by Minrose Gwin
“Hold that foot still,” the girl said. “I’ve only got one good arm here.” The girl reached down and took hold of the hem of Dovey’s dress and wiped her eyes with it. “Hurry up, I can’t see much and I’m wasting light.”
Dovey took hold of the foot and held it to the beam of light.
The girl was quiet for a minute. Then she asked, “Why’s your skin so black and the bottoms of your feet so light?”
Dovey lowered her foot to the floor. Something in the girl’s tone. “Is there anything in there?”
“Nope,” the girl said. “Just a big old ragged cut. Looks like a railroad track. Hold your horses.”
She got up and headed into the kitchen, leaving Dovey in the dark. Dovey could hear her slamming drawers, running water. Once she screamed one short but piercing scream and cursed, which caused her mother to startle and moan louder. In a minute she came back.
“Hold it up again,” she told Dovey. “Hold it high so I can clean it out.”
“That clean water? Don’t put no dirty water on it.”
“Don’t know,” the girl said, “but it’s better than the mud that’s on there now.” She poured some water on the foot, setting it on fire. “When you find a doctor, get him to give you a shot or you’ll get lockjaw. Hold up now and don’t put it down yet.” She went off somewhere again. Dovey could hear her rummaging around, bottles falling and breaking.
She came back with something in her hand. “Give me back the foot,” she commanded and Dovey held it up. She poured something liquid from a bottle onto the cut and it stung and sizzled and Dovey cried out. “Stop that. Now you hold still,” the girl said and she began to wrap the foot in what looked to Dovey like a long scarf, tucking the end inside. “There,” the girl said, “now we just need to find you some shoes.” Then she was gone again, this time heading for the living room.
She came back carrying a pair of men’s shoes the size of shovels. “Put these on,” she said, groping around for one of Dovey’s legs. “They’re my brother’s. I stuck some wash rags in the toes. I needed to get some big shoes to fit over the bandage.”
“No shoes from the Devil’s feet,” said Dovey, pulling away.
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” the girl said, already placing the shoe on Dovey’s bandaged foot and tying the laces. “You got to get on into town now. You got to tell them to come to 425 North Church. Or just tell them the McNabb house. Can you remember that? Do that and then get some stitches in that foot and that shot and some more shoes.”
WHEN DR. JUBER came to patch up Dreama, he’d said the same thing, that the girl probably needed stitches, definitely a tetanus shot. Dreama had kicked at him when he tried to open her legs to see the damage. The one good eye glared over his shoulder at Dovey. Don’t let him. Nobody looking at me. Nobody touching me.
Dovey took the doctor back into the kitchen where the neighbors and Virgil were clustered, the women, Harmony and Ollie, sitting at the kitchen table crying, their husbands and Virgil pacing back and forth with clenched fists. The five of them looked at the doctor, who said, “Seen this sort of thing one time too many. Enough to make a man go blind.”
“Who?” asked Virgil.
“She ain’t saying,” Dovey said.
Virgil slammed his fist down on the kitchen counter. “She going to tell me! I’m her Papa.” He stormed out of the kitchen and around the corner to the bedroom.
Dovey stepped in front of him. “Don’t you go asking her now. We got to get her fixed up.”
Virgil didn’t even look down at her, just over her head at the small shape curled in a ball on the bed. Dovey sighed and stepped aside, then followed him in.
When they went in, Dreama looked at Virgil and shook her head.
“Baby,” Virgil said.
“Not naming names, Papa.”
“Baby,” Virgil said again.
Dreama shut her eyes. “And have you strung up on the highest tree? Then where’d we be?”
No fool that girl. Just last month over in Itawamba County, an elder at the Mt. Zion A.M.E. named Elijah Smith had been dragged from his bed and taken out in the country and hung by his wrists from a giant cedar tree and burnt alive. All of that for going after a white man who bothered his wife.
“What you thinking now, girl? You thinking I just going to sit back and not do something about this here? What you think I am?”
