A Parchment of Leaves (28 page)

“Aidia, come here and help me,” I said, but she wouldn't come near the bed.

“I can't,” she said.

“Well, go get me some water and heat it up a little. I want to clean her up good before anybody gets here.”

Aidia felt her way out by hanging on to the wall. “No, you'll have to get it,” she said. “I have to go tell the bees.”

“Aidia, I need you to help me.”

“I have to tell the bees,” she said again, and slipped out the door.

I drawed water from the well and stood in the yard for a minute, getting a good breath of air. Aidia was leaned close to the hives, talking to the bees that Esme had always kept. My family never had gone by such beliefs, but I knowed that many people did. If you didn't tell the bees when someone had died, the bees would leave and there would be no more honey. It seemed a selfish thing to me—to be thinking of honey at such a time. Some people spread towels out over the clover, thinking the bees would want to fast during the wake. But I wanted to smack Aidia's face.

I went back into the house and heated the water. I washed Esme
gently, lifting her arms and wiping her feet and down her legs. I lifted her and soaped her back, her skin as white and soft as a Bible page. I used a new rag on her face and put the tortoise combs in her hair. I put her glasses back on and found her new dress, which she had sewn for the Easter service. I hustled it up on her and went about latching all the buttons. All the while, I remembered everything I knowed about Esme. Replayed every time we had together in my mind. I had spent many a day with her, and my soul ached. She was like a mommy to me. She had taught me many a thing without me even realizing that I was learning. She showed me what sacrifice was—the way she had laid down her pride to raise a child that wasn't hers, the way she had loved Aaron in spite of the way he had come into being. I would have loved her for this alone, even without all the other things she had done for me.

I sat back down in the chair by the bed and looked at her for a long time. I felt hollow, as if grief had cleaned me out. I couldn't believe I wouldn't have her company anymore. Every time I thought of this, I became more empty. I could not cry, for there was nothing inside of me to let out. I stared for a long time without blinking, without moving.

When Saul come off the mountain, I told him to go into town to get a coffin made. How would I tell him that she didn't want to be buried by his daddy? I sent Aidia after Serena. When they come back together, I asked Aidia to tend to Luke and Birdie. I wanted her out of my sight.

Serena patted Esme's hand and smiled. “She was a sight, old Esme was. Nobody ever doubted what she thought of them, that's for certain. I like that in a person.”

“She grieved herself to death, over Aaron.”

Serena turned quickly. “Now, Vine, she was an old woman. Worked many a hard day. She was just wore out.”

“Not till he was gone, though. That's what killed her, sure enough.”

Serena didn't say anything else. She knowed what I was thinking
and knowed there was no use arguing with me. She pushed my hair out of my eyes, looping it behind my ear. By the look in her eye, I knowed she was saying,
It's not your fault,
but it didn't matter. Because it was my fault. This was the place where I couldn't take any more. I had to make it through her funeral, and then I didn't know what I would do. I didn't know how much more guilt I could pack on my shoulders. It could have been Saul or Birdie or any one of them, but God took Esme as my wage for taking Aaron's life. When you do wrong, you are always paid back. This is one thing I have learned for certain. I didn't have no other choice but to kill him—I was sure of that—but I shouldn't have left him up there on that mountain without so much as a headstone to mark his place in this world. And I should have told Esme and Saul. I didn't see how I could ever be forgiven now.

Serena went into the kitchen to make coffee, and I followed her. “She don't want to be buried by her man,” I whispered. I thought about telling Serena the whole story about Willem and Aaron, but I didn't. This was my and Esme's secret together, and I would never tell a soul.

“Was he mean to her?” Serena asked, setting the pot on the stove.

“They had troubles, more so than most, I guess.”

“That'll hurt Saul,” Serena said, “her not wanting to be by his daddy.”

“It don't matter. She asked me, and Saul will have to agree to it. I owe her that much.” I set down at the table, and it seemed wrong to be setting, somehow. I felt like I should be up and milling about, but I couldn't. My legs shook so bad I couldn't stand anymore. “People will talk, though.”

