Mary's House

Mary’s House

Jade got out of the car, a little stiff from the long ride, stretching and telling her old bones to loosen up. At her age you had to coax joints into movement, to make sure they knew you meant business. As she walked towards the house, she saw the screen door lying on the ground, wood and screen torn and tattered. She knocked on the door that was slightly cracked and heard nothing in return. With a creaking sound like that of a horror film, she slowly pushed on the old wooden door and revealed a long-forgotten world. Sunlight streamed from the one small window, dust dancing in its wake, and lord knows what varmints scurried in the. Possibly her imagination but she swore she could hear those creatures scratching. The room was empty, no sign of anyone living here remained, no hint of those who endured the cold winters or sweated out the oppressive summer heat. But Jade remembered. She could see it, Mary pulling a pan of cornbread from the oven, the aroma wrapping around you like a warm blanket. Mary’s husband Coon already seated, smiling in anticipation as the aroma of that delicious dish filled the air. Mary’s cornbread was even better than Mama’s, Jade recalled, an opinion she would never share with anyone except Mary. So many of her memories of this house were wrapped in one scent or another. Turnip greens and bacon, deer sausage and field peas. But she remembered there was also the smell of Mary herself.

The fog of a past life flowed through Jade’s mind like the scent took solid form and lingered in the air, her scent, softly sweet, clean and fresh like a bedsheet dried on the clothesline. That scent. It’s been twenty-five years, but it was so strong, that scent that calmed every nerve in her body, that Mary might as well have been standing in front of her. Even with eyes closed she would have known she was in the room. Mary was her person when she was a child, the one and only person she could share everything, and know in her heart the secrets would be safe. There were lots of secrets back then and she has no doubt without Mary she would not have survived her childhood, emotionally or physically.

Now, standing in the empty room there was the damp, moldy smell of the old cypress walls, a faint scent that never seemed to go away, grew stronger during the rains of spring. That smell was there when Mary and Coon lived here, but not overpowering like it was now. Mary would often open both doors, letting air flow through the shotgun house, carrying the smells of the farm on the breeze, the rich smell of Mississippi Delta soil. Being empty and closed up for who knows how many years really made the dampness sink in and the memory of anything else too far in the past to be real.

Jade walked around, looking at the walls, recalling the beautiful colors and laughter found there, Mary having covered them from floor to ceiling in comics from the Sunday newspaper. Back then she loved reading the comics, never seeming to see the same one twice. It made her smile just thinking about it. Now the papers were torn, brown and brittle, crumbled to the touch, very few complete enough to make out. Jade spent a lot of time in this one-room house when she was young. It was her escape, her haven. She would always run to Mary when the screaming and fighting started at home, sneak out and run to the other side of the bayou where the tenant houses were lined up like dominos, identical and evenly spaced. Mary knew of the turmoil, knew that sometimes Jade’s father fell headfirst into the Jack Daniels bottle, changing his personality, making him mad and mean. It was never spoken, but they all knew, had seen it for themselves. You didn’t talk about the landowner’s business though, not to anyone or even amongst those who already knew. There was no gray area on that subject. Black and white. And that was that.

Jade stepped on something, lifted her foot and found a single jack, one of many Mary kept for the children to play. The dang thing had stuck in her shoe, pressing through to her heal. She removed the shoe, trying to balance and not put her foot on the filthy floor. She extracted the jack without losing her balance and falling on her ass. Not bad for a sixty-year-old, she thought.

Silly memories ran through her mind as she held the jack, turning the pointy ends between her fingers. Jade remembered playing Jacks the night Coon shot F.H. Collier, Or was that another time entirely because she remembered being in the woods when she heard the loud boom of the shotgun. Memory is an elusive thing Jade thought, unable to grab enough of the details to recall it clearly. That night was another secret that remained in the dusty shadows, in the silence, no one ever mentioned afterward. Jade knew there was more to the story she couldn’t recall or was even privy to at the time. It was swept under the rug with the dust from the fields, probably not even a record of it at the Sheriff’s office. That was the way of the world back then, some folks just didn’t seem to be as important as others, and F.H. Collier was at the bottom of the stack. A chill ran through Jade and she realized she was shaking, unsure as to what had come over her, but it had nothing to do with the Jack in her hand or the Daniels in the bottle. She stood frozen in the middle of the room, unable to move her body or her mind forward. The question was crazy thinking, misremembering. Are you sure it was Coon that shot him? She asked herself and had no answer. She swore she could smell cornbread.

