Knee-Deep in Wonder (28 page)

“To take the baby?”

Liberty held the sleeping child out.

“Do they even know Duck dead?” Mable's question hung between the two women. Mable already knew that if Duck was the daddy she was Chinese. Nothing escaped her notice.

“Course they do.”

“Why don't you—” But Liberty cut her off.

“I can't. Chess can't gone out there. Look at her.” They peered through the window at the car and saw a man and woman get out. “She ain't no fool. One look at him and she'll know.”

Now it was Mable's turn to feel nervous. Panic caught at her throat and shook her hard. “I don't know about this, Liberty. You think these folks outside just gone take a baby when the mama above ground?”

“Just listen. You tell her Queen Ester ain't right. And when she say, What you mean? you just nod your head, real slow. You hear me?”

“Liberty.”

“When she ask after me, tell her I'm too old to take care of no child, plus—and Mable, say it just like this—I didn't want to say, but Duck and Liberty never did get along. I don't know how he would feel … then trail right on off.” Liberty shifted the baby in her arms. “Now take this baby and get out there.”

“Liberty, I don't know.”

Liberty played her last card. “Since I done known you, I ain't never asked you for a thing. I'm asking you gone and do this one thing for me. How many times you done told me yourself that I need to look out for Queenie fore she turn foolish on me?”

“All right, all right.” Liberty passed Mable the child and opened the door for her. Other waited on the porch and Mable spoke to him while walking down the stairs. “Come on, Other, I just need you to stand by me.”

And, well, Liberty was right. Annie b. Taylor was nobody's fool. She took one look at Mable and Other and knew something was awry. Where's the mama? she thought, watching the two come closer. Here we are, getting a welcome from some lady who I know for a fact ain't kin and a nigger big as a bull. Liberty could of come out. Who ever heard of meeting family in the middle of the yard? No one asked them how their trip went or invited them to come on and sit in the cool for a spell. “Something smelling sour,” Annie b whispered to her husband.

“Hey there,” Mable said, smiling as she approached.

“Hey yourself.”

“I'm Mable and this here is Other. And”—Mable moved the child higher in her arms so Annie b and her husband, Ed, could see—“this is your little niece. Can you say howdy to your auntie?” Mable cooed.

Annie b didn't look at the child. “Where Queen Ester at?”

“She laid up right now, sleeping, I think.”

“I bet.” Annie b snorted and spat carefully behind her feet. “And where Liberty?”

“Well, somebody got to see after the brand-new mama.” A wobbly smile pulled at Mable's face.

Annie b turned to Other. “What? You can't say nothing?”

“Other ain't much for talking. He just came out with me cause I asked him to. You ain't even take a good look at the baby. That's what you came way out here for, right?” Annie scared her, and Mable couldn't put aside the creeping fear. It's the hair, Mable thought, looking at Annie's shorn head.

“You got this dumb nigger with you, like I don't know no better from a turd. Humph!”

“Miss b, you know what they say.”

“What's that?”

“Don't run off and kill the messenger.” Mable coughed a faint laugh and shifted the baby from one arm to the other.

“Yeah, well, you know what else they say? Mama's baby, Daddy's maybe.”

Ed brought his hands out of his pockets and moved closer to the child, peering into the bundle Mable carried. “I think that's a right fine-looking baby, b.”

“I bet you do.”

“Sure do seem to sleep a lot.”

“They do when they this little. She ain't no trouble at all and that's a fact. Just sleep and eat. Ain't never seen a better baby. Lord as my witness, I think she look just like you and Duck, Miss Annie,” Mable said, as she put the child in Ed's arms.

“My eye she do.” But they took the child anyway, Annie b's suspicions be damned. She could see Ed had fallen in love with the child in his arms, and she felt it wasn't her right to deny him what she herself couldn't give. Together, the new uncle and aunt drove away with the baby.

