by Robert Inman
Xuripha, ever the tattletale, managed somehow to keep Bright’s secret. She tried, as best she knew how, to comfort. But Bright was still much alone with her own dark terrors. She wished fervently to die, to escape at the same moment that life fled her father’s wasted body. He would die, she knew that. In truth, he had gone from her in that one horrible instant in which he had stepped toward the gaping black twin holes of the shotgun barrel. She would have stopped him if she could. She would have reached out and plucked at his sleeve and turned him gently away, out of danger, and then turned to stare calmly at the death-flame herself. But it had happened too quickly, even though the moment seemed frozen, all except for Dorsey’s brief step and the tiny movement of the finger on the trigger. Dorsey Bascombe had died in that instant, and Bright had lived.
On the second night, she lay awake for a long time after Xuripha had gone to sleep, hearing the strange house creaking and settling about her in the empty hours toward midnight. Then there was a tap on the window screen. She paid no attention at first, thinking it a moth or a night bug. But then there was another tap, and a whisper. “Child,” it said, and she stifled a cry of sheer joy. Hosanna!
She rose softly from the bed, found the latch at the bottom of the screen, loosened it and pushed the screen away from the window frame. There wasn’t much of a moon, and Hosanna’s blackness was a shadow in shadows beneath the window.
“Come with me, child. We gone see your sweet daddy.”
She was out the window in an instant and into Hosanna’s arms, hugging her tightly, losing herself in the softness of her arms, barely feeling the chill dew on her bare feet. “Oh, you knew!” she cried softly.
“Course I knew, child. Come on, let’s get away from here before we wake the house.”
Her bare feet flew above the pavement of the sidewalks and her nightgown billowed about her as they walked swiftly the few blocks to the Bascombe house, Bright clutching Hosanna’s hand. They entered through the dark kitchen and crept up the back stairs, cringing at each creak the boards made under their careful feet. And then at the top of the stairs, Hosanna released her hand. “He’s in yonder,” she whispered, pointing at the closed door of the death room. “Doctor’s in there too, but he’s near dead hisself. You be quiet, you won’t wake him.”
Suddenly, she could smell death here. Not just the strong odor of camphor and medicines that hovered in the close air of the narrow hallway, but death itself. She turned to Hosanna, afraid. Hosanna folded Bright in her arms again, then took her gently by the shoulders. “I know, I know. It’ll be all right, child. That’s your daddy in there. Can’t nothin’ change that. You don’t have to say nothin’ if you don’t want to. Just be with him a minute. He’s mighty sick, but you’ll do him a world of good.”
Bright eased open the door and stuck her head in. There was a soft light on a table near the open window, a single oil lamp turned low. She saw the cot, the sleeping form of the doctor sprawled across it, fully clothed. And then the big high four-poster bed. And her father. Her fear fled right out the window, into the deep black midnight, and she felt a great loving joy squeezing her heart. And the music came back, just a few faint chords now, but music just the same. For the first time in a long time. She crossed to the bed and stood looking down at him. The sheet was pulled up to his chin, and his face seemed to hover above the pillow in the golden light from the lamp, very peaceful, very still. The only physical evidence of near-death was the dark stain where the sheet covered the wound. She leaned over and kissed his cheek. The stubble of his whiskers was rough against her lips and they lingered there. She felt a faint breath from his nostrils, the merest hint of air. She drew back slowly, then looked around and saw a chair not far away. She drew it quietly to the bed, then reached under the sheet and felt for his hand and pulled it to her.
She sat for a long time, holding his hand, watching the soft lines of his face in the lamplight. She had missed him so terribly much, had imagined him in pain, racked by fever, crying for death to bring him mercy. It had broken her heart. It was hideous what her mother had done. But no more. After a while, she leaned over very close to her father’s ear and whispered, “Papa, I’m going to stay with you now. I’ll be here until you’re ready to go, and then I’ll hold on to your hand and we’ll go together. I’m not going to leave you anymore.”
