Mama Day

by Naylor, Gloria;

  I wasn’t going to get it that day. You were in a mood. And I guess that old adage was true: you keep ’em laid and you keep ’em happy. But I had just been too tired the last few days. There was so much to be done around that place and those poor old ladies couldn’t handle the heavier work. Your grandmother’s foundation needed cementing, the east end of her garden had to be plowed under, Miss Miranda’s chicken coop could use a good coat of whitewash after it was cleaned out. I dreaded the thought of the last task. I didn’t want to admit that I was a little afraid of live chickens, but what to do when you see her dragging gallons of disinfectant by herself? She had promised to fence them off so I could work in peace. Yeah, if I ran from roosters, how could I be a farmer? But there was more to do in Willow Springs than farm. I could fish, open some sort of store at the bridge junction, or just sell Bruce my half of the business and write textbooks while we raised a family. It wouldn’t cost much to live down here. We could heat our home with solar energy—it had to stay warm more than six months out of the year. And all of this beauty to make up for what you were giving up. A nice dream. I leaned over and whispered in your ear.

  “Let’s play Adam and Eve.”

  “You know, George, I’ll be so damned glad to get you back to New York. You’ve just about lost your mind down here. I hardly know you anymore.”

  “Never pleased—and this time you’re the one with no imagination. We have a chance to sneak up among these trees and take advantage of paradise, and you’re sitting there with your knees locked.”

  “You really don’t know this place. But just go on and roll around in those woods with your clothes off, and the first red ant that bites your behind will tell you all about paradise.”

  I laughed but you only smiled, and with effort at that.

  “What’s wrong, Ophelia?”

  “I don’t know, I …” Your fingers pulled and pulled at the grass. “Why is it taking me so long to get pregnant?”

  “We’ve only been trying for three months.”

  “Maybe we’ve waited too long. And now I’m too old.”

  “Thirty-two? And I’m just thirty-five. Baby, we average only thirty-three and a half years old. And next year, we’ll average only thirty-four and a half. The year after that …”

  “I get the point, George.”

  “I don’t think you do—there’s no rush.”

  “I just feel like there is. I don’t know, maybe …”

  “Hey, look. We can scratch the fig leaves, but from now on we’ll just work overtime. I’ve put in worse hours doing much less pleasant things.”

  “But it should be natural.”

  “What won’t be natural? I could jump your bones twice as much as you let me anyway.”

  “There you go, lying again. I never refuse you.”

  “In the mornings?”

  “Six A.M., George!”

  “You see, that’s the problem. We’ve just got one of those kids waiting to come here at dawn. And you’re going to have to accommodate it. And if the first one’s a girl, we’ll call her Dawn. Let’s do that with all our kids. Dawn, Midnight, Shower—Oops. It’ll be an easy way to educate them about sex. Just explain their names to them.”

  I finally got you to laugh, but your eyes remained sad as they looked out over The Sound.

  “You know, you can be a very sweet man.”

  “I try.”

  Yes, George, you tried hard. But it would have been too much to ask for you to understand those whispers as we passed through my family plot. As soon as I put the moss in my shoes, I could hear them all in the wind as it moved through the trees and stirred up dust along the ground. That’s what upset me so the day we first sat right here, looking at the water. A beautiful day like this; I knew I wasn’t the best of wives, but I gave it my personal best and you—or any man—would have to accept that or nothing at all. And I was lucky enough to have found someone who often accepted much less than the best from me. So how—I wanted to scream at all those silent whispers—how would I break his heart? Instead of screaming at them, and having you think I’d lost my mind, I snapped at you. And you probably thought I was in one of my uglier moods. Well, it was the lesser of two evils.

