Tina Mcelroy Ansa (46 page)

Lena had thought she was now truly a lusty woman, one who slapped her pussy at will, but Herman’s observation embarrassed her. She lowered her head a bit, but Herman would have none of that.

“Oh, Lena, baby, I didn’t say that to shame you. Shoot, I’m proud a’ the fact. In fact, thank you, ma’am, fo’ the honor.” And he bowed his head a bit and let his eyelids drop briefly in her honor.

It was a new way of life for Lena—this living in the moment with a loving man who might disappear at any moment. She wanted to revel in it, throw it on the ground and roll around in it the way her horses did in a nearby field of clover in spring.

All Lena had to do was think about this world of hers without Herman and tears would start to well up in her eyes.

Lying in bed with Herman beside her, her grandmama’s quilt spread over them, Lena felt blessed. Truly blessed. The way everyone in Mulberry always thought she was.

W
ith her summer-reddened braids and her golden-brown skin, to Herman, Lena looked like autumn itself walking through the woods in October, dry leaves crackling under her boots. She had grown so strong in the few months since he first appeared in April. She had not been anything like weak before. But now she was lusty.

With his ghostly vision, Herman could see it in a way that Lena couldn’t appreciate. Though Lord know, Herman thought as he stretched his stride to catch up to her, she sho’ do appreciate it as much as she can.

“Uh, uh, uh,” Herman said under his breath to himself as he shook his big head and continued walking. “I wish I had somebody I could tell ’bout this ’oman.”

Lying naked next to him in bed or just in shorts out on the river deck in the low bone-warming sunlight, Herman would see Lena look down at her body and smile. She was surprised to see how toned and strong she looked when just a few weeks before she had remembered
looking at herself naked in her grandmother’s old standing full-length mirror and seeing a different person.

Lena had started out with a good God-given build and stayed active, riding her horses, turning their manure into the compost piles for the gardens, swimming laps every day in Rachel’s Waters. She had seemed to effortlessly keep her great S-shaped figure into her early forties. But in the last four or five years, she dropped much of her physical activity as her responsibilities to her people grew. So, for quite some time now, she no longer rose and rode or walked or swam. Instead, she rose and got on the phone to begin taking care of business, business and duties that didn’t seem to cease until way after dark.

To Lena’s chagrin, her body had begun to show the lack of activity, sagging a little in the hips when she sat on the edge of her granite bathtub with just her panties on. She was almost beginning to thicken in the waist the way old dowagers did. The seldom-massaged skin around the base of her breasts was threatening to become crepey; her shoulders, forearms and breasts were beginning to think about becoming round and soft.

The word “flabby” had come to mind. And it shocked her. She had seen other women who had obviously had cute bodies as young adults, but hadn’t yet realized that they no longer looked cute, little and toned the way they always had.

Just weeks before Herman arrived, Lena had said, “Oh, Lord, I’m on the road to looking like one of those women!”

She had intended that very day to leave The Place and her business meetings in the hands of her staff a couple of hours early and saddle up Baby for a flat-out run the way she used to every morning. But when she got home, there had been a note on her door or a person at the door or a phone call from somebody in need, and she had never gotten around to her ride or any other exercise.

But now as the autumn days grew shorter and Herman pointed out the Swan constellation each night to remind her, “You know, they mate for life, Lena,” she thought, Damn! Look at my body!

She hadn’t noticed the gradual change over time. How could she? She had been too busy to take a look at her own self. All that ripping and running with Herman in the woods, exploring caves on her land that extended into the next county, racing their horses, betting blow jobs and massages on who would win.

And then, she thought, there was the lovemaking.

For Lena, that activity covered everything she and Herman did or planned to do to give each other physical, that sometimes verged on spiritual, pleasure. Fucking, licking, sucking, scratching, fondling, tickling, holding, pumping, biting. All of it meant lovemaking to her. And she had to credit her incredibly strengthened inner thigh muscles as much to riding Herman as to riding horses.

Gloria teased her when she came in The Place, “Look at her. Think she cute again.”

