Stillwater

by Nicole Helget

  The boy’s voice was lost.

  “Who are you talking to?” she asked.

  “Just my prayers,” said Angel. She felt hot and dizzy. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and then she fainted into black again. She came to and ate and went to sleep again and again and again.

  Over the weeks, she remembered her mother preparing her a hot onion broth and bidding her to drink it all gone. She remembered the terrible stomachache that came when she ate it, but then the floating feelings, the dreams. She remembered her mother hovering over her, her father standing at her bedside, petting her head. She even remembered a priest coming and muttering prayers over her. Shortly after that, the soup’s taste changed. It looked the same, but now tasted of salt and pepper without the metal and bile. Then, Angel knew, her illness was coming to an end, her punishment was over. She knew it was time to heal. Now when her parents came, Angel understood how to tilt her head and bat her eyes at her father. She knew how to look dotingly toward her mother, to thank her effusively. Without ever discussing it, her mother had communicated that all these days in bed, all these aches and illness, all the small poisons planted in Angel’s body were a contract. Angel understood, somehow, that every sweet syrup, metallic powder, or bitter bite was a ploy, a plot, a hook between her mother and father. Angel accepted, very early, that her mother was poisoning her, and that her life for now was in her mother’s hands. Angel aimed to be very, very good. She thought that if she was very, very good, then her mother might not kill her. And then someday she too might woo a man and feel a love that conquered sense.

  But Angel had a secret she kept all to herself. She too profited from the sickness. In those hot, wet, drowsy days, Angel was turning into a sorceress or a prophet or a saint. She was making magic or miracles. She didn’t know which, but she didn’t care.

  24

  The Story of the Swan

  ONCE SHE LEFT HER PEOPLE, Big Waters found few causes for talk. All the talk of her previous life still echoed in her ears. She could hear the first sounds made by each of her children, the high, hungry cries in their first desperate breaths and first whiny days. Even in her old age, she was sure she would be able to single out her babies’ cries in a place of a hundred crying children.

  She could hear too, word for word, her mother’s instructions before she was to become a wife. Those words were transferred in a long hymn from the mother’s lips to Big Waters’ ears one autumn evening as her mother oiled and twisted her hair, whispering in the home that, come morning, would no longer be hers. She would be a married woman with a home of her own. Knowledge of her mother and all her mother’s mothers of the ages came to her that evening, and Big Waters had listened well and trapped all that knowledge so that even now, she hadn’t forgotten.

  This is how you dry the meat, the mother had said. This is how you waft the smoke to keep the flies from settling and laying eggs on the meat. This is how you store the corn so that the rodents and snakes will not get it. Off the ground and hung by a string. Even then, the little animals may find it and you will have to be vigilant or bring a cat to your home. A cat is best, but you will have to trade with the whites for them to bring you one, and you will have to pay many hides for it. Burn the leaves of nightshade to rid your home of a bad smell.

  This is where you find the thin mud and the stinky leaf to protect the children’s skin from mosquitoes. This is how to seal the seams of your home when the green grasshoppers come. But if the grasshoppers are brown and scream as one and fly as though in a cloud, these will eat through even the hides that cover the poles of your home. I have seen them eat the poles. If you see the screaming brown cloud, close all the flaps of your home and let the smoke fill it. Take your children and run to the water. It is the only safe place. Put cloth over your ears and faces. The smoke may keep them out of your home, and when they leave, you can return to it.

  The moss on the north side of the rocks is the same as the sky before a big wind and ice. Call your children to you when the sky looks the way the moss looks. Always set up your home close to an overturned tree or large boulder. Then, if the fierce wind that looks like a dog’s tail comes down from the sky, take your children and crawl into the hole where the tree once stood or burrow into the ground close to the boulder. You will be safe among the roots or near the rock.

