Tina Mcelroy Ansa (33 page)

Magic happened all the time when they were out together. If it started to rain while they were out walking down by the river, there would seem to be a bubble around them as they raced back toward the house. One minute it was dry and breezy inside the bubble. The next minute it stopped raining outside and only rained inside the bubble. And they’d arrive home dripping wet and refreshed.

The first time Lena and Herman swam together outside, it was in the waters of Cleer Flo’. They had headed to the river one morning to see what had washed ashore during the stormy night, but when they saw the clear inviting waters rushing past the deck, Herman had suggested, “Let’s go for a dip, Lena.”

Both strong swimmers, they shed their clothes right there and dove into the green pristine waters of the Ocawatchee squealing like children. The river was full of life. And each time Lena or Herman brushed past a fish or a toad or a tadpole or a crawfish, it sent off electric sparks like an eel, and Lena felt like something from a science-fiction novel.

But Herman did not win Lena over with magic or the manipulation of science. He eased into her heart and took her over with real old-time love and attention.

He slid into her heart so smoothly, so seamlessly, that before she knew it he was truly her man.

Lena didn’t know when it actually happened. She knew it didn’t really happen overnight, but that was the way it felt. It was just that Herman and the day they had planned or didn’t have planned opened up to them like a woodland amusement park each morning. There were horses and a swimming pool and woods to explore. There was a river to fish in and gardens to work. There was a flat-bottom boat to snake up into secluded estuaries. Herman was a lot more seductive than her duties in Mulberry. And Lena just didn’t seem to have time for her old routine.

At first, when one of Lena’s customers or friends or acquaintances called or showed up at her door needing, practically demanding, some help or intervention, Lena did what she had always done and rose to the occasion. She would rush to the phone or dash out the door with a big pretty peach-colored wool melton shawl trailing behind her and catch a glimpse of Herman out the corner of her eye. He would be stretched out in front of the fireplace with his big sock feet crossed on the table, his drugstore reading glasses low on his nose, a couple of books on the floor, a gooseneck lamp over his shoulder, and she’d immediately regret her decision.

“Shoot,” she’d say under her breath as she raced to help the latest caller out of a scrape, “I could be laying up here with Herman.” And to make it worse, she would recall the feel of his coarse chest hairs brushing across the tips of her breasts when they made love face-to-face.

So more and more, Lena found herself setting some new previously unheard-of limits. Herman showed up in April and by the end of May, she refused to leave home for any reason before daylight in the morning. By the end of June, she would not let anyone draw her out of the house after dark, “unless it’s a dire emergency,” she told Herman.

Lena tried her best to stop doing so much of the work herself. She discovered that without her at the helm twenty-four hours a day, her money, holdings and power kept right on working.

She continued her “hush mouth” work because she enjoyed giving. And as Gloria would have said, “Ain’t no need to rock the boat right ’long through here.” Lena continued signing checks and ordering gifts from catalogs. But more and more, she found herself asking’ Precious or one of the other assistants at Candace to screen her messages and mail and keep her apprised of important dates and events in the lives of her people.

And she continued sending out blessings to people and households in Mulberry even if she didn’t drive past them every day anymore. Lena even heard herself say to a caller, “You know, it’s you that your father wants to see at his final moment, not me. He probably doesn’t even remember who I am. All you have to do is forgive him and let him forgive you.”

Herman would hear her up on the deck talking on the phone.

“Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. Uh-huh. Of course, I understand how you must feel. Uh-huh. Of course, of course. Uh-huh.

“But I’m still going to have to say I can’t do it this time,” she persisted, looking out at Herman swinging in the hammock. “I’ve made another commitment.

“Your father just wants to talk to you. It’ll be okay. I’ll pray for all ya’ll.”

Then, she would come outside and slide into her space under Herman’s right shoulder.

“You know, Lena, Miss Cora—who taught me to read out the Bible after I was grown—Miss Cora say the Lord don’t want no sacrificed victims or no burned offerin’s. He want yo’ mercy and forgiveness fo’ each other and yo’ willin’ness to he’p each other out.

