The Last Odd Day (9 page)

In the late spring it yields great clusters of milky white flowers. In summer it is full and fernlike, providing restful shade. In the fall, when the other trees turn and fade, the leaves of the mountain ash stay red and yellow and the branches drip with red berries, supplying birds with food. In winter, while other trees are barren and unwelcoming, the berries remain, a resource that is dependable and abundant.

European mountain ash is the most widespread of this variety in the United States. For more than a century it has been rooted and maintained across North America. It was one of Thomas Jefferson's favorite trees, evidenced by the large numbers of them planted in his garden at
Monticello; and it was my grandmother's favorite tree. Near the reservation, we were surrounded by them.

The old folks called the tree witchwood because it was said that the burning of the bark and limbs could be used to exorcise witches or rid a place of spirits. When Mama and Daddy died, an uncle from my mother's side left a small stack of twigs outside the front door for me to burn and send away my family's ghosts. But I knew what the sticks were, and I didn't light them.

My grandmother used to pick the berries and make tea that we drank for an upset stomach and to prevent colds in the winter. I loved the mountain ash; and O.T. knew it. That was, after all, the tree in his picture. Of course he would have planted one near the grave of our daughter. Of course he would have kept it strong and healthy. Of course he would have taken care of my baby's resting place.

I pointed out to Lilly where she was, and slowly we walked together. I felt the weight of the sun on my neck, the pull of my heart to return to the car, and the silence of my new stepdaughter as together we marched up the hill to a place I had long pretended did not exist.

I do not know what I thought they did with Emma's body. I guess I figured they just destroyed it in some way, burned it or threw it out. I thought if they called it fetal demise, they just ridded themselves of it in some orderly
fashion as if it were only a diseased organ or amputated limb.

I never considered the idea that O.T. would have made arrangements with the hospital staff, with a funeral home, and with a cemetery to care for our dead baby. I never thought he would have done such a thing, tender and careful. I just did not expect he could have known.

I stopped for a second before we got to the grave, to gather myself, I suppose. I felt a wave of fear, a rush or dread; and I reached out my hand to hold Lilly's. She took it, and together we walked the last few yards.

It was a small heavy stone, chipped, old but sturdy, with a statue of an angel sitting on top and an etching of a small flower in each corner. “Emma Lovella Witherspoon,” it read. “Born and Died November 11, 1959. Loved and adored by both Mother and Father.”

I touched the marker, drawing my finger inside each groove and line that spelled out my daughter's name. I felt the angel, the tiny petals of the flowers, the rough edge at the top, the smooth corners at the bottom. I dropped to my knees and felt the earth, cold and unyielding, that had buried and held my child.

I stayed that way for a while, kneeling at the grave, just as I had at the ocean when I decided to let her go. Lilly remained there behind me. She didn't shift from side to side, clear her throat, or even reach for me. She just
stood there, quiet and undemanding, letting me have the silence and the sun for as long as I needed it. When I finally felt ready, I got up, walked over to the mountain ash, pinched off a small limb, and laid it at the foot of the grave.

I stood back as if the prayer of benediction had been said, marking it as time to go, turned, and walked to the car. Lilly waited and then followed. And as she came striding toward me, the perfect reincarnation of my husband, I shook my head, realizing how my entire life had been weighted and balanced by death.

“What's it like being pregnant?” a young girl at the mill asked me as she watched me stop in the middle of my sewing and rub my stomach.

She was no more than sixteen, somebody's daughter sent into town to make a little money for her family living on the farm. The mill was full of girls like her, who never left home but were sent away, learning now about life from conversations with older, wiser women, discovering the world from the inside of a too-hot-in-summer, too-cold-in-winter warehouse where we made and boxed fancy underwear for rich ladies who could afford the finest in lingerie.

All the mill women dreamed of how it must be to wear fancy underwear, to have stacks of such lacy, silky things lining our drawers. We sewed while we fantasized about the good life, the life we had accepted would never be ours.

