Knee-Deep in Wonder (32 page)

“No, ma'am.”

“Now, you want some sugar from your granny or don't you?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“All right, then. Raise your head up.” Liberty slowly touched her lips to Helene's exposed neck and the child, feeling her grandmother's wide mouth and the tiniest bit of her tongue, erupted in laughter. With the laugh, Helene tickled Liberty's nose, so she shook along with the child.

“My, my, my,” she said, when she had caught her breath. She lifted Helene high in her arms. “You is a pretty one, that a fact. Sure is. You want to come live with me?” Helene, still laughing, didn't hear the question, so Liberty repeated it. “Say, baby. I asked you if you want to come live with your granny.”

There was no pause. The child's voice turned breathless. “Yes, ma'am. Yes, yes!”

Liberty heard the desire, and she put Helene down. “What you say?”

Helene, still panting from the laughter and her grandmother's tongue on her neck, spoke louder this time. “Yes, Granny. I mean, yes, ma'am.”

Liberty stepped back, wrinkling her nose as if a bad smell rose from the child. Her voice swelled rapidly to a crescendo of anger. “Somebody come get this baby girl. Ya'll need to go home. Now.” She fled inside the house, closing the door behind her. Helene heard a battle of hushed voices.

“I know a lot, you think I'm a fool. Lord know what you two carrying on down here,” Annie b hissed.

“All right, b, enough of all that,” Ed said.

“I think you better watch for your mouth when you in somebody's house.”

“You think cause you bigger than me, I'm gone run off scared?”

“I don't want you to be scared, Miss b.”

“You and your girl up to something.”

“B, now—”

“Shut up, Ed. You got Queenie upstairs, but I been up there to see, and even with the sheets covering her she look strong as a ox.”

“I done already told you she take sick from time to time.”

“My eye.”

“Your brother told me he want his little girl to be with you-all.”

“Who say, you?”

“You calling me a lie?” Their voices grew louder.

“All right, the both of you,” Ed broke in. “She ain't deaf. She right outside the door.”

“I know it, I left her there.” Liberty's words strained against decorum.

“I'm telling you, Ed, that girl healthy as a horse. They live in this big old house without a care in the world. So why come we the ones taking care of that little girl, just tell me that?” Had they known that the same little girl had stopped trying to sort through the adult argument and turned her attention to meddling with the hem of her dress, her small fingernails tugging at brown thread, perhaps they would have raised their fists along with their voices.

So I knew the story all along, Helene thought. I'm too late to change a thing. Why did I come in the first place? What I thought I wanted I already had. If that doesn't beat all. So why am I here? Because I wanted to make Mama laugh and feel blessed to have a daughter like me. Because I wanted Mama to lick at a hurt she's been trying to forget for some twenty-odd years.

*   *   *

Other pulled back the last bush, and together they stepped into the yard as if they had emerged from behind a curtain. The house looked not only empty but dead. The water pump had vanished in the dark, and night had dulled the flaking whitewash to gray. The house's wayward tilt, which Helene once had thought made it look to be fleeing, now reminded her of mourning. All the lights were out—whatever her mother was doing, she didn't need a lamp. They stood for a moment at the edge of the yard, taking big gulps of black air.

“What is she doing in there?” Helene whispered. There was no flutter of curtains this time as she climbed to the porch with Other. The door opened directly with a creak and Queen Ester came out, a green scarf thrown over her head, patches of gray hair poking out from beneath it. Behind her the house was dark as a cavern. Spit ran down from her mother's lip and she clutched at the fabric of her housedress, pulling it up to her thigh.

She's sick, Helene thought, and I left her here by herself. “Mama?” she said, her arms out and reaching. “Mama?”

But Queen Ester did not move, stood firmly in the doorway. “Mama, let's go in the house and turn some lights on,” Helene said, but Queen Ester continued to block the entrance.

“Listen.”

“Mama, what do you hear?” Helene peered into the dark. “Wait, wait, I've got a tissue in my bag.” She groped around inside her purse. “Here. Let me wipe your face.” Pulling out a crinkled tissue, she gently wiped away the spit. “See? Isn't that better?”

