“Well, now, Miss—”
“Ms.”
“Ms. Garland, I don’t even know if I can remember all—”
“You don’t have to. I’ll write it down. You can make a copy and we’ll both sign.”
“But I don’t think I did anything wrong.”
“I don’t think my father did either.”
He shifted papers on his desk, whistling low through his teeth.
I laid down my high card.
“There’s a girl in the hospital in critical condition because you tried to play God.”
His head jerked up.
“Well, I reckon, Miss—”
“Ms.”
“Garland, as a favor to you …”
I wanted to say, It’s no favor to me if you save your skin, but I held my tongue. The object wasn’t to have the last word, but to have the notebook and a clean way out.
He handed a legal pad across the desk and I wrote out the agreement. The paper was a sick green. Like I felt. But when I finished, he made the copy on the office Xerox and we both put our names to it.
I was shaking as I walked back to the car. I tried to concentrate on avoiding bird shit and tobacco splats on the sidewalk. I thought the courthouse square was deserted, but I turned and saw a one-legged man sitting at the foot of the doughboy. His twisted face followed me all the way to Druther’s. Was he mangled by the war that blew apart my family? Did the notebook hold a face more pitiful than his?
LAWANDA: One nurse is hunting with a needle under my collarbone. Another nurse is cutting my clothes off and I’m ashamed. Charred skin comes off with the T-shirt, the long strips of jeans. I look for the pink-white surface that was me. All that’s left is the folded-in skin between my legs, flashing when they move me.
I’m searching for pain, too, but I don’t feel any. Mom looks like she’s going to die, and the policeman who came to file a report couldn’t hide his horror. If you can’t do better than that, you need a different job, I wanted to say. But I’m too polite, and besides, my voice is missing. There’s just a squeaky sound.
Everybody’s talking about fluids and hooking me up and monitoring, but they also have to peel off what will come off. My hands you would not know are hands. I think about playing the tuba, learning to type. I wonder where tears come from.
The nurse tells Mom to leave. They’ve got to do some cutting. Mom asks if she could touch me somewhere. Only if she scrubs. Then she can touch my head, which isn’t burned. This is good. I feel like a guy on a space walk who’s just been tethered. Hold fast, Mom. Call Mamaw.
I try to squeak this out. She says she did, I think, and then says good-bye, her white face like the moon. Stay in orbit now. Don’t leave me.
They want to know if I can feel anything in my foot, in my groin. I shake my head. They want to know why I’m awake.
I wish I could sleep. I wish they’d turn off the lights and go away, not touch me, except Mom, and Mamaw when she comes. I want to go away myself. I can come back later, if I have to, when I’ve had some sleep.
But there are more faces above me all the time—masked now, their eyes anxious, their words puffing the cloth.
I guess I could be going to die. This thought’s like a bird. It lands and lifts off. But I’m not wanting to go. I just got here.
Then I think, If I die today, I’ll have to do something else tomorrow. What would that be? And where is my dad?
There’s a lurch and the ceiling starts to move. Somebody tell me where I’m going. Bags of fluid sway above me. I see the wrist of the guy who’s pulling me, perfect paper white skin. Write me a note, somebody, if you’re not going to speak to me. My name is Lawanda.
“Got a bad one here,” somebody says. I hear a low whistle. “A lot of third-degree.”
“Jesus Christ!” comes the reply.
It’s Mother Jesus, I want to say. You can take it up with Mamaw.
And just as we come to a stop, her face appears, right over mine. I can smell her breath. She puts her hand on my head, steadying. Somebody jerks it away.
“Lawanda,” she says. “Precious child of God.”
It’s the first time I’ve ever seen her cry.
NANCY CATHERINE: At Druther’s, I was afraid to open the object in question. “Mead Paper,” it said on the front, and I thought of honeyed wine as I drank Styrofoam coffee and stared at the plastic orange bench. I also thought of Pandora’s box. If I opened this, who knew what would fly out? I might agree with Galt. Then what? But I had to do it. You don’t get to choose your parents. My therapist said that. You don’t get to choose your scars or where your heart breaks. Lawanda didn’t choose the fire. Daddy didn’t either, I realized, my brain going orange, my ears filled with sizzle. Daddy didn’t get to choose.
