There, with her legs open, was Mama, the blood of her vagina filled the towels, her large breasts hanging beside her. Nothing in the room was white. And I could not see Mama’s face. But I knew, as all children knew, the vaginas they came from: the manner in which the fur rests between the muscles of their thighs, the battered stillness of their lungs upon birth. Beside Mama was Aunt Pip, holding me as I sucked the milk from her breast.
And through the silence, my grandmother spoke to me: You was caught in the tubes.
Now I knew why Mama had opened my mouth and pinned down the muscle in my throat. Aunt Pip had pulled me out of her stomach. And like my grandmother, she could not lie next to me in the days to come because the smell of death was yet on my body. I was the baby in my dreams—the blood from the tubes of my mother’s stomach suffocating me like a green lizard trapped in the space of a mason jar. I was a part of the world now. The milk of a whore’s breast was in my mouth, and I needed to see, for my own mother’s sake, the wrath that God had put upon a mistress. Because she had prayed for the saved breast, not the unsaved one, never knowing that I would soon be old enough to smell the milk of Aunt Pip’s breast on a tube of fire-engine-red lipstick—that which she had lain on a flat bed of porcelain, the words of Jesus calling me to it.
This was the way that it was in the beginning.
Because blood and milk are the same.
A set of headlights was headed toward the house. Fat was now reading the red letters of the Bible, the ones that came from Jesus. She told me that they were most important. The others didn’t count because they were not the voice of Christ.
“Lawdy mercy,” she said. “Who that be at this hour?”
The car stopped in front of the house. The dying motor sounded familiar. With the headlights still on, a man emerged, taking off his hat on the steps, pausing. He looked over at the lantern, the stillness of it, how private and solitary it was along the porch. The man was Willie’s grandfather, the deacon.
Fat met him at the door, taking his hat: “Thank God,” she said.
The lonely howling of the rabid dog was in the woods. It had not rained. The clouds managed to pass over Pyke County going eastward. But the fear of the night, it had left behind.
His mouth was closed. A moment passed through his lips. He looked at me with some sort of pity. Or power, perhaps. A bead of sweat trickled down his throat. And when he touched my hand, the dog stopped her howling.
“Lemme take your jacket, Deacon,” said Fat.
He shook his head at first. Then, after seeing Aunt Pip asleep on the bed, the covers pulled down to her waist, the darkness of her face, he changed his mind. “Mighty welcome,” he said.
There was a hole in his shirt the size of an avocado. It went up from the side of his stomach to the edge of his ribs, the part in the encyclopedia that turned into the sharp tip of a kitchen knife. He put his fingers over Aunt Pip’s private part, back to her breast, the private part again, the empty part of her chest that the doctors had stitched into a scorpion. “Let us pray,” he said.
“Lawd,” he said, “we come to you in prayer.” He began to pull the thin layer of skin between his eyes. “The flesh is tired, Father. I don’t doubt that it’s weak. It’s always been that way. But now it’s tired.” He patted his knee. “I come to you in no time or place,” he said. “For I don’t have the power to give you the hour of a heavy soul. We on borrowed time. How we live is how we die.”
Neither Fat nor I could hold back the tears. The blades of a fan had been our sole company. When neither of us could speak, the cold silence of the room around us, we listened to the rotating wind float throughout the house, hoping that somewhere in the midst of the noise, the coma would take Aunt Pip to the other side. But she was fighting, even on her deathbed: a light twitch of her eyes, a quick moment of her chest rising to interrupt her normal breathing pattern, a path of chills on the surface of her arm.
The deacon’s hand rested on the scar of Aunt Pip’s missing breast. He prayed and prayed over that hole until the Holy Ghost caught him. The wind began to pick up the avocado-sized patch in his shirt. “Yes, Lawd Almighty,” he said. “The soul is naked. Take it! Have your way with it, Lawd!
“The only time you should look down on somebody is when you picking them up,” said the deacon.
And were my eyes not witnessing the hole in his shirt, I would have missed it altogether. There it was, a shining scar with the familiarity of a missing kidney, because it slept inside a white man’s body, a postman, and healed him.
