Tomorrow, if I live, I’ll toast a slice of pound cake and spread some jelly on it. When I get the breakfast things rinsed up, I’ll slip out onto the front porch before it gets too hot and pinch around my plants. Dashnell comes in the fall and puts them in the garage for me and he comes back in late March and hauls them out. He does it like he’s doing me the world. It don’t take but half an hour. I never liked Dashnell and he never liked me. I bit my tongue in half when Rose of Sharon told me she was going to marry him. I’ll always believe her marrying him was my greatest failure. Or so I say. I have a few million to choose from. But who doesn’t?
After I get my fill of tending plants, it’ll be time to listen to my story on TV. I’ll turn it over to Channel 2 and catch the news. I’ll nap on the glider until the mailman wakes me. If he leaves a green check in a yellow brown envelope, that’ll mean Nadine will be by to drop it into the bank for me. Rose of Sharon fusses that I could
have it sent straight to the bank, but I like to feel it between my fingers first.
No, sir, here will come Nadine, talking loud because she confuses old people with deafness. She’ll want to know can she hold enough back from the check to pay the boy for cutting the grass on Saturday? That always makes me tired because you’d think by now, she wouldn’t feel the need to make like she has to ask. She sure don’t have to ask, “Which account do you want it in?” But she will. Nadine knows to the penny what I got in checking, but she figures, if I got anything, it’s in savings. If I was to tell her to put a check in savings, I’d have to give her my little passbook and she’d know. I won’t have the talk. I could spit at Nadine for her nosiness, except you don’t spit at a good neighbor. Nadine keeps me from having to lean on Rose of Sharon. God, take me two minutes before I become a burden to my child.
It burns me. But I just let Nadine have her petty thievery. See, the boy charges twelve dollars to cut the grass. Nadine always holds back fifteen. She’s no tipper. She’s keeping it for herself. Nadine would call herself too Christian to charge me for dropping my check by the bank. So she steals an average of six dollars a month from me instead. You have to overlook things in people if you want anything out of them. It has been told in these parts that all six of Nadine’s kids grew up hating her. What really gets me is that awful perfumed perspiration odor of hers when it’s too hot. God deliver me from my judgmental ways. I talk like I’m not a shrunk-up, shriveled sight, apt as not to frighten children away.
They used to say I could make piecrust blindfolded, and it must be true because I still keep a fresh pie on the table. I make six or eight crusts at a time and freeze them. I used to spend the entire afternoon cooking seven and eight dishes for supper. But all I ever wanted at mealtime was iced tea and a fresh slice of pie.
But I did, though I thought old age would bring me wondrous and terrible revelations. Foolish though it was, I actually believed it would come in some biblical fashion, like say a column of fire rolling down the hill over Moena’s yard or a revelation from a talking sparrow or the world aflame. Moena’s house has been gone
seventy-five years. It’s just pasture now. But I still say Moena’s house like it could bring her back.
No, I wanted the Fabulous Conflagration of All Conflagrations to come when I was younger, sure and straight and Christian. But you get too old to trust your own religion specifically. You get too old to pretend you got some exclusive hold on Jesus—or that Jesus has any exclusive hold on you—that he’ll be there for you, and you alone, when you know he’s got to be there alone for a million others mailing their money into the TV like you done in a weak moment.
But here I have to say things that have been forbidden to my lips. I have no hesitation with saying them, but I tremble to realize that their utterance no longer frightens me.
That
frightens me because in my advanced years, I have let go of all fear except one—that I outlived my good sense.
I did, though. I mailed in the money to the television. It was not, as I wrote on the note, so the Lord would remove the cyst from my spine or send a healing to Mama or take my desire for cigarettes away. It was because Holly Trace copied my spelling, stole my boyfriend Earl and drove Cadillacs with impunity until she died suddenly in her sleep at age seventy-six. Her crook son-in-law put her in a marble mausoleum over there in the fancy old part of the cemetery. I’ll be under a little flat piece of stone in the new part. I wanted that straightened out.
