One Good Mama Bone

by McClain, Bren; Monroe, Mary Alice;

  “He was sweet to me. That was the reason, a pitiful reason, but that was the reason.” She took her hands off her head, slid them down under mine, and I was left holding on.

  I washed her hair and put it back in a bun.

  When Harold come home from work that day, I said to him, “Teach me how to drive.” I smelled whiskey on his breath.

  “A woman don’t need to know that,” he told me.

  “This woman does. This woman needs to take Mattie, our Mattie, to the doctor.”

  He hadn’t been looking at me, but he turned my way when I said that. I started for the door.

  He give me a lesson. He give them to me all afternoon, and then I called myself knowing how to drive.

  I come in the house and got Mattie on the telephone and told her to be ready that next morning, that we was going to the doctor.

  She sat between me and Harold. I drove. Not a word was said. We dropped Harold off at work. Before he got out, I asked him how to get to Greenville. That was the next big town over. I figured we needed us a stranger for a doctor. He pulled out his billfold and handed me two one-dollar bills.

  We found us a doctor. He said it was so, said Mattie would have the baby in June of the next year. My nerves started at the top of my head and came on down my face and my arms and my legs to my toes.

  When we got back in the automobile, tears, big ones, filled up Mattie’s eyes. “I’m sorry about them potatoes, Sister,” she said, “cutting them round like I did sometimes. And right in your face.”

  I pictured them round like little tires that could roll. And what I told her back was the only words I could say. “I can carry it, Sister. I can.” And I took me a deep breath and held on until I got her back home and me across the yard where not a soul could see me or hear me.

  JANUARY 7–13, 1952

  The letter came in Monday’s mail. Sarah was at her sewing machine running a long stitch when Emerson Bridge came in from school and handed it to her. She was thinking it was the hospital, wanting its money.

  He was wearing his new coat. She especially liked the way its ribbing hugged his wrists. She reached over and circled his right one with her fingers.

  “Look, Mama! You can fit all around me.” He giggled.

  She saw his breath. Her room was cold. She’d meant to put another stick of firewood in the woodstove before he got home. She told him, “I’m glad that coat’s keeping you warm, hon.”

  This was her fifth and last dress. She would go with Mildred soon and deliver them. She had $38.22 left of Mildred’s money. She’d use $10 of it to pay on her hospital bill. The handwriting on the envelope looked personal and not business, and it carried no return address. This was her mother’s handwriting. She dropped the envelope in her lap.

  “Who’s it from, Mama?” Her boy’s eyes were wide. He’d asked about her mother before. She’d told him she lived “far, far away.”

  “Somebody you don’t know, hon.” She wished he would leave.”You seen Lucky yet?”

  She resumed pedaling. She tried to put her mind on running a straight seam, but how did her mother know where she lived? Sarah had told her the day she left she was moving to South Carolina, but she’d never said where. And her married name, how did she know that? Harold told his name that first night, but that was fifteen years ago.

  Then it came to her. That letter she’d sent her mother, You finally got you a boy. You got a grandboy. Her mother had received it and kept it. Sarah picked up her hook for removing stitches and caught just under the envelope’s back flap, moving the hook across the top like she was pumping water from a well. The paper inside was thin. She read to herself, “That first name you got, that Clementine name. That come from a song your papa used to sing to me back when he loved me. Mama.”

  Sarah felt a tightness around her eyes.

  “What’s the matter, Mama?”

  “Nothing, hon. Just got a letter from my mama.” She whispered those last words.

  “Your mama from far, far away?”

  Sarah nodded and squeezed the material she was sewing, a pretty orchid color in rayon taffeta.

  “What’d she say,” he asked.

  She felt like she was that fabric, and her mother was trying to put a stitch in her, trying to make some kind of connection. The two of them. Because her mother had saved her letter. And her mother knew where she lived and knew her name. “She said she loves me,” Sarah told him.

  Her mother was coming for her. After all this time, coming for her.

  …..

