One Good Mama Bone

by McClain, Bren; Monroe, Mary Alice;

  What a fool he’d been to go soft. It crossed Luther’s mind to fling open the window and aim right at him. Shoot him dead the way Luther made Uncle shoot hogs with that pistol. Go ahead and put him out of his do-good misery.

  But Luther decided to let the boy go on. He would be back soon. He was too much of a baby to last out there by himself in the cold dark.

  No, Luther would be waiting for him when he returned. He’d even give him enough time to get back inside his window and return to his bed. Then Luther would start the night over. He’d climb the stairs again, and, again, open the door to LC’s room. But this time Luther would not tell his boy he loved him and give LC the opportunity to pretend sleep and shun him.

  …..

  LC ran, cocooned in twinkle stars that night.

  He arrived at the Creamer driveway out of breath but paused only a few seconds to aim his eyes towards the answer he’d come seeking. He took off towards the barn and found the steer standing, along with Emerson Bridge, who stood beside the animal and Mrs. Creamer close by, sitting. His eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness.

  “Why, hon,” Mrs. Creamer said. “What you doing way out here?” She was standing now.

  Her kindness made tears puddle up in his eyes. He was glad these people could not see him clearly. When he could, he told them, “Just come to check on y’all. Heard your steer had the bloat.”

  “Why, hon, we thank you, we do. But in the night? You come in the pitch black cold night? And on foot? And that far?”

  “I was worried, ma’am,” LC said. “Didn’t know if y’all knew to keep him on his feet or not, but I see you do. You got to keep him on his feet.”

  He felt her arms come around him, and he knew that whatever happened to him when he returned home that night would be worth this.

  “That’s what Mr. Merritt told us,” Emerson Bridge said.

  But what about that cowboy, LC wondered. Surely, he came here and said. “But if anybody tells y’all to get him to lay down, don’t do it, OK?” He searched the faces of these two people, who stood beside each other now, both nodding. In the spare light, he could see a mother and her son.

  A cow mooed behind them. It was Splotchy pressed to the fence a few feet away. LC would know her face anywhere.

  “Reckon I’d better get on back home,” he said and started for the road.

  “Wait!” Emerson Bridge called out, “want to hear him whistle?” He motioned LC over and pointed to a place up high on the animal’s lower back. “Right there’s where that ice pick went in him.”

  “Ice pick?” LC said.

  “Yeah, that Mr. Emmanuel come and helped us with that.”

  LC didn’t know anyone with that name.

  “Put your ear there and listen,” Emerson Bridge told him.

  The air tickled LC’s face.

  Emerson Bridge leaned in, too, and whispered, “I’m scared.”

  “Just keep him on his feet,” LC whispered back.

  “Not that, I know that,” Emerson Bridge said. “I’m scared that everything I do for him comes up short.”

  LC wanted to tell him then don’t do it, stop it now, run while you still can.

  Emerson Bridge wiped his coat sleeve across his eyes and showed a wrist so skinny, it looked like a bone. And the boy’s mother, LC had felt how thin she was, the bones of her back still in his arms’ memory. Emerson Bridge was right when he’d said they needed the money the steer would bring. Maybe that would be enough to carry them through all that it would cost them.

  At that moment, LC vowed to help Emerson Bridge win. “Did that cowboy man come back here and tell you to make him lay down?”

  Emerson Bridge nodded.

  “Then you know enough,” LC told him. “You knew enough not to listen to him.”

  LC ran his hand along the top of the animal’s back. What he felt would make his father angry, but it made LC glad. “You got a winner here,” he said and picked up his friend’s hand and set it where his had been. “Feel how straight it is? He’s got what the judges look for. You’ll hear them say, ‘This one won’t hold water.’ They like that. Can you feel it?”

  Emerson Bridge nodded.

  “And I see you got that halter on him. Pretty soon, start walking him, get him to follow you. Put an apple or a pear like you like to eat in your back pocket. He’ll walk over nails to get to it.”

