The Tree of Forgetfulness (13 page)

“I write to you now because I do not know what to do or think or where to turn for advice about what is going on here in town, but you always knew, or you
acted
like you did, which is, as you taught me, practically the whole task life requires of us. Even on the day when the telegram came, you wouldn't open it or let anyone else open it either. The war was over, you said. Your son could not be dead. But that sniper in France hadn't heard the news.

“Howard recommends that I limit my newspaper reading to the social pages and my progress reports on the flower show. No doubt you would second his opinion. ‘Don't read the papers if it bothers you so much,' I hear you say. ‘Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you.' But I do read them, and even if I didn't, I can't go down to Hahn's or to the Savoy for a Coca-Cola, to church or a club meeting, without somebody showing me a clipping or quoting what's being said about us in a newspaper somewhere in the state or in the articles that New York reporter writes about us.

“Ladies, ladies, I tell the Little Garden Club, after all our dear town has endured, doesn't everyone deserve some cheering up? Let's work to make this the best flower show ever, I say. Beyond this glass, through which we see but darkly, lies the untroubled vastness of God's design, in which all is destined and ordained. In due time the guilty will be caught and punished. And shame on anyone who has suggested that the blight has spread beyond a few depraved individuals to everyone. Still, the damage has been done. You cannot forget what you know. I know that Wesley Barton called our men human buzzards at a feast, and I know that the woman crawled among the crowd that night, begging them not to kill her, and I can't erase either picture from my mind. What would it be like, I ask myself, to crawl and plead for your life and find no help or mercy? To search every face and see no kindness?

“The morning after it happened, I saw Papa and Howard talking in the yard. Papa banged his cane on the ground the way he does when he demands to be heard, and Howard paced and pressed both hands to the top of his head as though trying to keep the thoughts from flying out. I raised the kitchen window and stood at the sink, washing a coffee cup and listening. ‘Yes, Howard,' Papa said. ‘Sometimes it takes a violent storm to clear the air.' Whenever Howard repeats those words to me, I imagine a summer storm: smothering air and black clouds and sudden wind that rips leaves from the trees and a hard rain beating on the ground. Then the sky clears as abruptly as it darkened, the clouds gallop off to the east. But if what Howard says is true, and the violent storm has passed, where is the brighter day that follows? Why is the air still as thick and murky and black as the plague of darkness that God once called down on Egypt? A darkness to be felt, is how the Bible describes it, a darkness in which they did not see one another. That is what it is like here now.

“I am glad you are not still in this world to see what it has come to, Mother. Two days ago, in the ballroom of the Highland Park Hotel, Zeke was up on the ladder, cleaning the windows, as he does every year before the flower show, and in passing I said, ‘Remember, Zeke, no soap on those windows. Use muslin and clean water. Remember to add some lemon juice to soften the water, and use a cotton cloth
dipped in a little alcohol to add brilliancy . . .' But in the middle of my instructions, he interrupted me—and he didn't even bother to turn around on the ladder when he spoke—just kept wiping the windows, with that infernal hat shoved forward at its usual cocky angle. “I know how to do your job, Miz Libba,” he said. “Been doing it since I could climb a ladder.”

“I will tell you something else, Mother, knowing you cannot hear me. The darkness has even come between Howard and me. You always taught me that a wife should be a helpmate to her husband, and I've tried.
Her lamp does not go out at night
, I tell myself when I wake in the middle of the night and see Howard's empty bed and know he's downstairs, worrying. I say it again as I go down and find him sitting at the little kitchen table in his blue flannel robe, staring at nothing. And I say it once again as I stand behind his chair and stroke his hair back from his forehead until, slowly, as though he were giving in to temptation, he lets his head relax against me.

“Your words are a lamp unto my feet in all times and circumstances, except one. You spoke only once of what you called ‘the married embrace' as something to be welcomed, or at least accepted, as an inevitable circumstance of the matrimonial state. But you would shudder at the thought of the embraces to which I am subjected. Every night since those people were killed, Howard comes to my bed or pulls me into his, and what he wants, I can never seem to give him. ‘Lie still, Libba,' he says one night, and the next night I am not lively enough, and no matter how diligently I search for them, no words come to explain this to me, and I feel I have become the voice of one crying in the wilderness of her own bedroom.

