Tina Mcelroy Ansa (52 page)

“Yeah, I guess we little country folks in Mulberry wasn’t
worthy
and
sophisticated
enough to get her little designer castoffs!”

“Uh-huh, and I had my eye on that brown leather suit for years!”

“Yeah, what she want us to do? Get down and paw the ground just ’cause she did a few things here and there for folks? What we got to do, paw the ground at her feet?”

When Mrs. Jeffries, the receptionist at Candace, overheard one of these talks, she had snapped back, “Maybe what you got to do is give her a little credit and a lot a’ breathing room.” Precious and the other women at Candace had just smiled and kept on working. “We all make a good living here at Candace,” the receptionist added, “and if we want designer clothes, we can buy our own.” That had really shut the grumblers up.

It eased Lena’s pain a bit to know that every damn body in town was not poised to stand outside her gate with flambeaux and pitchforks.

Gloria left a message of support on Lena’s machine.

“Lena, girl, I know this town ’un tore its drawers with you,” the message said. “Call me when you feel like talking.”

Even days after the incident down at The Place, Lena still did not feel like talking with anyone in Mulberry but Herman. The storm on Saturday had finally passed on down the state, but Lena’s stormy feelings did not abate.

For hours, Lena would just sit—her elbows on her knees, her head in her hands. Then suddenly, she would slowly raise her head and shake it. “Um, um, um,” she’d say to herself with infinite sadness. Many times, tears would just roll down her cheeks. Remembering what Herman had told her, when she was out on the deck, she was
careful not to let any of the salty drops fall into the now muddy waters of the river.

Lena could still hear women all over town discussing the possibilities of just what was wrong with Lena McPherson. Even people who didn’t know her personally itched to get into the act.

“You know she had a lick to her head just last spring according to Bubbles down at The Place,” one of the secretaries at the East Mulberry High School office told another.

“Did she really?” the other asked from her brightly painted cubicle.

“Friend o’ mine work in the emergency room of the medical center. No, she didn’t see her come in, but she heard that Fred Jackson, the man who
own
the construction company, brought her in and was plenty worried. She say he
swore
she had been hit in the head with something even though they couldn’t find no bump.”

“Maybe it didn’t take no bump.”

“What you mean?”

“You know some womens go crazy when they reach the change of life. I know it’s hard to think of Lena going through that but she
is
at that age.”

“Lena McPherson, I know exactly when she was born. It was 1949. In the fall, I think.”

“Anyway, like I was saying, Lena ’bout at that age. Maybe that explain it.”

Each time she heard another Mulberry conversation, she grew angrier and angrier.

She was so mad, she even reverted to her five-year-old self and wondered how they’d all feel if she were dead. “Yeah, if I was laying up in a coffin somewhere, they’d have to get the Mulberry city
and
county police to direct the crowds.

“Yeah, like Mama say, ’Gi’ me my roses while I’m still alive to smell ’em.’”

If Herman had not taken her keys away from her, Lena would
have jumped in her car many a time and driven into town to confront each and every one of the folks who were so through with her.

For days, Lena would stand out in the garden near the stables and scream in the direction of Mulberry.

“Bump you!!!!!” “Forget you!!!!!” “Screw you!!!!!” She said everything but “Fuck you.”

“Yeah,” Lena shouted to the woods and the bridle trail and the road and the river leading into Mulberry, “why
don’t
I just wait? Wait until I’m, say, forty-seven, or forty-eight or forty-nine or fifty-nine to get a life of my own. Yeah, why don’t I just fucking wait until it’s convenient and comfortable for all of you?!!” She balled up her fist and shook it in the direction of town.

She thought Yahweh must have felt like this about the Israelites about the time they had been in the desert for a few decades. And they were still turning against Him, doubting Him, blaming Him.

“Fuck
these people!!” Lena imagined the Father turning to the Mother and the Holy Spirit and saying of his chosen people. Then turning to his people and adding, “I brought you out of Egypt. Parted the Red Sea for you. Dried up Jordan. Rained manna and birds on the desert so you could eat. I closed my ears to the pleas of your enemies, the Ammonites and the Hittites and the Canaanites and the Girgashites and the Perizzites—and made you my people, victorious.

