by Pam Durban
Mrs. Aimar wears a black suit and a small pillbox hat, but her hair looks untidy, poking out from under, and her skirt is twisted so the zipper shows. She shuffles in on Lewis’s arm, wearing on her feet what look to be velvet bedroom slippers. How are the mighty fallen. The younger woman wears a plain black dress, and her light hair falls straight to her shoulders. She has the shrewd blue Aimar eyes, the long thin nose and narrow family face. Seeing him, Mrs. Aimar brightens, shakes loose from Lewis and starts up the aisle, her purse gaping open and swinging from her arm. She walks as if she’s falling forward. Get up off that seat and go help her, his mother says. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? He starts to obey, but Lewis catches up with his mother, snaps her purse shut, speaks to her. In her raised chin, the vehement movement of her mouth, he sees the ghost of the woman she’d been, and his heart jumps and starts to pound, the way it used to do when she called him: “Zeke, you Zeke, come here this minute.”
The wife of the man who pointed a gun at him and ran him out of town. That’s how he’s thought of her since the day it happened, and even though his mother swore that Howard Aimar saved his life by running him off, Zeke will stick with what he remembers: Aimar’s eyes, the gun aimed at his heart, and Curtis N. R. Barrett protesting quietly, then not at all, until the only difference between the two of them came down to which one held the gun. Later, when Howard Aimar had gone inside, Barrett had handed him a New York address scribbled on a scrap of paper, and Zeke made sure he’d seen him drop it on the ground before he left the Aimars’ yard for the last time.
As his heart slows, he realizes he’d been afraid that Libba Aimar was going to try and give him the wren’s nest again. One day long ago Libba had found the nest in the yard, strands of his mother’s hair woven into it. She’d given it to Minnie as a testament, she’d said, to Minnie’s place in their family. But when his mother quit and moved out a month after he went north, she left it on the shelf above her fireplace. Left it along with every cast-off blouse and winter coat, every chair and knickknack and dish towel, taking with her nothing but what she’d brought when she came to work for them. For years Mrs. Aimar had tried to give the nest back to Minnie. She’d nestled it among the oranges, divinity, roasted pecans, and fruitcake in the yearly Christmas basket. Once she’d even tucked it into a basket of ironing, but his mother had sent it back on top of the tissue paper she always laid over her finished work.
This remembering is exactly why it is not good for him to come here. The sleeping wrongs kicked awake; the shut-up rooms opened; the return of a disheartening sense of what his life has cost him. What his mother’s life cost her. He doesn’t have to be here long before the husband, father, grandfather, retired Pullman porter on the New York–Chicago line that he is in New York begins to collapse. The man who takes pleasure in the still-growing totals recorded in Denise’s precise hand in the bankbook in the top drawer of the desk in their bedroom, who believes that their steady increase tracks not just a growing prosperity but a widening distance between the man he’d become in New York and the one he used to be here. All it takes for that man to start to doubt himself is to step down from the train in Aiken and see the low spreading limbs of the live oak where he used to park his horse and wagon and wait for customers. By the time that man has walked a half a mile from the station to Toole Hill and set his suitcase on his mother’s front porch and called and knocked and waited for her to unbolt, unchain, unlock, the door, he feels like he’s come all this way to return a nice borrowed suit, put on his own clothes again, and turn back into himself: Zeke Settles, hat in hand, at your service.
The Aimars file into the front pew of the white section, and watching them, he realizes that the memory of the day he left Aiken is not finished with him yet. It was the morning after the flower show, and Howard Aimar had just bailed him out of jail and driven him to his mother’s house, still wearing the white jacket he’d worn to serve supper the night before. A silent drive, he remembers. Something was wrong. He remembers the light sifting through the trees, a thread of smoke twisting up from his mother’s chimney. He’d gone inside to show her that he was all right, and when he came back out, Curtis N. R. Barrett was hurrying down the driveway, topcoat flying. He and Howard Aimar exchanged a few sharp words, then Mr. Aimar walked right up close to Zeke and started in on him about the gray fedora he liked to wear tipped down over one eye, to give a little snap, a little flair, to the way he eyed a girl. Mr. Aimar seemed to bear that hat a special grudge; he was forever at him to take it off, straighten it up, get rid of it. His mother had warned him about waving the hat in a white man’s face like a red flag in front of a bull, but as usual, he hadn’t listened. “Zeke,” he said. “I want you to set that hat straight on your head, and don’t let me catch you wearing it like that again.”
