The Good Fortune Harvest
Laura arrives promptly behind me. Eyebrows plucked into perfect ascending arches. Hair shaped magically against her face. Clothes tailored. She’s tall, thin, and very handsome. Instantly I feel my own shabbiness.
“You’re looking good,” is the first thing she says, “I like your hair that way.”
This puts me at ease. Her approval is welcome.
“Mom must have had Mr. A.J. mow the lawn,” I comment.
“A.J.’s dead.”
“Dead!” I’m horrified this minor character could have died without my knowing.
“Been dead.”
Laura breezes through the front door I have just opened and goes to the sitting room. I follow behind glancing around to make sure everything is in its place.
“So?” Laura says to me as she crosses her legs and tucks them under the chair.
“So nothing,” I shrug and sit across from her.
I can’t help looking at her, inspecting her for changes, following her eyes to see what changes she sees. I have a bitter love for Laura, at once pure and cautious. We have inflicted our own pain on each other as sisters and have endured more than our share as part of the larger, more complex pathology from whence we came.
“For goodness sakes, quit staring at me, you’re making me nervous.”
“I can’t help it. It seems like such a long time has gone by. And yet…,” I hear the phone ringing in the kitchen.
My mother’s voice sounds unchanged on the other end. Did I get in okay? How was the trip? Did I notice the flowers on the front table. They’re from David – a man she is seeing – he sent them for my arrival. I say that’s nice and tell her I will take her to dinner this evening when she comes home.
I walk back in the parlor and Laura says, “Well?”
“Mom wanting to know if I saw the flowers.”
Laura looks toward the front dining room. “David?” she asks dryly.
“Apparently,” I answer. “Do I know him?”
“No one you want to know.”
“And you?”
“No one you want to know.”
We laugh for the first time, easy in this understanding. The women in our family have never done men well.
Laura clears her throat and says, “You going over to the grave?”
Joy recedes. I haven’t seen the grave, don’t want to see the grave. I’ve tried my best to put him, it, out of my mind, but don’t think I even know how to forget. I knew this was coming. Knew it.
I squinch up my face a little and tell Laura, “Not yet.”
This pains her, I can readily see. But she is a living contradiction. During the time my Father was alive, Laura couldn’t sit in the same room with him without getting in an argument. And now in death, she has deified him. Why?
Laura rattles her keys in her pocket and clenches her lips.
“I’ve got to get back. You going to be okay?”
“I’m fine. Might even take a nap.”
After Laura leaves, I get the rest of my bags out of the car. Mom has set up my old room for me, so I bring my things in there. I sit on the end of the bed immersed in the memories of my own life, which now seem to belong to someone else, and I am not nostalgic, only dazed.
On the wall hangs a grouping of painted photographs of our family: mother and father in center, surrounded by six smiling children. Jack in the upper left corner, across from Lou, whose own tragedies outweighed him. Frank is under Jack. Then Andy. After Andy came out to us, his photographs disappeared from around the house, it’s good to see him here, included again.
Laura and I face one another from the lower corners. Her thin cheeks and bronze skin always photographic even in childhood. Me? A mess of curls and pink puffy cheeks; a love baby is how my family referred to me. There was always a surplus of love for me.
Over on the dresser are miscellaneous photos in dull silver frames. Group shots of all of us. Lou with Teréz and Omar standing in front of a grand unidentifiable vista. Teréz holding Omar so close to her, while Lou encircles both with his arms, as if even then they were suspicious about their dark future. Omar’s little boy smile is betrayed by purple lips and curly black hair which he inherited from his mother, they make him seem older and wiser than his tender age would allow.
I remember the way he used to smell when he came from playing in the field. A grassy, earthy smell that you would have to scrub off of him. All boy he was…snips, snails, and puppy dog tails-but you looked in his eyes and there was something else. Something….
Even my dog, Milo, felt it. He and Omar were instant companions. I remember one day Omar played with him so hard, he fainted. I was in the kitchen and I remember him running in shouting, “Milo’s dead! Milo’s dead!” I dropped the glass I was drying and ran out to the field. Milo’s chest was heaving slowly, so I knew he wasn’t dead, but he laid flat on the ground, still, like I’d never seen him.
He must have weighed 90 pounds, but I picked him up like a baby and carried him over to the hose to cool him down. He was mine. My Milo. We had been together 12 years and to this day I have never had another friend like him. I had forgotten about Omar standing behind me; he was crying so hard at the time, he too, nearly fainted.
What a handsome boy Omar had been. He had the hue of his mother and the structure of his father. We all saw the future when we looked through him. How wrong we were. Poor little Omar. It’s too sad to even think about him. And Lou…Teréz…everything all fallen apart and no good anymore.
I remember standing in the field with my mother and Omar the autumn before they left. A bird’s nest had fallen out of the crepe myrtle and the little chicks were all dead. My mother was crying. I was holding Omar’s hand. He was the one who had come in to tell us about the fallen nest. He stroked my mother softly, brushing his cheek against the fat of her arm. He raised his wise eyes up to her and whispered, “Don’t cry Mawma, you hardly even knew the little birds.”
He was six when Lou and Teréz went back to MerÃda to live. Lou was offered a good position in the University there, and Teréz was thrilled to be living amongst her people again. She was probably thrilled to be getting Lou away from here too, but she never said, never would say. She was a family woman. That is why she wanted Omar to grow up there, knowing her family and her history.
They had gone over to the farmer’s market in town one Saturday. Their first family outing since arriving. Teréz was loading the back of the
station wagon with colorful baskets of local produce, while Lou was busy scraping the remains of a dead bird off the grill in front of the car. “Bad luck,” the wrinkled old lady from next door had told them as they were leaving that morning. “Out. Take out. Malo suerte.” Then she spit to one side and went back in her dark house.
Omar was jumping up and down as if on an imaginary pogo stick. He jumped side to side and up around to the front of the car and was making his way back down the other side. Lou remembered saying, “Go help your mother.” Then bang, it happened. Omar jumped out in front of a car that was whizzing by. And he was dead.