By Monica Brashears
Winner of the 2018 Furrow Prize for Fiction
On the day that Auntie J was executed, Mississippi Sweet ate well. It was some spring day in 1963, and the weather was something awful. The sunrise was a bloodied gradient shrouded by rolling thunderheads that looked like pregnant blackberries. Mama Sweet was hysterical in the days leading up to her sister’s death. She sobbed into poorly woven quilts and showed Mississippi grainy photographs of the aunt she would never know. But when the time came for her sister to be strapped and shocked and sent to hell, Mama Sweet was calm. She stayed in her warm little cabin planted in the middle of the mountain and kept herself busy in the kitchen. She sent her husband through the trees, down the dirt road, and into town to the colored grocery five times before she was satisfied. He did as he was told, despite the throbbing corns that sprouted from his toes. It was a long walk, and the rain felt like bullets. The thunder made his brain bounce, his skull shimmy. Better that and too much food than all that crying, though.
She made sweet corncakes, pork chops, buttered carrots, chitterlings, collard greens with bits of ham hock, sugared grits and cheese grits, black-eyed peas, a small pitcher of orange juice, a big pitcher of iced tea, one sweet potato pie, and enough whipped cream to fill two bouillon cups.
Mississippi was in class listening to the sky grumble while Mama Sweet made the feast. She was only in first grade, and too young to understand that Old Sparky was not some stray puppy that killed her aunt. She knew enough, though, to understand that Auntie J was a murderer. Her aunt had been on death row since before she was born, and the kids at school liked to tease her about what the grownups in town whispered.
“I heard she took a axe and cutted off her old man’s head and it rolled down into the Holston,” a boy said. The kids called him Button, because his Sunday clothes were always missing a button or two, on account of his plump gut.
“That ain’t true, Button,” Mississippi said. Her eyes were light like tree sap; her skin was dark like dusk.
“Is so. And when they was gonna bury him they couldn’t find his head ’cause the river done washed it away. So they used a boiled chicken,” Button said.
“It ain’t true, Button! Pastor Wooly said you go down with the Devil if you lie, and you is! ‘Cause that ain’t true.” But no one believed Mississippi’s tearful protests—no one tried to. A cooked chicken in a casket was just too good for town talk.
When Mississippi reached their cabin after school, her pa was sitting on the edge of the porch letting the downpour massage his naked feet. Boy, did they hurt.
“I fed the babies,” Pa Sweet said. They had caught some minnows and put them in a mason jar full of creek water. They stayed on the windowsill in the kitchen next to a vase of wilted lady slippers.
“Thanks, Pa.” Mississippi said.
“How’s schoolin’ today, Sippi?” Pa Sweet asked. He knew that she hated when he asked, but he did every day.
“OK,” she mumbled without glancing in his direction. He clutched her arm as she moved past him.
“Your mama is real upset today, hear? Don’t bring up Auntie J,” he said without acknowledging that she never did and never planned on it.
“Yes sir.”
They ate dinner and after, Mississippi devoured a cloud’s worth of whipped cream on a single slice of pie. They normally only had whipped cream on Easter and Christmas, because vanilla extract was too expensive to pour around like it was water from the well. When Mississippi finished bathing, her mother sang her a lullaby in a voice that sounded like wind chimes. Then the dishes were washed, the half-digested food settled, and they slept through the dying storm.
—
It was about a week later when Mississippi saw a dead woman, and sunlight filtered through the trees and glittered on the forest floor like fish scales. She was trudging down the weed-choked path that led to school. Gnarled roots from the surrounding pignut hickories and oaks pushed through the earth. She was considering which hiding place she would choose during recess when she saw the wailing woman hunched over the trunk of a fallen tree. Her outfit reminded Mississippi of a bumblebee, if bumblebees could be black and white.
“Ma’am? You lost?” Mississippi took a step toward the woman.
Her weeping became louder.
“You need help, ma’am?” She took another step.
The woman whipped her head in the direction of the little girl and revealed a wide grin with teeth that looked like chipped pebbles.
“Gotcha, didn’t I?” She laughed, and it sounded like gravel crunching beneath boots.
Mississippi gazed into those black bean eyes and knew from old family portraits that it was Auntie J. She said nothing.
“You thought I was cryin’,” she said. “Bet you think clouds is mashed taters, too.” She grated out another laugh. A tooth flew from between her lips. The spongy soil swallowed the sound of the impact.
Mississippi lurched back and stumbled on a jutting rock.
