The Salt Eaters (3 page)

“I can feel, sweetheart, that you’re not quite ready to dump the shit,” Minnie Ransom said, her next few words drowned out by the gasps, the rib nudges against starchy jackets, and shuffling of feet. “… got to give it all up, the pain, the hurt, the anger and make room for lovely things to rush in and fill you full. Nature abhors a so-called vacuum, don’t you know?” She waited till she got a nod out of Velma. “But you want to stomp around a little more in the mud puddle, I see, like a little kid fore you come into the warm and be done with mud. Nothing wrong with that,” she said pleasantly, moving her hands back to her own lap, not that they had made contact with Velma, but stopped some two or three inches away from the patient and moved around as if trying to memorize the contours for a full-length portrait to be done later without the model.

Several old-timers at this point craned their necks round to check with the veteran staff in the rear. It was all very strange, this behavior of Miz Minnie. Maybe she was finally into her dotage. “A hundred, if she’s a day,” murmured Cora.

“I can wait,” Minnie said, as though it were a matter of
handing Jake Daniels her shoes and sitting in the booth in stocking feet to flip through a magazine while her lifts were replaced. She crossed her legs again, leaned forward onto the high knee, dropped her chin into that palm, then slapped her other arm and a length of silk around her waist and closed her eyes. She could’ve been modeling new fashions for the golden age set or waiting for a bus.

“Looking more like a monkey every day,” Cora thought she was thinking to herself till someone jostled her elbow from behind and scorched the back of her neck with a frown.

“Far out,” one of the visitors was heard to mumble. “Far fucking out. So whadda we supposed to do, stand here for this comedy?”

“Shush.”

“Look, lady,” tapping on his watch, “We—”

“I said to shush, so shush.”

The visitor turned red when the giggles from the rear and side drifted his way. And the woman who had shushed him, a retired schoolteacher from the back district, shifted her position so that she no longer faced the two women but was standing kitty-corner, her arms folded across her chest, keeping one eye on her former student in the gown with her behind out and the other on the redbone who seemed to have more to say but not if she had anything to do with it.

Velma Henry clutched the stool. She felt faint, too faint to ask for a decent chair to sit in. She felt like she was in the back room of some precinct, or in the interrogation room of terrorist kidnappers, or in the walnut-paneled office of Transchemical being asked about an error. She cut that short. She hadn’t the strength. She felt her eyes rolling away. Once before she’d had that feeling. The preacher in hip boots spreading his white satin wings as she stepped toward him and was plunged under and everything went white.

She closed her eyes and they rolled back into her head, rolled
back to the edge of the table in her kitchen, to the edge of the sheen—to cling there like globules of furniture oil, cling there over the drop, then hiding into the wood, cringing into the grain as the woman who was her moved from sink to stove to countertop turning things on, turning the radio up. Opening drawers, opening things up. Her life line lying for an instant in the cradle of the scissors’ X, the radio’s song going on and on and no stop-notes as she leaned into the oven. The melody thickening as she was sucked into the carbon walls of the cave, then the song blending with the song of the gas.

“Release, sweetheart. Give it all up. Forgive everyone everything. Free them. Free self.”

Velma tried to pry her eyelids up to see if the woman was actually speaking. She was certain Mrs. Ransom had not spoken, just as she was sure she’d heard what she heard. She tried to summon her eyes back, to cut the connection. She was seeing more than she wished to remember in that kitchen. But there she was in a telepathic visit with her former self, who seemed to be still there in the kitchen reenacting the scene like time counted for nothing. She tried to move from that place to this, to see this yellow room, this stool, this white tile, this window where the path to the woods began, this Ransom woman who was calling her back. But the journey back from the kitchen was like the journey in the woods to gather. And gathering is a particular thing where the eyes are concerned, M’Dear Sophie taught. You see nothing but what you’re looking for. After sassafras, you see only the reddish-brown barkish things of the woods. Or after searching out eucalyptus, the eyes stay tuned within a given range of blue-green-gray and cancel out the rest of the world. And never mind that it’s late, that the basket is full, that you got what you came for, that you are ready to catch the bus back to town, are leisurely walking now on the lookout for flowers or berries or a little holding stone to
keep you company. The gathering’s demands stay with you, lock you in to particular sights. The eyes will not let you let it go.