Zeke guessed that he was just showing off for Barrett, letting him know who was boss. So he said, “Yes, sir, Mr. Aimar,” and he nudged the brim up a fraction of an inch and stood there, rocking back on his heels, grinning like a fool.
What happened next happened so fast that he can’t slow it down, even now. To this day he’s never seen a man move as fast as Howard Aimar did that morning: one continuous motion that carried him over to the green Ford and back, a pistol held down at his side. “Zeke,” he said. “I’m going to ask you a question, and you’d better think very carefully before you answer me. Did you sell Mr. Barrett some of my whiskey?”
Nothing to say to that but the truth; it was clear he already knew. “Yes, sir,” he said.
“And did you show something of mine to Mr. Barrett?”
He remembers how the smoke stopped rising from his mother’s chimney then; the chickens stopped pecking the ground; his mother, who’d just that minute stepped out onto her porch to bring him a clean shirt, dropped it and put a hand over her mouth; Curtis N. R. Barrett stood there in his black topcoat. Even the leaves on the big magnolia next to his mother’s house stopped clattering and hung still.
He remembers the perfect silence, the stillness, and how he’d felt the answer rushing up his throat. Your shoes with the blood on them? He was free to say that and to be, for the first and last time in his life, an entirely free man. Over Howard Aimar’s shoulder he saw his mother. She had taken her hand down from her mouth, and he will remember the look on her face forever. It was as if years of grieving had carved her face into a mask of mourning. “Yes, sir,” he said, and his mother cried out, “He’s a damn liar,” and Howard Aimar raised the gun, thumbed back the hammer. For maybe half a minute they stood like that, and he watched Aimar’s mind race through the choices.
Then he lowered the gun, eased the hammer down. “You don’t work for me anymore, Zeke,” he said. “I want you gone by the end of the day, and you don’t set foot in this yard again.” He was on the New York train that night.
Now he checks his watch: They’re ten minutes behind schedule already because of the time it takes for all the old people to shuffle in and find seats. It is a muggy July afternoon, and two ancient black fans up front push thick air over the congregation. Around his mother’s casket the floral tributes stand three deep: lilies and gardenias and more red roses from the Daughters of Zion. The largest offering, a cross covered in white carnations, is from Mrs. Howard Aimar and family, “With deepest sympathy.” As the church heats up, the pews and the wooden ceiling beams creak and crack, the air fills with the smell of hot wood, starched clothes, pomade and perfume, gardenias and roses. Finally one of the ushers shuts the doors, and the preacher climbs into the pulpit, smiles down tenderly on his flock. He is a young man with a very round head and round glasses perched on a gentle face, new to the church this year. Minnie had liked him well enough, though she didn’t go to church often enough anymore to get worked up one way or the other about the preacher. For the last ten years she’d gone to meetings of the Daughters of Zion, but on Sunday mornings she’d mostly stayed home. She liked to go out and sit under the crepe myrtle tree in her yard if it was warm or inside by the
fire when it got cold. “And do what?” he’d asked.
“Think my own thoughts.”
He’d never have predicted that old age would have carried her away so steadily or so far. He doesn’t know what kind of old age he imagined and wished for her, only that it was easier than the one she’d lived. She wouldn’t move to New York—they’d settled that question early—and his life was there—they’d settled that too—but for years, she’d come to New York at Christmas and again in the summer. On those visits she mostly sat by the front window, looking down onto the asphalt playground in the middle of the apartment block where they lived. She cooked and washed and ironed their clothes as fast and skillfully as she’d always done that work. She taught his girls to cook and iron too.