  Sarah set her black hat upon her head and on her hands slid her black gloves. It was six o’clock in the morning on Saturday, and she stood before her chifforobe mirror. Darkness hugged all around her, but in front, where she held the kerosene lamp, a bright light lit her like a baby sun. She wondered if her mother would recognize them, the hat and gloves. They certainly were not plain but carried a distinguishing mark, a ridge that ran along the top of each finger like the railroad tracks that would soon take her home.

  She’d made herself a new dress, a chestnut brown organdy with wide lapels at the V-neck and turned-back cuffs at the sleeves. Buttons in a gold offset ran up the front. She had thought it all too fancy at the store, but her mother had saved the letter and remembered her name and where she lived.

  Her boy was still asleep. She went to the woodstove and put on a pot of water to boil. She would make him grits, and she would heap helping after helping onto his plate.

  When daylight began to show itself, she went to her boy’s room, held the lamp over him, and saw the shape of his body beneath the four blankets she had placed on him the night before. She put her hand on his shoulders and nudged him. “Me and you’s going on a trip today,” she told him and watched his eyes let in the light.

  “Where we going, Mama?”

  She wanted to tell him, was about to bust wide open to do so, but she made herself just say, “It’s a surprise. A big one, too.”

  She had new clothes for him laid over the back of his chair at the kitchen table. She felt like Santa Claus had come all over again. J. C. Penney’s had a cash-and-carry sale that week, and she’d spent all of a ten dollar bill on a pair of dark blue thickset corduroy slacks and a long-sleeved plaid sports shirt of blue and green. The clerk told her both were “sanforized-shrunk and vat-dyed for safe tubbing.” Sarah liked that. It sounded like the clothes would stay around a long time. But what she was most proud of were his shoes, oxfords with extra thick rubber soles.

  She led him to the kitchen. “Them pants has got double pleats, look,” she said and held the lamp out in front, where the pleats extended down three inches from the waist band. He wouldn’t know their purpose, but she did. They made the garment more sturdy.

  They left the house at eight o’clock. Sarah had a small suitcase packed for them. If she was lucky, tomorrow morning she would hear the church bells across the road from her upstairs window, where she was sure her mother would want Sarah and her boy to sleep that night. She’d give him her old bed, and she would sleep beside him on the floor. It would be their first vacation.

  “We going far, far away, Mama?” Emerson Bridge asked as she drove.

  “We are.”

  The train station was located on Main Street in the back of Lawrence-Brownlee Insurance, just up from the courthouse. She’d been there to buy their tickets the day before, had spent $8 for the round trip. Subtract out the price of her boy’s clothes and shoes and Sarah had $7.09 to her name. Mildred came down with a cold after the visit to the cemetery and had not yet arranged the delivery of Sarah’s dresses. The ticket man told her to arrive by ten o’clock for their 10:30 departure, but Sarah couldn’t wait that long. The big clock on the courthouse said it was almost 8:30.

  When ten o’clock came, they went inside. The train arrived shortly, and they were led down a flight of stairs, along with four other people. A man in a dark suit stood by the second car down from the engine. He extended his hand to take the tickets.

&
nbsp; “Can we sit in that first one there, Mama?” her boy asked.

  “I don’t see why not.” She handed the man their tickets and started for the first car.

  The man stopped them. “It would be the second car for you two, ma’am.”

  “But my boy here wants to ride in the first one.”

  “It’s closer to the engine!” Emerson Bridge said.

  The man stepped in closer. “That one’s for the colored and baggage.” He took her suitcase and nudged her towards the second car and told her, “You wouldn’t want it anyway. There’s no coal heat, and it’s noisy and more dangerous.”

  Before she stepped into where she was supposed to go, Sarah removed her coat of dark brown, the same one she had worn to Anderson when she married Harold, and handed it to the ticket man, asking him to make a present of it to a woman of his choosing in that first car. Sarah’s mother would make her a new one, a black one, to match her hat and gloves.

