Visitation of Spirits, page 12
But Rose never went to college. She never finished high school.
Rose loved pleasure, a foreign thing to Jonnie Mae Cross Greene. She would slip out of the house with tall country boys trying to forget long days of farm work in their brand-spanking-new Dodges and Chevrolets and Fords, going out to good-time, finger-popping juke joints, places that were no more than old barns and abandoned houses that sold liquor and beer and had a music box in the corner cranking out Johnny Walker and Little Richard and the Ink Spots. I can imagine her now, looking much older than sixteen, her long, slender neck exposed, some potent young man, his callused hands clutching her slender waist, nibbling at her neck, her tongue touching her top lip.
At sixteen she just disappeared. Vanished. At seventeen she returned, broken and pregnant. She bore Isador, and in a year she ran away again, leaving her child, only to return once more, battered and full with another child, Franklin. I don’t think it was the children out of wedlock that hurt Jonnie Mae the most—her standing in the community was unbesmirchable, and she was accorded more sympathy for having a wayward daughter than for harboring two illegitimate children in her home. But the loss of power, the blatant disregard and disrespect, shook her. The actual possession of the children soothed her somewhat, but at the same time they were reminders of what she could probably only see as her failure.
They tell me at Franklin’s birth Rose decided to change her ways, and wanted to take her children with her, up North. Jonnie Mae inquired after my mother’s sanity, coolly explaining that she would have to be moldering in her grave before she would allow that hussy to leave her house with those children. Rose left again. This time it was two years before she returned. With me, a six-week-old infant.
Rose was twenty-four. Finally a little older, a little smarter if not wiser, and I’m sure a little more afraid of life and the consequences of her past actions. There were three children about her feet now, calling her Mamma. She decided to bend to convention and her mother’s will and remain at home and work and take care of her children. I’m sure she meant well; I’m sure in her heart of hearts she had made up her mind to do right. But she had not reckoned on her sisters.
All three had been “good”; all three had married; all three were childless. They were the ones the family had sacrificed to educate. They had come home to tend home, to build nests around their mother’s nest, to nurture the family as was the duty they had been taught, as she had been taught. Yet in their eyes Rose had turned her back on the family, flaunted her sins, and smeared their name in midnight gutters and liquor-scented backseats. Did she really believe they would welcome her with honey and sunshine and a roasted calf?
Rose became a pariah in her own home. They treated her as they would a servant girl, humiliating her, excluding her, back-biting, accusing. She lasted about a year and a half, which in and of itself amazes me. She left finally, in stormy fury, rising from the Sunday dinner table surrounded by the entire family, disgusted, hurt, and angered beyond words. She just walked out the door, l suspect, never looking back. She wound up on the West Coast and returned only twice—at the death of my grandfather when I was twelve, a visit that I remember only as swift and veiled—it rained that day—and at the death of her mother.
Anne never meddled in my relationship, or lack of relationship, with Rose. Once or twice, in the beginning, she suggested I at least call, but when she saw my reaction she never mentioned it again. I had no reason, but she never called me either. I cannot say I felt abandoned—I was in more than capable hands, surrounded and protected with love and care and instruction from all quarters. We did exchange obligatory Christmas and birthday cards when I was young, eight or nine, but as I got older even that stopped, and any feeling I might have had for her simply evaporated. There was neither hatred nor sorrow nor pity, merely indifference, icy and void.
Last year, when I finally saw her again after twenty-three years, I was overwhelmed by one thing: I did not know this woman. I had thought perhaps I would have been overcome with a recognition, a primeval, instinctual knowledge. Mother. Mamma. Mater. Nothing. All my feelings of Mother were directed to the still woman who lay in state in a bronze and chocolate coffin, her face covered with too much powder, her cherrywood skin too dark, her bold, brown lips almost black, her eyes forever glued shut.