Then, ten years ago, she stopped coming. New York was too cold, she said. Too loud. Their tenth-floor apartment in Harlem was too far from the ground. She had bad dreams when she was there. Besides, she liked her little house in Aiken: the sandy yard she raked and swept, the two old tractor tires that she spruced up with a fresh coat of white paint every spring then planted with zinnias. She couldn’t skip a day setting out a potful of grits, bacon grease, and crumbled biscuits for the stray dogs that counted on her. As she got older and more hardheaded, those dogs became the main reason she wouldn’t come to see them, and the fact that she’d chosen a pack of mongrels over him and his family had hurt him more than any of the other excuses. But he didn’t let it show. He installed a telephone in her house, and they talked every Sunday. Every summer he went south on the train to visit her for two weeks, taking one of his girls with him.
It wasn’t that her mind stumbled either. Until her heart began to fail, she remembered his phone number. She knew the names, ages, and birthdays of his daughters and their children, and on each of their birthdays a card always arrived with a dollar tucked inside, “From your ever-loving Grandmother,” written in a hand that only last year began to wobble. Nonetheless, she’d left them, like someone rowing steadily away, not looking back at the shore. He thought he knew her better than that, but toward the end he wondered if she’d always been this solitary, unreachable person.
He remembers lying in his narrow bed in her house in the Aimar’s backyard, listening to the creak of the ironing board as she leaned into her work, the clunk of one iron being set back on the woodstove to heat before she picked up another, the small hiss as she wet her finger and touched it. The smell of cloth, metal, starch. When she ironed on muggy summer nights, he slept on the back porch, away from the unbearable heat inside.
“Mama,” he says once, under his breath, feeling the smooth wood of her casket, knowing he’d better not say it again, because to name who she was is to name what is gone, and once that absence began to spread, it could go on forever.
The church is quiet now, the old people all seated and settled. He looks out over the nodding hats on the unsteady old heads, the square cardboard fans from Jackson’s waggling through the air. “Though the fig tree does not blossom,” the preacher begins, “nor fruit be on the vines, the labor of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord.
“Habakkuk, the author of this verse, is called one of the minor prophets, but he bears a major message. I am weighed down with misery and failure, he says. Turned out into the dark to stagger blindly through the world, so heavy laden I cannot lift up my head to see the road ahead. And yet, the prophet says, and yet, I will rejoice in the Lord. Do you hear the joyful noise, the mighty sound of that simple word, my brothers and sisters? Do you hear glory’s trumpets in the prophet’s fateful word? And yet. Do you hear the stone rumble as it’s rolled away from the tomb? And yet, he says, I will not simply endure, I will rejoice. Our sister Minnie lived her life in the shelter of those mighty words.”
“Yes she did,” a Daughter of Zion calls out.
“She bore that weight of which the prophet speaks, and now she has gone home to a place where the harvest is bountiful and every tree is laden with fruit and the labor of the olive is done.”
“Amen.”
“Last night her son Ezekial shared with me some of the facts of our sister’s life. Perhaps you already know them. She was born in the country up near Edgefield, and after her father died, her mother brought the family to town so her children could attend the Schofield School.
“Let us give thanks now for the mothers. For those who labor through the long nights, through the long days and years so that their children may go on to places they have never traveled.”
“Amen,” Zeke says. He pats the casket lid and feels his mother’s absence widen inside him again. Mrs. Aimar nods and smiles around her, like she’s the one being praised, and Lewis puts his arm around her shoulder. Another sleeping wrong stirs and rouses: the way white people act like the sun shines on them alone and every word of praise rings to their glory.
“Last night Ezekial told me many things about our sister. He told me how she graduated from the Schofield School and that her domestic skills were beyond compare, how these skills carried them both until he was able to make his own way. He told me that she raised him to be the man he is today and of her lifelong membership, her leadership, in the Daughters of Zion, and as a pillar of this church.”
