My Drowning (16 page)

“It's a wonder she's got a scrap of meat on her bones,” Uncle Bray agreed.

“My brother is as sorry as there is. Drink you some more tea, honey. It's sweet, ain't it?”

“She loves that tea.”

“I can't get enough sugar to make it like I really like,” Aunt Tula patted her hair, “because of the war.”

The walk through the woods frightened me sometimes, because I traveled alone and usually carried a bag of something or a jar of something from Aunt Tula to Aunt Addis, plus the sack of my clothes. The woods had an eerie quiet; one hardly hears a quiet like that any more. “Did you like your walk?” Aunt Addis would ask, laughing when I hurried across the yard to the back door.

“There was something following me at the last part,” I panted.

“Hush that mess. There's nothing out there to follow you.”

“Aunt Addis, I swear there was. I could hear it coming behind me.”

“The only thing you heard was yourself, all worked up to a pitch. Now come on in the house.”

“I was scared that monster came back and was going to get me.”

“Lord have mercy. You listen to that mama of yours too much. There's nothing got nobody in these woods since I don't know when. Now come on in the house, I said. Your Nana Rose was asking about you. And I got a peck of things for you to do around here. What's wrong with your leg?”

“Otis chopped it with the hoe.”

“Well, mercy. Let me see.”

A long dark scab traced the side of my kneecap and along the bone the skin was red and flamed. “Your brother did that?”

“Yes, ma'am. Him and I were fighting and he got the hoe after me. And I busted him on the head with a rock.” I sighed. “He called Mama a fat sow and I told him he ought not to talk about Mama like that, and we was at one another pretty quick after that.”

“You and Otis are always fighting.”

“He ought not to call Mama names. I can't stand it.”

For a moment she stood looking at the knee, hand soft on the top of my head, a warm pressure, one of the few times I can remember being touched.

She fed me a slab of cornbread smeared with white lard and a cold cornmeal dumpling in pot liquor, delicacies such as I only dreamed of in my mother's kitchen. I wolfed down whatever she set in front of me, and she watched with her mouth set to a thin line. “Don't your mama feed you, child?”

“We ain't eat nothing but biscuit with meat grease since Monday.”

“Watch how you talk.”

“There hasn't been any food since Monday.”

“That's better. Why not?”

“Daddy can't work because he hurt his back.”

Aunt Addis sputtered. “The only way your daddy hurt that back was hunched over your mama.” She glared at me and said, “Now, you get to scrubbing the baseboards in your Nana Rose's room. Get right down on your hands and knees.”

I swallowed the last of the buttermilk that cooled my belly and gave me such a warm feeling underneath my ribs. It was the most delicious buttermilk and cornbread and at the end of the few minutes I had eaten enough food to make me swoon. I stood up burping and headed for the back porch to find the white enamel pan for baseboard washing. The burp brought the slightest smile out of Aunt Addis.

I scrubbed till my elbow ached sore, bending down as best I could with my bad knee. I wore out one cloth and Aunt Addis fetched me another. “There's germs all over this room.” She watched me at my work for a minute, tying an old rag around her hair. “If we don't keep it clean, a sickness will come on Mama that will take her for good.”

“I ain't dead, girl,” Nana Rose croaked. “I ain't sleep either.”

“No, ma'am. You aren't.”

“Goddammit, I know I ain't.”

A moment later Nana Rose started snoring again, and Aunt Addis left to take down the blinds in the front room. Pretty soon I could see her in the backyard. The blinds hung from the clothesline, as Aunt Addis furiously scrubbed and rinsed.

“It's a goddamn shame I stayed so long with that son of a bitch,” Nana Rose mumbled when she woke again, spit draining
from the side of her mouth, eyes closed but fluttering, as if the lids could not get fixed and still.

My knee ached, and pretty soon bending down opened the cut again and I was bleeding, oozing a little. I ignored it until Nana Rose sat up straight in the bed, glared at me, and pointed one long thin crooked bony finger. “That youngun is bleeding.”

“Shew,” Aunt Addis said. She had entered the door with clean towels and set them in the wardrobe, puffing as she stood. Her eyes came to focus on me. “Ellen. Oh Lord, look at you. I reckon I ought not to have you bending down like this. Stand up and show me your knee again.”

I raised the edge of my skirt.

She took me to the back porch and washed it clean with Octagon soap that stung. “Has there been flies in it?”

