The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead

by Chanelle Benz

“You’re tired.” I didn’t like the look on her face.

  She hobbled over and made me sit, taking off my hat and pushing the hair from my forehead. Standing over me, she drew lines with her fingers on my scalp. “There’s only one thing to do,” she said.

  “You keep saying the doctor took our money but she took it first. She’s the one who sold the house.”

  Izabel’s hands went still. “We have to kill the man in lavender and white,” she said.

  The night before Mother left for the hospital, I found her naked on her knees in the kitchen. Not a light on. Maybe she was praying. I don’t know what she was doing. When I put her to bed, I could smell liquor sour on her breath. I didn’t want her going to the hospital in Arkansas. I wanted her to stay in Texas and have the surgery. I sat with her until the early hours of the morning. When I got up and went into the kitchen, I found Izabel with her head down on the kitchen table, the sun creeping up her crooked waist. She turned her head. We both knew Mother was falling for another phony, the last man who would tell her whatever she wanted to hear.

  IZABEL

  At the Tourist Court, Lorene started me a bath, pretending to be sweet but feeling smug. Then she sat and smoked on the toilet while I sat on the edge of the bath, waiting for the hot water to cover my dirty feet.

  “Nice big ole bathtub, ain’t it,” Lorene said. “Be good to have one like it at home.” She cocked back her head and blew smoke at the ceiling. “You were gone a long time. What kept you?”

  “I’m a slow walker.” I began to unbutton my dress.

  “What happened to your clothes?”

  I said nothing looking at the mud drying on my hem.

  “You’re in a mood. Did you slip?” Lorene pressed her lips together and smiled. “I’ll stay for a little while and make sure you don’t slip again.”

  Our eyes met.

  “Go away,” I said.

  She stubbed her cigarette out in the sink, took the pack from the top of the toilet, leaned back, and lit another. “C’mon honey, don’t be shy.”

  Was my brother really in love with Lorene? When Mother was in love, she would run a fever. She couldn’t eat or sleep. She would whistle in the garden, her hands beating the dirt.

  “Stay or go—I don’t care.”

  I got up and yanked the shower curtain around the tub then went behind the curtain and finished unbuttoning my dress, pulling it over my head and dropping it on the floor. I unlocked my stiff right knee, my hands helping it to bend, and slipped under the water. When I stuck my head out from behind the curtain, I saw that Lorene was inspecting a pimple in the mirror.

  “You think you know me,” I said, soaping my arms, shoulder to nails. Then my waist, my womanhood, my legs, and my tiny, twisted feet.

  “You know we’ve lived in the same town for years,” Lorene said, “but your family always kept apart. That was your mother’s doing. I don’t want to speak ill, but that was her way of acting high and mighty, though truth be told, it didn’t hide what folks knew.” She waited. “Ain’t you gonna say any thing at all?”

  I wobbled up with a splash, the water glazing my tilted hips, the curve of my spine, my whittled short right leg, and pulled open the curtain.

  Lorene looked up, staring at the red welts Robert had made with the stick.

  “See,” I said, “I didn’t slip.”

  Lorene drank the gin Robert bought and fell asleep on the cot. I lay down on a blanket on the floor in Mother’s old nightdress. Robert came out from the bathroom. “We’ll leave in the morning,” he said, setting his glasses on the nightstand. Without his glasses, he looked more like me. “Why don’t you go up on the cot next to Lorene?” he said.

  I turned onto my side to see his face, slipping my hand under the pillow. “Remember when we thought the world was ending? That Sunday the duster came so thick and fast, and I couldn’t find you,” I said.

  “I was in the yard.” He lay back on the cot, his hands behind his head. “It got real cold and windy. Then black. I could hear the birds going nuts, but I couldn’t see a thing.”

  “It swallowed the sun and made us blind.”

  “Then I heard you calling and I crawled to the house. Where was Mother?” he whispered.

  “At the doctor.”

  “The doctor’s closed on Sunday.”

  I turned onto my back. “Remember we sat wrapped in that wet sheet for hours.”

  “Remember you saying it was like Pompeii?”

