Knee-Deep in Wonder (23 page)

“No, now. I can deliver.”

“One o'clock, Reverend.” He looked at her blank face and saw the rim of her nose flare. “None later.” She stepped back in the house and shut the door before Reverend Mackervay could say yes.

Once inside, Liberty slumped against the door. Suddenly, she bent in two and coughed, harsh and dangerous; a spew spread wide and clacked like death in her chest. Thick veins appeared on her neck, and her eyes watered. The sound floated upstairs. Queen Ester could smell Liberty's fear all the way in the back room.

“Mama, that you?” Queen Ester called down, camphor oil in hand.

“You know it is.”

“We got to do something bout you. Call the doctor. Something.”

“Doctor way off in McKamie,” Liberty said, with tight laughter. Queen Ester came downstairs and took Liberty by the arm, leading her into the café, which had begun turning slowly back into a living room as Liberty grew sicker and steady customers fell off one by one. By the end of the week there wouldn't be a single person to slide pie to.

“You sit down, Mama.”

“You gone go for me or ain't you?” Liberty's voice trembled.

“Might, if you ask right.”

“I'm your mama.”

“I'm a ma'am too, remember?”

“You holding on too tight,” Liberty said, trying to shake her daughter off.

“You hear me? I'm a ma'am too,” Queen Ester said, still clutching her mother's upper arm.

“You don't let nobody in this house forget, Queenie.”

“Who in this house cept you and me, now? Ain't nobody can stop us, if we got a mind to do it. You let her come back, and I'll go get that doctor right now.”

“Right now?” Liberty pulled away from her daughter's hand and searched her face.

“Won't even put my coat on fore I walk out the door.”

“Too hot for a coat anyway.”

“You know what I'm saying.”

“Yeah, I guess I know.” Liberty let silence crawl between them.

“Well?”

Liberty began slowly. “I been a good ma'am to you. Can't a soul fault me. You ain't never gone hungry and ain't never want for a thing.” She stopped and coughed harshly into her hands. “And now you sitting here trying to be mama over me; want me to trade something you ain't got no say over. I shouldn't have to ask you to gone and get me a doctor; you should know to go and get one. And—”

Queen Ester cut her off. “That don't mean you can't ask right.”

“What I'm saying?” Her voice desperate and wavering. “You ain't gone nowhere. Ain't been nowhere in five years and then some.”

“Well, maybe I'll be somewhere tomorrow.” Queen Ester smiled.

“Stupid bitch.” They rushed apart, and Queen Ester left, walking back upstairs to her room, leaving the camphor oil on the table. Liberty picked up the bottle and lifted the cap. Beyond the slight stench of camphor she smelled mostly vegetable oil and water. “Ain't gone yet,” she yelled, and slumped against the couch, looking through the window outside where the reverend and his men had left so quickly the dust hadn't even time to rise in the wake of spinning tires.

*   *   *

“Crazy, ain't she?” said one of the men in the cab of the truck, as they drove back to the furniture shop.

“Grief-stricken,” Reverend Mackervay said to him, and sighed. “Just grief. We'll take care of that tomorrow.” The truck rolled on until a mile from the furniture store and the reverend asked to get out. “I'll walk the rest. See you tomorrow at the church at one o'clock. Even if it means a closed casket.” Once out of the truck, the reverend thought about the sermon. First Corinthians came to mind; the bitter wrath of God's words through Paul the Apostle loomed over him on the street and carried him to his office.

Charity suffers long, and is kind. Charity envies not, is not puffed up, does not behave itself unseemly, seeks not her own, is not easily provoked, thinks no evil,… bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

He loved Paul, his guidance, his steadfast words to a lost and tortured congregation. Sitting with pen in hand, Reverend Mackervay wove into his sermon consoling words to the poor and imagined the hardworking and sick falling to their knees, weeping. He smiled, his heavy lips curling above buckteeth at the thought. Only he had the grace to feed them God's words.

