The Memory Thief Page 7

  It was the first time she’d ever heard the ocean. Before, she’d always been distracted by looking at all the colors and counting off the patterns of the waves. But staring into that black wall, she heard power. What had always seemed like a shhhh shhhh lullaby was really a war cry. Water delivered blow after blow to the shore. She sat there all night, until the war cry echoed inside her heart.

  When the sun rose, she went to Cora’s Steampot Motel and rented a room for the price of daily labor. Cora thought it was strange. Sissy told her as much. But both of them pretended to accept her lie about Father returning to finish up loose ends and out-of-town company showing up for a visit.

  “There just isn’t enough room for all of us and my cousins,” Hannah said.

  It hurt her to hear deliveries pull up. And it hurt her again to hear the new shrimper laugh at her mermaid hair. Ridicule wasn’t new. But once, not so long ago, she had been called pretty.

  At night she sat at a picnic table under the snake tree with Cora and Sissy and listened to them talk about men and raising babies.

  “You have a man?” Sissy asked her.

  “No.”

  “Ever had one?”

  “No.”

  “She’s lyin’, Momma,” Sissy said, a sly grin on her face. “Look at ’er. She’s lyin’.”

  “Leave her alone,” Cora said. “Just ’cause you like to share your business with everybody don’t mean she wanna.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  Sissy giggled. “Was it Sam? We ain’t blind, you know.”

  “Hush,” Cora said. “Her people would stone ’er.”

  “Yes,” Hannah said, as a tear ran down her face.

  “Aww, what’s wrong?” Cora said. “He not good to you?”

  “He doesn’t love me.”

  “He’s a little boy. Can’t love nobody but hisself right now.”

  Cora put her arm around her. “But you. You’re a woman. You never been allowed to be a baby girl.”

  “It hurts sharp,” Sissy said. “But another’ll come along one day and ease that pain.”

  “There’s never supposed to be another.”

  Cora laughed softly. “Said somethin’ like that myself once,” she whispered, and looked at Sissy. “About your daddy.” She turned to Hannah. “Poor baby girl, you’re more right than you know. But honey, we lost the garden a long time ago. Devil’s done twisted this earth as crooked as a live oak. We livin’ in the snake tree now, and there ain’t much that goes the way it oughta. On the chance that it does, it’s so God can whisper one more testament of his presence to a dyin’ earth.”

  “Amen,” Sissy whispered.

  “My husband was killed,” Cora said. “Loadin’ freight down in the harbor on the big boats. Somethin’ wasn’t stacked right.”

  She held up her hands. “They put a check in these empty hands. Some kind of apology or maybe just best wishes. I threw it across the room. Stomped on it. Even put it in the oven once with the gas turned on. I didn’t want to be a check-holdin’ widow any more than you wanna be a Yankee Holy Roller. I just wanted to be his wife. That’s the way my life, how’d you say it? Was supposed to be.”

  Hannah nodded.

  “I learned, like it or not, that’s who I was. A check-holdin’ widow. And as I stared at that check, I began to see it different. It wasn’t the thing that took my husband from me. Instead, it was the last thing that he would ever give me. I had four babies, and I had to make it count.”

  “So here we are,” Sissy said. “Twenty years later. Momma raised us in that motel. We had a home and a business, all because she decided to turn the gas off and get that check back out.”

  “Wasn’t as easy as Sissy likes to say. She’s my baby sunshine,” Cora laughed. “It was hard on ’em. I ordered the kids to sleep outside under the snake tree when the rooms were full and the late-nighters were watchin’ TV in the lobby. It was a sad sight to look out there and see their hot faces peekin’ in the windows, the boys’ dirty hands—little boys’ hands is always dirty—wavin’ at me. It hurt me, but we needed the rent money bad. And now there’s a real sweetness to it. They was wild, all four of ’em. But they laid under that tree all night for me. They never once acted up. I can’t imagine how hard that must’ve been on ’em.” She shook her head. “They’ll break for you. If that’s what they think you need. They’ll lay under a twisted snake tree and never once cry Momma.”

