by Jim Grimsley
Mama rubbed your forehead with her cool hand. “If you won’t ask for the car, I will. I don’t have to talk to that man, I’ll ask his wife. I don’t have any intention of sitting in this room watching this youngun bleed to death.” Wordlessly she bathed you, lifting you gingerly to change your shirt, pulling on clean pants without disturbing the system of towels where the blood collected. Papa picked his teeth. He drew a glass of water at the sink; you could hear every swallow as he drained it. Mama took your dirty clothes away. Papa turned to you, the black window framing his face. He pulled the coat together and buttoned it with the one hand. At the back door he stopped. “Tell your Mama to finish getting you ready as quick as she can. I’ll be back in a little bit.”
But when Mama came back you didn’t have to say anything at all. She nodded at the empty room, smiling softly.
You dozed again in the near-silence that followed, hearing only Mama’s soft footfalls and her quiet gathering of clothes into a paper bag, some for her and some for you. She ran water to bathe her face after pulling the curtains closed. You drifted in and out of a cloud, watching her sometimes and forgetting her others, aware mostly of the light and the warm trickle from your tongue to the soft towels. Once you heard her hum a hymn from church. She never liked to sing but she would sometimes hum a tune.
Later, you never knew how long, Papa came back. He brought Mrs. Rejenkins with him, fresh from sleep, her silver hair screwed onto pink plastic rollers. She wore pink fur bedroom shoes and a pink quilted housecoat that descended from her shoulders like the sides of a pyramid. Her broad face glowed red and ruddy; her broad hands showed knobby, sharp-backed bones. These were the hands that polished Mr. Rejenkins’ shoes. Mrs. Rejenkins ran across the room and hugged Mama close. “Poor baby! When Bobjay told me what happened I had to rush right over here. You must be scared to death.”
Mama stiffened when the woman touched her, and slowly backed away. “I thank you for the trouble,” she said, “but there wasn’t any need for you to bother yourself.”
“Bother? Lord knows, you’re the one with trouble. I’d be a poor Christian if I didn’t do whatever I could to help.” Mrs. Rejenkins tilted her hair curlers in various directions as she spoke. “Imagine the foolishness of it. Bobjay told me what happened. It’s a wonder that child didn’t kill himself on that windshield—”
“Windshield?”
Papa gave Mama a warning look. He said slowly, “It’s a crazy thing to happen, him falling like that.”
Mrs. Rejenkins glanced at you sorrowfully. “Poor little thing. I guess it’s no need to holler at you now, is it? You’re being punished enough. You won’t go climbing on no more frosty car hoods, will you? It’s a lucky thing you hit it with the back of your head and not the front, or else God knows how hurt you’d be right now. Likely you’d have broke your nose to boot.”
“He can’t talk,” Mama said. “He ought not to move his tongue.”
“Oh honey, don’t I know!” Mrs. Rejenkins said. “Look at that blood.”
“The car’s running,” Papa said. “We ought to go.”
Mama rubbed her bare arms. “I got to wake up the other younguns first.”
Mrs. Rejenkins said, “Now you let them younguns sleep, Ellen. As soon as Bobjay told me what happened I says to him, ‘Bobjay, who’s gonna look out for them other babies you got while you go to the hospital?’ Ain’t that what I said, Bobjay? He acted foolish then, like he hadn’t even thought of it, which don’t surprise me, because men never do think practical when there’s trouble. I says to myself, them younguns will worry that poor woman to death in that hospital, and lord knows she don’t need any more worry. So I thinks to myself, why can’t I go over there and sit up with them? My husband sleeps like a hog in the mud, he don’t care if anybody is next to him or not. We ain’t got us no little babies, so I’d love to take care of them.”
Mama thanked Mrs. Rejenkins and told Papa, “Carry him careful. Can you walk steady enough?”
“My husband loves your little children,” Mrs. Rejenkins said. “He loves to come over here and see them. Did you know that? That’s why he does all these little repairs himself, when he’s got the money to hire some trash to do it if he wanted to. It wouldn’t cost much of anything, there being so much trash around without work, and this house being so old.”
