The bell jangled, and the clerk looked up from what he was doing, as was his custom, to see who had come in. Immediately, the color drained from his face.
“You been tellin’ lies ’bout me to folks round town?” Ellis accused in a menacing voice.
“I don’t tell no lies,” the clerk replied.
“Don’t try to get out of it now. I done heard what you’s tellin’.” Ellis walked up to the counter, nearly leaning over it as he pointed his finger at the clerk. “You’s tellin’ lies ’bout me, and I wanna know why!”
“I can’t hep you. Best if you just move on ’long.”
Ellis glared at the man. “I ain’t a-goin’ nowheres till you tell me what you done said ’bout me, so’s you better start a-talkin’, mister.”
The clerk pursed his lips as if to say, without saying it, that he wasn’t about to talk. He stood where he was with a look of disdain for Ellis.
“I said you tell me what you been sayin’ behind my back!”
“I ain’t got nothin’ to say to you,” the clerk spat.
They were in a gridlock, the clerk haughty in his dismissal and Ellis unwilling to let it go.
He opened his mouth to threaten the clerk again, waited for a split second, muttered, “Ah, what the hell,” and then reached over the counter and dragged the man to him, pounding his fist again and again into the clerk’s smug face.
The man let out a yelp and tried to break away, heading for the door. “He aims to murder me!” he screamed in desperation, blood spouting from his nose.
Ellis held him firm and hit him again. “Shut your mouth!” Ellis commanded, ramming his fist into the clerk’s lips.
The group of men out front heard the commotion and peeked their heads in to see what was going on. They saw Ellis beating the store clerk mercilessly, volleying blow after blow upon him. They rushed in to come to the clerk’s aid. Three of them attempted to pull Ellis away, but he just kept punching and jabbing at the clerk until they managed to get a good hold on his arms and thrust him to the door.
“I’ll kill you, you son of a gun! I’ll kill you!” Ellis shouted.
Spectators from other businesses filed out onto the street to see what was happening, but he didn’t care. They probably all knew too, he thought. It was clear he wouldn’t get another shot in so he shook the men off him that had interceded on the clerk’s behalf.
“Get offen a-me!” he growled. “I’m a-goin’, so get off!” He walked away, shambling heavily, his leg aching.
His next stop was the doctor’s home. He banged on the door, rattling it in its frame, but there was no answer. So he sat on the front steps with his leg stretched out before him, trying to make himself comfortable. He waited for nearly an hour before Doctor Fielding showed. Ellis watched him approach with a guarded expression.
“Good to see you, Ellis. You’ve finally gotten around to that follow up examination?” Doctor Fielding guessed.
Ellis’s black look was not intended to be friendly. He imagined his appearance was not unlike that of his daddy’s over twenty-five years ago. A quarter of a century was a long time to hold onto a secret. He wondered how the doctor had managed it. Now, all was about to be revealed. Just as the body worked to expel a foreign object, a thorn, a splinter, this secret had festered until it was now rising to the surface, demanding attention, wanting to be exposed.
Ellis played dumb. “Sure am,” he lied.
The doctor squeezed past him and opened the front door. “Well, come on in then,” he offered, stepping aside to let Ellis in. Ellis followed him into the examination room and allowed him to remove the bandages from his leg. Doctor Fielding studied it intently, touching it mildly with his fingers, probing it with care. “How’s it feeling?”
“It’s mendin’, I s’pose.”
“Yes, well, it looks as if your wife has taken good care of it. It’s coming along quite nicely.”
“Guess she has.”
“Has she ever considered taking up nursing?” he joked.
“Reckon I don’t know.”
“She seems like a good woman,” the doctor commented, looking Ellis in the eye.
“Funny you should mention it. She tells me you and she done had yourselves a visit while we was here.” Ellis didn’t even blink. He just sat there watching the doctor, trying to gauge his reaction.
“Did she now?”
“Sure did. That ain’t all, neither. She says Mrs. Fielding was there when you delivered me.” He watched the doctor work over his leg for a moment and then asked, “That so?”
