Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  The story of my grandfather Monahwee and the people at the Battle of Horseshoe Band was horrific and it made a deep groove in the family and tribal memory. A story matrix connects all of us. There are rules, processes, and circles of responsibility in this world. And the story begins exactly where it is supposed to begin. We cannot skip any part. In some story realms the baby is born and the next day he or she is a giant who kills monsters. Mine was not that kind of story. I am born of brave people and we were in need of warriors. My father and I had lost the way. I was born puny and female and Indian in lands that were stolen. Many of the people were forgetting the songs and stories. Yet others hid out and carried the fire of the songs and stories so we could continue the culture. In a world long before this one, there was enough for everyone until somebody got out of line. We heard it was Rabbit, fooling around with clay and the wind. Everybody was tired of his tricks and no one would play with him; he was lonely in this world. So Rabbit thought to make a person. And when he blew into the mouth of that crude figure to see what would happen, the clay man stood up. Rabbit showed the clay man how to steal a chicken. The clay man obeyed. Then Rabbit showed him how to steal corn. The clay man obeyed. Then he showed him how to steal someone else’s wife. The clay man obeyed. Rabbit felt important and powerful. The clay man felt important and powerful. And once that clay man started, he could not stop. Once he took that chicken, he wanted all the chickens. And once he took that corn, he wanted all the corn. And once he took that wife, he wanted all the wives. He was insatiable. Then he had a taste of gold and he wanted all the gold. Then it was land and anything else he saw. His wanting only made him want more. Soon it was countries, and then it was trade. The wanting infected the earth. We lost track of the purpose and reason for life. We began to forget our songs. We forgot our stories. We could no longer see or hear our ancestors, or talk with each other across the kitchen table. Now Rabbit couldn’t find a drink of fresh water. The forests were being mowed down all over the world. The earth was being destroyed to make more, and Rabbit had no place to play. Rabbit’s trick had backfired. Rabbit tried to call the clay man back, but when the clay man wouldn’t listen, Rabbit realized he’d made a clay man with no ears. I was not brave. I was pulled from my mother, whom I almost killed with the struggle. I was hooked up to a ventilator.

• From Trash (1988)

  Nobody really knows Temple. The women smile about her, say, “Lord God, but she loved that man.” Everybody says it’s a pity, how she sits, how she doesn’t get on with her life, take another husband, have another child, plant zinnias or baby’s breath and go on. Go on. I sit on Temple’s porch and drink coffee, drink tea when the morning heats up, talk to her of New York and California, of cities she’s never seen. I watch how she laughs, her red hair swinging from side to side, bringing the gray and white to the surface, bringing out the shadows and wrinkles under her eyes. “How can you live in a city? All those pictures like to make my heart hurt. I could smell it—hot concrete, tar, and piss. No green for miles. No color a’tall. Lord, where’s the life in it?” I tell her about the color of night, the lights on the bridges, the hot shine in the women’s eyes, the cold glare of metal moving fast. I tell her about the cold winter light shining on flat stacks of slate, hanging over the New Jersey highways, the cars growling rock music out their vents—how tight the people wear their clothes, how tall the buildings, how sweet the dawn after you do not sleep for days. The silence answers me. I wipe my fingertips on the porch, smell myrtle and crushed onion through the dust of passing trucks, watch Claire cross the yard, how she swings her arms and throws back her head, her white face with the black eyebrows etched as high and fierce as crows across the highway. I have not been this still in years, have not heard my own heart when I was not shadowed by full dark and bourbon, not looked into a face that mirrored mine as Temple’s does—bone to bone, ancient grief to daily rage. “How do you do it?” I ask her. “How do you live this far from the rest of the world?” “What do I need the world for?” Temple laughs at me. “Besides, I got sugar, just like Granny. Came on two years ago, and ’pressure, they say, though I an’t checking. What good is it to know you gonna die sooner than later? It makes me think the world’s too damn close on me anyway. “Claire, honey, pour me another glass of tea.” Claire, the wire child, thin as the poplar on the corner, pale as the birch peeling in the backyard, brings the jug in two hands and smiles at me. The little reddish-brown nodules on her shoulders could be freckles but are not. The flush under Temple’s skin deepens, and her hands start to shake on the glass. She is seeing what I am watching—Claire’s smile and those deadly little warts.

