Hard Old Life, Part iii

Dear Mother,

Gone are the days, and can this really be? Six years to this very day since I got the call and learned that you had slipped out of this life and into the next. My strongest memory of that day is not of a sense of grief, but rather the self-centered thought, “Now what do I do? I’m an orphan now.” And also, “I can’t talk to her anymore. Where did she go?”

And that’s the question, isn’t it, Mother? Where did you go? I have no way of proving it to the satisfaction of the refrigerated bean-counters of today’s Christianity, but I know that sometimes you are with me, listening to me, watching me. And I know that I will see you again.

Do you remember telling me about your earliest memories? You told me about how your daddy showed you a duck and her ducklings in the pond near your cabin, and how you went and sat with them during the day and watched them swim, and how you tried to feed them but they were skittish? Do you remember telling me that you reached too far one day and fell into the pond, your body taking one of the ducklings down with you, and how when your daddy pulled you out, the duckling floated on the surface, dead and still, and how you sobbed and sobbed and told the mother duck, “I Sowwy! I sowwy!“?

And you told me of the time you were at the Perry County Courthouse in the autumn, wearing your too-small coat, and you were waiting for your daddy who was transacting business inside, and how when you walked around the back of the courthouse, the huge gray wolf was standing there staring at you, and then leaped across a log and disappeared into the woods? I remember the day I took you back there in 1999, and we stood on that same spot and you pointed to where the wolf had stood, and where the log had been, and where the long-razed trees had been. I remember the distant look in your eyes, as if you were simultaneously living in those past moments and yearning for a future when you might see again that same wolf, or those same ducks.

You told me how, when you were a little, little girl, your cousin came and stayed at your cabin for a week, and how she broke the glass pane in the kitchen door and then let one of the hens escape from the pen and then blamed it on you, and how your mother whipped you until you wet yourself and vomited, crying to her all the time, “I didn’t do it, Mama! She did it! She did it!”

You told me about the man your daddy knew who was reputed to have sold his soul to the devil, and how he got drunk one night and the constable locked him up, and the man laughed in the lawman’s face and said, “Your jail can never hold someone like me.” You described how the constable and his deputy entered the cell and knocked the prisoner down and clapped him in fetters, then locked the cell again, then bolted the heavy wooden door of the courthouse, and how they had barely gotten a block down the street when the man called out to them, and how they turned around and saw him behind them, strolling with a grin on his face and the shackles in his hand, swinging them like a lariat, and how he threw the irons at the lawmen and spat at them and ran down a side street.

You told me about Clyde Cutrell, the best preacher you ever heard, who held services at a tent revival, and how he would read a verse from the Bible, close the book, and then preach for two hair-raising hours without consulting notes, and how the area down front would be packed twenty deep with souls seeking salvation while the pianist banged out “Just As I Am.” And how Mr. Cutrell’s detractors believed him to be completely reprobate and hellbound because he smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and occasionally took a sip of white liquor from an offered jar.

You told me how your mother, worried about the baby’s pneumonia, let your older sister Oleta, the true firstborn, sleep in the bed with her and your daddy, and how during the night she rolled over on Aunt Oleta and accidentally smothered her to death, and how your mother never recovered from the loss and became the hard, wary woman who turned her anguish and rage on you, her second-born, for all of your childhood and most of your life.

And you told me of how you would go to the cotton fields as a toddler and rest in the shade while your mother and daddy toiled in the broiling delta sun, filling their long sacks with the white puffs that were turned into dresses and overalls and funeral shrouds. How you learned to cook by watching your mother and enduring her slaps and cuffs and rebukes.

My duty is to remember. And on this sixth anniversary of the day you died, I remember, Mother. I remember more than I sometimes realize. It all comes bubbling up when I start to write about it. I can see your eyes, the way they looked when you looked directly at me while talking. My eyes look just like yours.

I remember.

~ S. K. Orr