Mama Stalks the Past (19 page)

Now, Sarah Jenkins looked at Daddy. Her eyes were enlarged behind the rimless bifocals that hung on her bony face. She belched softly. “Raven has been gone away from around here for years now, ever since she finished school.”

Carrie Smalls leaned forward smugly. You could see she was about to disagree with Sarah. “Raven came home for Hannah’s funeral. She stopped by my house and we had a long talk. She’s doing fine, real good now!”

I cleared my throat. “Was she here for Nat’s funeral, too?”

Carrie Smalls shifted in her chair, took one tiny sip of iced tea, then another. “I don’t reckon she came home. Not much of anybody attended
that
funeral.”

Sarah Jenkins glared at her.

The atmosphere would have continued strained, but Mama reached over and patted Carrie’s hand. “I’d like to get in touch with Raven Wescot, talk with her about the property Hannah willed me. After all, now that both Nat
Mixon and Raven’s sister, Betsy Fennell, are dead, Raven is Hannah’s nearest kin, don’t you think?”

Carrie Smalls nodded. “I suppose Raven could be considered a kin, yes.”

“I’m for doing the right thing,” Mama said.

Carrie Smalls hesitated, thinking. “I don’t reckon Raven would mind if I gave you her address.… ”

Mama flashed a smile.

Another silence followed.

“Are there any others of the Wescot family still living in these parts?” I asked.

Carrie Smalls glanced at Mama with a bit of caution, then reached for the bowl of collards. “There are some distant cousins in Darien.”

Mama’s eyebrows raised. “What can you ladies tell us about Hannah’s last husband, Leroy Mixon?”

Sarah Jenkins cleared her throat; her chest rattled. She started coughing.

“You all right?” Daddy asked.

She nodded. “It’s my windpipe,” she said. “It’ll be all right soon as it’s clear.”

We waited.

After a while, Sarah Jenkins continued. “Ain’t much to know about Leroy Mixon. He was a drinking man, mean and—”

I cut in. “I heard he made it a practice to beat Miss Hannah?”

Carrie Smalls gave me a direct look. Her dark eyes were cold, almost piercing. She rested her elbows on the table and waved her fork in the air. “There’s not a man in these three counties who would try to beat up on Hannah Mixon!” she said indignantly.

I took a deep breath and tried hard to keep my voice polite. “I guess I’m wrong. Maybe what I heard was that Leroy Mixon beat up on his
first
wife.”

Annie Mae Gregory nodded. “That’s a fact. People say Leroy killed Stella just so that he could marry Hannah.”

Carrie Smalls nodded, chewing on a buttery piece of corn bread. “I knew Leroy all his life. He
was
mean enough to kill!”

Sarah Jenkins folded her arms across her bony chest. She took a deep breath that sounded like a strangled moan.

I glanced at Mama. She refused to give me eye contact. Daddy snickered.

Annie Mae Gregory spoke, the flesh under her large jaws swaying like autumn leaves in a slight wind. “Stella Gordon was too good for Leroy. If Stella’s Mama and Daddy were living, they’d never have let Leroy court her.”

I sipped from my glass of iced tea and eyed
Mama, who finally slid a look in my direction. She reached for the silver coffee urn at her side, poured coffee into a china cup. “You know,” she said, matter-of-factly, “since Hannah and I were neighbors, I wish that I would have gotten to know her better.”

“Don’t fret about that, Candi,” Annie Mae Gregory said. “Not many people got close to Hannah Mixon. What surprises us, and I reckon it surprises everybody in town, is that she left
you
all of Leroy’s property. The Hannah Mixon I knew was mean enough to try to take it all with her!”

And both Carrie Smalls and Sarah Jenkins nodded.

T
he telephone rang. Sarah Jenkins, Annie Mae Gregory, and Carrie Smalls looked around the table. Mama glanced at her watch, then got up to answer the phone. After a moment, she put her hand over the receiver. Her eyes had filled with tears. “Uncle Chester has had another heart attack. He died on the way to the hospital!”

Three hours later, we sat in Cousin Agatha’s front room. “It happened so quickly,” Agatha kept sobbing. “He was signing his name on the power of attorney when he got his first pain. I suppose I should have taken him to the hospital
right then, but he said not to bother ’cause it stopped hurting him. He started to sign his last name when the second pain hit him. I knew it was bad this time so I bundled him up, put him in the car, and headed for the hospital. He …” Her voice trailed off into a sob.

“It was best the way it happened,” Mama soothed. “He didn’t suffer.”

I wondered if she was thinking of the painful deaths the town of Otis had seen in recent days.

One week later, we buried my great-uncle Chester. The sky was gloomy, the air wintry cold. A few flurries of snow whipped across our faces as we stood in the cemetery.

The drive to the Cypress Creek Baptist church had been short and no one spoke during it. Mama, Daddy, Cliff, and I walked to the front of the church and sat down. The church was built of cinder block; it was bitterly cold inside. Hundreds of people came to the funeral, people from all over the country, as well as the county. The women, in their dark dresses, cried as they walked slowly up the aisle to view Uncle Chester for the last time in the open coffin.

An hour later, when Uncle Chester’s coffin descended into the earth, I couldn’t help but think of how much of his life he’d spent trying to
protect what appeared to be his eternal resting place.

Daddy, dressed in a navy suit, a white shirt, a dark tie with small burgundy comma figures, stood at Mama’s side. Cliff wore a gray European suit that complimented his muscular, dark-complected body. He stood next to me, holding my hand.

After the burial, we went back to Cousin Agatha’s house. The potbellied stove was red, and a long table was full of food, a good portion of which had been cooked by Mama.

