Knee-Deep in Wonder (22 page)

“You want me to empty out the tub again?”

“That's all right, let the water spill on the floor.” Helene held the hose, the water spilling over Queen Ester's hands and the clean collards. “If he would of let her die natural, I think by now I would of forgot who Chess was. But he couldn't let her be, even gone.” Helene's hand slightly trembled, and the water waved from the hose.

“You know what Mama's last words were to me? Not Bye, baby, I'll see you on the other side. Don't nobody think that maybe I needed Mama to say, ‘Baby, I sho don't want to go'?

“But I don't get nothing. On the last breath she conjure she tell me to get out. My own mama tell me to get out: get up and get out.”

Helene took the last leaf and wrung it clean, then turned the empty collards bag upside down and shook it. Gathering the washed collards back in the bag, they both stood. “Maybe she didn't mean it.” Helene saw the words crawl out of her mouth like puffs of smoke that curled and sat in front of them, full of nothing.

They passed through the porch door (it did not shut behind them) and went back into the kitchen, the story dropping again for the moment, unheeded. “Go to the pantry and get onion and potatoes and cut them up.” Queen Ester looked at Helene, waiting, as if her daughter would know where to find the vegetables, as if upon stepping into the house Helene knew enough not to bump into a stick of furniture. “Right there, behind the curtain.”

The curtain, a sheet, hung next to the refrigerator. Lifting it, Helene walked inside and the sheet fell behind her. A smell, cool and woody, surrounded her; the top two shelves were lined with canned fruits and vegetables—peaches, strawberries, cucumbers, peppers—pickled eggs, and pigs' feet.

“Hurry, now. The potatoes and onions are on the bottom shelf in the back.” Helene heard her mother's voice again, along with the sound of water filling a pot and the whisper of a striking match. Stooping, she smelled the dirt from the potatoes and melting butter from the stove. And then, with potatoes and onions clutched in one hand, she lifted the curtain and saw a knife and a newspaper laid out for her at the table.

“Sure nough, Chess die on a Sunday.” There was just the almost soundless scrape of knife against potatoes. “Ain't no passing like the kind that got to be taken care of midweek. And it was hot. Maybe that's how things got turned around. Cause like it or not, you can't wear all them heavy dark clothes in the summer. Folks not dressed for a funeral, so they stop acting like they was at one. Mama tried to hold it all together, put on the only dress she owned, so folks should of known better. But Mama's dress was red, with two ribbons on the side to hold it up, so I guess it looked like she was at a party. But that was the only dress she owned, so what was we gone do?”

“Is that the dress outside?”

“That's the dress. Mama wore the dress that Wednesday and washed it the same day. She start dying fore she got to take it off the line.” Queen Ester took the onions from the table, the knife in her hand gleaming. With one hand she pushed the onion out of its dried skin, like a tongue thrust out of a mouth. She doesn't cry when she cuts onions, Helene thought, just like me. Setting the onions aside on the counter, her mother scooped up the potatoes, browning on the table, and dunked them in the boiling water.

“Porch put on a record, somebody slid back a rug, pushed the couch into the corner, and fore I could blink we had some kind of party. Folks decided a funeral was as good a place as any to cut up a dance floor. Mama had a stack of records but not that many, and didn't nobody want to hear the same song twice. So we went to the house in the back where Chess lived, crashed through all the cotton, made a path where there wan't none.”

Queen Ester turned to look at Helene, her palms and elbows lifting in bewilderment.

“Helene, he didn't even have no real furniture. All them children and he didn't have a bed frame. But he had music. Had records stuffed everywhere. And we found them all. Under the mattress, behind the loose walls, under the sink. I don't know what possessed Mama to search all them places. It took till six o'clock to finish all Chess's music. And it started to look like folks had done worn themselves out—like they was gone go home. But then Mable said she had a couple of records her Downtown man had bought her as a present, and as soon as she said it folks were pushing her out the door and yelling for her to hurry it up.

