Tina Mcelroy Ansa (58 page)

Lena looked around the stables and saw that everyone
was
there. Her whole family was around her.

“Hey, Lena, you old pop-eyed fool, you can’t do this,” her younger brother, Edward, chided. “You better go get some help.”

“Don’t pay him no attention, Lena,” Raymond said reassuringly. “You can do this. Edward don’t know what he talking about. You can do this.”

Keba made a kicking motion, and Lena saw something emerging from the mare. Lena was thrilled until she realized it was the hind portion of the colt. “Shit,” she muttered.

But she heard Herman’s voice at her ear. “Oh, Lena, it ain’t no big thang, baby. You know what t’ do. We talked ’bout the time I delivered that colt. ’Member?”

“Uh-huh …” Lena said uncertainly.

“Well, what ya think?” Herman prodded. “You know ya can do it, Lena.”

Lena’s mother was as encouraging as Herman.

“Look at my child,” Nellie said from way off in a comer of the
stable. She was dressed to kill in an all-seasonal cream and caramel wool Chanel suit with ropes of gold chains and pearls around her neck and waist. Lena heard the click of her low-heel cream and white spectators on the stable’s brick floor as she stepped back farther into the corner.

Nellie looked beautiful. In death, she had more than “kept her color.”

Lena knew Nellie wouldn’t get much closer because her mother was delicate and had a weak stomach. And looking down at herself covered in the mare’s blood and mucus and such, Lena knew this was no place for weak stomachs.

Jonah appeared and put his arm around his wife. He looked good, too.

“Look at her, Nellie, delivering that colt. Shit, probably gon’ be a thoroughbred racehorse. Probably gon’ win the Triple Crown or something. Damn, my baby girl lucky!”

Lena’s first-grade teacher, Mrs. Hartwick, was there, too, her face and body unravished by the cancer that had taken her away from this world in her sixties.

Lena smiled when she saw Nurse Bloom, dressed in her spotless white St. Luke’s Hospital uniform and cap, cheering Lena, the pretty little special baby girl, on.

“I was there when you were born, Lena, and I’m right here now in case you need me. Kinda feels the same way in here it felt in your delivery room. Things are alive out here at your place.”

Dr. Williams was standing next to Nurse Bloom, just as he had at Lena’s birth. And it made her feel better knowing a physician was around.

The next time Lena looked up, she saw a small light-skinned woman with fluffy white hair and a bright red scarf tied around her head standing over in a corner trying to look around somebody’s shoulder. She was such a nice, gentle-looking older lady that Lena couldn’t believe her first thought was, I bet that’s Anna Belle.

Lena took a deep breath, lay her head against Keba’s extended belly and reached her right hand up into the mare’s birth canal. She almost fainted when she felt the live colt inside its mother’s womb.

“Jesus, keep me near the cross,” she prayed.

She panted a few times as if she were the one having the baby, grabbed the colt above the tail, and tried to give it a little turn.

It was not easy to do. The colt, eager to enter this world, squirmed and thrashed about in its mother’s belly, making Keba snort and cry with each kick. She was ready for this baby to be born, too.

As Lena got her hand inside Keba up to her armpit, the baby started and kicked back, grazing Lena’s forearm.

“Oww!” Lena yelled, but she didn’t withdraw her arm. She could feel the open gash on her arm bleeding inside Keba’s womb. And at the wounding, Keba started to kick back, too, right toward Lena’s pretty face. But something stilled her hind legs. Lena felt it. Probably Herman, she thought automatically.

“Shoot, we up there now, Keba,” Lena said, resolutely praying to the Mother Spirit. “Let’s do it!”

She placed her slimy palm firmly on the colt’s hind portions and gave a push, a hard push from her shoulders, and spun the baby around. That’s all it took. She barely had time to pull her hand out and sit back.

With a rush of birth fluids and mucus, the colt came out front legs first, first one then the other, then the head. The rest of the body, covered with slick, wet chestnut-brown hair, and part of the birth sac followed quickly. The white membrane made the newborn horse look like a ghost emerging. It was all over in less than ten minutes.

Lena sat back on her heels and went, “Whew!”

