Getting Mother's Body

by Suzan-Lori Parks

  “They’ll be in here in a minute,” I says. “They’ll come streaming in for business, just you wait.”

  “I ain’t waiting all day.”

  “Miz Addie said she’d send them,” I says. If she sends everybody she knows, I could make the money I need today and ride up to Gomez in a taxicab.

  “Miz Addie didn’t say she would send nobody,” Miz Ruthie says. “All Addie said is that she would see what she could do.”

  “You and her is friends,” I says.

  “Addie probably went home and took a nap,” Miz Ruthie says.

  I watch Mr. Gonzales watch Tilda. Snipes never looked at me like that. There is a worry and a longing in Mr. Gonzales’ eyes, like, if he was to stop looking at Tilda she would disappear and then turn up again in some other man’s arms. Tilda and him got something. I thought I had something with Snipes. He stuck me with this baby, but I’ma get the last laugh on that. Shit. All that time I was calling him Clifton and his name was Clifford.

  Tilda finishes mopping. She sets her cleaning things near the back screen door and her and him go through the alley and come around to the front where Miz Ruthie’s got they money waiting. Tilda don’t know much English but she knows not to walk across the floor once it’s mopped and she knows how to get a man who she can have true love with.

  Tilda and Gonzales go. A few folks walk by but no one comes in.

  “I can’t pay you today,” Miz Ruthie tells me. “Next week, when I get ahead, I’ll pay you then.”

  “Shit.”

  “That’s the best I can do,” she says. Her hands shake. She holds them together to stop them but they keep shaking. The floor dries. I walk through the shop, prop the back screen open with a cement block and sit in the doorway. There’s a little alley back here, just unpaved dirt and nothing across the way but cans and boxes of trash from the beauty shop and the other stores. The air feels good. Today I made two dollars. I fish it out my smock, count it, put it back. I could get that doctor to help me for forty. Maybe thirty. His office smelled of bleach, like Miz Ruthie’s floor smells now. His floors were green-fleck cement, like the floors at school only those was brown. A row of pale green plastic chairs, bolted to each other and to the floor, made a ring around the room. Myrna Carter said when Doctor Parker helps you, it don’t hurt none and he lets you spend the night in a little room in the back and gives you chicken soup out of a can for dinner and your stomach would be flat and your worries would be over. When we was at Miz Candy Napoleon’s, Mother went and tried to help herself. She said she could help herself and it wouldn’t cost us nothing. She said she knew just what to do. She used a wire. She went into the toilet of the room we was staying in, Room 33, the one on the end, and she went in there and then come out and lay in the bed. I asked her where the baby went and she said it weren’t gone yet but it would be soon. She said it didn’t hurt at all and she’d be up and we’d be in California, picking fruit right off the trees in the morning. I asked her again if the baby was gone yet and she said she didn’t know so I kept asking her. Miz Napoleon would come to check on us and Mother had the room door locked and would yell that we was OK and to let her rest. She didn’t know what Mother was up to. Mother told me to go and ask Miz Napoleon to call Dill and have Dill come visit. Her voice was so light when she told me, that when I went and asked Miz Candy for what Mother wanted, I talked in the same light voice. Dill showed up and that was that.

  What happened to Mother couldn’t happen to me if I go to a doctor who’s got a white jacket and a doctor-diploma and a green shiny floor smelling of bleach. And if that doctor took ten dollars for one pearl then he must think the pearl’s real. He might take it to a jeweler so I gotta get the rest of the money together before he does. Or maybe the pearl is real. And if the earring pearl’s real then the rest could be too. Ten dollars for one pearl. There was plenty of pearls on Mother’s necklace. All I need is ten. Ten times ten gives a hundred. Anybody knows that.

  Laz comes walking down the alley. He stops across the way and turns his back to me like he’s looking at the piles of trash.

  “What the hell you want?” I says.

  “I heard you was back, I didn’t believe it, though,” he says. Something near his head flashes in my eyes. He’s got a mirror, held up, and he’s watching me without turning around to look me in the face.

  “I didn’t feel like getting married to no Snipes,” I says.

