Celia's Song (22 page)

“Now I do. I don't know why, but seeing all those people swaying up there all sexy and dead woke up a song in me.”

“You still have that drum?” Stella's poppa asks.

“Can you sing for a while?” Celia cuts him off. As Momma leaves the house with her drum, Steve falls in behind her, wiping up his hands.

“I can do anything, child, anything at all.” Momma says something to Ned in the language and he fetches a bench from the woodshed and a couple sets of sticks, one for him and one for Steve. He sits on the bench, tells Steve to face him, and Momma picks up the drum. Momma sings. After the first round is finished, the others join in. Judy can't get past her Prussian accent, and Steve can't get past his lyric-less English, but it doesn't matter. They sing until near sun-up, all except Celia. They sing until their voices crack.

“AND THAT IS THE
last song I know,” Momma says.

“That's all you know?” Steve asks, and they laugh. He takes Stacey's hand. He knows he will sleep now. He will wake up. It will be a new day. He will be too sober and too serious for his own
good. He will have grave doubts about what they are doing, but as long as they come together like this he will get through every completely insane and irrational demand Stacey makes of him.

XIX

GRAMMA ALICE SITS AT
the end of Momma's bed, saying, “Something has to die before something can be born.” Momma floats through her dreams, wondering who will die and what is going to be born. She sees Celia sitting at Alice's house and knows they are up to something. Alice looks like she is reading from a slim sheet of paper. Celia is quiet. Why in the world would Alice still be reading to Celia? Surely Celia can read. What in the world is one grown woman doing reading to the other? What has that to do with Gramma Alice telling her that for something to be born something has to die?

NED IS BACK. JIM
is leaning against the same windowsill Ned left him leaning against; the place looks cleaner. Things are arranged
in neat piles where Stella intends to put them when the cupboards are built. With clean clothes folded neatly, Ned feels a little safer and more comfortable. She has made a lot of decisions over the past three days. It surprises both men. She still seems strange, not quite all there, as if she is walking through a dream, but they have started to build whatever it is she asks them to. Ned brings a couple of windows with him, old but serviceable. He tells Jim to start putting up shelving while he installs the windows.

The industry of building eases the tension within the men. Stella sings as she puts things away. There is a lot of garbage to be tossed. Ned hands her a pack of garbage bags and tells her to fill them up and load them onto the truck. No one lives close enough to mind the sound of sawing and hammering, so they carry on through the night trying to bring some sort of order to this place Stella calls home. Jimmy does his best to choose pieces of wood that are better on one side; he trims the edges so the shelving looks good.

There is a bucket in the middle of the floor that Stella keeps avoiding. Jim finally asks the obvious: “Does the roof leak?”

“Yes,” Stella answers, just as if he were asking “How are you?” and she were answering “Fine.” They will have to head up the hill for some cedar to make shingles; a couple of squares is all they'll need. Jim half-smiles thinking about dodging a helicopter one more time.

“Getting too old to dodge the man, Ned, you think?”

“Never too old for a little adrenaline rush, lad. Never too old for that.” They kick around stories about the times they poached something that used to be theirs until the magic foot of the white man landed on it and it wasn't theirs anymore.

“I want a pair of white man's boots before I die. I want to be able to step on something and make it mine,” Ned says to Jim.

“Ain't they some shit,” Stella says like a man, coming out for a smoke. They turn sharply and look at her.

“Yeah. They're some shit all right,” Jim says.

Ned decides it's time to talk. “What happened to that little girl of yours?”

Stella looks around. “Where is she?” she asks.

Ned closes his eyes and shakes his head. Jim thinks it's too soon, but he answers her. Stella fights for some kind of grip on what has happened. She bounces words around, letting go bits and pieces of phrases that make no sense. She runs into the house, unable to handle the cacophony of sound that is going on in her mind and not quite coming out of her mouth. Jim and Ned finish their smokes. As he crushes out his cigarette Jim looks at Ned and says, “Too soon.” He gets up and goes into the house.

