by Lisa Samson
Dr. Seymour smiled.
“And I can’t say no, either,” Claudius said. “When you going to bring her?”
“I came to ask you first. How about Wednesday?”
It was Monday.
“We’ll be ready.”
He wouldn’t have recognized her if he’d seen her on the street. Dowel thin, her skin stretched over her cheekbones like a latex glove over the knuckles of a fist, she tried to smile when he hurried across the driveway to Michael Seymour’s old station wagon.
“May-May!”
She raised a hand, and when he pulled her into his arms, she went limp and whispered, “Oh, Claudius!”
“Now, now, May-May, I’m here. It will all be all right.”
Tears filled Michael’s eyes as they met Claudius’s gaze over May’s shoulder. “I’ll get her suitcase,” he said.
He opened the hatchback and pulled out a bright pink rolling suitcase, a glaring shade of the old May, not this colorless child in his arms.
“Let’s get inside,” Claudius said, hating to pull back.
The two o’clock sun shone hot, as it always did in mid-August. It would feel better inside.
Michael followed them into the house, gently setting the suitcase by the bottom of the stairs.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Claudius asked, always mindful of the manners Violet taught him.
May shook her head.
Michael stuffed his hands in his pockets, a fatherly defeat written all over his face, the words I tried seeming to come from his eyes and the words I failed just on their tail.
An awkward silence filled the space between them.
“Well, I guess I’d better go, then,” Michael said, running a hand over his head. “Elisabeth—my wife—has a doctor’s appointment at four.”
“I’ll take care of her.” Claudius laid a hand on May’s shoulder.
“Thank you.” Her father turned May to face him. “You going to be okay, shug?”
She nodded, whispering, “Yes.”
They said their goodbyes, Claudius’s heart breaking for the two of them. For himself a little too. He and May watched her dad turn around at the end of the drive and pull away.
“You want to rest?” he asked.
“More than anything.”
“Let’s get you up to your room, then.” He grabbed the handle of the suitcase. She took his arm, and they climbed the narrow, steep stairs together.
At the top she stopped and rested her head on his shoulder. “I’m so tired, Claudius.”
“I know, honey. But we’ve got nothing but time.”
He turned down the bed as she found a T-shirt in her suitcase. “You sure you wouldn’t rather be home?”
She shook her head. “My mom is sick. She doesn’t need this.”
“Your father seems like a good man.”
“He is. He doesn’t deserve this either. He was trying so hard. But I just need to be, Claudius. To rest in peace.”
“You can do that here, honey.”
Poor baby. He left the room.
Checking on her an hour later, he found her resting on her side, back toward the door. She’d been wearing a long-sleeved shirt and pants upon her arrival, but she’d taken off the shirt, just a yellow T-shirt now, and her arm rested atop the light summer blanket. He ventured forward.
Lordymercy. He thought he might have whispered the word. But then, some prayers go beyond sound and straight to the heart of God. The sleek red lines on her arm were just memories of something gone deeper in, and the skin in-between was still puffed, as if someone had stuffed her arm a little too much with down feathers. Gone were the sculpted lines. He knew her arms were, in some manner, ugly, deformed not so much from appearance as from the intent of those who wounded her. And he felt sad, because he knew women well enough to know she’d never bare those arms in public again. Maybe to the sun. When she was alone. Maybe then.
In the kitchen Claudius slid his mother’s old remedy book from a shelf on the hoosier near the door. He’d never concocted her ointment himself. Didn’t really have those herbs growing. But he’d find them somewhere, even if he had to drive to Lexington or, heaven help him, Cincinnati. He’d been there once, on a class trip when he was fourteen, and he’d prayed to God he’d never have to go back. So far God had proved himself faithful!
His little freezer was full of dinners, thanks to Sister Ruth, who had made herself useful from the moment he told her May was coming home. No need to kill one of the ladies. Although Frances was ready to go. If he didn’t take her soon, she wouldn’t even be good for jerky. Maybe she already was jerky, come to think of it. He smiled.
