“You Sarah?”
“I am. Be as quiet as you can.” She nodded toward the stairs that led to the doctor’s office and Cee’s room.
When Frank got to the bottom of the stairs he saw through an open door a small white-haired man sitting at a large desk. The man looked up.
“What? Who are you?” The doctor’s eyes widened then narrowed at the insult of being invaded by a stranger. “Get out of here! Sarah! Sarah?”
Frank moved closer to the desk.
“There’s nothing to steal here! Sarah!” The doctor reached for the telephone. “I’m calling the police. Now!” His forefinger was in the dial’s zero when Frank knocked the telephone out of his hand.
Knowing completely now the nature of the threat, the doctor opened his desk drawer and pulled out a gun.
A .38, thought Frank. Clean and light. But the hand that held it shook.
The doctor raised the gun and pointed it at what in his fear ought to have been flaring nostrils, foaming lips, and the red-rimmed eyes of a savage. Instead he saw the quiet, even serene, face of a man not to be fooled with.
He pulled the trigger.
The click from the empty chamber was both tiny and thunderous. The doctor dropped the gun and ran around the desk, past the intruder and up the stairs. “Sarah!” he shouted. “Call the police, woman! Did you let him in here?”
Dr. Beau then ran down the hallway, to where another telephone sat on a small table. Standing next to it was Sarah, her hand pressed firmly on the cradle. There was no mistaking her purpose.
Meanwhile Frank walked into the room where his sister lay still and small in her white uniform. Asleep? He felt her pulse. Light or none? He leaned in to hear breath or no breath. She was cool to the touch, none of the early warmth of death. Frank knew death and this was not it—so far. Glancing quickly around the little room, he noticed a pair of white shoes, a bedpan and Cee’s pocket-book. He rummaged in the purse and shoved the twenty dollars he found there into his pocket. Then he knelt by Cee’s bed, slid his arms under her shoulders and knees, cradled her in his arms, and carried her up the stairs.
Sarah and the doctor stood locked in an undecipherable stare. As Frank passed around them with his motionless burden, Dr. Beau cast him a look of anger-shaded relief. No theft. No violence. No harm. Just the kidnapping of an employee he could easily replace, although, knowing his wife, he dared not replace Sarah—not yet anyway.
“Don’t overplay your hand,” he told her.
“No, sir,” answered Sarah, but her hand remained pressed down on the telephone until the doctor descended the stairs to his office.
Once Frank had fumbled and eased his way through the front door and reached the sidewalk, he turned to glance back at the house and saw Sarah standing in the door, shadowed by the dogwood blossoms. She waved. Good-bye—to him and Cee or perhaps to her job.
Sarah stood for a moment watching the pair disappear down the walkway. “Thank the Lord,” she whispered, thinking that one more day would have surely been too late. She blamed herself almost as much as she blamed Dr. Beau. She knew he gave shots, had his patients drink medicines he made up himself, and occasionally performed abortions on society ladies. None of that bothered or alarmed her. What she didn’t know was when he got so interested in wombs in general, constructing instruments to see farther and farther into them. Improving the speculum. But when she noticed Cee’s loss of weight, her fatigue, and how long her periods were lasting, she became frightened enough to write the only relative Cee had an address for. Days passed. Sarah didn’t know if her scary note had been received and was steeling herself to tell the doctor he had to call an ambulance when the brother knocked on the kitchen door. Thank God. Exactly the way old folks said: not when you call Him; not when you want Him; only when you need Him and right on time. If the girl dies, she thought, it wouldn’t be under her care in the doctor’s house. It would be in her brother’s arms.
Some dogwood blossoms, drooping in the heat, fell as Sarah shut the door.
Frank raised Cee to her feet, draped her right arm around his neck. Her head on his shoulder, her feet not even mimicking steps, she was feather-light. Frank got to the bus stop and waited for what seemed like an eternity. He passed the time counting the fruit trees in almost all the yards—pear, cherry, apple, and fig.
