Ellen Foster (8 page)

It must have been hard for her to keep in mind that I was a
girl Ellen and not a man she wanted to be alive by her so she could kill but wanted him alive too so she could work her power on him.

And she had some power. Without saying one word she could make my bones shake and I would think of ghost houses and skeletons rattling all in the closets.

Her power was the sucking kind that takes your good sense and leaves you limp like a old zombie.

That is how I felt some days. Like a old monster zombie who was a girl a while back.

But I got my fire back in me now.

She would take all the feeling she needed from somebody and then stir it up with some money and turn the recipe back on you. The money made it sweet and without it she might have been just another mean old lady. But set up in her big house she could make the devil scared of her.

She wanted me so hard to be like him. She reminded me all the time how me and him favored and acted alike. I never told her how Mavis said I looked just like my mama. Sometimes she talked so strong to me that I had to check in the mirror to see if I had changed into him without my knowing or feeling it. Maybe her wishing so hard had made it so I thought.

I decided I would jump off the bridge if I was different from my old self.

Maybe he did rub off on me. I still wonder sometimes if I am fine myself or if I have tricked myself into believing I am who I think I am.

So many folks thinking and wanting you to be somebody else will confuse you if you are not very careful.

It gives me nerves to worry about me.

My mama’s mama would shake a little like this too. I hide my hands under my desk if it happens at school. It is not enough to notice good.

Her hands shook right much though when she told me about my daddy dying. But she managed to slap me with one.

She said your bastard of a daddy is dead and then she hit me in the face. That does not make sense but that is what she did.

I had not planned to cry over him when he died. I had practiced it all so many times that all I wondered was if he had died one of the ways I had planned. All varieties of accidents and unfortunate mishaps.

But he was somebody I knew who was dead. I felt the way you feel when they say a star or a old president is dead and you feel sorry for a flash when you remember his face and think about how you could go quick as a wink.

She was looking in my eyes for a reason to slap me again but I was determined not to give her one.

Go ahead and cry for your damn daddy she got in my face and said to me. Go ahead and cry. Just make sure you cry more than you did for your mama.

Why did she say that to me? I wondered and reached up to catch a tear I felt had just rolled over my eye ledge.

But she grabbed my shaking hand with her hand shaking and said to let that be the last tear I ever shed.

I still wonder how long she meant that rule to last.

You can bet we did not go to his funeral. I know they had one because my daddy’s brother Rudolph brought me the flag they had laid on his coffin. He got the flag because he was in the war.

I did not go to the funeral but I imagined how bad the preacher must have felt to put my daddy in the same ground with good people and babies born dead who get to be angels. And beside my mama.

They put her in a box too and him in a box oh shut the lid down hard on this one and nail it nail it with the strongest nails. Do all you can to keep it shut and him in it always. Time would make him meaner to me if he could get out and grab me again.

Go ahead and look said the magician.

I do not want to look.

It is all illusion. Look in the box and see what is there.

I do not want to see.

Go ahead said the magician. There is nothing to be afraid of. Everything has vanished! See. There is nothing in the box.

Where did it go? I need to know.

Oh I suppose they put him in the hole and everybody walked away without talking just like before and they will wish they were already home.

Rudolph came straight from the graveyard to my mama’s mama’s. She sent me to my room and told me to stay there until he left. Which I did not do but I stood in the hall and spied.

She had some secret business with him. He came to the house now and then and she always told me to leave. I knew that what I was not supposed to hear was most likely juicy so I always listened in.

What are you bringing that trash here for? she met him at the back door and asked.

He said in a hang dog way he thought Ellen should have it.

I watched her get stiff and then she spit on the flag he had folded up in a neat triangle and held to her like a present.

Then she said to him after all the money you have taken from me you have the audacity to bring that bastard’s business into my house. You should be shot.

Rudolph had the nerve I would not have and said he only took what she offered. All that was due him.

She called him a worm and a farm boy too big for his britches. And if you don’t think I can ruin you too then just hide and watch me! You just remember whose name that dead bastard’s farm is in and while you’re at it take a drive to the courthouse and check the name on your own damn deed. Then come back here and tell me who is running this show.

Rudolph stood there like the farm boy too big for his britches that his teacher had just unbuckled and dropped around his ankles so the paddle could sting and snap his behind.

Then he turned and ran out the door.

He left the flag though.

That night I woke up from my sleep because I heard something outside and I looked out my window and saw her standing by a wood fire she had made herself poking what was left of some stripes farther into the flame.

I did not go back to sleep that night because I kept thinking over and over again about the encyclopedias. Oh the froze sneeze and the poems. I wanted to rub my hands on the pages again. The flag on fire did not matter but just those encyclopedias. They might not have ever been mine but I believed that much touching and looking had made them into mine.

That is what I thought to myself while she poked her flame.

I do not know why I thought she would be happy when my daddy died. She was the kind of woman you cannot even die to suit. She would swear you did it to spite her.

We all did things against her she said. She even fired the colored household help because she swore they were an infernal conspiracy and were stealing out from her nose.

And when they were gone it was just her and me. Me to look after her not the other way around like you might expect.

That did not surprise me because I had just about given up on what you expect. I just lived to see what would happen next.

At least taking care of her took me out of the fields.

When she got sick with the flu all she wanted to do was talk. That was about all she was able to do. I called the doctor who checked her over and told me to feed her particular foods which I sent Mavis’s husband to the store after. She told the doctor to leave and never come back and on his way out the door he could unload all the silverware and jewelry he’d stole. He just chuckled like he thought she was joking with him. Ha.

