I took the elevator to the third floor, and a nurse walked me down to Howard’s room, warning all the way, “Don’t upset him,” like he had no cause to be upset. “Let him enjoy his breakfast,” she said when we passed the cart with all the trays. I held my tongue.
At room 307, the nurse pushed the door open. Green and skin tan walls, like the whole place.
“Mr. Ingle, Mr. Garland’s here to see you,” she announced, then made mouth motions to me: Five minutes.
I went in. Howard Ingle is a small man, and now he looked drawn up like he’d had a stroke. His arms were held out from his sides, thick with dressings. His face was turned to the window.
“You know who I am,” I said, and he looked at me. He nodded. “I got to tell you something. I done what you done.”
Howard stared at me, face white, eyes sunk in.
“I set a fire once, away across the ocean. The army gave me the gas can, the matches. All that water between here and there and still it burnt my family.”
“That was war,” Howard Ingle said.
“What do you call this?” I asked him.
He shut his eyes.
“I wanted to protect the boys they gave me. I thought I could, too, like I’d watched over my high school kids back home. But these boys were killing people, you see. That was their job. I told them to do it. That was the purpose of our travels, our outfits. So the killing came back to us. Same as if a kid tries to throw a cherry bomb out a closed window. Comes back and blows up in his face. And the window’s always closed, buddy. It may be far away, so it’ll take years for the force to get back. But it’ll come … it’ll come. You were right at the window, Howard Ingle. You didn’t have to wait.”
He couldn’t wipe the tears from his face with his arms bandaged. I swiped at them with a Kleenex.
“What are you telling me?” he asked.
“That what you did to me, you did to yourself. And that I’ve done it too.”
Howard Ingle flinched, as if I’d hit him. “But it’s Lawanda—” he started out, his voice rising.
“Lawanda flat-out believed I was human,” I told him. “She forgave me. She’ll do the same for you.”
“But I burned your buses,” he said.
“And I shelled towns,” I gave back. “Scalded my kids’ dreams. You think I could send you to jail?”
“I was wrong about you,” he said.
And I answered, “So was I.”
HOWARD: It wasn’t that easy, by God. Nobody knows what Lawanda went through. I come the closest because I did have burns, but they were nothing like Lawanda’s. And the scars don’t matter on me, long as my hands work, long as my arms can lift and bend. But Lawanda’s a girl, headed toward being a woman. And she used to be pretty as a clear sky, not that she paid much heed to it. Now she has to. Everybody does.
She was four months in the hospital. Four months a hundred and fifty miles from home. June and Mamaw taking turns staying with her. Me visiting sometimes. Nancy Catherine taking Garland the first time, on her way home to Louisville. He rode back with Mamaw and took my job till I got better. Had to get a driver’s license to do it. Garland hadn’t driven since the war. And he was no great hand as a route man. Kept passing roads he recognized, then turning back for a little tour.
He kept sober, though, at least on the job. Curtis Ballard fixed him a cot in the boiler room. Got him a hot plate. There’s a bathroom at the cleaners. Much better than a bus. Now he’s back on the ridge in a HUD trailer. And he has a truck, but I’ll get to that.
Lawanda’s a different person is all I can say. She says she’s not.
“A part of me that was way back in there has just moved forward,” she told me. But that’s the kind of thing she never would have said.
She’s been through so much. The stuff they do to you— bathing and scraping, robbing one crop of skin to plant another, having her face patched together like a roof. Like when you can’t afford to strip the whole thing and start over. Just bring hot tar and shingles and do what you can.
Oh, Lawanda!
June’ll never be the same either. Let’s just say it. We’re every one scarred. Ray ran off. Noonie found him. He was headed north. Whenever he ran out of money, he’d just sell blood.
“Think about it,” Garland said. “You could ride your own red river all the way to Canada. ”
Lawanda said it’s not red, it’s plasma.
Whatever color it is, thank the Lord he couldn’t do it. Thank the Lord he’s back on the school bus, riding to school. Still almost as mad at me as I am. We just abide each other.
Dessie didn’t leave us by running away. She just acts like we’re not related. She talks about circumstance, like that’s all this is. I didn’t know she knew a word that big. And Jeff, my least one, he’s afraid of me. I can tell when I swoop him up. All his bones lock. I thought maybe it was because of the scars on my arms, but he went straight up to Lawanda. Sat by her side, reached up to touch her face. “Does it hurt?” he asked. She shook her head and smiled and left the room.
Then there’s June. She’s the one’s come forward, it seems to me. She wants everything firsthand now, said she’s through being treated “like the dummy and the discard.” You should have seen her with Lawanda’s doctors. She looked things up in books and then asked them questions just like they was people. She’d back them up in a corner, not leave a thing to Mamaw or me. And when I was back at work and her pa began to wander, she went straight to Garland. Hired him to help with the farm and to stay with John when Mamaw was in Lexington. Got John’s old truck towed and fixed. That’s how Garland got wheels. If you’d told me a year ago we’d look to that old man for help, I’d of said you was crazy. But the world has turned.