I turned to the pages Galt had marked with a matchbook cover. All about weeds and the army, a ditch and Mother and some boy. There was sex; there was blood—war blood, menstrual blood—but it was all mixed up with this place, this boy: “I couldn’t lift him… . You could go back, but you couldn’t find him.” It was obsessive and wild, but not about sex with Lawanda: Galt was crazy. I read it again, seeing all Daddy couldn’t control. Even the language—it skidded and turned and flipped—a car gone off at the curve. But this boy was in there with him. Who was he? I flipped to another page.
Always there beyond what Lawanda would want. Before she came the buses were enough: books lined up in rows like goddamned soldiers. Some with spinal wear, not a one shot up. Maps on the ceiling like the skin stretched for lamp shades. Soft light through slaughter.
You send a man to kill in the name of family, country. And then he sees that no matter who you shoot, it’s the same stuff flies out. It’s one death, one life, I’m telling you. So Lawanda here the first time was a return. Didn’t know enough to be scared, thought I was human.
Didn’t know I could see her sex, her bones. Words dancing in her mouth. Died before she was bom. By my hand somebody tied the strings to. Five-star God general.
A shriek in the sky, dirt explodes, and she’s thrown back into the water. And I can holler myself inside out for help but help’s crushed in a shell hole, help’s oozing in a tank. So she goes to school. Out of this bus and dying every morning, dark streaks of ditch water in her hair.
That’s when I started shaking—in hard spasms, spilling the coffee, rattling the notebook in my hand. I couldn’t cry here, but my throat felt swelled to splitting. Then it closed and I made this gasping sound and I was lost in a long wave of weeping. It’s like I had struck the rock of pain, and Daddy’s, Lawanda’s, mine all gushed up.
He couldn’t love us because he’d killed us. Or would kill us. So he drove us off to save us. To be alone in those buses, in that ditch. Until Lawanda—oh God, when he finds out about Lawanda … I’ve got to go tell him, not let Galt—
I fumbled for my purse and keys and realized two people were standing by my table, a boy who’d been mopping and the gray-haired woman who’d sold me the coffee.
“You okay, honey?” she asked.
I nodded. I couldn’t find my voice but made motions at the door to indicate that I was leaving. The boy looked at his arms and legs, then moved away slowly, as if he’d just been released from a spell.
The woman sat down in the hard chair opposite me. “It’s late to be out,” she said. “You sure you got somewhere to go?
“Yes.” And I was sure.
When I got in the car, I sat and breathed a minute before leaving the parking lot. The car smelled like home to me— chilled flowers from deliveries I’d made, incense from my apartment. It was comforting. Somewhere I’d had a life before this, a life to go back to.
But now I had to go back to jail. I started the motor and pulled onto the road, turning right to downtown Cardin. What I wanted to do was head for the hospital and find out how Lawanda was, but I was too frantic about Daddy. Maybe I’d even take him with me to the hospital. He belonged there as much as anybody. He sure didn’t belong in jail.
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“You’re awful antsy,” Galt said when he answered the buzzer. He was wearing gray pajamas and a robe like pillow ticking.
“It’s not a night for sleeping,” I told him.
“Yeah, I noticed that,” he said. “What you want now?”
“Did you tell Daddy about the fire?” I asked, following him down the hall to his office.
“Shoot, no,” he replied. “Let sleeping dogs lie. Or lying dogs sleep,” he added, pleased with himself.
He flipped the fluorescent light on and I felt a springing in my brain, like I was not seeing, never had seen, but was getting ready for vision.
“Have a seat,” he said, gesturing to the wooden chair I’d occupied just a while ago. He sat behind the desk.
“You read that thing I gave you?” he asked. His face was flushed, his gray eyes wary.
“Yes. The part you marked and a few other passages.”
“And?” He leaned forward.
