The Nine-Night

Miss Ivy died on a Tuesday, in the bed she had been born in, with the window open because she said she wanted to hear the rain come over the hill. It did not rain. Althea sat with her until the breathing changed and then stopped, and then she sat a while longer, because there was no one to call who would arrive faster than the news would travel on its own.

By dark the yard was full.

That is how it goes in the district. Nobody sends word. A woman passing on the road sees curtains drawn in the middle of the day and tells another woman, and by evening there are men setting up tables under the breadfruit tree, and somebody’s cousin arrives with a pot of fish tea, and somebody else brings a bottle of white rum and a lamp. Althea had been to nine-nights all her life. She had never been to one for someone she could not imagine the house without.

Her Aunt Pauline flew in from Fort Lauderdale on the second day. Uncle Desmond drove down from Kingston on the third. Both of them walked into Miss Ivy’s room and stopped in the doorway the way people stop at the edge of cold water.

“You kept it just so,” Pauline said.

The bed was made, the chenille spread pulled square. The Bible lay on the nightstand with its ribbon in the Psalms. The enamel cup, white with a chipped blue rim, sat upside down on its saucer where Miss Ivy had left it on her last good morning. Her slippers were side by side under the rocking chair, toes to the wall.

“Where else would they go,” Althea said.

· · ·

Every night the yard sang. The old women led. They lined out the hymns, one voice calling a line and the rest answering it, slow enough that the words seemed to lift off and hang in the lamplight before they faded. The men slapped dominoes down on the table hard enough to make the glasses jump. Children fell asleep on laps and were carried inside. Someone always kept the coffee hot.

Althea moved through all of it carrying plates. She had moved through the last four years the same way: the tablets at six, the tablets at two, the basin and the washcloth, the lotion on the old woman’s shins, the long afternoons reading the newspaper aloud while Miss Ivy argued with it. Her body did not yet know how to stop.

“Sit down, chile,” Miss Cynthia from up the road told her on the fourth night. “She not going nowhere tonight.”

Althea sat. Across the yard, through the open window of the room, she could see the rocking chair.

It was moving.

Not much. The small, patient rock of a chair that someone has only just stood up from. There was no breeze. The lamp on the windowsill burned straight as a pin.

She watched it until it stopped. Then she got up and fetched more coffee, and she said nothing to anyone, because she already knew what they would say.

· · ·

On the fifth morning the enamel cup was right side up on its saucer, and there was a ring of water on the saucer where it had been washed and set down wet.

Pauline found it. She stood in the doorway holding the saucer in both hands.

“Althea. You wash this?”

“No.”

“Desmond?”

Desmond was out on the verandah with his phone, talking to someone in Kingston about the land title. He put his hand over the phone. “What?”

“Nothing,” Pauline said. She set the cup back on the saucer, upside down, the way it had been. Then she went out into the yard and stood under the breadfruit tree for a long time with her arms folded, looking at nothing.

That night, when the singing started, Pauline sat close to the fire and did not once look toward the house.

· · ·

After that it was small things, and they did not stop.

The slippers were turned around, toes to the door. The Bible was open, not at the ribbon but at a different Psalm, one Althea did not remember her grandmother ever reading. On the sixth night the chenille spread had a shallow dip in it, at the edge of the bed, the shape a person leaves when she sits down to put her feet into her slippers.

On the seventh night Althea woke in the dark to her name.

It came from the room down the hall, and it came the way Miss Ivy had called her for four years whenever she needed turning in the night: two notes, the second one falling. Al-thea. Not loud. The old woman had never needed to be loud.

Althea knew better than to answer. Everyone knows you do not answer a voice that calls your name in the night, not until it has called three times, because only the living will call a third time. It called twice. Then it waited.

She lay with her eyes open until the roosters started. At two o’clock, the hour of the tablets, she found she had already sat up and put her feet on the floor.

· · ·

On the eighth night Miss Cynthia took her aside by the water drum, away from the lamps.

“Tomorrow is the last night,” she said.

“I know.”

“You know what have to happen.”

