Mother Wells

The Keeper of Hours

Chapter 12: Mother Wells

Mt. Calvary on the first Sunday in May was always full, because the first Sunday was Communion, and because the choir had been adding new songs for a month in preparation for the spring revival, and because the congregation had a long unspoken sense that the first Sunday of a month belonged to the people, not to the calendar.

Mama Tate walked the three blocks alone.

She had told Marcus, who was driving Tiana over in Tiana's Civic, that she would meet them at the door. She had told Yvonne, who was riding with Carl and was carrying the sweet potato pie she had made yesterday for the after-service Communion table, that she would see her in the pew. She had not, this morning, wanted company on the walk. She had needed the three blocks.

She had needed them because Marcus had told his mother last night.

He had told her at the kitchen table at nine-twenty, after Tiana had gone home and Carl had poured Yvonne a small glass of red wine she had not asked for and had set it in front of her without comment. He had told her with his hands flat on the table and his voice low and his face careful, and Yvonne had listened — Mama Tate had been on the small couch in the front room with the door open to the kitchen, not eavesdropping but not pretending she was not in the house — and Yvonne had received it the way Mama Tate had told Marcus on Saturday morning that Yvonne would receive it, which was: she had been afraid, and she had loved him, and she had risen to the love. There had been crying. There had been a long quiet stretch in which Yvonne had held her son's hand across the table and not said anything for a full minute. There had been the slow turn, after that, into the practical questions, which Carl had begun to ask in the quiet steady voice he used when the household needed him to be the one who held the next thirty minutes — what is her last name, what is the family situation, what does the child know, what do you need from us this week.

Yvonne had not, in that hour, said the sentence Mama Tate had been afraid she might say, which was Marcus, why didn't you tell me sooner. Mama Tate had been listening for that sentence. Yvonne had not said it. Yvonne had said, instead, near the end of the conversation: Baby, you came to your grandmother first because she was who you needed first. I am not hurt. I am proud of you for knowing what you needed. You came to me when you were ready. That is the order.

Mama Tate had cried quietly on the couch in the front room when she had heard her daughter say that, and she had not, on Saturday morning, told Marcus to expect the sentence, and the fact that Yvonne had said it without instruction had been the small confirmation Mama Tate had needed that her daughter — at fifty-eight, in the harder part of her own life — had been formed by the Lord into a woman whose interior had been quietly preparing, for years, to do what the family had needed her to do this weekend.

She walked the three blocks slowly, with the news still moving through her, and she thanked the Lord aloud — once, on the corner of Park and Saratoga, with no one to hear — for her daughter.

Brother Carlton was at the door in the navy suit he wore on first Sundays.

"Mother Tate."

"Brother Carlton."

"You bring me family today."

"I do. Marcus is with Tiana. Yvonne and Carl are coming behind."

"All in one pew?"

"All in one pew."

"I will hold the row."

"Thank you, Brother Carlton."

He nodded. He gave her the program. He walked her to the third pew on the left and then walked back to hold the row for the others.

Mother Wells was already there.

She was in the gray suit she wore on Communion Sundays, and her grandson Curtis was beside her with the wheelchair folded against the end of the pew, and her hands were folded over a small handkerchief in her lap, and her eyes — when they turned to find Mama Tate — were the particular eyes she had been giving Mama Tate for two weeks now, which were the eyes of a woman who saw a thing and was waiting to be invited to discuss it.

Today, Mama Tate decided, she would invite the discussion.

She sat. She leaned slightly toward Mother Wells.

"Mother."

"Sister."

"After service. You and me. Side room."

Mother Wells nodded once. She did not need any more.

The choir began. The service began. The congregation rose and sat and rose again. Pastor Honeycutt preached on the calling of Samuel — the boy in the temple, the voice in the night, the elder Eli teaching the boy to say speak, Lord, your servant hears — and Mama Tate listened more closely than she had listened to a sermon in a year, because the sermon, in the providence of the Lord, was about an elder teaching a child to recognize the voice that was already calling, and she knew, sitting in the third pew with her family arriving in stages around her and her oldest spiritual sister beside her and a four-year-old in Whitehaven whose name was newly underlined in her book, that she was being given more than one note of instruction this week and was meant to receive them all.