Rose stood at the graveside ceremony as Reverend Raines eulogized my grandmother, reading from Paul’s letters to the Corinthians (“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal”), a beautiful woman, once blessed with that intangible irresistible nature men call sexy, her skin still richly loam dark, her lips full and insolent. I could easily detect the defiance that had set her against her mother those twenty and odd years ago—all in those lips. (“And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.”) But her eyes—I could see them even through the veil—bore the consequences of hard living, hard love, hard times. They were lonely, lovely, scorned eyes. Eyes that had learned to look for themselves, and had seen. (“And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.”) When she began to cry, a calm and low sob, she looked suddenly forlorn and forsaken, a child lost and alone. And even now I cannot believe that no one, not Aunt Rebecca, not Aunt Ruthester, not Aunt Rachel, not Isador, not Franklin, and not I, especially not I, turned to comfort her. (“Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.”). Until finally, in a moment of such black tension, huddled over the lowering casket, a thin, invisible line separating the prodigal from the faithful, my Uncle Lester stepped over that line and put his hand on her shoulder. (“For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is part shall be done away.”) It was a crude and clumsy gesture, but in all its lack of grace it was full of grace. (“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”) Seeing that, I knew my sin, but was unrepentant.
As the first clumps of dirt thudded atop the coffin I began to think, What a shame. Looking at that sad, tall figure as she bent over to be kissed by my Great-Aunt Ruth and my Great-Uncle Zeke and as she shook hands with a cousin here and a cousin there—never a sister or daughter or son—the magnitude of my crime washed over me. How much I could have learned from her. She had raised her fist to her home, to her God, to her people, and chased after her heart . . . and lived. What had she seen? The scars were evident to me. I saw them in her hands, in her neck, in her stance, in her face. How had it changed her? For she could never return home. What had she come to understand of love and sex and lust and freedom, of violence and betrayal, of evil and hypocrisy, and all the naked pain I am sure she endured? Does knowing those things make living easier? But I would never know, for as Pharaoh I could hear my heart ossifying within my living breast. It would break before it would soften.
It was late September. Fall was coming, and a heaviness was in the trees, whose deep green leaves testified to the season and hung low in the heavy air. The family cemetery was at the edge of a field in the shadow of one of the three family tobacco barns. As we walked from the grave to our cars, she approached me. I searched for Jonnie Mae in her face, and was discomforted that I found only Rose.
“So they tell me you’re a preacher?”
“Yes.”
“I bet she died proud.”
“I bet she did.”
She said nothing more, not I’m sorry to hear about your wife, not Goodbye, not Take care of yourself or Fare-thee-well. She merely took one measured step back, looking me up and down, slowly, while pulling on her gloves. She smiled at me and nodded, nodded and turned, walked to a car, a rented Ford, got in and drove away, never looking back, not once.
A preacher.
December 8, 1985
12:30 pm
—But I do love you, Ruth. You know that, don’t you? I always did. I always did and I always will.
—You don’t love nobody, you old liar. You never did and you never will. You don’t love nobody but self . . . your own self. And you know what? You don’t really love you, neither.
She is old now. Once she was young, not long ago, really. Only a few days, it would seem. A few sunsets, a few sunrises, a few childbirths, a few deaths. But she has been old for some time now. This she knows; this she feels; this she hates. When she was young, younger, so full of life and living, so impatient for tomorrow, so hopeful of hope, she did not reckon she would be old for so long.
Hospitals. Cemeteries are more pleasant. There at least things are real—the ground beneath your feet, the sky above, the trees, the grass . . . but in a hospital nothing is for sure, nothing certain. Everyone is a victim, patients and visitors alike, at the mercy of those people called doctors. People she does not trust.
