Читать книгу Mulberry - Paulette Boudreaux - Страница 9

THE LEAVES WERE GONE from my mulberry tree and the world was barren with the approach of winter when Roy Anthony, Earl, and I looked up from our Saturday morning play in the yard to see Momma walking up the road after nearly three weeks of being away at the hospital with Ida Bea. The boys rushed to greet her with their emotions flying. I followed as she went into the house with them bustling joyously around her. She pulled off her coat and sat on the edge of her and Daddy’s unmade bed.

“Where’s y’all’s Daddy?”

“Gone,” we all said together.

Daddy had left the house at the crack of dawn just like he did on workdays.

June Bug climbed onto Momma’s lap, and Roy Anthony and Earl dropped to their knees on the floor in front of her. I sat beside her on the bed and she draped an arm across my shoulders, leaned in, and pressed her cheek against the side of my face. The subtle odors of hospital antiseptics, fatigue, and rubber bandages wafted from her clothes.

“Where’s the baby at?” Earl wanted to know.

“The hospital.”

“How come you didn’t bring her with you?”

Momma’s smile flattened. “She needs to stay where the doctors can see her.”

“Look at all you nappy heads,” she sang, her smile blossoming again. “You all gone get washed and clipped soon as me and Maddy clean this house.”

Roy Anthony and Earl shook like puppies and jumped to their feet. “You’ll never take me alive,” Roy Anthony said. He posed briefly, as if he were running when someone called “red light.” He opened the door and ran onto the porch. His laughter floated in as Earl disappeared after him and slammed the door.

Momma stood and lifted June Bug. The muscles in her forearms tensed, dark and sinewy as she held him in the air above her for a moment then rubbed his cheek against hers. He giggled and drew his knees up toward his chest. Momma settled him on her hip and began her survey of the rest of the house. I followed, seeing the mess through her eyes—the unmade beds, the pile of school clothes on great-grandmother’s trunk and in the rocking chair, school papers scattered on the dresser-top and the floor, the mound of book-bags in the corner, toys everywhere, dust bunnies lining the baseboards, dirt trails on the linoleum from the back door to the kitchen sink, leaves huddled in little clumps around the legs of the kitchen table, food cemented to the floor in crusty patches near the stove, dirty dishes leaning against each other in the sink.

I stole a glance at Momma’s face. Her disappointment and aggravation were visible in the bunched lines between her eyes and in her pursed lips.

I wanted to say it wasn’t easy to keep an eye on the boys and keep the house clean at the same time. She had to know how hard it was just to get the boys up and fed and dressed and out of the house, then back home safely every day.

“You just don’t seem to know how not to shame me,” Momma said.

She shook her head and made that familiar sound with her tongue like the speeded up ticking of a clock. “This house ain’t got no business looking like this with a girl as big as you living in it.”

June Bug pressed his head against Momma’s chest, put his thumb in his mouth, and stared at me.

“Maddy, girl, you got to act more grown now. You big enough to clean a house. I showed you how. I didn’t make you do as much housework as some people made they girls, but I showed you how. No excuse for this kind of mess. You got to make better use of yourself. I’ve told you. Ain’t no room in the world for no lazy colored girl. You understand what I’m telling you?”

She was always saying things like that to me. I didn’t understand exactly, but I nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“What I tell you ’bout ‘sorry’?”

“It don’t fix nothing, and it make me sound like I’m no count and lazy.”

“So why you standing here saying it to me now?”

“I’ll do better next time.”

“Please God, let that be the truth. Now don’t just stand there like a little empty-headed sow, we need the broom, the water bucket, the mop, the wash tub …”

I followed her orders and we set to work cleaning the house. I helped her pull the sheets off the beds and put them to soak in a tub of scalding water laced with bleach and soap. While they were soaking, I washed dishes and helped scrub the floor of every room in our four-room house, including the little room on the back porch that housed the toilet. We took the sheets from their soak and scrubbed them on the metal scrub-board until they were pristine. Then we washed several weeks’ worth of dirty clothes, including Daddy’s work overalls with their stench of hay and chicken feed and droppings from his job at the poultry farm. Finally, we heated more water and the metal washtub was set in the middle of the kitchen floor and filled again with warm soapy water. One after the other, the boys and I climbed in and scrubbed away two and a half weeks of dirt.