“Gave you land you didn’t have to clear and till. Gave you vineyards and olive trees you didn’t have to plant. And just listen to you.

“Fuck
these people!”

Herman just looked at her.

“So now you up there wid Yahweh, huh, Lena, baby?

“Good God, Lena, just ’cause people loves ya don’t mean they won’t wear yo’ ass out day to day. Why you so surprised?

“But if folks truly loves you, they be there for ya. They don’t let you run yo’se’f completely in the ground doin’ fo’ them. They like children who don’t know no better, if they do that, Lena. But regardless of what
they
do, you gon’ have to give it up, baby.”

“I have given up as much as I could, Herman, and you see what’s happened. You see how people acting now!”

“Naw, baby, I don’t mean givin’ up the work. I mean givin’ up the control. The decidin’ who gets what, who needs what, who can’t survive wi’out Lena McPherson’s he’p.

“You don’t know the meanin’ a’ the word yet, but, baby, you gon’ have t’
surrender!

“Once you do that, you’ll be able to love folks again.”

“Love them?!”
Lena sucked her teeth.

“You know, baby, you can tell Mulberry and all its people,
Tuck
you!’ and still be able to love them.

“ ’Cause no matter how much you hurt, all they done is just be human. It’s just people bein’ human. You ain’t in control, Lena. No matter how sweet ya want to do it. Doin’ fo’ people don’t make ’em
yo’s.
Everybody responsible fo’ they own se’ves. Just like you.

“Damn, baby, you don’t have a clue, do you?”

Herman said it with such power and emphasis that it had hurt Lena’s already wounded feelings. It was spoken almost as an indictment, a grand jury charge. Herman felt the weight of his words, too, and tried to soften them a little.

“Lena, baby, you got t’ do better. You can’t afford not to have a clue. You got thangs t’ do. And ya ain’t got to sacrifice yo’se’f on the altar of doin’ and goin’ and fixin’.

“You ain’t got to give burned offerin’s of yo’se’f to be good. God don’t even want that. That’s all yo’ hush mouth is … burned offerin’s. And yo’ good works, too. Burned offerin’s.”

Lena was hurt to the quick by Herman’s judgment. Tears welled up in her eyes.

“I ain’t judgin’ you, baby, I’m try ’na he’p you.

“I been dead a hundred years, Lena, baby, I do know a thang or two.

“You done forgot to look out fo’ yo’se’f. Shoot, Lena, baby, even iron wear out! What you make possible fo’ Lena to do? See, you might be able to come up wid som’um, but you got to think, don’t ya?”

She listened to all that Herman said and then settled down to hurt. He wrapped himself around Lena in a stream of warm loving mist night after night when she finally fell asleep angry and spent.

Things began to settle down with the folks in town and in Lena’s heart. She felt as if God had replaced her heart of stone with a heart of spirit, of love.

She couldn’t believe that with Herman’s direction, his help, she was beginning to forgive folks and herself.

She was understanding how to say, “Fuck you!” and not let it end her love.

Before Herman came and opened her back up to the earth and the universe, she would have just ignored the feeling. But now she tried to be attuned to everything, every thought, every prayer and wish that came across her path. Not to just solve the problems or even to alleviate the suffering. But to take note and learn.

For a while, she felt she could do anything with Herman by her side.

Finally, one night in early December, Lena got up out of her nice warm bed and walked naked out onto the deck. She left Herman lying in bed among their rumpled flannel sheets, but he rose on his elbows and watched her through the French doors. There was another meteor shower lighting up the night sky over the river. Herman thought Lena looked like a goddess as she stood naked in flashes of celestial light comfortable and natural. Facing south toward Mulberry, Lena stretched her arms high over her head and took a deep breath of the crisp air. She leaned forward a little bit over the cypress railing of the deck. Then, at the top of her lungs, she screamed,
“Fuuucccckkk
you!”

The invective rang out through the woods and over the river, all the way to town, Lena imagined.

“Fuuucccckkk
you!” she screamed it again. Lena imagined folks in town being awakened by her directive.

She paused and said it again. This time she didn’t scream or yell. In a normal voice, she repeated,
“Fuuuccckkkk
you!” Then, she chuckled. Lena liked the sound of it.

