A Gracious Plenty

  “Why?”

  “Because,” she said. “Just because.”

  “Dumb reason,” I told her.

  “It was this part of my body that nobody’d seen,” she explained. “I’d do it before parades, and it made it okay somehow. I’d be riding on the back of somebody’s Corvette, waving at the crowds, but underneath my dress, I had a secret. Didn’t you ever see me in the Christmas parades?”

  “No,” I told her. And I studied her to see if she was telling the truth. “You scarred yourself on purpose?” After all my years of olive oil and peanut oil and almond oil and pig fat, I didn’t know what to think.

  “I just thought my body should reflect my life,” she said.

  And that made some sense to me.

  But not FUC KME over her ninnies. That didn’t make a bit of sense. That never made sense. “Were you out of your mind?” I asked her.

  “No, it wasn’t that,” she said. “Blaine did the letters one at a time, and God, you wouldn’t believe how he’d treat me afterward. I mean, he brought me flowers and rented me movies and rubbed my feet. He even cooked me dinner and fed it to me. He was so good to me while I was healing.”

  “Hmmm,” I said, not saying what I was thinking.

  “He didn’t want me dancing. He told me I’d never have to dance again for money.”

  “Sounds like a real prince,” I snarled.

  But she was whimsical back then, and busy hiding, still protecting him, still finding ways to blame herself for every bad thing that ever happened. She talked about Blaine like he was some promised messiah. “He thought blood was so amazing. Not violence or anything like that. Just blood, and the way it moved. He’d do it in the bathtub, with me laying back with my head beneath the faucet. Without water—’cause he wanted to see the blood against the white porcelain. And I’d be sort of dizzy and usually stoned, and the blood would run off and drip down, and he’d say, ‘Damn, baby, look at all that blood.’ But I’d be so woozy by then that it’d just look like a cherry Life Saver, gathered around the drain that way.”

  “Blaine’s gonna have some paying to do when he gets here,” I told her. And already I wanted to search him down and kick his ass, because I was still alive and I could.

  “He didn’t hurt me,” Lucy swore. “Not any more than I wanted him to.”

  “You trying to tell me those cuts didn’t hurt you?”

  “Not so much,” Lucy said. “We had a pact. He’d quit anytime I said so.”

  “Whose idea was it?”

  “His,” she admitted. “But I agreed to it. He was just trying to keep me from dancing. He said he wanted me all for himself.”

  That was in the beginning, when she was still holding her stories in a balled-up fist, careful about how much she let out. It wasn’t until later that she came to see that even if she agreed to the cutting, even if she chose the cutting, there was something terribly wrong that yielded such bad choices.

  “Girl,” I tried to tell her, “you were wronged. Even if you were wronged by yourself.”

  But the Mediator left her alone. The Mediator knows that all truths are partial and that what needs to come out will come out.

  Like now with William Blott playing his horn. Chances are good he doesn’t even know how much he’s saying.

  I’ve learned these things from watching. If it hurts you bad enough inside, the truth is the first thing to go. And so many times, the truth takes your words along with it.

  But there are other ways to tell stories.

  William Blott’s music: ba-ba, de-Dee, ba-Ba, ba-Ba, ba-Ba, de-Dee—happy enough to snap your fingers to. But sure enough, it begins to limp, slipping to a lament before long, every song a pining lifting to oaks. He holds the end too long even for Lucy. She sits down naked next to Marcus and strokes his head, waiting for the next one to begin.

  But it doesn’t. Instead, William puts away his trumpet and settles on the ground, facedown. Then the wailing begins again, only slightly muffled by grass, and he says, “I just can’t believe they’d be so petty. I just can’t believe they’d be so cruel.”

  Lucy pulls him to her, and he sobs while the Mediator speaks.

  “In the living world, there is so much fear and hatred,” she says. “When we were a part of that world, we held within us that fear and that hate. When we were in the living world, we could not see what they cannot see: that the things they hate and fear are around them all the time in the things that they love.”

  “They were my friends,” William whimpers. “They were the nicest people I’d ever met.”