  No, you didn’t know this place. And you didn’t know my people. I was sorry I had brought you—on that walk, to Willow Springs period. And if what they said held any truth, then I was sorry I had married you. But I’d never allow myself to think that, so I told myself it had all been a figment of my imagination. I was simply annoyed because you were being dreamy and hypothetical. You’d last in Willow Springs about as long as a blizzard lasted. Or would you? Could there be just an outside, outside chance that you would insist on staying down here? Stranger things had happened—they had just happened when we passed through the family plot. And if you really insisted, after all the fuming, battles, and hysterics, really insisted, what would I do? Why, I’d resent that you’d put me in a position like that, that you’d demand something of me that you knew I absolutely did not want. Yes, I might even hate you for it. And I would stay. But we’d be trampling on dangerous ground: to be unable to live without someone is one thing, to be forced to prove it continually is something else again. No, it was all a dream for a lazy summer afternoon. Our marriage was safe within a catch-22: knowing I cared enough to go beyond the limits for you, you’d have to care enough not to ask me.

  So what could those voices possibly mean? The voices I told myself I hadn’t heard in the graveyard and did not hear when we got to the other place. The house where my grandmother was born and her father before her. The stories about my great-grandfather, John-Paul, were legion and just as fanciful as the ones about what Mama Day could do out there in that garden. Sure, when a child I was delighted with the game of following Mama Day around her garden, looking under bushes and in tree hollows for the family of mockingbirds her daddy carved so lifelike one day they just took off and set up housekeeping on their own. John-Paul’s wooden roses and lilies sprouted buds and his magnolia leaves dripped dew. But his oldest daughter did him one better: her trees sang and her flowers took flight.

  Wonderful stories that fed a child’s imagination through her eyes and ears. I saw those same flying petals now as our legs brushed a patch of zinnias and startled a group of scarlet butterflies. It was exactly what you said, an old house with a big garden. The oldest house in Willow Springs. The only house with three stories and a full verandah, a second floor balcony, sloping dormers, and bay windows. Too old to have been built by even my great-grandfather, but he played on those verandah steps and later he climbed them with his new bride, Ophelia. What had Grandma said about her mother: an unhappy woman who never recovered from the loss of her youngest child? But Mama Day, in her no-nonsense fashion, had gone right to the bone: crazy as a bedbug and she died without peace. Yes, just an old house with a rocking chair on the porch. A hand-carved rocking chair that was moving ever so slightly in the breeze from The Sound, its rounded slats creaking relentlessly against the wooden planks. Why couldn’t you hear it? Over and over: you’ll break his heart. You wanted to sit in the rocking chair and play southern gentleman with me on your lap. I wanted us to get out of there; I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  There was nothing to stop that house from sitting right in the beginning of the nineteenth century except a fresh coat of paint. White paint, of course, because it had originally belonged to Bascombe Wade. Or he had originally lived in it; it actually belonged to the garden engulfing it on four sides and there was little difference between that garden and the woods that stopped at the front gate. It was an old house and it was an old garden: a garden designed by a woman. A subtle arrangement of human hands had peach trees and pecan trees flowing into flowering bushes flowing into low patches of herbs; the same herbs you grew in our kitchen window flourished in abundance outside the door that led into the pantry of that house. And then there were so many strange plants I didn’t recognize and you couldn’t help me with; the refrain was familiar b
y now—ask Mama Day. It was her garden and the iron kettles near the huge fireplace I saw through the windows were for her medicines. Those dried bundles of herbs over the mantel may have been hers, but they hung on hooks that were rusted and ancient. Miss Miranda was not the first to use them.

  It was an odd place for a plantation owner to have a home, isolated in the woods like that, but odd had been the word for that day. Your behavior, the graveyard, the facts that were as clear as your complexion while you ignored the evident—you’d inherited his house. No, you’d inherited their house. The other place. Had he built it so he could come out here and be with her? Sit on that verandah and watch her pruning roses that grew as large as my fist, snipping sprigs of mint for his tea? It was a nice image but it didn’t feel that way. The place felt uneasy in spite of the gentle breezes coming from The Sound. That house had known a lot of pain. And more than what you talked about: your great-grandmother, Ophelia, losing her baby daughter at the bottom of a well; closing herself off from her husband and her children. Your grandmother hating the place so much she hadn’t set foot there in over fifty years. No, there was something more, and something deeper than the old historical line about slave women and their white masters. A slave hadn’t lived in this house. And without a slave, there could be no master. What had Miss Miranda said—he had claim to her body, but not her mind? Yes, that house resonated loss. A lack of peace. And both had begged for peace. What caused those two people to tear each other apart in this old house with a big garden?

