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PACHYSANDRA

Everyone who knew Pachysandra knew that she talked to herself. Yet her face never betrayed the slightest hint of what she was talking about. Her expression remained hard, closed, the brick-colored skin drawn taut over her cheeks, her eyes shaded by the brim of the straw hat she never removed.

As soon as she opened her eyes in the morning and remembered who and where she was, her lips began to move — not just with any words, but with verses from the Bible. The first verse that came to mind and fully penetrated her consciousness would stay with her all day long, to be recited over and over from morning to night.

Pachysandra did not select her own material. Biblical texts and images flooded her imagination, adapting themselves to her moods, which shifted in reaction to the weather, or to an argument with her son Tom, or to some distant pagan source whose origins she did not know and did not want to know.

Pachysandra believed in the holy patriarchs of the Old Testament. She knew they were looking after her because they came without premeditation or prayer. They arose from the depths of her spirit, filling every corner of her room, settling on the bed, giving her advice on what to cook and what to eat. When she laughed, they laughed with her; when she cried, they cried, too. They embraced her like a trellis of roses, guarding and protecting her private world.

All day, while her mind was busy with this and that, the images were in motion. Figures appeared as if under a silver cloud. She saw Abraham’s caravan on the edge of the desert and the matriarch Sarah, encircled by a retinue of maidservants and wrapped in white linen, riding side-saddle on a small donkey. Pachysandra couldn’t see her face, but sensed her royal bearing, and with the utmost respect she chose not to peel away the swaths of fabric protecting her privacy. For each image, she had a corresponding verse. The images and the verses populated Pachysandra’s world, which she tended in a special chamber of her being, minute as a pinhead and yet infinite.

Pachysandra saw parallels between Sarah’s fortunes and her own. She too had rescued her only son from the butcher knife that he himself had sharpened. She too had crossed the river into a foreign land — and not just one river, but many rivers, many seas, until the very last wandering that brought her from South Carolina to cold, alien Brooklyn.

Pachysandra yearned for South Carolina. She missed the wide open universe, as wide and open as God had created it. Every morning when she went shopping for her son Tom, she made a detour through Prospect Park so that she could luxuriate in the scent of the grass, the trees, the water. She scolded the birds in the park if they refused the bread crumbs she’d set aside for them the previous evening.

“If I had any teeth, I wouldn’t be tossing God’s bread at you like this,” she told them. “The Creator has already provided you with nuts from the trees and worms from the earth.” Pachysandra carried the leftover crumbs to the river where the less finicky ducks quickly devoured them.

“How happy you are,” she said to the ducks. “You have no worries or concerns. Your conscience doesn’t bother you when you grab a morsel from another’s mouth. You know nothing of sin, you live and laugh as if you’d never left the Garden of Eden nor eaten from the Tree of Knowledge. All’s well with you, my little ones. Eat, eat, and enjoy.”

Even as she spoke to the birds, the song inside her continued without interruption, seamlessly anchoring her to the spiritual world.

Sometimes Pachysandra forgot a word from the tract she was repeating. When this happened, she’d open her straw purse to touch the Bible that she always carried with her. The word would come to her immediately, pronounced in the quavering tones used by the preacher every Sunday morning in South Carolina.

Pachysandra tended the small plot of green that graced the entrance to the big apartment building where her son Tom was the superintendent. As she gardened, her mind often strayed to far-away South Carolina, where each drop of water was repaid with the blessing of abundance: golden corn and green peppers. There her life had taken root like a seed dropped in the earth. The rise and fall of her green days pursued her in her dreams. The faded images appeared the moment she fell asleep.

In her dreams she and Tom’s father are still young. They pick cotton side by side in the sun-drenched fields. At the end of the day, they count how many bushels they’ve picked. Sometimes she dreams she’s waiting for Tom’s father in the high corn. All her limbs draw her toward him. He stands nearby, but is unable to see her. He looks past her into the distance. She feels his breath on her face, sees the sweat that has trickled into his eyes from under his wide-brimmed hat. He wipes his face with his torn shirt and flashes his white teeth, always ready to laugh.

His playful laughter flows out of the pillow, sometimes turning into lament. Wanting to console him, she searches for words to soothe his sorrow. She looks for her Bible, but can’t find it — and when she does, all the pages are blank. In her younger days, truth be told, she knew very little about the Bible. She went to church only on the most important holidays. It was not until Tom’s father was brought home dead that she began to pay attention to the preacher’s sermons.

She used to sit on the wobbly rocking chair in the front room of her little house with the child at her breast, rocking back and forth in search of God. All the world stretched before her like a desert. With the child in her arms, like the Biblical Hagar before her, she searched for a spring where she could fill her jug. And the spring rose up before her. And she lifted her eyes and saw the great house on the other side of the tracks, beyond the grand garden where her mother had once worked. Now, Pachysandra arose early every day, took the boy by the hand, and went to the great house. Day in and day out, with the boy in tow, she did all that she was told. In the evening, she returned home to her ramshackle cottage by the open field.

The deep wounds left by Tom’s father’s death dried out under the southern sun. The years passed, and Tom grew tall and strong, the image of his father. Women chased after him. The one he chose to marry later came to betray him. She aroused in Tom the bad blood of his father, and this caused her, Pachysandra, to swear falsely.

Late in the evening in her rocking chair she would speak to God. She spoke to Him directly, without restraint. The mild breezes that knew all the secret pathways carried her prayers to the place where all heartfelt pleas must go. Even today, in Brooklyn, she lived by the grace of those heavens and by the blessing that pulsed in that brown earth.

