Tina Mcelroy Ansa (56 page)

After Herman disappeared, really disappeared, Lena just wanted to dissolve right where she lay and follow him back into his dead world. She wanted to close her eyes and just will herself to die, too. But she couldn’t, even though she felt she might die of the pain anyway.

“Oh, Lord, don’t do me like this. Please God, you know I’ve tried to be good, tried to be a true Christian. Jesus, you know that, you know everything. You know that.”

Lena pulled herself up onto her knees and prayed to every deity she believed in.

“Oh, our Mother who art in heaven, don’t just take him away like this. Please, don’t do that. Didn’t I forgive when you wanted me to? Didn’t I? Didn’t I love the way you wanted?

“Now, I’m asking this one little favor. Give me back my man.”

Lena started making deals with the Lord.

“Okay, Jesus, if you just send him back to me for one more month.
This is what I’ll do. I’ll be aware of every single thing around me. I swear I won’t let my anger and emotions get out of control. I’ll learn more about the gifts you’ve given me and how to use them. I swear if you’ll just send Herman back to me.

“Oh, Yemaya, please hear my cry. You’re a woman. You know how it feels. Let me have Herman back, and I’ll never ask another thing of you.”

All she could think of was Sister Louis Marie telling her and her female classmates in their senior year not to think they could fornicate, then make deals with God not to get pregnant.

“Girlies, you can’t make deals with God, you don’t have the ante.”

She stood shakily on the cold kitchen floor and stumbled into the Great Jonah Room. “I swear on my Grandies’ graves that I’ll do
anything
if you help me find Herman,” she said aloud to the rafters.

She stopped dead in her tracks.

“Oh, God, I don’t even know his last name!”

Then, she fell to the floor crying and wailing.

When she rose, she got up feebly like an old or pregnant woman—first on all fours like a dog, then one foot flat on the floor, then the other, and finally, with her knees bent, she pushed herself slowly upright from the floor with the palms of her hands. She moved to the oak French doors overlooking the deck. Our deck and our stables and our garden and our ground, she thought achingly, bracing herself against the door with the palm of one hand.

Lena knew she had to gather all her wiles if she was going to be able to do any good and get her man back.

“Not knowing his full name won’t matter, I don’t think,” she mumbled to herself as she moved toward her bedroom, pulling her braids back out of her face. Herman had told her that the rites or ceremony of conjure or voodoo or hoodoo or Christianity were just outward signs, like a sacrament, of inward grace or belief. She wanted to show that she truly believed.

Her mind raced to remember concoctions she had overheard
down at The Place, to recall what Sister had said was used to hold onto a wandering husband.

Now, was it Adam’s root or valerian root she told me to use? Lena wondered desperately. Her heart was pounding and her ears were ringing as if she had a steel band around her head. She just couldn’t think.

The word “root” reminded her of Herman’s Georgia jumpin’ root, and she had to fight images of Herman’s beautiful penis.

“Let’s see,” she said to herself as she stumbled around her big deserted house, “I think you add some ginger lily root and some rabbit tobacco. Now, where would I get some rabbit tobacco?”

Lena remembered that she had taken a piece of thread from Herman’s trousers one night, not to try to hold him, but just to have it. But when she checked the tiny peach and purple trunk-shaped box where she knew she had placed the threads of dark green cloth, the box was empty. A small knot from his hair had vanished, too.

She put on the red silk underwear that Herman liked under a pair of worn jeans and one of Herman’s long-sleeved shirts.

She sprinkled salt and pepper around all the doors of her house and stuck a fork in the ground in a vain effort to keep Herman there with her. But she knew it was too late for that.

When she thought of the chinaberry tree and its aphrodisiac roots that Herman had teased her about, it had begun to rain hard, coming down in sheets across the river. Still, she walked into the woods without a raincoat and got soaking wet sitting at the foot of the chinaberry tree on a stump.

Lena was truly torn about eating one of the mushrooms growing at her feet. She didn’t want to go on living. Sitting there, she composed her obituary, “She died after eating poisonous mushrooms she found in the woods near her home.”

