Little Altars Everywhere

  Back outside, I hand them each their cold drinks and they both say, Thank you.

  Finally Shep finds his tongue and asks, Where you work, podnah?

  The old man replies, Over to Dr. Jackson’s place in Bunkie, Louisiana.

  Uh-huh, Shep nods and stares down at the ground.

  I wish he’d look at me, share something with me, but he just stares at the ground. We both know that Brainard Jackson’s been dead for eight years. His children sold the farm for the new Garnet Parish Golf and Country Club. The only black men working over there now are the young ones who keep that golf course groomed and park the cars.

  The old fellow just murmurs again, like he’s chanting, like he’s praying: Gotta find my mules. Gotta start my ploughin. A man can’t dawdle this time of year.

  I sit there in the lawn chair, holding my cigarette away from them so the smoke won’t bother Shep. (He will only let me smoke outside now because it irritates his asthma.) The pinks and yellows and blues of the sky all over those green fields look gorgeous, and light spills on Shep and the old man. I can feel my cocktail start to leak through my bloodstream a little and my neck starts to relax. This is my favorite time of day.

  All Shep does is look at his hands. Finally he talks and it’s like it hurts him to make the sounds. Where you stay at now? Shep says.

  Over to my daughter’s, the man replies.

  Where’s that? Shep asks.

  The old man looks at him, but all he answers is, Gotta find my mules.

  I feel like a Peeping Tom, witnessing the look in Shep’s eyes. He leans back in the swing and takes a sip of his 7-Up, and tears start to well up in his eyes. I swear that man just cries over everything these days. Here he is, sitting on the swing, a sixty-four-year-old man with tears streaming down his cheeks. All the things he has done to me, all that he has taken from me and hurt me with, and he has never cried about them. But he can sit here and cry over an ancient colored man he doesn’t even know. There is no justice in the world for me.

  What about me? He’s a stranger! I want to scream. But I don’t. I don’t say a word. I have worn myself out trying to help people. And I have never gotten a damn bit of recognition for all my effort.

  You don’t have to tell me why he’s crying. He’s seeing the shopping mall and the subdivision that took over the cotton fields he used to work. Seeing the 7-Eleven that took down his favorite pecan tree where they used to stop the flatbed trucks and set up the water cooler. He’s seeing all the fields and fields of farmland that he’d known all his life, and the kids diving into truckloads of cotton. Seeing himself follow his Daddy around, learning how to tell exactly what was happening with a cotton plant. He’s seeing Little Shep and Baylor when he taught them to farm. And then seeing both of them walk out of here with no interest at all in getting dirt under their fingernails.

  Old man, he asks, how far did you have to walk to find my farm?

  Well, nobody needs to answer that question. He knows the man had to walk at least five, six miles before he found anything except the Taco Bell and Wal-Mart, Carpet World and Minute-Lube. The old man doesn’t breathe a sound. And Shep slumps over in the swing and sobs until his chest is heaving up and down, until he has to take out his inhaler and draw on it. In spite of all he has done to me, I still want to hold him. But I sit there and leave him alone. I have gone to him too many times and had him turn me away.

  The old Negro sits perfectly at ease with his walking stick across his lap. Like he knows just what his business is and he can sit and wait just as long as he needs to, thank you kindly. The sun is getting lower and lower.

  I look at the rows of pine trees that ring the yard, thirty feet tall now, and I can remember the day they were planted. I look out at the mailbox and think of the five-million times I ran out there in the middle of a hot summer afternoon, believing that something would arrive that would change my life. I stare at my own hands, the way the veins pop up now, no matter how much lotion I rub on them. My nails still look good, but these are the hands of an old person, and you can’t go around wearing gloves in 1991 unless you really want them to think you’re batty.

  Vivi, will you go inside and get me the cordless phone? Shep asks me.

  I’m relieved to get away from all this silence. It’s just getting to be too much, sitting there with a strange Negro and a sobbing husband. I walk into the kitchen where you can smell the Lea & Perrins I’d started to put on the T-Bone. I stick that cut of meat back in the refrigerator, because we don’t need ptomaine poisoning here at Pecan Grove, on top of everything else.

