GOING HOME
By C.B. Hoffman
Copyright C.B. Hoffman 2010
The sky was blue; not June’s endless blue, but with a tinge of late-summer gray, smudging out past the dark green shadow of steep, tree-covered hills rolling away like waves of a high sea. Elizabeth shifted her gaze from hills last seen a quarter-century ago through an uncomprehending film of tears; hills she had gladly never expected to see again then, and hadn’t wanted to see again now.
She’d had no choice, then. They had brought Mama back to the holler to sleep. Elizabeth frowned because the phrase—their phrase—had come to mind. Buried. Mama was back there to be buried. Pop had insisted, and in distant Chicago, Elizabeth found out too late to protest, to shout that Mama wouldn’t want to be brought back. Elizabeth bowed her head. Even if she had told Pop no, Mama would have sat up in her coffin and gently said that it would do no harm, such a small thing, and it would make Poppa happy.
Elizabeth exhaled, a now-or-never sigh, and smoothed her khaki slacks with a slim, tanned hand that was beginning to show signs of age. Reluctance curled up hot and tight in her stomach, weighting her legs so that she stood rooted by the side of the car she had rented in Charleston. She dropped her eyes to the ground as the bruisingly familiar scent of the trees, the rich earth, and the gentle tang of rock warmed by the sun swirled around her.
Surely they had heard the car. If she dawdled long, someone would come out onto the porch soon. Elizabeth stepped away from the car, her beige canvas shoes soundless in the sparse, weed-spiked gravel, and her steps down the narrow walk of old hand-cut field stones were muted.
A pair of rockers sat on the warped boards of the porch, their cushions ratty and faded to gray, as if the couple of baskets of rioting pansies sharing the porch had stolen all the color from them. A few weeds straggled thinly along the front of the porch, reaching toward the sunlight beckoning beyond the deep shade of the sweeping sugar maples guarding the old farmhouse from the lane.
Tiny shreds of old paint hung on the porch rails and eaves, waiting for a breeze to release them. Memories, like the felt-covered hammers of a fine piano, tapped insistently, bringing notes alive to which Elizabeth had closed her ears years ago. The scarred boards sagged under her feet as she went to the screen door. As though released by her touch on the knob, the sound of voices carried to her from inside.
“That must be Orrie a-comin’.” The voice belonged to Aunt Lizy, repeating a baseless nickname that Elizabeth hadn’t heard since she was a child. The tiny rush of warmth Elizabeth felt surprised her. The image of Aunt Lizy, an apron over her shapeless cotton print dress as she canned, came unbidden to Elizabeth’s mind; of Aunt Lizy humming—she had always been humming—her broad face red from the kitchen’s heat, a toddler and one barely grown beyond toddling playing happily on the dirty linoleum floor. “Orrie, why don’t you take Chub and Marlene outside to play,” she would ask with a smile.
The rush of warmth faded, replaced with a sudden stiffness at the voice of Elizabeth’s other aunt, Stella. “Thank the Lord! Poppa insisted I bring him up here by nine this mornin’, and we’ve been waitin’ ever since.”
The eldest daughter, Stella, had long ago become entrenched in her father’s household after her husband was killed and she was left with three young boys to raise. Aunt Stella disliked girls; mostly, Mama had said, because she had three boys, and no girls of her own. “Little split-tail!” The words, and the dismissive sniff that always accompanied them, floated clearly across the years to Elizabeth. And the sniffing and the snide remarks about all the extra work now that she and Mama were at the house had always grown more frequent, until Pop would suggest to Mama that maybe she ought to find someone else to stay with for a spell; just till Stella wasn’t quite so touchy.
Elizabeth consciously unballed her first, and blinked suddenly burning eyes. Mama, who would have walked through fire if her father had asked her, always packed up her child and moved on; up to Stoddard’s for a night a two, then further up the holler, up here to Aunt Lizy and Uncle John, who squeezed them into that old four-room farmhouse alongside themselves and their own ten children. A few months later, Mama would move them back to her father’s house, and the cycle started again.
