Roxanna Slade Part 29

Nothing. Not one whiff of forgiveness. Miss Olivia knew I'd killed her or was killing her now. She was bound and determined that I pay every penny and bear every penalty for crossing her will to save her blood-kin, which I was not, not in her way.

My mouth locked up. I didn't know one other syllable to say, so I looked back to Dinah.

By then she'd moved to the edge of the bed and was sitting up and looking past me. She said "Grandmother, please answer my mother."

I couldn't help hearing that she still hadn't asked Miss Olivia to forgive me, just to answer my offer.

I turned to see if Miss Olivia could obey even someone she loved as much as Dinah.

The old lady had flabbergasted me more than once in our previous lives. She could run twisted paths like the finest fox in the woods and lose you, and now she gave me a look that might have sawed a shaft through the Great Pyramid. Then she shut her eyes and held her right hand out toward me.

Was she offering me touch? And could I take it? Still behind me Dinah said "Mother, move."

I moved on toward my mother-in-law then and took the one good hand that my meanness had left her. Neither one of us grinned, shed a tear or offered more warmth. But then we'd known each other forever and could scent the slightest clearing of the b.l.o.o.d.y air between us. When I spoke I just said "Miss Olivia, I've got Simon Walton downstairs strong as Goliath. Let him carry you gently to the car, and let's ride to Henderson for you to see a doctor."

Miss Olivia's eyes cut back to Dinah.

And Dinah said "We're set against that. She'll live on here." Again my daughter sounded like a pioneer wife that had brought her family through the c.u.mberland Gap past rocks and rapids. And once I thought that much, I had to grant that some of those tough wives must have been no older than my

young child here behind me now but long miles gone.

Simon drove me home so I could think. In the cool of the evening, I telephoned Leela who said there was nothing left to do but wait Miss Olivia out and then talk common sense to Dinah about her coming child. We both understood that waiting Miss Olivia out meant waiting for death. With that old champion's dauntless strength, she might outlast us. I knew that waiting was the only course, though, unless I was ready to go back up there with Simon tonight and seize Dinah Slade against her own will. No question of that of course. By late in the night, alone as I was, I felt like a person pinned at the elbows from behind by something at least as powerful as melancholy and stronger even than the hopeless sadness of Palmer's last affliction.

But you live on, don't you? There comes a time in most people's lives, I seem to have noticed, when --unless you accidentally pick up a knife or a loaded gun in your household ch.o.r.es when you're feeling off stride--you're forced to conclude that you're going to last. Your endurance is all but endless, and you're nothing that matters more to Fate than a middle-aged housewife from the northeast corner of a humble state. But Miss Olivia was one of G.o.d's exceptions to human rules. I learned that again for the billionth time as I sat in the kitchen in early light and ate a substantial breakfast of b.u.t.tered cinnamon toast with bacon and a world of black coffee.

I was on the verge of walking uptown to post a letter to August and Daisy when I heard a mild hand knock on the back door. Turned out to be a young boy, the color of Mally and with her hair and eyes. I mentioned the resemblance and the boy nodded "Miss Mally's my auntie" (black people here still p.r.o.nounce aunt as ont in the British style). Then he said "She made me drive down here to tell you something."

I said "Son, you're too young to drive." He was maybe twelve.

"Yes ma'm, but Miss Mally say the phone is broke and to tell you, gentle, to come up yonder."

Of course my mind raced at once to Dinah --miscarried, hurt, dead, what? I asked him

"Is Dinah Slade all right?"

He nodded hard. "Doing fine, last I saw her. She the stout one, ain't she?"

I had to smile. "She's expecting, yes. But what's the trouble?"

"Miss Mally told me not to tell you."

I hit him a low blow, figuratively speaking. My purse was in my hand; I offered the child a crisp dollar bill which was real money then.

He shamed me. "No ma'm. But the trouble's Miss Olivia."

I said "Is she worse off?"

He nodded. "Cold dead." Then a big grin took his helpless face. He turned full around and pointed northeast--the Slade place precisely. Then he said to the air "I touched her too. Lord, cold as scissors!"