  The kitchen and the breakfast room are spotless. Between having Letta in three times a week and no kids here anymore, this place is like a mausoleum. It’s almost cool with the sun nearly down. I could turn off the fans if I wanted to, but I love our ceiling fans in the evening. I have to admit Shep was right when he had them put in, even though we’ve got central air conditioning.

  I go back to Shep’s bathroom, pick up the cordless phone, and walk down the hall with it in my hand. This is such a big house now with all of the kids gone. I swear—we’ve got more phones and TVs in this place than we do people. Sometimes I round a corner and think I hear one of the kids calling out, Mama, look at me! Look at me! And I’ll turn my head, but nobody’s there.

  It was all so fast and furious—having them, raising them, watching them go. I thought when Baylor left: Alright now, this is when my life can begin! But it never did begin and I can’t tell you why.

  Walking through that house with the cordless phone makes me feel like an astronaut who got disconnected from his spaceship. With just the two of us living here, I have all the quiet I want. I have too much quiet. I mean there are just so many Sidney Sheldons you can read. I go to the movies with Necie twice a week, I get my hair done. I used to do my volunteer work at the Veterans Hospital—until they got so bossy about making us wear those tacky little uniforms that I had to tell them where to get off. I look at other women my age sometimes and I think: Maybe I should look all content like that. Maybe I should be pulling out pictures of grandchildren and oohing and ahhing. Maybe I should be happier. But those women are fat as hell and I still weigh only four pounds more than I did the day I graduated from Thornton High. I look ten years younger than any of them.

  I don’t know, it all just came and went before I had a chance to realize. One day I was head cheerleader at Thornton High, then I lost the twin, and the next thing I know, Sidda is grown-up and talking to me like she’s some kind of refugee with a Ph.D. in psychology.

  You can’t blame me for any of it. I had no idea in God’s world that DDT was poison. We didn’t know what was and wasn’t poison back then. You didn’t even think about such things. It is not my goddamn fault if it caused Sidda’s breathing problems. I didn’t know about smoking, either. A mother can’t know everything in the G.D. universe. I did my best.

  You don’t have to tell me what Sidda was thinking when she asked for that picture of me and Caro taken at the kitchen table in 1952. I’m eight-and-a-half months pregnant in that photo and so is Caro. Both of us sitting at that round oak table. Had our feet propped up on the table, smoking Luckies, sipping a little bourbon and branch, reading Dr. Benjamin Spock. Necie took the picture. I remember where she was standing, right next to the drainboard where I had some chicken thawing out. I know why my oldest child wanted that picture. I am not ignorant. To bring it to her group, where they all sit around and whine while she tells lies about the way I raised her.

  But I just handed over the damn photo like she asked. I didn’t want my saying No to be one more thing she can add to her litany of abuses. She’s got the world thinking I’m Joan Crawford as it is. Even though I never once touched them with a coat-hanger.

  Hell, I was just trying to stay alive. Four kids in four years and eight months, and a husband who did nothing but farm and duck hunt. Even when he was home, he wasn’t really here. Cook, clean, wash crappy diapers, wipe runny noses, listen to him run on about
goddamn drainage ditches. That’s not what I was raised for, that’s not why I was created! I am not a goddamn maid. I have a bachelor’s degree from Ole Miss in Speech, not in Home-fucking-Ec. I used to be so much fun. I lived to laugh, to make other people laugh. Then I started praying, I started confessing once a week, I studied the lives of the G.D. saints. I tried to be holy, but nothing stopped the shakes like a bourbon and branch.

  Sidda can’t explain this to her friends, I don’t care how many books she reads on the subject. She hates me now. She divorced me without even handing me any papers.

  When I get outside, I hand Shep the cordless phone and he calls the sheriff’s department. Evening, he says. This is Shep Walker out at Pecan Grove. I got me a old black man out here and he is, well he’s…Then he chokes up with tears and can’t talk.

