One Good Mama Bone

by McClain, Bren; Monroe, Mary Alice;

  She held up the sack. “He’ll be getting off the school bus this afternoon right at four o’clock, if you want to give it to him yourself.”

  “Appreciate that, but I’ll be gone by then. There ain’t nothing for me here. Time to let her sister finally sell this place and me to move on. Been down on the coast with a buddy from the war ever since I come off my war bond tour, which the army put me on right quick as soon as they whisked me away that day.” He put his hat back on and tipped it towards her, stepped around her and started for the garden.

  She wanted to scream, She didn’t kill herself because of you. She did it because she was stained. And she couldn’t live with that. But who was Sarah to say? She realized she did not really know Mattie. Still, she wanted to take the burden from this man before her.

  But all she called out was, “I lost Harold last March.”

  He stopped and turned back towards her. “Your boy told me. Sorry to hear that.”

  “And Mattie.” The words slipped from her lips, and she did not wish to call them back.

  “Mattie,” he said, his voice not going high with a question, but staying down low, accepting.

  But his eyes said the most. They said, This is what we have now. This.

  He turned and continued on across and got in his truck and drove away. She imagined he had killed some people, maybe even some slant eyes, but none could have the bite of the deaths that had taken place here at home.

  She began to shake all over. It was like all that she had hidden was fighting to be freed. She opened her arms, stretched them wide, and her feet, she set them apart. Sarah opened her mouth and flung back her head. The skies above were blue and full of puffs of clouds like the smoke from the cigarettes of the men she had loved—her papa, Harold, and now Billy Udean Parnell.

  …..

  “Hey!” Emerson Bridge called out to LC, who was up ahead in the hallway at school. This was Emerson Bridge’s first day back, and he hustled towards his friend and told him in a rush, “I don’t have to sign that paper. Mama ain’t going to make me.”

  “You’re lucky,” LC said, his voice flat.

  Emerson Bridge thought his friend would be happy for him, but LC had his head lowered and was gritting his teeth. Big mouth, Emerson Bridge was thinking. LC didn’t have a mother who would do this for him.

  “My dad would kill me before he’d not sign that paper.” LC’s eyes looked bloodshot.

  Emerson Bridge felt a sweat move through him.

  “He keeps a pistol under the seat in his truck. He’d kill me dead with it.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  He saw LC swallow.

  “Do you mean that?”

  “He hates me,” LC said.

  “You know he don’t hate you.”

  “He hates me. My dad, my daddy hates me.”

  Several girls walked past them. Emerson Bridge thought how lucky girls were to only have to make curtains for their 4-H project.

  LC moved from being out in the open to the wall, which he hugged up against. “If I don’t win this year …” His voice trailed off.

  “Then what? If you don’t win, what?”

  LC moved his forehead against the wooden boards. He looked to be grinding it in.

  “He’ll holler at you?”

  LC made no response.

  “Give you a whipping?”

  LC turned to look at Emerson Bridge straight on, his forehead dark red. “Kill me.”

  “Boys,” their teacher called out from the door just beyond them. “Almost time for class.”

  LC slapped his hands over his ears and stomped his feet. He had become moody, but never like this. He balled up his fists.

  Emerson Bridge thought LC might hit him, but his friend put his hands flat over his face and pressed and said, “I hate him. I hate him. And I will not win for him.”

  “Well, then don’t,” Emerson Bridge told him.

  “I won’t. You’re right, I won’t.” LC wrapped his arms around himself like he was cold and scared and every bad thing there could be. “I’ve thought about taking my steer and running away.” LC was whispering now.

  “Where would you go?” Emerson Bridge whispered back.

  “Nowhere to go. He’d come find me and kill me with his pearl-handle.”

  “What you talking so much about killing for? It scares me.”

  “Just a fact. What’s wrong with a fact?”

  Big mouth, Emerson Bridge told himself again.

