Knee-Deep in Wonder (6 page)

Confusion slipped back over Queen Ester's face. Soft, with just a trace of tear, she said, “Well, I'll be.” That was all. They wouldn't fall to the ground together, there would be no tangling of arms.

Helene felt uncertain of what to say next. “The funeral is Wednesday.”

“Never understood why the dead get a show in the middle of the week,” Queen Ester said, dipping her tea bag in and out of her cup. Her voice had sharpened. The promise that had been there when they ran around the house had vanished.

“Are you coming? Uncle Ed says hello.”

“Ed? Ain't seen him in—well, since before my mama passed … Back in 'fifty, I think. Is he still big as the sky?” And she paused. “Awful, ain't it, the way folks only think to get out when somebody dead.”

“Are you coming?”

Queen Ester squinted when Helene asked again. “No, can't say I am—going, that is. Miss Annie b and me didn't get along when she was living, and I don't suppose I should act like I like her now that she dead.” Queen Ester gulped down barely steeped tea, and Helene watched as her mother's mouth disappeared from her view. “No, no, I'm not going nowhere.”

Helene thought that if there were two mamas, this one would have tried to show her the door. Helene remembered Uncle Ed's worry and his question: “Can't you leave well enough alone?” Except now he sounded full of mocking.

“She's dead,” Helene pleaded. “I want you to be there; she would want you there too.”

“See, now that's a lie, plain and simple. What am I going to go for? So folks can stare at me and lie and say how good I look, when I know I look like I fell down? So I can hear people lying about how much they miss her and then hear myself lie about how much I miss her too? No. No, I don't need that kind of mess. How many funerals you been to? Can't be more than I have. I know Annie b dead. What am I going to go to Stamps for, to make sure?”

The rust was off her mother's voice. Queen Ester's tongue flapped like a runaway. She had turned the faucet on, letting the water run, and suds toppled over the sink and onto the floor, but she didn't notice. Lord, Helene thought, maybe Uncle Ed was right. Maybe I should have stayed at home.

“You listening?”

“Yes, Mama, I'm listening,” Helene said.

“Cause it sho don't look like it.”

“Just because I'm not looking you directly in the eye doesn't mean I'm not attentive.”

“Oh, there you go,” said Queen Ester.

Her mother was quick; she knew back talk when she heard it. And the first thing to fly out of my mouth shouldn't have been Annie b's funeral, Helene thought. I should have told Mama how I missed her and how I thought she looked like me. How I don't hold it against her for sending me away like something she didn't want. I could tell her that her toes are like mine, so she'd know I won't lead her to anything bad and unknown. Nice and easy, I should have talked to her, like a stroll that takes you nowhere. But now her skin was up and Helene not only had to smooth her down but also had to get her in the car.

“Mama, listen, let's talk about Annie b later. I mean, I didn't just come down here to get you to go to the funeral. Stamps is real nice, you know…” Helene's voice dwindled, but she coughed and began again. “Mama, remember the window? You and me at the window? I have your letters.” Gently, she groped in her purse, forgetting she had left them in the car. “I know you probably don't … such a long time ago. I wanted to ask you—”

“What you want to know about that room anyway?” Queen Ester interrupted.

Helene swallowed her words.

Changing her mind, Queen Ester began mid-sentence as if they were picking up on an old conversation. “Short thing, too. Couldn't be no more than five seven. Short and looked like toast made just right—brown and brown over. And pretty, which don't ever look right on a man, but I guess that's why Mama let him stay. Friends with your daddy, Duck, if I remember it right. Guess he was a friend of mine too.”

There was a slight pause in her voice, but then she said his name in a slow and concentrated moan. His name came out of her mouth like a hard, labored birth. “Ah … Chess. He didn't never listen to Mama—”

“Grandma knew him?” As Helene questioned, her mother's eyebrows set down.

“Yeah, she did. You know how your grandma was. Took in every stray cat, dog, and raccoon in Lafayette. Guess she didn't know the difference when Chess came sliding up on the porch.”

“I guess she wouldn't have,” Helene said. Even Annie b softened when she spoke of Liberty.

