Stephany L.N. Davis

Island Stillness

Lauren Victorie Lafaille

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Chippewa Street

Stephany L.N. Davis

Last year, the bodies of three women were found in an area known to local law enforcement as a hub for prostitution and drug activity. Still no leads, no death certificates, or pending autopsy results; news outlets, local and national, caught wind of a possible serial killer in the small North Carolina town, previously known for its swine houses and lagoons, and filled up every motor inn along the I-95 corridor with reporters to broadcast any breaking detail in the case. On our way to visit Lumberton, my daughter and I pass my Granny and Papaw’s farm, the home of my maternal grandparents. Papaw kept bee boxes between the blueberry bushes and the chicken coop. Granny kept a Double D lard bucket in the kitchen corner for slop. Scraps of buttermilk biscuits, half eaten egg sacks from the hens, chunks of ham hock used to flavor greens, peels of pomegranates that grew just outside Papaw’s bedroom window. All there. Brewing in my Granny’s kitchen. Even the old pecan tree is there, though its limbs have been cut back for the new powerlines. I remember my cousins’ shrieks and hollers as they run in opposite directions playing 1-2-3 get off my Papaw’s pecan tree. After it rained and water collected in the ditches, I’d imagine catching a great big fish. See its fins emerge out of the water. The sun glistening on the scales of its back. Wade in the waters and try to catch another by hand, catching ringworms instead. Feel the butter knife hours later scraping at my skin. Maybe we can stop to visit the farm on the way back to the mountains. I can tell Sylvie stories about how we played hideand-go-seek in the cornfields and caught minnows in the pond. Or chased guineas away from the electric fence that protected Papaw’s

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Ford pick-up, jumped from barn lofts into the stuffed tobacco stacks below until Granny said no more. I can tell Sylvie how fresh morning sausage and biscuits were wrapped in dishrags left on the freezer for us in case we got hungry and cold caramels were left in the refrigerator draw when we were good. Every part of me is rooted in each layer of dirt county-wide, yet there’s an anxiety that comes now when leaving the mountains. The openness of the Piedmont leaves me vulnerable, defenseless. I miss the mountains. Miss the way the trees of the ridgeline stand at attention like soldiers ready to defend me. I can’t catch my breath among the flat fields. Each mile of country road that brings me closer to home triggers the trauma of my childhood, bits and pieces of my life’s story that wake me each night from sleep, more lately since news broke of the murders. I tell Sylvie that when I was her age, little more than six, my Memaw Helen, my paternal grandmother, gave me a book, The Little House. She’d picked it out of a gas station nickel bin next door to her house, a cinderblock building where to get to the bathroom, we’d have to enter a separate entrance from the outside. There was no shower, no tub in her house, only a spigot that ran cold water, a urine-colored, stained basin, and a hole in the dirt floor. Memaw smelled of onions and frankincense and I’d go to the station’s bathroom as often as I could to escape her odor. Her house still had in its corner a rusted through Squirt slider Pepsi machine, another one of Memaw’s trash treasures, that Mama thought would certainly give us Tetanus on one of our visits. Once, while playing hide-and-seek, my brother locked himself inside. We found him a few hours later, sleeping or suffocating, even now I’m not sure. Memaw Helen didn’t have much money so when I held the paperback, pages yellowed and corners torn, it meant something. Even as a child, its story made me sad; its pages said everything about change and loss and the passage of time. There are days still when I imagine myself as the Little House, restored from a state of

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decay and despair back to the foundation that’s always been there, strong and solid. It was all a matter of finding just the right place. Turning onto Chippewa Street, I see my Memaw’s house three-stories high, a dark crimson, the color of blood once it hits the air, outlined in sullied cream. It sits across the street from a tobacco warehouse; many now sit empty, bulldozed down to flat sheets of concrete, cracked and crumbled. Traditions lost since farmers were paid not to farm. Not to do the thing they’ve done for generations. Like asking a fish not to swim. I’d sit in days hot and humid, choked by soil and sweat, barefoot and swaying to each meter of every line of the auctioneer’s chant. A working chant like the preacher calling his lambs to fold. Piles of cured tobacco on wooden pallets. Men shuffling along, coasting till the selling got better and faster and the crescendo of the auctioneer’s syllabic melodies became quicker and sharper. Falling asleep some days, belly full of bottled soda and peanuts.