  This is the onion root to feed a child if he is constipated. This is how you make the paste if his insides pour out of him. If he touches a fire or steps on a hot ember, take him to the water. Others will tell you to put grease on the wound, but this will not ease his pain. Only the water will ease his pain. Do not believe the others, not even your husband’s mother, if they tell you about the grease or fat or even plant oils. Those will not ease his pain either. Only the water. For the old ones with the brittle bones that pain them, prepare sun root with the blood of an animal and spoon it into their mouths each morning.

  To catch a porcupine, throw a blanket over him and hit his nose with a big stick. Some quills will poke through the blanket and you can take them for sewing needles without harming yourself. Leave him a bit of corn cake as a gift.

  This is the way a child’s eyes go when he lies. Off to either horizon in a lie. This is the way a child’s eyes go when he tells the truth. Up to the sky in truth. In a man it is changed because he becomes wise to his mother. But he is not yet wise to his wife. This is the way a man’s eyes go when he lies. This is the way they go when he tells the truth. Watch closely, my daughter. This way in lie. This way in truth. Up to the sky in a lie. Off to either horizon in truth. It changes from child to man.

  Sometimes in an old man it changes again, and he takes on the ways of a child once more. Remember these things so that you will not be fooled.

  So many other words. So many that Big Waters didn’t want to clutter the world with more talking. But with Clement, this child entrusted to her, now five summers old, Big Waters felt compelled to tell him the story of his beginning. If she didn’t give him the story of his origin, who would? And so, once, when he was old enough to listen, she put him under the big window near the schoolroom and said, “Listen.”

  “Yes, Big Waters-Mama,” he said.

  “In my forty-eighth year, I was without a man or children and living here among the sick and orphaned. Every day I would cut curling toenails, clean waxy ears, soap bloody wounds, or wipe pus-filled eyes or otherwise do as the long-faced nun and the dog-faced priest told me to do. I worked and was happy working, but my spirit was not satisfied, and I was sad for the husband and children who had forgotten me. I prayed to God at every sunrise. When I was a small girl among my people, the missionaries in black clothing came, and though they looked poorly dressed and ill-prepared for cold weather, we listened when they told our people about Jesus and his father and his great spirit because it was our way to greet and make welcome people who may need help to find food and shelter. We smiled and nodded at the missionaries as they told of their big father above the clouds, and we understood and agreed among ourselves that the missionaries spoke of a god similar to our own. That night, a deer stag with magnificent antlers came to our village, and so we welcomed the missionaries and we began to talk some of the talk they used to their god above the clouds because it made them happy and more agreeable to live among.

  “Each year, great white birds come from the north, and the sky is covered with them so that it looks like winter. They fly here in groups as big as a hill and descend upon the still waters to build their nests and hatch their young and feed them until the young can fly, and then they go to warmer places until the cold fades. On the first day of the great birds’ arrival, an eagle shrieked in the sky and swung down upon the flock. The eagle split the flock in two, and by spinning and soaring separated one swan from its mate. Then the eagle rose above it and dove upon the great white swan. The eagle opened its talons along the back of a white swan, lost from its mate and its flock. The swan reeled back and dipped. The eagle lost its grip. The swan was hurt but fled from the eag
le. She could not fly to the other swans or her mate. They had gone on without her, and she was injured. But she was a wise animal. If she flew back to her flock, she’d bring the eagle to them too, and she was kind, so she did not do that. Instead, she landed in that windowsill where my bed sits below. When I looked at her, I had a vision of eggs in her belly, and so I made a nest out of corncobs and reeds in the corner where the swan rested until it was time to birth her clutch. With much effort, because of her wounds and because these eggs were her first, she brought forth the eggs upon the nest that I had made. She sat on them and kept them warm until morning, when the eagle shrieked across the sky once more. The eagle had not forgotten its lost meal and would not go away until it had devoured the swan.