The communion came at the end. The deacons brought the elements down the rows. Mama Tate took the small piece of bread and the small plastic cup of grape juice and held them in her lap until the table had been served. When Pastor Honeycutt said take, eat, she ate. When he said take, drink, she drank. She closed her eyes for the long quiet moment between the drinking and the dismissal, and she said, without words, the small Communion prayer she had been saying since 1965:

Lord. I am here. I am Yours. I have eaten and drunk, and I receive what You have given. Make of me what You will. Give me one more day to keep what You have asked me to keep.

The amen came up out of the congregation like a low organ note. The benediction followed. The recessional began.

Mama Tate did not move.

Mother Wells did not move.

Curtis, who had been her grandmother's wheelchair captain for two years and who had developed, in that role, the small tact of a man who knew when he was the audience and not the actor, leaned over and said: Grandma, I'll be in the lobby. He went.

The pew emptied around them. Yvonne, leaning across from the row behind, said quietly: Mama, we'll wait in the car. Mama Tate nodded. The family went.

The sanctuary thinned.

Brother Carlton, at the back, caught Mama Tate's eye. She gave him the small lift of her chin that meant open the side room. He did. He walked away into the back hall and was gone.

Mama Tate helped Mother Wells up.

They walked, slowly — Mother Wells could walk for short stretches, which she insisted on doing in the sanctuary even though Curtis was three feet behind her with the chair — into the small side room off the south wall where the deacons sometimes met and where the women's Bible study had been held in the years before they had moved it to the basement. The room had two upholstered chairs and a low table. Brother Carlton had turned on the lamp. He had set out a small pitcher of water and two glasses, because Brother Carlton always set out a small pitcher of water for the elder women when he opened the side room, because Brother Carlton had been raised by his own grandmother to know what an old woman needed in a small private room.

They sat.

For a moment they did not, either of them, speak.

Then Mama Tate said: "Mother. I have a great-granddaughter."

She told her.

She told her with the careful brevity of a woman who knew she was speaking to another woman who would not need every word. She told her about Aliyah, and about Naomi, and about the Hightowers, and about Marcus, and about the conversation Saturday morning at the kitchen table. She told her about the underline. She told her that the family had been told. She told her that Marcus would, this week, before he flew back, sit with his mother and father and walk through the next three months.

Mother Wells listened.

When Mama Tate was finished, Mother Wells did not, at first, speak.

She put her hand — which had been steady all morning, which had not been steady in a year of mornings — on Mama Tate's arm.

"Sister."

"Mother."

"The Lord."

"Yes."

"The Lord has been busy in your kitchen for two weeks, Sister Tate."

"He has been, Mother."

"Three receipts in two weeks. Calvin. Patrice. Now Naomi."

"Yes, Mother."

"And one of them living. And one of them alive and four years old. And the four-year-old in our city."

"Yes, Mother."

Mother Wells sat with it.

After a while she said, slowly: "Sister. What you said to that boy on Saturday morning. About the grammar. About stepping into her life and not bringing her into his. About letting Sheryl Hightower lead. That was not your wisdom, Sister."

"I know it was not, Mother."

"That was the wisdom of a woman who has been listening for fifty years and has had the muscle made in her by the listening. You did not invent that. You received it. You received it because you had already, in advance, said yes to whatever the Lord was going to put in your mouth on Saturday at five forty-seven in the morning. That is what fifty years of vigil does. It does not make you smarter. It makes you the kind of vessel that, when the Lord pours, the pouring goes where it is supposed to go without spilling."

Mama Tate did not, at first, answer.

Then she said: "Mother. You are about to tell me a thing about you."

"I am, Sister."

"Tell me."

Mother Wells was quiet a moment. Her hand was still on Mama Tate's arm. The hand was warm. The room was quiet. Down the hallway, the after-service noise of the congregation was beginning to thin — fewer voices, more car doors, the small wind-down of a Sunday morning at a Black church in Memphis.

Mother Wells said: "The Lord told me on the eleventh of April that He was about to call me home, and I went to the doctor on the fourteenth, and the doctor told me on the seventeenth that what we have been managing as my heart for six years has begun to fail in the way that the medicine cannot reach. The cardiologist told me, with my grandson in the room, that I have somewhere between three and six months. I have known this for two and a half weeks. I have not, until this hour, told a single soul outside of Curtis and the doctors. I have been sitting on it because I wanted to bring it to the Lord first and to you second."

Mama Tate did not, immediately, breathe.

She had known this was coming. Mother Wells had been failing visibly for a year. The wheelchair had been new in the fall. The breath had been wrong since Christmas. The eyes had been carrying a thing for two weeks that Mama Tate had not asked about because she had not, in two weeks, wanted to know.

