The bed the old woman lies in has grown too large for her, like the hand-me-down Mother Hubbards she'd worn as a small child. Strange, always so delicate and yet she's almost outlasted them all: family, friends, and foes, while never surrendering her family's heritage.
"Gran'maw? Gran'maw? Zoë, I don't think she can hear me anymore."
"Oh, she can hear you all right! Surely, Angéla, you know the hearing's the last thing to go. Even if she is comatose-and one hundred and six today! Makes you wonder if the 'miracle of modern medicine' isn't some kind of Cosmic irony."
"Quit complaining. She can't hold on forever. When's the last time she took more than a bite of food, or a sip of water. And with her old veins, it's small wonder the IV's don't hold! Which since Home Health quit coming...."
"God, but she's shrunk! Reminds me of one of those headhunter skull souvenirs you can get supposedly from deep in some South American jungle."
"Or a Voodoo gris-gris. Can you imagine finding that on your doorstep some 'dark and blowing' night?"
Their uneasy laughter forces the old woman to consciousness, and she recognizes their voices even before she's fully aware of her surroundings.
It's like that too much lately. This inability to place herself coupled with a glass-edged awareness of others.
She wills her eyes to open, and their lids advance upwards in unsteady jerks like an old roller shade that must be pulled and coaxed to rise. The room is filled with a citron-tinged grey light, and she knows that her laser-procedured, implant lens replacement sight is playing distorted tricks on her again, masking time's identity in a watery reflection of itself, just like the hardened arteries in her brain sometimes keep even the memory of her own identity from her.
But briefly she realizes who the voices are and what they want: Her granddaughters: Zoë, the strong one, and Angéla, the sweeter one-children of her youngest daughter, her 'ti chere bébé.' And they want her to hurry and be done with her dying, so they can get back to their living.
Why else did they come? Where are the others? She's forgotten. So there it is. They are the two the family designated to push her over and to carry the family forward into the future.
"Maw-maw. Happy Birthday, Maw-maw. Come on, wake up now. And we'll give you your bath. And you've got a cake and candles waiting."
The old woman mumbles her request. "I want my presents first. Like always."
"What? Gran'maw, I can't understand you."
"Leave it alone, Ange. Don't even bother trying. She's gone over the rainbow again."
Thought trains speed through the old woman's brain, tossing off memories here and there like bundles of newspapers.
'Morning, Enfant. Bonne fête. Lookee here what we all done brought you.' Black Marcelline, pure in blood as well as heart, who has had the care of her since she was born, brings a cornshuck doll and a corncob and cane bubble pipe.
John Henry brings a hollow reed pea shooter and a paper sack of chinaberries to blow at the mockingbird who swoops down on her long-haired yellow cat and steals soft bits of fur to line the nest high up on the hackberry tree.
Auguste Alanson Arceneaux has made her a bow and three arrows from the hickory trees in the dense woods behind the house. The feathers-silver, dark gray, and white, of her cat's enemy-balance the arrows.
Her sister, Adèle, has a small white box filled with balls of sweet gum sap; better than anything to chew. Better than the beeswax off Maman's jelly jars, better than the sugary fibers of the first cane stalks cut from the field across the road.
All the way from New Orleans, her marrain and namesake sends her tiny gold hoop earrings and a matching slender gold crucifix hung from a golden chain.
Her maman (with love but small imagination) presents her with a blue and green enamel and pewter buttonhook, and tray to match.
Her papa's surprise is best: A shoebox, one end green with clumps of wood sorrel; the other brown with a nest of Spanish moss and a huddled baby swamp rabbit, its glittering eyes circled in pale pink-cinnamon. 'Be kind to it, Chère 'Ti Fille. An owl got her mother. Almost got her, too.'
A sweet fragrance to water your mouth floats up from the kitchen. Maman's baked a chocolate cake frosted with chocolate icing, delicately flavored with mint from the mint bed next to the kitchen door. And because it's her birthday, she gets to lick the paddle of the ice cream churn.
"Zoë, wipe her chin. She's drooling again."
"God, I hate old people's slobber!"
"I really think we should call the doctor."