There were very few passengers on the bus back to town, and he was relieved to be relegated to the back, where bench seats allowed the two of them space and protected passengers from the sight of a man carrying, dragging, an obviously beat-up, drunken woman.
When they left the bus, it took a while to locate a gypsy cab parked away from the line of licensed taxis waiting, and more time to persuade the driver to accept the probable ruin of his backseat.
“She dead?”
“Drive.”
“I am driving, brother, but I need to know if I’m going to jail or not.”
“I said, drive.”
“Where we going?”
“Lotus. Twenty miles down Fifty-four.”
“That’ll cost you.”
“Don’t worry ’bout it.” But Frank was worried. Cee looked close to the edge of life. Mixed in with his fear was the deep satisfaction that the rescue brought, not only because it was successful but also how markedly nonviolent it had been. It could have been simply, “May I take my sister home?” But the doctor had felt threatened as soon as he walked in the door. Yet not having to beat up the enemy to get what he wanted was somehow superior—sort of, well, smart.
“She don’t look too good to me,” said the driver.
“Look where you going, man. The road ahead ain’t in your mirror.”
“I’m doing it, ain’t I? Speed limit is fifty-five, you know. I don’t want no trouble with cops.”
“You don’t shut your mouth, police will be the best thing happen to you.” Frank’s voice was stern but his ears were pricked for the cry of a siren.
“She bleedin’ on my seat? You have to pay me extra if she mess up my backseat.”
“Say another word, just one, and you won’t get a fucking dime.”
The driver turned on his radio. Lloyd Price, full of joy and happiness, sang out “Lawdy Miss Clawdy.”
Cee, unconscious, occasionally moaning, her skin now hot to his touch, was dead weight, so Frank had trouble fumbling in his pockets for the fare. Barely had the taxi door shut when dust and pebbles kicked up behind the tires as the driver got as fast and as far away as he could from Lotus and its dangerous bed-bug-crazy country folk.
Cee’s toes scooted the gravel as the tops of her feet were dragged down the narrow road to Miss Ethel Fordham’s house. Frank picked his sister up again and, carrying her tightly in his arms, mounted the porch steps. A group of children stood in the road fronting the yard watching a girl bat a paddleball like a pro. They shifted their gaze to the man and his burden. A beautiful black dog lying next to the girl rose up and seemed more interested in the scene than the children. While they stared at the man and woman on Miss Ethel’s porch, their mouths opened wide. One boy pointed at the blood staining the white uniform and sniggered. The girl hit him on the head with her paddle, saying, “Shut it!” She recognized the man as the one who long ago had made a collar for her puppy.
A peck basket of green beans lay by a chair. On a small table were a bowl and paring knife. Through the screen door Frank heard singing. “Nearer, my God, to Thee …”
“Miss Ethel? You in there?” Frank hollered. “It’s me, Smart Money. Miss Ethel?”
The singing stopped and Ethel Fordham peered through the screen door, not at him, but at the slight form in his arms. She frowned. “Ycidra? Oh, girl.”
Frank couldn’t explain and didn’t try to. He helped Miss Ethel get Cee on the bed, after which she told him to wait outside. She pulled up Cee’s uniform and parted her legs.
“Have mercy,” she whispered. “She’s on fire.” Then, to the lingering brother, “Go snap those beans, Smart Money. I got work to do.”
THIRTEEN
It was so bright, brighter than he remembered. The sun, having sucked away the blue from the sky, loitered there in a white heaven, menacing Lotus, torturing its landscape, but failing, failing, constantly failing to silence it: children still laughed, ran, shouted their games; women sang in their backyards while pinning wet sheets on clotheslines; occasionally a soprano was joined by a neighboring alto or a tenor just passing by. “Take me to the water. Take me to the water. Take me to the water. To be baptized.” Frank had not been on this dirt road since 1949, nor had he stepped on the wooden planks covering the rain’s washed-out places. There were no sidewalks, but every front yard and backyard sported flowers protecting vegetables from disease and predators—marigolds, nasturtiums, dahlias. Crimson, purple, pink, and China blue. Had these trees always been this deep, deep green? The sun did her best to burn away the blessed peace found under the wide old trees; did her best to ruin the pleasure of being among those who do not want to degrade or destroy you. Try as she might, she could not scorch the yellow butterflies away from scarlet rosebushes, nor choke the songs of birds. Her punishing heat did not interfere with Mr. Fuller and his nephew sitting in the bed of a truck—the boy on a mouth organ, the man on a six-string banjo. The nephew’s bare feet swayed; the uncle’s left boot tapped out the beat. Color, silence, and music enveloped him.
