The Night, and the Rain, and the River by Liz Prato

Author:Liz Prato [Prato, Edited by Liz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Forest Avenue Press
Published: 2014-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

Tessa’s Drought

Cindy Williams Gutiérrez

After Mama died, I stopped sleeping. This was after I decided to stop crying. Not for Mama—I couldn’t shed a tear for her—but for all the other bereavements in town. You see, I’m the town mourner.

It’s a small town and I’ve always taken up too much space. But this is just one more reason I loved Mama so much. When someone let loose an unkind word about my size, Mama always gave me a bear hug and bellowed—as if she wanted the whole town to hear: “Tessa, you’re a big-hearted woman. Your body is the perfect frame for your large heart.” Sometimes I’d try to pull away, to burst free of her arms. She’d hold me a minute longer, then whisper: “It’s your smile that worries me—it’s big enough to swallow all the sadness in the world.”

That’s how I became the wailer at town funerals. If I could smile away other people’s pain, I might as well cry it away, too. People say when I wail at funerals, my round body rumbles and shakes—as if the earth itself were mourning.

But not one tear for Mama. It’s like a switch had been flipped. All I could manage was to greet each morning with stone-dry silence. After I dragged myself out of bed, each day was a blur. And when darkness finally came, sleep evaporated. I could only mourn in the dark, though it didn’t sound at all like wailing.

As soon as I closed my eyes, I started concentrating on Mama’s particulars. I couldn’t help myself. Maybe it was the quiet all day long. But when I tucked myself under the flower quilt Grandma made for Mama, I distinctly heard Mama’s organ-pipe voice. Before I knew it, Mama and I were reliving entire conversations. And soon we began to have new ones.

A month after her death, I said, “Mama, I have to tell you something. You’re not going to like it.” She said to go ahead, she was listening. I gulped, then spat out the words: “Flora’s Flowers is closed. I put a CLOSED—INDEFINITELY sign on the door of your shop today.” At first, she didn’t say much. But I could tell she was smiling. Then she said she knew I knew what was best. I could never contain myself when she listened so close like that, so I kept going: “Mama, I love our talks. But I feel like I’m in the middle of a tornado. A great big tornado that sucks me up every night. I just keep whirling through the air, blind, with no place to land.” She said I’d find what was best.

That’s when I began to give everything a try. There had to be a way to coax sleep. Warm milk with a drop of vanilla and a dash of cinnamon. Hot oats sprinkled with goat’s milk or fresh cream. A warm poultice of Dead Sea salts applied to my head, then to my chest. Long baths with rain water collected in steel buckets. Lavender essence pressed from the garden behind Mama’s shop.

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