Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir (10 page)

Tat’s shifts were sudden, like streak lightning, or St. Elmo’s fire in the swamp. She cut loose. I was attracted. She shouted all the bad words, a thrill. I wished my aunt Hazel could hear; she’d turn to butter. My grandmother who only seemed to say the same nice sentences over and over—she would croak if she knew what I heard. Turkeyfucker. Shitass. Fuckface. I did not even let my lips form the words—felt that if they passed into sound I would be ruined. But her other language she really let rip. (Was it a long holdover from Fante or Bantu, taught by a slave grandmother?) Was it God’s own? Sometimes in a dream I expect to hear that language again: Tat’s whooping o’s and l’s, rising and falling to a growling whisper. Tat’s voice rolled and sped, seemed to catch me later in the dark when I couldn’t sleep. She gave herself to the small scorpion roaming her brain. At night in bed, her face zoomed close to mine then pulled back fast, crying. I never imagined terrible haints and night monsters since I knew one so plainly by daylight.

Finally evening cooled. She sat on the stump, dipped a little snuff, pulled the rag off her head, and cursed to the ground. “Sons of bitches, bastards, motherfuckers, all of them motherfuckers. Jesus knows you. He DIED for you. YOOUUUU.”

Where was my mother? Not that I wanted to go home, but I didn’t want to stay at Willie Bell’s either. When my mother was mad she could start to rant. Not like Tat but closer to Tat than to her usual self. Tat was what happened if you let yourself look in a certain direction. Had my mother looked? At Bible school
they said the smallest seed, placed under a dead man’s tongue, could grow into the tree that made the cross. Here’s Tat in a dirt yard baying like a bird dog. What words should be spoken? What should never be said?

Was Tat always that way? Willie Bell said so. “Long gone,” she said, rotating her finger beside her temple. “Lun-a-tic.” Tat spit and foamed, never noticed me hanging on the wire fence getting rust on my smocked blouse. She drew X’s in the dirt. All she had was an old hinny tied to a bush. He looked as if I could push him over. Mule or donkey I didn’t know, but I licked my thumb, pressed it to my palm, then stamped my palm with my fist for good luck. When it whickered and whinnied, she stared at the sky. Anger bolted her to the ground. “The wicked gonna perish from the earth. The wicked KNOW who they are.” Her words almost sparked. Then she’d get the gift of tongues and shout in her own secret language. Sometimes a string of drool roped down from the corner of her mouth and I’d laugh, then duck, afraid she’d turn her wild eyes on me. Willie Bell, relentlessly calm, shook her head with disgust so I did, too. She took my hand and led me into the house.

I follow Willie Bell through her dark living room into the kitchen. From her paper sack she takes out a new coloring book and a thirty-two-color box of crayons. She sits me at the white porcelain table, and then turns on the iron. The kitchen has two other tables instead of counters and Willie Bell covered them in red oilcloth and stapled it underneath the tops. Over the drainboard hangs a picture of Jesus with his eyes rolled
back, and three iron pots swinging from nails. I like the things Willie Bell has—the straight chairs with pony skin bottoms and the cigar box of forks stamped with
U.S. NAVY
. Her plates are each a different bright color.

While the iron heats, Willie Bell sits down. “What are you going to color me? You color me a pretty picture and I’ll hang it there by the door so’s I see it every time I go out.”

I study the pages and select a colt looking down at a daisy in a meadow. I begin to zigzag two shades of green crayon over the grass. Willie Bell takes a droopy black dress off the back of the door and holds it up to the window. “I’ve got to get this dress ready to go to the funeral.” She dips a corner of a rag into the pot on the stove and rubs at the sleeve.

“What are you doing?”

“I clean off spots with coffee. You can’t wash this kinda material.” When she irons, the scorched smell of sweat rises in a steam around the iron. I remember the flowery mildew smell around Auntie.

“Where is Auntie?” I make dark blue loops for the sky.

“Why, you know, she’s laying out at Riggs’s.”

I put my face down on the cool porcelain. I keep coloring slowly. “I saw her, too.”

“What? Yo’ mama ain’t going to like that one bit.”

“I won’t tell her. I wanted to see. What
happened
to her?”

Willie Bell pushed back my hair. “Sugar, she had a seizure, a fit; she’s just gone, that’s all.”

“Did she go to heaven?”

“Yes, they says so.” I wait for her to say more but she goes back to the iron and carefully presses the piqué collar.
What’s a
seizure
, I wonder,
something like an enormous hand shaking you?
I imagine Auntie walking down Lemon and a bony hand coming out of the pecan trees and shaking her to death. Could a seizure happen anytime? I run my tongue around my mouth, counting my teeth to myself.

Outside the window I see the wooden shed over the well. I remember Mother reading me a story out of the
Atlanta Journal
about a little girl who fell down an old well in a vacant lot. If I go running in any field, the ground could collapse; I could fall, fall, fall, splash into black water and no one would hear me scream. If I tried to climb up the sides, the way I shinnied up doorframes, I would slide back down the slimy stones. I remember Willie Bell has a well, too. “Can’t we get a drink from the well? I’m thirsty again.”

Willie Bell slides the cover off and I lean over and see my face, small as a nickel, way down in the water. The bucket goes down on a rope, tips and slips under water, then Willie Bell cranks it up, dips in a gourd, and pours a drink into a jelly glass. I hold up the glass and see little specks swimming. Just as I am about to ask Willie Bell why it doesn’t taste like faucet water, a rooster comes out of a row of dry corn. He flexes his wings and lifts up on his claws. Every instinct I have turns me toward Willie Bell but she is taking sheets off the line, just out of reach. The rooster gives a low, broken cackle. I raise my arms with a little cry just as he squawks and flies at my face. Pecks and flaps. Willie Bell lets go of the sheets. In one motion she kicks the rooster hard and jerks me away. The rooster, suddenly indifferent,
ruffles his feathers and struts around the house. Willie Bell slings a clod after him.