“Like I told Mrs. Hooper, I’ve delivered quite a few babies in my time. It gets hard to keep track of all of them.”
“My daddy always tole me you wasn’t round that day. That you was tendin’ to somebody else, and you come after my mama done passed on,” Ellis said.
The doctor looked as if he were thinking hard, trying to call to mind the events surrounding the incident. “Come to think of it, that sounds about right.” The doctor attempted a chuckle, but it didn’t sound natural; it was forced. “You know, it’s been a lot of years now,” he reflected as he worked to re-bandage Ellis’s leg. “It’s hard to remember the details.”
“Where’s Mrs. Fielding?”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Where’s Mrs. Fielding? Maybe she ’members,” Ellis suggested. He could see the doctor squirm ever so slightly.
“I believe she’s quilting over at the church this morning,” he replied. “It wouldn’t do any good anyhow. Why would she remember if I couldn’t?”
“Seems everybody else in town ’members. Seems they done ’membered for you,” Ellis retorted. “So you gonna tell me a tale, or you gonna tell me true ’bout my daddy and my mama?”
“Why do you want it from me if you already know?” Doctor Fielding inquired. He suddenly appeared very old, his gray hair magnified, multiplied before Ellis’s eyes.
“’Cause I don’t know. ’Cause I wanna know the truth. Did my daddy carry on with another woman? Is that what happened?” Ellis barked. “He always tole me my mama died tryin’ to have me. But that ain’t the real story, now, is it? He’s with another woman.”
“What are you talking about? Your daddy with another woman? Who told you such a thing?” the doctor demanded.
“If that ain’t it, then what is? ’Cause Edith Hooper weren’t my mama, now, was she?”
The doctor sat quietly, collecting his thoughts before he proceeded. “Jim Hooper came here looking for me. In a way, I knew that it would come out somehow, that it would come to this. But when I placed you as a tiny babe in Jim Hooper’s arms, it seemed unavoidable. Then the years went by, and I grew to believe that the secret was safe, that you would never discover how it had really happened.”
“And what really happened?” Ellis encouraged, hanging on his every word.
“It all began when he came to bring me back to help his wife. She was going to have a baby, and it was coming early. But I wasn’t here that day. I was out on another call that day.”
“So my mama was Edith?” Ellis wondered, growing confused.
“Mrs. Fielding told him that she would have me come as soon as I could. But by the time I got there, Edith was already long gone. There was nothing I could have done for her.”
“Who’s Lottie Borden then?”
“Let me just finish,” the doctor insisted. “Jim was beside himself. He had just lost his wife. He had just lost his baby. A girl.”
“A girl?”
The doctor continued, as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “A girl. And, well, I suppose he didn’t feel he had a reason to go on. I suppose he blamed me—that I hadn’t been there when Edith needed me. I can’t say as I disagree with that, but he came here one night, intending to kill me.”
“My daddy? I don’t believe it,” Ellis said in mocking disbelief. The man he knew would never have done such a thing. He hadn’t been capable of it.
“You must understand, Ellis, he was lost, and he
was angry, and he was hurting. He thought that I was responsible for all that had happened, and he wanted to punish me. So he showed up here with a gun and got a little loud, and he woke you up.”
“Woke me up?”
“You were sleeping in here, just four days old, and the noise woke you. Someone dies and someone else is born. Strange, isn’t it, how that works?”
“What was I doin’ here for?” Ellis simply could not connect the dots.
“You were born, and the same day your mother died, Ellis.”
“My mother?”
“That’s right. Your mother, Lottie Borden.”
“Lottie Borden was my mama.” It was a statement, not a question.
“We were caring for you until the people from the children’s home in Nashville could come for you. But Jim came that night, and he saw you and wanted you. He said he’d do right by you, that he could care for you better than they could at the children’s home. I knew that to be true, and so…and so I let him take you.”
There was a silence that hung between the two of them, thick and suffocating. Ellis felt his insides collapse, his head working hard to understand what the doctor was telling him. “Jim Hooper weren’t my daddy?”
