I watched them, and I had to hush the voice in my mind that said: “Me, M’Dear, now me! Me, please!” Finally, she took my hands and she looked me in the eyes, smiling, shaking her head like she was so happy at what she saw. Her eyes told me, “Calla, you are all that I hoped.” Then we moved together. I reached my arms up to the sky and M’Dear raised her arms as much as she could. We reached our hands out, went low, down to the ground, and then turned our bodies in slow circles that ended in light steps of stillness. M’Dear came toward me, touching my arms lightly, and whispered, “Remember to look up now and then and throw me a kiss, baby, and I’ll send one back to you. Remember the stars, Calla.” We looked at each other, tears rolling down both our faces.
Then it was Papa’s turn. To see M’Dear and Papa together was like watching butterflies. They smiled at each other so deeply that they seemed lost for a few moments. “My Lenora,” I heard him whisper. Then the smile cut loose into movement. At first, I thought their dance was too intimate to watch, my father in his pajamas, his eyes all red from lack of sleep, my beautiful mother’s face drawn and tired—both of them dancing themselves out of pain. I could see that it wasn’t easy for M’Dear and Papa to move like this when they hurt so much. I watched as she leaned into him for strength. I saw that pain is part of beauty—that inside of all that music, all that love, all the moonlight and sunlight, are shafts of pain, and we are meant to bear it all.
Then M’Dear and Papa reached out to the three of us. We all stepped together and wrapped our arms around each other.
I did not want my mother to leave me. But I knew she must.
After our night of dancing, M’Dear was so weak that she rarely left her bed. Olivia and Aunt Helen were always by her side. Often as not, when I got home from school, M’Dear would be sleeping, so I started spending the hours between school and dinnertime over at the Tuckers’.
And that’s how it happened that Miz Lizbeth wound up buying me shoes for the Valentine’s Day Ball.
I had been telling her about the dress that Aunt Helen was making me for the ball, with Tuck as my date. We had picked out the fabric together, and I showed Miz Lizbeth a swatch I had in my purse. It was white, with little red hearts all over it.
She said, “I can just picture you wearing that with a pair of red shoes.”
Now, I was so excited about the dress—the ball was still a month off—that I hadn’t even thought about my shoes. “Tell you what,” Miz Lizbeth offered. “We have plenty of time to ride over to Claiborne and see if we can’t find you something nice.”
So the two of us got into her Buick and headed out for Richardson’s Department Store. And, wouldn’t you know it, there was a whole display of pumps and platforms. “Get out that swatch,” Miz Lizbeth told me. We held it up to the shoes, and sure enough, a pair of red platforms looked perfect.
“I’ll have to talk to Papa about these,” I said. “I don’t have enough money of my own to buy them today.”
“I didn’t mean for you to buy them, Calla. It would make me very happy if you just let me get these shoes for you as a gift.”
“Oh, Miz Lizbeth,” I said, “I could never impose on you that way!”
“You’re not imposing. I offered to get these shoes for you, and I mean to do it.”
When we got home with the shoes, Miz Lizbeth dropped in to see if M’Dear was awake. She was indeed sitting up, and she seemed a little more energetic than usual.
We both kissed her, then sat down at her bedside to tell her all about our shoe-shopping adventure.
I got out my swatch and held it up to the shoes. “Look, M’Dear, isn’t this a perfect combination? Can’t you just see this with my dress? And I have to give Miz Lizbeth all the credit. She just imagined exactly the kind of shoes I needed.”
“Well,” M’Dear said, lifting a shoe from the box, “the color is perfect. Reds are hard to match. Lizbeth”—she smiled at her—“has always had great fashion sense. But you’re only sixteen years old. I think you’re going to break your neck trying to dance in these.”
“Oh, M’Dear,” I told her, “Sukey gets to wear even higher than these, and so do other girls. Watch how well I can walk in them. And they do make me feel sooo glamorous.”
I put on the shoes and paraded around the bedroom, proud that my ankles didn’t even wobble. “You see?” I asked her. “Everybody’s going to love these shoes.”
