A Gracious Plenty (3 page)

I
KNOW THE WAY
mothers go crazy. I lost Ma that way, my sweet ma, who let herself die over sins she didn’t commit. In the days before my burning, while Papa was tending graves, Ma played with me all the time. We played library, and I got to be the librarian, and Ma was the little girl. We played Singing Sisters, and Ma cut cattails from the ditch, and we put on concerts for the squirrels. She let me help her in the garden. She let me play in the rain. She let me toss my dolls into mud holes, stir them around, and make doll soup.

She showed me trees to climb and taught me how to climb them. She knew the places to pick grapes and helped me fill my bucket. She took me to the circus and bought me candy cotton. And then one day when she wasn’t looking, she let me burn off my face.

Ma never recovered from that.

She kept herself alive for ten years after, but every day was a task. And she cried. My happy ma cried. She touched my cheek and wept like widows and orphans. Even years later, when I was healed, she cried that way.

Ma got skinny and distant. She didn’t sit on the porch with me and Papa, and she didn’t talk. She did the laundry and made the beds, kept the garden and cooked the meals, and she never complained. She never left the house anymore, and when Papa would send me on errands, she’d say, “Sam, you can’t send
her
.” She told me once that I didn’t have to go to school if the children made fun of me. She told me she’d teach me herself.

And once when I came home hurt by words, insisting that I’d never show my face in public again, Ma pulled out her wedding dress, the dress she’d been saving for me, and she ripped the yellowed tulle and satin, pulling the skirt from the bodice to stitch me veils.

I swore I’d never wear them.

In the nights, she’d come to my bed and touch my scars, stroking my skin and crying sometimes. In the end, she couldn’t even cry anymore, and her own fingers were nothing but dust on my cheeks. She died slow, eaten away by her own insides.

Ma loved me, but she didn’t burn me. And the burns were hard to live with, but not as hard as being left stranded. Sometimes I get so mad, I kick her stone.

T
HERE IS WORK
required of all who pass away. The Dead control the seasons. Everything depends on them. In June, the Dead tunnel earthworms, crack the shells of bird eggs, poke the croaks from frogs. The ones who died children make play of their work, blowing bugs from weed to weed, aerating fields with their cartwheels. They thump the bees and send them out to pollinate gardenias.

The ones who died old cue the roosters to crow and dismiss the dawn each morning. They time the tides, give directions to wind. They serve as midwives at animal births and reach out to stroke the dying sun’s head until the rays spread pink and orange across the sky.

The ones who died strong push the rivers downstream, pull at clouds and keep the sky in motion. They green the grass and tug it taller, grab tree trunks and stretch them upward in tiny bits.

The ones who died passionate kiss each bud and pinch its base until it pops open, surprised. The ones who died shy string spiderwebs, almost invisible. There’s a job for everybody, on any given day. The Dead are generous with their gifts to the living.

Unless, of course, they are angry, and then they call the bees away so that nothing will bloom. When they are angry, the Dead catch the rain in their hands, bury it in their pockets, and laugh when the hard ground cracks.

But for now, it is June. The season is easy. The season is new. The Dead are content today.

The Dead always have their bodies to fall back on, but if they want to move through walls, they can take the shapes of termites. They can ride a breeze the way a song does. And, contrary to myth, they do not wear their burial garments for all eternity. Who would want to spend eternity in a musty Sunday suit? The Dead, they have some choices. They can wear whatever they like.

Lucy Armageddon wears tight patched jeans, a suede vest. Her hair stays knotted in light brown dreads—the way she grew it when she rejected pageantry and hot rollers—her face and arms still sunburnt. I watch her summoning clouds from her tombstone. She pauses to wave, and I’m glad her arms are strong. I’m needing a storm.

I work my way through the cemetery with my weed-eater, speaking to everyone I know. I meet Papa near the riverbank, Papa, who has only been dead for a couple of years. He still carries his smell, sweet and musky, like the deodorant he always wore. The traces of aftershave are fading, but Papa is still distinct to me. If he didn’t turn to air when we hugged, I’d believe he was full-bodied.

“Where you off to?” I ask him.