"Whatever for? He said it's only a matter of time, and just to keep her as comfortable as possible.
"Which is more than we are. Comfortable. This waiting sure makes the time drag! No TV. No radio even if there was a radio station worth listening to. And I can't even hook my laptop to the Web on that antiquated local phone company line that doesn't know yet that more than phones can go on a telephone line!"
"What do you expect? The twenty-first century to reach Île Prairie? That would be a sacrilege of history! Although, to be fair, it's not just here in this house. It's the whole area. They all live in the past."
Then silence that roars until the old woman's ears are ready to explode, sucking her deep down to the debris of memories at the center of its whirlwind. Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.
The old woman is a child again. It's summer, and since she's the youngest, her older siblings (thanks to her Maman's insistence on it) think playing with her is a chore and a duty. So they ignore her, leaving her alone as much as possible to entertain herself.
She doesn't mind. She has her small creole pony and her imagination for company. Forbidden to ride into the gloomy, watery woods north of the house, where, the grown-ups tell her, loup-garous and the mysterious swamp light feu follets wait to devour her, she and her pony roam Île Prairie from the front fence to the side hedges of thorny bois d'arc to the bayou in the rear. She establishes a strong bond with the house and land where she will spend the rest of her life.
At the pecan orchard she dismounts her pony and holding her arms in a wide V over her head, she pirouettes through the pecan orchard, lifting her face to watch the green leaves as they join her in her dance.
Other times she is Heroine, doing noble and dangerous deeds. As Jeanne d'Arc, she leads the ducks in a charge through the chicken yard.
She mountain climbs the lowest spreading limbs of the huge, ancient oak on the bank of the bayou, and letting no obstacle defeat her, in triumph plants on its crest her grandpère's old, bullet-torn and bloody, 18th Louisiana regimental flag from Shiloh that she's found in among the treasure stores in the vast attic.
One July day, while the rest of the children go to town with Maman for the seamstress to fit their school clothes, she is left behind. As consolation, Marcelline fixes her a bowl of peeled fresh figs in rich cream, newly skimmed. She sits back-propped against the old oak, dreamily eating them.
Idly, she watches a redbird fly to a cottonwood tree, and her attention is caught by a thin haze of smoke rising from the barn. Suddenly it explodes into an orange-red plume of flame. Leaping up, she runs toward the house. Her limited English forgotten in her excited fright, she screams for Marcelline.
'Marcelline! Flammes! Viens! Flammes! Vite, vite! Marcelline! Marcelline!'
There's no answer. In the yard, live coal embers dropped by the wind smolder in the dry grass. She tries to stomp them out with her bare feet. Sobbing from pain and frustration, she prays frantically for help.
As in the miracles she's heard the priest talk about, she hears Marcelline calling her, and she sees men lined up in a bucket brigade, until at last the volunteer firemen arrive with the horse-drawn pumper, followed closely by her parents, the other children, and half the town.
Marcelline tells everyone who will listen, 'She done saved the house! Ma chère enfant done saved her home. All by her own babyself, with her own baby feets!'
Even now, one hundred and two years later, the scars still criss-cross the soles of her feet as testimony to her genuinely heroic deed...
"She's somewhere else again. Do you think life really flashes by you when you die?"
"Well, God knows, Angéla, I'm certainly not in any hurry to find out!"
"I wonder what it's like-to have lived in one place all your life? Even a life a lot shorter than her's been. To have slept in the same bed almost every night of your life?"
"Not only that, can you imagine having all your babies in that bed? And she had all eight of them right here in this room!"
"Or making babies-" A giggle. "You'd sure have to search to find each other...What are you doing, Zoë?"
The old woman suddenly smells the faint fragrance of vertivert sachet that tells her the secret drawer behind the apron of her armoire has been found and opened.
"Just looking over this armoire. I thought that it might have one of these hidden drawers."
"Well, close it. If it's hidden, it must be private."
"What? Private now, and our business a few hours from now?"
"Maybe. But she's not dead yet, so leave her privacy, private."
"Yeah. To go with all the dignity that's left to her."
"What's wrong with you? Now what've you found?"
