Eden

by Olympia Vernon

  Grandma had walked clean out the back door with Daddy’s arm in her hand. I remember the commotion, the loud voices, Daddy telling Grandma to shut her old ass up. Phrases, secrets that went right over my head. Mama crying for Grandma to stop before her heart stopped working. “I chop my own wood,” said Grandma. “I’ve always chopped my own wood!” She was a strong woman. She hated the weak. “It’s all right if you can’t see my heart from the inside,” she said. “My child is my business. It’s her heart they stare at when you can’t pay the bills.” She called on God. “Her heart is on the outside now. You took her pride. It’s not even her pain no more. Now she belong to the world.” She yelled those words over and over again as if she’d rehearsed them. Daddy said something. Next thing I know, Daddy’s screaming and there’s a pool of blood on the floor.

  Everything was so blurry. Mama hanging over Daddy’s chest and pushing me against the walls. Her saying that Daddy’s life was missing. Grandma took his life. The backyard covered in a blanket of blue. The eye sees most when it’s not looking, as I witnessed the shape of my grandma’s crawling hair marching out to the hog pen with Daddy’s arm in her hand. She didn’t just turn around. She stayed there awhile with Daddy’s arm in one hand and an ax in the other. Daddy’s arm: the radius of a complete body, the portion of a man that every man needed, his trouble, a six-sided dice throw against the wall, an acoustic guitar’s whine, half his life. Grandma dumped it into the trough. I was sure of it. That’s why my daddy hated that hog so much. After that night, he fed it anything he could get his hands on. That hog had eaten his arm, his manhood, his work. Yeah, he fattened that hog up real nice before he drove all the way to Morgan City to kill it, because it had lived too close to his memory, so close to his house to have owned his house, owned him.

  I gathered a load of sheets in my arms before going back into the house.

  “Are they sour?” Mama asked.

  I smelled them. “No, ma’am.”

  The rain came pouring down. I went to my room to listen to it, to become a part of my God, to leave behind the quiet silence between a mother and child who didn’t know how to talk to each other, how to fully communicate about the dead, the cheating, the alcoholic father, the whispers in town about a sinful child with no respect for God’s house, His rules.

  I always had my encyclopedias. I hated history. If it hadn’t been for that one subject, I would have been an honor student. I read everything. Paid more attention to Negroes than they had to themselves. I knew why that hog didn’t come to me too. I read things about those white scientists and how people, animals, were conditioned to a sort of “used to” type of living. That hog was so used to being locked up that she didn’t know how to move or break the rules. She lay there like that because she was used to being confined, eating slop. I mean she was so used to eating slop that my daddy’s arm went right down her throat, fingers and all.

  “I got a telegram today,” said Mama. I folded my arms and leaned my head to one side as her shadow grew larger over the edge of my bed. Finally, she sat down. The pot on the stove was boiling over, full. “Pip’s sick.”

  I heard that line over and over again in my head. That “Pip’s sick” and there was something she wanted me to do about it, something I, a fourteen-year-old child, was supposed to do about it.

  “Pack your things,” she said. “You going to Commitment.”

  There was a nerve of electricity in her mouth, a tiny movement of activity riding the side of her jawbone as if a parasite had gotten trapped inside.

  “What kind of sick?” I asked.

  She went for the door again. Her shadow halted. She had not seen Aunt Pip since Grandma’s funeral. Even then, they did not say one word to each other.

  “Graveyard sick,” she said.

  Later that evening, we drove to the outskirts of Pyke County. Aunt Pip lived on Commitment Road with one other lady who didn’t belong to any church for miles around. And she used her social security check to pay her bills. She, like Miss Hattie Mae, was a widow.

  “Maddy,” said Mama, pulling her Goodwill hat over to one side and giving me the eye in the rearview mirror. “Make sure that if you and Pip leave the house, you put on some underclothes. Never know what could happen these days.”

