Yellow Like the Sun

Momma says she don’t remember Toomey River, even though she knows she was there, even though she has the scars to prove it. I think she’s lying, but she says it’s just like being born. You don’t remember that neither, but you know sure as the sun come up you were there.

“Too much mess,” Momma says, exhaling and flicking the loose ash from her cigarette. Blue smoke curls around her auburn hair and she takes another long pull, ragged breath raking her blackened lungs. “Too much pain and too much mess. Ain’t nothin’ worth rememberin’ ‘bout that and your mind knows it, so it forgets it for you.”

That’s what she says about Toomey River. Too much pain and too much mess, so her mind just forgets it. Mine will, too, she tells me.

“You’ll see,” she says, one hand on the steering wheel, the other pointing her cigarette at me between tobacco-stained fingers. I can see her pink lipstick on the end of it, a perfect imprint of her thin, papery lips. “One day it’ll just be gone. Poof!” – she flicks her fingers – “Just like that!” And then she laughs, a thick, damp laugh like she’s swallowed a sponge. “Your mind’ll clear it out just like it cleared out the mess of your birth ‘fore you was old enough to realize it went missin’.”

I shove my hands under my skinny legs and stare at the ash falling like snowflakes at my feet. “Oh, what,” she says, pinching me. “You think I’m lyin’? You think I don’t know? Well, you mark my words, Tillary Ames Brick.” And she is suddenly hard, the laughter gone from her eyes, her flint-like voice willing truth into her words. “Soon you won’t remember it at all. You mark my words.”

Momma is wrong, though. I remember everything.

*******

She walks quickly, purposeful but unsteady in her heels, shoulder-bag clutched tightly at her side, a cloud of dust rising at her feet. Coils of tightly-wound razor wire snake like silver ribbons along the top of the concrete wall, glinting in the light of the bright, high sun. She glances up at them, green eyes squinting into the light, and touches one trembling hand to the wall to steady herself. She presses the back of her other hand to her face, blotting sweat from her brow and her cheeks, and draws one long, anxious breath.

At the security gate, she exchanges her shoulder bag for an ID badge and, heels clicking, follows the path worn into to the mottled gray tile by other feet, around the corner to the right, then down a long corridor to another checkpoint. Beyond that checkpoint, a set of thick steel doors clang open and then shut behind her with a tiny, anti-climactic click. She looks around in surprise. She didn’t expect there’d be so many people, or such bright, warm light. She didn’t expect to see giggling children, unfettered by fear or unanswered questions; or loyal friends; or steadfast wives, cloaked in forgiveness and love. She expected a place of reckoning, of repentance and regret.

She pulls a yellowed photograph from the back pocket of her jeans and studies the face in the picture once more, then looks around the room again. And there, like he’s slipped in through a crack in the water-stained wall, sits a gaunt, spectral man, gray tufts of hair sprouting from a pasty, faintly freckled crown. The beard is gone, the hairline higher and the creases around his mouth much deeper, but there is no mistaking him.

She looks at the picture again and it strikes her that, in the flesh, he looks more like a photograph than the one in her hand; like some pale facsimile of reality, with all his color stamped out. She watches him, transfixed. The bony fingers of his left hand pick reflexively at his yellow teeth, the bony fingers of his right clasp a photo of his own. She knows without looking it is a photo of her, the one she sent him when he agreed to meet, and she wonders, with a twinge of disappointment, why he is not right now studying it, searching each visitor’s face for its match. She is suddenly, irrationally self-conscious about her outfit and begins a frantic, surreptitious examination of each piece, shoes first.

She feels it the instant she looks down: the subtle weight, like breath, of a stare. She looks up and sees him, blinking bald eyes regarding her, then the picture, then her again. She takes a breath.

“Well,” she says finally and steps towards him. “Hi Daddy.”