That she was. They had found her at dawn when Mally went in to help her rise and dress for the day. They said she'd seemed unfazed by my visit, had eaten a little soup in the evening and had lain awake while Dinah read selections from Miss Olivia's chosen book of the Bible-- Ecclesiastes, the one about fools, her favorite subject. Dinah had kissed her good night then, left a low light on and gone to her own room. Dinah had fallen asleep at once, worn out by the day. So neither she nor Mally had heard the least sound of trouble in the night.

When Mally saw Miss Olivia next, she was neatly composed flat of her back and facing the ceiling with both eyes open, entirely natural. Mally even spoke to her while she raised the window shades. And she later told Dinah, "I knew she was lying there waiting for you like she always did. I was trying to stall her and give you a few more minutes to sleep, but then I felt of her hand and knew. She'd met her match finally."

Both Mally and Dinah were pitiful. Even some two hours later--when I'd packed an overnight bag, finally found Simon and got up there--they sat at the kitchen table like actual souls of the lost. I'd have thought that Mally could manage a spewing volcano or a big earthquake (and she could have, every instance but this as time would show). But that one morning Mally looked like the child she must have been before that strong old woman took her in and raised her. Aside from smoothing the bedcovers slightly, they'd done nothing else with

Miss Olivia.

So I had to step in, call the undertaker that had buried Palmer and make those arrangements. None of her stepchildren were alive, and their scattered widows and children had paid her so little mind in recent years that I felt no pressure to track them down at once. The people Miss Olivia had truly mattered to--Negroes from up and down the river and the bad back roads and her old tenants' widows--all found out by their own country grapevine and wandered in through the next two days with cooked food and other offerings.

One old woman I'd never seen before brought a beautiful stark-white linen pillowcase she'd embroidered through the years for her own coffin. She wanted it to go with "Miss Livvie" now, and I didn't refuse it. I well understand that many people today, black and white, may find that hard to believe or stomach. To them I can only say that it's been my observation through life that people will choose out someone from the world to love and honor, or maybe just honor, no matter what that person's standards may have been.

Not many souls can live without that much, however odd their choice looks to others. I actually saw and heard that old woman, black as pitch with hands so wrenched they looked like crab claws, when she told me "to be real sure" it went on to Glory with her "mistus." I understood that her word meant mistress. Later I even put the slip on Miss Olivia's favorite pillow, and I cupped her mighty skull in my own hands and lowered its heavy weight onto the linen. There were still only scattered white strands in all that rich dark hair that had never thinned.

Near sundown the next day, Mally and Dinah, August and Daisy with their two boys, Simon and Harley and I, Mally's nephew Princeton and a small clutch of neighbors buried her. Miss Olivia had paid no serious attention to church in the years I'd known her, less so even than me; so I asked our minister to say the least he possibly could. After the meeting those children and I had with him back in June, I didn't want to give him too much rope and have him rattling on about somebody he'd never known and what a stalwart Christian she'd been. Any unfinished business between Olivia Slade and her Maker was no doubt

underway at that moment, which very likely explained the splendor of the sky; and I've never felt comfortable lecturing G.o.d on his available choices.

I listened to the sweaty young man make his wax through Paul's great promises in the teeth of death. Then I signed off and stood there counting the times I'd been here beside the earlier dead. Young Larkin was first, then Major, then mine and Palmer's stillborn child, then Palmer himself. There was maybe room for two more bodies if they hunched up close and gained no weight between now and the end.

Looking around me I realized that almost surely the next would be me, and then I'd be the last. Whatever happened with Dinah and Harley, Dinah would lie wherever her husband finally led her. Augustus would have no wish to lie here. For all his sweetness he was very progressive and had his eyes on a life in Charlotte or--pray G.o.d--Atlanta if he could just climb out of the job he was stuck in in Rockingham.