  “Thanks,” Emerson Bridge told him and stretched his arms around the animal’s neck. “He’s got to live. I love him.”

  LC’s stomach churned. He understood that kind of attachment, but he also understood that if his friend was going to make it through the next four months, he would need to think another kind of way. LC told him, “You’re doing a swell job raising your project.”

  He wanted Emerson Bridge to say the word back, but all he said was, “I just hope Lucky thinks so.”

  Telling him about his steer’s name was the biggest thing, but it seemed too much right now to lay all that on him. But wasn’t all of it too much? LC took a deep breath. “It’d be better if you could stop calling his name.”

  “Why?”

  LC cleared his throat. “It just is. It’ll make you stronger.”

  “What would I call him, then?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  LC would try one more time to get him to say the word. “It’s good that we have a project that could bring so much money.”

  “Yeah, project,” Emerson Bridge said.

  There it was. LC had begun his friend’s education. In the pit of his belly, he felt a deep sadness. But he remembered these people’s bones and let it be.

  A vehicle’s engine sounded near the house. LC saw headlights moving towards the lot. A rush shot up his body. His father had come for him. The vehicle stopped just out from the fence but did not sound like his father’s truck. A door creaked open. It was Mrs. Creamer. “Let me run you home, hon. I know you must be cold.”

  He was cold but mostly he wanted to spend time with her. “That would be real nice.” He climbed in.

  They started for home.

  “I didn’t want to say this in front of Emerson Bridge, Mrs. Creamer, but his steer’s mama’s done lost one. It was that steer’s twin. I mean it, y’all got to keep this one on his feet.”

  “They was twins she had?” Mrs. Creamer said.

  “Buzzards got to it when it was born. All that was left of it was a little rug.”

  He heard her make little whimpering sounds.

  His father called them heathens for being unchurched, but LC knew better. He’d felt their hearts. And in his few short years of life, he already knew that’s where all truth lies.

  …..

  Luther waited, deep in the shadows on his front porch. He waited with a belt, his thickest, wrapped around his fist and coiled like a snake.

  He couldn’t spot the moon from where he was sitting, but he could see a scattering of stars, peppered above his trees, and appearing to wink at him as though they shared his secret. Luther and all those stars in cahoots. It had crossed his mind to go roust Uncle and tell him to come chop down his boy’s escape tree. But Luther knew that Uncle liked to have his whiskey on Saturday nights, and, at this late hour, he’d probably be drunk as a coot and trying to have relations with his common law.

  He thought he heard noises coming from that way now. Uncle’s tenant house was set off to Luther’s right and far enough back so it wouldn’t be in the line of sight with his house, but close enough to the road for people to see that Luther had a tenant family. Luther had built the house new when Uncle came to work for him, which was soon after Luther bought the place.

  No, it was laughter that he heard coming from Uncle’s way that night.

  Luther stood. He had not always called him Uncle but by his name, Emmanuel. They grew up together, lived side by side in tar-paper shacks on Mr. Joseph Allgood’s place. The name Uncle came when Emmanuel went to work for him. That’s what white men of means did, ca
ll grown male negroes “Uncle.” Luther had sneaked out when he was a boy, too. Growing up, his and Uncle’s shacks were so close, a grown man would barely fit between them. Laughter always lived at Emmanuel’s house but wasn’t welcomed at Luther’s, his father greeting such with a strap as if Luther was an animal. The only time Luther he was free to laugh was with Emmanuel, when they were in the fields working. But the laughter they shared was nothing like what Luther heard that night when he was a boy, so strong, it drew him from his floor pallet, his bare feet sneaking across the rough boards and outside to Emmanuel’s window. There was his friend and Emmanuel’s mother beside him in a rocking chair, both with their heads thrown back in raucous fun, her hair as white as cotton and not a tooth in her head. In her arms lay a baby, a white baby. Luther took off running to the Allgood house that sat in the midst of a grove of pecan trees. The sheriff came and took away the baby and also Emmanuel’s mother. Within a day, Mr. Allgood moved another family in and sent Emmanuel, barely a teenager, on his way. Luther watched him leave and wanted to tell him good-bye but was too ashamed of what he had done. Emmanuel’s mother died not too long after that.

