My Drowning (3 page)

“I don't want to go out there.”

“You get your ass out there and pump water like your sister told you.”

“Do I have to go right now?”

“Yes, you got to go right now. Now get out there.” The rising sharpness of his tone lifted Otis from his torpor. He shoved his arms into the sleeves of his coat.

“Fill it twice,” Nora said. “We might not can get no water
tomorrow.”

“I ain't going out there twicet.”

“Yes, you are, Otis. I can't do it all by myself.”

“I chopped that goddamn wood all day till I got blisters. I don't see why I have to do everything.”

But Daddy said, “Get your ass out there like I told you.” Otis stomped out the door, the screen slamming with a ringing echo.

“I need to beat that youngun's ass,” Daddy said thoughtfully, sopping the last of his coffee onto a biscuit. “Give me some more coffee.”

Nora poured. On the radio played a song I knew, I could hear myself singing it under my breath. Daddy rolled his cigarette and smoked it. He tapped the ash on the biscuit plate. The coffee steamed as he lifted the cup.

MAMA WENT TO
bed. Nobody asked where she was. Everybody knew.

Sometimes, most of the time, Daddy would linger by the fire, and he and Carl Jr. sipped whiskey or moonshine, and smoked cigarettes, and listened to the radio. Sometimes, Daddy went in to Mama.

Tonight he stood by the fire awhile. Nora tended the flames to keep them burning, adding logs judiciously, mindful of our stock. Carl Jr. passed through with a last bucket of water. “Well's about to freeze, like Nora said it would.”

Nora set the water tub near the stove to keep it from freezing. She would stoke the fire before we slept and let the warmth drain out of it through the night. She and I would sleep out here tonight, in Uncle Cope's bed, since he had
gone to his daddy's house for Christmas. I liked the thought of sleeping in that bed. We would have extra blankets and the warmth of the dying fire, and clean sheets that Nora ironed.

I went to bed in my cotton nightgown. Nora slept beside me, close. I could see through the grates of the stove into the embers of the fire. The silver dishpan and pitcher caught the orange reflection. Either I slept or I became hypnotized. All night I dreamed of doors opening and closing.

THE BABY BOY
drifts through the house on a current of air. I am riding behind him. The lifted edges of the baby's shroud lap my face. I have become able to fly through the agency of the dead baby boy, and we are one cloud together. I have the feeling I may be as cold as the baby. We float down the hall, over Daddy's work shoes, into the bedroom, where Daddy is lying on top of Mama in a strange huddle, and Mama sees us over his back, rises up, and screams.

ON CHRISTMAS MORNING
under the tree, between the empty lanterns, appeared a toy pistol for Joe Robbie and a small doll for me. A bushel of apples stood among the lower branches. Otis got a toy, too, I forget what.

I held the doll in my hand loosely. Joe Robbie pointed the gun at my head.

He took the doll, and I sat beside him while he stroked the skirt.

I turned the pistol over and over in my lap. I liked the shape. Carl Jr. showed me how to hold it.

The fox had frozen on the shelf in the back room. I wandered in there when no one noticed. The rigid carcass lay on
the flat surface, legs jutting straight in the air. A moulded pink tongue sprawled over yellow teeth. Frost had formed on the snout. Clearly dead, but for the eyes, which had a glint of fire.

We ate leftover beans with ham. We used syrup and sopped it up with biscuit. We ate twice, plus biscuits in the morning. Daddy drank coffee with sugar the whole day and never stirred from the fire. He sipped whiskey through the long afternoon, listening to the radio till the batteries were weak.

By the end of the day Joe Robbie screamed if I touched the doll. I sat dumbfounded beside him. The gun meant nothing to me, but, truth be told, neither did the doll.

The apples were the best gift. I ate until I was sick from them. I ate as many apples as I could stuff into my belly. Never before had there been so much of a food that I could eat all I wanted. I ate the apples until I could hardly move. I lay flat on my back through the cold afternoon, in an ecstasy of digestion.

Nora fought with Mama about my doll. Nora wanted Mama to take the doll from Joe Robbie so I could play with it. But any time anybody touched the doll, Joe Robbie screamed, and Mama couldn't stand to hear him scream. Mama decided Joe Robbie might as well keep the doll since he was puny and it made him happy. Nora huffed off and made Mama mad, and Mama reared back to slap her, but she remembered it was Christmas and contented herself to yank Nora's ears good and hard.