“Is this how it is when I’m gone?” Momma had asked in a snappish voice as we ate supper without Daddy. “Go watch for him,” she ordered as soon as our plates were empty.

The washing was all dry, the beds remade, supper was eaten, and it was getting dark by the time we saw Daddy coming up the road.

“Momma’s home, Momma’s home,” Roy Anthony and Earl sang, hurrying to meet Daddy when he strode into view, lumbering slowly from inside the Quarters.

“She waiting for you,” Roy Anthony said, running backward in front of Daddy. “She ain’t happy neither.”

On the front porch, Daddy stopped to tuck in his shirt, pull the front of his jacket together, and square his shoulders. He wiped his mud-caked shoes on the back of his pant legs, patted his kinky hair, and fixed a smile on his dark, lean face. The boys and I followed him inside.

In the kitchen Momma leaned against the sink, her arms folded across her chest, a wet dishrag dangling from one hand.

“Well, well, well, seems they was telling the truth,” Daddy said with a guilty smile.

The tight expression on Momma’s face didn’t change. She turned her back to us all, sloshed the rag in the dishwater, wrung it out, and hung it over the side of the sink. “Y’all keep your coats on and go on back outside to play,” she ordered. “Me and your Daddy need to talk.” The heat of her anger fanned out, touching everything in the room.

“Junie Boy can stay,” she added. “The rest of y’all go on out of here, but don’t leave the yard.”

Roy Anthony, Earl, and I went onto the front porch. Earl’s eyes were moist. “What we gon’ do now, Maddy?” he asked.

“Momma said play,” Roy Anthony answered. “So let’s play then. Pick a game you crybaby.”

I suggested hide-and-seek. As soon as their backs were turned, I ran to the back porch, quietly opened the screen door, stepped in between the screen and the wooden door, squatted, and pressed my ear against the cold wood to eavesdrop on Momma and Daddy in the kitchen.

“… nothing like before,” Daddy was saying. “Ain’t at all the same, Dot. This baby was born sick. Samuel was born healthy.”

What was he talking about? Who was Samuel?

“It’s ’bout me being there or not being there, Gene. I got to be there, and I got to count on you.”

“I ain’t going nowhere,” Daddy said.

“I been hearing stories from folks coming to the hospital. Stories ’bout you at Loralee’s joint.”

“Don’t put no credence in other folks’ stories.”

“I smell the whiskey on you right now.”

“It’s Saturday night, Dot. Don’t mean I’m drinking every night.”

“I’m worried ’bout these children, Gene.”

“Come on home then, Dot.”

“We been over this. You know there ain’t no nurses up there in the ward with the colored children. Somebody’s got to take care of Ida Bea, feed her, change her diapers and such.”

“She dying, bleeding from her belly like that. If she don’t die she likely gone be a cripple like Harold was. Dying would be better.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Mama ran herself to the bone taking care of Harold. Sister did Mama’s work, then died like a old woman at twenty-seven. Folks a lot older than her got flu that year. Didn’t die from it though. Even with all the sacrificing, Harold ain’t had what nobody could properly call a life. I used to look at him, all hunched up, slobbering on himself, grinning from ear to ear like some kind of fool, and I’d think, Lord have mercy and put this suffering fool out of his misery.”

“Gene—”

The sudden silence on the other side of the door was like a quick intake of air. I waited in the darkness recalling what I knew about Daddy’s family. His older sister, my Aunt Ida Bea, and his younger brother, Harold, died long before I was born. Before he even met Momma.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen with our Ida Bea,” Momma said. “Doctors don’t even know. Besides, her living or dying is God’s decision.”

“God loosed death in the world. Don’t think he much cares one way or the other about how the dying goes. I seen a lot of bad living and hard dying in the war. Ain’t seen God there for none of it.”