She knew now.

She put her own hand over Mother Wells's hand on her arm. The two old hands, on the upholstery of a side-room chair at Mt. Calvary, were the hands of two women whose combined years on the prayer-floor of that church added up to a hundred and twenty.

"Mother."

"Sister."

"How are you?"

"I am ready, Sister Tate."

"Mother."

"I am ready. I have been ready for some time. The Lord has been preparing me for two years. I have not, in those two years, been afraid. I am not afraid now. The thing I am asking the Lord for is that the going be clean and that the people I love be cared for. That is the prayer I am praying. I have stopped praying for more time. The more time was a prayer I prayed for thirty years. I do not pray it now. I pray for the going. I pray for the leaving well."

"Mother. What can I do."

Mother Wells looked at her for a long, considering moment.

"Sister. I am going to ask you for two things. Then I am going to ask you for nothing else, because you are an eighty-two-year-old woman who is going through her own hard road and I will not put more on you than I have business putting."

"You ask, Mother. You ask whatever you need."

"The first thing. When the time comes — and it will come; I would guess in the next two months, though the Lord has not given me a date — I want you to come and sit with me. Not the whole night. Not every night. But on the night the Lord moves me — if the Lord arranges the timing in a way that makes it possible for someone to call you — I want you to come. I want a keeper in the room with me. I want you to be the keeper. Curtis will be there. My daughter will be there. The pastor may be there. But I want you, Sister Tate. I want a woman who has been at the prayer-floor longer than I have been alive on it, in that room, when I go. I am asking for the keeper at the keeper's door."

Mama Tate could not speak.

She nodded.

After a moment she said: "I will be there, Mother. The Lord and I will arrange it. You tell Curtis to call me. He has the number. I will come."

"Thank you, Sister."

"What is the second thing, Mother."

Mother Wells was quiet a long moment.

"Sister Tate. The second thing is the harder thing for me to ask, because you have your own work to finish. But I am going to ask anyway. I have a list of my own. It is not as long as yours. It is forty-three names. Some of them are people I have been carrying since the fifties. Some of them are new. Most of them are church people you would know. A few of them are people you would not know — friends of my late husband from his Memphis State days, a cousin in Mississippi, two children of a sister who left the Lord in 1979 and whose grandchildren I have been carrying under the radar for the last ten years. The list lives in a small green notebook on the second shelf of the bookcase in my front room. Curtis knows where it is. He does not know what it is. I have been protective."

She paused.

"Sister. When I am gone, I do not want my list to die. I have been thinking about who to ask. I have considered Sister Doris Akers, who has been a faithful friend. I have considered Mother Cole's daughter. I have considered Curtis himself, though Curtis is twenty-six and a man and has not yet been formed by the long sitting. I have prayed about it for a year, Sister, and the Lord — the Lord brought your face to me in the pew this morning, before you and I had spoken, and I knew. I want you to take the list. I want you to fold the names into your own. I want my forty-three names to live inside your book until you cannot keep them, and then I want them to be passed to whoever you pass yours to, and on, and on. I am asking you to be the woman who carries the carrying."

Mama Tate, who had not in two weeks been able to predict the shape of what the Lord was going to put in her hand on a given morning, found that she could not, at this moment, find the word that was in front of her chest.

She nodded.

She nodded for a long time.

Finally she said: "Mother. I will take the list. I will fold the names in. I will, on the day Curtis brings me the green book, copy them into my own book in my own hand, the way you have written them in yours. I will keep them as long as I have hands. I have a granddaughter who has agreed to be the next keeper after me. I will tell her about your list. I will tell her your name. I will tell her that the green book she is holding came from a woman who sat with my grandmother in a side room at Mt. Calvary on the first Sunday in May twenty twenty-six, and asked her to carry the carrying. Your forty-three names will be kept, Mother. By me. By the next one. The list does not die."

Mother Wells closed her eyes.

She did not, for a moment, move.

When she opened them they were wet, in the small dignified way that an old woman's eyes go wet when a long quiet fear has been finally answered.

"Sister."

"Mother."

"That is everything I needed to hear today."

"I know, Mother."

"I can go now."

"You can go now."

They sat for a long while in the side room without speaking. The water in the pitcher Brother Carlton had set out had warmed to room temperature. Neither of them had touched it. Outside, the parking lot was emptying. The choir was changing in the back room. The custodian had begun, somewhere down the hall, the small Sunday afternoon work of vacuuming the carpet in the south aisle, and the low hum of the vacuum reached them through the door like the small ordinary world insisting that it would, today, continue.