"Nothing much. It's so faded it's hard to tell, but it looks like a magazine article. 'A Girl's Preparation for Marriage,' from 1908! A year before they married. Now that should be a hoot!
"Listen, it says, as near as I can tell, that letting a boy hold your hand was to 'give him the engagement privilege.'"
"It might not hurt if we had some of that innocence back."
"It's not all 'innocence.' Listen to what else it says: A young girl should be taught that for Love to come to her is her fate...because with Love comes the keys to a Paradise she can't enter without Love's aid.'
"And it goes on that 'girls should know the Big, Simple Truths of Life.' The truths of sex-I swear it says this, in 1908!- the 'sacred physical facts' should be known as simply and directly as any of the other big, simple facts of life, since Love's 'crown and citadel' is the human body.
"Humm-who'd of thought that old moss mattress and rope springs could ever have witnessed such lessons being taught? I always thought back then all a woman did was 'submit' anyway."
Her granddaughters' words focus the crystalline lens of her memory as easily as the diamond in its high prong setting on her wide gold wedding band prisms light. Love. Louis. Their wedding night. The pale ivory-pink bisque doll no longer lies next to her pillow. Gone, too, is the blue homespun, cottonade counterpane and pillow spread embroidered with daises. In their place on the high-testered Mallard bed are matching covers of fine linen and crocheted lace insertings, while real orange blossoms have been tacked to the mosquito baire to decorate and perfume the bridal bed.
She trembles in her long white chemise de nuit of Grandmother Swiss and pearl buttons that cascade down the front and close the Cluny Lace edged cuffs of the long sleeves and the high ruffled neck. Her virginity briefly forty-six buttons secure.
A final glass of wine; the bed is turned down; the maid leaves.
She loves Louis. And he is gentle in his urgency. And her fears, like the buttons, are soon no longer in the way.
Guided by Louis, she discovers the wonder and excitement in touching and being touched; the beauty and power in discovering his, and her own, body; and the rapture of a love sacred in Le Bon Dieu's sight.
They are feelings she'll keep beyond death. The wonder of completion as they become truly one flesh, forever joined.
Aroused by the memory, her brain struggles to overcome its lethargy...Was that yesterday? Or last year? Non, longer than that. When? It's important. She has to remember. Today doesn't matter too much. But yesterday-you know yesterday. Yesterday holds living and breathing, love and happiness; today holds only decay. They thought she was crazy, always remembering the past, even to keeping the few strands of frayed rope in her locket. The rope that her papa had used to pull Louis' new 1907 Oldsmobile from the mud road in front of Île Prairie. And that had pulled her and Louis' lives toward each other.
Her hands, their veins ridged and gnarled like the roots of an ancient wisteria vine, begin to caterpillar their way across the crocheted coverlet, seeking yesterday.
"She's moving. Don't you think we should call the priest while she's still just semi-comatose."
"Not yet. Besides which, if you ask me, I think asking Father to come is a lot of trouble all for nothing. Anyway, it looks like rain, and I'd hate for him to have to come here in a downpour. Especially if that awful, rutty road gets muddied up. You'd thinks by now some Police Jury would've paved it. I guess there's nothing or nobody important enough way out here."
"Which brings up a question. What do you think's the best thing to do with this house and all her stuff when it comes to that?"
"I guess we'll all agree just to sell it. Shouldn't be any problem over that with the others. Surely none of us wants to be stuck living way out here a million miles!-and years-from nowhere."
"But it's falling down. The plumbing alone is so old I'd almost rather use the privy! And no lights but those old wires Edison, himself, could've strung through the window. Sell it? Who'd be crazy enough to buy it, I'd like to know."
"I've already made a few inquiries. There's a lot of land. Almost a mile of natural levee bayou frontage. Some smart developer won't let that pass. Plus the woods have never been timbered and that alone is worth a small fortune. Plus Île Prairie's close enough to the city for some tradition-bound buyer with more money than sense to buy it and remodel it. Simply because like her, it's old."
"What do you say, we start right now to make a list of everything we want to keep? Then find out where we can get the best prices for the rest."
