A Gracious Plenty

  And so admiring his tomb, I happen to see him holding baby Marcus in his arms, rocking. I happen to see William Blott nursing Marcus with bright blue ninnies. He’s cut a spongy football in half and locked his ninnies into place with a maternity bra. And baby Marcus, who always cries, baby Marcus, who screams each time the mayor or his wife or even Leonard passes through the cemetery gates, the baby is sucking, content. He reaches to William Blott’s cheek and touches it with a small dirty hand.

  THE FALLING RAIN makes the night seem cooler than it is. I usually spend damp evenings in the house, but tonight I’ve got things to talk over with Lucy. Already my dungarees are soppy, my shirt drenched through. And though my hair, as a rule, grows up and out like a bush, on this night, there are curls coiling in front of my eyes. I wipe the water from my face, one side smooth, one side pruned, and give Lucy an earful. “I’m telling you he had ninnies. And that baby was sucking.”

  “Did he see you?” Lucy asks.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her. “I ran.”

  “Why’d you run?”

  “Just because,” I spit. “ ’Cause what else could I do? He’s a man, and that baby sucking …”

  “Marcus isn’t crying anymore,” Lucy says.

  “I know.”

  “I haven’t heard him cry all day. It’s been a long time since Marcus quit crying.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe he died hungry, Finch. Maybe he just needed to be nurtured, and if William Blott is the one who can do that, then more power to him. Maybe now Marcus’ll begin to lighten. He can’t tell his story when he’s screaming.”

  “Well, he sure can’t tell it with his mouth full of ninny. Styrofoam ninny, too!”

  “Finch,” she calls. “You’re judging him.”

  “I might be, but I can’t believe what I saw,” and I shiver.

  Then Lucy lays the blow: “You’re judging him the same way people have judged you all your life.”

  And what she tells me makes me mad, because it’s not the same thing. Not even close. “I’m surprised, that’s all,” I fuss. “You got to give me a minute to get over being surprised. I thought he was a man.”

  “He is a man,” Lucy says, then adds, “It’s okay. You’ve had a shock. I’ve known other cross-dressers, so it doesn’t upset me.”

  “Hmmph,” I snort. I hate it when she acts high-and-mighty with me, like she’s been all around the world and knows all that there is to know. I almost remind her that all the knowing she did landed her in a grave before her time, but I catch myself and unclench. I reckon she does have a point. Sometimes when the Dead piss me off, I have to keep myself from bragging that I’m alive and they’re not. But it’s not anything to feel superior about. Not really.

  I roll over to my back and let the rain beat at my face. I can’t feel it on the thickest scars, but I feel it on my eyelids. Rain washes the smells down off the leaves, out of the clouds. I breathe that smell, sweetly woody, and thin as a lung. In the dark, on cloudy nights, there’s not much more than smells and textures. I pull a stick from beneath my back and toss it to the side.

  “Your mama tried to have me thrown in jail today,” I tell Lucy, readjusting with my mouth on soil so she’ll hear me clearly. “I spent half the day at the police station.”

  “What?”

  “Accused me of harassment.”

  “That’s insane,” she says. It’s what I want her to say.

  “That’s what I told Leonard Livingston, but he took me to town anyway. Put me in handcuffs and threw me around …”

  “That son of a—”

  “Nah. I’m kidding. Leonard’s all right.” I slide my lips against each other, feeling the dirt gritty there; the dirt so damp and rich and buried like a treasure in the grass; the grass tickling against my good cheek, like Ma used to tickle me with her eyelashes. “Butterfly kisses,” she called them. I blink into the grass, wishing Lucy could feel those tickles. And I give her the story of what happened with her mother, without much minding anymore that I’ve been to jail.

  “Tell me everything,” Lucy begs.

  “Not much to tell. Your ma was serving refreshments to the Bible school children, and she was in her front yard, welcoming them one at a time.”

  “She’s such a hypocrite,” Lucy bitches. “Won’t even go to the church. If she really had the faith she claims, she’d know that church would be the best possible place to have a seizure. Like she’s really going to have one.”

