by Bill Brooks
When I opened my eyes again, the room was white, smelled medicinal. I tried to sit up but it was as if heavy sharp rocks were lying on my chest. I fell back trying to decipher it all.
A woman in a high-collar dress came and stood next to my bed. She wore a white pinafore over a gray dress. She had an angel’s face with pale blue eyes, a scarf covered her head, but a few sprigs of hair the color of ripened wheat had freed themselves from under the scarf’s edge.
“Don’t try and move,” she said. “You’ve been terribly wounded.”
My thoughts were as scattered as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that have been kicked off a table.
My throat was so parched I could barely swallow and my tongue was scratchy against the roof of my mouth. She poured me a cup of water from a pitcher, and then put one hand under my head, tilting it upward so that I could drink.
“Slowly,” she said. “Not too much now.” She had an Irish brogue.
The water was not cold but it tasted like salvation, and I tried to get more of it before she pulled it away.
“You can’t drink too much,” she said. “You’ve chest wounds, so you must be careful.”
I had a mind full of questions that needed answers, but before I could get any of them asked, I sank into the darkness again. And when I opened my eyes later, the long room with beds lined up either side was dim and nearly dark. I could hear the groans of men, could smell the smells of sickness and all that goes with sickness.
It went on and on like that—waking up and going under again—for what seemed like forever. Sometimes the blue-eyed woman would be there, and sometimes another, and sometimes a fellow with silver hair and mustaches. They’d roll me over and change the bedding and give me water and sometimes soup to swallow. I wanted to scream that I couldn’t breathe, that everything inside me felt broke. But I couldn’t and I didn’t.
Then I started to remember the shadow in the doorway of the room and about Sara and what had led up to that moment and what the man had said: You looking for me you son-of-a-bitch. Then nothing until I woke in the white room.
Days passed and I slowly started to put things together. I had learned that the man with the silver mustaches and hair was a doctor and that the women were nuns and the place was a Catholic infirmary somewhere a few miles from town.
I learned some of this from a big black man who looked like a giant and had a head full of hair like cotton waiting to be picked. His name he said was Lincoln Johnson and that he was an orderly.
He was soft-spoken and deep-voiced. He helped me from my bed to the privy and back again and got me water and brought me trays of food once I could eat solids and keep them down. He asked me if I liked sitting in the sunshine and fresh air, and I said that I did, and he helped me go outside where I eased down into a wood rocker beneath a big cottonwood whose trunk was smooth as bone and spotted green and ivory.
“I sure could use a drink of something,” I said when I got up the courage.
“You shake in your sleep,” he said. “I seen you do it.”
“Nightmares,” I said.
“You got the whiskey fever,” he said. “Had a brother who caught it, too. It killed him. They found him this one time sitting in a snowbank with a half-drunk bottle of snakehead liquor clutched in his hand. I had to go up there and get him and bring him home to his mama so we could bury him proper and the preacher could pray over him. You got the whiskey fever.”
“I still could use a drink,” I said.
“We all could use something or other,” he said, and looked off toward the road that ran past the place like a wide brown scar that could be seen through the arched entry of a whitewashed wall of plaster that encircled the infirmary. Others sat out in the compound, too. Some of them dozed in their wheelchairs and others stared startle-eyed off into nothing at all. Some limped on crutches, and for others it didn’t seem like there was anything wrong with them.
The nuns went about speaking to them, reading to them, writing letters for some of them.
“These are some kind people,” I said.
“They good people, sure enough,” Lincoln said. Then: “I’s the one found you out on that road yonder. Thought you was dead. Butt naked like the day you was born and bleeding. I saw you and thought . . . Lord, how’d this body show up here of a sudden? Then I seen your fingers twitch and knew they wasn’t any dead man twitched his fingers.”
“I don’t remember much of it,” I said, “except the shadow of a man in my doorway one night.”
“Well, he shot you good. Three times and I never did know any man who got shot three times and lived, though three is a lucky number some say.”
“Nobody who’s ever been shot three times would say it was a lucky number,” I said.
“Reckon it depends on how you look at it.”
“There was a woman I was with that night,” I said.
“There always is when it comes to bad troubles between mens.”
“No, I don’t think he shot me because of her.”
“Why do you think he shot you, then?”
“Because he knew I was looking for him,” I said.
“Why was you looking for him, you don’t mind my asking?”
“He killed a friend of mine and I aimed to repay the favor.”
“He sounds like a killing fool, for he done nearly killed you, too.”
“Nearly ain’t close enough,” I said. “You got makings I could roll myself a shuck with?”
“I wish I could help you out, but I don’t smoke,” he said. “I doubt you could roll yourself a carpet the way you shake. I don’t have the habit, but maybe . . .”
“That’s OK,” I said, but my nerves felt like freshly strung wire singing in the wind.
“I gots to go back to work,” he said. “Just flag me down when you want to go back inside.”
I thanked him and watched him lumber off. He moved slow, like he was carrying a great weight on his shoulders, and I figured he probably was in one way or another given his age and what all he’d seen and been through.