He didn’t answer, of course, because he was grievously ill and might not even be able to hear what she said. But then again he might. Perhaps some music would help. She began to hum softly, making up a tune as it came into her head, imagining Dorsey’s golden trombone anchoring the melody with its smooth round tones, the sound of God’s breathing, and the light graceful notes of her piano dancing above like angels on the head of a pin. She hummed for a long time, pouring her soul softly into the music, until finally she felt at peace and the silence of the room enveloped the last sweet notes of the song. She wanted for just a brief moment to cry, but then she thought there was nothing to cry about, not now. So she rested her cheek against her father’s hand, feeling the rough lumberman’s skin, so strong and reassuring. And for a time, as dawn approached, she slept safe in the warmth of his touch, waiting.
She woke with a start, hearing a footstep outside the room. Then the doorknob clicked and turned and her mother stood there, staring at her.
“Get out of here,” Elise said simply.
Fear leapt into Bright’s throat—fear of being separated again from her father. She fought the panic, gained control of it, turned it slowly into a cold anger. “I’m not leaving, Mama,” she said. “If you try to make me leave, I will kick and scream and wake up the whole house and tell them all that you beat me.”
Then Hosanna appeared in the doorway behind Elise and even from where she sat by the bed, Bright could see her eyes flashing, full of fury. “Come away from there, Miss Elise,” she hissed.
Elise whirled on her. “Don’t you tell me what to do!” she cried.
Hosanna didn’t flinch. She reached around Elise, grabbed the door handle and pulled it closed. But Bright could hear their voices plainly in the hall. “You leave that child alone with her daddy!” Hosanna said. “You done broke her heart, sending her off like that.”
“What is she doing here?” Elise demanded, her voice rising.
“I went and fetched her, that’s what!”
“How dare you!”
There was a small terrible silence and then Hosanna’s voice again, quiet and measured now. “What you afraid of with that young’un, Miss Elise?”
“Damn you!” Elise cried. “Damn you all! When this is over I’ll take that child back to New Orleans and raise her among proper people where she can learn some manners!”
Bright’s entire body convulsed with terror. No! She couldn’t! She leapt to her feet, still holding on to her father’s hand, looking wildly about the room while the shouting of the women in the hallway beat against her ears. She would escape, take her father with her!
But just then, Dorsey squeezed her hand and his eyes popped open. And he said in a voice so faint you could hardly hear it, “No, she won’t.”
Bright froze, stared down at him. Dr. Tillman woke with a start and sat bolt upright on the cot. “What? What’s that?” he called out. His voice was thick, his hair tousled, his eyes sunken and haggard. Then he saw Bright. “What are you doing here?”
Her eyes never left Dorsey’s. “I’m tending to my father,” she said. “He’s going to be all right now.”
Dorsey Bascombe was not all right, but for the moment he was at least alive and showing some signs of rallying. Finus Tillman said it was medically impossible. He had lost an incredible amount of blood, his body temperature had dropped precipitously, his pulse was so weak it hardly registered. He had for all intents and purposes been a dead man from the moment the shotgun blast hit him. Yet he lived. The parlor prayer group took much of the credit and gave some to God. Dr. Tillman, to his credit, claimed no credit at all.
But even then, it was a ten
uous thing. The doctor warned them that chances for Dorsey’s survival were slim, even now. And two days later, what he dreaded most happened: infection. The wound began to fester and Dorsey was racked by delirious fever. He moaned and babbled, drifting in and out of consciousness, finally lapsing into a coma. Finus Tillman stayed on. He did what he could, changing the bandages often, trying to keep the wound as clean as possible. The prayer group took up their vigil again in the parlor. Elise put on another air of stoic composure. But this time, Bright stayed put. She had nothing to say to her mother. She simply went to her father’s room when she wanted, sat by the bed, held his hand, patted his flushed skin with cool washcloths. She hummed and sang. And when she was there, Elise stayed away.