—Okay, let’s find those herbs.
Thursday afternoon, May having slept through the last evening and into the night and still not having risen, Claudius expressed his concern to Ruth, who’d come to keep vigil with him.
“She’ll be fine,” Ruth assured him from her seat in his living room, her lap hidden under another rug she was hooking.
So he piled Scout and Girlfriend in the Galaxy, and off they went to Imogene Meyer’s herb farm near Lexington, on a perfectly decent Thursday afternoon too.
May slept on. Through that evening and into the night.
He checked on her every few hours just to make sure she was still breathing.
Friday morning he received a letter from the cardiologist in Lexington. He’d had a spell a few weeks ago, liked to have died he was in so much pain. Claudius had never felt anything like that before, nausea, pain just beneath his rib cage, and the sweat! So he did some tests. Ran around all day with something hanging around his neck. Oh, he really didn’t want to remember it all. He never did trust doctors.
The letter held good news, mostly. His heart was fine, but he had a medical condition called Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome. It wasn’t even bad enough to be medicated, and if he ever needed a surgical procedure, it would most likely be outpatient.
Tucked into the envelope, a folded handout was ready to tell him all he needed to know. He tucked it into his pocket and headed over to Ruthie’s. She’d make heads and tails of it in half the time it would take him.
“Well, as near as I can tell, it’s an electrical problem.” She removed her reading glasses and set them on her glass-topped kitchen table.
Ruthie kept up on fashions. He liked the mustard yellow walls of her kitchen and the bouquet of sunflowers in the middle of the table. He’d grow some of those come spring too. May-May seemed the type to enjoy the sight of a sunflower.
“What’s that mean?”
“It means the electrical impulses in your heart get stuck and go round and round in one chamber, sort of, your heart speeds up to the point you can’t even hear a beat, and if it’s bad enough and you can’t get to the hospital in time—” She ran a pointed index finger across her neck and emitted a sound like crrrreeeek.
“Lordymercy!”
“The good news is, the chance of that happening is slim to none.”
He squeezed his bottom lip. “Well, that’s a relief.” He’d always had more than his fair share of good luck.
He checked on May around ten, as soon as he returned, and she looked about to stir. Her breathing had changed, and so he figured the smell of good country cooking would finish the job.
Hiking up his pants, he tried to think about what he’d like had he gone through all she did, including the heavy drinking in Lexington. Something salty and substantial.
He gathered the day’s eggs, snipped a couple of ripe tomatoes off the plants, just beefsteaks, nothing fancy. His customers loved his heirloom tomatoes, so he left those alone. Back in the kitchen, he pulled from the Frigidaire a plastic bag of loose sausage one of his neighbors brought by in exchange for some of his yellow tomatoes. A good trade. Her sausage had just the right kick without setting a person’s mouth on fire. Claudius really wasn’t one for highly spiced food. Another reason it was good he never traveled afar, he figured.
He was laying th
e final fried tomato, the cornmeal crisp and browned, on a napkin-covered plate when she came into the kitchen.
“May-May!”
She had changed back into her jeans and long-sleeved shirt. “Good morning.”
As much as the sight of her scars had grieved him, it was the tone of her voice that sent an arrow right into his heart. The life in it wasn’t exactly gone, May was too strong-willed for that. But the liveliness, the way her tones sometimes sounded like music more than speech, was missing. In its place? Something dry and quiet, as if the creek had dwindled down to a trickle in its bed.
Beside her plate he placed a little earthenware jar filled with the whitish goop he’d spent the past couple of days working on.
“What’s that?”
“My mother’s recipe. For scars and whatnot.”
“You saw them?” Her eyes darted from tomato to sausage patty and back again. Then they met his.
He just nodded, then sat down at the table and tucked a napkin into his shirt collar. “For the life of me, with this old shirt, I don’t know why I bother! Just training, I suppose.” He forked up a tomato and put it on her plate.