His question made me see the answer. “There’s not a thing in there but suffering, private suffering you had no right to lay eyes on. If there’s a crime here, Mr. Galt”—I stood up and he wheeled his chair backward—“it’s yours: invasion of privacy and unlawful detainment. And look at the ruin that’s come out of it!”
He stood too. “You can’t blame me—”
“Well, I do, but that’s not important right now. I need to talk to my father, and I may need to take him with me.”
“You’re welcome to the son of a bitch,” he said, and pulled a chain on his belt that drew a fist of keys from his pocket.
…
I could hear Daddy’s snoring all the way down the hall. “Sawing logs,” he used to call it. When I saw him through the bars, curled tight under a thin beige blanket, I thought, Why wake him up to this? Why take away these last hours of not knowing? But I’d come this far.
Galt switched on the light. The cell seemed even worse than before: the metal cot, suspended by chains from the wall, the steel toilet, the one rusty chair.
“Hey, Amos!” Galt called out. “You got a visitor.” He unlocked the door and swung it open. “Hate to interrupt your shut-eye, but she’s all fired up about something.” He winked at me. I wanted to smash his face. He walked over and shook Daddy by the shoulder. “Your spitting image!” he said.
Daddy rolled over, propped himself up on one elbow, and looked at me without recognition.
“Holler when you’re ready,” Galt ordered, and left.
I took the chair. “Wake up, Amos,” I said. “It’s me, Nancy Catherine.”
“You a dream?” he asked.
“No, but you’re going to wish I was.”
He sat all the way up. He had on somebody’s worn-out jogging suit, black with red and yellow diagonal patches. It was too little, and his hairy wrists and ankles showed.
“Something’s happened to Nora,” he said, like this was bad news he’d been expecting.
“No, Mother’s all right. She’d … she’d be pleased that you thought of her—”
“I mate for life,” he said. “Come on, now. State your business.”
“Howard Ingle set your buses on fire and Lawanda tried to stop him.”
“He done what?” Daddy rose to his feet.
I stood up, too, and took his hand. He wasn’t even looking at me, didn’t seem to feel my touch.
“He took a gas can, poured out a trail—”
All of a sudden, he came into focus, dropped my hand, grabbed my arms. “Did he bum them?” He shook me hard. “Are they gone?”
“Yes, yes. Stop it. There’s more.”
He froze. With his beard and white hair grown longer, unkempt in jail, he looked like a prophet. Only I was the one bringing word. But then he said it, low, strangled: “Lawanda!”
I nodded.
“No!” he bellowed. And he swung the chair up in one arc and smashed it against the bed. He did it again and again, till the metal legs bent. “Not Lawanda!” He ripped the blanket in half and was trying to tear the bed from the wall when suddenly he dropped, kneeling, onto it and rocked, banging his head against the cinder block. I could feel Galt staring through the bars. I grabbed Daddy’s shoulders, but I couldn’t stop him. I put my arms around his neck.
“She’s alive,” I said. “She needs you!”
He whirled around, slinging me backward. Blood cracked his forehead.
“Needs me?” he said sweetly. Then his voice rose. “To strike another match, beat another woman, drown another boy?”
I grabbed him again and held on, my face against his chest. Big as I am, he’s a lot bigger, and I breathed beneath the jail stink a smell I knew, his skin, the chest I used to lean against in rare times when he had me on his lap. And for the first time, I wasn’t scared of him. For the first time, his misery was greater than my fear. At this release, he started to cry—just a whimper at first, but then great sobs that sounded like they broke something getting out.
“It’s not your fault,” I told him. “Not Lawanda. I read your journal. I know you never hurt her. And Canaan, the war—that’s everybody’s fault. What happened to us. You can’t bear it all.”
I was shaking now and we held on to each other. Finally I said, “I need to go to the hospital. You want to come?”
He drew back and saw Galt at the door.
“Clear out anytime,” the jailer said. “You folks are causing a disturbance. And you’ll have to pay for that chair and the blanket, Amos. That’s government property.”
