Tina Mcelroy Ansa (37 page)

Herman had brought back that sense of reverence to her dining room table out by the river.

Other than feeble attempts at romantic dinners, no one had sat around her big oak dining room table after she moved to her own house. No one, that is, until Herman brought his big-eating self into her life.

Herman brought a sense of reverence back to her kitchen, too.

He wasn’t much of a cook himself. He could “scratch around” okay in the kitchen enough to fill his stomach, “in a fashion,” he said. And he
could make
some of the lightest, fluffiest, big old buttermilk biscuits that they sopped for breakfast and snacks, although he’d end up with flour all down his shirt and splashes of buttermilk on his forearms where he had rolled up his sleeves. Herman called the biscuits “catheads” and the molasses he called “mule blood.” But really cook?

“Shoot,” he said admiringly, “cookin’? Now, that’s a
real
skill. That’s what you got, baby. Now, you can
really cook.”

It made her proud.

Whenever Lena wanted to tease him about his appetite and her cooking, she’d pat his flat hard stomach or pinch his beautiful black behind, and say, “Herman, don’t you think you getting a little thick through the waist? Maybe I need to cut back on the corn. You look almost plump!”

Herman always had a comeback for her:

“I ain’t fat,” he’d say, “I’m tall. That’s all.”

It was part of some old song, long forgotten by everyone but Herman.

“I ain’t fat, I’m tall. That’s all.”

“W
e’ll eat as soon as the dressing get done,” Lena had heard her mother say hundreds of times when Lena, Edward, Raymond and Jonah would stroll from the living room through the kitchen and back asking if there was something they could do to hurry dinner along.

“We’ll eat as soon as the dressing get done,” Nellie would say without bothering to look up from the Sunday paper she was reading. The corn bread dressing she made with her own egg bread, Colonial sliced white bread, onions, bell peppers, celery and stock from the cooked hen to keep the dressing moist during baking. Lena pronounced the last two words just as Nellie had, “get ’un.”

“Don’t look like that dressing gone
ever get
’un,” little Lena would say under her breath to her two brothers. And Lena
knew
how to fix dressing.

“First, you have to make a good-sized pan of corn bread,” Nellie had instructed her one Sunday afternoon as she prepared the dressing
for dinner. “But this isn’t just corn bread. You know that, don’t you, baby?”

“Uh-huh,” Lena had answered, proud that she knew the difference between regular corn bread—which could be as simple as cornmeal, salt and warm water poured into a hot greasy skillet and fried on both sides in a cake—and what her mother termed “egg bread” that called for buttermilk, cornmeal, flour, eggs, a little sugar, a little salt.

Nellie would, of course, make it without a recipe. Nellie didn’t write down any recipes, nor did she follow them. She disdained them.

“Try this, Nellie,” Jonah would suggest, handing his wife a recipe he had found in a magazine or on a hotel menu.

She would take it as if it had come from Typhoid Mary. Holding it between her index finger and her thumb, she’d look at the recipe as if it were written in Venusian, and she didn’t read the language. Wrinkling up her pretty nose in distaste, Nellie would finally ditch the recipe and prepare the dish using her own instincts.

“Now, I know that lobster thermidor we had in Cincinnati had paprika in it. Hummm. How much?” She’d tinker with it and tinker with it until it tasted better than it had in the restaurant.

“I’m sorry,” she would say at the family dinner table in response to the compliments on her dish, “but it’s not according to the
recipe.
I’m sorry, I just can’t follow a
recipe.”

Then, she’d give a helpless little shrug. What she meant was she
refused
to follow a recipe.

Whenever Lena had asked her mother how to make this or how to make that, the answer always began with, “Give me a moment.” Then, she would blow through her clenched teeth and narrow her eyes in concentration as if she had never given the preparation a conscious thought. She’d start with “a handful of this” and “a smidgen of that” and “juuusssssttt a pinch” of the other and Lena would be more lost than found. So, with Nellie gone, Lena just closed her conscious mind’s eye and combined what she thought and remembered was correct. And most times, it worked.

