As I lay still, not only had Big Mama consumed my thoughts, but Laurel Pillar too. Whether her body was taken or given, abused or absorbed, so much had depended on a woman’s hair. Every part of her beauty categorized by the length and history of it. It was then that I was glorified by the feeling of Aunt Pip losing hers. It hadn’t mattered at all that it would no longer be a part of her. It was a beautyless thing. She had not gotten rid of her beauty. She had gotten rid of her rape.
I felt a hand over my breasts.
Then my eyes opened. And standing over me was Mama, her swollen hands going down over my breasts, checking me for signs of cancer. The muscles in her throat were rising now, like an undigested egg in the belly of a snake, going up through a tunnel of blood and milk, surrounded by electricity.
The gossip traveled throughout Pyke County. The doctors had found a donor for Mr. Diamond. The number that Mama and the others had used at church had worked. Mama was in the yard talking to Landy Collins. She pointed up toward the sky with one hand on her gut. And pulled out an envelope from her breasts, offering it to him. But he wouldn’t take it. He opened the door of his truck and took out a sheet of paper, jotting down her vocabulary with a pen from his pocket. When done, he got back in his truck and disappeared through the trees, his engine in full-blown speed.
Mama returned to the house. She paused somewhere in the kitchen, quietly thinking of something that had troubled her: possibly the night she had been in her bedroom with one foot on the corner of her bed, the other solidly on the floor, lifting the fat of her vagina, pushing her fingers far up inside her, as she had done the plastic bottles of vinegar beside the toilet, looking for a relapse of yellow cream. Or the many nights she’d slept beside Daddy, counting the loaves of fat on her stomach, hoping that perhaps she could loose them. Perhaps it was neither. Only the silence that had begun to rise in her own body, because to forgive was much greater than anything she’d ever known, even in the testimony of God’s house.
She made her way to my bedroom, her face in the mirror. The oval egg in her throat had grown larger over the course of a day.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Pip back,” she said. “She broke the treatment.”
“Did it work at all?”
“I don’t reckon,” she said, walking back toward the door. “Going to the misses. When I come home, be ready to go.”
Her footsteps were melodic, programmed, like the dripping water from the faucet. It seemed that she was still counting the number of thumps in her head. This was the safest way, focusing on one object to memorize its rhythm. She walked this way until she reached the front door.
The misses was waiting for her. Over her shoulder appeared the toddler, sitting up in the backseat. He rubbed his eyes, his yellow hair almost white. He was still weak with sleep when Mama opened the door. He immediately reached for Mama, and her loose arm drifted from her lap, pulling him over the divided seat by one arm.
The sky was still white when she made it home again. Mr. Rye was in his yard with his hands behind him. It seemed that he was crumbling. We were all, in some way, falling apart.
Daddy was standing on the side of the house with the red gas can in his hand. He was far away from the vocabulary of the liquor labels, sober. The sun began to show on his face. He stared up at it with the likes of a prisoner coming out for the light that he so missed while in the company of his own solitude. He resembled the oval picture of Uncle Sugar, the side of his face molded into the age of a habitual mannerism, the neck up and tactful, the jawbone in a state of poised effort: something inside of him hung over the edge of his lips, as if he wanted to speak but could not find the words.
Mama looked at him and sighed. “We leaving now,” she whispered, as if it no longer mattered that he was not listening.
Her hand was gripped tightly around the steering wheel. A narrow line of ink fell between the space of her index finger and thumb, disappearing behind the sleeve of her arm. It was not an act of child’s play. The yellow-haired toddler of the misses had been sitting in her lap, drawing the thing in his mind on her skin.
We pulled out onto the road. A car approached us. The driver’s head was octagonal, red like a four-way stop sign. His arm went up to it and combed back the hairs with his fingers. The figure beside him was motionless, the hair coming down over the shoulders, the face hidden along the sentiments of a dead bird, plump and straight.
