My Daddy was a sweet, sweet man. William Albert Brasfield. Did you know him? Everybody liked him. He was fair and he was honest, and he loved to make people laugh. "Just a natural born clown," Mama would say.
Daddy had rheumatism and carried a buckeye in his pocket to help keep the pain away. He used to get up from the supper table and act kindly weak-kneed and say "woo law me! I got a bone in my leg," and he'd commence to shaking his leg and dance around and we'd all laugh like it was the funniest thing in the world. It was funny, seeing him give a little hobble to his walk and reach in his pocket to feel and see if that buckeye was still there.
Daddy worked the life right out of that good bottom land and not one boy to help him. Not one son to carry on his name. We girls always felt sorry for him like it was our fault, and some of us tried to be tom-boyish for his sake, but it didn't work. Sooner or later we'd find the paint and powder on Mama's dresser and start pinning up pictures of movie stars on our walls and poor Daddy'd just give a sigh and go off by himself. He said he'd bide his time and surely one of the six of us would see fit to give him grandsons. Even if we had, they wouldn't have carried Daddy's name. There wasn't nothin' we could do about that.
Lord, it wadden 'cause Mama didn't try....poor soul, she tried everything. Douching with vinegar in the evening. Douching with baking soda in the night, carrying a white rabbit's foot pinned between her titties and resting, with her feet propped up on the arm of the divan. She tried everything anybody ever told her, but out came another girl each time.
It got so easy for her to have babies, she said to me when I was so scared with my first, "Oh hon, it ain't no worsen shittin' a hard turd." On my second and my third try it wasn't, but Lord that first! I was so scared after hearing all the women tell how this one and that one tore 'em and how they were numb down there for weeks afterwards, and so on. My sisters said the same thing. Listening to the other people was the worst part.
I am the oldest of the six of us, and I thought I'd be the first to go, but Leota was the first. She was a cripple and a little dwarf and she never married. Died when she was thirty-three. "Just like Jesus," Daddy said. It hurt Mama and him so much to lose their grown children. "It just ain't natural," Mama'd say, "for your chil'ren to go on before you. It jest ain't natural."
We didn't know, not any of us, just how natural death really was. I didn't understand until long after I myself died and got over here, how foolish it is to wish it wasn't so. All you can do is make the best of it and go on.
Jannell went not too long after Leota, she had suffered the most with a long illness that was never fully explained. Then it was Sadie Lee and then me. We were the only ones for a long, long time. Then finally Naomia joined us. Boy! If we didn't have us a good time then.
We went around mocking Mama and Daddy like we did when we were small and we laughed so hard. It didn't take much to set us off either. Like we'd overhear somebody at the home place say, "What do you want done with these bones?" and we'd just hoot and start hobbling around like Daddy and saying, "Woo Lawd, ah've got a bone in my leg!" Truthfully, good times didn't start 'til we got on this side. Made us wonder why we dreaded it so and none of us could remember.
It's pitiful trying to comfort them that are left, when they think they've lost one of us. We all try, but it's so hard. First of all, they carry on so about our bodies, those fragile shells we carried around. They don't want 'em cut on or burned up or buried natural. They want 'em painted up and powdered and filled with fluid that hardens like concrete. They don't want to think about 'em rotting away and seeping into the soil. They shudder if the thought even hits them. They wouldn't feel so sad, if they could know. If they could just know. We're not in there...we're here! Alive and well and doing fine. "Don't mourn for us," we tell them, but most of them can't hear. It's like the tree that falls in the forest with no one, no animal, nothing around. If there is no way for them to hear us, then our words hang in mid-air, like frozen drops of water.
We had the hardest time you ever saw, waiting for Naomia. She had this real pretty house and a husband that just worshiped the ground she walked on. He gave her anything and everything she wanted, including seven children. She seemed like she just didn't want to let go of it all. When she finally did let it all go, we had us a party to celebrate. Leota fixed fried peach pies. She could make the best crust. We always said it was because she was so close to the height of the table she rolled it out on. The rest of us, when we tried to fix pie crusts, we'd bend over backwards measuring water, flour and lard just right, and ours would come out tough, in spite of us. Where you take Leota, she never measured anything, just cupped her hand and dipped it into the lard bucket and worked that flour in.