*   *   *

Thus began years of corrections: I ain't your mama, I'm your auntie, answered with a shy
Yes, ma'am.
They took the child. For Helene, only the letters offered solace. At six she would peek inside the Christmas cards scrawled with,
I love you. I love you.
Helene's desire to see her mama wouldn't quit, despite Annie b's shooing and hush-all-that. “She ain't here and she ain't coming” was a common refrain. At least Queen Ester had had seven days of bliss. The letters, instead of soothing Helene's want, jump-started her desire, and Annie b, gruff and almost mean, didn't know what to do with a child that small and needy.

Who knew what would have happened to the child had she stayed in that house? With both the mama and the granny set against her, the child might not have survived. Annie b knew what was going on, never mind that she hadn't put a foot inside the door. She knew. She smelled it as soon as she stepped out of the car—soured jealousy and craziness cooking on a stove. Can't tell me, she had mumbled on the way back home. If Duck was the daddy, I'm a monkey.

13

HELENE WOULD HAVE
sat there listening forever—wept in all the right places, held her mother's hand when she looked shaken, gulped it up like a good girl. She had seen enough movies to know when to raise an eyebrow, quiver a chin. She didn't have to show me that room, Helene thought. But she didn't; I went up there on my own, ran up the stairs, and kept looking when I should've stayed in the kitchen and clipped Mama at the knees, tackled her until she calmed down. Helene stopped, slowing the car down, because she could hear herself talk like a Southerner, her voice rounding out each word as if she were choking on it; she sounded like her mother. “Good goddamn,” she whispered. “I don't. I can't sound like her in just one day. I'm wrong and I'm scared. But I'll take care of it when I get home. Maybe I'll move to New York after the funeral and get rid of all this forever.” She took me up there, Helene reasoned, just as if she had led me by the hand. She wouldn't show it to me in the first place, which set my curiosity going, and like a child I bit into the first thing I couldn't have and ran to the room Mama didn't have the decency to lock.

Helene now had what she wanted: knowing, not yet complete but she couldn't imagine a time of not knowing. She rolled down the car window, rested an elbow on the ledge, and remembered Aunt Annie b saying gleefully, “Your mama done turned like milk set out.” Queen Ester's face suddenly struck her as if it were rotting fruit, gagged her so that she heaved and thrust her head out the window. Not until she crossed over a footbridge did the clacking of tires on old wood jolt her out of her reverie. The road before her was deepest black, night wrapped around the landscape like a wool blanket, and she realized she had lost her way.

She had paid no attention to the numbered farm market roads. Helene had seen Queen Ester vanish in her rearview mirror but still she hoped, never mind her mother's craziness or the dead she imagined living in her house. Perhaps Queen Ester had secretly left the porch without Helene noticing and was trotting behind the car, saying, “You didn't hear what you heard, and even if you did I'm sorry about it.” But the gravel from the road sprayed out beneath her wheels, tearing down all imaginings, including her phantom mother. Roads turned into circles that led Helene nowhere. The farm road signs stood in corners, their wisdom shrouded by bug-clogged streetlights. Now, unlike the morning ride, Helene saw not a single house.

When she spotted an old man, the only person she had seen since she left Queen Ester's house, Helene slowed down. She thought of Uncle Ed, alone in Stamps without her or Aunt Annie b. The old man sat in the dark with his pants rolled up; his shoes, tied together at the laces, were slung over his shoulder. When Helene's headlights flashed on him, he got to his feet as if he had been waiting for her, thick strong fingers resting on his knees, a full plastic bag at his side. Girl, what are you doing? she thought, stopping to look at him. She got out of the car, thinking maybe he could point the way through the trees and get her back to Stamps.

“Hello there,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Are you lost?”

“Sho nough.” He smiled, his words flickered with laughter.

“Okay.” She smiled back at him. “I'm trying to find my way to Stamps.”

“Sho nough.”

“Yes, well, could you help?”

“Yeah.” She waited for him to give her directions.

“I was visiting my mother,” Helene volunteered, surprised she said the word
mother
so easily. “I just took my eyes off the road for a second.” She paused for him to speak. “And there you have it.”

“Sho nough?”

“Yes. Queen Ester Strickland. Do you know her?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes, well, my aunt just recently passed and—well, I came out here to let her know.”

“Yeah.”

