I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots

by Susan Straight

  “Where he stay now?” Marietta asked.

  Roscoe shook his head and got a rake from the hooks on the wooden gate of the truckbed. “You coming to Red Man’s on Sunday for the game?”

  “I guess I might,” she said. “Freeman ain’t much company for football yet. He only like for see he daddy two, three time, and then he bored.”

  “I look forward to seeing you,” Roscoe said. “And don’t touch that wood.”

  Inside, she looked at the shiny wood floor, remembering the thick dirt clotted with beer and urine, the glass vials, the cigarette butts. Damp clothes in the corners of the big front room, and the dank smell. Last time for somebody else dirt, she had thought when she first stood inside the boarded-up house. I run away for the last time. I make my own dirt now.

  She had sat down with Nate and Calvin, just the three of them, and talked about the money. The accountant called a real-estate agent, who said the house was only $42,000. “The neighborhood isn’t really that good,” the agent said to her on the phone. “That’s why the price is so reasonable. Location really means a lot. Are you thinking of renting it out after purchase?”

  The boys decided on the money themselves, without her. They set up an account after the accountant drafted the check to buy the house, and like Tiny Momma, they gave her money every month. But she only let them put $1,200 in the account, saying, “That all I need for feed us and buy book and toy. Pay my utility. You save the rest.”

  Calvin said, “I’ma need to buy a new car, since you taken the Lincoln.” He laughed. “I never liked no big car anyway. I want me a Z-car.”

  When she swept out the dirt and bottles, she saw that though the varnish was pitted and scarred the wood floor was solid. And three bedrooms—one for her, one for Freeman, and one for visitors. Calvin slept on the foldout couch.

  She liked the words, calling Tiny Momma to say, “This my new phone number. I got me a house, with a big yard and plum tree. In Rio Seco. Only half hour from them two, and they gon visit. When you coming out?”

  She asked Red Man about the floors, and he brought a thin young man with a drum sander, which sent fine dust everywhere and left sweet-smelling bare oak. He smeared golden stain onto the wood, then brushed over clear varnish, and even Carolanne said, “It came out nicer than I thought. But wood floors are so much trouble to keep clean, and it’s gonna be cold in the winter.”

  “Sweep em out easier than fool with that huge vacuum you need for all you carpet. And me and Freeman wear socks, huh, baby? You gon stay with you gran while Mama have a new baby.”

  “Fireplaces are really dangerous,” Carolanne said. “You need a screen.” Marietta remembered all the brass-trimmed screens she had polished in Charleston.

  “I let you pick me out a nice one,” she said.

  The floor man put new linoleum in the kitchen. He said the house looked like it was built in 1920 or so, and then he brought a young white man, who painted the kitchen cupboards pale blue and the rest of the walls white. Marietta scrubbed the sink, gleaming white enamel with ridged drainboards on each side; she loved to wash dishes or clean greens and see the rivulets of water run in tracks down to the double sink.

  Nate and Calvin had come three times, during the week, to hose off the outside after she had moved in. Then she asked them to paint the windowsills dark blue. Blue for keep spirit away, window and door all.

  Carolanne didn’t like it, that they were working on the house when they should have been resting, but Marietta painted, too, listened to their voices, and watched the way they moved slower in the yard. She went to the window now and looked out at the wood. Nate don’t need for throw chair at no wall, he chop wood. No—he ain’t want for do that. Wood for winter.

  Roscoe had been finding reasons to come by. Red Man teased him about being a poet, about the way he shifted his languages, too. He reminded her of Baby Poppa sometimes when he talked, but he was different. He stood close and talked low sometimes. Red Man and Mary watched, she saw, but she didn’t mind. And when he was out of the yard, they told her how he had taken his son’s daughter, how he had protected his son from the cops during the summer when there was trouble in the neighborhood. She washed the breakfast dishes, cut up a chicken, and thought about the outline of his lips.

  He came early in the morning to tell her that he and Red Man were cutting down a carob tree today, and the thick branches would make even better firewood than the pepper trees.

  “What you cookin?” he said, bending over the stove.

  “Grits.”

  He laughed. “Rich woman like you gon eat grits for breakfast? That’s poor folks’ food!”