The old woman smiles bitterly as she pictures them, black-veiled and tearful, going through the drawers of the chifforobe, the armoire, the clothes-press, and palming pieces of her possessions that they don't want to share with the others.
"Maw-Maw, are you in pain?"
The concern tells her she hasn't smiled, but grimaced. She feels the anxious glance of Angéla, the sensitive one.
"Maybe we shouldn't talk about all this in front of her. Seems awfully callous."
"Why ever not, Ange? Look at her. She probably can't understand half of what we're saying. Anyway, face it. She was always a sharp old lady, and she'd be the first to tell you, 'You can't take it with you.' We just have to be practical."
"And while we're at it, we may as well think about burying her. I'd like to do it as quickly as possible. Maybe the same day, if it can be managed. No one will be here but us. It's too far, and she's been sick for so long, who remembers her anymore?
"Except those poor put-upon ladies of St. Lucy's Altar Society who've been coming to check on her-and count the silver to make sure the sitters haven't stolen any of it!-ever since she broke her hip and started going downhill so fast.
"And my job won't wait forever. And I'm sure your husband and kids are more than ready for you to come home."
Their words buzz through the old woman's mind like flies through the open window, and one of them is caught in the spider's web being spun by her brain. 'Home. Save our home! Who whispers? Is it you, Maman? Papa? I must get up! They must be stopped! I hear pounding. Nails being pounded in the fresh sawed-board smell of the woods. My coffin. Non, it's thunder.'
"Sounds like it's going to be a real storm. I just hope the roof doesn't leak, or we'll have to sell it on a clear day."
"It won't matter too much. The new owners will have to strip it down to the bones and start over anyway."
'There will be no new owners! Non! Our home will never go to strangers! Papa's books and private papers. Maman's spinet. My own grandparents' furniture, clocks, crystal, candelabras, mirrors, memories, handled by strangers! All these years I never lost hope-faith-nothing was so important I couldn't manage it without selling my family's things! How sharper than a serpent's tooth is it, to have a thankless child. Please, Lord. Loving Lord. Merciful Lord. Faith of our fathers, Holy Faith....
'Get out! Get out!' In quick gasps she inhales her own carbon dioxide instead of oxygen. 'Dizzy. More pounding. Louder this time. My own heart.'
The rain blows in on a gust of wind that billows the faded lace curtains.
"Quick. Tell Ella Mae to send for Father before the weather gets any worse. She just can't last much longer. Not breathing like that."
The old woman knows when they spread the old white linen runner, embroidered long ago by kerosene lamp, over the marble top of the bedside table. Then the stoppered cut-glass cruet of holy water, the Crucifix, oils and cotton, tapers and a penny box of matches, in preparation for the Anointing of the Sick.
Several rapid cracks of thundered lightning split the sky as she lifts from her body on the bed. He has come to lead her, unafraid, to the Light ahead.
Aloud she whispers, 'Wait. Please let me return for one more thing. Then I'll be ready to go with You.'
They are all downstairs waiting for the doctor and hearse, before her last remaining strength struggles to strike the match, and her last breath wavers the tiny flame. 'It's time for my party. I'll light my birthday candles and I won't blow them out. Not yet. They'll be so pretty. That's my wish. To let my candles burn awhile before we cut the cake.'
A sudden, searing lightning flash like a blaze of Glory travels from Heaven to the Earth, while thunder rolls away like a chariot.
The hastily printed, black-bordered death announcement, nailed to the trunk of the primeval oak by the bayou, fades in the rain as the cortege turns in at the rusted iron gate in the graveyard fence. A young girl, in a hand-me-down Mother Hubbard too large for her, smiles at bouquets of butterflies that dot the yucca bushes, and she whistles at the purple martins peering out curiously from their gourd houses hung in the trees.
At sunset, she joins in as a wood thrush sings in the pecan orchard near the charred chimneys and burned boards of her house, where even yet, behind a hastily erected, mud-spattered, "Land For Sale" sign, an occasional wisp of smoke rises and breaks into dust motes to reflect, like the rain drops, the last rays of the sun slanting through the clouds.