Sign Languages (8 page)

I don't build a fire in the stove to fry the bacon they gave me that I keep in an old metal bicycle basket deep in the well. The wires icy to the touch. Instead I take some of her ribbon off the nails near the back door. Two yellow ones which bring with them a laugh of hers about something or other.

I tie them in my beard, let them dangle on my chest. The yarrow has begun to spread near the door; I try not to crush it as I get down on all fours and pull out the twisted shovel with the shattered handle. As I walk down the road that circles the house and goes down through the evergreens that block it from Farm Road 3941, I smell the jonquils. And I want to let Mothermae listen to my mind thank her God and Baby Jesus that it's warm again and I've come out of the cold to see the road, to “glean it clean,” she'd say. Glean it.
Glean
a word I believe sprouted from black bottomland cotton fields. A word I love.

“No, I never worked. My legs never been right.” And we looked at one another until he smiled and nodded. “That's all right. That's all right.”

So I lied, Mothermae. Okay, you smiling, compassionate man, I walked into Hopkins when I was twelve and she cut across Mecham's Prairie to Luxor to mend clothes in a converted garage. I could read. I sat for centuries in the dark filthy room. The old man droned on and on. Stomachs growled all day. We all itched lice. The dark, near the muddy floor, under the desks full of mosquitoes drinking constantly, raising purple welts. Spring thunderstorms melted the cardboard windowpanes. The damp curled paper.

Later I came with her past the windowless garage to the sawmill icehouse. In the awful August heat I loved the wet sawdust floor, the blocks of ice warped and irregular rising to the ceiling. The clunk of metal tongs, the shower of ice from their deep bites.

Nigger this, nigger that. The oldest, who ran the hand-cranked crusher, named Nigger Boss.

But soon there were troubles. The whites laid off and waiting for someone to cuss, to yell at from store porches and through screened doors.

No work for anybody. The cross-tie mill burned. We woke that night smelling it on the dry wind and walked down to the Farm Road—just dirt then, the scant gravel beat to the sides—to watch it. The sky free of town lights. It was wonderful and Mothermae shook her head and cried. Took my arm and trembled.

Somehow she worked on. She saved almost all of her money in a metal saltine tin.

I never went to see the destruction. Now there were shootings all over. Whites drunk and mad. Black folks trying to be absolutely quiet and still in Shady Bend, the nigger quarters down the hill from the icehouse.

No work. The last time I saw the icehouse, we walked through its empty dark caves, me and Boss. “I'll be okay. You, too,” he said more than once.

And so I tried this and that. For a long time we drank whatever we could find. And some nights I'd stay in the quarters with someone from work.

Now at the ancient fence—a few rotten posts, the rusty wire sticking up from the pine needles like some red leafless vine—I turn away from where my road goes on to cross the bar ditch and connects with Farm Road 3941. Instead, using the shovel as a cane, I move slowly through the saplings so I'll come out onto it a long ways from the house. My ribbons flutter in the slight breeze. I ease across a low spot and cross another abandoned road. I stop to breathe but I don't sit down. That day I'd been on the road until after dark. I crawled up this slope and sat listening to them in the car. The windows were down. They rocked its stiff springs. She kept saying, “There, right there. No, right
there.”
But he didn't seem to be getting it right. He shouted “Nancy,” and the woods came back with its sounds of frogs, an owl far away along Bridgett Creek.

They began again. Something I could never do. Only once and I melt away to sleep. The small house in the quarters full of people noises and the heavy odor of kerosene and boiled supper. She called it my dick. What I'd thought of as my thing, what Mothermae had called it when she washed me in the metal tub we'd gleaned from somewhere.

We fought and drank and sat on the porch. And everything else, I guess. Years ago. She'd drink the whiskey we got in Mason jars and at almost sunup she'd hit me with her fists as we lay on the bed. I'd jerk awake, the others beginning to get up. Coughs and the last deep snores from the soundest sleep. “Goddammit,” she'd shout, “I can't even sleep. Why can't I sleep, you bastard. Laying there snoring. Get out, goddammit. Go on home to ‘Mothermae I.'”