• From Trash (1988)

  I was crazy, you know, oh yes. We lost the store, the car, even the baby’s bed—all those weeks with Robert lying still, breathing like a train going up a hill. All that slow, crazy time, and me crazy. Me just out of my head. I was howling at Granny, screaming at the girls, tearing at myself. Hated myself, like I’d done it, like I’d brought it on him. Nobody in his family had it, but Granny said we’d had a cousin with it, so maybe it had come through me. “It was important then, how it had come on us. Later I didn’t care, but then it was like that was the only thing that mattered.” Dust drifts down in the sunlight. Another truck turns the corner and shakes the porch. It’s a short cut, this road and Temple’s lot. Truckers come through and wave. Temple ignores them, slaps her porch, watches the dirty paint flake down. The dogs in the yard, tied off to a tree, howl and kick and lie down again, panting in the heat. “I got mustard grass, you know, and yellow nettles. Grow ’em cause it makes people mad, ’cause an’t nobody can tell me anything. It keeps people away, makes sure no one touches what’s mine. ” They still have fireflies in Greenville, and green tree frogs, katydids, and rock-sucking worms. The muscadines still hang in sheets off the trees behind Old Henderson Road. Once every few years, Temple takes up with some traveling man, someone she can’t see staying around. She wants nobody permanent now, not after Robert and the girls, that first baby, everybody she ever loved. “Temple’s nothing but trouble,” the cousins claim. They complain of her life, her girls. “Hard-assed, cold-hearted woman.” Everybody agrees. “Thinks more of that ratty-walled house than her family, thinks more of herself than a woman should.” Off Old Henderson Road, the porches tilt. The paint chips off. Temple’s bathroom is still out back of the pines. She has the cousins come over to prop the windows, wire back the roof where the slats are sliding down. Where the paint has gone the wood stays bare and rain-marked. She won’t paint again, says it will just flake off in the heat. Kids come over from West Greenville, drive their pickups right up on the grass, hide behind the dead vines that shield the shed out back; stare in where Temple stores broken chairs, empty boxes, an extra bed. They giggle a lot, smoke dope, and occasionally fall through the rotten boards. “You gonna pay for that, you white-eyed son of a bitch!” Temple threatens to pen that shed for chickens, set traps, loose the dogs. All she really does is talk to the uncles real loud on the phone. “Come up here and shoot me a few of these bastards!” Sometimes she doesn’t bother to dial.

• From Trash (1988)

  I rolled away, but I didn’t cry. I almost never let myself cry. Almost always, we were raped, my cousins and I. That was some kind of joke, too. “What’s a South Carolina virgin?” “ ’At’s a ten-year-old can run fast.” It wasn’t funny for me in my mama’s bed with my stepfather; not for my Cousin Billie in the attic with my uncle; nor for Lucille in the woods with another cousin; for Danny with four strangers in a parking lot; or for Pammy, who made the papers. Cora read it out loud: “Repeatedly by persons unknown.” They stayed unknown since Pammy never spoke again. Perforations, lacerations, contusions, and bruises. I heard all the words, big words, little words, words too terrible to understand. DEAD BY AN ACT OF MAN. With the prick still in them, the broom handle, the tree branch, the grease gun . . . objects, things not to be believed . . . whiskey bottles, can openers, grass shears, glass, metal, vegetables . . . not to be believed, not to be believed. Jesse says, “You’ve got a gift for words.” “Don’t talk,” I beg her, “don’t talk.” And this once, she just holds me, blessedly silent. I dig out the pictures, stare into the faces. Which one was I? Survivors do hate themselves, I know, over the core of fierce self-love, never understanding, always asking, “Why me and not her, not him?” There is such mystery in it, and I have hated myself as much as I have loved others, hated the simple fact of my own survival. Having survived, am I supposed to say something, do something, be something? I loved my Cousin Butch. He had this big old head, pale thin hair and enormous, watery eyes. All the cousins did, though Butch’s head was the largest, his hair the palest. I was the dark-headed one. All the rest of the family seemed pale carbons of each other in shades of blond, though later on everybody’s hair went brown or red, and I didn’t stand out so. Butch and I stood out—I because I was so dark and fast, and he because of that big head and the crazy things he did. Butch used to climb on the back of my Uncle Lucius’s truck, open the gas tank and hang his head over, breathe deeply, strangle, gag, vomit, and breathe again. It went so deep, it tingled in your toes. I climbed up after him and tried it myself, but I was too young to hang on long, and I fell heavily to the ground, dizzy and giggling. Butch could hang on, put his hand down into the tank and pull up a cupped palm of gas, breathe deep and laugh. He would climb down roughly, swinging down from the door handle, laughing, staggering, and stinking of gasoline. Someone caught him at it. Someone threw a match. “I’ll teach you.” Just like that, gone before you understand.

• From Trash (1988)

  I put it all away. I began to live my life as if nothing I did would survive the day in which I did it. I used my grief and hatred to wall off my childhood, my history, my sense of being part of anything greater than myself. I used women and liquor, constant righteous political work, and a series of grimly endured ordeals to convince myself that I had nothing to decide, that I needed nothing more than what other people considered important to sustain me. I worked on a feminist journal. I read political theory, history, psychology, and got a degree in anthropology as if that would quiet the roar in my own head. I watched other women love each other, war with each other, and take each other apart while never acknowledging the damage we all did to each other. I went through books and conferences, CR groups and study groups, organizing committees and pragmatic coalition fronts. I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something, change something in a world I wanted desperately to make over but could not imagine for myself. That was all part of deciding to live, though I didn’t know it. Just as I did not know that what I needed had to come up from inside me, not be laid over the top of my head. The bitterness with which I had been born, that had been nurtured in me, could not be eased with a lover or a fight or any number of late-night meetings and clumsily written manifestos. It may never be eased. The decision to live when everything inside and out shouts death is not a matter of moments but years, and no one has ever told me how you know when it is accomplished.

