"Empty Wood" by Hannah McGinley
My mamma says that the trouble with the stain-glass music box is that it’s too damn hot. “The geriatrics” in the back row say that they keep it that way so that boys like Derek Phillips will be too lethargic to even think about fingering the sweaty knee-caps of girls like Stacey Buford. Reverend Hartley calls it the “the lovin’ warmth of Gawd’s embrace.” But the truth of the whole thing is that Bluebriar Baptist—the one with that “God-awful” red carpet—hasn’t had working air conditioning since 1978—partly because “the geriatrics” find the “Hades heat” perfect for a mid-morning nap and partly because Reverend Hartley is always giving half the offering basket to a pretty Ms. Sylvia Starr, who always wears the kind of lipstick all the other ladies seem to avoid.
But the good people of Bluebriar, Tennessee never seem to mind. Mamma says that they only do it so that they can “ignore anything that might just make their lemon pies just a little to bitter.”
So things go on in there sweating and fanning way, with Mrs. Johnston spending the entire sermon paying more attention to her flyaway baby hairs than anything Jesus ever said. Mr. Johnston sits always to her right, praying that the pussy, purple mushroom growing right out the side of his neck won’t rise above his sticky, ironed shirt collar.
The widowed Mrs. Maybell Johnston sits behind her son, fanning her squinting face with what she doesn’t know is her dead husband’s funeral bulletin. The day he died, she disappeared into the woods and returned with a broken wrist and without her smudgy, circular speck-tackles. She told the newspaper she’d had a vision from God, who would guide her from now on. No one’s had the heart to tell her that God must not know the lyrics to his own hymns.
Mrs. Johnston stands like she’s trying not to “piss in her panties,” to hear the Ben Addiction—except I never know “who in the hell” that is.
My mamma—Dr. Mary Frances Franne—slips inside the music box to hear the invisible Mr. Ben Addiction with that look that makes her face as spotted and wrinkly as Mrs. Maybell Johnston’s rear-end. She doesn’t wear it too often, but when she does, it makes me think just how lucky I’ll be to have someone like my mamma love me enough to make a face like that. Sometimes I get myself to thinking that she makes that face just for me, but I know it’s silly. My mamma always knows what’s going on inside those crying ladies with balloon bellies, when she doesn’t even know what’s in her own “you-tree-us.” And that gets me to laughing, which gets my mamma to making that face again.
The singing picks up again and everyone rises to trade the “Hades heat” for the Tennessee heat, which right around this time of year could curl even Shirley Pott’s spaghetti locks. With a wide breath, my mamma sits down on the back bench that’s been missing her drool for ten years and waits for the crank to stop turning.
“The geriatrics” give her the biggest grins, even though they’ve lost all but three of their teeth combined and can’t quite remember her name. Granna’s book club girlfriends place their painted fingernails over their lips to act surprised, but really they’re just trying to smile without showing how much of Jesus’s body is still stuck in their teeth.
“It’s been so long Miss Mary Frances!” they say.
“Oh, it’s Dr. Fanne, now.” My mamma smiles with all her teeth showing.
“Did you find yourself a gentleman up there, Mary Frances?”
“Dr.--
“How long are you in town Mary Frances?”
“A week, but--
“You just couldn’t stand the big city could you now, Mary Frances?”
“It’s Mary.” My mamma says it like it was burning a hole in her tongue, hitting Granna’s book club like hot biscuit batter. “Just Mary.”
The crank sputters for only a moment and then carries on as if my mamma’s voice wasn’t too loud. Granna makes her face just as wrinkly as my mamma’s and tells her that she’ll see her at home. And if there’s anything I know about my Granna, it’s that she never just “sees.” After all, my mamma didn’t get her too-loud voice from my Granddaddy.
By the time the music box is still, it’s just my mamma sitting in the splintery pew—the one with the broken, blue hymnals, third from the back row. I think she’s waiting for Jesus to say something. He never does, which makes her face wrinklier than anybody’s rear-end.
***
“Have you missed a day yet?”
“Have I what now?” Granna hates it when people talk to her while she’s making her Saturday morning grits. When she’s standing over that greasy cooktop, she don’t like to give anyone the time of day—not even Grandaddy, before he went away. My mamma says it’s because Granna like to play pretend “like she’s busting her ass.” But the truth is that Granna has to wrinkle her face real hard if she don’t want her tears falling into the pan, making the grits all salty and whatnot. Now, I’d be a “goddamned liar” if I said I knew why she cries in the first place. I think she just really loves making those grits.