Asa looks pitiful. It saddens her more than she thought it would, more than she thought it could, to see him here. A light-skinned man all his life, now his skin appeared ashen, sickly, frail. He had been there in bed when they entered, his eyes closed, trembling with every breath, one tube stuck up a nostril, another tube jabbed into his arm—one green, one red. He wheezed as he breathed, and the green tube gurgled like a straw does when you’ve finished a drink. And the smells—disinfectants, ammonia, soap, urine, and that smell she knows so well, sickness. It has its own smell, sickness, like a dog with its tail betwixt its legs, its head held down, an old dog with droopy eyes and a worn-out tongue. That’s the smell of sickness. It is here, in the air, in the sparkling white, hard bedsheets, there, surrounding the gleaming metal railing of the bed, and even about them fancy gadgets and whozits ablinking and abuzzing.
When Asa opens his eyes they are bright white, and she almost forgets that he is here in this place where sickness breeds, where women dressed in white wearing funny white shoes look at you as though you should be in bed. When she sees those eyes she remembers when they were both young, she a new bride, he a cousin of her husband and the best-looking thing she had ever laid eyes on. Is that when it went bad? When she realized she was not content? Was it her first sight of Asa with his broad face and round cheeks, his full lips and smiling white eyes? Now Asa’s eyes are rheumy and dark-ringed; they seem to call out in pain, and at the same time betray embarrassment. He had jumped when he opened his eyes, looking puzzled and lost, unfamiliarity surrounding him in an unfamiliar place, feeling, probably, unfamiliar himself, though she figures the feeling of coming death is probably a very familiar feeling, one we begin to acquaint ourselves with the moment we take our first breath. He had opened his mouth, saying something so low no one, not even he, could have heard it; his bottom lip descended, trembling, trembling as though he would burst into tears at any moment. Slowly, shakily, he lifted one hand, to no one of the three in particular, clearing his throat, and said:
“What time is it?”
“It’s about one-thirty, Daddy.” His daughter, Tisha Anne, stands on his other side, but he does not look at her. He still looks at the three standing by his bedside. Who are they? his eyes ask. Three ghosts? Apparitions? Spirits? Is this death come to take me?
“Asa?” Zeke stands uncomfortably, his face caught in a grimace.
“That you, Zeke?”
“Yeah, boy, it is.”
For a minute Asa continues to look puzzled, trembling, looking at the old man, the old woman, the tall man in the center, his hand still wavering in midair as if about to point out something arcane and mysterious. He puts his hand down, closes his eyes, and sighs phlegmatically. His breathing is ragged, as if he had run up many flights of stairs. He asks with his eyes still closed: “That Ruth? That you, Jimmy Greene?”
His daughter answers yes. He falls asleep.
—Woman, you can’t throw me out of my own house.
—Oh, yeah. Watch me.
—I live here.
—You don’t live nowhere, nigger. You live where you can get your hands on a bottle of liquor. That’s where you live; you live where you passes out. But I swear to God you won’t pass out here no more.
—Stop, Ruth, dammit. I said stop it, right now. Don’t you throw another thing—
—No. No. No, Goddamn it. I tried—Lord knows I tried—but I ain’t gone try no more. You gone, Jethro. Gone.
—Woman, I’ll—
—And if you ever lay a hand on me, nigger, I’ll kill you.
It seems to be that way with old ones: things known and not known are one and the same. They begin to place true importance on something young people, except perhaps the very young, pay no attention to—feelings. When was it? When she was seventy-eight? Eighty-three? Eighty-nine? Suddenly the things she felt became more real to her, as if she could reach out and touch them. Just like the old saying, I can feel it in my bones, she too now could feel things like the coming of spring, or an early frost, or a bad storm, or the creation of a youngin. It was as if, like the blind who hear better than the sighted, she had been given this sixth sense in the place of her failing legs and curved back and stiff, aching joints. She believed it to be no miracle, nor anything important or special. No particular blessing or curse. It was nothing, she suspected, that other old folks didn’t have as well.
