Mississippi Sissy (16 page)

I plopped back down on the floor beneath the sewing machine with
TheWonderfulWizard of Oz
and began to read to the satisfied, though oddly saddened, Epiphany. Chapter One concerned the cyclone, which I informed Epiphany we called a tornado in those parts. She smirked at me like she always did when I told her something she already knew. By the time we got to the munchkins in Chapter Two, my mother was stirring from her morphine dream and Epiphany motioned for me to go over to her and step up on the kitchen stool placed next to the tall hospital bed so I could be closer to her and feed her some of the crushed ice my grandmother kept in a thermos there on the table next to the bed, a job that made me feel I was being helpful when
helplessness was all that I remember from those days. The crushed ice would keep my mother's mouth moist and make it feel more comfortable, and maybe even allow her eat a popsicle, the only bit of sustenance she seemed able to keep down. I stared at her mouth and longed for it to be able to sing once more for me. I even longed for the hymns that took the place of the show tunes during the few weeks of remission she enjoyed after we had moved in with my grandparents following her diagnosis. A solemnity had understandably overtaken her during those days, which lent itself to lyrics about Jesus and the cross and what awaited her in heaven, a boilerplate of platitudes set out beneath the notes of the treble clef inside the thin, scruffy, old brown Cokesbury hymnals used by my grandparents' Trinity Methodist Church. Instead of Sondheim and Jule Styne, she had turned to John Wesley tunes, and on many Sundays inside Trinity's new A-framed sanctuary, one that acoustically seemed able to summon the Holy Ghost, she sang solos in her still clear soprano or, from time to time, duets with an alto-voiced flame-haired beautician named Ozella Weems, two of their stand-out numbers being “Whispering Hope” and “Sunrise Tomorrow,” which were suggested by the church's organist, Grace Speed, a white-haired, old-maid, first-grade teacher whose name made me realize how economical beauty could be, how unexpected in its origin. When Miss Speed discovered I had inherited my mother's perfect soprano in a little-boy version, she had me later singing the same solos my mother had sung in church when she was alive. I'd pretend I was lip-synching to my mother's voice—as I had that night of secrets back in Pelahatchie when I stood in the moonlight at my bedroom window—but her high notes really would, there in the church, miraculously sound from my throat. My own soprano was the lone physical approximation I had left of her. I hated singing those church solos, but I did it anyway so I could feel my mother's presence inside me. It was how she reached out to me from wherever death had taken her. It was the closest thing that remained of her touch.

“Did I hear you reading again out loud?” she asked me now, as I stood on that stool next to her bed. Allowing the piece of crushed ice to melt in her mouth, she stared at my face as if I were her own imaginary friend that no one else could see. “Mommy is so proud of you when you read. Always read. Never stop reading. You still have Miranda hidden away?” she asked. “You're my own little Miranda. Put us together, in fact, and we equal one whole Miranda by now. Though I don't know if I'm going to come through all this with the same flying colors that she did . . . if this were only influenza . . . I'm afraid I'm going to meet Adam's fate,” she said, sounding downright biblical as she evoked Miranda's boyfriend's name, a piece of crushed ice slipping from her mouth. Although her breath was putrid with morphine, I had come to love the stink of it, equating it with the limited time we had left together. I placed the bit of ice back on her tongue. “I'm so sorry you have to see me like this, Kevin. Mommy is so sorry,” she said and turned her face away from me toward the wall.

