Tina Mcelroy Ansa (24 page)

She honked her horn
beep-beep-bee-beep-beep
when she drove down her winding road past James Petersen’s house to let him know she was home and everything was okay with her. But when she pulled up in the driveway between the house and the stables and parked the car, she questioned whether she was in the right place. She recalled from her childhood that ghosts could do just about anything they wanted, unfettered by the laws of gravity and time and matter as mere mortals were.

I wonder if Herman created some kind of lovely ghostly mansion on this spot while I was gone, she thought. Then, she smiled at the thought of his name. Herman.

There were no lights on outside and a strange new light seemed to be burning inside at each and every window and glass door of the place. Lena was sure that some of the lightning bugs must have gotten inside. Every window in her big log lodge seemed filled with soft golden natural-looking light, welcoming her home.

She tried to be cool, but she found herself flying from the car along the stone alee of roses and mantles of bridal veil hanging
overhead in pots and annuals flower beds bordered by crossties up to the back door of her house where the southern jasmine was thinking about budding. Soft light was shining from that entrance, too.

Herman met her at the door looking as real and solid as he had that morning, sporting a warm shy smile. Lena thought, This man is light itself. He’s what’s shining in my house.

“Good ee-bah-ning, Lena. I lit some tallows fo’ you,” he said, holding the door wide open, in a casual yet grand gesture.

Lena stood there a moment, gazing at this big good-looking old-timey man standing in her back doorway, welcoming her home. Other than Frank Petersen or his brother, James, it had been years since anyone was there to greet her when she returned home at the end of the day.

“Um,” Lena said to herself. “So, this is what it feels like to have family again.” She smiled and entered, feeling the depth and passion of his welcome warm her as if he had indeed lit a “tallow” deep in her belly.

Herman took a step back in his big soft black leather boots—a graceful step, Lena noticed—to let her in, and Lena let out a little gasp, “Ooooo.” All along one wall of the Glass Hall and into what she could see of the rest of her house was aglow with what looked like a hundred burning candles.

He must have lit every candle in the house, even the birthday candles, she thought, enchanted by the look of her cabin completely illuminated by the flickering light.

“I used all I could find. What ya think?” Herman asked, closing the door behind them. Lena could hear a taste of uncertainty in his voice, and it moved her. He really cares what I think of what he’s done, she thought.

“It’s just beautiful,” she said sincerely.

“I care ’bout everythang got to do wi’ you, Lena. Like I tole ya this mo’nin’, I’m yo’ man. I loves you already. You just got t’ decide if you my woman. That’s all.”

“That’s all?” she asked, smiling. She could hardly believe how much fun she was having just messing with this man.

“That’s all,” he said, smiling back at her.

Lena dropped her purse on top of a heavy flowered silk throw with bronze-colored fringe on the back of the sofa and walked through the rest of the house on the deck side. There were burning candles leading all the way through the pool room into her bedroom suite at the other end of the house. Out on the deck, Herman had lit tall fat candles inside hurricane globes that had not been lit since her last weak attempt at a dinner party more than a year before.

He had even lit some of the candles left over from the man-calling ceremony.

“I didn’t think you’d mind me ligh’in’ up all yo’ candles.” He paused and smiled. “Even them
ceremonial
ones. I don’t think you gon’ have much more use fo’
them.”

He came up behind her and stood looking over her shoulder at all he had done. Lena could feel his breath on her neck, and she had to step away quickly to catch
her
breath.

“Mind?” Lena said, walking on through the house and rubbing the tingling spot on the back of her neck. “Everything looks wonderful.”

Her house always looked ready for company. James Petersen saw to that. But tonight the house
felt
cozy, too.

Lena had seen his old black hat hanging on her grandmother’s antique mirrored coatrack by the back door when she had first come in. So, she figured, he planned to stay awhile.

Herman had laid and lit a good-sized fire in the cavernous fireplace in the main room. As Lena walked by, the heat felt good against her legs. The country smell and the pop and sizzle of seasoned split oak wood filled the house to the rafters. Clever Mr. Buck had vented all her fireplaces so the heat and smell blew into the house and didn’t go up and out the chimney with the smoke. She noticed Herman had carefully replaced the huge leaf-embossed screen so no sparks from the pinecones he had also thrown in there could pop out and burn her as she passed.

