My Drowning (25 page)

“You laid there asleep.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So you didn't see what jackass it was run off with her.”

“No, sir. I didn't see anything because I was asleep.”

He glared at me for a while. We all speculated who the boy or man might have been. Mama still believed she had eloped with Lyle Yates, but Daddy assured her Lyle Yates needed too much mending to be thinking about eloping with anybody right now.

“She was a strumpet,” Mama said. “Strutting around here like she did. She acted liked she was the mama.” But even as she said this, something sad and lonely filled her eyes.

“She probably had a boyfriend in every cornfield,” Madson declared.

Daddy reflected on what Madson had said, chewing the end of a match. “She probably did, son.” He hawked and spit
in Mama's spitcan, and announced, “I don't want to hear another thing about it.”

He sat there brooding. Now and then I could feel his gaze on me.

That night I slept between Corrine and baby Delia in the middle of the bed, with my head at the foot of the bed, and woke at the slightest noise in the room.

During the day I kept a wary eye. The work Nora had done fell on me, including all the cooking, since Corrine proved sorry help. I boiled grits, fried fatback, mixed biscuit dough, and stoked the fire in the stove. I pulled off Daddy's shoes and socks and washed his feet. I stirred the sugar into his coffee. By the time we learned what had happened to Nora, that she had married Burner Boyette and lived on the farm right down the road with the whole Boyette family, I had replaced her in nearly every way.

I discovered I made a better cook than Nora had affected, that I made the biscuits lighter and fluffier than she did, stirred the grits better with fewer lumps, and I fried a good chicken the few times we had it. I could make a gravy out of the least bit of drippings and flour.

At night, I continued to sleep upside down in the bed, staring at Corrine's, Baby Hob's, and Delia's feet. Hob slept with us whenever Daddy wanted Mama for his business. Often I hardly slept. I was listening for something, a step in the night. I would know the sound when I heard it.

I began bathing during the day when Daddy worked, or early in the morning, when he was still asleep. Even then he would find me sometimes. He would amble to the doorway
without warning and I would freeze. “Excuse me, honey,” he would say, and smile, and I would cover my breasts with my hands.

Once Otis walked in on me while I was washing. I slapped him sharp across the face and sent him squealing to Mama, who slapped him again herself when she found out what he had done. “I never meant to,” Otis squealed, dancing, while Mama's blunt hand lashed at him.

“You little peeping tom son of a bitch,” Mama hissed, “you stay out of that room when you ain't supposed to be in there.”

At night I dreamed about Nora. In the dream we were sleeping together, only Nora and me, and she curled herself sweetly around me and kept me warm with her arms. Then I would wake up and see feet sticking out from under the blankets, and I would draw my legs under the covers and lie there missing Nora in the dark.

THE NEXT TIME
I saw her she was expecting her first child. She had been living down the road at Maxie Boyette's farm all this time, when for us it had been like she flew to the moon. Mama and I walked to visit.

“Hello, Ellen. Hello, Mama.” She spoke with the tip of her chin quivering, her voice quivering too, and led us to their tiny bedroom.

We sat on the bed. Nora held Mama's hand like a little girl again. Her eyes filled with tears and, to match her feat, so did Mama's. They sat sniffling and holding hands. The backs of Nora's hands were nearly as rough and brown as Mama's.

“You're going to have a baby,” Mama said.

Nora rubbed her belly. “I sure am. If it's a girl, I'm going to name it after you.”

Mama blushed and ducked her head a bit. “I was thinking you didn't miss me at all.”

“Oh, Mama.”

“It's the truth.”

They sat together. They still held hands but their fingers had loosened.

“Who's looking after the younguns?” Nora asked me.

“Corrine,” I said.

“Corrine is right smart with them younguns,” Mama added, but that was a lie.

The moment becomes important and large when I look back at it. I am seeing Nora with new eyes as I look back on that room. She has become kinder, softer, at least on the surface. She smiles at Mama without that little twist to her mouth, that sneer. Her lips have learned to relax for the moment. When she speaks, her voice drips with affection. When she looks me in the eye, for a moment, the Nora I remember needles like a knot at the center of each pupil.