  “What you gonna do instead?”

  “I dunno,” I says. He puts the mirror in his pocket and turns around. Two years ago he asked me to ride with him in his hearse and I went. The whole time we rode, he didn’t say nothing. I talked about this and that, how much I didn’t care for school, how I was gonna move to California someday and get me a swimming pool, I was just talking, just saying words to fill up space. Laz stopped the hearse. We’d rode all the way to Lake Thomas.

  “I would like to do it witchu,” he said. He was looking at the water, not at me.

  “I don’t wanna do it witchu,” I said. And he drove me home.

  Laz crosses the alley to stand near me, stopping when my eyes tell him he’s come too close. “Where’s yr pearl?” he asks.

  “I sold it for ten bucks,” I says. Laz whistles.

  “You ain’t marrying Snipes?”

  “I said I didn’t feel like it.”

  “Who you gonna marry instead of Snipes?”

  “I got better plans,” I says. I give him a look that makes him quit eyeballing me.

  “Like whut?” he asks.

  “Whatchu think of Willa Mae getting buried with diamonds and pearls?” I ask him.

  “For her to know and for you to find out, I guess,” Laz says.

  “I’m going to LaJunta,” I says. “I’ma get the bus fare together and I’ma go get me Willa Mae’s treasure.”

  “Want a ride?”

  “Hells no.”

  Laz takes the mirror out his pocket, catching the sun with it, lighting up part of the beauty shop wall and then flicking the light in my face. “How come you don’t call her ‘Mother’ is what I’d like to know,” Laz says.

  “That’s just how we had it,” I says. My words come out flat, like I’m talking about how hot it is. Laz stands there flicking his mirror and kicking dirt but I don’t pay him no mind and after a little while he leaves.

  Miz Ruthie comes out of the doorway to stand behind me.

  “You got a job here if you want it,” she says.

  “I’ll be back next Saturday,” I says, getting up, walking down the alley towards home. I can see myself working next Saturday. I’ll go get the treasure then head to Doctor Parker’s and then, when I step off the bus back here from Gomez, I’ll get right to work. Miz Ruthie will have my smock waiting for me. It’ll have my name sewed back on it and the buttons’ll all close up cause my belly will be smooth again. If they ask where the baby went I’ll say I lost it, then I’ll burst into tears. But I gotta go to LaJunta first. I’ll get my bus fare together and head out tomorrow.

  ROOSEVELT BEEDE

  The sun comes up in back of our mobile home. If you want to see it, though, you got to go out in the yard cause we don’t got no windows on that side. Sunset is different. The sun climbs up over the mobile home and over the filling station and then slides down along Main Bully, straight down it, like the road in the summertime was a canal, to set where the road ends, at the edge of Butler County. Me and June’s sitting on the porch watching it. The sunset is so bright we don’t see Billy walking up until she’s almost on the porch.

  “You ain’t been over at Mrs. Jackson’s all this time have you?” June asks.

  “Nope.”

  “She took yr dress back?” I ask her.

  “Nope.”

  June touches her hand to the scarf she’s wearing cause Billy still ain’t finished her hair.

  “I’ll get to it right now,” Billy says. She goes in the back to turn on the stove.

  “Where she been all this time?” June asks me.
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  “Dunno,” I says.

  We both turn, not wanting to miss the sun disappear down the road. Maybe cause Tryler, where we had the church, is west of here.

  “Goodbye,” June says, talking to the sun.

  I hold my hand up, waving. Another day past. Another day spent working at Sanderson’s. I can’t complain too much, though. We got a roof over our heads and that’s more than most got.

  Billy turns the porch light on and comes back outside. The metal comb is hot. She stands behind June, taking the head rag off, parting her hair, and getting to work.

  “I’m going to LaJunta,” Billy says, her hands moving steady over June’s hair.

  Me and June both catch our breath. “What for?” June asks.

  “Whatchu think for?”

  “Don’t get smart,” I says.

  Billy touches her hand to the comb. It’s gone cold. She heads back to the stove to reheat it.

  “I didn’t hear her right,” I says.

