Late Migrations Read online

  The day before the wedding, one of the retired farmers who gathered on the Holsum Bread bench outside the community store had some news for my grandfather: the priest who performed the wedding ceremony would also mount my mother that very night. Hadn’t anyone mentioned it? It was a Catholic rule, the old farmer said. The bride must sleep with the priest the night before the wedding to confirm that everything was in working order, to be sure that other crossbacks would appear in due time.

  In his wisdom, my grandfather said nothing. Only when my mother was confirmed into my father’s church did my grandfather confess the terrible story he’d heard. He hadn’t believed it, he said, and anyhow he was relieved she had finally seen her way to becoming Catholic: “I didn’t want to say a word, daughter, but a woman belongs in her husband’s church.”

  The Parable of the Fox and the Chicken

  The plain yellow chicken stalks the green sward with the other plain yellow chickens and a few baroque brown ones with curling feathers and arching necks. Moving through the grass, they fan out across garden and pasture and compost pile, pausing to warm their reptile feet in its heat. They work tirelessly, clearing stubble and stalk of every small crawling thing too slow for their sharp black eyes and scratching pink toes.

  Their eyes cast down, they do not see the fox step out of the trees at the edge of the wood, but the mares see. They push their velvet noses under the pasture fence to watch as the ragged fox pounces. The bird is fat, but perhaps the fox is young; the horses gaze, rapt, upon a struggle that should not be a struggle. The other chickens hasten on heavy wings away, away—up the hill, down the hill, into the low branches of the very trees that sheltered the fox—with no thought of their stricken sister or her shrieking cries or her fruitlessly beating wings.

  The barn cat, hardly bigger than a yellow chicken, becomes the unlikely hero of this tale, entering the fray and driving the feckless fox back into the trees. But the cat does not exult in her triumph. The mares do not gaze at each other in amazement. The chicken is not grateful for her rescue. She is hurt but not mortally hurt. A day or two in the safety of the coop, and she will be fine.

  Or she would be fine but for her sisters, who cannot, will not, leave her alone. On this hill there is a pecking order, and it is not a metaphor. The hens, not the fox, are now her enemies, the plain yellow chickens and the ornate brown ones alike. She cannot live safely alone, and she cannot live safely with her flock. The hands that fling the corn will dress her for supper, and the fox will go hungry tonight.

  The Monster in the Window

  LOWER ALABAMA, 1967

  The ceiling was sloped in my mother’s childhood bedroom, all angles and lines in a sanctuary carved from half the attic. Even the attic itself was an afterthought, added willy-nilly to a peg-built dogtrot: two rooms connected by a breezeway, the only kind of house that makes sense in the oppressive heat of Lower Alabama. By the time my mother came to live there as a child, it had doors, four more rooms, and two attic nooks: one for her and one for her younger brother. Decades later, my own brother and I slept there when she was sick.

  The stairs and the walls of that makeshift old house were covered with dark pine boards, and neither the staircase nor the landing was lighted. Climbing the steep steps to sleep alone in those close rooms felt like walking upstairs into a basement, ascending into an underworld. In summer the heat must have been suffocating, but I don’t recall the sticky sheets or the hair clinging to the back of my neck or the restless turning all night long. What looms in memory is the fan at the top of the stairs. Built into the huge dormer window on the landing between the bedrooms, it faced out into a damp, batblasted night, a vast machine the size of an airplane propeller that pulled air from the screen doors through the still house and up the stairs. There was nothing, no screen or wire cage, between the spinning blades and a little girl’s hand. My grandmother told me it would cut off my arm if I tried to touch it.

  I never did, was never even tempted to, but at night I would lie in bed and listen to that fan, its roar drowning out the night-singing insects and the crunching tires as my father turned the family car from the dirt yard onto the blacktop, carrying my weeping mother into a blacker night than the one that enveloped our own house in town. I didn’t hear them leave. I was listening to the terrible fan, afraid some larger force, something cold and inexplicable, might make me lean into those spinning blades and find myself sucked through and cast by bits into the black, fathomless sky.