“Maybe folks didn't know what to do with all that quiet, and was too stubborn to put the same songs on again. I don't know what it was. They start talking. Nothing serious at first. Just about how well the funeral was done and how the new reverend really outdid hisself on the eulogy. Then I think it was Banky who said it sure was a pretty day, too bad it had to be messed up by going to a funeral. And then out of nowhere, somebody asked, ‘Member how Chess loved blue skies?'

“And even then there was a space of quiet where folks could have sat down and behaved themselves. But not us. All of a sudden we was up, one pair of feet back through the patch of cotton, not taking the way we had made before. It was like we was lost all over again, and for no good reason, cause by now there was a path already laid down in the cotton field. I don't know who was at the front of the line; all I know is that I was in front of Carol Lee, and she screaming, ‘Where the hell are we?' Nobody wanted to get left behind, so instead of stopping and picking the burrs out of our clothes we just keep on. All that white cotton and thorns and no way out, just moving in circles.”

Queen Ester shook her head, but Helene only saw her two hands flashing as if they were four—light, quick, taking down the jar of bacon grease and splashing some in the pan now that the pork chops were done, then reaching over to a large clay jar, pulling out pinches of flour, shaking in salt and pepper and something else from a bottle that was not labeled.

“When we finally got out of the patch, everybody was white and cut up. But none of us minded a bit. We went through the back porch, and all us went into the living room that was still the café. Even then, Helene, we just could of shook off and said to us selves, ‘Well, look here,' then held our heads down in shame, and still God would have thought it was sadness.

“But they just wouldn't let things be. They went on and started talking about Halle, the yella gal didn't not a one of them know. Porch and Buttermilk got to talking about the wedding party Mama threw for Chess, and Halle's white dress with the slit up the side, and how Chess was singing in her ear like a piano. But nobody say how Halle had that dress with no drawers on.”

Queen Ester carried the boiling pot of potatoes to the sink, where the colander was waiting. Hot steam licked at her hands and elbows. Helene watched her mother's profile, cheeks drawn, mouth puckered, while she blew to keep the steam away.

“No brassiere on neither, but who was I to say, cause she was dead by then, and I can't talk bad about a dead woman.” Opening the drawer by the sink, Queen Ester pulled out a spatula and a large fork. From the refrigerator she took out a carton of cream.

“And we just kept on, do you hear? The music was gone now and they just words, sounding like pages out of the Bible. The blue sky opened and shined down on Him, and He was Glory—He was the Miracle—there was no living and dead. There was only Him, Chess, living and dead, on the water and under the water. That's what we sounded like.” Helene saw her mother pouring cream and butter over the potatoes and wasn't surprised when Queen Ester turned to her, holding the fork like a knife.

10

BY 1959, LAFAYETTE
had gone through two churches and six pastors. It wasn't the town's resistance to religion that kept the pulpit bereft of sermons. They prayed like any loose body of people for cash crops to come to fruition and for state taxes not to find them (which was in fact a wrong-headed prayer, since state taxes would have brought them paved streets), but the churches never captured generations or even an entire family. First a Lutheran church appeared, built by Germans who came through the county in the late 1800s in covered wagons—a century late, but filled with wanderlust and headed for Texas freedom. The congregation they left fell apart before it ever came together. Then the Baptists took over, trying to assemble as many mothers as possible, but to no avail. Yes, the mothers came with young children and the old arrived with a visiting nephew, but a complete family never. Those who fled the town, carrying everything under a black arm or tucked in a kitchen apron, took with them a rumor of Lafayette's sacrilege: idols lay hidden under beds, conjuring was done without the help of God. Untrue. The people of Lafayette just didn't have a full understanding of a church's potential. They grumbled when they tithed (which afflicted them again, the first three pastors filling their own pockets and the fourth drinking it all away). They couldn't see that Sunday's collection could have been used for new pews and doorknobs.

Still pastoral trust, never questioned, flowed implicit, and even after the fourth one, Reverend Johnson, stumbled out of town drunk while boarding the train, that trust never diminished. The fifth and sixth pastors saw the dust on the pews and hymnals and turned around and left. With Little Rock so far away, the town reverted to some primal understanding of God or gods, depending on your neighbor and religion. It took the time of a child's yawn for Lafayette people to read the yearly almanac as a second set of scriptures, and they never went to bed without sweeping the dirt out the door. Superstition came on the heels of desperation. Everyone chewed baked chicken on the right side of the mouth, and each and every foot in the car lifted when crossing railroad tracks.