  But, God, it was a lovely place. Why not move out here for the last week of our vacation—a sort of second honeymoon. We could wake up and see what those morning glories entwined around the pillars would look like in full bloom. There was an ancient bed on the second floor, a mahogany headboard ten feet high, and we could call the girl Mahogany—Mahogany Andrews. Let’s bring ourselves into the house and erase a little of the sadness. Your grandmother would have a fit, you said, a natural fit. The other place wasn’t a joke to her. I wasn’t trying to turn it into a joke; I felt we had something to give—maybe something we owed—to those other couples who tried but didn’t make it. I was that sure about us; we could defy history. Obviously, I was not the first young man to stand on that verandah and feel that way.

  Death. Miranda feels death all around her. A bowl in her lap and her hands coated with peach juice, she can’t shake it off. She frowns real, real deep, picking up another peach and peeling away the skin without hardly touching the flesh underneath. The slippery ease of it disturbs her until her knife hits the hard core as she whacks the fruit into slices. It ain’t like the death she been planning for Buzzard for the last two days. First lying about her to that boy and then dropping him off like a sack of potatoes in the front yard drunk as a skunk. Naw, all them fancy tortures she was visualizing to get back at Buzzard would probably only amount to her letting all the air out of his tires or sneaking over to the south woods and throwing potash into his still. This here was real death. But whose? It didn’t have to be a who—it could be a what.

  Why, she was feeling the way she felt just before they got a sudden fall. Overnight the air turning cool and frost killing tomatoes on the vine. Leaves dropping like rain from the trees. She was feeling change. Naw, it didn’t have to be a who—but it could be. It could be I’m getting beyond old, she thinks, stirring cinnamon, vanilla, and sugar into her peaches. Could be I’m getting to be Old’s mama. It seems like it in her bones when she stands up to heat the stove. That liniment works a shorter and shorter time with the years. Her bones are talking today. But something else was telling her something and if it just got a little louder, she was willing to listen. She measures out the flour for her pie crusts, throws in a pinch of salt, quickly starts working in her shortening. But she always sprinkles her ice water and seeing it dripping from her fingers into the bowl, everything stops. Her head turns to the salt shaker, she picks it up again on the slant, and her eyes widen as the clumped-up crystals start falling slowly over each other. Like them forgotten nickelodeons, the pictures move backward and it all falls into place.

  From the dripping water to the clumped-up salt to the white foam washing up on shore at the east side of the island. And so much in between. Them waves had been coming in—just a bit too fast. After ninety years the natural motion shoulda been in her blood, but she had been talking, hadn’t she? Talking and fishing. Talking and walking. She walks back over it all now: them high high hills the crawfish built up around the mouths of their burrows; the kingfishers and bank swallows nesting way way up from the water; bush rabbits—she walks past a dozen of them hollows if she walks past one, and all of them is deep deep into the ground. And right there at Chevy’s Pass, Buzzard’s bees are clustered close close to the door of their hives. Yes, it was high high, way way, and deep deep. This was gonna be a big big storm. Miranda goes to the back door of her trailer—wind steady from the southeast and not a cloud in the sky, Oh, Lord. She shakes her head, looking at George out back, whitewashing the sides of her chicken coop. There’s more of it on him than on them walls, but he’s going at it full of steam. A waste of effort; the thing might not be standing by the end of the week.