“Sorry, baby. Electrocution’s hard on the soul.” Auntie J wiped spit from the corner of her smile.
Mississippi said nothing. Auntie J raised an eyebrow. Then, finally, she muttered, “You supposed to be dead.”
“Lots of things ain’t the way they’re supposed to be, Sippi. Like you. Why you in the woods all by your lonesome?”
“I’m goin’ to school, Auntie J.” The name felt funny coming from her lips; it was a foreign word that she was never allowed to speak.
“You got a real sad look in your eyes,” Auntie J said. She tilted her head. “Don’t you like school?”
“It’s OK.” Mississippi waited, and when she saw there was no harsh judgment in Auntie J’s eyes she added, “The kids is mean sometimes.”
“Aw, baby.” Auntie J walked over and crouched down to meet her gaze. “They ain’t nothing but a fleck of dust in your eye. You pretty. Smart too, I bet. What’s one plus five?”
“Six,” Mississippi said. Her eyes were focused on the rich mud caked on her shoes.
“Yes, baby.” Auntie J was smiling. “And what are those mean kids to you?”
“Dust in my eye.”
“We got a real genius stompin’ through this dirt,” Auntie J sang. “I bet you make real good grades.”
Mississippi’s face softened. She smiled.
“Why you here, Auntie J?” The name began to feel more natural, and she didn’t think she would ever stop saying it. “We got to go tell Mama.”
“Can’t do that, now. I just came to say it’s your minnows, baby. Now get on to school.” Auntie J ruffled her skeletal fingers through Mississippi’s coarse hair and disappeared through a thicket of wild strawberries.
Mississippi walked on to school and thought about how her scalp tingled where those fingers rubbed, and how her dead aunt smelled like pancake syrup, and how them kids weren’t nothing but a fleck of dust in her eye.
—
After school, she ran home.
“It was great,” she huffed to her pa before he even spoke. She pushed past him into the cabin. “Mama, guess what.”
“What, child?” Mama Sweet was scrubbing the kitchen floor with Pine-Sol.
“I saw Auntie J today, Mama, and she was so nice, but she had to go into the woods, and—”
“Sippi!” Mama Sweet hollered. “Don’t go tellin’ lies in this house.”
“But it ain’t a lie, Mama, and she smelled like pancake syrup, and she said she bets I get good grades and—”
“A whoopin’ is what you’ll get if I hear one more tale come from you.” Mama Sweet was frozen on her hands and knees; her watery eyes were pleading Mississippi to stop, child, please, no more, my heart can’t take it. She wanted her child to cope, but not in a way that made her heart feel like it was an empty peanut shell, and her own daughter was about to crush it under her thumb.
“But Mama—”
“But nothing, Sippi!”
“She was there.” Mississippi’s voice cracked.
Pa Sweet barged in. “What’s all this noise?”
Mama Sweet ignored him. “Go to your room ’fore I get a switch.”
Mississippi saw tears streaming down her mama’s sunken cheeks and knew that she didn’t mean it. But the thought of her mama searching the backyard for the strongest piece of wood and making her writhe in pain for telling the truth was enough to make her not want to see, hear, or touch her mama. She stomped away.
Tears fell on her chapped lips, and they burned. She collapsed on her bed, wrapped her arms around her doll, and cried until she gagged. The doll’s name was Ripley. He was a crude, fat thing with pine needles for stuffing and acorns for eyes. Her mama had made him for her to talk to when the kids started picking on her for her name. Then, he was useful when the kids found out that she was related to a murderer. Later, he helped when the kids called her “Sunrise Girl,” and thought she was Death’s keeper.
Once, she brought him to school, and Button had ripped him out of her hands.
“You still a little girl baby that plays with dolls,” he said loud enough for the entire class to hear.
“Give it back,” she said.
He looked at the doll’s eyes. “Why’s he got squirrel eggs for eyes?”
She gripped for Ripley’s leg and yanked. “Everybody knows squirrel eggs is white,” she said. Button ignored her and told everyone that Mississippi played with a doll like a little girl baby, and that the doll had squirrel eggs for eyes.
The teacher heard the children laughing, and announced that the next student to stray from the lesson would be paddled. Later, the Teacher Who Never Smiled allowed a grin to surface when he explained to the class that squirrels do not, in fact, lay eggs.
“Ripley,” she said when the sobbing ebbed to sporadic gasps. “Things ain’t the way they’re supposed to be.” She closed her puffy eyes and dreamed of pancakes and bones.
When she awoke the next morning, her minnows bloated and floated in the mason jar.