Queen Ester continued. “Your grandma took in anything and everything. When she was living, this house was filled with things other folks would of turned out the door.” She moved out of her puddle and then grinned. “Got myself some kind of wet.” She pulled opened a drawer and took out a kitchen towel. After patting herself dry, she put it back in its place and continued. “You know, we had this chicken that wouldn't lay eggs worth nothing. Shoulda killed it. All that bird was good for was a cooking pot. But Mama said, ‘Naw, it ain't right to kill a body just cause it don't act the way you expect it to.'

“Then we had this cow that looked like rain and only thought about giving us milk on Saturday nights. I kept telling Mama: Steak, steak. But she wouldn't listen. Had that cow for the longest time. Folks was always stopping by to tip they hat or tip a cup or get a slice of pie or talk when they wives swept them out of the door.”

Without prompting, Queen Ester was filling in the blank spaces of her daughter's memory and Helene loved her for it. She could see black women in thin cotton dresses, draped on bar stools, laughter in their mouths, while they waited for her grandmother to fill their plates.

“Yes, yes, them piano fingers of his.” Queen Ester's voice broke into Helene's thoughts, and suddenly she remembered: tapered hands holding a caramel Mary Jane between two fingers. Yes, I'm sure that was Chess. All I needed to start remembering were these things around me. Mama's troubled hands holding her empty cup, her rumbling voice, and the fistful of letters on the car seat. His hands were attached to the candy placed in my mouth, the fleeting taste of a Mary Jane suddenly snatched away, its sweetness turned bitter on the tongue. Where was this? Yes, right in front of the house, this house, my house, and then Helene wondered if it were her uncle's knowing she thought of now or her own.

Why my house? And then she remembered: someone had told her—Uncle Ed?—some deep rolling voice saying, “Yeah, this your house, baby girl, more yours than anybody, cause here, right inside the door, right upstairs you was born.” Rolling laughter. “You the only one born in this house. Now what about that? Ain't that something? Not many folks can say they was born in a house with a blanket waiting on them when they come out.” Did something turn sour in the voice? Whatever it was, it smelled bad, since Helene or someone else wrinkled their nose.

“But Chess couldn't play for nothing and couldn't read to boot. Best he could do was write his name. He should have been listening when Mama was trying to teach him what a group of letters say.”

In the space that opened up while Queen Ester caught her breath, Helene asked about her father. “But Mama, what about Daddy?” she whispered softly, her voice studied, casual. “What was Daddy like?”

“Oh, your daddy was real nice, real nice man.” Queen Ester picked up a dishrag folded on the kitchen sink, playing with its ragged edges. “Real nice.” She spun her finger around a loose thread and pulled. Hard. “Yes, sir. Nice as pie.”

“There's got to be more than that, Mama. Uncle Ed said he worked at a place called Mr. Carthers's sawmill.”

“Yeah, that's right.” But Queen Ester didn't look up as she spoke; her eyes held fast to the unraveling dishrag. Loop after loop, its stitches opened as Queen Ester plucked at the thread. “I made this myself. With that sewing machine you saw upstairs. Chain-stitch machine is what I got. Tug a bit on a loose thread, and whatever you make is liable to fall apart. Just like this here.” She tugged at the string. “I always wanted one of them lockstitch machines they got out there now. Pedaling ain't so hard.”

Helene waited for her mother to pick up her story and spin a life out for her father the way she had for Chess and her grandmother. According to Aunt Annie he was good, boring. He never stole anyone's wife, beat a child, or drank himself into a stupor. No one talked about him, a vanished thing whose name (Helene only knew his nickname; Ed had thought and thought and come up with nothing else) she had heard twice, foolish and poor sounding—Duck. The name of a boy of twelve. That was her father. He died right before Helene was born, cut to pieces in a sawmill accident. Filling two sacks they put into a coffin, along with bloodstained wood shavings, he was the parent gone by childbirth, a mother accident that chose the father instead.

Queen Ester's silence had crept between them and spread. “Yes, well, that's nice. We should try to get you one.” Helene smiled at her mother, but Queen Ester didn't look up from her hands. A nest of thread sat in her palm. “About Daddy. How long did he work at the sawmill? What did he do there? Where is it?” Helene piled questions atop of questions. “How old was he when he died?”