________________

Something strange was happening to Epiphany's face when I started reading to her from
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
. It was, no doubt about it, slowly disappearing, turning away from me in her own way. She became more faint with each chapter I read to her. When I commented on this after Coco's funeral—she had been hit by one of the many cars she had begun to chase on the road in front of my grandparents' house, almost as if she had worked up the courage to throw herself in front of the wheel that killed her in a suicidal attempt to escape us all—Epiphany just frowned, her mouth hazy in the twilight as we sat by Coco's grave, which my grandfather had dug in the corner of the backyard out toward the pond. He had also made a wooden cross to mark the grave and my grandmother had printed COCO on it with a Magic Marker, her tears overwhelming her when she began to
say a prayer as we lowered Coco, her little Chihuahua body wrapped in plastic, down into the hole. Suddenly, from behind us in the house, came the faint sound, growing more intense, of my mother palming over and over the little hotel desk bell kept by her bed, the repeated ping-ping-ping of it—the signal that she needed to go to the bathroom—competing with the crickets that always came to sudden life at the end of each Mississippi summer day. “Oh, God. I got to go see about Nan,” my grandmother interrupted her own prayer. “Nothing seems to stay in her stomach. I thought morphine was supposed to make you constipated. That's what Rogers told me,” she said, citing, as was her wont, Lackey Memorial's head nurse, for whom she had unbounded respect. “Amen,” she remembered to say, then headed into the house. Karole and Kim, forlorn, their eyes as usual fixed on each other, followed her inside. My grandfather excused himself and went for a walk around the pond. He stared down at himself in the water.

I stayed where I was. I whispered to Epiphany, “I guess you're glad Coco's dead.”

Epiphany's eyes hardened. I loved the fact that she never cried, never once, but looked at me more fiercely when something upset her. Hers was the one tearless presence in my life; for that alone she will always have my gratitude. “Just ‘cause I don't like dogs don't give you no right to say such a awful thing,” she said, lighting into me. “I'm sad the damn thing's gone. I'm sad for all y'all. I'm sad so much sadness is all around this place. Sad sad sad sad sad,” she said, spitting out the word like it was that awful little piece of licorice she had tricked me into trying the week before that I had spit right at her. “It's all too sad out here,” she said. “When you're sad back home inside the TV you can just go on down the street and watch Mr. Ed's mouth move or play Barbie with the Beaver or hang out with Alice Kramden and Trixie Norton and try not to pee in your pants when they start telling each other dirty jokes. Alice'll even give you a puff
off her cigarette. Where I come from, sad don't mean what it means out here. It ain't real. I was warned, though. Especially by Topo Gigio and Hoss Cartwright. They was right. They said I wouldn't like it. All this shit out here is too damn real.”

“I saw President Kennedy get kilt on the TV,” I told her, staring down at the fresh mound of dirt now covering Coco. “I saw his funeral. That was sad. That was real.”

Epiphany sat thinking about what I had just said. One of the Derricks' skinny cows from their small herd came up close to us from their neighboring pasture and stared at us across the barbed-wire fence. You could smell the Derricks' chicken houses in the distance, the warm breeze blowing from that direction musky with feed and the feathery dust that the swarms of baby chicks could muster when I would sneak off to their farm by myself a few years later and hide away in one of those long unventilated structures, my movement setting the chicks off as I waded through them, their soft down brushing against my ankles in their dumb excitement, an ebbing and flowing of deafening chirps as they stirred up the wood chips scattered on the dirt floor, the choking odor of their slimy, greenish bits of chicken waste clotting in the chips sending me back into the sunlight as soon as I had quickly masturbated.

“The world's gone crazy, ain't it,” Epiphany finally said as she fixated on that chicken house smell. “Real folks done started dying where I come from. And here I am a fake person dying out here,” she lamented. “That's what Topo and Hoss told me would happen. I should'a listened to that little'un and that big'un. But, ch
iii
ld, I wanted to come help you so bad I told them it didn't matter. You ever watch Miss Whatshername on
Romper Room
when she says that romper-bomper-stomper-do shit and asks if all her friends had fun at play and says she can see you through her magic mirror? That mirror really works. I borrowed it from her one time when she was sleeping off that Schlitz she stole from a commercial and saw you watching us
all on TV. You near ‘bout broke my heart with all your hankering not to be no ch
iiii
ld no more. That's when I knew I had to come visit you. Even Alice and Trixie warned me about all this when they were lettin' me smoke one of them cigarettes and teachin' me them dirty jokes they tell behind their dumb husbands' backs. Them husbands smell bad. You don't want to stand downwind of them two. Alice and Trixie told me that once I rounded up some laughter for you that I'd start to fadin' on you. You'd lose my signal. I was just so sick of be in' . . . what's that word that your mama's Katherine Anne and her Miranda are so nuts about?—
immured?
—yeah, that's it . . . I was so sick of bein' immured in that make-believe bullshit, I traded livin' forever for livin'. Some of us do. Not many of us, but some. Mostly the ones like me who are in the background and bored and so full of hankerin' for stuff ourselves. You keep thinkin', ch
iiii
ld, that I was your wish come true when I come out of that TV and sat down beside you. But didn't you ever stop to think that you was
my
wish come true, too?”

