Tending to Virginia (42 page)

“By bleeding?” Lena sits up and looks at her mother. She suddenly
doesn’t feel quite as weak as she did before. “But I don’t want to have a baby. I want to go to the fair.” Her mama goes on and on about how women are put on this earth to suffer, that it is God’s will that they suffer, that a lady (if she is a lady) has a hard row to hoe and the earlier that lesson is learned, the better off she will be. Then she takes Lena to the linen closet where she has a stack of diapers there on the bottom shelf and tells her how that’s what she’ll wear and how she’ll need to wash them out and hang them on the line down at the end of the field so that no man will see them hanging there.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” Lena asks Emily late that night when they are in bed. “I’m so mad that nobody told me this.”

“Mama said it needn’t be discussed,” Emily whispers. “It’s personal.”

“Well, you still should have told. I thought I was dying, bent over to pick up some chicken feed and caught a glimpse up my dress and thought I was dying.”

Emily turns her face to the wall. “You’ll get used to it.”

“How? How can I get used to something that I’m supposed to keep a secret?” Lena lifts her gown and hikes that diaper back in place. “Mama says it’s a sign from God that you can have babies. Mama says that God wants you to cramp up and bleed like a river, that he makes you.” Lena watches Emily’s back jerk with a loud sigh. “Mary Towney told me that babies are made from pee.”

“That’s not true.”

“What is true then? Tell me what is true.” Lena feels so mad she could spit fire. “Do you know?”

“Not completely, no,” Emily says and rolls to face her, Emily’s eyes so wide and fearful. It seems to take the anger right out of her to see Emily look that way.

“Well, I’m gonna find out all there is to know,” Lena whispers. “I am.” She nods her head at Emily but now she feels so tired and confused about the whole thing, concentrates on that throbbing she can feel like a tiny heartbeat, dreads that she’s going to have to wash that nasty thing out and walk half a mile where nobody will see it drying.

* * *

Emily stands in the center of the yard and watches Lena playing there by the pump. Lena is in her underwear, her feet potty black. She glances at the front door to make sure her mama isn’t there behind the screen, and Curie is off to the side, waving his hat and grinning at her. “Dance yourself a jig, Miss Emily,” he says, “Come on, now” and raises one finger, twirls it as if he has a june bug on a string, and she starts, slow at first and then faster and faster, Lena and the front door and Curie’s dark face just a blur beneath that wide blue sky. She laughs and twirls till her head is light and dizzy. “Rain, rain, rain,” she cries, her heart beating fast like the word might be magic. She knows the yellow dust of the yard is clouding up and covering her shoes that she just greased to a fine shine with chicken fat, covering the hem of her dress and her ankles. Her hair has come undone and is whirling with her, sweat trickling down her neck, and she has to breathe faster and faster to keep up with her feet, the sky spinning, until finally, she flops down on a grassy spot and stares open-eyed at the spinning trees and clouds, Curie’s face spinning as he gets closer. “That was a fine dance now,” he says. “Don’t it make your heart feel good?”

“Yes, yes,” she whispers and closes her eyes to the spinning, her arms and legs so tired in a good way. “I’m going to dance every day.”

“Emily Pearson? What are you doing?” Her mama is on the porch, the screened door creaking shut, and she bolts up and brushes off her dress, searches through the yellow dust for her hair pins. “You are too old for such.”

“Last time I ask you to dance a rain dance,” Curie whispers the next day when the sky is so black and stormy. “And you just a child.” His warm face is right next to hers so her mama who is kneeling by the bed won’t hear. “I guess children got
the power,” and he grins and heads down the road through the pouring rain, and she stands at the window and watches, thinks about Curie’s girl that he speaks of so often, the girl that has one of Emily’s doll babies, a girl that Emily bets gets to spin and dance and feel that good feeling every day. Her mama tells her to kneel down and pray, that God has the power and that Emily must believe that God has the power. And yes, she does believe in the power but it has nothing to do with her mama’s ways.

* * *

Virginia Suzanne Pearson wakes to see her mother standing at the end of the bed, a slight shadow, white bony hands clutching the neck of her robe made visible by the glow of the kerosene lamp that Curie had hung from a porch rafter. “I gotta see my way from the house to the barn or back,” he had told her. “I can’t stand no pitch black darkness.”