For the first time since my own worst torment, I let myself think all the way down to the time of my death. In a few more weeks, I'd be fifty-three. According to the mirror, I was holding my own. I could finish my trek anywhere from tonight till fourteen years from now. I was gauging my possibilities from Muddie's life span; she died at sixty-seven. I hadn't the slightest intention of living as close to a century as I have. In fact returning to the world there before me, I saw my children (strong as they were, even Dinah in her trouble) and knew that if I vanished this instant they'd pause a few days and then do what the world in general does--head out once more on their own hike.

Flawed as I'd been and absent and dark in my bad years, I'd kept my marriage vows to Palmer and his dust. I'd reared my children almost as well as I knew how. I'd fed a very few of the hungry, as many as knocked on my door. I'd tried to lighten the load of a very few black people that came my way. With no delusions that such a slim total ent.i.tled me to Heaven, still when the gravediggers stepped up to lower Miss Olivia, I actually felt a slow instant of pride in who I'd been till that complicated moment--an evening as fine as I've ever seen with early stars big as furnace mouths all burning

clean.

I was all but right. Looking back I see how you could claim that my life truly stopped at that funeral. By far the majority of white women in my time and place were forcibly retired, flat out of a job when their husbands had died and their children were grown. Their lasting for another four or five decades sometimes served as a well-earned rest. More often it was slow time, day after long day of nothing to do that anybody needed, no other mouth to feed, no spirits to raise and urge on forward--a billion hours of television, telephone chatter and doctor's visits down toward the end. Just last night I watched a program about baboons. A male or female baboon that lasts beyond the mating age is welcome to hang on with the family, grooming others for fleas and pa.s.sing on pieces of useful knowledge. Few human families allow for that now.

For me, to be sure--after Miss Olivia went back to the Earth--there was still young Dinah and her growing baby. I'd spent long months agonizing over that with no good plan accomplished. Yet the last thing I'd told myself, before we watched the dirt hit Miss Olivia, was I'll give her her last wish. I'll see it through to safety. Her was Miss Olivia and it was the unborn child in our midst. And by that I meant I would never mention adoption again nor urge Dinah Slade to do anything but cherish her body and all its purposes and bring a healthy child to the world for her and me to raise.

We did exactly that. I stayed in the country a few days more with Dinah and Mally. And though the three of us never sat down and spelled it out, we gradually understood among us that Dinah and Mally would stay in the Slade house till near Dinah's due date. Then the two of them would move in with me in time to get to Henderson for the labor. Then we'd look at the future one week at a time.

When I didn't bring up adoption again--and Lord knows they never mentioned it to me--Mally came up to my bedroom the last night I spent in the old Slade house (dinah had moved into her grandmother's room). She was in a flannel nightgown and a wool bathrobe as if this were snowtime. Even so she still looked frailer than

usual and trembling--very slightly trembling, her chin and hands.

I told her Miss Olivia had left her a hundred dollars in the will--a nice sum then, especially from a woman who had very little cash at her disposal.

Mally already knew that. She said "I'm not here to beg for money. Money don't mean nothing to me, never has. I just want you to know that I mean to stay right next to Dinah and her baby as long as she'll have me--long as you'll let me stay."

That surprised me greatly. I don't know why. Maybe because, even that long ago, it seemed old-timey past believing. When I faced Mally's eyes again, kind as a doe's, I had the only answer I could think of. As it reeled out of me naturally, it felt like something I was hearing from an angel, not saying myself. The news was that good--and that good for me. I said "Come when you will, Mally. Stay long as you can. You can see old me on into the grave if you think you could stand to watch for that long."

Mally was solemn but she thanked me and turned to go. At the door, though, she looked back and said "That's an offer that could last, I know. You a strong woman still. Just let me take it one step at a time. I'm safer that way."