  There were tiny holes in the floor panel. When she drove, the dirt road underneath my feet reminded me of time and its passing. After Grandma died, the folks at the funeral home sent word that Mama needed to bring her some more comfortable shoes to be buried in. Only the oldest child was allowed to see the dead. Nobody else. The telegram said that Grandma’s feet were swollen. I sat in that very seat, drawing the letters of my name on the windows, looking down at Grandma’s shoes, hoping that she’d come alive in them. It was muddy that day. The sky didn’t have a color in it.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Two church members followed closely behind us in the rearview mirror. A woman in a white hat threw her hands up. Every so often, her husband, in his brown suit, would take one hand off the wheel and bring it to his forehead. The wife was holding a Bible up now. They were like Adam and Eve discussing sin. Whose voice mattered most I did not know. The husband, his face microscopic, lit a cigar.

  The road was wet as leaves of thick, fat pine trees grazed the windshield. Mama slowed down, complaining about the car’s hanging muffler. “Lawd,” she said, “the only good your daddy give me was a nine-month-old seed.”

  “Even that doesn’t count,” I said.

  She didn’t understand me. We didn’t understand each other. “What?” she said.

  “Women hold babies for almost a year,” I said. “And when it comes out, they have to start all over again.” My nose itched. “That’s not fair.”

  “Well,” said Mama, “some babies come out early. You was so small I thought the flies would eat you alive.”

  “But Ma,” I said, “almost a year?”

  “That’s the way God made us, Maddy.”

  “I’m actually fifteen,” I said. “A year older than I’m supposed to be.”

  “You lose something with age,” she said, slowing down to escape a large hole in the road. She didn’t know anything else. She knew only what she lost. “Don’t ask for more than you need if you can help it.”

  She watched as the cows hovered over blocks of salt in the pasture, the glass vase in her throat vibrating. “No other part will ever matter as much as the outside part,” she said. The electricity was in her hands now; she nursed it and rubbed it inside her hands like a dead bird with dead eyes. “What’s going on?” she said.

  One of Pillar’s cows blocked the road. She blew the horn, but the cow didn’t move. A big, grown cow with one of Pillar’s tags clamped on her. Something so slow and patient belonged to a troubled man. A backslider like Pillar.

  “Ma,” I said, “roll your window down.”

  “What for?”

  “So I can touch her,” I said.

  “Are you out o’ your mind, Maddy?” Mama turned around and pulled my hair down. “Grease this stuff up real good before you go to bed. And don’t forget to take the rubber bands out. They’ll give you a headache something wicked.”

  “She won’t hurt me,” I said.

  The sound of my voice irritated her. I embarrassed her in front of the church. Everybody knew that her sister had slept with her husband. They knew who the fire-engine-red lipstick belonged to. “The devil sent you,” said one of the ushers. I’ll never forget the feeling of her hands on my wrists; it was like a single leaded bullet trapped beneath the wings of a dead bird, mechanical.

  “Cows hate red,” said Mama. “You know that.”

  “But I’m not wearing red, Ma.”

  She pretended not to notice me. She was a Christian woman. The devil tried her. He wanted her to mess up that good religion of hers and come to him. He wanted her but sent for Aunt Pip.

  “I wonder if Mr. Clyde knows that one o’ his cows is out,” Mama said. “I wouldn’t want nobody to have no accident out
here. Something that big could kill.”

  The cow didn’t budge. A gnat flew around her ass, followed by other gnats that clung to the brown patches of her skin; her nipples sagged. “Come on now,” said Mama as she pressed down on the horn. Mama grew distant. She didn’t have to tell me. Aunt Pip’s milk had turned sour. A lump was growing inside of her, a lump the size of a headache.

  I had seen it in the encyclopedias that Mama had bought for me, how the milk was born to the mammal of a woman, running up through the tubes of her stomach, ending up in her breasts, forming a clot. The encyclopedias had been my language, the language that I spoke of only inside my head.

  “Lawd, have mercy,” said Mama, putting pressure on the horn.

