The nurse said I had to wash and “suit up.” She took me in a room like a trailer kitchen. I scrubbed up to my elbows, put on a gown, paper hair net, paper shoes. Then rubber gloves, like I was about to clean the oven.
“But I just saw her and I didn’t have any of this!” I said. “I put my bare hand on her head.”
“Well, it’ll be a long day before you do that again,” she told me. “Your daughter’s in a sterile field now—at least as much as we can make it. Put on this mask, too.” She held it out to me. “After fluid loss, infection’s the greatest threat.”
I did as she said, dressed up like I was going to rob bees. For Lawanda, I had to hold myself together. For Howard. I put one foot in front of the other like I was going across the kitchen. I got to her room. I got to the bed. What kind of crib had they put my baby in? High and fenced, tilted. I looked at the machines, lights, heard the whirs, whooshes. I looked at my hands. One had a red shiny spot on the back where hot grease had splashed. I remembered how fierce it hurt and how it blistered. All that pain from just a skimp of flesh. “Oh, Lawanda!” I said. My womb clenched tight, as if it could take her back.
I never saw so many bandages in my life. She looked like a mummy, with just her eyes showing, and a sprig of hair.
“You cut her hair!” I said.
“What was left, yes,” she said.
“Last night when she ran out the back door, she had it tied back, and it was flying out behind her, all crinkly, and I thought, That Lawanda, she’s like the wind, and I was just thankful to God or Whoever that she blew through my house. And—”
“Mrs. Ingle …” The nurse had her arm around my back by then, heavy like a snake, a fire hose. “We’ve got to keep working here to get your daughter ready to move. Don’t you want to tell her something?”
“Can she hear me?”
Lawanda’s eyes shot open. They latched onto me like her mouth used to grab my nipple.
“I’m right here, honey,” I told her. “See? They’ve got you wrapped up so I can’t touch you. They’ve got me in this outfit—” Don’t cry, June, don’t cry, I said to myself. Don’t let it out now. I took a deep breath. I wanted to give Lawanda my body, my whole skin, but all I had was words.
“Why, you’re snug as a bug, Lawanda, like Mommy wrapped you after your first bath. You were a big bundle then, too. Couldn’t walk or talk, couldn’t feed yourself. We took care of you. There’s people can do that now, honey, where they’re taking you. It’s just Lexington. We’ll come too. Don’t you worry. Your mamaw’s got her prayers going. Nancy Catherine’s gone to tell Garland. And your daddy—”
“Daddy?” Lawanda’s voice was thin and high, squeaky.
I looked for the nurse. There was a different one across the bed.
“It’s a burn voice,” she said, looking quick at me and away. “It comes from trauma to the vocal cords and lungs.”
“Trauma?”
“Smoke. Chemicals,” she told me, stringing up another fluid bag.
“Daddy?” Lawanda asked again.
“He’s in the hospital, too,” I said, “but not hurt too bad.” Not by fire, I thought.
Lawanda’s eyes closed.
All I could do was pat the air around her, just pat it and think hard, Good girl. Good girl. Then the nurse latched onto my arm and pulled me away.
MAM AW: June came back looking like a scarecrow with half the stuffing gone. You do something, her eyes said.
She told the nurse, “Take Mommy back now. I’ll go see Howard.”
So a nurse led me one way and pointed June in another.
I had to wash and get all covered up, then she took me to Lawanda.
Swaddling clothes, was what I thought when I saw her. She was all bound up. And there was tubes stuck in her everywhere. Another nurse and a boy stood by her, checking machines, writing stuff down.
“We’ve got to get ready to roll,” the nurse said. “Be quick. ”
“Lawanda, it’s Mamaw. Are you hurting bad?” She didn’t say anything and her face didn’t change. “I know you can hear me, honey, somewhere in your heart. You’re fixing to fly in a helicopter! Mother Jesus is coming like a big bird to pick you up, to take you where they got what you need.”
I heard a clattering behind me and another boy wheeled in more doctor stuff.
