by Devon, Gary;
They heard him say, “Well, Russell … come in, come in.” He always said it twice. The other man said he couldn’t stay, apologized for interrupting their dinner, but he had seen their father come home from work and he had something he thought he might want to see. Would Ray step outside?
“Who’s Russell?” Mamie asked Toddy, who shrugged and grimaced and dug his spoon into his peas.
“Why, I’m ashamed of you two,” their mother said. “You know who Russell is. It’s Mr. Ambrose. He lives right behind us.”
Very carefully, Mamie sat back in her chair. She left her fork on the edge of her plate, slowly withdrawing her hand to her lap. She licked her lips. “What does he want, do you reckon?”
“How should I know?” their mother said. “Toddy, don’t play with your potatoes. It’s something to do with your daddy.”
“I want to see,” Mamie said. She rolled from the chair and dropped to her feet even as her mother told her she couldn’t. She went to the window, but the projection of the porch blocked her view. She pivoted and ran through the kitchen to the screen door.
On the palm of his left hand, her father held the brown paper sack. It was open at the top. He was taking the things out of it one at a time, glancing at them and dropping them back in, while Mr. Ambrose talked. For a moment Mamie felt dizzy; the air began to waver. She turned and stepped into her mother. “I told you no, Mamie. Now come have your supper before it gets cold.” Steering her by the shoulders, she marched Mamie back to the table.
Keeping her eyes downcast, Mamie turned her peas with her spoon. Fine prickly goose bumps nibbled her legs as the worry gathered in her mind. Still she didn’t move, sneaking sidelong glances at the empty plate, then at the empty blue eyes peering at her across the table. The minutes stretched indefinitely. Knowing the screen door would bang shut when her father came in, waiting for it and steeling herself, did not lessen its startling surprise. It was like waiting for the cuckoo to spring from a striking clock—when the screen door slammed, she jumped so hard she upset her plate. And he still didn’t come for her. He stayed in the kitchen.
He made himself scarce. At eight-thirty, Mamie was helping her mother put the supper dishes away when she heard him in the living room. “Toddy, you better go on up to bed.”
Toddy said he wasn’t through with his geography questions.
“Then you can finish them upstairs. And stay up there. What I have to do won’t concern you. You better go on up right now.”
Mamie took a deep breath. Under her skin, her muscles tightened as if straining for a place to hide. She heard Toddy climb the stairs. Her father called her into the dining room and closed the door behind them. By then, she was far too tense to cry. She stood in front of the closed door, tucking her lower lip in over her bottom teeth with three of her fingers, breathing very fast. “Sit down,” he said, and she did, at her place at the table. “Mamie, when things were really bad, I asked you to tell me the truth and you wouldn’t.” He was fuming, his words sawing across her nerves. In the shine of the tabletop, the ceiling light reflected an inverted ghostly pool. She fixed her gaze there.
“Is there something you want to tell me now?”
She did not flinch; her eyes began to smart.
“Mamie, you were in on this from the very beginning. You’re just as guilty as he is. Maybe more. All along you’ve lied to me. Now tell me you don’t know about this.” He dumped the contents of the sack on the table, the harder things—the fountain pen, the silver dollars, and the tiny telescope—bouncing and skittering on the tabletop, the noise deafening, then clattering to a standstill. “Now, what am I going to tell all these people—all our neighbors?” A web of bleary light skimmed across her eyes. She couldn’t gulp her tears any longer. She twisted from the chair, but he caught her in midair and thrust her down on the seat. “Oh, no, you don’t,” he said. “I’m putting an end to this right now. Tonight. I want to know what you did. Everything you did. If there’s more than this, you’d damned well better tell me.”
Her mother opened the door to the kitchen and stood there, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. He didn’t glance at her or pause. “There’s more to this than meets the eye. You didn’t do this by yourself. You couldn’t have. So let’s find out who helped you. And stop that bawling. Don’t you dare cry.” She choked and swallowed and wiped her face.