“Amen,” he said, bringing himself to his feet and closing the jacket in about him.
chapter
twenty-five
I lay there on the pallet, the yellow moon broken up into jagged pieces on the floor. Above my body, on the mantel, was a glass of water; the balance of it was an inch away from the rim. It was a transparent object, nothing clouding it except the fingerprints of a human hand.
When you are in darkness, your fingers and mind search for things that are not there, things that you feel you are somehow responsible for. But I knew for sure that I had heard the early beginnings of footsteps. The exact ones that walked through the forest the night before the doctors took Aunt Pip’s hair.
One … two … and the third dropping off. It was not a constant sound or activity. It was more like the creature had stopped to look around, underneath the yellow light of the moon, for security. One … two … and before the third was heard, the footsteps began to fade away.
Fat stood over me, her hands on her large hips. Had her arms been outstretched, she could have been Jesus Christ. “Pip,” she said, her voice breaking the silence of the room, “we going to New Orleans.”
I was in the right place to pray, on the floor, with the glass of water over my head, hoping that it would lose its balance and baptize me.
“Let’s bathe her,” said Fat. “Go run some water.”
Before anything else, I went out the back door and grabbed an armful of pine needles. Aunt Pip couldn’t talk to me now. She couldn’t tell me what she wanted.
Fat had begun to talk to herself: “I’m gonna bathe my Pip.”
The last time she’d been alone with death was when Justice died. Those white men hanged him from the oak tree and took his heart. They killed him and left his flesh to rot where the oak tree had claimed her house and made her sore.
I filled the tub with hot water. The pine needles floated to the top. Everything came to a head: the sound of the stove lighting up for a bowl of soup, the doe, Jesus, Laurel Pillar, the pills, Mama, death.
“I need help in here, Maddy,” yelled Fat.
I rolled the covers back from Aunt Pip’s neck. Her bones felt like a child had traced them out on a piece of paper and toted them to school underneath his arm. Thin like that. Thin enough to be drawn out on a sheet of loose-leaf paper and delivered.
“My God,” said Fat, looking at Aunt Pip’s body. “What they do to my baby?”
The footsteps picked up again.
“Do you hear that?” asked Fat. “We going home.”
Aunt Pip’s feet were so very warm in my hands. That’s where the good blood was. She had carried a fever in the lowest part of her body. They were pointed. I tried several times to bend them, but her fight against death was strongest where her feet had flattened out the muscles in her fingertips. “I got her,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Fat lit three candles and fixed them around the bathroom: over the window, in the sink below the mirror, on the shoulder of the porcelain bathtub. We moved the pine straw out of the way. Aunt Pip’s arm hung lifelessly: over and over again, Fat pulled her body up from the water and cried over the scar. “Maddy,” she said, “what they do to my Pip?”
She stood up from the bathtub with her back to me. She was peeling the clothes from her body now, heading for New Orleans, where they had both laughed with men who did not deserve them, walked the streets with their arms closed tightly around each other. The loaves of fat hung from her abdomen.
And when she lifted her arms above her head, the fat rose a little, to complement the change in her body. A bear had not been the right word to describe her. She was made of lead, solidly written upon the green slate of the earth like Moses and the Ten Commandments fingered into stone with the hand of wisdom.
“Lawd, Pip,” she said, pulling back the mirror above the sink. There it was, the kerosene-filled bottle. She looked at it, her hand opening the small cap, smelling it: “Get me the lantern.”
“I’m scared, Fat.”
The tears fell. “Don’t be scared,” she said. “Let Him use you.”
Somewhere on the other side of town, my mother’s birthmark was turning red. She was going through the house moving furniture and lighting candles. She didn’t have the words, the strength to come. But she knew that death was in this house tonight. She and Aunt Pip were of the same womb. No matter what room of the house Mama was in, it was eating her alive that she couldn’t come to Commitment Road and listen to the dead.
The lantern sat on the porch. The mud of the earth was still on it. How it felt inside my hands: the curved body, the long, narrow wire pressed against the palm of my flesh. I was grateful, for there was someone in the world, like Aunt Pip, like Willie, who could not feel this intimacy, this connection with a living thing.
