Chapter 7 7

7 The house smelled of okra pods, thick as green ropes that you could swing from one end of the kitchen to the other.I put my suitcase on the beige rug and walked down the hall to my mother's bedroom.I called out, "Mother? It's me, Jessie." My voice sounded rough and tired.She is not in bed.The blankets had been turned back, and the white sheets were rumpled as if children were frantically prancing about on them.The bathroom door was closed tightly, and the light came through the crack in the door below.I stretched my sore shoulders and neck while I waited for her to come out.A worn-out pair of terrycloth slippers were thrown upside down on the beige rug, the same color as the rug in the living room.Mother didn't believe in non-beige rugs.The walls and curtains are also not allowed to be any other color, only pure white, cream, or ivory.She believed that the outside of the house should be painted green, but the inside of the house could only be the color of running water.A color that is drained of blood and devoid of any breath of life.I looked at the old-fashioned dresser surrounded by a pleated skirt—was the skirt originally creamy white, or had it changed from pure white to creamy with age?In the center of the dresser stands a ceramic Madonna of the Mother, with a postpartum blues on her face as she sits a chubby Jesus on her lap.Next to the Madonna is a photo my father took on his boat.The water is deep blue and flows forever behind him.I didn't think about how quiet my mother was behind the bathroom door, all I could think about was walking into her life again, into this room, struggling with the vortex of contradictions she always stirred up in my heart , the ambivalence between love and hate.I examine the contents of her bedside table: her well-worn red rosary, two bottles of prescription medicine, a roll of gauze, duct tape, scissors, and a digital clock.I realized that I was looking for the mayonnaise bottle.It's not in the room. "Mother?" I knocked on the bathroom door.There was an eerie silence inside, and then a faint, sticky anxiety seeped from behind the door.I turned the doorknob and walked in.

There was no one in the tiny bathroom.It's empty.I went into the kitchen—the ever-changing room seemed to have been magically fixed, and walking in was like stepping into the fifties by accident.The same can opener hangs on the wall, a rooster-themed jar, a copper teapot, a tin bread box, and teaspoons on a wooden shelf.The wall clock hanging next to the refrigerator is in the shape of a black cat, and the pendulum is a wagging cat's tail.That's the immortal cartoon cat Felix.I expected to see my mother eating gumbo pod soup at the Formica veneer table, but, again, the room was empty.I hurried across the dining room to check out the other two bedrooms—Mike's and my old room.When Hepjibba was here, she must have been home—that was, ten minutes ago?I went back to the kitchen looking for Hep Jibba's phone number, but, as I reached for it, I noticed the back door was ajar.I grabbed a flashlight, walked up to the back steps of the house, and swept the beam of the flashlight around the back yard.The belt of my mother's blue bathrobe was twisted and thrown on the bottom step.I go down and pick it up.The wind has picked up.The wind blew the belt from my hand in a jiffy.I watched the belt tremble, and then, fluttering, disappeared into the darkness.Where has she gone?I remember when Dee was five years old and somehow she slipped away from me in the Northlake Mall.I panicked, but then felt an almost supernatural calm, and an inner voice told me that the only way to spot Dee was to think like her.So I sat on a bench, thinking like Dee, and then I went straight to the kid's shoe store and found her in the middle of a pile of "Sesame Street" tennis shoes, trying to put Bert and Ernie in on her little feet.I knew my mother only liked one thing, like Dee liked Bert and Ernie.I found the path leading to the monastery deep in the backyard.The path is not long, but it winds through shady wax myrtle, laurel and dewberry bushes.The monks had made a rough breach in the monastery wall so that when mother came to cook for them, she didn't have to go all the way to the main entrance to get in.They called that opening "Nair's Gate."Of course, my mother found it very useful.She told me at least fifty times.I walked through the gap, calling her name.I heard the rustling of an animal in the bushes, followed by the cry of a nightingale, and then, as the wind died down for a moment, I heard the roar of the sea in the distance—the never-ending percussion.Mother stamped a path with her feet to the path between the monastery and the houses where the monks lived.I walked along the path, pausing now and then to call her name, but the wind seemed to carry my voice back on my face.The moon had risen, and hung low over the swamp like a beautiful, clear disk.When I saw the back of the monastery, I turned off the flashlight and ran.Everything passed me by—the little sign of the Passion of the Cross, the wisps of mist, the sea breeze, the unevenness of the road.I whirl past the stucco houses where the monks weave their fishing nets. The sign on the door reads FORTUNA, MARIA, RETIANOSTRA—Blessed, Mary, our nets.