Fuck that obituary, she thought, I don’t think I want that to be my epitaph. I don’t want that to be the last thing I do on this earth. She got up and headed back to the house to tell Herman of her decision, but when she realized Herman was gone and that she’d never
be able to tell him anything again, she fell right to her knees on the mucky, muddy ground and began crying again.

Worn out from weeping, Lena walked back to her house and stripped out of her clothes—wet to her panties—at the back door. Lena felt chilly in the house and thought she would never feel warm again without Herman. She sat naked at the shiny breakfast room table, the wood of the shiny benches cool against her butt. Recalling the first time she and Herman had fallen back onto the table, knocking a tall vase of daffodils and yellow roses to the floor, and made love there, Lena rubbed her hand across the slick surface. She lay her face, still wet with tears, against the table’s top and thought for a moment she could detect their scent.

But it was gone as soon as she sensed it.

Lena suddenly shivered and thought of going to get one of Herman’s big cotton sweaters that she loved to wear. Herman’s clothes!

Stumbling and bumbling, she ran to the closet and saw all his things there in her house, some lying on top of her freshly laundered things, some still smelling like him.

Lena was so happy to see something of her man still in her possession, to touch and smell, that she sank to the floor and burst into tears in the doorway of the closet. Each time she collected herself, she broke down again, until she was spent and drained. She finally gathered her strength and walked in.

She entered slowly, stealthily, quietly, and buried her face in the cotton and wool and silk of Herman’s things, still full of his smell.

Then, right before her eyes, Herman’s clothes began to disappear, dissolving just the way Herman had. She could hardly believe it was happening.

“Oh, God, don’t do this,” she said, feeling anger amidst her grief.

She started grabbing the clothes off the shelves and hangers and hooks, holding them in her arms as tightly as she could, as if her will could keep them real, solid, there with her. It could not. They all
disappeared: his boots by the back door, his rain and outer wear hanging in the laundry room, his undershirt on the back of the chaise longue, his jeans and leather belt hanging on a hook behind the bathroom door. She raced around the huge house looking for just one sock or undershirt that Herman had worn.

By noon, all of Herman’s personal belongings had vanished, even the white shirt she was wearing. Lena was desperate. She could not even find one of his short hairs among her rumpled sheets.

Lena knew she couldn’t perform any kind of ceremony without some personal artifact of his. And other than the things he had built around the property—the gate, the signs, the carved-seat chairs, the trellises, the altars—there was not a shred of physical evidence of him.

Lena was willing to try anything to get Herman back.

She began seeking out ghosts for help: burning white candles, calling out Rachel’s name in her pool room until blue and gray and purple forces swirled around the room so fiercely that waterspouts appeared in the pool.

But she received no answer.

Lena thought of other ghosts she could turn to.

“Let’s see,” she said shrewdly as if she were planning how to get some money together quickly for a business deal, “there’s Mama, Daddy, Grandmama and Raymond and Edward. There’s Granddaddy Walter, even though we never met. And my baby aunt who died. We already know each other. Then, there’s Frank Petersen.”

She ticked the names off until she had to note that just about everyone she cared about was dead.

“I’ll ask my dead baby aunt where Herman is,” Lena said, forgetting how the infant’s ghost, in a photograph over her Grandmama’s bed, had terrorized Lena when she was three until her grandmother moved the picture to the attic on Forest Avenue. “I’ll ask her how I can get hold of him. She will know, and she’ll know how to get him back, too.”

She raced to the velvet jewelry case in her dressing room and put
gold hoops in all four holes in her ears. She had read that gold improved one’s sight for ghosts.

Thinking of her best friend, she said, “Oh, God, I wish I could get my hands on Sister. She could really help me.”

Sister had always told Lena, “White women may go crazy quietly in their homes. But black women, little girl, like to get out in the street and go crazy.”

Sister was right.

Lena put on dry clothes, grabbed one of her suede jackets hanging by the door and a khaki wide-brim hat hanging there, too, and made her stumbling way to her car. It was storming seriously outside, and she was just about soaked again by the time she passed the wooden sign Herman had made to try and protect her.

“It stand for ’Leave Lena ’Lone,’” she remembered Herman saying. She traced each letter with the tips of her fingers and crumbled against the wall of rosebushes to wail some more.