This feeling of safety and goodwill, he knew, was exaggerated, but savoring it was real. He convinced himself that somewhere nearby pork ribs sizzled on a yard grill and inside the house there was potato salad and coleslaw and early sweet peas too. A pound cake cooled on top of an icebox. And he was certain that on the bank of the stream they called Wretched, a woman in a man’s straw hat fished. For shade and comfort she would be sitting under the sweet bay tree, the one with branches spread like arms.
When he reached the cotton fields beyond Lotus, he saw acres of pink blossoms spread under the malevolent sun. They would turn red and drop to the ground in a few days to let the young bolls through. The planter would need help for the laying by and Frank would be in line then, and again for the picking when it was time. Like all hard labor, picking cotton broke the body but freed the mind for dreams of vengeance, images of illegal pleasure—even ambitious schemes of escape. Cutting into these big thoughts were the little ones. Another kind of medicine for the baby? What to do about an uncle’s foot swollen so large he can’t put it in a shoe? Will the landlord be satisfied with half the rent this time?
While Frank waited for the hiring all he thought about was whether Cee was getting better or worse. Her boss back in Atlanta had done something—what, he didn’t know—to her body and she was fighting a fever that wouldn’t go down. That the calamus root Miss Ethel depended on wasn’t working, he did know. But that was all he knew because he was blocked from visiting the sickroom by every woman in the neighborhood. If it weren’t for the girl Jackie he would have known nothing at all. From her he learned that they believed his maleness would worsen her condition. She told him the women took turns nursing Cee and each had a different recipe for her cure. What they all agreed upon was his absence from her bedside.
That explained why Miss Ethel didn’t even want him on her porch.
“Go on off somewhere,” she told him, “and stay gone till I call for you.”
Frank thought the woman looked seriously scared. “Don’t you let her die,” he said. “You hear me?”
“Get out.” She waved him away. “You not helping, Mr. Smart Money, not with that evil mind-set. Go ’way, I said.”
So he busied himself cleaning and repairing his parents’ house that had been empty since his father died. With the little that was left of his shoe money and the rest of Cee’s wages he had just enough to re-rent it for a few months. He rummaged a hole next to the cookstove and found the matchbox. Cee’s two baby teeth were so small next to his winning marbles: a bright blue one, an ebony one, and his favorite, a rainbow mix. The Bulova watch was still there. No stem, no hands—the way time functioned in Lotus, pure and subject to anybody’s interpretation.
Soon as the blossoms began to fall, Frank headed down the rows of cotton to the shed that the farm manager called his office. He had hated this place once. The dust blizzards it created when fallow, the thrips wars and blinding heat. As a boy assigned to trash work while his parents were far away in the productive fields, his mouth had been dry with fury. He messed up as much as he could so they would fire him. They did. His father’s scolding didn’t matter because he and Cee were free to invent ways to occupy that timeless time when the world was fresh.
If she died because some arrogant, evil doctor sliced her up, war memories would pale beside what he would do to him. Even if it took the rest of his life, even if he spent the balance of it in prison. In spite of having defeated the enemy without bloodletting, imagining the death of his sister he joined the other pickers who planned sweet vengeance under the sun.
It was late June by the time Miss Ethel sent Jackie to tell him he could stop by, and July when Cee was well enough to move into their parents’ home.
Cee was different. Two months surrounded by country women who loved mean had changed her. The women handled sickness as though it were an affront, an illegal, invading braggart who needed whipping. They didn’t waste their time or the patient’s with sympathy and they met the tears of the suffering with resigned contempt.
