Even as she spoke to the birds, the song inside her continued without interruption, seamlessly anchoring her to the spiritual world.
Sometimes Pachysandra forgot a word from the tract she was repeating. When this happened, she’d open her straw purse to touch the Bible that she always carried with her. The word would come to her immediately, pronounced in the quavering tones used by the preacher every Sunday morning in South Carolina.
Pachysandra tended the small plot of green that graced the entrance to the big apartment building where her son Tom was the superintendent. As she gardened, her mind often strayed to far-away South Carolina, where each drop of water was repaid with the blessing of abundance: golden corn and green peppers. There her life had taken root like a seed dropped in the earth. The rise and fall of her green days pursued her in her dreams. The faded images appeared the moment she fell asleep.
In her dreams she and Tom’s father are still young. They pick cotton side by side in the sun-drenched fields. At the end of the day, they count how many bushels they’ve picked. Sometimes she dreams she’s waiting for Tom’s father in the high corn. All her limbs draw her toward him. He stands nearby, but is unable to see her. He looks past her into the distance. She feels his breath on her face, sees the sweat that has trickled into his eyes from under his wide-brimmed hat. He wipes his face with his torn shirt and flashes his white teeth, always ready to laugh.
His playful laughter flows out of the pillow, sometimes turning into lament. Wanting to console him, she searches for words to soothe his sorrow. She looks for her Bible, but can’t find it — and when she does, all the pages are blank. In her younger days, truth be told, she knew very little about the Bible. She went to church only on the most important holidays. It was not until Tom’s father was brought home dead that she began to pay attention to the preacher’s sermons.
She used to sit on the wobbly rocking chair in the front room of her little house with the child at her breast, rocking back and forth in search of God. All the world stretched before her like a desert. With the child in her arms, like the Biblical Hagar before her, she searched for a spring where she could fill her jug. And the spring rose up before her. And she lifted her eyes and saw the great house on the other side of the tracks, beyond the grand garden where her mother had once worked. Now, Pachysandra arose early every day, took the boy by the hand, and went to the great house. Day in and day out, with the boy in tow, she did all that she was told. In the evening, she returned home to her ramshackle cottage by the open field.
The deep wounds left by Tom’s father’s death dried out under the southern sun. The years passed, and Tom grew tall and strong, the image of his father. Women chased after him. The one he chose to marry later came to betray him. She aroused in Tom the bad blood of his father, and this caused her, Pachysandra, to swear falsely.
Late in the evening in her rocking chair she would speak to God. She spoke to Him directly, without restraint. The mild breezes that knew all the secret pathways carried her prayers to the place where all heartfelt pleas must go. Even today, in Brooklyn, she lived by the grace of those heavens and by the blessing that pulsed in that brown earth.
When Tom decided to become a superintendent in Brooklyn, she brought with her a small box filled with that earth, dug from behind the old walnut tree where she and Tom’s father used to meet. The tree hadn’t produced any nuts for years. Spanish moss hung thickly on its branches, like faded mourning shawls on the heads of widows. Pachysandra placed the earth in the finely carved box that Tom’s father had once given her filled with chocolate.
In her basement home in Brooklyn the little box sat on a private altar covered with a white tablecloth embroidered with colorful flowers. Beside it was a portrait of Mother Mary with the crucified Christ in her arms, and nearby an incense burner and the Bible, which she took out of her straw purse as soon as she came home.
When her heart was heavy, Pachysandra would kneel before the altar. Her eyes were hungry for a small patch of sky or the edge of a green field. But all she could see through her small basement window were feet, without faces or bodies, forever tramping back and forth. It seemed to Pachysandra that they wanted to crush her and bury her under the dust of the city until not the slightest trace remained of her past or of the mother who’d birthed her.
Tom, too, felt choked by the umbilical cord to which he was attached. Pachysandra saw him as the very incarnation of his father. He roared like his father and gnashed his teeth, and he, too, believed that God was a white man and that only through blood and fire would the black man find his place in the world.
Pachysandra listened to him talk. She rocked back and forth as he spoke, as if she were still sitting in her rocking chair in far-away South Carolina. A great pity overcame her when she considered her son’s loneliness and his tormented, starved, and depleted soul. She longed to share with him the riches of her faith, the dream that couldn’t be bought with money nor broadcast over television or transistor radio. She wanted to reveal her visions to him, but knew not to disclose this secret. Tom was sure to laugh at her. The patriarchs have no one better to visit than an old black maid from South Carolina, he’d mock. Knowing what he would say, she kept the vision locked up inside, protecting it from eyes that looked but couldn’t see and from hearts that couldn’t feel. The tie was between her and her God, and she would carry the secret with her to the grave.
On her knees, Pachysandra looked beyond the crucifix to the night when Tom came home with a knife in hand, intent on killing his wife. He had just found out that she’d betrayed him. Pachysandra planted herself between them and grabbed the knife by the blade.
“Get out of the way,” he shouted, “or I’ll kill you both!”
“You’re not going to kill anyone,” Pachysandra answered.
Tom saw the blood gushing from his mother’s hand and Myrtle, his wife, lying unconscious on the floor.
“Your wife is innocent,” Pachysandra said. “I swear to you on the Holy Bible that an enemy has cooked up these false accusations to destroy you, just as your father was destroyed.”
“My father defended his honor.”
“Your father accepted a liar’s word.”
“Swear!” Tom roared.
“I swear!” she replied.
“On the open Bible?”
“On the open Bible!”
“On my father’s honor?”
“On your father’s honor.”
Pachysandra placed her bloody hand on the Holy Book and swore an oath that she knew to be false.
That night Pachysandra sat in her rocking chair enveloped in darkness. She waited, hoping her punishment would come like a lightning bolt and strike her down on the spot. She waited for the gates of hell to open up and for devils to emerge with glowing tongs to roast her flesh, or for a snake to spring out of the grass, wrap itself around her neck and strangle her. She opened her heart and laid bare her soul to receive the punishment. She was prepared to pay with her own life for saving the life of her son.
Pachysandra closed her eyes. Cool sea breezes caressed her burning face, her bony hands, her bare feet. She drew her shawl tighter around her shoulders; her head sank to her breast. She saw the oleander tree that grew beside the little house, climbing like a ladder toward the vault of heaven. High above, on a lattice of roses, the figures were descending. One, two, three, four women clad in white. They stepped down the ladder and settled on the rungs and the ramp. They were quarreling over a matter she knew well.
“She desecrated God’s word,” said one.
“She conducted herself as a mother would,” replied a second.
“She swore falsely.”
“She saved her daughter-in-law