Libertie

I saw my mother raise a man from the dead. “It still didn’t help him much, my love,” she told me. But I saw her do it all the same. That’s how I knew she was magic.

The time I saw Mama raise a man from the dead, it was close to dusk. Mama and her nurse, Lenore, were in her office—Mama with her little greasy glasses on the tip of her nose, balancing the books, and Lenore banking the fire. That was the rule in Mama’s office—the fire was kept burning from dawn till after dinner, and we never let it go out completely. Even on the hottest days, when my linen collar stuck to the back of my neck and the belly of Lenore’s apron was stained with sweat, a mess of logs and twigs was lit up down there, waiting.

When the dead man came, it was spring. I was playing on the stoop. I’d broken a stick off the mulberry bush, so young it had resisted the pull of my fist. I’d had to work for it. Once I’d wrenched it off, I stripped the bark and rubbed the wet wood underneath on the flagstone, pressing the green into rock.

I heard a rumbling come close and looked up, and I could see, down the road, a mule plodding slow and steady with a covered wagon, a ribbon of dust trailing behind it.

In those days, the road to our house was narrow and only just cut through the brush. Our house was set back—Grandfather, my mother’s father, had made his money raising pigs and kept the house and pens away from everyone else to protect his neighbors, and his reputation, from the undermining smell of swine. No one respects a man, no matter how rich and distinguished-looking, who stinks of pig scat. The house was set up on a rise, so we could always see who was coming. Usually, it was Mama’s patients, walking or limping or running to her office. Wagons were rare.

When it first turned onto our road, the cart was moving slowly. But once it passed the bowed-over walnut tree, the woman at the seat snapped her whip, and the mule began to move a little faster, until it was upon us.

“Where’s your mother?”

I opened my mouth, but before I could call for her, my mother rushed to the door, Lenore behind her.

“Quick,” was all Mama said, and the woman came down off the seat. A boy, about twelve or thirteen, followed. They were both dressed in mourning clothes. The woman’s skirt was full. Embroidered on the bodice of her dress were a dozen black lilies, done in cord. The boy’s mourning suit was dusty but perfectly fit to his form. At his neck was a velvet bow tie, come undone on the journey. The woman carried an enormous beaded handbag—it, too, was dusty but looked rich. It was covered in a thousand little eyes of jet that winked at me in the last bit of sun.

“Go, Lenore,” my mother said, and Lenore and the woman and the boy all went to the back of the wagon, the boy hopping up in the bed and pushing something that lay there, Lenore and the woman standing, arms ready to catch it. Finally, after much scraping, a coffin heaved out of the wagon bed. It was crudely made, a white, bright wood, heavy enough that Lenore and the woman stumbled as they carried it. When the coffin passed me, I could smell the sawdust still on it.

My mother stepped down off the stoop then, and the four of them lifted it up and managed it into the office. As soon as they got it inside, they set it on the ground and pushed it home. I could hear the rough pine shuffling across the floor.

“You’re early.” Mama struggled with the box.

“Don’t start with me, Cathy,” the woman said, and Lenore looked up, and so did I. No one, except Grandfather before he died, dared call Mama “Cathy.” To everyone except for me, she was always “Doctor.” But Mama did not bristle and did not correct, as she would have with anyone else.

“Word was you’d be here at midnight.”

“We couldn’t leave,” the woman said. “He wasn’t ready.”

The woman knelt down in her dusty skirts and drew a long, skinny claw hammer from the handbag. She turned it on its head and began to pull at the nails on the coffin’s face. She grunted. “Here, Lucien.” She signaled to the boy. “Put some grease into it.” He fell down beside her, took the hammer from her hands, and began to pull at the nails she’d left behind.

Mama watched, eagerly. We all did. I crossed the room to stand beside her, slipped my hand into hers.

Mama started at my touch. “If you’d only come later.”

The woman’s head jerked up, her expression sharp, and then she looked at my hand in Mama’s, and her frown softened.

“I know we’ve done it differently. This time we really tried,” she said. “Besides, my Lucien sees all this and more. If you do this work, Cathy, your children will know sooner or later.”

Mama did not take advice from anyone, certainly not advice on me, but she said nothing at this softest of rebukes, only watched the woman and her son.

The boy, Lucien, pulled hard, and when the final nail was out, he and Lenore pulled at the splintering plank until it gave a terrible yawn. And then I saw:

a man curled in on himself like a dried mulberry leaf, his

skin gray, his eyes open and staring,

his pants damp. He smelled sharp,

like the spirits Lenore used to cut Mama’s medicines.

The woman gasped and reached for the boy and held him close. Lenore gasped, too. Mama let go of my hand and knelt down at the side of the coffin. She held her ear over the man’s open mouth, and her eyes went blank, that look she always got when she left this world and entered the one of her mind.

Click here to read an interview about Libertie between Kaitlyn Greenidge and New School author Mira Jacob.

Kaitlyn Greenidge’s debut novel We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books), is one of the New York Times Critics’ Top 10 Books of 2016. Her writing has appeared in Vogue, Glamour, Wall Street Journal, Elle, BuzzFeed, Transition Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, and American Short Fiction. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is currently Features Director at Harper’s Bazaar as well as a contributing writer for The New York Times. Her second novel, Libertie, is published by Algonquin Books and out now.