MayMaw

Maymaw, when she got to be Maymaw around the time my older brother was born, took to traipsing about her yard with a sharp set of pruning shears, snipping away at the honeysuckle and the Cherokee Rose blossoms that grew wild along the side of her green-shingled house; cultivating them. That was Leroy’s word. Cultivate. Leroy had studied horticulture at Alabama State before he’d come by this way to look at what he called the “prehistoric melding pot of the swamp” and before he’d met my momma and before he’d become my stepdad—but probably not before he became an ass-muncher—so he used words like “cultivate” where the rest of us all just said “tame” or “pinch back” or “rip off the fucking heads so’s they don’t rot the wood siding.” We’d rather treat the cause than the symptom. Preventative medicine, Momma called it, even though it weren’t so much preventing as masking. But that’s why until I was ten I got a nightly dose of liver and castor oil. We tried to tame our bodies the same way Maymaw tried to tame those damn wild vines.

We lived a little ways north of her, but summer days I could cut through the backyards, kicking up the dandelion heads and sending Mrs. Bryar’s hounds into a rage as I bee-lined through her yard. Momma would send me off with those huge skeins of acrylic yarn she’d pick up at the Wal-Mart, and Maymaw would use them to crochet those zigzagging afghans after her eyes got too blurry and her fingers got too frail for the quilting. Maymaw’d fix me up a PB and banana sandwich and get out her hook and tune the television to her stories, and I’d go out in the yard and search out the quartz arrowheads stuck there between the muddling of white sand and red clay.

Leroy’d always come looking for me just before sundown saying that Momma had sent him to get me in before dark. But I knew it was just him trying to exert his newfound ownership over me by making me comply to his Rules for How a Proper Household is Run, or else hoping for a glimpse of Sue Ellen out watering her garden in the last glints of the sun’s rays through the Cypress. Leroy’d been the one to tell her it was best to water her plants either early on in the morning or at dusk so the moisture wouldn’t evaporate right out of the soil, so when he caught sight of her following his directive he got a double boner over her doing what he said and her in her tank top with the little spray of droplets that backwashed up from her hose glistening on her tanned skin. For her part though, Sue Ellen went with hosing down her plants in the evenings even though she was born here and raised here and anyone who was worth their salt ‘round these parts knew that the pre-dawn moments were key so the excess water had time to evaporate during the sun-drenched day hours and root-rot wouldn’t get the chance to set in because she knew Leroy’d more than likely pop by in the evening time, and she liked the attention.

A few months or so back I’d wandered back inside to wash the dirt out of the crevices on the two arrowheads I’d dug out when Leroy showed up, so he took the opportunity to push around through the bushes and vines that separated Maymaw’s yard from Sue Ellen’s, angling to get a better view of Sue Ellen’s tatas. Maymaw’s stories were long over and the six o’clock newscast had just ended, so she’d grabbed her shears and gone out to do her business, snipping blindly at the hazy shades of green and tan and grey that encircled her yard. She’d nearly taken out Leroy’s pinky, he’d been so wrapped up in the girl next door and had barely even noticed her approaching out of his periphery and pulled his hand away, yelping in an awkward and knee-slappingly funny way, and liked to give Maymaw a heart attack or triggered in her another stroke like the one that’d blurred up her vision. After that, Leroy was a lot more cautious when traipsing about the bushes, but it never really did stop him from doing it. Not until later.