A lump formed in Mama’s throat. It was Mr. Clyde and his wife. There would be moments when he would take her out for a drive, away from the cold house in the woods, the cold memories. Mama looked over at me and smiled the smile of a cautiously trained woman: “Only the Lawd knows,” said Mama.
Both the Pillars and Mama were driving at a slow speed.
Mama looked out ahead of her. The Pillars were closer, and the octagonal head of Mr. Clyde grew into focus, his eyebrows thick and wild. His wife’s lips were immobile, straight like the line of ink between Mama’s fingers. She sat next to Mr. Clyde, her face showing no form of expression, as if the reaction of her daughter’s rape had permanently hardened her facial muscles to sadness.
Mama and the Pillars were face-to-face now. The wife did not budge or change her posture. Mr. Clyde stared deeply into Mama’s eyes, as if he hated that he had ever given her anything on credit. I turned around and looked at them. He had run off the road. His wife stepped out of the car and walked over to the grass with her hands out, sitting on her knees with her arms facing the row of trees. Mr. Clyde sat in the car. It did not matter that he had worked my father in the field. He was burdened, his octagonal head banging against the steering wheel, his crying uncontrollable.
Mama looked at the line traveling up her arm, as if she had swallowed their hatred of her. “It took that oldest chap the longest time to get used to my nerves,” she said, smiling. “He was like a Clydesdale at first. Them Clydesdales won’t let you ride ’em till your nerves straighten out. They know fear.”
A long piece of yellow hair had found itself rising on Mama’s forehead. At some point, I imagined, the toddler had lain his pale head on her face. And without feeling it, the hair had become detached from his scalp. He was an active child, playful. The evidence of his character left on Mama’s skin, limp and blond.
“When I die,” she whispered, “don’t cry over me none. I’ll be in the Kingdom, and God don’t need no help.”
I wanted to tell her that I was afraid, that something was crawling on the back of my throat, a spider perhaps, wrapping its arms around my vocal cords, strangling my vocabulary the more we approached Commitment Road. Her voice began to fade in my ears. Her mouth and hands moved, but I heard nothing.
My thoughts were ahead of me. In no time, we were approaching Aunt Pip’s house. The house appeared dark like when a child closes himself up in a closet to hide away from the world without knowing that the world stands behind him, trapping him.
Mama pulled up in Aunt Pip’s yard. And before I stepped out of the car, I removed the yellow strand of hair from her forehead.
I opened the door to Aunt Pip’s house. Her hands were out to me, her voice hoarse, crumbling.
chapter
twenty
A piece of glitter was glued to the inside of my hand. It glistened in the sun under the magnolia tree. Bare now. I picked at it with a silver teaspoon that I had carried from the house to catch the morning raindrops. The earth was beginning to light up again, the branches of the magnolia showering from above.
Aunt Pip was in the window, the green curtain pinned to the sides of the paneling. She played with her fingers, flexing the joints until her knuckles formed a row of mountains. We no longer needed to talk to use our voices. She was becoming forgetful, waking up in the middle of the night to touch her coarse hair, her hands frozen in the darkness because the machines had changed her body.
She reached for the area above her collarbone. Her hand was outstretched, moving alongside the space there. Her mannerisms were slow unt
il she disappeared from the window altogether.
Fat had abandoned the oak tree. She appeared through the trees, her arms swinging beside her. Then she stopped alongside the road to dig out a patch of red dirt. When the amount pleased her, she tilted her head back and swallowed a large mass of it and threw the rest back on the ground.
I sat on the front porch next to the lantern, its clear symmetry holding still through the morning weather. But nothing, not even this lantern, would keep me safe now. To have held such an important device in my hands, an invention of light, was unsuitable, for I lived in the days of darkness.
“Where Pip?” asked Fat.
Blowflies had found themselves feasting on a piece of cantaloupe rind that I had thrown into the yard. Their wings fluttered about, as if they had discovered the sweetness of cantaloupe for the first time. How full of life they were, activated by a string of music in their collective buzzing.
