by Ted Minkinow
She averted her gaze and said, "I'm sure you'll do fine."
Sure she wasn't and both knew it.
Anderson said, “Store him for me, Doc. I'll have the coroner from Huntsville down sometime next week. He'll do the official look over."
Dr. Walters said nothing.
"Okay, then,” Anderson said, “I'll send in Arnold on my way out. Thanks for your help."
"I didn't really do much at all, Chief."
"You confirmed my suspicions. I appreciate your patience. See ya soon, Doc." He left to call a late night meeting of the Vienna Police Department.
Arnold reentered the examination room and wheeled the gurney to the morgue. The route took him past the few patients scattered in the waiting room.
An odd pair sat in the orange plastic chairs opposite the television set. Neither paid attention to the used car ad thundering from the device bolted to the cinder block wall above. They could not help but look in the direction of the noise and the overweight ambulance attendant pushing a body.
Faint, crimson splotches mottled the sheet.
"Hattie Jackson!" The emergency room nurse looked in no particular direction as her voice rebounded off stark, sterile walls.
CHAPTER 5
Tuesday, July 13, 9:58 pm, Grimes Hospital, Vienna, Alabama
1
Hattie stirred and her movement caught the nurse's attention.
"Follow me, please. The doctor can see you now."
Steady pain in her chest threatened to push Hattie back into the chair. Her companion grasped an arm.
"Mind if I go in with Aunt Hattie?" the man asked.
"Sorry, only members of the immediate family are allowed to accompany a patient into the examination room," the nurse said. She never removed her eyes from the door ahead.
"The boy is family," Hattie said.
The nurse halted.
"Ma'am," the nurse said, "I hardly think-"
"Young lady," said Hattie, "I’m tempted to believe you."
“I’m willing to take a DNA test,” Hattie’s companion said. The nurse ignored him, though red mottles blossomed on her cheeks.
"Ma'am, it is strict hospital policy, for your privacy and protection. You cannot be related, he is white; you are-"
"His Aunt," Hattie interrupted once more.
"Let them in please." Doctor Walters ended the brewing controversy. She eavesdropped then intervened before things intensified.
She saw an elderly black lady claiming relation to a 35 to 40-ish white man and decided a full moon shone outside. Cassandra noticed the man’s slight limp. She noticed something else…the man kept his eyes riveted on her face.
It seemed to Dr. Walters as if he were evaluating her…like maybe wishing for a male doctor to do the job right.
Doctor Walters swore she could hear his peripheral vision click as it scanned…and for some reason it angered her. Her eyes found their way to his…Eyes. As more a woman than a doctor, she read the sadness. Sad eyes or not, this was her turf.
2
Tom Brunson hated hospitals and harbored no fondness for doctors. His Aunt Hattie was sick...more than sick, he was sure. This made the hospital his only choice. "Dr. Walters." He saw the name stitched on her scrubs. In his previous life, he flushed anything or anybody unrelated to flying fighters from his mind. Doctors weren’t fighter pilots.
Doctors forced him back on life’s trail when he just wanted to die…an ex-fighter pilot strapped into a grounded body. The way he saw the score, the AMA and its tee-timing membership owed him one. That bill came due tonight.
3
Hattie interrupted their mutual stare as she walked between the two and into the emergency room.
"You children get acquainted; I'll sit myself down in there and wait."
Doctor Walters felt the immediate need, if only for pride’s sake, to counter what the old woman implied. But all she could come up with was “Yuck” so she didn’t say anything.
Tom turned to Nurse Delaney as he followed Hattie. “Should have taken my DNA offer,” he said. “I was bluffing.” He winked at the nurse and moved to Hattie’s side.
After a pause for composure, Cassandra Walters joined them.
"Ms. Jackson, I’m Doctor Walters. How can I help?"
"Call me Aunt Hattie, child. And there isn't a thing wrong with me." She lied in a calm voice. "I got a bit hot this evening and called Tommy. He drove over and made a fuss, so here I am."