“Here’s your setup for the cath,” the boy said to the nurse.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to leave,” she told me.
I leaned over and whispered in Lawanda’s ear, “You know what Job said, deep in his troubles?
“I know that my Redeemer lives
and that at last he will stand upon the earth;
and after my skin has been thus destroyed
then in my flesh I shall see God.
This is awful, what you’re going through, but Mother Jesus is with you, Lawanda, tied up in the same pain—”
“Time’s up,” the nurse said.
“And I love you, honey. I can’t touch you with feathers, but I’m brooding on you. I’ll be there to see you go and be right behind you all the way to Lexington.”
The boy took hold of my arm.
“This way, grandma,” he said, steering me out like I was blind or half-witted, one.
NANCY CATHERINE: When the adrenaline faded, it took my self-assurance with it. I shook like a tambourine as I walked Daddy to the car. How did I get into this? Wasn’t it just last night I’d pulled up at this jail, determined not to let my father near me? And now I’d sprung him, more or less as my responsibility. Me, who could barely meet my flower charges month to month. I had to be nuts. It was the mountain air, or the coal dust, or the water… . But I knew it wasn’t. It was something deep, deeper than coal.
“Good air,” he said as I unlocked the passenger-side door. “In jail, you think the whole world stinks.”
I took a deep breath.
Once we were in the car, I asked, “Have you ever looked into VA benefits?”
“What do you think I live on?”
“So you get a check every month?”
He nodded. I pulled out into the dark, narrow street. Drove past the drugstore, the hardware store, the florist. Very clumsy window display—I’d noticed it before.
“That’s good,” I went on. “Since your need for support is already established, maybe they’ll be quick to see that now you need housing, too.”
“What are you contemplating?”
I was contemplating how to work the one-way streets to get out of town.
“A trailer,” I said.
“Two,” he fired back. “I’d have to have two.”
I almost laughed. “At this point, one would do you a lot of good.”
He didn’t respond. In a few minutes, I reached the bypass and we left the little town behind. Ahead, the black road gleamed. On either side, lights dotted the hills like stars.
“She gonna live?” he asked.
“I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I kind of dropped her off and ran.”
“What did she look like? What did they say?” There was anger in his voice.
“All they say in an emergency room is, ‘Wait.’ She looked awful. They took her away. They took Howard. Said they would come back and talk to me, but they didn’t. I called her mother, picked her up, and then I came after you.”
We rounded a curve and the lights of the hospital loomed. Daddy put his head down, his hand over his face. It was so strange, him sitting there, him being there physically in a dirty jacket—big-shouldered, big-chested. Not the threat of him, not his absence. I touched his sleeve. He looked over.
“Lawanda would like me hitting all the high spots,” he said. “Jail, the hospital…”
I turned in at the divided drive. Except for the staff section, the parking lot was deserted. I pulled into a spot just off the emergency circle.
“This is it,” I said, shutting off the car, setting the brake. Daddy was very still.
Then all at once, he slammed his fi
st on the dashboard. “Goddamn Howard Ingle!” he said. “Burn his own baby!”
“You know he never meant to.”
His voice got tough. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “He meant to bum me out. His daughter’s just what they call collateral damage.”
My throat tightened.
He went on. “What you hit besides the target.”
“Is that what happened to us?” I asked him.
He shouldered his way out of the car, stood up, and spat on the asphalt. “Come on,” he said.
I didn’t budge. “Is it?” I asked again, looking up. He walked off.
I scrambled after him, slamming the door. Furious, I grabbed hold of his arm to turn him around, but he was already turning. I lost my balance and would have hit the sidewalk, but he caught me.
“Yeah, N.C.,” he said. “You could call it that.”
GARLAND: She could call it whatever she wanted; it was Lawanda I was thinking about, not baby Nancy Catherine. But she got all blue-faced anyway, had to blow her nose before we got through the second set of doors.
“Don’t run out of tears too early in the night,” I told her.
With no warning, she took my arm and started shushing me, saying, “The ER is down this hall.” I removed her hand.