The sound of her relief in the stables seemed to break a spell of some kind, and Baby and Goldie, who had been quiet as nurses during the whole delivery, began kicking in their stalls. They lifted their huge heads in the air, whinnying their welcome to the newborn male colt.

Lena stood for the first time in over an hour and stretched her
weak-feeling legs. She realized she was bone-weary from the events of the last twenty-four hours. Holding onto the stall, she walked over to the wide closed barn doors and swung them open.

Outside, the furious storm had passed so suddenly, leaving the air wet and warm and still. Crickets were singing a cappella, and from the stable doorway, Lena saw early fireflies on the other side of the river.

Over her shoulder, the colt—Lena thought his name should be Emmanuel—lay next to his mother on the straw in the corner of the brick stable floor. Lena thought it was a lovely sight, mother and son together. But the restful scene didn’t last long. Within just a few minutes of his birth, Keba’s baby began struggling to his feet. Herman had told her that was normal, but seeing new life stand and walk so soon after birth right before her own eyes stunned her.

He was wobbly on his thin, new slender legs, legs almost as long as his mother’s and as wobbly as Lena felt. Right away, he had found his mother’s milk and stood nursing while Lena was still trying to catch
her
breath. And she wasn’t even the birth mother. Just the midwife.

Lena remembered Herman saying, “Life follow life, Lena,” as he had brushed and babied a pregnant Keba. It made even more sense to Lena now.

As she marveled at the birth of Keba’s foal, she marveled at the wonder of her own transformation and the gift of her family of ghosts.

It surprised her just how comfortable she was with all these ghosts appearing and disappearing around her. Some were family. Many were friends. A couple she did not recognize right off, but she was not a bit afraid of or confused by any of them. They all seemed to have a place. And she did, too.

The specters she now saw all around the stables did not seem to upset the horses, even the newborn, one bit. And she couldn’t remember just when she had become so comfortable with the spirit world.

“Well, lovin’ me fo’ bre’fast, dinner and supper might have had som’um to do wid it,” Herman’s voice said at her ear. Lena raised her hand and touched the ear where his words still echoed.

Feeling the love and strength and warmth she received from this community of ghosts, she felt she would never again want to keep these gentle spirits at bay.

When Lena went outside and stood under the night sky, the wind, just brisk now, was pushing the clouds away in a rush, exposing a golden moon. She saw the Virgin in the sky and thought of Herman. Automatically, she reached for a fence post, feeling she was about to break down again, but she found she did not need the support.

Softly, sweetly, she felt Herman right there next to her, gazing up at the stars along with her. Not in the same way he had for the last year, real and solid, ready to slip his hand inside her panties first chance he got, but next to her all the same.

“How I do, Herman?” she asked.

“You done fine, Lena, baby,” he replied, his spirit leaning against the wooden fence post, sinking into it, becoming a part of it. “But then, I’m always proud a’ you.”

They stood there in the cool, wet night air together, and it felt good. Not the way it had felt when Herman was real, but good.

“Herman,” Lena said finally. “It’s not ever gonna be the way it was before, is it? You’re not ever gonna be here like all this past year, are you?”

Herman spoke, but it was as if the fence post were speaking. “Naw, baby. Not like it was.”

What he said broke her heart anew, but he spoke so plainly, so like her Herman, that she had to take the news in the same honest way.

“I didn’t think so, but I had to ask,” she said. “I know ya did, baby.”

“You know what, Herman?” she asked, stroking the rough fence post with the tips of her fingers. “What, Lena, baby?”

“I am much in love with you, Herman.” She didn’t want to start crying again. But she couldn’t stop the tears or the weeping in her
soul. Lena reached for Herman and the fence pole for strength and support and held on.

She heard Herman take a deep breath, then reply:

“Lena, baby, I am much in love wid you.”

“I’m still your woman,” she told him.

She could feel Herman smile.

“I’m still yo’ man,” he replied.

They both sighed. Then, Herman moved out of the fence post and into the stables.

When he had vanished, other spirits came out of the stables.

The spirit of Mamie, the beautiful amazon of a woman who did Lena’s hair when she was small and taught her how to be nosy, wafted out first.

“Are you okay, Lena?” the healthy-looking ghost asked. “You know Herman’s being here this past year was a gift. Have you been paying attention to what’s been going on this last year? Then, he
still
here!!” Mamie smiled and wandered off in the direction of the river.

