Tina Mcelroy Ansa (42 page)

Lena began to realize what an unexamined life she had been leading before. She had given herself so little time to just sit and think, without planning and fixing and scheduling her day in her head. Now, some days she found herself sitting alone under a sycamore tree in the woods just pondering. She was beginning again to think freely and comfortably about her mother and her father and the other dead
members of her family, chuckling to herself how she was like this one or that one.

Lena started noticing all kinds of things. She discovered that her garden and woods were full of volunteer plants this summer—those that had been borne as a seed or a spore on a wisp of the air or on the wing or beak or claw of a bird or in the stream of rainwater formed by a sudden heavy downpour or even cunningly attached to the antennae of a buzzing insect. All along the banks of the Ocawatchee River on Lena’s land new and unusual plants foreign to Middle Georgia were taking root and flourishing. Little mountain orchids with lady’s slipper-shaped flowers brought downstream in the Big Flood of ’94 bloomed in a crevasse past the woods on the other side of her stables. She wouldn’t see them for five or six weeks, but the sprouts that would become a colony of wild Venus’s flytraps were just coming up at the foot of hickory trees in a woodland meadow south of the creek. Mushrooms were growing everywhere.

Right outside her workroom window facing the river and the western sky, there on an antique oak drafting table where she made drawings that came to her sometimes, she noticed for the first time that the Mirandy rosebush dead in her sights had split at the root and reverted back to two earlier unhybridized breeds of flower, a big fragrant red rose on the left, a tiny pink unscented climbing rose on the right.

Taking the time to look, to smell, to recall, to touch, Lena began to see the earth in the way she had as a child. The way she had before everything around her seemed to turn sinister. She had eaten the earth around her house when she was three and four if her mother didn’t prevent her. Now, with no one around to stop her, and with Herman there thinking it was cute and natural, she ate a small amount of Middle Georgia clay and black-belt loam from the cupped palm of her hand whenever she felt like it.

Just the simple act of sitting on a wooden bench out by the barn and watching the wind gently disturb the fronds on the clumps of lemon grass all along the path down to the river became as moving, as
prodigious, as phenomenal, as snatching up family land from the bank and getting it back in the hands of the original black owners.

Now, there was a symmetry to her life that she saw reflected in nature on her property, in the stories Herman told, in the crape myrtle leaves that he crushed in his hands and rubbed all over her exposed skin to keep biting bugs away.

She was even beginning to see some harmony in the death that always seemed to crop up all around her.

The longer Herman was with Lena, the stronger she became. It got to the point around the end of September where she first noticed that she could think something without Herman smiling and agreeing, or disagreeing and gently guiding her onto another path.

She liked the new feeling of awareness and confidence this ability gave her.

She and Herman would be walking in the woods or along the bridle path or through the fruit orchard, and they’d both stop in their tracks and lift their noses in the air. Rain, each of them would think. They would look at one another and smile as the intoxicating scent of rain on a patch of dirt in the next county drifted over their bodies and entered their bloodstreams through inhaled oxygen.

Although Herman often encouraged her, “Put yo’ bare feets to the earth, Lena,” he wouldn’t let her ride Baby or Goldie without good heavy boots.

“I done spent too many nights rubbin’ those feets to see ’em messed up in a twisted stirrup,” he joked. Then, he turned serious. “I couldn’t stand to see you hurt none, Lena, baby. Havin’ to go to the doctor or the hospital.”

Lena had never been in a hospital overnight. And her body reflected that.

Charting her body, Herman would go all over it with the tips of his fingers examining, looking for any mark or scar or blemish other than her vaccination mark on her left upper arm and a chicken pox mark on her nose.

“Got a pretty stomach,” he would say almost to himself as he traced her body like a blind cartographer feeling a relief map. Lena laughed and thought of her gynecologist, Dr. Sharon, who addressed all her patients as “Boo.” She had said the same thing as she examined Lena the last time. “You got a pretty stomach, Boo.”

Lena laughed when she remembered Dr. Sharon’s routine questions about premenopausal symptoms on her last checkup: “Any soreness of your breasts, Boo?” “Any vaginal dryness during intercourse, Boo?” With Herman around, her breasts were always a little sensitive. And just kissing Herman made Lena as wet as a sixteen-year-old girl slow-dragging in the dark for the first time at a basement party.

