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bud that kills the motor. Immediately, in unison, we sense the next-room emptiness, which then screams at us. My mother gasps. Through the window we see Mamie in the yard, her fingers ripping cloth. Outdoors my father approaches her from one angle, I from another. She stands alone on the grass, tilted a bit in the wind like a scarecrow with its rags blowing. Then she bolts. For a fifty-seven-year-old woman she is remarkably fast and sprints through Celia Kidd's yard. Boys younger than me and men older than my father appear from nowhere to join the chase and revel in the sight. Cornered against the boards of an abandoned sawmill, she stands flabby and grayish-pink, as naked as a jaybird. My father, pulling his shirt off, ties it around her as best he can. 
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"Where's my mama?" she says. My father explains that Grammie Marlowe is dead. "I'll wait," she says. So we drag her. In the house my mother calms Mamie with new clothes and herself with a tumbler of Four Roses. My father is unstrung and seats himself at the kitchen table; I lay my head on it, falling asleep at once. In a dream Mamie has a hook for a hand and tries to slash me. Dodging, weaving between the slashes, I beg for my life. Instead my own hands become hooks and I use them both against Mamie's one-but the struggle is useless. In painless ecstasy, stripped of a sin which I never had understanding of, I watch flesh peel off me in long loving slices. Eagerly, as Mamie raises her hook for a final slash, I open my mouth like a fish.  |
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