“Yesterday, as on every Sunday morning, I got Lewis dressed and fed and ready to go to the nine o'clock Mass with Howard. Lewis looked so handsome in his gray sweater vest, his clean white shirt and gray slacks, with silky hair neatly parted and combed to one side. “Such a little gentleman,” I said, and I knelt to straighten his tie.

“He put a hand on my shoulder, looked into my eyes, and said, ‘Come with us, Mother.' He looked so serious and hopeful, as though his heart might break if I said no. And I knew instantly what section of
the
Baltimore Catechism
he'd been studying. I could have marched up to his room and picked up that book from his nightstand and opened it to the exact page.

Q:
Are all bound to belong to the church?

A:
All are bound to belong to the church, and he who knows the church to be the true church and remains out of it cannot be saved.

“That page is marked with one of the cards the nuns hand out to the children at St. Angela's as rewards for good conduct and memorization. On the front of this card is a picture of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, with
The Holy Family
in gold script underneath, and on the back are the words ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, pray for us. 100 days indulgence.' I asked him once what that business of the hundred days meant, and he explained that every time a Catholic said that phrase, one hundred days were subtracted from the time certain people had to spend in purgatory. ‘What kind of people?' I asked. Unbaptized babies and the misguided or ignorant others who'd died outside the Roman Catholic Church, he said. ‘The Poor Souls,' he called them.

“And I knew it would do no good to explain to my son that because I neither knew nor accepted that the Catholic Church was the one true church, I could not be lost or condemned. That reasoning would be beyond him. But I ask myself: What kind of people torment a child with visions of his own mother shivering outside the gates of paradise, waiting for enough Catholics to whisper ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph' so she can go in?

“But rather than make an issue of it, I said, ‘Thank you for the sweet invitation, Lewis Hastings. But I have my own church. Now go outside, please, and wait for your father, and don't you get down on the ground in those good clothes.' Poor soul or no, I am still his mother, and when he examines his conscience every week before making his little confession, he has to ask himself if he's disobeyed me. His little catechism says so.

“But that all happened yesterday, Mother, and today is today, another
one of your lessons, expressed so aptly in lines by our favorite South Carolina poetess, Elizabeth Reese, where grief departs and joy comes in: ‘And every lad his love can win / For here is April weather.' Granted, it is November now, not April, but the sentiment holds true no matter the season. I woke up early this morning, full of energy. It was barely light outside when Minnie arrived to help me with the household inventory. You are the one who taught me the pleasures of our twin yearly chores: the fall inventory and the spring cleaning. Two poles of the axis on which our domestic globe spins. It was you who taught me so long and so well that there are certain things that no home should lack, others that cannot be tolerated. Without surrounding ourselves with quality and beauty that heals and rests the soul, you said, how shall we live? You are the one who instructed me in the vigilance we must maintain to guard against the rot and wear that can so quickly drag our lives down into the shabby depths.

“Thanks to you, I know that egg white applied with a small camel's hair paintbrush and rubbed gently with a soft cloth will remove fly-specks from gilt frames. I know that cut glass must be washed in hot soapsuds and not dried but left to drain; that silver is to be washed in a basin by itself and never touched with a greasy cloth. And my knowledge of household minutiae is matched and amplified by Minnie's of washing and ironing.

“If I close my eyes, I can see her and Zeke now, the two of them walking down the driveway, each carrying a suitcase. She wore a plain yellow dress, and her hair was done up in two neat braids pinned across the top of her head. She was tall and skinny as a crane and carried herself with great dignity, as she still does. For the first week they lived here, Zeke ran and hid his face in her skirt whenever Howard or I spoke to him, until one day I took his hand. ‘You are too big to hide in your mother's skirt,' I said. ‘Everybody must earn his keep here, Zeke.' And I led him toward the house. Minnie walked along behind us for a little way, saying, ‘Go on now, son. Nobody's going to hurt you,' and I put him to work sorting kindling on the back porch and gave him a glass of buttermilk when he was done, and after that we were square.

