Can a bloodhound remember you from years back and smell you coming from half a mile away? Caleb’s welcome grew louder as we drove along the sparsely tree-lined road that would bring us to Ma Charles’s property. Uncle D winked at me as if to say, Girl, you were surely missed, and my heart clanged worse than when I got my first kiss from Ellis Carter. I wanted to be with my grandmother and my great-grandmother more than anything. I wanted us to all be together. As many of us under one roof as could fit. I needed to know we weren’t all falling apart.
I could see Ma Charles’s yellow aluminum siding house as we wound around the road. It seemed to have grown larger, and not only as we neared it: its size appeared to have doubled. The girls must have seen the house as well. They sang at the top of their lungs, “I’m Going Back to Indiana” even though we were in the heart of Alabama. I sang along with them. Finally, in the seconds that seemed longest, the truck bounced, shimmied, and slowly trailed up the dirt and gravel driveway of our great-grandmother’s house. Even the hens, fenced in by the wire chicken run, clucked and fussed in our honor. Their fussing and squawking went on for as long as it took one hen to spot something tasty on the ground and the others to join in the scuffle to get a piece of it.
Caleb, sturdier than when I saw him last, didn’t stop singing his dog song, which was neither a true howl nor a bark. Then Big Ma stepped out on the front porch and scolded him for raising a ruckus. Ma Charles, who had been sitting on the porch in the pine rocker her father made, called out to the bloodhound and joined the noisy welcome, shaking the tambourine that she always kept nearby. Knowing my great-grandmother, she probably told the dog, “Go on, boy. Wake the dead.” One of the funniest things about being down home was that when Big Ma said, “Stop,” Ma Charles said, “Keep on.” All the pieces of down home came flooding up to greet me.
Uncle D stopped the truck and he and I got out. He went around to lift Vonetta and Fern out of the truck bed. My sisters and I became six knees in shorts galloping toward our grandmother. Before she had time to scold and fuss, Vonetta, Fern, and I were on her, circling her, squeezing her and feeling her squeeze us. Yes, we were surely missed. I took it all in: the firm but biscuit-doughy feel of Big Ma’s arms; her gardenia talcum powder and Dixie Peach hair grease dabbed under her wig around her temples. It was good to be circled by hands that smelled of pine cleaner and to be blotted by her coffee-breath kisses.
When Big Ma couldn’t stand another squeeze, she pushed us off of her and said, “Let’s not carry on for all the neighbors,” although the only neighbor within any visible range was Mr. Lucas.
“Come on, rascals!” our great-grandmother cried, her arms stretched outward. We ran over and hugged her, but carefully. Big Ma’s mother was wiry and upright but tender-skinned and small-boned. She rapped us all on the tops of our heads, one, two, three, and said, “Look at my young’ns,” as if there were an army of us. “Just look at you! All those heads inching to the sky.”
“All right, all right. Let’s look at them inside.” Big Ma was anxious to not be seen. It was too late. Mr. Lucas’s house sat less than a half acre beyond the vegetable garden to our right side. He leaned against one of the white posts that ran from his porch to his roof, and he waved to us and called out to Big Ma. Big Ma waved her arms but only to tell her neighbor, “Stop that waving.”
She said to Uncle Darnell, “Go drive that rig back over to him before he comes down here.”
“Can’t,” he said. “I need to get to town.” Uncle D and Mr. Lucas had worked out an arrangement to share the truck even though Mr. Lucas hardly drove it.
Big Ma scolded us. “See what you all started up?”
Mr. Lucas didn’t have as much land as my great-grandmother, but he had a few fruit trees and pecan trees on his property. The last time we drove down south, he had planted a pecan tree in Ma Charles’s yard for shade. That pecan tree was hardly the same tree he’d planted a few years ago. The tree was full of pecans and its trunk and branches were now good for climbing. I couldn’t hide my smile. Between the tree’s height, sturdiness, and branches that formed a seat, I knew I’d found my hiding place.
Ma Charles took her time to bend down to scratch Caleb’s ear. “That’s a good dog. Let ’em know across the creek that I have young’ns. Let them know my roots aren’t cursed. Sing, boy. Go sing! That’ll show her!” Caleb raised his throat and snout and did just that while Vonetta and Fern petted him.
“Ma! Will you hush about a curse!”
Ma Charles ignored her daughter. “That’s right! Sing, boy. Sing so she knows we have life on this side of the creek. Sing!”
Uncle D dropped our bags on the porch and said, “I’m going to town for spark plugs. I’m taking Mr. Lucas with me.”
