Chapter 28
Instantly, the bonfire blazes upward with a whoosh. Inside the flames, the apparition of a warrior woman glows bright white. I know Her. The same warrior, who stood over me in the swamp when I was twelve years old and promised to save me and that I would find Her again when I was ready. Even if I didn’t recognize Her by sight, I would know that breathtakingly powerful presence of Hers.
I hear Her voice in my head. “Why do you so seldom ask anything of Me, child? You have but to ask.”
“State your intent.” Virgil’s whisper grounds me, and I bend my fingers through his, tightening in what I fear might be hurtful, but holds me to the planet.
I clear my throat. “My intention is to find peace.” I clear my throat to speak more loudly. “My intention is to find peace, and then make peace with my past. Help me make peace when the person who should’ve protected me as a child did not. “
The Goddess inside the fire seems to grow with the flames. She lifts Her hands high and wide above Her head, and the four past incarnations in each of the corners lift their arms to touch Her hands. They begin to swirl in a clockwise rotation all around us.
I close my eyes against the sudden dizziness. When I open them, my mother’s mother steps out of the South, walks directly through the flames, and stands in front of me. She holds out her hands to me.
I disentangle my fingers from Virgil’s and place my hands tenderly in her palms. Her form changes from that of a young woman, maybe eighteen or nineteen, into the form that I remember as a small child. An older woman, not much older than I am now, with graying hair and eyes that look like mine. The instant I touch her hands, everything around me falls away, and I’m somewhere in the past, looking at life through her eyes.
I know this scene. I’ve seen it through my own eyes. I was in the backseat of the car, no seatbelt on, hiding in the shadowy side of the family car and hoping my dad didn’t notice me. I fall back through time until the past is my present.
He’s driving the car, the old one that he sold before I started the first grade. He’s yelling at the top of his lungs. But not at me.
My mommy sits in the front seat, his passenger, his prisoner.
She pleads with him. “Can we stop for just a few minutes? My mama’s been really sick. I want to see her. Please, Buddy? I need to see her.”
This is years before Bobby’s weekly visits on Sundays, but it’s just as much a routine. It’s the same every Sunday afternoon except this time my mother’s beloved mother is ill. Every Sunday, we leave church and head straight over to my paternal grandmother’s home where all of her children and grandchildren, including my cousins, gather to spend the day. Not Chelsie and her siblings—they haven’t been born yet—but I have a dozen older cousins who grew up to scatter across the South and eliminate all family contact, including with me. Somehow, our weekly visits always end after four hours or so with at least one child crying and two or more of the adults yelling at each other. That’s the norm in my dad’s family whereas my mom’s family is quiet and supportive.
Every Sunday, we drive right past my mother’s parents’ home on the way to our destination. I wave at them frantically from the backseat, hoping that Daddy doesn’t see me, and they wave back from their rockers on the front porch.
When the long day at my paternal grandmother’s home is done, and we drive the few miles back to our house, we once again pass my maternal grandparents sitting on their fern-lined porch. Each time I can tell by their ready-to-rise posture that they hope we’ll stop for even a mere five minutes so they can see me and visit with their daughter.
But that’s forbidden. Daddy is having some kind of argument with his father-in-law over money that my parents borrowed from my granddaddy so they wouldn’t lose their farm. Somehow, that good deed has emasculated my dad and everyone else is paying the price for it. My grandparents are forbidden from seeing me or my mommy, and my daddy has threatened my mommy within an inch of her life if she defies him.
In the front seat, my mommy’s thin shoulders convulse with sobs. I remember this moment as a child, but it looks different to my adult mind. My Gods, she can’t be much older than Rhiannon. She looks so young and so frail.
“Please, please,” she begs. I can barely understand her through her sobs.
Daddy raises the back of his hand and starts to fling it at her before stopping short of her cheek. “Stop that squalling right now. Stop it right now before I give you something to squall about.”
My mommy sniffs several times, then leans her forehead against the passenger window. I can’t see what she’s looking at, but I know. She’s gazing at her own mother.