The statue of Saint Cynara sits in a walled garden next to the church.I passed through the garden gate and walked into a garden full of rose bushes, the bare rose branches tangled up and down, casting chandelier-like shadows on the distant courtyard wall.When the monks designed the garden, they erected the statue of the saint Sinara in the center of the garden, and six corridors evenly distributed around it led to Sinara.She looked like the axis of a great flowery wheel.I used to play here a lot when I was a kid.I would come here when my mother toiled in the monastery kitchen, pluck dozens of roses from the bushes, fill a herb basket with petals - colorful ones - which I would then use to hold secret For the ceremony, they were scattered in the swamp behind the church, under a few stately old oak trees, and on the mermaid chair. In the dark, I think the mermaid chair is the most sacred place.This was my funeral game, a solemn ceremony I played again and again after my father died.The petals were his ashes, and I thought I was saying goodbye to him that way, but it might have been the opposite—I was trying to hold on to him, hiding him in a secret place known only to me.After a few weeks, I would find that those petals had turned into piles of withered and yellowed debris.The night seemed to become a little brighter, as if the wind had blown away part of the darkness.I stood still and let my eyes sweep over the rose bushes and down the moonlit aisle.There is no shadow of the mother.I wish I had called Hepjiba and Kate instead of running up here and wasting so much time.I'm pretty sure she'll be here, and Bi Dee's in the shoe store.Around the same time she started working in the kitchen, my mother volunteered to be the guardian of the statue.She would come there with a bucket of soapy water to wash the bird droppings off the statues, and she would wax the statues four times a year with a paste that smelled like orange peel and limes.She came here to pour out all the troubles in her life, instead of going to church to appeal to God.In the world of hierarchical saints, Sinara is practically a nobody, but her mother believes in her.She liked to tell the story of my birth, as a testimony to Sinara's powers.I was upside down in her womb and stuck in labor.She begged Sinara to protect her, and Sinara immediately turned me over, and I squirmed into the world head first.The statue in the center of the garden looks like a stamen standing in the center of a giant flower that has withered in winter.It occurred to me that Sinara had watched over my childhood in the same way, that her shadow had always hung over the void that had appeared in my life when I was nine years old.Once, Mike and I dressed the statue in a two-piece bathing suit, sunglasses, and a blonde wig, and we got the worst punishment for it.We cut the bottom of the bathing suit in half and pinned it to her hips.Some of the monks found the attire ridiculous, but Mother wept at our disrespect and punished us by writing "The Lamb of God" five hundred times a day for a whole week: "Lamb of God, take away the evil from the world , have mercy on us." I didn't feel remorse, just confused, as if I'd betrayed Sinara and at the same time freed her.

I was standing at the back of the garden, wondering what I would do without my mother, when I heard a small scratching sound coming from the direction of the Sinara statue, like a bird raking the ground for worms.I walked behind the statue and there was my mother, sitting on the floor with a mayonnaise bottle beside her, her white hair glowing in a ball in the dark.She was wearing a long yarn bathrobe over a practical dark blue coat, and she sat with her legs spread apart like a child playing in the sand.She was digging in the dirt with her left hand, using what looked like a stainless steel spoon.The bandage on her right hand looked the size of a child's baseball glove and was covered in dirt.She didn't see me; she was completely absorbed in what she was doing.I stared at her figure for a few seconds, finding her relief, which momentarily turned into new terror.I said: Mother, it's me, Jessie. "She jerked up and the spoon fell on her lap." Jesus, Mary, Joseph! "She yelled, You scared the hell out of me! What are you doing here?" I sat down beside her. "I came here to find you," I replied, trying to sound natural and unassuming.I even tried to smile. "Oh, then you found me," she said, and picked up the spoon and continued digging in the mouse hole that had been dug next to the base of the statue. "Okay, we know what I'm doing here. So, what are you doing here?" I asked. "It's none of your business." When I found Dee in the shoe store the other day, I grabbed her by the shoulders and wanted to yell at her for scaring me like that, and now, too. Unwarranted anger churned in my chest.I wanted to shake my mother so hard that all her teeth came chattering out. "How can you say that?" I said bluntly, Hepu Jiba must have told you that I was back, and you ran away before I entered the house.You scared the hell out of me too. ""Ah, for God's sake, I didn't mean to scare you.I just need to get this thing out of the way. "This thing. What is this thing? I turned on the flashlight and shone a beam of light on the mayonnaise bottle. Her severed finger was lying in it. The finger looked clean and the nails had obviously been filed. I put the bottle Lifting it up to my eyes, I saw that the skin on the edge of the wound had shrunk, and a white bone had protruded. I felt a nausea, similar to the feeling of morning. I closed my eyes and did not speak, and my mother continued to dig on the cold ground. I finally I said, "I don't know what you're doing here, but you're not feeling well and you need to go home with me." I suddenly felt blurry and exhausted. "What do you mean I'm unwell?" She said, I'm fine. "