Bright could tell the doctor was uncomfortable with her being there, a child in a room where death hovered. “Step outside now, while I change the bandage,” he said to her at first.
“No,” she said, “I don’t mind.”
He gave her a curious look, shrugged, and went about his work. It was a hideous sight, raw flesh oozing with yellow poisons, but she swallowed hard and forced herself to look as he peeled the clotted bandage away, dabbed at the wound with a clean white cloth, then swabbed on an antiseptic that smelled like creosote.
“Is that yellow business the germs?” she asked.
“That’s what the germs cause. They’re in the flesh.”
“Can you get rid of them?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head as he covered the wound with a fresh bandage. “Only your father’s body can do that. It has to fight back. I can help, but not much.”
“Is he fighting very hard?”
Dr. Tillman straightened, wiping his hands on the cloth he had used to clean the wound. “Yes. But he doesn’t have very much left to fight with.” He hesitated a moment, then said, “Bright, don’t get your hopes up.”
“You think he’s going to die, don’t you.”
He nodded. “Yes. But then, I thought he was going to die two days ago. It’s what the praying bunch downstairs might call a miracle that he’s still here. But there’s only so much …”
She looked at him a moment. He was painfully weary, the lines of fatigue etched deeply in his face, his eyes bloodshot.
“Is it very hard being a doctor?” she asked gently.
He thought about that a moment. Then he said, “No, not if you just do your job and leave the rest to nature. But it’s hard being a doctor to a friend.” His voice sagged with weariness and she reached over and patted him on the hand and gave him a nice smile.
“You keep doctoring, and I’ll keep singing,” she said, “and we’ll let Papa do the rest.”
But nothing either of them did seemed to help, and Dorsey seemed to slip away from them into the deep reaches of his fever. Bright could feel Dr. Tillman’s resignation and she began to despair.
The morning of the third day, she woke very early, dressed, and started for her father’s room down the hall. But she stopped outside the door and her hand froze on the doorknob. Dread welled up in her, and she turned, ashamed of her cowardice, and crept downstairs to the kitchen, seeking solace. It was empty, hollow and dim in the pale light from the windows above the sink. The faucet dripped methodically, big round droplets that went ploik-ploik as they landed in the dishpan below. She felt wretched, afraid and alone. He will leave me, she thought. He will leave and he won’t take me with him. I really can’t go, even if I want to so desperately. She thought fleetingly of running to the river and throwing herself in, sinking silently beneath the eddying green water. But no, that would be a very great sin and she would rot in hell and never see Dorsey again, and that would be the worst possible thing.
Right now, this instant, she must get out of the house. The thought of it without her father seemed to close in, smothering. She crossed to the back door and opened it, and then she looked down and saw Buster Putnam sitting on the bottom step, sitting very still and quiet with his arms locked around his drawn-up knees. He heard the rattle of the doorknob and turned and looked up at her.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I come to see the angel,” he answered.
She closed the door behind her and walked down the steps and sat beside him. The backyard was cool and plushly green in the half-light under the trees, holding its breath in the expectant moments between dark and dawn.
“What angel?” she asked, tucking her dress around her knees.
“The angel of death,” Buster said. “I heard Mama and Daddy talking about it last night. They said the angel of death was nearby. I always thought that death was a big old black boogeyman.”
Bright stared at him for an instant, and then she felt her face collapsing and she started to cry. She put her face down in the folds of her dress and sobbed quietly, letting the ache wash over her. Then she felt Buster’s arm around her shoulder, comforting.
“I’m sorry, Bright,” he said. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
She looked up at him, her tears blurring the lines of his face. “I’m tired of being brave, Buster,” she said. “And I’m scared.”
“Course you are. Just like I was the other day when the big tree fell down on my bedroom. If I’da been in there, it woulda squooshed me like an old june bug. I reckon the angel of death just flew in the window and right back out again, but I just missed him. Or at least, he just missed me. It’s a good thing I had to pee.” Buster fished in his back pocket and pulled out a grimy handkerchief and handed it to her. She dabbed at her eyes and tried to get control.