“Gotta peel the skins from snakes today,” he says. “Dangerous work, but somebody’s gotta do it.” And we laugh because the snakes won’t see him at all. They won’t even know he’s been around.

“Where’s Ma?” I ask. I haven’t seen her much lately.

“Doing light duty,” he says with a smile. “She’s off to pinken tomatoes in all the gardens. She’s getting so light that nobody much notices her anymore.”

Ma has been buried almost thirty years. She’s come a long way in that time. We will all be proud for her when she fades.

Papa asks if I need anything.

A mess of butter beans for supper, I tell him, if he sees somebody with nothing to do. I try to kiss him good-bye, but as usual, it’s just a gesture, and he is gone.

When I go to be with the Dead, I feel it like a hazing, like the air before a summer storm, almost like a fog. The world around me opens, loosely woven, spaced for wind to sift through and blow my meanness out. But I never get there completely. I never get there in body. It’s a partial reunion, with no way to really touch them except in my mind.

T
HE
V
EGETABLE
M
AN
is still alive but smokes so hard and coughs so dark that he may not be for long. He comes each week, his rusty truck rattling predictably into the parking lot of the church just two blocks from the gate. Then he blows his horn three times long, two times short, and I can hear it all the way over here, even if I’m at the back of the cemetery, clipping the vines that grow along the fence. When the horn blows, I know that within the hour, the Vegetable Man will be stopping by.

He visits regularly in summer and fall, though I don’t see him as much come winter. He has a cousin buried here, but most of his people are up in Petersburg.

I don’t buy from him. He buys from me, at a discount. Sometimes I trade him squash for peas, potatoes for rutabagas or other things I don’t grow.

“Damn, almighty,” the Vegetable Man says. “Not an ounce of fertilizer, you say?”

“Not an ounce.”

My squash plants grow eight feet tall, sometimes ten. The potatoes come thirty to a hill some years. Though the Vegetable Man has seen my garden before, he shakes his head and laughs as he loads up his truck. He is old, with white stubble that never grows to a beard. He’s worn the same boil on the side of his nose for as long as I’ve known him.

“God have mercy,” he says. “My wife could make drawers out of them squash leaves, and she’s got an
ass
on her, too.” He laughs and coughs, and bits of the raw turnip he’s been chewing spray into the basket of onions.

The back of his truck is full of rust and dirt. He’s built a wooden awning over the truck bed, but now the wood is dark and softened, shadowing the vegetables but not offering much protection from rain. The brown paper sacks are held down by a bushel of string beans, a half-bushel of okra. Today he pays me in quarters and crumpled bills, pulling money from every pocket and a greasy five from beneath his hat. He throws in a couple of pears, “to have with your supper,” he says.

At the store, they’ve stopped selling my vegetables—since Reba Baker took over and made the place a “Christian establishment.” They say it’s unnatural for cucumbers to grow so fast, so long. I ask them what they think fertilizer
is
. And ain’t nothing never died in their yard? A possum or coon? I’ve been eating my vegetables all my life and couldn’t die if I tried. I tell them that, but the only time they sell what I’ve grown is when the Vegetable Man does it for me, without their knowing.

“You going to the store?” I ask him.

“Done been,” he says. “Reba made me swear I hadn’t been up here ’fore she bought anything. Sniffed everything I sold her to see if it stunk of death.”

“She thinks death stinks, she ought to get a whiff of her breath,” I retort.

Then the Vegetable Man cackles and shakes his head. “You being nasty, Finch. Reba ain’t that bad.”

“Maybe what’s bad to you’s different from what’s bad to me,” I say. “But I got no use for Reba Baker. She
claims
to be Christian,
claims
to do good and love everybody. But don’t matter how many raffle tickets she sells to help crippled children. Don’t matter. She’s full of hate and venom.”

“You women fight ugly,” he says as he climbs into the cab of his truck. “I ain’t getting involved. No siree, I’m just gone take these pickins I got from you and sell ’em over at Foxbridge. You ain’t gotta worry. I can
sell
your vegetables.” He cranks up, and his engine rattles like loose dentures. “See you directly.”

When he’s gone, I wash off the pears at the outside spigot for fear he’s spit turnips on them, too. I put one in my pocket and bite into the second. It’s sweet, but not as sweet as the ones on the tree next to Ma’s grave.

