“For God’s sake, Reba,” I tell her. “Don’t you know what happens to a corpse? It gets sealed up so tight that a Genesis flood couldn’t wash out the chemicals.”
“You tell me what I’m smelling then, when it rains too hard in the summer and I walk by them drains. You tell me.”
And I don’t have an answer for her on that count. There is a certain sweetness I can’t explain.
Then a police car pulls up, and it’s Leonard, of course. He’s the only officer that works this area. He’s slow to get out, slow to make his way to the door. He’s even slow pushing it open, so that the bell that tinkles to alert Reba of a customer rings longer and quieter than usual.
Reba increases her volume to make sure that he hears. “I smell that formaldehyde in the drains ever time it rains. And if it’s in the drains, it’s in the ground. And if it’s in the ground, it’s in your bell peppers, and I ain’t selling ’em here.” She punctuates her speech with a nod of her head in Leonard’s direction. He’s taken a seat at the lunch counter, but he’s skipped a chair, so that there’s an empty space between us.
“How much do I owe you?” I ask her, and then I begin counting it out in change as she gets Leonard’s coffee. I use all the pennies first.
“For all I know, we could end up with cancer, with William Blott just barely dead, bless his soul, and them tumor cells trickling down to your tomato bushes.”
“Now, Reba,” Leonard says. “I think you’re out of line.”
“I might be, but I ain’t selling them vegetables in this store. There’s been dead buried on that hill for a hundred years.”
“Sixty,” I say.
“And the way disease spreads, and when nobody knows what it is that causes cancer, and with all the things killing people today, you got to be cautious,” she adds. “I was doing my best to help out William Blott, and I approached him with Christian kindness. But he was a filthy man, covered in sores, and he’s buried right on that hill with drug addicts and common trash, and as far as I know, he didn’t even clean up his soul before he died, the Lord help him.”
“My baby brother’s buried next to Blott,” Leonard defends. “And it don’t bother me a bit. There’s a lot of other good people up there, too. That graveyard’s clean and kept up better than any I know. Finch does a fine job with that.”
“Thank you, Leonard,” I tell him. “But there’s no point. Reba likes being ignorant.”
And Reba keeps going on about how she intends to pray for me, but in truth, I’m more surprised to be defended by Leonard than to be chastised by Reba.
“I’m gone pray for your soul,” she hollers. “You keep company with dark spirits and you’ll never see the pearly gate.”
“To hell with you,” I tell her as I’m walking out. And Leonard drops his head to hide what might be a smile.
THE DEAD MAY fertilize my garden. They may even darken the silks on my corn. But I haven’t yet convinced them to do the picking. I take a foot tub and head for the land I tilled and planted myself. I might be slight, but my shoulders are broad from working like an ox all my days. I carry my own firewood and I move my own furniture. My arms are like cables, and my will is stronger still. I climb my own pecan tree each fall, tie thick ropes around the branches, and jump to the ground. I hook the ropes to the tractor and drive, shaking those limbs until the pecans fall like hail.
And then I pick them up, heavying brown paper bags. And yes, my back hurts the next morning. But lugging around the things I cultivate is not a burden to me. Even if I grow stiff with it, I love every minute, from the planting to the weeding to the watching to the harvesting. I love every plant like a daughter.
Gardening is something I’ve done all my life. Even as a child, I planted the seeds of apples and grapes. I sucked the pits of peaches down to the tiniest orange strings, and I planted the hard nuts that remained at the edge of the yard. Some of them sprouted and some didn’t. I planted rotten persimmons and potato eyes, and I grew plants and harvested fruits in the most unlikely places.
Now in the warm season, I can feast out of my own yard. I can work in the dirt until dark. And tonight I have worked so late that I’ve forgotten to close the gate. Leonard’s the one who reminds me.
“Aye, Finch?” he calls, and I startle.
I’m at the spigot, washing the dirt off the back side of a watermelon, except now, the watermelon is dirty again.
“You surprised me,” I tell him. “What do you want?”