  Luther now saw two headlight beams cutting through the night and coming his way from Whitehall. They stopped up the road near the far end of his pasture, and he heard a vehicle door open and could have sworn he heard “Thank you, ma’am.” He could have sworn it was his boy’s voice. Sounds carry in the night. And then another voice came his way, the Creamer woman’s. She must have gotten a new vehicle somehow. Maybe his do-gooder boy helped her buy it.

  The word “good” hung in the frosty air around Luther, then jumped onto him, marched up him like a ladybug, then descended him and sank like a rock, a heavy one, the kind, if tied, would drown a person. He felt a gathering around his eyes like parishioners around a baptism pond. He’d been thinking all this time his boy was becoming a small version of Luther. But he’d been wrong. His boy was a larger version, much larger. He’d sneaked out like Luther had, but his boy had sneaked out to do good.

  Luther unwrapped enough of his belt to free a foot or more of the tongue. And then he shoved his fist high in the air and brought it back down, slapping his own thigh and leaving a heat that soon became cold.

  He dropped his belt on the floor.

  …..

  In the early morning darkness, Luther walked among his cows. They lay not out in the open pasture but nestled under trees that lined the trickle of a branch that ran from his pond. In the moon’s light, he saw most lift their heads, the pure white of their faces more prominent now. They had no need for what Luther came seeking. All cows had to be was cows, no pressure at all to be a head deacon. Or boss man. Or husband. Or good father.

  If he was Uncle or either of his boys, the cows might think he came carrying some kind of grain, and they would push themselves up and stand. But he was Luther, and they would expect nothing. They all stayed on the ground.

  The sun was just beginning to rise over his pastureland that morning. Over the pond, a mist rose like a fog. One of his cows drank at the water’s edge. His boy would know her name.

  He went there, let the tips of his boots touch the water and then stepped onto the muddy bottom. Already he could feel the shape of their hooves beneath his soles. If the weather was hot, they would stand out in it as if they were preachers, waiting for a sinner to baptize. He could have thought of them the other way, as sinners, but, in his two decades with cattle, he had never seen any darkness in them, only light.

  Luther had come to their water, intending his own salvation. He ached to be somebody in his boy’s eyes, looked at the way his boy looked at Uncle, his eyes fixing on him and not letting him go. Even the boy’s mouth, the way it’d be slightly ajar, as if he was amazed. But mostly it was that smile that would come across his boy’s face when he talked to Uncle that dug a home in Luther’s skin. His boy always looked as though he could break into laughter.

  Luther took himself into the water, until he was waist high and then raised his right hand as if he was the preacher, while he placed his left on the shoulder of the man he imagined turned sideways in front of him. He was that man. Luther closed his eyes and recalled the precise words that would make it official. “I baptize you my brother, Luther Charles Dobbins, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.”

  Then Luther dropped his hand and took a step forward, assuming the position of the man being saved, folding his fingers over his nose and squeezing, waiting for the preacher to place his hand in the small of Luther’s back and his other over Luther’s nose, so the preacher could take him backwards into the water.

  But the preacher’s hands never came.

  Luther would have to do it himself. And the only way he could, would be to fall, to completely fall. He would have to get on his knees and tip over backwards. He got down on his knees and tipped over backwards, forcing himself into the waters, where he sank to the bottom of the pond and lay in mud and cow dung. He worked to free himself, and when he did, he ran back to his land. Water, now full of himself, fell from him in streams.

  He was cold. The sky now was beginning to brighten, but the sun brought no real warming. And Luther Charles Dobbins was still not saved.

