superstitions

I did not want to go back into Mama's and Papa's room the day after the funeral. The whole house seemed scary to me. Yesterday it had been filled with people eating and drinking, talking and even laughing.

" How can they laugh?" I thought. " Don't they care that Mama is dead?"

Now the house was empty and quiet. The furniture  was still out of place. They had moved it around to make room for Mama's casket beneath the double windows. There were some petals that had fallen to the floor from the many flowers that friends and neighbors had sent. Shadow leaves moved across the walls as the sun came and went, shining through the big maple tree in the yard. It looked like it might rain. I was glad it didn't rain yesterday when we buried Mama.

My sister, Gertrude, was with me. Papa and the others had gone back to the cemetery. Gertrude was eleven, four years older than me but we still liked to play together. We played dolls and had tea parties on the back steps. We drank pretend tea from our Blue Willow tea set that I'd gotten for Christmas two years before. We would sit on the steps playing while Mama and our aunts sat on the porch and snapped beans or shelled peas. Sometimes they had peaches to peel and would give us little bites to go along with our tea. Mama put up all the fruits and vegetables that Papa could grow to feed our big family through the winter.

As the women worked they talked, their voices keeping rhythm with their busy hands. They talked about their husbands, their children, the neighbors, even about which ever sister happened to not be there that day. Sometimes they talked with words like "you know who" or "you know what".

One day Mama began talking about something called superstitions. She told us that if you pulled a tooth and didn't stick your tongue in the hole that was left, your tooth would grow back gold.  My Aunt Bertie said that if you cleaned your hairbrush outside and a bird wove some of your hair into it's nest, you would go crazy. Aunt Evelyn told us that she had heard that when a person died you could open up the pillow they had died on and if the feathers were in the shape of a crown that meant the person had gone to heaven.

Aunt Johnnie made us laugh when she said if you pulled a tooth and lost it on the ground and an animal stepped on it, your tooth would grow back like that animal's tooth. I could just see Gertrude with a big cow tooth in her mouth. Gertrude said, " What if a chicken stepped on it? They don't have any teeth."

But there came a time when Mama couldn't sit on the porch with her sisters and work. She got very sick and her sisters took turns coming to the house to cook and clean and take care of Mama. Mama cried because of the pain and the doctor gave her medicine but it didn't help much. He said he could operate but Mama said no, she was afraid of being put to sleep. She stayed in the bed all the time and when the weather got really hot, Papa moved the bed to the screened in porch where it was a little cooler. Aunt Bertie plaited her hair and pinned it up because it was so hot on her neck. One day they cut the plaits off and Mama looked funny with such short hair.

Mama was sick all summer, growing weaker and weaker. We hoped she might get better when fall came but she only got worse. She was skinny and her skin had a strange color to it, kind of yellow looking. Her room began to smell bad, like nothing I had ever smelled before. Papa went to the drug store and bought some disinfectant to use to try and kill the odor.

One day Papa came out of their bedroom. He had one of his handkerchiefs, wiping his face that was strangely wet. I noticed how dingy the handkerchief was, not bleached or ironed like Mama used to keep them. I think Papa was crying. I had never seen him cry before.  I knew why he was crying when he told us that Mama was dead.  I could not believe that Mama was dead,even though I knew that she had been very sick. How did you get by without a mama? Papa couldn't take care of us like she did. Besides, he had to go to work. Papa  gathered us all up in his arms and said we should pray and thank God that we'd had such a good mama. I didn't feel like thanking God. He shouldn't have let her die. So when everbody else was praying I kept my eyes open.

I thought about that as we stood in the house. I guess that's why I felt so scared. Gertrude was pulling at me to go in the bedroom.  I kept telling her, "No, I don't want to. I don't want to do it."

"Lillie Mae," she whispered to me, " I want to see. It won't hurt anything."

"But Papa will get mad,"I whispered back.

"Papa won't have to know. We'll hide it before he comes home."

She grabbed my arm trying to drag me through the door. I held on to Papa's trunk that always sat in the hall. It was full of important papers like the house deeds and his discharge from the army.  Although it was heavy and I held to one of it's leather handles, Gertrude was too strong for me. She pushed open the door and forced me into the room.

The tan shades were pulled down over the long windows. When the sun came out and shined through the shades, the room was colored with a brownish wash. The color came and went with the sun. I  could see myself in the mirror above the dresser. Gertrude and I looked like brown shadows as we stood side by side with our backs against the door. Gertrude looked scared now. Her eyes were wide and she kept biting her lower lip.

"Get the scissors, Lillie," she said to me.

I pulled out the dresser drawer where the scissors were kept but I couldn't see them in the dim light. I reached in and felt around until my hand touched something that made me snatch it away as quick as I could. It was Mama's braids. I wrapped my arms around me, trying to make myself as small as possible so I wouldn't touch anything else in the room. I wanted to run outside and hide in Papa's old junked car where I kept my favorite books and spent long afternoons reading and eating green peaches and plums.