“He has no house!” I hissed, and Galt walked away. He came back with a grocery bag of belongings they’d confiscated when Daddy was brought in. There was little in the cell to add to it. So we left, light-handed, heavyhearted. Father and daughter.
MAMAW: They wouldn’t let us stay with Lawanda. Had to see how bad off she was, they said, and get her evened out. They steered her into a holding room and sent me out a-shaking. June, who until that night had always sneaked off to smoke, was puffing the waiting room full.
“I don’t know which direction to cry in,” she said as a few tears squoze down her face. June never was a crier. If she did get tearful as a youngun, she ran the whole time so you couldn’t watch the tears. I didn’t expect her to break down yet.
We was quiet. I was breathing a prayer when June’s pastor showed up. Hardly older than Lawanda, he had put on a hard-times face. He said we must turn to the Lord in our hour of need. Where did he think we’d been facing? He said God wouldn’t put on us more than we could bear.
“She won’t,” I told him, “but we do.”
“Pardon?”
“This ain’t the Lord’s doing,” I said. “This is a mess of sin we cooked up.”
He scooted deeper into his seat.
“Mother Jesus”—breathe in. “Heal Lawanda”—breathe out. I was about to find the rhythm when the doctor came in, tall and puny, sweet-faced.
“You’re the Ingle family?” he asked.
We all stood up. June grabbed my hand.
“I’m Dr. Graboe. And please, sit down,” he said, bending himself into one of the shoehorns they got for chairs.
“She’s going to make it, isn’t she?” June asked, leaning forward, her grip on me tight as a claw.
“I wish I could tell you that for sure,” the doctor said.
“God knows,” the preacher put in.
“Looking at the percentage and degree of her burns, it could go either way.”
“What does that mean?” June asked him.
He sat poker-straight. “We predict recovery on the basis of how much of the body is burned and how deeply. Anything more than twenty percent we classify as critical. Closer to sixty percent and some of it third-degree, then—”
“Them’s Lawanda’s figures?” I had to know.
He nodded. Then said, “Roughly. The depth of burns isn’t always evident at the outset.”
“How about Howard?” This was June.
“Both arms are significantly burned,” Dr. Graboe tol
d us, “but he’s not in real danger. Depending on the scarring, he could have limited mobility on the left side. If that’s the case, we’ll do what we can to relieve it.”
“Lawanda’s face?” June asked, her own gone white and bony with pain.
The doctor slumped a little, looked at his hands. “You have to understand, it was the gasoline fumes that ignited. They were disbursed in the air. And the patient had no clothing to protect her face.”
June moaned. Dr. Graboe reached out like he was going to pat her shoulder, but he didn’t. “Mrs. Ingle, right now our concern is keeping your daughter alive. With so much skin gone, it’s very hard to keep enough fluid in her body. Blood pressure drops. …” He cleared his throat. “To survive, she’s going to need skin grafts as soon as she can take them. But before that, she’s going to need care we can’t give her here.”
“Where are you taking her?” I asked.
“To the UK Medical Center in Lexington. The helicopter is on its way now.”
“Helicopter?” June sounded about five years old.
“Her condition’s too critical for a three-hour ambulance ride.”
“She’s never been on a plane,” June said. “She just took her first bus trip last week.”
“Can we go with her?’ I asked him.
Dr. Graboe flipped through papers on his clipboard, like the answer was there.
“Not in the helicopter,” he said. “There’s room only for medical staff. And they’ll be working. But we’ll give you directions to the hospital, and by the time you get there, she’ll be settled and you can see her.”
My lips was shaking. “We need to see her before she goes,” I said.
“You can do that,” he said. “But only for a minute, and one at a time. Mrs. Ingle, would you—”
June about ran over him getting to the door.
JUNE: The nurse treated me like a patient or someone as old as Mommy. Had her hand under my elbow, a coo in her voice. Didn’t know I don’t faint. Walked me back through the blue door, told me there would be machines, tubes. She didn’t know I’d been with my girl when they started all that.
With a Hammer for My Heart Page 14