“Nothing turned up yet?” Mothermae'd ask. And I'd shrug and walk back into Luxor to drink and sleep with her. With Kay.

Until I couldn't anymore. When they burned most of Shady Bend down. Black and white. And Kay just sat on the porch, drinking, and never let the jar touch the floor. Hugging it between her thighs.

I stepped over one of the white bastards outside of town. Someone had laid him out cold, a brick propped against his temple.

But I don't count any of that. So maybe I didn't lie to the first priest or later to Father Stephen and the thick heavy Jesus, now a grown man, on the wooden cross on his vast chest. “No, I've never had a job.” Besides, all that was before Social Security shit.

She still sewed. Up to the very end. And I complained about my back for years until one day I just stopped in the middle of the sentence because both of us were tired of hearing it.

People came to me over the road. I gleaned the road.

Like now, when I come up out of the ditch, deeper here than anywhere else except at the grate where it drops sharply into the creek. That's tomorrow. I admit I've pushed it up a day. One day only. That's bad enough. I won't do it again. Never have before, that I can remember. I can't begin to be haphazard now; I'll miss something valuable.

Today the clouds are low. The gray light is warm. The asphalt is damp though there wasn't rain last night. Along here once a car ran off the road and rolled through the fence—the posts, metal now, were spindly cedar then. I heard the whump of it all from the house.

No one was killed. Or even hurt. Back then the road was slow and the cars heavy and strong. I helped two white women up the bank and we talked for a long time until a delivery truck for a meat-packing plant stopped. We shook hands and waved. I heard the wrecker at the car the next day, but I didn't go look. I already had a pair of earrings and leather gloves which I wet and stretched until they fit.

Today it's a raccoon. Sometimes it's a possum or a dog or tabby cat from somewhere far off. Or maybe they're let out here by people tired of the trouble. Once I helped a man chase down a beautiful red bird-dog who'd escaped when he'd stopped to take a piss. He'd given me two dollars and a can of beer from a yellow cooler he had on the passenger's side. He asked about something I had on my jacket or in my hair and I think I told him all about it. And he asked more and I saw he understood everything I said.

I dig good and deep. The raccoon whole, not a sign of broken skin anywhere. Those are the best kind. Before I nudge him in with my toe, I squat to look at his face. His teeth are exposed in an even line. Tiny and sharp. Locked into either a snarl or a grin. And I consider Mothermae's opened mouth and the man I stepped over once leaving Luxor. At this point I always worry about dying and not being buried at the house with her, up under the pears. If it's not sudden, I could go to the priests. Or lay down out here with a note pinned to me. Or maybe just stay inside with the birds banging into the walls.

This morning I rise before the sun and bring up the bacon and light fat pine pieces in the stove. There's bacon and one egg from the priests and a handful of chicory coffee in the pot of rolling water.

“Silly old man,” I mutter, eating at my table made out of a door. But I still don't think much about the grate or my silliness about it—my making it into some big deal which it's not. Instead I get up and gently pry out tacks with my thumbnail and take the ancient yellow pieces of paper and sit down in the open doorway; beyond my feet the new dark green mint running in all directions like crazy. And though I don't lift my head still heavy from sleep, stiff from the cold nights and warming days, I think beyond the scraps. “Bruno Hauptman Executed.” We've had that forever, huh, Mothermae. I watch her hands take it down. Putting it back, she matched tack and hole perfectly. “State Rep. Wallston Convicted.” “The Eagle Has Landed.” Sometimes some of the story. Never all unless it's there right on the back. In the gift box they put pamphlets and tracts. About Mary mostly. Seldom about Baby Jesus grown old on Father Stephen's chest. Never God himself, I think. But sometimes the green-eyed younger one slips in a
Reader's Digest
or, once, an almanac.

I have read those. Looked at the pictures. But these from our walls are the best. I remember where I found this one about white men on the moon. It was the year the drought burned up the garden, the pears dropping easily, still the light green of mossy places in Bridgett Creek. As hard as stones.

