Tina Mcelroy Ansa (48 page)

Just looking at the seed on his penis, Lena knew that Herman was no incubus. He was real and he was good.

Herman’s uncircumcised penis was a new one for Lena, who had never been a real dick woman anyway. She hadn’t seen that many, but she didn’t think she needed to have seen a lot to appreciate Herman’s penis in the same way she appreciated him.

Lena had as much interest in tongues and fingers and ears and minds as in penises, and all things considered, she had seen her share.

But next to Herman, all those men she knew before—the passionless ones with cushy jobs, the ones who were wastes of time with good bodies, the ones who continued to look at a football game while you talked—seemed lifeless, dead, empty as an ancient robbed tomb. Herman was boyish without being puerile, fun-loving without being silly, manly without being overbearing, foolish without being a fool.

Herman prided himself on seldom having to rely on his ghostly power to impress, please or take care of Lena. Even as an ordinary man, Lena knew he wasn’t any ordinary man.

He didn’t seem to have time for what she and Sister called “man-shit, one word.” The name encompassed all the strange, foreign, foolish, unrealistic, annoying, spirit-crushing things men,
all men
, did naturally, it seemed, without a thought. Things that regularly drove women crazy. “Man-shit” included everything from leaving the toilet seat up to not stopping to ask for directions.

“Lena, baby, I got a powerful pocketful a’ tenderness stored up in me from the last hundred years,” he told her. He showed it to her every chance he got.

Then, he punctuated his statement with a deep, long, lush kiss.

When Herman kissed Lena, deeply, tenderly, gently, insistently, urgently, she often thought of Moms Mabley and the comedy routine of the hysterically funny toothless genius Lena had heard as a child.

“And that man kissed me!” Moms had explained about an amorous encounter with a prized younger man. “My toes curled up just like that!!”

That’s what Herman’s kisses did for Lena.

They made her toes curl up just like that.

And although he was technically nearly a hundred years older than she, Lena realized when he sprinted out to the shed and back before she could finish peeing, when he grabbed a bale of hay with the huge iron tongs and slung it on his back, when he sat in a chair
sometimes with one of his legs thrown over the arm like a teenager, that Herman was indeed her younger man, her pig meat.

“Look at that old lightbulb,” Lena’s mother would say about some aging Romeo, especially ones who
had been
lovers in their day, the ones who were really old. “Old men when I was a child still out there trying to be sweethearting like they certifiable pig meat—young and tender,” she’d say. Nellie called them “flambeaux.”

I wonder what Mama would call Herman, Lena thought with a smile. She said a quick prayer for the repose of Moms’ and her own mother’s souls whenever Herman kissed her like that.

Herman kissed like Tommy Davis, the first boy Lena knew who really could kiss. Lena remembered sitting in the parking lot of M’Lady Cleaners after the James Brown and the Famous Flames Show and Revue at the Mulberry County Auditorium. Tommy was all gangling arms and legs and pretty, smooth brown skin—just fifteen himself then, like Lena. But Tommy had not kissed like a fifteen-year-old boy. He kissed, Lena thought, like a man. He kissed with passion.

Before Herman came and put his magic on her, Lena had a
powerful amount
of compassion. What she didn’t have was passion. Her wild, raging passion had been depleted by all her duties, her responsibilities, her gifts, her wealth, her business dealings, her property, her life.

She still had to struggle to keep Herman from becoming her god. Seeing him jealous made him more human, more real to Lena. One day in mid-October, she got her chance.

Herman eyed the young man coming up the driveway by the river in his old beat-up electric-blue truck for a good long time. Longer than he usually took to look at someone, Lena noticed.

“This boy, what he atta?” Herman wanted to know.

Lena, headed to the back door, stopped in her tracks and turned to look at her man. She laughed.

“Herman, he’s not
after
anything! He’s just someone’s son come to pick up some papers for their farm.”

Herman didn’t seem totally convinced. Lena had to smile.

“With so many people taking care of their own business now, folks need their papers. It’s hard to believe I had that many deeds and wills and stuff in the safe.”

Herman disappeared into the bedroom without another word, but Lena could tell he was not convinced.

