My Drowning (20 page)

IN MY KITCHEN
, now, a rage comes on me, a quiet one, but strong enough to bind me across the ribs and rob my breath. As if someone is waiting for me to cook for him, to bring him something, as if one of my brothers or husbands or uncles or my daddy or my grandaddy or the sheriff or some other man has asked me to bring him something that he is probably sitting in plain sight of. Bring me a cup of coffee. Get me a biscuit. Find my suspenders, these pants are baggy. You need to
do some laundry so I have some clean clothes to wear. The voices wait at the ready. I have heard them all my life.

I go outside, I shake my head to clear it. I have a little yard and I walk in it, I admire the bloom of my azaleas and scoop up the petals that have fallen to the ground and put them in a plastic bag. My neighbor thinks me crazy for doing this but I hate the sight of flower petals decaying on the ground underneath the flowers that are still alive. I dump the petals behind the shed where there are also piles of decaying roses, dogwood blossoms and even the remains of a few camellias. The smell of the roses overpowers everything, even the honey-suckle. I take a deep breath of it. But still in my mind's eye I see Nora's hands working the biscuit dough, a morning so long ago.

WHEN MAMA LUMBERED
barefoot into the kitchen, her house-dress already hanging limp on her shoulders, I asked her if I could go to church. Right away, Nora chimed in, “There's still a whole lot of your work you haven't done, missy.”

“I know I have to do everything before I go.” I turned to Mama with an expression I imagined as earnest and appealing. “I promise I'll do my work.”

“I don't need you worrying me about no church this morning.”

“Please, Mama, let me, I want to go so bad.”

“I said, don't bother me youngun, else I'll take this firewood after you.” She waved a split log at me, standing with the stove grate open and studying the fire. I stepped back by instinct; she had clubbed me on the head with firewood often enough. “I waked up with a headache this morning.”

Nora added, smiling at me, “There's a whole pot of beans for you to wash up here on the counter. You need to get your ass to work.”

When I neglected to move to the beans quickly enough, Mama cuffed me across the face, a warning sting. The movement startled me and I backed up, blinking, toward the pot of beans.

I washed the beans, swollen from their soaking overnight, and then lifted them out a handful at a time, cleaning out the husks, the dark beans and the ones that were deformed. Nora could not abide a deformed bean in her pot and she was sure to find the very one I let get past me. While I was working she fixed on me like a hawk.

NOW IN MY
own home, as I stand over the sink pouring water over a pot of dry white limas, I am thinking, almost out loud, I should not cook the beans because they will give me gas. Anyway, I have much better food than beans these days. I have fluffy clean white bread in loaves, some stacked in the freezer from the recent sale at Food Lion, I have pork chop thawing and sandwich meat, ham and turkey. Not one ounce of fatback or bologna resides in my house. I have frozen vegetables from my garden, and jars of canned tomatoes in the pantry. I have learned to make a pickle or two. Nowadays I can eat beans because I have a taste for them, and today I do. So here I am standing over the mouth of the drain sifting my hands through the heaviness of white beans in water.

I scoop off the husks, the dark ones, the ones that are deformed. I will not abide a deformed bean in my pot. I must sift and sort till I have found every last one.

But the memory of that Sunday morning hangs me up: the drifting nature of the memory, like smoke, so fragrant when you catch it. I stand in my clean white kitchen. I step to the back door, I wipe my hands on a towel and pause where I can see the blooming of the roses beside the shed. I have the smell of beans and water on my hands, and the heady drift of the honeysuckle from the fence. The vivid present brings up the vivid past, and for a moment I am standing again in that dingy kitchen so long ago, my hands in the pot, the pile of beans shimmering in the cracked bowl, the water cloudy.

But I shake my head and I am watching my roses, years later, and I wonder what connects the two times when at the same moment floods me the fact that I already know. The smell of honeysuckle. Through my backyard, as through that dark kitchen on a long-ago Sunday, flows the smell of honeysuckle in full bloom, the heady thick odor drifting through the kitchen, overpowering even the smell of the half-rancid sausage Nora has begun to fry.

Again I shake my head and this time I have moved toward the roses, I am walking, startled as if I do not know how I could have gotten here.