  “That like them we would suffocate.”

  “That it was the End Days.”

  “This is just like then.”

  “But then there was a next day, and a next. We only have to wake up.”

  I got up, pushing on my damp shoes. “I’m going with or without you,” I said.

  “It was her choice to come here.” He rolled over, his face turned from me. “She was going to die anyway.”

  “Not alone in a hospital room.” I walked out the door.

  Outside, the warm air wanted to be close. There was no part of me it did not find. I climbed into Robert’s car, shutting the door and sinking into the seat as if it were hot sand. I watched Robert hurry from the bungalow and run to the top of the Tourist Court’s drive, stopping to peer both ways down the empty road.

  I pushed the car door open calling to him in a low voice. He looked frightened when he turned. The lump in his throat was mine.

  On those warm midnights when we waited up for Mother, we would tell stories, sing, dance, howl—anything to fill the house. But we would never talk about the men, never mention their names or wonder where they’d gone. All my life, I loved only her and Robert, and so did not understand how you could let someone you did not love inside you.

  ROBERT

  I parked at the foot of the drive leading up to the hospital. Izabel got out first, stopping in front of the headlights, her face smooth like it was made of marble. I turned off the car and found her in the dark.

  We went across the lawn, past the gazebos to the back entrance of the hospital. When she opened the door, light from a crystal chandelier dropped onto her hair like the moon on water. I stood a foot behind her, hatless in still wet shoes. Through the door, there was a staircase and farther down the hall, I could see the front lobby where two china dogs stood guarding a giant white stone fireplace. Izabel brought out the scissors and my face went hot, my head too light.

  “Come on,” she whispered.

  “Wait.” I tried to think of something. “Scissors?” I said.

  “They’re sharp.”

  “You should’ve brought a gun. Or at least a knife.” I waved the gnats from my face. “Even if you stabbed him, it wouldn’t kill him, it’d only make a mess.”

  “Not if I get him right in the neck.”

  “You’re not tall enough,” I said.

  “I’ll ask him to kneel down and pray with me for her.”

  “He’d overpower you, easy.”

  “I’m going,” she said, and I could see that her hands were shaking. “Are you coming?”

  I wished we were still on the floor of the Tourist Court, wished that we had never come, wished she could just be filled with dumb love and never feel what was not fair.

  “No,” I said and the door closed, leaving me standing in the dark, croaking night.

  I cracked the door and watched her go toward the staircase, its walls pink with gold flowers, when the blond nurse from the afternoon appeared in the hall pushing a gurney. I opened the door wider, thinking Izabel would run back out, but instead she turned and limped up the stairs.

  “You’re not allowed in here,” the nurse cried, going after her and dragging her back down by the arm. I stepped into the hall. Izabel swung around and without thinking—for it was just the pure clean release of the poison for which there is no cure—drove the scissors into the nurse’s waist. The nurse screamed, clutching at the red eating the white of her uniform.

  Izabel toppled backward, letting go of the scissors now lodged
in the nurse’s body. She didn’t try to get up, but stayed sprawled on the last few steps, staring at the nurse where she’d collapsed on the hall floor white and sweating, her blood all over the tile.

  I stepped carefully around the nurse and helped my sister up. She was so light—it was like she was not even there.

  The nurse wasn’t moving much but her eyes were on me like she thought I would help her.

  “I need the scissors,” said my sister. “They’re Mother’s.”

  “I’m not getting them,” I said and my head filled again with hot air.

  We stood over the nurse who was sobbing now in a blind, lost way. I thought of my mother in her last hour, alone and in enough pain to have forgotten where she was, maybe her name, us.

  “She might live,” said Izabel.

  I drove west, leaving the nurse, Lorene, Mother, the baby—everyone but my sister, until they put her in a little cell again.

  AFTERWORD

  After some investigation, I located the records of the case, which found Robert Sibley guilty of manslaughter at the courthouse in Dalhart. Evidently, the nurse he stabbed died in the early hours of the morning. Of course, there was no mention of Izabel. I have gone through each of the scenes multiple times and realized that the other characters were only ever truly speaking to Robert, and that Izabel existed for him alone. Was my grandfather haunted all his life by his sister? Or did he conjure her ghost in 1938 to spur him to vengeance when their mother died of cancer at a hospital of ill-repute? Questions like these are impossible to answer and maddening to raise.