Cousin Agatha immediately sank into her chair, obviously tired from the ordeal. A few of Daddy’s other cousins acted as servers so that we could sit around the fire and talk, since funerals are our way of visiting informally.

Sarah Jenkins, Annie Mae Gregory, and Carrie Smalls had already taken their seats. All were eating when Annie Mae Gregory looked at Mama. “Candi,” she said, her mouth full of fried chicken, “I know people are talking about Hannah leaving you all that land but, child, you’re doing good. You ain’t even scared of whoever it is that’s been trying to kill you!”

Everybody suddenly seemed to need to cough. Daddy’s cousin Tishri, the sister of a twin, tried to dilute the impact of Annie Mae Gregory’s statement by asking Daddy’s cousin Gertrude a
question. “How much arsenic
does
it take to kill a person?” Tishri demanded.

I bit my lower lip and watched Mama. But if talking about her brush with death bothered her, she didn’t show it. Gertrude answered Tishri’s question. “Not much,” she said, cheerfully.

Tishri looked around the room. She seemed pleased that everyone’s eyes were on her. “How long does it take before you feel the effects of poison?” she asked, satisfied that she was the center of attention.

Gertrude looked like she had been put on the spot. “I don’t know,” she said, her tone unsure. “I just work at the hospital, I’m not a doctor.”

Tishri now turned to Mama. “What kind of treatment did they give you, Candi?”

“They pumped my stomach,” she replied.

“How did it make you feel?” Tishri asked, her eyes searching Mama’s face.

Mama looked around the snug room filled with relatives, friends, and neighbors, people who eagerly wanted to hear her tell the story. It was the kind of a thing that set nerves on edge, that made you realize how much people like hearing about the evil that happens to other people. “My stomach felt like a knife was slicing through it!” Mama said reluctantly.

I glanced around the room: They waited to hear something more. “The nurses arpund told
me that you were vomiting, and had diarrhea with blood,” Gertrude said, when it was clear that Mama wasn’t going to continue.

Mama nodded. “I was hoping I didn’t have to tell all that.”

We laughed. My mother wasn’t the type you’d imagine throwing up or having diarrhea. It just wasn’t the thing you expected of Candi Covington.

Gertrude’s voice boomed above the laughter. “I remember a story that one of the doctors told me,” she said. “A man was admitted to a hospital complaining of weight loss, severe gastric problems, hair loss, numbness, and skin rash. The doctors ordered test after test, but they all came back negative. They were about to send the man home without knowing what was wrong with him when one doctor overheard nursing students talking. One girl, who read mysteries, jokingly said that the patient’s wife must be poisoning him with arsenic. The doctor wrote the order to test the man’s arsenic levels and was shocked when the test came back positive. The man’s wife
had
been giving him poison every morning in his coffee!”

“You ain’t trying to say that it was James that poisoned Candi, are you?” Sarah Jenkins demanded loudly as eveiyone else laughed.

Whatever emotions Daddy had bottled up
against these women now broke loose. He wasn’t laughing. For a second, watching his face, I actually thought he was going to hit this silly woman. He shook his finger in front of her watery eyes. “Sarah Jenkins, have you lost your mind?”

Mama and I rushed to Daddy’s side. “Now, Daddy, calm yourself. Miss Jenkins didn’t mean that. Did you?” I asked.

“Calm down, James,” Mama added.

Sarah Jenkins shook her head. She was scared. Her face told everybody in the room that if she had ever
thought
James Covington capable of hurting his wife, she was very sorry she’d
said
it.

“Now, James.” Carrie Smalls came to her friend’s assistance. “No sense losing control, you know. Sarah didn’t mean no harm.”

“James,” Mama said. “Carrie is right in what she’s saying.”

But Daddy was livid. “I had better never,
ever
hear anything like that said again!” he shouted.

Sarah Jenkins didn’t say anything, but she was trembling. Carrie Smalls spoke again. “We all know that you’d never do anything to hurt Candi.”

This was the last time I remembered hearing from either Sarah Jenkins, Annie Mae Gregory, or Carrie Smalls that day. To be honest, they
were so uncommonly quiet, I don’t even remember them leaving the house.

Somebody passed around a plate of deviled eggs. I glanced at Mama, who looked at the platter, shook her head, and handed it to the lady next to her.

Right after that, Daddy’s first cousin from Philadelphia, Fred Covington, got to his feet. He cleared his throat loudly. “We might as well have this out here and now,” he declared. “It’s my opinion that land is dirt. The only good it does you is when you’re dead and gone like Uncle Chester. Money is what’s for the living, plain and simple!” Fred looked around at the gathered family and friends, glaring.

Cousin Agatha squirmed in her chair. “If you’re insinuating that we sell the Covington land, Fred, it ain’t going to happen. This land has been in our family since Reconstruction. And it’ll stay with us until Christ comes again!”

Fred waved his hand dismissively. “What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense,” he insisted.

Cousin Agatha spoke again. “Our people worked hard for this land, did without things they needed, suffered so that we could have it.” Her voice trembled with emotion. Fred tried to cut her off, but she didn’t stop talking until she
had finished her speech. “As long as I live, it won’t be sold!”

“Suffered for what? So you could have
this
?” Fred roared, pointing around the room. His eyes bulged. “Floors that are wooden, walls that are plywood that’s been stained mahogany, chairs that will give you splinters if you sit too fast, a table with one of the four legs shorter than the rest?”

Daddy stood up, anger still in his voice. “Take it easy, no need talking about this place like that. As long as Agatha is comfortable …”