******

I didn’t know my father in his youth. He wasn’t present for my birth, having disappeared within hours of Momma’s announcement that she was pregnant. And he reappeared only once more, three years later, briefly and violently at Toomey River which, despite Momma’s willful insistence, I remember with terrifying if disjointed clarity, and always the same way: I remember my dress, yellow like the sun, with tiny button trim around the collar and lace ruffles at the hem. It was a new dress, for my birthday, the only dress I’d ever worn that Loma hadn’t worn first. We were playing on the river bank that day, Loma and me, dancing and skipping in circles, our sweaty hands clasped tightly and slipping, slipping, slipping; singing “Here We Go ‘Round the Mulberry Bush,” our laughter like wind chimes.

I think that’s why I didn’t hear it. Didn’t hear Momma screaming; didn’t hear the pop!, like hot corn exploding in Mr. Culpepper’s fancy machine at carnival; didn’t hear the dull thud that followed. Because we were laughing; I was laughing. I just saw my dress, yellow like the sun, with a new, fine spray of red polka dots across the front.

I remember laughing louder then, thinking how lucky I was; thinking I’d been given the most beautiful dress in the world, with tiny button trim and ruffled lace hem that changed colors at will; thinking nobody had a dress like mine, not even Loma.

I didn’t notice that Loma’s hands had slipped from mine, or wonder why she was no longer laughing. I didn’t even see her lying there – her own pink dress puddled at her knees, and a single darker, redder polka dot spreading across her chest – until his rough hands gripped and lifted me. That’s when I saw her, with Momma crouched beside her, gathering her into her arms and pressing her pale, still face to another florid polka dot now blooming on Momma’s shoulder.

I remember seeing them shrink before me, Momma and Loma, disappearing in the bright light reflecting off the river, as the strange man with the scratchy beard and burnt-toast breath ran, yelling at me to hush, his sharp ribs pressing against the flesh of my belly while I twisted and kicked at the air in vain. I could hear Momma’s screams now, and my own. And the strange man’s labored, panting breath. And then Abel Brick’s black, angry shouts as he ran to his truck for his hunting rifle.

And then I remember silence, and glass falling like rain all around me, and the strange man’s bony arms pulling me tighter, covering my head, my face, my arms, his wet cheeks pressed to mine, rocking me, murmuring gentle words I could not hear or understand.

*******

It was this single act of tenderness, of unconscious paternal instinct in the wake of his desperate, craven violence that prompted me to visit my father at the prison so many years later.

Momma was gone by then, dropped dead at thirty-nine, during my freshman year of college. She was in the kitchen baking bread when she collapsed – from the weight of her too many fictions, I was convinced – her final cigarette still stuck to her pink-lipsticked lips and burning a hole in the yellow linoleum floor on which Abel found her sprawled. “I kept tellin’ her to quit,” he told me when he reached me in my dorm that night. Officially, it was a heart attack, caused by a tiny pellet of birdshot buried in her shoulder, expelled from my father’s shotgun at Toomey River, which migrated to her heart and pierced the pericardium, then lodged itself in the heart-muscle wall.

And Abel, too, the only father my mother ever claimed for me; he followed Momma two years later. It was lung cancer that took Abel, a swift, aggressive cancer that wasted his strong, sturdy frame with savage speed. He had never smoked a cigarette in his life.

I was thirty-six when I went to the prison, a single mother with two small children of my own and a store of sorrows grown too heavy to bear alone. As my father stood to greet me, laboring to pull his thin, rickety frame upright, I saw right away the ghost my mother was running from all those years; I saw it in the long neck, the narrow hips, the knock-knees – my neck, my hips, my knees – and in the hollows of his cheeks and the strength of his chin.

I reached out, without thinking, and touched his face. As my fingers traced his thin lips, so like my own, I thought of the wounds that just my face inflicted on my mother’s heart; and I thought, then, of how fiercely she claimed me as solely her own and then, later, Abel’s. I thought of her necessary fictions, her deliberately selective memory, and the daily battle she waged to love the very picture of the one who had rent her heart in two. I thought of all these things, and marveled at my betrayal, at my cowardice in coming here, and I wept.

And then my father – stooped with age, vanquished by guilt, crippled with regret – wrapped his bony arms around me and pulled me close, pressing his wet cheeks to my own, and held me tight. And a grace I could not have known nor dreamed he possessed, lit my father’s pale, sunken face, shining brightly; shining yellow, like the sun.