Knee-Deep in Wonder (21 page)

“We got everything we need for dinner here.” Queen Ester took her hands out of the water, letting them dangle on the edge of the sink. “Everything we need is right here.”

“Mama, when was the last time you went somewhere—anywhere?”

“What, you race and go all the time?”

“No, but—”

“You think I don't know what's going on outside? I been outside. Everything I want, I can get right here in this house. You sound like Mama—”

Queen Ester did not finish, because Helene snatched her mother's hand and plunged it back in the dishwater. “We'll never get dinner if we don't finish.”

Queen Ester took up the fork and the sponge and began to scrub. If I can forgive the number of years you sent me away, you can look past my wanting you to step out of this house, Helene thought. Shoulder to shoulder, their arms rose and dipped, the pads of their fingers touching when Queen Ester passed her a soaped-clean plate or cup.

“Done,” Queen Ester said, stepping away from the sink. She leaned against the table, wiping her wet hands on her housedress. “Now for the collards.”

“Where are they?”

“In the fridge. We looking at a big mess.” Helene walked to the refrigerator, which growled with age. It stood in the corner, large and rounded at the top; the cursive silver letters
Frigidaire
sat on top of an arrow shaped like an old Cadillac. When the door opened, the fridge moaned in response. “Pull up the whole door and it won't act like that.” Peering in, Helene saw a bottle of ketchup and mustard, two blocks of butter, a carton of milk, tomatoes still on the vine, a brown hair comb, and three tubes of lipstick. Don't even ask, she told herself and pulled out the collards that poked from a big brown bag.

“I don't let Cookie clean them for me, cause that's just a waste of water.”

Laughing, Helene said, “Lazy?”

“Naw, talk too much.” Queen Ester raised an eyebrow. “You know how to clean collards?”

“Aunt Annie b made me clean them every Sunday in the bathtub.”

“In the tub?”

“Yeah. I couldn't reach the sink until I was twelve.”

“Why not outside or on the porch?”

“Aunt Annie was funny about me being outside alone.” Helene felt her face settle into a pleasant smile. Their conversation dropped, then languished.

“Let's go on the porch and see to the collards,” Queen Ester said, after a silence, taking the bag out of Helene's arms. The porch was enclosed with three large window frames that held no glass, just screens to keep the flies out so sunlight came in from both sides. A slim door was in the back, as if placed there as a last and fleeting thought. The wall was covered with maps: Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Mississippi held up with yellow and green thumbtacks, smaller maps of Washington, D.C., and Chicago fastened with gray masking tape, and a framed map of the New York subway. On the floor close to the wall were more maps scattered: New Mexico; Kansas; Louisiana; Atlanta, Georgia; Seattle; and California. An old washer and dryer sat in the corner, and in the middle of the porch was a large copper bucket. Green crawled and circled around the bottom of the bucket as if it had stood in water for a long time. The wooden floor buckled in places. A thatched-bottom seat like the ones in the kitchen and a wooden rocking chair painted pink perched in another corner.

“Pull out the chairs,” Queen Ester said, and Helene picked up the rocking chair and placed it next to her mother. “You take the rocking chair, I ain't that old.” A vacant smile tugged at Queen Ester's mouth. She dumped the collard greens on the floor. “Look between the washer and the dryer, and you'll see the water hose.” Helene pulled out the hose. Standing up, she turned the knob for the water. The hose slithered alive, rising from the floor from the sudden pressure, splashing and spraying water all over the porch, all over Queen Ester.

“Turn it down! Turn it down!” Queen Ester yelled. “Ain't nobody trying to take a bath.” She was soaked through.

“Mama, I'm sorry. You should go and change.” Helene tried not to, but she couldn't help laughing.

“It's all right.” Queen Ester laughed too. “Lord know, I ain't gone melt cause no water.”

“I didn't know I had turned it that hard.”

“Suppose be washing the collards, not me.” Her mother picked the hose up from the floor, handing it to Helene. “Fill the bucket so we can get started.” The tub filled quickly, and they put the collards in. Helene watched Queen Ester take a large leaf in her hands, wringing the two sides together as if it were cloth. The dirt collected in the middle of the leaf, and Queen Ester dipped the collard in the water again. Taking hold of the stem, she pulled it away from the leaf, folded what was left, and rolled it up to cut later on. No sound was heard except the whispered tear of leaf from stem and the lapping of the water in the tub.