“They fly around, but I swoosh and don't let them crawl on it.”

“Because they can lay eggs right in the wound,” pinching up her nose, “I seen a man with a leg like that, before they cut it off. Maggots crawling around in the leg.” She spoke practically, without a whiff of pity. “So you keep flies out of it unless you want to end up without a leg.”

“No, ma'am, I don't,” I said, wincing when she spread Merthiolate on it, and thanked her when she cut a clean white sheet-piece from the rag bag and folded it up in a pad to cover the cut.

At the end, patting her own hair back into place, she admired her handiwork, the pad tied to my knee with a clean strip of Nana Rose's old yellow housedress that she would never again rise out of bed to wear.

“Can you work?” Aunt Addis asked.

In the bedroom, as I sat on the floor by the baseboard, bending my good knee, Nana Rose asked, in her powdery husk of a voice, “When did you put my good dress in that bag of yours? It won't near ready for rag picking.”

“Mama, that dress was so thin you could poke a finger through it. When I laid it in the rag bag it fell to pieces by itself.”

“That friend of yours makes the soap so strong it rots cloth.”

Aunt Addis tucked her lips together in a tight line. “That friend of mine has a name. You know it as good as I do.”

“I might know her name and I might not like to say it.” “Jenny,” Aunt Addis said to Nana Rose. “There, see? I said it for you, so now you don't have to.”

Nana Rose pursed her lips together and then shot a wad of tobacco juice into the spittoon on the floor beside the bed. By then, I had knelt over the baseboards and begun to scrub again.

Later I scrubbed the wall behind Nana Rose's night table and the night table itself, both stained with tobacco juice that had missed the spittoon. Nana Rose slept peacefully through the trickling of water into the bucket, the rasp of the cloth on the wall. With one hand she clutched the top of the quilt that warmed her, a grip so tight she might have feared someone would come along to snatch down the covers at any moment. Her skin lay fine as tissue along the bones and veins.

After Aunt Addis checked the wall, the table, and the baseboards, I helped her hang the blinds in the front room,
where they made the light cool and pale. Aunt Addis had a couch and two chairs in the front room, and a rag rug and two tables, not the same but similar, with a picture of Nana Rose in a frame on one of the tables. I considered this a lot of furniture, and Aunt Addis spent the rest of the day dusting and polishing it, with me to help.

When we were nearly done, Miss Jenny, tall and lean, appeared in the doorway. “You still want me to wring that chicken's neck?”

Aunt Addis gave me a sharp look. “This youngun needs some meat on her bones, that's what it looks like to me. Do you think you can eat a piece of fried chicken, Ellen?”

“Oh, yes, ma'am,” I said, and my stomach started to dance.

“Then I'll kill that yellow-looking one,” Miss Jenny said, “she hasn't given an egg in two weeks.”

“I don't know how you think you know which chicken lays which egg.”

“I know,” Miss Jenny said, and turned, and vanished, her long shadow trailing behind her.

Out the window, while rinsing my saucer in the pan of cold water, I studied Miss Jenny as she grasped the yellow-feathered chicken by the neck and twisted the body through the air. Through the window I heard the crack of bone and then the chicken's garbled cries as it circled the yard in a final run, head flopped over to one side. I had never watched a chicken die.

Miss Jenny scalded the chicken and plucked it clean, so fast it was hard to believe, the smell of wet feathers clinging to her hands and filling the porch. Aunt Addis gutted it and
cut it up for the frying pan. For Nana Rose she boiled a short thigh till the meat was nearly falling off the bone, adding a dumpling to the thin broth, and when she had cooked this bland stuff, a good while ahead of our supper, she set me on a tall chair to feed the old woman. Mostly Nana Rose lay back on the pillow, wheezing for breath and accepting the food I offered into her mouth when she felt it against her lips. When she chewed the dumpling, a line of meal strained through her lips and down her chin. I wiped this away, and she opened her eyes. Glaring like a hoot owl, she said, “I guess Miss Princess couldn't be bothered to feed me herself.”

“I wanted to do it,” I lied, and this answer confused her to the point that she closed her eyes again, and reclined on the pillow.

“I wish the Good Lord would go on and call me,” she murmured, as I settled the spoonful of chicken meat and broth to her lips. She sucked greedily and gummed the food.

When she had eaten and drifted someplace between sleeping and waking, her breath moved haltingly in and out with a sound like the rasp of my washrag on the plaster walls beside her bed.

