October Suite

by Maxine Clair

  Just because she felt suddenly grateful, she put both her hands flat on her Aunt Frances’s grave. A blessing. Grateful, too, that Vergie had made it. She and Vergie were fast becoming the older generation, and so far David was their only link to the imperfect dream of eternity. He would be the only one left to remember them. David reached over and touched the grass on top of the grave with his fingertips. He looked awkward trying to do what he saw her do and not knowing why. Eventually she took away her hands, and he did, too, and they walked silently back to the car.

  She noticed that the day had heated up but stayed on the clear side. Why go back to Monroe Street, when they could ramble around a whole afternoon? David had never seen the greatest effigy mound in America, and neither had she. They could get to Adams County, as she had vaguely thought they might, and back by the time Gene got home. And so off they went over the bridge and out to Route 32, across lazy farmland, through small towns and a cool stretch of forest.

  When they got to the town of Peebles, October could see the forested hilltop they had talked about on TV. She pointed. “I’ll bet it’s right up there,” she said to David.

  “I don’t see anything that looks like a snake,” he said, and though she wasn’t sure about this, she promised him he would see it when they got closer. And she began to tell him all she remembered about the Mound Builders and what she had heard on the news. He wanted to know what an effigy was, and she told him. He wanted to know how the ancient Indian people could have carried enough baskets full of dirt to build something that big. And how long it would have taken them. And of course October didn’t know, either, but they both paused at the wonder of such a feat. Two centuries before Columbus waded in Caribbean waters, these people had thrived.

  The Serpent Mound site was a park with other mounds too—conical ones—and with a ranger in a tiny pavilion, and an angled-metal tower where visitors could get a full view. Though there were no walls or roped-off areas along the narrow walkway around the whole thing the signs all said “Do Not Walk Across the Mound.”

  “It just looks like a hill to me,” David said.

  “Let’s go up in the tower and look from there,” she said, and they climbed the wooden steps to the top.

  “Look!” David said. “It’s wound up like a rattlesnake. It’s eating something too.”

  Uncoiling across a forested hilltop, the giant earthen snake wound and stretched nearly as far as she could see. She read the legend posted in the tower. Quarter-mile long four feet high, thirty feet wide. No human remains had been found there—it was not a burial mound. At the farthest end, she could make out its jaws stretched around an oval-shaped, earthen egg, which it appeared to be swallowing.

  “How did they do that?” David asked.

  “It had to take them a long, long time,” she told him. “Generations.”

  “What was it for?” he wanted to know.

  She guessed it had some sacred significance. Maybe it was a marker for the gods to see, should they look down. Or maybe all the mounds said to anyone who came looking. Remember us, we were here.

  Once they were back down on the ground, David wanted to walk around the whole thing and they started off toward the coiled tail, she following him on the path. They met a few other people, but the surrounding forest gave the place a cloistered feel. Sparrows powdered themselves in gravel dust and an occasional breeze soughed through the trees. From the tower, the mound had been a serpent. On the ground, it looked like a long hill, yes, but smooth on top, and it ran for a quarter of a mile.

  “Do Not Walk Across the Mound,” the sign said.

  October looked both ways and whispered loudly, “David...”

  He turned around, and he must have seen the glee in her eyes, because he grinned. She grabbed his hand and like two scrappy rabbits, they scrambled up the hill—David mumbling about bad luck, and her laughing telling him that it wasn’t a grave—to the top, where a long grassy plateau wound and stretched ahead of them. Holding his hand still, like a shot—just because she could—she took off running laughing and pulling him along until she couldn’t hold herself back anymore, and flew on off ahead of him, running a race with the girl she had been when she last ran for the sheer joy of running arms akimbo, feet landing wherever they would, feeling her chest straining to keep up, running along the Greatest Mound in America with David laughing and whooping on her heels.

  When she started seeing stars, she slowed down to a jog and stopped. David, too, laughing still the two of them bent, holding their knees, huffing and puffing.

  “You can run,” he said, breathless.

  “Yeah,” she blew, “I can.” She looked up. “I guess those people up in the tower can see us, but I’ll bet we’re not the first people to ever walk across a mound.”

  She scooted down the hill, ignoring the grass stains, laughing at herself. David followed. When they got to the car, she opened the door for him but then stopped and suddenly hugged him to her. “I love you, David,” she said, “—do you know that?” into his hair.

  “Um-hmmm,” he said, hugging her back.

  She released him and they got into the car and headed out of the park toward the highway and Chillicothe and Monroe Street.

  As they cruised along toward the bridge David asked, “When is Momma coming home?”

  It was the first time he had said anything about Vergie’s being away. October told him maybe in a week. Was he worried?

  And then, sliding out of his mouth as easily as a licked spoon, he asked, “Is it true that Momma can’t ever have a baby again?”

  “Who told you that?” October asked him. He was way too young to be hearing this.

  “Brenda.”

  October got the details. Ronnie Whoever’s sister up the street had told him.

  When was this? One day. And what were they talking about? David didn’t know. She just told him, and was it true?