First the bleeding: “Spread your knees. This is going to hurt. Hush up. Hush, I said.”
Next the infection: “Drink this. You puke, you got to drink more, so don’t.”
Then the repair: “Stop that. The burning is the healing. Be quiet.”
Later, when the fever died and whatever it was they packed into her vagina was douched out, Cee described to them the little she knew about what had happened to her. None of them had asked. Once they knew she had been working for a doctor, the eye rolling and tooth sucking was enough to make clear their scorn. And nothing Cee remembered—how pleasant she felt upon awakening after Dr. Beau had stuck her with a needle to put her to sleep; how passionate he was about the value of the examinations; how she believed the blood and pain that followed was a menstrual problem—nothing made them change their minds about the medical industry.
“Men know a slop jar when they see one.”
“You ain’t a mule to be pulling some evil doctor’s wagon.”
“You a privy or a woman?”
“Who told you you was trash?”
“How was I supposed to know what he was up to?” Cee tried to defend herself.
“Misery don’t call ahead. That’s why you have to stay awake—otherwise it just walks on in your door.”
“But—”
“But nothing. You good enough for Jesus. That’s all you need to know.”
AS SHE HEALED, the women changed tactics and stopped their berating. Now they brought their embroidery and crocheting, and finally they used Ethel Fordham’s house as their quilting center. Ignoring those who preferred new, soft blankets, they practiced what they had been taught by their mothers during the period that rich people called the Depression and they called life. Surrounded by their comings and goings, listening to their talk, their songs, following their instructions, Cee had nothing to do but pay them the attention she had never given them before. They were nothing like Lenore, who’d driven Salem hard, and now, suffering a minor stroke, did nothing at all. Although each of her nurses was markedly different from the others in looks, dress, manner of speech, food and medical preferences, their similarities were glaring. There was no excess in their gardens because they shared everything. There was no trash or garbage in their homes because they had a use for everything. They took responsibility for their lives and for whatever, whoever else needed them. The absence of common sense irritated but did not surprise them. Laziness was more than intolerable to them; it was inhuman. Whether you were in the field, the house, your own backyard, you had to be busy. Sleep was not for dreaming; it was for gathering
strength for the coming day. Conversation was accompanied by tasks: ironing, peeling, shucking, sorting, sewing, mending, washing, or nursing. You couldn’t learn age, but adulthood was there for all. Mourning was helpful but God was better and they did not want to meet their Maker and have to explain a wasteful life. They knew He would ask each of them one question: “What have you done?”
Cee remembered that one of Ethel Fordham’s sons had been murdered up North in Detroit. Maylene Stone had one working eye, the other having been pierced at the sawmill by a wood chip. No doctor was available or summoned. Both Hanna Rayburn and Clover Reid, lame from polio, had joined their brothers and husbands hauling lumber to their storm-damaged church. Some evil, they believed, was incorrigible, so its demise was best left to the Lord. Other kinds could be mitigated. The point was to know the difference.
The final stage of Cee’s healing had been, for her, the worst. She was to be sun-smacked, which meant spending at least one hour a day with her legs spread open to the blazing sun. Each woman agreed that that embrace would rid her of any remaining womb sickness. Cee, shocked and embarrassed, refused. Suppose someone, a child, a man, saw her all splayed out like that?
“Nobody going to be looking at you,” they said. “And if they do? So what?”
“You think your twat is news?”
“Stop worrying your head,” Ethel Fordham advised her. “I’ll be out there with you. The important thing is to get a permanent cure. The kind beyond human power.”
So Cee, bridling with embarrassment, lay propped on pillows at the edge of Ethel’s tiny back porch soon as the sun’s violent rays angled in that direction. Each time anger and humiliation curled her toes and stiffened her legs.
“Please, Miss Ethel. I can’t do this no more.”
“Oh, be quiet, girl.” Ethel was losing patience. “So far as I can tell every other time you opened your legs you was tricked. You think sunlight going to betray you too?”
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