“Why are all those maps there?” Helene asked, pointing a wet finger at the wall.

“I put them up.”

“How come?”

“Folks always moving, and I never knew where to. Every time somebody go, I got a map of where they done gone to. That way, if I ever get to one of these places, I know where I'm at. Mable got most of them for me. I got the Chicago map on my own, though, cause Mable and her man was the ones that went to Chicago.”

“Are you ever going to go?”

“Where?”

“To any of those places?”

“Ain't ever had no reason to. Ain't nobody ever wrote or called for me to come. I can't go all that way to see folks who don't know I'm coming.”

“But Mama—”

“Don't start, Helene. You know what I'm gone say, so don't start.” They were halfway done with the washing. So close to being finished, when memory saw the blank and leapt in. Helene heard the collards in her mother's hands try to hush her memory:
shah, shah, shah.
But she still saw in her mind a wooden fence with shrubbery all around, three paths decorated with broken glass and colored brick that converged into one. Helene watched herself, eighteen and agile, jump on a wooden crate. The timing off, she had lurched when she shouldn't have, banging her leg viciously on the fence. If I jump just so,
just so,
I'll land to the left, which is good,
good;
and if I run quick enough the crunching of dead leaves will not wake a soul; then the kitchen, the bathroom, the hallway to my room—that's all. Helene opened the door without a sound and, untroubled, she walked through, past the kitchen and bathroom (so close, so close), but Annie b had been waiting for her, sitting in a kitchen chair pulled into the hallway for that purpose only, placed in the sharp turn, and without seeing the white of her eye or her teeth Helene bumped into her aunt.

“Where you been?” Annie b said, still in the chair, not bothering to stand up, growing with that unstoppable rage that only adults can have, the sort that jump-starts itself from past incidents that do not always have anything to do with the person being addressed. In Annie b's mind, her niece had broken the sanctity of her home, had been in a place she shouldn't have been, at a time when she shouldn't have been there, and her aunt's anger sprang not only from Helene having been out, and drinking, but also because at one o'clock in the morning her niece was in the hallway and should have been in her bedroom.

“Aunt Annie b, I just been out, that's all. With some friends.”

“Out where?” She stood up. Helene noticed Annie b wasn't in her bed clothes but was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt.

“Aunt b, just out. I mean, at my girlfriend Kiesha's house.”

“She got a mama?”

“Yeah.”

“So you gone stand here and lie to my face and tell me Kiesha mama let you stay up in they house till one o'clock in the morning?”

“Aunt b—”

“Don't lie to me, girl. You think I don't smell that shit on your breath?” Annie b stood erect with rage in her pocket, but Helene's anger was there as well, the nameless and thus helpless fury of an eighteen-year-old who had been kept in the house for so long she knew of no real trouble to get into.

“Just a couple of beers, Aunt b.”

“And now I suppose to believe Kiesha mama let you have some beers too.”

“Aunt b—” Annie b's open hand came out of nowhere. Helene felt the fast whirl of air before she saw her aunt's fingers curl in the air and land on her collarbone, but that was the last clear hit Annie b would have. Helene ducked and came up with a fist of her own—two of Helene's thumps landed on Annie b's hip and chest—and her aunt came back with two blows to Helene's ear, making her niece stagger. Between the slaps, slivers of their argument bellowed in the hallway:
You turning into nothing but a slut
—three blows lashed out, making Helene fall back a few feet from her aunt;
That's what you want me to be, but I ain't
—Helene's foot came off the floor and she kneed Annie b in her crotch;
Get pregnant and work for nothing but a dollar and change somewhere
—her aunt's hand caught Helene's hair in a fist and she jerked her face close to her own.

“You can't pull this kind of shit in my house, you hear me? I ain't raised you so you can be nothing.” Her hands tightened in Helene's hair, her forearms locking Helene's face inches from hers. Even at eighteen, Helene was dwarfed by Annie b, so that only one foot touched the floor.

