It’s just a minimum day today, and King is buzzing when I pick him up. At dinner, he talks with his mouth full, but he’s so excited I allow it. There’s an assembly in the morning, he says, where kids give a speech about anything that’s bothering them. He got up and talked about moving to a new school.
“Afterward all these kids walked up to me in the hallways and introduced themselves. At my old school, somebody would have called me a punk, but here they were so”—he pauses—“nice.”
Grandma Martha is beaming.
“And that’s just the beginning,” she says. “You’re going to meet so many friends at this new school. Fine kids who will be good influences for you.”
His face suddenly turns, and he sets his fork down.
“I had friends at my old school too,” he says.
“Yes, yes, of course you did, but I’m just saying . . .” her voice trails off.
“We’re both just so happy you had a good day,” I say, and he seems to relax.
Spaghetti is one of his favorite foods, and he cleans the plate, then asks to be excused.
I clear the table, then help Grandma upstairs. I hadn’t noticed her outfit when she was sitting, the same classic button-down shirt with starched white pants that she always chooses, but she’s spilled tomato sauce from dinner and didn’t bother to wipe it. Even now, the red juice is running down the pant crease. Then too, there is an odor that wafts up from her, the unmistakable scent of funk. I almost ask if she needs help cleaning, but I see her heading into her bathroom, and I let it go.
KING IS SITTING ON THE EDGE OF HIS BED WHEN I WALK by his room. I go in and sit down next to him, rub the back of his neck like I’ve done since he was a baby at my breast. Sometimes he allows it, and sometimes he doesn’t. Today he sinks into me.
“What is it?” I ask. “You seem like you got a little down back there.”
“I don’t know. Just the way she said that thing about these kids being good influences. Like my friends weren’t good.”
“I hear you. I noticed that too,” I say. “But you have to understand she didn’t mean it that way. She’s getting old and she can’t always find the right words, but trust me. If anybody knows those are good kids, it’s her.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“You miss your friends, don’t you, buddy?” I ask.
He nods.
“How ’bout this? I’m off this weekend. We could go back to the old neighborhood. I’ll call Senait, we’ll set up something with her and Nathan and Issa, sound good?”
He nods.
“I love you, Mom,” he says.
“I love you more,” I say back.
Midsentence I hear a crash from just beyond the door and I rush to the landing.
Grandma is standing outside King’s bedroom. I gasp. I don’t mean to but I didn’t expect to see her there; not only that, her hair is never down the way it is now, and I see for the first time that it reaches her stomach. She has changed already, and her nightgown is pale and translucent; dark and light flashes of her naked body shine through. I look away.
“What happened?” I ask, my eyes darting behind her.
“Oh, this lamp just fell down. I swear I didn’t even touch it, just passed next to it, and it leapt to the floor.”
“Oh,” I say. It’s my mother’s great-great-grandmother’s lamp, the only thing of Josephine’s that we own. I don’t need to examine it to see the brass is chipped.
“I’m so sorry,” Grandma says. “I can have Juanita run out tomorrow and get you another one. I’ve seen this very thing in Nordstrom.”
“No, Grandma, that’s all right. Don’t worry about it. You just surprised me is all. I’ll walk you back to bed.”
Along the way to her room, she wants to discuss each picture we pass.
“That one is my wedding day,” she says, pointing to a black-and-white eight-by-ten. “He got the jewel. All the boys in the county would wait for us by the farm entrance.”
“Oh, and I see why,” I say back, not unlike the way I might respond to a toddler.
We keep walking. When we reach the room, I watch her navigate to her bed, wait to hear her mattress creak under her. She must know I’m still there because she talks the whole while, her back to me, first about the weather and then as the bed shifts, so does the topic.
“I hope you’re not thinking about leaving,” she says in a near whisper. I almost think I’ve misheard her.
“Oh? Of course not, Grandma. We just got here. Where would I go?”
She sighs. “People have their places. Their dreams. That I know. It always seems more pleasant in somebody else’s fields. But we’re good to you here, right?”
It is an odd question, but I am still thinking about that lamp.
“The very best, Grandma,” I say.
“Good. I love you, Ava.”
“I love you too, Grandma.”
THERE WAS NO QUESTION I WOULD CHOOSE THE HAMPSHIRE—he was already seven hundred pounds, fat off sweet potatoes, milk, beets, and turnips. This last week though I’d cleaned him out with corn because it wasn’t every day your only son got married. There would have to be enough pork to feed the parish.
At Wildwood, babies weren’t swaddled in white and dipped in water as soon as their color came in, and a man and his woman didn’t jump over a broom with their mother’s blessing. Once, an aunt who wasn’t really my mother’s sister fell hard for a man across the swamps. Tom, who didn’t like to be called Master, said yes, of course, and they slept in the same cabin that night. Besides that, no attention was paid, and though we settled Resurrection in the West Alexander Parish of Southeast Louisiana over thirty years ago, I still wake up every morning in disbelief. My gratitude is not close to wringing itself out, and out of thanksgiving, I make sure to do everything Tom, who made sure we called him by his first name, wouldn’t have done. I bore and raised three children but only one of them is with me now, a son, and for him to choose a bride. Don’t get me started.
And the Hampshire is the richest swine. My husband and I started out as sharecroppers on the edge of a bluff that toed the line between Mr. Dennis’s farm and the Mississippi River marshes. At first we didn’t fare much better here than Wildwood. We’d wake every morning before the sun rose to ride the mule to work on a dirt road straight along the water’s edge. But Mr. Dennis was a gambling man, a man who swallowed whiskey straight, and it was only so long before what he