Heavy Lifting

I wrote this story about 20 years ago. It is my mother’s favorite of everything I’ve ever written.

The crows sat high in the pine trees, their black-winged shadows dancing across the red clay, cawing over each other like an assembly of philosophers. My mother and I crunched air moss under our sneakers as we walked up to the trailer with its peeling green-and-white paint.

My grandmother, Nana, had been dead for a month, and it was time to clean out the trailer. To get my mother’s childhood home ready for selling.

“Where are the cats?” I asked.

There had always been a dozen Toms and queens running around the yard. Interbred and poorly managed, the wild felines ranged from black to calico, from sweet to feral beasts. During the many summer visits to Nana’s trailer, I had fed neglected kittens, captured reclusive and often savage adults to dose them with flea medication, and buried those that had succumbed to illness, snake bites, or cars. You never saw the remains of the ones taken by coyotes.

“I suppose they’ve run away.” Mama stood on the porch for a moment, her hands on her hips. She has big hips, made for birthing, supporting, holding. Her eyes watered. “Or maybe locals came for them.”

The houses near Nana, all of them more than a mile away, were full of farmers who hated Nana and her cats. If one of the pride wandered too far, the echo of rifle shots and hounds baying would haunt the pine forests.

We spoke no more of the missing cats. The crows continued to scream at us. Perhaps they knew where the cats were.

The screen door on the trailer was the old kind with no hinges to silence an arrival or departure. As a child, it had been the Devil’s pleasure in me to run through that door and let it whack against its frame. Drove Nana nuts. My mother opened the door and walked into the trailer. I watched her in the hallway kitchen, touching the gold-speckled Formica countertops, her hips against the sink as if she were holding it up.

I shut the screen door, gently, so it whispered instead of shouted.

“What’s first?” I asked. My voice, suffocated in the stuffy heat of the trailer, whispered between us.

“The oak dresser. It’s antique. No sense in it being sold.” She ran her dirty, bitten nails through her hair. She left a red streak of dirt across her brow. The dirt in Brooksville clings to you, like memories.

We crossed the kitchen, passed through a hallway, and down the two steps into Nana’s bedroom. It was so much of nothing. Shift dresses with rose prints as faded and old as the woman who wore them. A table with pills and magazines, both moldy and sticky. A record player and a box of yellow, dusty record jackets beside it.

And the bureau. Solid oak, honey-colored, too light for this room, this day.

My mother ran her fingers across it, opened each drawer, bent to examine a corner. She wiped at the sweat under her eyes and told me to come help. That this was too heavy.

I looked at my mother then. Her cheeks were stained with pressure, her eyes tired from work. And though she stood by the dresser, her hands did not grip it. They stroked it, almost embraced it.

I crossed the room, laid one hand on the wood next to hers. There was a name carved into the wood, the thin and wavering scrawl of a child. I didn’t look at her; she wouldn’t want me to.

I asked her, “Can you carry this, Mama?” When she shook her head, I held her.

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