The elderly Ms. Jackson’s bravado came freely enough but sounded hollow to Cassandra. Even so, the old woman radiated kindness though the complaint provided scant information; uncommon for people her age. The doctor turned to Tom.
"She sounded out of breath. I could barely understand a word…complained of soreness in her chest. I got over to her and she seemed disoriented."
Hattie nodded as if Tom’s story cleared everything up.
Then he said, “She didn’t have any energy…not like what’s normal for her.”
4
Though technically accurate, Tom withheld a significant detail. She sounded scared. Very scared. For as long as he had known Aunt Hattie, most his life, she never seemed frightened or disoriented. But something shook her up this evening…something she was hiding.
He asked her if one of the countless people she tended to threatened or maybe robbed her. She denied it, and Hattie never quibbled. Besides, he could find no evidence of a struggle, nothing askew or missing.
For her own reasons, Aunt Hattie seemed unwilling to share information…maybe to protect someone. They would delve deeper into the matter later.
"We need to check her vitals," Dr. Walters said to the nurse. She glanced over to Tom. “I'll let you back in just as soon as we are through."
Tom focused on the identification badge hanging from the doctor’s collar. "That's fine, Cassie, I'll be in the waiting room."
5
Cassandra flushed. Her eyes followed as he disappeared into the corridor. Limp or not he carried himself well. Her identification badge displayed first and last name. Even so, she preferred "Doctor” in the hospital.
Ms. Jackson sat quietly and Cassandra wondered what an elderly African-American lady would have in common with a conceited jerk. Conceited white jerk, her mind said.
"You know, Doctor Walters, my Tommy is a good man…good as any on God's Earth."
Dr. Walters blinked.
"I used to watch Oprah…saw the question mark over your head," Hattie said. "He's better than gold. He doesn't get around much since the accident."
"Auto accident?"
"No, dear, he was in the Air Force."
The simple answer raised questions in the doctor's mind. She stopped the next inquiry before it left her tongue. This was Grimes Hospital in Vienna, Alabama; not General Hospital in Burbank, California. Her duty lay in medicine, not in gossip about men that squired patients to the Emergency Room.
"I'm sure he's nice,” she said, and congratulated herself at the ambivalence in her tone, “but it’s you I’m concerned about. Let’s figure out what we need to do for you."
Dr. Walters performed the routine part of the examination. "Doesn't hurt there...or there…I can feel that slightly." The doctor covered the standard litany then listened to Hattie’s chest. Fast. She seems calm enough. Still I’d better…
She ran an EKG.
"We'll have to order some lab work before we can know for sure, but I’ll be straight with you Ms. Jackson, I think there may be something to this. Some of the results will come in right away; others may take a day or two. We’ll decide after the initial tests whether you can go home tonight. I'll get the lab to send over a technician."
Cassandra filled out the forms and handed them to the nurse. She stuck her head in the hall and motioned for Tom to return.
“We’ll need to run some tests,” she said as Tom took up position beside Hattie.
“You two get on out while they do that,” Aunt Hattie said. “Go get a cup of coffee or something,
” she added in response to Tom’s raised eyebrows. “It’s not proper for a gentleman to see a lady under indelicate conditions.”
Tom complied. He returned to his seat in front of the obnoxious television.
Dr. Walters treated the remaining couple of people in short order. Two stomach viruses of unknown origin. As the last patient departed, Cassandra took a break.
She walked into the waiting room, and noticed Ms. Jackson’s friend staring out of the window, into blackness just beyond. Above his chair, the television set spouted Huntsville’s late news echo between the cinder block walls before fading.
Dr. Walters paused, not sure if she should say anything. The man looked isolated; a vision all too familiar in her own mirror. Her heart threatened to soften. She saw Tom notice her reflection in the window. He stared for a moment before turning.
"How's Aunt Hattie?"