• From Trash (1988)

  I remember going home for the service one of the local drug counselors organized. People were standing around talking about the shame and the waste, and Katy’s mama slapped my hand when I touched her accidentally. “It should have been you,” she’d hissed. “Any one of you, it should have been. Not Katy.” Her eyes had been flat and dry. She hadn’t cried at all, and neither had I. I spent that night in my mama’s kitchen, talking long-distance to my lover up North about how everybody had looked, and the way Katy’s last boyfriend had glared at me from beside his parole officer. I’d hugged the phone to my ear, that yellow cowboy shirt between my fists, wringing it until I was shredding the yoke, pulling the snaps off, ripping the seams. I’d torn that shirt apart, talked for hours, but never gotten around to crying. I didn’t cry until months later in the Women’s Center bathroom. I’d been stone sober, but I was standing up to piss, my knees slightly bent, my jeans down around my ankles, my head turned to the side so I could see myself in the mirror. It was the way Katy had insisted we piss when we went road-tripping. “You’re the dyke,” she’d always said. “Keep your health. Learn to piss like a boy and keep your butt dry.” “Piss like a boy,” I’d whispered into the mirror, into Katy’s painful memory. And just that easy her face was there, her full swollen mouth mocking me, whispering back, “Like a dyke. You the dyke here, girl. I sure an’t.” So then I’d cried, sobbed and cried, and beaten on that mirror with my fists until the women outside came to try and see what was going on. I’d shut up, washed my face, and told them nothing. What could I tell them, anyway? My ghost lover just came back and made me piss all over my jeans. My ghost lover is haunting me, and the trick is I am glad to see her. Katy hands me the joint again, moving her small hands delicately. She smiles when she sees where my glance is trained. She flexes her fist, opens the fingers, and wags them in front of my nose. I laugh and take the joint again. “I loved that shirt. It was the best present you ever got me.” “You forgetting those black gloves with the rhinestones on the back I got in that shop on Peachtree Street. We always got the best stuff in Atlanta. Didn’t we?” “You just about got us busted in Atlanta.” “Oh hell, you were just a nervous Nellie. Thought you were the only woman capable of sleight of hand. You just never trusted me, girl.” “You were always so stoned. You did stupid things.”

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Because of the long and unceasing care that was lavished upon it, and also because the soil was enriched by the decomposing head inside the pot, the basil grew very thick and exceedingly fragrant. The young woman constantly followed this same routine, and from time to time she attracted the attention of her neighbours. And as they had heard her brothers expressing their concern at the decline in her good looks and the way in which her eyes appeared to have sunk into their sockets, they told them what they had seen, adding: ‘We have noticed that she follows the same routine every day.’ The brothers discovered for themselves that this was so, and having reproached her once or twice without the slightest effect, they caused the pot to be secretly removed from her room. When she found that it was missing, she kept asking for it over and over again, and because they would not restore it to her she sobbed and cried without a pause until eventually she fell seriously ill. And from her bed of sickness she would call for nothing else except her pot of basil. The young men were astonished by the persistence of her entreaties, and decided to examine its contents. Having shaken out the soil, they saw the cloth and found the decomposing head inside it, still sufficiently intact for them to recognize it as Lorenzo’s from the curls of his hair. This discovery greatly amazed them, and they were afraid lest people should come to know what had happened. So they buried the head, and without breathing a word to anyone, having wound up their affairs in Messina, they left the city and went to live in Naples. The girl went on weeping and demanding her pot of basil, until eventually she cried herself to death, thus bringing her ill-fated love to an end. But after due process of time, many people came to know of the affair, and one of them composed the song which can still be heard to this day: Whoever it was, Whoever the villain That stole my pot of herbs, etc. SIXTH STORYAndreuola loves Gabriotto. She tells him of a dream she has had, and he tells her of another. He dies suddenly in her arms, and whilst she and a maidservant of hers are carrying him back to his own house, they are arrested by the officers of the watch. She explains how matters stand, and the chief magistrate attempts to ravish her, but she wards him off. Her father is informed, her innocence is established, and he secures her release. Being determined not to go on living in the world, she enters a nunnery.

• From Trash (1988)

