Gravity

From Deadhaus

1. those were rose-colored times

The stifling heat and humidity made the little girl's wispy brown hair stick to her neck with sweat. Mommy's bug didn't like it either. The little Volkswagen puttered along the gravel parish roads, coughing blue exhaust in its wake. There wasn't any air conditioning (the compressor was broken), so Mommy had rolled down all the windows to make sure Cherice wouldn't suffocate from the heat.

The four-year old squirmed restlessly, bored - it was a long drive from Nachitoches all the way down to Terrebonne parish, and she was hungry again even though they'd stopped at the Hardee's in Lafayette just an hour ago - and kept straining to look out her window at the wetlands and the enormous cypress trees growing in the middle of the standing water. Their boughs were heavy with Spanish moss, the curly grey tendrils drifting lazily in the damp, warm breeze.

It stank outside, like someone's really nasty farts. She wrinkled her nose.

"We're almost to your mamere's house, baby," her mother said, patting Cherice's sweat-sticky leg. "That was Chauvin where we turned off."

Cherice ignored her and strained to look out the window some more.

2. warm like fresh cotton

Her paternal grandmother's house was a rambling old bungalow of wood and peeling paint, weathered from the elements and the passing of time. It wasn't a shack like some of the tiny houses she'd seen passing on the parish road, but it wasn't pretty either. It used to belong to a rich man in olden times, Mamere said, until the man lost all his money and killed himself. She didn't say "killed," Mommy stopped her and said "K-I-L-L-E-D" instead, like Cherice wouldn't know what she meant if they spelled the word.

Mamere called her "pischouette," a word Cherice didn't know. Mommy said it was French, which surprised her because Mommy only spoke English around her. She was playing with the little toy car that came in her Hardee's meal so she didn't see the reproachful look that her grandmother shot in Mommy's direction.

Mamere said she should have a bath, so she took Cherice's hand and guided her up the rickety old steps, led her down a hallway that smelled strongly of acrylic paints, and into the bathroom with its cracked tile floor and the clawfoot bathtub. Cherice stared in open fascination; the tub in their little apartment hadn't had those fancy gold feet on the bottom, and her hazel eyes remained fixed on it while Mamere removed her sweaty clothes and drew the bath for her, then picked her up and set her in the water.

She even gave her a little rubber duck that used to be Daddy's when he was a boy, her grandmother said, and left out a big soft white towel for her to dry herself. And a small box of talcum, "to powder your bits with," she said. There were bubbles in the bath too and they smelled like Mommy's rosewater. Mommy had never left out towels for her.

When she finally clambered out of the big tub, the skin on her fingers shriveled like prunes to grab the towel, she saw a big T-shirt folded neatly next to it. It was dry too, except warm like it had just been washed, and it smelled like Mamere's perfume.

3. incommunicado

The syllables of archaic colonist's French drifted about the room like lazy swirls of smoke, filling it with the scent of the roast and potatoes on slow cook in the oven.

"You didn't say much on the phone, Lelia," she said, pouring chicory coffee into a mug and pushing it over towards her daughter-in-law. "Why you bring the bebette? This isn't like you."

"I'm going to California, Helene."

"Why?"

"To become a singer."

Silence for a long moment.

"If y'leave her here, ain't havin 'er back. Wouldn't be good for either of you. I won't have your fool self drag your baby down with you."

"You won't have to worry about that," Lelia Martin said softly. "I thought you'd try to stop me."

"What's the use? You'll do what you want no matter my say," Cherice's grandmother told her only son's widow severely. Lelia didn't say anything. "Defan Pop wouldn't like it, but he ain't around to say so and you and Paul are grown and gone for five years now."

"Were."

Helene's smile was tight. "They're only gone if you can't hear them."

The silence that followed was strained.

4. the hedge

There were lightning bugs everywhere, a counterpoint to the dry buzz of cicadas from the cypress trees flanking Mamere Helene's house. They floated in the still air like tiny stars, blinking on and off, elusive and fascinating.

Cherice giggled, wandering through the grass around her grandmother's house with a Mason jar. She had the lid in her other hand, the top punched with holes, and every time she caught one she'd stick it in the jar with all the others. Sometimes she was a little too excited and she caught the bugs in her fingers and accidentally smashed them. The dead fireflies left soft glowy green streaks on her oversized T-shirt where she wiped her hands on the cotton.

When she was done she sat down in the soft wet grass and pulled the shirt over her skinny bug-bitten legs, then tucked her arms and hands inside the holes and wrapped them around her knees and watched the fireflies buzz around inside their glass prison. Her captured starlight.

The air smelled better up here than it had in the swamp. Mamere's house was stilted like all the others, in case of storms, she said. But it wasn't in the water or anything. It sat on a small hill overlooking the marsh, which made sense because Cherice knew if she had money she sure wouldn't want to build a house in a big stinky swamp like the ones they'd drive through. Mamere sat on the porch in her chair with her cat in her lap, smoking a cigarette and drinking her coffee.

Cherice heard a soft little giggle somewhere behind her.

She ignored it the first time. The second time she stood and wiped the dew off her butt, and went looking for the source.

The giggle was louder the closer she ventured to the back of the house with her lightning bug jar. It was really creepy back there, and if not for the winking lights of her jar and her own curiosity, Cherice would have turned back.

"Who's there?" she called. No answer.

At the same time she yelped in surprised pain from the thorny brambles in that unseen hedge to which she'd stumbled, she felt Mamere's arms around her, lifting her out of harm's way. "No, no, pish'ette, don't wander off that way. It's dangerous. You'll fall into the nasty water and drown. Come back with Mawmaw."