  In the air, he saw buzzards flying. He wondered if they were coming for him.

  They would not be for his boy. He was in bed asleep. Luther had stayed in the shadows and watched him climb the tree and listened to the creaks the tin roof made as LC’s little body, light with goodness, danced across it.

  …..

  The church bells had just sounded that Sunday morning and found Sarah Creamer’s ears, when she heard her boy scream, “Mama, I don’t hear it no more!”

  Sarah had nodded off against the barn. But when her boy’s words came, she shot up from the overturned bucket and ran to him, his finger pointing to that place on his steer. She put her ear there.

  “You hear it, Mama?”

  She wanted to tell him yes, yes, she heard the whistle, but she did not hear it, nor did she feel what had become the familiar tickle of the little wind against her skin. Still, she told him, “I’m listening” as she tried to think what she would say. This was what she had feared, that it would stop on his watch. Each time her boy had taken his turn, she had tried to lengthen her stay by telling him, “I don’t believe my time’s up yet.” But each time her boy would say, “It is, Mama. It’s mine now.”

  “I bet this is just part of it,” she told him. “Lucky’s just needing to rest. Like we do. Maybe we should go in the house and take a nap. What d’you say?”

  Her boy leaned in towards her. “I ain’t supposed to call his name no more,” he whispered.

  “What you mean? What you supposed to call him then?”

  He hunched up his shoulders.

  “That don’t sound right to me. Everything God made deserves a name.”

  He spread his arms like angel’s wings around the animal’s neck.

  She wondered if he knew what an angel was. “You know what an angel is, hon?”

  He shook his head.

  “It’s something that you can’t see that looks out for you good, gives you extra help.”

  “Like Papa??”

  She nodded. She wanted to tell him about a second one. She wanted to say, You got you two, hon. But that might break something loose inside of her. And him, too.

  If she took him to church, he would know about angels, and he could get saved when the time came. But that would mean she’d have to step inside one.

  She thought about getting a rock and tossing to him, see if she could get a back and forth going, but this wasn’t a mood for play. She could sing. She sang, “Jesus loves me, this I know.” It was a song she had heard the other children sing when she was a schoolgirl. They had learned it at church, but she learned it at school, hearing them sing it every morning.

  Her boy joined in. He not only knew the words, he claimed them. He must have learned it in school, too.

  What H
arold had started in him, maybe she was helping move along too.

  So you lost you a baby, too, Mama Red? Lucky over there had him a twin? And buzzards got to it? Oh, girl, I’m so sorry. You come by being a mama loud, too, didn’t you?

  Can I tell you I lost me one, too? But whatever got to mine didn’t come from the skies, it come from me, way down inside.

  I told you I was carrying, and that’s why Harold Creamer married me. One day not too long after I moved over here, I was making up our bed and felt something move down in my belly, a little jab. And I got this picture in my head of a finger, a little one, held up at me like it was trying to catch my attention. It was my little baby. Her touch was real light, and I knew that was in case I didn’t catch it. That way she could tell herself she didn’t do it on purpose, she must have just bumped into me. But I did catch it, Mama Red. I did. I ran my hand up under my dress and put it flat where I’d felt her and waited for her to touch me again so she could see that I was there. I kept on doing that.

  Harold took me to town to a doctor, said I had four more months to go. I’d never been so happy. But on the way back home, I let my mama’s words about me not being a good mama come to me, and I grabbed onto the door handle with one hand and with the other grabbed Harold.

  “What’s the matter?”he said.

  I didn’t want to tell him all that was in my head, so I just said part of it. I said, “I’m scared,” and I let go of him in case he wanted to beat on the steering wheel. But he didn’t do that. He picked up my hand and said, “I am, too.”

  We went home, and me and him got in the bed. If I was a swearing woman, I’d swear that Harold Creamer that afternoon loved me. I liked when we had relations, because it give me somebody close, even if it was just for a few minutes.