Seeping, cloistered bottomland. The spores loosen. Look — they are dropping through the trees.
You would have to burn down the delta to stop it.
And do what, to stop our Sister?
She makes her way in with a sickle, hacking at the matted vine. The spores shake loose — a sack of eggs, a thickish rind, a warty bulb that roots, divides, in the loam where it touches down. They find Sister fallen to sleep in it — in the broad, sweet leaves, the ghosting, the heads of the trees grown over, grown into, disappeared.
Hearsay from Mississippi. We make our few brief visits.
I swear and swear to do better, and Daddy docs, and Daddy’s wife, and doesn’t Sister have her vocation meantime, her piece work they give her to do — bagging dirt, sorting screws, packaging tobacco? Tasks for the able of body and mind, for the residents who stir from their chairs.
The boy I remember best doesn’t. “He’s gone by—” this is how Sister will say it when I ask—“He went on by last week.”
He is spindly, pretty, his mouth licked clean, a boy grafted to a shabby chair. He sings, and drives and drives a Matchbox car across snapshots of his family.
Honk and the gate glides open. A pond, a rolling green. A hatching of beds for flowers, the crepe myrtle in bloom.
And then they come at you, falling out of the trees for you — flapping arms and twisted, torpid, ruinous mouths.
They flopped themselves onto the hood of my car, shrieking, pleased, hula hula, somebody new, some mother, hawker, hapless holy joe.
Some stingy sister. I sat at the wheel with my head in a vice while they battered and stroked the windows, my boy not even in me yet, my belly flat and still. And still it seemed to look at them would spread their sickness to me, saddle me with mother-dreams: ears knuckled stubbornly in the column of a boy’s limp neck; hands like melted plastic, paws, paws, repeaters, spit swinging from their mouths.
Yes, yes, we will visit. Make our slow way down.
How better to feel lucky? To list my missed afflictions, his: no blighted limb nor burgeoned lobe, no purple stain: to gloat?
And yet I must know better. Things take their time to show.
Baby okay? Baby okay?
Just ducky.
I hear the piggledy snort in the loam. Then sleep — in the shallows, in the grievous sweetness of milk on his breath.
Before long they will mount the stairs, George in his boiled slippers, Sister hauling the dog. “Hey! What do you think you are doing, huh? Quit that. Gooood. Hey.”
George is trying, gently, to hush her. It is like trying to hush the wind. “What did I just say to you? You stay. There. Hey. YOU. COME. RIGHT. HERE.”
The baby stirs, and paws against me.
Outside: a growth of fog, a glaze of sleet on the windows.
I sleep again, pretend to, when George eases open the door.
I watch him undress in the windows, fast, in the cold of the summer-room — a boy with his flashlight burning, diving for his bed. I go bed to bed, boy to boy, as I wish to, as I must.
Baby sweet, sweet night. Something nibbles, drags its tail through the walls.
They will come to me — days I cannot stop shaking. Burgundy at noon. He is toddling, too young for school, strapped into his seat in the car. I hate you, Mama. My heart hates you. I am driving. To keep him safe from me. Keep him safe from harm.
Sister turns in her bed, the dog nested.
The animals asleep in the barn. Used to be.
Used to be I whinnied. I was a girl who whinnied. Slept out in the field with the broodmares, springtime, foaling time, a stick at my side should the coyotes come, longing for the night’s heroics.
Sister asleep and walking, used to be, water for the rabbits, a pot to scrub, the garbage dragged to the barrel where we burned. Her shoes buried. A stash of food beneath the bed.
My bonnie. My bonnie lies over.
We had a music box for our necklaces. A ballerina beneath the lid. Little caketop, little throwaway, mesmeric, smooth and pink and poorly made. Little glory. A life’s beguilements. She sprang up before the mirror — endlessly, shamelessly spinning.
If you wake Sister, you wake her screaming. Something you ought to know.
Months pass, whole seasons pass, my boy caught, clasped to the bed, a clockhand, he turns, searching for me, his mouth pulsing — in the watery murk of a car swung past, the slow sweep, a dappled shade, the great leviathans circling.
Sister is singing, a few odd hollow wavering notes, out on the glistening shore.
I draw the bedsheets back. It is winter yet, I can hear them: the small, furred bodies in the walls.
The wind has risen. Ice crazes in the trees.
I find Sister down the hall in the bathtub, in a dusky wash of grime and blood, sudsing with the dog. She has got the candles burning. The dog whimpers when I open the door.
“Just checking,” I say.
Well and good. Good enough.
“Good night, then,” I say.
“I’m just washing her. She likes it,” Sister says.
“Yes.”
“She likes it. See?”
“Well, goodnight,” I say.
“Where is Messpot?”
She calls him Messpot. Toung’n. Binny. See? I am right here.
I see she has ground out her cigarette on the blotchy rim of our tub.
“He’s asleep,” I say.
“Like a baby. I gave him a soft goodbye.”
The dog lunges, “HEY,” tries to. Sister hauls her down by the collar, water slopping onto the floor.
“It’s late,” I say. “I’m tired.”
“So you won’t sit with me.”
“No.”
“I thought maybe.”
Might have, yes, maybe — in the humming, the distant ward, might have brushed her hair, mothered her, a girl without a mother, laboring in a tub.
I swing the door shut.
She tried to lie down. Daddy had her by her hair.
He had her things heaped up in the room Sister claimed in his house by the time we reached there. I was to clear her out, drive her south to Mississippi — withered fields, the cotton picked, the river dropped and chalky. Home.
I packed Sister’s figurines for her, the pale little porcelain boxes she kept, the dingy china dolls, amused, their vacant breakable faces, their broken hands and shoes, their bodies cloth beneath their gowns, flimsy, durable, sewn. Our grandmother’s sorry slippers, I packed, and the bundles of letters a boy had sent, some darling, new for a time, the ones I hadn’t stolen from her that Sister was waiting to open.
A little something, baby. All I’m asking, the boy wrote.
Token, talisman, caketop, stone. Anything small to rub or suck, to hoard — a nut, a buckeye — I packed. A china doll, a Matchbox car: easily lost, renewably dear, something to grieve, lament at last, the breakables, perishables, bloody plugs and silken locks, the rheumy gristled button plucked, the newly born, the newly dead: first and last and only.
Send me a word or something. José needs a kiss or two.
We kept the windows down Sister healing, rank in the heat — and her hair, pulled free, was carried upward, out. A great bristly shank of it hovered and plunged above the roof of my car.
A day at the lake, a battlefield. And then the bright gates swung open.
I pull the door shut, move away down the hall.
The baby is waking, whimpering—quick! Then the trumpet, the sound like an elephant charging.