  When I could bear the darkness no longer, I would pull a string to light the single bulb in the closet. Thumbtacked to the narrow door were the curling tatters of my mother’s old life, the life before me, the life before my father: 4-H ribbons and funeral-parlor fans and wedding announcements and corsages with petals turned to powder. I loved especially all the photos of my mother before she was my mother. In one she’s posed on the grass, her waist surrounded by the full circle of a chiffon skirt: my mother the daisy, my mother the medallion. In another she’s sitting on a low stone wall, the very center in a line of girls in pale dresses, all of them smiling and squinting into the sun.

  When did she stop smiling? When did her dresses cease to sprawl so extravagantly across the jeweled grass? I always wondered. At home she would lie in her room with the curtains drawn on long, long Sunday afternoons, but I liked to imagine this other mother, this movie-star mother in the dancing dress with a flower tied to her wrist and a careless smile. That girl did not yet know there was a monster in the window, one that could chew her up and send her out into the night in pieces.

  The Snow Moon

  Here in this first-ring suburban neighborhood, we are far from the spongy paths of the forest peoples who gave this moon its name, but we are not far from the snow moon itself, which rises through the bare trees as it has done since long before we were here, since long before the forest peoples were here. The world is warming now, and this year the snow moon heralds no snow: the bluebirds are peeking into the sun-drenched nest box, the star magnolia is in full bloom weeks before its time, but still the snow moon rises between the black branches in our postage-stamp yards, as lovely as it has ever been, untouched by all our rancor, unmoved by our despair.

  Let the earth cast a shadow across its golden glow. Let the green-headed comet streak past, unclasped, on its journey through the darkness. Still the snow moon rises and sets as it must. It has never burned, and it will never darken: all its light is borrowed light. Its steadfast path is tied to ours. The snow moon brought a time of hunger to the forest peoples, but we are fat in our snug houses, tethered to the shine of our screens. The snow moon is our hungry sister. The snow moon is our brighter twin.

  Swept Away

  LOWER ALABAMA, 1967

  For eighteen years, no one came to the front door of our house in Tennessee but local politicians and trick-or-treaters and teenagers selling magazines. The brick path was slick with moss and buckled by the roots of maple trees, and guests rarely chanced it. Better to follow the driveway around the house and take the stairs to the back door.

  My husband’s frail parents forced the issue, and we finally replaced the crumbling bricks with scored cement. I am in love with the jaunty stripes of monkey grass along the outside edge, and the solid place to squat as I weed the flower bed. I love to see it gleaming in the darkening light beneath the too-close trees, a welcoming path through the clover. As soon as the cement was safe to step on, I set to keeping it tidy. Left, left, left, I would swing the broom from the center out; then right, right, right, just the same. Left, left; right, right, and in a moment I’d cleared the windfall, put straight the gently curving track, brought to momentary order one bit of chaos.

  And then one day: left, right, left, right, I’m swinging the broom like a metronome, like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. Left, right, and suddenly I am a tiny girl holding a broom too large for me, holding it halfway down the handle, dragging it too lightly across the footpath that leads from the road to my grandparents’ house. M
y grandmother is saying, “Honey, swing it back and forth like this.” Back and forth, left, right, she demonstrates, and I try, too, the bristles scraping the tops of my bare feet, the broomstick grazing the top of my head as I bend to watch it whiff the air above the acorn crowns and the twigs and the brown petals from the blown roses and the crumbled bits of rock tracked in from the roadbed. Soon I am more or less copying my grandmother, making the motions my kin have made in this very place for four generations, back to when the path was hard-packed dirt.

