I dig good and deep. The raccoon whole, not a sign of broken skin anywhere. Those are the best kind. Before I nudge him in with my toe, I squat to look at his face. His teeth are exposed in an even line. Tiny and sharp. Locked into either a snarl or a grin. And I consider Mothermae’s opened mouth and the man I stepped over once leaving Luxor. At this point I always worry about dying and not being buried at the house with her, up under the pears. If it’s not sudden, I could go to the priests. Or lay down out here with a note pinned to me. Or maybe just stay inside with the birds banging into the walls.
This morning I rise before the sun and bring up the bacon and light fat pine pieces in the stove. There’s bacon and one egg from the priests and a handful of chicory coffee in the pot of rolling water.
“Silly old man,” I mutter, eating at my table made out of a door. But I still don’t think much about the grate or my silliness about it — my making it into some big deal which it’s not. Instead I get up and gently pry out tacks with my thumbnail and take the ancient yellow pieces of paper and sit down in the open doorway; beyond my feet the new dark green mint running in all directions like crazy. And though I don’t lift my head still heavy from sleep, stiff from the cold nights and warming days, I think beyond the scraps. “Bruno Hauptman Executed.” We’ve had that forever, huh, Mothermae. I watch her hands take it down. Putting it back, she matched tack and hole perfectly. “State Rep. Wallston Convicted.” “The Eagle Has Landed.” Sometimes some of the story. Never all unless it’s there right on the back. In the gift box they put pamphlets and tracts. About Mary mostly. Seldom about Baby Jesus grown old on Father Stephen’s chest. Never God himself, I think. But sometimes the green-eyed younger one slips in a Reader’s Digest or, once, an almanac.
I have read those. Looked at the pictures. But these from our walls are the best. I remember where I found this one about white men on the moon. It was the year the drought burned up the garden, the pears dropping easily, still the light green of mossy places in Bridgett Creek. As hard as stones.
The year white men landed on the moon. I imagined I could see them that summer. But black folks would have showed up better, I laughed. Like periods in the newspaper. Like ticks on the white face of a Hereford in the farthest pasture up the hill from the grate, the road going on to Monterrey Prairie 8 miles away. There there were black folks, white men, too. But I’ve never been that far. The white men on the rising orange moon closer than those at the Prairie.
Today I’m anxious to get there; too anxious maybe. I know I’ve cheated; I’m going a day early. Once a month. And I thought about traveling there once every two months and right now my mouth’s dry as can be.
I hurry myself up. I wash my face, put back the bacon, ignore the sprouting lantana, the first white veins showing along the buds of the tea rose. Though I walk down the road trying to recall its fragrance. “Milton it’s wonderful. Milton, look at what you’ve found us,” she’d said, me pulling her up the road. She stood about here and looked around but I pass on, walk through the memory. Don’t stop to look back. Pears. Tea roses. Sometimes the recollection of Rudy’s strong body all over the place. On the porch. The sounds of hay lifted up, thrown down. For years we thought maybe this spring they’ll remember. Or this winter the feed will run low. If they come, they’d come across the field where the road crosses a dry stream and edges around a hill. But they never did. Rudy on the moon maybe.
Now I ease across ditches, enter sapling thickets, emerge on the road as the sun comes up behind clouds pink and orange. The bridge, the hill ahead blurred, washed all together, a dark sweep to the west. The sun on my chilly back. It’ll get stronger.
That first day was terribly hot for late summer. I thought of the icehouse. I remembered Kay. I had forgotten the porch and the whiskey; the smells of Shady Bend.
Mothermae was dead, but the boy hadn’t fallen to the rock yet. Sometime in there, in between whatever the in-between is. I try to keep it all straight, but I don’t think I can anymore. It’s like something has worn out. But I could see better at least. Terribly hot but no drought. The thunderheads came on late in the afternoon, at almost sunset, their bottoms blossoming red like roses, the lightning like the day’s sun. There’d be some rain. Not much but enough to give things a drink, a sigh of relief. I was walking, expecting that later.
I had never crossed the bridge. The sign peppered with holes. I stopped there, put my little finger gently in the holes, saw the jagged exits. Thirty feet to the rushing water, green like young lettuce. The road going uphill on the other side. Sharply up into thick evergreens and gone over the top toward Monterrey Prairie 8 miles.
“Just stay away from it, you hear me? That’s going too far. It’s full of water moccasins and greenbriers anyways,” she’d said. Some fear, respect, darknesses in her words I understood but didn’t, too.
So we always turned back the other way. Seldom gleaned up to the creek. Only sometimes, if we spied something shining in the sun. Something of interest.
Now I cross it. Without fear. But that hot day I must have been breathless. Like I was stepping on the moon. A nigger on the white face. The green water below boiling around the large flat rock. Then there was the car. Voiture. I heard it ahead in the evergreens the other side of the hill and I ran toward it, past the other sign full of holes and dropped down the rough concrete along its side, my skin scraped away. The swallows’ nests over my head, my feet sticking through a mulberry bush.
The car come and gone. Only its sound present. Clanking over the metal plates, air rushing through the railings. I must have been old even then.
Now the best path is the easiest. Cross the road, hang onto the sign with its wrong name. Swing slowly until my shoes touch the head wall. Drop two feet and walk under. A natural path here. All the way to the mouth of the grate. The outlet of a drainpipe at least four feet in diameter. The hole set back at an angle into the cement, rusty iron rods the size of my fingers broken, bent upward, trapping whatever comes down from beyond the top of the hill.
I sit and lean back against the concrete. It is damp, still cold in the shade. I wait a moment. I wait even longer.
That past day not magic, not Mary or Baby Jesus. Though she would have said all that. And she’d looked at me as she often had. Her eyes drawn almost shut. “Behold the lilies of the field,” she’d say. “The birds of the air.”
The niggers of this land.
But it was close to magic, I guess. Everything coming all at once.
I laid against the grate, my hands all scratched up and beginning to bleed. I sat up slowly and looked up into the black hole. There was a mound of leaves, paper, metal shining, all of it dried into a wad of stuff. I crawled toward it but before I reached out the voices came to me over my shoulder.
“As pleasant a way as I know.”
“Better than anything, I’d say.”
A woman’s and a man’s. Then laughter. And I see myself gasping for air like when the wind howled down the stovepipe and smoked us out into the open.
Angels, Mothermae?
The sounds of them crystal clear and floating on the heat waves. Bright and distinct right at my feet. Passing through my head like a breeze.
But I’m not a believer, and so I scrambled past the tangle of greenbriers just in time to see them drift around the bend. In a long low wooden boat. A canoe. Their voices still coming back over the sandbars and the flat rock they almost scrape. The first and only time I’ve ever seen anyone for any reason on Bridgett.