I lie on your grave and see the world your way. Big, blue, all the same. Still-- except for the slap of the wind against the dry stand of sea grass, the distant rattle of the odd corn stalk left standing after combining. Salt air brought by last night’s rain comes in heavy and moist off the Choptank River. Budding trees sway, flushed from their long hard sleep. I turn over, the weight of me pressing into young grass washed plump and sweet. "It’s your mama, boy," I say, holding you as close as I can.
Talking to you is like talking to God. I could see that coming at the end when you lay quiet in your bed, a shadow skimming the covers. Sometimes I feel you so strong you’re right here hearing all I say. But the days my faith is weak, it’s just me, my words tossed and carried away by the wind.
Last night’s rain knocked every last one of your little toy figures off the ledge of your stone. I wipe each one down and set them back in their place just the way we lined them up on the windowsill above your bed.
Nobody can see me from the road. Not through the big stand of oaks along the crumbling front walk and the burned-out brick wall of the old church. 1692 the first church was built here, that’s what the plaque they put up says. Back then people mostly buried their kin at home. I can see the comfort in that. The dates on the oldest stones start at 1745, the names the same as the ones in the phone book: Lloyd, Bowie, Lowe, Martin, Tilghman. It cost me double to bury you inside the fence next to the ruins, but all that old death felt safe, like I wanted to make you.
I put you in with the other babies, the ones that either died before their parents felt sure enough to name them, or, like you, lived years that could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Love and the best intentions in the world didn’t save them, didn’t save you. The tiny stones list in the quack grass like a chain of white paper dolls. I tend this nursery of limestone orphans, doing for them like I hope some mother will do for you when I’m gone. I move down the rows, touching each one. I pull the grass away from the headstones, call the babies that have them by name.
The day we laid you in the ground it snowed a heavy wet snow. The flakes swirled big as tissues worried to pieces from all my crying. The hush and slide of snow glanced off us and fell on you, hiding the horrible turned earth with a blanket soft and fine as flocked lace. It was easier to look at the growing mound of snow on the little lamb that topped the old stone next to you. That's a dead child too, I told myself, to keep from hollering out. The parents that buried the child are dead. The stone that marks their grief is smoothed away. “Rest" and “be still" whispered the silvered touch of each flake. Now sometimes when I can’t sleep I lie on your bed and call up the silence of that snow and the moist air white with quiet.
"Mama, be still," you said as soon as you could talk, the need in your keen little voice full of longing for me. I was just a girl, not even twenty years old, and I ran headlong from one thing to the next. If I did stop I had a cigarette going, or one foot jiggling to beat the band. Gardening really got me going. When you were nothing but a baby I’d lie in bed thinking about all the plants I needed to put in the ground the next day. I could feel them growing up around the house, holding it in a sweet green embrace. I’d start one flower bed, and there’d be something, the soil solid with clay or riddled with rock, and then I’d get carried away by the next, never finishing much of anything. I bought flowers and they wilt in their plastic pots or their roots worked their way out of those little holes at the bottom before I got them in the ground. If I did get them planted I’d forget about watering and then once the ground was dry and cracked I’d over-water until the soil washed away.
Your getting sick was the two-by-four that took all that out of me. God leveled me, yanked me back so I could stick for the first time in my life. I planted a pink garden right outside your window so you could watch from your bed. I brought home those two cherry trees all covered in soft sweet blossoms and no taller than you. They made me think of your little ears and the flush they got when you were tired.
Later, you were always tired. I lay beside you in that crank-up hospital bed until it was hard to tell which one of us was doing the dying. I got so I could smell the strawberries you swore you smelled all the time. Death was there with us, speaking in the bones that jutted through your flesh and mine, agreeing to support us just a little longer. I felt your changes as I cradled you at night and matched my breath to yours and willed you to stay. Each day I woke wondering was this the day you’d go, and dreading how it would be. I wanted the end to be sweet for you. I pictured you in my arms, the two of us spoons, and me breathing in the last of you through every pore, my love exhaled in a steady whisper in your ear.
I went on buying you those meals with the toys, your favorite toys. You liked them better than anything fancy, even after you were too sick for the food. I would stop right there in the restaurant to empty it in the trash and left the box open on the drive home to air out so you wouldn’t smell the grease.
The counter help got so when they saw me coming they would just hand me the toy so their eyes could hurry up and settle on someone hurting less, somebody less crazy. Mary, Etta’s girl, the one that babysat when I cashiered at the grocery store-- she waited on me this morning. She pressed this scooter-riding rabbit into my hand and gave me that everything’s-fine-he-just-went-down-for-his-nap smile she met me with each afternoon when I’d come home from work. Bless her heart, she never says a word. She just wants me to be fine-- that’s what everyone wants.
I turn the rabbit this way and that, seeing how he looks best, fighting back the panic crouching inside that waited for this toy and a thousand other things before to nudge it awake to rear up and grab me. There’s a story you made up for these toys that goes back all the way to when you were two. I don’t know who this rabbit is or if he even fits in. I don’t know because you’re not here to know, and nothing will change that.
Death is death. A big still blank place where everyone who was becomes the same. The truth touches me, light as the snow that fell when I laid you here. I put the rabbit in my pocket, steady myself against the list of shifting sorrow. The truth. Isn’t that what I come for each day? There’s still tomorrow to get through and the day after that, like snow on lambs, like water on stone.
Judith Cox’s awards include a 2003 residency fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, a 2003 residency from Fundacĺon Valparaiso, the 2000 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, the 1999 Virginia Governor’s Screenwriting Award, a 1997-98 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Virginia Commission on the Arts, and the 1989 Washington Prize for Fiction. She was the 2002 StoryQuarterly Scholar, Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She has been a finalist for numerous additional awards, including the Sundance Institute Screenwriters Workshop and the 1998 Governor’s Screenwriting Awards. Her stories have appeared in various magazines and journals, including The American Literary Review, Parting Gifts, Potomac Review, and Snake Nation Review, as well as numerous anthologies. She has taught fiction at the Writers’ Center at the Chautauqua Institution, the Danville Writer’s Conference, and at the Writers’ Center in Bethesda, Maryland. An art historian, she is a critic and feature writer covering the arts, design, and travel for Elle, USAir, Art & Antiques, Southern Accents, and The Boston Globe Magazine, among others. Her work is represented by Kim Witherspoon, Inkwell Management, New York. Born and raised in Asheboro, North Carolina, she lives in Arlington, Virginia.
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