Not once did I ask Joe Robbie for the doll. When he kept the pistol too, I didn't mind.

I had been flying with the baby boy. I replayed the dream in my head, and the memory kept me buoyant. The bushel basket still held more than half its apples. Tonight Nora and I would sleep in the kitchen again, with the ghost fire glimmering in the stove. All these were good things. But above all, I had eaten as much as I could hold. I had learned of the possibility of abundance.

WHEN THE WEATHER
warmed, Mama carried the carcass of the fox outside, wrapped in burlap. She flung the softening corpse into the ditch. Daddy never asked what happened to it.

At night, across the room, Joe Robbie slept with the doll wrapped in his arms. I remained oblivious to the loss, but Nora carried the anger like a hot coal. She would get me another doll, she said, when she worked in tobacco this summer. This promise consoled her in some way. I did not care, myself. I would never want a doll.

NOT LONG AGO
I drove to the Low Grounds, down that road where we used to live. I had begun to remember the Christmas of the dead fox, and I realized I was headed toward the place where that house had stood as soon as I slipped behind the steering wheel. I made the drive early one morning, after my slice of toast. The distance isn't much, only an hour or so from the place I live now, near Pinetops.

The road had been paved, Lord knows how long ago. Electric wires lined the pavement and now there was light in the Low Grounds, and more houses, most of them brick, with plain bare yards and pitiful scrawny azalea bushes. The house where my family lived collapsed long ago, and nothing
remains except the chimney, lying on its side in the white dirt. I stood at the sidewise mouth of the fireplace. I closed my eyes and pictured the gray fox, the white biscuits, the specter of the dead baby boy. I remembered gathering wood across the bare field where now a brick house squatted. The countryside suddenly smelled of winter. I could not quite remember what year it was.

WE MOVED FROM
the Low Grounds to a house near Moss Pond. The house was small, four rooms, with a wood heater, a woodstove, and a hand pump for water in the backyard. An empty chicken house leaned precariously under a sycamore. The outhouse stood there too, in thick shade, with its narrow door hanging from the hinges and its plank seat with two holes cut in the surface for doing your business. We resorted to a slop pot only in the coldest part of winter. Otherwise everyone took the long trek down the path, except for Joe Robbie, who was allowed a pan and a jar.

Sitting suspended over the cavern of shit and piss, in summer with the buzzing of green flies, in the winter with cold fingers creeping from the wood along my nervous bottom, I felt a pure and memorable terror. I was small enough to drop straight down the hole, and I clung to the edges with my hands in fear of snakes and other creatures that lived in the woods thereabouts; I pictured them crawling along the planks toward my bare behind. The echoing of the hollow place beneath me sent a shiver of fear through me and I finished
my business as fast as I could. I cleaned myself with soft leaves in summer and newspaper or comic books in winter, learning to rub the newsprint together until it softened and to grip the seat with one hand while cleaning with the other. I was fanatical in cleaning myself, frightened as I was of sitting there; Nora made fun of me for my fastidiousness.

If you walked far enough through the woods that surrounded the house, you came to Moss Pond, where the woods were full of bobcats, snakes, and even bears. Nora and I made the trip together. I savored the black surface of the pond, the reflection of pine and sky. Nora in general disliked my company but preferred it to that of our brothers. Carl Jr. and Otis never invited us when they went fishing, but whatever they caught, we cleaned. I learned first to scrape the scales from the sides of the fish and later to cut the fins neatly at the base. Spines in the fins were sharp as needles at the ends and drew blood from careless fingertips. I worked as hard as I could but nothing I did ever pleased Nora, who herself moved with neatness and efficiency that I admired. Nora sawed off the fishheads and gutted the silvered bodies, scooping out mysterious soft masses that clung to her fingers. Cats yowled and marked the door, trying to climb inside, whenever we cleaned fish.

