The Healing (20 page)

Polly gently swayed her body side to side, like a streamer of moss caught by the breeze. Her arms extended, weaving the starlit heaven. Her entire body became liquid and flowed like a gentle wave to the rhythm of her voice. She began to make new sounds, and Granada heard what could have been words, foreign to her ears, borne out on the rhythmic cadence.

She didn’t understand the meaning of the song in the same way she understood the rhymes that Chester sang, but she found this one comforting, familiar even. The secret part of her, warmed by Polly’s touch, was awakening from a lengthy sleep, urged on by the sound, aching to rise from her chest into her throat and fly out into the night.

Granada watched the old woman through the gathering dark. Polly had transformed. She appeared softer and much younger, graceful, as delicate as morning mist. Granada found herself thinking Polly beautiful, in a way that, like the place in her chest, had not been known to her before this moment. She was irresistibly drawn to Polly, wanting to lose herself in the words and the rhythms and the softness of her curving body.

The last of the song flowed gently from Polly’s lips and was carried off by the cool evening breeze, and Granada believed she could hear that final, waning note as it traveled to places she had never seen. She ached to go with it.

Polly blew softly through her mouth, as if she were putting out a candle, and then brought her arms down to her sides.

Granada felt many things she had no words to shape, so she remained quiet and let the secret part of her flicker as long as possible until at last it faded to its hiding place.

Polly still peered into the distant night. “Them words come from far off, from my momma.”

Was this sadness she heard in the old woman’s voice?

“You missing your momma?” Granada asked.

“I do that,” Polly answered. “But I don’t forget her. I draw memory from my mother’s mouth like you draw water from the cistern. Her words are sweeter to my tongue than honey. They come to me from all the way back.” Polly crossed her arms and sighed. “From the time before the lie.”

“That song sure was pretty,” Granada said, edging closer to the woman, craving the warmth that radiated from Polly’s body. “Don’t know what it says, but I sure would like to learn it. If you was to teach it to me.”

Polly nodded. “It’s a song the village women used to sing. It says, ‘What we see and what we can’t see … What we know and what we can’t know … The mighty and the small … The Father and the Mother … The creatures that prowl the forest and the growing things in the fields … The young ones that tread the ground and the old ones that sleep under it … The birthing and the dying … The laughing and the crying and the bearing up … All creation breathes with one breath.’ ”

She reached up and wiped something from her eye with the back of her hand.

“Anyhow, that’s the way my momma told it to me,” she said, looking down at Granada. “And that’s the way I’m telling it to you. All the people is caught up in this thing together. Like your eyes and ears and heart is one in your body. We all tied by invisible threads, one to another. My momma said nobody can go her own way without breaking them threads that make us one tribe. One breath.”

She held both hands out before her. Then she laced her fingers.
“This,”
she said with conviction, “is where you belong, Granada.”

Granada studied the woman’s hands. Granada looked up at the house lit like a giant chandelier. She then raised her eyes to the stars once more.

“Them stars, Granada. You thinking they need a mistress? They need a master?”

“But they the master’s stars, ain’t they?” Granada said. “They on his property.”

“No. Ain’t no white master over them stars. No mistress, neither. Just made-up words. Master. Mistress. Nigger. Slave. Property. They ain’t nothing but bothersome night clouds that keep you from seeing the heavens with a clear eye. Keep you blind to all them stars.”

Polly placed an arm gently around Granada’s shoulder and drew her close. She pointed a finger to the sky. “Look up, Granada. Look to your people. We as beautiful and as plentiful as them stars knitted together in heaven. We just forgot. Somebody’s got to remember for us all.”

F
or the rest of that day, Violet let go of Gran Gran’s apron strings for as much as an hour at a time, doing nothing but studying the masks. Already on the table were Sylvie and Silas; Chester, Pomp, and Lizzie; Mistress and Master Satterfield and Little Lord; and Ella, Gran Gran’s mother. Violet would carefully lift each up with both hands and move them around, arranging and rearranging them.

Gran Gran guessed maybe the girl was acting out a story, the way children do with dolls and spools and just about anything else you set in front of them. But she couldn’t say for sure. She only knew that it was a relief to see those anxious eyes calm some, and even fire up a bit with what Gran Gran judged as curiosity. Or maybe it was nothing but that age-old game called “play-like.” If so, that was fine with Gran Gran. A child’s pretending was a much better pastime than remembering all the real-life, grown-up mess this girl had seen. Too much to learn, too quick.

When Gran Gran had been a girl and the time had come for her to leave Sylvie and the kitchen, the only world she had ever known, suddenly nothing made sense. No one had ever told her about the ingredients of life, only of biscuits. No one had readied her for the new things she saw. Birthing and mothering and living and dying. The kitchen had been a pretend place, where life never intruded in its
typically messy fashion. Now, remembering, the old woman wished someone had prepared her better.

“Violet?” Gran Gran asked, looking at the girl as she placed Polly’s mask between Aunt Sylvie’s and Silas’s. “I don’t know if you old enough for this story or not, but something tells me you are. I know when I was about your age, I sure wish somebody had let me in on the big secret. I reckon Aunt Sylvie and Chester and the grown-up folks who raised me didn’t think it was good for my ears.”

Gran Gran shook her head and laughed. “Lord were they wrong about that! It was the best news I ever heard!”

G
ranada was sitting on the porch of a swamp slave’s cabin in one of the master’s far-flung settlements, wondering what Polly was doing to the woman inside to make her so angry. She had been growling like a gut-shot bear.