"Really? Since when did you intentionally cut off your own fingers and everything is normal?" I sighed. "My God!" She turned sharply toward me. "Why don't you visit people?" she said in a hurtful tone, and no one asked you to come back. ""Kate asked me to come back. "" Kate better stay out of other people's business. "I snorted with my nose." Oh, then you just wait. "I heard a laugh from the back of her throat, an intoxicating sound I hadn't heard in a long time. For some reason, that sound knocked down the little wall of anger in my heart. I I moved my body so that our shoulders were touching, and I put my hand on the back of her hand that was still holding the spoon. I thought she would shake it away, but she didn't move. I felt the bulge on her hand. Thin bones and criss-crossing blood vessels." I'm sorry.For all that, "I said, I'm really sorry." She turned and looked at me, and I saw tears welling up in her eyes, shining like mirrors.She is the daughter and I am the mother.We have reversed the natural order, and there is nothing I can do to bring it right.Thinking of this, I felt a pang in my heart.I said: tell me.okay?Tell me why you would do this to yourself. "She said, 'Joe—your father,' and then her jaw dropped, as if the weight of his name was too heavy on her mouth. She looked at me and tried again." Father Dominique . . . " she said, but her voice faded away. "What?What happened to Father Dominique? ""nothing. "She said, no more. I can't imagine what kind of pain she was hiding in her heart, or what Father Dominique had to do with it." I didn't receive ashes today. “I don’t think I did either, she said. For the first time since my father passed away, I didn’t go to Ash Wednesday services today.

She picked up the spoon and started digging again. "The mud is too hard." "Are you going to bury your fingers?" I asked. "I just want to put it in a hole and cover it with earth." If your mother says fish can fly, you say, yes ma'am, fish can fly.I took the earth-digging tool from her. "That's it." I continued to dig the hole she had made next to the base of the statue, until it was about six inches deep.She unscrewed the bottle cap and took out her fingers.She held her finger up, and we both looked at it together, mother's face in sombre respect, and I feeling resigned, almost numb.We're burying my mother's fingers, I told myself.We bury a finger in the garden and, moreover, it has something to do with my father.Something to do with Father Dominique.I think we might even light the tip of our finger and let it burn like a small candle, and I wouldn't find it any weirder.The mother put her finger in the hole, knuckles up, and she stroked the severed finger with her uninjured finger, and then buried the severed finger with the excavated soil.I watched the severed finger disappear, and an image was left in my mind of a small mouth that had appeared on the ground, opening and closing, swallowing a part of myself that my mother could no longer tolerate.The ground was covered with dry rose petals, like red flames dripping from a candle.I gently grabbed a handful with my hands. "Remember that you are dust, and you will return to dust," I said, pressing a petal on my mother's forehead, and then pressing one on my own head, "Now, you have received holy ashes." Mother smiled at me.There was silence in the garden, yet none of us heard him coming until he was about to approach us.My mother and I looked up at the same time and saw him coming out from behind the statue.He came out of the darkness, wearing a ring robe, with a slender figure and a face shining in the transparent night.