It was about the time when the tobacco market no longer thrived and the warehouses became relics when I was no longer allowed to go beyond the yard of Memaw’s house. The other houses that surrounded it had already began to fall, withering porches and rotted rooves, boarded windows of broken glass. Weeds so overgrown the dead bodies sat for weeks before any saw. Smelled them first, decomposition hitting noses like the sting of ammonia. I’d swing on the porch wonder why shoes hung on the powerline. Try to understand the words of graffiti tagged on the walls of crumbling brick and rotted wood. Count the minutes between one whistle to the next of a passing train, wondering if I’d escape one day, where I’d escape to if left untethered and unattended. Knowing in my gut that I wasn’t going anywhere. Felt my home like quicksand. Knew too much of poverty and illiteracy and crime that plagued my every day that their effects were my second skin. But, if I didn’t leave, I’d be one of those women in the reeds of grass, cause of death unknown.

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Each time we visited Memaw, Daddy told me to lock the car doors and not to look anybody in the eyes. Said if we drove too slow, folks might get the wrong idea. With Sylvie alongside on this visit, I made sure the windows were rolled up. Men hustled, girls walked pigeon-toed. Looking in the rear view mirror, I saw a girl, who looked little more than thirteen, peek over her bare shoulder to see if we’d stop. “Mama, why’s that man sleeping on the floor outside?” asked Sylvie. “He’s homeless,” I said. “Well, if he was home a little more maybe he’d remember his shoes.” “He doesn’t have a home, sweet pea. That’s why he’s sleeping outside in the cold with no shoes.” Memaw Helen lived with her sisters, Eula Mae and Cleo, in the house now condemned and decayed. I worked hard to get away from the decay that sits in me like a rotted tooth. Eula Mae was so deaf you could sneak from behind and hit her upside the head with a 2x4 and she’d never notice, Daddy said. Said she’d lost her husband young in World War II, never had children, never lived much after that. Just sat and swatted flies and others’ young’uns. What Aunt Eula Mae lacked in speech, Aunt Cleo more than made up for. Nuttier than a squirrel turd, Daddy’d say. She kept stacks of back issued magazines and newspapers, hundreds, maybe thousands, piled high. You couldn’t walk down a hallway without knocking them down, mildewed and molded they choked me each time I entered the house. Once, Aunt Cleo was committed to the highest floor of the hospital. Daddy would visit her. Said she’d been sent there by her sons because she gave too much money to the televangelists and Publishers Clearing House. I went on occasion. Sat in a lobby twelve by twelve playing first to blink with a guy with carvings on his forehead and said he was a disciple of Jesus. Once when Daddy opened the door to leave, the man tried to slip out after the buzzer, told me

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through the crack to come on in. That’s the last time I visited Aunt Cleo.

Memaw Helen was the sanest of the three, and that wasn’t saying much. Once when Mama was desperate for help after being called in for a last minute shift, she left my brother at Memaw’s house to be tended to. She came back several hours later to see my brother, a toddler at the time, lying on a bathroom floor surrounded by empty medicine bottles, candy Memaw called them, so my brother, a dimwit himself, aside from age, ate as much candy as he could. Had his stomach pumped with charcoal. Other days, Memaw taught my brother to spit in light sockets. “You like fireworks?” she’d say. And my brother, the dope he was, would watch her spit into light sockets, then do the same. Those three old women kept only cat food and Goody powders in the refrigerator and skin melted from their frail frames like the wax from a candle. The only somewhat eatable thing in that old house was hard ribbon candy clumped together on a crystal candy tray covered in dust and cat hair. Sometimes, Memaw would keep butterscotch in the pocket of her housecoat, save it for the children visiting, away from those old nasty guineas, she’d say. The smell of butterscotch rooted in her clothes like the dip she’d chew. Lumps of sweet tobacco she held in the corner of her bottom lip. We picked up Uncle Johnny from the bus station on Chippewa after he found out he’d gotten cirrhosis of the liver. Mama said you could wring him out and alcohol would drip and pool like the water from a soaked rag. When he came home to stay with Meemaw, I felt like I should bring him something, a welcome home gift of some sort; so, from my mama’s bookshelf, I took a book from the Encyclopedia Britannica supplements. A book on cowboys. Seemed fitting. I’d never met Uncle Johnny but had heard stories of his lawlessness and violence. Daddy asked him how he was, soon as we met, noticing the frailness of his frame, the yellowness of his skin and eyes. “Sober, broke and disgusted,” he’d said.

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