We wore the rejects, the mistakes that were left in a large bin near the lunchroom for anyone to go through and find what they could. We took them home and fixed them, knowing that to use company time to work on the irregulars was grounds for being fired. We took them home, satisfied that we had all that we needed, grateful that even though we made luxurious things we'd never wear, at least we had a job, at least we were off the farm and managing things for ourselves.

Wanda, the young girl who asked me about being pregnant, was not a good worker. She was slow to learn the machines, always late with her work, more interested in the women around her than in meeting her quota or filling the boxes. She was forever away from her machine, standing behind someone else, asking something about how the rest of us lived.

“Doesn't feel too good right now,” I answered her, trying to rub away the low ache of skin stretching farther and tighter than it was meant to go. “My back hurts; my feet are so swelled I can't wear any shoes but slippers. There's indigestion and this high-strung baby kicking me
in the ribs.” I poured out a long breath. “And I'm so tired I feel like, if she'd just lay quiet with me, I could sleep all day and all night long.”

I leaned over and stuffed the completed batch of underwear I had finished into the empty carton at my side.

Wanda came closer to me, peeked around to make sure no one was listening to her; and then she whispered, like what she was saying was too dangerous to be spoken out loud. “My sister said it was like being God.”

She stopped. Her eyes darted from left to right. “But you ain't supposed to say that,” she added, shaking her head. “My mama hear somebody say something like that, and she'd fly after them with a broom.”

“Why?” I asked, noticing the time on the clock. I was getting hungry and hoping it was time for dinner.

“Sacrilege,” she answered. “Can't nobody claim to feel like God.” Her voice was clipped, sullen, a child in confession.

She waited. “You feel like God?” she asked.

I shrugged my shoulders and pulled out another stack of unfinished panties. “I don't know,” I said.

I thought about what she was asking. “I feel like I'm part of something like a miracle, something that pulls every part of me into it—my spirit, my blood, my dreams. That the pieces of who I am are being drawn into
this life growing inside me. That I'm being multiplied and divided into somebody else.”

Then I stopped what I was doing and considered God at the beginning of the world. I thought about how it might have been, the loneliness at first, the powerless echo of one single voice, the desire to share what was imagined and dreamed, the appetite and ache of a heavenly heart.

I wondered if creation started with an inkling, a feeling, that eventually developed into a choice that God made. The choice of pulling God's own self into winding rivers and flashing stars and small glossy leaves.

I thought about the notion of color, a wish for magenta and sapphire blue, pale pink and deep, deep brown. And how God then breathed out marigolds and black-eyed Susans and plush green carpets of rye grass, the exploding laughter of God's beaming yellow sun. Rich black plums, tiny red berries, and ripe golden peaches. Trees and flowers and long, curled, white blooming vines.

I imagined that at first there was an idea and then there was a reality, a hope and then the unfolding, a “why not?” and then a “yes,” all streaming from the fingers and eyes and marrow of God.

The spinning planets, the emerald seas, the wide, wide spread of purple fields and long lovely meadows. All
of earth and sky and watery depths, all of light and darkness and life. Mountain and sand, valley and stream, marbled stone and ice-capped peaks, all from the dancing and delighted bones of God.

Then, in the gathering of the colors, the whirling moons and stars and planets, God looked around at all this creation, all this space filled with possibility, bounty, and without limits; and God desired, for creatures, beings like Godself to roam and honor and celebrate the world carved from the Creator's own imagination. So God gave birth.

Like a woman pushing and groaning and delivering of herself, God gave birth. A flood of water breaking forth into creeping, crawling life. God gave birth to lions and beetles and pelicans and mice. To sleek graceful horses and soaring fearless eagles. To amoebae and insects and frogs and worms and snakes and fish. God brought forth them all, in joy, in zealous expectation. God brought forth them all, out from God's own great and mysterious and fertile womb.

And when the world was round and brimming with all the animals of the one host, alive and thankful, exploring and explored, God still thought that there was need of one creature more.