“You take him into town,” Big Ma said. “But make sure you tell him tonight’s for family. Just family.”
Ma Charles said, “Son, tell him no such unkindness.”
And Uncle D, who was probably used to being between his mother and grandmother, was already in the truck.
Fern hopped from her left foot to her right, doing her “Gotta, gotta” dance, and Vonetta hopped along with her. They both looked around for a dreaded but familiar sight. I did too.
I asked what we all needed to know. “Ma Charles, where’s the moon house?” That’s what we called the small blue wooden shack with half-moons painted on its front door and sides.
“The outhouse?” Ma Charles threw her head back and laughed. “The outhouse is gone,” she said.
“Then where do we go?” Vonetta asked.
Ma Charles said, “Go where you want.”
“Don’t tell them that, Ma!” Big Ma scolded. “In spite of that no-mothering mother of theirs, they’re not savages.” Big Ma swatted Vonetta on the bottom, then Fern, which was as playful as Big Ma got. “Go on in the house. Use the bathroom.”
Vonetta and Fern screamed for joy. They didn’t want to see that outhouse any more than I wanted to iron cotton sheets.
“Nothing scarier than going to the outhouse in the spooky nighttime with the crickets chirping,” Vonetta said.
“And a hoot owl going, ‘Whoo-whooo’ while you’re trying to make doo-doo.”
“Last one waits!” Vonetta shouted. Then they raced each other into the house, leaving the bags for me to carry inside.
Last time we were here Fern was five and too scared to go to the outhouse. She used a pot instead, and my job was to dump it all down the hole inside the little moon house. And for a long while Vonetta called Fern “Stinkpot.”
When we went inside the house I asked Ma Charles, “What happened to it?”
“Mr. Lucas came over one day a year ago, took down the outhouse, and put in all the pipes and pumps and such. Next thing you know, we have indoor plumbing through and through. Always had running water, but this was a welcome change.”
“That was nice of him,” I said. It was more than nice. I was relieved to not have to go to the moon house, or walk Vonetta there and stand guard, or carry Fern’s pot there for dumping. Besides, I was a Brooklyn girl. But as sure as I couldn’t stop calling my father Pa, I knew I had a small bit of the South in me too. It was funny. You don’t know something bothers you until you no longer have to do it. Suddenly you’re both angry and glad. Angry you did it for all those years and glad you’ll never do it again.
When you get older and taller, everything else gets smaller. But not Ma Charles’s house. The house was actually bigger, inside and out. It wasn’t my imagination.
“What happened to the house? How did it get bigger?”
“What a dumb question,” Vonetta said. “Houses don’t grow.”
“Not like daisies.”
My rolling eyeballs spoke for me.
Ma Charles said, “House grew some.” She turned to Big Ma and said, “No thanks to anyone under this roof.”
Eyeball-rolling was catching. My grandmother rolled her eyes at her mother—something I’d never do to Cecile, and out of respect, not to Mrs., either.
“What do I know about adding on rooms, Ma?” our grandmother said innocently. “I’m a woman, not a lumberjack.” Vonetta and Fern thought that was especially funny and cackled. Big Ma said, “If Elijah Lucas wants to put in plumbing and add a room or two onto your house, that’s his business.”
Ma Charles was disgusted by her answer. “That’s not the point—whether you swing a hammer or not, daughter. The point is one day you’ll step out on that back porch and smell Elijah’s new wife’s pecan pie cooling from her windowsill.”
“She can bake shoofly pies for all I care,” Big Ma said. “If Elijah wants to kill the memory of his wife and marry some woman, that’s between him, God, and that some woman.”
Ma Charles waved her hand away like she had no use for Big Ma.
I had once overheard Big Ma telling Pa he need not worry about her remarrying. She didn’t want two husbands in heaven. Only one. That’s why she didn’t remarry after Grandpa Louis died, and that was when Pa was twelve and Uncle Darnell had been just born. Grandpa Louis died four years after he’d come home from liberating Italy along with the all-black army, according to Big Ma. He gave his medal to Pa, and Pa had given it to Uncle D when he went to Vietnam. Although no one spoke of it, Uncle D had put the medal in the pawnshop when he was sick and moaning, rattling around like a ghost. The medal was more than twenty years old and Grandpa Louis had been gone for about twenty years.
Big Ma didn’t seem to mind being alone for so long. She had us and a picture of Grandpa Louis. And when she wasn’t with us in Brooklyn she had Ma Charles, Uncle Darnell, and the Lord. She didn’t need another husband. “No sir,” she said. “One husband’s all the Lord and I know about.”