The Tilted World: A Novel

by Tom Franklin

  She’d had Willy for eleven days now and he’d not suffered so much as a sniffle, but this weather could get the best of anyone. Yesterday in the seam where the chimney met the wall, a line of mushrooms had knobbed forth like hat hooks. It was, as Jesse would say, wetter than an otter’s pocket. Where was Jesse now? She hadn’t seen him since the day Ingersoll had met her at the stream, and that was four days ago.

  Well, okay, she wouldn’t go shining this evening, not one drop of rain splashing onto Willy as she ran to the still, no toweling off the baby’s plump legs as he balanced on the thumper keg. It was a pleasant thought to settle into. She’d baby her baby today.

  Dixie Clay lifted Willy to her shoulder and walked to the kitchen to warm his milk and her coffee. It was still dark, so she turned on the electric light. At the sink, filling the kettle, she saw Willy’s reflection, the back of his neck looking mottled. She lowered him and found the pink of his cheeks was blotched onto his forehead and neck. She put the back of her hand to his brow and it was warm. Too warm. Fever warm. In fact, she could feel the heat of his body through her nightdress. She carried him to the marble-topped console she’d conscripted for a diaper changer and lined with towels. Usually when she laid him down, he’d ball his legs into his body, sometimes grabbing a foot, but now he lay lankly. He did not cry. The diaper wasn’t wet. She pinned it around him again, frowning.

  Back in the kitchen she made his bottle and carried him to the rocker. Usually when she held up the bottle he fastened his eyes on it and opened his mouth and sometimes even flapped his arms. He’d suck, gazing at her, perhaps lifting an erratic arm to swat her nose. But now his mouth wasn’t even closing around the rubber nipple. Dixie Clay squeezed it, but his tongue was slack and the milk dribbled out. He seemed to be panting. She put the bottle down and lifted him onto her shoulder again. His forehead was sweaty on her neck. An aura of heat emanated from his body, and patting his back was like moving her hand toward and away from a fire. His panting grew a furry quality. He coughed again, and it was terrible. Great wings of panic thrashed in her.

  Not again, Lord. Not again. You took my firstborn. You leave us now. You leave me this child. You let him be.

  Behind the thunderheads, the sky had lightened a notch. She rocked Willy and prayed except it wasn’t prayers so much as threats, promises and threats, lamentations and threats. His chest spasmed with each raspy-aired bark. And Jesse gone with the car. And Jesse gone every time she needed him.

  Lord, if this child dies, I will kill Jesse. And it will be your fault.

  The rain fell in gusts, which she watched out the kitchen window over the baby’s damp head. Sheets of rain were blown from the left to the right and then passed beyond the window, like panels of rain, like funny papers erased of their pictures and words. She clasped Willy to her and pumped the chair.

  That’s right, God: give me a son and then set a match to him.

  On Dixie Clay’s tenth birthday she and Lucius had been playing in the barn’s hayloft and started squabbling over a wooden whirligig and she’d hidden his spectacles. When he gave chase, he misjudged the distance to the loft edge and fell over, breaking an ankle. A miracle, said her father, he could have broken his back. “We’ll tell your mother it was an accident,” he decided. “She’s near her time and doesn’t need to be ruffled.” But Lucius tattled and her mother was indeed ruffled, and three weeks later she was breech-birth dead. Dixie Clay confided in her father that she’d caused them, these deaths her punishment, but her father was emphatic, one hand on each of her cheeks, No, no. It had nothing to do with her. And he made her promise not to think that the world organized itself to spite her or reward her, the world just was, and good could come from praying but not the good she expected when praying for sunny weather for the county fair.

  Dixie Clay knew that her father’d been right—she was not so important as to be the focus of God’s machinations—but it was hard not to view Willy’s illness as retribution for two revenuers who wouldn’t be returning to their children.

  The day had begun a thousand hours prior, yet the mantel clock read 10 A.M. She rocked her child, waiting for the fever to break, for the rains to stop, for the slam of Jesse’s car door. Imagine being able to telephone the doctor from this very room. There’d been talk of installing lines out this far, but of course the city had run out of money after lining Main Street and Old Barn and Broad Street. Broad Street, where the mayor lived. She cursed the mayor. She considered going for help but feared taking Willy out in the storm would make him sicker. Then another cough from Willy like butcher paper torn from its roll. She rose with him and walked to the door. Through the shaking, rain-pebbled window, she couldn’t even see the pines beyond the gallery. She turned and went back to the rocker.