So, Leota fried the pies and I fixed the lemonade. Jannell sliced up some of her prize winning tomatoes and pulled a few green onions, fried a little okra and a little corn. We heated up the left over turnip greens and crowders and we had us a meal fit for queens. Sadie Lee was never much of a cook, but she could make good cornbread and she did, only she made plain this time on account of she was out of milk. It goes better with turnip greens anyway, we thought.
So, when Naomia came, we had the table set and the food hot and the lemonade cold. She said it was the best meal she'd ever had. Then we sat around and talked and laughed until our faces got tuckered out from laughing so much. We remembered how when we were little, Daddy would cross his big strong legs at the knee and start pumping the top one up and down and we'd just squeal with anticipation. Mama'd say, "Now don't get the girls all excited 'fore bedtime, William." Daddy'd say, "I'm not doin' nothing. It's this rascal pony. He needs taming. Whoa boy, whoa!"
We'd all stand in line to take our turn at trying to tame that old pony. Leota was lucky because she got to ride that bucking bronco for many years being she was so small. One of the saddest days of my life there with Mama and Daddy was, the day Daddy said, "Jessie honey, you're jest gettin' too heavy to ride this old pony." I kinda knew that day was coming, but it hurt me when it did. Riding Daddy's leg was a part of being little and young, and I had to give that up and be grown up and make room for Naomia and Lil'yen. Daddy and Mama knew how it hurt, but there wasn't nothing anybody could do. It was just a fact of life.
Poor old daddy had to give up a lot of his shenanigans as he got older himself, but thank the Lord he never gave up his singing. I can still hear his voice ringing out through the trees at twilight as we'd run around catching lightening bugs to put in a fruit jar.
"Weelll....Mr. Nigger Preacher went a hunting and it was on a Sunday morn, 'twas agin his religion, but he carried his gun along..." Then there was, "Old Dan Tucker was a fine old man, washed his face in a frying pan, combed his head with a wagon wheel...died with a toothache in his heel. Get out the way for ole Dan Tucker, he's too late to git his supper. Supper's over and dinner's a cookin' all my friens' jest settin' nere a lookin'".
Hey ya'll! I just thought of something. Y'all? Y'all hush a minute. Jannell! I just remembered. Do ya'll remember that time Mama took us into town together and we just about drove her crazy? Remember how we put Leota in amongst the women's lingerie hanging on those satin hangers in that one shop and we pretended she was lost and when Mama found her she was standing there with her head sticking out from a leg of one of those old women's drawers? Yall remember that?"
"Yes, yes...lord yes," Naomia's holding her sides. "And remember how we'd all act like cripples or deformed when we'd pass somebody on the street?"
"I can't stand it!" Sadie Lee's laughing so hard now, she has tears runnin' down her cheeks. "And Jessie, you'd cross your eyes and look right up at a stranger and say, 'Howdy Mister' real innocent like and then when he took a look at all of us, Leota, just bein' herself and me all gimpy like Daddy and Naomia hunched over and Lil'yen hiding one of her arms up in her sleeve, he'd look at Mama and act disgusted and we'd just holler."
I told 'em, "The best part was telling Daddy all about it when we were back home. Remember how he laughed?" Leota's smiling big now. "He got a big kick out of us didn't he?"
Sadie Lee was always the best at mocking Daddy. She looked the most like him and she had, all her life, tried to be his boy. She'd run along behind the plow, little ankles turning in her floppy sandals as she ran in the furrows. "Can I now Daddy? Please, can I now?" He'd stop old Jim and hoist Sadie Lee up on the plow and she'd grab onto the reins and click her tongue and say "c'mon now, Jee um, click, click, c'mon now." Daddy'd have the reins around his shoulders, so he had all the control needed, but Sadie Lee felt like she was a tough, rugged farmer and she was in charge. She always liked to be in charge.
There was a time when she wadden quite big enough to reach the plow handles, and she was too big to ride on the cross bar, but she didn't whine and carry on like a girl. She just cleaned the stalls, and carried water and feed, and waited to grow. Once she was big enough, she started doing most of Daddy's plowing. Her legs and arms got muscles in 'em as hard as rocks, and brown? Law me, she turned as brown as that buckeye Daddy carried in his pocket. Mama would yell out the winder, "Put you on a hat, Sadie Lee!" To the rest of us she would say, "She shoulda been a boy, that one."