“Nothing. Just came by to be sure everything’s okay. It’s heading toward dark and the gate’s still open. I noticed it driving by—”
I study him in the dim light. He shifts his weight and eyes the ground where a wormy kittens rolls at his feet. Another one comes up and rubs against his pants leg—wild little kittens that have never let me touch them, and Leonard scratching their ears.
Then he peeks back up at me and says, “That’s a hell of a melon.”
I rinse it off again, turning it beneath the water like a globe. The deep green irregular bands cut into the paler green like mountain ranges traversing long distances.
“I got three or four more ripening,” I tell him. “Didn’t plant but a few hills of watermelon this year.” And I offer the melon to him, holding it out, with water running back up my arms.
“I can’t take it, Finch,” he says. “But thank you just the same.”
“Can’t or won’t?” I push. “You scared to eat what grows here?”
“Nah,” he claims. “It’s just that ain’t nobody at the house but me, and it won’t get eat.”
“You can share it with your folks,” I suggest.
He shakes his head. “We’re on the outs. Father’s disappointed I didn’t get promoted.” He looks down.
“Sounds like all the more reason for me to give you a melon,” I tell him, and step forward with it, almost pushy. “You can take a few of them kittens with you, too, if you’ll have ’em. Must be ten little wild ones running around.”
When he takes the watermelon, he holds it the way a man holds a baby the first time—tentative and away from his body, its weight balanced between his two hands.
In the distance, I hear a baby’s cry, high-pitched and whole-lunged.
I walk Leonard back to his police car.
“ ’Preciate it,” he says, sitting the melon in the passenger seat.
But then the kittens are there, too, sniffing inside the police car, and when I reach to shoo them, they hiss. But when Leonard reaches down, they ram their heads against his big fingers.
“They had their shots?” he asks me.
“No,” I tell him. “Do they look like they’ve had shots? They’re wild.” But I feel stupid for saying it, because they’re tame enough with him.
He lifts them both into the car, tossing them into the backseat, where they bat at old coffee cups and trash.
Then he reaches out and shakes my hand. His hand is cold, but what I notice most are his hairy knuckles, how black and sporadic that hair.
In the distance, I hear a baby’s cry, and I remind myself to lock the gate on time from this day on, before Leonard has a chance to come back in and upset the balance of things.
MOST BABIES FADE quick. Most babies are so light that they’re pushed out right away—by the next few people who come along. Most babies don’t have a story to hold them down.
But Marcus Livingston does. He just can’t tell it.
In the nights, he cries, waking me wherever I’m sleeping. Sometimes curled up on the porch with the cats, I mistake his voice for an animal in heat. His screams are sharp with needing, like the female cats I keep.
If I’m in bed, I jerk deep into my quilt to layer myself from his crying. Sometimes his cries are the throaty waaaas of newborns, and sometimes the screams of toddlers. Sometimes his cries are the cries of a man the age he would have been if he’d lived—a man in his thirties and horribly hurt. His cries age and retreat. Maybe that’s what makes them so horrible, those cries wi
thout words. There is no blanket or pillow thick enough to protect me from the noise.
Sometimes when I’m stretched above Lucy, damp with sweat and dew, I leap to my feet before I’m awake. And even when I’m standing, his crying vibrates the small bones of my feet.
No matter where I sleep, when Marcus cries, I awaken. I wish for only one thing: quiet. I would like to soothe him, but there’s nothing for me to hold. And the Dead insist that he must be allowed to wail. “Until he finds his way,” the Mediator says.
Sometimes when I’m especially tired or especially content, curled up in a soft place, in a soft way, when I’m dreaming easy and resting fine and his nighttime fits interrupt, I want to choke the screams right out of baby Marcus.
“I’d like to knock that child on up to Jesus,” I say to Lucy.
“Maybe you need to help him instead,” she replies, yawning. She’s patient about most things, even in sleep. It’s one of the things she’s learned since dying.
“Help him how? You tell me how a baby can have a story to tell.”
“You could teach him to talk, I guess. And ask him.”