So it came as no surprise to her when she felt it, heard it. She knew it when she came in. The hospital was made to be reassuring, to give some sort of hope, she surmised—its lobby had been made to look very like an old mansion, with fat columns and marble floors, fine wooden panels and carved ceilings—but at the same time it was modern and fancy, with all sorts of machines lurking in corners. It didn’t deceive her none. Not the orderlies rushing about in their whites, not the loud families with their loud no-mannered children, not the patients with prosthetics who ambled about, not the wheelchair-ridden, nor the crutch-laden, not the shiny tiled floors, nor the jerky elevators that tinged at each floor and upset her stomach so. She knew, she knows.
So why is it, Ruth, if you are so firm in your knowledge and knowing, so sure of all these things and not fooled, why is it that you are so unnerved to see your husband’s cousin at death’s door?
Had he been a good man. Had he been a righteous man. Had he been a loving man. Had he been a man who cared for his children. Had he been a man who looked after his farm properly. Had he been a considerate man. Had he been a lucky man. Had he been a man who would, and could, turn away from a bottle. Had he been a faithful man. Had he been a religious, churchgoing, God-fearing man. Had he been a less handsome man. Had he been a man who couldn’t have laughed so brightly. Had he been a solemn man. Had he been a hard man. Had he been a soft man. Had he been . . .
So they had come this far . . . for what? To be depressed? To watch a dying man die? To . . .
“Obadiah? Obadiah! Boy, where is you?”
“I’m right here, Maw. Hush, now. Hush.”
. . . to pray over, to attempt to pray over, a dying man for this . . . this outrage? She wants to scream. She wants to holler, to grab the woman by that little white piece of mess that passes for a hospital gown and slam her up against the wall and yell: Can’t you see we trying to pray over here, you no-mannered white fool?
“Obadiah, my teeth ain’t in. Boy, where my teeth?”
“In your head, Maw. Now hush awhile.”
But the more Ruth thinks ill and hateful thoughts about the old woman in the room with Asa, the more pity swells up in her—no, not pity, something more like sorrow, sorrow for herself, sorrow for Asa, sorrow for Zeke, sorrow, yes, even for that crazy white bitch.
“Don’t somebody need to see about that colt? It’s cold outside. Go put a blanket around the colt, Obadiah. Will you, son? I’m scared it might freeze to death.”
“Maw, it ain’t gone freeze.”
“Well, I’m gone do it myself. Livestock’s too expensive. You work, you toil, Lord knows you do, and you got to take care of what you got even if it ain’t much, even . . .” The woman starts getting out of bed as her mouth continues on and on like some never-ending record player someone left on in a room no one could get to. Thin as a pole, with skin the color of dried corn, her eyes are ringed with deep black circles.
“Maw, now just lay down. Please. Just lay down now.” The boy she calls Obadiah, if Obadiah he even is, is a thin, lanky child with thin mouse-colored hair and a plain straight-up-and-down face; his teeth are bad. On his face is such a hopeless expression that Ruth is almost moved to go over and comfort him. Almost.
“No. No, I can’t just lay down. Sun be up soon. Got to get breakfast. Milk that old cow. See bout them hens.” She stops abruptly and turns to her son, her hands still poised at the tubes she fully intends to jerk from her arms. “Did you hear them chickens last night? Bet there was a coon after them.” She goes back to unplugging her tubes.
“Maw, now stop that. Stop that, you hear. Quit it.”
But she is too quick and has already swung her feet to the side of the bed, making Ruth think, Where do these sick folk get this energy? Is it from their craziness?
“Obadiah, you seen my hoe? Where my hoe? I bet them damn Simpson children come by here yesterday and borrowed my hoe and didn’t bring it back nor say hello, goodbye, kiss-my-foot, nor nothing. Just like them. Damn white trash. I got to hoe my beets and my row of butter beans. They bad off with the weeds.”
The old woman is pushing to get out of bed as her son, baffled, gently tries to prevent her from getting up. It looks to Ruth, in some funny way, as if they were trying to dance.
“Nurse! Maw, please. Maw. Nurse! Nurse!”