  The train soon left the station, its wheels churning the way Sarah’s belly felt, flipping over on itself and then returning. In a little more than four hours, she would be in Gainesville.

  Her boy kept his face pressed against the window. She liked that he was taking in the sights, the rows of white houses that lined the track and then the tall pines near the grain elevator, followed by wide-open fields and pastures. They were headed to Seneca, only twenty-five miles away, where they would pick up a second train that would take her home.

  She saw his shoulders bobbing and was thinking the train was jostling him, as it did her. But then she saw the wetness on his face. “What’s the matter, hon? You don’t want to go to Grannie Teenie’s?” She’d never said that name before.

  He covered his face with his hands.

  “You hungry? Or cold, is that it?”

  “Lucky, Mama,” he said through his fingers, and she leaned in close to hear his words. “What about Lucky and Mama Red? Who’s going to take care of them?”

  “Why, hon, Mr. Ike. And he’s even going to stay the night, to look after things.”

  He slid his hands down.

  Her mother didn’t know they were coming. It would be a surprise, and her mother would meet her grandboy, and she would be happy. Maybe even for the first time in her life, be happy.

  She thought of this and allowed the noise of the train to fill her ears.

  …..

  The smell of smoke from Uncle’s burned house no longer filled Luther’s world. This is what he was thinking as he emerged from his garage that Saturday morning, his flask and body full of whiskey. It had been two weeks and a day since it had finished burning and its bones collapsed to the ground and Luther had telephoned Walter Moorehead and told him to bring his bulldozer over. “I need a big hole dug and for you to push a big mess into it.”

  Luther that morning breathed in air, clean now, and then exhaled and stumbled to the ground.

  “Breakfast is getting cold, Big LC!” It was Mildred. She’d already called him three times. LC was running the hammer mill, and its sound helped drown her out. Luther wished it would drown her out forever. No, he didn’t. He didn’t wish that. He didn’t want everyone to leave him.

  He picked himself up and waved his boy over, but LC ignored him and threw in another shovel full of corn.

  He went inside the house and began his breakfast of sausage and eggs and grits. Mildred sat with him and had a cup of coffee. “I’m going to have to start buying our sausage and fatback at Richbourg’s, Big LC, if you don’t get my freezer restocked by the middle of next week.”

  Luther stopped chewing.

  “And I know you don’t want anybody wondering why we’re not eating the almighty Dobbins hog.”

  Luther slammed his fist on the table, making her delicate china jump like it was spooked.

  But Mildred didn’t even blink. She dabbed her mouth with her napkin, got up from the table, and began clearing it.

  Luther intended to kill the hog that very day. It would be easy. The animal was still in the fattening pen where Uncle had put him before Christmas. But what Luther needed first was another drink. That way he could hold his hand steady when he fired the pearl-handle. He slid his chair back and started for the door. Mildred shot her eyes at him like she was trying to show him how to shoot his own gun. Luther hollered, “How dare you think I can’t do my own dirty work,” and raised his hand to her.

  He thought she’d slink away, but she stayed where she was and pulled a bottle from her apron. It looked like one of his, except it wasn’t as fat. He thought he was seeing things. “That cough syrup?”

  She took the bottle from her mouth. “You could say that.” She raised it towards him. “You want some? It’d save you a step or two from going to that garage.”

  Luther slapped the bottle out of her hand and sent it across the room to the wall, where it broke wide open. Then he grabbed her arm and threw her on the floor.

  At the back door, he put on his coat and stepped out into the symphony his hammer mill created, his arms opened wide, the music surrounding him. LC was really coming along. When he finished the grinding, his boy would move on to his next task, teaching his steer to follow him. Luther had given him an apple early that morning and told him to put it in his back pocket.

  Luther went to his garage and turned his whiskey bottle up at his mouth. It was empty. He threw it on the dirt. He had one more hidden behind some old tires.

  But no bottle was there. He knocked the tires over.

