Follow Me to Ground(24)

Her flesh is somewhere torn. Her blood is landing in my mouth.

I kept a hand at my throat, fearful of swallowing the wilted violet tang.

And I was tired. All the time.

Too tired, even, to dream.

Each night I’d lie down and begin to think of Samson, convince myself I caught his scent, and then there’d come a creak across Lorraine’s shoulders.

Her gut-gurgle bubbling.

Her squeak-lung wheeze.

I’d push it to one side and think of Samson’s hands, the bulge of his shoulders. I’d put my hands over my ears as though the sounds weren’t seeded inside my own head, and imagine him coming back up from The Ground.

I was tracking a piece of cotton, matted and thick, up the length of the lawn. It was headed toward the trees and it struggled over the long and scratching grass.

I walked a little way behind it, the shift I wore rising up over my knees.

Follow me, follow me.

It made a whistling sound, the cotton. The way a man whistles, hard and through straight teeth. I crouched and watched it bob a moment longer from stalk to stalk, to the occasional thistle-stem, and then I heard a voice.

It was Fred Languid lamenting over a stillborn calf, and I was no longer in our garden but in the Languid’s sodden barn and I looked down at myself and saw I was Lorraine.

The dream was a dream of Lorraine’s, rooted in a springtime some fifteen years before.

Opening my eyes I saw the sun was almost up and tasted the blood-taste strong in my mouth.

I went to the bathroom and spat, spat, spat.

–You and your father seem so rarely to speak.

–Often there isn’t much to say.

–It’s a funny way you have, of living together.

I don’t know what she got from this back and forth between us. She was eager, I suppose, for some sign we were even a little bit alike. When she grew tired of asking after Father she’d say –Tell me about your day.

Never mind whether or not she’d seen me throughout it, and I’d tell her what I could. Of the changes I’d seen in plants, of the growing weight to the air. She’d look at me with pity creasing the skin around her eyes.

–Season’s changing, I suppose.

Thinking Dull girl, dull girl. What a nonsense life you’re living.

All old women, I know, were at one time young.

These afternoons spent sitting next to her while she slept, I started wondering how she’d die, and where she’d be put to ground – not The Ground of our cramped garden, but those stretches kept sacred by Cures. Those stretches Father said we must never enter. Throughout my childhood he told me We leave the graveyards be.

But why?

Because they’ll think we’re there to make them well, and then they’ll sit up.

Sit up? In their graves?

All their heads will come up over the soil, all asking to be the first saved.

One day the heat was such that she lay down on the couch right away. One hand over her face, the other fanning her breasts. The car hadn’t even left the drive and already she was saying –Oh put me out, Ada! Put me out! This heat! I don’t know how you stand it.

So I put my hand over her eyes and she was gone right away. Her mouth slack, her chin doubling into her neck. She hadn’t even taken her shoes off, only one heel was unsheathed from her worn leather shoe and her stockings were wetly gathered ’round her knees. I couldn’t keep looking at her. It was too much. The look and the smell of her. I went out on the porch and sat on the steps, thinking thoughts of Samson with my knees knocking and my head in my hands.

Long time in the desert.

Long time long time.

I looked at my feet, my toes weathered with dust, counted ten breaths, and got up to go inside again.

Back in the house the air smelled sweeter and I thought

I’ll wake her and be stern with her, tell her we’ve another Cure.

I tripped a little over something on the floor: Lorraine’s shoes, Lorraine’s stockings.

Lorraine herself was gone.

The couch, where she’d been; ruffled and sagging.

My insides turned liquidy and quick. Where was she? And how had she woken on her own?

If Father sees, if Father sees …

I went into the kitchen, into the pantry, the toilet, back into the kitchen, and then: from the corner of my eye, a white spot moving. She was walking over the lawn. Right over the lawn. Bobbing slowly up and down like the cotton I’d seen in her dream.

I’d never seen a Cure gone past The Burial Patch. It looked like the sun and moon side by side in the sky.

Her feet, outside of their stockings, had a yellow tinge. I opened my mouth to call to her but again thought of Father, still unknowing, and then she was gathering up her dress – bunching it at the hem. She carried on, away from the house, deeply curving the arches of her feet like a dancer might, or like a woman about to step into a too-tight shoe.

When she stopped she bent her knees, letting them splay to either side.

The Ground will take her.

I went out the back door but she had already lowered to The Ground, hoisted her dress up further.

She was all contentment, all swagger.

She turned from me to show the house her buttocks, all pale and quiver, naked of their usual skein of aged silk and frayed lace.

She squatted, deeply. Paused.

The urine left her in an even streak. The sound of it on the grass, the crackling dry lawn.