Meg’s Homecoming

excerpted from the novel Blood and Mud by Suzanne Turner

I took the early morning ferry from Vidalia, getting onto Busey’s property before 8 am, just as the sun was tepidly starting to warm the February soil. By mid-month the young girls would be sunbathing on their rooftops, that’s how hot it got that early in Mississippi. But not yet. It wasn’t cold, it was never cold, but the sunlight had the quality of dishwater — strained and over-used.

I had never seen the little house where Billy grew up, even though it was right in the treeline near where Necole and I had scavenged for river treasures since we were little girls. Grandmama Adana had told me where to look for it; everyone in the country knew where everyone else lived — especially the honest poor folk knew where to find others of their kind.

It was an hour’s walk from the ferry, she’d said. Daddy offered to drive me, but Adana put down her dishcloth a minute, put her hand on his shoulder and said, “Denny, cher, let that child alone.”

I walked slowly in the early morning mugginess, hardly an insect or a bird making a sound in the winter air, following the benchmarks Adana had shared with me. She had told me of various landmarks — who knew how she knew them, the stump of an oak, struck by lightening years ago, a rusting car off in the woods; she warned me that if the road got mucky and swampy I was almost at the next ferry point and had gone too far.

Finally, when I had begun to believe I was fully lost and to question the wisdom of my journey, I got to the fourth gravel driveway from the ferry — as predicted about fifteen minutes’ walk past the still-blackened oak stump. I softly crept around the bend to the house, I felt the soil below my ballet flats as fully as if I had been barefoot.

The front of the house had once been white-washed, boards that ran across the dirt yard to the front porch were lined with rocks that also looked as if they had once been painted white. I could see Billy’s hand in this. We had spent a full weekend finding and whitewashing stones to line the paths leading to our secret riverboat hideaway. Many of the stones here had been kicked aside and lost over the years, but a trace of his presence remained.

The brushed dirt front yard showed the evidence of plants that had burst through the dirt and died in the fall. It was a yard slowly going back to seed, as I had often seen along country roads. This was a precursor to these old houses falling in bit by bit over the years, until they were entirely in the ground, only chimneys still standing.

I was surprised to see Jerry Slattery on the porch, now a young man, where he sat staring out into the trees, with the door of the house hanging ajar as if no one could be bothered to close it. He did not speak as I approached, or even as I said something about seeing Meg, nor even when I gave up on his answering and knocked, then started to push the front door all the way open when there was no response. But he did clear his throat in a noisy hawk as I passed and spat a massive wobbling throatful of phlegm at my feet. He said nothing but looked at me with bloodshot eyes of purest hate.

I was too numb, too transfixed by the strangeness of the setting, the feeling of Billy’s presence, the knowledge that this is where Billy had grown to manhood, to react. It felt, in fact, perfectly reasonable.

The floor inside the house was at a slope. An ancient threadbare couch was pride of place. Someone had been sleeping there in a pile of pillows without pillowcases and a tangle of unraveling crotched throws. All about the house were scattered men’s belongings — giant shoes, clothes, a girlie magazine, a broke-open shotgun on the well-worn kitchen table.

I had never seen anything like it — the sloping floor, the woodstove, the chinks along the boards in the exterior walls allowing the weak sunlight through in periodic pin pricks. Even so, I could see Billy’s hand — someone had plastered the walls in places, had put up wallpaper behind the ancient couch, the same flower print that decorated the nicer married couples’ cabins on Busey’s land, no doubt Billy had been gifted some extra from the storeroom.

There was a pleasing regularity to the way little decorations — stones and bird’s nests and little pieces of broken crockery or china — were placed on top of exposed beams and cabinets, in places where they could not be moved despite Billy’s absence. I could feel his simple touch as if he were in the room — his ability to gentle something pleasing out of nothing, to take pleasure in tiny details.

I could see him in these little touches like pin pricks of longing, as evenly spaced and occasionally blinding as the sun poking through the wall boards. But it was clear he had not been here for a long time. All of his handiwork had been overtaken by the creeping messiness of men left without proper supervision.

The kitchen was full of dishes, casserole dishes brought from town. If I inspected them I was sure I would find Auntie Rhetta’s signature Corningware with a typed red label stickied to the bottom. But I noted among the pile of dishes not just those of the church ladies I’d known since youth, but also of the local folk who had made their offerings — the buckets and washtubs of the country poor, the clay pots and baskets of the African-American AME Church. All once full, some of them now heaped with rotting food, filled the tiny kitchen. I opened the old ice box and saw someone had also gifted venison and squirrel. Rich and poor, black and white had come to honor Meg.

A cough from the back broke my reverie, and I walked to the dim recesses of the house suddenly filled with dread. I could picture Meg standing in church, singing the hymns, flanked by a young Billy and his younger stepbrothers, but I’d never spoken to her. What on earth would she say to me now?

As I entered the other room of the two-room house, a ray of light came in from the kitchen window, I felt it warming the back of my head as surely as if it were a palm comforting me. And as that shaft of light hit me, the quilts in front of me shifted, and a tiny face, like that of a bird, turned to me, blue eyes burning for a moment with fierce intensity.

There was a flash of consciousness, and she sat straight up. “Billy?” she asked, tremulously, then she saw me more clearly, her eyes filled with confusion, and she sank back into the covers. Before I could get to her she had dozed off, her breath coming in labored rasps, a fine mesh of sores on her upper lip. I moved some things off a chair near the bed and sat, waiting for her to come back to me, the tepid February sun puzzling at the windows.

I slept a moment myself, after that long overnight drive and the early trip over the ferry, in that stuffy room. I awoke to Meg’s eyes upon me in her tiny bird skull face.

“So pretty,” she said. “Always so pretty.” Then paused, closed her eyes. “Billy’s not here. He’s off hunting with the boys maybe.”

My heart leapt. Perhaps he was here after all. I leant in so that she could better see me. “I’m Ashlyn, Meg, Busey’s niece. Is Billy here?”

Her eyes clouded with confusion again, and I thought she might fall back under the water. But then she swam back up from the depths and looked at me wonderingly, put out her hand and pulled her to me. Touched my face all over with her papery fingers, saying over and over again “Oh my word oh my word oh my word.”

I covered her hand with mine and held it to my face, asked again gently. “Is Billy here?”

“Oh, no, child,” she murmured. “Billy is long gone… hasn’t been here… in a month of Sundays…” Just as I thought she was asleep her eyes opened again, rheumy but now with some sense behind them. “Won’t you stay? Sleep in your mama’s bed over there,” she indicated a small bed tucked under the eaves of the house. Clearly she didn’t know who I was, or who my mother was, but it didn’t matter. She had invited me. I would clean up the dusty bed while she slept.

Then she smiled, took back her hand, slipped halfway back into her dreams as she watched me quietly cleaning her room, head nodding, smiling, slipping in and out of sleep.

I stayed for three days, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. Jerry Slattery had left and did not return. I worried that my presence was keeping the boys from their mother and would sit on the porch looking for them, hoping to have the opportunity to offer to leave.

Meg slept and I scrubbed and sorted and tidied. First put the house to rights, then soaking and cleaning all the dishes, carefully stacking them in piles by the neighborhoods they were likely from, keeping the labels on the bottom so they might eventually find their way home. Rhetta had used the bright red label she used when the help was sent with a dish, one of the dishes from the mess hall Busey had put up the year before.

On the third morning I was out in the kitchen, everything polished and organized and lovely, some dried grasses cut from the riverbank for winter bouquets, when I heard Meg stirring in the other room, coughing. “Sib!” she called out, more agitated that I’d heard her before, my mother’s name catching in her throat.

When I got to her room she was out of the bed, hair wild, nightgown I had washed yesterday bunched up under her armpits showing her stick-like legs, knee the largest part of them, skin hanging in folds against her thigh bones. Her eyes were wide with desperation; she calmed a bit when she saw me.

“The boys always saved all your things. They kept them safe for you.”

I ignored her, she clearly was out of her right mind, had no idea who I was. I went to her, smoothing her gown into place, stroking her hair, trying to get her back into the bed. But she would not be comforted.

“You have to look! We’ve been keeping them!” she pulled me to the little bed where I had been sleeping and got down on her knees, pulled aside a floorboard and handed me an old band aid tin, about the size of a man’s hand.

Before I open the tin, I help her up to her feet. She was calmer now, with her chore almost accomplished, her eyes on the tin in my hand. She sat on the side of the bed, docile as a child, watching me expectantly as I sit next to her.

The tin is heavy, whatever is inside sliding from side to side as I move. A toy, I think, that Billy and the Slattery boys had hidden years ago. I open it and slide the contents out onto the bed between us.

It takes a moment for my eyes to make sense of what I see. The necklace with the three rubies, now dimmed with time. A braided gold necklace. A ring with a cameo, its face nearly worn off, once my grandmother’s, distantly remembered from my mother’s hand. A pearl necklace. Diamond earrings I once saw winking in my mother’s ears.

“See?” Meg says excitedly. “We saved them all for you. Everything you gave us, we saved them. We didn’t sell them. We didn’t need them. We were able to make do without your things, Sib. We made do. We did. Take them back! It has been worrying me all these years!”

I am having a hard time reconciling this, looking at jewelry that had been as much a part of my mother growing up as the comfort of her physical presence. My grandmother’s cameo with the worn face, which would be just under my chin as a tiny child when she gathered me into the safety of her arms. The tiny rubies so red and perfect for her, winking from her neck, replaced by the little blue sapphires daddy had chosen when this necklace disappeared, not as suited to her fiery nature. The trio of white, rose and yellow gold-braided necklace, I would watch her stroke the braids absentmindedly, in her rare moment of calm, soothing them into place, replaced by the simpler all-yellow version when this one was gone.

My father, always trying to make her into something else with his gifts, something quieter and more manageable, a person who sought to please. Seeking to make her like he was with his Cajun charm, not someone wild and untamed who dominated by force of nature.

I remember my mother’s shopping trips, the many times she came home with only a few scarves rather than the new clothes we had expected. “I didn’t see anything I liked,’ she would say, then make something herself something spectacular on her Singer sewing machine, her clothes always the envy of the diplomatic corps. I remembered my father’s rage “how can you keep losing your jewelry?” he had asked, time and again. “Denny Boudreau you have absolutely nothing to complain about,” she had hissed at him.

Instead of New York or Atlanta or New Orleans, the fabulous sophisticated shopping trips I had imagined as a young girl, she was coming here, to see Billy grow up. She had never abandoned him.

Meg was petting my hand, looking at me expectantly, touching my face with her parchment fingers. “You couldn’t help it, Sib,” she said. “you couldn’t help it. They made a plan. You were just a girl. We had our babies so young in those days.”

“Meg,” I ask, “how often did Mama come here?” I asked this, even though I could see the timeline in the jewelry on the bed: the cameo, lost in our first humble apartment the weekend of the singing fiddles when I was hardly more than a baby. The rubies, lost when I was about seven, waiting at the window the whole time she was gone in our split-level house when we were still in public school. The braided gold necklace, lost when I was about fourteen, just before I met Billy for the first time, just before they sent me off to Madeira and my long series of failures and expulsions started. The jewelry got more expensive over time, as our homes also got larger every year, and daddy’s postings more prestigious.

But Meg is doubled over, coughing more violently than I’d seen her cough before. She is coughing and coughing and when she pulls her face from her hands I see they are spotted with great dashes of blood — some brilliant red, some dark and rusty.

There is nothing to it but to put the jewelry away, to clean Meg up, to tuck her back under the covers, then to walk over the hill and find Rhetta and get a doctor, to ‘fess up that I have been hiding here in the tree line these many days.

When I am satisfied Meg is comfortable, I tuck the tin back into the floorboards and gather my things for the long walk. My mother had been here in this little house not once but many times. I am pondering these things. I had not allowed myself to think of my mother as a person with feelings, nor of her relationship to Billy; I had only ever thought of her as someone with an implacable will, a person that did whatever she had to do to get things done.

Meg is sleeping, but there is a spit bubble of blood at her lips and I wonder what on earth I had been doing playing house here these last three days, waiting for Billy to come see Meg, selfishly not looking for a doctor. It’s been as though I had been in a trance. As I head to the door, I hear voices in the yard.

Opening the door to the yard, I see one of the older Slattery boys emerging from the treeline, tall as God, with waist-length blonde hair. Then I recognize him — he used to be at Mindy’s brother’s house by the river. “Just cookin,’” he had sad shyly the first time we met, as stoned and awkward as a cartoon bear, the biting acetone stench of Meth coming from the kitchen, mortified to be in my and Mindy’s W-girl presence.

He is with a small old woman, her nearly bent over, carrying a burlap sack, herbs and twigs peeking up out of the opening. “Duane?” I ask, uncertainly, tired of the unexpected and remembering the way Jerry greeted me.

To my surprise, he smiled as he helped the old woman to the house. “Ashlyn!” he said, greeting me as though we had run into one another in Columbus, with the same goofy stoned bear enthusiasm. “Duane Slattery! Billy’s brother!”

I was dumbfounded, but there was no time for that. “Duane, your mama’s really bad, we’ve got to get a doctor.”

“Nah, honey, she don’t need no doctor. This here Millie the root woman got everything mama needs.” The women smiled at me. She is tiny, her brilliant white hair is long, scalp showing through the strands. She looks up at me, smiles, clasps my hand, her soft paper palm soothing even as her grip shows surprising strength. “We can’t do much more now than comfort her as she passes,” the woman says.

Duane helps Millie onto the porch. I sat in a rocker, to give them time alone, and also because I had no capacity left to be astonished.

It was a few more days before Meg passed. Duane stayed the whole time. The other Slattery boys came one at a time — the little boys Jerry and Amos and the other older bear from Mindy’s brother’s house called Aitken. Slowly they came, and then they stayed. Billy never arrived, but I waited and waited, never asking, always hoping.

I cooked and I cleaned and I took care of everyone, including the root woman Millie, to whom I gave the bed in Meg’s room, and made a pallet for myself on the porch, the nights sweet and temperate as February turned toward March. I stayed quietly working in the background, so Meg could go about the business of dying and her boys could go about the business of grieving.

I wondered if this was the way my mother felt all those times here at Meg’s cabin, playing house, taking care of people, observing, being on the edges.

One morning I am on the porch not long after sunrise, drinking country chickory coffee, which still grows wild in the winter, and Duane came and sat with me.

Like Billy, Duane had the gift of silence, the ability to sit companionably for hours at a stretch without a word. I imagined he must also have Billy’s gift of stillness, that calmness that camouflaged an animal in the wild, that stillness Billy used to have in the woods behind the swimming pool, when we would sit back-to-back for hours, he on his side of the fence and me on mine.

Finally Duane said “he’s not coming.” I waited for him to say more. He waited for me to react. We lapsed back into companionable silence for a while longer.

“Whyn’t you go with him?” Duane asked. I did not respond.

“When he went up north to fetch you?” he prompted.

I still did not respond. I didn’t rightly know.

Finally, I answered. “There’s no place for us to be in the world together.”

Duane looked at me for a long moment. “You can be anywhere you want to be.” He spat off the porch. “Just not here.”

I didn’t answer. It wasn’t that easy. This was home. This was the only place we needed to be right in the world. All the places mama and daddy lived, those places did not count. You could not uproot me and Billy from this soil the way Necole and I saw entire trees uprooted, branches down to muddy root ball and all, headed downstream in the Mississippi. For some reason the hawk Necole and I once found in the harvested fields came to mind, and my fantasy of it circling and circling and circling the world with nowhere ever to land.

“Why won’t he come?” I asked. “Should I leave? Would he come if I left?”

Duane gaped at me, “what, you don’t know?” I stared at him.

“He’s gone with off with Daddy. He give everything up. He went down to Central America to … you know, do what they do down there. Bring horses up. Or whatever.

He won’t be back for months now, maybe a year. Maybe longer. Maybe forever. Some of them wreckers stay gone forever.”

That didn’t mean anything to me, but then I thought of Mindy and the house on the river where she bought her drugs and Billy slipping in and out of Columbus unexpectedly and things started to come together. They didn’t make sense, but I glimpsed a distant pattern across time.

“He’s a wild man now,” Duane said. “Ain’t nothin’ made sense with him since he started with you, Ashlyn. Not one thing. Like you’re his only comfort.”

I thought of Jerry hawking at my feet when I arrived. His fury and hostility. But Duane did not speak with anger. Besides it was true. We were only right together and we could never be together. Billy was God knows where, not able to be with his mama as she lay dying. And I was headed to Central America. Maybe we were both just heading off to be killed, a redneck Romeo and Juliet.

We sat there in the February sun side by side for a while longer. The other Slattery boys were starting to stir in the house. It would be time for me soon to start the endless cycle of cooking and cleaning up and straightening and neatening. I was about to rouse myself when Duane spoke again.

“Your mama never even knowed about him.” he said. “Never even knowed about Billy. Them rich ladies got the gas in the hospitals back then. They went in pregnant. When they woke up the nurse handed ’em a baby. Mama told me. Sib never even knowed she had twins ’til right before Billy come to live with us when he was a bitty thing. She was real good to us, Ashlyn. She helped us every way she could. But she never even knowed about Billy, ’til right before she sent Mama to get him. She never knowed he was born ’til it was too late for her to raise him.”

This was another bit of information to process later, when I could put all the new facts out on a table, next to my mother’s jewelry, and figure things out. But the most important fact stood out boldly right this instant, the redheaded child in the cuckoo’s nest: Billy had always known I was his sister.