My Drowning
Authors: Jim Grimsley
A NOVEL BY
JIM GRIMSLEY
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
For Faye Araiza
THE LOW GROUNDS
I CAN STILL
remember the whiteness of my mother as she slips beneath the surface of the river. Years later I am standing in my clean kitchen when the memory returns. We are somewhere near the Holcomb River in the shade and my mother wears a white slip that flutters up in the water. She is very pale and fat and the blossoming of the slip makes her seem immense. Kneeling in the river, submerged to her shoulders, she turns her face to the sky. The fat of her arms sways in the air, dips into the dark water. She takes a breath and closes her mouth. From me, from all of us, she slides away.
I am hardly old enough to know how much like drowning this is. Why have we come to the river when it is swollen with rain, when it is running so hard and fast? The reason is lost; I remember nothing. Since I am wearing shoes, this must be autumn or winter. The world shows brown and dry. Only the daughters have come; my older sister, Nora, stands with me but none of my brothers has followed. Why not?
Mama rises out of the river gasping, throwing water from
her hair. Her breath rises in trails of steam. The surprise of seeing her move so freely still echoes in me years afterward. Her large, flat breasts lift, the yellowed bodice of the slip clinging to the high flesh. She says something, I can't remember what it is, something about the cold. But she addresses the air above my head, not me. Another person stands behind me, I can't remember who. How can such a vivid memory be so imperfect?
In the present I am standing in my kitchen with the light on. I am alone in my house but I am seeing everything around me in a strange way. All the objects have a patina, a film of iridescence. I am seeing a river at my feet as if it is flowing darkly there; I understand this is happening because I am old and all the rivers of my memory are rushing toward the sea, unstoppable. I understand that I am prone to re member the most ridiculous things, same as Nana Rose when she died. I have grown old enough that a memory becomes as real as the real thing.
Mama steps ashore. She stands over me, shivering and dripping, and I see the outline of her heavy belly, her rolling thighs. She looks down at me with the blankness of a cow. I am so in love with her, every part of me aches. The feeling returns vividly, an electric current running through me. She scoops me up, her arms are strong but soft; I burrow into them. I weigh less than the wet slip.
She holds me almost level with her face. Her eyes are blank and blue. She sets me onto the ground abruptly, having forgotten why she lifted me in the first place. The wet fabric of the slip heaves as she steps away from all of us.
I have seen and will see these simple images again and
again, in memory and dreams. We have come to the river, Nora and Mama and meâEllenâand Mama in only her slip. We stand out in the cold while Mama sobs in the woods.
WE LIVED IN
the Low Grounds, in a house with a fireplace, a wood stove, a well outside where Nora pumped water. We had a bed in the kitchen for Uncle Cope. We had kerosene lamps for light and an outhouse for shitting. My daddy was a tenant farmer on this land. He was thirty-two, my mother, the same.
I was hungry, watching the fire, wishing for something to eat. We would have biscuits soon, I could smell them, but I never ate fast enough to fill my stomach, and afterward there was never anything left over. So I huddled in Mama's lap and watched the fire and felt the hollow fist in my belly.
The smell of the biscuits filled the house, drawing my brothers, Carl Jr., Otis, and Joe Robbie, slouched like dogs along the walls. The smell awakened Daddy, who shuffled from the bedroom pulling a flannel shirt over his thin shoulders.
He spooned sugar into his coffee and said nothing. When nothing but biscuit appeared to eat, he stared into the top of the table. He chewed the biscuit as if he were grazing in a pasture.
I got half of a biscuit. The sensation of warm bread in the stomach made me happy, and I was allowed to eat in Mama's lap. We were eating, all of us. We crowded near the fireplace. No one talked.
I SLEPT WITH
Nora. We had a bed in the same room with the boys; they slept across the room. At night Nora tucked me
against her like a warm brick, and we breathed peacefully while our brothers snored.
Early every morning Mama woke Nora by pulling her feet, under the covers, from the foot of the bed, and Nora slid away from me with the groan that meant she knew better than to linger. Mama hovered, a large round shadow at the foot of the bed. I could see the softness of her eyes in the light of the kerosene lantern she carried. “Get on up, now.”
I slid out of the bed with Nora. The floor struck cold at the bottoms of my feet, and I ached. I slid into clothes in the cold while Mama with the lantern sailed toward the door.
Nora had already dressed and stumbled after her.
We made a fire in the stove in the kitchen and another in the fireplace in the adjacent room where Daddy would sit to take his coffee and eat his grits. The fires had to be lit before Daddy would rise. Mama and Nora crept into the kitchen to build the fire in the stove, because Uncle Cope slept in the kitchen, and they were afraid of him. They heard him breathing in the dark while they fumbled with the wood. Once the fire was lit, Nora began to make biscuits. She ladled water, pumped the night before, and scooped lard from the tin. She measured by eye and kneaded the white dough carefully. She shivered in the cold kitchen, the kitchen fire only beginning to throw its circle of heat. She stood near the stove, warming as the oven awoke.
She made coffee. She boiled water for grits. She added wood to the fire from the firebox. I stood near the stove along the wall and watched. I fetched and carried whatever I was told.
Uncle Cope, when he lived with us, got out of bed and
roamed the house on crutches from the time Nora lit the fire in the stove. He woke, the first of the men, after the fire began to make heat. Mama and Nora had said over and over not to be alone with him, so I never was. If he came into a room when I was alone in it, I left. Even in the morning he smelled like whiskey, and he never shaved; he buttoned his shirts crooked, and his belly hung over his belt. His teeth were dark and bluish and had jagged shapes. I did not like him. Uncle Cope busted his leg to splinters when he fell off a truck, drunk, a long time ago, Mama said. He lived with Daddy part-time since Daddy was his brother.
