The Arms of God: A Novel

by Lynne Hinton

* * *

  Tree was cradled in her mother’s arms, deaf and blind and mute. She was uprooted and cut away. Ruth, herself only recently alive, scrambled for something, everything, trying to bring her baby back to life. But the young girl was empty of anything, anything at all. Not bitterness, not hatred, not pain, not anything. She was wood, hollow and void, a limb floating in shallow water. And Ruth did not know how to care for such a thing so dead.

  When E. Saul got home from work he could only grasp at pieces. From Ruth he could hear only terror and the primal anguish of a mother over her ripped and broken child. From his sister he saw only the bruises, the drops of blood that pooled across her neck, and a glaze across her eyes that seemed slowly to unsteady them.

  When he faced the window that gave view to the house next door and saw Olivia storming from the house, a gleam of silver in her hand, he left his mother’s side, his sister’s fallen stare and emptied spirit, and headed after his neighbor.

  He ran after her as she marched down the road, calling out her name to which she never responded, never heard. Once he caught up with her there was no discussion between the two of them, only a struggle just beyond the limits of Smoketown, just within sight of a patrol car that had stopped earlier to ask a young man walking a weaving path if he had some identification.

  The eyewitness report as recorded in the next day’s paper said a Negro boy was fighting with a white girl just at the edge of town, wrestling over a butcher knife. The deputy yelled at the boy to drop the weapon and then shot him twice in the chest without harming his apparent victim.

  The sheriff’s office had been quoted as saying that there were no future plans to investigate the incident any further. Everyone had agreed that force had been necessary and that the shooting had been justified, all within the legal bounds of the system. The boy’s body was later released to an old woman, a Miss Comely, who arrived soon after it happened and claimed that she was a friend of the family.

  The girl, the paper went on to report, was sedated and taken immediately to a state hospital for observation, obviously traumatized by the events of that late August night. She had no family or next of kin to contact.

  Having no mother, since Mattie had now finally mastered the art of dying, her best friend and neighbor gone without a forwarding address, her brother escaped, her life consumed by evil, Olivia, a young girl who was becoming a woman, would stay locked up and forgotten for a very long time.

  Years later when folks would ask the residents of Smoketown about the two little houses that marked the line between black and white, the two little houses that stood so close together but bore witness to worlds apart, the two little houses that no one, black or white, would rent or buy, people would shake their heads, peer toward the graveyard behind a little brick church, and out toward the headstone of a woman who used to hear angels.

  They would remember a warm spring day and wearing a look of pride that one of their own had managed a way out of the sorrow. They would think of that Kingdom of God Banquet and the perfect way a mother loved her son and how everything, for the first time in their lives, had felt exactly right. They would consider their own shame in having let their guards down so easily and so low. They would look at the grave of Miss Nellie Star Broadnax Blackwell and they would quietly shake their heads and say that they should have known.

  And even though they had not ever allowed themselves to be so full and happy again, never ate that much or laughed that loud. Even though they now counted the deaths of neighbors and asked about last words and the rooms where people had died, checked to see if the eyes of the dead one were opened or closed and calculated what day of the week the person had passed, even though they never got so spirited about the accomplishments of another young person from Smoketown, the price had already been paid, it had been too late.

  Evil, in its triune and ugly face, had warned them and they had not heeded its counsel.

  March 15, 1960

  This hereby orders the release of Olivia Ruth Jacobs from the Long Memorial Mental Hospital. She is released into her own custody after having been institutionalized for a number of years due to severe depression.

  This release is ordered by the Clerk of Court for the State of North Carolina and the Guilford County Offices for Mental Health.

  Signed,

  Dr. Lindsey Pope

  Chief of Psychiatry

  Long Memorial Mental Hospital

  Nine

  The new chief of medicine at the mental hospital took inventory of all the files in the facility. He started with the records of those patients who had been in the hospital the longest, proceeded to those of the most newly committed patients, and ended with the files locked in cabinets down behind the basement stairs that were marked in bold black ink, DECEASED.

  In 1960, the state government hired Dr. Pope because of his tight administrative style and because of a decision to clean house in the state hospitals, beginning with the psychiatric facility that was slated to close by the year 1965. The funds were low and the state senate was demanding a new, streamlined means of managing mental illness. Those patients who had lived in the facility for more than ten years and who could be diagnosed as being functional enough to be placed into a productive, tax-paying existence were quickly discharged and released.

  Olivia Jacobs was twenty-eight years old and had lived at Long’s for fifteen years. She was originally classified as catatonic, uncommunicative, and mentally unstable due to severe trauma. For the first five years of her commitment, she was considered a suicide risk and was housed in the ward with thirty other female patients who were tied to their beds at night, kept locked in tiny cells, and were allowed only thirty minutes outside every day.

  Later she would recall that she had never experienced this mode of treatment as confining or unpleasant. She hardly remembered those five years at all.

