by Rilla Askew
The woman’s face was shut tight in the middle, and I knew she was worried, but I just looked at her and said finally to Thomas, “Quit that!” The woman stood in the yard, by the wagon. I looked at her, staring hard, full of hatred.
Little Jim Dee sidled up then. He stood close to the Misely woman, and then slowly, shyly, backed into her. That was his way with Mama, how he used to do with Mama, back his skinny behind into her skirts and lean against her where she was sitting. I was furious. I didn’t know what to make of it. I hollered, “Jim Dee, get over here!” But Little Jim Dee didn’t move. He just looked at me, big-eyed, filthy, his bony arms and legs still for once, his rusty fingers in his mouth. The woman touched the top of his head with her free hand. A look came over her. I don’t know if I could name that look even now, but it was something like helplessness, something like sorrow, but it didn’t belong to her. It wasn’t like the grief was her own. She sighed and disentangled her skirt from Little Jim Dee. She went back to her son and bent down and talked in his ear.
The next day—this I know, it was the next day, because I remember Lyda screaming all through that night, her mewing cries grown fierce and hysterical, like she was being stuck on the inside with common pins—the next morning a colored woman came to the gate. She stood there, thin and silent, and waited for somebody to come open it for her. She had an infant slung sideways in a blue bandanna across her chest. I knew what she was there for. I’d never been around colored people because we lived far from town and we didn’t have sharecroppers, but I knew of them in the same way you know about Indians and panthers and other things you don’t hardly ever see. I knew she was a nigger woman, and she’d come to nurse my baby sister. I went to the gate and pulled it open. She never looked at me. She came in the yard and went straight to the lean-to where Lyda was yowling, and bent her neck and went inside.
In a short time the crying stopped. In a little while after that the woman Misely showed up and walked through the gate like it belonged to her and went to the lean-to and flipped back the doorway and disappeared in there in the dark.
We did not salt that bear carcass like Papa said. I don’t know what became of it, if the Miselys went and got it or if it rotted in the sun, because no one ever mentioned it again. The dogs kept dragging the mauled head back into the yard to chew on it, and Misely or one of his boys would throw it back over the fence, and the dogs would find it and drag it back in, until finally somebody took it off into the woods and buried it, I guess. We lived on cornmeal and squash and sweet potatoes once the beans were gone, because Papa did not hunt at all now, and me, I didn’t have time. The Misely woman came daily. I don’t know how she got her own work done, unless her many whiteheaded children did it, because it seemed like she was always in our yard. She was strict on me, stricter than Mama ever thought about, and she made me wash the children, made me sew up the holes in their clothes. The colored woman came once in the morning, once in the evening. Lyda thrived on her and opened her gums laughing when she saw her, and I hid every time I could somewhere and watched.
Most usually the colored woman had her own baby with her, though sometimes she didn’t, but either way it didn’t matter. She’d take Lyda in her arms. She held her like she was nothing, like she was—I don’t know. Like she was a part of her clothing or something. Not like she was anything bad, not like she was good, but like Lyda was just something the colored woman wore. Often she’d have her own baby and my sister together, one nursing from each breast.
I had a secret fear, and there was nobody to tell it to. I watched Lyda’s mouth, pink and eager and hungry. I watched it open for the long brown breast coming to it, the dark nipple, almost black. I watched the woman’s baby, his rounded cheeks, his lips soft and sweet like my sister’s, but brown and not pink. I remembered how I had sat and watched Mama nurse Thomas, and John Junior before him, remembered Mama turning Thomas to the cup when Lyda was born, and I saw her nursing Lyda. I remembered how even when her face and hands turned brown from the sun, Mama’s breasts remained white, blue-veined, her nipples large and pink and bumpy, how the color of Mama’s nipple matched the color of Lyda’s mouth when she opened and clamped over it. I thought my sister might turn brown from drinking from that woman.
At night I unwrapped Lyda, checked her soft folded places, looking for a change. But of course no change happened except how she got more and more attached to that colored woman and would smile with her two teeth and jerk her arms in the air when she saw her and cry whimpering when the woman handed her back to me and walked out the gate.
