My Drowning (17 page)

Aunt Tula received us on the back porch as if she had been expecting us. She sniffed each jar of the sweet figs as if she could determine the quality of the contents using only her nose. “It's got a pretty color this year.”

“It come out pretty good.”

“Uncle Bray loves his fig preserve,” Aunt Tula said to me, “I can't keep enough in the house.”

“Addis done real good this year. He'll like these.”

“Well, it's a good thing. Mine didn't come out worth a hoot.”

She packed us up with a whole pound cake, a mess of collards, and jars of sweet pickle to take to Aunt Addis. She had
plenty of eggs she could have given us, the hens were laying good, but we thanked her and said no. We had enough to carry. So Aunt Tula made us each three fried eggs, for lunch. She fried my eggs exactly like I wanted, with the yolk a little runny but thick at the bottom, and I sopped the yolk with cornbread.

“You never seen such a mess of eggs from such a pinched-up bunch of chickens.” Aunt Tula dipped her fork into her own solid yolks. “The roosters is going around all puffed up about it.”

“We're getting about the same eggs as ever,” Miss Jenny said.

“Addis's chickens is some good layers,” and I noted that Aunt Tula laid a slight stress on the word “Addis's.” Aunt Tula sighed, the bottom of her chin quivering. “How is my mama?”

“She's right quiet this last couple of days.”

“She still running fevers?”

“Twice, three times, lately. She don't seem so bad to me, even when she's hot, though.”

“She eating?”

“We get something down her every now and again.”

“You ought to see to it that she eats. Keep up her strength.”

This had the effect of quietening Miss Jenny, and pretty soon after that she rinsed her plate in the pan of water by the window, and I did the same with mine. Aunt Tula rose from her own seat.

“Bray would sure love to visit with you-all, if he was here.”

“You tell him I said hey. All right?”

“I'll tell him.”

Aunt Tula looked me up and down. “Ellen, you never had so much meat on you. Addis feeds you pretty good, don't she?” Again, stressing the word “Addis” for effect.

“Yes, ma'am, Aunt Addis is a good cook.”

“That sorry mama of yours can't hardly keep food in the house. It's a good thing you come up here to see us, ain't it?” She studied me while I blushed.

Miss Jenny tugged me by the collar toward the door. “We got to go, girl.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“You stay with your Aunt Addis for a while, you'll get fat as your mama,” Aunt Tula, fixing her eyes on me again, said sharply.

“We work Ellen too good for her to get fat,” Miss Jenny announced, very loudly. “Ellen is a good worker, too. Come on, girl. We got to tote these sacks down that path.”

“Don't you break one of these jars.” Aunt Tula gave my ear a tug to help me remember.

“She didn't break one coming, and she won't break one going,” Miss Jenny declared, and eased me away from Aunt Tula's outstretched hand.

AS NANA ROSE
sickened more, a change came to Aunt Addis's house, a cloud of tension filling the rooms. Aunt Addis moved cautiously in the vicinity of the sickroom, and Miss Jenny stayed out of the house whenever she could. Nana Rose perched clawlike in the bed, her body decaying, exuding a sweet smell. But from her eyes and from her clenched jaw radiated the fiercest strength and sharpest hatred. Most of the time she hardly understood where she was or who we were, except that about half the time she recognized Aunt Addis and tried to slap her across the jaw. Now and then, on seeing my face in the lamplight while I was putting lotion on her dry arms, she said, “Your daddy is a goddamn rat-ass son of a bitch. Do you know it?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Don't let that man mess with you.”

“No, ma'am.”

“Don't let any man mess with you. Do, you'll be a whore.”

“No, ma'am, Nana Rose, I won't.”

Once she grabbed me by the hair at the back of the head. She was suddenly as strong as a girl and pulled my face to hers. “You lay down with your grandaddy, don't you?”

“Nana Rose, let me go, that hurts.”

“You answer me, girl. You lay down with your grandaddy, don't you? Nasty little thing.”

With her free hand she tugged at my ears, and I squealed and pulled back. She gripped my head tighter and glared at me.

Aunt Addis heard her shouting and found us, but she had to call Miss Jenny to help her pry Nana Rose's hands out of my hair. Tears of fright ran down my face.

