A Memory (Ode to Faulkner)

A Memory (Ode to Faulkner)

by Amari

When old Annabel Leary died, I paid my attention to my brother David to see if he was crying, and doubtless, he was not. He stood frozen like a block of ice as we lifted her to the ground with a dozen tall, black crows watching as the preacher-man buried the casket gently before our twenty pairs of eyes, and those crows glazed down as the casket lowered below the quiet metallic vault where the casket sunk.

I stood watching them, the crows, and not at my mother, who was crying, and not at David anymore either, and thought back to when I was younger, six years ago, watching the very same crows congregate around the morbid, macabre field, that was, in fact, macabre not because of what it is today, but what it was long ago: a hundred-acre colonial plantation owned by a diplomat and colonel in the French and Indian War, after the first stroke of the first great aunt, who died on a Sunday like all the others, with a horde of old, black crows with wide lustrous, iridescent eyes perching pristinely around her body resting like a stump in a vegetated forest. I remember the way the crows used to wait, never roosting, and the way my aunts and uncles, my mother and my father, recollected stories about the first aunt, Isabel, and seeing my family mourn for the first time as if they had never mourned before. I could not look at my mother because she was crying, and I (twelve years old) looked down at the tattered ground, wet from all the rain and tears. Tears derived from the late Isabel, who I had never met until she was lifted in her casket and hoisted out into the churchyard. I met her through the grave. And now, the second sister, the last great aunt buried next to her tombstone, stood almost symmetrical to the first. And on that day I watched the crows and thought I could not bear to watch them then, and I cannot, will not watch them now and wondered why.

When I was young, I did not even feel like I was young and could not understand the capabilities and powers youth possessed until I was older, and even then, I did not appreciate it because I was not old enough to be old yet. My memory of my parents and my younger brother David visiting me in Spain is something that flashes back to me from time to time, mostly when I am alone in bed, an older woman thinking about the afternoon we visited Los Museo Nacional del Prado and saw the famous, renowned Las Meninas hung delicately on the wall below a marvel dome in the sunlight—the central attraction which I urged my family to see, especially since I had not seen it myself, but studied it a semester ago in a cinderblock classroom at my American college, pressing against the paper to look at the photograph and wondering what it was that truly made it special since I had such little appreciation for anything back then and felt almost embarrassed because of it. An artist who cannot feel is a mathematician who cannot count. And so, I brought them there, showed them the gallery, and when we came upon the painting, already tired from touring through the hot, old streets of Madrid, we looked and became at once crows waiting for the picture to die. But it did not die because it did not live.

And I observed it, for the first time, something that had stood on the wall for years, an old tour de force triumphing over age itself, to marvel at the girl, the Infanta Margaret Theresa of Spain who is depicted in her silk, white dress beside an idle dog in the foreground, appearing to look not at me, but at the millions of days all bundled into one quixotic memory—a dream, a dream of dreams as the old Spanish plays taught us and cascade my thoughts when I am alone in that room thinking of my days of youth, able to appreciate it now that it was late and gone.

The museum was empty since folks were on siesta, and so it was just me, my parents, security, and a few English tourists making their way through the gallery. But as soon as I saw the painting, everything else became blurred and futile as my attention zoomed towards the foreground where it was just her and me looking at nothing because I was not looking at her but merely an interpretation of her, me feeling the painting myself, an object without feeling, projecting feeling, consequently onto me: feeling not like a girl, nor a lady, too old to be young and too young to be old, unable to die and still waiting to live, to feel as I do now—long after the funeral where I lay in bed, thinking of arrhythmia, glaring at the blackness on the wall with no moon, no window, thinking back to when I was not a girl, not a creature, not a person, but a projection, like Las Meninas—Margaret Theresa of Spain.

But not even she, Margaret, could be me on that lugubrious day of the casket lowering, where my mother cried and my brother stood still amongst the watching, waiting crows and the late great aunt who was the last to come from southern Virginia as we drove in droves down from New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Washington D.C. with my dad cursing out the truckers along the highway until we reached Richmond and I thought of the time we visited her country home, which smelled of grass and fresh manure, lived on a golf course west of Williamsburg and that old memory of when we were little and David and I would run out on the lawn hunting for stray balls like it was candy hidden in the clumps of grass that was cut by a craftsman lawnmower in the same fashion as the neighbors and the neighbors’ neighbors—pretentious, hegemonic, and masculine as the nameless American king who once owned over 100 acres of land and over 100 enslaved people, but has since been detached from the old ways, only remembered by a monument torn down by a civil order with no other purpose but to forget. That memory I have of us clumping through the suburban lawn that may have been wilderness once but is now mowed into several compartments and commercialized even before we knew what it was. Since land is land and I, a city girl possessing the same inherent innocence as all children, thought of the property as a rolling pasture, not a lawn.

So innocent we did not understand why Annabel said what she said that one time at the restaurant when the waiter came back to our table with the wrong bill. He looked different from us because he was Black and we were White. And even after he smiled and apologized, he still did something wrong. She waited for him to go away. Showed the bill to my mom and said, 'That N_ did it again.' And my mom warned Annabel if she ever used that word in front of us one more time, she would never see us again. I did not know what that word was back then, but I do now. And sure enough, I never heard her speak it again and we did see her a few more times. But Annabel also told me, long before anything else, with her crystal blue eyes staring back at me like I was a painting, the oldest woman I ever met, ‘Let me look at you,’ and then said, ‘my dear, my dear, my dear. You are so beautiful; you know that. You really are.’

And that was it. Maybe not the first, but the oldest. The first one I can recollect and that I carry with me to this day, even as I lay in the blackness, suffering from arrhythmia, thinking back to the funeral, the hot afternoon in Spain, the golf balls, the word, and my dad driving us back to Maryland asking us, ‘Do you remember when you were kids, and your great aunt lived out on that golf course and you kids would—’

And then I stopped listening. Because I would get annoyed at my dad for asking such a question—a question we all knew the answer to because you don’t forget your oldest memory.

You don’t.