Tina Mcelroy Ansa (38 page)

Most of the stacks of shiny cans of food and bottles and jars had long ago been removed from the shelves, drawers and bins of the walk-in pantry and given to folks and organizations who needed them. Only a few huge cans of mandarin oranges in syrup remained.

Lena smiled at the ten-year-old cans of fruit. Her father had
bought them from a wholesaler who gave him a good deal. But Jonah had had a hard time finding someone who liked the overly sweet soft canned fruit. The only thing Lena liked about mandarin oranges was their bright Halloween color.

“Um, still can’t get rid of those things,” she said aloud, and suddenly realized that she was laughing softly to herself. She had trouble recalling when she had last laughed in that house.

There was the bean-shelling party Nellie had lured her to the summer before her mother was killed. Lena had shown up at her mother’s dressed for lunch at the Dupree Hotel, but Nellie was wearing a comfortable housecoat and sandals.

Lena just laughed at her mother’s trick. The two of them had sat all afternoon in rocking chairs on the screened porch with big paper bags of unshelled baby butter beans between their legs. As they shelled beans like two country women, they laughed and joked, drank sweet lemonade and laughed some more. Then, they pulled out brown leather photo albums and laughed even more at how the family had looked ten, twenty, thirty years before.

Lena felt herself smiling as she scanned the pantry’s back shelves. She found the ice cream churn and the stainless-steel meat grinder right away. Someone, her mother probably, had packed the grinder away in what looked like its original heavy-duty cardboard box with all of its parts and attachments. She took the churn and crank out of its box and examined all the parts. It looked as Lena remembered it from childhood. Still shiny in spots.

Looking up at the shelves again, Lena caught sight of the edge of another box peeking out from a corner. She grabbed at the small box on the bare shelf above her. When she did, she heard a stiff scraping noise and about two dozen white four-by-six notecards fluttered out of the toppled tin box to the black-and-white-tiled floor like tiny ghosts.

Lena didn’t even jump. The sight of the papers sailing toward her feet warmed her heart. She didn’t know why, but she felt as if she had suddenly remembered the face of a loved one.

Without any trepidation, she reached down and collected the cards in a short stack.

On the first card she saw her mother’s handwriting, thin, spidery cursive like her spoken language—a combination of southern schoolgirl grammar and bawdy juke-joint talk—written with one of her vintage fountain pens.

“Recipes!” Lena said, astonished.

In her thin quick hand, Nellie had written
BRUNSWICK STEW
across the top of the white card that had light blue lines running horizontally over it. She had underlined
BRUNSWICK STEW
twice, then listed the ingredients:

• 1 whole hog head
  

• 1 3-lb chicken
  

• 2 medium cans whole-kernel corn (yellow) 2 cans peas, English
  

• 2 large cans tomato juice
  

• 1 large onion
  

• 1 tablespoon sugar
  

• 1 stalk celery
  

• salt & pepper to taste
  

Then she had written out the instructions:

Take one large hog’s head. Scrub it. Remove the hair, eyes and brains. (Set brains aside for breakfast next morning for brains and eggs.)

Put head in large pot along with chicken. Add salt & pepper, onion, celery. Cook until meat of head and chicken is tender. Remove from liquid and save liquid.

Ground meat from chicken & hog head coarsely, add corn, peas, tomato juice, mix well. Cook slowly for about 25 to 30 minutes. You might add stock from the chicken and hog head if mixture seems too dry but not too much.

Add salt and pepper to taste also add sugar. If you like hot stew, while cooking the head and chicken add 5 pods of dried red pepper to the pot.

Reading each line of the recipe brought her mother’s voice back stronger and stronger to her.

This, Lena knew, was part of the haunting of the house on Forest Avenue. Dead souls calling out to her from every room, from the linen closets, from the basement, from the pantry. But this voice, her mother’s voice in her mother’s kitchen, began to hold some comfort for her, not reproach, or loneliness or terror, but comfort.

Lena looked at all the cards again.

She could tell, from the slightly newer, bluer blue ink, her mother had gone back later on and written at the top of each recipe card:
“Dear Lena.”