Gertrude shoved me away and got the scissors herself. I watched as she slowly walked to the bed. The sheets and pillowcases had been stripped from the bed and the mattress and pillows were left in their blue and white striped coverings. I watched as she picked up a pillow, the feather pillow Mama had died on.

"No! No!" I heard myself scream as I rushed across the room and grabbed the pillow from Gertrude's hands.  I crushed the pillow to my chest and fell across the bare mattress. " Gertrude, please, I don't want to know," I cried.

Gertrude lay beside me, face down. I could feel her trembling as she began to cry. She cried with long deep sobs as if she was losing her breath. I felt her arm move across my shoulders and heard her say with a gasp, " I'm sorry, Lillie, I don't want to know either.

Exercise Three/Creative Writing Assignment

Huntingdon College 2001

 

BLACK SHEEP

 

 "When I was a little girl," she said," Every spring my father would let us pick a newborn lamb of our own to care for and then when it came time to sell the wool, we got to keep the money."

"Now Susan," he said, "Pick out the lamb you want."

"This is the one I want, the little black one. He is so cute."

" But Susan, the wool won't be worth anything. You need to choose a white one."

But she did not want a white one. So her father agreed and after thinking for a long time she finally named it Mckinley. She had heard her parents say the name many times. A man named Mckinley had run for President and her father had campaigned for him and he was elected. She thought it was a very nice name.

One morning the phone rang and her father answered it.

" What? Oh no! I don't believe it!"

" What's happened?" her mother asked.

"Mckinley! Mckinley's been shot!"

"And when I heard that," she told me," I threw myself on the floor and started kicking and bawling. My little lamb had been shot.

" I was so relieved when I learned it was the President."

 

as told to me by Susan Byrd

Denver, Co  1993

MY FRIEND

She knew I was coming so she put on her red dress and painted her lips and darkened her eyebrows.

I pulled the crumbling wicker chair close to her.  "I used to keep that chair on my front porch with the table that is in the bathroom," she said.  And the memories, told in her precise, midwestern, school teacher voice, began to flow, like a slow pleasant stream. It was as if she reached out her hand and we walked together along that stream, two people from different centuries and much different backgrounds. She was born in a small Ohio town in a large farmhouse to a well-respected family, close friends with a future President. I was born in a small Alabama town, in a two-roomed house on a hill surrounded by kinfolks where someone once said, only boot-leggers, whores and poor people lived.

It seems we met by chance but I think it was by God's grace, a blessing, a prayer for a friend, answered.

I was hired to care for her while her daughter worked. As we passed the days in the cramped, one room apartment, through the routine of breakfast, lunch, bathtime, naptime and supper she opened up a window on the past and let me look through, down a long, long road that led to the big farmhouse and her first memories.   The sound of her brother's buggy wheels on the dirt road as they raced home late on a Saturday night.  The pet billy goat who pulled their little wagon around the farm. And the sound of the neighbor's feet tramping past her Papa's coffin in the front room downstairs.

How strange, yet so wonderful it was, our friendship. Two people from such different backgrounds and such a wide space of years, sitting side by side, laughing and crying together, agreeing on so many things.

She was in her last years, her hair gone from jet black to white, her skin from smooth white satin to yellowed crepe. Her spine, once so straight and proud was weak and bent, needing help from a walker to hold her upright.

" I never wanted to live this long."she said.

But I'm glad she did. I thank God that our paths crossed. I felt privileged and blessed to have her for my  friend.

 

In memory of Susan Gaberson Byrd

1896-1994

Denver, Colorado

THE RIVER

All my life we have"gone to the river."  We didn't call it camping or vacationing or anything else. Just "going to the river."

A large part of going to the river involved fishing. And fishing meant a trot line. This is a line with hooks tied all along it, strung out into the river. The hooks were baited with either doughballs or worms.  Mama made the doughballs at home. She stirred milk and meal and flour into a pot and cooked it until it was like paste. When the paste cooled we took a small piece and rolled it between our hands until it formed a round ball. When it dried it was firm enough to stay on a hook.

If we wanted worms we went "fiddling." Daddy would take us to the shady, damp woods with a tub and a handsaw. He sawed down a sapling about as big around as his wrist, leaving a stump two or three feet tall. Then he ran the saw, lightly, back and forth across the top of the stump, making shallow cuts again and again. In a few minutes worms would begin to poke their heads out of their holes. As Daddy continued fiddling they would crawl out all over the ground. The worms were everywhere. Once one even crawled up between my toes. Our job was to pick them up and plop them into the tub. We always gathered a big tub full of worms to take to the river. We didn't mind gathering the worms but we hated baiting the hooks. Some of the worms were nearly a foot long and we had to thread them in loops on the hooks. Our fingers got sticky with smelly worm juice that glowed in the dark.

