A Place Called Wiregrass

by Michael Morris

  Miss Claudia pulled herself up by the arm of the chair and gripped her cane. I learned long ago nothing made her madder than to have someone rush over and help her get out of a chair. Leaning on the cane, she turned her head and smiled. “Erma Lee, what do I have to do to convince you that you’re family now? And that’s what families do, they bear burdens. I love you and Cher.”

  I looked down at the Oriental rug and shook my head. The words I love you sounded different coming from her than they did when I tried to drill them into Cher.

  She caressed the strands of hair pulled neatly back on my head.

  “Can I offer advice? These are burdens we can’t bear. Cannot control. Whenever I face times like these, I just put them at the Lord’s feet.”

  I did not respond, but simply sat still and studied the swirls of navy and burgundy that jumped at me from the Oriental rug. I wanted to shrink into the swirls and become part of the carpet. Instead, I clasped her hand and closed my eyes tightly. Would God hear my prayer? I wasn’t worthy like Miss Claudia. I was silent and let her lead.

  We prayed for protection of Cher and for peace of mind. She even prayed for LaRue and Suzette, people I was sure the good Lord had long given up on. When it was over, she hugged me tightly. “We have our crosses to bear, you and me.”

  I never fully explained to Gerald why I couldn’t go to the steak house with him on Friday night. I told him Cher was on restriction and couldn’t go to the skating rink. It embarrassed me that he brought dinner to us that evening. As he placed plastic bags on the counter, I knew the Lord was answering part of the prayer already. Gerald’s presence seemed to lighten the tension that ran between Cher and me.

  As typical of our fights, after two days me and Cher were speaking again. In that way she was like me. We were too no-nonsense for pouty bickering. She entered the kitchen Monday morning downright chipper. Even kissed me on the cheek before she went to the bus stop. All day, I felt guilty for trying to force her into accepting something Mother Nature had not intended, to hate a parent.

  After determining how much it would cost to host a skating party for ten, I sat at the kitchen table to figure up how far my bank account could stretch for a skating party. Sixty dollars was the bare minimum for a party, and with the light bill due next week the numbers in my register just wouldn’t cooperate. Reluctantly, I approached Miss Claudia with the idea of a loan. But I made her sign a piece of notebook paper stating I would pay her back by June 15. “You didn’t take us to raise,” I continued to remind her.

  The truth shall set you free. It’s one of the few lessons I still remember from my days attending Sunday school and church with Aunt Stella. But telling the truth about Cher and Suzette to Miss Claudia gave me insomnia. As I laid there in my bed hearing the clumps of pine straw drift down on my tin roof, I was all tight inside. All I could think of in the first few nights after my confession was that spring day twelve years ago in Shreveport. I had dismissed it out of my mind when Suzette entered prison, and now LaRue had drug it all back up. All this is his fault. I kicked the sheets until they clumped together at the end of the bed. I sat up and sighed at the stillness of the room. Turning on the lamp, I picked up a pencil and notebook.

  With a pillow as a bumpy desktop, I put little dots beside each point I wanted to tell Suzette someday. All the questions and details that led up to my discovery that spring day in Shreveport. All the holes I had not allowed myself to fill during the trial, vowing to never speak to her again.

  I sat with the pencil dangling between my fingers like a cigarette. Thinking of issues to discuss in this imaginary world, I swung the wild strands of hair out of my face. The movement brought Gerald’s perfect daughter to mind. Even I had to admit, with all her high and mighty ways, Marcie was a success. I saw it in the way Gerald grinned at her sassy one-liners, or at how he shook his head and chuckled at the cookout when she told him he was serving the salad all wrong. His daughter had become what he and Leslie expected and hoped for. Beside the pencil dot on the blue-lined paper, I wrote the last point I would address with Suzette: Why?

  “This little thing ain’t half bad. Sounds pretty good,” Gerald said, examining the pink radio I had transferred from Cher’s room to the counter of the kitchen. After asking Gerald over for dinner, I asked Cher if I could borrow her radio.

  “The old me would’ve just pulled it right out without asking,” I reminded her at the skating rink.