  Left, right, left, right, and now my grandmother is sitting on the swing in the dark, waiting for us on the porch as we drive down lonely county roads with never more than a single light shining in the towns—some not even towns, not even a crossroads where two blacktops come together in the middle of fields and fields and fields. Our grandmother rises and stands in the doorway while our weeping mother waits in the car, while our strong father lifts my brother and me from the back seat and carries us down the walk, across the porch, and up to the attic room where our mother slept as a girl, the room where my mother was happy as a girl. She is not always happy as a mother.

  How long do I lie in the dark, listening? How long do I wait as that ancient house settles and sighs under immense trees that creak in the wind, to hear my father bringing my mother back to me from the long, dark highway? I wait and wait.

  But when I turn over in bed, there are lights that glide like fairies across the wall between the shadows of leaves, and downstairs my grandmother is in the kitchen with Eola, who comes every day to help with the cooking and the housework and my ailing grandfather—Eola, who makes the lightest yeast rolls anywhere, and who once baked me a birthday cake like no other I had ever seen: a Barbie doll at the center of a hoop skirt made of frothy frosting. A Scarlett O’Hara cake made by the hands of a black woman who worked for a dollar a day.

  And now, on my own front walk, I stand still with my broom and think of Eola, and I’m no longer sure it was my grand mother who taught me the proper way to sweep a sidewalk. Wouldn’t it have been Eola? Not my grandmother at all but Eola, who walked down dusty roads in hand-me-down shoes to sweep my grandparents’ walk every day of her working life? Wouldn’t it have been Eola who offered me a turn when I asked? Eola, who let me string the beans; Eola, who traced my hand in the dough trimmings and baked me a piecrust turkey? Eola, who left behind no recipe for yeast rolls? Eola, forgotten until the seedcrowns brought her back to me on the wind?

  Safe, Trapped

  Inside the nest box, the baby birds are safe from hawks, sheltered from the wind, protected from the sharp eye of the crow and the terrible tongue of the red-bellied woodpecker.

  Inside the nest box, the baby birds are powerless, vulnerable to the fury of the pitched summer sun, of the house sparrow’s beak. Bounded on all sides by their sheltering home, they are a meal the rat snake eats at its leisure.

  Things I Knew When I Was Six

  LOWER ALABAMA, 1967

  Flowers that bloom in the garden are called flowers, and flowers that bloom in the vacant lot are called weeds.

  A grasshopper leaping away from your feet in the vacant lot sounds exactly like a rattlesnake coiled next to your feet in the vacant lot.

  There is no worm hiding in the raised pink circle of skin that your grandmother calls ringworm.

  From the top of a loblolly pine, your whole neighborhood looks simple and shabby and small.

  When you dare your little brother to break a big rule, your brother is not the one who gets in trouble.

  It’s a mistake to play leapfrog with a kid who’s bigger than you.

  The roly-poly and the centipede both have lovely tickling feet, but the centipede will bite and the roly-poly will only roll away.

  If your mother is crying and cannot stop, there’s a little blue pill in the bathroom that will help her sleep.

  Things I Didn’t Know When I Was Six

  LOWER ALABAMA, 1967

  The God you believe in acts nothing like the God other people believe in.

  The rhythm method is something secret for grown-ups, and it makes them very mad.

  If you have a baby sister, it’s because of two X chromosomes, not because you bribed your little brother to pray for the baby growing in your mother’s belly to be a girl.

  No black people live in your neighborhood even though black people work in every house in your neighborhood.

  Just because birds eat the berries doesn’t mean you can eat the berries.

  Your father’s new job in the city isn’t better than his old job at home, but his old job went away, so the new job is lucky anyway.

  Your mother wants to work too, but there are rules that don’t let mothers work.

  Sometimes Santa Claus has to wait till the hour before the store closes on Christmas Eve to get the markdown prices.

  The hospital in Montgomery is better than the hospital at home because the hospital in Montgomery knows how to help a mother who can’t stop crying.

  Your mother’s tears are not your fault.

  Electroshock

  LOWER ALABAMA, 1968

  “If the baby is a boy, he’ll sleep in Billy’s room,” our father says. “If it’s a girl, she’ll sleep with you.”

