Men We Reaped (17 page)

That night, after my mother had fussed at me for forgetting my key again, after we'd all been bathed and ordered to bed, I lay awake in the dark, staring at the ceiling, trying to see the dresser, our stuffed animals, my lonely fish in its small, plastic rectangular tank the size of a saucer. I wanted them to
glow brightly, to pacify me and let me know I was not alone, but they stood silently in the darkness, beyond my view. I was tempted to shake Nerissa awake so she'd open her eyes because I knew they would be white in the dark and she would at least grunt at me, but I did not. Along with the responsibilities I'd resumed when my father left again, his departure renewed my sense of abandonment, worthlessness. While I lay next to my sleeping sisters, questioning my father's love, I equated the cellar out in the woods with my deserved misery. Instead of waking Nerissa, I pictured the open mouth of that cellar off in the darkness, in the future, gaping as a grave.

The next day, I didn't ask my friend Kelly about the cellar, or my friend Tamika, or my friend Cynthia. Instead, I stood barefoot in the empty lot next to our house, still thinking about it, while half listening to Kelly talk.

“Girl, have you heard that new song by that White rapper?”

I looked confused.

“He is so fine,” she said. I was thirteen by then, all slim lines and teeth and unruly hair that my mother had first given up on combing, and then attempted to tame with a relaxer. When Kelly said this, she smiled and her entire body shook, the woman parts of her moving like water. Kelly was fourteen. She rolled her eyes.

“Wait till you see him.”

When I saw him on television, the White rapper was all hard lines and sequins. There were other boys I saw in the
neighborhood who I thought were more attractive, boys with prominent cheekbones and black hair and dark, almost black eyes. Boys who looked like my father when he was younger. But I had no boyfriends. I thought I was too skinny and ugly to get a boyfriend: I would never approach and speak to a boy I didn't know, and most times they wouldn't approach me either. And if they did, I didn't feel flattered. I felt embarrassed. But Kelly had boyfriends, and so did Crissy, one of my friends from the middle school in Pass Christian. We still talked on the phone sometimes, and she told me stories.

“I almost had sex,” she said.

“Huh?”

“I did.”

“Really?”

“My boyfriend came over and my mama wasn't home. We was in the room and we was kissing and stuff. He tried to put it in, but it wouldn't go.”

“Oh,” I said, amazed at her brazenness.

“I guess that meant God didn't think it was the right time,” she said.

We were thirteen, but even so I was surprised by her mention of God. My ideas about God at the time were that He'd have nothing whatsoever to do with sanctioning an unwed woman, a teenager, having sex, so I didn't understand Crissy's logic.

“I guess not,” I said.

We weren't allowed to let kids into our house when our mother was at work for the day, and mostly I didn't want to. We met our friends on the street or in the woods, and in Gulf-port, all of my friends were girls. Even though my girlfriends
were dating, I didn't want to. I was still reading books and playing with dolls in secret. I let a boy into my mother's house once when she was at work, but I did not let him in because I thought he was attractive, or because I wanted something to happen between us; I let him and his friend in because I thought they were Joshua's friends. It was a disaster. It was a few weeks after we'd found the cellar, and two boys we knew from the neighborhood came by. Phillip was actually Joshua's friend, skinnier than my brother and maybe a few inches taller, and he liked to wear his hair in a lopsided Gumby cut. His friend was a boy named Thomas, who was around my age, twelve, and we didn't know him well. He was taller than Phillip, by at least a foot, and thick. He had a wide, flat nose, and his shoulders seemed lopsided, set at an angle, like whatever aligned him was askew.

“Can we come in?” Thomas asked.

Joshua and Charine and Nerissa were in the living room, watching
You Can't Do That on Television
, and I stood at the side door that opened to the carport. The day was bright and hot beyond them, the bugs loudly lamenting the heat. The house was cool, even though my mother kept the thermostat at eighty to save money on her electricity bill during the summertime. We were threatened with whipping if we changed the setting. We never did.

“I guess,” I said.

