“You’ll never know how relieved I am you were home. Can you just imagine Richard trying to handle all this?” I heard Patricia snort from the other end of the phone, all snug in her cozy bungalow.
Patricia’s disgust with Richard made me feel honorable and helped take away some of the guilt for not having all Miss Claudia’s medical information. “Uh, one more thing,” I said, looking over my shoulder at Miss Claudia. Her chapped mouth was open, and her eyes shut. “The doctor said something about…well, I didn’t know she was this sick…I mean real sick.”
The silence on the phone line was frightening. Maybe Patricia did not know about the leukemia. I bit the edge of my lip and searched for something to say.
“Who told you? Mama doesn’t want anyone knowing about it.” The same shrill tone she used to discuss Richard was now directed at me.
“Well, the doctor said something about…”
“Erma Lee, I have all the confidence in the world in you. Now, I know you won’t talk about this. We don’t want Mama to become a case for pity. She flat-out won’t have people feeling sorry for her.”
I almost told Patricia that Gerald knew, but decided against it. This will be a good test for Gerald’s honor, I thought. “I’ll be right here when you come.”
“Hey.” Her voice was weak, and she ran her tongue over cracked lips.
“Hey, yourself.” I rubbed a piece of ice over the thin lips.
“You liked to scared me to death.” Death. Why did I have to bring up that word?
She slapped the ice cube with the tip of her tongue and cleared her throat. “I just didn’t know who else to call.”
“I’m glad you did. I just got off the phone with Patricia, and she’ll be here before lunchtime.”
“Oh, Lord. I went and ruined their trip,” she said and turned her head to look out the window at the bright orange sun, which was rising over a mass of pine trees.
“Well, they gave you a transfusion. Put some new juice in you,” I said with a chuckle that failed to make her laugh.
She was so still that at first I almost panicked and thought she wasn’t breathing. Her sigh made me know she was still with me. “This is the beginning of the end. I just know it. Up to now everything was just like normal and now…”
I refused to play games with this smart woman. To make her out to be some little child who stays in the dark while adults speak in hushed whispers. “I know about it. About the leukemia, I mean. The doctor must’ve thought I already knew.”
The IV monitor beeped, and she turned to face me. Her hazel eyes were wild and glassy. “Listen, you got enough to worry about. I don’t want you studying about my problems too. Now I plain won’t have it, hear?”
I cradled her bony hand in my palm and was careful not to touch the tape that secured the IV line in the blue vein. “You’re my only family down here,” I said, not telling her what I really wanted to say. That as far as I was concerned, she was my only family—period. “It’s not a one-way street. My problems just can’t be yours. We got to help each other or this relationship ain’t worth squat. And I know better than that.”
The second beep of the IV machine was shriller. Her hazel eyes misted in tears, and she patted my arm with her free hand. I wanted to reach down and hug her so hard that the poison would ooze out of her system. But I held myself back, thinking that she might burst into tears and embarrass us both. “Now let me go get the nurse and tell her this thingamajig just hollered at us.”
She giggled and dabbed the corners of her eyes. When I entered the brightness of the ammonia-washed hallway, I thought of Gerald and his prayer chain. I turned the corner towards the nurse’s station and thanked God with my eyes wide open. I thanked Him for the words and strength that I had found inside Miss Claudia’s room.
“Y’all got plenty of money. She’ll just have to go to one of those hospitals where they do special tests.” I squeezed the empty coffee cup to the point of cracking and then released it. “My old plant manager took his wife all the way to Duke University when she got breast cancer. And now she’s back teaching school.” My eyes shifted from Patricia’s dark-circled eyes to the blue-uniformed women serving food in the Southeast Alabama Medical Center. I wondered if I looked as homely behind the counter at Barton Elementary.
Patricia rubbed her temples with her two pinkie fingers. “We’ve been through it and through it with her. She’s adamant about this now,” Patricia said. Her voice sounded like any minute she would take off into song, like they do in those old artificial-colored movies Cher and me watched on rainy Saturdays.