All Velma could summon now before her eyes were the things of her kitchen, those things she’d sought while hunting for the end. Leaves, grasses, buds dry but alive and still in jars stuffed with cork, alive but inert on the shelf of oak, alive but arrested over the stove next to the matchbox she’d reached toward out of habit, forgetting she did not want the fire, she only wanted the gas. Leaning against the stove then as the performer leaned now, looking at the glass jars thinking who-knew-what then, her mind taken over, thinking, now, that in the jars was no air, therefore no sound, for sound waves weren’t all that self-sufficient, needed a material medium to transmit. But light waves need nothing to carry pictures in, to travel in, can go anywhere in the universe with their independent pictures. So there’d be things to see in the jars, were she in there sealed and unavailable to sounds, voices, cries. So she would be light. Would go back to her beginnings in the stars and be star light, over and done with, but the flame traveling wherever it pleased. And the pictures would follow her, haunt her. Be vivid and sharp in a vacuum. To haunt her. Pictures, sounds and bounce were everywhere, no matter what you did or where you went. Sound broke glass. Light could cut through even steel. There was no escaping the calling, the caves, the mud mothers, the others. No escape.

She’d been in a stupor, her gaze gliding greasily over the jars on the shelf till she fastened onto the egg timer, a little hourglass affair. To be that sealed—sound, taste, air, nothing seeping in. To be that unavailable at last, sealed in and the noise of the world, the garbage, locked out. To pour herself grain by grain into the top globe and sift silently down to a heap in the bottom one. That was the sight she’d been on the hunt for. To
lie coiled on the floor of the thing and then to bunch up with all her strength and push off from the bottom and squeeze through the waistline of the thing and tip time over for one last sandstorm and then be still, finally be still. Her grandmother would be pleased, her godmother Sophie too. “Girl, be still,” they’d been telling her for years, meaning different things.

And she’d be still in the globes, in the glass jars, sealed from time and life. All that was so indelible on her retina that the treatment room and all its clutter and mutterings were canceled out. Her kitchen, that woman moving about in obsessive repetition, the things on the shelf, the search, the demand would not let her eyes, let her, come back to the healer’s hands that were on her now.

“A grown woman won’t mess around in mud puddles too long before she releases. It’s warmer inside,” she thought she was hearing. “Release, sweetheart. Let it go. Let the healing power flow.”

She had had on a velour blouse, brown, crocheted. She felt good in it, moving about the booth in it, the cush, the plush soft against her breasts. The kind of blouse that years ago she would have worn to put James Lee Henry, called Obie now, under her spell. She moved about in the booth, the leather sticky under her knees, but the velour comforting against her skin. He no longer thought she was a prize to win. But the blouse was surely doing something to him, she was certain. But certain too that she was, even sitting right there, just a quaint memory for him, like a lucky marble or a coin caught from the Mardi Gras parade. She didn’t want to think too much on that. She was losing the thread of her story. She had been telling him about those Chinese pajamas and the silver buckets but had lost her way.

But it wasn’t the blouse feeling good or the memories of
their courting days that was distracting her. James Lee had begun moving the dishes aside, disrupting her meal. Her salad bowl no longer up under her right wrist where she could get at it between chunks of steak and mouthfuls of potatoes but shoved up against the wall next to the napkin rack. Her sweet potato pie totally out of reach. And now he moved her teacup toward the hot sauce bottle. He was interrupting her story, breaking right in just as she was about to get to the good part, to tell her to put her fork down and listen. She was seriously considering jabbing his hand with the fork as he reached to grasp her hands, his tie falling into her plate, covering the last two pieces cut from near the bone that she’d been saving to relish after she finished talking.

“Baby, I wish you were as courageous emotionally as you are …”

She missed hearing it somehow. Close as his face was to hers, plainly as he was speaking, attentive as she tried to be, she just couldn’t hear what the hell he was saying. She couldn’t blame it on the waiters. Usually rattling trays and slinging silverware into the washer, most of them were at the busboy table drinking ice tea and murmuring low. No diners were laughing or talking loud, only a few men sat about alone reading the Sunday papers and sipping coffee. The winos who usually parked by the coatrack to bug the diners lining up for the cashier were outside, sitting on the curb. It was quiet. But she still couldn’t quite seem to make out what he was jabbering about all up in her face.