I am thinking, I want to go to church. I want to sit in the pews with a clean dress. I don't care if somebody has to go with me. We will sing the songs of church and we will think of the Lord on high and we will pray some prayers. Maybe I will see Aunt Addis and she will sit with me. Maybe Carl Jr. will come with me; he can sleep on the back pew like always. All the while I sort and grade the beans I am thinking about the holy face of Christ that I see in church sometimes. Alma Laura has also seen the face of Christ. His glory hangs over us
like a big balloon. Alma Laura will go without me if Mama won't let me go. I don't think it's fair for Alma Laura to be so free when I am not. But Alma Laura would probably see things differently.

“I'm always cold of a morning,” Mama muttered, standing so near the stove she is apt to cook herself.

“I'm done with the kettle,” I said, “you want me to rinse that biscuit pan?”

“I barely got the biscuits made,” Nora said, glancing sideways at me. “You tame your little ass down. Breakfast won't go any faster because you're jumping up and down to get to that church.”

Carl Jr. shuffled in, scratching his head. “What's wrong with Ellen wanting to go to church? I'll go with her, you know Daddy won't let her go by herself. If I can get a clean shirt.”

“You ain't got but one clean shirt and it ain't ironed.”

“Then Ellen can iron it and I can go,” Carl Jr. said, and I was already reaching for the flatirons to warm them on the stove.

“Look at her move now,” said Nora with a sneer.

I was transfixed by her expression for a moment, the meanness of that look, and at the same time I grew aware that her body had become different than it was, more curved. The cotton dress clung to her breasts and thighs. I studied Nora in her meanness, a memory as vivid as the scent of the drooping arm of this rosebush covered with blossom, so thick with smell I am almost drunk.

I have buried my sister Nora, in the present. She died of kidney disease some months ago. All her children came to
her funeral and cried, and in spite of the fact that my sister lay dead, I thought it was a fine sight. I thought my sister had done well for herself, to have so many children willing to cry at her funeral. Since then I have visited her grave and I know she waits in it, her body anticipating resurrection in her dry vault.

But the Nora I cannot escape is the one who rises out of me, the one who turns to me when I am setting the pot of beans on the stove. “You let them beans alone now, you'll ruin them if you put in the salt. You let me season them beans.”

I IRONED CARL JR
.'
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shirt and Mama refused to say a word, though she glared at me now and again. I checked the biscuits in the oven and told Nora when the tops toasted brown. I boiled the grits and kept them stirred, in between resting the flatirons on the hot stove, and ironing the shirt, and carrying Carl Jr. his coffee with three spoons of sugar. I moved from one task to another like a good girl without complaining. I thought about my blue skirt and white blouse that were nearly new given to me by Mama's sister Lucy Baker as hand-me-down from her daughter my age. I had only worn this outfit to church twice before and now I could space it with the green check dress Mama had bought me out of my money from working in cotton and tobacco over the summer. I had begun to think of that money as my money now, even though she still collected it, kept it and spent it as she pleased. I could wear one outfit one week and one outfit the next. This made church easier to deal with than school, where two outfits did not last so long.

When Daddy shuffled into the kitchen scratching his behind through his overalls, I brought him a hot biscuit and he tossed it from one hand to the other while I rinsed out his coffee cup and wiped it dry.

“You make me sick.” Nora glared at me as I moved back and forth.

“She twists that little ass around here like she's going somewhere. I ain't said she could go nowhere.” When I approached the stove, Mama cuffed me again to warn me, not much harder than before, but I still backed out of range. “That goddamn church will fill your head with a bunch of mess. I know all about Jesus. Jesus can wipe my goddamn ass, that's what Jesus can do.”

Nora pouted over the kettle of hot water, the plate of sausage dripping with grease, the pot of grits. I fed Madson and the baby, then I ate, but by then the grits were mostly cold.

When I had eaten the last mouthful of grits, Carl Jr. said, “Get your dress on. It's a long walk to that church and I don't want to bust in on them people when they're ringing that bell.”