  “You’re trying,” she said and got out of the car.

  After a second pork chop, I decided I had to do it before my heart tore out of my chest. Gerald was still holding the biscuit on the edge of his plate when I ventured on shaky ground. “This is some of the best corn,” he said, using the biscuit to guide the kernels onto his fork.

  “Hey, I need to talk a minute,” I said, clinching the paper napkin into a ball. I was glad the radio was softly playing to provide distraction. The truth shall set you free, I heard Aunt Stella’s pastor scream from old files in my mind.

  Gerald looked up, holding the serving bowl of fried corn. His green eyes looked bigger than usual. He probably thought that he really didn’t know me. Maybe he thought I was going to announce I had put poison in his pork chop. “What’s on your mind?” He calmly put the corn back on the table without taking a second helping.

  The feeling of dread almost overtook me, and I wanted to run out the door. The long forgotten image of seeing Bozo, breathing heavy with a red nose, blocking my escape drifted into view. I glanced at my unlocked and unblocked door. The words came first in a whisper and grew in volume when I didn’t see Gerald push the dinette chair away from my kitchen table and leave. Halfway through the story of my daughter, son-in-law, and the horrors they created for me to find that day in Shreveport, I wanted to stop and laugh. It’s a joke. It’s not all as bad as it sounds, I wanted to say.

  At first the only sound was Travis Tritt’s voice singing about a quarter and calling someone who cares. Gerald shook his head, almost in time to the music. He looked up at me and scrunched his eyes, calling attention to the deep wrinkles in his forehead.

  “Dog,” he whispered.

  I began clearing the table as if I had just reported about a successful daughter who was like some Martha Stewart and lived in a three-bedroom brick home. A daughter like his own. When I got to the sink and began spraying water on the remnants of greasy fat, I felt his thick arms wrap around my shoulders. The width of his chest lay against my back, and his mustache tickled the edge of my ear. “You done good with Cher. You ought to be proud. You’re a good woman, Erma Lee.”

  He felt inviting, and part of me wanted to lean my back against him and fall into his tight grip. But I continued to spray the water on the white dish until the spots of pork lard were washed away and the presence behind me had slipped away to the couch.

  I told two people I had known only a few months the secret I had been unable to tell old friends like Roxi, who I’d known for twenty years. The people I spent decades working alongside at the plant simply thought Suzette had moved to Las Vegas and worked at a blackjack table. The unstable lifestyle was my excuse for raising Cher. Roxi and the other folks in Cross City may have known of the punches I put up with from Bozo’s direction, but they never saw the licks Suzette left on my heart.

  Gerald almost ran into me when I turned to retrieve another pot. “Oh,” I said, balancing myself by putting my hand on his shirt. The touch was forbidden, and I removed my hand. He was carrying the corn and salad dishes. I took them without looking into his eyes. Just when I had poured dishwashing soap on the dishes, he pulled me around to face him. His pull startled me, but I softened when he stroked his hand up against my face.

  “There’s some people on this earth don’t seem worth the clay God used to make them. It just don’t make sense when I hear stuff like that.” He was looking over my shoulder at the radio.

  “Look, I shouldn’t have said nothing.”

  “That’s just like you, ain’t it? After all the
crap you been through, you still worrying about somebody else.”

  I looked down at the bright white tennis shoes, washed especially for our date. The touch of his warm hand on the back of my neck drew me to his inner being.

  “When you gonna let somebody care for you?”

  All I could do was shrug. Just as I opened my mouth to say something funny, a trick I was learning from Miss Claudia, he leaned over and put his mouth on mine. Feeling the bushy hairs of his mustache on my lips, I leaned all the way into him. Before I knew it, my hand was on the back of his neck, pulling him down tighter into my grasp.

  At first, I hoped the ringing of the phone was happening at the trailer next door. Thinking it could be Cher, I pulled myself into reality and broke free.

  “Hello.” My lips tingled from his kiss.

  “Erma Lee.” The voice was so faint I first thought it was LaRue calling to harass me. “I need some…” The phone on the other end hit a hard object. A chill ran from the base of my skull to the pit of my stomach.