I returned to the bathroom with the lantern; Fat was holding Aunt Pip, her hand over the scar in her chest. “Sit it down,” she said.
The footsteps picked up again. They were in threes now. Not even in Mama’s counting did I hear the third step, the Holy Ghost. “Listen,” said Fat, closing her eyes.
She said this innocently. There was a time when a diseased woman lay on the boards of the house with me and did not hear the sound of these footsteps.
Fat put her hand on Aunt Pip’s still-beating heart and said: “They coming for us. I hear them.”
The women were surrounding us now: Aunt Pip’s life was in their hands. They were warming the blood in her body and loving her feet and hands. Fat heard them. They were in the mirrors of the house, on the doorsteps, in the piano room, singing and holding their missing breasts with living hands.
“Where is it?” asked Fat, pulling Aunt Pip up by the waist, her arms draped over her thick shoulders.
“What?”
“The lipstick.”
The fire-engine-red lipstick was yet inside the brown paper bag that Fat’d brought the first time I saw her. There it was on the shelf, next to all the things that the living used: the baking soda, toothpaste, baby powder. “Here,” I said.
“Hold her head up,” said Fat as I sat behind her on the toilet.
I did. Fat leaned over and put Aunt Pip’s face inside her hands, kissing her lips before spreading a thin layer of the lipstick on them. She grew silent. The dog that had bitten her finger was howling in the darkness. She occasionally looked up to listen for the women and their voices.
“Pip,” she said, “I love you.”
The tears came down. There was no sound at all. Fat kissed Aunt Pip’s lips while holding the red inside her hands: “Amen,” she said.
I flattened my face against Aunt Pip’s backbone. The grooves in her spine went through my flesh, and I felt their sharpness on the bridge of my missing wisdoms. You must hold the dead in their last days. Look into their eyes and listen to their voices. The dying know not what you do for them. They live in the spirit. They can no longer speak your language. Your words mean nothing to their bones. It is their spirit that listens.
Fat turned around and opened the baby powder. The holes of air were blocked. When she blew over the top of them, the white powder rose into a white cloud above us. “No one will ever take your fur again,” she said.
She stepped back and looked over what she had done. She was in another world. I did not know where she was. It was far beyond me. I was still green. Green like the land of Eden where the flesh was confused, where green was so beautiful that nobody noticed it. Because mankind had opened their mouths and eaten it. We had all swallowed our Father. We ate of a measured place where our lives were limited and unbalanced in human understanding. Not knowing that there was no understanding in human language. Only greenness and death.
Fat left the bathroom and came back with Aunt Pip’s blond wig. I lifted Aunt Pip’s chin and waited for her to put it on her head. “We going to New Orleans,” said Fat, laughing and holding herself at the stomach. “Remember, Pip?” she asked. “Everybody wanted us.” She stiffened her shoulders. “They all wanted us.”
Aunt Pip began to wheeze. I felt the sickness coming up through her spine and letting her go. Not saving her. Just letting her go. There was a moment when the spirit overpowered the sickness. The sickness could no longer hang on. It had fucked up the body. The body was temporary, but the spirit went to a place where disease had no place. It turned around at the gates of heaven and slumped its shoulders, detached itself from the green, from Eden.
We made our way to the bed, where we laid her nudeness down on the bed she had been in. Her old abandoned gown hung on the front porch for the night wind to carry away. “Cover her up,” said Fat.
I put my hands underneath the white quilt again, moving along the fabric in search of the green lizard. I found it. This thing itself was dying. The spirit of Daddy’s hand was still around it, strangling it from the eye of the kitchen window.
It fit so neatly inside the white handkerchief, its body wrapped, covered. I had no memory of how the fabric had gotten into my hands. When the living are dying, there is but one thought that takes over all others: death.
“Me and Pip’s going to New Orleans.”
I could not remember the hour, the minutes, the seconds of which we coated Aunt Pip’s hands and feet with oil again. But I do remember sliding the lizard over her abdomen, letting it go. Aunt Pip lay there with her arms beside her and the covers coming up every now and then when her breathing became too unbearable.