“So I did—let her know. And somehow I thought she would come back up to Stamps with me. Maybe if she had I wouldn't be lost right now.” Helene rattled on, knowing that if she could step outside herself and look at the two of them standing in the road, she would hear herself, not letting him get a word in. For the life of me I can't stop, Helene thought. It wasn't just because she'd found some old man sitting at the side of the road as if he were lingering there just for her sake. His manner, his yeahs and sho noughs, coaxed her on. Soft and melodious, their sound dipped and rose, questioned and answered, prodding her until Helene stuttered to a close. “So I left the house. I couldn't stay, could I?” They had stepped away from the lights of her car, or rather he had moved and Helene had followed, still talking, her voice full of anguish.

“Yeah,” he said, beckoning to her, pointing toward the darkness of the woods. She gripped his forearm, noting that the skin felt loose and thin while the muscle underneath was taut. She spoke in a softly persistent chatter, churning the question over and over. “I mean, I couldn't just stay there and pretend with her, could I?”

“Sho nough.” But his eyes said different, and Helene felt shamed that she had left her mother alone in the house.

“Where are you pointing?” she asked, when he pulled at her as if they should both plunge into the woods. “That's the way back to Mama's.”

“Yeah.” She could have shaken him off, pushed at the arm that moved like paper across a clear desk, but she didn't.

“Isn't Stamps the other way? That's the wrong way, isn't it?” Again he said nothing, and Helene only heard the crunching leaves beneath their feet and a wrinkling of the plastic bag he clutched at his side. “What's your name? Do you hear me? Tell me your name.”

“Other.” Helene heard him breathing. “Other.”

*   *   *

Queen Ester watched Helene leave as she had always left, flying from the house with the quickness of a getaway. She didn't wait for Helene's car to round out of her sight before she walked back into the house, still singing the word
good
in measured tones while she closed the door.

She was amazed Helene had stayed as long as she had. The daughter had come, twenty-six years grown, with her hair parted down the middle and feathered at the sides in soft curls; yes, the daughter had come at last, her forehead high and round, the color of pecans, eyebrows plucked, wearing the sort of dress Queen Ester thought she would wear—dark green and cinched at the waist, the length licking the calves—her daughter who had sat down with her and listened.

“Just a little bit more and I would have got what I wanted,” Queen Ester said aloud. They had been so close to having dinner and then Helene had turned on her, just like Liberty. “You would of loved my gravy.” Sorrow kicked in as Queen Ester thought about the fat separating and rising to the top as the gravy grew cold, and she began to cry, ravenous tears welling in her eyes and streaking down her cheeks.

She lifted her hand and smeared the back of it across her face. “She don't see,” she said, her head tilted, hearing the sound of Helene's feet on the stairs; not the thud of a woman bent on opening a door Queen Ester had never closed in the first place but the soft patter of a child, complete with pigtails and something messy in her hand, a malleable child with “Yes, Mama” on her tongue. She loved that daughter, a fiction of a child, not the pecan-coated thing who had tried to strike at her with the word decent. “As if I ain't,” Queen Ester said.

Still standing in the hallway, she thought again about dinner and decided she would go hungry tonight, not wanting to eat alone what she had made for two. “But y'all still here, ain't you?” Queen Ester called upstairs, then touched the wall smiling, her imagination as strong as the surface she leaned against. All the way upstairs, she saw a dead hand, in repose, lift and wave back to her. She took to the stairs, humming softly. “I know she look like me, but she ain't just mine, Lord, she ain't all mine.” Tightly holding the banister, she swung one heavy foot in front of the other until she reached the top of the stairs. Without meaning to she softy mumbled a dead man's name: “Duck.”

Her mumbling grew as she willed the madness (which wasn't madness at all but a cultivated, flexible memory that allowed Queen Ester to take out and replace the events that displeased her, so already while moving up the stairs she wiped clean the image of Helene inside the room, scrolling back her daughter's visit, erasing the ugly words and replacing them with
I love you
). Queen Ester wished the madness that fell warm as a cloak would hold her even tighter. “Duck,” she said. “My husband.”