  “A glass of water,” she said. She leaned over the table to line up her closing shots. I brought her a glass of water. “You’re good,” I told her, wanting her to talk to me about how she had learned to play pool, anything but family and all this stuff I so much did not want to think about. “Children.” She stared at me again. “What about children?” There was something in her face then that waited, as if no question were more important, as if she knew the only answer I could give. Enough, I told myself, and got up without a word to get myself that can of Pabst. I did not look in her eyes. I walked into the kitchen on feet that felt suddenly unsteady and tender. Behind me, I heard her slide the cue stick along the rim of the table and then draw it back to set up another shot. Play it out, I cursed to myself, just play it out and leave me alone. Everything is so simple for you, so settled. Make babies. Grow a garden. Handle some man like he’s just another child. Let everything come that comes, die that dies; let everything go where it goes. I drank straight from the can and watched her through the doorway. All my uncles were drunks, and I was more like them than I had ever been like my aunts. Aunt Alma started talking again, walking around the table, measuring shots and not even looking in my direction. “You remember when y’all lived out on Greenlake Road? Out on that dirt road where that man kept that old egg-busting dog? Your mama couldn’t keep a hen to save her life till she emptied a shell and filled it again with chicken shit and baby piss. Took that dog right out of himself when he ate it. Took him right out of the taste for hens and eggs.” She stopped to take a deep breath, sweat glittering on her lip. With one hand she wiped it away, the other going white on the pool cue. “I still had Annie then. Lord, I never think about her anymore.” I remembered then the last child she had borne, a tiny girl with a heart that fluttered with every breath, a baby for whom the doctors said nothing could be done, a baby they swore wouldn’t see six months. Aunt Alma had kept her in an okra basket and carried her everywhere, talking to her one minute like a kitten or a doll and the next minute like a grown woman. Annie had lived to be four, never outgrowing the vegetable basket, never talking back, just lying there and smiling like a wise old woman, dying between a smile and a laugh while Aunt Alma never interrupted the story that had almost made Annie laugh.

• From Trash (1988)

  Even now, after all this time, I sometimes make love holding my breath, trying to make no sound, pretending that it is the way it always was back then, with drunk and dangerous strangers around the corner and Katy playing at trying to get me to make a sound they might hear. It was the worst sex and the best, the most dangerous and absolutely the most satisfying. No one else has ever made love to me like that—as if sex were a contest on which your life depended. No one has ever scared me so much, or made me love them so much. And no one else has ever died on me the way she did, with everything between us unsettled and aching. I slap her thigh brusquely, pushing her back. “You should have had the consideration to puke into a pot. Ruining that shirt that way. You were always careless of me and my stuff.” Katy nods. “A little. Yeah, I was.” She settles back on the mattress, cross-legged and still just touching my shoulder. “But I always made it up to you. Remember, I stole you another shirt in Atlanta.” Her hand trading the joint is transparent. I can see right through to her smoky breasts, the nipples dark and stiff. “That cotton cowboy shirt with the yellow yoke and the green embroidery. Made you look like a toked-up Loretta Lynn.” She gives her short, barking laugh. “You still got that one? ” “No, I lost it somewhere.” I remember going home for the service one of the local drug counselors organized. People were standing around talking about the shame and the waste, and Katy’s mama slapped my hand when I touched her accidentally. “It should have been you,” she’d hissed. “Any one of you, it should have been. Not Katy.” Her eyes had been flat and dry. She hadn’t cried at all, and neither had I. I spent that night in my mama’s kitchen, talking long-distance to my lover up North about how everybody had looked, and the way Katy’s last boyfriend had glared at me from beside his parole officer. I’d hugged the phone to my ear, that yellow cowboy shirt between my fists, wringing it until I was shredding the yoke, pulling the snaps off, ripping the seams. I’d torn that shirt apart, talked for hours, but never gotten around to crying. I didn’t cry until months later in the Women’s Center bathroom. I’d been stone sober, but I was standing up to piss, my knees slightly bent, my jeans down around my ankles, my head turned to the side so I could see myself in the mirror. It was the way Katy had insisted we piss when we went road-tripping. “You’re the dyke,” she’d always said. “Keep your health. Learn to piss like a boy and keep your butt dry.” “Piss like a boy,” I’d whispered into the mirror, into Katy’s painful memory.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘Moreover, since you felt bound to bring so much dishonour upon yourself, in God’s name you might at least have chosen someone whose rank was suited to your own. But of all the people who frequent my court, you have to choose Guiscardo, a youth of exceedingly base condition, whom we took into our court and raised from early childhood mainly out of charity. Your conduct has faced me with an appalling dilemma, inasmuch as I have no idea how I am to deal with you. I have already come to a decision about Guiscardo, who is under lock and key, having been arrested last night on my orders as he was emerging from the cavern; but God knows what I am to do with you. I am drawn in one direction by the love I have always borne you, deeper by far than that of any other father for a daughter; but on the other hand I seethe with all the indignation that the folly of your actions demands. My love prompts me to forgive you; my indignation demands that I should punish you without mercy, though it would be against my nature to do so. But before I reach any decision, I should like to hear what you have to say for yourself on the subject.’ And so saying, he lowered his gaze and began to wail as though he were a child who had been soundly beaten. Realizing, from what her father had said, that not only had her secret been discovered but Guiscardo was captured, Ghismonda was utterly overcome with sorrow, and needed all the self-control she possessed to prevent herself from screaming and sobbing as most other women would have done. But her proudness of heart more than made up for her shattered spirits, and by a miraculous effort of will, she remained impassive, and rather than make excuses for herself, she resolved to live no longer, being convinced that her Guiscardo was already dead. She therefore allowed no trace of contrition or womanly distress to cloud her features, but addressed her father in a firm, unworried voice, staring him straight in the face without a single tear in her eyes.

