Mama’s sitting behind me on the porch telling me when to flip the salmon cakes. Like she can see when they’re brown enough. Since she’s been sick, she’s been getting me to do more cooking. I’m old enough to do it by myself, I tell her. But she has to have it her way. Just like I know this one she’s trying to tell me to flip ain’t ready yet. It ain’t brown like I want it to be on the bottom, I’ve been checking, but I do what she says anyways.
Mama’s swatting flies. Don’t know how they all get in the porch. Mama says Abner lets them in. And that don’t make sense either. Everything’s always Abner’s fault with Mama and that ain’t fair.
She says she got Daddy to screen in this porch so she could sit out here and enjoy it.
I turn around and watch her swat and kill another one. It was sitting on the arm of her rocking chair.
“That one there was a horsefly,” she says.
She flicks it off her chair and looks out towards the swamp field.
I look too—the clouds back towards town look heavy.
“Looks like the bottom’s gonna fall out,” she says.
We all hope it does. We’ve been needing rain real bad. The corn’s hurting, it won’t be worth five cents. We’ve been praying for it at church. Worst dry spell we’ve had since I can remember. The animals don’t even have any water. The creek down the swamp path has run dry. There’s a bear that lives down there. We’ve seen him rambling for something to drink. He’ll sway from ditch to ditch.
Wayne saw him last week laying in that fallow field next to Hiram’s house. And he went up to him to see if he was alright. He figured the bear’d been hit on the highway. But when he got real close, the bear got up slow and went off real sleepy-like to the edge of the woods. Mama says he was probably laying out there to get cool, probably rolling in a patch of dirt. Mama says animals will act funny like that when they’re dehydrated.
The dust comes up the path and Mama hollers through the porch window. She tells Sister to put ice in the glasses. I put the last salmon cakes on the platter and help Mama to the table. Daddy and Wayne and Abner come in to wash up. I pour tea in the glasses. Daddy tells Abner to wait for the blessing.
And Mama says the blessing, “For this and all your many gifts of love Lord, bless this to the nourishment of our bodies and our bodies to your service.”
“And please send us rain,” Daddy says.
“In Jesus’ name we pray,” Mama says.
And we all say, “Amen.”
Abner is a grown man now, he’s 25. But he smacks when he eats. And he never looks up at any of us. I can’t stand it. And he ain’t been getting any better. And he smacks so hard. Heaving forkfulls into his mouth, gasping for breaths in between. But Mama don’t say nothing about it, she just talks over it. She asks Daddy if he got up with Donnie about cutting timber. She asks Wayne if he tended to the paint for the hunting lodge.
“Yes, Mama,” they both say.
She’s been asking them all week.
Mama tells Sister she did real good on the biscuits. Sister smiles but just for a second.
Abner grabs the bowl of butterbeans and almost spills them on the table.
“Slow down, son,” Mama says.
Mama’s always talked to us in orders.
Abner looks at Mama for the first time in a long time it feels like and then he looks back down at his plate. He asks me to pass him the salmon cakes.
Then Wayne says, “Well somebody’s shot that bear.”
I can’t believe it. I don’t want to.
“I found him out there in the middle of that fallow field,” Wayne says and he reaches for his tea.
Wayne says he figures somebody rode by there and saw him wallowing in that dirt and thought he had rabies and called the law. Daddy says it was probably the new hot-to-trot sheriff, leaving that bear out there like that. His body out there swelling in the sun.
“Common,” Mama says. “Common, if I’ve ever heard it.”
“That bear was a pretty thing, too,” Wayne says. He figures that bear was at least 300 pounds.
“You think he suffered?” Sister asks.
“He bled to death out there, I know that,” Wayne says. “Shot him like they didn’t know what the hell they was doing.”
I started thinking about that bear waiting to die out there in that hot field.
“Funny that he stayed out there to die,” Mama says. “Bears go off in the woods, find a thick patch of briar or a fallen tree to lay up under to die. They get in a ball up underneath something. I read it in the paper.”
I look down at my salmon cake and it tastes good even though I didn’t get it as brown as I wanted and I’m trying to finish my plate because Mama says there’s folks out in the world that ain’t got nothing to eat but I can’t help it—I keep thinking about that bear.
When Abner was okay he read all these books about Indians. He told us at the dinner table one night that the Indians around here prayed to the bears for strength before big battles. And he told us that after an Indian died, his spirit stayed with his favorite arrowhead he made when he was living. And when Abner used to talk about the Indians so much I reckon he thought none of us was listening. But I was. And I wish he’d show me all those arrowheads he’s got in his bedroom like he used to do. He’d tell me and Sister the story behind every one of em, what it killed and what it was made out of and how old it was and sometimes even how far it’d come from, all the way from Eskimos sometimes, places with snow and big mountains, big rivers and elks.