The Reverend Doctor Robert Claire Mackervay stepped into this state of affairs; while walking to the church, the railway conductor spat over his shoulder because he and Mackervay split a pole. Unlike the six pastors before him, however, the Reverend Mackervay carried ambition with his scriptures. Young, heavy-lipped, he sought to galvanize the entire county. Though the pastor's first sermon would be a funeral eulogy, which should have damned him immediately, he filled himself with hope because he wouldn't have to search around Lafayette looking for congregants. They would come to him, mourning and humbled, seeking solace at his pulpit. Amid the swooping crackle of tissue-thin parchment, balm for grief would be found. The sheer possibilities of what could be done with all the newly assembled—rapture bound, ready to be consoled, on the brink of baptisms—made him shiver. Reverend Mackervay knew he would not have so many people united again unless somebody else died soon, and from what he saw they seemed like a resilient bunch.

The sermon had to hold out redemption and hope, stroke the living, and respect the departed. But before Reverend Mackervay could deliver his sermon, he had to convince Liberty to embalm the dead. An open or closed casket shouldn't have been his concern, but a closed coffin meant a missed opportunity to console the grieving. Reverend Mackervay had plans on how to use a viewing to draw in the congregation. A solemn greeting and a good-bye at the door wouldn't be enough. He needed to stand next to the stricken family gleaning precious information while visitors filed past the coffin offering the bereaved condolences. “I know you was gone come by and help plug my roof, but ain't no need for that right now” or “I know you like rhubarb pie just like my Uncle Willie” were the sort of insights Reverend Mackervay hoped would slip out of their mouths. Who wouldn't come back to a church where the pastor not only offered redemption but was willing to help fix a leaking roof?

Three times in two days he went out to Liberty's house, trying to coax her into letting the undertakers prepare the body. By the time Chester Hubbert died, coffin making had been given its own special room in the furniture store, and the staff showed respect by a change of aprons. Where formerly the dead had been prepared on their own sheets, now this was the province of practical hands. But Liberty wouldn't let them take Chess out of her house. She had heard stories, she told the reverend: how they cut the dead under their arms and turn them upside down, treating the dead like a hen during slaughter. “We do it the old ways in this house,” she said. “Death doesn't need something extra.” People in town had lied to her about having mothers and uncles prepared. Liberty fought Reverend Mackervay with a calm stare that fixed him to the door while she bit her nails in his presence. She fought him not just for her own sake but for the entire county. So when the reverend said that Mrs. Cecil had been embalmed—hadn't she liked the way the woman looked?—Liberty replied, “That ain't so, at least the family's saying different.” The reverend tried wheedling and then admonishing, but nothing got him or the undertakers past the living room. The argument kept Chess above ground—bloated from lake water, teeth stained with blood, shit and water oozing out of his asshole—until the smell of dank rotting flesh forced Liberty to let the funeral men move the body from the house.

She stood in the doorway while they lifted his body into the back of a truck, frowning, smiling, embarrassed, while Reverend Mackervay stood beside her, fidgeting with his hat. “How bout tomorrow?”

“What about tomorrow?” he said.

“You got him now. Ain't no sense in wasting time.”

“Now, I don't know about that, Sister Liberty. The men they got stuff to do and—well, I ain't had time to prepare something appropriate.” He turned the rim of his hat between his thumb and forefinger. Six feet two inches, Reverend Mackervay stood as high as Liberty's chin, her height casting a dark shadow over him.

“You got the rest of the day and all the night, don't you?”

“You right about that. Sure enough, you right about that. Still, I think tomorrow is too soon. Ain't told a soul the funeral gone be tomorrow.”

“We got Mable; I tell her. But you don't sound like you can deliver.” Violence shimmered beneath her words, even though she looked tired. “You can't deliver, I take him back.”