The two boys followed me into the living room. Phillip sat on the sofa next to Josh, and they began talking. I sat on the long sofa. Nerissa and Charine looked up from their playing for a moment, dolls in mid-meal on the floor, and then went back to it.

“Can I sit next to you?” Thomas asked.

“I guess,” I said.

Thomas sat next to me on the sofa.

“What y'all been doing today?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Watching TV.”

“It's hot out there.”

“Yeah.”

Thomas scooted closer. His leg touched mine. I scooted over, further into the crack of the sofa.

“Where y'all mama?”

“Work,” I said.

Thomas edged closer so his leg was touching mine again, and I tried to scoot over, but I was jammed into the arm of the sofa. I couldn't understand why he wasn't talking to Josh and Phillip.

“Why you keep scooting over?” Thomas asked.

I shrugged, turning a shoulder to him and leaned away from his face. Josh and Phillip, still talking and laughing, walked out the side door. It closed behind them.

“I like you,” Thomas said.

I was mute. He pressed against me, sandwiching me between him and the cushions. I half stood, and he grabbed my arm and yanked me back down to the sofa.

“You don't like me?” he said.

I shook my head. His hand slid up my arm, to my shoulder, my neck. I jerked away from him, and he moved with me. I was helpless.

“Stop,” I said. It was a squeak.

“What? I'm not doing anything.”

“Stop touching me,” I said.
I deserve this
, I thought.

“Come on, girl,” he said, leaning into me again, leading with his mouth. He grabbed my arm hard.
This is my fault
, I thought. Charine and Nerissa were quiet.

“Stop it!” I couldn't breathe. He was too big.
Just sit there, and if you take it long enough, it'll be over
, I thought.

Charine jumped up from her squat on the floor and ran toward the sofa. She leapt into Thomas's lap feet first and began jumping on him, stomping his crotch.

“Leave my sister alone! Leave my sister alone!” she yelled.

“Get off me,” he said, trying to push her away, sliding over enough that I was able to get up and away from him. I stood.

“Leave her alone!” Charine said, kicking. Nerissa was crying. I scooped Charine up under her armpits and swung her to my waist. She had given me my voice back.

“Get out!” I said.

“What?”

“Get out!” I said. “Or I'm going to call my mama!”

He jumped up from the sofa. I ran to the side door, Charine still on my hip, and swung the door open wide, letting in the heat of the day.

“Out!”

He walked past and out into the heat, looking down at us.

“Fuck you,” he said.

“Fuck you!” I said, slamming the door, locking the dead-bolt. I was surprised I could be so angry.

Thomas hit the door, hard.

“You stupid bitch!” he said.

“I'm not a bitch!” I said. But even as I said it, I was ashamed for not fighting back earlier on the sofa.
I had to be saved by a three-year-old
, I thought.

“Fucking slut!” He hit the door again.

I backed away from it, Charine clinging to me. We stared at the shuddering door: Charine was alert, ready to go at him again.
I'm pathetic
, I thought. There was a knocking at the back door, and then Josh opened it and walked inside. I locked that one, too.

“What you locked the side door for?” Josh asked. Thomas banged again. I could hear Phillip laughing on the carport.

“Him,” I said, pointing at the side door.

“Bitch!” Thomas hit it again. There was quiet on the other side. I put Charine down, walked to the front window, knelt, and peered through the blinds as the two boys skipped out in the sun and slowed to a walk in the middle of the street. I watched them until they disappeared around the corner of the house.

It didn't matter if my mother was home or not. Thomas caught me out when I was hanging clothes by myself or sweeping the carport. He wouldn't come into the yard, but he would roam the edges of the fence, the woods at the back of the house, scream,
I know you hear me talking to you. You hear me talking to you
. And then:
I see you
. When he said this, I thought he meant that he saw all the misery in me, saw that I deserved to be treated this way by a boy, any boy, all boys, everyone, and I believed him.