“All you young girls are bitches,” Nana Rose shrieked, and she repeated the words for an hour or more while Aunt Addis, Miss Jenny, and I huddled in the front room listening to her hawk-call voice. “My husband took up with bitches all his sorry life.”

I HELD THE
pan full of warm water while Aunt Addis washed Nana Rose's yellowed hair. Limp strands flecked with suds draped Aunt Addis's fingers, while Nana Rose, head bowed, stared fixedly into the flower pattern of the rug.

“I feel old,” Nana Rose muttered.

Aunt Addis laughed. “You are old, Mama.”

“I ought not to be.”

“Well, why not?”

Nana Rose swung her bony head up and looked Aunt Addis square in the face. “You think it's funny to make fun of your mammy, don't you, you dried-up bitch.”

Aunt Addis swallowed. She rinsed the suds from her fingers
and, using a washcloth, dripped rinsewater through Nana Rose's hair.

“I hope you get miserable and old like I am.”

“I'm sure I will, Mama.”

“With nothing to take care of you except some bony dried-up bitch and her stringbean friend.”

Aunt Addis carefully dried the strands of hair with a small towel, squeezing out the water. “You ought not to talk so ugly, Mama. I do the best I can.”

Nana Rose's voice rose in pitch. “A dog wouldn't do what you do. That's why God took your babies.”

Aunt Addis froze. Long seconds trickled past.

She finished drying Nana Rose's hair, then carried away the pan of water. When she was gone, Nana Rose clamped her mouth shut on her mostly toothless gums, glaring straight ahead at the gap between the curtains, the last bit of outside left to her.

“Open them curtains some, and quit gaping at me, you skinny biddy,” Nana Rose snapped, and she scarcely bothered to glance at me as I raced to the window.

A
T NIGHT, WHEN
the house was dark and everyone slept, I lay awake tossing and turning on the pallet, listening to Nana Rose's dreams.

“Cope,” she began, “don't hang off the back of the truck like that, fast as your daddy goes, he'll sling you out. Cope. Don't lay all over the truck like that.” Then followed the sound of her lips smacking, a moistness that sounded like a dryness. Light of the full moon spilled across her face. She turned on her side, hair matted on the pillow, and smacked
her lips again. The sound of her breathing followed, a bellows, a breeze, and a frightened, strangling sound. “Get him off the road. No, you left some of him. Get all of him. Get all of him off the road. I can't stand to see him lying there like that.”

“Paulie,” she called, “Paulie,” and later I learned Paulie was her sister, dead for years.

Lips clicking again, parched as paper. The sound continued, until I finally stood from the warm pallet. We kept a glass of water by her bed. I held the glass to her mouth and dropped a thin trace of water across her lips. She swallowed greedily and her knobby-jointed hands reached vaguely upward toward my hand. She almost woke, almost slept. She drank the water and rested more deeply for a while.

While we both waited for sleep her words kept running through my head, a thread of connection through all my dreams. Paulie, she said, come close to my bed. You can sleep with me. Crawl under the covers, all right sweetheart? We can eat some chicken liver all mashed up. I killed three chickens for the chicken salad for the Easter supper, there's three livers. We can boil some rice till it sticks. You can scrape it out of the pot with your spoon and I can eat mine off a saucer, like I like. I want to eat my chicken down by the creek. Paulie, we can go down there together. There's a good place to hang your feet in the water. I'll take my children down there one morning. I'd like to drown every one of them. You don't know I have children, well, I do. I had me eight that lived and four that died, and I am wore out. I can't chase after butterflies and such today. I can't run around after dragonflies today. So let's just sit here cool by the creek. And
we did, Nana Rose and I, we sat there beside whatever creek flowed in her mind, and I was aware that I was Paulie to her, that this old woman in the room with me was Nana Rose, in her dream or mine. We sat underneath the shade of a summer day at the riverbank with our feet in the cool water, and I worried that there lurked something under the water to bite my feet, and I suddenly could not breathe, and Nana Rose's voice went on carrying words into my head, Paulie, sit still, and if you be quiet the fish will come up and kiss your toes. They're tasting you to see whether they can eat you. But it feels like a kiss and anyway, they can't eat you, they can't even bite you good. While the children are off in the woods to play. Willem and Addis and Tula is buck naked. When we come fishing they run around in the woods, and Willem plays just as sweet as the rest. Nana Rose spoke as if we were merely young girls. We sat by the river in her mind. I was aware that I was asleep and lying on the pallet on the hard floor at the foot of Nana Rose's bed. But while she talked in her sleep, the dream drifted like a water of her through my head; we were both dipping our feet into the dark water.