“All right, Curie,” she told him, recalling with amusement the last time he stayed overnight. It was the middle of the night and he made his way to the end of their bed and stood there reeling off all the chores that he had in mind for the next day. Cord had not even awakened until she returned to bed after walking Curie back to the door. “It was so awful,” he finally confessed as he stood in the darkness on the other side of the screened door. “I dreamed I come into this house and you was all ghosts, white and still with glassy eyes and not a breath I tell you. I called out and nobody said nothin’, I was the only one of us livin’. I says ‘Miss Virginia, I’s scared’ and your head turned so slowlike, them eyes still glassy and you says, ‘Curie, ain’t no reason,’ and I says ‘but I am, why ain’t you in the bed, why’re them children setting up and it way in the night’ and you says, ‘Curie, ain’t no reason’ just that same way. You said it over and over and then little Lena she said it too, and Emily and on and on till I woke up in a sweat like I’ve never in my life had.” His eyes were wide and frightened as he told the dream and she felt a chill go through her scalp just listening, the same chill that comes now with Mother’s voice.

“I’ve come to tell you something,” her mother says and though Virginia cannot distinguish her mother’s mouth in the darkness, there is a difference in her voice, her teeth clenched. “You have to listen,” she whispers and steps closer to the bed. “I’ve come to tell you that if any of those children of yours ever run wild, if you let them grow up to be hateful or cheap, if you ever let them go without food and clothes and knowledge of the Lord, I’ll come and
stand here every night after I’m gone. I’ll stand right here and I’ll never let you rest.”

“Mother,” she begs. “Please don’t say things like that. You know I’ll take care of my babies.” But her mother turns and leaves the room as quietly as she had come in. In the days that follow when Virginia’s mama sits out on the porch and waves a straw broom back and forth, Virginia tries to ask her about what she said, ask her why she did that, but her mama’s stare is foggy and distant. It is as if that night never happened, as if Virginia dreamed it all. Even after her mother’s death, she catches herself wondering about those words, if they were real, or if they were like the words “ain’t no reason” that Curie’s dream had given to her, words so foreign to her mouth and yet so real for him. And Curie did have a reason to be afraid, and now she has a child who is dead, a child who went without food and starved.

It is 1897, mid-December, and Virginia Suzanne Pearson is sitting by the fire, her cherry rocker moving back and forth, a worn woolen quilt pulled up over her full abdomen, her hands clasped under her stomach to support the weight. Just a few minutes ago, she had looked out that frosted kitchen window and studied the thick gray clouds in the sky. This area rarely gets snow, but this night, Virginia has a feeling that it is coming, the clouds, the crisp sharp smell, the frozen rattling of the limbs of the pecan tree outside the window. She had stood, watching and waiting, as if there would come a sign, but then she had been distracted by a kick, a tiny unknown elbow trying to make room. She had held her breath but had not moved for fear that the moment would end too quickly as it had the other times. It is time, yes, and it will snow before morning, she had thought and pressed her heart-shaped face against the frozen window, her thick curly hair pulled up away from her face. She watched Cord brush down that old mule and lead it into the barn and now she is waiting for him to come in from the cold, the fear that the pneumonia that has taken so many could take him.

It is like a secret that she has, this knowledge that the time has come and she will enjoy it, enjoy when Cord sits beside her and
speaks of the fields and what he did today. She will hold this secret like she might be a child herself, until she can hold it no longer and needs to let go. She will rise so early, all the feelings that she has felt before and she will concentrate on a smudge on the ceiling, her hands gripping that bed and she will not concentrate on the pain for good can come from pain. This pain will bring her so much good and when the sun is there within her sight out that window, it will all be over and she will cradle that warm little body beneath the quilt and Cord’s eyes will say how he’s glad that part is over and her breath on that little neck will say Emily Suzanne Pearson. Yes, she will know when the time has come and she will just let go.

* * *

“Were you looking for this?” Gram asks and pulls an ear of corn from her pocket, the pink silks falling over her hand. “Tessy said you wanted this.”