At that moment, the car slows down just enough to give both of us hope. I’m right in front of my grandparents’ front porch where they sit on rockers ready to jump up and greet us. Just as Granddaddy stands, my daddy kicks the accelerator, and we speed away.
Yes, I know that scene, buried in my memory, mainly because of the intensity of my mommy’s tears. I try not to think about it as an adult, but I knew it very well as a child in the backseat of that car.
But now, between the bonfire and me, this ghost from my past stands, looking exactly as she did only weeks before her health failed. I never got the chance to know her very well. By the time I was allowed to spend much time with her, she was already on her deathbed. I’ve often thought of her in her final days and with distance. My mommy came up with every reason imaginable in Grandma’s last six months of life for me to spend time with her, including allowing a woman in the final stages of unsuccessful chemo and radiation to “babysit” me while my mommy worked. Mommy did everything she could to make sure that I had some memories to build on.
Maybe Daddy regretted his obstinance, or maybe he was just satisfied that he had finally broken both his wife and mother-in-law, but he “allowed” us to visit as frequently as we wanted in those last few months of her life. Those were the days when my daddy would go to work in the fields and leave my mommy in the kitchen to clean up his breakfast dishes. I’d wake up and find her there, weeping, on her knees, collapsed against the kitchen cabinetry. I’d always do my best to console her, and most of the time she would murmur something about her mother’s memory living on for as long as I lived and that she hoped that I live a long and healthy life. I still don’t know if she was trying to make up lost time for me or for her mother, but most of the time she had to work double shifts—one on the farm and one in town at a dress shop—so she herself didn’t have this many days with my grandma. Not even at the end when Mommy wanted to sit by her mother’s side in the hospital, and Daddy would find some chore for her to do on the farm that was supposedly more important.
All those memories are through the eyes of a small child. Occasionally, those memories are through my mother’s eyes, or at least the way she shared those memories with me.
But I’ve never in my wildest dreams thought of how my grandmother witnessed those Sunday drive-bys when, for at least a year, we never once stopped. Here, my hands in my grandmother’s, I see them all through her eyes now, a woman not too far from my own age, a woman with grown children like me, and with a grandchild that other people in town tell her all about, one whom she herself isn’t allowed to see or to hug or to hold. Grandma can’t even risk waiting in the aisles of the grocery store to accidentally bump into us for fear that I might slip and mention it in front of Daddy or some busybody in town might let him know at church that we were all seen together visiting, hugging, loving, laughing.
For a split second, I feel myself in her body, looking through her eyes on a Sunday afternoon. Sitting in her dress of floral cotton broadcloth. White, with blue flowers, buttons from neckline all the way to the hem. The slats of the rocker, thin, uncushioned, hard and painful to her pelvic bones. She rocks ever so slightly and doesn’t glance up at her beloved husband. There’s no point in saying aloud what she’s hoping, what she’s always hoping.
Maybe this time. Not last Sunday or the Sunday before or the Sunday before, but maybe this time.
She’d sent word to Emma through the cashier at the local grocery store. She’d sworn Eunice to secrecy, except to deliver the message to her daughter that the doctor says she can’t wait any longer for surgery and that the surgery itself may not do any good. She may not even survive the surgery, and if she does, it’s only a short extension to her life. She’ll never live to see Laurie graduate from high school. She won’t live to see the birth of another grandchild either, even if Emma were pregnant now.
The knot in her stomach burns constantly. It keeps her awake at night. She can barely eat anything at all. The doctor says he’ll take out part of her stomach, and then he’ll start her on chemo and radiation. She could ignore treatment and let her life end, but it’s six months of time that she could have with her family if she chooses to fight, but ultimately, she will lose the fight. Still, even though her treatment will be torturous and her quality of life nil, she might have another six months with her daughter and granddaughter.
If Buddy will allow it. I feel her fingers curve over the arms of the wooden rocker. Maybe this time. Maybe this time.
