I remember Mama

I can still remember the whiteness of my mother as she slips beneath the surface of the river. Years later I am standing in my clean kitchen when the memory returns. We are somewhere near the Holcomb River in the shade and my mother wears a white slip that flutters up in the water. She is very pale and fat and the blossoming of the slip makes her seem immense. Kneeling in the river, submerged …

…owed so much money, she said, Mr. James would put us off the land. Daddy refused other work. She looked out the window at Daddy's spidery figure in the field. He won't go to work to save his neck nor mine, she said. His neck nor mine. She was prone to repeat words, as if she were her own echo. Her sentences trailed off, as if the words were thin and would soon die away.