During our Georgia history lesson for Social Studies, the teacher Mr. Cantrell let us each do a presentation for extra credit, and seeing as how I’d bombed the bit on the Bill of Rights earlier in the school year, I brought in my collection of arrowheads to show the class and figured I’d talk a little bit about the Indians who used to live in the swamp before we got here and took the land from them, making them walk away from their homes, eyes full of tears until they saw the casinos we were giving them and realized how much money they’d be raking in. Mr. Cantrell told me I should call them “Native Americans” and not “Indians,” and Jessie Richards who’d gone up to Toronto with his family that last summer and thought he was cultured now in a way the rest of us backwoods, bog-born folk weren’t insisted that even “Native American” was derogatory and informed us all instead that “First Nations People” would be the more appropriate terminology. Whatever. We got the land in the end, and we made it livable. They left behind their arrowheads and black hair and about one sixteenth of everybody’s blood in the county, but they didn’t leave behind any My Name Is… stickers so, I said, all of us could call them whatever we reckoned fit the best. Besides, way I saw it, “Indian” was the shortest and using that term gave me more time for the crux of my presentation: the seven fully-intact and eight more partial arrowheads I’d dug up myself from the yards around the town. Lance Smithson cried foul and tried to get me in trouble. He’d almost gotten expelled from school once for bringing in one of his daddy’s Playboys and neither me nor Jimmy Dicks—poor kid, but the ribbing had died down mostly by the eighth grade—had come clean about looking at it with him so Lance was searching for a means to get back at us and figured me bringing a set of weapons to school was a good enough way. The assistant principal had just laughed it off, guffawing over the notion that rocks would ever be considered weapons in our civilized day and age, but said that for legal reasons, due to the complaint, he still had to call my parents in and send me home for the day. Things always get messy when legal reasons or permanent records get involved. Neither can ever account for the full story. Momma couldn’t get out of her shift at the grocery store—they’d made her assistant manager in charge of produce—so Leroy was the one who showed up to collect me.

I saddled up into his pick-up, my quartz weapons at rest in a box on my lap. Leroy told me again about how he was always telling me I was wasting my time with digging up those old things and that I ought to be paying more attention to the living matter all around us and why didn’t I ever listen to him. For instance, he was droning on, did I know that the whole swamp was only a couple of thousand years old? Older than Jesus, true, but not nearly ancient by standards of the world—depending on whose clock you go by at any rate—and that the fascinating thing about that prehistoric melding pot was that, genetically speaking, it was like the inhabitants, plant and animal alike, had somehow reverted to their most base and wildest form. That somehow they’d overcome the taming of time and sprung up and out and majestic. He always did sound like a chode when he went on about natural processes. We stopped for lunch at the DQ, and he gave me the option of either going back out to the Park with him to help him finish cataloguing some samples or spending the afternoon at Maymaw’s ‘til he could swing by and pick me up.

I told Maymaw it was just me as the screen door bounced hard on the frame behind me. Following the sound of her stories coming loudly from the television, I found her spread-eagle on the armchair she had in the living room, a mostly drained bottle of bourbon or scotch or some other caramely liquor knocked over by her feet. Maymaw didn’t drink, except for when she was thinking about Pawpaw, so I was beginning to rethink my decision to come here instead of the swamp. All of the sudden Maymaw’s eyes popped open and she looked at me in terror, saying “Mitchell! What the hell are you doing here? Danny’s gonna be home any minute!”

Momma had tried to convince us that Mitchell, whose name showed up right after Maymaw suffered her stroke, was some character from one of the soap operas who got soiled up in her brain with her real memories, but I was convinced that Maymaw’d had some torrid affair back when she was younger, especially since she was always worried about Danny—which is my name and I’d been named for my grandpa—showing back up to scold her tarty ways or join in or whatever it was that women past menopause thought about when sex was still trying to fight its way into the brain and the loins, like Leroy’s swamp, attempting to regain their territory. Like those vines that keep on coming back or those “wild oats” that men are always trying to sow.

I poured her up a cup of water from the tap and set it up on the lamp table next to her for when she woke up again. I put the cork back in the bottle and put the bottle on the kitchen counter, then went back and covered up her body with one of her afghans, even though it was itchy, and awkwardly, for some strange reason or another, checked her pulse as I tucked the blanket around her neck. She’d been talking a few minutes before, but at her age, you just never know. She was still ticking so I left her be and sat down to watch some TV even though the networks don’t make any advertising dollars off of kids stuck home from school so I knew there wouldn’t be anything worth watching bumbling through the airwaves.

I thought I heard the whine of Leroy’s truck rounding the bend in the road about an hour later, but so many of the pick-ups around here had that mixture of gravel-dented mufflers and humidity-strained belts so it really could have been anybody. It woke Maymaw up though. She was mostly sobered, the slight slur in her speech more the product of her age and false teeth than the whiskey or the stroke. She mumbled something about her good-fer-nuthin’ son-in-law and how he was always swinging ‘round these parts but never visiting her. She asked me to check her mailbox for her and then went on talking to Mitchell who wasn’t there so I put the cup of water in her hands and slipped out to gather the junk mail for her. Momma’d had all her bills and official mailings rerouted to our place about a year and a half ago so as to make sure none of the important stuff got lost or misplaced. But Maymaw still liked to sort through the grocery store fliers and the Have-You-Seen-This-Child messages from the post office, imagining sometimes that she’d discovered a secret love letter that she had to keep hidden. Once I found at least twenty random post cards and Pennysavers stuffed under her armchair cushion. But it made her happy.