“Have you missed a Sunday yet?”
Granna hasn’t missed a Sunday morning service at the music box since Grandaddy went away all those twenty-two years ago, today—says its brought her straight to the Lord, when she says anything about it at all. That’s what my momma told Dr. Hamond, the lice-ends there-a-pissed. My mamma talked her sometimes, but she quit going a while back. I think she was tired of talking about Grandaddy, or maybe just her face getting so wrinkled all the the time.
“You always have to add the ‘yet,’ don’t you? As if we’re all so keen to up and leave.”
“Yeah, well, one can only hope.”
“You don’t know the first thing about hope, Mary Frances.”
“I guess I take after Daddy in that way.”
My mamma kusses and her mamma kusses and yells up a storm about babies and wrinkles and God and Grandaddy—but mostly about Grandaddy.
“You’re thirty-six years old Mary Frances, you don’t have time to sit around and—”
“Jesus, you can’t go one week with out this. Daddy never cared about this bullshit. You know he didn’t.”
“Well, I care about it; its doesn’t matter what he cared about.”
“He was my father. God, it’s been twenty-two years and you can hardly say his fucking name.”
“That’s not true.”
“Then say it. Say his name.”
“Mary—”
“Say ‘I was married to Earl Francis Fanne for twenty-seven years before he decided to trade in his usual Budweiser for rat poison.’ ”
My mamma feels the burning in her belly and Granna breaks. They yell and cry about Granna “stuffa-cating” Grandaddy and rat poison my mamma was supposed to put back in the shed but forgot about and the rocking chair that sometimes still creaks out on the front porch and “your fault, it’s your fault, it’s your fault” until the burning’s on my mamma’s tongue and she can’t make it to the toilet and soggy pieces of Granna’s biscuits splatter and swim between the green kitchen tiles.
Granna stares down through the floor at something I can’t see, and it’s in moments like this when I wish I could throw my arms around both of them—tell them that I love them and Granddaddy and how wrinkled their faces get when they talk about him. It gets me wondering if my face is as wrinkly as theirs from loving too hard.
“Mary, that’s the second time today.”
But my momma’s out the door and passing Granddaddy’s empty rocking chair before Granna can think to stop her. She slams shut the red door to her Ford rental and drives the two minutes to the Walgreens where the letter G is always burnt out.
My mamma’s heart’s a-thumping faster than I’ve ever heard it as she walks past Daisy Marler, who she says has worked there since 1981. The lights beam down as if they’re asking us all kinds of questions my mamma don’t want to answer. My mamma catches a look at me in the mirror on the ceiling above the “farm-a-see” and puts her hand right over my foot, her eyes so wide and her mouth so open I can hardly stand to sit still—to think how excited she must be to be my mamma.
My mamma’s fingers shake as she wraps them around the box with the ugliest baby I have ever seen printed on it. It’s blue eyes are too far apart, bald as a peach, and drooling straight out of its mouth like a “goddamn dog.” I know my mamma agrees because she’s glaring at that baby as if it just spat in her face, and I pray to God that I don’t come out looking as ugly as that. But I don’t even worry about praying not to spit. I would never do that to my mamma.
My mamma takes the ugly baby box into the bathroom that says “Employees Only,” mumbling about how bad it smells like cat piss. In the box is a little, white stick—like the kind my mamma sticks in balloon bellies’ mouths to see how happy they are. The higher the number, the more red those ladies look—as if they been “laughing their guts out” all day long. But my mamma must be just playing pretend because she drops her black, lace panties, sits on the pee stain toilet, and “pisses” all over the thing.
It gets real quiet after that, and I wonder if my mamma’s trying to hear me talking to her. So I yell real loud about how much I love her and can’t wait for her to meet me and hope I get Grandaddy’s eyes and her hair and Granna’s bumpy fingers and all their wrinkled faces because I’ve never seen anything more beautiful in my whole, long life.
But I don’t think she hears me because all she does is tear some holes in her socks. My mamma has torn up so may of her pink Hanes socks over “good southern gentlemen” and “good baptized babies” and Grandaddy. Anytime my mamma can’t wrinkle her face no more, she curls her toes under so hard they won’t come undone.
My mamma sucks in the “cat piss” smell as two little pink wrinkles appear on the white stick. My mamma cups her hand over my whole body and cries and I am happier than I have ever been.
