Mucho Mojo

14.

We finished our coffee and were about to go back to work, when across the street we saw the old, black lady on the walker come onto her front porch. It was a slow and dutiful process, her coming outside, and watching her made me nervous. The screen door slammed her in the hip because she couldn’t move away from it fast enough, and she wobbled and the porch groaned loud enough for us to hear across the street. I bet she didn’t weigh ninety pounds, but I could see boards sagging as she went.

She looked across the street at us and we waved. She waved back, careful to do it so her arm didn’t come off at the shoulder.

She stood in the frame of her walker and watched us awhile, then slowly lifted her hand and flicked a come-over signal with her fingers.

We went over and stood at the bottom step of her porch and looked up at her. The hot sunlight lay on her like a slice of thin cheese and showed her to no advantage. She looked as if she had been boiled down and wrung out and left to dry. The wrinkles in her face were very deep and rivered with sweat. Her prune-colored eyes were runny and the whites were no longer white; they were a Hiroshima of exploded blood vessels: pink, red, and blue. Her false teeth hung too low in her mouth at the top and were set too high at the bottom, giving the impression of living things trying to climb out of a hole. Her head was mostly bald and her hair was spaced in gray tufts and looked like dirty cotton that had been blown by the wind to collect on a damp, black rock. Her breasts sagged and wobbled against her ribs inside her simple blue shift. She wore fuzzy pink house shoes on her feet and one black toe, like a water-logged pecan, poked through a hole in the right one.

I tried to imagine her younger, middle-aged even, but it was impossible to envision that she might ever have looked any different.

I said, “We help you with something, ma’am?”

She took a deep breath, collecting enough wind to speak, ignored me, and turned to Leonard. “You,” she said, “the colored boy,” just in case Leonard might be confused on his ancestry. “I heard about your uncle. I don’t believe it for a minute. I don’t care if they found babies in his toilet, he didn’t murder and saw up no chil’ren. I’ve known that boy all his life.”

“Word sure gets around,” Leonard said.

“Ain’t no secrets in nigger town,” she said.

“No, ma’am, guess not,” Leonard said.

“And if the policemens catch anybody it’ll be an accident. They done decided it was Chester, and that will be the end of it.”

“What I’m afraid of too, ma’am,” Leonard said.

“Them boys next door,” she said. “Y’all don’t have nothing to do with them niggers. They’re on drugs.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Leonard said. “We was kinda thinkin’ they were.”

“You can tell way they walk,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Leonard said.

“And they sell’m too,” she said. “Every little chile you see go in over there and come out, they done sold them some drugs. They kill’n their own, and I betcha some fat-cat peckerwood somewheres is on the gettin’ end of the money.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Leonard said.

She looked at me, as if examining my fat-cat white peckerwood tendencies. I guess none showed. Her wrinkles shifted. She said, “Listen here, I got some apple and pear pies baking. You boys come on in and help me get ’em out of the oven a’foe they burn up. I wore myself out bakin’ ’em.”

We mounted the porch and it screamed at us. I looked down and saw a split in the boards and the ground looking up at me. That old lady fell through those boards, she’d break a leg or kill herself.

The smell of baking pies from inside was rich and fine and made me hungry. I opened the screen door and held it. Leonard stood beside her while she used the walker, and after she made a few short steps she said to me, “Close the screen door, son. You’re lettin’ in flies. I’m gonna be coming for a bit.”

I closed the screen until she got closer, which, true to her words, took awhile, and when she was close enough, I held the screen open and she and Leonard went past to the tune of straining boards.

I followed inside and closed the screen and left the front door open because it was hot in there with all the heat from the oven and there being only a little rotating fan on the kitchen table to cool the place. I felt mildly dizzy, as if I had been riding too fast on a merry-go-round. When I looked back at the screen door, it had begun to bead and buzz with house flies hoping for a chance to wipe their shitty legs on some pies.

The kitchen was very clean, and beneath the smell of the pies I caught a hint of Pine Sol. I wondered if she cleaned the place herself, and couldn’t figure the how of it if she did. Being frail as she was, a bathroom trip would be like an expedition through the South American jungles.

One wall was quite amazing. It was papered with snapshots taped to it, some in color, some black and white, some very old and very faded. Where the wall gave them up was a doorway, and through the doorway I could see another room, and the part of the wall I could see in there was also covered in photographs.

Over the stove hung an ancient dime-store painting of a serene Jesus dressed in red robe and sandals, a worshipful beggar at his feet. The painting was in a frame behind clean glass, but the frame was too big and the glass wasn’t pressing the picture and the picture had started to fade and heat-curl at one corner, giving the impression that Jesus’s robe was rolling up and would soon expose private matters to the beggar.