  Okay, she told herself, I’ll give it till noon, and if Willy isn’t improved, we ride for the doctor. Come hell or high water: she was in both.

  The deadline gave her a bitter determination and the rocker clacked like a metronome measuring a song no one wanted to hear. The child’s eyes were slits, glittery slits. His pupils seemed small. He would take no milk. He did not cry. She peeled him from her shoulder with a wet sound and checked his diaper and it was wet only from sweat. He’d left a baby-shaped spot on her dress. She gave him a sponge bath with cool water.

  Finally the clock struck noon and she sprang like a mousetrap. She suited up like she was going to war, which in a way she was. She bundled the baby inside her apron and yanked on Jesse’s old wide-brimmed leather hat as a rain break for Willy’s body. Even through her dress the child felt like a branding iron. Dixie Clay cradled the aproned child as she ran splashing to the stable where she tossed the saddle on the back of sleeping Chester, who brayed and danced sideways. As she tightened the straps she spoke to the mule of what they must do. They set off, through watery mud that completely obscured the road. Only the rows of pines and Old Man Marvin’s mailbox told her she hadn’t lost it altogether.

  She wasn’t far down Seven Hills, the rain horizontal, straight at her, when they came upon a brown Chrysler turned sideways in the road, its stuttering engine masked by the storm. Beyond the fogged windows she could see three black hats. The driver’s elbow worked to roll down the window.

  “Mrs. Holliver!” shouted the driver as she brought Chester closer. “Tell Jesse we come for the delivery but can’t get there.”

  The driver’s squashed nose she’d seen before. Where? In the driveway, counting dollars by the light of the Chrysler’s headlamps.

  “We’re heading back. Tell Jesse—”

  “Take us to town. We need the doctor.”

  “What?”

  “Baby’s sick. Fever.”

  “Baby? You got a baby?”

  She pulled down the apron bib. Sweat-slick hairs pressed darkly to Willy’s skull, eyes closed and too deep in his head, raisins pressed into gingerbread.

  “Hellfire.” The driver drew his breath. “Get in.”

  But when the driver turned back to the other two passengers, something was said. He faced her again where she had slid off the mule but didn’t meet her eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Holliver. Can’t take no chances on diphtheria. We’ll send the doctor out.”

  “We’ll ride in the back,” she pleaded. But the driver was already rolling up his window. She shouted, “I’ll give you a hundred dollars. Each. A case of whiskey—”

  But he had the Chrysler in reverse, its wheels throwing a sheet of water over the mule. “We’ll send Dr. Devaney on out,” he shouted through the window crack. “You go home now, Missus Holliver. The doc will be there directly and your young’un will be fit as a fiddle by teatime.” And with that the car lurched forward and in just a few feet both the sound and sight of it were lost to the everlasting rain.

  It was close to 10 P.M., Dixie Clay pacing with the baby held in front of her like a goblet, when there was a banging on her door.
She ran to unlock the bolt, already yelling, “Oh, thank God you’re here. Thank God—”

  But it wasn’t Dr. Devaney with his black satchel. It was Ingersoll, shucking off his slicker right there on the gallery, tossing his hat aside. He stepped forward and filled the doorway, rain coursing off the saddlebag that he dropped to take the baby before she could even make sense of things.

  “Wait,” she said. “No. He’s sick, he’s burning up. I’m waiting for—”

  “Doctor’s not coming.” Ingersoll wasn’t looking at her but walking with the baby to the lamp. He rested the child on one palm and with the other turned its chin from side to side. He parted Willy’s eyelids with his thumb and index finger and looked in.

  “Not coming? But—”

  “Not coming.” He thumbed the baby’s mottled chin down and peered into his throat. “I need alcohol. Not to drink. For the fever. Alcohol, cold water, towel. Now.”

  The baby did his cough, one-two-three barks, Dixie Clay with a hand to her mouth while his chest jumped, as if snagged by a fishing line.