“Back off, woman,” I warned. “I ain’t living in pajamas yet.”
She gave this short sigh so much like her mother I could feel Nora beside me. Gave me gooseflesh.
“I tell you, I got to talk to Howard Ingle.”
N.C. shrugged. It ain’t polite for her to look so much like me and then act like her mother. She pushed me through a door into a waiting room. Slumped figures. Mamaw big as life.
She stood up as we walked over, held out her hand to me.
“A free man,” she said when I took it.
I whistled through my teeth. The skinny woman I took to be Lawanda’s mommy looked scared. Mamaw hugged Nancy Catherine.
“I’m Amos Garland,” I said to Howard Ingle’s wife. “I’m sorry about … all of this. Is Lawanda going to live?”
“They can’t tell yet. But they’re moving her to Lexington.”
“In a helicopter,” Mamaw added. And then: “This is June.”
We nodded at each other.
“Who’s going with her?” N.C. wanted to know.
“Nobody!” June’s face clenched like she would cry. “She has to go all by herself.”
“She won’t know—” Nancy Catherine began.
“Yes, she will,” June cut in. “She’s talked to me. She knows what’s going on.”
“That’s good,” Mamaw said. “Then she knows I said we’d meet her there.”
“You going?” I asked June. Then her face wadded up and she really did cry.
“I want to go, but I’m afraid to leave Howard. He feels so bad. …”
“I got something to tell him,” I said.
“He doesn’t need more blame,” she told me. “He’s sick with it.”
“Amos is the person Howard has to face,” Mamaw said. “Besides Lawanda. Have a seat,” she said to me. “You can’t see him till morning anyhow. June just tried and he’s asleep.”
“Will they tell us when Lawanda goes?” N.C. asked.
“They got to,” Mamaw said. “She’s ours.”
They all settled in. I couldn’t do it. The waiting room was small and I’d just got out of jail.
“I’m going for a walk,” I told N.C. “You hold down the fort.”
I watched her start to say some caretaking thing, but she was smart—she didn’t. I got out fast.
The night air was wet and cold. Had that moss-on-rocks smell that mountains make. Felt good to my skin. I tried not to think about Lawanda’s. I tried to think about getting a government trailer with heat, maybe water. But I kept seeing her face rise like the sun over my ridge, kept hearing her brand-new voice holler my name.
I don’t know how many times I hiked around the hospital before I heard the chopper coming in. The way sound bounces off these hills, it could have been a squadron instead of just a single on loan from the National Guard. I watched it land, then made my way to the pad, which was on the ground, not the roof.
The medics were already out when I got there, hair and clothes blown by the rotor wake. They headed for the hospital. The door opened before they reached it and a tall skinny man began rolling Lawanda out. A herd of people was around and behind her, like dogs following the gut wagon. I saw N.C. coming toward me.
They slid a stretcher from the helicopter, moved Lawanda onto it, with all her tubes and bags. I couldn’t see much, didn’t want to—I’ve seen enough, buddy. I know what fire does. I thought, Even if she lives through this, that girl is gone.
And then I heard Lawanda far away, back in First Bus, say, “I think you’re beautiful,” to me, all warped and grizzled. By God, that was forgiveness. I went right over to her.
She struggled to move, bandaged and hooked up like she was, and her eyes were looking everywhere. “Lawanda!” I said, and she focused on me. “Thank you!”
Then the crew lifted her, tilting the head of the stretcher up to get it into the helicopter. Suddenly Mamaw and June were there too.
“I’ve got to stay with your daddy now, Lawanda, but I’ll come in a day or two,” June said.
“We’ve got to fly!” the nurse declared. “Everybody back!”
“Mother Jesus is riding with you, ” Mamaw hollered, “and I’ll be driving underneath.”
Then the stretcher and crew were in, the doors shut, and a doctor waved us back into the hospital. We watched through the windows as the rotors gained speed and carried Lawanda away.