She couldn’t believe she had to reassure Herman,
her man
, that she had no interest whatsoever in this other pig meat who was indeed trying to flirt with her. The young man—she thought he must have been about twenty-seven or twenty-eight—craned his head around her a couple of times as they stood in the Great Jonah Room to see if there was anyone else in the house before he spoke.

“So, eh, Miss McPherson, Lena. I can call you ‘Lena,’ can’t I?” the young man had asked, eyeing this woman who looked like the title character in
Carmen Jones
he had seen on cable the night before. He had sat through the credits just to learn that Dorothy Dandridge was the name of the beautiful actress.

One of Lena’s undershirt straps had even slid off her shoulder like one of those
Carmen Jones
blouses. And, the “boy” noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra. He could see the outline of her nipples under her shirt.

Lena went about her business quickly and professionally, but she saw him watching her and looking for an opening. She smiled at the flirting, but she didn’t give him a chance.

When the young man left, frustrated at having made no headway with Lena, Herman appeared, really miffed, walking around the house with a heavier-than-usual footfall.

“You don’t see me being jealous of your otherworld friends, do you?” Lena said.

When she didn’t get a rise from him, she continued, digging deeper.

“You don’t see me being jealous of Anna Belle, do you?”

Lena suddenly shivered as if someone had just danced over her grave. She knew she had hit her target.

She had not really wanted to bring up the spirit of the woman who was out to get her, but she just
had
to ask. Herman had not
mentioned Anna Belle in the month since Lena had found the dents in the door down at The Place.

Actually, now that Anna Belle’s name was out in the open, Lena felt better. There had not been one sign of Anna Belle in more than a month. Lena needed to know what had happened.

Herman was silent so long, Lena thought, Oh, shit, I done gone too far with this man. Why the hell did I have to mention that woman’s name?

However, when he turned to her, he didn’t look a bit bothered.

“I was wonderin’ if you was gonna mention her again,” he said.

Lena shrugged her shoulders, pretending to be unconcerned.

“Lena, baby, right after you saw those marks on the do’ downtown, I did just like I said. I took care a’ that thang. I wouldn’t no mo’ have you—of all people—walkin’ ’round here scared a’ some ’oman I done brought in yo’ life for nothin’ in the world, this one or the next.”

Lena knew he was serious.

“So I had me a talk wid Anna Belle.”

Lena sat there in the heavy silence waiting for Herman to continue. When he didn’t, she asked exactly what she wanted to know.

“You saw Anna Belle? You met with her?”

“I don’t know if you would call it a ’meetin’,’ ’xactly, Lena baby. I just went out in the yard and called her. The wind stirred up a bit in a familiar way, and I started talkin’.”

Lena leaned forward waiting for the details.

Herman chuckled at his woman and her curiosity.

“All I said was you was the only ’oman fo’ me, you
the ’oman
, now and fo’ever. And nothin’ was gon’ change that, ever.”

Lena just smiled. Then, she asked, “And that was it?”

“What somebody gon’ say to that?” Herman wanted to know, coming over to Lena to close the space between them. They kissed, dismissing Anna Belle and the “boy” who had been trying to flirt with Lena.

Before Herman came, Lena had gotten off on flirting. She did it with just about everybody. It was an inherited natural gift. Jonah,
when he really put his mind to it, could charm the sweetness out of syrup. And Nellie could get anything she wanted by opening up her face and smiling. Lena could, too.

But Lena didn’t need that kind of fake passion anymore, flirting with a bag boy, a liquor salesman, a fellow passenger on a quick flight out of Mulberry.

Herman rekindled her passion, unstopped its rush and gave it a number of new directions in which to flow.

He did it with love. He did it with concern. He did it with wisdom. He did it with laughter. He did it with sex. And he did it with surprises.

Herman loved to surprise Lena.

He would walk up to Lena while she curried and cooed to Keba, who, halfway through her term, seemed to be getting big with her foal so quickly. Herman would have his hands behind him and say, “Baby, close yo’ eyes and stick out yo’ hand.”

Sometimes she’d squeal as she shimmied her shoulders, dropped the currying brush and pulled off her short leather work gloves and, with her eyes shut tightly, offered her palms to Herman.