  “Now!” Ingersoll yelled. And she whirled about and opened the crate by the pantry and lifted a half-pint of whiskey and handed it to him as he strode past into the kitchen. She followed and saw him grab the dish towel off the stove handle, then bite the cork from the bottle and spit it out. At the sink he found a bowl, poured it half full with the whiskey, filled it the rest of the way from the tap.

  “Hold him,” he said, and then slid one of the baby’s arms out of its swaddling and dabbed the dish towel in the bowl and then blotted from Willy’s shoulder to his wrist. Then he rolled Willy’s limp arm between his large hands, like dough that you elongate for a pretzel. Ingersoll tucked that arm back in and removed the other and did the same, his movements brisk and confident.

  “What you’re doing—how can I—”

  “The alcohol evaporates,” he told her, moving to a leg now, “and it cools him, and we rub him down, see, we bring the blood to the surface. We break the fever. It’s cooling him. We’ve gotta break the fever first.”

  Ingersoll continued with the other leg, the torso, and then took Willy from Dixie Clay and flipped him to do his back. “You got a croup kettle?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then get your teakettle going.”

  She ran to the stove while Ingersoll crossed her kitchen in three long strides and entered the hall and returned with the baby bed. He flung it before the stove and yelled to Dixie Clay, “Get a sheet, a bedsheet.” She flew to yank one from her bed and when she returned he’d laid Willy in his crib. They kneeled on either side and Ingersoll tented the sheet over their heads, holding one end so the kettle’s spout was under the sheet.

  “What now?” she asked.

  “Now,” he told her, “now we steam it out.”

  “Steam it out? Diphtheria?”

  “Baby doesn’t have diphtheria, least I don’t think so. Doesn’t have that layer of skin on the back of his throat, where tonsils grow. Baby has pneumonia, which has led to croup.”

  They bent over the crib in the cloud built by that kettle, Ingersoll massaging the baby’s chest or giving him another alcohol rub, Dixie Clay refilling the kettle or tightening the sheet. As the steam grew thicker the baby’s brassy cough worsened, his whole body spasming, snatched by some dreadful fist. Dixie Clay rubbed her palm over the baby’s slick head, felt that hollow where the halves of the skull met, and the depression seemed deeper, sunken like earth over a coal mine. She tried to make the baby take the bottle, but what got inside was flung back at her with a cough. Each breath seemed to cost him something terrible. She wished she could do the breathing, do the coughing, take the sick into her own lungs. “Please God please God please God,” she said silently or maybe aloud. Through the fog of their own making, the man was pressing his ear to the baby’s rattling chest, long locks of his brown hair dripping sweat on the baby. She was herself raining, sweat and tears both plopping on the floor or on the baby as she leaned to tuck the sheet around the kettle but keep it from catching afire.

  Lord, I beg of you, I’ve got no reason to live but him.

  Lord, you took my mama, you took my Jacob, you spare this child.

  More steam, more steam. An hour passed. Two. Was he coughing less? He was. Less of the terrible rattle to it. More like the way a giant bean pod rattles. They attended the lank limbs and above them the storm-tossed pines attended the roof and then there were fewer branches swatting the windows and fewer raindrops falling through the chimney to the hearth and the wind pinched off and they could hear the baby’s breath and there was no doubt it was better, a less harsh tearing of his throat. His eyes were closed, but they rolled beneath the lids in an uneasy, restive half sleep.

  Dixie Clay and Ingersoll were sitting cross-legged now beside the crib instead of kneeling. It was three thirty in the morning, and from the woods behind the house an owl hooted. Ingersoll spoke for the first time about something other than Willy.

  “Ham—he’s my partner—hates owls.”

  “Why?”

  “Won’t say. Or he’ll say, but he changes his story every time, and I reckon I ain’t got the real reason yet.”

  “No need to be scared of an owl, ’less you’re a dormouse,” she said, and listened as the owl gave again its eight-hooted call. “That’s a swamp owl,” she said. “Swamp owl asks, ‘Who cooks for you? Who cooks for y’all?’ ”

  The owl hooted a third time and Ingersoll tilted his ear and said, “Yeah, I can hear that,” looking at her through the clearing gauze of steam.

