. And you’ve even got a place for me right next to you. Me. I may not be ready to go to college, but I’m not ready to die.”

  You were a fish out of water in Naqada, he said. I could hear his voice inside my head. You were a fish out of water on the Hill. You’ll be a fish out of water at Thomas Ford. You’ll always be a fish out of water. Get used to it and stop feeling sorry for yourself. And I never lied to you. I never told you I was a professor. That was your own idea. For Christ’s sake, I was the only one who stuck up for you. I came to your wedding. I bailed you out of jail after you shot that jerk of a husband. I drove you down to St. Louis and took you to a French movie: An American in Paris. I offered to help you escape to Mexico. I knew a place where nobody would ever find you, but you were more scared of Mexico than you were of prison.

  After you were convicted I pulled some strings to get you transferred from Little Muddy down in Hardin County to the Hill. I came to see you every visiting day. Till I got too sick. I put money in your account so you could buy what you needed. I told you what was going on at the university because I found it interesting. Some faculty members wanting to get rid of the fraternities … controversial hiring decisions … a new dorm … football games, baseball, basketball, women’s volleyball. It was all interesting. And those shorts that say DON’T YOU WISH on the butt. I wish they’d had those when I was working there. It’s all interesting.

  “All right, Uncle Warren. I’m sorry. Take it easy.”

  That’s better, he said. Now tell me what’s been happening since I died. You still had two years to go on the Hill.”

  “They wouldn’t let me out for your funeral,” I said, “but the warden let me watch from his office. I could see the little cemetery from his window. I could see someone standing up. Jackson. Talking away. What did he say? I guess I’ll have to ask him.”

  He read a nice poem, one of my favorites. He used to sing it to an old Muddy Waters tune. I don’t suppose you know who Muddy Waters was, do you?

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know who Muddy Waters was.”

  Well you should find out.

  “You know, I lost my faith in prison,” I said. “I thought it was easy at the time, like taking off a coat that’s too warm. But now I don’t know what to say. It’s like giving the graduation speech as valedictorian. On the Hill, not high school. Did you know I was valedictorian? Top of my class. I didn’t know what to say. It was in the exercise room. Everybody was there. The teachers … Hard work. That’s all I could think of. I’d been the valedictorian and got to make a speech at our graduation. I spent a lot of time working on it, but I couldn’t get beyond the obvious. Hard work will pay off. It really will. If you work hard … I couldn’t get beyond this. Maybe I didn’t need to. Maybe I really believed it. What my teachers had been telling me in high school. I wouldn’t listen. I had the hots for Earl. All the girls did. After Daddy got killed.

  “I can’t get beyond the obvious now. I guess what I should have said is ‘thank you.’ For everything you did. And for the money too. But what about a tombstone? You don’t have one. We’ve got to take care of that. What do you want on it?”

  But he didn’t answer.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll think of something.”

  Back home I put my briefcase away—I didn’t want Jackson to see it—and took the bottle of wine down to the house. His truck wasn’t there, so I knew he wasn’t home. But I wanted the wine to be there when he got back.

  The door wasn’t locked. It wasn’t even closed all the way. So I let myself in. I let the dog in too. Maya. It was the most beautiful house I’d ever seen. More beautiful than Mawmaw Tucker’s on the bluff by the old lock. Not as fancy, but more comfortable.

  The dog was making herself at home. She was at home. I knew the dog wouldn’t tattle on me. I thought I’d just set the bottle of wine down somewhere. I thought that as long as I was holding the bottle of wine I could always say I’d just stepped inside and was going to put the wine down somewhere.

  There was a leather davenport in the big living room, and a chair big enough for two people, and stairs that were wrapped around a stone chimney. A big wood-burning stove with glass doors was vented into the chimney. There were two ceiling fans, and books everywhere. That’s why there was only one window in the front of the house. The whole wall was books. I’d never seen so many books. He had more books than the public library in Naqada. The books made me uneasy.

  All the windows had shutters with little adjustable slats on them that seemed to warm the beams of yellow light that came into the room. The windows in the back opened onto a deck and then onto the woods. There was a little stream and a bridge over the stream. The bridge had been dislodged, as if it had been lifted up by the stream and set back down crooked. The stream was the bottom of the hollow. The ground rose up on the other side. I couldn’t see past the trees. I didn’t want to leave this room. I wanted to sit down at the big table—as big as the ones at the library, with drawers on both sides—and read a book.

  There was a big kitchen with lots of copper pots and pans hanging from a wrought-iron frame over the table. The fancy dark blue stove—really fancy—had two ovens. Blue and white tiles covered the walls behind the counters. The downstairs bathroom was big too, but there was nothing in the medicine cabinet over the sink. The toilet was running in the bathroom. I lifted the lid of the tank and adjusted the flapper. The huge bathtub, which had some kind of whirlpool hookup, looked inviting.