  She apologizes to her chickens, calling them foolish for standing with their backs to the wind for days, when she was the real fool. What had she told that boy? You just gotta watch all these creatures long enough to find out what’s going on in the elements where they live. Well, she had looked without seeing, listened without hearing. Ain’t her rag rugs been warping and the chairs been creaking? Ain’t she been listening to crickets trying to tear their legs off for nights on end? Listening without hearing. But she knew what she’d hear now: crows, hawks, ducks, and geese making a mighty racket for no earthly reason; ’cause the reason was coming in from the southeast, pushing clear skies before it. And storms like that are born in hell.

  The last one blew the bridge down back in 1920 when she was younger than Baby Girl. She was living at the other place with John-Paul then and The Sound almost reached their back steps, saltwater gouging out the soil, killing their garden and leaving hordes of dead fish piled up along the trunks of the fruit trees. That is, the trees that were still standing. Nothing much was standing out there after that storm. She claimed that garden back, inch by inch, handful of soil by handful of soil. If it happens again, Miranda sighs, I ain’t got another sixty years. She finishes rolling out her pie crusts and has ’em in the oven before she rings up Abigail.

  “You there, Sister?”

  “Uh, huh.”

  “A storm’s coming.”

  “Ya know, I been feeling something for days.”

  “This here is an 18 & 23er.”

  It’s a sharp intake of breath—“Lord have mercy.”

  Miranda remembers that Abigail was carrying Peace when the last one hit. Her husband was caught beyond the bridge, and Abigail came to wait out the storm with Miranda and her daddy in the other place. Behind them shutters in the darkened house, John-Paul whittled while Abigail sat in Mother’s rocker, her hands resting high up on her stomach as Miranda fed the parlor fire and heard the garden die. What was Daddy whittling that day? A toy for his first grandbaby? Whatever, it was lost and so was Peace. And it was the last time Abigail set foot in the other place.

  “Are you sure, Miranda?”

  “The signs don’t lie, Abigail. At least, not these signs.”

  “It may not hit us head-on.”

  “It may not. But it’s best to be prepared.”

  “Oh, no—and with the children here. And their party tomorrow night.”

  “Watch the sky, it ain’t coming before tomorrow. But it’s coming soon.”

  “What have I done to deserve this trouble?”

  “Abigail, stop your foolishness. All God got in mind is to send you a hurricane? It ain’t got nothing to do with us, we just bystanders on this earth. Sometimes I think we was only a second thought—and a poor second thought at that.”

  “Well, the Script
ures do say it: man was the last thing the Lord made.”

  “He shoulda quit while He was ahead.”

  “I ain’t listening to this blasphemy today, Miranda. Not with a storm on the horizon. And don’t come sitting over in my house, ’cause I don’t want it blown down.”

  “So you’d leave me over here in this flimsy old trailer?”

  “It’ll be a fitting punishment for you.”

  Miranda has her peach pies cooling on the countertops and table when she goes out back to see how George is coming with the chicken coop. He’s got himself a job, ’cause her hen house is larger than some garages in Willow Springs. The long-handled brush he’s using can reach up to the roof, but until he got the knack of shaking out the excess and covering a section with small strokes he splattered whitewash all up his arms and across his face. It’s a good thing she found a pair of her daddy’s old overalls for him—he woulda made a mess of them city clothes. He actually looks like he’s having fun, John-Paul’s overalls belted around his middle, him working away white as a ghost. Her coop looks fine, too. She ain’t got the heart to tell him right now that it might all be in vain.

  Miranda looks up at the sky. Clear. Clear as a bell. But the chickens pinned up in wire cages is making an awful racket. She gotta get them out of there soon or they’ll start eating each other alive. She don’t know why folks believe chickens are cowardly. She’s seen two of ’em stand toe to toe and peck each other to death. And you couldn’t get her to go near a brooder’s nest for nothing in the world, unless she was after losing an eye or a plug out of her hand. She even had an old hen once that would attack a rooster—a young rooster, spurs and all. Naw, that boy had the right idea being a little wary. If you don’t know their ways, it’s best to give ’em their distance.