Promise, page 28
* * *
•••
I began to spend more and more hours exploring the land that edged the backwards river. Most afternoons, the river was gold with whitish-green caps. The water helped send a cool breeze for a few miles. I had been warned not to swim in it because I didn’t understand its moody currents. But when I dipped my fingers into the river for the first time, a sensation went through me. The river recognized me and greeted me with easy warmth.
Mama told me that she and Daddy shared their first kiss in the currents of the backwards river. They met after dark because Daddy had been shy, and a little vain, about his missing arm back then. In the night, they’d waded, naked, into the river beneath a metallic moon. The shadows of their bodies were silver, liquid shapes on the nearly still surface of the water. Mama said that when they’d kissed, they drew some of the moonlight into themselves, swallowing its taste. When I went alone to the river, I liked to think about Mama and Daddy alive in love. Mama hadn’t told me about the naked part, but when I stood at the river, the water told me.
There were only birds, insects, and shadows to survey me. When I pressed myself flat against the wet stones, the earth came up through the river and the rocks and went into me. Gold foam frothed across my bare feet and ankles. Clouds passed over my closed eyelids as I settled myself against this new world, relieved for once, to accept its older wisdom. Come back, the water seemed to say whenever I left.
As I walked from the river back to my grandmother’s house, I thought about the last time I’d secretly visited Hinder Me Not. I’d seen a shovel leaning against my father’s indigo headstone. I couldn’t forget the rusted shovel, left casually by one of the maintenance men near a rectangular patch of land that had been roped off next to Daddy’s plot. Hinder Me Not was prepared to bury Mama. I knew I couldn’t beg heaven to turn Mama away. She was close at the gate. The evidence of this silenced me for days.
* * *
•••
One July evening Mama and I sat together in Ginny’s good parlor. Often, it was Mama who now leaned against me, because it was too much for me to put my weight against her. It was strange, thinking that my body was the heavier one and could make her tired. We held hands. Since leaving Salt Point, there were many things I wanted to ask my mother, but I’d learned patience. My mother’s helplessness flickered in the veins beneath her hands, so I pretended to be brave and believed, as my grandmother advised, that one day I would claim my strength. Bravery insists on repetition. It meant that I had to be vulnerable every day without letting anyone see. Rubbing Mama’s hands with oil, I tried to distract myself from her suffering by being useful.
That evening she whispered for me to sing to her.
“But I’m not Ezra,” I said, staring at the hand-painted blue flowers on Ginny’s blue walls. “I can’t sing, Mama. I was never good at singing.”
“You could try anyway,” my mother said, sighing. “It makes you feel good even when you’re blue. That’s what really makes singing good. It’s not about whether your voice is better than somebody else’s.”
“How long can the blue protect us, Mama? Are there other ways for ghosts to get inside this house?”
Mama pushed herself up with care. “Your grandmother was afraid the nuns would come back and take me away. Or the foster care people. She was also afraid of her old ways. She was afraid her old self would come back and rob her of her new, chosen life.
“We’ve made our peace about all of that, so it does no good for me to pass our injuries on to you. My mother has worked all her life to keep from going back to prison. Maybe one day she’ll tell you about it.” She made herself say the last part softly, “When I’m not here.”
I couldn’t speak for a moment, and when I did speak again, I couldn’t say anything about Mama’s death, so I changed the subject.
“Sometimes when I go outside, I keep seeing blue when things aren’t blue. It takes time for me to see what things really look like. I have to blink and squint until the blue goes away. It’s like looking at neon signs. I almost feel sick. Maybe it’s too much.”
“Is it too much? I like that Ginny’s beliefs acknowledge the things we can’t always see. Especially things like evil. It’s lovely, the way old folks can be, that my mother believes she can distract or ward evil off as if it’s real. But look at what my body’s doing to me.”
“Mama, I know.”
“The only thing I can do with all of this blue is enjoy it. Because this blue is about our belief in goodness. Maybe you should try to enjoy it too. You know that this will be your home, don’t you?”
“I don’t know her, Mama. I don’t like her,” I said, and then felt slightly bad that the words had finally come out of me. It wasn’t nice to speak badly about anybody’s mother, but I knew it was even worse to be saying it about my own grandmother. “She cusses all the time and always gives her opinion when nobody wants to hear it. Her teeth are always loose and the gas—it’s nonstop. Her way of being a grandmother is scary.”
Instead of scolding me, Mama nodded weakly. “If I’d understood what she’d gone through, maybe I wouldn’t have run off with your daddy the way I did.”
“She made you run off, though, didn’t she, Mama?”
“Oh, no,” said Mama. “Love made me run. And I ran—I flew! Your daddy and I couldn’t stay here and have the love we’d found. I’d been dropped into Damascus from a cloistered world. The people here didn’t like it, didn’t trust me. I was awkward, shy, and had the nerve to talk like white people. The children mocked me. Even the adults rolled their eyes at me.