“Let us pray,” said Fat, kneeling beside the bed. “Lawd, me and Pip’s going to New Orleans. Watch over us and feed us on our journey. Take us home, Lawd. Bury us there. Leave us.” She lifted her breasts in her hands. “Take us to where men call us by our first names,” she said. “Amen and amen.”
Beside her lay the glass lantern. She picked it up as she peeled the quilt back from Aunt Pip’s face and smiled. “Ain’t nobody gonna take my Pip ’way from me now.”
The footsteps were louder now.
The women were out there in the forest, leading us back to where Landy Collins had dug the hole. Barefoot and naked, Fat held Aunt Pip’s body in her arms; the glass lantern dangled from her hand. We started for the forest. The creatures of the world were asleep. No crickets chirping or the sound of blowflies on a piece of sliced cantaloupe. If I had not been in darkness, I would have known nothing of light or creatures or the noise of living things.
We heard something.
Fat stopped to look down at her feet. We both knew what it was now; a stream of urine had come from Aunt Pip’s bladder: she was dead.
Every tear that I had been holding back came out. They flowed through me from my stomach; they became my voice. Everything lived in darkness. Jesus put our pain in the dark so we’d pay more attention to our eyes, our noses, our hands, our flesh, the part of us that we failed to witness, because the beauty of its being was what blinded us. He blessed us and blessed us until we walked in our own darknesses.
Fat laid Aunt Pip’s body beside the hole and looked into the mouth of the glass lantern. The moon was no longer yellow but blue. And with this light, Fat took the match from the lantern and struck it on the base. There it was! A flame that ignited the upturned wick. I could not see the faces of the women. I did not know them, only their missing parts. And the cancer that had eaten away at them.
Fat moved her fingers over the scar as the deacon had done, letting out a loud noise. She then opened the lid of the coffin. “We gots to be going now,” she said. “Walk away.”
“But Fat …” I
said.
“Don’t cry for us,” she said. “We going to New Orleans!”
At that moment, the oak tree that she had been chopping on for so many days came crashing down, as if it had become weak at the waist. With its noise, she closed her eyes and sighed, her nude body collapsing to the earth. “Go,” she said.
It was then that she began to sing:
It won’t be water
But fire next time
I ran for a short while before looking back to find her hovering over Aunt Pip’s coffin. There, circling them both, was the bearer of footsteps: the naked lady whom I had drawn on the first page of Genesis, her chest as flat as a man’s, her face blank and clear, beautiful. Fat looked at her and smiled. The glass lantern was high over her head now, her hands around its throat. She looked at me in the distance and simply let it fall into the hole, setting off the burning kerosene, before jumping into the rising flames.
I ran back to the house to find Mama standing on the front porch with her hands in the air. The miles of Deuteronomy had been beaten into her. The closer I grew toward her, she knew that Aunt Pip was gone. “No!” she yelled. “My God, no.
“This is my home,” she said. “I left my heart here.”
But it was too late.
She was already dead.
epilogue
Here, lying open-eyed on the pallet beside Aunt Pip’s bed, I recalled the shadow that had awakened me the night before I discovered the mason jar on the front porch. It was a man’s footsteps, his hesitant pattern of breathing, his one arm on the windowsill. It was my father.
Somewhere in the midst of his nudity, he was changing. He was well aware of his past, the use of his fingers going up the hole of a woman’s vagina. He remembered the last image of his brother being pulled away from the tubular glass, into the arms of a guard, back into the jail cell with the other numbers. Nothing happens by accident. It was no coincidence that he had burnt down the factory of Jesus, the man whom he’d blamed for the course of his diseased life. He had not listened, as I had, to the pastor when he said that Jesus was of the spirit. But because he had found a man with the same name, the man he had given his life to, it was easier to distort the physical. The physical could be found like the embalmed kings of worshiped men in other countries, their followers who consider it tangible to believe in what they can see. Not in what they cannot see. It was no act of circumstance that my father had found himself in the shoes of the raped, the sick woman with only one breast to touch. It was his shadow, indeed, reminiscing, hoping to correct the wrongs of his past, so that all things in death could be accounted for through repentance. So that he would now know what it felt like to have something hurt him. Something God made.
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