from Saying Grace

for my mother the living 1. After Independence Day all our toys began to tear up, school growing sweet on our tongues. We had already cut & hoed the cotton into rows, weeds piled useless as Confederate bills. September meant picking & half-days at Springfield, us colored grades let off at noon to pick the valuable white till nightfall. My hands, civil & slow, didn’t even deserve my behind on the picking truck, but Unc Chock ran the thing & Mama would’ve killed him dead if he’d dreamt of trying to get salty. The money was bad like all money then, not near as green or wide. Three dollars for a hundred pounds, better part of a day. I barely kept up, hands swole up like unpicked fruit. No matter when she started, Frankie plucked fifteen pounds more, food for two, a new Easter dress. Summers I turned so black & bent, all because I’d rather pick with friends than sling weeds alone, than stuff my mattress green. 2. Winters, when the white king had gone, we slept like fish, still moving. We walked back home for lunch & retraced after school, changing into our other pair of drawers before we chored the stove’s ash. No one got gas till after the War. Each November brought a boxcar from the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe; for a share, Lopez balanced it home on his flatbed, a whale from the hunt. Once full of hobos, that bell we burnt kept us from freezing all season long. Before tossing each board in, I would run my hands across the wood speech of burns, carvings warning Unfriendly Conductor, Town of No Sleep. Leftover wood turned to toys; three boards & somebody’s old rollerskate became a summer scooter. Bored, what was that? We were too busy being poor in that house air-conditioned all winter, too busy sharing everything, even bathwater evenings by the pipe stove. No plumbing, no rats, only mice thick enough to believe we had more than they did.