“It’s again the law,” he told her. “I could lose my license.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” she said.
“Tell ye what,” he said. “I’d have to think some on it. Meanwhile, you’d have to think too. You’d have to ask yourself if you’d actually want to go against nature and destroy a life that’s trying to get going inside of you. Come back tomorrow.”
But she did not return the following day. When she threw up her breakfast, her mother caught her at it and demanded to know who had knocked her up. Latha would not identify the man, but she admitted that she was indeed expecting, confirmed by Doc Swain. Her mother fetched from the attic a pasteboard suitcase and told Latha to put into it anything she wanted to keep. And to count up her money, which came to $27.35. When the mail truck came back through town returning to Jasper, Latha was on it, with the address of her sister Mandy written on a piece of paper. She took the bus from Jasper to Little Rock, passing through towns much larger than any she could imagine. And then Little Rock itself was unbelievable, with buildings that reached to the sky.
Mandy lived with her husband Vaughn Twichell in a small white house, a bungalow in what was known as the shotgun style, at 2120 West Nineteenth Street. Vaughn answered her knock and at first did not recognize her. “Is Mandy home?” she asked.
“Lord love a duck if it aint ole Lathee,” Vaughn said. “Is that there yore suitcase? Come to stay a while, have ye?”
“Is Mandy home?” she asked.
Vaughn hollered over his shoulder, “Hey, woman! Yore sister has come to spend the night.”
When Mandy appeared, wiping her hands on a dishtowel, she said, “Lo and behold!” She started to reach out to embrace Latha but stopped herself. She had never in her life given Latha a hug.
Latha explained, “Maw thought it would be best if I stayed with you’uns a while.”
“How long?” Mandy wanted to know.
“Maybe nine months?”
Mandy gasped. “Who was he?” she said.
“Don’t ask me that,” Latha said. “I’m not saying.”
Mandy asked of her husband, “Can she have that back room?”
“Aw, hell,” Vaughn said. “that’s where I keep all my samples.”
“She don’t need your samples. Just the bed.”
“But the bed is all covered with my samples.”
“Caint you just put ’em on the floor?”
“Then I couldn’t reach ’em so easy.”
“A little exercise aint gonna kill ye.”
From the beginning of her nine-month stay with her sister and Vaughn Twichell, Latha felt like an intruder. Vaughn’s resentment at having to give up the one spare room where he’d been keeping his samples soon became a resentment for a different reason: there appeared to be no way that Vaughn could cajole Latha into letting him fuck her. Vaughn was a traveling salesman, at least in travel around Little Rock and its environs, and he came and went at all hours. Mandy clerked at Woolworth’s, a store which sold everything for either a dime or a nickel. Latha intended to go out and look for a job, but meanwhile she spent long hours at the house, where she attempted to pay her rent by keeping the place spic and span. Often she would be there alone when Vaughn would drop by, and invariably he would ask her if she wouldn’t like to lie down with him. She wouldn’t. He was polite and courtly about it at first, but then as she continued to say she wasn’t interested, he became less genteel.
“You was raped, wasn’t ye?” he said. “I could just rape ye myself.”
“That wouldn’t be much fun for you or me,” she declared.
Vaughn wasn’t a large man, but he had strength enough to pick Latha up and carry her to the bed, and climb on top of her. She kneed him in the groin and scratched his face with her fingernails until the blood flowed, and he got off her, and later explained to Mandy that a customer’s cat had attacked him.
Despite the wounds, he never stopped trying. All that kept Latha from telling her sister was the thought that after all this was Vaughn’s house, even if he was renting it, and Latha didn’t want to upset the domestic situation. But one time when he squeezed Latha’s behind, as he usually did when he passed her, Mandy caught him at it and told him he had better keep his hands to himself if he knew what was good for him.
Latha found a job as a bank teller, at which she had experience, and so was not around the house for Vaughn to molest. She was thus able to contribute toward the cost of her breakfasts and suppers, and she could give up spending her days cleaning the house. Thereafter the house got messy, and Vaughn complained, and then Mandy complained, not to Latha but to the room in Latha’s presence, “This place is becoming a pig-sty.”