“Now, just where did you get the money to buy them?” M’Dear said.
“Lenora, I insisted on buying them for her,” Miz Lizbeth said. “I practically had to press the gift on her. It was just something I wanted to do for Calla.”
“Hmmph,” said M’Dear.
I heard the anger in M’Dear’s voice—M’Dear, who never snapped at anyone, whose heart was full of love.
M’Dear said, “Lizbeth, Calla is not your daughter. She’s mine. And it’s not my fault if your own daughter left!”
Miz Lizbeth couldn’t even look at her.
I saw M’Dear gripping the sheets, trying not to cry. She was that tired and spent. I didn’t understand what had just happened, but it scared me. “M’Dear, are you okay?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
“Lenora, don’t even think about this,” Miz Lizbeth said. “I’m going to let you rest now. I promised Bernard that I would have his supper early tonight because he has a Rotary Club meeting.” She kissed both M’Dear and me lightly on the forehead, saying, “Good-bye, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
M’Dear grabbed at her hands and said, “Wait!”
She held Miz Lizbeth’s hands between her own and said, “Lizbeth, I was unkind. It hurts me that you bought Calla her first pair of grown-up dress shoes. I am laid up here, unable to do that for her. And it hurts me that you’ll get to watch her become a woman and I will not be here.”
“M’Dear, don’t say that,” I protested.
But Miz Lizbeth was telling her, softly, “I understand. But I also know that no one could ever take your place in Calla’s heart—or in mine.”
M’Dear sank back on her pillows, tears spilling down her cheeks, exhausted.
Miz Lizbeth kissed her again and left to go home.
I reached out for M’Dear’s hand. “M’Dear, I’m sorry I’m spending so much time with Miz Lizbeth. It just happens, you know, because Tuck and me—”
M’Dear said, “You don’t need to say you’re sorry. She’s a woman I want you to count on. And you can.”
The next day was typical January weather, dark and gloomy. I usually woke up on Saturdays feeling excited about the weekend, but that morning Sukey and I were at Renée’s, and Sukey sensed my mood. “What’s wrong, Calla?” she asked.
“It just feels like there’s so much weight on me! Sukey, I feel like there’s this heavy black coat on me, just weighing me down to the ground, and I don’t know how to take it off.”
Sukey hugged me and said, “We’ll help you, Calla.”
“Yeah,” Renée said. “Let’s just cut that coat right off.” She went and got two pairs of scissors and an old sheet, which she draped over me.
“Now, Calla,” she said, “this sheet is that heavy coat. Close your eyes. Do you feel it?”
“I do. It feels horribly heavy. I can barely walk in it. I can barely put one foot in front of the other.”
“Don’t even try to walk,” Sukey told me. “Just wait till we cut you free.”
Then they each took a pair of scissors, and with Sukey in the back and Renée in the front, they cut the sheet into strips, starting at the bottom. When their scissors met at my shoulders, they’d give one last snip, and that strip of the sheet would fall to the ground. I watched the strips puddle at my feet, and it did feel like I was slowly shedding that black and heavy weight. And at that moment, I realized that I had two sisters so strong and so smart that I would never be crushed by even the deepest darkness.
It was the night of the Valentine’s Day Ball. M’Dear watched me get dressed with dark, shiny eyes,
sharing my excitement. She even helped me with my hair, sweeping it up and creating little ringlets in the back. She asked me to turn around and around so she could see me from all angles, as if she was memorizing me. When Tuck arrived, she made us pose for pictures, which Papa snapped. As I was leaving, she smiled and said, “You know, those shoes do make the outfit.”
When I got home that night, she was waiting up, hoping to hear all about the ball. I told her about the music and the dancing and tried to make her feel like she’d been there herself. She couldn’t get enough of each detail.
Later that night, after cookies and milk, Papa and I both fell asleep in the bed with M’Dear. The bedside table light was still on. In the middle of the night, I thought I heard something and woke up for a moment. But everything seemed still. I could see the moonlight on the windowsill, and I could hear Papa breathing. He always had a little snore, nothing too bad, just a sort of whiffle. M’Dear hardly made a sound when she slept. I heard a hoot owl in the trees near the river.