  Upstairs were two big bedrooms, one with the bed made up. Blankets and quilts were stacked on open shelves. The bedrooms ran the width of the house. On one side you could look up the hill at the garage. You could see right into my apartment and I wondered if I could see into Jackson’s bedroom from my window. On the other side you looked down at the stream and out into the woods. There were no closets, but there was a big wardrobe built to fit under the slope of the ceiling. I looked in the wardrobe. No sign of any sexy magazines, no vibrators.

  The bed wasn’t messy, but it wasn’t made either. The flannel sheets on top and bottom smelled like they’d been washed recently.

  The medicine cabinet in the upstairs bathroom was much smaller than the one downstairs, but it was full of prescription medications. There was a small shower. No tub.

  What was I doing? I asked myself. What did I want to know? What did I want to find out about Jackson? What did I want?

  What I wanted was to live in Warren’s little apartment over the garage and not in that prison of a dormitory with Tiffany and her stuffed animals.

  I lay down on Jackson’s bed. Who was the woman who was here last night? Who drove in with the headlights off? I was betting it was Claire. That’s what I was looking for, I realized. Signs of a woman’s presence. Clothes. Makeup. Lipstick. But I didn’t f
ind anything. Not even a trace of Claire’s perfume in the air.

  The second bedroom was identical to the first—double bed and another wardrobe—but it was empty except for a locked gun cabinet holding a couple of hunting rifles and a shotgun that hadn’t been oiled in a while.

  Back downstairs I sat down at the electric piano and played as much as I could remember of “I Got Rhythm” from An American in Paris. I looked at the books on the shelves. Most of them were in French, but an English title caught my eye: Untrodden Fields of Anthropology. That sounded interesting, and it was. Interesting, but disgusting. It was hard to imagine such things. By Doctor Jacobus X. I almost couldn’t look at the chapter titles. “Physical love amongst the Annamites.” “The most usual methods of copulation.” “Asiatic houses of prostitution.” “Dangers of sexual intercourse in Annam.” “Perversions of sexual connection in Annam male prostitution.” “Usual habits of Annamite sodomites.” “Study of the buccal, vulvar, and anal deformities caused by male and female prostitution in the Annamite race.” “The Negress and her sexual lust.” “The Decoction of ‘tightening Wood.’ ” “The hot aubergine.” I thought I’d heard about everything there was to hear about sex in prison, but not this, not the hot aubergine. “You cut an aubergine in half and make a groove to hold a man’s penis. Then you make a paste out of match tips, small pimentos, peppercorns, cloves and vanilla beans …” I was still reading when Jackson came in the front door.

  “Find something interesting?” he said.

  “I was just going to leave this bottle of wine on the kitchen table and I started looking at the books.” I still had my thumb in Untrodden Fields. “What’s an ‘aubergine’?”

  “An eggplant.”

  “Oh.” I said. “Look. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come in when you weren’t here.”

  “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “I wasn’t looking for anything,” I said. “I just wanted to drop off the wine. A kind of thank-you. But it’s a beautiful house,” I said. “It’s the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen. And so many books.”

  “A lot of them were Claude’s,” he said. “Most of them.”

  Claude was the man who went to Africa with him and gave him the house.

  “How could anybody read so many books?” I asked. I handed him the wine. A bottle of Bordeaux. I was glad to hear him pronounce it: Bordough.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Your uncle always made himself right at home. You might as well do the same.”

  “I wanted to ask you about my uncle.”

  “Sit,” he said, pointing to a couch.

  “I’m not a dog,” I said.

  He gave me a look of astonishment. “Oh, for Christ’s sake. Would you care to sit down? How’s that?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’ve been going through Warren’s books. Up in the apartment.”

  “Do you mind if I do some yoga stretches?” he said. “Lyme disease affects the joints. I try to keep a regular schedule.”

  “No,” I said. “Of course not.”

  He took his shoes off and stretched out on the floor and started pulling one knee up against his chest. The dog came over and licked his face. He shooed her away.

  “He wasn’t a professor,” I said.

  “A professor?”

  “I thought he was a professor. I mean, the way he talked about this place. I mean the university, but this house too. He talked about you too. As if you two were friends. Colleagues.”

  “We were friends.”

  “But he wasn’t a professor.”

  “No.”

  “I wondered why I couldn’t find his name in the catalog.”

  “Did he tell you he was a professor?

  “No. He just let me think it. He said you were an anthropologist.”

  He nodded.

  “We had some anthropologists come to the church once, but they didn’t stay long.” I laughed.

  “We go everywhere,” he said. He was still on the floor, doing different stretching exercises. “A lot of cultures are disappearing. Anthropologists try to document them before it’s too late. Languages are disappearing faster than wildlife species. There are over three hundred languages with fewer than fifty native speakers. There are over forty languages with only one native speaker left.”

  “I wouldn’t care if we disappeared,” I said. “I mean the Church of the Burning Bush with Signs Following.”

  He laughed. “What are the signs?”

  “Healing the sick, raising the dead, drinking strychnine, handling serpents, speaking in tongues.”

  “Quite a list.”

  “It’s from the Bible,” I said. “Warren gave me a copy of your book about the pygmies. It’s pretty good. Sounds like you had a good time in the Forest.”