“Maybe the dying you saw wasn’t down to God. Maybe it was down to men.”

“That’s my point, Dot. God didn’t do nothing to stop or start the dying. Whether any of us lives and dies ain’t nothing to do with God. It’s to do with the bad luck of sickness, or the doings of other folks.”

“Just because you don’t believe in God’s help, don’t mean I got to follow suit.”

Momma continued in a smooth even voice like there were strong feelings behind it that she was trying hard to hide. “I believe God is looking down on Ida Bea. I want to be on the right side of what he sees down here. Maybe this time I won’t have to lose—”

“You promised to let that go, Dot.”

“I never promised my heart would stop hurting or that I would stop thinking about the loss of my first-born child.”

I stiffened. Loss of her firstborn? I was her firstborn. I wasn’t lost. Had there been a baby before me?

Momma’s voice was hoarse and her words rolled out slowly when she spoke again. “I stopped blaming you. That’s all. But he’s with me all the time, Gene. Sometimes more real to me than these living ones. Sitting up there in that hospital ward, watching all kinds of sick children come and go, I can’t help but think, what if I’d been there? Maybe Samuel would still be here.”

“There wasn’t nothing you could’ve done for Sam. I’m the one—”

“Gene, don’t.”

“What? Tell me that’s not what you really thinking. You thinking you could’ve kept me from—”

“Stop it, Gene. No matter what you say, I won’t take a chance with Ida Bea. I won’t leave her to nobody else’s tending. The one thing I need from you is for you to take care of these children at home. You got Maddy here to help you this time.”

“I need you here, Dot. My head won’t stay straight these days.”

“You got control. You been controlling your head for better than twelve years. You were doing fine till you started drinking.”

“I started seeing death again.”

“You ain’t in the army now. You ain’t fighting nobody’s war. Why do you keep on bringing all that back up? You can’t let something from that long ago take over our lives again.”

“It comes up on its own, Dot. It comes on sudden. Drink quiets it down.”

“From what I can see, drink just thins out your mind so you don’t see what’s real.”

“I’m near the edge—”

“What edge, Gene? You ain’t got no edge. There’s you. There’s me. There’s our five living children. We all twined up together. I’m doing my best to take care of our sick child. You got to take care of the well ones ’cause I got nobody else to help me. No family, nobody. Lord, Gene. You can’t fail me this time. I won’t stand it a second time. Won’t go through it with you again.”

The silence that grew in the room was soon punctuated with the heavy sound of weeping. Footsteps moved across the creaky floorboards of the kitchen.

“I ain’t as strong as you think. Not like you.” Daddy’s voice was soaked with pain. “I can’t hold on too good without you.”

“You been saying things like that our whole life together. It ain’t that you ain’t strong. You just give up too easy. You don’t get to do that this time. I can’t hold up both ends of our life. With Samuel I counted on you. You let me down. That can’t happen again, Gene. I don’t have it in me to forgive that big again. You promised me things back then. You promised.”

Silence collected inside the house.

I leaned against the door frame. My mind skittered from one bit of information to another, but it kept landing on the same piece—I have a dead brother, Samuel, and Daddy had something to do with his death.

As I stared into the darkness, I started to tremble. My stomach turned in on itself and I felt queasy.

“Olly, olly, oxen free,” Roy Anthony and Earl were shouting in unison from the front yard. “Olly, olly, oxen free.” They sang again. “Maddy, come out, come out wherever you are.”

I was paralyzed in the flat gray air on the back porch, hearing only silence in the kitchen.

“Come on, Maddy—olly, olly, oxen free. You can come out. You safe. We don’t want to play no more,” Roy Anthony yelled, now from the side of the house, frustration rising high and keen in his voice. “Come on, Maddy, we don’t want to play no more. I quit. Come on out.”

I righted myself in the doorway and stood up. Little paisley sparks of color floated in the dark air in front of me. I grabbed the doorknob to steady myself, swallowed some air, and turned the knob.