“No.”
“So this Lottie Borden died, and my real daddy didn’t want me?” Ellis asked.
The Doctor cleared his throat. “I don’t know about that.”
“You said I’s to go to the children’s home. That’s what you said,” Ellis reasoned. “So, my daddy, he don’t want me?”
“Nobody knew who your real daddy was, Ellis. Your mother was only fourteen, a young girl. If Lottie Borden knew, she never told anyone.”
Ellis felt all the energy drain from him. He suddenly understood it now. Before, his mind could not grasp the what and why. But then it all fell together, and he was totally lost. Jim Hooper was not his father. Edith Hooper was not his mother. Everything he had believed to be true up to that point had all been a lie. He was nobody, with no name. It was like he had just disappeared into the crowd of unfamiliar faces and total strangers that he walked among on the street. They meant nothing to him because he did not know them, and now he was one of them, adrift in the crowd. Despair filled him up with darkness.
“Who was she?”
“Lottie Borden?”
“Yes, Lottie Borden,” he barked.
“She was Solomon Borden’s daughter out of Cole County. I didn’t know much of her. She was just a girl that needed a doctor, and I was him.”
The front door opened and shut, and they heard Gilda call out. “Doctor Fielding, you home?”
The doctor got up from his stool and yelled back. “In here, Mrs. Fielding.”
She appeared in the entrance of the examination room. “Oh, Ellis Hooper. How are you doing? You mending well?” she said with a pleasant smile, surprised to see him.
He was shaking, his hands tremoring, fighting to appear composed. “Fine, thank you, ma’am,” he answered with his eyes downcast. If she could sense the tension, she didn’t let on.
“Just finishing up in here,” the doctor informed her. He plucked a tin of salve from his shelf and handed it to Ellis. “Keep putting this on and you should be fine,” he instructed. “You’ll still need to be cautious, mind you, but you seem to be healing as you should.”
“Yessir,” Ellis said, pocketing the tin.
“Is your wife with you?” Gilda asked.
“No, ma’am. She’s at home. I come alone today.”
“Well, we certainly enjoyed getting to know her better. You have a fine woman,” she commented. “You know, she was so worried over you when she brought you in; she’d hardly leave your side. She was just a real sweet girl.”
“I’d best be on my way. I done took up ’nough of your time.” He got up to leave.
“You’ll tell her hello for us, won’t you? Give her our best?”
“Sure I will, Mrs. Fielding.”
He walked out onto the street, trying to remember where he had parked his truck. His head was in a fog. He just didn’t know what to do with himself. As he rambled up and down the streets, he eventually came upon a shop that sold ladies’ things. He looked in the window, spotting a pair of white gloves with a scalloped cuff and little pearl buttons. Without thinking, he went in and bought them, perhaps an attempt at appeasing his guilt.
The clerk smiled in a way that made him uncomfortable. “You want them wrapped?” he asked.
Ellis scowled. “No need.” He took the gloves and shoved them into his coat pocket and left the store, feeling as if he shouldn’t have bought the silly things in the first place.
Once he found the truck, he sat there for a long time, not knowing where to go, feeling like he didn’t belong to anyone or anything. Something inside told him to go home, to go to Clairey. He fought that urge. He didn’t want to see her now. He was humiliated. It wasn’t just what he had said to her, either, although he had regretted the words as soon as they had come out of his mouth. But now, how could he tell her he had no father? How could he tell her about his real mother?
Ellis knew her well enough to know that she wouldn’t care. None of it would affect how she felt about him. It wouldn’t turn her away from him; he knew this. But having to say the words out loud—to actually speak them, to own up to it all—well, he didn’t know if he could do that. He thought the clock would stop and the earth would come to a screeching halt. Life as he knew it would end if he were to admit it to her or to anyone. He felt that he wasn’t the same, that he no longer was Ellis Hooper. He didn’t know who he was, like his body was disconnected from his head.