  She had to laugh, too, because he was so obvious about wanting to stay in the kitchen. “I beena have grits without groceries many time.”

  Then he said, “You want to see what poor California folks eat, if they come from the desert like me? See, I ain’t from Georgia or South Carolina like the rest of you. I couldn’t go out and get fish like you’re always talking about. I’m part Mexican, part Indian, desert people. Let me make you my specialty.”

  He left abruptly and came back by the time she had finished making coffee. Freeman looked up from the kitchen floor, where he was racing trucks. Roscoe dropped a brown bag on the table and said, “I’ma make you the Mexican equivalent of ground-up cornmeal. Each culture dresses up cornmeal as best they can. I’ve written poems for tortillas.”

  He stood at the spattering cast-iron frying pan and slid something onto the plate: crispy-fried envelopes filled with melted cheese and a vein of hot sauce inside. “Quesadillas,” he said, and then, “Sun circles of yellow corn, keep us alive with their heat.” A poem—she heard it in the rhythm.

  While she ate slowly, he leafed through the Sports Illustrated she had left on the table, the one with her picture. She said nothing, but he told her, “I’ve already seen it, everybody has. Red Man’s son Darnell bought four of em. I just want to look at you again.”

  “All in the Family” was the title of the photo essay: first there was a crinkle-eyed white woman with curly hair and her two sons who played hockey. “Twin Sticks,” it said below them. Then two teenaged girls, with braces and freckles, and their father: “Double the Racket.” A Mexican woman with a gold eyetooth and shy smile, and her two sons, who played soccer in college. Sidekicks. And then the stark photo of Nate and Calvin’s bare chests, plates of bone hard-edged in the light, and her face and shoulders rising above them. “Blood Sport,” the title said. Below was a line reading, “Marietta Cook, who now lives in California, and her sons, Calvin and Nate, rookie teammates on the Los Angeles Rams.”

  “My wife died when Louis was six,” Roscoe said abruptly. “She was in a car accident.”

  Marietta nodded.

  “Your husband?”

  Marietta almost said it. He dead, too. It fit perfectly. But she waited, and he stood up to turn another tortilla in the pan.

  “The boys’ daddy—he here and gone people.”

  Roscoe nodded, finished the quesadilla. She watched the hot sauce drip from the corner, remembered Pinkie and Laha always wanting “vinecka-peppa sauce” at lunch in the fields. Then Roscoe said suddenly, “I like that, the way it sounds. Here and gone people.” He sat down across from her. “But is he gone?”

  She smiled into his eyes. “Been gone—longer than twenty year.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I like the way that sounds, too.”

  He finished his quesadilla and washed his hands. “Let me take Hollie for the day,” she said. “You bring me all that wood.”

  “Who you plan to invite for a fire, with all this wood?” he said. She looked away.

  “I ain’t decide yet. Go on and get Hollie for me. She play good with Freeman.”

  Hollie loved to boss Freeman around, telling him, “Go put that dirt in the bucket,” and he loved to follow her orders. Marietta sat in the beach chair she’d bought at K Mart, watching the lake. The fishing here was hard to get used to, different from the la
pping edges of the waterway and the sliding creeks.

  The Vietnamese men crouched near her, gathering those tiny clams that breathed in the black mud around the edges of the lake. “I don’t know why they want to fool with them things,” Red Man had said. “Whole lotta work for a toothful a meat.” Marietta watched her line floating, the fat larvae from the wasp eggs shifting below the water, and listened to the Vietnamese men’s low, quick syllables. Their voices thudded in their throats almost as fast and hard as Aint Sister’s old-time talk. Their feet were much smaller than hers in their rubber thongs.

  She could stand the pole up the way the others did here, maybe work on a basket. She turned the circle around and around, wishing again that she knew how to make a bassinet like Aint Sister had made for her, a long round-cornered cradle with pine-needle squares in the sweetgrass. She had finished a low round for Carolanne, to hold baby powder and lotion and all the things she needed on the changing table. The grass and reeds she and Freeman collected near the swampy pipe didn’t smell sweet, but they bent under her fingertips.