She thought of old men and their stories of old women sitting in tubs of hot water and alum to tighten up loose and overworked vaginas. Lena would hear the jokes as she passed a cluster of men her father’s age chuckling at the bar. “And when the preacher got up to the pulpit the next morning, he said, ’Ummmmphhh-uuhhhhhhu.’”

Herman reminded her of those old men sometimes.

He had an old-timey way of talking, of saying things that she had only read in books. He said “cipher” or “figure” for add. He called a purse a “satchel,” and pants of any kind—even her panties—were “britches.”

And although he understood the inner workings of a computer better than most experts because he had actually been inside one, Lena would still hear him say to himself as he figured the amount of pig iron he would need for his blacksmithing: “Nought from nought leaves nought.”

Lena had never heard Mr. Renfroe refer to his penis as his “Georgia jumpin’ root.” Still, Herman’s speech continued to remind Lena of her gardener.

Walking through her grounds with Herman by her side, his arm draped over her shoulder, Lena would come up on Mr. Renfroe and stop to chat a bit about a fungus on the roses or a new clematis she had seen in a magazine.

“Eee-bah-ning, Lena,” the gardener would say.

“Good evening, Mr. Renfroe,” Lena would reply.

“Good eee-bah-ning, Mr. Renfroe,” Herman would echo politely.

Herman would stoop down beside them and examine the plant in question, then stand and offer Lena his own seasoned advice.

She wanted to ask Renfroe, “Did you hear that? Did you see that? Did you?” But she knew he hadn’t heard or seen anything. Only she had.

By the end of summer, Mr. Renfroe had cut down drastically on his time out at Lena’s. She was his only client, and he had continued to work there only because it was such fun, though he saw from week to week how much she was doing on the property with her “friend.”

Mr. Renfroe had finally demanded to know who was building all those trellises for moonflowers, who was turning the compost piles before he and his assistant could get to the job, who was planting that old-fashioned shooting star primrose all over the property. Just who was her new yardman?

“I got a friend who’s real handy,” Lena told the old man honestly. “And he enjoys doing things around the place. He hasn’t messed up anything, has he, Mr. Renfroe?” she asked, trying to hide the talons she was going to use to rip the old man to shreds if he criticized any of Herman’s work.

“Naw,” Mr. Renfroe admitted. “He done okay. And some of that stuff, like the trellises, is
fine workmanship!”

Lena retracted her claws and just beamed at her man’s compliment. Lena knew where this conversation was going. She had been down this road before with James Petersen.

James Petersen had seen things: Lena dancing in the moonlight. Lena sitting naked in the sunlight with her feet stretched out in front of her just chattering away. He had caught her a couple of times running from the direction of the barn, laughing and glowing, as if someone were right on her tail.

He had seen all this, but he hadn’t said a word to anyone.

To begin with, whom would he have told? If his brother Frank Petersen had been alive, maybe, but Frank hadn’t liked hearing anything
that even sounded like it was against Lena, and there was no one else with whom to share it.

Anyway, what would he have said? “I keep catching Lena talking to herself and singing to herself even when her lips aren’t moving. I saw Lena dancing naked out on the main deck of her house. I’mo say that?” James Petersen muttered to himself time again as he moved about cleaning Lena’s house and considering what his duty was as her only in-house guardian.

James Petersen hadn’t yet spied “The Man,” as he called him, but James knew he was there. Practically moved in, it looked like. The housekeeper had washed enough of Herman’s shirts and jeans and brightly colored cotton underwear; fallen over enough of his big work boots; dusted around enough of his dissected handiwork to know that there was a man around. A man who felt comfortable in his surroundings.

“But then, who wouldn’t be comfortable out here?” James Petersen asked the empty house. It was what he said about his position at Lena’s with his own stone house and his own hours when someone remarked on his good luck. “I’m quite comfortable with my situation.”

“Yeah, fine workmanship, Lena,” Mr. Renfroe had repeated, waiting as James Petersen had for her to say something, then continuing.