  “I stood right at the end of the line with the Bible school class. I reckon it’s a good thing my spine grew crooked, ’cause I didn’t look much bigger than them sixth graders. And when Lois had reached the last child, she looked up at me, and I mouthed, Suicide, and then I left.”

  “Did she cry?”

  “I don’t know. Last time I saw her, she was just standing there with her mouth open. Stricken. She looked stricken, I guess.”

  “Did she turn pale?”

  “I reckon she did. A little bit.”

  “What was she wearing?”

  “I don’t know, Lucy. What difference does it make?”

  “Just wondered,” and she paused. “How’d you say it? Suicide. How’d you pronounce it?”

  “Regular. Suicide.”

  “Slow or fast?”

  “Slow,” I tell her impatiently. “And without a sound.”

  “That’s good,” she replies. Then, “Thanks.”

  Above us, there’s thunder, and I ask Lucy who’s working this evening, making weather on this night. She tells me that the Poet rigged it up earlier in the day.

  “He’s got a string tied to his belt,” she says. “If he rolls over in his sleep, another storm will come.”

  After a while, I tell her I’m going to seek cover. It’s late, but I’m wanting hot tea and a shower. There’s too much grit in my mouth.

  “One favor,” Lucy says as I rise. “Next time, tell Mama to visit.”

  “Your grave? You want her to come here?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “Tell her to visit next time you see her.”

  My bones creak and ache as I walk away. My heels hurt even though I haven’t been standing. My backside throbs on each side of my spine, the clothes on my body so wet and weighing me down. When I’m on the porch, I peel them off like skins and leave them behind.

  THOUGH I WAS a teenager when I found Ma in the graveyard and began to learn the ways of the Dead, I’d been exposed much earlier, just after the death of my face.

  When my face had scabbed to a hard rusty shell, Ma had to scrape it with a piece of glass or Papa had to scrape it with his pocketknife—to help it heal better, they said. And while I don’t remember the burning so much, I remember the scrapings, the rasping as my skin scuffed off in bloody wafers.

  The doctor who came to the clinic said that the scrapings were critical. He pointed at my face as he spoke to Ma and Papa: “You have to get the scabs off to stimulate the formation of scar tissue.” And he showed them how to do it, explaining that they needed to rip from different directions each time so the scars would grow evenly. That first time, it took all three of them to hold me down.

  But when you are four and your ma holds a broken windowpane to your face, when you are five and your papa opens his pocketknife and rests that blade against your chin, it is almost unimaginable, that horror. I hid beneath the kitchen table, where they drug me out. I hid beneath the porch steps, where Ma chased me out with a broom.

  They caught me each time and tied me down because they had to, and I screamed and twisted until the ropes burned my wrists, even before the scraping had begun. I screamed while they kissed me. I screamed while they soothed. I hardly recognized them at all. Finally, they had to shroud me in a sheet, and Ma scraped my face while Papa held my head, and I hated them for it. Though they took me out for ice cream after, or took me fishing on the river, I hated them for making that sound with my body. I didn’t have much skin left, and I didn’t want it torn away.

  I f
ound a secret place beneath a boxwood, and that’s where I hid when I wasn’t being whittled. I met the Mediator there. She came to me after the very first scraping, and she stayed with me for years.

  Beneath the boxwood, the dirt was deep blue and hard, and I dug at it mercilessly, scraping into the ground to find coolness. The first time she appeared, I thought she was a queen. She crawled in on hands and knees, sat down beside me in the dirt, and offered me a stick. We dug trenches and circles and mazes in that dirt. Then she let me ring the bells on her robe until I fell asleep.

  When I told my parents about my friend, they laughed and Papa said, “That’s wonderful, sugar. We all need friends.” They let me meet her on the grounds for games of tag, and they let me take my ribbons down to the river so she could braid my hair. When they asked me if my friend had a name, I explained that she didn’t need one because she was an angel. They laughed about that, too.