  For heaven’s sake! I think. And he has always said I was the dramatic one. I reach over and take the phone from him. Hello dahling, I say. Vivi Abbott Walker here. Look, we’ve got an old man out here at our farm and he says he’s looking for his mules.

  The man on the other end says, What?

  I say, Mules.

  Shep yells out, Mules, damn it! Doesn’t anyone even remember mules?

  I tell him, Shhh, Babe, I’ll handle this.

  My husband is acting like a big fat baby, I swear to God. You simply must have decent telephone manners in this world or you will get absolutely nowhere.

  He is looking for his mules, I explain to the man on the phone. Mules, like they used to plough with. We’re calling because the old fellow can’t remember where he lives. And I think one of yall should come out here and get him and help him find his daughter’s house. Yessir, that’s right. Pecan Grove.

  Only undeveloped land at the end of Jefferson Street Extension, Shep says.

  Did you hear that? I ask the man. No, it’s past Bayou Estates subdivision.

  Shep takes the phone away from me and says, Listen, podnah, send out one of your black officers, would you? This is a fine old gentleman here, this is a fine old man, I don’t want you to shake him up.

  Shep clicks off the cordless phone and stares out at the last of the sunset. The old man starts humming a song Letta and them used to sing. It amazes me to watch how comfortable the old man is, sitting there like we had just called up and ordered the sheriff’s department to bring his mules out to him, right on the double.

  We all three of us sit there not saying a word. Part of me wants to sob, and part of me wants to scream bloody-murder. Part of me wants to take Shep by the throat and yell, You care more about this old black man than you do about me!

  But I don’t say a word. I will not be dragged away from Pecan Grove in my old age because they claim I’m nuts (like certain people have implied when they thought I wasn’t sharp enough to know exactly what they were saying). They don’t know what sharp is. I have been sharp as a tack my whole life, so nobody better even try to fool me. No, I have suffered too much on this plantation to get carted away because of one unguarded moment.

  We sit that way for—oh, I don’t know—about fifteen minutes. Until I’d seen at least two lightning bugs over by the clothesline. When the sheriff’s car pulls into the driveway, Shep gets up and walks over to the officer and I follow behind him. The officer is indeed a black one—young and handsome, I am ashamed to admit. But I have always loved a man in uniform.

  Shep says to the officer, Look you know how us old farmers get when spring rolls around. Got to get those seeds in the ground. The old man’s looking for his mules. Help him find where he lives. Help him find his home.

  And then Shep opens the front passenger door and helps the old man in most respectfully. The car backs out, and the old man rolls down the window and calls out to Shep: I sho nuff hope the Good Lord give us enough rain this year!

  Shep walks over to the car and leans down to him, puts his hand on the man’s shoulder and says, I do too, podnah, I do too.

  Then the sheriff’s car pulls out of the driveway with the headlights on and takes off down the gravel road toward town. Shep watches until it’s out of sight, then he stares out into the field where the beans have disappeared in the dark. He stands that way for a good long time with his hands in his pockets. When he turns to me, his eyes are so soft and serious.

  He says, It goes by so fast, Vivi, it just goes by so goddamn fast.

  I know, Babe, I tell him and try to hook my arm through his.

  But he turns and walks up the drive saying, I’m hungry. It’s way past suppertime.

  Oh God, I think, it’s such a good life, but it hurts!

  After supper I fall asleep, but for some reason I wake up after only a couple of hours. I get up and go into the kitchen and fix myself a Coke over crushed ice. I will tell him that I still love him, I think.

  I will tell him that when we are old and looking for our mules, we don’t have to be alone, we can help each other.

  I rinse out my Coke glass and put it in the dishwasher. Then I walk down the hall to Shep’s room. I start to knock on the closed door, but I think, No, I will just go and sit on the edge of his bed, touch his shoulder, and say his name softly so I don’t startle him.

  I reach down to open the door, try to turn the knob to the right.

  The door is locked.

  There are only the two of us in this house and he has locked his door before going to sleep.

  I will never let him hurt me again as long as I live, I say to myself. As I walk back down the hall, I say it over and over to myself. One of these days I will learn.