“You think she left the radio on?” Queen Ester said.

“I don't know.” Helene grabbed Queen Ester under the arm, surprised by her mother's feebleness. “Let's go inside and turn on a lamp. Remember that lamp you showed me? Does it work?”

“Maybe she left the radio on,” Queen Ester suggested again.

“Mama, did you leave the radio on?”

“Naw, our radio quit working, I don't know when.”

“Oh.” Helene moved a bit closer. “Come on, let's go inside.”

“You act like you don't hear all that.”

“Hear what?”

“All that noise.” She sounded younger suddenly, incredulous at Helene's deafness. “You sure you don't hear it?”

“No, Mama. No.”

Queen Ester cackled loudly, and for a moment Helene thought perhaps all this time her mother had just been sleeping and had now woken up, mad as ever. “Well, look here.” Queen Ester noticed Other, who stood silently next to Helene. “Yes, sir. Here come the messenger. Dropping off what's mine. You good at that, ain't you? Ain't that right?”

“Yeah,” Other said.

“You get out of here! You hear me?”

“Sho nough.” Other backed away.

“I want you off my porch!”

“Mama, please.” Helene stretched out her hand to Other, but he moved beyond her reach, walking backward. More than nervous, he saw Queen Ester's face and remembered her rage years earlier in the dark of the hallway.

“See you soon, Helene,” Other said. Without a word, Queen Ester pulled Helene into the house, followed by the moonlight.

“I don't know what you did, but I got to find them.”

“What are you talking about now, Mama?” Helene spoke quickly, glancing in the direction of the stairs.

“You know what. Mama and him. They gone.”

“Mama, I think we should get you—” The crash of glass shattered the quiet in the room as Queen Ester knocked over a vase. “Mama?” Helene stumbled in the dark, her hands out in front of her, searching for a chair or a table to brace herself against. “Damn it, Mama. We need to get you—”

“Get me to where? I'm telling you they gone, just up and gone, and I can't find them nowhere.” Her voice lifted, shrill and plaintive. “You hear all that racket? Helene, you hear it, don't you?” Helene moved toward the sound of her mother's voice.

“Gotcha!” Helene said with triumph. She clapped her hands on Queen Ester's shoulders. “Come on.”

“Let go now,” Queen Ester said evenly, not bothering to struggle under her daughter's heavy grip. Helene tried to pull her toward the pool of moonlight in the front hallway. “Helene, stop on that.”

“Mama, damn it, I said come on!” She maintained her hold on her mother's shoulders.

“Helene, didn't I tell you to stop on that? Let your mama go, fore you hurt her.” Her tone was pleasant, as if she had asked Helene to put away a toy or come down for dinner. “You done got yourself riled so, you liable to take off and hurt your mother, then it'll be too late.”

“Don't turn all mama on me suddenly. Not now.”

They stood shoulder to shoulder, equals. You still mine, I'm still Mama, Queen Ester thought, groping for the words to make Helene knuckle under her control. “I ain't never wanted you no place but here. It was Mama—”

Helene felt buttery and mean. “Goddammit, Mama, what were you all doing in this house?”

“Ain't nobody done a thing.”

It was Queen Ester's innocence that triggered Helene's fury. “Maybe. Maybe nobody else has done a thing, but I will, Mama. This, it's all got to end.” What had always worked so well for her grandmother—unstoppable rage with a dash of mad planning—took hold of her, and with nothing but the moonlight she fished in her purse, pulling out her personal cache of old hurt. Letter after letter fluttered to the floor as the pages flew out of her purse like a deck of cards. I'll regret this, Helene thought. Later she would remember that she hadn't even trembled when she scratched the match to life. A tongue of fire lit up her mother's face and licked the side of the Valentine card, leaving a black scorch mark.

“You quit that! You got no right! No right!” Queen Ester's hand struck out at the burning letter, sending it to the floor. Instantly, the room flared into bright orange as the Valentine card latched its blaze to the other letters. Fire ate up the grocery lists written at Christmas, the one-sentence scraps, the heavy bond paper. Queen Ester crashed her foot down on the carpet, but the small fire leapt from under her house shoe, curling around the sole. The feeble kicking split the flame in two, and now one tongue snaked toward the couch while the other ran over the carpet and edged toward the curtains. “I'll get that bucket on the porch,” Helene shouted.