The truth was Lena didn’t
think
she was cute. She
knew
she was cute. And she hadn’t thought
that
since she was a child prohibited from crossing Forest Avenue by herself. Herman thought she was pretty cute, too. He had caught her admiring her strong, healthy, fit body in the old warped mirror and hat rack in the barn.

“It’s hard to believe that that’s Lena McPherson standin’ there, eh, baby?”

Lena couldn’t get the small pleased smile off her face quickly enough, so she turned around and let Herman see her pride.

“Things are so different. I’m so different, Herman, sometimes I can’t even take it in. If I didn’t know better, I’d think this was one of my dreams.”

Their passion for each other had not cooled at all from spring to fall. At night, in their bed under the covers like old married people, they still made love like dancers in a Salt ’n’ Pepa video, moaning and grinding and humping and caressing, the music from Lena’s matchbox playing furiously to their rhythm. Some nights when they made love, champagne corks popped in the wine cellar. And through it all, Herman never forgot to stop and kiss and lick the cherished mole on her neck that he called a “beauty mark.”

“This isn’t a dream, is it, Herman?” She knew Herman wouldn’t lie to her about it.

“Naw, baby, this ain’t no dream,” Herman said straight up.

“Good,” Lena said, heaving a big sigh. She gave herself a nice firm pat on the seat of her jeans and went over to a rough wooden table to pick up a currying brush.

Keba’s rich brown coat glistened with the attention she was getting, and Lena felt the quickness of life each time she gently stroked the mare’s tight rounding belly.

“I
am
different now, Herman. My life is so different,” Lena said as she continued currying the horse’s thick mahogany mane. Both she and Herman gave Keba as much love and attention as they could now that Keba was expecting. In the next compartment, Baby began softly kicking the side of her stall.

“Hush up, Baby, I’ll get to you,” Lena said, quieting the horse for a while. “I look back just six months, Herman, and I truly think, How could I have done all that shit? And it’s not that I was miserable. No, Herman, really I wasn’t. I know it looks like I was trying to take care of the world but …”

Herman wouldn’t even let her finish.

“You were, sugar. Ain’t no buts ’bout it. You
were
tryin’t’ take care a’ the world. And you
were
miserable. Yo’ yoke, baby, was hard.” He didn’t even give her time to reply.

“You mighta been pretty on the outside right along. But on the inside,” he declared, pointing a long sturdy forefinger at her head, “Look at yo’se’f! That’s how you felt!”

The currying brush fell to the floor from Lena’s trembling hand as if someone had just read from the Gospel of Luke. “You fool! This very night your soul shall be required of you!”

She looked down in surprise at her bare arms and went over to the old warped mirror. She was shocked by her reflection. There were long thin scratches on both her arms as if she had gotten caught without a long-sleeved shirt among the rosebushes in Miss Zimmie’s garden. On the left side of her face along the faint fading scar that a hot curling
iron wielded carelessly at Delores’ Beauty Parlor before her favorite beautician Mamie arrived had caused when she was a child was a long thin scratch as if she had fallen on a cat.

When she saw the unexplained scratches on her face and arms she looked at her ghostly lover and teacher and said, “I know, Herman, I
needed
to get rid of that cat.”

Herman just sighed and smiled, then went back to work.

Lena didn’t seem to notice, but the longer Herman stayed with her, the more her childhood powers—powers of the caul—were returning to her. The random voices she had heard as a child were now the inner voices that guided her. Now, she put the magic on declining plants and revived them. She began to be able to look at strangers and familiars alike and sometimes read their thoughts and intentions.

Not many people drove up Lena’s road anymore to knock on her door in the night. She was proud of herself for having made it clear so many times that they couldn’t anymore, and she was proud of her folks for how well they were taking the change in things.

Herman had punctuated her resolve for privacy by building a wide locked gate of Middle Georgia pine a few hundred feet before James Petersen’s house. He set a huge mailbox in the posts beside the gate, and he didn’t install an intercom system to Lena’s house or to James Petersen’s.

“When folks come to a locked fence, they oughta turn ’round,” Herman said.

He also made a long wooden sign with the initials “LLL” etched into it and hung it at the back door where most of the traffic entered.