  I grab my cigarettes and walk out into the backyard. That candy-cane striped swing set we bought the kids years ago still sits out there, looking ridiculous. I look up at the stars and say a prayer straight up to Heaven: Please, do not give me any more than I can handle. I am a strong woman, but don’t push me. Don’t push me, Lord, you hear me!

  I finish that cigarette, then I go in and get back into bed. I need to lay back and give up. I need to surrender for at least one night, for at least eight-and-a-half hours. I look like crap if I don’t get enough sleep. My eyes get all puffy and I’m cranky as hell. I need my beauty rest. I always have.

  The First Imperfect Divine Compassion Baptism Video

  Siddalee, 1991

  I’m a godmother now.

  Baylor called me while I was directing a new play at a small house on Theater Row.

  We’ve named her after you, he said, and we’re going to call her Lee. She’s beautiful, looks exactly like you. We’ll wait till after your show opens to have her baptized.

  End of October alright? I asked.

  Sure, he said. October is the only decent month in this state.

  I direct plays. It’s nice work if you can get it. I make about the same amount of money as a teenage golf caddy, but I like what I do. When I’m not in Manhattan, I’m at regional theaters in places like Milwaukee or Seattle. I go where the work is, season to season. Like a migrant worker. I love studying a script on the page, then presiding over the accidents that occur when the actors let their bodies lead them. The whole process, from first read-through to opening night, feels like a series of tiny miracles to me—one person’s thoughts getting transformed into flesh and movement and conversation and thousands of gestures.

  I don’t go back to Louisiana very often. It makes me too sad. I get an emotional hangover for months afterward. There’s too much danger of getting sucked back into the swamp I’ve learned to crawl out of—or at least swim through.

  I’m not what you’d call a serene person, but I’m not a walking nerve-end either. Let’s just say that with a lot of work, I’ve managed not to become a full-fledged Junior Ya-Ya. I have one main rule for myself these days: Don’t hit the baby. It means: Don’t hurt the baby that is me. Don’t beat up on the little one who I’m learning to hold and comfort, the one I’m trying to love no matter how raggedy she looks. It’s sort of a code, a shorthand of the heart.

  I murmur Don’t hit the baby when I wake up, when
I ride the subway, when I board a plane, when I step into a theater. I whisper Don’t hit the baby before I go to sleep. And on the nights when I make it through without a futon-soaking nightmare, I know I’ve breathed it like a prayer during my sleep. You can read all the books and spend a small fortune on therapy, but that one sentence just about covers it all.

  It takes me weeks to prepare myself for the trip home for Lee’s baptism. One day I’m fantasizing how warm and loving and familiar it will all be and how much everyone will have changed. Then that same night I’m having one of the old familiar nightmares where I must swim for hours through a black ocean looking for the boat Mama and Daddy are about to capsize in. I swim until my whole body aches. I wake with my neck hurting. I wake up needing to rest from the night’s sleep.

  It’s a blessing to have to show up at the theater each day. To block the show, to feel for pacing, to go over last-minute lighting cues and costume changes, to bird-dog the ten-thousand things that lead up to opening night—when you stand in the back of the theater and hold your breath.

  The day after the show opens, I sleep fourteen hours, see my therapist for one last emotional rehearsal, then have dinner with my best friend, Connor.

  He gives me six of those little Guatemalan worry dolls in a little pouch, and says, Don’t forget: While you’re in Louisiana, blue-green coral is still growing on the ocean floor.

  Connor is a scenic designer/carpenter/sometime writer with a fascination for Salinger. He leaves messages on my machine like “Sidd! Listen up! J.D. was spotted in Queens at a retirement party for an old policeman friend of his. This is fact. Believe it.” For the past year we’ve worked together and played together, and even spent the night at each other’s apartments after late nights at the theater or watching videos about Delta folk artists. We haven’t made love yet, though. Not because the chemistry isn’t hot, but because Connor feels too important for me to risk blowing everything by sleeping together. On good days, I tell myself: Hold on. If it’s meant to be, it’ll happen. You have all the time in the world. Our friendship, or whatever you want to call it, is one of my main comforts. With Connor I get to rest.