She let go of her mother, raced out of the living room to the back of the house, and found the water hose, knotted behind the washer. Filling the bucket, she dragged the large copper basin through the kitchen. Helene smelled the blaze before she saw it. In the minute she had been gone, the flames had slid under the couch, caught at the netting, and were consuming the sofa stuffing. Fire engulfed the living room, the walls were burning up, fed by ancient dry wallpaper.

Blinded by a sudden sea of smoke, Helene called for Queen Ester, but besides the chewing of fire she heard nothing. “Where the hell is Other?” she wailed, watching the fire suck at the plywood. For a moment it seemed as if it might sputter out of its own accord. The orange glow dimmed, and she saw black fingers spread across the length of the wall.

“Mama!” Helene yelled. “Mama, where are you?” She became frantic, unable to see Queen Ester, and ran back into the kitchen. As she called out again, she lifted the curtain to the pantry but found nothing. The back porch, Helene thought, she's probably outside waiting for me. She dashed to the door and pulled, stunned to find it locked. What the hell was going on? Her mother couldn't have locked the door from the inside and be outside at the same time. Helene's stomach lurched as she heard the hollow clatter of her sandals taking her into the hallway, her voice desperate.

“Come on, Mama! Mama!” The flame had poured down the length of the hallway, blocking the stairs from the front door. Now fire leapt from the first floor windows; the silvered blue curtains burned to ashes. Helene jumped through the fire to the front door, but this time she didn't try to open it; the large bolt told her it was locked. She heard Other banging furiously outside on the porch. “She locked the door!” Helene rattled the lock latch, her sweaty hands slipping on the latch. She tried to undo it, once, twice, the third time her hand steadied, and between Other pushing and her pulling, the door swung open. “Is Mama out there?”

“Naw.” Other grabbed Helene's arms, pulling her off the porch into the swept yard, and together Helene and Other watched the house heave and shudder as the fire ate at its walls. Just before flames swallowed the roof, Helene thought she saw Queen Ester standing in the blackened doorway, her housedress unsinged. “There she is!” Helen was sure she saw her mother lift her hand and smile the way she had when she spoke about Liberty's walk. Then Queen Ester turned, vanishing in a cloud of smoke at the bottom of the stairs.

*   *   *

“She came out of the front door, her hair all wild—I don't know what happened to that green scarf she had on. All I could think was God I had to get her out of there. I just wanted to get her out of the house. She said that something was talking to her. You should have heard her.

“Thank you,” Helene said, as Ed handed her his clean handkerchief. “I didn't know what to do. I couldn't hear a thing and Mama sounded so sure.”

Ed kept his thoughts to himself, taking in his niece's hair that stood on end, her blackened clothes, the soot coating her skin. She looked just like her mother when Annie b had kicked her off their doorstep so many years ago. At any moment he expected Helene to race out the front door and hoot at the moon. All this havoc in just one day, and she wants to tell me the shape of her mother's hair. These women, Helene's family (and, yes, they were hers), could only act askance. The three of them—one dead, the next disappeared to who could say where, the last too young to know that with family no one ever escapes—all lived inside a bright fluttering innocence that allowed them to break souls in two without a thought in their heads. Ed bottled a weary sigh. Some lives should just be swallowed whole without being tasted.

“Maybe I would have been worse off, you know, if I really could have held their lives in my hands, known them all from end to end. Don't you think I'm better off, not having lived all that trouble?” Her uncle's face told her that he, and she, were unconvinced. She remembered, wrenching out of Other's grip, leaving him to stand alone in the yard and watch the flames eat the roof. Despite the woods and its darkness, she ran a clean line to her car while chanting, “Maybe I'm the better off. Maybe I'm the better off.”

About the Author

APRIL REYNOLDS
teaches literature and creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Her short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, among them
Mending the World
and
The Heretics Bible. Knee-Deep in Wonder,
her first novel, received a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Award for unpublished work. April Reynolds lives in New York with her husband.