With a ramrod spine, Elizabeth, swung the door open, and her taut nerves shivered at the door’s faint, squealing protest. Pop was poorly, failing fast, they had told her; he had asked about her, had wished that she come and visit. Refusal was easy, for several months. Pop, who had never stayed in touch, wanted her to visit? Pop, who time after time had stood by and let her and Mama be bullied by Aunt Stella? After all the times they’d been left to make supper from a handful of beans and moldy cornbread in that shack of a house they got rent-free because Mama cleaned the school-house?
Pop could have done better by them. He commanded respect around the county. Elizabeth had never understood why Aunt Stella’s boys got eggs for breakfast, but she didn’t; why Pop and his wife allowed Aunt Stella to run their home like it was hers, but she and Mama were made to feel like interlopers. Elizabeth would have liked to have hated them, but Mama had been devoted to her father, and her reproachful face and gentle voice had always risen in Elizabeth’s mind at even the fleeting thought of entertaining such feelings. When the War came and Mama found work in the factories in Ohio, Elizabeth had been fiercely glad to leave the holler, and had turned her back without a second thought.
The threadbare carpet over the old linoleum muffled her footsteps as Elizabeth entered the front room, and the heavy ticking of the ancient mantle clock continued, unchallenged. Aunt Lizy, rounder and shorter than Elizabeth remembered, came out of the kitchen, tucking loose strands of blond hair gone gray behind her ear, a blossom of flour on one wrinkled cheek. The dress and the smile were unchanged. “Orrie!” she said warmly, and gave Elizabeth a hug. “I’m so glad you could come.”
From the corner of her eye, Elizabeth could see her Aunt Stella perched in a faded chair, her navy dress clinging stiffly to a big-bosomed figure that had always been lumpish. Elizabeth’s palms grew moist, and her lips tightened. Stiffly, she gave Aunt Stella a cursory hug, her stomach rolling at the feeling she was back at her mother’s funeral.
Elizabeth scooted her eyes away, and let them fall on a small, shriveled man seated on the sagging sofa. His black slacks were sharply creased, and he wore a white shirt, just like always. Elizabeth moved to hug him, and said, “Hello, Poppa, how’ve you been?” He was frail beneath her hands; he seemed so small. Was he truly the man who had been the benign Caesar of his household? The man worshiped by his daughters, the giant in her world, the object of years of resentment? She looked into dark eyes gone hazy with age.
“I’m glad you came, Orrie,” he said earnestly. “You look like your mother.” As Elizabeth suppressed a stab of irritated discomfort, he shifted a veined hand and invited, “Come and set.”
And she did, despite the sudden impulse to turn and escape back outside, where the ghosts were truly ephemeral, and not living specters. She sat next to him and answered his questions about her life, while Aunt Lizy returned to her kitchen domain, and Aunt Stella sat like a navy blue crow.
Elizabeth prattled on, driven to avoid any awkward silence, to fulfill her duty, until finally she wound to a halt, like an old toy. “I really should be going,” she said, the words coming too quickly and too bright. “It’s an hour and a half back to Charleston.”
Pop murmured something Elizabeth didn’t quite catch.
She smiled and took Pop’s hand. “It’s been nice visiting with you, Pop. It’s been such a long time.” Polite words properly spoken, and her eyes widened when she realized that neither the words nor the smile had taken much of an effort. She could see the pleasu
re in his expression, could almost feel her mother’s approval at such a simple gesture. Elizabeth’s forehead puckered slightly as she found she had no words left, nothing to continue spinning the thin and fragile thread binding her to these people, who were nearly the only ones left with a living connection to her mother.
From the chair, Aunt Stella, who hadn’t spoken a word beyond her greeting, said brusquely, “You’ve come all this way—you may as well set and eat.” She was as stiffly upright as always, her dark eyes direct and unwavering as they focused on Elizabeth. They were pre-emptory words from days gone by, and anger shivered up Elizabeth’s spine. She rose, looking at Pop rather than Aunt Stella, and gave him tight, apologetic smile.
“I really don’t think—“ she began.
“It wouldn’t be right if we sent you off without supper,” Pop insisted, patting her hand like a child’s, leaving his hand gently on hers.
Elizabeth’s eyes swung to the ancient clock on the mantle as it chimed, and then back at the old man next to her as the chime faded to silence and inexorable ticking again filled the room. Elizabeth sighed. “Sure, Poppa, I can stay awhile.”