Then Sister Margaret came round the corner and she was carrying a small book in her hands and she sat next to me and said: “How are you doing today, Mister Blood?”
“How do you even know my name?” I said.
“Why you told it to me, don’t you remember?”
“I tend to forget certain things, then they come to me, and then they go away again.”
“It’s probably the trauma of being shot nearly dead,” she said. “Who could blame you?”
Somewhere a bird sang way up in the branches of the cottonwood that allowed the sun to filter down and fall like patterns of lace upon the ground.
“You need a shave, Mister Blood.”
“I’d just as soon let my beard grow,” I said.
“It’s unsanitary,” she said.
“Not if I wash it good.”
She nodded her head gently as though she understood she couldn’t win that particular case with me.
“Would you like me to read to you a bit?” she said.
“Sure,” I said.
She opened the book.
“Anything in particular?” she said.
“Whatever strikes your fancy, Sister, I’m not choosy.”
She looked at me with an arched brow.
“Just pick something at random,” I said.
“OK.”
She started to read: “‘And it came to pass in an evening tide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house, and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon.’” She paused.
“Go on,” I said. “It sounds like a fine story.”
“Perhaps it is better that you rest now and enjoy the fine weather,” she said, a bit of crimson crawling up her neck and cheeks.
“No, please read more of that.”
Her finger traced the spot where she’d left off.
“‘And David sent messengers,
and took her; and she came in unto him, and he lay with her; for she was purified from her uncleanness: and she returned unto her house.’”
She stopped again and turned her face away, and I knew she was embarrassed reading such things to a man.
“I think I shall read to you another time,” she said.
“It’s OK, Sister,” I said. “That’s some fine writing, whoever wrote it, and sounded even finer hearing you read it.”
She stood and said: “I have to go now. I’ll see you again later.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and watched her hurry off. I felt damned bad about her embarrassment.
I was wearied from just the little effort to talk and listen. I closed my eyes there in the cooling shade of the big tree and listened to the bird singing its lonely song and knew what it was feeling, for I was feeling it, too.
I soon found myself walking in the land of the dead. My boy stood at the end of a long road, the light around him like a blaze of fire.
“Papa!” he called.
I tried to run to him but I couldn’t get any closer. He just stood there calling for me. I came out of the dream like a man drowning.
The sky off to the east was a purple haze and the compound empty of everyone but me. I thought if I could I’d get up and start walking, but I couldn’t.
Then the big man came lumbering toward me in the dying light and he eased his large frame down next to mine and said—“Here.”—and extended his hand and in it were the makings of a cigarette already rolled. I took it with shaking fingers, and then he struck a match he’d pulled from somewhere I couldn’t even see, and the match head flared into a flame and I lighted the shuck off it before he snapped it out. The light gleamed against his dark blue-black skin and jumped into his wet eyes before he snuffed it.
“How’s that do you?” he said when I’d taken a draw that crawled down into my sore chest like a muskrat trying to chew its way out.
I coughed and held my fist against my breastbone.
“It tastes just like sweet sorrow,” I said.
“I bet it does.”
“You didn’t bring some whiskey, too, did you?” I said.
He shook his head, the cotton hair soft white in the dying evening.
“A man would have to be some sort of prophet to find anything ’round here to drink stronger than coffee or water,” he said. “He’d have to turn the water into wine he wanted a drink.”
He smiled then and his teeth gleamed white in his dark face.
“I guess I amuse you,” I said.
“Some,” he said.
“Well, it’s worth it for this here,” I said, putting the cigarette to my lips and giving it another try, prepared this time for the deeper breath.
“Best get you back inside so they can feed you,” he said.
“You live here?” I said.
“No,” he said. “I live yonder.” He pointed a thick finger. “Got a wife waiting on me ever’ night with supper on the table. Mostly fried chicken, chickpeas, mashed up potatoes, gravy, corn when it’s available, squashes. Yum, yum.”
“And I get some more turtle soup,” I said.
He grinned all the more.
“It’s good for you, I hear,” he said.
“You like it?” I said.
He shook his head.
“I’d have to be pretty hard up to eat water had a turtle cooked up in it,” he said.
“Yeah, me, too.”
He helped me back inside and that night I supped on soup that had a turtle cooked up in it and thought about Lincoln Johnson eating fried chicken.
It didn’t seem fair.
Chapter Fourteen
Sometime that next morning Lincoln Johnson stopped by my bed, looked at me with those wary, weary eyes.
“I told Bess about you,” he said.
“Who’s Bess?”
“My missus. I told her you was scrawny as that chicken she wrung the neck of and cooked up and how I thought you could stand a decent meal and she said . . . ‘Do he like chicken?’ And I said . . . ‘Show me a man who don’t.’ And she said to bring you on home for supper if you’re up for it and I told her I’d ask you. So, that’s what I’m doing, asking . . . do you want to come to supper tonight?”
I’d had a rough night and was feeling the aftereffect, like my skin was raked over and my bones were trying to heal but wouldn’t.
“I might not live till tonight,” I said.