  “The ‘Mbuti,” he said. “Not ‘pygmies,’ ‘Mbuti.’ ”

  I tried to say it, but it was hard to get the “Mb” sound right.

  “You shouldn’t feel bad about Warren,” Jackson said. “He was a lot of things. You’d be surprised.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, he was quite a ladies’ man.”

  “Warren? You mean he went with a lot of women?”

  “Well, he had a lot of adventures, and he was a good storyteller.”

  “Like what?”

  “After he got out of the Navy,” Jackson said, “he hung out in Asia for a few years—Kuala Lumpur, Goa, Sri Lanka; he learned Portuguese; he mined copper in Colorado; an army buddy got him a job at Thomas Ford, and he fell in love with a woman here and bought a house on Prairie Street, not far from the campus, and two cemetery plots. He was putting down roots. But the woman left and he stayed.

  “He sold the house,” Jackson went on, “but kept the cemetery plots. They’re worth quite a bit now that the cemetery’s full. That’s why there’s an empty plot for you.”

  “Then somebody ought to take better care of it,” I said.

  “He worked in Buildings and Grounds for ten years and then he was a janitor in Davis Hall for a while before he went over to South Campus. That’s how he met Claude. In Davis Hall. They both loved to talk, and Claude offered him the apartment over the garage. Rent free. And Warren took care of the place. He knew how to do things.

  “He was a Mason too, and claimed that Old Main was built to the specs of a Masonic Temple. He had Claude convinced, and Claude got him to publish an article in The Zephyr. That’s our alternative paper. I’ve got extra copies somewhere.”

  “You were with him when he died?” I said.

  He nodded. “We put up a hospital bed right over against the wall.” He pointed his head at the east wall—no windows, but lots of pictures.

  “What’s it like? Dying? If you’re not expecting to go straight up to Heaven, that is.”

  “I suppose it’s different for everybody. I was kind of sick myself.”

  “What was it like for Uncle Warren?”

  “It wasn’t too bad. We talked a lot, listened to music. Country blues.”

  “Muddy Waters?”

  “Muddy Waters too, the early stuff.”

  “They wouldn’t let me out for his funeral, you know.”

  “I didn’t know they let people out for funerals.”

  “Sometimes. It’s called ‘furlough.’ But I watched it from the warden’s office. I saw you. At least I think it was you. You were wearing a suit. You made a speech.”

  He smiled and got up from the floor and sat next to me on the couch.

  “I read a poem. Langston Hughes’s ‘As Befits a Man.’ ”

  I don’t mind dying

  But I want my funeral to be fine;

  A row of long tall mamas,

  Fannin’ and faintin’ and cryin’.

  I laughed. “That’s pretty funny for a funeral.”

  “Warren was a funny guy. He used to plop himself down in the Common Room and say, ‘What do you make of these Dead Sea Scrolls?’ Or, ‘What do you make of this Big Bang theory?’ He was in
terested in everything. And he always knew more about whatever it was than I did.”

  “And he went with a lot of women?”

  “Quite a few.”

  “That’s why there were so many women at the funeral? I could see them, you know.”

  He laughed.

  “I could do Warren’s job, you know. Make sure the well gets shocked, check the septic tank, bring in a supply of firewood. I see you’ve got a splitter in the garage, and a blade for the tractor. I can drive a tractor, keep the drive cleared in the winter. Put a new railing on the ramp. You need some more gravel on the drive too. Fix up the bridge over the creek.” I was out of breath, afraid he’d laugh.

  “How about shooting a deer in the winter, so we’d have some meat?”

  “I could do that.”

  “Warren’s old 30.06 is upstairs in the bedroom closet. All you’d have to do is sit on the deck and wait for a deer to come along.”

  “Did Warren say anything about me before he died?”

  “He talked about you all the time. He wanted me to look after you.”

  “I don’t need anyone to look after me,” I said. “But maybe you need someone to look after you.” I hoped he wouldn’t take this the wrong way, and he didn’t.

  “I could use someone to look after me,” he said. “At least for a while.”

  5

  Meditation

  The yoga exercises that Jackson performed every day had been prescribed by Dr. Kali, the internist at Billings Hospital in Chicago who had diagnosed Jackson’s Lyme disease. These were simple exercises to relieve pain and muscle spasms, to strengthen damaged joints and tendons and ligaments, to increase range of motion and relieve stiffness. Dr. Kali had demonstrated the different poses in his office without removing his white coat. When he stood on his head—the Sirsasana pose, king of the Asanas, which Jackson had never attempted—two ball-point pens fell out of his jacket pocket. The poses were also intended to calm Jackson’s mind, to discourage the visitors from his past life who appeared to him in his dreams and sometimes in waking moments, too, and to ease his neuropsychiatric symptoms, especially his fear that the cylinder-shaped spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi that had invaded his central nervous system was not merely adaptable but actually intelligent, capable of advanced survival strategies that would prolong the infection and increase his suffering, and his fear that the universe, which had once seemed full of meaning and purpose, light and beauty, was indifferent to the damage done by Borrelia burgdorferi, indifferent in fact to all suffering and to all questions of value.