Althea knew. On the ninth night, after the last hymn, the family would go into the room and turn the mattress over. They would move the bed away from its wall and shift the chair and the nightstand, so that nothing stood where it had always stood. Some families turned the pictures to face the wall. Some sprinkled white rum in the corners. The purpose was the same. The house had to become a place the dead did not recognize, so that they would stop coming back to it and go on to wherever they were meant to go.

“She’s here,” Althea said. It was out before she could stop it. “She’s been here the whole time.”

Miss Cynthia did not look surprised. She looked old, and tired, and kind.

“Then tomorrow you help her leave,” she said. “That is the last thing you do for her.”

· · ·

The yard was fullest on the ninth night. People came from three districts over. There was curry goat and rice, and fried fish, and bread, and the rum went around more than once. The dominoes got louder and then quieter. The singing went on past midnight, and past one, and the last hymn was the one Miss Ivy used to hum over the washing, and when it ended nobody started another.

Desmond stood up and looked at his sister, and Pauline stood up, and Althea put down the plate she was holding.

The room was cool. Someone had closed the window. Desmond took the head of the mattress and Althea took the foot, and they lifted it, and it was heavier than she expected, as heavy as it had been on the mornings she changed the sheets with her grandmother still in the bed. They turned it over and let it fall.

They dragged the bed from the inside wall to the window wall. Desmond moved the nightstand to the far corner. Pauline picked up the rocking chair and carried it out into the hall, and set it down facing the front door. She took the photograph of Miss Ivy and Mr. Lester from the dresser, the one from their wedding, and turned it to face the wall.

Then Pauline uncapped the rum. She poured a little into her palm and flicked it into each corner of the room, one, two, three, four, the way their mother had done for their father twenty years before.

“Go home, Mama,” she said. Her voice broke on it and then held. “Go on home now. We alright.”

Desmond said, “Walk good.”

Althea said nothing at all.

· · ·

The last of the mourners left near four. Desmond reclined the driver’s seat of his car and slept in the yard with the doors open. Pauline took the spare room and locked the door, which she had never done in that house in her life.

Althea waited until she could hear both of them breathing. Then she went back into the room.

She moved the nightstand first, because it was lightest. Then the bed, a few inches at a time, lifting the legs so they would not scrape the floorboards, stopping to listen, moving it again. It took nearly an hour to put it back against the inside wall, where it had stood all her life. She turned the mattress over on her own, which was the hardest part, and her arms shook, and she thought of all the times she had turned her grandmother on her own and how her arms had shaken then.

She made the bed with the same sheets and pulled the chenille spread square. She turned the photograph around. She wet a rag and got down on her knees and wiped the rum from each of the four corners until the boards smelled only of wood. She brought the rocking chair back from the hall and set it where it belonged, and put the slippers under it, toes to the wall, and set the enamel cup upside down on its saucer.

Then she sat down on the floor beside the bed, with her back against it, the way she used to sit on the bad nights.

“I’m here,” she said into the dark. “You don’t have to go anywhere.”

For a long time the room was silent.

Then, behind her, the chair began to rock.

· · ·

Pauline flew back to Fort Lauderdale on Sunday. At the airport she held Althea longer than she needed to and said, “Come up by me for a while. You don’t have to stay in that house.” Althea said she would think about it.

Desmond left on Monday. He said he would see about the title, and asked whether she wanted to keep the place, and she said yes, she wanted to keep it.

The district stopped coming by after a week or two, the way it does. People had their own dead.

Althea kept the room. She dusted it on Saturdays. Every morning the enamel cup was right side up, and there was water on the saucer, and every morning she dried it and turned it back over. In the evenings, when she sat on the verandah, she could hear the chair through the wall.

She still woke at six. She still woke at two. The voice still called her, two notes, the second one falling, and she never answered it, and she never needed to. She was already on her feet before it finished.

Some nights, standing in the dark doorway of that room, Althea wondered which of them was keeping the other. She never wondered for long. The chair would start to rock, and she would go in and sit down on the floor beside the bed, because someone had to, and there had only ever been her.

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