Daddy ran the trot line at night.  He paddled along the line, raising each hook. If there was a fish he took it off and baited the hook again. I  can remember waking in the tent at night and hearing the boat motor crank up way across the water and I knew that Daddy was coming back. When I heard the splashing of water and the sound of the boat being dragged upon the bank, I could hardly keep from jumping up and running to see what he had caught.   It would usually be catfish which I loved to eat because there were no little bones to choke on. I was deathly afraid of choking on a fish bone, having heard tales of people who choked on one and died. I always kept a piece of bread handy, just in case, because Daddy said you could eat the bread and the bone would stick in it and you wouldn't choke and die.

We spent many, many happy days at the river.  My cousin Snookie would find out when we were going and he would follow around after my Daddy, offering to help him do things, hoping Daddy would let him go with us, which Daddy usually did. Snookie spent the night with us and we had a contest to see who could get ready to go quickest in the morning. Sometimes we slept in our clothes and once Snookie beat me by sleeping in his shoes.

Once we got to the river, Snookie would not help do anything, not even bait hooks. All he wanted to do was stay in the water. Mama got aggravated but she always let him go because she felt sorry for him.  Loretta, Snookie and I liked to paddle around the shore in Daddy's boat. Once Snookie was in the boat alone and it started drifting out. Loretta and I waded out as far as we could and shoved the paddle to him. The three of us agreed that we had saved his life and talked about it for days.

There was a deserted boat house near where we camped and we liked to lay on the walkway inside and look down into the mysterious, yellow-green water where the sun never shone. We dropped bread down to the minnows swimming about but we never could catch any of them. 

We fished for bream along the river bank with bamboo canes and catgut and tiny red and white bobbers. Once while wading in the shallow water along the edge, we saw what looked like eyes closing  in the sand just as we would start to put our foot down. Everytime we took a step, another eye would close. We dug down into the sand and found mussels. They lay with their shells slightly open, hoping to catch something to eat and what looked like closing eyes were their shells snapping to when we disturbed them.

We swam for hours with old innertubes around us, twisting our legs in such a way that we would spin around and around in the water until the earth seemed to tilt and we were so dizzy we couldn't tell in which direction we were going. Late in the afternoon we sat on the river bank, eating supper and watching the fish leap from the water. The whole river would be covered with silvery circles where the fish broke through the water and the air filled with the sound of their splashing.

I always hated when it came time to go home and would keep looking back as our truck climbed the mountain, to catch the very last glimpse of the river. Once home,  I would hang upside down from a tree limb and pretend that the sky was water.

THE CREEK

I chatter, chatter, as I flow

To join the brimming river;

For men may come and men may go

But I go on forever.

 

I wind about, and in and out,

With here a blossom sailing,

And here and there a lusty trout,

And here and there, a grayling.

 

And here and there a foamy flake

Upon me, as I travel

With many a silvery water-break

Above the golden gravel.

 

And draw them all along, and flow

To join the brimming river;

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on forever.

 

I steal by lawns and grassy plots

I slide by hazel covers;

I move the sweet forget me nots

That grow for happy lovers.

 

I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance,

Among my skimming swallows;

I make the netted sunbeams dance

Against my sandy shallows.

 

I murmur under moon and stars

In brambly wildernesses;

I linger by my shingly bars,

 I loiter round my cresses;

 

And out again I curve and flow

To join the brimming river;

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on forever.

 

(author unknown)

An Old Woman of the Roads

Oh! to have a little house!

To own the hearth and stool and all!

The heaped-up sods upon the fire

The pile of turf against the wall!

 

To have a clock with weights and chains

And pendulum swinging up and down,

A dresser filled with shining delph,

Speckled and white and blue and brown!

 

I could be busy all the day

Clearing and sweeping hearth and floor

And fixing on their shelf again

My white and blue and speckled store!

 

I could be quiet there at night

Beside the fire and by myself,

Sure of a bed and loath to leave

The ticking clock and shining delph!

 

Och! But I'm weary of mist and dark,

And roads where there's never a house nor bush

And tired I am of bog and road,

And the crying wind and the lonesome hush!

 

And I am praying to God on high

And I am praying him night and day,

For a little house, a house of my own-

Out of the wind's and rain's way.

 

by padraic colum  (Irish poet)

 

should you go first

Should you go first and I remain

To walk the road alone,

I'll live in memory's garden, dear,

With happy days we've known.

In spring I'll wait for roses red,

When fades the lilac blue,

In early fall, when brown leaves call,

I'll catch a glimpse of you.

 

Should you go first and I remain

For battles to be fought,

Each thing you've touched along the way

Will be a hallowed spot.

I'll hear your voice, I'll see you smile,

Though blindly I may grope,

The memory of your helping hand

Will buoy me on with hope.

 

Should you go first and I remain

To finish with the scroll,

No length'ning shadows shall creep in

To make this life seem droll.

We've known so much of happiness,

We've had our cup of joy,

And memory is one gift of God

That death can not destroy.

 

Should you go first and I remain,

One thing I'd have you do:

Walk slowly down that long, lone path,

For soon I'll follow you.

I'll want to take each step you take,

That I may walk the same,

For someday down that lonely road

You'll hear me call your name.

by a.k. rowswell