“Lena, you he’p a whole heap a’ folks out all the time. Doin’ all kinds a’ thangs. You ain’t got to sacrifice
yo’se’f
, too. You ain’t
got
to do nothin’, baby. We used t’ say back in my day, ’All I gotta do is stay black and die.’ And that’s all
you gotta do.
Stay black and die.”

But even when she had done all she could without sacrificing her days and nights to good works, Herman still found her looking off into space with that worried look around her pretty mouth. He’d tell her: “Lena, baby, don’t worry ’bout the mule goin’ blind. Just hold him in the road.” And Lena would have to laugh because she did a lot of worrying about the mule going blind.

He got her laughing most mornings when he awakened her in her bed now that she slept soundly through the night. She could feel the weight of his body on the edge of her wide bentwood handmade bed waken her and she couldn’t help it. Before she even opened her eyes in the morning, she would realize Herman was sitting beside her, waiting for her, and she’d awake with a big smile plastered all over her face.

Some mornings, especially as they came up on the nearly hot days of early summer, he woke her with song.

Lena would lie in bed—a luxury she had never allowed herself—and listen to the sound of Herman’s rich old-timey—sounding baritone.

Sound like he ought to be singing “Ole Man River,” Lena lay in her bed that smelled like her man and thought with a smile. Then, she laughed out loud when Herman launched into the tune from
Show Boat.

God, he made her happy.

But if she didn’t feel like laughing first thing in the morning, he would sense it and respect that feeling, too. On those days, Lena awoke to the sensation of being nuzzled by smoke, by mist.

She didn’t dwell on the fact that Herman was a ghost who appeared
and disappeared like dew in the morning. He was so full of life, it spilled out all over him and Lena.

“Hey, Lena, come look what I found in the barn!” “Hey, Lena, baby, let’s go see if the fish bitin’.” “Hey, Lena, hey, Lena, Lena, baby, put on yo’ boots and come here a minute.”

He called her all the time. And she never tired of hearing him speak her name. “Hey, Lena. Hey, Lena, baby. Hey, Lena, come see this big old blue boulder I found waaaayyy down the riverbank. We can jump in the river off it. Lay on it naked in the sun. Hey, come see. Baby.”

“Lena, Lena, hey, Lena, baby,” he’d call urgently from out on the deck. And he would point to the sky with wonder at a flock of long-legged wood storks in from the coast. “Look a’ yonder.”

It was difficult for her to talk on the phone, let alone conduct any kind of business in person, with him calling her name all the time. It was just a whisper in her ear, but it was a summons all the same.

His “calls” to her during meetings and visits and errands and conversations roused her to the point where she couldn’t do anything but drop what she was doing and answer him.

He was the familiar breeze that intruded on her business. He was the waves of heat that made her fan like one of the ladies at church and made her want to drop her clothes right there in the bank. He was the frog in her throat that prevented her from accepting the Business-person of the Year award held at the new Dupree Hotel.

Some days he’d call her on the phone at the Candace offices. When she placed the phone to her ear, Herman would blow into it, sending a swirl of his breath down the tunnel of her ear canal, leaving her breathless. Sometimes he was the short in the electrical system that plunged the windowless center rooms into darkness and threw out the whole computer system for the week. So
everybody
had to go home.

The few times she tried to ignore the calls and continue with the business at hand, he would start
messing
with her. No one else in the
business meeting seemed to notice the gentle breeze that suddenly stirred up one of Lena’s giggles. It would lift the braids from her neck ever so slightly and brush across the short curly hairs of her kitchen. It coiled itself around her leg like a vine and spiraled up her leg in tiny teasing tendrils.

She could ignore Herman’s calls, but she couldn’t ignore his touches.

“Ms. McPherson, am I doing something amusing?” Mr. Potter at the bank asked one morning. It was soon after Herman had arrived, and Lena was squirming and giggling in her seat.

