Tina Mcelroy Ansa (28 page)

Shortly after the plane crash, while she was still in deep mourning for her own mother and father, an old classmate from grammar school had called Lena to go with her to
her
mother’s hospital room. The older woman had spent her last years in the west wing of Mulberry Acres, a nursing home, away from her own home and her things and her family. Lena’s friend didn’t say so, but Lena knew she was afraid to face the dying woman alone.

The nurses greeted Lena with quiet smiles and hugs, and her friend
knew
she had done the right thing by asking Lena along.

When the mother heard them come in, she turned her head from the wall to face her daughter. Lena had to steel herself to keep from gasping. It was her own mother Nellie’s face she saw, full of pain and forgiveness. Lena could tell it was not Nellie’s pain and forgiveness etched on her face but that of the woman who lay there reaching out her hand for her daughter. But Lena, reaching her hand out to her own mother’s manicured hand, took the succor the image offered, allowed herself to move into the circle of love and forgiveness that the other two women offered and received.

Lena, who never got to sit by the deathbed of her own mother. Lena, who didn’t have bones to bury. Lena, who couldn’t for the life of her call up the feeling of her mother’s skin where it was beginning to soften along her sharp jawbone. Lena sat by the deathbed of this strange woman who wore the face of her mother, the hands of her mother, the eyes of her mother, and said her own goodbyes.

Her friend, grateful for the lead, leaned forward as Nellie’s visage slowly faded from the dying woman’s face, and Lena stepped away from the bed, back into the shadows. As night fell, Lena saw the woman turn her head to her daughter and smile. In a surprisingly strong voice, she said,” With night there is weeping, but dancing
comes with the morning.” Then, she turned her head back to the wall and died.

It was the first time for Lena but hardly the last for the sightings. Lena began seeing Nellie all over town. Driving to work, Lena would look in her rearview mirror and see a woman with short red hair in the car behind her, indolently smoking a long cigarette. Lena would almost crash into the oncoming traffic in her amazement. The woman looked exactly like her mother. Lena had thrown the car into Park and turned all the way around to get a better look. Even head-on, face-to-face, the woman was the spit of Nellie!

When the light changed and the Nellie-looking woman and the cars behind her started honking their horns impatiently, Lena still sat and stared over her shoulder at the woman. The more Lena looked, the more she discovered in this woman’s face. Lena got out of her car and stood in the street with her eyes squinted up and a hand on her hip, staring at her mother’s visage on the face of the woman in the car behind hers. It was her mother’s face from ten years earlier.

Lena was so shocked she almost fainted right there beside her little Mercedes in the middle of traffic.

For a while after that, Lena saw her mother’s face, no matter how briefly, in every face she came in contact with. It finally made it impossible for her to turn her back on any of her fellow citizens of the world. Haitian orphans—rusty ashen skin bespeaking a life of malnutrition and deprivation—had her mother’s face. Women who sat on their front steps or stood over steam tables with their faces bruised and beaten to the color of an eggplant had her mother’s face. Winos who offered to do some made-up task in exchange for a drink of liquor had her mother’s face. The parishioners who sat next to her in church had her mother’s face. Family men looking for housing for their wives and children had her mother’s face. Saleswomen and cashiers all had her mother’s face. Turning her back on them was turning her back on her mother. And she could not do that.

Even now, years after the phenomenon had subsided, her mother’s
spirit still asserted itself. Lena would look down at her hands and recall Nellie sitting at her machine in the sewing room when the child had padded in crying from a cut or scratch on her finger. Without hesitation, Nellie had stopped her sewing, dropping the needle, thread and material right where she sat, and gently taken Lena’s little injured buttery hand in her smooth reddish brown ones. She would make a sympathetic sound somewhere between “ooohh” and “aaahh” as she examined the wound. Then she’d bring her lips down to Lena’s hand and kiss the injured spot, hard enough so Lena felt the magic of the mother’s kiss, but not too hard.

Little Lena would be satisfied. Even when she heard her mother mutter wryly to herself, “Ain’t no telling where these little hands have been.”