Although Latha enjoyed working at the bank, she didn’t like Little Rock. The houses and buildings were too close together, and there were too many of them, and the streets were filling up with vehicles that ran on gasoline motors and made a lot of noise.
Latha could use part of her salary to get some better-looking clothes for herself, and this might have been the reason men started noticing her and asking her for dates, to the movies and such. Latha had never seen a movie, and couldn’t imagine one. But when the men came to pick her up at home, Vaughn would meet them at the door and tell them he was Latha’s husband, and would drive them away.
“Vaughn Twichell, you are a son of a bitch,” Latha said to him.
“Yeah, if you’d ever seen my ole maw, she shore was one honest-to-god bitch,” he said.
“It’s just as well,” Mandy put in. “You caint step out on no dates anyhow, the condition you’re in, starting to pooch out in the belly.”
From the beginning, Mandy had been transparently envious of Latha’s pregnancy because she desperately wanted children of her own. She had said bitter things to Latha like, “If you had any sense at all you’d run a coat hanger up you and rip it out.”
Sometime around Halloween, the manager of the bank called Latha into his office and told her that it was becoming obvious that she was anticipating a blessed event, and therefore she had ought to take a leave of absence until after that event. Latha went back to spending her days cleaning the house, and reading the stack of magazines that came to Mandy in the mail.
Mandy did not want her to leave the house, even to go for a walk. Thanksgiving and Christmas were the only break in the tedium of a gray, cold winter, and they weren’t very festive. On neither occasion did Mandy do anything special or serve some finer food. Latha offered to roast a turkey but they said it would be a waste of money. Latha spent the balance of both days as she spent most of her days, sitting or lying in her room. She missed the bank, she missed Stay More, and yes, she missed sex. Her belly was so swollen. She began to hate that belly. She hated what was inside of her. She wished there was some way she could kill that creature without killing herself. Once when the creature began kicking, she pounded it, she struck it repeatedly with both of her fists, until she became quite dizzy. Then she stopped pounding and lay still, and thought perhaps she had killed it.
But maybe she had just scared it. After a while it started kicking again, worse than ever. “Goddamn ye, you little ape,” she said, and pounded it harder than ever with her fists.
Mandy caught her. “What’re you trying to do, for Chrissakes, kill it?”
“Yes.”
“Why, for the love of Pete?”
“I don’t want it.”
“You don’t want it? Are you out of your mind, girl? What have you got against babies? Pore defenseless little thing…. Pore, pore sweet little thing.” And she began stroking and patting Latha’s belly till Latha felt like screaming.
“It will be a cute little boy,” Mandy said, “and we can name him Saultus after Dad.”
“It will be a disfigured monster,” Latha said, “and I will name it Mandyvaughn after y’all.”
“Well, I like that! That’s a fine lot of gratitude for all me’n Vaughn have done for you! Who feeds you? I ask you. Who gives you a place to stay,
huh?” Who the hell you think is gonna pay the goddamn hospital bill and the doctor bill? Huh? You answer me that!”
And that was the day Latha ran away. She had walked and walked, nearly out of the city, before Vaughn’s car had caught up with her and began to move slowly along the road beside her, for another hour or so, with Mandy at the window, saying over and over, every mile or so, “Tired yet? Hungry yet? Shamed yet?” until she finally gave in and let them take her home.
Chapter sixteen
The view from the window of her room was of a vacant lot grown high with rampant weeds. If she’d wanted to, she could have given a name to each of the weeds, as she knew the names of all the Stay More wildflowers, hundreds of them. Beyond the field of weeds rose a single large sycamore tree; she had studied the configuration of its branches endlessly and she was beginning to read the language hidden in that wild calligraphy. God or Whoever It Was had been putting up these trees as signboards, as posters, for millions of years, but nobody until now had learned how to read the script of the twisting branches. She was finding a long message there, and understanding it; without that message she could have closed her eyes and ceased to exist.