  “And you’d have liked for them to appreciate you in death,” the Mediator continues. “There were plenty of things about you to appreciate, William Blott.”

  “But now they hate me and I can’t do anything about it.”

  “Knots untangle themselves,” the Mediator tells him while Lucy holds him close.

  Baby Marcus, who has not been outcried in years, will not be outdone. His crying is salt in a wound.

  But as bad as it is to admit, I envy William Blott, rejected by everybody he knew from the living world, with all his valuables reduced to ash. I envy him for being in Lucy’s arms, where I cannot go.

  The knots. The tangled webs. Lucy Armageddon, who wore tap shoes and tiaras, who cropped her curls and grew them back in dreads, who let a boy carve her like a tree trunk, who danced in titty bars and drove fast cars, Lucy who said that she didn’t mind the blood, who ate cotton candy for breakfast and peed on the side of the road instead of waiting for a rest stop, she found herself alone one day, in a big city, with no money and no plans.

  She stood before the mirror and saw FUCK ME scrawled on her chest in the handwriting of a man who’d moved to Vegas without her. She went to her old job, and it was under new management. The owner didn’t need “no scarred-up, used-up bitch” dancing on his stage, but he gave her fifty bucks for a blow job. He hooked her up with a colleague who gave her three hundred for a whole evening.

  She used the money to buy the gun. Then she drove to the beach in the car that was about to be repossessed, and she kept the top down all the way and let the wind blow in her face.

  She sat at the edge of the water, wearing a crown of seaweed. She danced in the waves and wailed until the surfers left. She jumped waves until her skin blistered, the tide came in, and the crowds went home. And then Lucy Armageddon wrapped herself in a fishing net. She crouched between two dunes, put the gun in her mouth, and came to me.

  “Put her here,” I said, because she was nobody special. Because I was sick of hearing about “that pretty little girl found dead.” I knew the community wouldn’t have cared so much if she’d been an ugly little girl. I staked her off a lopsided plot without shade. She was nobody I knew, and I was only getting partial payment anyway.

  But I planted wildflowers on her grave out of sympathy for her mother. Her mother was taking it hard, I heard. And I am generally only sour for short periods of time.

  The community rallied around Lois Armour, with her only daughter, who’d been missing for years, returned in a body bag, with her husband cuddling a bottle instead of his wife and not coming home for days or weeks at a time. People took the “murder” of “Lucille Armour” as an example of the price of youthful rebellion. “She wouldn’t have never been killed by them city niggers if she’d just stayed home,” Lois was fond of saying.

  I heard the rumors on the street corners. After people stopped talking about her beauty, they started talking about how she died. People said she’d been stabbed, chopped, cut to shreds. People said it was a sex crime, that she had marks on her body to prove it. People said all kinds of things, wanting to believe that anybody who left behind their mother and father and church would surely have to pay with their lives. Especially beautiful people who thought they were too special to live out in the country. They wanted to think that Lucy was paying for something she’d done.

  But Lucy wanted to die. She told me.

  “If you’d shi
t the bed as bad as I had, you wouldn’t want to sleep in it, either,” she said.

  Her back was still burned from the sun, and the skin peeled away in huge strips, like wallpaper. I sat behind her and tried to pull the skin free, but whenever I’d reach for her back, I’d grab my own fingers. There was nothing in between.

  I thought maybe if I touched her lightly enough, maybe if I touched her with just my mouth—and I closed my eyes and leaned to where I thought her back should be, tugging her skin between my teeth.

  I thought I had some of her at first. It tasted like bits of Bible in my mouth. But later when I told the Mediator, she said it was just leftovers from my supper, a bit of pear skin, nothing more. She said there was no way I could touch Lucy, any more than I could touch Papa or Ma.

  When the autopsy results came in the mail, Lois Armour had to be taken to a hospital. She fell to the floor in hysteria and lost her mind so completely that she broke wind in front of a roomful of people. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she called, “MURDER, MURDER” all down the street as the paramedics lifted her into the ambulance.