Herman had also laid a smaller fire in her bedroom hearth against the cool of the spring night air.

She stepped out on the deck in her bare stocking feet just in time to catch something in the sky that looked like a spark from the fire. “Oh, my God, it looks like a comet,” she whispered in awe as the shooting star arced across the sky.

“You had any sup’er this ee-bah-ning, Lena?” Herman asked as if he asked her that every night.

She jumped a little at the sound of his voice. I got to get used to
that
, she thought.

“Uh-uh. Not yet. I usually get something before I go to bed.”

“Well, there’s a whole heap a’ cooked groceries in there in yo’ kitchen. And it look good, too. I waited fo’ ya.”

When Lena walked into the kitchen ahead of Herman, she saw that he had already started heating up the food in her favorite heavy gray pots on the stove. It smelled good.

“I usually just stick the food in the microwave,” she said, lifting lids and stirring the big pot of black-eyed peas, turning the gas flame down a bit.

“I looked at that box,” Herman answered her about the microwave oven. “Real interestin’. Right clever. But it ain’t the same as heatin’ it up on the stove over fire, is it?”

He came over to stand by Lena and eyed the food hungrily. She turned with a big silver serving spoon in her hand and lifted it to Herman’s lips to let him taste. He closed his eyes and took the whole spoon in his mouth.

“Ummmmmmmmmmm-uh,” he said as he slowly chewed and swallowed. Then, he sighed.

Lena smiled at Herman’s appreciative yummy sounds. Her intimate gesture of feeding him from the silver spoon had even taken her a little bit by surprise. But his grunts and purrs made it seem so natural, just the way it should have felt.

“That sho’ taste good, Lena. You eat like this every day?”

“Uh-huh,” she replied. “I call them my CARE package meals.”

The town women and the one man who prepared the CARE meals did care for her.

Most of the food she had consumed in the last ten years had been cooked by the loving hands of Mulberry women, and one man who died the year before of AIDS. They felt it was their lifelong duty to feed Lena after her entire family was dead. Like mourners come to a never-ending wake, the steady stream of food continued into her house out by the river this tenth year after the double memorial services had been performed.

Old women who knew her, knew her daddy, knew her mama, knew her grandmama, knew her daddy’s family, knew her mama’s family, ever went to The Place, whose husband or man ever went to The Place regularly, or were the recipients of the family love or largesse continued each week to send Lena food.

Delicious food, hot-right-from-the-oven food.

Fried chicken, with thick light brown crunchy gravy. Chicken-fried steak with darker brown gravy. Pork neckbones and spaghetti simmered in tomatoes and onions and bell pepper. Pork roast, standing rib roast and pot roast. Roast hen, turkey, duck and chicken. Chicken and dumplings.

Pots of collard greens from somebody’s garden kept Lena regular for a week. Pole beans with little new potatoes and onions cut in quarters the way her father had liked them. Squash casserole, baked macaroni and cheese and candied yams. Pickled beets and peaches and bread-and-butter pickles.

They sent turkey and dressing and rice and gravy that didn’t taste like Sunday dinner but tasted more like Thanksgiving or Christmas.

And the desserts! The desserts! The women and Cecil sent red velvet cakes, chocolate layer cakes, lemon-cheese cakes, coconut cakes, German chocolate cakes, lemon pound cakes, applesauce cakes. They sent banana pudding and bread pudding with raisins, pineapple chunks and peach slices. They sent peach and blackberry cobblers; icebox pies and coconut cream pies and lemon meringue pies. If they had their way, Lena would have weighed three hundred pounds.

“Lots of it gets taken out to the homeless shelter or one of the soup kitchens in town where ’my children’—some young people in town—eat some meals. James Petersen takes it for me usually in the afternoon before I get home or the next morning.”

“Then, why don’t the ladies just take the food to the soup kitchen d’rectly?” Herman asked.

Lena just chuckled at the idea of trying to explain the machinations of her and her folks. “You
are
new around here, aren’t you?”

And he chuckled because
he, too
, knew how good it made him feel to do something for Lena.