  I pray the baby is a girl. I tell my brother I’ll give him my Jell-O if he’ll pray for the baby to be a girl too. When our sister is born, I hold my finger up to her hand, and she holds on, gripping tight. I cannot believe it’s possible for a person to have such tiny fingers. I cannot believe such tiny fingers can grip so tightly.

  “What was I like when I was a baby?” I ask our mother. “Does Lori look like me when I was a baby?”

  “I don’t remember very much about when you were a baby,” Mama says. “That was a long time ago.”

  Many, many years later, she clarifies: “I don’t remember much about the time just before you were born or the time after that,” she says. “The treatments took all those memories away.”

  And now I understand: before the “treatments” gave her back her life, they took her life away.

  In Mist

  It came in the night on a cold wind that rattled the windows, and it lingered after the cold rains moved out this morning. It seems to mean that we will have no autumn at all this year. The long, desultory summer has finally given way, but it has not given way to fall. Winter is here now, and to signal its arrival we got just a single night of wind and rain, a single morning of mist beading in the air above the pond and blowing off with the wind.

  It won’t last. In Tennessee we don’t get much of a winter anymore, and highs below freezing are random and uncommon. I like the idea of mist as much as I enjoy the lovely mist itself. Aren’t transitions always marked by tumult and confusion? How comforting it would be to say, as a matter of unremarkable fact, “I’m wandering in the mist just now. It will blow off in a bit.”

  The Wolf I Love

  LOWER ALABAMA, 1968

  The room is quiet in that humming, vibrating way of a dark house in the country with its windows open to summer. Tree limbs brush the metal roof of the porch with a thousand discrete scratches, each branch and twig a claw. Vast, uncountable orders of insects are just beyond the screen, and every winged creature has joined the whir in the restless leaves. There’s a dog sleeping under the porch, his eyes closed and his ears pricked, but I don’t know he’s keeping watch. My parents are upstairs in the room where I sleep when I stay here without them, and I know they will never hear me over the roar of the attic fan. They will not hear me cry out when something tears this screen away. Neither they nor my grandparents, sleeping likewise beyond my reach on the other side of the shifting house, will hear my keening when great jaws close around me and carry me into the night alone.

  I am awake in a house with too many holes in it, and all that lies between me and the dark world is a rusty screen—that, and an old woman in the bed beside mine. My great-grandmother has lived to an enormous age, and I console myself by thinking of how long she
has slept safely in this room, all the years she has slept with her windows open to the creaking chain of the porch swing just beyond the screen, and no harm at all has come to her in the night. I hear her sigh and turn in her bed and settle again into stillness. But when the rattle at the window starts, she is silent, and when it grows louder, she is silent still.

  “Mother Ollie,” I whisper. I tiptoe to her side and put my hand on her shoulder. “Mother Ollie. There’s a wolf outside our window. It’s trying to come in.”

  She reaches up and sets her soft hand on top of mine. I feel her listen. There is no sound.

  “Honey, that ain’t nothing but that old bird dog,” she says. “Ain’t no call for you to be afraid of that old bird dog.”

  In seconds she’s asleep again, but soon enough the wolf is back, louder than before. The wolf is panting, gasping, growling. The wolf will be through that screen in an instant!

  “It’s back,” I croak, my throat too dry for screaming. “It’s back,” I try again, too frightened to get out of bed to shake her.

  No sooner are the words out of my mouth than the wolf draws back. No longer scuffling and grunting, it is still breathing in the darkness. I hear it breathing as my great-grandmother stirs, and then it is growling again. This time I take the two steps between our beds in a leap, tear back the sheet that covers her, and climb in. The wolf retreats.

  I feel my great-grandmother shaking, and I pull the sheet up tight around us both. Her shaking erupts into chuckles. “Honey, that’s just me snoring,” she says, scooting over to make room for me in her narrow bed and turning on her side to reach around me and pull me closer. “Ain’t no wolf gone get my girl.”