Anyway, to my knowledge, Garland’s been reliable. Oh, he and Nancy Catherine got into it once when she was here. She says he threw things. Doesn’t surprise me. I’ll bet she did too. They’re that alike. The surprise is that they made up. A big wad of thorns and sometimes roses.
Lawanda would say that. She would. It’s probably the kind of thing she writes in her notebook. She’s taken to keeping notebooks, just like Garland. Now I’d think if anything would put you off writing, all this would, but that’s not the way of it.
It may be because Lawanda read so much in the hospital. Listened to taped books before she could hold one in her hand. And she got real deep into music. Singing. She had to sing as part of her treatment, to build her voice back. Garland would take his harmonica; Nancy Catherine brought a friend with a guitar. Now Lawanda sings all the time. Makes up songs too. Writes those in the notebook.
She’s solid, Lawanda is. Still planning to go to college. She’ll do it too. This summer, she’s making up the math she missed in the hospital. Garland helped her stay caught up on the rest.
And I’m looking around me real hard all the time and trying to see what life is like, trying not to label it. Even my life. That’s the hardest. I can feel so bad, so sick at myself, like I ought to crawl off in the woods and die. But that would just mean more pain for June, and no money. Mamaw said, “If Lawanda can live, you can too.”
So there you have it.
LAWANDA: Now that Garland’s living in the world, I can’t just hike up Cade’s Hill anytime and expect him to be there. The truth is, I can’t hike. I can walk very slowly up the access road HUD cut to put in the trailer. But I call first. Garland protested about getting a phone, but Mom said if he was working for her, he’d have to. Isn’t that weird?
Anyway, the other day I called and he said to come on up. Even offered to come and get me. But I explained I’d get my therapy out of the way by walking, and if it wore me out, he could bring me home.
It’s strange going up there. So strange, so familiar. The ground is scarred, the buses gone, and Garland lives in a place with a regular door! It’s got carpet, a couch, a kitchen with running water: weird. Sometimes it seems fake, like somebody put a new background behind Garland’s life the way they do in movies.
But it’s real as a helicopter.
And it’s full of books. More books than anything, even in the kitchen cabinets. “Reference section,” Garland says. One bedroom has the maps. New maps, of course. Including a star map and one of the United States that shows where his kids are. Garland’s come back from the war.
This day, Tuesday, he welcomed me in, gave me orange juice, asked how I was doing.
“Algebra is not all that exciting, but I’m getting it done.”
“I thought you liked math,” he said.
“I do. But I liked it better when I thought things only had one answer.”
“Makes sense to me.”
That made me smile. It’s so good to be with someone you make sense to.
I was thinking about this when he said, “Can I read you something?”
Now there’s a difference. Before the fire, he would have said, “Listen to this.” I was the kid. He was the grown-up. Now we’re both veterans.
“Sure,” I said. “Read away.”
He dug in a stack of papers and notebooks on the kitchen counter. “Ah,” he said. “Here it is.” He held up a magazine. “Found this in Lexington. Little bitty article. What they call a filler. Listen:
“A summer or so after the end of the Second World War, Londoners noticed strange plants growing in the bomb craters, rare flowers flourishing. Botanists were called in and, through intense study, they made this discovery: though native to London, the plants had not grown there since 1666. The Great Fire had burned them off, buried their seed under ash and rubble. Nearly three hundred years later, the blaze and force of bombs resurrected them.”
He looked up at me. I just stared. I didn’t like what he read.
“Don’t you get it?” he asked.
“Maybe.” I was mad, but I tried to let it go. “What’s the Great Fire?”
“Somebody left the stove on and accidentally torched the city. It was London’s worst disaster until the bombs.”
“Okay,” I said, teeth clenched.
“But look here, don’t you—”
“No. I don’t. ” I closed my eyes to block him out but he went on.
“It’s like …”
“Just stop it!” I ordered, standing up. Slowly. Only my mind was fast now. Only my tongue. “I get it, all right. How neat. They had fire, then bombs. But we got the bombs first.” I started pacing around his tiny space. “And when the fire came, it just burned the mange off the mountain. And the skin off me. Or am I supposed to be the flower, only charred?”
“Lawanda—” Garland was on his feet now too, his hands lifted like this was a holdup.
“Or am I the seed blasted free?” My voice twisted. “Tell me, Poetry Man. In this great epic, where do I wind up, scarred for life?”
In a kitchen, I thought, by a refrigerator, at the end of my rope. With sky out the trailer window instead of sky out the windshield of First Bus.
Garland came over to me and put his hands on my shoulders. His face looked different.
“It is for life, Lawanda. That’s all I’m saying. Life will come out of it. ” And there were tears on his cheeks, Garland tears.
“Oh God,” I said, and took him in my arms.
With a Hammer for My Heart Page 16