She stopped talking and blinked at Mama slowly, exactly the way a cow blinks, chewing grass. Mama told her where the cereal was for Allen’s breakfast and showed her Duck’s bottles and wrote down the time Amy needed to get up to catch the school bus. Papa looked down at you then, Danny, and laid his heavy hand on your forehead. The rough, stiff skin felt strangely pleasant. “You’ll be all right,” he said. “We’ll get you to the doctor real fast.”
He knelt, and you leaned onto his firm shoulder. He smelled of kerosene and sweat and afterwards of your blood, since in walking he jogged the towels this way and that, spilling the dark stuff on his shirt. When he lay you down on the car seat he wiped the back of his neck, muttering.
At the hospital Papa parked under a rectangle of gray concrete with the name of the hospital in raised letters on the front. Papa lifted you from the car into harsh fluorescent light. As you settled against his sweaty shirt you could feel his heart pound. Mama followed close this time, holding the towel to catch the blood and brushing your hair back from your eyes. “There’s not a thing to be afraid of,” she said. “It’s a hospital and they can help you here. You been to one before even if you don’t remember it.”
Papa paused at the gray metal door, a cool glaze on his eyes. Mama watched him. Papa coughed and spat. “I don’t like the way this place smells.”
“It won’t be so bad once you get inside. Don’t let it worry you.”
He shook his head, half turning away. “I don’t think I can stand it, Ellen.”
Mama watched him silently. A softness stole across her face, that she tried to suppress. She reached a hand to brush Papa’s stubbled cheek. At the touch he drew back, as if struck. Something in her tenderness startled him. Only after a moment did he lean into her hand. “Funny,” he said slowly, “how this door makes me remember things.”
“You don’t have to come inside if you don’t want to. You can wait in the car.”
He shook his head, still watching her, doubtful of her tenderness. With his piece of arm he pushed open the door.
Inside a nurse asked, “Are you the people with the hemophiliac? A lady called to say you were on your way.” The nurse leaned close to your mouth, as if she expected to find the blood a different color. The wings of her white cap brushed your cheek. In the warm corridor you felt sleepy and heavy. You watched two painted girls with caps pinned to mountains of teased hair writing in charts by the light of goose-necked lamps. You yawned in the nurse’s face and she took a quick step back.
They carried you to a room where a little black boy slept on a large metal bed, tubes descending into his thin arms and plunging into his nostrils. You lay on a bed like his beside the window. The mattress felt different from any mattress you’d ever slept on before, as if each part of it knew exactly how much each part of you would weigh. Mama tucked the sheet under you chin and smiled. “Now you don’t have a thing to do except lay there and stop bleeding. You think you can do that for your Mama?”
At the foot of the bed you heard Papa whisper to the nurse about insurance. The nurse said wanly that she really didn’t have anything to do with the financial part of the hospital. But she was sure arrangements would be made when the time came.
A doctor shone a light in your mouth, talking to you quietly about a little boy like you at home, who had a red plastic firetruck and a G.I. Joe doll. A nurse wheeled in a creaking steel rack with a swaying sack of blood at its top. She rubbed the back of your hand with alcohol. The doctor touched the small blue veins with the tip of his finger. He tied a rubber hose around your wrist. The nurse said, “What a quiet little boy. Most little boys don’t like it when we do this.” The doctor t
old her that big boys like you didn’t get scared at the sight of a teeny tiny needle. When the nurse tore the needle from its sterile wrap, Mama said, “Be real still now. It’ll sting a little.”
You watched the steel shaft. It bit your vein, sliding inside stiff and cold. From the swinging sack the red blood dropped into your arm.
After that you slept. But all night behind your sleep you heard Papa talking to Mama in a low voice you couldn’t quite understand. Mama’s answers were sometimes clear. “You got to work, Bobjay. Me and the youngun both know that. Nobody expects you to stay … I’m sorry you won’t get any sleep. You should have thought of that before you decided it was such a good night to have a fight … That boy is not going to bother Danny and neither is his Mama … It was a strange lie you decided to tell Mrs. Rejenkins, when any fool would know a fall that hard would split his skull wide open and not do half the damage to the windshield …”
Every time you woke Mama stroked your forehead to keep you still, while the nurses changed the bottles of blood. Once you saw Mama walking Papa out of the room, Papa saying, “I smell blood every place I go, even in the cafeteria.”