  After an hour, she only had three bluegill thumping against the sides of the water bucket, and she thought she’d better take the kids home soon. Hollie wanted to try to make a basket, but Freeman snatched her grass away, shouting, “My Dig Ma! My Ma!”

  She had wanted to catch a few catfish to fry for tomorrow, bring them to Red Man’s house, since she was going to watch the game there and she knew he would serve her something. But this lake fishing wasn’t the same. She would have to practice.

  “You want fish?” Roscoe said when he came to get Hollie. “I’ll take you to the fish market tomorrow before we go to Red Man’s and you can buy anything you want—red snapper, oysters, catfish. I don’t eat much fish, but Mary loves it.”

  They drove in his truck, in the morning, with the kids between them in the long cab. It was a tiny storefront with bars on the windows and SEAFOOD SPECIALTIES painted on the white stucco over the door. When they walked inside, the two small tables with red-vinyled chairs, the warm-oiled air, made her blood turn to foam. A plump woman stood behind the counter, where the fish lay on ice, and said, “How you doing? What can I get for you?”

  Waiting for the catfish and snapper to fry, she had to sit down and breathe, the smell coursing through her. Freeman and Hollie pressed their noses to the glass case, and Roscoe sat across from her. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Fine,” she said.

  He was quiet during the game, while Red Man and Lanier and Red Man’s sons yelled and drank beer and ate. Marietta sat with Mary at the table, eating a plate of fish and greens, but when she was finished, she moved to sit on a chair near Roscoe. “Thanks for take me to the market,” she said. “You don’t even like no fish. You ain’t ate nothing.”

  He watched Nate on the screen, and Marietta waited until Nate had fallen inside the pack of players near the line. “Nice to see your sons play,” Roscoe said strangely. “They big time. Make you feel good.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “But make you feel nervous, too.”

  “Nervous better than nothing,” he said, and he got up to go outside, where Red Man’s daughters, who were in grade school, shouted with Freeman and Hollie.

  Red Man watched Roscoe go, and he came to sit in the empty chair. “He don’t like to watch sports,” Red Man said. “His son used to play basketball, Roscoe was pushin him to play in college, and now the boy don’t do nothin. Run wild with them dope dealers. Roscoe don’t even like to watch the Lakers.”

  Marietta stayed in the chair, counting Nate’s tackles and seeing Calvin play a few downs, listening to the men, but Roscoe didn’t come back until the game was nearly over. The Rams won, 14–3, and Marietta felt Roscoe circle the room until he worked his way back to her.

  “You want some a that wood done?” he said.

  It was late afternoon, and the kids smoothed racetracks in the dirt near the plum tree. Marietta brought the chopped wood to the porch, stacked it, and watched him swing the mallet onto the wedge in the huge stumps. Sliding around the handle, the wood smooth in his hands—she remembered, the motion, the rhythm, the palms hot. The sun hung low in the sky, and he stopped chopping suddenly to point at the sky. “There go the crows,” he said.

  Flock after flock of big crows, fighting and croaking, went over the yard, and he stood mesmerized. “They’re going to the riverbottom—that’s where they sleep,” he said. “They go home at this time every night.”

  The kids looked up, too, and the birds washed across the sky, darting at each other, flapping gracefully. “They got gold inside their wings,” Roscoe said to her. She looked hard: at just the right moment, the sun reflected gold in patches on the undersides of their wings, close to their breasts. “My son loves birds,” Roscoe said. “He used to.”

  “Mine just love fish,” Marietta said, but he didn’t even hear her.

  “You can find gold in a lotta places, if you look the right way,” he said, his head still thrown back, his skin tight.

  “You have for look hard, huh?” Marietta said softly.

  “No, I didn’t mean hard. Just right.”

  She thought about Roscoe’s face, about what he’d said his son had lost. Every day she read the newspaper articles about the Rams’ game, the analysis and features on the players. Carolanne said Nate was being good, that she thought he was off the steroids, but that he still stomped around before games. He told Marietta, “Take me two days to get up, get mad and pumped, and take me two days to come down after the game. With the game day, I only got two days for rest.”

  Calvin just got more and more quiet before games, and lost in his own face afterward. That was how he’d always been, running plays back and forth in his mind, correcting everything, he said.