• From Trash (1988)

  She married late, Cousin Temple did, married late and well—a steady boy, one of those Roberts from Asheville, a lean, freckled, still boy, as steady as she was and as quiet, a good son who loved his mother and never ran around like the other boys all the other cousins married early. Temple rolls a little hair between two fingers and turns her red-tan face up into the sun slanting past the porch beams. This house, yard, dirt road, myrtle trees, kudzu holding the screens on the windows—none of it would stand up to a northern winter, a Yankee tax assessor, or an estate sale. But it puts Temple outside them, a property owner, something none of the rest of the family can imagine becoming. Temple has been an outsider all her life, though living on her own since her mama left her with her own mother when Temple was barely seven—a quiet red-faced seven as she is now a quiet red-faced woman whose hair shows gray where it lies close to her skull. “You were a bean when you were a girl,” Temple tells me, “a string bean, and your sister was a butter bean. Your mama was a stretch of stringy pork, and together you didn’t make a decent Sunday dinner.” When Temple laughs, her head goes back. Her long red hair shakes out, and all the gray she has so skillfully tried to hide flakes loose and flashes at me silver and white. “Temple,” I tell her, “you’re finally getting old.” “Bullshit,” she flares. “And apple butter. I’m just more woman than the men in this town can handle. And I’ve more left to me than most people get to start out.” Then she smiles, oh she smiles! The skin around her mouth that’s aged so dry and tight flushes and fills like the grin on a mewling baby. But her teeth slip loose, and her hand flies up to hide the wolf grin. “Goddamn,” she sighs. Her daughter doesn’t look up. Temple’s hand caresses her porch, strokes the soft, worn wood like the lover she barely remembers. “It an’t Robert, you know, but it is, I’d swear. All I have of him anyway. Nights, I seem to hear him breathing, but it’s the walls. They sweat so, they smell just the way he did. And I got to where I don’t care if I’m crazy. I talk to this house like it was him.” Somehow it is. There was an army insurance policy, a thousand-dollar burial, and a four-thousand-dollar mortgage, plus two more for the plumbing which never worked anyway. In the North, it would have bought nothing: in Asheville only a little more: but out here off Old Henderson Road in 1959 it was an estate for three orphans and a redheaded woman suddenly going gray. “Lupus,” she says. “It was lupus.” An old story I have heard many times these twenty-five years.

• From Trash (1988)

  Her expression stunned me. Her mouth was drawn up in a big painful smile, not at all sincere. “Did you want to kill him?” I turned away from the black window, expecting Jo. But it was Arlene, her eyes huge with smeared mascara. “Sure,” I told her. “Still do.” She nodded and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “But you won’t.” “Probably not.” We stood still. I waited. “I didn’t think like that.” She spoke slowly. “Like you and Jo. You two were always fighting. I felt like I had to be the peace-maker. And I . . .” She paused, bringing her hands up in the air as if she were lifting something. “I just didn’t want to be a hateful person. I wanted it to be all right. I wanted us all to love each other.” She dropped her hands. “Now you just hate me. You and Jo, you hate me worse than him.” “No.” I spoke in a whisper. “Never. It’s hard sometimes to believe, I know. But I love you. Always have. Even when you made me so mad.” She looked at me. When she spoke, her voice was tiny. “I used to dream about it,” she whispered. “Not killing him, but him dying. Him being dead.” I smiled at her. “Easier that way,” I said. Arlene nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah.” That evening Mavis stopped me in the hall. She had a stack of papers in one hand and an expression that bordered on outrage. “This an’t been signed,” she said. Her hand shook the papers. I looked at them as she stepped in close to me. She pulled one off the bottom. “This is from Mrs. Crawford, that woman was in the room next to your mama. Look at this. Look at it close.” The printing was dark and bold. “Do not resuscitate.” “No extraordinary measures to be taken.” I looked up at Mavis, and she shook her head at me. “Don’t tell me you don’t know what I mean. You been on this road a long time. You know what’s coming, and your mother needs you to take care of it.” She pressed a sheaf of forms into my hand. “You go in there and take another good long look at your mother, and then you get these papers done right.” Later that evening I was holding a damp washrag to my eyes over the little sink in the entry to Mama’s room. I could hear Mama whispering to Jo on the other side of the curtain around the bed. “What do you think happens after death?” Mama asked. Her voice was hoarse. I brought the rag down to cover my mouth. “Oh hell, Mama,” Jo said. “I don’t know.” “No, tell me.”