I try to sleep, but my mind gets tangled, figuring what kind of story Marcus could hold. He was born privileged. He got plenty to eat. I never visited his house, but I know he must have had a store-bought crib softened by white blankets with rabbits and cottages and trees delicately embroidered.
His ma was the mayor’s wife, who wore pillbox hats and pressed-hem skirts. The mayor’s wife, who cut the ribbon when the library opened, who traveled all the way to New York City to see a show and wrote a story about it for the local paper. The mayor’s wife, who lunched with the wife of the governor and who drove a Cadillac, who sent off the black-and-white pictures of her boys and got back portraits in oil that still hang in the library. Baby Marcus had it good with those fine folks.
But Leonard, the oldest son, was a lumpy, cross-eyed boy. “There must have been some mistake at the hospital,” Papa used to joke. “With parents like his, and that boy so brooding. He pure-tee looks inbred.”
“Sam,” Ma would say, “you better hush talking like that.”
But it was true. Leonard, the first son, was scared of dogs and ran between his daddy’s knees whenever they got too close. The mayor pushed him out and made him pet the dogs, even if he cried.
“You act like a girl,” the mayor would say, ashamed.
Leonard, the first son, wore glasses with square black frames. He stood shorter than the other boys, even though his father was tall. Thick-tongued and snaggletoothed, he could not say his S’s, and the children teased him almost as much as they teased me. I was glad for every time he stumbled, for the day he peed himself in class, for every time he went to the board and subtracted his equations wrong. Though Leonard sucked the attention away, I probably hated him more than anybody else, and when other kids taunted, “You so ugly that when you were born, your daddy puked and your mama passed out,” I laughed harder than anyone.
It was even funny after the children turned to me and said, “What you laughing at, Granny?” or “Shut up, Witchy-Bird.”
On the day the new courthouse was dedicated, the year I was in first grade, the mayor’s family stood on the courthouse steps without Leonard, with just the baby, Marcus, in his mother’s arms.
“Wonder where their older son is?” Ma asked, but I just shrugged.
The mayor said a little speech, and while he was talking, I spotted Leonard off to the side and wondered why he was kept back with the nanny when the pictures were being made.
Baby Marcus laughed at the photographers. Though he wasn’t quite a year old, he called out and laughed to the crowd, and the jovial mayor said, “That’s my boy.” When the baby started crying, the mayor joked that he had a politician’s lungs.
The mother tried to hush him, and someone from the crowd said, “Poor little fellow. He needs a nap.”
“He won’t sleep,” his mother explained, and some of the women nearby nodded knowingly about colicky babies.
That day was the last public appearance of Marcus Livingston, and as he left, the mayor held him up and said, “Wave, boy. Tell ’em bye.”
The baby, who was done with his crying by then, waved to the crowds. But he waved backward.
I remember that scene because Papa said, “Looka there, Finch. He’s waving good-bye to hisself,” and Papa lifted me up on his shoulders so I could see, and I pretended, for a minute, that I was in the mayor’s family—a rich little girl without scars from burns or holes in her socks, waving like that baby, held up by somebody important. I thought Leonard Livingston was a fool for missing such a grand opportunity.
Not many weeks after, I sat on the screened-in porch with Ma and watched the cars file into the graveyard like soldiers marching. The governor came to the funeral and rode in a car with a tiny flag flying from the hood. A tiny flag for a tiny baby in a tiny little grave. They drove around the house and behind the big hill, then up to the top, where they parked. And Marcus was buried way up there. From my swing, I could see the people gathered at his grave site, tiny moving dots. There were so many people that the cars spilled into our yard and outside the cemetery, on the streets.
From my swing, I could hear his mother weeping. It was winter, and the cold made my nose run and reddened my ears, but still I stayed on the porch, watching and listening, wondering how it could be that a baby as lucky as Marcus had died. His family had money enough to go to Richmond, where they had doctors who knew more about babies than adults.