“Has she talked to more than just one doctor?” I asked and opened my arms on the table. I fought the notion that I was overstepping my place. Patricia was acting only a touch mentally stronger than Richard.
My shoulders flinched when she slapped the glass tabletop. Her diamond rings hit the glass as loud as a bell chime. She closed her eyes and smiled that big toothy grin. “You know, honey, I realize you’re trying to help. But sometimes it’s just a little bit hard to come in on fourth quarter and start playing quarterback.” There was only one quarterback in this game. And only one head cheerleader. Patricia had double duty. I smiled sweetly and nodded.
“Now, you know we just appreciate you to pieces,” she said, patting my hand the same way she would’ve patted the heads of third graders in the lunchroom line. “We just have different roles.” She looked at her watch. “Oh me, I know you’re worn slam out. And I need to go check on Mama.”
In the hallway, Patricia reached over and lightly kissed the top of my ear. I wondered if she was trying to do one of those haughty air kisses and missed. “Now, you go home, draw you a nice hot bath with lots of bubbles, and just relax.”
But I did not relax as Patricia ordered in her fakey voice. I picked Cher up at the house and headed straight for the library. “I don’t want Miss Claudia to die,” Cher sheepishly said in the car.
She needs rocks, not mud, I reminded myself. “I don’t neither. That’s why we’re gonna fight this thing. And we’re gonna make Miss Claudia fight too.”
Cher was amazing on the Internet. She whizzed around that thing like she was driving a Corvette through an obstacle course. Before I knew it, she was making that computer screen come up with doctors’ names from Montgomery to Seattle, all specialists on leukemia. I watched her from a distant table and twirled the key chain on my index finger. The foreign environment with its cases of musky-smelling books and humming computers made me feel as though a spotlight was on me and any minute a college professor-type fellow would come out from behind a shelf and say, “Go away. You don’t belong here.”
“While Cher’s on the computer, why don’t we pull some books,” Mrs. MacIntyre said behind me. I followed her blouse of yellow hummingbirds and couldn’t help but feel proud that the librarian knew Cher’s name. When I was going to school that was always a sign of a real smart girl, a good girl. All the same, for the sake of privacy I warned Cher not to tell the librarian Miss Claudia was the patient. “My great-grandmother’s got leukemia,” Cher told a frowning Mrs. MacIntyre.
The days that followed were a bonding experience for Cher and me. Every day after school, she would come home with a new printout from MedLine or some other Internet page describing the latest in leukemia research and treatment. Mostly the words seemed to run together in some mixed-up language. But since I always made good marks in science, I found it all interesting whether I knew what it meant or not.
Instead of battling over LaRue or Cher’s self-appointed new last name, we spent our evenings reviewing papers and books with coded graphs and illustrations. Lymph nodes, immuno-suppressive therapy, T-cells, and blasts were road signs for our mission. Chronic myelogenous leukemia, according to a heavy book with a black cover, was not a fast killer. “Sometimes people live for five, even maybe ten years after they get it,” Cher read. She leaned over the book with her hands stuffed inside the back pockets of her cut-off jeans. I knew by the way her wild
brown eyes gazed up at me she was seeking reassurance. I held the fat book and ran my finger under the words that streamed together like Chinese. “How ’bout that,” I said and handed the book back to her.
But it was the part in the book on blasts that worried me. The section I hoped Cher had overlooked. Later when Cher was asleep, I sat at the dinette table, and the low-hanging light cast shadows on the cell charts. My finger slowly crept along the pages and delivered me to a destination of worry. Blasts, the point in leukemia when the white blood cells take over the bone marrow and prevent the marrow from making enough of the cells and platelets. The blasts overwhelm the system: the white cells needed to fight infection, the red cells that carry oxygen, and the platelets that help blood clot.
My eyes locked on the words that predicted the blasts would take over Miss Claudia’s organs and glands. I looked into the darkness beyond my kitchen window and saw the orange outline of Kasi’s truck across the street. Under the hum of the lightbulb, I added blasts to my mental list of enemies, right under LaRue and Bozo.
