Knee-Deep in Wonder (16 page)

Just thinking on you today. Mama spend all her extra on Chess. He can't get hungry fore she think to stick a slice of toast in his mouth. My wanting got to get in line. First she take care of Chess, then she see to the folks that come by here for coffee and pie, then she give a little to Mable, and maybe if I can catch her right she give some time to me. I done conjured every piece of nastiness I can and none of it do a bit of good. Last night, him and her get into a big mess of some sort. Mama hollering at him and carrying on. Everything falling over. Crash, crash, crash. Right up till morning. And you think she'd set him out after that. Cause with him round here we can't get no peace. But she got a biscuit in his mouth fore he can say, “Morning.” What she need him for when she got me? I love you. I ain't a mama just in name.

Helene shivered. Not enough to frighten herself, just enough so that she wondered whether the door had been left open. Something light and feathery fluttered in her chest. She thought of her mother's words and remembered her aunt's voice, heavy and sour. “Them two women share that man like a blanket. Nasty the both of them.” Smacked with jealousy, the letter held a sour rivalry and malice. Queen Ester was ready to do battle. It hurt that her mother's envy didn't reach to Helene. Maybe her aunt was right and something nasty had been going on in this house, and what Helene held in her hands was an invitation to step into the fray, fists raised.

She was on the last pair, the last set of letters. Helene tore open her mother's copy.

Chess done died. I don't want to, but I dream about water every night. And I'm watching Mama close. Just now I'm getting to writing about this, cause every time I try my hands turn over and look at me like I is crazy. But I'm glad he's gone. Mama's face all pushed in and she broke the church up at Chess funeral. I got omens on Mama. But look like she got omens too.

Queen Ester was coming downstairs. Helene heard the stairs moan, but she didn't rush to put the lid back on the box. Her calm hand merely brushed away a layer of dust. She heard the soft rustle of her mother's housecoat and did nothing to restore the books' chaotic order. She crouched, listening to the floor heaving in response to the heavy footfall. Her stomach rolled.

Slowly, Helene turned in Queen Ester's direction. An explanation, Helene thought. Now you have to give me an explanation about Chess and all these people in these letters. But what she said was, “Mama.”

The green housedress with blue and orange flowers did not look sleep-wrinkled. Queen Ester shook her head from side to side and said, “Post office damn near thirty miles away, way off in McKamie; what else I gone do? Baby, it was such a trial getting them letters to your place, and Mama look at me funny every time I ask Mable to give me a ride up there. What else I'm gone do? It so hard to get them letters to you, cause every time Annie b get the yard the way she wanted, Ed had y'all up and moved. On the way up to McKamie, Mable telling me the mail ain't no good. Most of the time it get lost or them fellas stick the letters in they pockets cause they just ugly like that. So, what else I gone do? I start writing a letter and pray for the best and then I make a copy for me and I ain't got to pray cause I knowed they in the box.”

Helene sighed. “Why did you stop sending the letters to me?”

Queen Ester tugged at the scarf on her head. “Mable done run off to Chicago with her Downtown man. But I keep writing cause I can't break off now. And as soon as I can get me a ride I go and mail what I got. How many you read?”

“Just a few.”

“What you reading now?”

“The last one.” Queen Ester stooped beside Helene, leaning in close, peering over her daughter's head. “You didn't date any of them,” Helene said, wishing her voice could somehow smooth the lines on her mother's neck and calm the trouble she saw in her mother's mouth.

“Couldn't figure out what date I should put down. Ain't none of it in the right time.” Gently, Queen Ester began to rub her daughter's back while Helene sat between her mother's legs. Her mother's hands, old, spotted, danced around Helene's shoulders, while Helene struggled to match her breathing to her mother's and wondered what to do with her hands. Queen Ester continued to press behind her, her legs entrapping Helene, her housedress throwing off a scent of old age, but Helene did not tilt her head back so that her mother could stroke her hair. She curled like a misshapen rock between her mother's knees.

“Your grandmama died seven days after that one.” Queen Ester's voice sounded muffled as if she were talking in her sleep. Then she woke up. Looking around, Queen Ester saw her daughter crouching between her legs and the box of letters open in front of them.