  The husband and wife were somewhere on the connecting roads now, talking about the naked lady, how well the fur between her legs was drawn but that her breasts were missing. I wasn’t a normal fourteen-year-old. Something was wrong with me, let them tell it. A woman with no breasts? The sound of the wife and husband’s motor went ricocheting through the trees, spreading gossip from house to house like a line of smoke from a sinner’s pipe.

  We turned down the road to Aunt Pip’s place. The widow across the way had every light on in her house, it seemed. The shingles were lapped, one on top of the other, like sleeping men of old age. It was rare that a house had so much light on a rainy day. Negroes mostly found a safe spot, a bedroom, and went to sleep until the storm was over. But not her. As we passed her house, I turned my head and watched the curtains slowly open; her large index finger emerged.

  “Behave yourself,” said Mama. “I don’t want nobody telling me you didn’t mind.”

  She dropped me off in front of Aunt Pip’s place and told me to go inside. “Take care,” she said as she drove down the road with the fat of her arm hanging from the driver’s side.

  I was at the house where the dying lived. There was a sort of cold gray energy around me. The slow wind at my shoulders was loose, tiring.

  The door opened. Aunt Pip stepped on the front porch, her face tender and dry around the edges. The bones in her neck were sharp, visible. A fragile woman with the skeletal framework of her body moving forward as if the metamorphosis of the hour kept her lungs weak and without breath.

  “You just gone stand there, Maddy?” she asked. “Come on in.”

  She was the beginning.

  “Mama would’ve come in,” I said, stepping inside the house, “but she had a pot of greens on the stove.”

  The room was intimate, rectangular. Everything seemed motionless: the mute pattern of a record player, the dust of paragraphs written on solid objects, a porcelain doll with her mouth open. Inanimate things that fit inside the tiny room because a woman needed something to talk to. She had positioned them in an order of speech, as if this were her room of solitude where her voice could match perfectly the placing of paragraphs and record players and dolls.

  A strong odor of VapoRub came through. The couch where Big Mama had died after getting her legs amputated was still there. Big Mama was an independent woman. She couldn’t deal with her legs being gone and having people around the place pushing her around and sniffing her panties to see if she had peed on herself. A woman who, like her daughter, was used to chopping her own wood and stacking it against the side of the house. That’s what happened to her. Having to be dependent on mankind killed her.

  The house was warm. The dark clouds were fading behind the magnolias. The earth had become pregnant with silence, a few birds flying through the trees, the occasional barking of a dog in the distance. There was a fireplace in the middle of the rectangular room. Ashes had mounted up inside it. It was the first sign of loneliness, detachment. I looked around at the photos. One in particular: a black-and-white photograph of two small children. The bright hue of the cotton field smothered the light in their eyes. A coldness that I couldn’t pinpoint.

  “Turnips or collards?” asked Aunt Pip; her voice sounded distant, battered.

  “Ma’am?”

  “What grade of greens? Turnips or collards?”

  “Oh, collards.”

  We had been close once; she had given me the drag of my first cigarette, taught me things about my period and boys. And how to tell the difference between shit and diarrhea when it came to a man. “Shit,” she’d say, “is what they get stuck into, but diarrhea is when one lie turns into another one and they all become one great big lie. Trust me, child. All men lie. In one way or another, they all do.”

  “One minute,” said Aunt Pip.

  The bed next to the fireplace was covered in ants. I killed them with my fingers and waited for Aunt Pip to emerge from the connecting room. Big Mama’s curtains were still there. The rods were not made of aluminum or iron. They’d been made from the twigs of a magnolia. Big Mama loved magnolias. Once the flowers wilted, she took them inside the house and stripped the branches bare. She would show me the curves. “This is a woman’s body,” she’d say. “I’m putting her clothes on. She will live here with me until I’m gone. She will never leave me.” I felt her spirit in the house as I ran my fingers across the dead ants. I don’t know why I killed them. One by one, I put them in the windowsill, aligning them as if they were crushed powder or bone.