“I just need my rest,” Miss Claudia said the second day home from the hospital. I closed the bedroom door and stood still, listening to her breathe and feeling helpless. Her sinking spell, as she called the hospital episode, put my butt in gear. While most of the stuff Cher lugged home from the library was over my head, I did find something I could make sense out of—good groceries. Cher checked out a book on nutrition for leukemia patients, and soon I found myself in Winn-Dixie squabbling with the produce manager over the spinach. The acne-scarred man never understood why the nutrition book said spinach had to be a bright green, not a dull color.
Driving to Gerald’s one Saturday afternoon, I stopped by a vegetable stand that an old man ran at the edge of his farm and bought a mess of squash and a watermelon. But my feasts were only successful in spoiling Richard. “I want you to get some more squash. That was the freshest mess of squash,” Richard said, getting up from the table with his half-tucked napkin sliding down the front of his pants. I ignored his request and studied the dark yellow squash and chips of cooked onion, which had been creatively moved around on the plate Miss Claudia left outside her bedroom door. Nothing I did made her eat or even crack a remark. Her only communication with me was an occasional, “When you get a minute, could I have some more tea?” And when I knocked on her door with a crystal pitcher of sweet tea and a glass of ice, she’d faintly say, “Just leave it by the door. I’ll get it directly.”
“She just ain’t acting right,” I told Gerald.
At first I thought he was ignoring me when I saw him cast his spinning rod in the center of the murky pond. He had called me early that Saturday with an invitation to go to the weed-infested spot known to Wiregrass natives as “Kingfish Hole.”
“Well, she just probably don’t want you feeling sorry for her,” Gerald said, reeling his shiny silver rod.
“I just don’t understand why she won’t take treatment. I keep putting papers that Cher finds on that computer under her door. You know, about new medicine and stuff,” I said, looking down at the knee-high weeds around me.
“Dog,” he yelled and quickly reeled in his limp line. “That was a big ’un.” The light thud of the line weight hitting water made a ripple across the black surface. “She’s lived a good life. She knows where she’s going.”
I put my hand on my jeans and held the grooved cane pole with my other hand. “Yeah. She’s gonna die is where she’s headed. I can’t believe…”
He stopped reeling his line for a second and looked at me. His mouth was partly open, and the brim of his blue Ford cap cast a shadow over his eyes. Even his mouth was good-looking. The tickle of his mustache was still fresh in my mind. I looked quickly away at my bobbing red-and-white cork. Nibbling. That’s all I ever get.
“No, she knows she’s going to heaven,” he said as matter-of-fact as if he had been giving me the time.
I glanced at him, but he was mumbling something undetectable and reeling his line back to shore. “Dadgum it,” he said and stomped his foot.
His ways and tongue were foreign to me. How could he be so confident in thinking he knew everything about Miss Claudia? Most likely he thought the same of his first wife. That she was safe and secure in a land of peace. Probably why he doesn’t drown himself in drink.
The second time he stomped his foot in protest, I let go of figuring him out and laughed.
“Hey, hey,” he said, pointing at the spot where my cork had disappeared under the water’s surface. The pole bent forward, and the weight at the end made me think that the pole would surely break in half. The slick pole pulsated in my hand, and I leaned towards the lake. My mind told me to give up and realize whatever had snatched onto my line would get away. Gerald stood behind me and gripped the pole. His hands were warm and rough on top of mine.
“No, let loose. I want to do it myself,” I yelled. I grunted and moaned, pulling the heavy pole upward and towards the pond’s bank. Before I knew it, the water was splashing around the edge of the lily pads. “No,” I screamed when my wrists began to burn. I gritted my teeth and lifted the heavy pole over my shoulder.
Gerald held the big-eyed bass by the corners of its mouth. “I bet you he’s a six-pounder.”
Driving home in Gerald’s truck with my prize secured in the orange cooler, I removed the rubber band and let my hair take off in a fury. Wind swept through the open windows and lifted the ends of my hair on a wild ride. “Well, ain’t you something,” Gerald said and brushed the corner of his mustache.