The rest of the kitchen was cabinets and pot-holder hooks with pot holders and transparent, time-yellowed curtains over a slanting window.

“Turn the oven off and get the pies out,” she said, and leaned forward on her walker as if getting lower would help her breathe better.

Leonard turned off the oven and got a gloved pot holder off a hook and opened the oven and took out three thick and beautifully crusted pies and sat them on top of the stove. The smell of pies filled my head thick as an allergy.

The old lady said, “You don’t remember me, do you, Lenny?”

Leonard closed up the oven and looked at her for a long moment, then shook his head. “No, ma’am. Guess I don’t. Haven’t been back here in a time. I came to visit my uncle, it was the Browns lived here. Mr. Brown, he worked for the railroad or somethin’.”

“Browns are all dead and buried,” she said. “They call me MeMaw.”

“MeMaw?” Leonard said. “MeMaw Carter. You used to live over on Sheraton. I used to go over to the park there. My uncle brung me. Y’all visited while I played.”

“That was just for a couple of years,” she said. “So I ain’t surprised you don’t remember me. You was practically a baby. I don’t never forget nothing, though. You know there ain’t no park there now? None you can use, anyway.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Drug niggers took it over. Kids with them beepers and needles and pistols in their pants. Ain’t no place to do nothing ’round here anymore but get killed. My youngest son, Clarence, moved me here ten year ago. Thought it was a better place than Sheraton Street. Was, then. Old house was falling apart and all them drug niggers around. Now I got them ’cross the street and this old house ain’t much.”

“You used to tell me stories about Br’er Rabbit and such,” Leonard said.

“And you ate my cookin’ when you come with your uncle. You liked pies and vanilla cookies. Any kind of vanilla cookie.”

“Yes, ma’am, that’s me. I oughta remembered you right off.”

She showed Leonard an acre of dentures and some of her wrinkles straightened out. “I’ve changed a little, Lenny. You know how old I am?”

“No, ma’am. I’m no good guessing ages.”

“Don’t guess no woman’s age,” she said. “That’ll just cause you trouble. ’Course, you get old as me, it don’t matter no more. One day to the next couldn’t make me look no older. ’Foe long I’ll be bakin’ pies for Jesus… I’m ninety-five years old.”

“You don’t look it,” Leonard said.

She made a noise in her throat that sounded like crisp crackers being crumbled. “You don’t start lyin’ to MeMaw now. I look a hundred and ninety-five. You boys, help me sit down.”

We got hold of her arms, which felt like sweaty sticks covered in foam rubber, and helped her away from the walker and onto a hard-backed chair at the kitchen table.

She sighed and said, “Thank you. That sittin’ part and gettin’ up by myself tuckers me. Turn the fan on me.”

I twisted the fan around so that the rotation stayed mostly in her direction. I said, “You like a drink of water?”

“No,” she said, “I’m OK, but I’d like you boys to help me eat some of that pie.”

Leonard sliced us pie and poured us milk and we ate. The pie was good. It made me nostalgic for home and my mother, but my mother was long gone and so was the home where I had been raised.

I turned and looked at the photographs. They were of all manner of folks. People black and white and brown. The clothes and hairstyles and backgrounds revealed just how long ago this whole photographic display had begun, though a lot of the photos appeared to have been taken in recent years on MeMaw’s front porch, or in her yard, or right here in the kitchen. A healthy number of them showed people eating at her table.

“Quite a collection of photographs you have there, MeMaw,” I said.

She turned her head toward the wall and looked at them. “Got a whole nuther room of ’em. I always take pictures of folks. Cheers me, all them I’ve met. I look at them walls, I got memories.”

“Who are they all?” Leonard asked.

“Some family,” MeMaw said. “Most ain’t, though. There’s people come by to check the gas meter or the water or bring the mail, and they’re nice enough, I’ll take their picture and put it up there, try and remember what we talked about that day. This here,” she waved her finger at a row of photos, “is all my family.”

Some of the photos she was pointing to were old and some were new, and some had been taken by someone other than MeMaw, because she was in a number of the photos with her children. In the earlier ones she didn’t look a lot different than she did now until you got to the oldest black and whites, and even then she looked elderly, but with darker hair and more of it, less wrinkles maybe, and a few of her own teeth.

She pointed out and named her children, and there were eight of them, five girls and three boys. The first seven close together, the last, a boy, born when she was forty-five, way past the time she thought she’d have another child.

“Ain’t one more loved than the other,” MeMaw said, “but Hiram, he’s the baby. A surprise. Lives in Tyler, but travels a lot. He’s a salesman.”