A thin line of red drops darkens my red skirt, as in summer when I got nosebleeds that wouldn’t stop until Willie Bell held cold scissors against my back. Willie Bell lifts me on the kitchen table and swabs my face with water. I stare into her brown face as she paints the cut with a cold wand of iodine. She looks as though it hurts her, too. She frowns and makes little clicking noises. “Lord, Lord.” I kick at the table legs as the medicine burns into my cheek. Sudden stings of pain force my tears. I burrow against Willie Bell’s arm. “You cry all you want to.” Willie Bell holds me on her lap, rocking me back and forth. The rooster seems to fly at me over and over. The hard, beady eyes and the hooks of his feet. I think I never can get away from the feeling of his feathers all over my body and I am right. I curl as small as I can, crying until I stop and my chest feels tight with no more tears. Something dense and heavy, like a stone growing inside, keeps me still.

At six o’clock, the blare of the Oldsmobile horn. As I open my eyes I see Willie Bell’s black dress still draped over the ironing board. My hair sticks to my forehead. Willie Bell buttons my sweater and hands me the crayons and coloring book in a paper sack. “You can finish tomorrow. Now run on, yo’ mama’s waitin’.”

I climb in the backseat. My mother looks at me through the mirror, then turns around, her smile disappearing as she sees my face. I watch her mouth move into an O. “What on earth happened to you? You look awful.”

“A rooster pecked me and scratched me.”

“You were teasing him?”

“I was not. You always …” I run my finger over the rough welt that is now my face.

“Always what?”

I don’t answer. I don’t know what I even started to say.

“Well, look in the pink bag on the floor and you’ll feel better.” I find the bag among the other boxes and sacks. Before I see it, I feel the white musical puppy with blue velvet under his ears. I wind him and put him to my ear. He smells new and I can hear the little mechanical purr under the sound of the music.

“Mammy, did you know Auntie died?”

“Um-hum. That was sad, wasn’t it?”

“I was scared of that rooster.”

“Awful. Wasn’t Willie Bell looking after you?”

“Yes, but she couldn’t help it. He was too fast. He shook me in his beak.”

“That’s not so, but I just hope it doesn’t leave a scar.” I see my mother’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Is so.” She is looking straight ahead at Roanoke Drive. Even in the dusky light her eyes are blankly clear, almost like the blind beggar I saw on the sidewalk the last time I went shopping in Macon. He sold a cup of yellow pencils, his milky blue eyes tipped up toward heaven. But my mother looks soft, too, especially with the rusty-colored foxes around her neck. I over-wind the new dog and he plays his song double time all the way home.

Many primitive charms must be worked in solitude. On the island I slipped out early to walk the beach washed clean of footprints. My father taught me about the beach at sunrise. All the years I was small, he often would wake me up and say, “Come on, Bud, let’s go to the beach.” At this hour it’s easy to see why these are called the Golden Isles of Georgia. The first peach-cream rays slide over the water and strike the sand first, lighting the beach as if from underneath. We pick up sand dollars together and line up our collection along the driveway wall. I tell my father the little bones that rattle inside are doves of Jesus’s because I saw that on a Legend of the Sand Dollar postcard, but he says nonsense, sand dollars are real money that mermaids use. When I break one open, the “doves” that fall out look like my baby teeth that I’ve saved in a ring box at home.

They’ve warned me not to go in the ocean alone. The undertow pulls even in shallow water. My father was sucked under
as a boy. He said he knew not to fight, not to try to get back by paddling against a current stronger than man or beast.
When a current pulls you out, swim sideways, parallel to the beach, gradually angle in, and let the current help you
. Since I know that, of course I swim alone. I am nine and I’ve had lessons. I can sidestroke all day. I’m a cold-blooded animal and walk into the water at dawn with little shock, ride waves in until my fingertips shrivel, then cartwheel dry. By the time the wobbling gold orb hoists out of the water, I’m on the beach wrapped in a towel with my knees against my chest, every ugly hair on my arms standing straight up, my teeth chattering though the air is soft and my skin powdery with salt. I like to stare out at the straight line of blue ink horizon. How could they ever have believed the earth was flat? Why couldn’t they see the ocean water would drain off the edge? Where could the tide go when it went out? Someday I will live here alone and have my own boat and sail out exactly to that line where the ocean and sky meet. I will have candles and a bunk bed and a two-piece bathing suit.
So very vulgar to show the navel
, my mother says.

Sometimes Willie Bell comes out to find me and swears she will tell if I do this one more time. On the island she doesn’t wear the black or white uniforms she wears at our house in Fitzgerald. Here, she’s in a pressed red plaid dress, with short sleeves that point, and sandals. We’re the only ones up and I walk back to the kitchen with her. She makes me a piece of oven toast—I don’t like toaster toast—and a soft fried egg because I will dip my toast into the yellow with lots of salt and pepper and she will eat the white.

We love St. Simons, Sea Island, and Jekyll.
Summer
is here, less than three hours from home, on this string of barrier isles, ocean on one side, marsh on the other. We stay sometimes on St. Simon’s, sometimes on Sea Island. Jammed with my mother, sisters, and Willie Bell (my father and the dog traveled in a separate car with a driver), along with a month’s supply of clothes, games, cheese straws, fudge, and beach towels, we cross the rickety bridge from Brunswick to St. Simons and I see the marsh grasses waving, sense suddenly the land not earth, not water, but both, with the grass moving in time with the tide and the sulfur-laden wind. Then it comes to mind, the poem I’d just been required to learn by heart in third grade: