Nowadays, Miss Priss and her mother, Garlic's family, live in the old overseer's house. The house where Lady caught some fever, smallpox or scarlet, and died. Someone has ludicrously trained rosebushes to grow up the side of this slap-dash wooden structure. Most nights Garlic sleeps in Planter's old room and leaves his bed in the overseer's house empty. He's put my bags in the trellised shack; I'm to sleep in his empty bed. Before I came down from the old house, I took a bottle from Other's dining room sideboard. I hope no one misses it tonight. I help myself to a long swig.
I walk out on the porch, hoping it will help me catch my breath. There's no gas to illuminate the dark out here, only oil lamps and bee's-wax flame. It makes for a different color of night. The stars are brighter. It's hard to see to write.
There are so many things of Other's I have wanted. Things, then people. People more than things—but nothing she has ever had, no emerald, not R., have I ever wanted as much as I wanted her love for Mammy. As the sun sets, it don't hurt near as much that Mammy didn't love me as it hurts that I didn't love Mammy.
Once upon a time I loved my mother. But that love was frail and untended; I let that love die. No, it wasn't like that, like a plant in a pot deprived of water. Truth is that love got some sort of sickness that moved so quick and there was no doctor to tend the patient and my love just died. I had no idea in the world how to stop that death from coming once it started, and started coming on quick. It was like the smallpox moving through the house, leaving scars and death, and you're scared to see it coming. And you never forget it came. Just like the first time you see a dead body, you know one day death's coming for you too. The first time you stop loving somebody, you learn all love ends. And loving somebody is just the graceful practice of patience before the love dies.
I know exactly where my love for Mammy is buried. Like an unembalmed beast left decaying in the yard of my mind, it stinks the place right up to high heaven. Is there a low heaven? Can I drift there and stay close to her?
It hurts not to love her. And it hurt more when I didn't—I still don't—believe she ever loved me. I close my eyes after writing that, after making that witness, and I wince in a breath. God damn her soul! And it's less a curse than a fear. What do God do with folk who won't see the beauty He put in all creation? What do He do when He tired of hearing the angels weeping? I know the angels weep every time a dusky Mama is blind to the beauty of her darky child, her ebony jewel, and hungers only for the rosebud mouth to cling to the plum moon of her breast.
Don't I understand why Miss Priss killed Mealy Mouth? Don't I remember Garlic's wife with Mealy Mouth and Dreamy Gentleman's Harvard-going brat at her breast? Miss Priss lost two brothers to that woman. It's all so mixed up. I take a sip more—or is it more than a sip—from Other's brandy bottle, and my memories are like fish in a bowl swimming one way and then another, detached, insignificant, but still I turn back to look, remember, watch, mesmerized as the memories glide past.