MARY

I was always Mary in the Christmas play. Would make the dollbaby appear like magic and treat it like it was the real thing. I would lay the baby in the manger—it was the Child of God I was letting go with my hands. I heard the donkeys bray, the cows swish, smell the ripe, sharp horse shit. The starlight falling in on his sleeping little face.

He won’t nothing but a country boy. Just like us.

My cousin Matt was always Joseph and I remember thinking it would be better if he’d been someone who could read good—someone I could love in real life. It would have made Mary feel more real. I wanted to be rocking the son of God to sleep.

BLOOD SONGS

We sing the blood songs in church all the time but we sing them a lot once it gets to be around Easter.

I’ve never seen a lot of blood, except when Johnny Sykes killed that bear and we went out to watch it get skinned, and then I guess there’s my period too. But that’s mostly clots, nothing flowing, not enough to fill a washbin.

And then I guess there was also some blood when Cleo started having kittens in between Mama’s legs that night on the bed. But Cleo licked all that up. You couldn’t really see anything red.

And then there was the time Miss Pat Baker took the church kids out to the mountains to her little sister’s farm. She had a dairy farm. We’d never seen nothing like that. We don’t have milk cows where we’re from. They took us to taste the milk, we got to pet a lil calf and then right there in the damn sun there was a mama trying to push a baby out. She was really heaving, she was really having a hard time. It was just one of them things, they just wanted us to walk past it but I wanted to stay because I was worried. It looked like that baby was half outside of her, couldn’t see but two legs, maybe one, maybe a tail. I don’t know if the tail was swishing but it would make a better story if it was.

Anyways I wanted to stay and watch it but everybody kept walking on and I wanted to ask one of the grown people if she was gonna be alright, if we need to help her pull the baby out. I was worried she was gonna crush it the way she was sitting on it, like it was half out of her, it didn’t look comfortable at all but everybody kept walking and I realized I was straggling behind. But that really hurt my feelings. And the rest of the damn day that’s all I could think about. I mean I can’t even tell you what we did on the way home. I think maybe there was a pumpkin patch, maybe we picked pumpkins, maybe we rode some trailer topped with hay. But I can tell you this: that mama cow, she was on concrete, she won’t even on grass. She was on concrete and there was blood on the concrete and it was hot.

HARD BISCUITS

If I could make you biscuits I would. Granddaddy’s been dead for 5 years now, still doesn’t have a headstone. And there’s only one tobacco farmer left in the county. The robbers strewed pictures of Big Mama’s family all over the bedroom floor to get her jewelry. They tried to take the air conditioners. Termites are eating the big columns at church. The choir’s forgetting the hymns. Main Street just got a Dollar General and the grocery store closed. Now we drive to Rich Square for hog jowls for seasoning. We cross the river to go to the butcher. We don’t cut up hogs anymore. There’s only one family down in the curb that still has them. On Sunday there’s less people at the table. At the last cover dish dinner, Ms. Ferrel made her pound cake with salt. She can’t think since her husband’s died. Her children moved to places with traffic. We still are afraid of traffic. We shell peas real fast. We wonder when the rain will come. We know God won’t give us something we can’t handle. His shoulders can carry the burden we can’t. I’ve seen deers get skinned. Pulling apart fast, hanging up in a floodlight. The heat comes out like smoke. Mama won’t eat deer burgers. And I’ve never seen my Aunt snap a chicken’s neck in the backyard, just the flick of her wrist, held above her head. We’ve been frying oysters every Christmas morning on the porch ever since anyone can remember. We don’t care to know the number but it’s been since before 1910. When my Uncle was dying in his living room, we took turns sitting up with him at night. He told me that he needed me to drive the tractor. Said I was one of the only ones that could get back to all the places on the land nobody else knew about. I want to share my home with you. I want you to eat the biscuits I learned to make. In the same wooden bowl my Big Mama used, the one with the big crack that when you picked it off the table no flour ever fell through. On the same farm my family sweat and bled in. The old mules are buried behind the barn. I picked blackberries down deer paths and toted watermelons to the back door. They’re all mixed in the dirt I came out of. You ask me to make you biscuits. Like it’s something I know how to do. The last time I made them they turned out hard as rocks. I picked up every one of them and threw them at the wall.