Behind him, Dovey backed through the doorway and headed for the kitchen. She didn’t want Dreama to see her crying. The doctor and other men were drinking something clear out of her jelly jars. The women sat at the table, stone-faced.
She took the glass out of the doctor’s hand. “You got work to do in there. This here can wait. Do what you got to do and get it over with.”
“Seen too much of this,” the doctor said. “Surprised these eyes still open in the morning.” He took another gulp, then got the medicine and needle out of his case, and as the rest of them watched, he drew the liquid into a syringe.
When she and the doctor, who held the syringe behind his back, returned to the bedroom, Dreama had turned over in the bed, her back now to the door, her face to the wall. The whiter-than-white sheet under her bloomed like a dark red rose.
The doctor stopped in the doorway. “Have mercy.”
Dovey went around him. “Baby, Dr. Juber’s going to give you a shot now. Make you feel better.”
Dreama didn’t budge. For one horrifying moment, Dovey didn’t think she was breathing. Then the girl moved her head just a little.
“A tiny stick,” said the doctor.
Dovey felt dizzy and breathless when she saw the needle slip into the buttery flesh of Dreama’s little arm. “Going to the outhouse for some rags,” she said.
“No rags,” the doctor said. “Clean towels. And get somebody to boil some water.”
Dovey put the kettle on, then went out back and vomited.
Once out of the house, she couldn’t bear to go back in. She paced between the outhouse and the back stoop, her breath coming ragged and loud. The lightning bugs were flaring across the yard, the frogs down at Gum Pond had revved up. Then she walked around the house to the front. The half-pie moon had made its way from one side of the porch to the other, the light playing on the bare yard that she kept raked. She liked to rake waves into the dust; they looped and curled and, she imagined, crashed onto a long white shelf of sand. She had always wanted to see the real ocean down in Florida, watch those big waves come in. Virgil’s daddy had gone once. He told Virgil the sound of the waves took his heart and changed the beat to slow, then slower, until it seemed like it wasn’t beating at all.
On the front porch Henry lay curled in his bed. Dovey crouched down beside him. That’s when she felt it descend: something heavy and feathered. It got her by the shoulders and settled there, its talons reaching around, curling themselves against the cords of her neck, flexing against them. That night it would go to bed with her, and the next morning and the mornings to follow it would be there still, never once loosening its hold, almost piercing her skin but not quite, kneading her neck silently. She would learn to work with it on her shoulders and neck, she would learn not to turn her head too far one way or the other. Her neck would become stiff and sore and her head heavy as a stone. Some mornings she would feel as though she couldn’t lift it from the pillow.
In the moonlight, weak and watery though it was, she saw something in the dust. Tire tracks from a car with skinny little wheels. She knew then that whoever had done this had dumped her granddaughter like garbage. Used her up and thrown her out.
The heavy, feathered thing flexed its talons. She put her hand to her neck. Then she ran back into the house and called Virgil to bring his flashlight.
He came running, along with everybody else.
“Stand back,” Dovey commanded. “Let Virgil see.”
Virgil held out the light and looked hard at the tire marks. “Don’t nobody walk on them,” he said and ran back into the house. A moment later he
came back out with a piece of paper and folded it to the width of the tires. He pulled a pencil out of his pocket and marked the tread tracks on the paper. Then he walked on past everybody and headed out into the night.
“Virgil,” Dovey shouted after him.
“I’m getting the proof,” he shouted back.
NOW, NEXT to Dovey on the cold wet floor, the mother lifted her head again. “Where’s the baby? I’ve got to find him. Jo? Where are you? Where is everybody?”
The girl stepped over Dovey and sat down next to her mother and used her good arm to pull her mother’s head into her lap.
The wrap on the mother’s leg had shone white against the darkness when Dovey first came in; now the bandage was dark.
Dovey lifted her head and looked through the open doorway. Was the pitch-black turning to gray or was she dreaming? Was it another day?
Dovey rose to her feet. She could barely pick them up in the Devil’s shoes. They were twice the size of her feet and kept slipping, even on the wrapped foot. “You got any rags to tie these on? Ain’t getting nowhere in these.”