Not exactly true, he thinks, but comforting to those who believed it. Like the meek little smile the undertaker set on his mother’s mouth. No doubt that was meant to comfort the living too. He’d asked, then insisted, that the undertaker fix it; he didn’t want to think of her smiling through eternity like she was saying, “Yes, ma’am.” He’ll apologize to the mortician later; the man was just doing his job, trying to ease the sorrow of the living by making the dead look as if they’d had no quarrel with life.
“And Ezekial told me something else about our sister as well. Something many of you younger people, myself included, may not know, though the elders will no doubt recall it. I’m speaking of the night in the fall of 1926 when three of our people were dragged from the county jail and murdered.”
The hats on the old heads are moving now, shaking slowly, to and fro. Lord. Lord. Lord.
“The next day, while many huddled in their houses, Mrs. Settles and another member of the Daughters of Zion went to Mr. Jackson’s parlor, bringing clothes for the murdered three. And being there so struck by the horror of what lay before their eyes, the other woman fled, and our sister found herself so weak she could only sit in a chair in the corner while Mr. Jackson went about his labors with the clothes she’d brought.” The church is very quiet now; even the cardboard fans have stopped. The old people sit with bowed heads. His wife and daughters, to whom he has never told this story, watch him, worried. Latitia, his oldest daughter, looks at the ceiling, holding back tears.
Mrs. Aimar whispers to Lewis, who pats her on the shoulder, puts a finger to his lips. He looks puzzled, troubled, and it occurs to Zeke that his mother might have been right to say that Lewis Aimar had never heard any story but his mother’s about that time or his father’s complicity. And Libba Aimar herself might never have known why Zeke was there one day and gone the next. On that fateful morning she’d been at her cousin’s place in the country. Who knows what Howard Aimar told her about Zeke’s disappearance when she returned. Whatever it was, she would have believed him.
Lewis’s daughter watches him intently. He remembers what his mother said about that one. She and her first husband had gotten down on their luck and come home, and Lewis Aimar had put them to work on the rich man’s estate that he’d started managing after the war, when he took over his father’s business and shouldered his debts. “After Mister died, the Aimars were poor as church mice,” Minnie always said, not without pleasure. Lewis put his daughter with the cleaning crew, and the husband worked on the grounds. His mother was the boss of the crew that put the houses in top shape before the wealthy northerners came to town in the spring. Lewis’s girl came and went as she pleased, Minnie said, to
ok as long as she wanted to for lunch, but what could she do? Fire Mr. Lewis’s daughter? When she worked, she worked hard. She’d get down on her hands and knees and scrub the baseboards along with everybody else. She didn’t remember how it came up, but they talked about the Long killings once, and his daughter asked all sorts of questions. Said she suspected that her grandfather had a hand in the thing. Someday, he thinks, they might be able to talk to one another, but not yet.
“Ezekial says that she told him once about that terrible night,” the preacher says, “about the undertaker’s room and the common grave where the three of them were buried, and then she never spoke of it again. That was some of the weight our sister carried through life.” The preacher bows his head, and he keeps it bowed for a minute or more. Then he begins to nod, slowly at first, then more emphatically, as though he’s won some argument with himself. “And yet,” he says, his voice rising. “And yet. Thank God our sister lived to see the world turn a little bit away from that darkness and toward the light of the prophet’s ringing words.”
“Amen,” another Daughter shouts.
“And yet, our sister rejoiced in the Lord. The journey is ever the same, my brothers and sisters, for those who love the Lord. Though we walk through the valley of the shadow, we come at last to the Lord. Though the tomb be sealed, the stone is rolled away. Though the labor of the olive fail and the fig tree does not blossom, we rejoice in the Lord. We rejoice.”
“Is that what you were doing?” he imagines himself whispering to her, the way he’d often done in this very church when he was a child. “Were you rejoicing in the Lord when you stopped coming to see us? Is that what you were doing out under the crepe myrtle on those Sunday mornings with your pack of stray dogs at your feet?”