One summer Sunday, Lena had prepared the dressing just the way she had seen her mother do countless times, when Herman came into the kitchen, smelling the air and looking at her, then smelling the air again. The golden-brown hen with a red and white dish towel over it sat warm and plump on the butcher-block-topped island with shelves of old blue and cream country crockery below.

Lena didn’t even look up from the Sunday crossword puzzle she was doing, but she did smile at her hungry, voracious lover.

“We’ll eat as soon as the dressing get ’un,” Lena heard her mother’s words come from her own mouth. She had never had anyone around her big country kitchen sniffing the air when she made dressing until Herman showed up with his ravenous appetites and love of her cooking.

At the sound of her own voice speaking her mother’s words—“We’ll eat as soon as the dressing get ’un”—she could for a brief time taste tears in her throat. And for the millionth time in less than half a year, she put her knees to the floor right there and gave thanks that Herman could read her mind and know to walk out on the deck and leave her still for a minute.

If Herman thought too much time had gone by without him tasting his own woman’s food, he would ask, “But, Lena, when
you
gon’ cook some?” It was all he had to say. Lena was a good cook and proud to cook for him, proud that she could sate his appetite. It gave her prodigious pleasure.

Lena even made a rare trip into town to her mother’s pantry off the big kitchen in the Forest Avenue house to get the family’s old hand-cranked ice cream churn. The peaches from Fort Valley were about to come in, and they both wanted some homemade peach ice cream. She had a small electric churn from Sweden that she had used once five or six years before to make sorbet when she had attempted a romantic dinner with a newly divorced physician in town. But Herman said he thought the ice cream would taste “off” made in that one.

Lena still remembered the rich creamy dessert her mother had
made every week of each summer of their lives thick with peachy threads of fruit swirling throughout. She recalled her brothers fighting over the dasher covered with ice cream, falling down on the floor and rolling around in a double stranglehold while the ice cream melted onto the white china plate. Raymond usually won the fight simply because he truly loved ice cream more than Edward. He also had a good foot and three years on his brother as well.

But even more than the churn, Lena wanted the shiny silver meat grinder that she knew her mother had packed away in the pantry in a compact cardboard box with its attachments and blades wrapped in old newspaper. The day before while she was preparing some oxtails with the abundance of fresh tomatoes, eggplant, string beans and carrots and onions from her and Herman’s garden, he mentioned a dish he had not had in a hundred years.

“Brunswick stew, Lena. It was the speshalty of folks ’round here, baby,” Herman informed her earnestly, hoping she would take the hint.

Lena made sure it was early on the next sunny day when she drove over to her parents’ closed-up house. Unoccupied as it had been the last several years, its few furnishings shrouded in sheets, Lena knew the children in Pleasant Hill were right. Her childhood home on Forest Avenue
was
haunted.

Before she left, Herman had kissed her one good long time on the mouth, then dropped his head and kissed her once more between her breasts. Then, he disappeared off somewhere on the property. He seldom traveled with her. Sometimes, he would appear in the passenger’s seat of the car while she drove—she had to get used to
that
—just to tell her something or keep her company or rub her stiff neck. Or he’d only appear long enough to punch up a number on the CD player like “Dedicated to the One I Love,” smile at her and disappear again.

There were places that Herman did not seem to
want
to go. It had never occurred to Lena that there were places he
could not go.
At least in his corporeal state.

He went all the way with her to and into Miss Zimmie’s house one or two times, and he had even visited his secret room that Mr. Jackson, the contractor, had discovered down at The Place.

After Herman became a part of her life, Lena almost forgot about the discovery. But Mr. Jackson hadn’t forgotten. He was down there bright and early the April morning following Lena’s incident to check things out by himself.

“Still smell like somebody been screwing in here,” he said softly to himself.

It was one of the reasons he nearly panicked when he had found Lena lying on the room’s dusty floor, her little short skirt flipped up showing her pretty, expensive-looking underwear, a smudge of dirt on her cheek.

The aging contractor said, “Lord have mercy,” every time he thought about it.