She would never know what caused him to notice her ring at precisely that moment. But he did. “I suppose that’s part of it, too,” he said, and for a second she didn’t know what he was talking about. “All this time you’ve been parading it right in front of me, and like a damned fool I didn’t even look. What d’you want with this trash?” Suddenly he pulled her fist up from her lap, forcibly undid her fingers, and yanked off the skull ring—all while she was begging, “No, Daddy! Oh, no, Daddy! That’s my ring! Toddy gave it to me! Daddy, it’s my ring! Please, Daddy! Please! Oh, please! Oh, please, Daddy, that’s my birthday ring! We didn’t take that!” But he had gone to the window and shoved it up and, with a snap of his wrist, the Phantom’s skull ring sailed into the night. Shocked, she stood completely still, her voice like a rock stuck in her throat, astonished at the irreversible suddenness of it. Her ring was gone.
Her father crossed the dining room, threw open the living-room doors, and strode toward the lounger. Her mother followed after him. “Ray, don’t, for God’s sake. Let it pass.”
“Don’t start on me, Ellie,” he answered. “I won’t live in a nest of trashy thieves.”
From under Mamie’s hair the sweat trickled down her back. She shuddered.
Her father brought Sherman into the dining room, with Sherman in front. In dungarees, a plaid shirt, and his Pirates baseball cap, the boy looked like any other strapping thirteen-year-old, except for his cold, blank eyes. Immediately he saw the jumble of trinkets on the table and sauntered to a stop.
“Sherman,” their father said, “have you ever seen any of this junk before?”
Mamie saw the realization flicker on his boyish face. Almost imperceptibly his expression drew tight—his jaw muscles clinched, his brow peaked slightly as he squinted, the rekindled hate flowed in his eyes. “I been tryin’ to remember,” he said under his breath.
“Oh, you remember, all right. There’s nothing wrong with your memory.”
Recalling that other time, Mamie rushed between them. “Daddy, don’t hurt him,” she cried. “Don’t hit him! He don’t know any better.” The bile rising in her throat was so sour it burned. She tried to cover her mouth but couldn’t in time, vomiting into her hands and down the front of her dress. Everything blurred. Doubled over, she retched and vomited and blindly stroked the air. She didn’t know when her mother came or where she came from, but she was there, holding her at the waist and forehead. “That’s it. Get it out. Let it all out.” The room and the side of her mother’s face swam out of Mamie’s focus. She couldn’t find Sherman. Her father had picked up the telephone.
“Ray, put that down and help me,” her mother said. “What’s the doctor or the police or anybody else going to do anyhow … after all this time?”
Mamie couldn’t remember being taken to bed that night or how the two heart-shaped pillows from the sofa came to be under her head. She awoke in her petticoat as Sherman lifted her in his arms. Nestling upright against his chest, she put her tired arms around his throat and shoulder in a loose hug. “Are you okay, Sherman?” she murmured.
She could feel him nod against her hair.
“What time is it?” she asked, her voice as droopy as her eyes.
“Almost daylight,” he said.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked. Slowly the room wheeled; she nodded against him lightly as he walked. Still blinking with sleep, she glanced down the back slope of his shirt, seeing the cuffs of his pants and the slide of the carpet beneath them.
“Far away,” he said. Blades of cut grass were stuck to the backs of his shoes.
Mamie batted her eyes hard. “My purs
e,” she moaned, still woozy. They went back for it; he turned and stooped and she caught the strap in her fingers; they turned again.
The door to her room rasped as it opened and they went through it, with Mamie jogging gently against him. They crossed to the top of the stairs. “Are we going right now?” she said.
“I’m taking you to a safe place,” he said.
The pictures in the stairwell loomed up and passed beside her as they went down the stairs. “One last thing I gotta do,” he said, “then I’ll come after you.” He turned on the halfway landing and went on down, and she bounced with him, the top of the stairs receding and curving away with every downward step. “Something smells funny,” she said, “like gas.” Her voice snagged and bumped on his shoulder. “I think I smell smoke.”
“I’ve got it ready to blow,” he said. “Everything’s fixed. It’s already started.”
“Why?” she said, still yawning, fighting sleep. “Is Toddy comin’ with us?”