  When she turned eighteen, they transferred her into a room with five other patients; and her records reflect that she began to register activity around her by following the other girls with her eyes and demonstrating emotion through facial expressions and the grip and release of fisted hands. She rarely, however, participated in group activities, preferring instead to stay alone, reading, in her bed. She was given several electric shock treatments; and although the doctors had been optimistic about the outcome, there were no behavorial changes.

  At age twenty-one, she spoke for the first time since she had been committed. A new patient, a young female, fourteen, was being assaulted by three other girls. Olivia first began banging her book along the railing of her bed and when no one came, she screamed for help.

  For the last seven years that she was institutionalized she spoke only four more times. Once to say good-bye to a nurse of whom she had become fond and who was leaving to get married. Once to reply with the word “no” when she was asked if she knew if any of her family were still alive. Once in a conversation with a blind boy that no one else heard but in which she told him the color of the sky at dusk. And finally at her exit interview that was supervised by Dr. Pope and attended by Dr. Levi, her psychiatrist of ten years, two nurses, and a secretary who took notes in a short, fat binder in which the pages were held together by three silver rings.

  Dr. Pope began the interview. “Olivia Jacobs, age twenty-eight, female, committed to the facility in August, 1945.” He peered over the folder at the young patient.

  Olivia was staring at the table. Her hair was swept back in a tight ponytail and she was wearing a blue flowered gown.

  “It says here that you were brought to the hospital when you were thirteen.” He flipped through the pages in her chart. “Your mother died then?” he asked.

  The doctors and the nurses and the recording secretary all peered at Olivia. She didn’t answer.

  Dr. Levi cleared his throat. “She was a victim of assault.” He turned toward his patient, a sympathetic glance, confident that he had correctly ordered her history and diagnosed her condition.

  “I
see,” the chief of psychiatry replied. “And she hasn’t spoken since a time of distress when a roommate was being beaten up?”

  One of the nurses, the old one, the one who seemed to know her best, Miss Alice Spears, answered. “She’s said a few things since then.”

  She reached over and patted the young woman on the hand. “But mostly, no, she’s remained quiet.”

  The secretary furiously wrote down what was being said.

  “And, Miss Jacobs, do you understand that we’re planning to release you?”

  Olivia felt the nurse’s hand on hers. She liked how it felt to be touched by the older woman, the comfort and care that was implied. She didn’t respond to the chief doctor. She thought he was brusque and unhappy.

  “Olivia, Miss Jacobs, you’ve been in here a long time, a lot of years, isn’t there somewhere you’d like to go?”

  She still did not answer.

  “Make a note that the patient does not respond,” Dr. Pope said to the secretary.

  The woman with the binder blew out a puff of air and kept writing.

  “Well, there’s no reason for you to stay here,” he said. “Even if you don’t talk, we’re going to have to let you go.” He closed the file and wrote something on the top.

  Dr. Levi drew a line through Olivia’s name that was written somewhere near the bottom of his writing pad. He had lost ten patients already that day.

  “Thank you,” was all she said as she got up from the table, gathered up her things, and left the meeting.

  The next day she was released from the hospital with two sets of clothes that were donated by the Church Women’s Society, one pair of shoes, black ankle boots that were a size too small, fourteen dollars, and a seed of life growing in her womb.

  She walked away, turning back only once to notice the window where she had sat when she first noticed the bright orange sunset that faded into thin, narrow wisps of purple clouds and which she had reported to the boy who had not asked but in whom she recognized a desire to know.

  She was discharged from the institution and three months pregnant by the unseeing boy whose name she never learned. Neither she nor the nurses nor the supervising physician bothered to check for such an unlikely thing at the time of her departure.

  She left the hospital aware of something moving within her, thinking that something had broken inside of her; but she had not considered it could be a growing, emerging life. Like her mother before her, Olivia rejected the notion that she could be pregnant since everything within her felt old and lost and dead.

  She took a bus to Virginia and settled into the Salvation Army Women’s Shelter in Danville. She swept the floors and changed the linens; and months later after having given birth to a quiet, slow-moving baby who followed her mother with her eyes, she tried to think of tenderness, tried to dream again.

  The young babe, the stirring of grace, and the limping along of hope, almost succeeded. But once the child was old enough to ask her questions and call attention to the long life of disappearance she had lived, the sorrow and the memory of something held and lost poured across Olivia’s mind and won out.

  She left her child because she was confident that everything she could share had been ripped up and burned like the church across the street from her birth house in Smoketown, that everything she would give her would be tainted, sullied, and unlovely.

  She was sure the little girl could learn life more easily from someplace else, from anybody else. So, after coming home from work one day and realizing that she was pretending to be more than she was, pretending to have more than she had, she packed her daughter a small bag with some clothes and a toy, pinned five dollars to the inside front pocket in her bib overalls, and dropped her off one last time at Miss Kathy’s Play Care Center. She walked away, convincing herself that she had done the right thing.

  It hurt, but no more than the long windy nights when she thought she heard the muffled cries of her best friend, Tree. Or when she reached into her Bible and pulled out a loose-leaf paper with a poem from E. Saul’s hand. Or when she happened upon little girls whispering a secret that toppled them over in laughter. There were times she was sure she would not breathe again. And yet, she always did. In and out. Labored and listless, Olivia breathed and lived, her sadness an old coat she never took off.