  The man in lavender and white, the founder and self-appointed “doctor” running the cancer hospital in Arkansas, makes no appearance in these particular transcripts, though upon further research it seems that he does come to his own sad end: dying alone on a boat of cirrhosis of the liver, a submachine gun his only companion.

  Saul R. Sibley, January 2003

  The Mourners

  The clocks had been stopped and she did not know if a day had yet passed only that it had been light then dark, and now the light had come again, but had it yet been a day? In this uncertain passage of time, she had not had thought. Instead a road of airless wool had unfurled wide in her head, winding monotonous through the astonishment of her loss.

  Just before, when Henry had lain swamped in his own blood, his wife had heard his mother telling the new Negro cook as they stood outside the bedroom door with the dinner tray: “There is an art to dying and the boy does not have it—never mind he has been dying since first he was born.” Out the bedroom window in the fermenting dark, a loose dog had again started baying. “Should I turn over a shoe, Henry?” his wife had asked, wiping her folded handkerchief across his mouth. Henry’s eyes were closed, active in their closing, the collar of his nightshirt flecked red. Having been married to him fifteen years she had grown accustomed to his notseeing. Notseeing his mother’s slights when first he brought her to Mississippi. Notseeing her unseemly origins. Notseeing her father’s vulgar, dubious profession. Notseeing Judah’s exhausted frailty betrayed by the transparency of that child’s skull.

  For days now his wife had heard voices speaking of her, the Yankee, so of course a Negro lover, a motherless daughter who had entrapped Henry. Whether this was spoken as she sat there in the swelter of the parlor as the townsfolk came in to view the body she could not tell, she knew only that the voices were those of women.

  Her own mother had not bothered giving her a name. Perhaps predicting that she would not live past birth, it then being a time of yellow fever, or perhaps imagining that if she were to survive girlhood, she would enter into the fleshly profession, adopting a name meant to jollify men—Diamond Dolly, Baby Minnie, Big Kitty—rendering a name prior to that undertaking inconsequential. It was her father who had named her Emmeline. Emmeline, after his sister who while still a girl had fallen from a tenement window in the Lower East Side.

  Emmeline stood in the stately plush oppression of the parlor and went to where her husband had been placed, propped, arranged, displayed, to where the day was finding its way into his body, choking the candles and compression of flowers.

  That rot in the heat could not be her Henry. The dull gold hair she had combed and cut, the smooth emaciated body she had bathed, making certain to touch every part—the left hollow of his collarbone, the stilldamp behind his knees, the indent of his lower back—because it was said that a dead person’s spirit could enter through your hands she had gripped and kneaded his fast ossifying skin, pinching his spirit into hers.

  For it was through the body that they had first understood each other. When first he saw her outside of the finishing school, he had taken her hand as if he had been waiting for her.

  His dying left her in a strange muscular silence: a black halo of notsound. If ever they were to speak again it must be now through the spirit.

  She closed her eyes and traced the scrolled back of the sofa to the center of the parlor, nipping her shin on a serving tray. She walked until she banged into the wall, bruising her left knee, sliding along until she felt the door. When she opened it, she opened her eyes.

  No sunlight striping the hall’s floral patterned wallpaper. No pallbearers coming to carry him away. Nobody to tell her if it had yet been a day and if she, Emmeline, once the wife of Henry Stovall, was free to leave his body.

  Emmeline was not seen leaving the house except for Sundays. On the church bench, the weeping veil of black crepe could not wholly hide her, but she felt sequestered, screened. Only Judah, squirming on her lap, could slip under and touch, his fingers reminding with their hot wet that though no longer a wife, she must be a mother. The baby clutched her skirts as if trying to steer her, melting his yellow curls into folds of her heavy black serge. Kissing his hands was enough to make him smile for she was his religion.