“I seen your kind before,” he said. “Tough as old boot leather, tough as a rooster you can’t catch nor kill with a hatchet. You’ll make it.”
“You know more than me, then.”
“These folks here is good and generous, but truth is, they don’t have much to give other than the time and care. Food here is poorly and too little of it. Turtle soup, ha! Who can live on turtle soup and bread and water?”
“To tell the truth that soup tastes like something they wash socks in,” I said.
He looked around to see if anyone was listening. “You didn’t hear that come outta my mouth.”
“I don’t know where my clothes are,” I said.
“Remember I told you that you didn’t have no clothes on when I found you.”
“Well, I don’t reckon it’s proper I go to supper with no clothes on,” I said.
He looked at me oddly.
“I got work out in front of me yet, but later on, when I get off, I’ll come by and bring you some clothes, then take you on to my place. Bess will cook you up some good eating. Put some meat back on your bones.”
“Why would you do such kindness like that to a stranger?”
His eyes stayed on me like a hunting dog pointing a bird in the bush.
“You mean why would I do such a kindness to a white man?”
“No. I mean a stranger . . . somebody you don’t know anything about.”
“You know what He say, don’t you?”
“Who is he?”
Lincoln Johnson pointed toward the ceiling.
“Man upstairs?”
“You mean God?”
“I mean Jesus, yes.”
“I’m not exactly any expert on that business,” I said.
“‘What you do to the least of these you do to me.’ That’s what He say. I’m a Christian man, Mister Blood. You a Christian?”
“No, I’m not anything.”
“Yes, you are. You just don’t know yet what you are.”
I watched the big man lumber down the aisle between the beds, the one he had most recently mopped and gleamed with the shadow of him. I saw him stopping here and there to take a chamber pot, pour a patient a glass of water, and so forth. I wondered what was the measure of a man to empty chamber pots and mop floors and care for the sick the way that Lincoln Johnson did it?
I shucked into a cotton robe provided for the primary purpose of having me not strut about naked—not that I was able to do much strutting, naked or otherwise—and went outside to sit in the sun. I still craved a drink of bourbon, but the craving was less so now.
Sitting there in the courtyard, I saw Sister Margaret push a wheelchair with a one-legged man in it. She said something to him after she’d parked him in the shade, then went back inside. I watched the man reach into his robe pocket and take out his makings. Well, nobody had any whiskey around that place, so I limped over.
“I sure could stand a smoke myself,” I said casually. He was a young man with dark hair and a goatee. Handsome as an actor.
He looked me up and down, grinned, and handed over his pouch and papers.
“Help yourself,” he said. His voice was soft as magnolia and deeply Southern.
“Thank you kindly,” I said.
I fixed myself a shuck, then lighted it off the one the young man was smoking. Inhaling still hurt my chest to where it felt a little like my breastbone was snapping like a dry twig.
“You ever smoke one of them things before?” the young man asked, watching me hold myself against the coughing.
; “More’n than I probably should have,” I said. “It just makes it a little harder when you’ve been shot through the middle. Made my lungs sore.”
“That’s what I heard about you,” he said. “I sort of make it my business to know among whom I might be dying. You’ve heard it said, of course, that a man is known by the company he keeps.” He smiled and smoked, carelessly, as though he had not a care in the world.
“I suppose you’re like Vitter,” he said.
“Never heard of him,” I said.
“Oh, Vitter was a fellow came through here in the early spring. He’d been shot about like you were . . . several times through the body by a jealous husband. Vitter prided himself in regaling us all with stories about himself and the wives of other men. It was almost like a badge of courage to him to get shot. Well, like yourself, he’d been shot several times and he was actually getting better and probably would have walked out of here a whole man until that same husband caught him going to the privy and gave him one more lead pill. And like that . . . Vitter was killed.”
The young man snapped his fingers, then fell silent for a time. Then, while he fixed himself another shuck, he began to talk again.
“I lost my leg sawing down a tree,” he said. “I thought it would fall one way and it fell the other.”
“Damn’ poor luck.”
“I should have just sawn my leg off and saved me the labor of that damned big oak taking it.”
“Might have been the best way,” I said, not wanting to sound disagreeable, but finding some humor in it, too.
“Doc says he knows of a man in Cheyenne will make me a new one out of wood. Wood! Wood took my leg and now I am fated to end up with wood for a leg. Damnedest thing, ain’t it? I’d like it if they made me a wooden leg out of the tree I sawed down. Now that would be some justice, wouldn’t it?”
“I knew a man had a peg leg once,” I said, remembering Peg Leg Harry Lee who was a Mississippi riverboat captain.
“How’d he take to it, walking with a peg leg?”
“Seemed to take to it fine,” I said.
He studied on that thought for a time, both of us there in the shade, smoking, looking at our futures.
“They got some good-looking women around here,” the young man said then, exhaling streams of smoke through his nostrils. “Trouble is, they’re all married to Jesus and won’t a one of them consider a proposal from a real man. I might only have one leg, but at least I’m not dead. You’d think a woman would want a live one-legged man over a two-legged ghost, wouldn’t you?”