“B, what you doing to that girl?” Ed came out of the bedroom in his underwear, struggling into a shirt.

“You gone back to bed, Ed. I got this.”

“Ah, b, let the girl alone.”

“Uncle Ed, tell her to let me go.”

“Let her go, now.” Helene heard him breathe behind Annie b, before he stepped forward. “I say, let her go, b.” Ed was right beside them now, although Helene could only see his right shoulder. They were no longer yelling; Ed was concentrating on prying Annie b's forearms from Helene's face, and b's breath came in staggered gusts. Then she let go and Uncle Ed fell back.

“I ain't the one, b. You let the girl git to sleep.”

“You say she right coming in my house at this hour?”

“Naw, but you ain't got to beat on her. She grown now. Eighteen years old.”

“She grown when she move out my house. She want to drink and lay up with some man that ain't gone do nothing but use her and get her pregnant, she know where the door is.” She turned to Helene, her lips already swollen from the fight. “Front or back door, make no difference to me.”

“Just come on to bed and let things alone.”

“You want to jump in now? You ain't got no right when you never here. I'm the one that take care of her. You got no right!” She was screaming, but Uncle Ed wasn't looking at her; he had turned to Helene, his mouth open and moving, except Helene didn't hear him at all.…

The porch reappeared plank by plank, left to right, with the slide and pull of a curtain being drawn. “Helene?” Queen Ester said. “Helene, baby? Change the water, so we can finish.”

The soundless words of Uncle Ed still ringing in her ear, Helene hauled the bucket to the back door. It swung open. With no fence, the backyard seemed to stretch on and on. Grass and trees leapt toward the house like a jungle. Weeds that had forgotten their place ripened into half-grown trees, dandelions and wild bush reached up and beyond the knees, and fifty yards out, decaying rampant cotton mingled with wild Kentucky bluegrass and white three birds and Solomon's seal fairies that waved their bright blue petals. A person with shears wouldn't know where to begin, where to stoop and make the first trim. Helene walked down the steps and turned back to her mother. “Where do you want me to dump it?”

“Right on the end of the steps.” Helene splashed the water where the grass didn't grow. It made a low arc, leaking over her feet.

Walking off the steps, Helene could see the back of the barn, with its wide doors hanging off their hinges. In a small space where feet had stomped the grass to dirt a sundress hung on a clothesline, red in the folds lifting and falling with the wind, the straps shiny like ribbons. The dress seemed too small for Queen Ester. Beyond the cotton field was a shotgun house with its door flung open; squinting, Helene saw through the house to another yard beyond. She returned to the porch and, reaching again for the hose, began to fill the bucket.

“Whose house is that?”

“What you say now?”

“That house. Behind the cotton field.”

“Ours.” Queen Ester pressed her lips together and began to hum as she pulled a collard's thick stem away from its leaf.

“You shouldn't let it go like that.” Helene took the leaf from her mother.

“I'm too old to get way out there and take care of it.”

“You could rent it.” Helene watched her mother's nimble hands tear another stem.

“Still mean I got to go out there and get the rent.”

“You could make the tenant come to you and give you the rent.”

Queen Ester snorted. “You know somebody that just come and give money without somebody pushing on them for it?” She picked up a fresh collard. “You gone close the door?”

“Can I keep it open?”

“You want to go outside?”

“No, but I thought we could have a breeze.”

Queen Ester looked guarded. “Ain't nothing gone come through that door cept flies.”

“I guess that means I should close the door.”

“Guess you right. Plus the porch ain't nothing but open windows, what more you want?”

They said nothing for a while. Maybe after dinner we'll get into my car, Helene thought, and with the windows rolled down I can ask Mama to put all her words in the right places. But then Queen Ester picked up the story again as if it were a folded dress that needed to be shook out.

“Fore Mama died, I thought all dying did was take your breath away. Like all the dying folk just lay up in bed looking sick and sad, and when they almost ready they say, ‘Well, bye, now.' But that ain't how it is.” Queen Ester paused. “It ain't like I ain't never seen no dying fore Chess come, maybe I did, but I don't remember now. I just remember his and hers; everybody else just fell away.” She looked at Helene. “Turn the hose back on and hold it over my hands, so we can get finished.”