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In the Belly of Her Ghost. Colin Dayan
Читать онлайн.Название In the Belly of Her Ghost
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781940660615
Автор произведения Colin Dayan
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Серия LARB True Stories
Издательство Ingram
Lucille told me bedtime stories. My bedroom, with its twin beds and old mahogany dresser, painted an odd kind of ultramarine blue, with a cream-colored carpet, turned into my little cabinet of horrors. Lucille’s stories were not fairy tales. They scared me out of my wits. She always saved her favorite one for last, repeated but sometimes with a slight change in her warning. “Stay on your back,” she said, “or else that man in the closet will fall out straight down over you.” I knew I had to be ready. Surprise could kill me. I would die of the shock, she said, “You’ll wake up plumb dead, dead as a doornail. And don’t you go screaming out for me. Don’t yell. He’ll be flat over you before you can holler.” Just like the spiders under the bed, the moon outside the window, and the hand through the screen, the man in the closet was waiting for me to turn the wrong way, look over the wrong shoulder, or say the wrong thing.
Everybody was always dying around Lucille. A black widow spider bit her niece, and she died a few days later. Her name was Helen. Lucille’s first husband fell or was pushed off a truck and died. Another one was cutting Florida cane and the scythe slit his foot clean to the ankle. When she laughed and clapped her hands talking about the next husband, the only man she ever loved, I learned how terror could be jubilation. Like Peg Leg Bates, he got caught in a cotton mill, but he lost everything from the trunk on down. Cut just about clean in half. She was called in to identify him. There was nothing left but his chest and head.
Joe Moses was the last of Lucille’s five husbands. I figured she must have loved him, since she changed her last name from Nero to Moses. She told me that she never “took on no man’s name. Not until Joe.” I only met him once, but like so much else in my past, I don’t remember anything except what Lucille told me.
He drank too much, and Lucille finally decided that she would “fix” him once and for all. She was tired of the way he embarrassed her by yelling out the windows all hours of the night and bothering the neighbors. “Lord, I’m gone again,” he would shout. When he wasn’t hollering out the window, he used to jump up and down on the bed and hooted all the same. They had twin beds pushed together. So one night he jumped up, and she kicked his bed out from under him. “Lord, I done missed the bed that time,” Lucille remembered him saying. She told the story with a wistful smile on her face. “He hurt his self, bad. Real bad. Went to the hospital and died a couple weeks later.”
Sometimes when I walk down the hallway in my house, I catch myself moving like Lucille. Up and down I pump my shoulders. I hold my arms out, each hand clenched, dancing just the way she did out in the backyard, singing B.B. King’s “Why I Sing the Blues.” Lucille used to tell me that she was named after his guitar, though now I realize that couldn’t be right, since she’d been around quite a few years before he named it.
During my third year in college, my father and mother wrote me that Lucille was old, so they “let her go.” That’s how they put it when they wrote me. She moved to her sister Nellie’s house on Ponce de Leon Boulevard near Georgia Baptist Hospital, where I visited her my next time at home. Photos of me were on her night table and the living-room wall. She saw me looking at them, and said: “You’re my baby, always was and always will be.” We sat together for hours one afternoon in her room that smelled of soapsuds, honey, and the cod-liver oil that she swore by, taking it by the teaspoon whenever she felt her blood pressure rising. I thought then that I would remember everything about our talk. But memory fails me. All that remains is that smell and the feel of lanolin in her hair. Only in retrospect do I realize that I never asked her about her parents nor did I ever find out where she came from. No last words. Not a thing I can recall doing, ever, that might square with her love for me.
A few months later, I came home for her funeral. She had died of a heart attack, alone in the shower. Stubborn and tough as always, she didn’t listen to Nellie’s order that she shower or bathe only when someone else was in the house. Whoever embalmed her had the last say. That was a shame. Lucille never liked cosmetics and thought makeup was for “fool women.” She didn’t want anything unnatural touching her skin. But there she lay, in a suit, with a shiny black wig and her face caked with makeup. Even Thomas didn’t think she looked good and warned me when I said I wanted to see her: “You wouldn’t want to see her in the fashion she’d come back in. In the clothes she was put away in.” When the preacher asked for remembrances, I went up to the pulpit. I can’t recall what I said.
“Adonay shammah.” “The Lord is there.” In his vision Ezekiel prophesies the future temple by remembering the first one, the House of God. When I think about the glory and gold of Solomon’s temple, and its desecration, which my father mourned until his dying day, I remember what Lucille told me the year before she died. “You can find God in an outhouse hole.”
I grieve for her soft, tenderly luscious voice.
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