  “Starting tonight, I’m going to sneak out to the barn and take away the afternoon feed. Put it back in Luther Charles Dobbins’s feed sack that I’d like to cram down his throat, make him choke on all that roughness, scratch his insides out.” LC began to cry.

  Emerson Bridge put his hand on his friend’s shoulder.

  “Boys,” the teacher said again. “It’s time.”

  “I don’t mean that,” LC said. “Forget I ever said it. I love my daddy.” He took off out the front door.

  …..

  The material was an emerald green gabardine and thicker than most fabrics Sarah worked with. Pinning patterns to this material required something more. She was grateful. She needed something more. Billy Udean had been gone less than an hour. Sarah was standing at the end of the kitchen table where he’d always sat for their Sunday night fish suppers, her body now leaning where he had kept his empty beer bottles lined up around him. Mattie always sat to his left. Sarah looked there now and pushed a pin through, the two pieces now together. Even if a wind blew, the two would stay.

  Like mothers do. Mothers stay. Mama Red had taught her this when she had to separate her from Lucky back in the fall. Sarah would see her eating alongside her calf, four lines of barbed wire keeping them apart, yet not at all. Mattie was a mother. But she had not stayed. How could you, Mattie? How could you leave your little boy? You took the easy way out. Mamas don’t leave. Sarah pushed another pin through and thought of her own child, the little girl she let the doctor take away.

  She raised up from the table. She didn’t even know where her baby was buried. And there she was, finding fault with Mattie.

  Sarah had to find her baby. She had to find her that day. She got her pocketbook and was out the door to her automobile. Where she was going, she did not know. But, when she approached Dixon Road, she found herself turning left and making her way to Mildred Dobbins. Sarah pulled beside the house and stepped into air that was not fresh and fragrant but smelled of something burning. She glanced around for anything on fire, but saw nothing out of the ordinary, only a man who looked like Mr. Dobbins leaving the garage. He appeared to stumble but then righted himself.

  “Why, Sarah!” she heard as she stepped up onto the Dobbins front porch. It was Mildred with a broom in her hand. She was sweeping.

  Sarah rushed out the words, “Would you happen to know where a doctor back in 19 and 37 might have buried little babies whose parents didn’t go to no church? Some place south of town?”

  Mildred propped the broom by the front door, reached back and untied her apron, and ran into the house. Sarah’s fast words had scared her friend off. “I’m so sorry. Where’s my manners?” she called into the house. “I meant to say hello first.” Why hadn’t she just driven on to town? Then she wouldn’t have lost her new friend.

  She turned to leave and heard Mildred’s shoes tapping across the hardwoods behind her. “So sorry, dear,” Mildred was saying, “had to get my pocketbook and put on some lipstick. I want to take you somewhere.”

  There were no words between them as Mildred drove.

  It began to rain.

  They drove through town and just south of it to White Street to a cemetery where they went under a curved archway that carried the words “Silverbrook Cemetery.” “There’s a baby section here,” Mildred told her. “Some ladies at the church keep it clean.”

  Sarah pictured an area with a fence, a pretty white one and so low to the ground, a person could step over it. But there was no fence, on
ly tiny markers lined up in crooked rows like children’s teeth and all following the downward slope of the earth. The tips of her fingers and toes tingled.

  The rain was not a hard rain. Sarah could see through the glass on her window with ease. “There looks to be a hundred of them,” she said.

  Mildred parked along the road under a large oak tree that grew at the top of the hill, its bare limbs like bones piled up in the sky. Sarah stepped out and extended her hand as if she was reaching for someone’s hand. She was reaching for Harold’s. She did this without thinking.

  The markers were a dark gray metal and no more than two inches high. They set in the ground on spikes and carried the name of the funeral home, McDougald’s, along with a date, most carrying only one. “There ain’t no names,” Sarah said. “Nobody’s got them a name.”

  She started down the hill. “January 19th, 19 and 37,” she called out. “That’s the one I’m looking for. It was a Tuesday.”

  The graves seemed to be organized by date. Mildred began on the far side. Sarah moved through the early ’50s and then the ’40s and began the ’30s. Her pace picked up.