• From Trash (1988)

  “You know, a lot of famous people died of the lupus. But then people have it for years and never die, or at least don’t die of just that.” She sighs, rolls the ragged ends of her hair between fingers suddenly flushed pink. “You know what I did?” She looks away, away from me, away from her daughter, away from the dogs who paw restlessly at the bare patches near the trees. “I let them take his body. Told them to go ahead, do anything they had to. When it came down to it, I said, just tell me what it was. The girls, of course, I was thinking of the girls. And they took him, did their stuff to him, things I can’t even imagine. I don’t think, in the end, we buried more than the frame of him.” Temple’s hands shake, her tea spills over the splintered boards of the porch. Leaning forward makes her face go a deeper red. “Doctors, like lawyers you know, they don’t hurry. “I thought it would be a while, weeks maybe, even months. But Lord, years! I never thought they’d take years, and then tell me nothing. Just the lupus, ’cause of the spots and the strangling. Lupus like with Claire or that cousin I don’t know that I really believe ever existed. But hell, they didn’t really know what killed him. Lupus kills slow, and Robert died fast. “Sometimes, sometimes, I dream sometimes, oh God!” Temple rocks her head back and forth, casts a glance at her daughters and looks quickly away, speaking in a whisper that does not carry to where they sit. “I dream sometimes I lead the children out in front of a big old semi, a row of hearses following easy as you please, all their daddies nodding at me as they’re mowed down!” She shakes her head, shakes her shoulders, her whole torso following, the pink in her cheeks going brighter than sunburn. “But, sometimes, too, I dream I am alone, walking through Greenville as it burns, the sparks coming down on my neck but nothing burning me. No one sees me. They come out and throw water and yell. I just walk through and grin. Imagine the kind of woman I am to take pleasure in that kind of thing!” Imagine the kind of woman she is, Temple on her porch with the paint flaking down. Temple with her hands still on her knees, ridged and knobby, the veins blue-purple and high. Her face a permanent red-tan flush. Her daughters going in and out, slowly, carefully, the deadly warts on the pale skin of their necks and calves burning her eyes.

• From Trash (1988)

  It keeps people away, makes sure no one touches what’s mine.” They still have fireflies in Greenville, and green tree frogs, katydids, and rock-sucking worms. The muscadines still hang in sheets off the trees behind Old Henderson Road. Once every few years, Temple takes up with some traveling man, someone she can’t see staying around. She wants nobody permanent now, not after Robert and the girls, that first baby, everybody she ever loved. “Temple’s nothing but trouble,” the cousins claim. They complain of her life, her girls. “Hard-assed, cold-hearted woman.” Everybody agrees. “Thinks more of that ratty-walled house than her family, thinks more of herself than a woman should.” Off Old Henderson Road, the porches tilt. The paint chips off. Temple’s bathroom is still out back of the pines. She has the cousins come over to prop the windows, wire back the roof where the slats are sliding down. Where the paint has gone the wood stays bare and rain-marked. She won’t paint again, says it will just flake off in the heat. Kids come over from West Greenville, drive their pickups right up on the grass, hide behind the dead vines that shield the shed out back; stare in where Temple stores broken chairs, empty boxes, an extra bed. They giggle a lot, smoke dope, and occasionally fall through the rotten boards. “You gonna pay for that, you white-eyed son of a bitch!” Temple threatens to pen that shed for chickens, set traps, loose the dogs. All she really does is talk to the uncles real loud on the phone. “Come up here and shoot me a few of these bastards!” Sometimes she doesn’t bother to dial. Sometimes she doesn’t bother to roll over or get up, lies in bed for a day, her face set and angry so the girls know to stay away. Gets up thinner but quiet. Goes back to work as the crossing guard at Greenville South-East, the only work she’s had since Robert died. “You ever read that Flannery O’Connor? I got the book from Macon a few years back. Heard she’d had the lupus, thought it might be in there, but God knows it an’t. You read that crazy woman? Made me think people’re worse than I thought, and I thought bad enough. But the worst was some of it made me laugh and then made me ’shamed. Thinking, what kind of woman laughs at such troubles? Babies drowning themselves for Jesus, preachers and old ladies that get their whole families shot dead ’cause they forgot the right highway.” Flat, flat, her hand, her face, the sunlight on the porch. Temple’s memory of a boy dead now twenty-five years. “I’d hate to think it was the lupus.” “Get her to think of something else,” Mama asked me. “People say she’s going crazy out on that old porch all the time.” Nobody really knows Temple. The women smile about her, say, “Lord God, but she loved that man.”

• From Trash (1988)

