“Yes,” Mama said.
I wanted to ask her: What you see? But I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut and waited for her to talk. I might have been scared of what she would tell me if I asked her what she saw when she looked at me. Dying young? Never finding love? Or if I lived, bent by hard work and hard living? Growing old with my mouth twisted bitter at the taste of what I’d been accorded in the feast of life: mustard greens and raw persimmons, sharp with unfulfilled promise and loss?
“You might have it,” Mama said.
“Really?” I asked.
“I think it runs in the blood, like silt in river water. Builds up in bends and turns, over sunk trees.” She waved her fingers. “Rises up over the water in generations. My mama ain’t have it, but heard her talk one time that her sister, Tante Rosalie, did. That it skips from sister to child to cousin. To be seen. And used. Usually come around full-blown when you bleed for the first time.”
Mama worried her lip with her fingernails and then tapped the kitchen table.
“Marie-Therese herself could hear. Could look at a woman and hear singing: If she was pregnant, could tell her when she going to have a baby, what sex the baby going to be. Could tell her if she going to see trouble and how she could avoid it. Could look at a man and tell him if the ’shine done ate up his liver, done cured his insides like sausage, could read it in the yellow of his eyes, the shake of his hands. And something else, she said. How she might hear a multitude of voices ringing from any living thing, and how she followed the loudest voices, ’cause these was the most likely. How the clearest voices sang over the jumble of the rest. She could hear sound come from one woman’s face in the supply store: Flip slice me across the face for dancing with Ced. From the man that run the store who had a leg that sang: The blood turns black and pools, the toes rot. How a cow’s belly said: The calf is coming hooves first. How she first heard the voices when she came to puberty. And when she explained it like that, I realized I had been hearing voices, too. When I was younger, my mama complained about her stomach, how she had ulcers. They was sounding to me, saying, We eat, we eat, we eat; I was confused and kept asking her if she was hungry. Marie-Therese trained me, taught me everything she knew, and when your pop and me got married, that was my job. I was busy birthing babies and doctoring folks and making gris-gris bags for protection.” Mama rubbed her hands like she was washing them. “But it’s slow now. Don’t nobody but the old folks come to me for remedies.”
“You could deliver a baby?” I asked. The other thing she’d said, about the gris-gris bags, sat unspoken on the table between us, as matter-of-fact as a butter dish or a sugar bowl. She blinked and smiled and shook her head, all of which meant one thing: yes. In that moment, Mama became more than my mother, more than the woman who made me say my rosary before I went to sleep with the words Make sure you pray to the Mothers. She’d been doing more than mothering when she put homemade ointments on me when I broke out in rashes or gave me special teas when I was sick. That half smile hinted at the secrets of her life, all those things she’d learned and said and seen and lived, the saints and spirits she spoke to when I was too young to understand her prayers. The half smile angled to a frown when Given walked in the door.
“Son, how many times I got to ask you to take off your muddy boots when you walk in the house?”
“Sorry, Ma.” He grinned, bent to kiss her, and then stood and walked backward out the door. He was a shadow through the screen as he slipped out of his shoes by stepping on the toes. “Your brother can’t even hear what I tell him, never mind what the world sings. But you might. If you start hearing things, you tell me,” she said.
Given crouched down on the steps, beating his shoes on the wood, shaking out the mud.
*
“Leonie,” Pop says.
I wish he would call me something else. When I was younger he would call me girl. When we were feeding the chickens: Girl, I know you can throw that corn farther than that. When we were weeding the vegetable garden and I complained about my back hurting: You too young to know pain, girl, with that young back. When I brought report cards home with more As and Bs than Cs: You a smart one, girl. He laughed when he said it, sometimes just smiled, and sometimes said it with a plain face, but it never felt like censure. Now he never calls me by anything but my name, and every time he says it, it sounds like a slap. I throw the rest of Jojo’s birthday cake in the garbage before filling a glass with tap water and drinking it so I don’t have to look at Pop. I can feel my jaw tick every time I gulp.
“I know you want to do right by that boy and go pick him up. You do know they’ll put him on a bus, don’t you?”
“He’s my kids’ daddy, Pop. I got to go get him.”
“What about his mama and pappy? What if they want to go get him?”
I hadn’t thought about that. I place the empty glass in the sink and leave it there. Pop will complain about me not washing my dishes, but he usually only fights with me about one thing at a time.
“If they were coming to get him, he would have told me that. But he didn’t.”
“You can wait for him to call again before you decide.”
I catch myself massaging the back of my neck and stop. Everything hurts.
“No, I can’t do that, Pop.”
Pop steps away from me, looks up at the kitchen ceiling.
“You need to talk to your mama before you leave. Tell her you going.”
“Is it that serious?”
Pop grips a kitchen chair and jerks it an inch or two, straightening it, then stills.
Given-not-Given stayed with me for the rest of the night at Misty’s. He even followed me out to the car and climbed into the passenger seat, right through the door. When I pulled out of Misty’s gravel driveway into the street, Given looked straight ahead. Halfway home, on one of those dark two-lane country roads, the asphalt worn so bare the grind of the car’s tires made me think it wasn’t paved, I swerved to avoid hitting a possum. It froze and arched its back in the headlights, and I could swear I heard it hissing. When my chest eased and didn’t feel like a cushion studded with hot pins anymore, I looked back over to the passenger seat, and Given was gone.
“I have to go. We have to go.”
“Why?” Pop says. It almost sounds soft. The worry he feels makes his voice an octave lower.
“Because we his family,” I say. A line sizzles from my toes to my belly and up to the back of my head, a lick of what I felt last night. And then it goes, and I’m static, still, a depression. The corners of Pop’s mouth pull tight, and he’s a fish pulling against a hook, a line, something much bigger than him. And then it’s gone, and he blinks at me and looks away.
“He got more than one, Leonie. The kids got more than one, too,” Pop says, and then he’s walking away from me, calling Jojo.
“Boy,” he says. “Boy. Come here.”
The back door slams.