“Let the sumbitches talk. It'll give them a rest from talking about me for a while.” Serena poured us coffee. The coffee smelled so good, like something completely new in the world. I closed my eyes as I drunk it. The heat of it seemed to pulse right into my veins and spread up the back of my head.

T
HAT EVENING EVERYBODY
we knowed come up to the house. They all bragged on how good Esme looked. They come packing food and it was stacked up everywhere all through the kitchen. Her wake was a mix of every kind of emotion. One woman would bellow out crying, and another would laugh at a big tale someone was telling. It seemed like Esme's whole life was being played out by the people crowding into the house and spilling out onto the porch and yard. I thought that was a good legacy to leave—to stir up so many emotions in people.

Women moved around the kitchen elbow-to-elbow, slicing big pieces of pie, letting buttermilk gurgle from the crock into glasses, fixing plates that they filled with fried chicken and potatoes and dressing. I thought how Esme wouldn't have liked that at all, for all them people to be in her kitchen, fooling with her things—opening cabinets and stirring the fire in the stove as if they lived there themselves.

The fiddler from Free Creek set on the porch and played music for us, as we knowed Esme would have appreciated such a thing. She always liked the fiddle best of all. Serena told him to play “Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair,” and her voice flowed into the house. That was a strange choice of song to sing at a laying-out, but her voice was so beautiful. Bugs were bad already, so we built a gnat fire out of rags on the yard, and its thin blue smoke drifted up to move about the porch. The burning fabric smelled green and bitter.

I moved amongst the people, but I was numb to any touch. I was there, but I was not there. I felt like a vapor that drifted through the house. I eat a little bit, but never tasted a thing. I can't remember any words that come out of my mouth. I smiled, thanked everbody when they had to go, did all the things I was meant to do, but I was off somewhere else. I can't remember who took care of Birdie, or how I dressed myself or combed out my hair or anything else. I was a ghost.

I think it was not grief or guilt that stunned me so. It was surprise. Surprise to finally realize what had happened that night. The bigness
of it was all at once laid upon my body like a pile of rocks. The thought of hiding him, of leaving him up there on that mountain beneath them cliffs. This was the worst thing of all to me, this lie that was right up there on the mountainside. And I knowed that Esme had died because she had worried herself so over Aaron.

Everyone was gone before I even realized it. One minute there was a great, loud house full of people; then there was nothing but the night sounds, the occasional sound of Aidia tidying the kitchen, the creak of the floorboards when Saul moved about the house. When I saw that everyone was gone and that the night sky was the sort of blue-black that can only mean it is far past midnight, I was setting on the porch steps with my arms wrapped about my knees. I finally awoke when Saul sat down on the step next to me and took my hand. We sat there in silence for a long time, and I knowed that we would sit there until daylight.

“I appreciate you being so good to her,” Saul said, and he put his hand on the underside of my arm. His hand was hot. “It wasn't big of me, to run off and leave all that on you.”

“A woman ought to tend to the dead,” I said. “I wanted to do it.”

He held on to my arm tightly. We both held our heads high and looked out at the blackness. The creek sounded more quiet than it usually was, but the crickets and peepers sounded much louder. I could tell it would rain tomorrow. My daddy taught me how to listen to the crickets. They sounded different when a storm was on its way. Tonight their song was sharp and made up of short notes, like clipped little bits of melody.

“They's something I should have told you earlier,” I said. “Esme didn't want to be buried by your daddy.”

He turned and looked at me like I was talking out of my head.

“She told me on her deathbed.”

Saul looked out at the night again. The muscle in his jaw flinched, and I felt the need to put my hands on his face, but I didn't move.

“People talk out of their minds when they are dying,” he said.
“You said yourself that she thought Aaron was in the room, that she talked to my dead baby sister.”

“She knowed exactly what she was saying, Saul. I don't have a doubt about it. There was things happened, things you don't know about, and she don't want to be buried by him.”