Her lip trembled, and she gazed at Mama with watery eyes. “I miss you, Mama. I don't like to be here.”

“I know you don't, sweetheart. You'd rather be at home with me, wouldn't you?” Mama beamed, feeling herself so loved.

“They treat me kind of funny.”

“Minnie Boyette is a funny woman,” Mama nodded her head.

“I think that woman hates my guts. That's what I think. For taking her son away.” She lowered her voice and ducked her
head toward the door. She smoothed her hand over her stomach. “But I got me a baby coming. She don't matter.”

“She'll be all over you when that baby comes. Minnie Boyette is one funny woman all right.” She paused, as if she expected Nora to say something, but Nora watched the door.

On the walk home, Mama continued to weep and dab at her eyes with one of Daddy's stained handkerchiefs. We trudged along the side of the road. My shoes had begun to pinch again, and I resented it because Nora had two pair and took both of them when she left.

Mama said, “You won't ever leave me like your sister done. I know you won't.”

“That's right, I won't, Mama,” I answered, and petted her arm. But she gave me such a dull-eyed look, with such a flavoring of ash, that I hardly believed myself.

“She didn't say a word about the wedding,” Mama sniffled. “My own daughter.”

“She said it was a justice of the peace.”

“That's so sweet,” Mama said.

“She loves you, Mama,” I added, with an ache of loneliness in my own belly. “She said how much she missed you.”

“She did say she missed me right smart, didn't she?”

“Anyway, it was Daddy who run her off, not you.”

She heard me but set her lips tight together and never answered. I had, maybe, spoken more bluntly than she liked. We finished the walk in silence.

BURNER BOYETTE SOON
quarreled with his family over Nora and moved them both into a house outside of Pine Level, to help with another man's farm. The house leaned precariously,
hardly more than a shack with a bed and a kitchen table in it.

Burner picked me up in his boss's truck and drove me for a visit, to help take care of their new baby boy, Burner Jr. Excited to be away from home, I actually longed to see Nora again, though the anticipation had its sharp edges. We drove over a bumpy dirt road, turning into a narrow, wooded drive-way out of sight of the main farmhouse and the farm buildings. The house stood secluded in a narrow cleared yard and the woods bowed in from every side. An apple tree heavy with green apples grew to the side of the plank porch, where an old swing hung from a rusted chain. The apples had attracted some worms but enough remained whole that I ate myself a bellyful, raw and cooked, while I stayed at Nora's house.

Every morning Burner got up before daybreak to join the farmer and his sons bringing in the peanut harvest. Nora had been excused from that, for the first time in her life, because of the new baby; she was grading and tying dry tobacco instead, in one of the three rooms of the house where they lived. The dry tobacco took up most of the room, and each night Burner brought more.

I helped while I was there. We graded the leaves from golden to brown to trash, bundled the dry leaves, and wrapped their tops with another leaf, tight, like a head wrap, the lower leaves flaring out like skirts. We sat in the room or out in the yard with our piles of cured leaves, the dust working up our nostrils till we sneezed.

“I hate how this stuff gets up your nose.” Nora rubbed hers with the back of her wrist. “But we sure God need this money with that baby in yonder.”

“This tobacco's got a pretty color,” I noted. “It's not all dark and dried like Mr. Taylor's always comes out to be.”

“Daddy always did say Mr. Taylor burnt up his tobacco in the barn.” The mention of Daddy made her thoughtful.

“There's spiders in dry tobacco, sometimes,” I noted, to ease her thinking.

“I know. You remember when Mama found that wolf spider?”

“Good Lord,” I nodded my head in a knowing way, and the gesture reminded me, without any warning, of the way Mama nodded.

“She like to jumped out of her step-ins. If she was wearing any.” Nora fanned herself with tobacco leaves as she flushed red with laughing. She looked lovingly down at her own baby, dimpled and white in his nest of cushions, snug in a box on the floor. “I hope my younguns don't ever see me like we've seen Mama.” She pursed her lips and set her jaw.

“You'll be good to your younguns,” I said, watching her. “Like I'll be good to mine.”