Before I could nod Mally was halfway down the stairs. All my grown life, as I've mentioned before, it had been against my conscience to work black women on a regular basis in my house. I don't repeat that here to win special credit in this modern world. In those active years I never mentioned my conscience to anyone, not even when they called me an utter fool for hauling water and cooking year-round with no other help when Negro women were thick on the ground and begging to work. But before Mally's steps had faded off, I felt that soon I'd be taking strange steps into something new. Thinking that only, I slid off into peaceful sleep--a far more peaceful sleep that night than I'd ever known in this thrumming house. Even with Miss Olivia gone, it was live still (in every wall and floorboard) waiting for its next drink of blood.

Our plan worked out with very few hitches. Either Harley or Simon and I would drive up and bring Dinah down for doctor's appointments. I'd stay up there most every weekend, and Mally and I slowly worked our way through the mountains of

Miss Olivia's remains--hers and every one of the Slades for five generations at least. We even found the original land grant by which Lord Granville, of the Lords Proprietors sitting in London in 1668, had bestowed a wide parcel of riverside woods on Livingston Slade, the major's great-great-grandfather. It sported Granville's own signature, and I had it framed for August's Christmas.

There were whole barrel-top trunks stuffed with old letters, schoolbooks made by the pupils themselves (all young Slade boys) in elegant eighteenth-century script bound in tan homespun cloth, plus the major's stacks of cavalry papers--his commission, various citations, his written parole at the end of the War which let him bring his riding horse home in April '65 to start the spring plowing, however late. I grieve still to admit that, with Dinah and Mally saying they had no use for any of it, I burned many more of those papers than I saved. I'd asked Augustus by mail. He only wanted the major's war papers.

Even now I can think of s.n.a.t.c.hes of memorable words I saw in the letters as I burned them. Major's mother had written to him when she heard of the wound that cost him his leg. At the end she said "Son, you must never fear that you have lost anything in my eyes. Now you stand a commanding head taller." Or something very much to that effect. And when Major had gone to Spottsylvania in March of 1896 to sit by the deathbed of a cavalry friend, he wrote a brief note to Miss Olivia who'd only married him two years before--"Dearest Liv, This awful sadness of Tom's--he's out of his mind and scarcely knows me--doesn't weigh an ounce compared to what I know I'll receive in reward from you as soon as I bury what's left of his bones."

Lacking as I did any personal contact with a serious library or college, I couldn't imagine how else to save such traces. So all those pounds of witness to vanished lives--urgent to the writers--went up the chimney and are no doubt drifting still toward the stars as particles of smoke which may be as good a fate as any. Almost certainly no later human being would have learned anything by reading the pa.s.sions and secrets and boredoms of the nameless dead from a corner of the world that since the Civil War has barely ruffled the local newspaper much less the big world.

Maybe the greatest loss of all, though, was the first loss I noticed.

The night of Miss Olivia's funeral when I couldn't sleep, I went out to the Office where Palmer and I had started our marriage. I spent hours thres.h.i.+ng old books and drawers, hunting the volumes of Miss Olivia's diary. They were gone from the shelf where they'd always been. When I asked Mally at breakfast, she had no memory of ever seeing them or knowing their whereabouts. I seemed to recall that Miss Olivia had still written in the latest volume as recently as the early 1940's when Dinah and I paid her that sad visit in the hope of cheering me and heading off my torment. She may have burned them for her own secret reasons. They've never turned up in any case.

What a sizable pity to have no remnant of what that ceaseless mind thought of itself and the life it was caught in. Painful as some parts no doubt were, surely she couldn't have left a better legacy to Dinah and the world. Recalling it now I suspect that such a big loss was part of the reason I got the idea of writing down my story in time--no subst.i.tute for Miss Olivia's, I'm sure, but still an honest voice left over from a whole other world where women especially (but some men as well) labored through every day of their lives with far more careful intelligence and judgment than the beasts of burden they're widely considered now to have been.