  October had her eyes glued to the road. What do you tell a seven-year-old? Her third-graders were older, and she wouldn’t have known what to tell them, either.

  “I think that’s something you have to ask your mother when she gets home,” October said.

  “How does a baby get in her stomach?” he wanted to know.

  “You should ask Vergie,” she said.

  “When I was a baby, did God put me in her stomach?”

  “In a way, I guess. He did,” October said. But then thought again. “Not exactly, though.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “When she gets home she’ll tell you all about it.”

  “Can you have a baby?”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “Why don’t you have one?”

  This was way out of the zone where October could hold a conversation with a seven-year-old, especially this seven-year-old. And since she didn’t know what version of birds and bees he was supposed to know, she didn’t answer right away. And wasn’t that a Dairy Queen coming up right over there?

  That evening she sat and watched Gene and David devour her meat-loaf and her peach cobbler, thinking that Gene probably didn’t know any more than she did about handling birds and bees with David. Sitting with them at the kitchen table, listening up close to their lives, something was so right. Whatever it was, no amount of work or sacrifice could come close to tipping the balance against family.

  With Gene at the hospital most evenings, October could sit with Mrs. Hopp and watch David go up and down the block on his bike. Meanwhile Mrs. Hopp would lean on her cane, happy to fill October in on who was pulling a creep with whom, how much money so-and-so paid for his car, whose children would turn out to be hoodlums.

  October asked her one evening if she remembered that ticklish name-changing time at 752. Mrs. Hopp fingered the raisin mole on her chin, like the story started there.

  “Well, you kn
ow you were headstrong don’t you? Frances and Maudie had a time with you. They never got over what happened to Carrie.

  “’Fore she died, Carrie wanted to come back here. You know that? I guess she thought her and him would do better if she was close to her folks. ’Course, he wasn’t for it—he was a city boy. And your aunties—I guess they figured Carrie had made her own bed. No use encouraging her to give up—they wasn’t pushin too hard for her to come back. Don’t get me wrong they wasn’t nasty to her or nothin—just didn’t push to get her back.

  “Once he killed her, they had it bad. Had to deal with what they couldn’t see before. Maybe she couldn’a took care of herself and two babies with a man like that. I reckon they both had plenty trouble gettin over the fact that if she hadda come back here to Monroe Street she might be alive today.

  “Then here you come along chompin at the bit to be grown, and it scared ‘em, givin yourself another name and all. You went off to the college and didn’t pay them no mind ’bout comin back.”

  October had never known the details of her aunts’ regrets. While Mrs. Hopp sat working her gums, October pictured Aunt Frances pushing like forty-going-north to get to the doorway of the Jacksons’ pantry-bedroom that day, coming to save her girl and Carrie’s. No wonder.

  Mrs. Hopp crooked her finger in October’s direction. “You find yourself a nice man ’fore it gets too late, you hear?” She said it the way she would tell a child about coming in before dark.

  “Get a little love for yourself,” she said. “Your aunties would have wanted it, you know.”

  After dinner one evening October recruited David for kitchen duty, something that was not on Vergie’s list.

  “I’m washing—drying is the easy job,” she told him.

  “Momma does the dishes. I take out the trash.”

  “When me and Vergie were girls, we did them all by ourselves. I couldn’t even reach the draining board, had to stand on a stool.”

  “That’s for girls,” David said, taking forks and spoons from the drainer.

  “Suppose there aren’t any girls—what then?”

  “That’s different.”

  “Well, if you were at my house, I’d have you doing them all by yourself.”

  David frowned.

  “Maybe sometime you can come stay with me all summer. Your summer vacation. How would you like that?”

  She hadn’t meant to ask him—it just came out.

  He grinned “I would like it,” he said “I remember that time when we went to the zoo.”

  “You remember that? You were only four.”

  David stepped over to the kitchen table to start a stack of plates, talking about camels. October went on playing in the soapy water, thinking about possibilities.

  “You remember the kids you played with at Swope Park?”

  He remembered a little.

  “Well, they all still live around where I live, and if you came for the summer, they would take you swimming.”

  He dried plates and stacked them dropped spoons and forks into the drawer. October saved the glasses for herself.

  David said that he didn’t know how to swim, and October told him all she knew about easy lessons. She couldn’t swim herself. They could learn together if he was there. Someday. Maybe. “If Vergie and Gene think it’s okay.”

  Toward the end of the second week, the buzzing started. Vergie was coming home. October cleaned all over, Gene took his week’s vacation, David pulled out his crayons and watercolors and made pictures for Vergie’s wall.

  The day Gene drove up with Vergie in the car, David went out to the porch and stood watching like Vergie was a visitor. October told him to hold open the door for Vergie, but it took ages because Vergie had to take the steps so slowly. October wondered what he could be thinking, he had gotten so quiet. When, finally, Vergie got to the porch and let out a “whew,” she looked at David and smiled.

