Ugly Ways by Tina McElroy Ansa Page B

and plants of the formal white garden her mother had grown especially to stand out at night—the moonflowers, the stalks of ginger lily spreading in waves against the house, the caladiums and hostas with their pale green and white stripes, the climbing peace roses and the iceberg roses grown as standards—looked like spirits dancing in the autumn wind. The town marveled that Mudear's plants kept blooming so profusely and so late in the season.
    Some folks said she had bodies buried back there.
    If Mudear were to come back, that's where she would come, Betty thought. She was like some strange exotic mixed-up plant herself.
    During the day lounging around in her freshly laundered gowns and robes and pajamas giving off noxious fumes like carbon dioxide as she made everyone's life miserable in the house. Then, at night blossoming and exuding oxygen, coming to life and giving off life in her garden outside. She was like a strange jungle plant that had reversed the natural order of the plant world. Betty had even seen her stoop down and take a bit of her garden dirt in her mouth one night.
    Betty could see her mother now as she had seen her innumerable nights wandering around in the field of flowers in her nightclothes, barefoot in the summertime and heavy boots in cooler weather, as if gardening were the most natural thing in the world to be doing in the middle of the night.
    For Mudear it was. She had possessed night vision. Extraordinary night vision, as far as Betty could tell. Her night vision extended to seeing at dusk and all the shadings in between when most folks with night vision said it was more difficult to see. Even more unusual, Mudear could not only see in pitch dark as most blessed with the sight could, but she could see just as clearly as day. Mudear could not only make out shapes and figures in the dark, she could see the ants crawling over her vines, the aphids on her roses, the blossoms on her eggplant, the drooping falls on her beard iris. She could see to turn her compost pile and where she left the garden fork she needed for the job leaning against the side of the aluminum storehouse.
    She had had Poppa find an old stone park bench with flowers and vines chiseled into its legs, sides, and back and set it down in the middle of where one of the paths of her garden crossed the other. When she was a teenager, Betty would get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and stop to gaze out the window at Mudear sitting on one of her benches brushing the side of her thigh lazily with a huge sprig of lavender and be so mesmerized by her mother's movements that she would forget to go back to bed and would fall asleep at the windowsill.
    But Mudear had a knack for doing the strangest things and making them appear, at least for the moment, perfectly natural. Betty thought it was part of her charm, part of her beauty. Not that Mudear could be called a traditional beauty. She was nothing special really, just a little brown-skinned woman past middle age. She was never as pretty as any of her daughters, but she had a way about her, a confidence, a sureness in the way she moved, in the way she squatted down in the dirt next to a plant with real tenderness, a tenderness she never showed her family, that was downright seductive. And she could throw back her little pea head and laugh with such a robustness and a sense of abandon and irony that her daughters learned to talk about people in Mulberry and on television and in the news with a cutting wickedness just to hear her roar.
    Mudear's actions just seemed normal. Betty didn't notice right away, for instance, that Mudear never came out of the house like her little classmates' mothers did until her teachers at school began making sly comments in class about mothers who didn't seem to care enough about their daughters to make the effort to show up at parent-teacher meetings. At first, Betty didn't realize they were referring to Mudear. But when the comments