I sent that money into the television for all the times I looked at baby Rose of Sharon and wanted to grab a carving knife and spare her the torments of this life. I got so scared of that, one time I made myself stand over her crib and hold a knife in the air just to prove to myself that I wouldn’t go through with it. I mailed in my check because one night, when she was asleep and Searle was away, I let a half-grown dictionary salesman in. I sat there like a lady in the parlor listening to him, getting hypnotized by his soft voice and his curly blond hair. Later I slipped down into the orchard under the stars with him. I smiled after he went because I could see he thought he’d took complete advantage of me. For a year after, I let myself watch out the window and beg God to send him back. What a pity
you have to be old and useless before you can justify the warming sun on the rosebud, the dew fading, the leaves opening, offering water to the sky. I sent money to my television. But I never gave a single drop of water back to heaven.
I’m ninety-four or I’m ninety-seven. I forget. Nadine knows. Rose of Sharon pretends to. That young one who comes in the black panel truck and makes everything work, he might know. He’s a grandchild of one of Searle’s cousins. He wants something. Won’t take a dime when he mends the screens or cleans out the gutters. Still his isn’t Christian charity. Rose of Sharon was a change of life baby, a complete surprise. I had no idea how to mother her. I fought with everything in me to keep her from knowing I didn’t want her.
I can’t hold a thought in the present tense. My heart drops back into the woods and the silky dust on bare feet in the worn place in front of Moena’s porch. I can’t keep today straight because remembered voices never die and time, like space, runs in circles. I drew that much from school or maybe it was Daddy. I had thoughts of becoming a math teacher once. I had regrets that I didn’t once. But it would all be the same now either way. Daddy’s been dust for forty-three years. Moena’s been gone ages longer than that. Daddy went away in a flower covered mahogany casket with a choir singing. My Moena left crouched up on a wagon with the end of the world in her eyes.
I lived out my life thinking she would be back. But I think I confused her returning with her memory never leaving this house. I can’t get it straight in my mind what went with the doll she give me. I tried not to let Rose of Sharon play with it. But it may have gone the way of all things forbidden to the children in a house where there’s no help except the wife. It used to gall me. I had plenty of money for help. But there was none to be found in these parts. These ignorant white women around here would let their kids starve before they’d earn a wage cleaning my house. They was all too damned good for that. Well, I wasn’t. I’ve been cleaning it for eighty-five or eighty-eight years. Before that Mama had Beauty and her sister Dot in here six days a week. It’s a big house. It took the
pair of them to keep it right. The best I ever did was keep it decent. Mama raised me to be a lady like her. But the world had no use for such a thing by my time. I slipped into Searle’s roughshod ways. Lightning strike me for saying it, but Rose of Sharon slipped down from there.
Beauty was Moena’s mama. She made dolls for white girls like Mama wanted me to be, like Doctor McKutcheon’s girls in White Oak. You thought you’d seen finer. Hers were cloth stuffed with tobacco, and their hair might be corn silk. But you couldn’t resist the faces. They were painted on flat muslin heads and they’d rub off because Beauty didn’t have any real paint.
Beauty B. was charmed. She said very little to me because I was a child, but Mama knew her well. Her dolls looked at you. It was like that portrait of Wee Mama’s granddaddy in the parlor. It catches you when you walk in the room, and it holds you the whole time you stay in there. Beauty’s dolls claimed you the second they looked at you on Christmas or birthday morning, before the tissue was off them; they promised a silent companionship that would outlast any lover or husband or vow you made never to speak to, never to do this or think that. Beauty B.’s dolls grabbed a little piece of your way-down deepness. They knew you before you knew yourself. I only know the whereabouts of three of those dolls today, and that’s because they lie in the caskets of three dead Prince George County women who were buried with them. I say three, I mean four. Because I got one around here someplace. At least I did.
Moena was like my sister, but she was more like my reason. I had Hattie and Florence, but they was older. Moena was mine. We stood together. This I remember. This I know. This is not no in-law Birmingham boy cousin crawling around under the house in no December freeze and his fat girl wife making idle talk in the parlor and that black panel truck. This is not that awful tugging at my soul because I need the boy doing things here and he never knew Searle or how he loved Rose of Sharon and why the house goes to her if she never lifted a finger to help me out.