“After your daddy was in that accident, he didn’t belong either. He’d shattered the way these people wanted to see him and the saintly Kindred family. He didn’t want to sacrifice his life before he had a chance to live it. They couldn’t stand the thought of him being anything but a hero, and it’s hard for heroes to breathe. They nearly hanged him with all that talk of Legacy. Because sometimes you can go too far with that kind of thing. It makes you depend on the past and the future in a way that makes you forget how you need to be right now.”
“But it wasn’t his fault.”
“Fault? Oh, that had nothing to do with it. It rarely ever does in a tragedy. Where you find a tragedy, you will not find justice. Though the people here might say different; and they could very well be right. These are good people. Wise people. They only let your daddy and me go because they knew we’d come back.”
“But we’re here because Ruby’s father killed himself and they’d blame us and—”
“And I’m dying, Cinthy. We’re here because I’m dying.”
* * *
•••
The next day after sunset, which I didn’t like to admit I’d come to enjoy, I crept inside from where I’d been sitting on my grandmother’s swing. The house was too quiet. Like Mama, my grandmother always had a radio on somewhere in the house. Carefully, I removed my sandals and crept up the tilted, crooked staircase. I was afraid that Mama had passed away. I was often afraid Mama had passed away, which made me skittish and transformed the lush landscape around me into a sort of horrorscape.
At the top of the stairs, I sighed with relief. I could hear their voices—Mama’s soft and Ginny’s brassy—in the bedroom. The door was ajar.
“Cinthy is a good girl, Mama,” said my mother. “She has her ways, but when you get to know her, how deeply she feels the world, you’ll understand. She’s intelligent like her father. And sensitive, the way I was. Remember?”
“Oh, I remember,” said Ginny. “You cried about everything.”
“I had good reason to cry,” said my mother. “After all that I went through. I was alone all of my childhood. I don’t want Cinthy to go through that. I’ve let go of our past—yours and mine, Mama—but I need to know that I can trust you with her life.”
“You speaking like I’m going take her out to the woodshed or something,” said Ginny. “Shit, I’m a decent woman. I’ve made amends for the wrong I did and didn’t hold my breath waiting for the world to make their amends for doing me wrong. Nobody apologized to me, for those years in that cell. Only thing I was guilty of was needing to be loved.”
“I love you,” said Mama.
“Jolene, I know all what I done.”
“I want Cinthy to feel wanted,” my mother was saying. “I don’t know when Ezra will get here, but at least I know she’s in good hands, hands that are like my own. When she comes, you’ll need to love them both.
“Mama, I don’t know how long I have. I don’t want to leave this world. But I’m in so much pain. I want to be with my husband. I want to tell him, when I cross, that our girls were left standing inside a strong love.”
“Don’t worry about a thing, baby,” said Ginny. “Your baby girl is so much like you. It’ll be like me seeing you grow all them years I was locked up. And the other one? Don’t you keep worrying over Ezra. Easy to see right away that she’s strong. She takes after me.”
“It was hard on me, letting her go with Caesar and Irene. But I knew that they could protect her, help her, in ways I’ve never done. In my dreams, I’m standing on the platform of a train station, watching the trains go by, and she’s waving at me from a window. I can tell she’s smiling, but she’s going too fast for me to see her eyes. I have to believe,” said Mama, “that my baby is safe. It’s the only way that I can die. I have to use these last days to focus on the young girl downstairs who’ll have to grow up with a grief she shouldn’t have to bear.”
“World be like that,” said Ginny. “Jesus, the world is a grief, a wrong, a miracle.”
“The world is those things and so much more,” said my mother. “I wouldn’t have loved it any less, even with the suffering.”
“Your head is so hot. Let me get you a cool cloth,” said Ginny. “You’ve spoken too much, worrying your heart.”
“Oh, I have peace,” said my mother. I could hear her voice brighten. She called out to me. “Cinthy? Is that you? I hear you tiptoeing on the other side of the door, smelling like outside. Come in here with your grandmother and me, please.”
I went into my mother’s room. Ginny sat on the side of the bed where Mama lay under the quilt like a wisp. She lifted one hand for me to take while she slipped the other into my grandmother’s palm.
“Mama, I’m giving her in trust to you now,” she said, her voice dropping as she smiled tearfully into my eyes. I saw that my grandmother’s hands were shaking, but she turned to me. I wanted to run from their sad smiles, but I knew that it would hurt Mama too much. “Mama, my baby needs you. But I will always be her mother.”
Without speaking, my grandmother stood and extended her arms to me.
* * *
•••
Later that evening, after Ginny had bathed my mother, combed her hair, and put her to bed, I caught her wiping tears away from her eyes. When she realized I was watching her, she told me to come and join her in the kitchen. The kitchen wasn’t very large, but our feelings filled the room and made it feel as though we’d been pushed inside a stuffy closet.
“Thirsty,” I murmured, a little embarrassed for us both. Seeing her tears made my own eyes sting. I pushed my fingers against a pimple on my cheek.
“I don’t like people creeping up on me in my own house,” she said. “I’m not used to having…I’m not used to having family. Haven’t had no family around me since your mama ran off. Guess I deserved that. Payback, you know?”