We always said the only reason Sadie married was to please Mama. Her husband was a real sissy, or maybe it was because next to her, he just looked like one. Charles was his name and he came from up around Nashville and said, "you'ens" instead of ya'll. We like ta died from laughing the first time we heard him speak. Oh we were mannerly about it, we didn't let him know, but when he left, we all just went into convulsions. Daddy said you girls should be ashamed mocking the only boyfriend your sister ever had, and he'd cut his eyes over at Mama, and she knew, and we knew, he was gonna show us all up.
Daddy could mock people better than anyone. Mama'd roll her eyes and say, "William Albert Brasfield you set down, them girls are bad enough without you startin' in too!" But Daddy wouldn't quit 'til we were all rolling on the floor.
Poor Charles, he never was no match for Sadie Lee. He couldn't do nothin' right it seemed. For a while, she let him think he was big stuff but she couldn't keep it up for long we knew. Like when he'd try to fix something he'd have to stop and think which way to turn the wrench. You could tell he'd never done it before, where Sadie could just start right in and have it done before you could say Dag Nabbit.
We all felt sorry for Sadie being married to Charles, but there wasn't a thing we could do. She'd made her bed and she had to lie in it. Forty years they were married before he died. Sadie Lee cried and cried like she was real sad, but not long afterwards she perked right up and was her old self again. After she got up here, she told us her last twenty years without him were the best of her life.
She had taken up pipe smoking. Said she'd always wanted to and now, by golly, she was a gonna do it! Wore pants all the time in her later years too. Seemed a shame to put her in a dress to bury her, but we did. I stuck her pipe in beside her and didn't tell nobody 'til weeks later.
We're all here now, except for Lillian. That's how you spell it, but that's not how you say it. Lord only knows how long it'll be 'til she comes over, being the youngest and with her circumstances and all.
Naomia called her 'Duada' at first, trying to say 'sister.' Daddy called her 'Young'en' all his life. Never once said her name, she was just 'Young'en' to him. We always called her Sister at home, but when we were around people we'd say Lil'yen. It was after her and her husband went North that she insisted on being called Lillian. She said that's how it was spelled and that was the proper way to say it. Well...La...De...Da!
So, we said it, to her face, but behind her back...woo law! we had us a time! She had ambition and thought she could change the world to suit her, but life humbled her a little bit and her husband too. It's like that it seems. They went along nicely for awhile, her and old "Snuff" Danner. Lived high on the hog if anybody ever did. He worked construction at first, but then bought a piece of land out in the suburbs and then another and another and by the time the sixties came along they owned about a thousand acres of prime land and sold it off in small parcels to developers and made a killing as they say.
Snuff always did have a head for bidnis, as Daddy would say. His people bought and sold horses for years around home. No, he didn't dip snuff. He got that name when he was a real little fella. Every time he'd help his Mama around the house he'd do just a little bit and then ask, "That 'nuff, Mama?" They thought it was so cute they just started saying, "Snuff, darlin," to him, and pretty soon hardly anybody but his mama could remember his real name was Clarence.
He's pretty sad looking now, when you see him. All the money in the world can't bring him his Lil'yen back. He sits there beside her bed looking so helpless. If he just hadn't let her get all hooked up to that artificial, life saving contraption, but he thought he'd done right. How was he to know?
Oh he knew we were close to Sister, but I reckon he didn't realize just how close.
She was getting ready to cross over and even talked to us about it. "I'll be there tereckly," she had said not more than a week before she had her stroke. But of course, she didn't get to leave peaceful and now there she lays all hooked up just waiting to go and can't do a thing about it.
We held us a meeting last night after supper and decided to send Sadie down to get her. She said it wouldn't be hard to do, just go in there and wake Snuff and tell him why you've come, and then rig that machine to look like she died natural. We could all feel Sister's pulse beat faster as she listened to us plan it. She's anxious to come on over and join us.
So...tomorrow night Sadie's going down. Leota's got her dried peaches on cookin' right now and I can see Jannell out there in the garden looking over her tomatoes. Naomia'll fix the cornbread this time, since Sadie Lee will have her hands full, and me? I'm gonna fix a pineapple upside down cake to go with my lemonade.
If you look close you can see Mama and Daddy coming over the hill over yonder with a Christmas tree. Woo, Law! Won't Daddy be happy to see us all, and Mama too! We've got us a lot to celebrate now, and we won't have to be waiting on Lil'yen no more.
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