Her mother would say the same thing when Lena came to her carrying something for her to taste or smell or rub. Nellie would do the proper thing—taste the drop of nectar from the honeysuckle flower, put the dirty red leaf behind her ear—then she would smile and mutter to herself, “Humph, ain’t no telling where this little flower has been.”

It was memories like those that steeled Lena for the tasks that seemed naturally somehow to fall to her.

“Oh, Lena, Leroy just passed. Will you please call Mama? She still live down in Swainsboro. Here’s a number. Would you please call her and break the news that her baby boy is dead? I just can’t do it. And I know how good you are at that kind of thing. Would you do that for me and my family, Lena? I know we haven’t talked all that much or know each other that well. But somebody told me you’d help us out. Okay?”

Lena would see her mother’s face and hear her mother’s voice and have to make the call.

Over the years, she had perfected her technique in taking care of her death duties. She could hear herself on the telephone deftly breaking the news of death to a family member living up north or to the
estranged relative who had not spoken to the deceased in years. Even she was sometimes comforted by the sound of her own voice.

She would begin by making a little Mulberry small talk. Just by listening to her, you’d never know what she was leading up to. Then, she’d talk about life and the inevitability of the cycle of life. How death was a part of that cycle. And on and on, until it was time to let them know about the recent death of Aunt Eula or Uncle Jackson or Lil Bro.

Lena saw the kindness as a tribute to her mother. Nellie had always been the one to dispense care and kisses in her house. Her hysterically funny tirades were followed by voluminous hugs and assurances. Between times of telling them how much they were loved, her mother assured Lena and brothers daily that they were little “fanatical fools,” “little motley morons,” “a little horse-face heifer,” but they were her fools, her morons and her heifer.

While Nellie dispensed love, Jonah lounced out common sense. He was a man who felt he
knew
the meaning of real value in this world.

“Money make iron float.” Jonah had said it with a flat, matter-of-fact tone. And he pronounced “iron” as “ine” like it was “line” without the
I.

Lena felt her responsibility lay somewhere in between kisses and money.

Where Jonah went around collecting money in the mornings, Lena sometimes went about doling it out. Lena went the same route but took a different approach. She could never get him to agree that it was a good idea and a sound business move, even when he saw her largesse come back to her—and quick, too!—more than tenfold. Jonah was serious about his money,
his goddamn money
, to be exact. Just about everyone in Mulberry knew that Jonah McPherson was a man who didn’t want to be toyed with when it came to his money.

“Man, don’t play with me about
my goddamn money,”
Lena had
heard him say all her life to his customers, his card-playing buddies and just about anybody he met on the street.

One cold crisp morning when Lena was making the rounds collecting for Jonah while he and Nellie were flying off somewhere, she had an epiphany. Shit, she thought to herself as she tried to gun the motor and drive her new Jaguar out of a near ditch in some part of town where Jonah had a bunch of property and little involvement, what am I doing out here trying to out-Jonah Daddy. Hell, I don’t even care about these little collections. They ain’t worth the time I spend running these folks down.

By now, she had gotten out of the car and, pulling her mother’s antique cashmere wrap coat—a coat similar to the one she had seen the author Zora Neale Hurston wear in photos from the thirties and forties—around her neck and shoulders, walked around the car tipped in the ditch to examine just how deeply entrenched it was. All the time, she kept muttering to herself, “Yeah, if these no-good motherfuckers would pay their fucking rent on time, I wouldn’t have to be here in this ditch in my best, my
best
suede boots, trying to push my new car out of a muddy ditch. God, these no-account, no-rent-paying Negroes!” Her feet were soaked in the wet earth and as soon as she tried to take a step, she slipped in the muck and came crashing down on her behind, sliding down the incline and sending cold water and mud everywhere.

Now, she was really wet, cold and furious.

“These trifling niggers,” she hissed aloud. Then, she stopped dead still, the word hanging nastily in the cold air.

She heard herself, felt the bile rising in her throat at the thought of her customers and almost passed out from the force of her ugliness, meanness, stinginess, hatefulness. A word she never used popping out of her mouth like a thoughtless white person.