I looked at Fat, the part centered in her scalp, the manner in which she stood on her bare feet. And wondered if a man had ever tried to take her down, attack her, with the courage it took to wrestle Laurel Pillar to the ground. “Asleep by now,” I said.
She took a seat next to me on the steps. “How long she been out?” she asked.
“Not long.”
We both watched the blowflies perch on the pointed edge of the battered cantaloupe. “Then I won’t wake her,” she said.
Her hands were swollen. She pulled her dress up to her thighs and let out a deep sigh. “Pip’s bowels moved since you been here?” she asked.
“A little,” I said.
She reached into her bra and pulled out a row of laxatives. “She must be stopped up again.”
“I don’t think she knows who I am anymore.”
The corners of her mouth were red from the dirt. The blowflies bothered her, their constant buzzing echoing in the private area that contained them. She picked up her leg and stomped her heel on the ground. They flew away.
“It won’t last long,” she said. “She come in and out of it.” She hid her face when she said this, adding: “Jesus got burnt out last night.”
“I know,” I said, although I had heard this for the first time.
“It don’t matter none, though,” she said. “He had insurance.”
Fat looked down at her index finger. It had been split open, jagged, the cut going into her flesh diamondlike.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
She showed me the before and after of her hands, using one to create what the other used to look like. “A mad dog kept me up all night,” she said. “I went for her and she bit me. That haffa got me good too.”
With this, she got up and walked over to the magnolia tree. The petals had fallen to the ground. She picked them up and began to laugh. She was not the same Fat anymore. Something inside of her was changing. Now her head was low and forced to the bite in her hand. To have looked at her this way was to discover how unsafe she was in the world.
She returned to the steps of the house, seemingly more aggravated that the blowflies had found their way back again than at the fact that a mad dog had split her finger open. “Listen at it,” she said, the howling of the animal now penetrating the earth. “If I ever see her again, I’m going to kill her.”
“She didn’t mean to,” I said.
My words were useless to her. “Anger ain’t never been no accident!” she said.
An emergence of sweat appeared on the tip of her nose. She was thinking about what she was going to do, the cut yet ripped open from the canine teeth. The laxatives that she had removed from her bosom were there beside her. She thought about it: Aunt Pip’s bowels had moved only a little, her digestive system was breaking down.
She rose from the steps and called me to follow her into the kitchen to chop two blocks of laxatives on the counter of newspapers. The blade grated them into fine pieces, as I noticed, for the first time, the obituary that showed Big Mama’s name, telling of how old she was, announcing to the women of Pyke County that a disease was going around, a disease of the breasts.
“We gotta open her up,” said Fat.
Her flat feet rumbled through the house, stopping near the curtain draped over the window. “Pip,” she whispered, “get up.”
So calm was the response from Aunt Pip that she sounded cruel, beckoning for Fat to leave her alone. It was the atmosphere of effort. The living woman versus the dying one. Each arranging her vocabulary according to the price she had to pay for its use.
“Huh,” said Aunt Pip, her breath pouring out of a deep sleep.
When I walked into the room, Fat was sitting behind her, pushing her upward from the back. You would have thought of violence at first, but she was rough this way. Her love was forced now, demanding.
“Give me the laxatives,” said Fat.
Her hand, the bitten one, was outstretched, her arm balanced in the air with the resistance of an oar. Aunt Pip woke fully from her sleep and looked at her fingers, the diamond-shaped tear in the skin. Her eyes nursed the cut, wondering if it was only in her dreams that she envisioned this.
“Let me,” I said.
Aunt Pip’s arms were weak. She tried to fight me, but her energy did not allow it. Her head was turned now, facing the open window. The laxative was bitter in her mouth. She spat it out, and the pieces started to slide through her saliva. “I don’t want it,” she uttered. “Leave me be.”