She was three weeks overdue. Vaughn had begun to make smart remarks. “It’s just costiveness. Let’s dose her with a big gulp of prune juice and she’ll unclog.”
Sitting in that room, she read the newspaper, at least, and one day she read that the law permitted abortions in the case of violent rape. Her rape hadn’t exactly been violent, but she asked Mandy if she had known about the law, and, if so, why hadn’t she done something about it while there was still time.
“How you gonna prove it was rape?” Mandy said. “Who would believe you? If ever time you’d jumped in bed with a feller was rape, then, sister, you’re a regular rape-catcher. Besides, you won’t never tell who done it. They’ve got to catch the feller and make him confess, and if you won’t even tell who done it, how can they? Come on, honey, for the last time I ask you, please tell me who it was.”
“I’m glad to know that’s the last time you’re asking me,” she said.
Vaughn put in, “’Course she won’t tell you who done it. She’s hopin he’ll come back and do it again!” Then Vaughn said behind his hand, “Whoever he was, he must’ve been a awful big and strong feller, to of broken down her notorious resistance.” Then Vaughn said behind his other hand, “Bet he had a pecker on him so thin and tiny she didn’t know she’d been raped until she found herself knocked up.” Vaughn cupped both hands beside his mouth and said, “Bet she run first thing to her dad and hollered, ‘Paw, a feller just ruined me! What are you going to do about it?’ and ole Saultus he just smiles and says, ‘First I got to take care of that feller who ruint you last week.’” Vaughn counted the fingers on one hand. “Wouldn’t surprise me a bit if it was a gang shay, and she has quintuplets, each one different.” Vaughn was running out of remarks, but he made one more. “Well, maybe they’ll catch the feller and put him on trial and the judge’ll call on her to testify, and he’ll say to her, ‘Miss, this offense occurred on or about the middle of June. Has the man ever bothered you before or since?’ and she’ll answer, ‘I’ll say he has! It’s just been rape, rape, rape, all summer long!’”
Latha wished she could have locked herself into her room, but since she had refused to leave it, both of them had to come into Latha’s room to vent their verbal indignities upon her, and it was crowded with the three of them in that small, small room which Latha never left except to go to the bathroom—and Mandy took the lock off the bathroom door after she discovered Latha trying to take a bath.
“Have you lost your senses completely?!” Mandy stormed. “Don’t you know you can’t take a bath when you’re pregnant? Don’t you know you’re not supposed to immerse that pore thing in water?”
“How’m I going to get clean?” Latha whined.
“Just use a sponge, you idiot!”
Although she used sponges, Vaughn, whenever he was in her room, would say, “Pee Yew! I’ll shore be glad when warm weather comes so we can open that window and air it out in here.”
And because the lock was removed from the bathroom door, he could barge in on her, saying, “Oops!” but lingering long enough to take a good look.
“Why, I’ll declare!” he exclaimed one time, pointing. “Lookee there, sugar, yore belly button has done popped wrongside out!”
On the faded wallpaper of her small room was a 1922 calendar, printed by the bank where she had once worked. It was opened to the month of March and she had drawn a large circle around March 6, the day the baby was supposed to have been born. She had marked heavy black x’s through the twenty-two dates following.
She was sitting in a chair with her feet propped on the windowsill, on March 29, counting the weeds in the vacant lot next door and then reading the script in the branches of the sycamore tree, when suddenly she felt a snap in her womb and then she flooded the chair and made a puddle around it. She went to the kitchen to get the mop, but it wasn’t there. It wasn’t on the back porch either, or anywhere that she could find. So she got a towel from the bathroom. But when she returned to her room, she found that she could neither kneel nor squat to mop the floor. Using the chair as a brace, she slowly lowered herself into a sitting position on the floor, with her legs straight out before her. She began to mop. Then the first pains started, and she had to stop mopping. She waited. The pain went away. She finished mopping. She found then that she could not get herself up off the floor.