I looked at her baby. In the most recent picture she had of Hiram he looked my age and size, but with thicker shoulders. He had a personable face.

The latest photograph of her eldest child, Pleasant, showed a woman who looked seventy-five if she was a day. MeMaw said she was retired and had a little check, but was in business for herself, selling leather-stitched white Bibles.

We got a look at all the grandkids and great-grandkids, and she told us their names and stories about each one.

“How come you started doing this, MeMaw?” Leonard asked. “Taking all these pictures? Puttin’ ’em on the wall?”

“All my family done gone ’cept one boy, Cletus. Moved off tryin’ to get somethin’ decent for themselves. I wanted somethin’ to do, and after my husband, Mr. Carter, died, I took to takin’ even more pictures. Anyone I liked, I took their picture and taped it to the wall. Bet I’ve gone through half-dozen of them Polaroids. Every time I wear one out, my children buy me another. There’s pictures of your Uncle Chester in the other room, and an old one of you. I took it when you was just a child.”

“No joke?” Leonard said. “Be all right I see them?”

“Have to look for them,” she said. “I ain’t aimin’ to get up right now. They’ll be in the other room.”

I went in there with Leonard, and it was stuffy and hot and all the walls were full of photographs, some relatively fresh, some wrinkling from age and heat and turning green. It made me feel a little lonely somehow.

On one wall near the floorboard Leonard found a black-and-white picture of his uncle and himself sitting on a merry-go-round in a park, most likely the park Leonard talked about over on Sheraton Street. Leonard was probably about ten years old and his uncle was our age.

The photograph wasn’t too good, and Leonard’s features faded into his black skin. His teeth showed white in his face and he looked happy. His uncle had caught a ray of sunlight and was more defined. He looked a lot like Leonard looked now. I took a minute to make fun of Leonard, just so he knew I loved him, and he showed me his middle finger to show he cared about me too.

We checked around for a long, hot time and found more photos of his uncle at different ages, and finally, on the way out, we came across one near the door. The Uncle Chester there looked a lot like the Uncle Chester I had seen in his coffin, only a little less puffy and a lot less dead. He was standing next to a tall angular black man about his age, and he had his arm around him. They weren’t exactly smiling. They looked self-conscious, as if preparing for a hemorrhoid operation but bound to make the best of it.

“Who’s that with him?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Leonard said.

MeMaw heard us. “I’m pretty sure that’s Illium,” she said. “Take it off the wall and let me see it.”

Leonard freed the photo and took it into the kitchen and gave it to MeMaw. She said, “That’s who it is. Illium Moon.”

“Who is he?” Leonard asked.

“He and your uncle was near growed together at the hip,” she said. “You seen one, you near saw the other. Illium moved here from San Antonio. He’d been a policemans or somethin’ like that. He and your uncle met at the domino shack up by the highway.”

“Illium still around?” Leonard asked.

She studied on that for a moment. “I ain’t seen him for a bit. Couple weeks, I reckon. Hadn’t really thought about it. Your uncle not around, I ain’t expected to see him. Got so you couldn’t think of one without the other.”

“You know where he lives?” Leonard asked. “Being a friend of Uncle Chester’s, I thought I might like to talk to him.”

“No, I don’t,” MeMaw said, “but he works over to the colored Baptist church sometimes. I know that much. He used to drive the bookmobile too.”

“For the library?” I asked.

“It wasn’t the real library, the one downtown,” she said. “Illium, he was like your uncle. He wanted to do good by folks, so he got this bus… or what do they call them now?”

“Van?” I asked.

“That’s it,” she said. “He had him a van fixed up with his own books, and he went around and loaned books here in the East Side, like a library. I never did take none of ’em, ten year ago I quit reading anything ’sides the good book since I couldn’t get around good enough to go to church. I figured God would let me slide on that, I kept knowledge of His word. But I thought Illium was a good man. Sometimes your uncle helped him out, rode around with him.”

“Can you tell us where this church is where Illium works?” Leonard asked.

“I can,” MeMaw said. “But first, Lenny, you go over there and open that cabinet.”

Leonard went over to the cabinet she was indicating with a cadaverous finger and opened it. There was a snapshot camera inside.

“Bring me that camera,” she said.

Leonard did.

MeMaw looked at me, said, “What’s your name now, son?”

“Hap Collins,” I said.

“Hap, you and Lenny sit together at the table.”

We sat and pulled our chairs close and leaned our heads together.

“Ya’ll’d make good salt and pepper shakers,” she said, raised the camera to her face, grinned, said, “Now, boys, say cheese.”