Fat stood up beside her and pushed her back on the pillows. Aunt Pip slid beneath the covers and fell asleep again. Her eyes reopened for a moment. She stared into the woods, the mother of the puppies still howling. “When I die,” she said, reemerging, “take me to the center of the earth. Take me to the land of Eden.”
She fell asleep upon her closed hands. Fat had walked to the screen door, her eyes following the trail of noises in the woods, the cut on her hand. Then, over to the mantel, wiping the dust from the photo of the two children. “All right,” she said.
Moments later, the ax began to ricochet through the clouds again as I wiped the saliva from Aunt Pip’s mouth, her face soft and quiet.
chapter
twenty-one
The sun was setting behind the moving clouds. All the windows were closed except for the breeze that came from Aunt Pip’s curtain. She was sound asleep like the baby in my dream. Her face was turned inward, facing the direction of her breast. Her hands were overlapped, the elbows above her abdomen.
The blade of Fat’s ax echoed through the trees. One chop and another and another. It was carefully guided. The object of focus, then the blade at the center of the already disturbed lumber.
I stood under the magnolia tree and looked back at the house where the curtains were beginning to settle down. The blade lost contact with the object, and I heard Fat’s voice open up: “Dammit,” she said.
I ran toward her and found her at the base of the oak tree breathing hard, the ax in her hands. Her legs were open and her panties were stained. Perhaps her tubes were emptying out their religion. My grandmother whispered to me one night, over a cold mountain of ice cubes in her lap: “Don’t be bothered when your panties get dark,” she’d say. “It’s Jesus cleaning the devil out o’ your stomach.” Likewise, she had ignored the odor of her body, bathing herself in pine needles because she thought it drew the sickness out of her.
“Here!” yelled Fat. It took her a moment as she began to lift herself from the ground, forcing the ax on me. “You chop awhile. I chop awhile.”
“What?”
“You heard me,” she said, walking over to the steps of her house. “It’s gotta come down sooner or later. I do what the good Lawd say do. Now get!”
The waist of the tree seemed as wide as the red sun behind her. Her arms were in her lap; her toes formed a pyramid in front of her.
“How you know it wasn’t the devil?” I asked.
“’Cause I know the Lawd,” she snapped.
I looked up at the widespread branches, how the limbs quivere
d in the pink-colored sky. A man had been hung there, hung like the hog at Mr. Jolie’s, up high on a branch that cut the vein of life from his throat, the rope as sturdy and fixed as the penis of a rapist.
Fat’s eyes were on the leaves of the tree. She got up from the steps and reached for one of the limbs, afterward coming back down on her heels because it was too high up to touch. She looked into the sky, the last cloud was clearing the earth. It grew imperfect, ordinary.
“You ever wonder why the ‘h’ in ‘hour’ is silent?” I asked.
She turned away from the limb. “Because it ain’t no time.”
“Then what we need it for?”
“It’s a part of the world,” she said, reaching for a tangled cobweb in front of her. “We got to be measured by something. If nothing controlled us, we wouldn’t be afraid of death.”
She took the cobweb and searched for unhatched eggs. When she found a cluster of them, she took her fingernail and slit them open. She thought that she had seen a baby. She sat the eggs on the ground and waited for the spiders to come out. “My panties get dark at night,” she said.
“Maybe it’s your period, Fat,” I said.
I knew that it was not blood. I had seen Mama’s panties after the yellow cream had filled them up, how she would wash them with bleach until the discharge turned gray and she could no longer be reminded of Daddy’s need to push his fingers up a woman’s stomach.
“No,” said Fat, “I used to be clean as the Board of Health. I know what come from me. And it ain’t no blood.”
She was kneeling down now, watching the unhatched eggs for signs of life, activity. “When I was a little girl, Mama used to clean out my insides,” she said. “She even took me to Jackson a couple o’ times … even after I got grown and had my own place in New Orleans.”
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