CHAPTER 6
Friday, July 13, 1928, 6:24 pm, Jerome’s Grocery, Vienna, Alabama
1
Though the man rummaged through tomato and cucumber bins, the clerk thought him uninterested in produce because each time she peered above the cashbox…He’s staring at me. A cloud floated past the open window and, as if inspecting the wooden structure and finding nothing worthy, it slowed tired sunbeams; dropping the little store’s interior from afternoon bright to sinister shades of gray that would remain until quitting time—less than five minutes. No matter where she moved, the old man’s eyes remained on Hattie Jackson.
Pretending to balance the ledger, Hattie looked over the pencil—a quick peek—to press the image in her mind so she could look away. Tall…skinny…white hair…stringy…hat in left hand. A jacket draped over his right shoulder, exposing what Nana Sally called a flouncy shirt—stark white and silk, the kind of ruffled shirt some of the older gentlemen still wore in the twentieth century’s toddler years.
Eccentricity did not alarm Hattie. She imagined odd people came and went just about everywhere in the world. The sweat stains. That’s what made Hattie look twice.
Missing.
July blistered wet heat that permeated everything; evidenced by the sheen on her ledger that made the pencil marginally effective. All men sported dark stains, summer halos, around the armpits and though the ladies never sweated—Nana Sally insisted—they glistened around the forehead.
This stranger looked pale, bone dry as one of Nana’s ceramic creatures fresh from the kiln and waiting for paint. That did not sit right with Hattie. Her mind worked at making sense of the disparity…No, she thought, Doesn’t sit right at all.
2
Leland Graves released the cucumber to fall among its mates. Some of his ilk could poison food by touch; he never honed that skill, preferring more intimate methods that allowed opportunity to pass the important transition phase—from prospect to customer—by observing life dim from his transaction’s eyes. Lately, he could predict the point where life ended and product began to show. Poison required no more finesse than laying a trap and returning to collect the kill…tools of the crude, common sort who valued quota more than art.
The young woman across shop the interested him—Look at that aura…Exquisite—during this foray to the wooden building; enough so that he put thoughts of Sally Jackson on his mental back burner for the moment. No matter where Leland Graves traveled he kept track of things back here where it all started for him.
Despite the mysterious aspects of familial bonds, Leland Graves understood the value of chum when seeking to land big product. According to human hierarchies, this young Hattie belonged to Sally Jackson. His earlier intention involved immediate harvest…a violent episode designed to make Sally Jackson expel a portion of that noble air and make room for a little tar in the soul. Then Sally Jackson would belong to him. Short of that, perhaps he could send her frail heart plummeting, because would not a perfect orb—like the one that flew the wrong way—serve his desires for experimentation while a tainted essence would create another transaction for his unappreciative and narrow-sighted masters? No downside to either possibility.
But young Hattie Jackson’s aura, it altered his earlier machinations. Glacial purity, he thought. Sure enough, Leland Graves studied auras before, mostly because he found his expertise lacking that night of the perfect orb.
He recalled Jackson Brewton’s aura and the untouchable indicators—he remembered nothing of the hue or intricate webs that formed the superstructure supporting snowflakes of light. He considered aura study unimportant before…Until that perfect orb.
Thoughts of that orb transported his mind from the grocery to the events that necessitated his most recent visit to the home turf. His mind wandered these days, thoughts darted every which way—like a water bug zigging across the bare spots of a milfoil pond. And that was precisely why his masters took increasing care.
“So beautiful,” he said aloud.
3
Hattie jumped at the voice that came like a sudden creak of a screen door thrown open. She backed toward the paring knife display set up behind the counter.
So beautiful?
Hattie thought that’s what he said but could not put her arms around what he meant.
Where is Jerome?
She loved seeing him…I’d love seeing him now.
Calm down.
Hattie thought maybe it best Jerome was out delivering. If he saw the way she shook—tiny tremors visible only to someone you loved—nothing good could come of it. Either he would smile at Hattie’s inexperience—“Don’t scowl at the patrons, princess”—or he might go the other way and ask the stranger to leave. She thought about that.