  “Me neither,” June says.

  “I’ll ask her again,” I says.

  “Let her finish my hair first,” June says.

  In two quick combs, Billy turns June’s bangs to straight. She goes back to put the comb away and then comes out on the porch with us to sit.

  “Yr gonna bring your mother back home?” June asks.

  “Willa Mae can stay where she’s at, all I’m gonna go get is the treasure she left me,” Billy says.

  Me and June trade looks.

  Billy’s sitting on the porch counting her money. Her head, neatly combed, is in my arm’s reach. I hold out my hand and lay it on her hair, not petting her exactly, but not hitting her neither. She looks up at me.

  “Miz Ruthie gived me my job back too,” she says smiling.

  “She better pay you top dollar cause you deserve it,” June says.

  “We gonna work it out,” Billy says, turning back to her money. She’s got what looks like about two dollars. June said Billy was talking about someone helping us for seventy-eight dollars. Maybe it was bus fare she was talking about.

  “Bus fare’ll be high, going all the way out to LaJunta,” June says. There’s worry in her voice cause of the high price but there’s a pleasure in her voice too: Billy is finally going to get that treasure. I’m not sure what to think. June takes Candy’s letter out her apron pocket, squinting at the words in the fading light. I don’t got to look at the letter. I remember what it read.

  “Candy says they start cementing over the land on the first of the month. That’s this coming Thursday,” I says.

  “I know that,” Billy says, scraping her money together and putting it in her tin box. She don’t ask for my silver dollar and I don’t offer it. I wish she’d say something about bringing her mother home.

  She goes inside, coming back out with her sweater on, and goes walking down the road without another word.

  “I feel wrong about this,” I says to June.

  “Let her go,” June says.

  “You think she’s headed there right now?” I ask.

  “It’s too far for even a Beede to walk,” June says.

  I feel wrong and then the wrong feeling presses up against the rock and the hard place that the rest of me is pressed against, and Billy’s going to get the treasure and not Willa’s body, like everything else, becomes bearable. There’s lots of families I coulda been born into, families with more luck, or more money, but being a Beede means being able to bear the unbearable, so I guess I would rather be a Beede than be anybody else in all the world.

  BILLY BEEDE

  I’m standing on Dill’s porch thinking of how I can get her to lend me my bus fare.

  “Whatchu want?” Dill says.

  “Just visiting,” I says.

  “What for?” Dill says.

  “Can’t I just say hello?”

  “Yr Willa Mae’s child,” Dill goes, coming to the screen and standing there but not letting me in. “I better nail down the furniture and lock up the pigs.”

  I put my hands on my belly, hiding it. “I don’t favor no Willa Mae,” I says.

  Dill don’t speak.

  “I got my job back at Miz Ruthie’s,” I says.

  “You coulda gone into the pig business with me,” Dill says, “I taught you everything I know, now look at you.” Dill used to say she was a graduate of the Pig Institute of America which was just the day-to-day work of the breeding, buying, feeding and slaughtering of them. When me and Mother lived with Dill, Dill wanted me to have an honest trade, so she taught me the bacon-types from the lard-types, how to tell a Berkshire from a Chester White, why a Duroc is better than a Hampshire, that Yorkshires are the longest length and the most popular. Dill taught me how to build a good pen and how to check the fences every morning for holes and dig-outs. She taught me how to ring they noses, and why not to ring the boars cause they might hurt the females when they mate. Dill read to me from the Dictionary of Diseases. Abscesses, Anemia, Baby Pig Scours, Cholera, Dysentery, and Lice. Mange, Rickets, and Worms. I helped her with the slaughtering. I was getting pretty good at it.

  “Jez farrow in her pen?” I asks.

  “Her babies was born in the back room, same as you was,” Dill says.

  “I’d like to see them,” I says.

  Dill opens the screen door, leading me to where the pigs are. They’re right in Dill’s bed. Jezebel raises her head, eyeing us, while we stand in the doorway.

  “It’s just me, girl,” Dill says softly and Jez lays her head back down.