  He went to his truck, took his pearl-handle from under the seat, and made his way to the pen. The hog was eating from the mash trough. “Raise up that fat head of yours and look at me,” Luther told him, but the hog continued to eat. He fired a shot into the air. The hog jumped back.

  “See, I can do my own dirty work.” He aimed the gun at the hog’s head, but the animal snorted and charged at Luther, who fell into the mash. But not the gun. He had kept his hand high.

  Luther wondered what Uncle was doing. He bet he went back to Church Street and pictured Uncle in one of those negro hotels with rooms so little, it would be like living in a box of matches. Luther bet he was sad and missed his farm life. And missed Luther, too.

  He managed to free himself from the trough, and he and his pearlhandle went back to his truck and headed to town, where he parked a block away from Uncle on Benson, outside Dickson Ice Cream. He would hate for his former hired hand to see Luther’s truck and embarrass himself by running to it and jumping in.

  Luther walked up to South Main and took a right and headed towards Church. He struck a match to light a cigarette, but it couldn’t hold its fire against the stiff wind. He tucked in face first in the alcove by the front door of Kress’s Five and Dime. Something heavy tugged in his coat’s bottom right side. It was his flask. He pulled it out in celebration and sucked it dry. The flask was real silver and decorated in a pattern of loops that dazzled.

  He wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his coat and tasted mash. He spit it out and remembered he’d forgotten to light the cigarette. People milled around inside the store. He could see them through the glass. He could see himself, too. He’d forgotten to shave again. And where was his hat?

  He moved from the alcove to the corner and looked down Church Street, where he saw two little girls playing hopscotch in the middle of the road. Beyond them, ragged-looking boys bounced a ball off an old rusted Model T. What if the two negro boys he’d engaged saw him? He turned up the collar on his coat and slouched his shoulders from their usual high stance. Surely, Uncle could still pick him out. They’d known each other almost four decades.

  Past the girls, Luther saw a gathering of uncles. In the center stood his. Luther wanted Uncle to see him. He would risk it. He turned down his collar and held his head up high. Uncle had his head thrown back, laughing. Luther felt himself unsteady. The wind was stronger in the cross current. His wet back made a chill move through him.

  He waited for Uncle to look his way, but Uncle did not. Maybe he didn’t
recognize him. Luther stepped further up the street and lifted up on his tiptoes. But all Uncle did was continue to hold court with his new friends. Luther kicked his foot towards the gathering. He didn’t need Uncle anyway and held out his hand like he was holding his pistol. “And don’t think I can’t, either.”

  Luther needed a drink. He knew where the liquor store was, even though he’d never been inside. It was only one more block south and fronted West Market. He could see it in his head. It was a small place like they tried to hide it.

  He took himself there and told the man behind the counter, “I want your very best, top-drawer, top-shelf, fit-for-a-king whiskey.”

  The man looked at Luther like he was inspecting him.

  Luther held onto the counter.

  “That would be either Carstairs or Calvert.” The man talked with an accent like he was from up North.

  Luther didn’t like doing business with Yankees, but he would make this exception. “Which one do more real businessmen buy?”

  The man set two stand-up placards just out from Luther. “You can read about them in these advertisements and let me know.”

  Luther picked up the one showing a man in a nice suit. The words were a tad blurry, but he could make out the beginning, “The man who cares says Carstairs.” But what sold him were the words buried deep into the writing. “This is the one I want,” he told the man. “Says it’s tailored by Society Brand.”

  “They’re talking about the man’s suit.”

  Luther cleared his throat. “All the better. Give me two of the biggest bottles you’ve got.”

  But the man made no move. He wasn’t a midget like Luther had seen at the county fair one time, but the man was short and acted like he was tall. Luther slapped his hand against the counter.

  “Two would cost quite a bit, sir,” the man said.

  Luther pulled out his billfold and held up the twenty that topped a stack of one’s. “Would this cover it?”

  The man sat two bottles on the counter. “The largest we sell is the 4/5ths. That’ll be $4.50 two times and nine cents tax for a total of $9.09. Are you sure you want to purchase them?”