  This was the bye weekend, and they were all coming to spend two nights. She had planned carefully about what she would say, how she could keep them coming out to see her, how she could do her job from Rio Seco. She had asked Roscoe to bring her the things for Nate and Calvin, because she didn’t know where to go for them, and she had bought Carolanne’s birthday present and something for Freeman. Maybe this wouldn’t work at all; maybe it would be as disastrous as the red-and-white dinner she had served. But she still wanted to keep an eye.

  When Nate’s BMW pulled up, she was waiting on the porch. They stood in the yard and Nate pulled off the strange things he had attached to the windshield wipers, some expensive thing everyone wanted now. Carolanne ran for Freeman, who shouted, “Mama! Mama here!”

  “Rock said bring them things from the wipers in the house if we gonna park the car on your street,” Carolanne said to Marietta, pressing her cheek against Freeman’s. “He still can’t believe you bought this old house.”

  “I can,” Calvin said. “Old cheap Mama.”

  “You better hush all that. I don’t need you tell me nothing, just come on back here cause you got work to do,” Marietta said. She thought she might as well just get it over with.

  “Great—more painting and moving furniture,” Carolanne said, arranging Freeman’s legs over her bigger belly. “Just what we need—strain on Nate’s sore knee and paint fumes for me and the baby.”

  “No, not paint,” Marietta said. “Nate’s knee bad?”

  “Naw, just had for put some ice on it last night,” Nate said. “It ain’t no big thing.”

  “I see you been eating,” Marietta said to Carolanne when they walked around the house. “I’m happy you get some rest and fat.” She pointed to the yard when the boys came. They saw the carob logs, the ash trunk Red Man had brought, and the new ax blades glinting where they leaned against the wood.

  “Oh, man, Mama, you crazy,” Calvin said.

  “You see that thing, man?” Nate said, pointing to the Rototiller Roscoe had chosen. “She more than crazy. Don’t crack you teeth at me, Mama. What Laha’s Mr. Jerry always say—‘I see that much work, I take my foot in hand for head on downroad.’ You tell we that.”

  “Sound
crazy to me, too,” Marietta said. “But my neighbor say it really do get cold enough for fire here. And they say planting season in California come fall. Strangest thing I ever hear.”

  “Your coach is gonna love this, Nate. Don’t you even think about it until the season’s over,” Carolanne said.

  But he and Calvin were already examining the Rototiller. “Remember Baby Poppa use to tell us about some mule he had, said he had to cuss and fuss for get straight line in the field. Check out this blade. Mama, how big we gotta make this plot? You don’t know how for grow no vegetable in California. Gon be too hot.”

  They started on the wood, though, the sledgehammer singing against the wedge in the log when Nate went for the biggest stump first. “Man, coach gon be hot he find out we chopping wood,” Calvin said, holding the ax.

  “He don know,” Nate said.

  “What if you bang up you knee?”

  “Man, Muhammad Ali use to chop wood, get ready for fight.”

  “Yeah, but he was by heself, he mess up, it was on he back. We got the whole team lookin to you,” Calvin said.

  “Scary nigger,” Nate said. “I ain’t doin this by myself. Go on.”

  Freeman covered his ears when the metal rang against metal, and the ax thudded into the wood. “Owie,” he said, watching them. Marietta had given him an old paintbrush and a pail of water, and he got busy wetting the plum-tree trunk, the side of the garage, the faded boards of the back fence. Carolanne stood uncomfortably, refusing to sit in the beach chair Marietta had brought outside for her. Marietta raked splinters and branches from the dirt. She’d been watering it, but nothing grew yet.

  “Look at Freeman getting filthy,” Carolanne said. “Y’all look just like a bunch a country niggers.”

  “We are,” Marietta said. She took Carolanne’s arm and led her back into the house. “Don’t be mad,” she said. “Nate tell you if you ax he—he like for see what he do, and this work gon calm he mind. He still got too much time on he hand, you beena tell me youself. Let he sweat some.” Before Carolanne could answer, she said, “I ain’t lecture. And if they don’t want for work out there, they come back in. They grown. I didn’t pay hardly nothing for them thing. But I get something for you, too, for you birthday next week.” She handed Carolanne a small basket, with a box inside.