“Well, at least you won’t be an orphan,” Buster said.
She stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“You’ll still have a mama. Even when your daddy dies. An orphan ain’t got either one and he has to go live at the poorhouse and eat soup with cabbage floating in it. I read about it in a book.”
Bright thought about Elise then, and she felt a flash of anger. Her mother, growing strong as Dorsey lay near death, seeming to take strength from his weakness. She had been a lost soul until now, cowering in her room, drawing a veil of silence over the house that sucked the very life from the air. Why, she was no mother at all, Bright thought with a sudden burst of revelation. She didn’t do the things mothers do. A cold rage gripped her. “I’d rather be an orphan,” she said bitterly.
“Bright!” Buster looked quickly at the back door, as if expecting to see Elise standing there, hands on hips, listening to them.
“I’d rather …” She almost said “Live with the Hardwickes,” but then she thought about that for a moment and instead she said, “… live at the mule bam.”
“Jesus is listening to you,” Buster said, edging away an inch or two on the step.
Bright looked up slowly, past the spreading limbs of the trees at the brightening sky beyond. “Jesus,” she said, “my mama is a damn fool!” And at that, Buster Putnam leapt up as if he had been shot and took off running across the backyard, disappearing with a crash through the hedge without a backward glance. Bright sat for a moment longer, then stood, shaking out her dress, waiting to see if lightning would strike her. After a moment she thought, See, Jesus thinks Mama is a damn fool, too. Then she thought how wicked she was, how unchristian and perverse, and panic rose in her throat. Her father, hovering at death’s door while his daughter blasphemed on the back steps! Jesus, I’m sorry!
Upstairs, she opened the door of the sickroom and saw Finus sitting in the chair by the bed, his head in his hands. Her heart nearly stopped and a great terror seized her. I can’t go in there. But she took a deep breath and closed the door behind her and crossed to the bed and bent over her father’s still form. Dorsey was breathing easily, the flesh of his face cool to the touch. Bright felt giddy with relief and joy.
“He did it,” the doctor said quietly, looking up at her. He was near collapse. “The fever’s broken. God only knows how. Dorsey Bascombe will live. He’ll live to be an old man, I think.”
>
; It was a long, slow recovery. Dorsey was so weak at first that he couldn’t hold his head up. He drifted in and out of sleep, his face slack and sallow, the stubble of his beard stark against his pale skin on the days between the barber’s visits. He had never been a heavy man, but the wound withered him until the bones of his face and hands strained against the thin, wasted flesh.
“Food,” Dr. Tillman said. “Food is the best medicine. The more the better.” So they took turns feeding him—Elise and Bright and Hosanna—thin gruel at first and then a thicker soup with bits of finely chopped meat and vegetables in it. Hosanna kept a kettle of it simmering on the stove, adding to it bit by bit, filling the house with the rich, reassuring smell. They spooned it through Dorsey’s dry, cracked lips until he groaned in protest, and he began slowly to gather strength. The first hints of color returned, the bones receded ever so slightly from his gaunt face.
Then there was the pain—at times, only twinges; at others, great waves of it that washed over him, made the sweat spring from his pores and mingle with silent tears and trickle in rivulets down the sides of his face, and then subsided with a shudder. “It’s a good sign,” the doctor said. “His body has been in shock. It’s been protecting itself. But now it’s beginning to heal and it’s letting down some of its defenses and it hurts. I can ease it some, but not much.”
Dorsey bore it mostly in silence. An occasional groan would escape his lips, and when he opened his eyes Bright could see the pain deep down in there, great molten pools of it. She wished desperately to take it from him, but she realized that it was a personal agony that only he could bear. He did, and after a few days he seemed to gain some control over it. In a strange way, the battle appeared to make him stronger. He is very, very brave, Bright thought, awed by it. Then the worst of it went away, and Dorsey emerged from the pit with a flush in his cheeks.
