Mama smiled at me as I sat down in a stuffed chair by the bed. The chair smelled damp and old, like a wet grandma.
“I’d like to get up and fix you something to eat, baby,” she said, “but I don’t feel up to it.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I had what I think was a biscuit.”
“It’s the medicine,” she said. “It makes me woozy. I just don’t feel up to anything, with it or without it.”
“I know.”
She looked at me for the longest time, as if she was trying to see something beneath my skin, and then she came out with a confession. “Your daddy was in here last night.”
I wasn’t sure why she told me, but I said, “Oh,” like I didn’t know what she was talking about. It was knowledge I would have preferred to have tucked away someplace where I couldn’t touch it, like down at the bottom of an alligator pit.
“I’m so ashamed,” she said, and turned her head away from me. “I shouldn’t even be telling you, you’re just a young girl.”
“I know some things you might not think I know.”
Actually, I had an idea she had seen me, or Daddy had told her, and she felt obliged to explain herself.
Slowly she shifted her head on the pillow and looked back at me. “I don’t really remember all that well, but this morning I knew. He had been here. In the night.”
“That’s all right, Mama.”
“No,” she said. “No, it isn’t. He isn’t any good.”
We sat that way for a while, her looking at me and me looking at the floor.
After a time, I said, “What if I wanted to go away?”
“Why wouldn’t you want to go away?” she said. “There isn’t anything for you here.”
This wasn’t exactly what I expected, and I had to let that roll around in my head for a moment before I was certain I had heard what I thought I had.
“No, ma’am, there ain’t nothing here for me.”
“Isn’t,” she said. “Don’t use ‘ain’t.’”
“Sorry,” I said. “I forget.”
“Actually, you haven’t had enough schooling to know better, and I haven’t exactly furthered your education by lying in bed, but I’m not up to much, you know. There was a time when I thought I might be a teacher, or a nurse.”
“Really?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Mama, if you had a friend got drowned, and you found her body, and she always wanted to go to Hollywood to be a movie star, would it be wrong to dig her up after she was buried, burn her to ashes, take them downriver to Gladewater in a jar, catch a bus, and take her out to Hollywood?”
“What?”
I repeated myself.
“What are you talking about? Who is this girl you would dig up?”
“May Lynn.”
“The beautiful May Lynn?” she asked, like there were dozens of them.
“That’s the one.”
“My God, is she dead?”
“Daddy didn’t tell you?”
She shook her head.
“You been kind of out of touch,” I said. “She was found with a sewing machine tied to her feet yesterday and was buried today. I would have told you last night, but you was out of it.”
“Don knew about this?”
“Yes, ma’am. He and Uncle Gene and me and Terry found her in the river.”
“Oh my God,” Mama said. “She was so young. And it hasn’t been that long ago she lost her brother, and before that her mother.”
“She was my age,” I said. “She never did go nowhere. She wanted to, but she never did.”
“Your daddy was there when she was found?” Mama asked, as if I hadn’t already explained it.
“He was.”
“He never said anything to me.”
“No surprise. He wanted to push her and the Singer back in the water.”
“He doesn’t like problems,” she said, as if that explained all his actions.
“I guess not,” I said.
“And now you want to go away?”
“I don’t know what I want. Me and Terry and Jinx-”
“You still seeing that colored girl?”
“I am.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” Mama said. “I’m not speaking against her. I’m just surprised you aren’t like everyone else.”
“Everyone else?”
“Way it usually goes is children, colored and white, play together until they get grown, and then they don’t associate. It’s how it is.”
“Thanks for thinking highly of me,” I said.
“I didn’t mean it that way, Sue Ellen. I just meant it’s not the standard way things work out in these parts, or most parts, for that matter, and there’s the whole problem of how she’s affecting your speech. You talk like a field hand.”
She paused, seeming suddenly to have taken hold of what I had said about May Lynn.
“You said you want to dig up your friend and burn her up and take her ashes to Hollywood?”
“I said that, yeah, but am I going to do it? I don’t know.”
“That’s pretty crazy,” she said.
“You should know,” I said, and hated it as soon as I said it.
Mama turned her face away from me.
“I didn’t mean nothing by it,” I said. “I’m sorry, Mama.”
Slowly she looked back in my direction. “No. It’s all right. I wasn’t very thoughtful before I spoke. And I suppose I’m not one to judge anyone in any manner, am I?”
“You’re all right.”
“No. No, I’m not. Listen. I don’t know that you should dig up and burn anybody. I’m pretty sure that’s a crime. I think there’s a list of weird crimes and that’s on the list, along with eating out of the toilet and the like. It’s just not done. So forget that. But I think it would be good for you to leave. I haven’t got the gumption for much of anything anymore, not even being a mother, but you ought not to stay here. Something happens to me, there’s just you and your daddy…and you wouldn’t want that.”
“I don’t want to leave you here with Daddy,” I said, “let alone myself. He’s still got a pretty good left hook.”
“Don’t stay on my account,” Mama said. “I let him in last night, though I don’t remember it all in a solid kind of way. It was the cure-all. It keeps me confused. And I get so lonely.”
“That stuff doesn’t cure a thing,” I said. “It just makes you drunk and dreamy, and gives you excuses. You ought not drink it anymore.”
“You don’t know how things are,” she said. “It makes me feel good when I feel bad, and without it, I feel bad pretty much all the time. You should go. Forget digging up anybody, that’s a bad idea, but you should go.”
“I told you, I don’t want to leave you with Daddy.”
“I can deal with him.”
“I don’t want you to have to,” I said.
Mama considered on something for a long time. I could almost see whatever it was behind her eyes, moving around back there like a person in the shadows. Time she took before she spoke to me, had I been so inclined-which I wasn’t-I could have smoked a cigar, and maybe grown the tobacco to roll another.
“Let me tell you something, honey,” she said. “Something I should have told you maybe some years ago, but I was ashamed. I didn’t want you to know what kind of woman I was.”
“You’re all right.”
“No,” Mama said. “No, I’m not all right. I said that before, and I mean it. I’m not all right. I’m not a good Christian.”
It wasn’t Tuesday, so I wasn’t all that high on religion.
“All I know is, if something works out, God gets praised,” I said. “If it don’t, it’s his will. Seems to me he’s always perched to swoop in and take credit for all manner of things he didn’t do anything about, one way or the other.”
“Don’t talk like that. You’ve been baptized.”
“I been wet,” I said. “All I remember was the preacher held my head under the river water, and when he lifted me up he said something while I blew a stream out of my nose.”
“You shouldn’t have such talk,” she said. “Hell is a hot and bad place.”
“I figure I could go there from here and feel relieved,” I said.
“Let’s not discuss it any further,” she said. “I won’t have the Lord spoken ill of.”