It was a welcomed voice from the grave for Lena.
“Dear Lena,”
she read to herself, hearing her mother’s voice saying the words.

Lena repeated the two words over and over again with all different kinds of inflection and intonation.

“Dear Lena”
said with tenderness and love.

“Dear Lena,”
said with exasperation.

“Dear Lena,”
said with sternness.

“Dear Lena,”
said with wisdom and instruction.

“Dear Lena,”
said with infinite kindness.

“Dear Lena,” “Dear Lena,” “Dear Lena.”

She sat on a huge, restaurant-size can of mandarin oranges and dropped her face onto her bare smooth knees and broke down and wept. Lena felt for the first time in ten years that she indeed had not lost her mother completely.

She looked over at a gallon jug of thick brown Alaga syrup. Jonah bought in bulk until the day he died.

Floating on top of the South Georgia cane and corn syrup was a fuzzy green fungus. She could hear Nellie’s voice once more.

“Oh, that old mold is just what my mama used to call ’mother,’” she had explained to a repulsed little Lena. “It won’t hurt. Just spoon it off, and the syrup is good as new.”

She heard her mother’s voice say “mother,” and she wept some more.

Lena felt she had found her mother again.
“Dear Lena.”

She felt so much better after she had cried. Lena had no idea why she said it, but she whispered, “Oh, Mama, I forgive you. You didn’t mean no harm.”

She was near shocked to feel a wave of forgiveness for her mother flood her soul and lift a weight off her heart like a beached boat rising in the tide and floating away. Forgiveness for burning Lena’s birth caul. Forgiveness for dying and leaving her alone. Forgiveness for not telling her how to be a special little baby girl in this world.

She took a deep breath, wiped away the trail of tears on her face with the flat of her hand and laughed at herself as she squared her shoulders and picked up the tin box and put the recipes inside. She took them out into the light of the kitchen and sat in a shaft of sunlight full of dust beams at the table there and looked over the woods and stream out back and the spot where her grandmama’s ghost said her mother had burned her birth caul. She slowly lifted the top of the box and rubbed her thumb along the edges of the stack of cards fitting neatly inside.

She flipped past
BRUNSWICK STEW
and went on to the next card. Across its top it proclaimed:

“Dear Lena,”
then,

EGG BREAD
, with the ingredients listed below.

And right behind that card in an unusual display of conventional organization, Nellie had placed a white card with the heading CORN
BREAD DRESSING FOR TURKEY OR HEN

Nellie’s voice rang throughout all the recipes.

On the card for her yellow layer cake, she informed Lena, “Flour three round nine-inch cake pans. You know how to flour a cake pan.”
In another recipe,
BISCUIT BREAD
, she wrote, “Now, you know how you’ve always seen me roll out biscuit dough and cut out biscuits with the cutter. Well, do the same thing, round the whole thing out on the edges and put it in a well-greased skillet to cook slowly and brown on both sides.

“Serve it right away hot with some butter and Alaga.”

Lena had forgotten how strong her mother’s voice was.

Slowly, bit by bit, her mother came back to Lena in her mind. At first, she remembered Nellie’s delicate long throat right in the front where she stroked it from her chin to her chest when she was thinking or ignoring someone and “looking down that long country road” the way she did.

She saw her mother’s short slender legs and thin ankles. Then, she remembered her full breasts the way they had looked inside the bodice of a sexy summer sunback dress.

The ideal of “mother” was still Nellie to Lena.

“Lord, I’m worried about my child,” Nellie would say regularly to her friends Mary and Carrie. She chided Lena for doing too much, for being there for everybody. And she ain’t even got no husband or no babies of her own, Nellie would think.

“Lena, baby, you know nobody’s any prouder of you and your accomplishments or what you do for folks than I am. But, Lena, I’m worried about my child.”

Lena had just smiled at her mother’s reference to her: “my child.”

Although all the children in the McPherson family knew they were loved, with Lena it was different. She was the baby of the family. And even when her brothers were alive, Nellie only referred to Lena as “my child.” Raymond and Edward weren’t even offended by it. They seemed to use the phrase as much as Nellie. Looking up at Lena approaching, Raymond would tell his mother, “Here comes
your
child, Mama.”