Then she said I don’t need no doctor with Ellen here to nurse me.

Which I did the best way I could.

She wanted to talk mostly about my daddy and most of what she said didn’t make any sense. It was like listening to three different conversations at one time. She could ask questions and answer for all three folks.

But one day she got up on her elbows and said to me clear like she had come out of a long fever Ellen you helped him didn’t you?

Why did she say that to me I thought Lord did I do the wrong thing? But he said she would just sleep and if that didn’t make me quiet then the knife by his hand would. And yes it is easy to see him now in the fog of his not knowing she could be dead soon.

It is like when you are sick and you know all the things you ever ate or just wanted to eat are churning in you now and you will be sick to relieve yourself but the relief is a dream you let yourself believe because you know the churning is all there is to you.

Go ahead. Push it in said the magician. Push it in and turn it a few times just to see if it hurts. See? You didn’t feel a thing.

And through all the churning and spinning I saw her face. A big clown smile looking down at me while she said to me you best take better care of me than you did of your mama.

11

I stayed off by myself and figured most everything out.

I may not have the story exactly straight but what I do not say or know to say is just not important enough anyway to change the main things that happened.

Knowing or thinking I knew all she did helped me get along at her house.

Now I know what they mean by stumbling around in the dark.

When I found out her story I figured I’d march myself right up to Hollywood and get a Sherlock Holmes job. It took some real figuring to piece it all together and mainly I had to keep myself from adding more to the story than actually happened.

That comes from reading too many old stories.

My mama’s mama kept a tab on my daddy and me through Rudolph and Ellis.

Then Ellis died.

I do not know how he died but I want to say murder. I know
that is made up just because the story would go a lot smoother if he was murdered with a piano wire by my mama’s mama who had on a black hood.

But all that counts is that he died and Rudolph was left to keep up with how me and my daddy operated. He reported to my mama’s mama everything he heard the old men say about us while they chewed their cud at the store. He reported what the wives said about us while they squeezed their loaf bread or hung out the Monday wash.

Yeah old Ellen runs up and down the road with her little nigger friend they might say.

Yeah old Ellen is always bothering so-and-so to give her a ride home from the grocery store.

There ain’t no telling what goes on in that house when the sun goes down they must have said.

And Rudolph would hear a day’s worth and trot back to my mama’s mama’s like a yard dog with a fresh sparrow dangling from his mouth. Then she would pat his head and hand him one envelope for us and one for him because he did such a good job.

I could not swear all that is true because it sounds so extra ordinary when I run it back through my head. But as odd as I think it sounds I feel in my bones like I am on the right track.

I do not know all about her going to the bank and getting the farm and how she got all the land from Rudolph but all that counts like I said before is that she did it. And then you can move on to why she did it.

It must have got her goat when old Ellen ran away from him. That was very good for me but bad for him because that
is when she let go everything she had been holding back just because she did not have it in her to starve a girl.

The way she arranged it was she kept giving Rudolph the envelopes to drop in the mailbox but she put less and less money in them each week. Only a little money each time so all he could think to do with such a small amount was waste it fast.

He could have ruined his own self in time but she was tired of waiting for him to wither up.

He would waste that little bit of money so in the middle of the wasting he might forget his life had always been bad and was getting worse all the time.

I always figured that a little imagination to go along with the money would have stretched a dollar here and there. But he was fresh out of hope as he liked to say about the wishing and spitting in your hands to see which one fills up first.

He was weak as water I have heard more than one person say about him. And that is just what you do not need to be if you have dealings with my mama’s mama. She would come rolling in a wave over you and leave you there on your behind choking on the thing you had intended to say. And she could keep coming with her flood and stand laughing at you struggling in the waves of your forgetting.

That is how she confused my daddy.

I maybe should be sad and pray over him when I picture him fighting long distance with her but I blame him for making his own self weak enough to be beat to death by a little old lady no matter how mean she is.

Men and daddies are not supposed to be like that. But if you
pet and groom your strong heart long enough you will turn it into a damn lap dog heart. But on the outside you still try to show off how brave you are.

All she had to do was wait for Rudolph to drag up his last bird. But it was a flag instead.

God if I ever told Julia all of this she would say it blows my mind.

Which is exactly what happened to my daddy.

He had a vein or a head fuse explode so he died. It makes my own head hurt just to think about it.

Her flu got worse when it got cold outside. She’d sweat and then yell at me because she was freezing to death. I had trouble keeping up with her changing so much.

That syrup I had been feeding her ran out and she swore the medicine had been making her sick all along. You cannot reason with somebody like that.

I just did the best I could with what I had to work with.

I never let her get up and go to the toilet by herself. You let a old person do their business alone and next thing you know you have a broke hip on your hands. I never let her take a tub bath either. It is too easy to slip. I washed her off one limb at a time. Each day I could feel the meanness draining out of her body but her mind was still wound up tight as a tick.

She never complained about the care I gave her. Just about my eyes.

You got that bastard’s eyes she would say to me when I washed off her face.

So I would shut them.

I cannot help my eyes is what I wanted to say to her. But I
just said to myself I will look after this one good and I will not let a soul push me around this time.

But what if I let her die tonight? What would folks think about us here in this house together and her dead and me alive?

Lord it can happen because it has happened before. But she won’t die while I’m in charge.