There was no telling what he’d drop in her hands. A juicy piece of fruit, a small wiggling salamander that immediately turned the color of her palms, a velvety Mirandy rose that he had stripped clean of thorns with his new buck knife.

Herman was thrilled with himself for being able to surprise Lena—”Surprising a child like you, born wid a veil and all,” Herman would say, pretending to be incredulous. But actually, he was proud that Lena wasn’t surprised by nearly as much as she had six months earlier when she truly did not have a clue.

Now, when he came up behind her suddenly, she knew he was there. He had seen her do the same thing lately with people who came by for a rare visit to her house.

Lena was becoming sensitive about all kinds of things. A number of times, Herman had heard her say, “Umm,” out of the clear blue sky
and go to the phone to make a call to discover it was just the thing to do. She knew when the weather was about to change. And now that she was about to change life, she was just beginning to understand her own menstrual cycle.

But Herman could still surprise her with his acts of love.

“Shoot, Lena,” he had said back in September, sweating and digging in the sun outside her office, “you favor these hummers so much, it ain’t too late in the season for
yo’
land. Ill plant some mo’ of these fire-red cannas fo’ you here in the sun. And you’ll have mo’ of the little creatures than you can shake a stick at.”

Herman had watched Lena sit for hours at the big windows in her workroom watching and waiting for the tiny emerald birds with the slash of nail-polish red at their throats. Since Cleer Flo’, a couple of rufous hummingbirds up from the Gulf Coast and one with a purple head from Mexico had joined their East Coast family at the flowers. The bird’s tiny tongue darting in and out of the deep full throat of the canna flower made Lena and Herman both hot.

When Lena’s birthday came around in mid-November, he celebrated as if it were the beginning of time. He trained the telescope on Mars so Lena could see the planet flashing red, then green, then white in the night sky.

“My day a’ birth was that day in April when I kissed you and you kissed me back, Lena. That was my birthday, thank you.” But Herman wasn’t an Aries. Lena just knew that he was a Cancer. A child of the moon. Drawn to water. A sweet home-loving homebody.

Lena had put her newfound passion for her homebody lover into nesting, into making her cabin out by the river as soft and as cozy, as inviting and hard to leave, as she could. Leafing through a home furnishings catalog, she would see an outrageously overstuffed down comforter and immediately picture the two of them wrapped up in the cover together.

As the nights began to grow cooler and cooler in the fall, Lena made sure that every chair and sofa they used had a thick cotton or
wool throw on it so Herman would have something handy to throw around his shoulders if he got chilly as he sat and read or strummed his music box or her matchbox.

Lena watched Herman lying at the broad foot of her creepy-looking bed, wearing the bright red long Johns she had ordered for him buttoned all the way up to his neck, against the cold of a near-winter night in Mulberry, running his big hands appreciatively over the various patterns of her grandmother’s quilt—the homey blue and white flowers with yellow centers, the elegant red satin, the twining green vines with purple hearts hanging from them, the black and white checks, the pink and white gingham.

“It feels good to be real again, Herman?” she asked him. And he just snuggled in and smiled.

Most nights, before or after making love, they’d swim a few laps in the heated pool, then race to the sauna to lie naked, one above and one below, on the wide cedar benches. Surrounded by billowing clouds of eucalyptus steam rising from the hot lava rocks, they let the heat soak into their pores, their worked muscles, their tired bones.

Each night, Herman remarked, “This feel good, Lena.”

Then, before crawling into bed, Herman would take Lena’s hand cradled in his, close his eyes and repeat the first prayer he had ever invoked with Lena.

“I do thank you, Lord.”

Before Herman came, Lena would lie alone in her bed night after night after night and pull her Grandmama’s heavy quilt up over her body and into her arms like a child for warmth and love and assurance. At those times, she could almost hear her grandmother’s voice assure her, “Grandmama always here, baby.”

Lena had always slept with one of her Grandmama’s quilts at the foot of her bed. She would feel its weight, like her grandmother’s hand, resting on her feet while she slept, and she didn’t feel so alone.

Nearly thirty years after her grandmother’s death, the handmade quilts she had stitched with such care still smelled like the old woman
and her bedroom in the house on Forest Avenue—a little bit of dust, a little bit of talc, a little bit of age.