***
We walk out of Walgreens without paying for the little, white stick and straight to the music box. It’s fifteen miles and my mamma’s toes are bleeding onto her too-tight flip-flops by the time she slips through the door, but the carpet’s already red and the air moist with “the geriatrics’ ” sweat anyway.
We smile at Jesus, who you could always count on to look the same—snot rolling out of his nose and lemon-bitter lips that still held that piece of Johnny Everett’s Big League Chew. My mamma used to think it was his blood that made the carpet red, but I know better. It’s everyone’s curled-up toes.
“You’ve gotten yourself nailed up there again,” she laughs.
He never says anything back like Granna says he will. He never says, Don’t worry so much. I’ll be fine. I’m the Son of God.
But my mamma knows better—even if he does it so she won’t feel so bad. She know’s he’s still just a boy—a boy who bleeds and hurts, even if people like Mrs. Johnston won’t let him. She know’s he’ll always just be somebody’s son. Kids do the darnest things.
My momma starts crying because the carpet is too red and she knows that Jesus is like Granddaddy—all he leaves behind is empty wood.
***
It’s nearly dark by the time we get back home. The porch lantern Grandaddy installed twenty-three summers ago swings lightly in the breeze that always tucks the sun into bed and pulls the moon out to play. Granna’s sitting in her mother’s rocking chair, sipping a Budweiser that’s sweatier than a first prize pig and humming something I can never remember the words to. We climb the porch steps, letting the blood soak into the wood like rain into dirt. We sit in Grandaddy’s rocker and creak back and forth to the tune of the swinging porch light. Granna brings us Grandaddy’s favorite red blanket and a lemonade that hasn’t started sweating yet. We sip our lemonade and Granna hums and everything creaks and wrinkles as if the breeze was pulling all the corners of the world together.
***
The next morning, eight o’clock at the music box rolls in like honey on Granna’s oatmeal. “The geriatrics” take their place, along with book club and the Johnstons. Jesus doesn’t say anything and Reverend Hartley walks up the steps to his empty wooden crib, all too surprised that “Mrs. Elizabeth Ellen Franne” is at home on a Sunday morning for the first time in twenty-two years.
My mamma says that the trouble with the stain-glass music box is that it’s too damn hot. “The geriatrics” in the back row say that they keep it that way so that boys like Derek Phillips will be too lethargic to even think about fingering the sweaty knee-caps of girls like Stacey Buford. Reverend Hartley calls it the “the lovin’ warmth of Gawd’s embrace.” But the truth of the whole thing is that Bluebriar Baptist—the one with that “God-awful” red carpet—hasn’t had working air conditioning since 1978—partly because “the geriatrics” find the “Hades heat” perfect for a mid-morning nap and partly because Reverend Hartley is always giving half the offering basket to a pretty Ms. Sylvia Starr, who always wears the kind of lipstick all the other ladies seem to avoid.
But the good people of Bluebriar, Tennessee never seem to mind. Mamma says that they only do it so that they can “ignore anything that might just make their lemon pies just a little to bitter.”
So things go on in there sweating and fanning way, with Mrs. Johnston spending the entire sermon paying more attention to her flyaway baby hairs than anything Jesus ever said. Mr. Johnston sits always to her right, praying that the pussy, purple mushroom growing right out the side of his neck won’t rise above his sticky, ironed shirt collar.
The widowed Mrs. Maybell Johnston sits behind her son, fanning her squinting face with what she doesn’t know is her dead husband’s funeral bulletin. The day he died, she disappeared into the woods and returned with a broken wrist and without her smudgy, circular speck-tackles. She told the newspaper she’d had a vision from God, who would guide her from now on. No one’s had the heart to tell her that God must not know the lyrics to his own hymns.
Mrs. Johnston stands like she’s trying not to “piss in her panties,” to hear the Ben Addiction—except I never know “who in the hell” that is.
My mamma—Dr. Mary Frances Franne—slips inside the music box to hear the invisible Mr. Ben Addiction with that look that makes her face as spotted and wrinkly as Mrs. Maybell Johnston’s rear-end. She doesn’t wear it too often, but when she does, it makes me think just how lucky I’ll be to have someone like my mamma love me enough to make a face like that. Sometimes I get myself to thinking that she makes that face just for me, but I know it’s silly. My mamma always knows what’s going on inside those crying ladies with balloon bellies, when she doesn’t even know what’s in her own “you-tree-us.” And that gets me to laughing, which gets my mamma to making that face again.