  And to this day, she tries to get Lucy’s story on Unsolved Mysteries, and she calls the FBI at least once a week for updates.

  “I did it myself,” Lucy insisted. “I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t stand looking at those words.”

  “You needed a friend,” I told her.

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “I guess that’s the one thing I didn’t have.”

  So when Lucy holds on to William Blott, who died a lovable drunk and after his death turned into a monster, I suppose Lucy knows how he feels, in a way. She is not the woman her mother grieves, any more than William Blott is the man Reba Baker hates. The idea of the person and the heart of the person—those are wholly different landscapes.

  But still, it is hard to be here, on the outside, hearing the stories, hearing the horn, unable to touch them and forcing every connection. I leave the yellow flowers, all except for one.

  I’m not what you think, I want to shout. I’m not that.

  But what I say is different. What I say is whispered. “Remember the scars.” And heard by nobody at all.

  THE OUTSIDE OF my house is covered with ivy. In winter, the vines mimic my skin: pale brown, intricate, netted. Fingers inching everywhere. I like it because it’s ivy and because I never have to paint.

  In summer, when the leaves bloom, my house becomes a living thing. The runners reach into the windows, and if I don’t pay attention, I find ivy dipping into the kitchen sink or sneaking across my bookcase. I have to clip the spaces around windows before the vines grow too thick.

  The cats can race right up the walls. I hear them some nights crossing over my head, their paws scratching at shingles.

  And if a snake or two takes cover here, what business is it of mine?

  The Vegetable Man keeps telling me that the vines will hug the walls too tight and one day destroy them. He says, “You better chop them vines down ’fore it gets any worse. You’ll need a crowbar just to pull off what’s growed this year.”

  I ask him how long it will take before my house is consumed, but he doesn’t know.

  I just let it grow. I’m only partly at home here, and I’ve been here forever. Why should I uproot something else?

  Even when I pull back the running vines that have crept into the windows, they leave little bits of twine behind, bits of what they could be. The sound of that tearing reminds me of being scraped away.

  On the porch, I lift the tentacles of my hanging Pathos plant and drape them around the frame of the roof, outlining the beams in green. When I water the plant, the moisture travels along the stem and forms a single drop at the tip of the last leaf on every tentacle. I sit in the swing and watch them hold on like a secret before quietly dropping.

  One day when everything is planted, I’m going to name this cemetery Eden and lock the gate for good.

  YOU KNOW,” I tell baby Marcus. “I don’t understand why you cry so hard. Seems to me like you ought to save up that crying for times when you’re with people you don’t like.”

  “What makes you think he likes you?” Lucy asks. She’s still pissy over the Leonard flowers. Or maybe her muscles are sore from all that dancing. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to be baby-sitting again, but William Blott is raging, and Marcus is too young to hear the kind of language he’s using.

  In any case, Lucy’s sour, so I ignore her. Maybe she just slept too late and woke up wrong, but I’ve been awake forever. I’ve picked up trash and scrubbed the mold off three green stones. I’m doing my best and feeling fine, and no little leftover homecoming queen is going to ruin my day. I walk a few steps ahead and lead them through the trail down to the river.

  “You know,” I tell Marcus. “There are a lot of advantages to learning to talk. For one thing, you could tell your story and get it over with. But besides that, you could grow up a little bit. The kids have a hell of a time. Shoot, if you were walking and talking on your own, you could go out with them at night and pull pranks. You could take the change the preacher leaves on his nightstand and arrange it along the tops of his picture frames—little dimes and nickles standing on their sides. Or you could turn his pictures upside down. Don’t that sound like fun to you?”

  “Are you trying to talk his ear off, or what?” Lucy asks.

  “Do you hear him crying?” I retort, and as soon as I say it, I see his face crumpling, his lip pouting ugly, and I realize I’ll have to watch my tone. But I don’t give him time for the tears.

  “You got a big old lip there, boy,” I tell him. “Looks like you got stung by a bee. You ever been stung by a bee?”

