Bringing Mamma Home

My mamma knew there were things she still had to teach me. That’s why she fought so hard not to die. But death waited in the shadows like death has a way of doing, and when she got weak, it jumped on her. Daddy died of the flu nearly five years earlier, and I think somehow he just swooped back to earth and reclaimed his bride.

I sat on the porch with my brother Jacob after the funeral. We didn’t say a word till the sun dropped and an orange glow showed through the see-saw branches of the forest. The sky slowly paled as moonlight filled the air, and Jacob turned to me.

“Well, Tizz. I guess it’s just us now.”

The knot in my throat wouldn’t let me speak. I knew Mamma wasn’t gone, not really. I felt her everywhere; in the yard, in the barn where we used to sit in the dark and giggle like friends, in the attic of the house my grandpa built. That morning I heard her in the wind, whispering things a mother’s supposed to tell her daughter.

I couldn’t tell Jacob though–that mamma talked to me even after she died.

About a month after we buried Mamma, a storm hit our house. Jacob and I huddled in the basement with the light from a single candle showering over us. I kept thinking of the movie playing at the theater downtown. The Wizard of Oz. When the calm followed the storm, would we be in a land of talking scarecrows and witches and magic ruby slippers? Or would we still be just two kids living alone on a Missouri farm?

Dust fell from the timbers and the sides of the cellar seemed to breath with the wind outside. In and out the earthen walls moved, crumbling here and there, groaning as they threatened to bury us alive.

In the height of the storm I fell to my knees and made my deal with God. When the storm cleared and Jacob and I found ourselves clinging to each other but still flesh and blood in the musty cellar under our house, I knew God had accepted my bargain. As the last of the raindrops fell from the roof, and the cows came up from the field, the home I’d known changed forever. That was the first night I saw Mamma.

The storm had lifted completely from the valley that sheltered our house, leaving only a few uprooted trees and a dozen loose boards. Jacob and I went to bed with a promise to walk the five miles to church that coming Sunday.

The moon was clear and bright over the yard when a sound woke me from a restless sleep and drew me to the window. She was out in the yard, looking mournfully at the house. I watched her until just before dawn when she slipped into the surrounding air and completely disappeared. I only saw her occasionally for the next nine years, but I felt her everywhere. Many times I thought I heard her whisper, and there were times when I knew that the breeze that brushed gently across my face was really her hand.

Life on the farm was hard, but we always managed to get the plants in on time. We harvested before the first frost came. And we kept the cows milked and the chickens fed. Sometimes, late at night, I’d hear Jacob pace the floor in the kitchen. He walked the crooked boards and drank coffee till dawn. For awhile I think he was trying to decide whether we should leave. He wanted to. The city might be good, he said, away from crops and tractors held together with bailing wire and worrying about money you know will never be there. He worried about both parents dying so young and figured the place would lay claim to us if we didn’t get out.

Jacob later told me he started pacing the kitchen the first time he saw Mamma walking in the yard. A crescent moon hung in the sky that night, he said. And in its dim light, she appeared a foggy version of her former self, a ghost that had somehow managed to get back to her children. He waited all those years to tell me he’d seen her, and the whole while I clung to my secret like a spinster guarding her memories, so poor Mamma went unclaimed for nearly a decade.

But one night, when Jacob had been outside late into the evening, I guess Mamma’s presence finally got the best of him. He took the steps to my room two at a time, his face red and flushed when he arrived. I woke to him stuttering and waving his hands. I thought maybe the house was on fire so I tried to pull him down the stairs so we could get out. He kept pulling me back. Finally he told me.

“Don’t go out there, Tizz,” he gasped between breaths. “Mamma’s out there.”

I knew right away what he was talking about, but for some unknown reason I didn’t let on that I’d been seeing her too. I guess I wanted to make sure we’d seen the same thing. “Mamma ain’t out there Jacob. Mamma is dead and buried.”