She had meant to regain her composure, sternly rebuke Herman in her head for interrupting a meeting that might lead to a home and good credit for one of her mother’s friends’ daughter and husband, and return to the meeting to finish up business. But Herman slipped up under her dress and inside her pink-flowered silk panties, making her grab the arms of the big oxblood leather chair and guffaw right out loud in the old banker’s face. The sudden laughter sounded like something that Sister used to do in college and still did if something struck her funny enough.

Mr. Potter, whom Lena noticed for the first time had a bald head that was shaped just like an egg, large end up, laughed a little, too, just to make things a bit more comfortable in the glass-enclosed bank office with the understated gray and maroon drapes pulled discreetly around for the private business of finance.

“Oh, I
did
say something amusing, didn’t I?” he said.

The breeze wiggled under her deep-rose satin bra that Herman liked so much and pushed one of the wide straps off her shoulder, tickling her there. And the meeting, for all practical purposes, was over. As Gloria used to say when recounting some story of sexual mischief to Lena when she was a girl, “Sugar, church was out!!!”

When Lena got to her car, Herman was sitting up in there in the passenger’s seat dressed in a new cotton shirt and jeans she had bought for him, right proud of himself. She tried to be furious with him.

“Herman! How could you do that to me in there?” she spoke to what appeared to be the interior of the car even before she looked around to make sure no one was nearby watching.

“Good God, Lena, ain’t you
glad
t’ be out a’ there!??”

“Stop it, now, Herman. You trying to make it seem like you were doing me a favor.”

“Wasn’t I?”

“No, you were doing yourself a favor. You just want somebody to rip and run with. You just want me to go out playing with you.” “Uh-huh,” Herman readily agreed.

“So, you admit you were just looking out for yourself. Not me?”

“It’s the same thang, baby.”

“Herman, that was an
important
meeting!” Lena knew he had to know what was going on in there.

“You just holdin’ up the weight of the world, huh, Lena?” Herman said. “Lena, baby, those people ain’t in yo’ hands. They in God’s hands. And you ain’t God.”

He didn’t say it harshly or even judgmentally. Herman just stated a fact as he saw it. He thought it was something that Lena already knew. But he immediately regretted saying anything.

Lena wanted to be angry to cover her hurt feelings, but when they got to the next corner, she had to slam on the brakes to keep from ramming into the side of another car moving legally into the intersection. Herman didn’t miss a beat as Lena was thrown a bit against the steering wheel of the car, straining her seat belt. He reached out his strong solid arm across her breasts, clutched her forearm and held her safe from impact.

“Hold the baby,” he said and smiled at her as the car rocked to a standstill. Lena grabbed her chest. And her arm crossed his.

Herman had sounded just like her mother, her father, her grandmother, her brothers and everyone else who had ever loved her all rolled up in one when he said that. When she was little, riding the hump in the middle of the front seat of the green family woodie, her
family always made sure that her pretty little face would not ram into the big wide dashboard of the station wagon. Whenever the car came to a sudden stop, somebody in the car would reach across her with a protective arm and flat hand pressed against her tiny chest and say, “Hold the baby.”

Herman’s gesture evoked all the love and protection she had felt as the baby of the family and reminded her just why she loved this man. She had to struggle to remember just what she had been so furious with him about in the first place. And by the time they got home, she and Herman were laughing and playing together.

As his sabotaging tactics escalated with the coming of summer, Herman felt he had to explain to Lena how he felt.

“Baby, it ain’t that I ain’t got enough t’ do to fill my time while you away. It’s just that ya missin’ out on so much stuck in those meetin’s and speakin’ lunches and ’do good’ visits of yo’s. I want you here wid me. I can’t deny that. I can’t he’p it.”

It wasn’t that Herman was always up under her. He had slipped quite happily and unobtrusively into life at her house by the river—at his own pace and seemingly with his own agenda. Sometimes, Lena would have to go look for
him.
She’d find him busy over some project like building a new trellis off the bedroom deck for her Grandmama’s moonflowers or repairing a loose board on the deck steps. Or sometimes, he’d be taking a dip in the waters of the Ocawatchee.

“Hey, Lena, baby, you miss me?” He didn’t give her a chance to be coy. “Hey, Lena, baby, you miss me?” Just like that. He allowed her little or no guile.