I got children and grandchildren who need me. Clients too.” I don’t deliver as many babies as I had in my youth, but some mothers still call. “I cook three meals and take in some laundry.” I raise my hands. I’m more than a little surprised at how my words have streamed out like they’d been waiting for him. “I’m still wondering when the Lord is going to add more hours to the day, but until he hears me . . .” I trail off. They laugh at the joke about God, and I close the door and click the bolt behind me.
I DON’T NORMALLY LOCK UP. IN FACT YOU CAN FIND ME rocking on my porch most nights until the wind cuts through my shawl. The Klan isn’t deep here like they used to be in Link’s sister’s side of town. Not only that, I’m still marveling at the change: down the hill, the houses were so close to the marsh mosquitos ate us for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert; either that, or we closed the windows and suffocated in the heat. Here the night air feels like God close up, whispering his secrets, and I’m liable to stare at the butter beans and mustard greens my husband laid the groundwork for like it’s the seventh day.
Today is different though. Aside from the wedding, which was of course a joyous occasion, it seems like those neighbors got something sticky about themselves they were trying to pass off, press inside me, and I need more of a barrier than normal. I collapse on my bed before I even take off my shoes. I don’t know how long I am out, but when I hear the knock it’s clear it’s been sounding for some time. I jerk up, reach for my kerosene lamp and light it. Like I said, there isn’t any Klan, not yet, but Link talked about them like they were supernatural, an army of ghosts riding around with bullets peppered through them. Not only that, there was burning and looting, lynching too. Link’s kin had to stay by me for two weeks last winter after those devils shot a man for standing in front of a white woman at the general store. The memory of it sits low in my mind today, and for that reason I look through the hole my son drilled through the door before I answer. Oh. It is only Jericho.
I open up fast, set a pot of milk on the wood stove to boil; there are always roasted peanuts and he grabs a handful and tosses them back.
He sits down at the table. I had heard Eliza tell Link that today was the best day of her life. She would never forget it, but Jericho looks like he won’t forget it either, only for opposite reasons.
“What is it? You look like somebody been hainted.” The fireplace is out but I reignite it, add a couple pieces of lumber to the pit.
He shakes his head but he doesn’t say a word.
“What is it? I thought you was sleeping over by them tonight.”
He shakes his head again.
I stand all of a sudden, and the pine floor seems to bend with my weight. The sadness is too much for me to bear. I only met his mama a few times, but I’d been shocked when she up and left a three-month-old in my arms. A baby who had gotten used to the breast, and I had to drip milk from my cows onto his tongue with a medicine dropper. I shudder each time I remember the nights: he’d rumble awake at the sound of my breath shifting and it would start up again, that interminable wail that I’d take to my grave. My life had not been easy by any account, and I was surprised to realize, old as I was, finished as I thought I was, that that wail would be the hardest thing I’d endure.
I reach for my coat. “Where is she? I told her it was your house. I told her if she couldn’t abide that, we wouldn’t abide her. In so many words, I told her that.” I can hear myself huffing. I have always been a little too quick to anger; anybody who knows me knows you never have to wonder what I am thinking, but that trait looks different on me now. I don’t have to see a reflection to know it can read as sad. I can’t always keep my footing these days.
“She told me I could stay there, Mama,” he says, reaching for my hand.
It takes a while for his words to hold; I had become so worked up.
“What do you mean?” I ask. “Then why are you here?”
“I wanted to be here, Mama. I didn’t want to be anywhere else.”
“Oh,” I sit down. The milk is bubbling, but I’d get it in a second. “Oh,” I repeat. “Well, I suppose that’s okay,” I say. Him staying is more than okay. “I got some pig lips I set aside for us this morning,” I say.
He nods. “I didn’t have much of an appetite earlier.”
“That’s understandable.”
THOUGH HE IS TWELVE WE STILL SLEEP IN THE SAME room, and when I am done with the dishes, I lie down on the bed opposite him. I close my eyes, a drift away from that other world, unrecognizable faces and names already pulsing inside my mind, when he pats my arm.
“Mama?”
“Yes, son?”
“Can you tell me the story again?”
“It’s too late,” I say. I don’t remember what I just gave up but it was sweet, I know that, as sweet as anything I can dredge up from my own, real life.
“Please,” he whispers.
I prop up on one arm. Maybe I spoil him.
“He’s a black man in this world,” Major has scolded me. “You got him used to sweetness when life gon’ be tart.”
“Somebody’s got to do it,” I always shout back. “Doesn’t make it any more tart because you have known sweetness. If anything, the sweetness levels it out for you.” That’s what I’d say, but I have no way of knowing.
Of course Major isn’t only protecting Jericho. He resents me. I didn’t tell my own children stories, didn’t have the time to, and if I had the time, I certainly didn’t have the breath. I was still a child crafting jump ropes from vines when I was ripped off that plantation, and it took me past adulthood to see straight again, to be inside my body when I was hauling the plow, hammering nails on the fences, planting the cotton, cutting the onions, thickening the roux, marching through the streets with the stink from white people’s dirty clothes wafting off my head, balancing water from the wells, washing and boiling the clothes. I used lye to make soap and wheat bran for starch. I’d hang skirts and short pants on plum bushes. Then I’d heat the iron on the stove, cover it with beeswax, clear it, wet the garments, and run that iron back and forth. At least once a month, a bell would ring for me and I’d carry my sassafras and castor oil to a screaming woman’s house to thin the time between her contractions. I soaked beans and braided hair and sewed dresses for my children, but I didn’t bother to tell them I loved them.
“Okay,” I say now. “What story should it be?”
“The one where you died and came back to life.”
I nod. That is his favorite, and as far as memories go, it is harmless.
“You not sick of that one?” I ask, buying time.
He shakes his head.
“All right then.”
I clear my throat and lean my head against the pillow. It is hard looking back. As close as I have to be to dying it is easier to look forward than to look back.