“Don't fade away, Epiphany,” I said. “Please. I won't have a friend in this world if you fade away. Please don't.”

“Don't worry. You ain't gonna have to bury me. Nosiree. I'll spare you that one. Epiphany ain't gonna have no funeral. Won't burden you with another one of them things. Before too long I just won't be here no more. I'll just be part of the air that you breathe. Part of your brain that remembers stuff. Ch
iiii
ld, ain't you figured that out yet? That's what I am—I'm you.”

She reached out and held my hand.

“You think Coco's in heaven?” I asked her. She shrugged. Out by the pond, my grandfather's sudden sobs surged forth from him, the sound, like the pond's surface reacting to the rock he had just skipped fiercely across it, rippling that chickenhouse breeze and banking up against my mother's ever continuing moans of pain back up there in the house. The cow next to us mooed at all the ugly human noise it
was having to deal with as it walked away toward its herd, its hooves squishing the fresh patty it had just left behind. Epiphany and I unlocked our fingers and put our hands to our noses to staunch the patty's aroma, as rank as any of my mother's morphine-laced droppings which I had gotten a whiff of the day before when I happened by the opened bathroom door and saw my grandmother wiping her sore raw bottom with a warm bath cloth before she ordered me to close the door after saying, “Don't you dare look at this, don't you dare.” But I did.

“Dogs don't go to heaven, ch
iiii
ld,” said Epiphany, answering my Coco question, her voice muffled behind her fingers. “They all go to that mean bitch Lassie's show,” she said. “I've seen it with my own two eyes. They all line up and that bitch lets ‘em sniff at her. That's—Lawd be—dog heaven for you: sniffin' Lassie's hole for all eternity.” We softly laughed at this latest bit of celebrity gossip enabling us to get through another nightfall of a grandfather unable to fight back his tears, a grandmother who grimly coped with her renewed maternal shit-cleaning duties by attempting to coax my mother back to health with misplaced baby talk, and a mother, uncoaxed, whose hair was cleansed when sprinkled with a sickeningly sweet-smelling powder-like concoction called “dry shampoo.” Weeks earlier, I had volunteered for “hair duty.” When my grandmother was finished with tending to my mother in the bathroom, I went inside and carefully pulled the tiny plastic teeth in the concoction's accompanying comb against her tender scalp to loosen the powder into my palm. “Honey, stop, now, stop . . . it stings . . . stop . . . feels like a falcon's claws,” she said to me as I attempted to spruce her up a bit and tuck her in before I tried to fall asleep myself. I held my eyes shut and waited for another round of her cries to subside and delirium to set in, her moans becoming the lowing that would fill the house once the neighboring cows fell silent.

________________

By the second week of October 1964 I had made it up to the twelfth chapter of
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
and my mother, perhaps bored out of her morphined mind by my choice of childish reading material, had moved back to Lackey Memorial for her final hospital stay. She'd be dead in a month. Epiphany, by that point, had weakened almost as much as my mother had but insisted I continue with our reading every day after I got home from school. We'd meet beneath the Singer sewing machine and, ignoring the empty hospital bed stripped bare of its sheets, we tried to get to the end of the book before Epiphany faded away completely. I wondered at that point who would disappear from my life first, my mother or my imaginary friend. “It ain't like I don't already know how this story turns out,” Epiphany said, consoling me when I mentioned this to her. “Oz ain't that far a'-piece from Africa where Dorothy and me come from. Ifen I climb up in one of them TV trees enough I can see its emerald ass. Munchkins everywhere. But let's you and me stop for a minute, ch
iiii
ld. Let's talk for a spell. What you got planned for Halloween?”

I shrugged. “I don't know,” I said. “Maybe I won't go as nothing. Everybody's too busy with my mama dying for me to bother them with stuff like that.”