“Shit, is this what money does to you?” she asked herself as she sat in the muddy ditch. She was so angry with herself for succumbing to the forces of Mammon that she raised her hands out of the mud to the
heavens and screamed, “Who gives a damn about
this goddamn money?
!!”

That’s when she saw the little boy and girl looking down and laughing at her from the top of the ditch. She took a look at herself and had to laugh, too. She was a funny sight, sitting in the wet ditch like an expensively dressed pig, covered in red mud and slime. Laughing, she splashed the muddy water around her and screamed again, “Who gives a damn about
this goddamn money?!!”

This time the tiny children clamped their tiny hands to their mouths and squealed at Lena’s profanity. The little girl spun around in glee and almost slipped and fell in the ditch, too. And the three of them laughed all the more. Lena suddenly felt light and free sitting in the muddy water. Still laughing with the children, she rolled over and began climbing out of the ditch on all fours to call Mr. Brown’s filling station for a tow.

So, Lena didn’t get her feet wet anymore—soiling her expensive shoes and despoiling her sweet spirit—going around town collecting money. Instead, she just kept dispensing the money, expecting that it would be repaid one way or another. And it usually was.

After the death of her parents, when Lena was finally able to face the gauntlet of lawyers and accountants awaiting her, she discovered she was the owner of property and businesses and land she didn’t even know about. Even she was surprised at the extent of her family’s wealth.

That very next Sunday, Lena had sat in a front pew at St. Martin de Porres and heard Matthew 19 read from the altar with authority. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

The thought sobered her.

It was like hearing the responsorial psalm sung during Mass, “The Lord hears the cry of the poor. Blessed be the Lord.”

She wondered, Does that mean He doesn’t hear my cries? Is that why He blessed me with so much
stuff
but doesn’t seem to hear my
cries of loneliness and confusion and weariness. Is it why I have a stunning pink short Chanel suit, a forty-foot indoor swimming pool, and heated stables, but no man, children or joy?

The Scriptures seemed full of references to the difficulty the wealthy of this world faced in reaping the rewards of the next. Even in reading the Beatitudes and the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, some of Lena’s favorite verses, she was reminded of her station in life.

“But woe to you rich, for your consolation is now.”

She bowed her head and started praying even harder for the souls of her parents, so they, too—though rich—could enter the kingdom of heaven, could find rest.

Lena prayed with fervor for the
repose
of the souls of the dead. She had seen what it was like to wander the earth and the otherworld with no rest. What that ceaseless wandering had done to the souls who had haunted her, moaning and screaming in the night.

When she prayed for the repose of the souls of her dearly departed, she meant it.

“Oh, Jesus, Mary, don’t let my mama and daddy and brothers be out there somewhere wandering the earth. Give them rest, Lord. Give them repose.”

But regardless of her trepidations about the fate of her wealthy loved ones in the afterlife, on this earthly plane, Lena
made and used
her money. Lena had learned well from Jonah the power of money. And how it can be manipulated in your and your loved ones’ favor. She enjoyed her money and the comfort and beauty it could purchase. She wrapped herself in the luxury it could buy sometimes as if it were a cashmere blanket.

Lena wanted to wrap the world, her own little world of Mulberry, in that same soft comfortable blanket.

Lena’s generosity. Sister had seen it herself. A woman Lena had gone to grammar school with came by the house while Sister was visiting. Sister saw the check on the kitchen table stuck under a tall
pepper mill. It was for five hundred dollars even though Sister heard the woman say as she came in the front door, “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you saving my life like this, Lena. You know I’ll pay it back payday. This three hundred dollars is a godsend.” Sister wasn’t at all surprised at the check or the amount.

Then, as Lena ushered her visitor out the door, Sister saw her press a folded bill into the woman’s hand and whisper, “Here, why don’t you get yourself a shrimp dinner on the way home.”

“You can’t always get a check cashed this time of night,” Lena said as she came back into the kitchen, “and you cannot face this world on an empty stomach.”