Mulberry. Paulette Boudreaux
“Hold it like this,” she said, flattening the cloth on my cheek. “If you keep it still, and the pressure even, it’ll stop hurting.”
When I looked in her eyes I saw enough anguish and grief to swallow my whole world.
Ma Parker wouldn’t let Esther and me play together for a full week. When we did try to play together like before, everything was awkward and false—our movements, our games, our speech. Neither of us ever brought up what happened the night we visited her mother’s house, but I was always thinking about it whenever I was with her. I was embarrassed for her still—the shame of her mother’s violence toward her, her delusions and lies about it. I couldn’t will myself back to a place or time when I didn’t know that there was another side to her life.
I began to look forward to the once-dreaded end of summer. I was happy a week or so later when that blue-and-white Chevrolet pulled up in front of Esther’s grandma’s house. I hid in my mulberry tree when she came looking for me to say good-bye, but she knew me well enough to climb up and find me. She draped herself nearby on a sturdy branch and swung her long legs casually.
“Will you help me pick some of your mulberries to eat in my auntie’s car?” she asked.
There was that familiar flinty hardness in her eyes, playing there like tiny bursts of sunlight when I looked at her.
“Ain’t no more mulberries,” I said sadly. “We ate all the berries a long time ago, remember?”
“Oh yeah,” she said, gazing out through mulberry leaves braised by the late August sun. “Oh yeah,” she repeated. “Your mulberries been gone a long, long time.”
“Esther!” Ma Parker’s voice soared on the hot air and found us in our green sanctuary.
“Well,” Esther said. “Got to go.”
She started her descent, and I climbed down after her to be gracious.
“My mama does love me, you know,” she said, her wild mane of hair fanning out around her face like blackberry bramble as she got into the backseat of her Aunt Helen’s boyfriend’s car.
Not knowing what else to do, I nodded slowly, then stood there and watched as they drove away.
CHAPTER FIVE
“HEY KNUCKLEHEADS,” DADDY SAID without looking at any of us when he came home from visiting Momma and Ida Bea at the hospital. He had gone for his weekly visit, taking a small bag of food for Momma, the kinds of things she didn’t have to cook or put in an icebox—tins of sardines, boxes of saltine crackers, cans of pork and beans.
The boys and I had been waiting in the front room for his return, but he headed right past us and on through to the kitchen where he draped his jacket over the back of a kitchen chair. At the sink he washed his face and hands, splashing water onto the narrow counter around the sink.
He was losing weight despite my best efforts to cook meals as Momma had instructed during her visit home a few weeks earlier. His skin, black as wild berries, had tightened against his skull, highlighting hard angular cheekbones and a square clenched jaw. The veins in his arms and on the backs of his hands showed like small cords.
“Where my supper?” he asked, dropping into a chair as if he were in a diner.
He lit a cigarette and puffed on it quietly while I spooned up a plate of the greasy spaghetti I had made. “Thanks, Baby Girl,” he said, keeping his eyes focused on the food I had set on the Formica top in front of him. He chewed with slow concentration and an expression that said his mind was on something unpleasant. While he ruminated, the boys and I practiced patience.
I stepped back into the kitchen doorway and leaned against the door frame, watching him through the smoke curling away from the cigarette on the chunky glass ashtray beside his plate.
Roy Anthony had pulled a kitchen chair up to the sink and had run more dishwater in it. Earlier I had bullied him into washing the dishes. He had cleaned everything except the pot I cooked the spaghetti in and the plate and fork Daddy was using. He didn’t need to run another sink full of water for those things, but it gave him an excuse to play submarine pilot with the dishrag in the soapy dishwater. Cautious engine noises bubbled through his lips. Earl sat at the table across from Daddy, playing with a small pile of cornbread crumbs on the table. June Bug was lying on his back on the cold linoleum in the center of the room. He held one hand against his chest like a flower, his thumb pointed toward the ceiling. If Daddy weren’t there, his thumb would be in his mouth, a habit he had picked up in Momma’s absence. The first time Daddy saw him with his thumb in his mouth, he slapped his hand away. When June Bug puffed up to cry, Daddy had raised his hand to slap him again. “I’ll give you something to cry about,” he had warned. June Bug had swallowed his tears and figured out how not to suck his thumb around Daddy.
Whatever we were doing or not doing, we were all waiting for Daddy to talk to us about Momma. Thanksgiving was two weeks away, and we were hoping Momma would be home for that. Before he’d left for the hospital visit, Daddy had made us think that might be so. When his plate was empty, he sat back in his chair.
“Y’all’s momma’s fine,” he said, fingering the dying cigarette in the ashtray. “The baby, well, she still ain’t doing too good.”
He fished around in his shirt pocket, pulled out his pack of cigarettes, and made a big display of lighting the new cigarette with the one from the ashtray. He took a long deep draw and kept his focus downward as he exhaled smoke slowly through his nose.
“They fixing to send her to a hospital up near Jackson. Y’all’s Momma going too. It takes hours to get from here up there.”
Roy Anthony’s submarine splashed heavily in the dishwater and June Bug whined in a way that sounded like something was pressing against his insides too hard.
“I’m gon’ get Mr. Gamet’s truck Saturday to bring y’all to the hospital with me to visiting hours here. Probably gon’ be the last time we’ll see y’all momma for a while. I’m sorry. I’m gon’ be …” His voice cracked and he put his hands up to cover his face.
What had he intended to say? The boys all looked at me. We all knew better than to question Daddy.
When Daddy finally uncovered his face and looked up again, his gaze met mine. I read sadness and fear in his bloodshot eyes.
Healthy children weren’t allowed inside the hospital building, so we were made to “visit” outside in the chilly November brightness of the parking lot, overlooked by the red brick hospital building and the phantom baby that had stopped being real to any of us except Momma.
When Momma strolled out of the hospital on thin bare legs, she looked like an overgrown child. Her cloth coat was wrinkled and creased in the way that comes from sleeping in your clothes. Her braided hair had a frizzy, careless look. Her knees were ashy. She stopped a few feet away from us and stood, blinking back tears. My brothers were huddled around me in unfamiliar stillness.
“Well bring y’all’s little nappy heads over here and give me a hug,” Momma said, opening her arms in our direction. We went to her and allowed ourselves to be enfolded in a communal hug. It felt good to lean into her thin bosom. I tried to hold on to that feeling when she released us and we clumsily fell away from her.
“I been missing y’all,” she said. “Lord, I wish they had nurses to look after my baby. Then I could come home more.”
I walked beside her toward the back of Mr. Gamet’s truck. She took June Bug onto her lap as soon as she sat down on the tailgate. I climbed up and sat beside her, my legs dangling above the hard earth. Roy Anthony and Earl