  The Mediator stayed with me for years, consoling me when I was inconsolable, making me see the back side of every scab. “The dead skin protects the live skin. And this tiny little scab”—and she held one on her finger—“this tiny fleck of Finch will blow away to become earth.” And she’d blow the scabbed-off bits of me to the ground.

  I loved the Mediator. “Where do you live?” I asked her.

  “Everywhere,” she said.

  “Quit teasing,” I’d fuss. “Where’s your house?”

  “Everywhere.”

  “Take me to your house,” I begged her.

  “Not yet,” she told me. “It’s not time.”

  When my arm was rotting away with infection, the Mediator was the one who healed me. I couldn’t play then. I was too sick to move. The doctor said he may have to amputate. He rubbed me with ointments and told Ma to pray. I slept on the porch, on a feather mattress that we had to throw out later. And even though Papa said it wasn’t my fault, it hurt my feelings when he moved my mattress downwind so that he could sit on the porch without gagging. He sat on the doorsteps and read me books, pausing sometimes to get sick in the azaleas. He tried to blame it on poor digestion, but I knew.

  Even though I stunk, I resented him for vomiting.

  When I was sick, I couldn’t play outside. And the Mediator never came indoors. Finally, she found me on the porch, and she came back late at night, when Ma and Papa were asleep just inside. In her arms, she carried heart-shaped leaves, green and already moist with dew. She spit on them one at a time and wrapped them around my arm and shoulder. She layered my neck in heart leaves to cease the rotting.

  Every night, I became a plant, strong in the stem and green as any rooted thing. Nights, I dreamed I was turning to cornstalks, the hairs on my legs and arms becoming leaves, my hair turning to silks. But every morning when I awoke, I was a girl again and the Mediator was gone. Papa and Ma praised the ointment and the country air. When I told them my friend had healed me with leaves, they nodded and smiled. And soon the burns weren’t new anymore, and soon I’d lived with the burns for as long as I’d lived without them.

  It wasn’t until I was eight or nine that they began to worry about my imaginary friend. Ma read a psychology book, and Papa called doctors. They drove me all the way to Richmond, where a man with one gold tooth determined that I was creating playmates to help me through the trauma. Brilliant, he was.

  I must have been ten or eleven when she faded away. I don’t recall mourning her absence, so I guess I no longer needed her. When she was gone for good, I forgot she’d ever been around.

  Until I found my ma in the cemetery and began to learn the ways the next levels operated. I began listening in, and for a while, some of the recently deceased protested. Some of the new folks didn’t want me to hear their stories.

  “She’s not supposed to be here,” they whispered to the Mediator, a new one I didn’t know. They stomped their little feet and made fists. “She hasn’t died. She hasn’t earned the right.”

  But the Mediator corrected them: “Oh yes. She found us herself. She’s been around in one way or another since she was burned—you just never noticed. She’s been around longer than you have. She’s been here longer than I have. The last Mediator left me a note all about it. She works for us, you know?” And the Mediator winked at me and curtsied, dewdrops falling from her fingertips.

  And after that, I was welcomed there completely. To hear them, I had to keen my ears, teaching myself to hear lower pitches with one ear and higher pitches with the other. I had to bottom out my ears to make meaning of their words, and even now at times the effort aches in my jaw.

  Seeing them came later. I learned to multiply my vision and blur it until it softened to music. I learned to see separately at first—like two different pictures of the same moment. At the river, I’d see Papa in his boat, paddling through the water. Then I’d see beneath the water. There, hands of the Dead tipped at the bottom of a boat, pushing it along. Intuitively, I knew that the pictures were simultaneous, that the Dead were beneath Papa, that Papa paddled as they pushed. But for years, the pictures remained separate to my brain.

  Then one day, I was out walking in a snowstorm. I had my face wrapped in a scarf, and I realized as I moved down the streets that I looked just as normal as anyone else. No one recognized me as burned. And so I held up my head and pretended to be like them, at home in the living world. And that’s when I locked into the other way of seeing, completely by accident. I watched a group of boys digging out a Plymouth, shoveling and cussing and working like mules. Meanwhile, a group of dead children blew snowdrifts directly at the car, giggling mischievously. When I saw both scenes at the exact same time, I thought I’d reached a new plateau. Happily, I raced to the scene to help the dead children with their prank. But the boys, who could see me, of course, yelled and chased me off, and the wind blew at my scarf, and I was different and alone again, unprotected and exposed.

