After
my husband passed away, oh, several days later, a nice man took me in.
My mother has
compressed time, my father dead of a heart attack 43 years ago, and the man is my older brother, Willie, who a year earlier brought her to live with him and his wife.
I am the youngest son standing, bringing my mother for weekend visits where she perseverates
like a sad Abbott and Costello routine, the same litany over and over, wondering
when her family is going to pick her up.
Oh,
I don’t know what to do.
What
do you have to do, Mama?
I
thought somebody would come for me.
You’re
living with Willie now, your oldest son. You're visiting me, Raymond, your youngest son.
Her mouth rounds in momentary understanding.
Pause, rewind, repeat.
My
Mama will spank my butt ‘cause I didn’t come home.
Her memories are a
collapsing star, my grandmother gone almost six decades.
Sometimes she can be
diverted briefly.
After a supper of fried
chicken, I lean over and say she must have eaten a lot of fried chicken growing
up on the farm in Mississippi.
You
raised chickens, right?
Oh,
Lord, yes.
So
you must have eaten plenty of them.
Oh,
yes. And eggs.
And
your Daddy had a smokehouse, didn’t he?
He
did.
She nods once, the
memory sharp for a moment of the smokehouse some distance away from the farmhouse.
Meat
was cured there, right, Mama?
Another nod.
Probably
butchered hogs and calves, maybe some venison.
Yes.
There
was a garden also.
Oh,
yes.
A nod, chores growing
up: picking butter beans and string beans and peas, potatoes and okra.
You
ate good things on the farm.
A nod, less decisive,
looking down at her hands, rubbing them.
Your
hands hurt, Mama?
Old
and wrinkled, she says softly.
That’s
okay. All of our hands are getting old and wrinkled.
My
Mama is gonna whip my butt.