He rose to his feet and shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his dungarees. He leaned against the porch post and thought for a long moment. “I've already dug the grave. Spent all day on it,” he said. “What do you know about my people that I don't?”

“Me and Esme talked all the time, Saul,” I said. “I should have told you before you dug the grave, but I was just so tired.”

“Once you're gone, you don't know where you at noway,” he said in a tight voice that sounded like he was trying to convince himself of this as he spoke it.

“I promised her that I wouldn't let you lay her beside him. I can't lie to her.”

“People will notice it. It'll leave a bad mark on my mother and daddy's marriage.”

I got up and stood very close to him. “Who cares what they say? They talked about you marrying an Indian, didn't they? They said that I was a witch. That never bothered you.” I said this with a smile on my face, hoping to humor him a little. He usually liked it when I spoke of our courtship, of the way we had met. But he never flinched, and held his mouth sourly.

So I raised my voice a little. I took hold of his arm and said, “Well, you can help me do right by her or not, but I won't break a promise I made to somebody on their deathbed. Especially not to Esme.”

“She's my mother,” he spat.

“I was the one tended to her, and I was the one promised it to her. There are things you don't know, Saul. She didn't want to be buried by your daddy, and that's all there is to it.”

I went into the house and took the clock off of the mantle. The pendulum knocked against the wood and the glass, sounds I had not
heard since Esme had took the clock down to show to me, way back when I first come to God's Creek. She had give me the gift of time, and I didn't know if that was a blessing or a curse. I walked down the holler toward our house, cradling the clock in my arms like a newborn.

L
ATER THAT NIGHT
, I went back up to Esme's and didn't fall asleep until sometime after the sun rose. Aidia woke me up not more than two hours later. I come awake just by knowing that she was looking at me. She stood over me, seeming much taller than she really was. She wore an apron, and the smells of breakfast leaked out of its fabric.

“I've cooked,” she said without one change of expression. “You need to eat something.”

I put a hand to my brow to block the light that fell in the window in big squares. Aidia had pushed the glass up, and the smell of true morning washed in. The air was cool and it seemed to clean out the room. I was in the chair across from Esme's coffin. The scent of camphor nearly took my breath.

Aidia stood over me, her mouth pinched up like she was holding back a great mouthful of spit. I looked from her to Esme's form on the bed, and then back to her again.

Finally she spoke. “I know you're mad at me. For not helping you lay out Esme. But I just couldn't do it.” She looked off, like she couldn't bear to look at me no more. “I watched my mama die. My daddy and my brothers—they just went about their business like it wasn't happening. But I tended her. I was just a little child, Vine. And I cooked for her, fed her. She was so sick that soon as I would put it in her mouth, she would throw it right back up. Soup would just run right down her chin, and then I'd have to clean it off her neck and titties. When she cried out in pain, I was the one held her.”

Aidia's shoulders started to tremble, and her lip did as well. I put both my arms out without saying a word. I just held my hands still
in the air—offering them to her—and she sat right down in my lap. She put one arm around my back and put her face against my chest. She felt so little to me. She was the kind of person you wanted to take care of but also shake some sense into. She cried hard against me. Our grief come together there in that stuffed chair until it was something so big it threatened to overtake the room.

Aidia calmed herself. I could feel her back straightening, although she did not move. “And when she died, I cleaned her up. I was eleven year old,” she said. “I fixed her good as I could do. Put flowers on her eyes. Daddy was out in the fields, working. I walked out there and told him, and he didn't even put down his scythe. ‘Least she ain't suffering,' he said. Didn't even offer to put his arm around me or nothing. I went back to the house and crawled in the bed with her and fell asleep there with her. I was so tired. I felt like I hadn't slept in ages, and having her there by me—having her laying beside me and knowing I didn't have to tend to her—it was the most comforting thing. It was the best rest I had ever had in my life. But when Daddy come in and found me that way, he jerked me up so hard it hurt my arm, and just pulled a quilt up over her.”