  Every night before midnight, Emmeline let herself out of the whitewashed front door and hastened down the line of cedars clotting the path, her skirts rushing over the ivy trailing down the roots as a net of branches spread above, dissecting the night sky.

  Over Henry’s grave, the damp silence was swallowed thick and she was nakedly awake in the stutter of birds and stars calling through the melt and sway of Spanish moss suffocating the trees.

  HENRY JAMES STOVALL

  1855–1889

  She called but he would not come.

  Nine months passed before Emmeline received a letter from her father, Zebediah Ferris. In it, he made no mention of Henry, or of the year and a day that a widow must wait when in deep mourning. He wrote only: “I need you here.”

  She did not comprehend his urgency but recognized the habitual, cryptic pattern of all his attending her. When on holiday from The Select School for Young Ladies in Atlanta, she would arrive at a temporary town of picks, shovels and pans to live with him among the drinking, whoring and gambling. Either he had ignored her, or furiously concealed her in a hotel, setting Wilkie, a former buffalo hunter and his enforcer, at her door.

  Emmeline could not disregard the letter. It was her father who had sent her East to the expensive school, he who made certain that her marriage to Henry Stovall, variously contested by his family, had taken place, he who had been the originator of all her good fortune and as he was fond of saying: the devil has his price.

  Outside the parlor, Judah, a condensed weight on her hip, dropped his head on her breast.

  “Sleepy, button? Yes, we’ll do it now,” she kissed and kissed him. “We’ll do it quick.”

  Mother Stovall did not look up from her bookkeeping until Emmeline spoke saying, “Mother,” and the parlor filled up with a static, continuous ire as she raised her goldgray head but not her pen asking, “Yes? What is it?”

  Emmeline hesitated. “I’m afraid I’ve had a letter from my father.”

  “It’s about time. I saw it delivered.”

  “He said that he wants—well truly he needs me to come out West. And I feel I ought.” Emmeline shifted Judah onto her other h
ip.

  “Hadn’t you better not. To take a trip? Now? Why it isn’t at all seemly. Write that you will come in three months.”

  Emmeline turned away, lingering near the piano. Judah stretched to pick the wax at the bottom of a candle perched next to the sheet music. “But how could people, Christians I mean, find fault in my traveling to see my family? Is that not a duty? Not a wise and sensible course?”

  “Nonsense. The world will know it as a lack of respect for the memory of the dead. That you should have the courage to go against it—a Stovall would not contemplate it—it must be the extravagance of your age talking.” Mother Stovall put down her pen. “Wasn’t Harper’s right that the sham lady will always be manifest?”

  Emmeline put her chin on Judah’s hair. “I have no wish to be the cause of talk, Mother.” As she kissed his head, her lips felt for the thin, compact burn of a fever. She began vainly humming. He had yet to fall ill.

  “Don’t you take that boy if that’s what you are supposing.”

  Emmeline opened her mouth.

  “Why? Why Judah is as susceptible as ever his brothers were. Traveling for so many days on a dusty road will kill him if he isn’t first slain by Indians.”

  “Won’t my father want to see him, having never done so? He never got to meet August, or even Caleb.”

  “There was reason for that.” Mother Stovall sniffed. “Caleb. You always had a partiality for that boy—petting him so.”

  Caleb had died in the time it had taken her to change her dress. He had squeezed her hand crying “Mama,” and she had cradled him as she did the day he was born. She had not believed he could die.

  “And should I care what he of nopast may desire? He whose scandalous vocation Henry did not care to dwell on, nor whoever your mother may have been, yet how could not I? Being a Stovall of Mississippi, how could not I?”

  Mother Stovall had clung to this refrain for fifteen years, brandishing it whenever she could: a dull, starved outrage gone solid.

  Reaching for a pinecone, Judah toppled a frame from the mantel. Emmeline crouched on the empty bricked hearth where Henry’s rifle leaned with Caleb’s fishing rod, saying, “Judah, now look—you almost broke it.” It was a painting Mother Stovall had done: a small portrait of Henry, a blond boy in short pants. She laid it facedown on the mantel.