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The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.
Indian-giver be the name of the Lord.
Those words made Bingo furious, he kept to himself in the car, tense and cold. We were all silent riding to the cemetery, except Mama. She cried and made the car reek of whiskey. The trees were bare; I hadn’t noticed before. The last time I looked, they were all golden and lovely, but now the wind had made them bare. It blew the yellow leaves in the gutters and across the hood of the car.
I don’t believe that about the Lord giving and the Lord taking away, I don’t think that’s what it’s all about. The spirit of us, the human part of us that doesn’t die, what is that really?
She tried to think how to say what she felt but could only fumble to express.
I think that all the matter in the universe would just fly apart if it didn’t have something holding it together. All the electrons would just whirl away and could never form themselves into people and trees and stars. Everything would get all mixed up, then run down and stop. I think that what keeps everything in the right place must be something bigger than matter, it must be something that makes order out of matter. And we are part of that. Crystal is part of that.
You can’t have order without intelligence. It is some kind of intelligence that we cannot comprehend.
In the cemetery the yellow leaves blew across Crystal’s coffin, and there was a mound of raw earth next to her grave. You could smell the earth, you knew why it was there. We had been so wrapped in cotton wool at the funeral that nothing was real, but that raw earth was real.
The coffin was suspended over the grave on a rack and the flowers laid to one side. Then the minister said more words. It was cold and bright there, you could smell the new-cut grass—and the raw earth. The wind made the clouds move quickly across the sky.
After the last words, and we had bowed our heads—oh, what good does it do to pray for someone after they are dead? If their spirits are ready to go somewhere wonderful, they go. If they’re not, they’re not. What good does it do to pray for something that some power bigger than us has already decided? But I did, though. We bowed our heads, and I prayed for the soul of my sister.
Then it was over, and the minister went away. The coffin would be lowered after we had gone, and the dirt put over it. We turned away then. But Mama would not go, Mama would not leave Crystal.
Jenny sat staring out the window. She could see the old apartment building; in her mind she could see Crystal walking onto the balcony, then lying on the floor in the blood and glass. Then she saw, once again, the scene at Crystal’s grave. She saw Mama lurch forward toward the coffin, drop her crutch and fall against Crystal’s coffin, clutch at it, crying “No, no, she’s my baby! Give me my baby!”
Mama lay at the foot of Crystal’s coffin, drunk and crying hoarsely.
Chapter 18
It is two days since Crystal’s funeral. Mama is still drunk. At first I hid her bottle, but she begged so pitifully that I handed it over. I don’t care any more. Let her drown herself.
Sometimes she’s sick and I have to clean up the mess, then Bingo and I sit on the porch until the smell in the house goes away. Last night the stars were out and we sat wrapped in blankets at midnight. There was a little breeze and somewhere over the city a lonely night bird was crying. I felt so sad. And I guess I was feeling sorry for myself. I was tired of taking care of Mama. I wanted someone to take care of me.
Then Bingo put his arm around me and I remembered that we needed each other, that he takes care of me sometimes.
I made sandwiches from the chicken Georgie brought, and hot, sweet tea, and we ate on the porch in the dark night. It was comforting and it made us feel stronger.
Now it’s morning and the rain clouds are washing across the sky. I need to set down clearly what the days have been.
She wanted the details now, the small realities, to steady herself. She could not cry for Crystal; the lump inside her hurt so, but she could not cry.
Mama got up once and tried to dress. She was struggling pitifully and so weak she couldn’t manage. She wanted to go buy a bottle. I wouldn’t help her dress, I only watched her. She couldn’t get her skirt on. She might have gone without it, but then she was sick again. And then she started to yell and cry and she was like that the rest of the night. I slept finally and when I woke in the morning she had found my hidden purse and taken all the money. She had another bottle. She wouldn’t tell us where she hid the rest of the money. We looked in her purse, her bed, all her personal things, every stitch of her clothes, then searched the cupboards and closets and drawers, under the rugs, under the chest and the trunk, and beneath the chair cushions and mattresses. We looked in the springs of the chair and then, although we knew Mama could never climb so high, we unscrewed the light fixtures and looked into them.
That night Mama yelled terrible things and we could not make her quiet. Bingo began to search again. He went into the bathroom, felt under the lip of the basin, then got a screwdriver and removed the chrome fixtures that hold the soap and the toilet paper and looked in the holes that had been cut in the walls for them. Nothing. He examined the medicine cabinet. Nothing. Then he removed the lid of the water closet behind the toilet.
There it was, a mayonnaise jar full of money.
He carried it dripping into the living room and handed it to me. We grinned at each other. Now, there would be no more whiskey.
But after all that, Mama decided on her own to sober up. This morning when I woke she was in the kitchen drinking black coffee. She was wearing that pink robe Lud gave her, it was wrapped all crooked and there was a stain down the front. Her hair needs bleaching again, it makes a black crown on top of her head. She had the coffeepot on the table and was drinking the coffee practically boiling. She said, “Things will be better now, Jenny.” That was Mama’s way of saying she was sorry. It was lovely to hear her say that. Then she said flatly, “I guess I hid the money.’”
“I know, Mama. We found it.”
She looked surprised and a little annoyed that we had figured out where it was. Then finally, “I guess I really hung it on, didn’t I? Well, there are times for all of us.” She pondered this as if it were very profound. Then she said sadly, “Maybe the only rest we get in this world is when we’re finally dead.”
I was shocked at that, and it made me incredibly sad. I put my arm around Mama. The sun moved to touch the glass in the back door and send a slash of yellow onto the linoleum. I said, “You’ll be all right now, Mama.”
“I’m the way I am,” Mama said. “There’s nothing I can do about that.”
And the closeness I felt for Mama vanished. I wanted to shout, “There is always something you can do about yourself! You just don’t want to, Mama!”
But it wouldn’t have done any good.
*
Jenny put her notebook down, picked Bingo’s blankets off the floor and covered him again, then went to make the beds. She found Mama sitting on her rumpled bed with Crystal’s open suitcase before her. She was trying to sort Crystal’s belongings into two piles, one to give away and one to keep. She would put something into one pile then remove it and put it in the other.