Herman began humming to himself as he moved around the kitchen getting out of Lena’s way, watching where she kept bowls and plates and utensils. Hearing the tune, Lena reached over without even thinking and turned on the controls for the music system. Nat King Cole singing “Mona Lisa” filled the cabin.

Herman was not really in the way. It felt good to Lena to have him in there. She even pretended she couldn’t reach a big serving bowl and a crystal flower vase in the cabinets over the soapstone sink and needed his long arms to get them down for her.

“Oh, happy to he’p ya,” he said, and leapt sprightly to retrieve the desired items.

Lena could see he wasn’t comfortable standing around doing nothing. So, she asked him to get the pails of cut flowers inside the door on the west-side screened porch.

She never even considered that Herman might not know his way around her house.

He came back bearing two deep tin flower pails of daffodils, delphiniums, jonquils, dogwood limbs, twirls of wisteria blooms and even some early roses and sprouting grapevines.

“Lena, this part a’ yo’ magic?” he asked.

She smiled at Herman’s handsome face framed by the beautiful spring blooms.

“No, that’s Mr. Renfroe, the gardener’s magic. He cuts flowers
from all over the property whenever he works, either in the morning or the evening when the stems are nice and stiff, he says.”

Lena came over to the pails and began choosing big tall flowers to put into the vase she had filled with sugar-sweetened tepid water. Herman watched her as if she were creating life with the pink, yellow and purple blossoms.

“He takes most of the flowers in to the nursing home in town or by Miss Onnie’s house or Miss Pansy’s or Miss Emma Floyd’s, they can’t get out and garden anymore. And on the weekend, either I take some or he takes some by St. Martin de Porres for Mass.

“But regardless, he always leaves some pretty ones for me on the side porch out of the sun. I used to have a house full of orchids. A man from North Carolina delivered them. But even with the greenhouse, I couldn’t find enough time to keep them going.”

With a grunt, she picked up the enormous arrangement she had put together and headed for the Great Jonah Room. Herman followed her wordlessly.

“If I don’t have time to arrange them, James Petersen puts them out for me. He’s pretty good at it,” she said, placing the huge arrangement on a long narrow wooden table behind one of her copper-colored leather sofas facing the fireplace, then standing back to see how it looked there.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Lena,” Herman said, bringing his hand to his broad brown brow, still mesmerized by her flower arranging, “I shoulda he’ped you wi’ that. But I swear, you looked so pretty ’rrangin’ them flowers there that I couldn’t think or move fo’ a minute.”

Lena just smiled and went back to the kitchen to clip and arrange the other flowers. She tried and tried to set her face in an experienced “I’ve heard that shit before” mold, but she couldn’t stop smiling and blushing a pretty hot color.

“You look like a flower yo’self in that red outfit, Lena.” He walked in behind her and took down a large blue pottery vase from the open-faced cupboards and handed it to her.

“Pretty vase. Look like som’um my Indian people made.”

“It’s Seminole,” Lena explained, taking it from him and filling it for the first time with water.

Herman just smiled and said, “I thought so. Seminoles some a’ the folks I grew up with.”

Lena turned the tap off.

“You grew up with Indians?” she asked. “You weren’t on a plantation, you weren’t a slave?”

She had not meant to blurt out the question, but it had been on her mind.

“Naw, Lena, my peoples wasn’t slaves,” Herman said. He stopped, lifted his strong chin a bit and studied Lena’s face as he continued, “My pa and my ma took off from slavery.”

Lena held her breath as Herman paused again. Then, he spoke.

“My peoples was Maroons!”

“Maroons!!?” Lena asked.

“Yeah, baby. My folks run off from the plantation they was at in South Georgia, place named Cypress Oaks, long ’fore I was born. Mama was pretty heavy wid my oldest sister when they took off into the night. We’d sit ’round the fire at night in the woods in Flor’da, and they usta tell us children about that night and the plans they made fo’ the run fo’ freedom.

“How they prepared, keepin’ some a’ they little vittles saved back. Who they told the truth on the place and who they had to lie to till the moment they left. Who they left behind. How it hurt that they couldn’t take everybody. How everybody wouldn’a wanted to go, to take the chance, if they could have. How good and scary it felt to leave, to just set foot off the place.”