She rocks forward and rises just slightly to look down the road. It’s been five hours since Emma, that bastard husband of hers, and her precious little Laurie drove past on the way over to his mother’s house for the day. Any second now, they’ll drive back by, and maybe this time they’ll stop. She’s written a letter to her son-in-law, though Emma probably knows nothing about it. She’s told him the whole story. All about how she has only months left to live. She’s begged, pleaded, for him to allow her to spend time with her daughter and granddaughter.
Let our Little Laurie at least be able to remember who I was when I’m gone.
Her son-in-law hasn’t responded. In her heart, she knows he won’t. Her own husband has voluntarily gone to beg on her behalf. Not that he’s done anything wrong, but anything to get their son-in-law to see reason. As expected, their son-in-law has turned his back and walked away after hearing the news.
Emma doesn’t know. She can’t possibly know. If she did, she would find some way to slip across the fields when her husband isn’t watching and visit her dying mother. But what good would that do? Just earn Emma another beating and, maybe this time, Little Laurie would get one, too.
She sees the old car in the distance and scoots to the edge of her rocking chair, ready to bound up and run out and greet Laurie. “Here they come! They’re slowing down!”
Her husband doesn’t scoot forward in the rocker. He clinches the arms of the chair and then makes a fist and pounds and pounds the curved wooden arm twice. “They’re not stopping. Not this time either. He’s just playing with you.” He pushes back into the chair and rocks hard.
“No. No, they’re slowing down. They’re going to stop this time!”
In front of the house, in the middle of the highway, the old car almost stops. Her husband rises from his rocker in disbelief.
In the backseat, Little Laurie presses her nose flat against the window, her palms splayed on either side of her tiny face. In the front seat, Emma leans her forehead against the window and discreetly averts her eyes to stare back.
At that second, her son-in-law guns the engine, and they speed away. The distress on Emma’s face matches Laurie’s.
She collapses into the chair. It will be another three weeks before Eunice betrays her promise and tells every gossip in town about the upcoming surgery. Eunice will take matters into her own hands to shame Emma’s husband into allowing her to spend time with her mother or, if not her, at least letting Laurie be there.
They’d raised Emma to be a good girl, to be obedient to her parents and later obedient to a husband. Her first love had never come home from the war, and part of her thought she’d never find love again. Emma’s parents had seen through Buddy’s love-bombing, but Emma had thought Buddy would be just as pleasant to her as her soldier had been and that love was love, regardless of the giver. She’d been overjoyed to find love again, not understanding the difference in love that was healthy and whatever Buddy felt for her.
Her parents had been adamantly against the match, but her future son-in-law had courted Emma hard and promised a better life than she had known with her parents. All broken promises, of course. As soon as they were married, all the special attention he gave Emma stopped, replaced overnight by icy cruelty. He especially seemed to enjoy upsetting Emma, her parents, her friends, anyone he could while isolating his family from what would have been a support system for them.
Maybe if they hadn’t opposed the marriage, Emma wouldn’t have run off in the middle of the night and married her second Prince Charming. Maybe their brief love affair would have worked its way to its end quickly had they not had a common enemy to unite against—her parents. But once Emma had married him and it was too late, she’d made the bed she would sleep in until either she or her husband died. Until then, she still had the option of going back home to her parents, but that bastard son-in-law had convinced her that the price for divorcing him would be their baby girl.
And, if Emma ever thought that she could sneak away in the middle of the night with his daughter? He’d sworn to her that he would track them down and kill them both before killing himself. They all had reason enough to believe his threat.
Still staring into my grandmother’s eyes, I let my hands slip out of hers. All I can do is stare at her. I understand now. I needed to see my mother the way her mother saw her—weak, frightened. Willing to sacrifice for her daughter. But not knowing how to save her daughter any other way, and certainly not knowing how to save herself in any way that she could live with.
I’d always seen my mother through the eyes of a child, specifically the eyes of her child. Strong, determined, hard-working. A woman who fought for what was hers. But there was this other side to her that I never really thought about before.
My grandmother brushes the back of her fingers against my cheek to wipe away my tears. Her eyes are sad, but still she smiles at me.
“I’m always with you,” she says. “If you don’t believe me, look in the mirror.”
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