He finished the work at The Place in record time after he had left Lena’s house that night back in April. He had sealed the rear wall back up and painted over the plaster himself so it looked as if a gaping hole had never disturbed the site. But in the storeroom on the liquor store side of The Place, where Lena had the safe and the private bathroom, the clever contractor had installed a private steel door and a narrow passageway that led to the secret room. And he gave Lena the only key.

He felt it was the least he could do for Lena. She had never mentioned how she had been hurt on his work site. Of course, it got out all over Mulberry, in beauty shops and butcher shops, in barbershops and bakeries, in baby stores and bookstores. How Lena McPherson was “mysteriously injured and possibly assaulted in her own place down on what used to be the corner of Broadway and Cherry. But when they took her to the hospital, they couldn’t find nothing.”

“You know the girl was born with a caul over her face,” people reminded each other. “Yeah, Lena don’t talk about it much, but I’m old enough to remember what the old folks used to say ’bout children like Lena born with a veil over their face. You know, seeing ghosts,
looking in people’s eyes and reading they soul. Riding at night with the witches. Ain’t no telling what ’mysteriously’ attacked her.”

But word of the incident didn’t come from Lena McPherson’s mouth. Mr. Jackson knew that. And that meant a lot to him. So, the private entrance to the private room was his gift to her.

When he showed it to her, he acted like a young schoolboy, mannish enough to formulate a secret plan and execute it as a surprise gift for her, but too shy to brag about it.

Lena appreciated it more than Mr. Jackson could know. The secret passageway helped her to keep her secret lover to herself. Even though Herman never showed any real interest in the private room, he had gone there with Lena one time in the spring because she was so proud of owning a building where he had lived and worked.

But he had only walked around the edge of the room one time, looked up at the fresh-air system he had designed and smiled to himself, then declared he was ready to go whenever she was.

But other than that, Herman stayed close to home. And even there, Lena discovered, there were places he would just as soon avoid. Her wine cellar was one of them.

Lena didn’t have a true basement in her house, but she did indeed have a wine cellar, named for her daddy’s daddy. The wine cellar had been a gift from her father, who then commenced to stocking it with the best of Lena’s favorite white wines and champagnes and cognac.

“Your daddy, Jonah, had a reputation we got to uphold,” one of the liquor distributors would say each November as his man brought in two boxes of a difficult-to-find favorite champagne for her birthday.

It was cool and dark in the brick wine cellar. So, when it first got hot, Lena decided to show it to Herman. Herman drank a good bottle of wine with dinner sometimes if Lena wanted some and on very hot days during the summer, he would throw back an icy beer. But for the most part, Herman didn’t seem to care much about drinking alcohol. He was just as happy drinking lemonade or a cold small bottle of Coca-Cola, cases of which Lena now stacked up in her utility room just for him.

But she thought he would like to see the cellar. She was especially proud of its stone walls.

They had sat down there only a little while before Herman started breathing heavily. He didn’t like being underground for any length of time. He came right out and told her.

“Lena, baby, I can’t stay down here much longer.”

And he headed for the stairs.

There were places, too, where Lena just didn’t want to go anymore. She still loved The Place and sitting and talking with Gloria once in a while. But Gloria was always so busy, the way Lena had been before Herman came. And she still visited her beautiful old nurturer Miss Zimmie, who never had asked anything of her but her love. Together with Herman, it was enough.

Lena knew where her treasure was buried. That’s where her heart was. And Herman was her heart.

She loved him so that when he mentioned the Brunswick stew, she didn’t hesitate to brave her childhood haunted house again. For him.

Just entering the fine old two-story brick house on Forest Avenue flooded her with memories and voices and smells and heartache.

It’s a shame this big old house is just standing empty, she thought as she stood at the side door with the beveled-glass top looking into the foyer through the interior of the house. She thought sadly of her children downtown with no place safe and warm to go most nights and some days.

As she walked up the short flight of steps on the right leading from the basement hallway to the back of the kitchen and made a sharp turn into the darkened, yeasty-smelling pantry, she felt truly engulfed in the past.