  And I was embarrassed at my own foolishness. Snowballs whacked into my head as I ran toward home, and I felt every pelt in ways the Dead no longer have to.

  I have learned from the Dead a thousand lessons that the the Living should have taught me. I listened to everything in those first years. I took it all in—unless it was Ma’s turn to speak.

  Then the Mediator would say, “You can’t be here, Finch. Go on.”

  “I got nothing to say that my baby can’t hear,” Ma’d argue, and I’d huddle in closer to her stone.

  “You must leave,” the Mediator insisted. “You’re about to interfere.”

  And I considered myself rejected. I left, brooding, and sulked for days, often thinking I’d never return to the Dead. But I always returned, and in truth, I had interfered already, keeping Ma too connected to her past. It’s my guess that Ma hasn’t lightened because I’ve been around too much. How can she tell the truth when she’s thinking of me?

  I HAVE DOZENS OF cats. None of them have names anymore, though sometimes I call them by their colors or textures. “Come ’ere, Yellow,” or “You hungry, Callie?” or “Get down, Matty.” So they have names, in a way. Names that change as they do.

  I had a cat once who slept on my shoes. I called that one Shoe. Old Wilma Hedgepath brought me a litter of kittens one spring, and I called those kittens Wilma. I tend to cats and care for them, but I don’t get too attached. Cats, they have their own ways. No need to impose mine.

  When the weather is warm, I open the windows, and the cats come and go as they please. There’s a cat door for winter, open to any animal who wants to use it—including an occasional raccoon. Some cats spend their winters by the hot-water heater, and some cats spend their winters beneath the porch.

  When I sleep inside, I sleep with cats. When I sleep on the porch, I sleep with cats. When I sleep outside, there are cats nearby, but not close enough to be pillows.

  The ones who want attention have to come to me. If they rub against my leg, I’ll scratch their ears. But I have no patience for the forlorn ones that hang back. Wild ones are fine, and there are plenty of them that
I feed. But I don’t like the ones who follow me around and then run when I get too close.

  They remind me too much of myself, I reckon. They remind me of the part of me that I like the least.

  I had a cat once who mattered—purely by accident. I called her Flea. She cowered beneath flies. She growled at the rain and hissed at the windows when the wind blew. I thought she was funny, and I respected her ways. She’d bite and fight. She smelled like crayons because she never took care of her coat. But she never had hair balls, either.

  Flea was half-wild. She’d butt her head against my leg and let me pet her for just a moment. Then she’d claw a bloody horizon across my hand.

  She’d slip up beside me when I was eating crackers and lick all the salt off my saltines.

  And she got sick. She cocked her ears and walked crooked and drooled brown foam.

  I do not use veterinarians as a rule. I give the cats food and water and shelter and leave them to their fates. But Flea was special. So I called a vet and found a box and went to catch her to drive her to town. She minced my arm and screamed like Marcus Livingston. She didn’t know me at all.

  It took her too long to die. She did not eat and she did not drink. She did not shit, and she moaned night and day. And I cannot abide hard exits. I have seen one too many. So one night, I decided to put her out of her misery. I didn’t want to be bloody or cruel, but letting her live seemed so much worse. I defined compassion as one blow to the head, from behind, so she wouldn’t see it coming.

  I did it with a brick, thrown straight between her ears, where her brain rested flat, bull’s-eye.

  But she did not die, not right away. She growled out pitiful and long and her mouth filled with blood, and her ears filled with blood as she moaned. She got up and tried to walk but fell over on the floor. I had to pick the brick back up and bash her head again. I did it right the second time, but by then it was too late for us both.

  WE CHOOSE OUR truths the way we choose our gods, single-sightedly, single-mindedly, no other way to feel or see or think. We lock ourselves into our ways, and click all the truths to one.