  All of a sudden he ran up to her, tears streaming, and buried his face in her stomach, holding on. October wanted to look away. All that time, he’d been riding his bike and taking his bath and eating his peas and waiting. October could see from Vergie’s face that David was hugging her too tightly, but then Vergie was holding on to him, too. She was home.

  And then she was really home. To her house, where she could see a speck of dust ten feet away and hear David whisper up the street. Not one to take it easy when anyone else was working, from day one she got up to make her own coffee. Then it was her own breakfast and she’d throw in a couple more slices of bacon before she would sit down, After a week at home, there was no lying around for her. She’d stay up all day—in a chair, but up. Where she could supervise. It was her kitchen.

  Vergie’s kitchen. Whoever heard of baking biscuits in the cornbread pan? You don’t cook beans in the little pot meant for rice. Seven eggs—not six—go into real pound cake, no matter what the recipe says; and nutmeg ruins the taste of sweet potatoes. Two women cannot run one kitchen.

  Bleach in the white things, just the socks, not the underclothes, dingy or not. Light starch for Gene’s work clothes, heavy for his shirts. No rough-dried sheets on anybody’s bed, and double rinse the towels to keep them fluffy. Two women spoil the laundry.

  Until October had taken over, Vergie swore, David had never stayed outside after eight o’clock, watched television past nine-thirty, or slept past eight in the morning. He had never eaten lunch food for breakfast or talked back to Gene. What had gotten into him?

  Once Vergie could wield a broom and walk backward up the stairs so she didn’t strain herself, October knew that it was time for her to think about leaving. But first the Mound Builders had put something on her mind.

  Down on Bridge Street, the very bricks gave off heat waves, but the town had put new benches around some of the trees, and she noticed that white people sat around the trees, but black folks did, too. Just not together. It had been years since she actually shopped along there, and now they had a mall—five stores and a cafeteria. She wanted something for David, and it shouldn’t be a toy.

  Inside Seider’s, on a shelf against the mirror, she saw tiny figurines, crystal ballerinas, marble paperweights. And intricate, carved wooden things, a turtle with mother-of-pearl inlaid on the shell. And then it—a carved bicycle that could fit into her hand, with spoked wheels that actually moved and a tiny mother-of-pearl bicycle seat. A collector’s item—had to be—and expensive. But this was the thing she wanted that would say to David, I was here.

  Saturday she would be hitting the road. She thought she would give it to him Friday night. But Wednesday night after dinner, David—happy that Vergie was herself and his again—volunteered to help with the dishes. Vergie had been sitting drying, while October washed. Vergie laughed and handed him the dish towel.

  “Let me see what you can do, boy,” she said.

  October handed him a plate and he wiped it dry, put it on the table. “See,” he said. Then he said, “Auntie Oc said if I come to stay with her I have to do the dishes.”

  What did he want to say that for? October looked at Vergie and Vergie straightened her back.

  “Who said anything about going to stay with your auntie?”

  October started out, “I told him that if—”

  And Vergie cut her off. “I’m asking David.”

  David said, “If you and Daddy wanted me to, I could go see Aunt October by myself.”

  “Well, me and your daddy don’t want you to. We take you to see Aunt October. That’s how we do it.”

  “Vergie,” October tried again, “I just thought—”

  “That’s okay,” Vergie said. “David heard me. He knows now.”

  And she took the towel from David.

  And then Thursday morning before the sun got hot the three of them sat on the front porch, October and Ver
gie jabbering about flowers, David listening in. Again, Mr. Master-of-the-House had a bright idea and went in to get them all a glass of lemonade. Very nice, David. Then a truck went by, and the kids in the back waved and hollered to David. He waved back.

  He said to October, “That’s Ronnie and Brenda.”

  Vergie said, “Ronald Stuart’s kids—remember him?”

  Then David told her, “Momma, Brenda said you had a operation so you can’t have a baby anymore.”

  Vergie looked at October, and they both shook their heads. October took that moment to sip her lemonade.

  Vergie told him, “If God wants me to have another baby. He’ll put one in my stomach.”

  And David, clever boy, said to her, “Auntie didn’t say God could put a baby in your stomach, did you, Auntie?”

  If color could drain from Vergie’s face, it did then.

  “I said you should ask your mother,” October said. “Remember, I said that she would tell you where babies come from?”

  October saw the storm behind Vergie’s eyes. Without a word, Vergie got up and moved so fast she knocked over the glass of lemonade next to her chair. She went inside and slammed the door.

  David’s face—and October was sure hers too—was a complete question mark. She chased Vergie inside. Vergie had gone on upstairs to her room, off limits, but October had to talk to her. And David had come halfway up the stairs, too.

  The bedroom door was shut. October tapped lightly. “Vergie, can I come in?” Vergie didn’t answer, just suddenly opened the door. She had wiped tears. And when she saw David coming behind October she yelled at him, “Boy, get back downstairs before I light up your hind parts!”

  October stepped in, and Vergie closed the door and leaned against it.

  “What did you tell him?” Vergie asked her.

  October said, “Nothing.” She hadn’t told him anything except that he should ask his mother how he got into her stomach.