She nodded and wrapped her arms and legs around the comforting softness of her grandmother's torso, her eyes fixed on the big thorny hedge she'd stumbled into unwitting. As they drew farther away, she thought she saw a pair of eyes gleaming at her from behind the thorns. 'Coons, Daddy would call them. There had been coons in the bushes back in the apartment building too and they liked to eat people's trash.

But the childish giggle that drifted towards her was no sound any raccoon ever made.

5. aviary

Her grandmother used to keep birds. Not parrots or budgies. They were finches, high-strung small birds that flitted frenetically in their wire cages, just beyond the house. Cherice wasn't allowed near them until she was a little older, and then she had the duty of going to feed them after school. As soon as the bus that carted her to and from Chauvin for school pulled away with the same blue exhaust as her mother's car, she'd unlock the door and drop her books on the living room table.

Mamere Helene would be home, of course, but she'd be upstairs painting and usually the only sound Cherice could hear was the local station blaring from the upstairs landing, just by the open door of the room where her grandmother kept her studio. The music was always either local folk stuff or it was the oldies station broadcasting out of Houma, neither of which interested Cherice very much at all but her grandmother insisted on music to help her paint. When Mamere was in one of her painting moods she sometimes forgot the passing of time. It was one of the reasons her Crock-Pot saw so much use. There was always something cooking in it, some stick-to-your-ribs kind of food that didn't take a lot of preparation.

So Cherice always contented herself with the music from the finches instead. Sometimes she'd watch them batter at the wire that confined them. They wanted out, the same way she wanted out. She loved her grandmother but Mamere was strange even by the standards of her peers, much less the eleven-year old granddaughter she was raising alone.

The birds, for the longest time, were the closest things to companions that she had.

6. wards

Helene Martin was an artist, and a reasonably well-known one. The sale of her paintings were often what paid their bills, along with the pension money Pawpaw had left behind (the grandfather that had died when Cherice was only two and so she couldn't remember him at all). But she also gave people readings in her spare time. They often came to her with various minor woes and leave with a remedy securely hidden in a small paper bag.

Cherice was a fifteen-year old sophomore on the track team, moderately popular in the way that high school athletes often are, before she found out that her grandmother was a hedge-witch of sorts - at the very least, she made charms and folk remedies in addition to oil canvases. She thought privately that it was stupid. Who actually believed in that, anyway? Little charms made of johnson grass twisted in a certain way weren't what kept your travels safe, it was driving responsibly.

It wasn't until she was seventeen that she returned to the hedge she'd wandered into when she was four, this time in broad daylight. There wasn't anything special about it, she thought critically, fanning the back of her neck with her longish ponytail in one hand. It was just an old dewberry bush, twined in what looked like privet hedge. Probably the guy who'd owned this place back in the thirties - the one who'd lost all his money in the stock-market crash and then killed himself the night before his bootlegging trail - had planted it there.

As she moved to walk away a flash of green paper caught her eye and she frowned, pushing the brambles and leaves aside. Sure enough, there were little charms all over the hedge, a kind she'd never seen before.

"Mawmaw?" she asked that night at supper.

"Hm?" Her grandmother was only halfway listening, spearing a biscuit and dipping it in the small tin of redeye gravy from that morning's breakfast.

"Why'd you put those paper things all over the dewberry bush?"

Helene went still.

"What's that?"

"The dewberry bush out back, Mamere," Cherice said patiently. "Remember the one you used to fence off when I was little? Because you didn't want me wandering through there and falling in the marshes?"

"What about it?"

"Why'd you put that stuff all over it?"

Her grandmother set down her fork and looked straight at her, brown eyes boring holes into her. Cherice grimaced.

"What? I'm just curious."

"They're wards."

"Against the raccoons?"

"Against haunts." Mamere gave her a long look. "Don't bother them, pish'ette. And don't go wandering back there after dark either."

Cherice had plenty to say about her grandmother's superstitions, but in the interest of maintaining peace, said nothing.

7. momentum

"Why am I walking barefoot//Upon this road with no one around...."

Cherice shakes herself from the hummed snatch of song, something on her burned CD she'd had playing in the truck on her way to work yesterday morning, and glances at the broken glass and torn insulation littering the cracked linoleum of the old underground mall. Why her playlist occurred to her just now, she really has no idea. After the waking nightmare of the night before, though, there's something comforting in such a normal thing as having Vienna Teng's "Momentum" stuck in her head.

She knows she could try to tell herself last night didn't happen at all but Miles is limping on one side and the nurse, Miss Chastity, is half-attached to her arm on the other side. They all look like shit, but it's not like she has any room to talk. She knows she looks like she's been on a three-day bender.

James - the grim-faced, determined homeless kid - is leading their motley little group through the shattered paradise of people with no names, no homes, and nowhere to go. She's still unsettled by the crazy bag lady who offered to buy her eyes. That reminded her of the nutty old black woman who lived up the road from her Mamere, far too closely for comfort, and Cherice shivers despite herself.

For a moment she has the crazy notion of suggesting they all go find a pay booth so she can call her grandmother, find out what that warding charm was she used on the dewberry hedges. Maybe they could put it around the hospital and none of this would happen again, it'd be just one crazy isolated incident like one of those half-remembered night terrors.

But the notion here is laughable.

So she follows, and wonders if there was maybe something to her grandmere's superstition after all, after all her years of irritated dismissal.