Each breath from the hard-hitting wind filled me with energy. There had been too many times in my life when I had wasted time thinking about opportunities that nibbled but never bit. I concentrated on all the good things that were happening in my life—my new life. And Miss Claudia was at the top of the list. She would not nibble and retreat. She would stay with me, I would catch her completely. I was determined more than ever to get her out of her box, the one she crafted behind the mahogany door on Elm Drive.
Sixteen
“Now, this is her ulcer medicine,” Patricia said, holding up the prescription bottle in Miss Claudia’s living room like she was doing a Mary Kay sales pitch. “And these are her blood pills,” she said. Patricia held the bottle at arm’s length and read the label. She nodded and placed the bottle with the others on the silver platter. “Now Erma Lee, I only want you handling the medicine.”
I nodded and sighed softly. The house on Elm Drive had been under Patricia’s rule ever since Miss Claudia went into hibernation. Every time she called from school wanting to know an update, I felt like hanging up on her. But then I would remind myself that the strangeness in the home would pass and soon Miss Claudia would be back to her old self.
“Now, I don’t want Richard touching these bottles,” Patricia said with her hand cupped to her mouth. “Last time when Mama was having ulcer problems, he gave her a hormone pill.” The red lips parted, and her eyes rolled up to the penciled eyebrows.
The rows of orange bottles reminded me of Miss Claudia’s age and condition. Blasts, I thought and quickly pushed the negative thinking out of my mind, choosing instead to think of the prized catfish. Even at eighty, Miss Claudia was “so happening,” as Cher described her best. Only I hated that silver tray lined with prescription bottles.
“She’s just down in the dumps,” Patricia would whisper and pull the bedroom door behind her. Usually I stood in the hallway, leaning slightly to try to catch a glimpse of Miss Claudia before the heavy door slammed shut. I only managed a peek of her burgundy wingback chair. So often I wanted to knock Patricia out of the way and walk right in. If I could, I’d tell Miss Claudia something cute I heard one of the kids say in the lunchroom line. She always liked their young outlooks on life and often would repeat their comments days afterward.
After two weeks, I began to worry that the stuff I shared with Miss Claudia about Cher’s troubled start in life and the lies I told her about Suzette and her not being in p
rison had damaged our relationship. The tension was only made stronger by Patricia. She would shake her puffed-out hair and stick her lips out like a pouting child. “Not today,” she would say each time I asked if I could see Miss Claudia. “She’s asked for privacy.” My lip was slit from the steady clamping of my teeth.
I am only hired help, I would remind myself and then ball the dish towel, throwing it as hard as I could into the sink.
The creaks and pops of the trailer siding would echo while I laid still in bed trying to get inside Miss Claudia’s mind. She had refused treatment for her leukemia, she was not eating hardly anything, and now she had gone against her very nature and become a hermit.
Her good-looking pastor with wavy black hair was not even invited in to see her. The poor man had no clue what was really running through Miss Claudia’s blood. “Just simple anemia,” Patricia told him when he asked about her mama’s condition. One day after I had been staring at the pastor’s shiny white teeth, I found myself calling out to Miss Claudia’s God. “Show her some mercy,” I said, as if a friend had been standing at her doorway. “You’re the only one who can get behind that heavy door and pull her out of this.”
Gerald was patient while I worked on strategies to reach Miss Claudia. And every time the latest plan failed, he would silently listen to my discouraging words on the other end of the phone. If Marcie was at his house fixing his supper or washing his clothes, she always answered the phone. I would promptly hang up before she could get the word hello out of her mouth. I could only worry about so many things at one time, and whether his prissy daughter really did or did not like me was one thing I couldn’t take at that time.
Along with steak supper on Friday and Saturday nights, the Houston County horse show arena became another tradition for Gerald and me. As vice-president of the Rough Riders Horseman’s Association, Gerald made sure the sand arena was tilled and all the bulbs in the stadium lights worked properly. Two Saturday nights a month, the arena was set up for pole-bending and barrel-racing competition. Cher would even skip skating and join us. I like how it felt having her seated in the truck between Gerald and me as we pulled into the arena’s gravel driveway.
A Place Called Wiregrass Page 15