The singing picks up again and everyone rises to trade the “Hades heat” for the Tennessee heat, which right around this time of year could curl even Shirley Pott’s spaghetti locks. With a wide breath, my mamma sits down on the back bench that’s been missing her drool for ten years and waits for the crank to stop turning.
“The geriatrics” give her the biggest grins, even though they’ve lost all but three of their teeth combined and can’t quite remember her name. Granna’s book club girlfriends place their painted fingernails over their lips to act surprised, but really they’re just trying to smile without showing how much of Jesus’s body is still stuck in their teeth.
“It’s been so long Miss Mary Frances!” they say.
“Oh, it’s Dr. Fanne, now.” My mamma smiles with all her teeth showing.
“Did you find yourself a gentleman up there, Mary Frances?”
“Dr.--
“How long are you in town Mary Frances?”
“A week, but--
“You just couldn’t stand the big city could you now, Mary Frances?”
“It’s Mary.” My mamma says it like it was burning a hole in her tongue, hitting Granna’s book club like hot biscuit batter. “Just Mary.”
The crank sputters for only a moment and then carries on as if my mamma’s voice wasn’t too loud. Granna makes her face just as wrinkly as my mamma’s and tells her that she’ll see her at home. And if there’s anything I know about my Granna, it’s that she never just “sees.” After all, my mamma didn’t get her too-loud voice from my Granddaddy.
By the time the music box is still, it’s just my mamma sitting in the splintery pew—the one with the broken, blue hymnals, third from the back row. I think she’s waiting for Jesus to say something. He never does, which makes her face wrinklier than anybody’s rear-end.
***
“Have you missed a day yet?”
“Have I what now?” Granna hates it when people talk to her while she’s making her Saturday morning grits. When she’s standing over that greasy cooktop, she don’t like to give anyone the time of day—not even Grandaddy, before he went away. My mamma says it’s because Granna like to play pretend “like she’s busting her ass.” But the truth is that Granna has to wrinkle her face real hard if she don’t want her tears falling into the pan, making the grits all salty and whatnot. Now, I’d be a “goddamned liar” if I said I knew why she cries in the first place. I think she just really loves making those grits.
“Have you missed a Sunday yet?”
Granna hasn’t missed a Sunday morning service at the music box since Grandaddy went away all those twenty-two years ago, today—says its brought her straight to the Lord, when she says anything about it at all. That’s what my momma told Dr. Hamond, the lice-ends there-a-pissed. My mamma talked her sometimes, but she quit going a while back. I think she was tired of talking about Grandaddy, or maybe just her face getting so wrinkled all the the time.
“You always have to add the ‘yet,’ don’t you? As if we’re all so keen to up and leave.”
“Yeah, well, one can only hope.”
“You don’t know the first thing about hope, Mary Frances.”
“I guess I take after Daddy in that way.”
My mamma kusses and her mamma kusses and yells up a storm about babies and wrinkles and God and Grandaddy—but mostly about Grandaddy.
“You’re thirty-six years old Mary Frances, you don’t have time to sit around and—”
“Jesus, you can’t go one week with out this. Daddy never cared about this bullshit. You know he didn’t.”
“Well, I care about it; its doesn’t matter what he cared about.”
“He was my father. God, it’s been twenty-two years and you can hardly say his fucking name.”
“That’s not true.”
“Then say it. Say his name.”
“Mary—”
“Say ‘I was married to Earl Francis Fanne for twenty-seven years before he decided to trade in his usual Budweiser for rat poison.’ ”
My mamma feels the burning in her belly and Granna breaks. They yell and cry about Granna “stuffa-cating” Grandaddy and rat poison my mamma was supposed to put back in the shed but forgot about and the rocking chair that sometimes still creaks out on the front porch and “your fault, it’s your fault, it’s your fault” until the burning’s on my mamma’s tongue and she can’t make it to the toilet and soggy pieces of Granna’s biscuits splatter and swim between the green kitchen tiles.
Granna stares down through the floor at something I can’t see, and it’s in moments like this when I wish I could throw my arms around both of them—tell them that I love them and Granddaddy and how wrinkled their faces get when they talk about him. It gets me wondering if my face is as wrinkly as theirs from loving too hard.
“Mary, that’s the second time today.”