“Yeah, like to meet the man sometime. Talk to him face-to-face ’bout the work he done. Yeah, sure would like to meet him.”

But Lena just said, “Um,” stroked her throat and looked down that “long, long country road” the way her mother had when she no longer wanted to discuss something.

Although she relished her privacy, Lena missed the old man being on the property so much.

For years, she and the old gardener had moved among the vegetable plants and weeping willow trees and ivy and yew and hibiscus bushes together for a little bit practically every day. But after her parents’ death, she had had to get Mr. Renfroe some help of his own because she no longer had the time to be of any assistance to him.

She couldn’t remember all the great-looking animal-print ManoloBlahnik
high-heeled mules and Charles Jordan pumps she had ruined trying to squeeze some gardening in on the way to work.

Before the spring when Herman came, she just didn’t have time for gardening or any of the things she had enjoyed most of her life. Over the last decade, it had happened so gradually, so slowly, that she hardly noticed that her life revolved around doing for others.

“Shoot, I don’t even have time to turn my own compost pile or cut flowers in the evening,” she had complained to herself for years.

Now, when she walked with Herman on the grounds, he’d even look at her every now and then and say, “Time, baby.”

The long daylight hours of summer somehow agreed to continue on through the shorter days of early fall. For Lena, Herman had all the time in the world. And she felt that she had all the time in the world. Sometimes, he even seemed able to stop time. One day in September, he took her back to the berry patch where he had taught her how to really pick blackberries. When she saw where they were headed, she said, “Herman, it’s too late in the summer for those blackberries now.”

“Yeah, baby, but not fo’ us,” he said as they rode up to the massive mounds of vines covered with juicy purple-black fruit. He jumped off his horse, picked the biggest juiciest berry Lena had ever seen and coming back to where she sat on Baby, said, “Open yo’ mouth and close yo’ eyes.”

At Herman’s sweet shy insistence, they had even made love one night in August under a big full moon and the stars of the Southern Crown in the furrows between the rows of Silver Queen and Golden King corn growing in a high area near the river to enrich the soil and ensure a good harvest.

Herman paused in licking her breasts and rolling her hard nipples gently, carefully, between his strong teeth to say, “Well, we sure as shootin’ gonna have us a splendiferous harvest at this rate.”

Between moaning and kissing the crown of Herman’s bushy head under the tassels of the sweet white corn, Lena had to agree. She knew a good harvest was ensured as soon as she lifted her head from the rich
black loamy soil where she lay naked on her back and watched Herman slowly sink his thick tight penis deep into her wide-open purple and pink vagina like an ancient handmade farm tool sinking into the earth. Herman had not had to change shape or form or essence at all to make them both groan as he rested in her a moment—a long moment—then pulled out as she sunk her short nails into his clenched firm butt, and he sunk his into the rich dirt around her.

In the grip of a sweet, soul-rattling orgasm, their eyes met, and they smiled at each other. Then, they both fell back to the earth.

Even Mr. Renfroe remarked on how rich Lena’s garden soil was becoming.

From the first, Herman just wouldn’t allow her not to have a full garden on her property.

“Good God, Lena, you got soil like down on the muck in Flor’da, and you ain’t even gon’ plant no
beans!?”

Using old-time and Native American techniques of planting in nothing but hills of rotting compost from Lena’s kitchen, Herman grew so many ripe, sweet, juicy watermelons that he loaded some in the back of Lena’s dark green Wagoneer for folks downtown at The Place.

Perfectly round, nearly blue-skinned Cannonballs; long pale Charleston Grays; round, sweet Sugar Babies; oblong lime-striped Crimson Sweets.

A couple of her teenaged children from the corner, thrilled to see Lena for a change, trooped in with her with the melons on their shoulders and placed them on the counters and in empty sinks and half-f soda coolers.

Coming into The Place, Lena warned, “Be careful. You know, liquor and watermelon’ll kill you,” and old men and women looked up to make sure somebody as young as Lena was repeating such an old-timey belief.

Then, as quickly as she had appeared at The Place, she was back in her Wagoneer and gone.

“Guess she gone back out there by the river with her ’friend,’” Peanut said as he watched everybody’s face fall when they realized she had disappeared before anybody got a chance to say anything to her.