Could you take up somebody’s evil by walking in their shoes? Could you spread it all over town? Were these the shoes he wore when he did what he did to my baby?
The girl put her mother’s head down and went back to the hall closet and took out a sheet. She bit into one corner and tore two strips from it with her good hand. She leaned down and wrapped the strips around Son’s shoes and tied them onto Dovey’s feet. Dovey walked around for a moment, and they stayed on.
She walked in a circle in the hall; then she saw stars and had to sit down again. Her head felt fuzzy and clotted.
“You got anything I can eat before I go?” she asked the girl. “You got any clean water?”
The girl went back to her mother’s side, took up her head again. “There’s food and water in the icebox. We better eat it anyway before it goes bad. Go see what you can find. Be quick about it. You got to go out there and get us some help. Here. Take the flashlight.”
Dovey stepped around the mother and shuffled back to the kitchen. The door to the icebox was partly ajar. When she opened it all the way, something flew out, its wings brushing her face, making a little breeze. It flew around the room, whapping into first one wall and then another, faster and faster and more panicked. A bird for sure, but what kind? Then it settled and she heard it scuffling around on the floor. She turned back to the icebox, feeling around, something liquid in a bottle. She pulled it out and drank. Orange juice, blessed orange juice. She recognized it immediately, though she’d never had it out of a bottle. It flowed through her like nectar, making her fingertips tingle. Now she could think straight. She groped around for something to eat and found a stick of butter and ate half of that, then touched another bottle. Milk in a bottle, lukewarm but not yet sour. She drank half the bottle.
She was leaving the kitchen when the bird flew up and landed on the metallic kitchen table. Its feet made a clicking noise on the surface. Then she heard it coo. A dove. Sister.
When she was little, her daddy called her by spooning out the sound: Coo, coo. Got me a baby girl, and where’s she at? Got me a baby girl, and where’s she at?
That had been her signal to stop whatever it was she was doing under the house and come inside. She’d liked to play under the house, the coolness and quiet, the bloodworms that sauntered in and out and made brown piles, the spider webs with their struggling flies. It was suppertime or going-to-church time or bath time. He called her that way, making her feel like he knew her in this special way, like he’d been waiting all day to call her back to where she belonged, to the home that awaited.
He was the one who got sick first. It was the middle of August and the cotton was coming in. He came walking through the door from working John Calhoun’s field. He told them he’d picked 300 pounds that day at 50 cents per 100 pounds, a full sum of a dollar and a half, and her mama said, oh honey, and smiled and held out her hand for the money. He’d just reached into his pocket to pull out the heavy silver coin and the lighter one when a look passed over his face like a shadow and he’d said, “Miss Lou,” which is what he called Dovey’s mother, “I ain’t feeling so good. Maybe I need to go on to bed.”
And her mother had said, “And miss Blue’s birthday?” It was Dovey’s little brother’s birthday that day. He’d gotten a whistle their mother had carved late into the nights when everybody was sleeping, a whistle shaped like an angel with wings. He was blowing on it as they were talking. She’d made a cake too. Their mother was the best baker on the Hill. She’d carved it down with Dovey’s father’s straight razor into the shape of a laying-down lamb with curly hair that she’d fashioned in little waves of white icing.
About then, Dovey’s daddy had sagged and headed fast for bed, trailed by her mother and all the children. They all stood watching as he fell headlong onto the corn-shuck mattress in his full work clothes, clutching his belly, without so much as a good night or see you tomorrow or sorry to miss little Blue’s birthday party.
Dovey asked her mother, “What’s wrong with Papa?”
“He’s tired,” her mother had answered. “Too tired to spit.”
The next day he didn’t get out of bed. He tossed and turned and complained of his stomach. Her mother got a bedpan and kept carrying it in and out, with a cloth over it. The house began to stink to high heaven.