  About halfway down the slope and three graves over from the road, she spotted a marker with January 19, 1937. Beyond it, she saw dates in 1936. This was the only marker for her date. “Here she is!” Sarah called out.

  Mildred came running. Sarah dropped to her knees. “Here’s my … here’s my daughter.” She had never said that word. “My daughter, Claudia. Little Claudia. Claudia Creamer.”

  Mildred joined her on the ground.

  “Everybody hear me?” Sarah called out. “Her name is Claudia!” She put her hands on the sides of the marker and squeezed. “Everybody deserves them a name.”

  It was raining harder now.

  “The doctor didn’t let me hold her. ‘Attached,’ he said. Said I’d get attached. What’s wrong with getting attached? Tell me!” She was screaming now. She imagined the little girl in her arms now, awake in her arms, her naked bloody skin no longer blue but a deep red, her body no longer limp but squirming and her mouth hungry for her mother’s milk.”I’m holding you now, little Claudia. Mama’s holding you now.” Her sounds were guttural.

  But then Sarah took her hands from the marker. “You ain’t got you one good mama bone in you, girl.” Sarah mimicked her mother’s clipped tone, even moving her hand like she was holding a fly swatter.

  “Why, you’re a very good mother, Sarah,” Mildred told her.

  “No, I ain’t. I let a man, a complete stranger, take my little girl off. Told me to forget her, said he’d ‘handle this.’ This? This was my baby girl, and I let a stranger take her away. Didn’t give her a name. Didn’t give her a burial. Didn’t give her nothing. Mamas don’t do that.”

  She got up on her feet and ran for the automobile.

  “My Little LC talks about you all the time,” Mildred called out. “About how kind you are.”

  Sarah got in the automobile, water dripping from her hair and face and hands.

  Mildred joined her but didn’t crank the engine. “Sometimes I think my Little LC wishes you were his mama. I’ve even been a tad jealous of you, Sarah. You don’t realize how strong you are. I’m not as strong as you.”

  “Strong wouldn’t have let him take her away.”

  “You were doing what the doctor said. Any mother would have.”

  “But I ain’t any mother. I was Little Claudia’s.”

  She thought of Billy Udean’s coming and going and now Little Claudia. “It seems like my days past are reaching back to me and saying ‘Hey there.’ It’s like they’re trying to get me on the telephone line so we can talk.” The rain beat down hard on the automobile’s roof like the fingernails of a thousand babies.

  “You a good friend, Mildred. You are. And a good mama, too.”

  “Good mamas protect. And I don’t do a good job of that. Big LC’s hard on him. Little LC’s a bag of nerves, especially lately.”

  Sarah thought of her papa and the way they managed through Sarah’s mother. “Laughing. Laughing helps out a lot.”

  “And peppermints,” Mildred said. “I know you’ve smelled my peppermints.”

  Sarah did not smell them now.

  “That Retonga is 36 percent of what my husband would call the devil’s drink.”

  Sarah heard Mildred take a deep breath and then another.

  “Can I tell you what I’m afraid of?” Mildred whispered. “I’m afraid that my Little LC might crack up. One minute he’s laughing. The next he’s crying. It’s like he’s living in two different worlds.”

  Sarah thought of Mama Red, what she would do. “Stay close to him. Even if there’s hard wires between you.” She looked back towards her baby’s grave. Rain drops streaked down her window. “So the rain can run off.”

  “Off what, dear?” Mildred asked.

  “The hill that they put these babies on. They’re on the side of it. So the rain can run off, forget that it was ever there. But that ain’t right. They deserve to be on level ground so water can sit on them. And stay.”

  The mother cow took into her mouth some of her calf’s mixed grain. She ate it most days, now that they could share the feed trough, but she could only eat a little, given her two remaining teeth on the bottom and gum pad up top. This day, her chewing loosened further one of her last two. It fell from her, while in her offspring’s mouth, his last baby tooth had just come in.

