It Won’t Be Long Now
“It won’t be long now,” Mawmaw sighs, studying the November sun. It’s been so lazy this afternoon that she can look it in the eye, can scowl with disapproval as it slinks across the western sky and into last summer’s rice stubble. No point expecting a late fall 4:00 PM to feel like anything other than a July 9:00. She thinks this to herself, I’m sure.
Her hands are all knuckles and taut veins against a trembling cane. She stares down at them from in front of the screen door, says Uncle Jim lost a finger in his drill press last week. He planned to retire this year but changed his mind. Got scared he’d die with nothing to do. The cancer in Aunt Connie’s bones ain’t calling it quits yet either. Some days she’s in agony and other days it only hurts a lot. All she prays for now are days. Maybe then her kids could visit. But maybe them seeing their mother as something less than eternal is just as painful.
Apparently, my cousin Edmund got enough of a raise this year that it’s worth bragging about. It’ll go great with the brand-new baby girl his fiancé’s about to have. They’re gonna name her after a sad Irish folk song. Another cousin, Anna, recently lost a baby boy she couldn’t afford anyway. She must have thanked God for that one night when no one else was listening. The rain falls on the just and unjust alike. I believe Matthew said that. Sometimes I get confused about which one we are.
Mawmaw lowers her shapeless frame into an easy chair in the corner of her living room. She’s small, but this house makes hard work of judging just how. The ceiling, which sags under a roof that saw Sputnik fly over, is only seven feet above the stained linoleum, if that. Momma grew up here. It’s where she was brought the day after she was born, when what’s now the bathroom was then a back porch.
Gerald used to be my uncle before he ran off. Mawmaw mentions that he died this year. I hadn’t heard. And finding out didn’t make me feel one way or the other. She also tells me Cheryl stopped coming by about six years ago. “She thought people were after her, and she didn’t wanna lead them here.” This woman was Mawmaw’s niece or second cousin somehow removed. She went blind then died a few years back. Mawmaw found out only yesterday. Cheryl left behind thousands of acres that Standard Oil leased for ninety-nine years, a son who’ll spend the rest of his life in prison for murdering his boyfriend, and nothing else.
At some point, Mawmaw adds: “Hell, your Pawpaw’s been dead for damn near a decade now.” I don’t want to believe her, but I know she’s right, and that all this talk’s a proxy for a topic I’d rather not acknowledge. She dances around it again fifteen minutes later. “Come see me for Christmas,” she says. “It’ll be my gift.”
We stopped by today so she could see us, but it was under the guise of dropping off a Thanksgiving hambone for her to simmer with black-eyed peas. I spent much of my childhood collecting foodstuffs for her — shrimp shells for stock, snapping turtles for stew. Now my sister’s asking for her praline recipe. Mawmaw recites it from memory, as best as she can, and Momma fills in the gaps. She means one stick of butter when she says a block, one tablespoon when she says a tea. I wonder if she can recite the names of all her great grandchildren. I bet so, but I don’t want to test her. I can hardly name all my cousins. It dawns on me that Pawpaw made mainly girls, and that his boys got that from him. There’s twenty-two grandchildren but only one that’ll carry on his name. And Mawmaw says that he’s got shit for brains.
I eventually let myself out the front and sit in the step-side chair. From here, Pawpaw would smoke cigars and greet every Sunday visitor. Across the yard still stands (barely) Tante Fae’s house. It’s full of cobwebs and rotted window frames and curious objects the neighbors can’t bear to toss out. There’s just no one left on this end of the world to drive a bulldozer over what remains of it.
Behind it sits the yard where a stray dog almost tore my right eye out. I was four years old, and through two-and-some-odd decades gone, I can still feel my sister’s arms dragging me to safety. The blood too, rolling down my torn-up cheeks. It’s a vision free of pain, which doesn’t surprise me. I’m old enough to know that it’s wounds of the spirit, not the flesh, that hurt the most in what we remember. Pawpaw never sat in this chair and talked about The War, but it wasn’t because of shrapnel. Nonc Henri would talk about it on occasion, if he was drunk enough, though his stories were always so full of suspicious plot holes. We pretended not to notice.
The women walk out, and we say our goodbyes. I notice the road back here is paved now. Pine trees push against the ditch, twenty-feet high at least and dense enough to dim the underbrush. They used to be saplings planted in neat rows. Before that, they were a hay field. From the passenger seat, I survey a southern landscape I haven’t seen in what seems like four lifetimes. Fence lines leaning at sixty-five degrees. Grass growing out the grills of chopped-up trucks in unkempt lawns. Destitution. Neglect. Indifference. It’s too much to take.
We just get old, I guess, and the earth becomes cold and lonely. Lines fracture — through families, across the parched ground of another dry winter, and down faces that have seen one too many of them. Friends slowly become strangers once again, or else they pass on before anyone’s ready. Bodies tend to go before minds, as far as I can tell, but sometimes minds go first. Daddy always said: The only order to things is there is none.
He’s right.
On this prairie, prosperity and tragedy, progress and the same-old, can’t be untangled or foreseen. Sometimes our cruel prayers get answered. And sometimes we need a tablespoon but all we get is a tea. Best I can do is try to make it easier for my kids the same way my parents did for me. And maybe they’ll bring me a hambone in return now and then. Once my field becomes a forest. It won’t be long now.