If she could get up, she might go on to the hospital by herself. Which hospital? She wondered. Where is it?
She scooted backwards across the floor to her bed, and just as another pain started she turned over and got a good grip on the bedpost and pulled herself up and collapsed on her back in the bed.
That is where she spent the next seven hours, and when Mandy and Vaughn finally came home, she was screaming.
“You get her legs,” Vaughn said, “and I’ll get her arms and let’s see if we can carry her out and dump her in the car.”
“It’s too late, I think,” Mandy said. “You know anyone who has a telephone?”
“Not around here.”
“Then drive on out and try to get Dr. Rory and I’ll stay with her and try to deliver it if you don’t get back in time.”
Latha screamed, and she screamed.
It seemed like days passed before Vaughn returned. “This is all I could find,” he said. “Doc Rory’s out of town.”
The stranger came and looked at Latha and then snapped at Mandy, “What are you sitting on your ass for? Why haven’t you got some water boiling on the stove and some clean towels ready?”
Mandy got up off her ass. The stranger placed his cool hand on Latha’s brow and felt her pulse. “Easy, girl,” he said. “Easy.” It was the closest approximation to pleasant words she had heard in quite some time. But still she screamed.
“Get out of the room!” the stranger said to Vaughn.
“Aw,” said Vaughn, “it aint no different than watchin a mare foal.”
“Is she your wife?” the man asked him.
“Naw, she’s my sister-in-law, Doc. She aint even got a husband. Claims the guy raped her.”
“That true?” he asked her.
She screamed.
“Listen,” he said to her, “do you want this baby?”
She screamed, and thrashed her head violently from side to side.
“She does too!” Mandy hollered, coming and clutching the man’s sleeve and saying, “Look, Doc, we got to have that baby. Even if she don’t want it, I do. I’ll take care of it, Doc. Me and Vaughn caint have no children of our own, so I’d be more than happy to have it. Please, Doc—”
“Get out of here, both of you!” he snapped. “I’ll holler for you if I need you.”
Then she was alone with him, and he went to work.
“Relax, girl,” he would say. “I swear, I never saw anybody so tense.
“Relax. Try to
take a deep breath.
“Now. Bear down. Hard.
“Relax. Easy. Easy, girl, easy. Deep breath.
“Bear down.
“Relax.
“Bear down. You’re not bearing down. Pretend you’re trying to evacuate as if you were constipated.
“Ease up. Jesus Christ, girl, how long have you been tying yourself in knots?
“Come on now, press! Press! Press!”
He sighed loudly. She screamed loudly.
“I don’t want to have to do a Caesarean. Need you in the hospital for that.
“Let up.
“Squeeze.
“Goddamn you, mister, I told you to stay out of here! If you show your head again I’ll come after you with a scalpel!
“Let up, I’m sure it’s a breach. Now relax completely, I’m going to try to turn it. Easy. Relax. Relax.”
He gave her chloroform. For a while it was paradise. She heard nothing. She felt nothing. Later she heard:
“Mr. Twichell, come back in here a minute! Listen, I want you to telephone for an ambulance.”
“No telephone, Doc.”
“Then go out and get one! No, wait, just get your wife, and the three of us will carry her out to the backseat of my car.”
She was lifted, screaming, and manhandled out to the car. The doctor knelt on the floor beside her. “Twichell, you drive. And I mean drive!”
More chloroform, blessed oblivion.
A white room. Bright lights. People all around. An old white-haired man saying to the doctor, “What the hell does a goddamn intern know about giving Caesareans anyway? Shit, you don’t even know how to turn a baby! Here, nurse, she’s rousing, let’s clap that ether coat on her. That’s eno—”
Another room. A woman in another bed. A nurse. Mandy. Mandy saying, “Well, sister, you can go out and get raped all you want to, now, and never worry about having any more babies.”
Latha opened her mouth to scream again, but a calm question came out: “What do you mean?”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 57