  We stand there, watching the piglets suckle. They stink more than I remember but I ain’t gonna tell Dill that.

  “Jez don’t shit where she sleeps,” Dill says proudly. “And she cleans up after her litter.”

  “I guess you didn’t have the heart to move em out yr bed,” I says.

  “Heart, hell,” Dill says. “You try touching them piglets Jez’ll bite yr arm off.”

  The room is quiet, just the one bulb hanging overhead and the steady sucking. If my baby was gonna get born it would suck like the piglets do, but it’s a Snipes and Snipes got to go.

  “You was just like that,” Dill says to me. “Yr mother used to say that you about sucked the life out of her.”

  “She seemed pretty alive to me,” I says and we both laugh, longer than the joke calls for. I know when I stop laughing I’m gonna have to ask Dill for money and I ain’t ready to get to that yet.

  From my height, there ain’t no looking Dill in the eye. I used to think, when I was real little, that I was gonna be tall like her. Then Mother sat me down and said how babies was made and how my daddy, Son Walker, was broad featured and short statured.

  “You never come round here no more,” Dill says.

  “You said you don’t like my company.”

  Dill shrugs her shoulders to that.

  “Whatchu gonna name the piggies?” I ask her.

  “You was the one who always named them, not me.”

  “It helped me tell them apart.”

  “I can tell the difference between the piglets without giving them names,” Dill says. “Besides, these are all headed to market and I ain’t never seen no use in naming something that’s just gonna die.”

  She cocks her head toward me, taking a step out the doorway where we’s both standing, to look me up and down. My hands naturally go to my belly again, like my hands can hide the baby-ness of it.

  “You ain’t named it have you?” she says.

  “Nope.”

  “Yr gonna get rid of it?” Dill asks.

  “That’s right.”

  “Yr yr mother’s daughter,” Dill says.

  “If I had the baby, I’d just be greasing Snipes’ ass.”

  “And you figure you greased him enough already.”

  “That’s right.”

  I lift my hands to fan away the heat of the hallway, even though there’s a breeze blowing through. Dill’s got a regular house with a bedroom, a hallway, and a indoor toilet. Windows at
each end of the hall, so air can travel through on hot days and, should a tornado touch down, the house would stand some kind of a chance. But even with the breeze coming through, the pig smell makes my throat tight.

  “I’m going to LaJunta,” I says.

  Dill’s face goes blank like she don’t know what LaJunta I’m talking bout or like she knows what LaJunta but she don’t got no idea why I’d be saying I’ma go out there.

  “I’ma get Willa Mae’s treasure,” I says. “I’ma go out there on the bus and dig up—you know, her remains and such, and get the treasure. She woulda wanted me to have it, seeing as how I’m in need. I’ll use the money to get rid of this,” I say fanning my hands around my belly, imagining my stomach smooth and empty again. I keep talking, telling Dill about Doctor Parker and his green cement floors and how he bought the earring and how ten times ten is a hundred. The air is hot. I fan my hands around my belly and then flap them a little under my arms and wipe my hand across my mouth and then underneath my chin.

  “Hot,” Dill says.

  “You ain’t sweating,” I says.

  “I ain’t gone begging to Dill Smiles,” she says.

  “Anything you lend me I’ll pay back,” I says.

  “I don’t got nothing to lend.”

  “Yr doing well for yrself.”

  “You know how much my pigs cost me before they bring anything in?” she says. “You want me to show you my books?”

  “I just need twenty dollars,” I says.

  “I’ll show you my books,” Dill says and we go down the hall to the sitting room where she got a desk with a roll-down top. She takes out her big ring of keys and unlocks one of the drawers.

  “I just figured cause you got that new truck and all—”

  “Look at these figures,” she says, sticking the book in front of me. Rows and rows of numbers and names of sows, numbers of piglets per litter, prices of things bought and sold.

  “I could make it if you lent me ten dollars,” I says. “That would pay for the bus one way, the treasure would pay for my way back, and I’d carry a spade with me so I wouldn’t have to buy one when I got there.”

  “I’ll be selling the piglets in about six weeks,” she says. “Some are already spoke for.”