“What’s that stand for, Herman?” she asked when she came in that afternoon.

“It stand fo’ ’Leave Lena ’Lone,’ baby. That’s what it stand fo’. Thought I’d put up a sign just in case I ain’t ’round right then to say it.”

Then, he marched right down to the new wooden gate and posted another handmade “LLL” sign there.

When someone
was
coming, Lena could always feel it. She would
call James Petersen at his house and alert him. Then, she and Herman would make themselves scarce while James Petersen dealt with the visitor or delivery.

Where Lena used to envision pictures of her people stranded and suffering without her, she now saw flashes of folks helping each other out.

Nothing interrupted her and Herman as they lay in the grip of her big bentwood bed—surrounded by a sea of books and papers, his guitar and her laptop computer. It felt like a Sunday afternoon, but Lena really didn’t know what day it was. They lay up in her bed like that mornings, afternoons and evenings on end sometimes, the sky changing above them through the skylight. With the French doors open onto the screened-in section of deck and the grounds and river beyond, with small yellow sulfur butterflies flitting along the surface of the Ocawatchee like patches of sunlight, it was their favorite place to lounge.

Now that she had delegated most of her business to others, her days out at her house by the river ran together like the creeks that fed the Ocawatchee.

She and Herman did just about all the work with the horses now, finding work elsewhere for the stable hand and the gardening crew except Mr. Renfroe. Ever since the Fourth of July, Lena had counted herself among Renfroe’s staff whom he directed to weed and haul and dig and turn. It was part of the reason she had gotten her body back. Even the weak left ankle that had required her to wear an elastic brace from time to time seemed to have grown stronger over the last few months. For the spots that still gave her pain, Herman heated his molecules up and wrapped himself around her entire foot and leg.

Lena had watched Herman study her—her body, her expressions, her moods, her body language, her secrets—until she finally realized what Herman was doing. He was charting her body, as if she were a body of water he planned to navigate over and over, and he wanted to know landmarks.

He would delicately—and sometimes not so delicately—plant little
baby kisses all down her body, from up under her underarms, past her breast, down the curve of her waist, then back around to kiss the round of her butt. Then, a kiss on the spot above her hipbone, a sliding kiss down the outside of her thigh, another detour up to the curve of her belly above her vagina, then back down the other thigh until he stopped to suck gently on the meaty indentation behind her knee. Herman’s big bushy mustache tickled her along the whole route, giving her even more reason to laugh.

In summer when she wore sleeveless cotton blouses and at night when she wore nothing, Herman liked to plant a kiss like a flag on the tip of her shoulder and then kiss all the way down her arm, stopping momentarily at her fading wrinkled vaccination mark, and continue on to the bend of her elbow, where he planted another kiss, like a marker for an explorer.

In fact, that was what he was doing: exploring Lena just the way that they explored the woods surrounding the river and her house.

Herman had his favorite parts of Lena’s body like special points of interest on an adventurer’s hand-drawn map. One was her behind. He cupped her butt in his big hands, as much of it as he could hold. He held it up, lifting Lena into his naked lap like an offering to the big ass goddess.

He was always talking about her butt, speaking of it in the third person.

“Would you sit yo’ pretty ass down?!” he would say as close to exasperation as he got with Lena.

“Lena, would you please stop dawdlin’ at every flower you see,” he’d tease, “and bring yo’ big butt on so we can be in the water by sunset. We burnin’ daylight here, baby!”

“Miss Lena, would you do me the honor of bringin’ yo’ fine ass on to bed and let those papers wait ’til mornin’?”

Herman was always looking for an opportunity to prove how hot her butt was. He liked to sit in chairs after she had alit, then jump up as if burned, yelling, “Ooo, hot butt! Hot butt!” If she wasn’t vigilant, Herman would take a big kitchen match—he couldn’t stand the
smaller safety matches—and run its red and white tip along the curve of her hip, pull it away and light it with his ghostly magic, pretending Lena’s hot butt had set it on fire.

Herman felt he could worship at Lena’s back. The curve of it, the small concave spot at the base of her spine, the gentle slope of her shoulders.