I tried to imagine her younger, middle-aged even, but it was impossible to envision that she might ever have looked any different.
I said, “We help you with something, ma’am?”
She took a deep breath, collecting enough wind to speak, ignored me, and turned to Leonard. “You,” she said, “the colored boy,” just in case Leonard might be confused on his ancestry. “I heard about your uncle. I don’t believe it for a minute. I don’t care if they found babies in his toilet, he didn’t murder and saw up no chil’ren. I’ve known that boy all his life.”
“Word sure gets around,” Leonard said.
“Ain’t no secrets in nigger town,” she said.
“No, ma’am, guess not,” Leonard said.
“And if the policemens catch anybody it’ll be an accident. They done decided it was Chester, and that will be the end of it.”
“What I’m afraid of too, ma’am,” Leonard said.
“Them boys next door,” she said. “Y’all don’t have nothing to do with them niggers. They’re on drugs.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Leonard said. “We was kinda thinkin’ they were.”
“You can tell way they walk,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Leonard said.
“And they sell’m too,” she said. “Every little chile you see go in over there and come out, they done sold them some drugs. They kill’n their own, and I betcha some fat-cat peckerwood somewheres is on the gettin’ end of the money.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Leonard said.
She looked at me, as if examining my fat-cat white peckerwood tendencies. I guess none showed. Her wrinkles shifted. She said, “Listen here, I got some apple and pear pies baking. You boys come on in and help me get ’em out of the oven a’foe they burn up. I wore myself out bakin’ ’em.”
We mounted the porch and it screamed at us. I looked down and saw a split in the boards and the ground looking up at me. That old lady fell through those boards, she’d break a leg or kill herself.
The smell of baking pies from inside was rich and fine and made me hungry. I opened the screen door and held it. Leonard stood beside her while she used the walker, and after she made a few short steps she said to me, “Close the screen door, son. You’re lettin’ in flies. I’m gonna be coming for a bit.”
I closed the screen until she got closer, which, true to her words, took awhile, and when she was close enough, I held the screen open and she and Leonard went past to the tune of straining boards.
I followed inside and closed the screen and left the front door open because it was hot in there with all the heat from the oven and there being only a little rotating fan on the kitchen table to cool the place. I felt mildly dizzy, as if I had been riding too fast on a merry-go-round. When I looked back at the screen door, it had begun to bead and buzz with house flies hoping for a chance to wipe their shitty legs on some pies.
The kitchen was very clean, and beneath the smell of the pies I caught a hint of Pine Sol. I wondered if she cleaned the place herself, and couldn’t figure the how of it if she did. Being frail as she was, a bathroom trip would be like an expedition through the South American jungles.
One wall was quite amazing. It was papered with snapshots taped to it, some in color, some black and white, some very old and very faded. Where the wall gave them up was a doorway, and through the doorway I could see another room, and the part of the wall I could see in there was also covered in photographs.
Over the stove hung an ancient dime-store painting of a serene Jesus dressed in red robe and sandals, a worshipful beggar at his feet. The painting was in a frame behind clean glass, but the frame was too big and the glass wasn’t pressing the picture and the picture had started to fade and heat-curl at one corner, giving the impression that Jesus’s robe was rolling up and would soon expose private matters to the beggar.
The rest of the kitchen was cabinets and pot-holder hooks with pot holders and transparent, time-yellowed curtains over a slanting window.
“Turn the oven off and get the pies out,” she said, and leaned forward on her walker as if getting lower would help her breathe better.
Leonard turned off the oven and got a gloved pot holder off a hook and opened the oven and took out three thick and beautifully crusted pies and sat them on top of the stove. The smell of pies filled my head thick as an allergy.
The old lady said, “You don’t remember me, do you, Lenny?”
Leonard closed up the oven and looked at her for a long moment, then shook his head. “No, ma’am. Guess I don’t. Haven’t been back here in a time. I came to visit my uncle, it was the Browns lived here. Mr. Brown, he worked for the railroad or somethin’.”
“Browns are all dead and buried,” she said. “They call me MeMaw.”
“MeMaw?” Leonard said. “MeMaw Carter. You used to live over on Sheraton. I used to go over to the park there. My uncle brung me. Y’all visited while I played.”
“That was just for a couple of years,” she said. “So I ain’t surprised you don’t remember me. You was practically a baby. I don’t never forget nothing, though. You know there ain’t no park there now? None you can use, anyway.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Drug niggers took it over. Kids with them beepers and needles and pistols in their pants. Ain’t no place to do nothing ’round here anymore but get killed. My youngest son, Clarence, moved me here ten year ago. Thought it was a better place than Sheraton Street. Was, then. Old house was falling apart and all them drug niggers around. Now I got them ’cross the street and this old house ain’t much.”
“You used to tell me stories about Br’er Rabbit and such,” Leonard said.
“And you ate my cookin’ when you come with your uncle. You liked pies and vanilla cookies. Any kind of vanilla cookie.”
“Yes, ma’am, that’s me. I oughta remembered you right off.”
She showed Leonard an acre of dentures and some of her wrinkles straightened out. “I’ve changed a little, Lenny. You know how old I am?”
“No, ma’am. I’m no good guessing ages.”
“Don’t guess no woman’s age,” she said. “That’ll just cause you trouble. ’Course, you get old as me, it don’t matter no more. One day to the next couldn’t make me look no older. ’Foe long I’ll be bakin’ pies for Jesus… I’m ninety-five years old.”
“You don’t look it,” Leonard said.
She made a noise in her throat that sounded like crisp crackers being crumbled. “You don’t start lyin’ to MeMaw now. I look a hundred and ninety-five. You boys, help me sit down.”
We got hold of her arms, which felt like sweaty sticks covered in foam rubber, and helped her away from the walker and onto a hard-backed chair at the kitchen table.
She sighed and said, “Thank you. That sittin’ part and gettin’ up by myself tuckers me. Turn the fan on me.”
I twisted the fan around so that the rotation stayed mostly in her direction. I said, “You like a drink of water?”
“No,” she said, “I’m OK, but I’d like you boys to help me eat some of that pie.”
Leonard sliced us pie and poured us milk and we ate. The pie was good. It made me nostalgic for home and my mother, but my mother was long gone and so was the home where I had been raised.
I turned and looked at the photographs. They were of all manner of folks. People black and white and brown. The clothes and hairstyles and backgrounds revealed just how long ago this whole photographic display had begun, though a lot of the photos appeared to have been taken in recent years on MeMaw’s front porch, or in her yard, or right here in the kitchen. A healthy number of them showed people eating at her table.