  I ran my fingers over the shape of Aunt Pip’s body; a pattern was deeply molded into the bedspread. The long arms. The covey hole from the weight of her elbow. A small, distinct hole that showed clearly where her pain sank down into her elbows at night. Beside the bed sat a Styrofoam bust of a lady’s head and shoulders covered with a pink scarf. Rainwater came down on it; the roof had a hole in it.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” she said.

  I was growing older. At fourteen, I had never kissed a boy or let him stroke my pubic hair. I had seen a penis only when I walked in on my daddy using the john. I knew very little about myself. I knew little because there were things I was not supposed to do as a Negro child, questions I was not supposed to ask. I knew one thing and wore it alone. I knew to act Negro when other Negroes were around, not to talk about the bones I studied in the encyclopedia, the different species of animals, the words that Negroes in Pyke County never used. I was not to know why my ideas, my thoughts, my body were often too much for me. Or why I came home from school one day with a dead bird inside my hands, why I killed it to save it.

  “Come see,” said Aunt Pip.

  The rectangular room was blocked off by a thin paisley-printed sheet. It bore an odor that was strange, haunting.

  “Do you reckon it’s on wrong?” asked Aunt Pip.

  Aunt Pip stood before me with her gown pulled down to her waist, her bra exposed. I looked first at her face, the light eyebrows, the chiseled nose above her lips, how the yellow eyes turned away, focusing on a distant thing with no name. Down toward the neck, the throat, the aisle of bones in the middle of her chest. And there it was, a scar where her left breast used to be, running across her skin in the shape of a glass-trapped lizard, quiet, disturbed.

  She walked over to the king-size bed and sat down. It angered me that she didn’t have the energy to do it herself. She wasn’t this way. What happened to her strength? Where were her lovers? Where was Mama? They all sent me: Mama, the town, my father, Jesus.

  “I’ll help you,” I said.

  My hands trembled. I was afraid of the disease, the cancer. The heat from her body was warm. Willie Patterson, a boy whose parents died because his mama was breast-feeding him while driving, was called retarded by the boys at school. And what of Aunt Pip? If the boys had seen her now, she’d be another retarded Willie. Retarded. A word I never looked up in the dictionary because it was worse than being called a nigger. A word with its own dysfunction, an ugly, bare-faced word that went straight from a child’s mouth and into the cruel, nasty world that gave birth to it.

  “Don’t be ashamed,” said Aunt Pip. “We got the same things.”

  I wanted to hate her for asking me to come around from the backside, to witness her body from the fro
nt where the lizard on her chest lay motionless; it was her life. Not mine.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  What happened to a woman with half her life? Where did it go? What did the doctors do with the breast after they took it away? Men talked about women with only one breast. One wasn’t enough. Women needed two breasts. Because men needed flesh.

  “Touch it,” she said.

  “No,” I said, “I can’t.”

  “Here,” she said, with my hand in hers.

  I touched where her left breast used to be, where the lizard lay half asleep, his stomach flat across the flesh, his tail frozen. And the other breast—the full one—as it sagged in the mirror; it was the head of a swan. It was warm like the blue-eyed Christ.

  It was God.

  “It’s needed, child,” she said. “You can’t ignore change if it’s teething.”

  Daddy took a chance with her because she was brave. Courage didn’t live in Pyke County, Mississippi, if you were a woman. You got it the best way you knew how. Aunt Pip didn’t take lessons. She hustled. She hustled so much that she could afford to let her sister’s old man put his fingers up her vagina. The women in Pyke County didn’t use their eyes. Like Mama, they used their hearts. Daddy was hip to that. Men gossiped about it. They killed other men for stealing their lady’s eyes. Daddy was a drunk who grew tired of Mama and her God. The late nights bothered him. The times when he begged Mama to get off her knees and come to bed, make love to him for the man he was. Not the man he was not.