“Oh, Herman, why you have to leave me? Lord, take me, too.”

When she got in her little Mercedes, she took a deep breath. Even though he was rarely in the car, the interior smelled to high heaven of Herman. His sweat, his saliva, his oils, his funk, his musk, his semen. She threw her head down on the steering wheel and sobbed.

She cried so deeply and heartily that she began to feel relieved. She cried the way she had cried when she was a child, with all her heart and soul.

All the way into town, to 455 Forest Avenue, Al Green sang on the CD player.

Lena didn’t think she could bear to continue listening to the heart-rending voice of the now-preacher singing a country boy’s song,
her country boy’s
favorite song. But she couldn’t make herself turn it off. It made her feel still connected to Herman.

By the time she crossed the wooden bridge over the river, she barely had strength to shift gears. When she got to 455 Forest Avenue in Pleasant Hill, little Chiquita was at the piano working on her music and saw Lena through the window coming around the side of the house. Chiquita cheerfully opened the door for her with a big, wide grin.

Lena calmed herself enough to give the tiny girl with the big low butt a quick hug and say in a near normal voice, “I just came by to get something from the attic,” and hurried on up the stairs.

Chiquita gave her a funny look. Damn, Miss Mac look
bad!
the teenager thought.

Lena’s pretty face was bloated and puffy from crying, her big brown eyes were red and swollen.

Chiquita watched Lena disappear up the steps and went on back to her music, promising herself she would call Lena the next day to make sure she was okay.

By the time Lena got to the last flight of steps leading to the top floor, she noticed how hot it was already up there in April. She felt a little dizzy. The attic was where she had loved playing as a child among the boxes and relics of decades of her family’s life.

When she got to the top of the stairs and into the hot dark dusty attic, it was silent and empty except for some building materials. She had forgotten where she had told the carpenters to store her family belongings—including her dead aunt’s picture. There was nothing to do but turn around.

Lena slipped out the house without anyone seeing her face tear-stained, her hair barely contained in their braids, her hopes dashed, her heart broken.

Lena felt she had no one on earth to turn to. So, she headed for
church. She didn’t know how long it had been since she had driven to St. Martin de Porres. Her car seemed to drive there under its own power. She sat in the parking lot awhile waiting for the torrential rain to let up a bit, but it seemed only to get heavier. As she climbed the cement steps in the downpour, Lena felt like a ninety-year-old woman who had watched all her loved ones die before her. She didn’t think she had the strength to go on by herself.

Now that Herman had vanished, her heart, her soul, her special powers, had seemed to evaporate with him. And she wanted to throw herself down in a pool of mud that she could slowly sink into and die.

Her soft suede jacket was soaking wet against her skin, and heavy drops fell from the ends of her long fat braids. It was chilly in the church, but Lena didn’t feel the cold. She felt numb, the way everyone said her father was after his mother died. Lena had heard Nellie say over and over after Grandmama’s funeral, “Jonah, he just numb.”

Candles flickered in their Mary-blue glass holders on the side altar. Lena sat nearby with her head resting on the back of the pew and heard a rustling noise at the back of the church near the entrance like the ringing of delicate golden chimes. When she looked up, she saw a procession coming down the center aisle of the church. A family procession. Leading the way was her Grandmama. Right behind her was Nellie, and gently holding her mother’s elbow as if it were a monarch butterfly was her father, Jonah. Then came her brothers, Raymond and Edward.

They were only there for a second, but Lena did see this ghostly congregation clearly. And she felt better for the sighting.

Seeing her family, her people dead—and she thought gone—proceeding down the aisle of her parish church gave her a sense of peace, the way she felt now when she entered 455 Forest Avenue and felt only serene spirits, safe at home. She remembered Herman’s words—”Shoot, baby, if we s’posed to be t’gether, then we be t’gether fo’ever. This life ain’t it. This ain’t nothin’ but a vapor, baby”—but she was too angry and hurt to take any comfort from them. For a second, she
felt that she could almost feel him reaching out to her. But by the time she thought to extend her hand and spirit back to him, the feeling had vanished, and with it her hope of getting her man back.