No. This is Moena. It breaks me to see that fat girl in the parlor with her basket of food. I’ll say this. She can fry. She can throw
half-boiled potatoes around a skillet and dump out a right good salad. But she can’t think no longer than a passing car. Her skinny, hairless husband with his bass voice and his tool kit, flipping switches, wrapping frozen pipes, going into the shed and making Searle’s Chevrolet crank, it’s almost bewitching. But it don’t obligate me.
Moena comes back so clear some nights I think she’s going to swallow me. I think I’m dead and she’s come to lead me home. But that’s never it. It’s just so I’ll remember her. Or because I remember her so well. I did not love Mama or Hattie or Florence or Searle. I have a connection to Rose of Sharon that rivals love. But none of it is love next to Moena. Maybe that’s because she was taken from me when I was a child and hadn’t learned to hold back a little love for myself. Sometimes when Moena wraps me in her veils in the dark, I halfway let myself think she wants me to hold on to this life. See, now, I’m bawling because it’s so hard to hold on. I hate it when I let a thought like that break through. It takes me half a morning to recover myself. Because I know Moena is gone and not just removed from my sight, but no longer living. I don’t think she would visit me now if she were still living. Unless hearts can travel.
But this I’ll say. This I’ll tell you. I hold on to this life for one reason. There’s a kingdom coming and I don’t mean no kingdom that was ever told about in no Sunday school. It may have been rumored in Scriptures or hinted at in sermons, but I don’t relate it to that. The best I can do to explain it is to tell you to look into the eyes of one of Beauty B.’s dolls. It’s there and it was before I was old and crazy and outlived a husband, a grandson and all my religion. Beauty B. saw it and she put it there. I may not live to see it. But I’m inclined to try. It’s as real as the demons I saw the night they told me Carmen was dead. I only heard Beauty B. tell of it once when I was a child. She said it would roll down that hill in a shining light. You’d best believe we’re coming nigh onto the time. This is no tale of no monster in no lake. This is no Bible story or bony end of no world. This is the change of all changes, the circle completed. I drag myself up out of my bed and through this house praying I’ll see it. I don’t know that my Redeemer liveth. I don’t know that I’ll see
it. But I was meant to. So was Rose of Sharon if she’ll ever find the courage to open her damned eyes. Lord, my mind takes these fantastic turns and I believe these crazy things I’m saying and it’s no use praying now, I’ve outlived all my good sense.
I
thought when Dashnell got on at KemCo and we bought the house on the lake, it would be better. I never saw his attraction for Birmingham. I don’t mean Birmingham like it is today because Birmingham like it is today might as well be Bowling Green or Raleigh. It must be one strong town, though, when you think about it, because it was burned to the ground during the War Between the States in the 1860s and then bulldozed back into the dust by urban renewal a hundred years later in the 1960s. Now here it comes building itself back again. Maybe they’ll do it right this time.
I thought the lake would give us back a little peace for our years and our efforts. I’m far from miserable here. It’s a sweet house. It took three years of Dashnell and me roto-tilling roots out in back, but I have a real garden this year. My deep freeze is groaning and the corn isn’t even in yet. Of course the major portion of the yard still needs sod. Dashnell has tried every grass seed known to man. Grass won’t grow for Dashnell. I keep telling him sod is the answer.
At least I’m close here, I can run by and look in on Mother. I don’t know her, old and thin and pale as rice paper and shuffling around on a walker. I never did know her very well. Now I have to get up close to her to understand half of what she’s saying. I have to listen hard. She’s in and out. Mostly out. Not that she’d dream of coming to live with us. She can’t stand Dashnell. She never could. If
you listen to Mother, all the world’s evils begin and end with Dashnell.
It’s all I can do to drag her by the beauty shop on her birthday and bring her out here to the house for a cake. I don’t know what she knows. Mother held the biggest part of herself away from me even back when she might’ve told me things. I hate that. Sometimes I even resent it. My mother knows how to live. When I feel sorry for myself I say that life is one secret my mother kept from me.