  He stares at me puzzled, threatening to cry. It’s a wonder his lungs haven’t worn away.

  “One time I got stung by a bee right on my lip, ’cause I was eating clover by the handfuls. I was little like you—a little bigger, I guess—and a bee stung me right on my bottom lip, and it swoll up just like yours. Felt like that bee’d somehow got inside my lip and was buzzing around in there, humming fat. Did a bee get your lip? Is that why you’re pouting?”

  Lucy begins to relax as I put on a show for Marcus, poking out my own lip. I’m walking backward, too, turned around to address him but still moving toward the river, and when I stumble over a root and almost trip, he laughs.

  “The boy laughed!” I call out loud. “Did you hear that, Lucy? The boy laughed!”

  And Lucy laughs, and baby Marcus laughs harder. We all laugh to hear him tickled. It’s a new sound, like the first drips of a thaw coming to end a silent freeze. His laugh is the sound of hope, and it surprises me and Lucy—and maybe even Marcus himself.

  But I don’t trust it. I don’t give him time to remember what it is that plagues him so.

  “You ever eat clovers?” I ask. “Lord, they’re good. Medicinal, too. If you have indigestion, eat a clover—but watch out for bees.”

  “He doesn’t understand what medicinal means,” Lucy notes. “He’s a baby. Besides, he’s dead. How’s he gonna get indigestion?” We’ve reached the edge of the water, and I find my green wooden boat that I’ve chained to an oak.

  There’s a water moccasin curled up next to the cooler, beneath the seat. Nothing a snake likes more than a boat left in shade.

  “Hold up,” I say. “Gotta get rid of this snake,” and I look around for a stick or boat paddle.

  But Lucy puts Marcus in the boat, and he chases the snake away, right over the side and into the water.

  “I forget you don’t have to worry about things,” I joke. “Maybe you can come over later and talk some of those black widows living in my woodpile into moving to Kalamazoo.”

  Marcus giggles.

  “You like that word?” Lucy asks. “You like Kalamazoo?”

  “Zoo,” he says, and me and Lucy nearly choke.

  “Damn,” I say, and Lucy stares at him.

  When we’re on the water, and we’re paddling along easy beneath big limbs dripping with moss and
shadow, Lucy declares that we should play River King and Marcus can be the king. She makes him a crown from fishing lures, and then she belts out an opera about how Marcus is the mighty commander of the legions. Her voice is pretty enough, but just so loud. Marcus wrinkles his forehead and looks at me.

  “Lucy,” I say. “You’re scaring the child.”

  “He likes my singing. Don’t you like my singing?”

  But Marcus just grunts.

  “Okay,” I say. “Let’s make this an educational trip. Facts and distinctions. We’ve got to teach you the facts and distinctions. Where to start?”

  Marcus stares at me, all serious, like a little scholar, or maybe like he thinks I’ve lost my mind. He’s reverted back to his pout, though. I’m not sure if he’s sad or if his mouth has grown that way.

  “Bees,” I say. “Now, bees are round, but hornets are wiry. And dirt dobbers, in their mud caves, are black and do not sting.”

  “Bees live in hives, but hornets live in triangle nests. And yellow jackets live in holes in the ground,” Lucy tells him.

  “Like you,” I say. “You’re like a yellow jacket.”

  He looks at us, back and forth, quiet for a change and taking it all in.

  “Bees make honey, and dirt dobbers make tunnels. But yellow jackets just make noise.”

  And we all get silly, and I splash at the water with my paddle to wet them, and I point out a snake swimming nearby.

  “Snakes,” I say. “Snakes travel just as fast in the river as they do on the land. But they can’t bite you as easy, ’cause when they open their mouths, they fill up with water and start to sink. When you’re fishing, you have to look up in the trees to make sure a snake’s not about to drop in your boat.”

  And we all look up, but there’s no snake.

  “A dying snake will tie itself in a knot,” Lucy tells him.

  “Is that the truth?” I ask her.

  “I think so,” she says. “If you hit one on the highway, it’ll make a ball and bounce right down the road.”