I look up at Abner and I want to tell everybody that it makes sense to me the bear was out there rolling around in the fallow field because he knew that’s where he’d find arrowheads. And when he got shot, of course, he stayed out there to die because he wanted to die in the company of his friends, the Indian spirits. Maybe they were even singing him a song to get to Heaven.
But I don’t say none of this because Abner pushes his chair back and it makes the table shake. He gets up and walks towards the sink and then he walks back to the kitchen table. He goes back and forth, wringing his hands over his knuckles, squeezing them, cracking them. They’re starting to get red.
“Sit down, Abner,” Mama says to him. “Now, come on and finish your dinner.”
Daddy looks at Mama and says, “Let him be, Mama.”
Then Mama says louder, “You know I thought I heard something this morning.” She looks at Sister. “Didn’t I tell you this morning that I heard a gunshot out towards Hiram’s?” Sister nods her head yes, but everyone at the table knows that all morning Mama’d been at Lena’s looking at wigs she had to special order. Mama has to act like she knows everything, even things she won’t there for.
Daddy looks at Wayne and says they’ll have to take care of the bear, because ol’ Hiram sure can’t. “Better do it ’fore dark,” Mama says. “’Fore them dogs get to it.” Mama’s always complaining about the dogs ripping and rearing around Hiram’s house. She says they’re wild and they just turn up there because Hiram feeds them. She says he ought to know better than that.
Abner comes back to the table.
And Sister pours him more tea.
Daddy tells Mama that her wig looks nice. But he says “hair” instead of “wig.”
Mama says Lena tried to convince her to get the one with the red wash on it. “But I don’t need no wash at my age,” she says. She fluffs her wig and laughs. “I’ll look about like that cashier woman in Food Lion, hussy like.”
Wayne and Daddy and Sister laugh a little at that.
There’s three butterbeans left on Abner’s plate and he’s moving them around with his fingers. He looks at Sister and says, “Wash.” He eats one butterbean at a time and says, “Wash on her hair, wash on the land, the world needs to be washed in the blood of the Lamb.”
“Stop that messing, Abner,” Mama says. “I don’t know where you think you are eating with your hands like that at the table.”
Daddy takes his cap off and pushes his hair off his forehead. It’s sticky from sweat. He puts his hat back on, and lets it sit loose.
Abner starts singing, “Are you washed…in the blood…in the snow cleansing blood of the lamb?”
Sister looks at me like she’s afraid. Abner’s never sang at the table like this.
“That’s right, Abner,” Wayne says to him laughing, “like what we sing in church.”
Abner nods his head and keeps going, “Are your garments spotless, are they white as snow?”
And I don’t sing it out loud but I sing it in my head, I join in with Abner to finish it, “Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?”
And he gets up from the table. The table shakes again. Abner turns his glass up and gets whatever ice is left in it. He walks out, crunching it with his teeth.
“See y’all later,” he says and he throws up a wave behind him.
“See you later, Abner,” Daddy says as the door slams.
Everybody’s through eating.
Daddy and Wayne head to the living room to take their naps during the stories. They can’t be in the field in the middle of the day like this. “Daddy, y’all ought to go on out there now and tend to that bear,” Mama yells from the kitchen. “’Fore it gets to smelling too bad, the heat like it is.”
I get the scraps together to take out to the cats. Mama hands me some cantaloupe she can’t finish. On the porch I can hear her telling Sister how to wash the plates.
I go out to the smokehouse and the cats come out from everywhere like they’re starving. Running over each other, meowing. When they’re eating like that is the only time you can touch them. They’re real skittish. There’s a little black one with a white spot on her chest. She’s the runt. I’ve been trying to get her to like me and I think it’s working ’cause when I touch her now when she’s eating, she purrs. So before long I’ll be able to get my hands on her and hold her soft under my neck.
Since we ain’t had no rain, I’ve been giving the cats water plenty times a day. I keep one of the gallon buckets ice cream comes in at the back of the smokehouse in a shady spot for them. I grab the bucket and dump their old water out on Mama’s hydrangeas and take the bucket to the pump. The sky is still heavy and the dirt under my feet is cool like it’s gonna rain.
I look out towards that fallow field and see the vultures circling. I walk to the edge of the yard to get closer. That’s when I see Abner out there. He’s punching his arms up at them. He starts slinging hisself faster and harder. He’s singing, “What can wash away my sin?” He’s moving back and forth in front of the bear. It’s laying there still, a big black shape. They’re all out there far from me. They can’t hear me but I come in with Abner, singing loud as I can, “Nothing but the blood of Jesus!” Then Abner stops everything, kicks the bear in the face. And he stands there looking at it real still.
“C’mon in the house,” I yell to him. Abner turns around and sees me looking at him. I watch him coming to me fast, holding out his arms.
And before I know it, Abner’s holding me. I’m shaking.
“It’s alright,” he says. “It’s alright.”