All the Mothers

by Karen Salyer McElmurray

Holy Mother

When I was little, I didn’t believe in any of the church’s faces of god—the gray beards, the crowns of thorns. I wanted sand the color of garnets. Camels. Deserts. When it rained some nights, I dreamed a holy woman came and sat on the edge of my bed. She smelled like frankincense and myrrh and something else I could not yet name. A woman-scent, fierce and lonely. 

Granny

Strong hands wringing out dish rags in a metal pan. Skinny knife blade and a ruby red beet. Scrub brush and linoleum floor. Broom. Hoe. Well chain. Bucket. Feathers plucked from a fresh dead hen. Calluses. Raised blue veins. Steady beat of a fork in egg white. Meringue that tasted so sweet. Finger pointing out back to the smoke house. Fingers making three neat parts of a braid. Finger touching eyes that wept. One finger licking and a book’s page turned. Read me a story, I said, and she did.

Lineage

Beck was my great grandmother.  Her daughters were Pearlie and Opal. Pearlie’s daughters were Irene, Ruby, Ruth, and my mother, also Pearlie. I remember some about their lives. The well behind my granny’s house. The smoke house, and a garden that stretched forever. I remember a dark room in my great-grandmother’s house and sweet smoke from her pipe. And I remember the hush of all their secrets. My mother’s monthly periods were heavy, and my granny whispered behind her hand about a woman’s curse. When my aunt Ruby miscarried and tried to kill herself, my mother and my aunt Ruth fed her black coffee, walked her and hushed me out of the room. What I didn’t know then, I imagine now.  I imagine the generations of birth giving. I imagine my great grandmother’s hands massaging my granny’s belly, trying to gauge the hours until my mother’s head crowned. By the time I was born, my mother was in Kansas, with my father in the air force. My father tells it this way—as she was giving birth, her voice carried down the hospital corridor. I want my mother, she called, her words taking flight. Pain had wings. It traveled the miles back to Kentucky, found the hands that knew how to comfort. 

Birthday

It is my tenth birthday and all that day I can taste a cake’s sweet icing. All day I say to her, I know there will be a birthday cake. I know. I know there will. Her hard-soled slippers march past me in the room where I sit, waiting. I know there will be a cake, know there will be mother-love. Just keep right on knowing, she says. She slams the door to the bathroom in the hall, and I hear the water running. Hours pass.

Love

She wanted to be there for you, my Aunt Mae once said about my mother. She wanted to be there but she couldn’t. I know this is true. My father divorced her and she moved back home. She sat in a chair by the window and watched the world go by. The world picked me up and I rode on past.

Son I Surrendered at Birth

In the dream, I am sixteen again. I am swimming under water, trying to rise, but my huge belly holds me down. Water tasting of silt and mud fills my mouth. My water broke hours ago, but in the dream, my son won’t leave my body. He makes himself small inside me and waits and waits. In the waiting room, my father kneels to pray. A hundred miles away, my mother hasn’t seen me in five years. She never prays. I dream of hands, fists closing tight. My son floats out of my body and afterbirth trails between us until he disappears. 

Friends Who Have Mothered Me

Vicky, with her poems and her twelve string. Pamela, who I call so often she tells me she can’t listen any more. Carlyle with her house in the woods. Wendy, who tells me my voice needs to blossom, a wicked and terrible bloom. Gwendy, who pours me glasses of wine. Marcella, who draws Tarot cards and sends me my fortunes. Prentiss, who mails me photographs of flowers. Cindra, who sends me scented oils and finger puppets to make me laugh. Lorraine, who refused to try to fix my broken heart.

Pearlie

Lost in an Alzheimer’s dream, my mother’s arms were stiff and never touched me except for a pat, pat, pat. A hesitant welcome when I visited her again and again. 

Mountains 

In my mother’s nursing home, a blind hundred and ten year old woman named Goldie used to look out over the tables in the dining room and say, lord a’mercy, what they done to them mountain tops. I know she was right. I’m sixty, and I ride the highways to Kentucky whenever I can. As I drive I see the sawed off tops of mountains. I see the interstate that went through Paintsville and took the little town called Hagerhill where I used to live with my paternal granny. I drive past the house where my mother lived those twenty years of lonely and I see a giant car lot across the road. When I visit in summers, I drive the old roads at night so I can pull over in the dark and roll the windows down and listen to the sounds of tree frogs and locusts. A whir, a song, a spell like a mother’s voice. 

Gibson 

When I am ninety I hope I will remember Sunday mornings at the church house in Van Lear. I hope I will remember how a woman named Mary Ruth offered praise. Mary Ruth picked up her Gibson and buckled its strap on her hip. She flung her long gray hair over her shoulder as she sang the same God songs every Sunday. I was twenty years old and I was leaving home, heading out to make something of myself, something shiny as a brand new dime. That day Mary Ruth sang a song about home. When the roll is called up yonder. When I am ninety I hope I will remember her sad gray eyes. I hope I will still imagine the roads she might have wanted, the songs in high school auditoriums, the songs in juke joints she could have played if God had approved. I hope I will remember how words slid out of her o of a mouth, traveled down the aisle, a balm. Her words settled in the palms of my hands. I hope I will remember how her songs mothered me on all the roads I took, away and away.