His Last Wife

While the old Val had lured drunk Chuck to the hotel so she could get those pictures and bust Kerry out of jail, that old Val was nowhere to be found when the news of his death felt like a knife straight through Val’s throat. Standing beside Kerry outside the jail, Val encountered what had felt like a panic attack or heart attack or both. She kept her cool and held it in until they were climbing into the SUV, but inside she was feeling like she’d killed a man. A weak man, yes. But, a man, no less. Old Val might have laughed at that. Claimed it as collateral damage. But it was now keeping Val up at night, even with Ernest as her pillow. She couldn’t accept that she was the body bait that led to a man ending his life. There had to be something else.

“Shit, Mama Fee!” Val cursed when she emerged from her bedroom fully dressed and nearly stepped into a terra-cotta bowl of ashes set right outside her door. “Why is this here?” she shouted, stepping over the bowl and heading for the steps, where another bowl was waiting on the bottom landing. “God! It’s everywhere.”

She fanned some leftover smoke from her face and turned the corner off of the steps to head toward the kitchen, where she could hear the dishwasher going and voices speaking Spanish coming from the television.

“Lorna, please get these bowls up from all over the house. That woman is about to burn the house down or suffocate all of us,” Val said when she found Lorna in the kitchen, standing on the top of a stepladder with a rag in her hand cleaning the ceiling-fan blades. “And where is she, anyway? Got it smelling like a Catholic church on Christmas Eve up in here.”

“You know.” Lorna nodded toward the garden.

“Again?” Val rolled her eyes and walked to the window over the kitchen sink to see Mama Fee back out in the garden. “Lord, she’s in one of her moods again.”

“Been like that a couple of days now,” Lorna pointed out.

When Lorna got to work at sunrise, Mama Fee already had her seven bowls placed in doorways and turning points throughout the house and had just started her burning. Lorna didn’t bother to ask what she was doing or why. She had her own Santeria-practicing mother at home and knew not to touch a thing.

“Yeah, she has been like this a few days,” Val confirmed. It seemed like since Kerry had gotten out of jail, Mama Fee was sinking deeper into her practice. She’d never leave the house, always kept her hair covered, and went searching for spiders; morning, noon, and night. “You keep an eye on her today?” Val added. “Make sure she doesn’t burn anything else.”

“Es impossible,” Lorna replied. “Doctor’s appointment at noon. I told you I leave early today.”

“Early? Are you kidding?” Val turned to her. “I need you here.”

“I tell you, I no babysitter. You help her. She’s your mother. She needs you. You,” Lorna said and her tone wasn’t gentle or forgiving. “You’re going out.” Lorna looked at Val’s clothing. Every day, each suit looked more expensive than the last. One of Lorna’s paychecks had bounced a month ago. Val had given her the money to make up for the mishap immediately. But Lorna knew it was a bad sign and started looking for a new job. Her “doctor’s appointment” was actually a meeting with a woman who’d fired her maid after she’d caught her sleeping with her husband. “Take her with you.”

“I can’t. I’ll be gone most of the day and . . .” Val’s voice trailed off as she imagined Mama Fee sitting in the car with Kerry all afternoon to and from Dahlonega, how she’d be looking at Leaf. All of her superstition and suspicion about everyone and everything. “I can’t,” Val repeated, picking up her purse and slinging it onto her forearm. “Let’s just hope she keeps herself busy in that garden and doesn’t burn the house down.” Val turned on her heels and started clicking toward the front door like she couldn’t be bothered. “And make sure you get all those bowls up. It’s like a damn temple in here.”

That garden had been keeping Mama Fee very busy. Busy, indeed. For weeks. And before that another garden had kept her busy for months. Years. She was sowing and reaping and reaping and sowing in a febrile effort to quell the insidious labor pains that had been punishing her womb since her last child came into the world. Like any other mother, Mama Fee always wanted what was best for all of her children. Maybe she couldn’t always give it, didn’t always have the means of providing it, but she knew what it was and sometimes, the magic of motherhood was that just knowing it and wanting it was enough to make such things materialize in her children’s lives. This instinctive desire was commonly easy to resolve with her first two children, sometimes requiring little-to-no will on her part. But the last one, the one who’d bit clear into her tit when she realized she could get more milk by dragging her brand-new bottom teeth beneath the nipple while sucking, was just insatiable. And, as Mama Fee’s own mama had told her, Mama Fee was bound to spend the rest of her life quenching that unending thirst for more.

By the time Val was a grown woman, every ounce of milk in Mama Fee’s breasts, both literal and figurative, had been used and abused. Still, she stayed wanting the best for Val. And when she set her eyes on Jamison Taylor, Jamison Taylor’s house, Jamison Taylor’s car, and Jamison Taylor’s money, she thought she’d finally found the thing that might surfeit Val’s yearnings for more. The morning of their near-shotgun wedding, the day she’d actually met the man who’d impregnated her child, she stood in the window in that rich man’s house and made a vow to give it all to Val. And she knew how she’d do it too.

Her mother had taught her the good and bad of the roots in her backyard. How to cure her baby’s cough; how to make a man go blind and stumble off of the roof of a building. The good was simple. Uncomplicated. Those were the charms based in truth and righteousness. Light. But the bad was usually messy. Very complicated. Those were the incantations based in hexes and curses. Dark.

Mama Fee knew the charms she wanted for Val would require incantations. None of it was deserved or owed. It was just wanted. And would need to be taken, stolen away. There were two problems with that. Mama Fee never liked Jamison and did not want Val to have a child with him. How was she to get everything else in the beautiful picture Val wanted, while losing those two things? The answer was in the bottom of a dark pot that would make a slave of Mama Fee forevermore.

At the end of Mama Fee’s lessons on the bad, her mother left her with the most important truth of the work they did, what others called conjuring, voodoo, roots work, hocus-pocus, evil, paganism, witchery, and it was that when one casts condemnation, she is forever tied to condemnation. One dark spell begets another dark spell. If you wanted your enemy in the ground, your spell might make it happen, but then the next was to keep him in the ground. And the one after that would be needed to take care of anyone who loved him and hated you enough to want you in the ground. Castings could be endless and costly. It was how the old voodoo women made their money. It was the only way Mama Fee could get that house, those cars, and the money for Val.

So, she used it. For the first time in her life, with full advisory, she used it. When she got back home to Memphis from the disaster of a marriage at the courthouse in Atlanta, where Jamison’s mother looked at her and Val like they were some barnacles stuck on the bottom of a Louisiana shrimp boat, she sat a rock before her front door, slid off her shoes, and marched right to her garden with the sounds of a djembe pounding her ear. Yes, it was she who created that sudden and great and impenetrable divide between Val and Jamison right after the wedding. It was she who possessed Jamison’s mother and made the hot stew that poisoned the unborn child in Val’s stomach and led to the blood on the sheets and the baby’s death. It was she who then stole Jamison’s mother’s breath away at the bottom of the steps in the house, killing her slowly and painfully as she begged Val for mercy.

Her next step, and it needed to happen quickly before Jamison and Val ended their short marriage on paper,

was to get rid of the groom. Well, then, everything would be perfect. The house, the cars, the money. All for Val forever. Ironically, she never got to that. Jamison’s tumble from the top was wanted and wanton, but not of her work. Maybe it led to the completion of her work, but she’d had no parts in what Val reported had happened to Jamison. It was a mystery that she’d charge to fate, had it not been for the fact that her invisible third eye tucked away in the pineal gland, the conarium or epiphysis cerebri, in the middle of her brain could never see Jamison falling from that roof or any of the events that led up to it. That could be explained by her distance from the man or the hard work some other fate fixer was busy putting in.

But Mama Fee had little time to worry about that. Her own fate fixing had her busy trying to find more precious milk in her old, flattened tits for her grown-up daughter. As she knew, once they moved into the house, they had to keep that house. And every incantation Mama Fee had breathed into a bowl since she set foot in that house was toward that complex cooperation. The whispering to ancient flowers in the garden, the dried roots she was collecting for the glass jars in her bedroom, rings with gems on her fingers, the terra-cotta bowl at the bottom of the stairs, the cluster of salt on the doorstep . . . she was exhausted with work and worry. And worse, she felt all the way to her bones that something was still on path to take it all away. Because of that, she could never, ever rest. She could never, ever leave that house. Not until she could be sure she could get back in. Until she stopped feeling what felt like spiders trumping up her back at night, pricking and stabbing along the way. Letting her know something was coming.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” was what Mama Fee heard coming from behind her as she sat on the ground in the garden. She’d already seen the shadows of a man’s frame cast in the dirt long before she heard the voice, so the male voice didn’t startle her as she’d pretended.

“Oh, Jesus!” She turned and looked up and worked to appear surprised and sound simple. “You nearly scared me to death, young man!”

Val and Lorna were long gone from the house.

“I apologize! I wasn’t meaning to scare you at all,” the man with dark hair, eyes, and luscious, turmeric-colored skin said. “I probably should’ve announced my presence sooner. I actually tried to go to the front door, but there was one angry-looking cat waiting for me there. Then I noticed you out here.” He extended his hand. “I’m Agent Delgado.”

“I’m Marie Antoinette, but everyone calls me Mama Fee.”

Mama Fee shook Delgado’s hand, noting the heat and slight shaking, and used the grip to hoist herself to her feet.

“Thank you, young man,” she said for the quick lift. “And I apologize for that no-good neighborhood cat. You’d think a place like this wouldn’t have strays. Seems that old feline answers to Bast—at least that’s what I call her. She means no harm—unless you mean her harm.” Mama Fee smiled. “So how can I help you, Agent—” She paused.

“Delgado.”