Lena was her mother’s special child, and Nellie
was
worried about her. But then, ever since her only daughter’s special birth, Nellie had always felt a bit of unease about Lena’s safety and stability and future.
Nellie had just written off most of Lena’s strange comments and insights to her being “a high-strung filly” the way Jonah always said.

But even a mother could see that an unusual child like Lena could only do so much. Nellie had given up on trying to talk about it to Jonah. Especially after their sons died so early, Jonah wouldn’t believe that Lena couldn’t do any and every thing in the world.

But Nellie knew there were limits.

“Lena sho’ must be a big help to you now that she ’un got her education and all,” a new customer would say to Nellie as she sat at the front of the liquor store watching Lena walking around the other side taking inventory with her new computer.

“
A big help???”
Nellie would retort. “A
big help?
Shoot, Lena the hand I fan with. I don’t know what we did before she was here.”

Nellie said it all the time. That Lena was the hand her mama fanned with.

Once, Lena had heard a woman down at The Place, she thought it was little skinny Willie Bea, tell her friend next to her at the counter, “You don’t understand. You still
have
your mother.” Lena had turned away and cried.

But now Lena just smiled to herself at the memory. Although Nellie was dead, Lena knew she still had her. She hadn’t for a number of years, but she regained her mother sitting in the house on Forest Avenue reading the recipes Nellie had written down just for her.

She thought of what Herman had told her.

“People got t’ love ya in their own way, Lena.”

She caressed her haul of cards and said to the empty room, “This my mama right here.” She suddenly felt the peace she had felt as a child when her mother would answer, “This my baby right here.”

She cried over the recipes one more time, each one with its greeting,
“Dear Lena.”
Then, she collected them all along with the ice cream churn, the silver meat grinder and an old gray dishcloth she remembered seeing her mother sling over her shoulder in the kitchen, and left the house happily haunted.

W
ith Herman around, Lena found happiness everywhere.

She had always wanted to make love in the straw in the loft of her barn.

In the fifteen years she had lived by the river she had planned such liaisons with men who had piqued her interest one way or another. One was a professor of history at Morehouse College she met at an awards luncheon given there for her. He showed up at her house for a casual Sunday brunch dressed in a three-piece suit. And besides the unattractive images of his past that Lena saw flash before her eyes, he seemed intent on remaining fairly well dressed and fully clothed for the entire visit.

She had invited another perfectly good prospect over for a midweek picnic lunch. But they didn’t even make it to the barn, let alone the picnic Lena was anticipating. She had really planned this one. Talking on the phone with Sister, planning the menu, choosing her ensemble for the afternoon: a black cotton sweater over a black lace teddy and wide-legged white silk crepe trousers and white deck shoes.

“You know, something that can go effortlessly from barn to bed,” Sister had said on the phone with a laugh.

Lena thought she had made plans for every contingency. She had stashed away toys, some feathers, a big fluffy comforter, Handiwipes, towels, a bottle of her best champagne, two hurricane lanterns for when it got dark (for she hoped to be in there fucking ’til the sun went down), and the green wicker picnic basket filled with strawberries, raspberries, kiwi slices and tiny hors d’oeuvres in a cool pack.

But her date, the owner of a gas station and garage in the next small town, got mad at the very suggestion that they have a picnic in the stables.

“Oh, so it’s like that. You gon’ ask
me
out here to eat in the barn with the horses and animals.” He was really insulted.

Lena had tried a bit to explain, but she got kind of angry herself having to
explain
that she was trying to seduce his black ass. The whole thing ended badly, with him jumping in his souped-up Mustang and roaring off down her dirt road not long after noon, upsetting her horses grazing in the nearest field of clover.

Herman, on the other hand, was proud and honored that Lena wanted him in what he called “varied and divers” places and ways.

It was in the barn that Herman had learned that Lena enjoyed oral sex. Not just getting it—he had learned that the first night he touched her—but giving it, too. He was as pleased as he could be at the discovery.