  “She don’t tell it right,” Sissy said. “We was good kids, for one. None of that wild bit that she likes to talk. And we was happy ones, too. Sometimes at night, if no renters were here, Momma’d have all our cousins come and we’d have the biggest sleepover. We’d eat cheeseburgers, not a shrimp to be found. We’d jump on all the beds, run races down the hall, turn out all the lights and play hide ’n’ seek. Sometimes Momma’d pretend she couldn’t find us and start hollerin’ that she’d have to eat all the ice cream herself and, oh mercy, we’d come flyin’…”

  “Our point is,” Cora said, interrupting Sissy, “we livin’ in the snake tree now. Things ain’t how they oughta be. Won’t be till Jesus himself comes to uproot us all. Till then, you gotta make do.”

  They fed her sweet tea and key lime pie all week long. And at night, she would lay in Number Four and think about snake trees, falling freight on big boats, babies breaking themselves. But the thing she thought of most, the thing she whispered into her pillow like a sweet lullaby, was the thing Cora first whispered. You poor baby girl.

  When the week ended, the cabdriver drove her down to Folly Beach for one last look before driving to Columbia.

  She lingered. Searching for something different. The piled rocks of old broken fishing piers were the same. The war cry still matched the beat of her heart. The people, staring at her four-foot-long hair whipped around by ocean winds, seemed the same.

  Still, though, something was different. And though the cabdriver honked his horn, Hannah could not leave until she knew what it was. She took off her shoes, felt the deep chill of the ocean. Dipped her hand in the water, to scoop up a shell. Brought her hand to her mouth to taste the salt.

  And then she smelled it. Not like before, with the smell of salt. She could smell all of it. The dead fish and the clean live ones. The rocks being pounded into sand. The bait that had been discarded at dawn. The nylon of summer swimsuits. The oil of old shrimp boats.

  Something stirred within. Like a storm inside her body. Like hot snakes twisting in the sun. She was working to build a new universe. From her blood and bones and tissue. It wasn’t that she felt a baby. It’s that she could feel the making of one.

  She faced the ocean, her arms wrapped tight around herself as she whispered, “Poor baby girl.”

  ANGEL

  I

  Inside my left front pocket is a picture. Daddy’s back is turned, but if you could see his face you’d see love. Real as any of us ever knew. You’d see pride, too, as he gently scrubbed that car. You’d understand why he called it Baby. Why he used to joke that it made up for the fact that Momma didn’t give him a son.

  It was a 1970 Chevy Chevelle that shot little bits of fire from its muffler. It was green, but not rich like grass or yellow like tobacco. It was an in-between shade that Daddy called Money.

  Momma took that picture on a hot September afternoon. We were all outside in our cutoffs, Momma and Janie wearing bikini tops. I was a bare-chested five-year-old with nothing to cover.

  That afternoon he parked like he always did. As close to our trailer as he could get without splitting the tin walls.

  “Bring me buckets,” he yelled.

  We hurried inside to start the shower and fill up anything we could find. A mixing bowl. An empty milk jug. The little plastic bucket that Momma kept her curlers in. We carried them to him, careful not to spill any water and encourage the rust that crawled across our tin home.

  “Bring ’em quicker,” Daddy ordered. “If the sun sets, there’ll be water spots.”

  We worked as
fast as our skinny-girl arms let us. We didn’t talk or laugh. We didn’t even stay to watch him pour the water over the car. We carried water, over and over, to the front door.

  “Bless him,” my baby mouth whispered.

  Like he had sneezed. Or given me a gift. I learned the words from Mrs. Swarm before she served a farmhand supper. Bless this food, Lord. But I found the desire by my grandma’s grave. Let’s pray over your troubles, the preacher comforted us. There were many things I did not yet know about my daddy. But there was one thing no one needed to teach me. He was trouble.

  Momma slid from the trailer as Daddy polished the car with a soft piece of deer hide. She wore red lipstick, her shirt knotted up in front. She leaned against the car, showing herself off. I hid behind the corner and watched her. Leaned my body against the trailer. Matched the angles of my shoulders, the arc of my back, to hers.

  “Woman, git one smudge on this car and I swear I’ll…,” Daddy began, before Momma stood up and yelled, too.