“Fuck
you.” Now, she was really laughing as she looked out over the waters of the Ocawatchee.

Lena lifted her hands over her head, stretched her chilly naked body in the light of the moon and said it one more time as Herman got out of bed and, picking up her heavy wool robe, joined her on the deck.

“Fuck
you!”

Herman draped the warm robe around Lena’s bare shoulders.

Then, she and Herman sat on their deck, snuggled together inside her robe, and laughed and laughed and laughed.

F
or the first time in fifty years, it snowed in Mulberry on Christmas Eve. The frigid weather had blown in out of the north suddenly one day in mid-December. One minute, it was still fairly comfortable, the next, it was freezing.

However, after the floods of the year before, the recurring Cleer Flo’s, and the unseasonable storm that Lena’s anger had caused back in November, no one in Mulberry was really surprised at the weather anymore.

But everyone in Middle Georgia knew that Christmastime could bring balmy sweater weather. So, that’s what folks were expecting. Everybody except Lena and Herman. They had seen the signs.

First, Keba, little more than halfway through her pregnancy, began nesting. The second week in December, she started kicking straw into the clean brick corners of her stall as if she were a bird or a squirrel. Lena and Herman would stand and talk to her for hours, combing her mane, rubbing her big belly when she would let them, and reassuring her that the vet knew her due date.

Then, around that same time, Lena could feel a difference in the air. She looked like an old country woman stopping in her muddy tracks between the kitchen garden and the stables to lift her nose and smell the air. Sniffing two or three more times, she detected something new there.

“Herman,” she called, his name ringing out in the crisp strange-feeling air.

“Hold on,” he hollered from inside the stables.

Suddenly appearing next to her, he asked, “What ya want, Lena, baby? If you got the money, honey, I got the time.”

Herman said the same thing whenever or however Lena called him for his assistance, his perspective, his opinion, his touch, his kiss, his love.

She’d yell it aloud, whisper it or think it. Sometimes, she just felt the need for him, and Herman would appear.

“Herman, can you come here a minute?”

“If you got the money, honey, I got the time.”

“Herman, doesn’t it feel strange out here to you?” she asked.

“Uh-huh,” he replied without even pausing. “I been feelin’ it, too. Feel like we in fo’ some sho’ nuff cold weather.”

“Cold weather? Um, that’s what it is. But it feels so balmy now, almost warm. I bet I’ll know it next time.”

“Bet you will,” Herman said proudly. “I think it’s gon’ get real cold, Lena. Let’s brang in the last of those punkins from the field.”

They brought in the pumpkins and the last of the gourds, too, and put them in the barn just in time, before the first snow fell.

The Ocawatchee did not freeze over completely during the snowstorm, and folks marveled when Cleer Flo’ occurred about the same time. “In the middle of winter, too.” Puffs of frozen mist rose off the surface of the river like spirits. The children in town started calling them “snow ghosts” and stood on the bridges over the river to watch in wonder and try to catch the cold vapors in their little gloved hands.

The area was truly living up to its old nickname of Cold Neck.
Lena’s log cabin looked like an old-fashioned Yuletide postcard covered in a heavy snowfall with smoke billowing out of its chimneys.

The grounds looked like a wonderland indeed, and Lena and Herman cavorted in the snow like children until they were nearly frozen. They’d come back inside, tossing their wet clothes everywhere, and make love—naked and damp—in front of the fireplace at the manger Herman had built by the foot of the Christmas tree covered with heirloom family ornaments. Their cold skin tingled as the fire’s heat radiated off their naked bodies. The whole time, Donny Hathaway and Charles Brown and Otis Redding sang of Christmas on the sound system all over the house.

It was the best Christmas Lena had ever had. Even better than when she was a child.

Since reaching adulthood, she had not known the joys of a simple Christmas: a good-sized tree, a good meal and a good mate with whom to share it. That’s what Lena had this Christmas.

No extravagant, mad, feverish shopping for everybody in the world she knew to have a little Christmas. No writing a hundred individual checks to everybody who knew her name.

Instead, this Christmas, in place of all the hams and turkeys and poinsettias and gifts, she sat down in her office at home and wrote notes—some with checks and some without—of love, gratitude and forgiveness.