Thwack.
Mother came out on the porch and stood watching for a minute, her head stiff like it might fall right off her neck. Her green eyes were dark with suffering. I could tell she had The Headache. I capitalized it in my mind because it wasn’t just any old run-of-the-mill headache. It was the one that sent her to bed for three or four days, hunkered under the covers to escape the light.
“Y’all can’t be making all that noise. The racket’s bothering your grandpa,” she said, never mentioning that it wasn’t doing her headache any good either, but then she’d never been one to complain.
Although we were careful to steer the balls away from the house, before long another one would go astray.
Whomp.
And she’d appear again, green chenille robe clutched around her.
“Okay, that’s enough for tonight. It’s getting too dark out to see anyway.”
We’d have a molasses cookie and a glass of milk before heading up the stairs to bed.
“You two better get your britches down here and brush your teeth before you go another step,” Mother scolded, her face smeared white with cold cream.
We climbed onto the banister, saying, “Yes ma’am,” as we slid past her.
“You know your grandma’s gonna skin you alive if she catches you doing that,” she said, wiping her face with a clean white rag.
She bent over to brush her hair a hundred strokes, so we could tell her headache was easing off. We ran to the top of the stairs to slide down again.
“Okay, but that better be the last time,” she warned. “And don’t anybody come running to me if they break a leg,” she added without looking up.
“We can’t come running if we break a leg,” Vonnie said.
“Well, it wouldn’t do you any good if you could.”
At night, when the house was quiet except for the moans and occasional snores coming from Grandpa’s room, I’d lie in bed, eyes closed, and see him, peart and wiry, going about his day, me tucking along behind.
There we are, out hoeing the garden—him at one end of a row and me at the other. He steps off a ten foot square and puts a stake at each corner.
“That’s your garden,” he tells me, “and you can plant anything you want long as you tend it.”
I choose leaf lettuce and green onions, yellow tomatoes and little red tommy-toes. I dig and plant and weed and fertilize. When my garden comes in, Grandpa lets me pick the salad makings for dinner.
“Looky here what this little handful of girl did,” he says. “Why, them boys larping around over at the drug store can’t hold a candle to her.”
I see us sitting in the back yard, swigging lemonade from jelly jars.
When I say we’re larping around, Grandpa says oh no, what we are doing is way different from those boys. “Larping,” he says, “is aimless lazy, while ours is rest we earned by hoeing rows of beans.” And if anybody doubted us, we’d just show them our hands. “See there,” he’d say, opening my hand up in his, “me and you have the calluses to prove it.”
Next I’m plaiting a little braid in his hair, right on top, and tying it with a red ribbon. It’s soon time to leave for Wednesday prayer meeting, so he puts on his hat and we head out.
When he takes his hat off at the church door, Grandma’s face blanches. “For land’s sake,” she says, “what on earth will that child think of next?”
“I wouldn’t venture to guess,” Grandpa replies, shaking his head.
Grandma hurries to undo my handiwork before the red ribbon calls attention and she’s forever disgraced by my foolishness.
As the scenes slow to match my breathing, Grandpa is passing his hat for a visiting preacher. Sister Wood, Grandma’s best friend and the church treasurer, asks him why he takes collections for every preacher and missionary coming through when he won’t take a penny for himself, not even for gas money.
“We’ve got enough for all of our needs and some of our wants and plenty to share with those who don’t. Seems to me we’re making it just fine without it,” Grandpa tells her.
When I wake up, there is a change to the order of things. Grandma isn’t up to her elbows in flour. There’s no smell of ham frying and coffee perking on the stove. Mother and Grandma hover over Grandpa all morning, watching the quilt covering him quiver with each raggedy exhale. Time ticks by, unmarked except for listening for his next breath. There is a pause in the breathing, then another breath, a gasp really.
Then the breath I keep waiting for doesn’t come.
Doc Cunningham comes and goes, his worn stethoscope hanging limp from his neck, the black electrical tape Mother used to repair it for him months ago starting to come undone. Grandma and Mother come out of the bedroom crying.
“He’s dead,” Grandma says. The words strangle in her throat.
She wipes her worn face with a wadded-up handkerchief, then closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, straightens her back and walks to the kitchen and puts the coffee on the stove to perk. She pulls her mixing bowl and breadboard from the cupboard and begins the task that has started her days for the past fifty years. And while the biscuits bake, she waits for the funeral home to come for Grandpa.
The air is thin and sticky as spider webs. I can’t suck enough of it in to keep me breathing.
I reach for Vonnie’s hand and pull her outside.
We sit in the back yard, the place we call the park, bare toes pushing into the patch of earth beneath the swing to keep it going a little. I close my eyes and I’m sitting there with Grandpa, my feet scuffing the ground. “You’ll never get anywhere in life if you drag your feet,” he says.
Two of the neighbor ladies, ones I don’t know too well, come to the back