  Nobody really knows Temple. The women smile about her, say, “Lord God, but she loved that man.” Everybody says it’s a pity, how she sits, how she doesn’t get on with her life, take another husband, have another child, plant zinnias or baby’s breath and go on. Go on. I sit on Temple’s porch and drink coffee, drink tea when the morning heats up, talk to her of New York and California, of cities she’s never seen. I watch how she laughs, her red hair swinging from side to side, bringing the gray and white to the surface, bringing out the shadows and wrinkles under her eyes. “How can you live in a city? All those pictures like to make my heart hurt. I could smell it—hot concrete, tar, and piss. No green for miles. No color a’tall. Lord, where’s the life in it?” I tell her about the color of night, the lights on the bridges, the hot shine in the women’s eyes, the cold glare of metal moving fast. I tell her about the cold winter light shining on flat stacks of slate, hanging over the New Jersey highways, the cars growling rock music out their vents—how tight the people wear their clothes, how tall the buildings, how sweet the dawn after you do not sleep for days. The silence answers me. I wipe my fingertips on the porch, smell myrtle and crushed onion through the dust of passing trucks, watch Claire cross the yard, how she swings her arms and throws back her head, her white face with the black eyebrows etched as high and fierce as crows across the highway. I have not been this still in years, have not heard my own heart when I was not shadowed by full dark and bourbon, not looked into a face that mirrored mine as Temple’s does—bone to bone, ancient grief to daily rage. “How do you do it?” I ask her. “How do you live this far from the rest of the world?” “What do I need the world for?” Temple laughs at me. “Besides, I got sugar, just like Granny. Came on two years ago, and ’pressure, they say, though I an’t checking. What good is it to know you gonna die sooner than later? It makes me think the world’s too damn close on me anyway. “Claire, honey, pour me another glass of tea.” Claire, the wire child, thin as the poplar on the corner, pale as the birch peeling in the backyard, brings the jug in two hands and smiles at me. The little reddish-brown nodules on her shoulders could be freckles but are not. The flush under Temple’s skin deepens, and her hands start to shake on the glass. She is seeing what I am watching—Claire’s smile and those deadly little warts.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  In that part of the garden to which Simona and Pasquino had retired, there was a splendid and very large clump of sage,3 at the foot of which they settled down to amuse themselves at their leisure. Some time later, having made frequent mention of a picnic they were intending to take, there in the garden, after they had rested from their exertions, Pasquino turned to the huge clump of sage and detached one of its leaves, with which he began to rub his teeth and gums, claiming that sage prevented food from sticking to the teeth after a meal. After rubbing them thus for a while, he returned to the subject of the picnic about which he had been talking earlier. But before he had got very far, a radical change came over his features, and very soon afterwards he lost all power of sight and speech. A few minutes later he was dead, and Simona, having witnessed the whole episode, started crying and shrieking and calling out to Stramba and Lagina. They promptly rushed over to the spot, and when Stramba saw that not only was Pasquino dead, but his face and body were already covered with swellings and dark blotches, he exclaimed: ‘Ah! you foul bitch, you’ve poisoned him!’ He made such a din that he was heard by several of the people living in the neighbourhood of the garden, and they rushed to see what it was all about. On finding this fellow lying there, dead and swollen, and hearing Stramba taking it out on Simona and accusing her of having tricked Pasquino into taking poison, whilst the girl herself, grief-stricken because of the sudden death of her lover, was so obviously at a loss for an explanation, they all concluded that Stramba’s version of what had happened must be correct. She was therefore seized and taken to the palace of the podestà, shedding copious tears all the way. Stramba had by this time been joined by two other friends of Pasquino, who were known as Atticciato and Malagevole, or in other words, Potbelly and Killjoy, and the three of them stirred up so much fuss that a judge was persuaded to interrogate her forthwith about the circumstances of Pasquino’s death. But being unable to conceive how Simona could have practised any deceit, or how she could possibly be guilty, he insisted that she should accompany him to the site of the occurrence, so that, by getting her to show him the manner of it and seeing the dead body for himself, he could form a clearer impression of the matter than he had been able to obtain from her words alone.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The priests, monks, and nuns gradually left the city, and the bishop transferred his see to Annecy, an asylum prepared by the Duke of Savoy. Sister Jeanne de Jussie, one of the nuns of St. Claire, has left us a lively and naive account of their departure to Annecy. "It was a piteous thing," she says, "to see this holy company in such a plight, so overcome with fatigue and grief that several swooned by the way. It was rainy weather, and all were obliged to walk through muddy roads, except four poor invalids who were in a carriage. There were six poor old women who had taken their vows more than sixteen years before. Two of these, who were past sixty-six, and had never seen anything of the world, fainted away repeatedly. They could not bear the wind; and when they saw the cattle in the fields, they took the cows for bears, and the long-wooled sheep for ravaging wolves. They who met them were so overcome with compassion that they could not speak a word. And though our mother, the vicaress, had supplied them all with good shoes to save their feet, the greater number could not walk in them, but hung them at their waists. And so they walked from five o’clock in the morning, when they left Geneva, till near midnight, when they got to St. Julien, which is only a little league off." It took the nuns fifteen hours to go a short league. The next day (Aug. 29) they reached Annecy under the ringing of all the bells of the city, and found rest in the monastery of the Holy Cross. The good sister Jussie saw in the Reformation a just punishment of the unfaithful clergy. "Ah," she said, "the prelates and churchmen did not observe their vows at this time, but squandered dissolutely the ecclesiastical property, keeping women in adultery and lubricity, and awakening the anger of God, which brought divine judgment on them."348

• From Trash (1988)