  They argued over that car more than where the money went. More than over all the hours Daddy spent gone, long after farm work was done.

  “Weren’t for me, wouldn’t be no car,” Momma liked to say. “It’s been as much home as any you give us.”

  She was right. We lived in that green car the first half of summer, after Daddy lost his mechanic job and the peach crops didn’t need any more workers. After two months of not paying rent, the sheriff showed up with a piece of paper covered in big words that no one in my family could read. “What it means,” the sheriff hollered, “is if you don’t have the money, you have to git.” With nothing but old clothes piled in the trunk and my green baby blanket clutched in my fist, we left Daniel Island. “It’s awright,” Momma whispered to herself. “Promise land’s waitin’.”

  I was the baby, and a small one, too. So while Janie slept curled up on the backseat and Momma and Daddy leaned their bucket seats back, I snuggled into a ball on the car floor. When morning came, Momma would drag me from the car to pee in a ditch by the road, my legs too numb and confused to move.

  We crossed state lines twice. Daddy found weekend work at old garages. Just enough for gas money and a little food to keep moving. We entered East Tennessee, on our way to the big city of Memphis. But in that part of Tennessee we didn’t pass any cities. Just miles and miles of land with barns and old houses scattered across it. Occasionally we’d drive through a hub with gas stations, grocery stores, and a local diner. But it would quickly end and we’d drive back into empty land.

  Daddy coasted down hills in neutral to save gas, but our tank was nearly empty. Out of desperation he turned down a dirt road with a hand-painted sign staked at the corner: Swarm Tobacco. Established 1893.

  Tobacco as tall as Daddy and healthier than Momma waved like a welcome banner. It led us to Swarm house. A place more like a king’s throne than anything else.

  Daddy said he felt like saluting, the way he was taught the month he was in the army. Momma said she felt like praying, the way the preacher did over Grandma’s grave. Janie mumbled a cussword, because at ten that’s as big as it gets. And my hungry-baby eyes wondered if we were still on earth at all, or if Carolina had been the end. Maybe everything beyond was the heaven preached at Grandma’s grave. If so, I doubted they’d let us in.

  The Swarms walked out, one in overalls with a slick bald head, one in a gingham apron with gray hair tied back in a braid. Daddy told them about being raised in the fields. About running tractors since he was knee-high. Momma chatted with Mrs. Swarm about me and Janie.

  I hid behind Momma’s leg like I always did. Momma joked that I was more shy than a broke-down dog. And told how when we’d stop for gas, I’d tuck myself into the floor of the car so nobody could see me.

  “Must be good at hidin’,” Mrs. Swarm said. “That’s somethin’ to brag over when you’re a kid, ain’t it?” She peeked behind Momma and winked at me. “Might as well stay for supper. No place within miles to feed these babies.”

  “We got groceries in the car.”

  It was a lie. The money had run out so long ago I couldn’t remember the last time we’d eaten anything more than stale snack cakes from the gas station.

  “Your babies look pale. Give ’em a break from that car for a few minutes. Let me fix ’em a plate and run it out.”

  In all my years on Swarm farm, I never went inside that home. Long ago, Mr. Swarm had been robbed. Somebody stole his granddaddy’s shotgun and his grandmother’s engraved silver goblets.

  “Who’d ever want a goblet that says Swarm anyhow?” he’d ask, every time he told the story.

  Swarm house rules allowed only family and friends inside. We had many names on that farm. Bacca farmhands. Folks from Carolina. People living in Black Snake trailer. But we never confused any of them for the word family or friends.

  That first day on the farm, Mrs. Swarm made trips in and out of the house carrying bowls of stewed beef, plates of cat-head biscuits, and pitchers of milk and tea. We sat around a picnic table underneath a giant sycamore tree. The trunk as wide as Daddy with his arms stretched out. The leaves as big as my head. I looked all the way up, at the shaggy bark peeling off in chunks and wide strips, showing raw wood beneath. A trail of ants marched down the trunk. When Mrs. Swarm stepped inside to bring pie, I pointed them out to Daddy.

  “Ants is killin’ that tree.”