He was a strong man. He lived two long weeks. He never got up from that bed, despite visits from the family doctor and then the white doctor sent by Mr. Calhoun to see if his most valuable hand could please God get back into the field, the cotton was high. Dovey’s mother spent most of her time inside the bedroom; after the first few days, she told Dovey to take care of her sisters and brother. She would not allow them to come inside the curtain that cordoned the bedroom from the other part of the house where the children slept on one big pad on the floor.
Finally, one morning as the sun was rising and it was already hot as fire, her mother walked out of the bedroom and woke them and told them their father had flown away home. She told them it was time for him to go, it was his time.
Next it was her mother, who lingered just a week, and before she was even gone, little Blue got sick. Dovey put them together on the corn-shuck mattress and then, a few days later, the other two. Each time one of them passed, she went next door and told Ruthie Johnson, called Ruthie the duck lady because she kept ducks in the yard the way some people kept chickens. Ruthie was Etherene Johnson’s mother. She didn’t let Dovey come inside the house, but she and the other women at St. John the Baptist rolled up their sleeves and made sure Dovey and her brother and sisters didn’t go hungry. They brought dishes of food and placed them on the edge of the yard. Each night Dovey went out and collected them. As her family dwindled, the amounts became smaller and smaller, until there was just the one single portion and the aunt was called and Dovey went down to Shake Rag with her and that was that.
Dovey never could figure out why she was spared. There was a shame to it. When she bent over her aunt’s washboard, scrubbing the endless clothes, she wondered why she didn’t get sick, why God didn’t take her. Her aunt said she was left to tell the story, but really, there was no story to tell. After her father’s dramatic and precipitous decline, the progression of the others’ illnesses and deaths had been messy and tedious and predictable. They were there, then they weren’t. No story at all.
NOW, MANEUVERING cautiously in the Devil’s oversized shoes, Dovey shuffled her way toward the bird, which was still skittering around on the kitchen table. She wanted to grab hold of it the way Dreama would have done, easy and calm, and take it outside. But when she approached and began to feel around for it, it flapped in a panic and flew around the kitchen again, whapping into the wall over the sink. She could hear it now scrambling around in the sink, agitated and confused.
She turned off the flashlight, thinking it might be scaring the bird, making it lose its sense of direction, and then went for it
again because she couldn’t stand the ragged sound of its helplessness. This time she used her white-lady shawl and threw it over the sink. Under the shawl the dove twisted and quivered, but she held on and wrapped it lightly and moved with it from the kitchen out onto the back screen porch where the door to the outside was long gone. Then she unloosed the shawl and let it go, out into the night and the rain and the wind. A wingtip brushed her arm as it took flight.
She stood there in the open space where the screen door had been, following the sound of it, the whoosh of its wings, the relieved rattle.
“Good luck,” Dovey whispered.
6
6:37 A.M.
The morning after the storm. Coming up dawn now, gray and still raining. In the first light Jo looked into the washwoman’s face. It was like peering through a windowpane into another family’s house, watching them sit down to the table for supper, seeing but not seeing their shared life, knowing but not knowing their fears and desires. The ancient eyes, the lines that ran from nose to mouth to chin, the tightness around the mouth. Jo looked greedily, like a Peeping Tom, but the windowpane said no, this is not your story.
The old washwoman was buttoning Alice’s raincoat, pulling up the collar, preparing to go. Jo followed the old woman through the living room on her way out the door. She followed her as they both stepped around Jo’s brother on the floor, she followed her down the steps to the sidewalk below. She followed her down the sidewalk to the corner. She wanted to follow her to the ends of the earth.
The rain still came down in sheets. There were sounds of people crying out and digging in the rubble. Here and there houses were burning to the ground, even as the rain poured down on them.
“Be careful not to fall in those shoes,” she shouted to the old woman. “You could trip and hurt yourself and then you’d never get to town. If you see anybody with a stretcher on the way, bring them back here.”
“I got to find my own people,” the woman shouted back. She was covered neck to toe in the oversized raincoat and wearing Son’s felt fedora, which came down almost over her eyes; she looked like a walking talking pile of laundry. When Jo had pulled the fedora out of the closet shelf and handed it to the woman, she had taken care not to say whose it was and the woman had put it on her head without asking.