  I am my mama’s daughter, her shadow on the earth, the blood thinned down a little so that I am not as powerful as she, as immune to want and desire. I am not a mountain or a cave, a force of nature or a power on the earth, but I have her talent for not seeing what I cannot stand to face. I make sure that I do not want what I do not think I can have, and I keep clearly in mind what it is I cannot have. I roll in the night all the stories I never told her, cannot tell her still—her voice in my brain echoing love and despair and grief and rage. When, in the night, she hears me call her name, it is not really me she hears, it is the me I constructed for her—the one who does not need her too much, the one whose heart is not too tender, whose insides are iron and silver, whose dreams are cold ice and slate—who needs nothing, nothing. I keep in mind the image of a closed door, Mama weeping on the other side. She could not rescue me. I cannot rescue her. Sometimes I cannot even reach across the wall that separates us. On my stepfather’s birthday I make coffee and bake bread pudding with bourbon sauce. I invite friends over, tell outrageous stories, and use horrible words. I scratch my scars and hug my lover, thinking about Mama twelve states away. My accent comes back and my weight settles down lower, until the ache in my spine is steady and hot. I remember Mama sitting at the kitchen table in the early morning, tears in her eyes, lying to me and my sister, promising us that the time would come when she would leave him—that as soon as we were older, as soon as there was a little more money put by and things were a little easier—she would go. I think about her sitting there now, waiting for him to wake up and want his coffee, for the day to start moving around her, things to get so busy she won’t have to think. Sometimes, I hate my mama. Sometimes, I hate myself. I see myself in her, and her in me. I see us too clearly sometimes, all the little betrayals that cannot be forgotten or changed. When Mama calls, I wait a little before speaking. “Mama,” I say, “I knew you would call.” Gospel Song

• From Trash (1988)

  I sipped my beer and watched my aunt’s unchanging face. Very slowly she swung the pool cue up and down, not quite touching the table. After a moment she stepped in again and leaned half her weight on the table. The five ball became a bird murdered in flight, dropping suddenly into the far right pocket. Aunt Alma laughed out loud, delighted. “Never lost it,” she crowed. “Four years in the roadhouse with that table set up in the back. Every one of them sons of mine thought he was going to make money on it. Lord, those boys! Never made a cent.” She swallowed the rest of her glass of water. “But me,” she wiped the sweat away again. “I never would have done it for money. I just loved it. Never went home without playing myself three or four games. Sometimes I’d set Annie up on the side and we’d pretend we were playing. I’d tell her when I was taking her shots. And she’d shout when I’d sink ’em. I let her win most every time.” She stopped, put both hands on the table, and closed her eyes. “ ’Course, just after we lost her, we lost the roadhouse.” She shook her head, eyes still closed. “Never did have anything fine that I didn’t lose.” The room was still, dust glinted in the sunlight past her ears. She opened her eyes and looked directly at me. “I don’t care,” she began slowly, softly. “I don’t care if you’re queer or not. I don’t care if you take puppy dogs to bed, for that matter, but your mother was all my heart for twenty years when nobody else cared what happened to me. She stood by me. I’ve stood by her and I always thought to do the same for you and yours. But she’s sitting there, did you know that? She’s sitting there like nothing’s left of her life, like . . . like she hates her life and won’t say shit to nobody about it. She wouldn’t tell me. She won’t tell me what it is, what has happened.” I sat the can down on the stool, closed my own eyes, and dropped my head. I didn’t want to see her. I didn’t want her to be there. I wanted her to go away, disappear out of my life the way I’d run out of hers. Go away, old woman. Leave me alone. Don’t talk to me. Don’t tell me your stories. I an’t a baby in a basket, and I can’t lie still for it.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  For a long time now, the fair lady had been a plaything in the hands of Fortune, but the moment was approaching when her trials would be over. When she espied Antigono, she recalled having seen him in Alexandria, where he once occupied a position of some importance in her father’s service. Knowing that her merchant was away, and being suddenly filled with the hope that there might be some possibility of returning once more to her regal status with the help of this man’s advice, she sent for him at the earliest opportunity. When he called upon her, she shyly asked whether she was right in thinking him to be Antigono of Famagusta. Antigono said that he was, adding: ‘I have an idea, ma’am, that I have seen you before, but I cannot for the life of me remember where. Pray be good enough, therefore, if you have no objection, to remind me who you are.’ On hearing that this was indeed the man she had assumed him to be, the lady burst into tears and threw her arms round his neck, and presently she asked her highly astonished visitor whether he had ever seen her in Alexandria. No sooner had she put the question than Antigono recognized her as the Sultan’s daughter Alatiel, whom everybody believed to be drowned at sea, and he prepared to make her the ceremonial bow that was her due. But she would not allow this and asked him instead to come and sit down with her for a while. Complying, Antigono asked her in reverential tones how, when and whence she had come to Cyprus, and told her that the whole Egyptian nation had been convinced, for many years, that she had been drowned at sea. ‘I wish to goodness they were right,’ said the lady, ‘and I think my father would share my opinion if he were ever to discover the sort of life I have led.’ And so saying, she started crying prodigiously all over again, whereupon Antigono said to her: ‘My lady, it is too soon for you to go upsetting yourself like this. Tell me about your misfortunes, if you like, and about the life you have been living. Possibly we shall find that the point has been reached where we shall be able, with God’s help, to devise some happy outcome to your dilemma.’