Handful
Mauma couldn’t sleep. She was up fussing round the cellar room like usual.
She didn’t know the meaning of the words quiet as a mouse.
I was laying in the straw bed we’d always slept in, wondering what was
on her mind this time. I’d stopped sleeping on the floor outside Sarah’s
room a long time back, just decided it on my own, and nobody said a word
about it, not even missus. During those years, her meanness was hit and
miss.
Mauma dragged the chair over to the high-up window so she could
crane her neck and see a piece of sky beyond the wall. I watched how she
sat there and studied it.
Most of her waking nights, she would light the lamp and sew her story
quilt. She’d been working on those quilt squares bits at a time for more than
two years. “If there a fire and I ain’t here, that’s what you get,” she’d say.
“You save the squares cause they pieces of me same like the meat on my
bones.”
I pestered her all the time wanting to see the squares she’d finished, but
she held firm. Mauma loved a good surprise. She wanted to unveil her quilt
like they did marble statues. She had put her history on a quilt like the Fon
people, and she meant to show it all at once, not piecemeal.
The day before, she’d told me, “You wait. I’m ’bout ready to roll down
the frame and start quilting it all together.”
She kept the squares locked in a wood trunk she’d dragged from the
storeroom in the basement. The trunk had a bad, musty smell to it. Inside
we’d found mold, dead moth-eggs, and a little key. She cleaned the trunk
with linseed oil, then locked the squares inside, wrapped in muslin. I
guessed she locked our freedom money in there too, cause right after that
the bills disappeared from the gunny sack.
Last time I’d counted, she’d saved up four hundred dollars even.
Laying in bed now, I did the numbering in my head—we needed six
hundred fifty more dollars to buy the both of us.
I broke the quiet. “Is this how you gonna be all night—sit in the dark
and stare up at a hole in the wall?”
“It’s something to do. Go on back to sleep.”
Go back to sleep—that was a lot of useless.
“Where do you keep the key to the chest?”
“Is that how you gon be? Lay there figurin’ how to peek at my quilt?
The key hid on the back of nowhere.”
I let it be, and my mind drifted off to Sarah.
I didn’t care for this Mr. Williams. The only thing he’d ever said to me
was, “Remove yourself hastily.” I’d been building a fire in the drawing
room so the man could get himself warm, and that’s what he had to say,
Remove yourself hastily.
I couldn’t see Sarah married to him any more than I could see myself
married to Goodis. He still trailed after me, wanting you know what.
Mauma said, tell him, go jump in the lake.
Yesterday, Sarah had asked, “When I marry, would you come with me
to live?”
“Leave mauma?”
Real quick, she’d said, “Oh, you don’t have to . . . I just thought . . .
Well, I’ll miss you.”
Even though we didn’t have that much to say to each other anymore, I
hated to think about us parting. “I reckon I’ll miss you, too,” I told her.
Cross the room, mauma said, “How old you reckon I is?” She never did
know her age for sure, didn’t have a record. “Seems I had you when I’m
’bout the same old as you now, and you nineteen. What that make me?”
I counted it in my head. “You’re thirty-eight.”
“That ain’t too old,” she said.
We stayed like that a while, mauma staring at the window, mulling over
her age, and me laying in the bed wide awake now, when she cried out,
“Look, Handful! Look a here!” She leapt to her feet, bouncing on her knees.
“There go ’nother one!”
I bolted from the bed.
“The stars,” she said. “They falling just like they done for your grannymauma. Come on. Hurry.”
We yanked on our shoes and sack coats, snatched up an old quilt, and
were out the door, mauma tearing cross the work yard, me two steps behind.
We spread the quilt on the ground out in the open behind the spirit tree
and lay down on top of it. When I looked up, the night opened and the stars
poured down.
Each time a star streaked by, mauma laughed low in her throat.
When the stars stopped falling and the sky went still, I saw her hands
rub the little mound of her belly.
And I knew then what it was she wasn’t too old for.