After a long time Mother Wells said: "Sister."

"Yes, Mother."

"You are going to be all right too. The disease is going to take from you. It has begun to take. But you are going to be carried by people who have been keeping you, the same way the Lord has been keeping the people in your book. The granddaughter. The grandson. The daughter. The son-in-law. The doctor. They are going to carry you, the way you have been carrying. You are not going to fall. You are going to be set down. There is a difference. You teach Tiana the difference. She will need to know it for the women on the unit she will care for after you. She is one of us, Sister. You raised her without knowing you were raising her."

"Yes, Mother."

"Now help me up. Curtis is going to come looking, and I do not want him to find me sitting because he will bring the chair, and I would like to walk out of this room on my own feet."

Mama Tate helped her up.

They walked, slowly, out of the side room, down the hall, into the small lobby where Curtis was waiting with the wheelchair and a polite distance. Mother Wells transferred. Curtis gave Mama Tate a small respectful nod that said, without saying it, I know what just happened in there. Mama Tate gave him a nod back.

He wheeled his grandmother out. The wheels made the small sound on the carpet that wheels make at the end of a Sunday service, and Mother Wells lifted her hand from the armrest in a small wave to Mama Tate at the door, and Mama Tate lifted her hand back.

Then Mother Wells was gone, into the parking lot, into the rest of the day, into the next two or three or six months that the Lord had told her she had remaining.

In the parking lot Yvonne and Carl were waiting in the Toyota. Marcus and Tiana were in Tiana's Civic two spaces over. They were, all four of them, watching the door.

Mama Tate walked out into the May light.

She did not, at first, walk to the cars.

She stood for a moment in the middle of the parking lot with her hands folded in front of her purse, and she looked up at the steeple of Mt. Calvary, which had been the same steeple since 1947, and she said — without words, in the place she had been doing the saying-without-words for fifty years:

Lord. I have been given more this morning than the morning has room for. A great-granddaughter. A list. A friend's last months. I do not know how to hold all three at once. I am going to need You to hold them with me. I am going to need You to keep them in their own rooms in my chest until I can come back to them one at a time. Mother Wells is in Your hand. Naomi is in Your hand. The list is in Your hand. The book is in Your hand. I am in Your hand. Help me to walk to the car.

She breathed.

She walked to the car.

Yvonne rolled down the window.

"Mama. You all right?"

"Baby, take me home."

"Yes, Mama."

"Tiana. Marcus. You follow."

"Yes, Mama," Tiana called from the Civic.

"We are going to sit on the porch this afternoon. All five of us. You and Carl, Yvonne. Tiana. Marcus. Me. We are going to sit. We are going to drink the iced tea I have in the refrigerator. I am going to tell you what Mother Wells just told me. We are going to pray for her. Then we are going to talk about Naomi and how we are going to hold her well. Then we are going to be quiet for a while because I am going to need to be quiet for a while. Then we are going to eat what Yvonne brought. Then we are going to do tomorrow tomorrow."

She got into the car.

Yvonne pulled out of the parking lot. Tiana followed in the Civic.

They drove the three blocks home together, the small caravan of a family that had begun, in the last two weeks, to organize itself around the keeping of an eighty-two-year-old woman who had spent fifty years organizing herself around the keeping of everyone else, and the May light came down through the dogwoods on Park, and the keeping continued, and Mother Wells, in another car going the other direction, was being driven home by her grandson with her hand on the small green notebook on her lap, which she would, on Tuesday afternoon, ask Curtis to carry to Park Avenue.

The list would change hands on Wednesday.

The receipt the Lord had been gathering from Mother Wells's seventy years of carrying would, in time, also come — but the receipt would come differently for Mother Wells than for Calvin or Patrice, because Mother Wells's carrying was the carrying that would now be carried, and the receipt would be that the carrying continued in another woman's book.

Mama Tate did not yet know all of this.

She knew enough.

She rode home in silence beside her daughter, and she did not, on the short drive, attempt to say anything, and Yvonne — who had been watching her mother in side mirrors for two weeks and who knew the silences of the matriarch better than she knew her own — drove slowly, and turned into the driveway gently, and helped her mother into the house without comment, and put her in Eldridge's chair with the quilt over her knees, and went to the kitchen to start the iced tea, because that was the small thing her hands could do this afternoon while the larger things settled in the front room around the woman who had, this morning, been asked to carry the carrying.