WHEN THE SKY
lightened and the coffee began to boil, Mama headed to the bedrooms to wake up Carl Jr. and Daddy. By then biscuits were baking in the oven and grits boiled in a pot. Daddy's shaving washpan waited in the warm room for the water we heated on the stove. Nora gave me biscuit dough when Mama was out of the room. I ate it greedily, raw. Hardly morning, and I was already hungry from the night before.
Carl Jr. stumbled out of the bedroom, pulling on his pants. The rest of his clothes he carried in his hands, dropping them on the floor near the fireplace, where he stood shivering and rubbing his hands together. He hurriedly pulled on an undershirt and buttoned another over it.
When he washed his face, he took care to use no more of the hot water than Daddy would be willing to spare. Carl Jr.'s beard hardly required daily attention, though he rubbed his palm along his throat as if he longed for thicker growth. He would carry this gesture, and this wispy, blondish beard, into manhood.
Daddy glided out of the back of the house, thin and sharp as a blade. His small, round head shone, the hair thinning at the top, wispy as Carl Jr.'s beard. Carl Jr. carried away the washpan and emptied it while Daddy backed up to the fire. Daddy fingered the buttons of his overalls. He knelt and laced up his boots. When Carl Jr. delivered the washpan, Nora filled it with the hot water and they both looked at it before Carl Jr. carried it back. That morning hot water satisfied Daddy, and the minutes passed quietly.
Odd, the detail that a person remembers among all those that lie forgotten or pass unnoticed. I remember the red-checkered oilcloth we had when I was very young, scored with dark holes where cigarettes had burned it. Daddy always rolled his cigarettes and smoked them sitting at the table. What makes the memory particular? The oilcloth was finally thrown away when there was more burn than cloth, and we never had another. But I remember kneeling in a chair and running my hands along the oily surface, counting the bright checks, sticking my fingers through the burns.
What do I fail to notice? What do I continue to forget? Why this particular morning?
Mama emerged from the back of the house. She had pulled a pair of socks over her feet and walked with her shuffling gait, holding her knees wide apart. In the kitchen she stirred four spoons of sugar into a cup of coffee, hot and strong. She carried the coffee to Daddy herself this morning.
He took the cup and swallowed. Satisfaction spread through his features. The fire warmed him sufficiently, and he found comfort.
Out the window dawn climbed in the sky, a purple light behind the pine trees. I stood at the window beside the stove, near Nora's skirt. Objects emerged from the murky outside, becoming the chicken house, the toolshed, the outhouse. Tobacco barns leaned to the side in the distance. In the morning a pale mist glided over the yard, between the trees. The sky flushed every color of the rainbow, but mostly it burned like fire, especially along the tops of clouds.
I was cold, but I avoided the fire. I would warm myself when Daddy left.
“Go put on some socks, Ellen,” Nora whispered, “before you catch pneumonia,” and I nodded and skipped into the cold bedroom. None of us knew what pneumonia was, but we were all agreed it would be bad to catch.
In our room the boys were still sleeping. I walked on tiptoes so only a bit of my foot touched the cold floor. Mama would wake up Otis soon, since he had to get dressed for school. Joe Robbie would lie in bed as long as he liked, and Mama would bring him a biscuit and some sugared coffee later, when everyone else left the house. But right now the room was still dark, and I found my way between shadows. I grabbed socks and returned to the kitchen. There were spooks in the dark; they would get you if you lingered.
In the kitchen, by the stove, I slipped the socks over my feet, hopping to avoid having to sit on the floor. Nora smiled at me from the side. Carl Jr. joined Daddy with his coffee and they drank together by the fireplace, sitting in the two chairs. Nora served them biscuits. We had syrup, and today Daddy poured syrup on one of the biscuits, to get him started, he said, and Mama laughed. She brought the syrup, kept on
the top shelf out of reach of us little ones, as if it were a holy object. The stream of syrup oozed over the biscuit in thin, lacy trails. My mouth watered. Daddy smiled, showing the gap where a tooth was missing.
Daddy's face had paled from its summer bronze. His forehead was deeply creased from days in the weather. He was thin as a rake but strong as wire. He possessed, in my opinion, huge hands and feet. The feet could strike as swiftly and unexpectedly as the hands, and even Carl Jr. had no defense against Daddy's kicks and licks. An offense could be major or minor, even an offense as insignificant as moving too slowly across Daddy's striking range. I stayed on my toes around Daddy, I had learned that. I kept my back to the wall.
Carl Jr. left for work when the truck came. I had no notion when or why the truck arrived, only that it did. A dark round-hooded pickup truck with wooden rails at the back pulled up beside the ditch and beeped. Carl Jr. leapt into the back, and the truck vanished down the steep curve of road.
Not long after, Otis stumbled through the kitchen ready to walk with Nora the half mile to the place where the school bus stopped. Nora's coat had grown tight across the shoulders. Otis wore an old coat of Carl Jr.'s, a little too big for him, but he looked warmer than Nora.
When they were gone, the house became quiet.
Daddy sat at home in the kitchen and poked around in the yard. For much of the day he stayed in the shed. Later I learned he kept his liquor there. Sometimes Uncle Cope trekked across the yard on his crutches, to sit on a crate and fold his arms across his knees with Daddy in the shed. We could hear them laughing.
Mama studied the building with her milky eyes.
In the winter, Joe Robbie and I played near the fireplace or in the kitchen or, at worst, in one of the cold bedrooms. Joe Robbie never walked on his own legs, because of something I did not understand. I never liked to watch him because of the way he moved, but he could be right much fun, sitting down.