We sat in motion, hands sorting the fragrant leaves, though for a few moments silence and stillness clouded us over. The dimpled baby gurgled, and we smiled and looked down at him. We smiled together with the baby and with each other. We had seldom smiled together when we lived in the same house, not in this tender way, and shyness overcame us both. We worked till sundown.

In spite of the dust, I liked the smell of tobacco leaves, its acrid, sharp edges driving up the nostrils; I liked the dirt of the leaves, except the dust, and the bits of string, the tough stems of the leaves after they were cured. The rough texture
of tobacco sticks pleased my hand, and I never got a splinter, though I drew many a splinter out of Nora's hand, or Burner's, in the evening when he came home and helped us work.

Nora's baby, when she let me hold him, smelled warm and sweet, like biscuit dough made just right; and when Burner lifted the baby, himself fresh from the fields, the warm baby smell mixed with the sour field sweat of Burner, and then he laid the baby on a towel and unpinned the diaper where lay a sweet, fragrant baby turd. I loved to hold the baby and wished for one of my own.

I stayed till Mama sent for me. The time was sweet, in the same way time had passed at Aunt Addis's house. I saw everything more vividly because I never knew how long I would be there. We woke up and started the fire early in the morning, as early as we would have lit the kindling at home; but here in Nora's kitchen we were alone. We did the dishes side by side, and Nora praised my hands, the shape of them and the texture of the skin. “You have those smooth pretty hands,” she said. “Mine look like I soak them in lye twice a day.”

“They do not.”

“They do too. Look how bony my fingers are.”

“They're not bony, they only have a few knobs on them.” Her hands had large brown freckles on the back, the same texture of freckle that traced the sunny side of her arms and shoulders. My skin was clean and clear. I asked, “Do you ever hate me because I don't have freckles?”

Nora laughed. I liked the ease of the sound. “I don't hate you.”

“I used to think you did.”

“No. I don't hate anybody.” But she glanced at her shoulders, the dusting of freckles along her upper arms. “I think you're stuck on yourself, that's all, but so is everybody.”

“I am not stuck on myself,” I squealed, but for years afterward she would say the same thing, as if it were really true.

“Besides,” she added, “I don't even mind having freckles any more. Burner likes them.” She blushed and refused to say more, though I was longing to ask what, exactly, she meant.

My first night asleep on the couch, when I had heard Nora's moaning in the bedroom, I sat up with my heart pounding, afraid for her. Then I heard the rhythm of her whimpering, and Burner's heavy breath, and I lay reluctantly onto the cushions, though my heart continued to drum against my ribs till they finished. I listened till long after they were done. I hardly slept.

For days when I heard their bed rocking against the wall, the mattress springs creaking and singing, and their giggling or even their harsher sounds, I wondered what this feeling was. I had heard similar sounds in my own house coming from Mama and Daddy, though Mama had never squealed with laughter the way Nora did. I ran my fingers over myself, inside my drawers, where my stuff was getting hairy and changing. Exploring there, I felt warm, as if the surface of my skin shimmered. As I listened to Nora and Burner I was floating in the feeling with them, as if what they were doing was a cloud and I lay enfolded in it.

I have moved toward unknown places in myself at moments like that, lost in the night hours in some strange setting, like that time, sleeping on the lumpy couch in the unfamiliar room in Nora's house with the scent of cured tobacco
flavoring the breezes. What I understood exceeded any words I could provide to describe it, but the slight sense of nausea that overcame me, along with the pounding of my heart, the quickening of the blood in me, sufficed. Here was Nora making the same noise as Mama, and thinking nothing of it, right in the next room. I lay with the sheets pulled to my chin, feeling uncomfortable at the softness of my breasts under my hands.

Later by decades, in Nora's room in the hospital while she was dying, the memory of that particular moment returned to me. I could feel the closeness of the room, the bent spring of the couch jabbing against my shoulder blade, and my hands floating over my breasts, cupped around them, squeezing slightly. The headboard of the bed stopped hitting the wall. In the quiet aftermath of the ruckus they'd made, their murmuring voices lifted like a cloud; I could hear only the sound and none of the words, but the sound had a lightness to it. Their togetherness left me suddenly hollow and lonely.