*   *   *

“You coming or what, girl?” Liberty called up. Though tired, she made dinner, not trusting her daughter. Reverend Mackervay with his men had worn her out, Chess's death sickened her heart, and her first love was trying her best to kill her mother through careful neglect. The camphor oil bottle full of water was just the latest thing Queen Ester had done. No pillow in the middle of the night or kitchen knife missing, just Queenie doing everything within her power to make her mother change her mind. Liberty sliced that thought before she was carried away by it. Queen Ester wanted the child to come back, as if nine years could be turned into just a minute. Didn't the girl already have a home, people to care for her like her own kin? And now (although it was not now, it was always, but Liberty wouldn't admit that to herself), Queen Ester wanted to haul Helene back into their lives because she said she had a right to. No, sir, Liberty thought, let my first love do what she will. Knowing Liberty needed chamomile, Queen Ester gave her Lipton tea instead and laughed. It felt like malice, glittering, harsh, but it was also a misplaced thought, assuming that sickness ignored will be forgotten and that, with no one to mind, illness goes away.

Liberty had neither the strength nor the inclination to confront Queen Ester. She simply stooped when the ill will came too near. A child's mind and a woman's pair of legs. Together, they would kill Liberty by the end of the week. Queen Ester's child desire had gone awry, become strong enough to choke the life out of her. At the foot of the stairs, Liberty called out again. “You hear me?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, come on.”

“Mama, I am.”

Liberty lingered at the bottom of the stairs. Then she called out what Queen Ester was waiting to hear. “Down to eat, child.”

Queen Ester appeared at the foot of the stairs, apparition-like, smiling, laughing. “Mama, you know magic words.”

“Just come on.”

“I'm here.”

“I see.” Together they went into the kitchen. Cold tuna salad and fresh apples waited for them at the table, and each woman perched on her chair, her mind whirling.

“Heard the funeral at one o'clock.”

“You was way upstairs.”

“Ain't deaf, though.”

Liberty said nothing more until they finished the salad and started on the apples. “So, you going?” Liberty asked, suddenly resentful that her daughter wanted to share in what she thought to be her own private mourning.

Queen Ester picked up her apple, red and gleaming. As she bit into it, its juice ran down her chin unchecked. She smiled, her mouth full of crushed pulp, the red skin of apple poking out between her teeth.

“Oh, yeah,” she said.

Liberty reached over the table and slapped her face, and Queen Ester took the blow without flinching. It took more out of Liberty than Queen Ester, who tipped her chair and let herself fall, still chewing the rest of the apple. She lay on the floor, her feet and arms outstretched, enjoying the cool tile beneath her and sucking her teeth clean.

“Get up, get up, get up,” Liberty whispered, her lips chapped and split, arms stretched wide, pulling Queen Ester off the floor.

*   *   *

The same question and answer (“So, you going?”; “Oh, yeah,” but without the grief and violence) echoed throughout Lafayette County. Exchanged by Poo-Poo and Banky while sipping beer, out from the grin of Carol Lee as she rolled her hair, through the pursed lips of Pat while she cooked up a batch of collard greens. By the time Mable walked through Liberty's front door, everybody in Lafayette County was accounted for; they just needed to know the exact time. Mable came and went, staying long enough to learn when the service would happen and squeezing Liberty on the shoulder for comfort. She was shaken by Queen Ester's smiling—the grin uncalled for and sassy, with a touch of glee. Grief showed itself in different ways, she thought. Only God can know anguish.

*   *   *

The Reverend Doctor Robert Claire Mackervay thought the same thing at three o'clock in the morning. Braced awake with black coffee, he sat in front of his notes and his Bible. Don't start with grief, he thought, as he had been taught in seminary. It scares the congregation, a mother might break, and then the sermon is lost, the seminary pastors always said. Start them off small, lead them to grief, and pray the men stay at home. A woman's grief is common, the scream of a dress ripping, the weeping, and whatnot; religion knows what to do with it. A man's grief liable to topple the coffin; then what you gone do? What indeed? Reverend Mackervay yawned in spite of the coffee and wrote a phrase in his notes:
Still water and holy Jesus.

*   *   *

On the other side of town, Liberty's face was etched with torture, till finally she struck a fist out of the open window. Every night for the past month, a slow pain began in her stomach and moved upward, catlike, grabbing at her breasts, until it squatted on her face, clenching its thighs. Her only solace was the window; it allowed her to cough and not be heard. She had seen people die the way she was dying—constantly tired, their weight a sin, coughing until bright blood appeared.