  “Miss Claudia? Miss Claudia, is that you?”

  Fifteen

  The automatic sliding doors to the emergency room were not opening fast enough. I pounded my foot on the black carpet and held the blood-soaked dishrag on Miss Claudia’s nose. Just when I was about to kick the glass door open like some kick-boxing champion, the glass slowly separated.

  A black woman dressed in white with an ink pen dangling around her neck approached us. She opened the wooden doors of the treatment area and patted the black mattress of a vacant gurney. I thought the lady had ESP and knew we were in grave need the second we walked through the door, but then I remembered that the front of Gerald’s shirt was darkened with Miss Claudia’s blood. The strongest woman I knew hung in his arms with the limpness of a dead squirrel.

  By the time I unlocked her kitchen door with my key, Miss Claudia was in a pool of blood. Lying in the living room near the table with the telephone. All I could think when I first saw her was that she had been stabbed. “Meanness is just taking over,” she would say whenever Richard would report a new crime announced on his scanner. But when Gerald lifted her shoulders I saw the crimson flood coming from her nose. The fluid caked the front of her lavender housecoat like streaks of paint.

  Oh, good, just a nosebleed, I thought. I got the dish towel thinking that I could squeeze her nostrils together and stop the bleeding. But like most problems, it was not that simple. She was unconscious, and nothing seemed to stop the steady flow.

  “We’d better not wait for an ambulance,” Gerald said. “I can get her there faster.” He cradled her in his arms and gently lifted her off the floor. The silver cane sparkled next to the red pool.

  As we pulled out of her driveway, I saw Richard’s apartment lights over the garage. When I pictured her calling him numerous times before she gave up and dialed my number, anger flushed through my blood. Turmoil made me want to seek blame, and Richard was convenient. My insides rumbled like a creaky roller coaster. As her mashed down hair lay in my lap and her face tilted to the side producing a steady flow of blood on my white shoes, I couldn’t help but think this was it. Aneurysm raced through my mind until I wanted to scream out to prevent the doom my brain was creating.

  Beneath the eerie glow of outside streetlights, I knew my life would change for the worse if I lost her. In my need to find a new life on my own, I realized I had become utterly dependent on her. I stroked her thick hair, hoping to calm her. “You the unluckiest person I know,” Mama told me on several occasions throughout my life. She was right. Nothing good ever lasts long enough.

  “I’ve ordered a blood transfusion,” the young doctor with round wire glasses told us in the waiting room.

  “For a nosebleed?” I wondered out loud. And then I pondered whether this young man even knew what he was doing. He probably doesn’t even need those glasses, I thought. He probably just picked out the Grandpa Jones pair at the drugstore to make him look like he’s wise.

  Before I could question his medical schooling, like I even could, he was gone in a blur of green.

  Gerald blew a massive amount of air out of his mouth. Frustration, I decided when he placed his thumbs on his pants pockets. A white supremacist shouted at us through the television, and we stood there looking at each other.

  “Y’all need to fill out these forms,” the black woman with the pen hanging around her neck said. When I took the clipboard from her, the woman softly patted my hand. Why keep love in your heart when you can give it away for free, I imagined Miss Claudia saying.

  While I knew some personal details of Miss Claudia’s life, the thick white forms made me realize how much I didn’t know. Birth date, social security number, insurance, and medical allergies. I sighed out loud, vowing to learn the details and officially become the blood relation she made me feel I was. “I got to call Richard for some of this stuff.”

  “Tyler here,” he answered on the tenth ring. His tone was all business. Music blared from his radio, and code numbers squealed out from his scanner. The background noise gave away any pretense that he was answering an office line.

  “This is Erma Lee.” I started to just lay it out, but then feared he might have some kind of nervous fit over the shock. Miss Claudia would never forgive me if I caused him to relapse.

  “My fair Mrs. Jacobs. To what do I owe the pleasure?” He laughed and then went into a coughing fit.