Then it was silent. Papa stopped snoring. The refrigerator downstairs in the kitchen stopped its old comfortable hum. There was only silence.
Then I knew. I couldn’t hear her heartbeat. Since I was alive in her womb, I’d been hearing that old, comforting sound. I reached out to touch M’Dear, and I felt it. Her heart had stopped beating.
Papa woke up, seeming to sense this, and he kissed my forehead. He knew too. Oh, how much my Papa loved me and how brave he was to do that, before he leaned down and kissed M’Dear’s lips and hands. Did Papa want to feel any warmth of M’Dear that was left? Or to try to give her some of his? Or had he already set her free?
There was so much I didn’t know about what lay underneath M’Dear and Papa’s strong love. You could see it the way they touched all day long, the way Papa would come up behind M’Dear when she was stirring a pot on the gas stove, kiss her neck, turn down the gas, then pull her around to start dancing, making us laugh.
I stepped back to the doorway of the room and watched them. Outside the window, I could see the trees were bare. The room started to spin. M’Dear, you told me this would happen—that you would die. How I hated it when she took me and showed me the spot under the live oak where she would be buried, in the little graveyard near her mother and father. “To be near a tree is a wonderful thing,” M’Dear said. She told me to think of the roots of the tree, to think of the limbs and the branches and the thick leaves and how the tree reached up to the moon and stars. “Think of the stars, Calla,” she told me, “and imagine that they’re just other towns, and I’ve moved to them.”
I started to cry, and that’s when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I knew who it was. I could smell her, that lingering scent of bacon from her breakfast and the scent of Ivory soap so faint you might not smell it if you weren’t me. Olivia. She stroked my shoulder, then my hair.
“Everything all right, baby,” she whispered. I didn’t realize that my hands were freezing until Olivia took them in her own warm hands, the strong black hands with the pink palms. “Every single little thing gone be all right.”
Olivia is the one who understood why I wanted to do it. Before the men came to take Mama’s body away, I trimmed off some of the white feathers of her remaining hair. “I’m going to put this in a locket so I can have it the rest of my life,” I said, sobbing. Will came in then, and put his arms around me.
“I have known y’all since you were little babies,” Olivia said to us, “and I have never lied to you.”
Then I saw Sonny Boy in the hallway, leaning in closer.
Olivia continued, “Listen to me, and believe me when I say now: everything gonna be all right.”
I took a deep breath, and I tried to believe her.
Chapter 11
1970
The day of the funeral I could barely get dressed, my hands were shaking so bad. Will and Sonny Boy each held one of my arms as they helped me into the church and sat on either side of me.
How could this happen? M’Dear in all her beauty and dancing and laughing and greatness, how could she just be lying there in that coffin? How dare they put her there where people could just file past and look at her! I prayed with everyone during the Rosary, but couldn’t believe how they acted like this was just a regular prayer session—even with M’Dear lying right there in front of them. If it hadn’t been for my brothers and Tuck, I would have run through Our Lady of the River and jerked the rosaries out of their hands, yelling “Pray for yourselves! She doesn’t need it! Pray for those of us who don’t have her anymore, you rosary-clinking fools!”
Goddamn them! Goddamn breast cancer! I still couldn’t accept that the cancer ate up my mother through her breasts, the breasts that fed me and my brothers so lovingly.
And goddamn Aunt Helen. “Lenora, we love you,” she had said to M’Dear. But she didn’t listen to her! She broke her trust. M’Dear had told both Papa and me that she wanted to be laid out in a nude-colored leotard. “I want to show them what breast cancer does to the body. I don’t want to hide it or seem ashamed in anyway. I am going to show them my flat, boy-breasted body.”
But Aunt Helen betrayed her. In the funeral home, before the wake or visitation, as we Catholics call it, I confronted Aunt Helen. “How dare you! How dare you let them put her in a dress, and make it look like she still had breasts!” I screamed, unable to stop in my anger and grief. “You knew what she wanted, Aunt Helen!”