“Let me help you, Velma. Whatever it is we … wherever we’re at now … I can help you break that habit … learn to let go of past pain … like you got me to stop smoking. We could …”

She heard some of it. He was making an appeal, a reconciliation of some sort, conditions, limits, an agenda, help. Something
about emotional caring or daring or sharing. James Lee could be tiresome in these moods. She pulled her hand away and reached for her bag. If things were going to get heavy, she needed a cigarette. But he caught her hands again. Rising up out of the booth and damn near coming across the table, he pulled her hands away from her lighter and held them, then resumed his seat and went right on talking, talking.

“Dammit, James. Obie. Let go. I haven’t finished my—”

“Let me finish. What I want to say …” He paused and wagged his head like it was a sorrowful thing he had to tell her. She snorted. There was a shred of spinach clinging between his front teeth like a fang, which made it all ridiculous. “Do you have any idea, Velma, how you look when you launch into one of your anecdotes? It’s got to be costing you something to hang on to old pains. Just look at you. Your eyes slit, the cords jump out of your neck, your voice trembles, I expect fire to come blasting out of your nostrils any minute. It takes something out of you, Velma, to keep all them dead moments alive. Why can’t you just … forget … forgive … and always it’s some situation that was over and done with ten, fifteen years ago. But here you are still all fired up about it, still plotting, up to your jaws in ancient shit.”

“Up to my jaws in ancient shit. Nice line.”

“Like what you were going on and on about this afternoon. The time your mother wouldn’t let you go to the Freeman birthday party because Palma hadn’t been invited too. Hell, that was twenty years ago, Vee. And for the hundredth time you got to sink your teeth all in it. The invitation with the little elephant and the party hat and how—”

“So why are you giving me the details of it? We taping this session? If I’ve gone over it a hundred times, surely I’ve got it down pat. You seem to. And get your tie out of my plate, James. Obie.”

“All I want to know is how long are you going to overload your circuits with—”

“Until I get my pint of blood,” she said, shaking one hand free and pulling her plate toward her.

“Mixed metaphor, kiddo.”

She stretched her face into a grin that ended in a sneer. If he could only see himself, she thought, the shred of spinach reducing him.

“We’re different people, James. Obie. Somebody shit all over you, you forgive and forget. You start talking about how we’re all damaged and colonialism and the underdeveloped blah blah. That’s why everybody walks all over you.”

“You’re the only one to ever try to walk over me, Vee.”

“That’s why I just can’t stay with you. I don’t respect—”

“That’s not why, Vee.

“What?”

“Scared. Anytime you’re not in absolute control, you panic.”

“Scared?” She chewed with her mouth open, certain the sight would make him shut up or at least turn away. “Shit. Scared of you? Sheeeeet. Obie.”

“Intimacy. Love. Taking a chance when the issue of control just isn’t—”

She cut him off with a snort when he seemed to be speaking in imitation of her chewing. People trying to be earnest, serious or supercilious with their fly open or a button dangling from their blouse always cracked her up, made her feel sneery and sympathetic at the same time. She wasn’t sure which she felt. Mama Mae in the doorway doing her mother act while the safety pin in her bra worked itself loose was usually an object of pity. Or Lil James spreading the peanut butter thick and going on and on about the basketball game and how he’d had to sit it out on the bench when the coach knew full well he could save the day, a bugga hanging from his nose, always
triggered a wave of compassion that made her move to hug him, though these days he shied away from her sudden bursts of affection.

She wiped her fingers on the napkin and made her hand available, but her husband did not take it, kept talking, the green leaf waving, mocking. The two hands lay there side by side on the table like a still life. She rubbed his hand and he did not pull it away exactly, just sort of. She rubbed the ridges in his thumbnail and tried to listen to what he was saying now about the atmosphere she set up in the house, what her emotional something or other was doing to the kid, to him, mostly to her. She heard bits of it while floating in and out of the scene, thinking on that first day when she fell in love with his hands or called it love and called it, smirking, falling.