  Sarah was waiting in the yard for Emerson Bridge when the school bus let him out that afternoon. By then, the rain had packed its suitcase and left, leaving behind a patient sky of blue that showed itself full and strong. In her hand, she held a rock, the one from the blue blanket. She had squeezed it so, its jagged edges brought blood. She wanted it to bring blood. She thought of the cuts on Mama Red when Sarah met her.

  He ran up the driveway towards her, and when he got to within good sight, she tossed the rock into the air a whole foot high. She cupped her hands together and caught it.

  “Want to play rock?” she called his way and held it out for his view. She didn’t know what he and his papa had called the game.

  Emerson Bridge ran faster. “Swell!”

  Before she tossed it, she studied his dimples, sinking deep, and told him, “Your dimples there, Emerson Bridge Creamer, they could hold a whole lot of happiness.”

  “Throw it, Mama,” he yelled, his hands, ready.

  She swung her arm back.

  It was because of you, Mama Red. You. You and your boy taught me to play. There I was thinking I’d go into the night with a heart so heavy for my Little Claudia that I wouldn’t be of no use to my boy. But look at how it turned out. It started down low and went up high.

  Me and Mattie, I believe we went the other way.

  Six weeks after Harold’s birthday, she was too sick to go to work. Said for Harold to go on. I found her hanging off the side of her bed, throwing up in her slop jar. I got a wet rag and held it to her forehead. When she was feeling better, I went home and put a chicken on to boil to make her some good soup. She went back to work the next day.

  But the next Sunday night, when she come over for our fish fry, as soon as she stepped into the kitchen, she went to gagging. Threw up all over the floor. I wanted to get her to a doctor, but she wouldn’t have it.

  “The smells,” she said, “the smells.”

  I walked her back home, and, when I come back, Harold had him four beers lined up around his plate.

  After another month or so, Mattie started being too sick to go to work again. Then, on up in the morning, she’d get all right and we’d sit at her eating table and talk about things she’d overheard people say on the telephone. But one morning I went over there, and she had her hair up in a bun again like mine. She’d been wearing it long. She saw me looking at it as soon as she raised up from her slop jar and brought her hand up back there and pressed on it like she wanted it to stay forever.

  That’s when the light come on for me, Mama Red. Right then. R
ight then I let myself know what I’d been trying not to know. None of us did. None of us wanted to hit it straight on like that. Billy Udean had been gone for a good year by then. Mattie was carrying my husband’s baby. It didn’t take too much figuring.

  She eased herself back down on the bed and pulled the covers up high.

  I had all kinds of jumbled up feelings. I was hurt, because my husband had stepped out on me. And I was scared because what were we going do with that baby? And jealous. I was jealous of what the two of them had shared and would keep on sharing. Where was I going to fit in? But all I can tell you is that I loved her, and I couldn’t never have me another baby. I was thinking she could do it for both of us. We was close like sisters. Wouldn’t sisters do that?

  Her hair had a hard shine to it from grease. I said to her, “I want to wash your hair, Sister. Can I wash your hair?”

  She went to shaking her head and slapped her hands up top like she blocking me. But I just put mine right on top of hers.

  “I don’t want to take my hair down, Sarah. I want to keep it like this. Always keep it like this.” She had her eyes squeezed shut.

  “Call me Sister, Sister Sarah. Always call me that.” My voice was speeded way up.

  But she stayed quiet.

  “Please,” I said. “Please call me that.”

  I told myself I would sit there for the rest of time, if that’s what it took. But, soon, there she went opening her eyes. She whispered to me, “One time. It wasn’t but one time.”

  “Call me Sister, Sister Sarah. Say it.”

  “Sister Sarah,” she said, and I let them words coat me like plentiful flour on my hands. “One time, Sister Sarah. One.” She held up her finger. It was shaking.

  “Harold’s birthday,” I told her.

  The sun was coming through her window, fell in like a knife cutting its way in.

  “Let me wash your hair, Sister,” I said.