  Dixie Clay looked down at Willy, who was calmer, his chest rising and falling with no tremor, as if it had never been otherwise. “Look how quiet.”

  Ingersoll nodded and leaned forward to slip his index finger into the boy’s hand, which curled around it. “Got a grip to him,” he said. “And he doesn’t feel hot.”

  Dixie Clay took the baby’s other hand. He felt normal.

  The kettle rattled and Dixie Clay rose to turn it off and then dropped two chamomile tea bags inside to steep while Ingersoll excused himself to use the bathroom. They both returned to their spots beside the crib, and as she handed him his tea she asked, “How’d you know he was sick?”

  He told her that he was on his way to find Ham and guard the levee because explosives had been stolen and they were worried about saboteurs. He was almost there when the Harper boy ran by calling had anyone seen the doctor or Jesse Holliver. Saying that Jesse’s wife had a strange baby at her house who had the diphtheria and wasn’t gonna make it. One of the levee workers yelled that Jesse was in Greenville.

  “Greenville,” Dixie Clay spat. “And the doctor?”

  “At the Bradford plantation, easing Mrs. Bradford’s ague.”

  Bradford was about thirty miles south of Hobnob, Barry Bradford the richest landowner in the county. Dr. Devaney was a Dry, his wife, Jenny, head of the Anti-Saloon League. Dixie Clay saw it now, Dr. Devaney earning duck hunting privileges in the Bradford swamp—why would he rush to a bootlegger’s house to treat a dying baby that might snatch him into death as well?

  But this man came. She studied him as he blew on his tea. His dark hair hung forward in a wedge, blocking his brown eyes. His red shirt was dirty at the cuffs. A large torso, thick shoulders, long legs crossed. A man like that would enjoy a big supper. Who cooks for you?

  She asked, “How’d you know how to help?”

  “The war.” He shrugged. “I was friends with a medic who taught me some, but he was killed in the Meuse-Argonne, in September 1918. Most of our battalion was. Another battalion was skeletonized and more medics were sent, but before they arrived, we all learned a bit of medicine. A bit more than we’d hoped to learn.”

  He grew quiet and they sipped tea. The baby opened his eyes and gave a little whimper and turned his head, and when he saw Dixie Clay, he gazed at her. She ga
zed back. She thought, You have to teach a baby most everything but how to love. She made the bbbbb sound that Willy liked so well. Then she fetched him a fresh bottle and held it to his mouth and his lips closed around it and sucked a bit and swallowed and then slowly his lids drooped and closed in what was sleep, sleep not death, and his lips released the bottle, his tongue still flexing a time or two.

  Ingersoll said, “Seems like other than this you two been getting on all right.”

  She shrugged. “He’s perfect.” There was another pause. Then, “Amity told you I lost my firstborn.” She looked for confirmation and he nodded.

  She continued, “He died. Of scarlet fever. Jacob. I was twenty.” She paused between sentences because she wasn’t used to talking this way, or talking. She laid a hand on Willy’s forehead, the hair no longer slick but dried into wisps, longer at the ears.

  “Before Jacob died,” she said, stroking Willy’s head, “I’d sometimes feel a love for him so strong it almost scared me. Like I had to grit my teeth to keep from biting him. And I’d think about women who’d adopted babies. And I’d think that there was no way they could love those babies like I loved my flesh and blood. But now I know better.” She’d directed this slow speech to Willy’s face but looked up at Ingersoll now, his dimple pulling an asterisk in his scruffy cheek. She wondered how growing up in an orphanage changed a man.

  After a few minutes, she went on. “My mother used to tell me a funny story. She said that when I was four, and she was pregnant with my brother, Lucius, she asked where I thought I came from. And I told her, ‘I was a little angel in the sky on a cloud with all the other angel babies and God pointed to you and said, Who wants this lady for a mommy? and I raised my hand.’ ”

  He gave a chuckle, and Dixie Clay smiled and shook her head. It occurred to her that this was not only the first time she’d talked about Jacob but the longest she’d talked to anyone besides Jesse since leaving Alabama. So many words, like a net they were weaving.