“I didn’t know,” Aunt Helen said quietly, Uncle Richard standing next to her.
“Yes, you did,” I said, feeling so enraged I wanted to slap her.
“Calla,” Aunt Helen told me, “things change once people move on. I couldn’t stop them. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Calla.”
It was then that I realized Aunt Helen was going through her own sadness of losing M’Dear. We all had to share this. We all had to carry our own load. When Aunt Helen reached her hands out to me, I took them in mine. We were a family.
I was sixteen. M’Dear was thirty-nine. I was in her body for nine months of her life. For almost a year I lived inside her. And now she would live inside me forever.
When we got back from the funeral home, our house was full of pound cakes and casseroles. Even Mrs. Sally, Sukey’s mama, brought her string bean, mushroom soup, and onion ring casserole. She must have baked it right after she got home from work. Seeing Mrs. Sally was like seeing her for the first time. She had so much understanding in her eyes that I reached out for her and she held me in her arms, Sukey’s mama, who had only ever touched the top of my head before Sukey and me went to sleep. Sukey’s mama holding me in her arms.
The rest of the day, all of it, was a blur. Miz Lizbeth finally got me to eat something at some point, but the taste of it came back up.
Eventually I had to get away from everyone, and Tuck came out to the pier with me. I couldn’t even speak till we got down there. We sat down together, and Tuck put his arm around me. That made me cry. When I started to speak, I felt like I was choking.
“Oh, Tuck, I knew M’Dear was sick, but I still kind of believed that her heart would go on and she would live forever. Why couldn’t she? Why did M’Dear have to die?”
I was sobbing so hard that I could hardly get the words out. “She never did anything wrong. She never hurt anybody in her life! Tell me, damnit, tell me! Tell me why!”
I started pounding my fist on my leg, and then I began to slap my face, slap my own face. Tuck pulled me to him, wrapping his arms around me even further. I raised my fists and tried to shove him away.
“Goddamnit!” I cried, pounding on his chest. “Damnit, damnit to goddamn hell! How did that cancer get into M’Dear?” Then I started to beg, “God, please take M’Dear and make her alive again. Make it before the cancer got into her!”
I stopped pounding on Tuck and buried my face in his chest, running my fingers through my hair and pulling at it for comfort.
“Calla, I’m gonna hold your hands now, okay? You’re pulling your hair too har
d. I’m just gonna hold your hands like we always hold hands. Just hold them in my lap.”
I tried to pull my hands out of his, but he held on tight. I yelled at him: “I hate all those people and all that food and flowers! How can any of that make us feel better? Nothing can make me feel better.”
I collapsed in tears again, and Tuck cradled my head in his lap, stroking my hair. That calmed me a little, and after a moment, he said, “Calla, you oughta look up at the sky. The moon is what you always call a fingernail moon, a little tiny sliver, but still so bright.”
I lifted my head to look at Tuck. “I need for her to come back, Tuck.”
Very gently, he said, “I know. I know, Calla. I do know.”
I stared at him hard until I remembered that he did know. I remembered the face of Tuck’s mother as she left him on the Tuckers’ porch. He kept stroking my hair as he dropped his head, and his own tears began to fall, for the pain I was suffering and for the pain he hid so well for the mother he had lost.
Then he continued to hold me as I murmured for both of us: “M’Dear, you weren’t supposed to die. I know you said all those words about living and dying and living again right away and not ever really even leaving. But you were wrong, M’Dear. You have gone and left and I am so angry that I can’t find anything big enough to hold my tears.”
I am big enough to hold your tears.
I slowly lifted my head from Tuck’s lap. I looked out at the river our little town is built on. I looked up at the sliver of a moon. A river, a moon. They could not replace M’Dear. But they did give me comfort.
The river and me, La Luna—together we can hold your tears. Go ahead and cry.
The day after M’Dear’s funeral, Papa brought an envelope over to show us. In it was a letter in M’Dear’s handwriting, written in heavy black ink and in her own way of talking. It was her final letter to all of us. We taped it to the refrigerator door, and we each couldn’t help but read part of it every day.