  “The swan spoke to me then and asked me to care for her eggs, and I agreed. ‘Look around,’ I said. ‘Do you not see wounded and orphaned of every kind already in my care? What’s two more?’ The swan craned her long neck to see the people I had tended and found my work suitable. She told me I was a good mother. The swan tapped her beak on each of the eggs in farewell and then hopped onto the windowsill and took pained flight, for she was still greatly injured. Before long, I heard the eagle shriek again. And I ran to the window. The eagle swooped upon the swan and gripped her in its talons. The swan did not suffer long because an eagle is a quick killer. For her sacrifice, the swan lives forever in the heavens and flies across the northern sky in the time of the turning leaves. From there, the eagle can never reach her and all on earth can look to her. She reminds us that though summer has ended, it will come again in the same way the swans come every year.

  “Many weeks later, the eggs began to crack and open. One of the cygnets was hearty and cried out again and again. The other was quiet and small. For days, I fed them. The hearty one ate her own food and her brother’s too, as though she could not be satisfied. The eagle appeared in the sky again, circling, hungry. I was watchful. But the eagle’s eyes were keener than mine, they are the sharpest of all the animals’, and they watched from very far away, so far that I could not see and forgot. The first cygnet was greedy and grew stronger and cried out louder and louder. The eagle waited for me to go and warm the milk, and then he dove to the window, and opened his talons, and lifted that cygnet into the sky. The other one was quiet and the eagle did not heed him and forgot about him for a while.

  “I became more watchful then, to fulfill my promise to the swan I would be. I moved the little one into my bed, where I kept him warm and gave him milk. As he grew, I chewed up bits of fish and fed them to him. I kept him from all harm, and he became mine.

  “This is why you have one eye of the earth and one eye of the sky, so that you remember your mother of the earth and your mother of the sky. Never forget the sacrifice the swan made for you nor the lesson the other cygnet teaches, with her greediness and complaining.”

  She pointed out the window, toward the house far away through the forest.

  “There is where the greedy one was carried by the eagle. In the big house with the big people and all the money and food around them.”

  Clement looked and saw the huge house that belonged to the politician with the pretty little girl, the house that had only recently become visible because so many of the trees had been cut. He liked to see the house, but he hoped no more of the trees would come down.

  “Be quiet and listen for the shriek of the eagle. Keep still in trouble and stay close to me.”

  Big Waters was spent. She closed her eyes and tucked her chin to her chest.

  Clement went to the window and stared. He watched for the slightest movement. Though it was so far away, he felt he could see the girl’s shape standing in the window and staring back at him. He raised his hand to wave. He was sure she raised a wing in return.

  25

  The Beloved Child and His Whore-Mother

  ON A PALLET IN THE CORNER of Miss Daisy’s room at the Red Swan Saloon, Davis Christmas lay looking up at the ceiling and scraping his toe along the wall. Miss Daisy watched him in the reflection of the mirror as she sat putting white powder all over her face and chest.

  She put down the puff. “Whatsa matter, dear?” she asked the boy.

  “Where’s my mama now? Is she ever coming back?” asked Davis.

  Davis could be a real rascal. Only this morning, he had turned over her expensive perfume bottle and used one of her best hairpieces to make a nest for the silly cat. And she had yet to bother him about the gouge in her pressed rouge and the red smear across the cat’s back. She sometimes wondered if Davis misbehaved because he was missing his mama or acted out and then missed his mama coincidentally. Miss Daisy could never scold Davis when he was missing his mama. She hated herself for thinking the boy might use such a situation to manipulate her, but she’d never been a natural mother and didn’t know about these kinds of things.

  “Davis, dear, you know your mama’s in heaven,” she said. “Remember when Father Paul made the fancy ceremony over her, and we all wore our best and then she was laid to rest in the pauper’s cemetery?” She turned around on her stool and faced him. She put out her arms. “Come up here, hon. Miss Daisy wants to hold you.”

  Davis pouted his lips and shook his head. “I only want my mama,” he said.

  “Well now, you’re breaking my poor, poor heart,” said Miss Daisy. “I’m so sad I could cry.” She pretended to heave a little and pressed a tear out of her eye. Miss Daisy too knew how to be manipulative.