When Tom decided to become a superintendent in Brooklyn, she brought with her a small box filled with that earth, dug from behind the old walnut tree where she and Tom’s father used to meet. The tree hadn’t produced any nuts for years. Spanish moss hung thickly on its branches, like faded mourning shawls on the heads of widows. Pachysandra placed the earth in the finely carved box that Tom’s father had once given her filled with chocolate.

In her basement home in Brooklyn the little box sat on a private altar covered with a white tablecloth embroidered with colorful flowers. Beside it was a portrait of Mother Mary with the crucified Christ in her arms, and nearby an incense burner and the Bible, which she took out of her straw purse as soon as she came home.

When her heart was heavy, Pachysandra would kneel before the altar. Her eyes were hungry for a small patch of sky or the edge of a green field. But all she could see through her small basement window were feet, without faces or bodies, forever tramping back and forth. It seemed to Pachysandra that they wanted to crush her and bury her under the dust of the city until not the slightest trace remained of her past or of the mother who’d birthed her.

Tom, too, felt choked by the umbilical cord to which he was attached. Pachysandra saw him as the very incarnation of his father. He roared like his father and gnashed his teeth, and he, too, believed that God was a white man and that only through blood and fire would the black man find his place in the world.

Pachysandra listened to him talk. She rocked back and forth as he spoke, as if she were still sitting in her rocking chair in far-away South Carolina. A great pity overcame her when she considered her son’s loneliness and his tormented, starved, and depleted soul. She longed to share with him the riches of her faith, the dream that couldn’t be bought with money nor broadcast over television or transistor radio. She wanted to reveal her visions to him, but knew not to disclose this secret. Tom was sure to laugh at her. The patriarchs have no one better to visit than an old black maid from South Carolina, he’d mock. Knowing what he would say, she kept the vision locked up inside, protecting it from eyes that looked but couldn’t see and from hearts that couldn’t feel. The tie was between her and her God, and she would carry the secret with her to the grave.

On her knees, Pachysandra looked beyond the crucifix to the night when Tom came home with a knife in hand, intent on killing his wife. He had just found out that she’d betrayed him. Pachysandra planted herself between them and grabbed the knife by the blade.

“Get out of the way,” he shouted, “or I’ll kill you both!”

“You’re not going to kill anyone,” Pachysandra answered.

Tom saw the blood gushing from his mother’s hand and Myrtle, his wife, lying unconscious on the floor.

“Your wife is innocent,” Pachysandra said. “I swear to you on the Holy Bible that an enemy has cooked up these false accusations to destroy you, just as your father was destroyed.”

“My father defended his honor.”

“Your father accepted a liar’s word.”

“Swear!” Tom roared.

“I swear!” she replied.

“On the open Bible?”

“On the open Bible!”

“On my father’s honor?”

“On your father’s honor.”

Pachysandra placed her bloody hand on the Holy Book and swore an oath that she knew to be false.

That night Pachysandra sat in her rocking chair enveloped in darkness. She waited, hoping her punishment would come like a lightning bolt and strike her down on the spot. She waited for the gates of hell to open up and for devils to emerge with glowing tongs to roast her flesh, or for a snake to spring out of the grass, wrap itself around her neck and strangle her. She opened her heart and laid bare her soul to receive the punishment. She was prepared to pay with her own life for saving the life of her son.

Pachysandra closed her eyes. Cool sea breezes caressed her burning face, her bony hands, her bare feet. She drew her shawl tighter around her shoulders; her head sank to her breast. She saw the oleander tree that grew beside the little house, climbing like a ladder toward the vault of heaven. High above, on a lattice of roses, the figures were descending. One, two, three, four women clad in white. They stepped down the ladder and settled on the rungs and the ramp. They were quarreling over a matter she knew well.

“She desecrated God’s word,” said one.

“She conducted herself as a mother would,” replied a second.

“She swore falsely.”

“She saved her daughter-in-law from death and her son from eternal prison.”

“She used God’s word for falsehood.”

“She acted like a mother.”

“We are all mothers.”

“Who can judge a mother’s heart when her only son is being led to the sacrificial altar?”

“My twin sons were not bound for the altar, but I followed the dictates of my heart, not my mind.”

“I bore ten sons and abandoned them all to their own fate.”

Only the fourth one, the youngest, said nothing. She allowed her attendants to smooth out the folds of her white dress. Her head was bent low, and from the trembling of her shoulders it was clear that she was weeping.

To Pachysandra it seemed as if the hot tears of that veiled figure were running down her own face. She forced her eyes open, wanting to hold onto the dream, to run after the esteemed guests and offer them refreshment, perhaps something cold to drink and an ear of roasted corn. She longed to sit at their feet and listen to them argue. She would accept their judgment, whether good or bad. Around her the night was still and empty. She bent down and kissed the steps where the honored visitors had sat.

It was just a dream! a voice whispered, but Pachysandra did not want to hear. Instead, she listened to the rustle that their fine garments left behind in the air, and to the lament of the youngest and most beautiful of them all.

Pachysandra rose as if in a trance and saw that the heavens were parting. She was not surprised. Deep in her soul she knew that this was how it was meant to be. She made no attempt to understand the miracle. From the open heavens, a fiery arm reached out, sowing the vast field of the night sky with stars.

That night, at that moment, a spring burst open and holy words began to gush forth. Entire chapters of the Bible flooded over her. Her lips began to move. Words poured out as if from an overflowing jug. A choir of angels sang along with her.

All night, Pachysandra stood under the open skies. She didn’t see a rainbow, but in the very core of her being she knew that that night she had signed a covenant with the Almighty. She would repeat the words of the Bible all the days of her life. The Bible would be the very essence of her life. Whenever the words welled up, God would protect her, both her and her son Tom.