No one stirred when I stepped inside. Momma was sitting in a chair at the table, her elbows on the watermelon-colored Formica, her face in her hands. June Bug stood on his thin legs, pressed against Momma’s side with his head on her lap. Daddy was standing behind Momma, his fingers slowly kneading the muscles of her shoulders. His face was shiny with tears.

I paused in the doorway. “I need a drink of water,” I said at last.

“Okay.” Daddy said without looking up.

“Go find your brothers,” Momma said through her hands. “It’s getting time for y’all to come inside and go to bed.” Her voice was wet.

When I came back in the front door with Roy Anthony and Earl in tow, Momma was sitting on the edge of her bed with June Bug curled beside her. Daddy was slouched in the stuffed chair across from the bed, leaning back with his eyes closed. He looked gray, like spent charcoal.

“I need to talk to y’all,” Momma said, “’cause I’ll be leaving early in the morning before y’all wake up.”

“Why you have to go back?” Earl asked, dropping to his knees in front of her.

“Ida Bea needs me.”

“Can’t you bring her home and keep her here? You brought June Bug home. He was a little baby one time.” Earl leaned forward.

“Ida Bea’s got to stay where the doctors can see her. She needs the doctors.”

Roy Anthony moved around the room touching things—Momma’s little round alarm clock, the smooth plastic handles on the chest of drawers, the cold rounded metal of the bed frame, the smooth surface of the mirror above the dresser. He glanced at Daddy periodically. I sat cross-legged on the cold floor away from them all, trying to take it all in.

“Can’t the doctors see ’bout her without you?”

Earl, in his blundering open-hearted way, kept questioning Momma.

“She needs me to see ’bout her too.”

“We need you too,” Earl said.

“You got your daddy and you got your big sister,” Momma said. “Ida Bea’s got nobody but me.”

Momma looked from Daddy to me. When our eyes met, I blanched, trying to swallow whatever emotion might have been on my face. There was a free-floating mishmash of feelings that went with knowing that she and Daddy were hiding the fact of a dead child. There were no pictures of Samuel in our family photo album. There had never been a mention of his name. How could Momma and Daddy act like they always had?

My whole world was shifting. I had been removed from my place in the family. A brother had been born before me, and he had died before me. Daddy had something to do with the dying.

“I’ll be home when she’s all better,” Momma was saying, still looking at me.

Could she read how stunned I felt? I looked at Daddy. What was he thinking about?

Back in the summer Esther and I had been drawn in to keeping a secret with him. I had followed an overgrown path shaded by longleaf pines, towering oaks, and low-lying shrubs that sloped down toward Harvest Quarters creek. Esther was close behind, letting me take the lead for once. We were headed to one of our favorite places. We went there when we wanted to avoid the other kids in the neighborhood. At the creek’s edge, there were flat places where we could wade in the shallow water and catch tadpoles. We built watery corrals and let them flit around inside. Sometimes we just stood still in the water, pretending to fish with string tied on the end of a stick, feeling the cool and squishy mud between our toes and the tickling of minnows brushing against our legs. There were big rocks and moss-covered tree-stumps where we could sit and talk, or do nothing but watch dragonflies dart over the surface of the water.

We had never seen another soul in this particular spot, but that day when we spilled out of the shady path to look at the sunshine rippling on the surface of the water in front of us, there was Daddy sitting on a stump. The toes of his work-boots were submerged in the clear water. In one hand he held a mason jar, and in the other a photograph.

“Daddy?” I blurted.

His eyes were glistening when he looked up.

“Maddy? Baby Girl?”

He put the photograph in the pocket of his khaki shirt and stood. “What you doing here?”

“We kind of lost,” Esther said, and looked at me quickly.

Daddy’s lean dark face looked relieved. He patted his shirt pocket and stooped to retrieve something from the ground—the lid for his mason jar. Slowly, he screwed it on. For a few long moments we all stood in the music of birdsong and flowing water.

“Lost, you say?”

“Yes, sir,” Esther said.