Jerome did own the grocery, but that would not hold weight among the white people in town—not even the friendly ones. Colored people can’t do that. Whites took their own side no matter the facts.
Folks remembered the old days in Vienna, and why shouldn’t they? Some of Jerome’s customers—the older ones—owned slaves as children…Others were slaves as children, she thought. From cracker to aristocrat they’d join as one pack to handle any colored man—or colored woman—bold enough to insult a white. They’d pluck Jerome with no more regret than a gardener yanking a weed from between the okra plants. Whites understood how one weed spawned others. Young or not, Hattie saw how this situation—like so many other innocuous, daily things in life on her side of town—could escalate.
“On second consideration,” her mind said, “probably best for Jerome to stay away until this man’s gone.”
4
Leland Graves did not know it, but his erratic tendencies raised flags in higher offices. They could not put a name to it, but more than one of the masters suspected his dabbling in things prohibited to them since the second beginning—the first moments of the Great Unsigned Contract.
Leland Graves’s arrogance—thou admittedly admirable in their ilk—often brought them to the edge of contractual breech. None of the masters knew for sure where the winds of business may blow if that happened, but they anticipated a brief and merciless receivership followed by…well…annihilation. Their creditor stood ever vigilant.
So another punishment landed Leland Graves in the swamp and abutting village populated in sparse cliques of what he considered half-wits whose slow speech and insufficient brains clattered in constant disharmony. In other words, the place held little promise of closing significant transactions. A situation not at all similar to those feasting days of a decade before—The Great War, as humanity called it.
Nostalgia painted a grin on Leland Graves’s face, and he raised his stick and gave it a couple of twirls without even thinking about it; as if his joy possessed independence of will. He noticed Hattie edge away from the counter, her eyes fixed on him. Leland Graves winked and halted the walking stick with a grip so powerful that the stick did not jiggle one way or the other. One moment it moved in a whir the next still, and pointed at Hattie’s heart.
Scaring the lady, am I?
Leland Graves wanted to do more than point…felt
emasculated by silly rules that forbade drawing his blade from the stick and performing ad hoc experimentation on that fine aura and what lay beneath. He let his arm drop.
“Excuse me Miss, but—isn’t war remarkable?—care to assist in an experiment?” Memories again, and Leland Graves gave in to the sweet temptation.
5
Hattie swallowed the urge to run, not that she’d care if she stumbled and spilled dry goods from the barrels or upset the candy bins. Jerome could handle that later…could take damages out of her college money if he wanted. Panic, pure panic clawed its way from her heart to her brain, and threatened to squeeze away prudence in the manner of a noose squeezing away life. Only one thing stood in the way of a headlong rush down the narrow aisle out the screen door with its creaking spring. The stranger.
6
Oh the product he could move on an active day of that war in Europe—Many times the population of this God-forsaken here. He smiled again at humor of a private nature. But war-juiced successes spawned unholy challenges, not that he minded at all the unholy part. His masters—Idiots…all of them—rewarded brilliance, the meticulous planning, and the exquisite theatrics—by raising his quota.
Twenty percent year over year growth.
Always the masters worried about numbers and ignored the universal currency: power. Philistines, Leland Graves thought…as if he really could recall a single Philistine he did not begin to like after some getting to know you time. How could he impact the bottom line in such unreasonable quantities during tranquil times?
“Underperformed,” his rating after he gathered insufficient product the previous solstice. The subpar rating came with another stint—retraining, they called it—in Copper Gulch. They knew he preferred roving the wider world as anti-Paladin—spicing lives with just the right measure of hopelessness to bake a little black into their orbs—influencing the wisest of cattle, the noble but flawed, down the ramp and into the slaughter pen. So they considered the confined landscape of Copper Gulch adequate punishment for a misbehaving Leland Graves. The masters also needed time to monitor that concentration problem of his. Another upside existed.