“No Tizz. No she ain’t,” he said oddly calm. “Her body might be in the graveyard, but her ghost is out back. I’ve seen her for years. But tonight something’s different. Tonight she’s clearer to see and I think she’s trying to get into the house.” He pulled the curtains back with his finger tips and squinted to see through the darkness.

“She’s different tonight, Tizz,” he said. “I think some of the ghost is going away and Mamma is coming back. But I don’t know if that’s the way it should be.”

I turned from Jacob and searched the corners of my room expecting to see Mamma’s dark eyes mixed with the shadows. Bumps ran my spine and settled somewhere just below the base of my neck. Jacob ducked and hovered behind the thin cloth that covered the windows. Mamma had made the curtains from scraps the year she died. She sewed those little pieces of color into tiny square rainbows that met me each morning and brightened my day.

Our mamma was good to us when she was alive, and I couldn’t see my way to thinking she’d be any different when she was dead. “If it is her, why should we be afraid?” I asked him. “Wouldn’t she still be our mom?”

He looked at me, a little less filled with fear than thought, rubbed the sides of his head like I’d seen Mamma do a thousand times, and looked back, the fear fading away. “Guess you’re right,” he said. “If it’s her, why should we be afraid?”

Both of us put our noses to the bubbled pane of glass, our breath filling it with mist as we looked for Mamma in the yard. There she was, brilliant in her paleness, walking toward the house in a whispy gate. She looked up at the window and smiled.

We didn’t hear the door open or close, but after a few minutes we heard things moving around in the kitchen–pots, pans, the woodstove grates. We edged our way down the stairs, stopping when a clatter or bang echoed up, the whole while grasping each other’s hands like desperate friends. At the bottom of the steps we moved in unison to the kitchen doorway. Light spilled across our feet, up our shaking knees, and onto our blood-drained faces. Mamma stood with her back to us at the stove, more solid than I’d ever seen her out in the yard. She hummed a song that I remembered from her days of living, and she moved from the stove to the sink pump and back again as she cut and washed and chopped. We were both rooted to the narrow doorway, hands still gripped, eyes still fixed on the apparition before us. My brother spoke first.

“Mamma,” he said weakly. “Is that you?”

Neither of us released a breath as the ghost turned to face us. Although it’s hard to describe exactly, the thing that turned from our kitchen stove was surely our mamma. Filmy and luminous and not altogether there, yet there and her all the same. No color made its way into her wintery form, but we knew her hair would be black with touches of gray. We knew her eyes were the color of a soft forest floor, and the cheeks of her face just slightly tinged with pink. We knew her smile would make those brown eyes twinkle and the edges of her soft mouth rise in a gentle smile. We knew but couldn’t quite see.

Neither one of us cared if the vision in our kitchen wasn’t quite solid enough to hug, we had a mamma again. Not one that could hold us to her beating heart, or tell us the things we wanted to hear, but she was there.

The next night, as Jacob and I came in from the field, we stopped in the yard and searched the golden light that spilled from the house. Inside the kitchen were two shadowy forms walking from stove to sink and back again. From inside came two voices familiar to us. Daddy had come home to be with the woman he said he fell in love with when he was only ten. Our parents had gone to school together, courted and married before they left their teens, and bore and began to raise two children before sickness separated them. We hadn’t mourned his loss as much as hers because we were so young, but he’d been missed. Now he was back, next to the woman he loved, in the house where his children still lived. We stood outside for a long time watching the two shadowy figures mingle and mix like a river mist. Finally we went inside and sat at the dinner table with them like it was the most normal thing in the world. Daddy smiled his ghostly smile, held the shimmering hand of Mamma across the table, and looked on his family with pride.

I don’t know how long our family will exist as it does now. I don’t know how long a specter can stay on this earth and not lose itself to the wind. But, I haven’t been afraid of anything for a good long while. And every night before I go to bed I thank God for the promise He kept that time I bargained with him during the storm. I had traded a life away from the farm for a life with my mamma. He never said so, but I think maybe Jacob had done the same thing.