Serafima was my friend. She was just an old woman, I guess, but it was the biggest thing to me, just to know that there was someone like her. She called me Rosie. She was like a godmother to me, but I’m not going to say much about her ’cause she doesn’t like that. Some people called her Ms. Fimmy, but her name was Serafima, and that’s what I called her. Seems like everybody wanted to change your name around there. She once told me there would come a day when I would forget about her, that I would vanish, but I don’t think I will ever forget her. This story is for her.
Serafima was a gardener, not the kind that goes and buys little potted plants, but the kind that has seeds growing from her grandmother, and probably the grandmother before that. Her garden was all over her yard, it never stopped anywhere, except at the ends of her lot and the little paths that ran all over so you could get by. She had the biggest yard in the neighborhood, and part of it backed onto the little forest. Serafima said her yard was all that was left of 160 acres her parents used to farm. She had comfrey plants covering the ground under her apple trees that I especially liked. The leaves were like the soft ears of a rabbit, flopped over the big rocks she had all around the yard. That’s what she called those plants, her bunnies. Serafima used a shovel, and an ax, and a hoe that was made from a cow bone. That’s all she had and she said it was the best. She used her hands for everything else. She pretty much smelled like fresh dirt, and I just loved that. Her flowers grew all among the vegetables and there weren’t any straight rows anywhere. She used to tell me, “I’m gonna plant me a rose someday,” but she never had any rosebushes. I know now that she meant me. I was her one and only Rose, and I did get uprooted and I did get replanted.
One day, long ago it seems to me now, a lady knocked on the door and gave me something she said was a ticket out of there. She was good-looking, held herself straight, but wasn’t pushy about it. She didn’t ask to come inside but, still, I was grateful the boys weren’t around. Duane was capable of crawling up the steps and sniffing around her legs. I’d seen him do that. He didn’t have a clue how to act around a real woman. The lady told me about a program for people like me, who just needed a little help. Well, she didn’t say that, but that’s what she meant. She told me that I should put on good clothes and go to a certain place, on a certain day, before noon. I would then have the opportunity to take a simple test. She did say that. Nobody had ever used the word opportunity to me before, and hearing that word made me listen to what she said.
She gave me a brochure and left, and I took it with me into the kitchen. I heard Clyman’s car pull up, fast, into the yard.
We lived in an unfinished tract house that was foreclosed before it was even finished being built. My father and Laverle got it cheap because of that, and in fact it was paid for. Luckily, the whole neighborhood went to pieces at about the same time, so our house didn’t stick out like the sore thumb it really was, but the car frames scattered around it made it a little different from the others. Clyman and his buddies always pulled up right in the front yard, which was just dirt and junk. The curb was chipped away and there was too much stuff in the driveway to park there. I never even tried to clean the yard. My garden was on one side of the house, which was penned-in by a chain-link fence in the front and that old engine in the back. I had to get to my garden by going through the bathroom window, which wasn’t as hard as it sounds, and it made it real private. Every so often some smart aleck would lock me out there and then a whole other thing would go on. There was a mean dog on the other side of the fence, that was sometimes out in the yard. I had to be really careful not to let it see me, but that dog only had a dog’s brain. I pretty much thought like a cat and so I always outsmarted him.
I grew real food in that garden and I was a good cook. When the boys got too nasty from just hanging around doing nothing day after day, I would make lentil stew, which I knew they hated to smell. I don’t know why. They wanted to eat meat all the time, and they hated the smell of my stew full of celery and garlic. That was another way I had of controlling those boys. They would whine all the way out the door. We never talked about it.
I had my own room, right off the kitchen. It was meant to be a laundry room, I guess, so there weren’t any windows in it, but it had a metal door and I could lock it real securely when I needed to. I felt safe there and in fact I loved that little room, and that’s where I read. Not one of those boys had ever been in it, but I used to read stories to Roscoe there. My bed was a big shelf I had nailed up, which went from wall to wall, and it was good enough, and cozy. On the opposite wall were more shelves running, just like my bed, wall-to-wall, and filled with books and my clothes, folded up. I had an old mirror in a black wood frame of Mama’s that still had traces of gold and pink roses painted on it. It was big enough and reflected my lamp. When I was in bed with my book, I could look over and see myself reading, and I liked that. Half of the ceiling was covered with bunches of dried flowers that Serafima had given me. I really liked how the ceiling light showed through them. It smelled good in there too. Serafima was the only person besides Roscoe who had ever been all the way inside my room, but there were some mice that visited me there, regular, ’cause I fed them oats and celery, and I found out mice don’t especially like cheese. I loved those little mice about like I loved Serafima, and Mama, to tell you the truth.
There was only one thing I wished for then, other than to not live there at all, and that was a picture of my real mother. She was big, like me, I knew that, but that was about all I remembered, except that she used to tell me stories about everything under the sun. The only time I had been out in the wilderness was when I was with Mama, but I can’t really talk about that now. I still remember when Laverle burned all the pictures of her. I think my father started his dying from that moment, ’cause I could see he still missed Mama. I didn’t much care how my father was feeling, at any time, with good reason, but I know I felt a stab in my body when I saw what Laverle had done, and I knew he felt it too.
I can kind of understand why Laverle left this family when her baby died, and I can even see why she thought it would be okay to dump her big ugly boys on me, but I can’t bring myself to understand why she needed to burn the pictures of a dead woman. I hope I get over that someday.
It seems to me that forgiveness is something that you give, real easy, to the people you love, no matter what they’ve done, it just goes without saying, but the ones who can’t be forgiven are the ones who’ve never said they’re sorry, the ones who never asked. Laverle never asked. Neither did my father. It didn’t have to be with words, but they never did. When I figured that out, I knew I must have cared for both of them more than I thought.
Clyman was someone I could forgive. He sort of helped me keep people out of my room. There were even times when he seemed to know I had reached a point with all the work I did, and with all the filth I put up with in his friends. Clyman seemed to know when that was, and he would shove all the boys out of the house. They would all leave me alone for a while, for days. Pretty soon, Jeffrey got so he seldom showed up at all, and Duane always acted any way that Clyman did, but it was an act. If Duane was sitting around, doing nothing at all, you could bet it was because Clyman was doing nothing at all either. If Clyman said something sounded like a good idea to him, Duane would say it sounded good to him too, only Duane would keep on talking about it, just to make it sound like it was his own idea all the time. If I ever find any of this funny to think back on someday, it will probably be memories of Duane copying Clyman.