The quiet emptiness is palpable. Jim feels it the moment he steps in the door. She's not here. He looks around. The window in the sole bedroom is broken. There's a pillow outside, on the ground. She broke it and bolted. Jim runs out of the room, nearly knocking Ned over. “She's gone,” he tells him. They both head for the truck. They drive straight away from the house, down the main
road. “Is anyone home at Martha's?” Ned asks. Jim doesn't answer, just turns the truck in the direction of Martha's house.

The seconds click by hard. They have to reach Martha's house before Stella does something crazy. Crazy is getting to be so common. They pull up to the door and hear a scream. Jim kicks the door in and flips the switch. The gun in her hand, Stella lies in a pool of blood. They grab a blanket and staunch the bullet wound. Sam, Martha's husband, stands by in his underwear, trying to figure out what the hell has just happened.

“What the… What the … Stella …”

“Can't even do this right,” she says, and passes out.

They haul her into the truck. Sam fetches his pants, he means to go with them. When he gets outside, they are gone. He heads for Momma's house. He's gonna give that girl a piece of his mind. Two of his children died in that damn epidemic in
'54
. He lost another one to a drunken car accident. And now this, this suicide shit, threatened to take another. No more, he mutters, no more.

Halfway to Momma's, he turns back.

STELLA DREAMS. SHE DREAMS
of soft lace curtains, of white countertops, of pretty blankets, of dresses. She dreams of a softer life. She imagines that white women have everything she sees on the television. She pictures them in the malls, fingering everything like it belongs to them, all they have to do is decide what they want and poof there it is. Marry a white man and he will magically soften your life. All she had to do was find one that wanted to keep her.

She offered herself up to one after the other. Which one of you wants to keep me? They took her all the way through high school, taking turns and discarding her. John came along, plain boring John, John who carried the promise of softness, John whose feet were magical. John merely had to step in any direction and he could get much of whatever he wanted. She would do anything for him. She did do anything for him. But the more she did the crazier he got. He wanted a woman, not a doormat. How could she have known that? She wanted softness, not John. How could he know that? They slid into one drunken crazy moment after another because Stella thought that was what John wanted and because he had no other idea how to deal with this woman. Two children surfaced and John changed. Everything became a war, the girls needed this, and why aren't you doing that, the girls, the girls … and Stella began to hate those girls. They consumed her softness. They sucked up every penny she imagined should go toward easing the hardness of her life.

There was no softness. She looked everywhere for it. It slipped through her fingers the moment she turned around. She gave up. She convinced herself she would have hardness then, raw hardness, brutal hardness, and she hunted it down. And she found it, around every corner she found it. Her hunt began as a means to forget John and the promise. It helped her to forget those little girls whose own softness made Stella insanely jealous. It became some ordinary demon she had to feed each day, an old mean dog sitting on her porch. She fed it.

What happened? She went mad. “I went mad,” she tells herself. I deserve to die. I don't deserve to live. I don't deserve the hammering, the sawing, and the tending to my house. I don't deserve this child, this life, this anything. She had bolted out of the house, headed down the road to her father's house, found his gun, aimed it at her heart, and failed to kill herself. What's that voice? What's it saying? “Get some snarl, girl. You are going to survive. You are going to get through this and you are going to straighten up and live.” There is a threat in that voice. Poppa, is that you? “Yes it is. You aren't doing this.” Poppa, where are you? “I'm right here, baby.” Poppa? Poppa, don't hate me…

She drifts off.

STELLA HAS LOST A
lot of blood. “She needs blood,” Steve tells them. “We have no way of giving it to her. She needs to go to the hospital.”

Martha won't let them take her. “If she is going to die, she will die right here. Maybe she ought to die,” she says. “Look at what she did.”

No one knows what to say. They stare dumbly at Martha. “Don't talk crazy, Martha,” Celia says. Steve figures they can't take Stella to the hospital unless Martha agrees to it. He shudders to think that one generation of women has so much power over the next. He cauterizes the wound and stitches her skin as best he can. He prays Martha will be brought to her senses. Ned and Jim lean into the wall, their minds blank as they wait for the outcome of this mad chatter to emerge.

Sam arrives before it does.

Celia holds Martha. Martha stares at Celia. She is about to relent. Sam, gun in hand, goes to his daughter. He takes her in his arms. “No. If she is to die, she will die here in my arms.”

“No, Poppa, we can't do that,” Momma tells her uncle. “Keeping the child here is one thing, but not this, not this.”