  Davis sat up and crawled over like a baby. He made baby noises and put up his arms to be held, as an infant would. “Hold me,” he said in his best baby voice.

  “That’s a good baby,” Miss Daisy said. “Come up here now, dear, and let’s be happy today.” She picked up the boy and cradled him and rocked him. She put her nose in his hair and inhaled deeply. He smelled of face powder and tobacco smoke, of her. And if a person who didn’t have eyesight could see them, she thought, that person would believe that they were natural mother and child. If that blind person didn’t have eyes to see her painted face or the indent above her eye where a man had punched her so hard, he crushed part of her eye socket, that person would have no sense that she wasn’t a natural mother. She tended him like a natural mother. She’s the one who had put whiskey on his gums when he was teething. She’s the one who had splattered flour on his bottom when he had nappy rash. He was hers, and she loved him better than any other mother could love her own child.

  Sometimes, while Miss Daisy rocked Davis, she wondered about her old beau. She wondered if he now had children with his wife. She wondered if he was brutish to his slaves, even to the children among them. She sometimes let her imagination conceive of him ripping a child from its mother’s arms, and then she would get mad at him and think to herself that she was very lucky not to have married him after all. Even if she thought about his family’s big house, with pillars and marble staircases and the rose garden and colorful carpets and velvet drapes and floral settees and silver platters and crystal stemware, she’d then imagine him taking a cane across the back of a black mother, and she’d be very, very happy she wasn’t his wife, that she never had the opportunity to wear that lilac taffeta gown with the tiny pink flowers embroidered down the sleeves, which a seamstress had made especially for Miss Daisy’s wedding day, or the heirloom ruby ring with the tiny crystals all around it that had belonged to his grandmother, which surely would have become hers that day. Miss Daisy’d think that she’d choose this life, here at the Red Swan, rather than be wife to such a beast, even if he had all the money in the whole world and she could wear the best dresses and fresh, lacy undergarments and have meals made and brought to her room when she was feeling ill or tired, even if she would be invited to all the best balls with the most handsome men and women in all the South. Miss Daisy’d think that she’d prefer life here, with Davis, even over the comfort of her own mother and father and sisters and brothers, all of whom avoided her like leprosy once she was jilted and the rumors began about her lost
maidenhead. Davis didn’t care that she was a whore. Davis didn’t care that she sometimes got sad and stayed in bed in an opium stupor. He loved her no matter what. He hugged her and sometimes in his sleep called her Mama, and she would go to him and hold him, so his dreams would be the best and as real as possible.

  “I’ve got a good idea,” said Miss Daisy. “I think we should go down and practice your piano scales.” She sat him upright. “Would you like that?”

  He nodded. “Is the bartender going to yell at me for making a racket?”

  “Not while I’m there,” she said. “I’ll hit him with a stick if he does.” She tickled Davis’s tummy.

  He giggled and squirmed. Then he asked, “Will Mr. Hatterby come today?”

  “I’m sure he will,” said Miss Daisy. “We better straighten up this room a bit.” She fixed her pillows and smoothed the duvet.

  Davis opened the door and hung from the knob. He leaned back. “Will I have to stay downstairs while he’s here?”

  “For a while.” Miss Daisy went to her vanity and checked her face in the mirror.

  “Will he bring me a treat?”

  “I’m sure, sweetie,” she said. “He never forgets his favorite boy.” She worked an earring into her lobe.

  “Am I really his favorite boy?” Davis swung on the door, kicked the wall, and swung back.

  “Yes, yes!” said Miss Daisy. “He takes good care of you and me.”

  “He likes us?”

  “He sure does.” Miss Daisy hugged him to her, then stood him in front of her and spoke to him gently. “Mr. Hatterby is a very important and good man. We must be as helpful to him as we can.”

  “Are you helping him when I must leave the room and he sits on your bed and you close the door behind me?”