“Oh yes,” Virginia whispers, and reaches her hand, closer and closer, until it is there, the silks falling onto her own hand while Gram’s hair grows darker in the faint light, her face gets younger.

“A person’s got to know when to let go,” Gram says. “You can hold on tight but it don’t change the fact that sooner or later you’ve got to let go.”

* * *

Virginia wakes late, radio alarm still playing, the sky through the bedroom window still overcast, bathroom light on and towels strewn across the floor but Mark has already left. She gets up switching the orange nightshirt for the lavender sack dress that her mother made for her while she was there. Things are coming to her so clearly now, so many things that she had forgotten. She remembers the house on Carver Street so vividly, the windows, the way the light fell, and sees now what she wants to paint, from the back door as though you just stepped in, standing in that doorway and looking into the breakfast room as Gram had done so many times, kerosene stove to the left, the table, Venetian blinds, china cupboard on the right with that pink china bowl on the second shelf, the same
bowl that Virginia accidentally dropped and broke when she was ten, the hat box filled with buttons in the center of the table, a coffee cup, the white oilcloth, red and white woven placemats, rice in the salt shaker, through to the kitchen, the outside rim of the sink and counter showing through the doorway, the little step stool in front of the window, violets on the sill.

She sees it now, sees it so clearly, the colors and shadows, and then she will paint what it looked like to sit on that counter and look out the window, the huge brick warehouses down the street, smoke from what used to be Cutty’s Place, the pecan tree just outside the window where her mother stands with that brown sweater drawn close around her shoulders, standing on the sidewalk with its bumps and cracks, her mother’s hair blown back, so young-looking; and then she will paint it from her mother’s eyes as she looked up at that window and saw Virginia standing there, face pressed against the glass, her breath forming a circle, and her mother sees the leaves tumbling from those gutters over the back porch, the white wooden siding, gray shutters; and she will paint that same day from Gram’s eyes, staring down that hall to the bedroom, chair railing and bead boards narrowing like a railroad track to that closed bedroom door, a dim filtered light coming from the crack below the door, slants of light from the Venetian blinds falling on the wall to the left; and she will paint it from Gramp’s eyes, those large blue eyes as he sat in his chair and looked over the backyard to that chicken-wire dog pen, the Uncle Remus book that he had read so many times he knew it by heart, held on his lap.

Mark has left a note pinned to the lavender dress, “the new uniform” as he called it while she shredded up the yellow one and used it to clean the drops of paint from the floor in the baby’s room. He has gone to the library and then to mail the lease on the house in Richmond that they are going to rent, a small house with hardwood floors and dormer windows upstairs. He had brought her detailed floor plans and photos, which direction every wall and window faced and then he sat there like he was holding his breath. “What? Am I a difficult person?” she asked.

She goes into the spare room where she has already started packing
some boxes and put them in the closet, all law books cleared away, replaced with toys and a new painting, painted on top of the old, this time friendly animals, zoo animals in their bright colors, Tony the Tiger and Peppi Le Peu. The phone rings and Virginia goes to the kitchen to answer, no dishes in the sink, windows still smelling of Windex.

“Hey girl,” Cindy says. “Just checking to see if you’ve dropped it yet.”

“Not yet.”

“You haven’t been back in three weeks,” Cindy says. “Of course it’s probably good; you might get stuck again and wasn’t that a trip?”

“Quite a trip,” Virginia says, stretching the cord to reach the Mr. Coffee that Mark had left turned on. “I must have been going through something psychological, you know?”

“Shit,” Cindy’s laugh comes through the receiver so loud. “Why do you always have to have some smart sounding reason for acting like a spoiled bitch?”

“Was I that bad?”

“Oh God, Virginia,” Cindy says. “You have acted that way your whole life. And yes, I called you Virginia. Mama said if you wanted to be called Virginia that we should call you Virginia because you’re grown up now.”

“Madge said all that?”

“Oh man, she’s been saying all kinds of things,” Cindy says and laughs again. “But, I do think Hannah coached her on that one.”

“You can still call me Ginny Sue,” she says. “Really, it sounds funny for you
not
to call me Ginny Sue. Tell everybody just to stick with the way it’s been.”