“Let's gone back to the kitchen,” Queen Ester said, as she straightened up. Her walk back to the kitchen was smooth, mesmerizing, unlike her usual gait, which was a precarious stroll that wobbled as if she didn't know her own feet. Helene followed her, her feet mimicking her mother's, the slide and lift of a funeral procession, with only the chairs, sofa, and cabinet to witness their wake.

Queen Ester found her place against the counter, her eyes set and drowsy and her mouth pulling into a grim and grievous line. “Chess drowned hisself on a Sunday, so I guess Mama thought Sunday was a good day for her to pass too. Didn't hurt her, I think. She got up and cooked breakfast for all us, me and Other and Mable. Lord, Mama scouted around the house and came up with some fresh eggs. How she do that, I don't know, cause none of them chickens worked in the house. She was happy, you hear?” Queen Ester pushed off from the counter and went to the other end of the kitchen. “Your grandmama could walk,” she said. “She knew how to take a step in the right way. God-given talent.”

She smiled then. Out in the middle of the floor, with her hands above her head, Queen Ester and her half dance, half walk, moved the tile beneath her. Suddenly she twisted toward Helene, her hands still raised above her head.

“See, our preacher was a big-face man—all swollen up. Mama used to say his face like that cause he was heavy-handed with the salt. Well, you ought to a seen Pastor Johnson—or was that Pastor Jackson?—when Mama was making her way to church on Sundays. He see us coming and he say to Mama all uppity like, ‘Sister Liberty, I got a mind to see to it you leave first out your house so everybody can follow them tracks of yours.' Well, we just bout in the door and Mama looking over pastor's shoulder—trying to find a seat for all us, I guess—and then she look at him; push a little wind through her teeth and say, ‘Morning, Pastor.' Then he step aside and we file in behind Mama.”

“I don't know what happened to the pastor, but he see us walking to the church on Sunday and he say, “God don't like righteous women with loose ways, Sister Liberty.” Queen Ester threw out her chest, pulling on the lapels of her house-dress as if it were a jacket, to play the Reverend Johnson.

*   *   *

Helene saw her grandmother's stride, steps so small they reminded her of her own. Then she saw Aunt Annie b, her back to Helene's own small eight-year-old face. “I done told you the way,” Aunt Annie b said, her hands hasty with the morning's dishes and Helene's lunch sitting on the counter. Helene saw herself with scuffed shoes and her hair parted and rubber-banded in sections.

“I don't know it no more,” Helene had whispered back to her aunt, not wanting Annie b to think she was afraid. Helene waited for her to turn around, pull on one of her braids, and pat her on her bottom, and then together they could stumble out the back door. Instead, Annie b raised her voice to match the hit and clang of the morning dishes. “I done told and showed you the way, now. Helene, I don't need this kind of mess this early in the morning.” Hearing her aunt unmoved, Helene did what all eight-year-olds do: she cried.

But Annie b did not turn around, and there was no quiet space between the dishes' crash to tell the child that her aunt heard her fear. Helene stopped crying and grabbed her lunch with sweaty palms.

“You'll get there, all right. Ain't gone be no trouble at all,” Aunt Annie b said, a sudsy cup clutched in her hand. She walked Helene to the back door. “You just go on now,” she said, and shut it behind her niece. Outside, in the morning's new air, Helene knew that her feet were just not big enough to get her to where she needed to go.

*   *   *

She remembered her little hands full of bologna sandwich and cold baked yam wrapped in tinfoil. She remembered her worry. She worried that the sidewalk with its seams would stretch out forever. She worried that she couldn't hold on to Aunt Annie b saying, Three short blocks down, to the left, and then seven blocks and Helene would see the school; that even if she did get lost, with all the other children coming out of the woodwork looking school-bound she could find her way; that all she'd have to do is watch for the green corduroys hanging in Mrs. Allecto's backyard, and she couldn't miss those corduroys since rumor had it that they'd been hanging there for almost twelve years on account of a fight between Mrs. Allecto and her husband's laziness.