I nodded and looked down at the ground, feeling the heat rise to my face.

“You girls ain’t got no business wandering around in these woods. There’s some dangerous animals out here—foxes, mad raccoons, water moccasins. Maddy, you gone get your hide tanned.”

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” I said, though I couldn’t see what was so bad about going to wade in the creek on a hot day. We’d never seen any dangerous animals except snapping turtles sunning themselves on rocks. They always slid into the water and swam away from wherever we were.

“Save your sorry for later. It’s your momma you’ll need to explain yourself to,” Daddy said.

“It ain’t Maddy’s fault, Mr. Culpepper. I’m the one got us lost. We won’t come this way again.”

Esther was stepping from foot-to-foot and fingering the small hairs at the back of her neck.

I wanted to ask Daddy what he was doing here, and whose picture was that? But I knew better. “Bad manners to question adults. When I want you to know something, I’ll tell you,” he had warned before.

“Come on,” Daddy said.

He led us along the creek in the opposite direction of the way we had come. I followed in his shadow, worrying about my punishment. He veered off onto an unfamiliar path among the trees. The ground was worn bare and the shrubbery had been hacked back so nothing reached out to touch my face and arms as I passed. Esther and I had never come across this path. It occurred to me that there must be hundreds of ways to move through these woods. Daddy stomped on ahead, sure-footed with his head bowed. When we came out onto the Quarters road, he stopped.

“I tell you what. I got to go take this back to the people that gave it to me.”

Clear liquid sloshed inside the jar when he held it up. “You momma don’t need to know either one of us was down by the creek today. It’d just worry her for no good reason. So, I’m not going to mention it. This time.”

He put his hand on my shoulder. “Got that?”

He was asking me to keep a secret from Momma. What would she have a problem with—the jar, the picture, or the fact that he hadn’t come straight home from work?

“Got that, Maddy?”

I nodded.

“So you and your little friend here go on home. I’ll take care of what I need to and I’ll be there directly, like I always am.”

He tapped me under the chin with his fingers the way he used to when I was little. “Later, Baby Girl,” he said, then turned and headed back into the heart of the Quarters.

“Grown-ups always got secrets,” Esther said as we walked toward home in the opposite direction of Daddy.

“Maddy, are you hearing me?” Momma’s voice intruded on my memory. Her face was drawn in lines of aggravation when I looked across the room at her. I nodded. Esther’s voice still echoed in my head, “Grown-ups always got secrets.” “I’m trying to tell you that y’all’s daddy’s gon’ start bringing y’all to visit me and Ida Bea up at the hospital. Ain’t that right, Gene?” Momma moved her gaze back to Daddy.

“Uhnn huh,” he grunted. Nothing on him moved except the lump of his Adam’s apple, which vibrated in his throat like a hard candy he was trying to swallow.

They had both cried about their dead child. Now they were back to holding that secret with stoicism and ease.

“Now don’t y’all go making me feel bad for even coming home for a little bit,” Momma said.

Everybody stiffened, even Daddy, who opened his eyes and sat up straight.

“I want y’all to be good to each other while I’m away. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Y’all hearing me?”

We all nodded, even Daddy.

“Now y’all go on get ready for bed. Junie Boy will sleep with me and Daddy tonight. Maddy?”

She called me back as I was leaving the room and handed me a few pieces of notebook paper. In her precise cursive handwriting she had written out simple instructions for cooking a few of the meals she usually cooked—red beans and rice with onions; spaghetti with tomato paste and ground meat; chicken backs and rice; black-eyed peas and hog jowls; chicken legs in gravy; fried pork chops; beef tails and navy beans; corn bread; biscuits.

“Put those pages some place where they won’t get lost. I want you cooking supper now on. Don’t know how long I’ll be away this time, but y’all need good regular meals. You near grown now right?” She winked at me. “You can take care of your brothers and this old raggedy daddy of y’all’s.”

She grinned at Daddy. He returned her smile. For a moment they seemed like their old selves. But that idea shattered and dissolved beside my new knowledge about them.