My mother withdrew after my father left. When she was home, she was cleaning. Or she was in the kitchen, cooking. There were no more movie marathons. We had food stamps
then, books of them that I was always embarrassed to spend at the Colonial Bread store, but my mother had no compunctions about using them to keep the refrigerator stocked. Unlike my father, my mother wasn't comfortable with physical shows of affection. She didn't hug us or kiss us or touch us when she talked to us, like he did. Sometimes I think that my mother felt that if she relaxed even a tiny bit, the world she'd so laboriously built to sustain us would fall apart. So since she couldn't overtly express her love for us, which was as large and fierce and elemental as the forest fires that sometimes swept through the woods behind our house, she showed us she loved us the only way she knew how beyond providing a home for us, cleaning, taking care of us, providing discipline: through food. She cooked huge pots of gumbo, beef and vegetable soup, pork chops, mashed potatoes, roasts, red beans and rice, cornbread, and desserts—pecan candy, blueberry muffins, German chocolate cakes, and yellow sheet cakes that she decorated with elaborate flowers and vines made of frosting.

When she wasn't cooking, she was in her room watching television. She had one friend in the neighborhood, a woman who'd married my mother's distant cousin. They lived across the street. My mother's cousin was struggling with drug addiction, so my mother bought his wife and family food sometimes, allowed her children to come inside our house when they came over to play. My mother had one close friend who was also her cousin, who'd moved away to Atlanta. Other than that, she was alone. Even as she nurtured a general suspicion of men, she saw the cunning, messy cruelty of women, too; the various women my father had affairs with, some of whom had been her friends, some of whom had known her
since they'd been children, had gloried in my mother's disgrace, had called her and told her:
He doesn't love you—he loves me
. She didn't trust women or men. Her children were her only company, but we were a boisterous, gregarious tribe she loved wholeheartedly yet had little patience for, since she had been raising children her entire life. All the choices and all the circumstance of her existence heated to a rolling boil that summer of 1990, boiled and bubbled over and burned her. It was too much for one person to bear. She stumbled.

When one of us did something wrong, like leaving our clothes on the bathroom floor one too many times after bathing, or getting into arguments with each other and fighting, she whipped all of us. Sometimes she used the short shaft of a wooden toy broom. When Joshua found it one day while she was at work, he snuck out into the woods and threw it away. She bought another one. After months of touching us only when she physically disciplined us, she switched to psychological tactics. One day she threatened to give us up for adoption, and when she heard me crying in our room late at night, she called me to her doorway and asked me why.

“Because you said you want to give us up,” I said.

“Maybe if y'all weren't so bad,” she said, “I wouldn't have to threaten y'all.”

And still we felt our behavior would never be good enough. I was failing her. Driven by her sense of isolation or loneliness or a desire to reveal something about her sense of discipline to me or to warn me against what she might have seen of her legacy coming to life in me, she parked her car in the carport after a trip to the store one day and told me brother and sisters to go inside, and then said to me: “Wait—stay
here.” And then she did something that must have been incredibly hard for her since it was so opposite to her nature; she talked to me. She told me stories. “Mimi,” she said, “your father …” And then she opened herself up in ways she wouldn't do for many years. She told me some things I understood at the time, and other things I wouldn't understand until I was her age, and other things I still don't understand, about how she grew up as the caretaker for her brothers and sisters, about her relationship with her mother, about how she loved her father and her husband and lost them both, again and again. At thirteen, I glimpsed something of what my mother had suffered. For an afternoon, I knew some of my mother's burdens, some of which mirrored my own. For a moment, I felt keenly what it meant to be my mother's daughter. For a little while, I was wiser than I had the maturity to be, and I did what I could. I listened.

And my mother listened too, when she could, to our furtive whisperings. We missed DeLisle, we said. We missed running barefoot along the dirt roads and eating blackberries, hot with juice and sugar and sun, and floating in the current of the river. We didn't like walking in a little tight group down to Bel-Air Elementary in the summer to eat free lunch in the cafeteria, feeling awkward and poor. So she asked us: “Do y'all want to move back to DeLisle?” And we said yes.