Rachel came out of the stables next and walked right on past Lena with a smile and a wave. Lena could smell the deep, salty ocean scent on Rachel’s skin from yards away. Rachel didn’t stop. She went right on down toward the waters, catching up with Mamie.

Nellie followed. She seemed eager to speak.

“I told you wrong, Lena, when you were young. About how you could get away with a lot in this life, but you couldn’t get away with acting crazy. And you been trying so hard not to be crazy. I know I told you that folks won’t allow you to be crazy in this world. But life ain’t about what folks won’t
let
you do. It’s about what you
choose
to do. I wish I had told you that. If you don’t let yourself be crazy sometimes, baby,” Nellie said, “then you go mad.”

“I shoulda’ told you that, too.”

The ghost of her mother looked as if she felt better just having had the opportunity to say that to her baby girl.

“And, baby, I didn’t know what I was doing when I poured out
your caul water and burned your caul. I just didn’t know. But Mama always loved you.”

Then, picking her way through the muddy trail in her great-looking spectator pumps, Nellie headed for the deck on the west side of the house.

Frank Petersen came out of the stables just ahead of Grandmama, who had paused at the barn door looking out on the night. Frank Petersen was walking and looking back over his shoulder like something was after him. His beat-up old felt hat pulled down over his brow made him look like an elegant fugitive ghost.

“Hey, Lena-Wena, you done good in there. But then, you been doing good for a while.”

He touched his hand to the brim of his hat and disappeared off into the woods.

Lena felt as if she were having her own private family reunion, without the fights and petty squabbles and struggles.

Grandmama sailed over and began speaking as if they had talked that morning.

“Hey, baby, you look good under all that crying and blood and misery,” the old woman said. She looked good, too. She wore a lovely long lavender gauzy gown like the ones she wore in Lena’s dream.

“Okay, Lena, I know you been having the time of your life. But that part of it is come to an end. But just that part. It’s got to be, baby. Lena, you can’t say you didn’t get any warning. You just weren’t paying attention.

“But it’s going to be okay. It’s going to feel okay, too. It just doesn’t seem that way now. But how things
seem
don’t mean nothing.

“We think we know so much while we alive, Lena. Deciding stuff, fixing stuff, saving people, settling turbulence. Especially us black women. We think we can fix it all. And we don’t know shit, baby. We think we know this one and don’t give ’em nothing. And we think we know that one, and we give ’em everything.”

Grandmama’s ghost leaned forward and chuckled a little as if the joke were on her.

“Lena, baby,” she said finally, “I didn’t have a clue.”

“What do you mean, Grandma?” Lena asked.

“When I was ’live, I thought I knew a thing or two. Knew how things oughta be. Thought I knew ’bout life and death, too. But, Lena, I didn’t have a clue.”

Lena was dumbfounded. From the first time Lena remembered being held in the old lady’s arms, she knew that her grandmother was the very essence of power and wisdom. As powerful as her mother and father. As wise as any of the nuns and priests at St. Martin de Porres, as any of the winos and whores down on Broadway and Cherry.

“Good God, Grandmama,
you
didn’t have a clue?? If
you
didn’t have a clue, then what about me?”

“Exactly, baby!!!” Grandmama said and, rising like a soapy bubble into the night air, burst and disappeared.

I
t was a day in late May when Lena first noticed the sound of her own laughter. It truly shocked her to hear the throaty giggle coming out of her own mouth as she watched Emmanuel prance importantly around the corral right behind his mother. Lena realized that she was no longer in deep mourning for Herman the way she had been throughout the month of April, breaking down each time a spring breeze ruffled the hairs at the back of her neck.

Remembering all that Herman had taught her, Lena just didn’t feel right being miserable.

She could hear his voice as clear as anything.

“Ya gotta do the work you called to, Lena. But you ain’t gotta be miserable. In fact, that’s just what you ain’t s’posed to be.”

Now, Herman whispered at her ear when she had a question, or he swung open a gate when she reached it. He still spoke to Lena all through the day, just the way he had before, asking her questions and pointing out new signs of spring along the river. And she talked to
him, just as she had before, seeking his advice, sharing an interesting thought or pangs of love.