God decided, God chose: “Just one more image of myself.” And there in the final hour of creating, expectant
and full of faith, God knelt upon the newborn earth and breathed a deep and hopeful and lusty breath; and out from the great womb we came, male and female, separate and same, marching, calling and called; out of the hope and heart and soul and dream of God, we came. Children, infants of heaven, we came.

I turned to the young teenage girl who asked what this inexplicable gift to me was like, and I took her hand and let her feel the baby rumbling inside my belly.

Her eyes were big as plates as she felt the life stirring within me; and she smiled and pulled her hand away.

“My sister was right, miss.” She nodded her head and stepped away from me as if I had made magic. “It's just like being God.”

And I laughed and went back to work, at ease and at one with myself and my full, leaping womb, divine.

“Do you think I shouldn't have come?” Lilly was dipping out the ice cream to put on the apple pie I had made for our afternoon together.

Maude turned toward me, distressed. She pulled at her blouse, pushed her hair behind her ears, her face a bright shade of red. “Oh my, I think I left the stove on at the house.” She got up and headed out the door before I could say anything to convince her it was all right for her to stay.

The door slammed behind her.

“What was that about?” Lilly stuck the spoon in her mouth, pulling it out slowly.

“You know Maude.” I took a bite of my pie. “Crazy as a bat.”

The apples were tart, Granny Smiths, not like the ones from around home, not like the mountain apples.

“Well, what do you think?” She stared at me with those familiar eyes.

“Does it matter what I think?” I pushed a napkin toward her plate, wondering why she asked me such a question.

“I'm not sure it did when I came, but now I'm curious. What do you think of me showing up just before your husband died?”

I put down my fork and I paused. I thought how Emma would be almost Lilly's age. How she and I might have sat together at the table like this, talking about her father, the neighbor, or what I think about something, eating pie too close to dinner time. How she might have been similar to Lilly, similar to me.

I enjoy having Lilly come by these days. It's usually only once every couple of weeks. It's never strained, feels like she belongs, relaxed and comfortable. She's thinking about going to the university nearby, so she drops by after she's had an interview or a tour or taken a look at apartments in the area.

She spent the night once, slept in the guest room. And I liked it. I like having her call and drop by. I like our con
versations about the mountains and restaurants, gardens and children, the thought of even going to Italy together.

I'm sure lots of people consider the fact that I have a relationship, a meaningful relationship, with the daughter of my husband and his lover as pathological, that I was in need of finding my dead daughter and that she was searching for her missing father, her recently deceased mother, that we're both sick and desperate for a fix. But it doesn't feel that way, doesn't seem to be clinging or unnatural. And since no one can really know or understand all the layers of another person's life, why would I care what anybody else thinks anyway?

It was only difficult, strange, in the beginning when she called, when I heard she was visiting O.T., when I first had to face what it meant. Once I met her, once I had sorted through my marriage, sorted through my grief, my life, once it fit who she was and how she knew us, it was uncomplicated.

When she first walked up, it was shocking, awkward. With their physical similarities, she and my husband were related somehow, I knew, and then once I understood who she was, I realized that she was not only related but of him, a part of him. After I got over that, it just seemed like meeting a friend of a friend or finding someone who had come from the same hometown. Once I got through the surprise of hearing who she was, we settled in together,
into some kind of relationship I'm not sure can be cleanly defined.

“You had every right to come,” I said, wiping my mouth.

“I didn't ask you if I had a right,” she responded quickly and then took a sip of coffee. “I asked you if you think I shouldn't have come.” She was not letting it go.

I took a sip too, put down my cup, and placed both of my hands on the table.

“Lilly, you are a result of my husband's love. You are warm and kind, a woman who is a joy to be around. You and O.T. would have—” I stopped, not knowing how to say it. Then I made myself clear. “I am only sorry that you did not come sooner.”

I took in a breath and ate some more of my pie. She faced me, smiled, and turned away.

“Maybe you won't want to hear this,” she said shyly, “but you remind me of my mother.”

I sat with her appraisal, her idea that these two women, connected by a man, her father, were somehow alike, somehow made from the same cloth. I let the words, the possibility, sift through the feelings and the memories that I had only recently allowed to surface, and I found that I was not offended or upset.

