Getting Mother's Body (13 page)

“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.”

“They're gonna cement the ground on Thursday,” I says.

“Course, I won't get as much money for them as I hoped,” Dill says, thinking all about her pigs and not listening to me. “Yr uncle wants a piglet, and he can't pay. That's gonna cost me.”

“Willa Mae wouldn't of wanted me to have this Snipes baby,” I says.

“That's likely,” Dill says.

“She woulda wanted to help me out.”

“Who knows,” Dill says, her face going blank.

“Me getting the treasure would help,” I says.

“Ten times ten is a hundred,” Dill says.

“That's the plan I'm thinking,” I says.

Dill looks in her book, reading down the rows of figures and talks like the words she's saying is written down.

“If yr mother had wanted you to have her pearl necklace and her diamond ring she woulda gived them to you before she died,” Dill says.

“She didn't know she was dying.”

“She laid there breathing her last breaths and when she passed you clapped yr hands together and said ‘good riddance.' ” Dill says.

“I was talking about that baby she didn't want, not about her.”

“That's what you say now, but I heard you with my own ears. You was thinking what I was thinking. And I was glad to see her go,” Dill says. She turns the pages of her book like I'm not there. “You figure you just gonna waltz out there and dig her up and get rich.”

“I need the money.”

“She wanted to take her jewelry with her and it's bad luck to go against the wishes of the dead, ain't it?”

“Maybe not,” I says.

I look at Dill who has looked up from her book to stare at me. She got a face shaped like a skull with skin, blacker than mine, stretched over it tight. Mother said that Dill, even though she weren't really a man, was the most handsome man she'd ever met. But Dill weren't never handsome to me.

Dill crosses the room and sits in her big yellow-covered recliner, flipping through the pages of her accounts book. I stand by her desk, not moving. She closes her book and closes her eyes, leaning her head back, her long body folded in half by the chair.

“I sleep here cause Jez got the bed,” she says. “It ain't bad, sleeping in a chair.”

Her ring of keys is on her desk. One of them keys is to her new truck.

“I can't loan you bus fare. You should stay here, have the Snipes baby and make the best of it,” Dill says advising.

I cross the room as quiet as possible, opening the screen door and gulping in the night air. The air loosens up the pig smell.

“I'ma go to LaJunta and get that treasure,” I says.

Dill don't say nothing for a minute. It's like she's looking at me through her closed eyelids. I go out on the porch, letting the screen door slam behind me.

“Suit yrself,” Dill yells through the screen. “Suit yr goddamn knocked-up self.”

DILL SMILES

I miss her. Willa Mae. Much as I hated her. Much as I was glad to see her dead. Much as every shovelful of dirt I dug up for her grave made me smile, much as I enjoyed that fool Nestor, the undertaker with his bundle of measuring strings, pulling a string from her head to her foot and glancing at his wife who would say “got it,” then a string measuring her thickness, lingering a little too long around the body so that while I didn't say nothing, I didn't think it was my place to say nothing, I didn't think it was my place to say, “You undertaking fool, get your dirty string from round her breasts,” his wife coughed and he eased the string off. Then folding her arms to her chest and a string to measure her hips.

“We got a coffin that'll fit her,” Nestor goes.

“Praise God for that,” his wife says. “On account of the heat,” she adds. They had the coffin delivered by the end of the day. The wife washed the body and he watched. He drained the stomach and she watched. A plot at the cemetery cost more money than I had so Ma said it was OK for me to bury Willa right on her land. I dug the grave myself. I dug it myself and every shovelful of dirt made me smile. Willa Mae Beede was finally dead. And I was glad.

Folks in Lincoln heard I buried her and sorta stepped back from me after that. I became the one who had buried Willa Mae Beede. I became someone who had dug a grave and lowered their woman down into it. When a person do something like that, who knows what else they gonna do. Don't start nothing with Dill Smiles. Dill Smiles'll kill you with a look. Stuff like that, that's how the talk went for a while and I didn't mind. I mighta kilt her if she hadn't run off. I was gonna kill Son, but he ran off before I could get around to it.

His name was Son. Son Walker. Billy's daddy. The first man Willa ran around on me with but not the last. She met him in the jail in Lubbock and he drove her home to me then he stayed for a week. He had three trunks full of clothes. They'd go at it night and day. Then one day he drove off and she walked around the house like she was gonna die.

“Where you think he's at, Dill?” she would ask me.

“You got to put him out yr mind,” I said.

“You think he loves me?” she asked. I didn't say nothing to that, I just leaned more over my calculations books. There was, as there'd been the year before, more loss than profits.

I'm sitting here in my chair. One lamp on in this room and another one down the hall where Jez and her piglets are. Billy walked out the house slamming the door just like Willa used to leave. Before Billy was born, she would leave by herself, going all the way to Brownsville and calling me to wire her money cause her car had four flats. I took the bus down, fixed the flats myself and we'd drive back together. Then she got put in the Lubbock jail for drinking and cursing. When she came home from Lubbock, she had a man called Son Walker driving her car. He drove the car, Willa, and me right into the ground.

In my mind Willa's standing in my front yard, wearing her tight red dress. She says her car's broke and I look under the hood then turn the key. It starts.

“You got a way with automobiles,” she says.

“Yes, ma'am,” I says. I don't tell that her car didn't have nothing wrong with it, that it was just overheated. We go driving. Driving all day long and in my bed at my house that night.

“You love me, Dill?” she wants to know.

“Hells no,” I says.

I put her in the ground cause she asked me to. And she asked me to bury her with her favorite things. Her ring and necklace. But I didn't. I took them and I weren't wrong to take them. I took them and I sold the pearls one by one, for a hell of a lot more than ten dollars a piece, to keep myself afloat and I weren't wrong to sell them. And when I need to sell the ring, I'll sell it. Until then, I'll keep it in my pocket. And I'm not wrong to keep it in my pocket. Willa owed me the right to sell the necklace and she will owe me the right, when I need it, to cash in the ring. The bitch ran around on me and disrespected me in the street. The way I see it, me taking the fast-running, no-count, trifling bitch's goods is only fair. Still. I miss her.

LAZ JACKSON

I walk around at night cause I get my best thinking done when I'm walking in the dark. Also in the dark, there's people in they houses with they lights on and I walk by sometimes looking in, seeing what I can see. I see them eating dinner, or listening to the radio or watching the TV. Sometimes I see them at it. There's no one on the road most nights, except cars, going by fast, with they lights blaring in my face. Tonight, just past Dill's, there's someone.

“Halt, who goes there?” I says, trying to sound like Errol Flynn do in the pictures.

“It's me,” Billy says. “You out peeping and creeping?”

“I'm just walking. People keep they lights on, it ain't my fault,” I says.

Billy got something shiny and jingling in her hand. I hear it jingle and look towards it but she hides her hand behind her back before I can see.

“Whatchu doing out walking?” I ask her.

“I was over to see Dill. She got new piglets.”

“Thought you was going to LaJunta.”

“Tomorrow on the bus,” she says.

“The bus don't run Sunday,” I says.

“I know that,” she says, but I can tell she'd forgot.

I look her straight in the eyes and she looks down at the ground. “Snipes weren't worth yr time,” I says.

“I ain't studying no Snipes,” she says. Her voice is just a little sad. She looks down the road towards the filling station. There's one light on, the big sign that says Sanderson's Gas. She walks away from me backwards so I can't see what she got hidden behind her. I follow her and we walk down the side of the road like that. Her walking backwards and me walking forwards, in her face.

“If the moon wasn't out I wouldn't be able to even see you,” she says.

“You as black as I am,” I says.

“No I'm not,” she says.