Poppa has the gun. He threatens them. Steve freezes. “This is making me crazy,” he tells Stacey. Jim tries to soothe Sam. Not even his voice, buttery and assuring, can change the old man's mind.

“Don't we have some of them rigs the boys stole during that flu epidemic?” Celia asks.

“What rigs?”

“Blood transfusion rigs,” Stacey answers.

“You have blood transfusion rigs?”

“They're in the back house,” Momma says.

“But we have no idea what blood type Stella is.” Judy throws water on the fire of hope sparking itself up in the room.

“Sure we do. Same as mine,” says Martha.

“Okay,” Steve hears himself bellow. “Let me try then, just let me move around this fucking room without that gawdamned barrel pointing at me.”

Ned is out back with Jim, digging around for those rigs. Momma puts more water on to boil. Rena goes home to get more alcohol. Celia fetches bandages. Judy grabs syringes from Steve's bag. Ned and Jim return with the rigs and a box of the intravenous bags. Steve cannot believe what he's seeing. He recalls the theft; he'd read about it in the papers when he was a kid. These women are either insane or have very large brass balls hidden somewhere inside them. Sam backs up, but now aims the barrel at Momma. Steve gasps. Stacey sinks into the wall and slides to the floor. Celia moves toward her mother.

“She dies if anybody moves, Celia.” Sam cocks the gun.

“You die right after, if you shoot her,” Ned says, straightening up.

“Settle down, Ned.” Momma smiles at Sam. Momma nods at him, calm as she can be. She's known him for a long time. Martha was her gramma's youngest. She was younger than Momma by a decade. She had met this man late in life, married him, and given Momma an uncle. She doesn't for a minute think he would kill her.

“Don't fuckin' anybody move.” Steve does not know this man; it's the first time he's seen him. It is also the first time he's seen anything like this. So he hollers and gets down to work with Judy.

Ned believes anything could happen, a dish could fall, someone could sneeze or cough and this man would mistake it for traitorous movement. He squares off in the room, teeth grinding and fists clenched. The very moment that gun goes off, he will leap for the man's throat. He slows his breathing so he will be ready.

Jim wonders if the white people in the room will be able to fix this woman. He wonders if the old man is serious. He wonders if he could survive seeing his Momma, his hard-working, all-giving, tired Momma shot right before his eyes. He decides he can't. He decides he will jump in front of her. He stands stock still, aiming his eyes at the old man's trigger finger. As she and Steve are patching Stella up, Judy keeps mumbling, “Ain't this some shit, ain't this some shit.”

Momma watches Sam. Celia stares at her fingers as the humming in her mind returns.

The humming takes her to the top of Jacob's mountain
.

Rena is close enough to move the barrel, but something keeps her locked still; it's familiar, she knows this stillness better than she knows anything else.

Celia sees Jacob sitting next to Alice. They are planning something for the parched man.

Momma recognizes the tired in the old man's eyes.

The snake is running loose. He needs water. No water, there cannot be any water.

He's tired of losing.

The snake will consume us all. Only a pure-hearted man can kill him. She can too. Clean out your mind, your body, and your
heart; the ceremony will clean your spirit.

He has fought so many battles and lost. He is aiming the gun at losing.

This is not about anger, vengeance, or retaliation, Jacob. It is about the snake. It is about ritual, about ceremony, and about restoring our original direction. It isn't about her at all. It is not about finding yourself, Jacob. It is about finding your own song, the song that will move you through life. We are not lost. We are travelling in the wrong direction. Song moves us toward our humanity
and right now we are moving away from it
.

Knowing why Sam stands there with his gun pointed at her soothes Momma. Celia's humming stops. The picture of Jacob grows still. Celia is back in the room, her eyes focused on Momma. Momma seems so calm — too calm. She is looking at the old man with a small smile on her lips. Celia thinks she is enjoying his rage. Sam's gun-toting piece of insanity looks like it's bringing up some kind of pride in Momma. Momma must think that Sam's gun is motivated by his love for Stella. Celia doubts that. The whole scene is perverse. Momma decides to tell Stella how much her daddy loved her when she comes round. Sam is the first man who has dared to threaten her.