It would make sense that O.T. had found two comparable women to love. One when he was young and unbri
dled, the other when he was chained up, old inside. The idea that I bore some resemblance to the second woman my husband had cared for did not leave me bewildered or displeased. It was the same as having Lilly in my life, another wrinkle smoothed down.

“Do you think it's odd?” she asked.

“You mean about us or about O.T. and your mother?”

She shrugged her shoulders like she didn't know and ate another bite. “Everything, I guess.” Then there was a pause. “What's it like for you?”

I wondered at her questions, if she really wanted to know what I thought or if she was just trying to find more proof that I was okay with her, that her coming didn't in some way break me or lessen my life with O.T.

“There's a lot,” I replied, deciding how to tell her what place I had come to with all these things I now knew. I wasn't sure she would want to hear everything—how it was at first, the slight but sudden punch of betrayal, the struggle with anger and guilt, the immediate but then quickly released response of bitterness. I thought about her question and then answered as carefully as I could.

“My grandmother, my mother's mother,” I added, “was a Navajo woman who married a Cherokee. Her name was Thelma Whitebead, but we often called her
Grandma Cedar because she was strong and red like bark.” I remembered how my mother had given her that name. As a child I had thought it was a perfect description of her. “When I was little she told me the story of the Spider Woman and how the Navajo women learned to weave.”

I sat at my kitchen table and recalled the face of my grandmother when she told me this story. Her eyes narrowed, the lines around her mouth stiffened. She talked slower, her words like beats of a drum. She spoke as if the thing she was saying was the most important thing I would ever hear.

I turned to my husband's daughter, fully, and in the voice of my dead grandmother told her the tale from my childhood.

“There was a little girl who came upon a small hole in the ground as she was walking through the woods. As she peeked into the hole there was smoke rising from within. She moved closer. And when she examined what was inside, she saw an old woman weaving strands of thread with a wooden stick. She watched her and then asked her what she was doing. The woman replied that she was weaving a blanket.”

Lilly was attentive, still.

“For three days the young girl stayed with the old woman and learned how to weave different designs into
blankets. With each stitch, she followed the weaver's instructions, copied her, until she was able to make the same lovely blankets that the old woman was making.

“When the little girl had learned all that she needed to learn, the old woman said to her, ‘Child, there is one warning I must give you, and you must pass this along to all those who weave these designs. Whenever you sew a blanket, you must make sure that you leave a hole in the middle. For if you do not, all of your weaving thoughts will be trapped in the stitches and will stay inside.'”

I remembered how my grandmother stretched her hands wide and slid her crooked fingers in and out of each other as she ended the storytelling.

I continued. “‘It will not only bring you bad luck,' the old woman said, ‘it will also make you crazy.' So when the little girl returned to her village and taught the others how to weave, she always remembered to share the old woman's warning. From that day on, my grandmother recounted, the Navajo leave a tiny hole in the middle of their blankets in obedience to the old Spider Woman's counsel.”

Lilly nodded like she understood, but I knew I needed to explain.

“Since before I ever met O.T., your father,” I said with respect, “I have been weaving a blanket, making my life. I am white and Cherokee, the child of a blind man
and a sorrowing woman, the daughter of mountain people. All of this woven in me.” I leaned closer to Lilly.

“I am the only child of my parents who lived. Three children, and I am the only one who survived. All of my family died before I was old enough to understand what it meant to be left alone. And I was so lonesome, so completely by myself, I even begged their spirits to stay with me.” I sat back and remembered the house of my childhood, wondered if it was still full of the ghosts.

“And all that death and the loneliness was pulled like strands of cotton hard and taut into my heart.”

I sat forward, resting my arms on the table.

“Even and especially when I could not have a child and then finally had one and she was born dead, I yanked and sewed and made this life of over seventy years.”

I paused, now understanding what I had not for more than six decades.

“In all that time, in all that weaving, I did not leave a place for my pain to get out. I did not leave a hole like the old woman had said, like my grandmother had warned.”