But my momma’s out the door and passing Granddaddy’s empty rocking chair before Granna can think to stop her. She slams shut the red door to her Ford rental and drives the two minutes to the Walgreens where the letter G is always burnt out.
My mamma’s heart’s a-thumping faster than I’ve ever heard it as she walks past Daisy Marler, who she says has worked there since 1981. The lights beam down as if they’re asking us all kinds of questions my mamma don’t want to answer. My mamma catches a look at me in the mirror on the ceiling above the “farm-a-see” and puts her hand right over my foot, her eyes so wide and her mouth so open I can hardly stand to sit still—to think how excited she must be to be my mamma.
My mamma’s fingers shake as she wraps them around the box with the ugliest baby I have ever seen printed on it. It’s blue eyes are too far apart, bald as a peach, and drooling straight out of its mouth like a “goddamn dog.” I know my mamma agrees because she’s glaring at that baby as if it just spat in her face, and I pray to God that I don’t come out looking as ugly as that. But I don’t even worry about praying not to spit. I would never do that to my mamma.
My mamma takes the ugly baby box into the bathroom that says “Employees Only,” mumbling about how bad it smells like cat piss. In the box is a little, white stick—like the kind my mamma sticks in balloon bellies’ mouths to see how happy they are. The higher the number, the more red those ladies look—as if they been “laughing their guts out” all day long. But my mamma must be just playing pretend because she drops her black, lace panties, sits on the pee stain toilet, and “pisses” all over the thing.
It gets real quiet after that, and I wonder if my mamma’s trying to hear me talking to her. So I yell real loud about how much I love her and can’t wait for her to meet me and hope I get Grandaddy’s eyes and her hair and Granna’s bumpy fingers and all their wrinkled faces because I’ve never seen anything more beautiful in my whole, long life.
But I don’t think she hears me because all she does is tear some holes in her socks. My mamma has torn up so may of her pink Hanes socks over “good southern gentlemen” and “good baptized babies” and Grandaddy. Anytime my mamma can’t wrinkle her face no more, she curls her toes under so hard they won’t come undone.
My mamma sucks in the “cat piss” smell as two little pink wrinkles appear on the white stick. My mamma cups her hand over my whole body and cries and I am happier than I have ever been.
***
We walk out of Walgreens without paying for the little, white stick and straight to the music box. It’s fifteen miles and my mamma’s toes are bleeding onto her too-tight flip-flops by the time she slips through the door, but the carpet’s already red and the air moist with “the geriatrics’ ” sweat anyway.
We smile at Jesus, who you could always count on to look the same—snot rolling out of his nose and lemon-bitter lips that still held that piece of Johnny Everett’s Big League Chew. My mamma used to think it was his blood that made the carpet red, but I know better. It’s everyone’s curled-up toes.
“You’ve gotten yourself nailed up there again,” she laughs.
He never says anything back like Granna says he will. He never says, Don’t worry so much. I’ll be fine. I’m the Son of God.
But my mamma knows better—even if he does it so she won’t feel so bad. She know’s he’s still just a boy—a boy who bleeds and hurts, even if people like Mrs. Johnston won’t let him. She know’s he’ll always just be somebody’s son. Kids do the darnest things.
My momma starts crying because the carpet is too red and she knows that Jesus is like Granddaddy—all he leaves behind is empty wood.
***
It’s nearly dark by the time we get back home. The porch lantern Grandaddy installed twenty-three summers ago swings lightly in the breeze that always tucks the sun into bed and pulls the moon out to play. Granna’s sitting in her mother’s rocking chair, sipping a Budweiser that’s sweatier than a first prize pig and humming something I can never remember the words to. We climb the porch steps, letting the blood soak into the wood like rain into dirt. We sit in Grandaddy’s rocker and creak back and forth to the tune of the swinging porch light. Granna brings us Grandaddy’s favorite red blanket and a lemonade that hasn’t started sweating yet. We sip our lemonade and Granna hums and everything creaks and wrinkles as if the breeze was pulling all the corners of the world together.
***
The next morning, eight o’clock at the music box rolls in like honey on Granna’s oatmeal. “The geriatrics” take their place, along with book club and the Johnstons. Jesus doesn’t say anything and Reverend Hartley walks up the steps to his empty wooden crib, all too surprised that “Mrs. Elizabeth Ellen Franne” is at home on a Sunday morning for the first time in twenty-two years.