“He’s all right. He’s asleep.”
As they cut through the foyer, he dropped almost to his knees and they moved down and up like climbing a ladder. “Put this around you,” he said, and covered her with a quilt.
“It’s wet,” she said.
“That won’t matter,” he said.
She squirmed under it, shrinking from its icy chill, and she felt it run wet on her cheek. She wiped at it with the hand she kept around his shoulder and saw a dark stain. It took a moment for her to realize that it was blood. “Oh, Sherman, did you hurt yourself again?”
They went through the kitchen. “It’s not so bad,” he said, “just a nick.”
She tried to twist forward and sit on the perch of his forearm, but he held her pressed tight with his hand between her shoulder blades. “But it’s getting on me. All over my petticoat.”
“Then we’ll have to take it off.”
Later, she would remember him telling her to cover her mouth with the wet quilt as they went through the basement door and he turned sideways in the doorway to swing the door shut with his elbow. The air was mottled dark and hazy in the basement—one lonely cricket chirped along with the methodic grind of his shoes. She peered above her wet mask.
Great swarming coils of smoke hung between the black studs.
In the last few minutes of night, as the warm rising dew eddied and idled on the ground and the Chinaman lumbered from his opened pen, an explosion emptied the air like a massive spontaneous eruption—it rocked the foundation and shattered the first-story windows of the Abbott house. Old Mrs. Weatherholt, who lived across the street and reported the fire, said she felt the force of the concussion run up the corner posts of her bed and reverberate through her bedsprings so hard they strummed and tinkled for five minutes. “I thought it was an earthquake. I swear I did.” In the beginning, she saw only smoke billowing from crevices in the foundation, then small shooting flames. She said she thought the house looked out of kilter, off plumb, tipped a little like a top hat.
Before she could get back to the window from calling the fire department, the fire had spread to the first-floor windows and a festoon of curling black smoke encircled the broad front of the house. When she came to the second part of her eyewitness account, she broke down; she couldn’t tell the authorities what it was like to watch poor Mrs. Abbott tear at the smoky upstairs window that wouldn’t open—her soundless, wild face smeared against the glass as her white fists went on pounding against it more and more feebly until she was engulfed in smoke. And all this time, Mrs. Weatherholt yelling, “Throw something! Throw something through it!” But it didn’t help, nothing helped. Mrs. Abbott was beside herself with fear, then gone so quick, so unbelievably quick, already gone. When the firemen knocked the front door in, flames shot out of the house in a blast that scorched the geraniums at the end of the walk.
In their nightclothes, bathrobes, and wraps—some wearing slippers, some shoes, others in their stocking feet, their faces still puffy with sleep—the neighbors gathered and were cordoned off behind barricades on the other side of the street. They gathered to pray and wonder and bear witness, finding it unbearable to watch, but even more impossible to look away.
When all had been given up for lost, the fire spitting from the asphalt shingles on the roof and flapping in all the windows, when none of the neighbors staring into the gassy waves of heat could understand how the house went on standing, little Mamie Abbott wandered down the path beside the house through smoke and soot and sparks, clutching a wet and smoldering quilt around her shoulders with one hand and swinging a blue plastic purse by its broken strap in the other. Except for her awful retching coughs, she appeared abstracted, almost unconcerned, out for a morning stroll. Her hair, eyelashes, and brow were singed from one side of her head. Under the quilt, she wore only her panties. One of the firemen caught the child up in his arms and carried her to an ambulance. The siren sounded its shrill warning as the ambulance sped away. Some of the onlookers began yelling, “There’s someone else in there! In the front room! I see Ray in there!” And everyone crowded to the barricade for a closer look. But it was impossible to tell whether the shape was that of a man or a smoke trick, and it made no difference. The house collapsed into itself in a grating, slow-folding crash. Tossed out in the sudden convulsion of the wreckage, chunks of burning debris were strewn as far as fifty feet away.