I brought firewood for the cookstove and buckets of water from the pump outside, while Aunt Addis cooked our supper. The smell of frying chicken made my mouth water, impossible to think of anything but the food to come. Miss Jenny hefted the ax by the woodpile and split kindling with strokes as strong as Otis's. Her arms, relaxed, hung veiny and thin, but when she swung the ax, firm muscles tensed. She caught me watching and I turned away.

At supper I ate the drumstick, handed onto my plate by
Aunt Addis, her mouth set into its thin line. We ate in the kitchen with Miss Jenny, listening to Nana Rose's snores. Aunt Addis, watching me eat from beneath partly lowered lids, paused to listen to the sound. “She's resting good today. She's had her three little naps.”

“Her breathing sounds better,” Miss Jenny agreed.

“It's some more potatoes if you're still hungry.” Aunt Addis turned to me as if by accident.

“Yes, ma'am,” I said, and she dished them out, listening to Nana Rose again.

Miss Jenny said, “It's not every day we fry a chicken. You better eat good.”

“I didn't have fried chicken in a long time. Mine is good.”

“Here's you the neck to gnaw on,” Aunt Addis speaking gruffly, but with the tiniest smile at the corners of her mouth. “Then you can boil the water to wash these dishes.”

I sucked at that chicken neck till the bones were as clean as Aunt Addis's kitchen windows. Then I stoked the fire and boiled the water for dishes, as I had been told.

Aunt Addis had a particular way of washing dishes, beginning with the glasses, then the plates and saucers, then the spoons and forks and such, then the pots and pans. Always do them the last, she said, because they dirty the water. She stood near me while I washed to teach me what I should do, like scrubbing between each fork prong and cleaning the backs of the plates as well as the fronts. Sharp-tongued as she was, she kept her patience when she was teaching me; not like Nora, who criticized the least thing I did. At the last I scalded the clean dishes with more boiling water from the kettle, pouring the water carefully over each plate, to kill the
filth, as Aunt Addis described it. Boiling water kills all kind of filth, she said.

Nana Rose woke with a fever, and we piled blankets on her till it broke. Aunt Addis sat by her bedside with a lapful of cross-stitch, and when she caught me watching she gave me a swatch of cloth and set about teaching me the simple stitches. Always run the front stitches one way and the back the other, she said, to keep it neat. At first I worked clumsily with the needle and almost jabbed it in my nose trying to thread it, but later, mimicking the precise movements of Aunt Addis's deft fingertips, I got better. I practiced in the light from the kerosene lamp at Nana Rose's bedside.

As miraculous as the cross-stitch and the housecleaning was the fact that Aunt Addis troubled to teach me anything. Adults hardly ever paid attention. Aunt Addis spoke in the same rough tones and harsh words as Mama and Daddy. But underneath was something else, some part of her that watched me as if I were a tender shoot pushing up through the ground in springtime.

I practiced until time for bed, when Miss Jenny entered Nana Rose's bedroom for the first time, bringing quilts and a feather pillow for my pallet. I slept on the floor in Nana Rose's room, by the side of the bed where she could see me, in case she needed help to pee in the night. That first night she never waked to ask for help, but all night murmured in dreams about her children, Sudie, Tula, Wainright, Alice, Cope, and Willem Carl, my Daddy. Those were the names I knew, but there were more. At dawn she called me out of sleep, “Girl, get up here and help me out of this bed before I bust.”

After I helped her back in bed I carried the slop pot carefully out the back door and picked a path through patches of gray dirt, avoiding the dewy grass. I dumped Nana Rose's pale piss into the sitting hole and returned to the house. Nana Rose had begun to snore again, but in the doorway stood Aunt Addis, watching in her housecoat.

I WALKED WITH
Miss Jenny through the woods to Aunt Tula's house, to help carry fig preserves that Aunt Addis sent. The jars made a pleasant rattle in the potato sack bundled in my arms. I had drunk a glass of buttermilk and eaten half a hoecake for the walk, since Miss Jenny said I looked too scrawny to carry much. We walked through the woods along what Aunt Addis and Miss Jenny called the Dry Path. When I asked, Miss Jenny allowed there was a path called the Wet Path, too, shorter but crossing the wetlands where Miss Jenny preferred not to walk. We picked our way carefully so as not to jostle the jars of preserves.