We also burned a ton of ruined clothes that moths had long since turned into lace. For myself I kept Major's gold braid epaulets that were tarnished half black and the shawl Miss Olivia had worn to my wedding. The light paisley wool had somehow escaped destruction. When it came to clearing out the high oak bureau in Palmer and Larkin's old bedroom, I nearly flinched. They were still too much alive as boys with blood and warm breath. They still felt that young and unfinished in my mind. To save my feelings I asked Mally please to take that job. But she said "those boys' clothes" was my rightful ch.o.r.e, and I shouldn't s.h.i.+rk it. So I gritted my teeth, and it took a whole morning. Turned out Miss Olivia had never discarded a thread that touched either one of her sons.

Packed as dense as cotton in a bale, there

were everything from christening dresses to school graduation suits that seemed to have shrunk to boy-doll clothes--little sawed-off-looking drainpipe legs on the skimpy trousers, little coats and vests that could barely have s.h.i.+elded a starving widow from the cold, much less a man's chest. In general I couldn't tell what was Palmer's and what had been Larkin's. But there was one blood-red baseball cap still pretty much intact. I recall Palmer saying how Larkin had been the finest unsung pitcher in American history, so I still have the cap.

Maybe each of them wore it in separate games. Palmer was after all the elder by one year. Inside the sweat band some hand has written Sladie in black ink--a nickname I never heard for either of them, though it sounds more appropriate for Lark than his brother. Every year or so still, I take that out and think about it when I weed my own closet. I'll leave it for somebody else to burn when I've absconded with the last human mind that knows the cap's meaning.

With all our aching diligence, we had that relic of a house stripped to its bones by the first real cold spell in mid November. Everything left was something useful to Dinah and the oncoming child or to Mally. When the clean-out was finished, I spent more of my time back at home. That was partly natural and partly my private plan to get my mind and soul as calm as possible before standing by while my young daughter bore a child outside the safety of marriage. All through those mostly solitary days, I prayed a lot more than I'd ever done in my past concerns.

It was not on-your-knees, well-laid-out pleading. That kind of show-off had never felt right to me even when supposedly educated preachers stood up every Sunday of their lives and issued want-lists to G.o.d. No, my private way was something on the order of semi-constant radio contact. I'd always enjoyed those gospel songs that sprang up all over the South in the early days of the telephone--

Got a little telephone in my bosom; I can get Jesus on the line. ...

and the famous "Royal Telephone" hymn--

Central's never busy, always on the line, You can talk to Heaven almost any time.

Tacky as those were they bore more relation to my own practice than most other descriptions of prayer. I'd be sweeping down spider webs on the porch and hear my mind, of its own will with no prod from me, say Keep Dinah's spirits up today or Whatever you do keep Mally safe and healthy--we'll sink without her. Most of my little dispatches in those days anyhow were about people near me. But several dozen times a day and more so at night, I'd be was.h.i.+ng a fork or plumping a pillow and hear my mind beam out a brief hope like Let me fight down anger and my big fear of humiliation.

Did I think the G.o.d who made this maybe infinite universe sat somewhere and waited to decode such notes? And if so did my particular voice have any weight? Well all I can say now is--given what I hear and read every day about the wonders of computers--it strikes my feeble mind that, if a man-made computer can keep many billions of facts in its heart and act upon them instantly, then couldn't there be a mind somewhere that's at least as responsible and ready to listen as any old idea of G.o.d?

And if it listens, then surely it wouldn't resist leaning in now and then and tilting a crossroads or weighting some scales. If there's no such mind anywhere, then why has the human race through history so far as I know insisted on bowing to someone on the heights? Speaking for myself again I've never enjoyed regular bowing. I'm aware of course that the plea for help which so many of us broadcast turns out way more often than not to be answered with a silent Forget it if not a flat No.

I'm still glad to say that, heard or not, my requests were all but perfectly answered. When Dinah and Mally moved in with me in late January, none of us tried to keep their presence a secret. We didn't conceal Dinah's physical condition, but of course we didn't march her down Main Street at high noon either. Harley was in and out of the house at frequent intervals, the minister paid us more than one call, and

several people at the post office felt sure enough of our friends.h.i.+p to ask if Dinah's health had improved and would she be back in school this spring?

I thanked them politely and said she was better but would need further time to get back to normal, none of which was any kind of lie.