LAWANDA: I think I’d be all right if I could just get free of all this, if I could just get up and move around. But I’m tied and tethered—there’s even something going into my chest—and I’m shut in this machine who knows where in the sky. I want down! I want out! It’s so loud, they couldn’t hear me if they were listening. Which they’re not. Too busy saving me to find out how I am.
Mamaw said Mother Jesus was sending a big bird to take me—yeah, like an eagle takes a mouse.
My throat hurts. Most of my body feels somewhere else, but my throat has a knife in it and it’s turning, like you core an apple.
He said, “Thank you!” For what?
As long as I’m up here, I’d like to see out, but I can’t find any windows. It kind of bumps along. What happens if I throw up?
The nurse holds a pan. She says my pressure is better and they can give me something that might make me sleep. “Just a drop or two,” she says, and squirts it into a tube. Her name tag says Barbara.
…
“Barbara,” I call in a new place, the ceiling rushing above me. She doesn’t appear. Bright—maybe it’s morning now.
“This is the Bum Unit,” somebody says. “You’ve got your own bed waiting.”
That’s a first. I’ve always shared with Dessie. Jeff, too, when he was just out of the crib. Dad said Noonie and Ray would roll on him.
Noonie’s gone now. I’m gone. Jeff sleeps with Ray. Dessie’s got her own bed.
A nurse says her name is Treasure. Maybe my name is Lost Wealth. Like Lawanda, you know? She smiles, I think. Her mouth’s behind a mask, but her eyes are hopping. All the workers wear masks, cover their hair, wear gloves. Great place for a robbery.
A doctor comes up—Dr. Hostage. That can’t be right. He says they have to evaluate and transfer and change dressings and they might as well do this all at once. I nod. I don’t know what I’m in for.
A terrible smell, for one thing, as soon as the dressings are opened—sick-sweet. At first I don’t know where it’s coming from. Rotten chicken, I think. Bury it. Freeze it. Then I understand: Oh God, it’s me! Then comes the first slash of pain. The nurses have to pull off what’s stuck, and when that’s done, they have to wash and scrub.
“Go ahead and scream,” Treasure says, and I would if my throat would. I make noises more like a stepped-on cat.
Treasure says she’s sorry they can’t put me in the whirlpool. I picture spinning. “In a few days,” she says. I have to stay here for days?
It’s torture till they’ve poured on all their medicines and bound me up again. They put me in a big bed with fences. Pain quits shouting and just sings. I ask if Mamaw’s come yet.
“Mamaw?” they say, eyebrows rising up to their hair nets.
I try something else. “Then could I have some soup beans?” I ask.
“These people,” Treasure says, and sighs. “These people from the mountains.”
GARLAND: As we walked back to the waiting room, I felt like I still had to see Howard Ingle, but now my message was different. I didn’t want to rant. Could I say, “She’s forgiven me, she’ll forgive you too”? That wouldn’t make sense to him. Could I say I did the same thing to my daughter, only it started half a world away? Collateral damage? Could I say Canaan died, but Lawanda might not? No, I couldn’t tell all that. It would mean explaining my whole life. Still, I had to talk to him. I said this to the family when we all got seated.
Mamaw agreed. June wasn’t sure. I told her I wasn’t carrying blame. Nancy Catherine raised her eyebrows. “It’s different since I saw Lawanda,” I said. June covered her face with her hands.
Mamaw patted her shoulder. “You go first,” she said to June. “Tell Howard where Lawanda’s gone. You’ll feel better when that’s done.”
June took her hands down. She looked like the hind end of bad luck. “It’s getting light,” she said. “He’ll be waking up.” And she left.
She wasn’t gone long, and she came back looser around the edges.
“He says he cried so hard, he threw up,” she told us. “So they gave him a knockout shot. That’s why he was asleep when I went before.”
This fact seemed to make her feel better.
“You told him Amos was coming?” Mamaw asked.
June nodded.
“Better get it over with,” Nancy Catherine said.
“Nothing gets over with,” I told her. “That’s what I’m going to say.”
…
With a Hammer for My Heart Page 15