“But I could never tell Minnie any of this now. I am reluctant
to reminisce with her about pleasant memories of our time together because she no longer seems to share them. Like how good it used to be to come down the stairs amid the aroma of coffee and bacon and hear Howard and Minnie joking and laughing in the kitchen.

“ ‘Minnie,' he would say. ‘Did you and that rooster work out your differences this morning?'

“And she would laugh and say, ‘Go on, now, Mr. Howard, that rooster knows better than to mess with me.'

“Then Howard would say had he ever told her she made the best grits in the world, and what was her secret? Just put them in the pot with water and salt and a little pat of butter, she'd say, and back and forth like that they would go.

“These days she just plunks down Howard's plate of poached eggs and grits and bacon cooked the way he likes them: the yokes dry and crumbly, the bacon crisp, the grits served with a little pat of melted butter in the middle. He hardly bothers to look up when he says, ‘Thank you,' and the dining room door has already swung shut behind her before I hear, or imagine, her saying, ‘You're welcome, Mr. Howard.' Only now, more often than not, she'll catch herself and say Mr. Aimar. Mr. Aimar, Mrs. Aimar, that's who we are to her now, no matter how often I correct her. ‘Minnie, I am put out with you,' I say. ‘How many times have I asked you to call me Miz Libba?'

“ ‘Yes, ma'am, Miz Libba,' she says. ‘Looks like it just slips my mind sometimes.' But the next time it's right back to Mrs. Aimar again, and it has begun to seem like a deliberate act of defiance that Minnie, who can go down to Hahn's with a grocery list in her head and money in her pocket and come back with every item bought and every penny accounted for, can't remember from one hour to the next what the woman who pays and houses and feeds her wants to be called. And then I remember your calm forbearance in the face of provocation, and I calm myself with your wisdom.
Least said, soonest mended
.

“I even bought two tickets from Minnie to the upcoming performance at Schofield School by the violinist Joseph Douglass, an event I read about in the paper to which black
and
white are cordially invited. Joseph Douglass, so Minnie told me, is the grandson of Frederick Douglass,
but when I said, ‘I don't believe I know that name, Minnie,' she winced like a sudden pain had pierced her. The tickets are being sold, Minnie says, to send a deserving child to the school, and I am happy to support that cause, even though Papa swears that the money from ticket sales is going straight into the pockets of the colored lawyer from Columbia who's helping Herbert Long secure the two thousand dollars for each of his family dead that he feels entitled to by state law. Six thousand dollars is more money than many honest white men make in a year of hard work, Papa says. So what are the chances of that much money going to the colored father of murderers?

“I've come to expect Howard's morning gloominess, the way he pokes at his eggs, mashes grits with the back of the fork and complains that they're cold. But he looked especially glum when I told him that today was household inventory day. Then, once I'd gotten him a little cheered up and blown him a dozen kisses from the back steps and boosted Lewis onto Zeke's wagon and sent him off to school, I went inside and poured myself a cup of coffee from the blue-speckled percolator on the stove. ‘Minnie, get yourself a cup,' I said. ‘Come sit down with me for a minute.'

“We went into the dining room, but I was the only one carrying a cup. Minnie sat on the edge of her chair, flicking her dustrag at her shoes. ‘Minnie,' I said. ‘I wish you'd tell me what we're going to do about that child's bed-wetting.' Lewis's sheets had been sopping again this morning, and we've puzzled that problem through together more times than I can count. Minnie has always been as full of advice and sympathy as if Lewis were her own child. But no sooner had the question left my mouth this morning than she said, ‘I surely don't know, Mrs. Aimar,' and she went back to flicking at her shoes. ‘Zeke never gave me any trouble that way,' she said. ‘I best be getting back to work.' And she did just that, and I sat there staring into my coffee, feeling my whole face get hot.