All these years he had been so sure of himself, his place in the world. He pictured in his mind his name and traits all written neatly on a chalkboard, columns and columns of information, from his dominant characteristics down to the mundane small details. Then, someone came along and wiped it clean with an eraser, and the only thing that was left was the chalk dust in wide sweeping arc marks. Erased in one moment of time, hardly even requiring any effort to do it. In a flash, it was all just gone. Life would never be the same again.
He really didn’t know why, but Ellis, without explanation, decided to visit the Bayard farm. It was not that he craved their company, not that at all. It wasn’t until he pulled up to the house that he realized what he was thinking.
Elvira was sitting in the shade of the porch when he came. She stood up and shielded her eyes from the sun with a pleasing smile on her face. “How is it with you?” she asked.
“Fine, thank you.”
Myrna Bayard came out the door, squinting to see who had come to visit. “That Ellis Hooper?” she asked Elvira.
Ellis came up the stairs with his hat in his hands. “Good day to you,” he said.
“What’d he say?” Myrna had grown hard of hearing in her old age. She had begun to elevate her voice along the way, like a knob being gradually turned up on a radio, because she could not hear the volume of her own speaking.
Elvira put her mouth close to her ear and yelled, “He’s just sayin’ how do.”
“Well, I’ll be. What brings you this a-way?” she asked.
“I’s hopin’ to have a word with Ferg. He round?”
“You say you wanna talk with Fergus?” she shouted.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Myrna turned to Elvira, motioning with her finger for her to leave. “Go on and get him, girl.”
Elvira did as she was told and took off after Fergus.
Once she was out in the yard, Myrna told Ellis, in what she probably thought was a confidential aside, “She ain’t worth shootin’.”
It had been plenty loud enough for Elvira to hear. She gave Ellis a look, as if to say, “See what I’m dealing with?”
“Well, Ellis Hooper, whatcha want with Fergus?” she questioned, sitting down heavily on a chair with a grunt. She was a large woman, her gray hair swept up in an old-fashioned bun. She wore her dress long—the style that had been popular thirty
years ago. Here was a woman who stuck with the old ways, scandalized by the shorter fashion of dresses that girls wore now.
“I’s in town, thought I’d stop on by and see how you-uns is doin’, is all.” He made his voice loud and leaned into her as he spoke so that she could hear.
“You never come by afore, boy,” she informed him, her eyes shrewd and penetrating.
“Well, now, I got some empty time, and I thought I’d come on by and let Fergus know I’s grateful to him and all for what he done for me. It was good of him.”
“Yessir.” She nodded. “He’s a good boy, that ’un. Always was. Why he’d go and murry up with that gal’s a mystery to me. She’s got a nice body; I’ll give’r that.”
“How you been gettin’ on?” Ellis asked politely.
“Ah, my arthritis is actin’ up on me. Gotta keep my legs up ’cause they vex me sore,” she told him, leaning over and rubbing the calves of her plump legs.
“Sorry to hear it.”
“When you get as old as I am, things is bound to go bad,” she complained. “You know, I’s born two years afore the end of the aggression of the northern states.” She began to fan herself with her apron. “Never met my daddy. He’s killed durin’ Antietam in sixty-two without even knowin’ I’s to be born,” she informed him. “Yessir, I done seen it all, and it only gets worse, boy. It only gets worse.”
“Ain’t that a shame,” he said, trying to avoid upsetting her.
“’Course, your kin done fought with ’em yanks,” she said with a frown. “Your daddy’s daddy took up with Tinker Dave Beaty and his bunch, harassin’ and givin’ grief to Champ Ferguson and them that follered him. I named my boy for Champ. Poor Feller got strung up, but he died for the cause,” she said with conviction. “Couldn’t do no better’n that.”
Fergus came up to the house, a look of surprise on his face. Likely he didn’t have many visitors. “Hey, Mama. Hey, Ellis.”
“Fergus,” Ellis acknowledged.
“Whatcha up to?”
“Not much.” He shrugged.
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