  So that many years later, when she woke up from a dream about pine trees dancing under a summer sky and she finally decided to search for her daughter, the story was so tired and the sorrow so deliberate, she wasn’t sure of why she wanted to find her, what she would say once they discovered one another, nor how she would explain where and what she had been.

  For once, however, in her long and sleepwalking existence, she lifted herself above the memories and beyond the agonizing losses, pulled herself away from the pitch of despair, and fought and scratched all the way back to the ghosts of Smoketown.

  It was a journey of low-lying hopefulness but she did not turn from it and run away. She pushed herself all the way there. What or rather who she found untangled the tight knots and opened a space in her lungs to breathe.

  She died while growing back her heart.

  Epilogue

  Just after Anna had been born, a nurse brought her in for me to feed her. She was so tiny in that woman’s arms, so helpless and pink and frail. The nurse showed me how to position the baby across my chest, how to place the nipple in her little mouth, how to angle her head and steady her neck. I was nervous and tired, weary after a very long time of labor, and I couldn’t get my milk to come out.

  The nurse was angry at me. I guess she was tired too. She would raise her voice, “Sit up, lean back, hold her beneath you,” growing louder and more impatient with each instruction.

  I tried to do everything she ordered me to do. I changed positions, held my body differently, tried to relax; but nothing would come out. Even as Anna took the nipple, clearly doing her part, it seemed as if I were as dry as a bone, as if I had nothing inside myself to give to her. Even though I felt the presence of the milk, even though I thought I had what she needed contained in my full, tender breasts, I was unable to pass it on.

  The nurse sighed heavily, sweeping Anna from my arms in one swift motion. “We’ll try again later,” she huffed. “In the meantime,” she added in a disappointed tone as she headed to the door with my daughter, “try to calm down. This ain’t rocket science, you’re just feeding your baby. It’s the easiest thing you’ll do as a mother.”

  She left the room and I was completely alone. Suddenly I began to cry and it was as if I became a river. Tides of old tears swelled and burst. Wave after wave bumped and rolled across me. I ached from the sheer force of so much emotion streaming from inside me that I thought I would surely drown in this unmanaged sorrow. My heart split and opened like another ready womb.

  I did not know how to be a mother. I did not think I was capable of such a role, such a relationship. I had no island of memory, no foundation of wisdom within me. I had no place to go. And I wasn’t sure I should even try.

  Perhaps, I thought in my drowning moment, I did not have what my daughter must have and that maybe I should rise from my bed of labor and delivery and quickly exit from her life. Before she was spoiled. Before her life was corrupted by all that I was and all that I was not. Before I so gravely disappointed her.

  And it was just beyond that moment, just outside its coming and going, just after I choked and breathed, that I thought of and consequently forgave my mother. I had not expected such a thing, imagined such a development of birth. But it happened. In just a brief, tiny tick of a clock, I suddenly understood her fear, her hesitation, her choice. And the resentment and bitterness, at least for that moment, were gone.

  When the nurse brought Anna to me the second time and slipped her next to my heart, the milk flowed heavily and with ease. My daughter took all that she could. My breast became the source of her life. And when the nurse came back for my baby, to return her to the nursery, I slept, for the first night
in a very long time, in peace.

  I close Olivia’s book, resting it against my chest, surprised by the memory from my daughter’s birth. It was not the answer I seek, not the story I am trying to find, and I don’t know why it is that now I would remember the clean easy flow of milk that poured from my breast or that delicate moment of forgiveness.

  I don’t understand why it is in this place, this unfamiliar and unrelated place, that I would recall the way it felt to have my daughter next to me, that I would remember such a moment of grace and hope. That I would recall how it is to be in perfect love.

  I lean my head and shoulders against that old velvet rocking chair and close my eyes and remember something else, an old thing, a forgotten thing, a Sunday afternoon when I was bathed in sweetness and a picture I had drawn when I was seven years old.

  It was late in the summer and I was living in the home of a preacher and his wife. I remember that there were lots of children, that I couldn’t tell who was real and who wasn’t, that we were all treated the same, no one more or less special than the next one. I remember that for the six or eight months I stayed there I slept long full nights, that my stomach never ached, that I played board games and cards without asking to sit so I could face the door. I remember that the house was cool and spacious, that the windows were always open, and that big noisy fans blew in every room.

  It was after church, early in the afternoon, and we were all sitting around the table just about to enjoy our lunch. The father, a big man who wore a thick gray suit every Sunday and who hugged so tightly you’d lose your breath, stood to say grace as he did at every meal.

  “Children,” he said, and we knew that was our cue to reach out and hold each other’s hands. “God loves you more than you will ever know, more than you’ve been despised or mistreated, more than you think is possible. And even if you’ve been hurt or even if you’re going to be hurt, it cannot bind you or hold you or keep you in the way that God’s love is able.”