The year white men landed on the moon. I imagined I could see them that summer. But black folks would have showed up better, I laughed. Like periods in the newspaper. Like ticks on the white face of a Hereford in the farthest pasture up the hill from the grate, the road going on to Monterrey Prairie 8 miles away. There there were black folks, white men, too. But I've never been that far. The white men on the rising orange moon closer than those at the Prairie.

Today I'm anxious to get there; too anxious maybe. I know I've cheated; I'm going a day early. Once a month. And I thought about traveling there once every two months and right now my mouth's dry as can be.

I hurry myself up. I wash my face, put back the bacon, ignore the sprouting lantana, the first white veins showing along the buds of the tea rose. Though I walk down the road trying to recall its fragrance. “Milton it's wonderful. Milton, look at what you've found us,” she'd said, me pulling her up the road. She stood about here and looked around but I pass on, walk through the memory. Don't stop to look back. Pears. Tea roses. Sometimes the recollection of Rudy's strong body all over the place. On the porch. The sounds of hay lifted up, thrown down. For years we thought maybe this spring they'll remember. Or this winter the feed will run low. If they come, they'd come across the field where the road crosses a dry stream and edges around a hill. But they never did. Rudy on the moon maybe.

Now I ease across ditches, enter sapling thickets, emerge on the road as the sun comes up behind clouds pink and orange. The bridge, the hill ahead blurred, washed all together, a dark sweep to the west. The sun on my chilly back. It'll get stronger.

That first day was terribly hot for late summer. I thought of the icehouse. I remembered Kay. I had forgotten the porch and the whiskey; the smells of Shady Bend.

Mothermae was dead, but the boy hadn't fallen to the rock yet. Sometime in there, in between whatever the in-between is. I try to keep it all straight, but I don't think I can anymore. It's like something has worn out. But I could see better at least. Terribly hot but no drought. The thunderheads came on late in the afternoon, at almost sunset, their bottoms blossoming red like roses, the lightning like the day's sun. There'd be some rain. Not much but enough to give things a drink, a sigh of relief. I was walking, expecting that later.

I had never crossed the bridge. The sign peppered with holes. I stopped there, put my little finger gently in the holes, saw the jagged exits. Thirty feet to the rushing water, green like young lettuce. The road going uphill on the other side. Sharply up into thick evergreens and gone over the top toward Monterrey Prairie 8 miles.

“Just stay away from it, you hear me? That's going too far. It's full of water moccasins and greenbriers anyways,” she'd said. Some fear, respect, darknesses in her words I understood but didn't, too.

So we always turned back the other way. Seldom gleaned up to the creek. Only sometimes, if we spied something shining in the sun. Something of interest.

Now I cross it. Without fear. But that hot day I must have been breathless. Like I was stepping on the moon. A nigger on the white face. The green water below boiling around the large flat rock. Then there was the car. Voiture. I heard it ahead in the evergreens the other side of the hill and I ran toward it, past the other sign full of holes and dropped down the rough concrete along its side, my skin scraped away. The swallows' nests over my head, my feet sticking through a mulberry bush.

The car come and gone. Only its sound present. Clanking over the metal plates, air rushing through the railings. I must have been old even then.

Now the best path is the easiest. Cross the road, hang onto the sign with its wrong name. Swing slowly until my shoes touch the head wall. Drop two feet and walk under. A natural path here. All the way to the mouth of the grate. The outlet of a drainpipe at least four feet in diameter. The hole set back at an angle into the cement, rusty iron rods the size of my fingers broken, bent upward, trapping whatever comes down from beyond the top of the hill.

I sit and lean back against the concrete. It is damp, still cold in the shade. I wait a moment. I wait even longer.

That past day not magic, not Mary or Baby Jesus. Though she would have said all that. And she'd looked at me as she often had. Her eyes drawn almost shut. “Behold the lilies of the field,” she'd say. “The birds of the air.”

The niggers of this land.

But it was close to magic, I guess. Everything coming all at once.

I laid against the grate, my hands all scratched up and beginning to bleed. I sat up slowly and looked up into the black hole. There was a mound of leaves, paper, metal shining, all of it dried into a wad of stuff. I crawled toward it but before I reached out the voices came to me over my shoulder.

“As pleasant a way as I know.”