She didn’t eat much. Claudius understood that her appetite must have dwindled when she was in hiding. Lots of people were eating grass back there in Rwanda during that time, Ruth had told him. Then again, May hadn’t been given farm food like Claudius’s yet. Maybe that would change things.
She went back to bed and slept until suppertime. He hoped the smell of cornbread and pinto beans would help her appetite return. Familiar food now. Claudius figured he’d bring out one of Ruth’s meals the next day.
May must have slathered his mother’s goop on her arms and legs, because he smelled the clover, lavender, and comfrey just before she sat down and tucked her napkin in the neck of her shirt. That same long-sleeved shirt.
After dinner Claudius set her up in an old white-and-green webbed lounge chair out in the yard. While the sun set, he read The Hunchback of Notre Dame aloud, his thick Kentucky accent rendering a new flavor to medieval France. May bundled her scarred appendages in a sheet. Her hair, which had been shaved at the hospital in Nairobi because it was so infested, was milky brown. Still less than an inch long, it stuck up off her head as if it mirrored the shock down in her soul. She startled at every sound and Claudius wished she was five and he could just put her on his lap and read to her that way. She needed her mother.
“What’s wrong with your mom?” he asked. “Your father mentioned the doctor.”
“She had a stroke, Claudius.”
“I’m sorry. She’s too young to have a stroke.”
“Yeah. But it happens. One more thing, right?”
“At such a young age too.”
Girlfriend sat beside her, looking sad at what she’d become, but remaining loyal. At bedtime when May was in Africa, Claudius had lifted that dog up in the bed with him and she stayed all night, snoring like crazy, real and warm. She’d switched back to her mistress. Hopefully May didn’t mind the noise.
He found himself praying more these days. Just little snippets from a foreign land of caring for a young person.
“Serves you right,” Sister Ruth said when he saw her earlier that day at the IGA. “Your life’s been almost perfect for years now.”
He had to admit she was right about that.
May sat in that lounge chair every day for the rest of August, allowing the sun to bleach the scars as she rested under it in a T-shirt and shorts. When she first came down in those clothes she said, “I can’t dress like it’s winter when it’s 98 degrees. You’ll just have to get used to these things, Claudius.”
“It’s all right, May-May.”
Her legs must have been injured somehow also. He noticed when she walked, she always seemed to be a little sore. He was old enough to know those wounds wouldn’t be kind when she reached his age. The arm he broke when he was eleven gave him trouble on days when the weather was changing.
The first week of September Claudius came home from the farmers’ market with his backseat full of flowering plants. Elrod in the stall next to his said he was going on vacation and would just as soon get rid of the plants on the cheap. Claudius said he’d be glad to take them off his hands on the cheap.
May set down her magazine. He knew she loved fashion, so he’d purchased her a copy of some women’s magazine with a gal in an impossible pose with legs and arms so long he wondered if somebody had done something to the picture to make her look like that. A bit off-looking if you asked him, but then, he wasn’t used to the current ways.
“Oh, those are pretty, Claudius!”
He set the flowers down and swiped his hands against each other. “It’s a bit late in the season, but they’ll look pretty for a little while. And I got some mums. They’ll last for years.” He pinched his lower lip. “You’ll be home by then, though, doing great in Lexington. Have you thought about what you’re going to do?”
“Nope. I just can’t.”
After grabbing a shovel, he dug up the sod in a circle around her chair, leaving a grassy aisle back to the lawn for her to walk down. Inside near her chair he planted begonias, primroses, nicotiana, lobelia, and outside, zinnias, heather, and coneflowers. “They’ll come back for you in the spring too, May-May.”
“Can I water them?”
“I think they’d like it if you did.”
Each day the tender plants grew, their root systems feathering out beneath the soil. “Growing strong and wise,” Claudius told her. “The prettiest things are sometimes down in the dirt. I kinda like that arrangement. It’s a little surprising, isn’t it?”