Helene took a deep breath and walked out to the sidewalk, wishing she could step back inside the blue front door. But instead she counted the concrete stitches in the pavement: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Helene hoped the stitches would run out at fifty, because after five and zero she thought of the numbers in the wrong way. She wondered why only clear blue sky and morning silence watched her passing. Why, despite Annie b's promise and the fact that she was on the second block, past Mrs. Henry's house where Helene went on Tuesdays to practice piano, not one school-bound child had even looked outside a door on either side.

Maybe she had left the house too early or too late; maybe all the children had vanished; maybe Aunt Annie b's word had fallen in on itself, so now Helene couldn't even count on the corduroys being there. But she couldn't walk back to the house. She had already taken the left and was on the fourth of the seven blocks. Helene had counted all the way to thirty-seven. Her eyes strained for any sort of green that looked out of place. “Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three,” and she still saw no corduroys or Mrs. Allecto, who Aunt Annie b said sometimes stood on her porch and smoked a pipe.

“Forty-four, forty-five,” she croaked, and looked around for Mrs. Allecto's husband because she had seen him once before, a fat man with greasy pants whom Uncle Ed called a junkman and Aunt Annie b called a bum. But still there was no one and nothing: no smells of burnt bacon, no sprinkle of chicken feed, no clothes steaming in wash buckets with hot water and soap. She was approaching fifty and nowhere near the school, and after five and zero Helene knew she was lost. So she cried, cried that Aunt Annie b had let her down, cried that Mrs. Allecto wasn't to be found, cried that fifty lay on her tongue but she couldn't say it because she wasn't sure what came next. So she dragged out forty-nine as far as it could go.

*   *   *

Helene's memory fell to the floor in a heap, its place taken by her mother's voice and the hem of her housedress, her wrinkled knees, mimicking the grandmother Helene could only remember as a tall shadow. “So Mama says to Pastor, ‘If God sees all, like I think He do, then He seen how I walked out of slavery with this here walk of mine. It done served me then; it gone serve me now.' ‘Now, Sister,' Pastor say, ‘you ain't old enough to be no slave. You confusing yourself with your mama.' Mama say something back real fast and low, I didn't catch it at all, on account that Duck was blocking all the hearing, but she musta said something like, ‘Ain't confusing myself with nobody. If I tells you I was a slave, then that's what I was. Not for long, though. Soon as I found out what I was, I left. This here walk gets me all the way to this church to praise God, and you gone condemn it? It's you who ain't decent, Reverend.'”

Queen Ester brought her empty hands to her face, and pinched her brows together. In the middle of the floor, she stood bereft, grieving. Helene called softly, trying to fool her mother and herself into pretending that nothing had happened, but some suckling memory had come to Queen Ester, who had let it pull at her, thinking it was toothless, some harmless remembered thing with no bite. But it had turned on her. Helene walked over and did what she had wanted to do in the living room. She cupped her mother's elbows, surprised at their softness. “Mama,” Helene said, but Queen Ester did not make a sound. “Mama,” she said again. Just when Helene thought her mother was dozing, Queen Ester's hands dropped away from her face and revealed that she was seething.

“You don't know how he kill everything. Why? That's what I want to know. Mama had something. When we were down to the quick, Mama had a walk that got us out of anything and everything. And he took that walk. The walk couldn't nobody figure out, he took it. Chess yanked those beautiful legs right out from under.

“He kept bringing his evil self back to our house cause I guess he got tired of being out wherever he was without a roof over his head.”

“He had nowhere else to go?”

“Look around, folks round here only take care they own. Chess the only somebody who ain't kin to nobody. So pretty he take every breath away, even Mama's. Didn't have no shame, Helene. Just walked in and tried to steal something that wasn't his. Then we start living like there wasn't never no time when Chess wasn't with us; like the café Mama ran in the living room wasn't Mama's no more, it was Chess's. He was running the house and running the café and all was left for me and Mama to do was cook and sweep everything Chess crashed. You can see that, can't you?”

“Oh, yes, Mama. Yes, yes, I see.” Helene felt a hiccup coming. “This man had four legs, not two. Maybe, Mama, maybe he even had two heads.” Queen Ester didn't laugh.