When I got out to her postbox, I caught glimpse of Leroy’s truck parked a bit up the street, like he was trying to hide it behind the kudzu that had taken over a little ways down. He weren’t inside the cab and he weren’t at Maymaw’s, so I started off toward where he’d parked to see if maybe he’d found some rare species of flower in the ditch or if he’d finally keeled over and we could all get back to normal. He wasn’t there. I started back toward Maymaw’s when I noticed that Sue Ellen hadn’t closed up her blinds and was walking around with her milky breasts bouncing better than I’d even imagined the centerfold in Lance’s magazine’s breasts bouncing, and then they were suddenly cupped over and I’d recognize Leroy’s stubby fingers anywhere.

I marched back over to Maymaw’s and found her standing taut against her screen door, her eyes trained on the brush that separated her property from her neighbor’s. She told me something to the effect of it looking like Mitchell’d done off and found him some new floozy. Then the rage melted out of her eyes and she offered to make me a PB and banana sandwich while I played in the yard.

I was out back still as the sun started setting and Sue Ellen came out her back door and started watering her garden down. I pretended not to be paying attention, and sure enough Leroy slipped out the front of her house and started to traipse his way over to fetch me. The lazy son of a bitch didn’t even bother to bring his truck closer or walk up to the road so it’d be less obvious he’d been catting around. He gave a little wave to Sue Ellen and started making his way through the brush between the yards, his eyes trained so tight on the girl’s body that he didn’t even notice Maymaw out there taking her shears to all the vines and weeds like they were growing faster than she was able to snip. Then came Leroy’s scream. It was horrifying. Nothing like those yells and whimpers that were all throughout the horror flicks all my buddies and I watched together last Halloween. It was really gurgley and solid and real and falsetto. All of it at once. My flight instinct started to kick in, but I fought it and ran instead around the side of the house to find Maymaw’s back to me and her shears bloody at her side and Leroy standing in front of her missing his thumb and crying. Not even looking for his thumb. Just standing there crying.

I like to think that Maymaw was trying to tell Leroy that he was an animal by removing his digit. That somehow she was commenting on opposable thumbs separating us from the wild and that Leroy had lost his ‘cause he was no better than a hound out feeling for a bitch. I like to think that if it’d been out, Maymaw’d have gone straight for his dick and snipped that out of the way too. That’s how we were around here. Treating the cause and not the symptom. That’s how we made things work.

Leroy and my momma divorced after that and he hightailed it back to Mobile or Huntsville or some other hick town in Alabama. They never did put his thumb back on for him because when the paramedics found it, it was too caked in dirt and had long since gone bad. Maymaw never got charged with assault or nothing because of her stroke and her drinking and how Leroy didn’t want the news about him stooping Sue Ellen to get out so everyone just went along with it being an accident. Leroy took the blame saying he shouldn’t have tried to take a short cut on through the trees. Leroy took the blame and then divorced Momma and then hightailed it out of town. Looking for some other family who didn’t mind a thumb-less jackass of a stepfather to try to cultivate them. I lost track of him after that. I had no desire to track him after that. But that’s not really the point, where he ended up.

The point is that we’re always trying to tame something, to stave off nature, to cultivate ourselves, but in the end, the wild always finds its way back in. We always succumb. Maymaw was probably one of the strongest women I ever knew, and no matter how many vines she clipped or papers she stashed or highballs she took, nature always worked its way back in. It seems only right then for us to stay here and watch them as they lower the coffin down. To not let them send us away like they like to do now; to make us eat sugar cookies and drink fruit punch in the church mess hall while they do the actual burying. We should, all of us, stand here and watch as they place her in the earth. That way we know when the seed was planted. That way we’re all not surprised when the cycle starts on over and the wild starts trying to claim us all again.