Austin Downtown Arts Magazine

Fiction

Earthly Paradise

by Muriel Perkins

First there is Mamma.

Her hair rises when hurricanes come, sliding on itself like leaves in hot air, full of light and lightning. It dazzles, stands straight up, stirs like the banana frond at the window when the bayou is full and the field is flooded for planting. Hers is a fairy-tale gold, not like mine, which is all dusk and midnight.

Mamma loves storm. We never drive north when the big clouds lie green and purple on the belly of the rice fields. Instead we make songs, tell stories, listen to the wind by candlelight. We call the flashlight a battery torch to make it strange. We call it a firebrand, an oil lamp. My brother is a lion. The wind is his roaring. I am the brave warrior, lurking in the jungle of Mamma's arms. Somewhere a Daddy must lurk too, my father the ogre-ghost. But no one can see him when there are stories and wind and the beat of hungry rain.

My mamma's arms are strong enough, and there's green light in the shape of an almond around her -- a mandorla, she will call it later on when she shows me the pictures. She believes me, tells me what she sees around my head too, how it changes from white to blue to gold, and sometimes turns fire red, when I am, she says, passionate. She means when I cry and try to hit her. She lets me hit her, calls it passionate. But only God's saints have halos, she tells me.

Her face is warm from the sun. I kiss her lips, dark as the hibiscus, as the bird of paradise. Mamma, Mamma... Like the green stalk, the rice as it grows, tall and still and flawless like nature itself. I know, however, she is passionate too.

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She works the clay, her hands so strong she makes the clay obey her, so gentle the clay weeps to obey her. Her eyes burn gold with love for clay and images, brown when she studies the magic of making things that breathe.

She talks to me in my head when I am in bed in the other room. Through the walls she talks to me, and by reflection of light from the stars and in the voice of the wind in the hibiscus bush, in the great dense voice of the swamp so full of voices which are not hers, not mine, voices of the spirits that live out there. She sings to me when she can't touch me, and I hear her. I've always heard her.

Mamma has a studio, a screened porch at the back of the house, where my Daddy made her a worktable once upon a time, bought her a wheel, rented a kiln. The house gets hot when the kiln fires her elegant Greek pots, her little images of saints and demons and gods or her ravishing, frightening masks. We go to my aunt's house then, or to the house of a grandma who isn't mine, across the river in Texas, where we eat butter beans with corn bread.

When the kiln is not burning, the studio is soft and steady. Outside, the oaks shade us through the screen. Pines are tall above us, sweet and green, like Mamma, cool smell of Mamma among the pines. Twilight falls. She sits at her clay, poking it with little knives. She gives me clay to work and I make saints. I make the Blessed Virgin. I make Mamma. Sometimes she takes off her shirt to work like a man. The sweat pours down her back, every drop a diamond.

I look at her breasts while I make the Virgin Mary, while I make a lion, or a clown who is also a saint. Sometimes I stand up and walk under her arms and lift my mouth to her again. I suck as if there is still milk in her, and this thing happens inside me like milk spraying hard against a little thick knot in me. I want to laugh and pee and hum.

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She lets me do this because she is fearless. She doesn't care what people say. We will break with our kin who would make us tell lies. We will live the roaming life, the outlaw, gypsy life. We will never fit in. This is what she tells me, making it sound like the circus, that spectacle I have seen only once, when we went to Baton Rouge.

We will break with the ghost, my father, too. Soon, she says, very soon. Is he dead? I ask her.

Why doesn't he live here? Is he holy? Is he the Holy Ghost?

I press my tongue to her skin, which is smeared with clay, tastes of earth and turnips and clover, of the swamp, and the wood of pines. I suckle her with my arms around her waist. I smell her and she is mine. Wet with sweat and my spit, she is Mamma, Holy Mother of God.

She stands in the rice fields, her feet in the water, her hair like the high Gulf wind. She wears a patchwork shirt, a tank top through which the whole world can see her breasts. She wears beads made of mimosa seeds, which she says are poisonous, and corn grains, which, I know, are not. She speaks to the wind, and to the rain. When she calls storms they come. She brings the tides. She sings to the moon. These are the things I remember.

The whole town shuns her, except for the beautiful man who comes to visit. He has come through danger and ordeals to see my mother, and when at last she lets him, he falls at her feet and buries his head between her legs. He is not my father.

He rolls with her in the grass in the middle of the day and pulls down his jeans. He is crying. Her skirt billows around him like a quilt. He growls like a lion. She has made him mad. She will make many men mad. She needs men. When they see her they have to take down their jeans.

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His nakedness moves, moves. It shudders, stops, shudders, stops. He is beautiful, beautiful, this man. It is called fucking. I can't remember how I know. She has made him need to fuck. Am I angry? I can't tell. I feel ecstasy like wicked fingers in my pants. I shut my eyes, lean against a tree.

After, I cry. I don't know if I am happy or sad, if I'm a boy or a girl.

She makes clay masks, Mamma does, which are both boy and girl, or could be either, and little enameled sculptures of creatures doing things to each other. Mamma calls them obscene, and they must be kept under lock and key in the town where we live. They are a series, each so similar you have to look at them together, one at a time, in just the right order. Some have faces, others merely the suggestion of expression somewhere on their bodies: rapture, anger, ecstasy, pain. And you can never tell if they are male or female from what they are doing, nor from the shapes of their bodies.

Could her lovers tell the difference, I wonder, when she opened the painted cabinets? Could he, when he saw them? Her new hero, my next father, after she had fucked him under the oak tree, with his jeans down to his knees and his shirt and shoes still on.

"They are gods," she whispers to him as he blushes. "Not people. Gods, gods."

She has never said this to me; she never had to.

I hear her stories still, listen to her whispers in the fan palms, as I tell tales to placate the rage of hurricanes, as we did long ago when it rained green shadows, and there was only Mamma.

[Muriel Perkins grew up in the South, has written fiction since age five and taught English at the University of Oklahoma. She remains in love with New Orleans and Italy, sources of meaning and myth in her life and stories. She honors the writing process, always trusting the ambiguity and surprise inherent in it.]

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