“You got to go to work. I don’t want to hear about the smell any more, or else I’ll be smelling it all day myself.”
You woke and slept. You sipped broth through thin straws. The nurse taped your hand to a board to keep the needle still and you watched the raw blood drop along the tube into your arm, and felt it run out your tongue into the towels. When the towels were full of blood the nurse changed them, or else Mama changed them if the nurse wasn’t around. Once you woke to see Mama and the nurse holding a towel to the light. The center was completely red. The nurse said coolly, “You really can’t judge from the color. The blood spreads when it soaks in. A little blood makes a big stain.”
Sometimes the black boy cried at night, and his Mama couldn’t always stay with him to comfort him. Those nights Mama crossed the room to stroke his forehead, telling him, “It’s all right, boy. Your Mama loves you and she’s coming back tomorrow, she said so, didn’t she? It’s all right, we’re here in the room with you, nobody’s going to hurt you while we’re here, not with all these doctors running around.”
The boy drew long slow breaths and finally quieted. Mama came back to your bed to watch the blood roll away.
Papa visited, left, returned. He spoke to you gently at the side of the bed, telling stories he hoped you’d like to hear, about crawling under some woman’s house to patch a leak in her gas line and coming on a rattlesnake halfway underneath. It was shedding its skin against the cinderblock foundation. Papa crushed its head against the blocks with the heel of his work boot. Or he told you about the fight he had one Saturday night at the Marine base, when him and Ernest T. (who smoked White Owl cigars) went down to this bar where Japanese women served the drinks while black women danced on these little stages in costumes covered with sequins and embroidery. Papa said a Marine with a blue scar over his eye picked a fight with him—called him a one-armed son of a bitch and told him to get the hell away from where people had to look at him. Papa invited the man to make him leave and they stepped outside into an alley. The Marine cut Papa on the cheek with a switchblade, but Papa busted a wine bottle on the Marine’s head, and when the man keeled over Papa kicked his balls flat with the same work boots that had crushed the rattlesnake’s head.
Papa enjoyed stories like that, and you smiled for him in all the right places. But he seemed many miles distant when he spoke, and after a while so did all the nurses and doctors, so did the little black boy’s crying, so did Mama. You only wanted to gaze ahead at the white wall opposite you, seeing only the whiteness, hearing nothing, thinking nothing, feeling only the stillness of your body every place but the torn vein where the blood oozed out. You couldn’t have said it in words, but you understood then that your blood had always wanted to be free of your body, that it wanted to leave you flat and empty on this bed. No one else knew about it. They watched your moist, sticky mouth as if the thing that unfolded from it was something they had never heard of before. Only Mama understood. She knew you might be leaving. But she never cried, not once, and neither did you.
The veins in your hands closed up. The doctor moved the needle. You watched the swift scooping motion of the curved steel tip into the pale blue snake under your skin. When the nurse left you alone you touched the mound of flesh the needle raised. Mama stayed beside you day after day. Papa brought changes of clothes for her, told her stories about Amy and Allen and Duck, at home being taken care of by Mama’s sister Delia. Aunt Delia sent you comic books and a tin jet with an engine that sparked and crackled whenever the landing wheels turned. Mama didn’t like the loud noise it made. You set it on the table next to the bed, Mama saying, “You have to be quiet in a hospital.”
You slept and woke again. Mama bent over you, parting your lips, an ugly look on her face. Behind her the first doctor talked to other, older doctors. Papa stood by the window smoking a cigarette. Mama spoke earnestly in his ear, touching the piece of arm.
You dreamed of dark rivers lined with mossy trees, of dense undergrowth alive with small animals: monkeys with orange fur and curled tails, parrots with wings that burst like rainbow bombs in flight, deer with soft tongues and eyes like flower petals. You swam in the river, splashing water backward with your hands or upward with your feet. You dove underwater to watch the slow fish swim by, or else you swam close to the bank in the darkness beneath the arches of weeds, where the water moccasins nested.
