minnie and the fatal family reunion

She fell into the earth without a sound. There was no shriek as the terrain revealed its flaw and gorged itself on the fatness of her body. She lay at the bottom of that hole asleep, for all we knew, and what she dreamed I cannot say as we pondered what to do and the well, a satisfied and grinning snake, held its prize fast in its belly, content to doze and digest her until she was rendered utterly back to the soil, speck and particle of the mute and eternal ground.

Minnie was round and moved through her life without apology, stuffing herself with all she delighted in, taking care that even the tiniest morsels of the cakes, pies and biscuits did not escape her mouth, ingesting each crumb like a mosaic of confections until she was beautiful and arranged from the patterns and currents of eating. Teasing and insults slid off her skin, unable to snag and dig into her, her body tight and shiny, impenetrable to the most merciless jibes and jests aimed at her with a cruelty that spoke only from it own misery.

Minnie was undaunted in her pursuit of food and it was that personal quest that flung her headlong into the gullet of the earth to waste beyond the reach of any of us and beyond her love of food.

My daddy asked me did I see her die and I told him no. I did not even see her fall. We ran across the field towards home, supper. My mama said she watched us as we came , Minnie running beside me and she just winked out of sight, there one minute and gone the next. She said you could almost hear the whole horizon pop with the sound of her leaving it so quick. She told me she thought for a second that Jesus had come back and Minnie had been the only one righteous enough to leave with him.

My daddy and uncles walked up the hill and over the fields looking for Minnie, their hands held like blades across their eyes, pulling cigarettes from their mouths to let her name and the smoke roll out and over the grass. They walked and smoked, speaking softly one to another, punctuating their quiet conversations with a shout for Minnie to come home.

It was my daddy who found her. I had followed him up and crawled between his legs when he stopped and stared down at the ground. He was staring at a hole, black and unfathomable. He called for a lantern and my brother ran one up from the house. Then daddy knelt and lowered the lantern down into the hole. I laid there on my stomach squinting to see to the very bottom, wondering what my daddy hoped to find there at the bottom of that old well.

Light can settle and drift. It takes patience and time to notice it but if you are still long enough even the dimmest light can reach the blackest, deepest spot on earth. The light drifted and settled on Minnie. It fell down on her soft as fine dirt, illuminating her with a wan and trembling yellow. I thought she was asleep. There was no unnaturalness to her body. One hand was tucked behind her head as if she had curled it there while she napped. She was propped against the wall with her face turned up towards the light. I expected her to open her eyes and ask me to throw her down a biscuit.

Soon everyone was standing over the hole, taking turns and peering in. some of them balanced paper plates full of food in one hand and discussed what should be done about Minnie and should someone go down and fetch her out. One of my cousins stood at the edge of the hole and dropped a few stones on her, to see if she might move or protest. She did not. She was silent and still but as I watched her I imagined I could see her breathe.

There was a stillness to the men by the hole, my father looking away along the horizon as if he might find Minnie there and not wedged into the ground beyond his reach. Some offered suggestions of rescue; others spoke with hope already gone from their voices. No one offered to call for help. It was our way of life and death. We raised and buried our own as God and nature saw fit. If we could not raise her from that place then it was up to us to seal her in it.

My uncle George pulled a piece of fried chicken from his mouth long enough to say that he thought it was too dangerous to send someone after her and she was probably just dead anyway. No one else said anything, each one absorbed in their food, as if looking away from it or articulating a thought would unravel the silent truce they were erecting between them that would allow them to walk away from Minnie and back to their lives, grateful it hadn't been one of their babies and it was not their grief that would be swallowed up in that Georgia field. We are a mute people, my family, when a child dies. We do not speak of loss because we have so little already. Poverty makes even grief a luxury and to mourn a child or speak its name is an extravagance of emotion best saved for the everyday hunger and humiliation we are required to carry. Minnie's fall garnered no comment beyond what was necessary to bury her, her only monument a stone thrown down to test her mortality.

That night I woke trying to scream, imagining that my mouth was filled with dirt, that I had opened my eyes to a black and soundless world, air in my lungs replaced with fill dirt and insects. I dreamed I was Minnie and I woke alone and hungry, beyond understanding of what had happened to me and where everyone had gone. I imagined her slow madness as she aged and grew beneath the earth, feeding on dirt, blind in the dark and clawing her way underneath the fields and hills where I played. I sometimes feared she would rise from the earth in the garden, blackened and gaunt, her eyes luminous from years spent in the dark to demand from me a piece of cake. I thought of her reaching towards me for my food and speaking to me as if nothing had ever happened, that she had just retuned from playing while I sat horrified and mindless by the specter she had become. Minnie became for me my own nightmare. I saw her in every tilled piece of earth, worried over tarrying too long by a crevice or a hole, fearful she would rise and pull me down with her, to play and forage among the bones of the dead.

I had been running beside her. Only a chance path towards home kept me from tumbling into the well while she careened forward to her place at the table and the food she loved so perfectly. Only a few steps to her right took me up on my daddy’s shoulders and towards the sun, towards light, warmth, movement and air. I told me daddy I didn’t see her die and I am still not sure she is dead. My memory arcs back to the moment she winked out of sight and how I watched them lay the dirt over her. I went back once, fifteen years later to that field and walked the ground, calling her name and scanning the earth for a sign of that hole. I called and heard nothing. I searched the ground and found the earth healed and seamless after all that time. I watched the sun go down and I stretched out over the grass, pressed my mouth to the soil and inhaled. “Minnie’s breath.” I thought, and I breathed out, singing to her a song from our childhood, pressing my body against the curve of the earth in an embrace I hoped would tunnel its way to her, rocking her in her constant night and willing her to sleep, dreamless and unafraid, a prayer that she never wake to the moment of her abandonment. I rise and I pull her from the ground and swallow her memory, taking her from that hole in the fields and into my body, into my life, into a home without shadows.

Minnie is light and I carry her everywhere, facing her towards the sun as we walk and leaving a light on in the closet when the night comes in. It is our truce. She does not enter my dreams anymore and I resurrect her every day to the phenomenon of the sun and the joy of breath and air. I breathe for us both and avoid the dark places, describe to her the smell of baked chicken and fresh split water melon. We find it impossible to grieve what happened. Neither of us believes she is dead. She is only sleeping, dreaming of supper and the sound of her name calling her home.