The firemen continued to drench the facing sides and roofs of adjacent houses, but the fire had been contained. Later that same morning, as the men collected their implements, they found in the right-of-way behind the Abbott house a bicycle and a pile of newspapers belonging to Jimmy Porterfield, who had been reported missing earlier that morning. A few of the newspapers were freckled with blood. The police were called to the scene.
At approximately five-fifteen that afternoon, it was concluded that four charred and unrecognizable bodies, two adults and two children, had been recovered. Mamie Abbott was admitted to the Nathan County Memorial Hospital in stable but guarded condition, with second- and third-degree burns on thirty percent of her body.
Like a particularly devastating dream, the first night in the hospital would remain in Mamie Abbott’s memory for the rest of her life.
She awoke in the night, trying to talk. “Oh, please,” she mumbled. “Oh, please, don’t … oh, please …” Her lips shaped the same combinations of words again and again. When she eventually stirred and opened her eyes, she stopped murmuring, because she was in a black place, a steep black hole without shadows or limits. Where is this? she thought, and deep shudders shook her.
Blinking slowly, she glanced first to one side, then the other, until she could hold her eyes open. But she couldn’t see anything, and she hurt all over. She rolled her tongue on her lips; they were swollen and cracked. The dark was impenetrable.
She tried to get up, but things were stuck in her arms and they pulled and tore when she moved. She felt lifeless and yet her heart was hammering so hard it beat in her ears. Her hands seemed fat as mittens—when she touched herself, they had no feeling. She couldn’t tell what the things were in her arms or why they were there.
Where’s everybody at? she thought, and bits of what had happened began to trickle through her senses. Where’s Toddy? Is he comin ’with us? She remembered that someone had picked her up and she had glimpsed the burning house. They’re all gone, she thought. Oh, Mama! Mama! Mama! She felt raw inside, cauterized with the fearful knowledge that she was entirely alone … forever. They’re all dead! I’m sorry, she thought, and said, “Sorry,” as the tears welled and ran from the corners of her eyes.
She was gasping for air when she remembered Sherman’s promise, and two thoughts crossed in her mind. They’re all dead … except Sherman. He must’ve got out. Her eyes searched the dark, but only tiny disappearing pinpoints of light met her gaze. Careful of the things girding her arms, she shrugged up, wiping her face against her shoulders. Quietly, she said, “Sherman, are you there?” But with her thick lips and tongu
e, her voice was so unfamiliar she thought that even if he heard her, he wouldn’t know who she was.
She wanted to cry again, but instead she forced her eyes to search the darkness once more. As well as she could, she called to him, “Sherman …,” and the fear and anger and longing grew so intense that her teeth chattered. “Why didn’t you take me with you?” She lurched up through the dark, betrayed and forsaken. “Why didn’t you take me?” Her chattering teeth chopped her words in two. She wanted to get up; she found an edge to the place where she lay. Something metallic crashed to the floor and the scream rising out of her was like that of a trapped animal, a forlorn and vicious bawling.
A door flew open and, streaming in through the light, white shapes flocked toward her like the hosts of God. “Don’t take me!” she shrieked. She flailed out against them, still screaming and trying to talk, but they gently pinned her down and gave her a shot with a needle. As the shroud of her loneliness overtook her, she heard one of them say, “It’s the medicine making you say crazy things. You shouldn’t try to talk, Mamie … You’re not making sense. You don’t want people to think you’re crazy … now do you?”
After that night, it would be a very long time before Mamie Abbott again tried to speak of her hope and her terror, her love and her wrath.
3
She had seen it before in the picture show when the projectionist got the reels mixed up and backward—the fragments swooping up, the sloshed coffee flying back into the cup pieces, the teetering cup of coffee restored to perfection on the arm of the sofa—but she had never expected to have it happen to her. If life could have reversed itself—if the shattered fragments of a cup lying in a brown spill on the floor could actually reassemble themselves complete and uncracked and full of steaming coffee—then perhaps Leona Hillenbrandt could have explained the sensation of fullness and completion she experienced as she stooped by a hospital bed one evening and little Mamie Abbott, still dangerously in shock and wrapped in bandages, reached out and grasped her thumb. The memory of that evening had haunted and held her ever since.