Mama's belly had swollen with a peculiar roundness, hard and smooth like a ripe squash. Nobody told me why. Because it was summer, we worked on Albert Taylor's farm in his cotton field, or weeding in Ruby Jarman's garden, or topping and suckering tobacco for Mr. James Allison, whom everybody respected because he was rich. I worked along with the rest, weeding and plucking on my hands and knees.
Because I was so small, I could not hold a hoe to chop the cotton, but I pulled up handfuls of weeds that the hoe couldn't reach. At night we were all exhausted, but especially Mama, and Nora boiled hot water for her to soak her feet. Nora made supper, dry beans most of the time, maybe with fried fish, and we ate near dark or after dark, in the first cool of the day.

Mama began to talk about a new little baby in the house. She no longer dreamed about the dead baby boy, as if he had stayed behind at the Low Grounds. Nobody gave me the connection between the blossoming of Mama's belly and the coming of a new baby; I was left to wonder.

Daddy had quit being a farmer. People were after him for money, something about the farm, so when people came looking for him, Mama would say he wasn't home even when he was. Daddy became a logger like Carl Jr. and worked when he felt like it. Other times he sat in the house. Here he had no fields to wander in, only the white-dirt yard in which no grass grew. He wandered among the trees there, or walked to the pond.

Daddy and Carl Jr. listened to the war on the radio, between spells of country music. The war was a great thing, like a cloud. I was not sure which country was our country, but there was a lot of talk about what our army ought to do. My daddy and Carl Jr. pursued this discussion amicably and laconically, in their own manner.

“I think we ought to go over there and whip their asses.”

“You're right about that.” Daddy nodded his head as if he had thought about this a lot.

“Was you in World War One, Daddy?” Otis asked.

“No. I ain't that old.”

The radio played as long as the batteries lasted. We listened to the Carter family, Grandpa Jones and his wife, Little Jimmy Dickens. Nora sang along with the music while she boiled water to wash the dishes.

Because I was older now, I had more chores. I hauled wood a piece at a time to stack beside the stove and fireplace. I climbed on an old chair to pump water, as much as I could carry in a bucket. I dried dishes and stacked them to put away.

On wash day I gathered clothes. Mama and Nora built a fire under the washpot and we filled the tubs with water while Otis chopped wood. Mama moved awkwardly, now and then placing a hand at her lower back. She and Nora sorted the sheets, underwear, workshirts, skirts, socks, all that we gathered from the bedrooms. Mama added the clothes as the water heated, tamping the cloth into the pot with a tobacco stick. The boiling took a long time, and Mama tended the fire with my help, directing me to shove logs here and there; meanwhile Nora continued to pump water for washing and rinsing, and scrubbed the clothes on the washboard once they had boiled, churning them in the soapy water. Mama rarely helped with the scrubbing, and I was too small to be much use with the larger items, like Daddy's heavy overalls or the cotton bedsheets. I carried the clothes to the rinse water and dropped them in. I liked the scattering of soap bubbles in the water.

We had neighbors here, though none lived close to us, except a few houses down the dirt road on which we lived. We lived on the west shore of the pond, through a strip of
woods near the paved road from Luma to Kingston. Near the turnoff for the dirt road that passed our house, a bridge carried traffic across a narrow neck of the pond, and on our side of the bridge the Jarman family ran the Little Store. The Jarmans had built and run the old mill when you could still grind corn up there, and Chalmis Jarman acted as the agent to form logging crews. The Jarmans owned a house back of the store, under a huge old weeping willow and behind high azaleas. I liked to walk to the Little Store with Nora. I liked the candy jars stocked with candy and the smell of salt meat hanging in the back. We bought beans out of a barrel or fatback sliced from the slab and wrapped in wax paper. When we had money, Miss Ruby never said anything, but when we had none we had to ask if we could charge. Sometimes yes, we could, and sometimes no, we couldn't.

I was young, but soon enough I could distinguish between the two states. I could feel the slight discomfort of asking for credit, even for the smallest sack of potatoes; I could feel the difference when Miss Ruby narrowed her eyes, set her mouth in a line and shook her head. “Send your mama down here,” she said.

Nora, red from the neck up, nodded meekly, and we snuck out the door.

Mama never went to the Little Store herself except at times when we had money and she could pay down on the bill.

Across the road from the store stood a white wooden sanctuary belonging to the Church of God Congregation in Holiness. Sometimes, when we passed, I heard singing from inside.