No one else said anything, except Daddy, who muttered, “That girl is crazy for a church, ain't she?” I slipped quickly away from the table and hurried to the bedroom where I splashed water on my face and searched for a clean slip.

I had no Bible to carry but I pretended, as we walked, that I had a black leather Bible with the words of Jesus printed in red letters, as well as a hat and white gloves, wrist-length, as fine as any rich man's daughter. We took a cut through the woods back of a couple of shacks where the colored people
lived, a teeny naked boychild creeping through the yard in a tee shirt but no pants, carrying the slop bucket toward the johnny house, his miniscule wee wee jiggling at every step. His round black bottom glistened with dew. I was embarrassed to look, but Carl Jr. hooted at him to make sure he knew he had been seen.

Miss Ruby Jarman was out walking in the tiny yard at the back of the store, where it butts up against a clay bank, but when she saw us out so early headed for church, she ducked back behind the building, curlers clutched at her stringy gray hair. Spread over her bare white calves like spiderweb lay nets and vines of blue vein, like something that had ruptured.

We could hear the welcoming music flood down the hill from the church while cars turned into the driveway and people climbed the steep bank.

“We're going into the house of God,” I reminded Carl Jr. as we began to trudge up the driveway.

“You betcha,” he agreed, and we walked right in.

For the introductory service before the Sunday School session we sat at the back of the sanctuary, farther than which Carl Jr. refused to go. Usually he would stretch out on the back pew to sleep during the Sunday School class. Carl Jr. was a thoughtful sleeper and never snored.

As for me, I sat politely and anxiously among the other Sunday School children, keeping my back straight and sitting with my hands in my lap in such a picture-perfect way that I could continue to imagine myself as having gloves on my hands and a Bible in them.

Today I managed to get a seat next to June Frances Taylor in the Sunday School class, and she smiled at me and passed
me a note. It was a real note; I had half expected it, tangibly white and crispy, and I could hardly wait to sneak to open it at my side, where I read, with a thrill down my spine, “My Ma says you can have Sunday dinner with us today. Say yes or no, your friend, June Frances Taylor.” She had even made narrow “yes or no” blanks so I could check one or the other, though I had brought no pencil.

I blushed and raised my eyes shyly.

June Frances watched me cautiously out of the corner of her eyes, and I blushed more and nodded.

Behind her head, Alma Laura appeared and sat demurely with her hands in her lap.

The window hung open, and with every passing breeze the room washed with waves of honeysuckle, a huge old vine that ran along the fence at the back of the church.

IT IS AS
if she is with me now, here, in the present. As if I will find her somewhere working the soil of my yard. I have lived with the dead so long, it's hard to tell who's who sometimes.

I am smelling the roses in my own yard to block out the scent of the honeysuckle from long ago.

I am lost in that Sunday in the past, and I have no idea whether Mama will allow me to go to the Taylors' for dinner. We work for the Taylors in their fields. I have chopped many a row of Mr. Albert Taylor's cotton since I grew old enough to wield a hoe. I have handed many a truck of green tobacco to the loopers, and I have picked my share of cotton. Mr. Taylor is a placid man who never raises his voice, who always shaves clean and behaves circumspectly. June Taylor stands like him, with her shoulders slightly slumped, and she
stares at the ground when she walks, as if checking for potholes and such.

June Taylor is in my grade at school, but I have never visited her at home. Maybe that explains why this memory clings to me vividly. Sometimes she brings two cheese sandwiches for lunch, and when she does, I can have one; I can still taste it. She sits next to me and speaks to me in a quiet voice as if we have always been friends, and offers me the cheese sandwich without a word, without even asking, so that I do not have to say, yes, I want the sandwich. The weight of it rests in my lap. I unwrap the wax paper, inhaling the fresh bread, the scent of yeast. Smooth and white, the mayonnaise. My stomach is gurgling, and I already wish for something to drink with my sandwich.

I wish I could see her now. I heard years ago she ran a diner down the highway from here, maybe in Smithfield or Luma, I can hardly remember. I wonder whether she still owns it; I hope she is still alive. She would have aged straight and tall, I think. Hair pulled back neatly off her face and no bangs. The skin of her forehead always shone very clear and white.