Everyone suspected that the mayor wished it was Leonard who’d died. Probably even Leonard knew it, because after that, he got fat, like his body was trying to take up enough space for two boys—not just one. And after that, I felt sorry for Leonard for a little while and I didn’t laugh so much when he was teased.
Nobody knew what had happened to Marcus. The family said he’d died in the night. On his death certificate, the doctor wrote “failure to thrive,” and in my mind, I compared it to the tiny pines I’d found near the river and moved into the yard. I’d watered them, tended them, and they died anyway, like Marcus. I considered it “failure to thrive” when they dried up and the small needles broke away from the stick of their trunks. But I knew that I may have watered them too much, or stepped on them by accident once or twice.
It wasn’t until years later that I thought of Marcus Livingston again. I was fifteen, without friends, with no figure to speak of, no talents or plans for my life, and with my ma just past buried. I had Papa to take care of, but he kept busy all the time to keep from thinking. He took up motors, tinkering with them late in the nights. He fixed the lawn mowers and tractors himself in the little shed behind the house. He put them together and took them apart, and greased all the pieces and went back to work.
I did my lessons after school and walked down to the river. I had a bike, and sometimes I rode it between tombstones. I planted my flowers and picked them for Ma’s grave, and in the nights, I had dreams of vases and flowers in all sizes and shapes. In my dreams, I had to arrange them, and I arranged them over and over: daisies in blue glass and roses in clear, gladiolias in buckets, mums and phlox in old soup cans, again and again, like puzzles. Some nights as soon as I’d get an arrangement finished, it’d burst into flames. I’d have to put out the fire with the water from other vases. Then the flowers from vases without water withered, and so on.
I cooked sometimes, but mostly we ate sandwiches. We bought hams and turkeys, cut them to slabs, and ate them on white bread with mustard.
In the evenings, I’d sit in front of the mirror with slices of meat, plastering them damp to my face and imagining what I’d look like with skin unwithered. The meats we bought presliced were best, though the turkey was too white, the ham too pink. They did not make pressed beef—or at least they didn’t sell it where I grew up, and it would have been too dark anyway. But in the evenings, in front of the mirror, I could smooth it to my face and neck and pretend.
I wen
t through a stage where I slept that way, thinking that maybe the cure had never been discovered. Maybe burns could be cured with ham on the cheek, bonded with jellyish fat to my skin. I tricked myself into thinking that perhaps I’d wake up with skin thriving, and I began to wear the wedding-dress veils so that when I woke, I could pull back the veil and be surprised by the evenness of my face.
I was disappointed each morning. And if my soul could have divorced my body, it would have. Every day that I woke up burned and stinking of meat, I saw myself uglier, a remnant of a girl. I looked to the ground, uneven like my face, and took consolation in the textured earth. But after a while, I grew too ugly to go to school, to go to the store. After my ma was dead, there was nothing left to prove. I could go ahead and admit how ugly I was.
“You’re pretty as a picture,” Papa would say, and when I’d cry about my face, he didn’t understand. “You been this way for a long time, Finch,” he’d remind me. “It looks better than ever. Ain’t you used to it yet?”
He didn’t know what to do when his words made me quiet. So he grew quiet, too. Together we walked to Ma’s grave, and he’d stop by trees, take my hand, say, “Feel,” and rub my palm against the bark. “Your beauty’s like a pine’s,” he’d say. It was all he could do. It was all he could muster. He found more comfort mowing the grass and trimming hedges than he found with me.
The boys from the high school drove by in their Fiats and Volkswagen Bugs, rolling down the windows and hollering out that so-and-so wanted to take me on a date.
Papa’d look up from his newspaper and ask, “Do you wanna go out with that boy, Finch?”
“They’re making fun of me,” I’d snap.
“Now, you don’t know that,” Papa’d say. “Maybe that boy wants to take you to a show.”
But one night, some boys dared each other to break into the cemetery, climb into my bedroom window, and kiss me good night. It was a rite of passage for some club they were forming, and we didn’t have any haunted houses in the neighborhood. I was the next-best thing.