Papa was working fierce. If he worked fierce when we first got there to show Mama something, after she died he worked ten times more. He did not do smithwork, not even to shoe the mules hardly, but anything he could figure out how to carve from wood he would try. I thought he was still working to prove Mama something. It was like her presence hung over him, trying to make him show what he had done in the first place was right. The woman Misely said he was working his grief off, but I didn’t think it.
He built furniture like he expected us to keep it, and for a time I thought maybe we’d stay in those mountains and never pack up again and head on. He built an oak bed frame that was too big for the wagon, that there was no place to put it and it stood out empty in the yard. He built little tables, some chairs, a new pie safe. He tended our puny crops, helped the man Misely harvest his own, and fished sometimes, though he never now hunted, and still came home at night and sat by the fire whittling pieces with his hands.
Little Jim Dee was getting terrible to handle. He was wild and rough, and there was a tension, a knotted hard thing, in his bony body that never would ease up, not even when he was sleeping. He’d hit me and Jonaphrene, and if I tried to make him do something, wash up like the Misely woman wanted, he’d pitch a fit and fall down yelling. I couldn’t pick him up, he’d lay there dead weight, legs and arms kicking, hollering in the yard. I gave up on him. I wouldn’t try to do anything with him, and if that Misely woman tried to make me, I’d say, You do it, and walk off.
Jonaphrene took up with the Misely woman’s girls, but she was mean with them and would order them around, say, Stand there, Do this, when they played, and they would do it because she’d slap them if they acted like they had a mind of their own. I tried to keep a rein on my sister. I thought if we lost her the way we lost Jim Dee we might as well quit trying to be a family. But it wasn’t easy with Jonaphrene, because she was like quicksilver, she’d run everywhere, be under your feet like a new pup one minute and completely disappear the next. She’d stay off and gone for hours. Sometimes she’d be sweet and helpful and smile to make your heart melt, and she looked so much like Mama. Other times she’d be a pure little snot. They all took it for granted that because there was no woman in the household, I was the woman, and it was up to me to do all woman things. I resented that sometimes, I hated it, really, because I would’ve rather been working with Papa, but I guess I didn’t know any other way. And so I tried to rein in Jonaphrene, but it was hard.
Still yet—and this seems like the strange part, the way I remember it—still, I was more free than any time since we stopped there, and sometimes I’d just sit in the clearing and do nothing, just say Mama’s memories to myself. Even with both Lyda and Thomas to change and look after now and every bit of the cooking to do, plus cleaning and washing and mending and trying to stay out of the way of that Misely woman, I still had time to just sit sometimes. Because Papa let me alone. He never asked me to go off with him or help him build things, never asked me for anything or hardly talked or looked at me either, and it might’ve been partly true what Misely’s wife said, that he needed all that work to do to keep up his frenzy, but to me, what I knew was, with Mama gone, Papa had lost his need to make me his own.
One morning I woke up—it happened just that sudden—and the world had turned cold. Frost iced the top of the wagon where we slept, crimped the leaves brown, sparkled the sandstone. As soon as my eyes opened and I saw my bre
ath in the dim light of the wagon, I remembered.
I began to search for Mama’s tin box in secret. When Papa was off wherever he went to, I picked and pawed and pilfered through all Mama’s things. Papa had never unpacked Mama’s trunk or done anything with her clothes, and though the Misely woman hinted several times shouldn’t he Rid Himself of Those Painful Reminders, Papa ignored her, and Mama’s bonnet still hung by the tie straps from a nail next to the lean-to door. There came in those first cold days a driven secret thing inside me. Every time I was alone, I went in the lean-to and lifted the lid on Mama’s trunk and pulled out her dresses, her undergarments, her embroidered pillowslips and linens. I patted them, crushed them between my fingers, as if that square box could be hidden in a small secret fold somewhere. I felt the sides of the trunk with the flat of my hand. I hunted with one ear cocked for the sound of Papa’s dogs panting ahead of him into the clearing. If the Misely woman came in the yard, I hurried out in the daylight and got busy with Thomas, and when she was gone I’d duck back in the lean-to and search the same places again and again. I never doubted that box was somewhere in Mama’s possessions. I thought there was just some tiny seam or corner I’d left untouched last time that would, this time, reveal Mama’s secret to me.
The weather turned back warm after that first frost, but warm weather did not stop me, and I did not forget again. Sometimes I would have to hunt in near darkness because a dense gray fog seeped in the wagon before first light, filtered into the lean-to through the overhang of blanket, hung close to the earth, wrapped close about us, stayed surrounding us and in us for hours because the sun on those mornings could not seem to get strength enough to climb over the southeastern rim. I hated that dank fog as I hated everything about those mountains, because they helped kill my mama. I felt it, that gray mist, like an invisible hand that would press me into the dirt at the edge of the yard where I waited for the colored woman to get finished with Lyda.
It was one of those hollow times when I did not have to work or watch children because Thomas was still sleeping and Jonaphrene was in the wagon with him, sitting up on the feathertick, drawing pictures with charred fire sticks on beech bark—she wouldn’t come outside in the spitting mist that was falling, she was entirely too pinched up and prissy for that—and Papa was of course gone, and Little Jim Dee was out no telling where. So I was waiting, impatient, because I wanted to look in Mama’s things before the woman Misely showed up to start her bossing, and I was irritated, too, with a slow smolder that I did not then recognize, because what it felt like was that the colored woman was the dark weight pressing against me which I could not press back, and it felt like she knew it and she had no right to know it or stop me, because what I wanted, if I couldn’t search for Mama’s tin box, then I wanted to watch her nurse Lyda, and I could not think of one good excuse to go in the lean-to and stay there. She did not now nurse Lyda outside on Mama’s tree stump as she’d done in warm weather but came in the gate and went straight to the lean-to, the same way she’d done the first morning, stayed inside in the dark with my baby sister until it was finished, and then she’d lay Lyda back down in her wooden cradle, no matter even if Lyda was hollering, and come out and never say a word and disappear between the trees down the hill. I hadn’t watched her nurse Lyda in a long time.
I had my foot on the bottom rail of the fence near the lean-to, and I hung on it, my arms hooked over the splintery top rail, and danced my foot on the cedar, shrugging my shoulders and rolling my head till I could feel the ends of my braids touch way down on my back. I dropped my head all the way forward, held to the top rail with my elbows and reared back, but no matter how I craned my neck and twisted and wallowed, I could not shrug that invisible weight off me. I got still. I was listening, as I always listened, for some intruding presence: Papa coming, the woman Misely, Thomas waking up. The woods were quiet because the air was too thick and too damp, but somehow it sounded like I heard the woman singing—or not singing, I guess, humming, because the sound had no words, and I could just barely hear it, like it came from the gray mist all around me and not through the blankets and rough-cut wooden planks. Oh, I wanted to go inside and see her. I wanted to see her singing to Lyda because she didn’t have her own baby with her on that day, she didn’t bring her own baby anymore, hardly ever, and so it had to be Lyda she sang to, and I thought this was how she made Lyda open her mouth and arms for her, and it got me all stirred up.
I stood there, my insides churning, my foot scraping again on the fence rail, hard—yes, hard! I could’ve ground that soft wood into splinters—the smell of cedar rising, my toes cramped in last winter’s shoes. At once it came to me—and this without words but just the clear knowledge—that I could go in the lean-to if I wanted. I could just go in there and sit down. It seems strange to me now that I had believed a colored woman could keep me from my own family’s property, but I was young then, I didn’t know things then, her skin scared me and the way she never talked.
No. It wasn’t that. Or it was not that only.
The lean-to was Mama’s and Papa’s private place, their sleeping and grown-up talking place. Their place for babies and Mama’s soft crying, like the loft bed back home. It was the same as their privacies, as my own body’s privacies, and it had to be kept secret, no matter from colored woman or children or neighbor or what. It was secret from me even, and I had to hide my going in there from myself. I could not show it to a stranger, not to Jonaphrene or Papa, not to no one at all.
I thought, That woman’s got no right to be singing alone with Lyda in Mama’s and Papa’s lean-to! And I understood she would not stop me from coming in, nor tell anybody about it, and so it would just be between her and me. I felt a power then. I went quickly over the rough ground to the blanket hanging in front of the doorway and lifted it up.
She sat on piled quilts on the far side away from the doorway, over by Lyda’s cradle. There was no sound in the lean-to but the little sounds Lyda made sucking, and I crouched still for just a heartbeat because I’d meant to say, You quit lullabying my sister! but there was nothing to say quit it about, and then I gathered myself, saying, She’s got no right to be alone with Lyda in Mama’s and Papa’s lean-to, I don’t care if she’s singing or not, and so I ducked beneath the pink blanket and went in.
When the blanket fell, the room was dark like a cavern, and it was warm in there with the warmth of her body, but the quilt on the featherbed where my hands fell was damp. It was all damp, the whole ragged rectangular space, dank with the clouds living low on the mountain. I could smell mildew and wet earth. I could smell Lyda’s baby smell a little but mostly Papa, his hatband sweat and suspenders, and under it the sharp scent of stranger which was the colored woman’s smell. Mama’s smell had shrunk since her death until it lived only in the folds of her linens and dresses. I knew that already. It was one thing I searched for when I went through her trunk.
I waited with my hands and knees on the featherbed till the darkness would lighten and reveal shapes to me, and soon I could see well enough to pick out Mama’s trunk, and I crawled over to where it sat upon the bare ground by the west wall and climbed on it and sat. I looked at the woman, and her outline got clearer and clearer, a vertical dark shape faded at the top, the light shape of the baby crossways in the middle, until finally I could see the woman’s eyes big in the darkness. I got scared then. She was looking right at me, and she didn’t speak and she didn’t blink hardly but just stared at me like I was a demon, an intruder, a night thief, I thought. It was quiet and too close, the two of us together in that lean-to, and I couldn’t think what to say or what I’d come in for, couldn’t think any clear thing at all. My old childish ways came on me, ways from when I was very little, and I trembled before that colored woman. I could not move, could not speak or think, and I could not go back out, and so I just sat trembling upon Mama’s hard black wood trunk. It was a long time before she started to talk.
“She big enough now.”
The word
s came soft, almost whispered, in the closed space between us, but still they made me jump.
“Y’all could turn her out if you wanted.”
I was too trembling scared to understand what she was talking about.
“She big enough. Hear me?”
I nodded my head. Lyda’s sucking noises got louder—long, smacking sounds, empty. The woman lifted my sister then, I could see it, and broke her suck with a finger and pulled her away from the breast. Lyda whimpered, ready to start bawling, but the woman turned her around in her lap, all at the same time tucking her one breast in the front of her shirtwaist and pulling out the other, and she let Lyda have the other and Lyda settled down again, sucking. But it was strange to me, I got a strange start, because I could see she had Lyda swaddled, wrapped tight in the light blanket. My sister was too big for swaddling.
“She plenty big,” the woman said again, and at first I thought she was answering me, but then I saw she was saying it to herself.
“Why don’t you quit coming?” I said, and my heart stopped and started and fluttered, because I said it the same way I’d talk to Jonaphrene, the same voice I’d tell her to set her flighty self down and hush up. That colored woman was a grown-up, a grown-up, you did not talk to grown-ups in such a way, even niggers, I was taught that, or I believed I was taught that then.
The woman let out a dry little snort like hunh through her nose. She was not now looking at me; the white circles of her eyes held on the empty space in the center of the lean-to.
“Tell that to the doctor,” she said. “Tell him how come I don’t quit coming.”
She lifted Lyda again and shifted her on her lap. Lyda made not a sound this time, was stiff and still as a cornshuck-wrapped baby doll, and it frightened me. I thought she was dead. The woman kept on. “Doctor have his own idea how come I don’t quit,” she muttered, and then she said other words I could not hear, and then I did hear: “He a flat fool and lying to his own self but I will not disapprise him of that.” She went on in her low voice like it was not even to me she was talking but some other person she’d been talking to for hours, like me there, I was hidden from her sight only to overhear.