She slid her hand out farther, till her elbow rested on the sill. The wind kicked up, promising and soft. “Didn't I have enough love for all, Jesus? And now my first love won't leave to save—” but then she felt a shattering knock, cold and persistent, starting in her chest.

Frightened, she leaned until she hung halfway out of the window, head down. Liberty coughed, unceasing; bright green phlegm streamed from her mouth, hanging straight and stretching a foot away but still attached to her bottom lip. The seizing in her chest passed. “I done too much for you to ask. You know that. And now you trying to make love look like sin. Are you there?”

Her head still down, she closed her eyes. “Don't ask tonight, all right, now? What I done ain't a sin; God know it ain't.” She rested her chin on the windowsill. “Her blood is mine, his too, even though he ain't kin. I gots to take care of everything under my arm, ain't that the way? Theys all fit. It ain't my fault I'm bigger than the rest.”

Who cooks for you?
She heard a voice, the question damning.
Who cooks for you all?
She knew what lay outside the window. It would look like a small monkish man with black eyes, a barred owl screeching from a perch beyond the cotton field with a songbird in its claw.
Who cooks for you, who cooks for you all?
The owl shrieked again, the question booming across the unpicked cotton field, knowing the answer Liberty would give, a smirk in the question. Her face a fatigued gray, Liberty propped her arms on the windowsill and saw the bird rise into the air, its wings two commas, still crying,
Who cooks for you?
The inflection of the question turned with every stroke of its wings: Who
cooks for you all? Who cooks for
you?”—the songbird, still clasped in its claw, living and singing a persistent rapid chatter.

Liberty's breathing became tattered as the end drew near. Too tired to leave the window, she let her muscles relax, hoping the dead weight would pull her back into the house. She answered the owl, half flailing over the ledge. “I did. Maybe that's the problem—” breaking in the middle of her answer, not quite crying, the lungs sucking deep and wretched. She wondered how Queen Ester could sleep while she suffered; how her daughter could lie in bed, hrrring with her mouth open, deep in a child's dream full of bliss. Liberty finally fell asleep close to dawn, still hanging out of the window, the owl gone.

*   *   *

The rush of it all began the trouble. Sleep pushed aside, the women of Lafayette County spent all night cooking potato salad, shit-on-the-shingle smothered with beef gravy, oxtail and onions. No one had time for chicken gumbo. Amid the hurry and with so little time, small things went awry. Who had the time to add bell pepper to the black-eyed-pea salad? Women wore stockings with runs from the ankle to the thigh: the good dress, dark and below the knees, couldn't be properly cleaned; ties forgotten, suit jackets with Thanksgiving stains, babies with uncombed, ribbonless hair. An entire congregation was tattered, brooding, and angry without knowing it, sensing the missing formality. At noon a small crowd gathered by the church steps with lukewarm food on plates covered with aluminum foil, talking among themselves. Women in torn black-veiled hats and Easter bonnets bobbed their heads, jostling children and Bibles in their arms. The sun directly overhead, dresses dampened, hat brims wilted, but no one went inside. Without being told, they waited for the truly grieved to lead the procession, to set the tone. Liberty, Queen Ester. The women who would walk into the church with proper hats and shoes, duly teary.

And then there was Morning, the mistress who really should have been called the unmarried wife, who cooked and cleaned but didn't have the children to show for it. Who knew whether Morning would arrive? No one had seen her since the drowning. Mable had checked her house twice but, finding it empty, went to the mother's in Canfield, only to come across an old woman who wouldn't let her past the front door. In Morning's absence, the rumors swirled. She had taken to stalking the woods, crouching behind bushes, pissing with her panties pulled up, shoving fistfuls of paper into her mouth: true grief—the sort that howled in meter, rent clothes, and tore hair from the scalp in a fit of loss. Minutes passed, and then at 12:32 a fight broke out. Afterward many said it started because of the town itself, the way buildings and land came together, and with all the grief involved it couldn't be avoided.