Bridger had come with a wagon early that morning, summoning Polly from the hospital. The two exchanged a few words and Polly hurried back into the cabin and grabbed the short cloth sack she kept hanging on a peg behind the door. While she filled it with remedies, she told Granada to fetch one of the clay vessels she had fired and painted the week before.

As soon as they had settled into the wagon, the mules took off at a trot. Polly rode straight-legged in the wagon bed, resting her back against the sideboard. After a while she removed her floppy hat and tied up her hair in the faded flowered scarf with the beaten-brass disks that glittered in the sun.

Granada made the trip sitting in the rear of the wagon, dangling her legs over the rough track. As the overseer persistently cursed the mules and snapped the reins, and the wagon jolted her, Granada hugged the little clay pot close to her chest.

During the four-mile trek to Burnt Tree quarters she had plenty of time to speculate about how long it would be before the woman called Ella would appear on one of these visits. Perhaps she was dead.
Or maybe she cared as little for a reunion as Granada did. But still the prospect filled her with an icy dread, and she tried her best to put it out of her mind. She looked back at Polly, who now seemed to be sleeping, her hands clasped in her lap, the little round mirrors catching the rising sun and flashing about her head. There were times now, especially when she slept, the old woman didn’t seem so scary.

When they entered the settlement, Granada noticed that Burnt Tree looked nearly identical to Mott’s quarter and Hanging Moss—two long rows of small whitewashed cabins with newly built porches facing each other across a well-trod lane. Screening the settlement from the fields was a skirt of woods on one side and a cypress slough on the other.

The quarter lay quiet. It had been light now for several hours and most of the inhabitants were already in the fields. Down at the end of the row she saw an old, shrunken woman sitting on a stump chair under a cottonwood, minding pallets of sleeping babies. Larger children squatted or crawled naked on the hard ground. Bridger pulled the team to a stop in front of a two-room cabin and both Polly and Granada exited through the rear of the wagon.

Bridger called back at them. “Get her done in good time so she can be back in the fields by morning.”

Polly didn’t reply.

As they walked toward the cabin, Granada spied two women through the open door. They stood on either side of the bed, obstructing from view all but the head of the sick woman, which she threw back and forth on a pillow of straw. Even through the shadows, Granada could see the sweat glistening on the woman’s face and hear her pained moans.

Granada dragged her feet as she followed Polly up the two steps and onto the plank porch, bracing herself for the disgusting sights of another sickroom. Polly turned to Granada and brusquely told her to wait outside with the empty crock. Then she entered the cabin and shut the door.

Unexpectedly alone, Granada couldn’t decide if she was more
relieved or hurt at being excluded, but she felt the need to register her complaint regardless.

“I ain’t going to say nothing!” she protested weakly through the cypress door. Then, resigned, she plopped onto a plank bench situated below a burlap-curtained window, the clay pot resting in her lap.

Granada’s feelings finally came down hard on the side of relief when the sick woman yelled out like somebody was whipping her with a leather strop. A while later a dark, mud-splattered woman wearing a sweat-stained head rag emerged from the nearby skirt of woods and came running down the track. She hurried up the steps of the cabin, passing by Granada with only the briefest of glances, and then tapped gently on the door.

“It’s Pansy,” she said.

The door opened to let her in as another woman stepped out and rushed off into the woods.

This odd routine was repeated several times throughout the day with some women collecting a baby to nurse before stepping inside the cabin. It was puzzling, all the comings and goings. The conspiracy seemed to involve every woman in the quarter. By midafternoon, Granada was determined to solve the mystery, even if it meant going into the sickroom.

Polly emerged from the cabin after several hours. When Granada opened her mouth, the old woman shushed her before she could speak. Polly sat down heavily on the bench and unknotted a square of cloth she had packed away in her sack.

Inside was a wedge of corn bread and a bit of salt pork. She nibbled a bird’s portion and secured her packet again, never bothering to offer Granada one bite. Then she shut her eyes.

It took only a moment for her chin to drop. She began to snore lightly, leaving Granada to watch the old woman’s chest rise and fall with her breathing.

Not more than five minutes could have passed before Polly woke with a snort and scrambled to her feet. She reached down and took the
crock from Granada’s hands, and then returned inside the cabin. She never said a word.

By late afternoon the cries of Sarie, the sick woman, were raw with exhaustion and her speech more agitated.

“Get the hell out of here and let me die!” the woman screamed. Granada pitied the poor women who attended her, but Sarie’s fury only evoked another round of gentle words and soothing tones.

The gray dark of twilight saw the slaves quitting the fields for home. Some of the women stopped off by the cottonwood and picked up a child or two, while the men headed straight for their cabins to sit on their porches and smoke their pipes, or chop weeds in the little garden plots that each family now had, thanks to Polly.

More magic, they claimed. Granada knew different. She had heard Polly tell the master to his face that a patch of greens was a small price to pay to keep out the blacktongue. “Don’t worry yourself,” she had told Master Ben. “Let them grow it on their own time.” Wasn’t magic. Sneaky is what it was! Polly also told him they could all use a porch as well. Soon as he started bellyaching about the cost, she explained to him how a porch would get him another hour of work out of them every day. With a porch, they could see to do their house chores like weaving, soapmaking, harness mending, and such after it got too dark inside the cabin. Of course that made folks love Polly Shine even more.