Finally, her eyes glazed over and she lay back into bed. The rasp of her breathing marked the passing moments, the arc of moonlight across my face on the pillow. I settled down on my pallet, and she did the same on her bed.

“Someone is here to kill me,” she said later, as I was at the edge of sleep again.

IN CHURCH, WHICH
I had begun to attend with Aunt Addis, we prayed for Nana Rose's health, including the preacher
from the pulpit, at the request of Aunt Addis. Bless this woman with an abundant old age and fullness of health to taste of her sunset years, the preacher said, and this was about the prettiest thing I had ever heard. The prayer left me with a feeling of benevolence, as if I myself had prayed each word, and I was certain that I would not, for instance, draw up all shivery the next time Aunt Addis and I helped Nana Rose onto the bedpan. I dreaded the sight of Nana Rose's shrunken butt cheeks. The process of tending her had be come a kind of torture for me, because my images of her mixed with dream images and grew powerful. The flat flaps of her breasts frightened me, so stretched and wrinkled and laced with dark blue veins. I looked elsewhere. I concentrated on Aunt Addis's careful hands as she lifted Nana Rose off the bedpan and cleaned her and pulled down the nightgown around her pale, stringy legs. They had given up on underwear because Nana Rose always grabbed Aunt Addis's hair and pulled it when Aunt Addis helped her into or out of her drawers, and if Aunt Addis complained about it, Nana Rose slapped her across the face again. Even to the last, Nana Rose had enough strength to give some sting to a slap, if she put her weight behind it. She jarred Addis's jaw a couple of times when I was there to see.

WINTER CAME AND
the bedroom was cold. We moved Nana Rose into the living room where there was a wood heater, and I slept between the heater and the foot of her bed again, tending the fire through the night. Aunt Addis sent me to school as many days as she could spare me. Sleeping in the front room gave me eerie chills. Firelight moved shadows on
the walls and in the room, across the living-room furniture that had been shoved to one corner. Out of familiar surroundings, I would wake in that room with the still-delicious feeling that I was sleeping somewhere I oughtn't, like falling asleep in a car that was moving, and waking, and wondering where I was.

Her sickness came and went like a tide. But she, being stubborn and strong even at her age, recovered after every stretch of fever.

But I was telling about Nana Rose's dreams, and I recall a lot about them. I have been remembering those nights, my long dreamy sleeping in that room, where the dreams continued, waking and shoving logs into the wood stove, waking exactly enough to do so, twisting my hair over one shoulder to keep it out of the upward shower of sparks. Out of balmy darkness I rose from my pillow, opened the grate and checked the fire, golden embers dancing, a shimmering terrain beyond the hot flames, and Nana Rose asleep on the bed with her mouth hanging open and her jowls drooping down. I jammed another split log through the mouth of the grate, it barely fitting, and flames poured upward around the new log, visible till I closed the grate and settled down again. I could not tell if I was waking or sleeping. I lay with the roar of the embers in my ear, and then her voice as she began again, always again: Get me a bucket of water. I want to soak my feet in cool water. My feet is hot. It's hot up under this house. I don't know if I ought to tell you anything about myself. I already told Jesus yesterday. Jesus come by and sit on the edge of the bed. And I says Jesus, I says, you sitting there like some kind of a spook. And Jesus was looking at me
and all. He got this twitchy smile. Rose, he says, I want to tell you something. Where I go, you coming after me. And then he got on up and went on out.

She quieted, and I pictured Jesus on the edge of the bed, more substantial because her description of him was clouded. His weight bowed down that side of the bed and Nana Rose hung toward him with her jowls, chins, the loose skin on her arms all descending toward Jesus. We were all in the room, and Jesus said he was cold, would I tend the fire? So I got up and tended it as he asked. I was so tired, my arms hung heavy and I couldn't lift the wood, and after a while I couldn't breathe, and the light was hurting my eyes. I shoved a log into the fire. Then it seemed like I hadn't and I shoved another one. Then I woke up with Nana Rose standing over me.