I stopped for a moment, to recollect, to make sure I was saying it just right, to make sure I was understanding this for myself.

“Only once,” I continued, recalling that night at the ocean, “did I ever let what I felt be released from me; only once did the seams that I had so carefully stitched
together get pulled apart. And that happened only because I knew that if they didn't, I would fold up inside myself, smothering under the weight of such sorrow.” I took a breath, that winter night at the beach a long, unforgotten moment in my life.

“Only once did I let the fear and the anger and the resentment and the sadness spill out of me. And even after I did that, I quickly sewed up the rip that had frayed and kept those feelings, that disappointment and grief, from ever slipping out again.”

I stopped. I opened like a flower.

“My life has been so tight, so ordered and neatly sewn, that there was no room for O.T. to find what he needed. I shut him out. And I think that even though he was not loose with his emotions either, not one to deal with or talk about the things that burden a man, I think that somehow the love and the width of your mother's heart freed him, warmed him, eased him in a way that I could not.”

I thought about O.T. and how painful it must have been for him to leave Clara. After Emma died and he came home, he was never the same again. He was a man engulfed in guilt, prepared to be punished because he believed that he was the cause of our daughter's death, that he alone, because of his infidelity, had stolen the breath of the baby his wife had wanted more than anything and then lost.

Surely, O.T. returned thinking that what he had done by loving another woman had produced seeds of evil, one single seed of disease that passed from him into our baby's heart, eventually spreading, multiplying itself into death. So that, because of his guilt, because of his lack of redemption, he put aside any thoughts of true love and replaced them with the regimen of devotion to the one to whom he was promised, the one he had so deeply invaded and wounded. He came home, extracted his need for attention, his desire for passion, and narrowed the size of his heart.

After Emma died, he stayed close to the farm, sending others to sales and fairs, and never allowed himself the pleasure of remembering how it had felt to be adored. All of what he had known from his two years with Clara, all of the little things he could not share with anyone but her, all of the simple silence and the romance and the deep, deep way he could sleep only next to her, he wrapped and packaged and put away. And he never again tampered with or peeked into the slender sleeve of love he had only briefly known.

I drew in another breath, waving off more thoughts of O.T. and how he suffered, and finished answering Lilly's question.

“So how am I doing with all of this? You want to know. What am I thinking?” I closed my eyes to consider
the question more clearly, to make sure I was being as honest as I could be. I opened them and answered her as truthfully as I was able.

“I am trying to make a hole in my blanket, trying to unhook the deeply made stitches, sew them together again around an opening that lets my heart release its contents. A hole, not a tear, not a rip or forced split this time. An intentional and purposely placed loop that pulls out all the pain and joy and fear and sadness and keeps it from being locked and hidden in tight hems ever again.”

I paused.

“People look at me, my lack of anger at O.T. for having an affair, you and me, our friendship, and they may think it is odd or strange in some way. But that's not what is strange. Our relationship, my reaction—these things are not what is so out of the ordinary.” I slid aside my cup of coffee.

“What is strange, what has been strange, is that with everything that has happened to me, the deaths, the loneliness, the hard choices, all of it, the oddest thing of it all is that I thought I could lock it away, put it out of reach, protect myself, and never deal with any of it. And that somehow as long as I didn't share it with anyone else, it would be forever harmless to me and everyone around me.”

I reached my hands across the table toward Lilly.

“Your coming has opened me in a way I had not expected. And I don't understand it; it's you and it's not you. I can't explain it. But for whatever reason, your being here has allowed me, some might say forced me, but regardless, it has let me walk again across the paths of my life and see who I have become, feel what has happened to me, understand who I am.”

Rays of late afternoon sun flooded through the window, and I suddenly felt warmed.

“You have done what my parents, my siblings, my grandmother, my daughter, their spirits, my husband were never fully able to do. You let me remember and feel the deep and burdened things that have been inside me, cluttered and undisturbed for most of my life. You let me remember and feel them, and then you let me see that I would not die because of it. You have helped me grieve all the death that has always surrounded me. You have brought me permission to be in touch with my heart.”