“You’re my grandmother,” I said. “Why do I have to call you Ginny?”
Carefully pulling off the wig she’d worn at the factory where she worked a part-time evening shift, she sighed deeply. It was a bob of black, wispy feathers, streaked with auburn highlights, like something that I’d seen on Dorothy Dandridge or Diahann Carroll in the movie magazines my sister and Lindy had once enjoyed.
“Girl, you might as well go on and call me whatever you want if it’ll help you get used to the idea that you and me got a lot of time ahead together.” Shaking her head and raking her scalp with her fingernails, she sighed hard. There was a fuzzy, silvery labyrinth of cornrows flat against her skull. “Lord, don’t tell me nothing ’bout living or dying no more. I just don’t want to know nothing. All I do is think about rest.”
“Why don’t you use some of the money we brought with us? Then you could just make your pies. They’re very nice pies,” I said tentatively, remembering how I’d come into my parents’ bedroom as we’d packed to leave our house in Salt Point and seen Mama snatching stacks of bills from a hole in the floor of their closet, beneath my father’s suits. He never put it all in the bank, she’d tried to explain to me while she beckoned for me to help her. We couldn’t trust them to be fair. I remembered how heavy the money had felt in my hands, like I was picking up pieces of my father’s dreams.
Ginny glanced at me. Then she smiled. “Glad you thinking about bills and savings, Cinthy, but honey I paid this house off years ago. Living don’t cost me much no more. Not far as the bank or the tax man would be interested in knowing.
“If all I could do was bake pies, I’d bake too many. Nobody would want them. They’d go to waste for sure. And I know about the money, baby. Jolene told me. I told her I’d keep it in a savings account for you and your sister. You may not want to stay in this place for too long. I hope you don’t. Jolene says you could be in college already, smart as you are.”
I watched Ginny pour herself a glass of iced tea. She sipped it, glancing at me. She was almost shy. “I got me a smart grandbaby,” she said after a long time.
“And I have a grandmother,” I said, smiling a little. “A grandmother who cusses and uses bad language in front of me when she shouldn’t.”
“You ought to try thinking of me as your family,” she said, shrugging. “Cussing ain’t cruel and who says I got to be nice in a world such as this. I’m soft in my own house. Don’t see no reason to change what’s kept me safe.” Pushing her wig down into her scuffed patent leather purse, which she carried around everywhere, even at home, she zipped it inside. A few stray strands stuck out like feathers through the zipper’s teeth.
“Take your bath and see if you can get some rest, honey,” she said. “Maybe I’ll teach you how to make a cobbler. You like cobbler?”
My eyes filled with tears as I smiled a real smile.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Mama used to make it for us. She used to sing the whole time.”
Ginny closed her eyes, leaning against the counter. “Praise that child,” she said, lowering her head. “Praise God for giving her to me. Lord knows I didn’t deserve her.”
Ginny stood up at her full height in the sky-colored kitchen. Her sweat had dried. In the sigh of evening, her skin carried the scent of chickens, dust, and grit.
“Best thing a woman can learn to do,” my grandmother said, “is to feed herself some sweetness so she ain’t got to wait on nobody else to give her something she already has. You keep that in mind, little sister. Far as I can tell, you’re a Kindred and an Abbott. That’s a combination the world won’t see again.”
I turned away from Ginny’s voice and walked out of the house to the porch.
In the deepening twilight, a constellation of fireflies transmitted soft lime and yellow lights. Their pulsing floated in front of me like a portal to another world. There had to be hundreds of them, shining as they wrapped the farmhouse with light. I could hear the frogs and insects just beyond.
The more I tried not to think about Ezra, the more I saw her. Using the fireflies like connective dots, I assembled the shape of her face floating just there in front of me. I could hear her voice in my head. I felt her smile go through my skin, and it was both bright and awful because I missed her so much. I was angry that she wasn’t with us, but I was beginning to understand how we all had been forced to change ourselves to survive.
I looked through the fireflies at the lush kudzu, which reminded me of Ezra’s hair and how she’d always taken care with my hair. I could feel her fingers pressing oil into my braids, her fingertips circling the tips of my ears, and how she’d use her hands to turn my face to hers so that we became mirrors. Swaying, I tried to think of my life without Ezra, no Daddy, no Mama. The ache surged through my entire body.
“Magic, ain’t they?” said my grandmother, pressing her hand against my shoulder.
Swallowing, I nodded as Ezra’s shadow face vanished before my eyes. “We have them at home, back in Salt Point. But not like this.”
“Did you catch them? You and your sister?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “We used to make earrings. Use them for nail polish. We would put them in jars.”
“We don’t catch them ’round here,” said Ginny. “We let ’em be. We just enjoy them little lights they share. Don’t let me catch you making nothing out of ’em. You too old for that. Let ’em fly and glow like nature wants.”
“I won’t touch them,” I said, tears filling my eyes. For once, I didn’t feel like I could float away and that nobody would care. A strong sensation, which I realized I’d never had in Salt Point, went across my face like a breath. Perhaps I did belong here.