“Good Lord,” Queen Ester said. “Well, let's see then. All them questions in a row, just lined on up, you got them. I don't know. That sawmill was over yonder.”

Helene tried to disguise her disappointment. “Why don't you know?”

Queen Ester put the rag down at the edge of the sink. “Well, baby”—she picked at the unraveled string, her fingers gnawing at the thread—“your daddy come and gone so quick, ain't like nobody got to know him.”

“But you said that Chess was a friend of Daddy's?”

“That's right, baby. Chess sho was a friend of Duck's.”

“So where's Chess? Where is he now?”

Queen Ester pinched the edge of the dishrag and bit at the thread with her teeth. She looked satisfied. “Baby, Chess dead.”

4

IN 1927, CHESTER
Hubbert believed he was knee-deep in the life being lived by every Negro in the state of Mississippi: steeped in rising debt and back-crushing work. Even in the late twenties, cotton plantations still dotted the delta, mixed with sawmills. Land once covered with willow oaks and cottonwood trees was now laced, crisscross fashion, with acres of land worked and worked over by black hands. For the most part, Chester was right. His father sharecropped for the Sillers plantation, kissing debt so tenderly that for seven straight seasons he'd been clutching at the hope that he could crawl out from under the money he owed Mr. Sillers. But in other ways Chester was wrong: his mother sang, traveling in an arc that took her to places like Itta Bena and Cleveland, Mississippi, where she sat on high stools, her legs open while she bellowed melancholy songs about string beans and the Devil. White men wearing loosened plaid bow ties stared at the ever-darkening gap between her thighs. And on the days when she struggled home, smelling of male sweat and whiskey, Mrs. Hubbert would stay up all night with Chess, whispering stories about gleaming black men who fought in barns with knives and women who could save whole cities with their bare hands. For fourteen years, Chess lived almost like every other Negro in Mississippi: quietly, with despair within arm's reach. But then in late April 1927, with spring struggling to arrive, it began to rain.

When it came, without a rumble, sharecroppers and owners alike were thankful. With cotton cultivating only weeks away, they had been worried because a generally rainy winter had turned stingy in early November, cracking low-tide creeks and withering gardens. Backbreaking work had become even more so, and every farmer between Corinth and Pascagoula prayed for just three days of rain—the ceaseless rolling kind, so that by May the earth would fold up and over itself like cloth—and at the end of April their prayers were answered. Before a grandmother could clutch her knee with familiar pain, it started to rain in the early morning.

When one day turned into two, which flashed into three, something not too far from pride swelled inside the tenants of the Sillers plantation. Hadn't they prayed and He delivered? They began plotting how many days it would take to finish cultivating so many acres and planned visits to faraway relatives. Even when the rain stretched to four days and five, they refused to be troubled. “Didn't we ask for rain? Can't look God in the mouth now,” they all murmured over late dinner. But by the end of the week, the rueful comments stuttered to a close. Even the old couldn't stamp out general concern with, “Ain't studying no rain. Week worth of rain ain't nothing.” Mrs. Hubbert reined in her travels, only going as far as Oxford that weekend and then turning immediately back for home.

One week slid into two, and now when children tucked in their chins and raced to gather kindling out of the wood bins in the morning, topsoil greeted them at the front door. Dogwood blossoms and trumpet honeysuckle drowned on the vine. Without being told, the sharecroppers knew their prayers had turned into a curse. With almost a full month of rain, acres of land were too wet to cultivate, and even the stubborn—who thought, You want rain? Gone rain, then, and soaked themselves through while dropping cotton seed in the ground—had their efforts cleanly swept away.

A respite arrived in the middle of May. Sudden and harsh, the rain stopped. For five hours, nothing came down, and Mrs. Hubbert swept puddles of muddy water off her porch. But before her neighbors could complete their collective grateful sigh, intermingled with mutterings of, “That sho was close,” the rain began again, drenching marigolds and daylilies, and if anything it rained harder. Two more full weeks of rain went by, and Mrs. Hubbert didn't leave the house at all, since rumors reached the Sillers plantation that farther north, everything with the misfortune of standing still was now covered with water. What they had thought was personal grief was in fact drowning everything near the Mississippi River. Cairo, Illinois, was on the verge of being swept away; the Ohio River had turned contrary and begun flowing upstream.