On a Sunday afternoon a week later they sat out in the circle eating tomato and cucumber sandwiches on white bread after Claudius returned from his little church. “And those around the ring’ll be around to remind me of you when you get back on your feet someday. Maybe my mother was right about flowers. She always said they work their own brand of magic.”
“I can’t imagine what is next for me.”
No picture came to Claudius’s mind either.
Every once in a while he’d take her down to the pay phone in town so she could call home. Late at night. Short conversations. Her mom had only improved up to a point. Dad was coping, helping her around in her wheelchair, feeding her when she couldn’t quite make it.
“She does all right with soft sandwiches, so we eat a lot of tuna and egg salad. But you’re doing all right?”
May related his words to Claudius.
“I am. I’ll be back soon.”
“Take your time, May. Mom said she loves picturing you having a good time on the farm. We can’t wait to see some pictures.”
“Did you bring your camera?” Claudius asked on the way home. “We got lots of flowers now to take pictures of.”
“It was destroyed in Africa.”
“Oh. Guess your dad just wasn’t thinking.”
“He’s got a lot on his mind.”
• 7 •
Through the end of summer and birth of autumn that September always seemed to bring, May sat in that chair just watching the garden grow. Beyond her circle, corn grew tall, and they ate it on the cob for dinner with butter that Claudius taught her how to make from the rich milk of Eloise the cow. She’d sit in her lawn chair with a big mason jar and shake, shake, shake, while Claudius took Bill the mule out to harvest the final round of broccoli and squash. And his tomatoes. They didn’t call him The Tomato Man down at the farmers’ market for nothing.
Sister Ruth told Claudius he needed to do more to get May on her feet, and he told her he just didn’t know how. And that was the truth of the matter. So he brought her little jobs to do right there in her seat. She even mended a couple of shirts. He told her she did well with the needle, and she seemed to like that.
One morning at the beginning of October, she sat down at the breakfast table.
“I’ve got a surprise for you.” Claudius slid two pancakes onto her plate and topped them
with a fried egg.
Her eyes narrowed, but she smiled.
—Guess Rwanda ruined her for surprises.
“Oh, yeah? What is it, Claudius?”
“I’m strapping Bill to the wagon, and we’re heading out to the pumpkin patch.”
“Really? When I was a kid my mom would buy a hay bale or two, some corn shocks, and five or six pumpkins to decorate our front porch. We’d sometimes go out to the apple orchard and get apples and cider. That was fun.”
“I’ll set up your chair there. You up for the trip?” Claudius never assumed.
She appeared to be convincing herself.
“We won’t even take so much as a step off this old farm.” The last trip to the pay phone had proved too stressful, and May had decided to start writing letters to her folks instead.
“That would be really nice.”
She helped with the breakfast dishes—been doing that for a while now—and hurried upstairs to change into jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. She must have rubbed in some goop, because she smelled like it when she returned.
“What’s that?” Claudius pointed to a length of beads and chain cascading from the side pocket of her jeans.
“My grandmother’s rosary. Sometimes just holding it, and remembering that my grandmother used it to pray, gives me comfort, even though I don’t think any of that does any good anymore.”
Claudius wished right then he was better at talking about God. Instead he just nodded, patted her shoulder, and said, “You never know, May-May.”
He helped her up into the wagon, put her chair in the back, and off they drove. “Ever been in a horse-drawn wagon before?”
“Nope. It’s nice.”
She was looking a little better now that her hair wasn’t quite so short. And honest to goodness, he could see some little white hairs sparkling in the light brown. Poor baby. Much too soon for that sort of thing.
He set up her chair, then turned to his work.
Bend down, turn the pumpkin, whip a small hatchet out of the loop on his pants, and cut the vine. He never had to bring the hatchet down more than once, that’s how many pumpkins he’d harvested.
And he never got tired of pumpkins either. He grew pumpkins like he grew tomatoes, odd varieties that struck his fancy. They were the happiest of harvests and filled his soul with a golden patina that echoed the glow the crisp air of autumn pulled to the surface of his cheeks.