A cat I don’t recognize rubs between my ankles, and I pick it up and scratch its ears. It purrs and tries to climb into my mouth, smelling the pear that somebody else grew. Sweet cat. I drop it on the ground and jingle the change in my pocket. Two dollars in silver, three dollars in ones, and an oily five. Money I don’t particularly need. It’s not about money, selling the vegetables. I’d give them away for free. It’s not about money at all.

I try to imagine the hands that picked these pears. I try to imagine the hands that planted the pear tree that grew the pear I’m eating. I try to imagine the yard that tree is in. Or is it a grove? A graveyard? I try to imagine the Dead who called down the storm that watered that tree that grew the pear that I eat.

I decide that tomorrow I’ll see Reba myself. I’ll pay her in change and wait while she counts it. If she won’t eat my vegetables, I’ll make her take my money. In one way or another, she’ll handle what I’ve touched.

T
HE NEWEST GRAVE
here belongs to William Parker Blott. Unlike most people who are buried first and later crowned with a headstone, Blott and his monument arrived together, a week after he died. His family paid the engravers so much money that they stopped what they were doing to design Blott’s new home. And what a home it is! It took two ton trucks and a crane just to place it. We’d never seen anything like it before.

William Blott woke to death disillusioned. Like everyone else, he was disappointed to find that death wasn’t what he’d thought. There were no lounge singers singing his name, no chorus lines kicking to welcome him here. There were no photographers snapping pictures, no symphonies, no hullabaloo. There weren’t even the predictable things—the saints waiting by walls of jasper, the harp music. There was no deep-flowing river with a raft waiting to carry him across. He was not reborn into a different body. Not a child, a tree, or a common bug. He was not unconscious, as he’d hoped.

And he was most definitely not at rest.

In the grave beside him, a baby was weeping shrill.

The Mediator welcomed him and shook his slippery hand. “William Parker Blott,” she said. “Welcome, William Parker Blott.” The Mediator, with her periwinkle robe, the gold pipes shining in her hair, she told him the facts. “You sleep in the coffin, you work in the air. Think of it as a pantry. In life, you lived on just one shelf. Now you’re on two. The one above life, the one below, to help you see where you’ve been. To teach you how to be honest.”

The others waited to see how he’d respond, shaking their heads, tittering.

“You’re heavy now,” the Mediator told him. “You won’t rise up for a while. Our whole business here is to lighten, and when you’re wholly weightless, you’ll move to the next level.”

“Ugh,” Blott said.

“I know,” the Mediator told him. “Those morticians overdo it with the glue,” and she moistened his lips with vinegar to break the seal.

The curious neighbors watched him recover his muscles and test his fingers and toes. The ones from plots far away tiptoed closer, peeking to see his face.

“It works like this,” the Mediator explained. “The Dead coax the natural world along. We’re responsible for weather and tides and seasons. For rebirth and retribution. You’re going to enjoy it, I’m sure. But if you want to know
real
enlightenment, you’ve got to lose the weight. All of it. And we’re not just talking about blubber here, either. We’re talking about burdens and secrets, buster. This is critical information, so listen up.

“In this place you’ve moved beyond experience. Now it’s your stories that keep you down. You can’t leave until you’ve told them.”

William Blott, never much of a talker, moaned, and the Mediator touched his head. The way he recoiled, she might have been a serpent or an apparition, a dangerous thing indeed.

“You don’t have to worry,” she comforted. “You won’t be lonely. You’ll learn a great deal about yourself and your kind. There
are
advantages.”

“Not too many advantages,” I whispered to Lucy. “He’s got the plot next to
Marcus Livingston
!”

“He’s in for a surprise,” Lucy said. “I hope he likes babies with big lungs.”

And sure enough, it wasn’t long until Marcus began to squall full volume. William Blott collapsed into a ball and hid his ears.

The next evening, I was trimming the grass around the edges of Papa’s stone, my hands and knees denting the earth. “He’s never gonna speak at this rate,” I told Papa.

“You might be right,” he answered. “Then there’ll be two of ’em up on that hill sitting heavy and turning the ground to acid. I don’t know how Rulene Thornton stands it, making her home up there.”