  Daddy looked and then shook his head. “Hurts to grow. Bark’s gotta yield to a risin’ trunk.”

  Mr. Swarm said the tree was famous.

  “Biggest one in the state, they say. I don’t set too much by it, though. Look out that way, beyond them fields. Think of all the trees nobody’s lookin’ at. One of ’em’s bound to be a big ol’ sycamore.”

  The land looked like my green baby blanket when Momma shook the dust from it. But in the distance, mountains circled. We weren’t in the mountains. But we would never be far from them.

  They watched us eat that day. Saw how I used baby fingers to pick up biscuit crumbs and tuck them in my mouth. Saw how Momma pushed the food around her plate, like she didn’t know what to do with it. Food never mattered much to Momma. She preferred a good smoke and a cheap drink. Her bony knees poked out from tanned-as-leather legs. Knobby shoulder blades humped up beneath her bikini straps and showed off her heart-on-fire tattoo. And her cheekbones never needed the flame-pink blush she smeared across them. No one could miss them, those bones that sharply divided her face and always made her look sick. Especially when she smiled.

  Momma’s bones are what made Mr. Swarm insist we move into the trailer in the first place. When Daddy said no, Mr. Swarm whispered gently, “Your family could use the break.”

  Mrs. Swarm nodded. “Joe ran power an’ water out to it two years ago, when we thought the men might wanna cool off in it. That was before they stacked it full of old parts. Turned it into another one of our sheds. But I bet we could have it empty for you by sundown.”

  It wasn’t being used by anybody but rats, and the old black snake that hunted those rats, until we moved in. Mr. Swarm bought the trailer because it was a good deal. Two hundred bucks at a farm sale. They carried it home on the back of a hay wagon.

  Before harvest, no one could see much of our trailer from the main road for all the thick yellow leaves around it. When I started kindergarten in early August, kids whispered that me and Janie appeared like magic every morning. The leaves would part and we’d step through to the waiting yellow bus. Words like bacca fairies and tar ghosts swirled around us at school. But the name that stuck, the one that followed us until we each dropped out, was Girls of Old Number Nine.

  Old Number Nine was a king’s tobacco. A type of Burley crop that grew so tall the tips would drag the ground as Daddy carried staked plants, his arms held over his head. That was why everybody called it bacca. It was big enough on its own. It didn’t need our extra letters.

  I knew paths through the bacca that seemed to stretch to the mountains. If Momma and Daddy started
to fight and the few dishes we had started to fly, me and Janie would run. If it was midsummer, the leaves would be so high we wouldn’t have to do anything but push through them. And if it was early we’d crawl. Our hands and knees dragging through the fresh spring dirt.

  If things were really bad, we’d spend the night out there. Sometimes in the mornings, we’d get on the bus without ever going home again. We’d wear the same clothes as the day before, only dirtier.

  When a teacher would ask if things were okay, I’d think of my family. How if Daddy came home late, he always said he was working the fields. Even if it was the middle of December. If Momma’s lip was busted, she said she fell over a cinder block. And if Janie got off the bus with purple marks all over her neck, she said she had the chicken pox. Again.

  “Yes, ma’am. Things are fine.”

  Lies were the same as mercy to us. Even if everything wasn’t okay, even if nothing was, we could pretend different. Sometimes when a lie would slip off my tongue, easy and warm, I’d think about Mrs. Swarm’s God. How maybe he heard my first cry and agreed with my tears. How maybe he gave me the only gift that could soothe a hard life, a lying tongue to sneak through it with.

  School never helped me, like the bacca and my lies did. So I went to eat a hot meal. To listen to the pretty music the teacher played during art time. To stare at all the colors inside a new crayon box. So clean and perfect I hated for other kids to touch them with their greasy hands. But I didn’t go to school to learn. Because I remembered the black snake, and the waste of its hard work.

  It was four and a half feet long, a legend on Swarm farm. It killed more farm rats than any pack of cats ever could. But that first night in the trailer, Daddy slapped a hoe on its neck. I ran my hand across its new skin, slick and inky as oil, and thought of all the shedding, all the growing it had done before Daddy came along.