Here were the facts, little notes of a little town, and history-making journalism all over the world. On July 20, 1969 at approximately seven PM in Hope, Mississippi, a small Delta town, Jimmy “Coon” Herd shot and killed FH Collier. Three hours later, over 200 thousand miles away, mankind had taken a giant leap, televised in color, but most eyes of the world watched it on their 12” Muntz or Philco black and white televisions. Jade was one of the few who didn’t see the moon landing, at least not until days or weeks later, for she spent that hot evening holding Mary’s hand as the Sheriff and her father drove Coon to jail.

But that’s pretty much where the facts end, about the death that is, for little more was documented. Those who did the documenting back then, in the backward-thinking Southern town, didn’t see any need to make note of much more. It was a blatant example of what people saw as important, all the small-minded ways of that generation, such clear divisions, no gray areas.

The questions kept circling in her mind, questions she thought she had known the answers to but didn’t fit quite right in the moment. What was she even doing in the woods or at Mary’s house near sundown? Why had Coon only stayed one night in jail, was back home working in the fields the next morning? That didn’t make much sense either, but she didn’t remember questioning them at that time. She took a deep breath, the dust and mold smell filled her senses but brought her back to the moment. She quickly walked out the back door and breathed deeply, pulling fresh air into her lungs. That frightening feeling was gone now that she was outside, but she had the strangest feeling, wished she had never stopped to explore the old house. Something made her want to jump in her car and head towards the highway, those mixed-up memories in the dust of the house.

Standing in the yard now, Jade stared at a sapling along the bayou, its roots holding tight to the bank that it so desperately wanted to become one with, forcing its way into the rich Delta soil, reaching for a taste of what it knows beyond a doubt will make it better, will make it stronger and want to be more. It’s the water. It’s always about the water. Well, that and the soil, soil so rich it appeared black when freshly plowed, ah and the aroma of that dirt in the air made Jade smile and remember what it felt like to be home. Here, deep in the South, it’s the muddy current of the River that made the land they tended and loved and cursed and harvested, that’s the River, the water they saw and were. That flat land formed by the Mississippi River, it shaped and took but gave with every day, shaped lives and took lives, provided a living and shaped their futures. It was part of who they were. The only thing stronger than the pull of the earth and the force of the water, was blood. Cousins and aunts and uncles, their kin, their blood tied to the land, drawn to the source, and over and over they saw how blood was thicker than water, if you were blood of those on the north side, the right side, of the bayou, if your skin was only dark in the summer, tanned while plowing and planting that land. If you were on the other side, the south side of the bayou, life was different, and despite the sweat and tears, and yes blood you’ve shed to help farm that land, it was different. Black and white. Lines were clearly drawn, and what was mine was mine, and sometimes yours was mine too. It wasn’t right, but they told you it was right, and all believed and acted accordingly. And that was that.

Memories, good and bad, flowed through her mind, and it was all she could do to move her body and get back in the car. She would call her therapist once back on the highway, needing to talk through what she had just experienced, wondering what ghosts she had stirred up in her visit to Mary’s house. Was it ghosts or true recollections? It didn’t matter. It had completely taken over her body, shaking as if cold but sweating in the sun. Her breathing was shallow, and she knew she had better sit down quickly or fall even quicker. She closed her mind to that memory lane and concentrated on the moment, willing herself towards the car. What the hell just happened? There was something that had grabbed ahold of her and tore into her like a mad dog with a rag doll, flinging her back and forth. She swore she could smell cornbread in the air. “Stop it!” she said out loud, hoping the sound of her own voice would get her into motion. She would not come back this way anytime soon, at least not until she could sort out why she had such a violent reaction to being in Mary’s old house and recalling the events of the night that changed the world, that obviously changed her world.