  “It’s your Mama. Nothing serious. Well, we hope not.” As I presented the facts as I knew them, he was silent. “Blueberry Hill” played softly in the background.

  “Patricia usually handles all Mama’s health matters.”

  “Yeah. Well remember her and Doctor Tom are down at that convention.” I pictured Patricia at a luau that very minute, walking around poles with fire at the ends of them.

  “Now you’ve got to help me here. I need…”

  “Hospitals and I don’t get along. My nerves can’t take the ruckus.”

  Neither could mine. “Man, nobody’s asking you to worry yourself by coming down here.” I saw Gerald turn around and look at me. “I’m sorry, I’m just real tired. Now let’s start with her birth date. Do you know that?”

  By the time Richard massaged his memory and provided the necessary information for the hospital forms, Gerald had already called Marcie and his pastor. “They got a prayer chain going right now,” he said with tremendous confidence.

  I knew most Miss Claudia wouldn’t want everybody all in her business, but decided it might make him feel better and didn’t say any more.

  We sat there in the waiting-room chairs with connecting steel arms and watched the pimple-scarred supremacist rant and rave over the airwaves. “Thanks,” I said when Gerald turned the television off. We were the only ones in the room, and the black lady sure did not object when the screams of insult were replaced by silence.

  Who could I call? I didn’t want to call Kasi because I figured she’d be all dramatic and make Cher believe Miss Claudia was fixing to die. So I just sat there. Without any prayer circle. My last prayer had been with Miss Claudia for Suzette and LaRue. A total waste of our time. God’s too, for that matter. Missoura, I suddenly remembered and stood up. I’ll call the lady who first taught Miss Claudia to pray. Only thing was, I couldn’t remember her last name, and with no phone number I would have to call directory assistance.

  I’m making me a notebook full of key information about Miss Claudia when this is over. I sat back down with my arms folded. I was ashamed of my slouchiness in caring for my employer, my companion. The clock went through two spins of its hour hand while I mentally filed away information on Miss Claudia from A to Z.

  Gerald turned the television back on for the late news, and the weatherman was predicting a scorching day. “Really, you can go on home now. Cher is spending the night at Kasi’s. And I’m just going to stay here.” Before Gerald could reply, his almond-shaped eyes widened. The doctor walked towards us with slouched shoulders.

  Dear Lord,
please don’t let her be gone, I silently prayed without thinking.

  “She’s real weak. She’s lost a tremendous amount of blood. It doesn’t help that she’s anemic. Are you her daughter?”

  Yes, I wanted to cry out. But I shook my head no. “Housekee…Companion,” I said. “And I’ll stay with her.”

  “Rochelle will give you her room assignment.” He half turned and looked at the black woman sitting at the reception desk.

  “Doc, what you reckon got her in this fix,” Gerald asked.

  “I mean, everybody gets nosebleeds.”

  “True. But nosebleeds usually aren’t complicated by leukemia either,” the young doctor said. He never saw my gaping mouth while he scribbled something inside his steel notepad. Although he could not tell on the outside, I was in need just like the other patients behind the light brown doors with the red signs that said Do Not Enter. My spirit was curled up on that tiled floor in the same position we had found Miss Claudia in.

  The ache in my neck woke me before I heard the new shift nurse enter. I watched the heavyset nurse tightly adjust the tape that held the white swab under Miss Claudia’s nose. Good. The bleeding seems to have stopped.

  As soon as the nurse retreated to the light of the hallway, I rearranged the tape so it didn’t pull Miss Claudia’s skin and put the bed railing back up. She looked so pale. The one age spot on the right corner of her forehead look bigger than usual. I stroked her hair with the palm of my hand, thinking she would be upset to know how awful she looked.

  At six o’clock, I called Patricia. I was pleased with myself that I could remember the name of that fancy hotel in Marco Island. “Richard told me he was calling you,” I whispered into the phone next to Miss Claudia’s hospital bed.

  “Lord, Erma Lee. And you believed him?” Patricia sighed.

  “We’ll catch the next flight out, and I’ll try to be there by noontime.”

  “Try not to worry about her. We managed.”