Or else you dreamed of clouds. You dreamed you were no longer a child, you were something other, something you assigned no name but only imagined: light-boned, colored like ivory, skimming the clouds on broad white-feathered wings that flashed in the clear air. The dream had no form or story, only the rhythm, the thick beat of your wings in the solid air. Your shadow skimmed the clouds. Sometimes you flew alone drinking mouthfuls of wind, reaching forward with your wings and scooping back, the whole sky empty around you—but sometimes there were others, sometimes thousands of you, above, below, from side to side, lost in mountainous hangs of cloud, wings beating up and down, endless pulse …
Once during this dream you heard Papa’s voice, and then Mama’s answering: “I found us a new house already,” Papa said. “You can quit pouting around like I brought the whole goddamn world to an end.”
“I’m not pouting,” Mama said. “I’ve got other things on my mind.”
“He had it coming. No telling how he would have treated you this summer.”
“Don’t act like a hero,” Mama said. “You did it. I don’t care why. All I know is you couldn’t have picked a better time to get thrown in jail, with your son lying in the hospital.”
“That fat son of a bitch had it coming to him. He can shove his house and his whole goddamn farm right up his own ass.”
“You’re lucky he didn’t press charges on you.”
Papa said, in a new tone, “Delia wants to stay with you here one night.”
“What will you do then? Who will you fight with that night?”
“Well if you’re going to get smart, Miss Priss, maybe I’ll start with that doctor friend of yours, the one you’re always talking about like he’s Jesus.”
“He ain’t nothing to me but a doctor, and if you don’t know that by now I’m sorry for you.”
“Maybe he don’t mean nothing but you sure do blush when I talk about him.”
“It’s what I ought to expect from you. You never quit. It ain’t enough you leave me here all day to watch this youngun bleed, and him laying here so weak he can’t say a word. No, you got to make me feel nasty about the only person that talks to me the whole day …”
You listened, you heard everything, you knew the words meant something to them but none of it meant anything to you. Nothing reached you in the dream, where you had become the other, flying with broad wings over continents of pure white clouds, not one stain of red. You listened to them talk as if they were a drea
m, and the dream of the other was real, the land of red lakes bordered with silver trees, lines of slim ladies and gentlemen walking along the banks, filling the sky with the soft fogs of their voices. The dream changed and you became new things, things you never remembered afterward.
You remember a long car ride and then a new hospital with forest green walls, in a city whose name you would always remember. Mars Hill. The doctors here spoke to you often. They called you by name. “How are you this morning, Danny? Is that tongue still leaking, Danny? Don’t you worry, Danny boy, we’ll have it stopped soon, there’s nothing to worry about.”
You smiled back at them, feeling the stickiness. Their faces made you want to laugh, even Mama’s. The blood kept falling, no matter what they said or did, and you were sure that even here, even in this new hospital, nothing would change. All day long you felt the blood running down your chin, away into the air, a smoke that vanished in front of you.
You slept and woke and finally did not wake, easing in and out of grayness. Sometimes you saw the shapes of faces, no longer caring to see more, feeling their presence as one feels the brush of a fly’s legs. You stared into the wall behind Papa’s head, over Mama’s shoulder, into a place neither of them saw: a river, a gate, a long stairway; you were following someone, following music, following the bare back of a man whose face you might recognize if you could catch him and make him turn around. You hurried after him because you wanted him to give you something, you didn’t know what it would be.
Mama said, “Danny if you drink this cocola your mouth will taste better.”
Papa said, “If you get better I’ll buy you a little guitar.”
Mama said, “Don’t be such a quiet little boy, talk to me.”
Papa said, “He don’t care, he’s just going to lay there.”
Mama said, “Darken the blinds again, so he can sleep.”
Papa said, “It seems like if he’s going to—if there’s nothing we can do about it—it seems like we’re going to pay a lot of money for him to lay here like this.”