Promise

by Minrose Gwin

  She came back into the hall and got behind her mother and, with her good hand, took her under one arm, and tried to raise her to a sitting position against the wall. Alice didn’t budge. Jo took her good arm and put it under her mother on the other side and tried again, pain coursing through the elbow up the arm into the shoulder and on up to Jo’s neck. The arm was too weak. Through her mother’s wet clothes, Jo felt Alice’s body burning like a furnace.

  On the floor, the baby had begun to shake, his mouth wide but no sound coming out. Was he having a fit? Was he dying? Jo eased her mother back to the floor and ran back to the baby. She sat down beside him and with her good arm pulled him into her lap, then up against her chest. He turned suddenly toward one side, began to make a sucking motion with his lips. He brushed her nipple and tried to take hold through her wet gown. She felt something tighten, then relax. This is what it is to be a mother.

  Jo remembered something from her Campfire Girls book about shock, she needed to warm the baby up. Clutching him to the side like a football in her one good arm, she scrambled to her feet and went into the bathroom. She fumbled in the cabinet. The towels on top were soaked, but underneath there were a few that were merely damp. She loosened her grip on the baby’s head and reached for one of the least damp ones, being careful not to strike the cabinet shelf with either her horn, which now seemed to have settled in and become a permanent part of her body, or Tommy’s head. Then she sat down on the cold wet bathroom floor with him in her lap and tried to wrap him in the towel.

  It was a trick with one working arm, and in the midst of it he began to wiggle and cry, a new kind of cry. It was softer, no fits of rage but steady and sad and resigned. Turning him this way and that, Jo finally got the towel around him. He cried on.

  From the hall her mother called out, “Is he all right? What are you doing to him? Is he hurt? Bring him back to me. I didn’t even get a good look at him.”

  Jo got onto her knees and then rose shakily with him in her right arm. She took him back into the hall and laid him on the floor. What she needed was clean water and a rag to wash the cuts and scrapes all over his body. Then she remembered, better yet, the rubbing alcohol she’d poured on the old washwoman’s feet. She went to get a washcloth.

  When she came back with the cloth, the baby had stopped crying and fallen into an exhausted sleep. A piece of sunlight played along his curved belly. His hair was wet and plastered to his head. There was more of it than Jo remembered.

  Jo shook her mother. “May-May, listen to me. I need your hands. You got to hold him while I do this. You got to keep him from hurting himself. This is going to sting.”

  Alice’s eyes fluttered, then closed again. Jo put the baby on Alice’s stomach and placed her mother’s hands on him.

  She poked her mother, then patted her hands. “Just hold on to him.” Her mother’s hands clamped on. Jo unwrapped the towel so that the baby’s front side was exposed and began to dab on the alcohol. Tommy’s eyes popped open, and he began to scream and thrash about and kick at Alice’s chest. Alice almost lost her grip on him.

  “Hold him, May-May!”

  When they finished with the front, Jo turned him over. There was a gash under his arm, but otherwise the scratches were superficial.

  “Is he hurt?” asked Alice, over the baby’s screams. Her head hung to one side. “I can’t see anything. Why can’t I see?”

  Jo sat down alongside her mother and took him back, rolling him from Alice’s stomach to her own lap. He started up again, a quiet dogged whimper, without much hope attached. Jo scrambled to her feet, locking him to her side with her good right arm. He must be hungry, and worse yet, thirsty. In her Campfire Girls first aid manual, dehydration was on the list of top five “Possible Killers in the Wild,” alongside heart attack and heat stroke and snakebite.

  She took the baby into the kitchen. She turned on the faucet at the sink. Some reddish brown sludge sputtered out, then nothing. Normally Tommy drank a powdered substance mixed in water; her mother made up his bottles six at a time. The icebox door was ajar. Jo cursed the washwoman for leaving it that way. Now the formula would be ruined! But when Jo pulled out a bottle, it was still cool. Normally she would have put it in a pot of water on the stove to warm it, but the stove, splattered in mud and debris, looked untrustworthy.

  Standing in front of the icebox, she looked around the kitchen. Cabinet doors were missing and the cabinets were empty. Mud and broken dishes and two overturned chairs. Oddly, Essie’s one chair at the kitchen table was in its usual place. She felt suddenly weak-kneed. How easily her own life could have been blown away! What an insignificant pawn she was, the instrument of one brother’s death, the means of another’s rescue! How little human will had to do with any of it. She’d been brought up on the sour doctrine of predestination, which she’d not for a single minute believed, thinking, arrogantly, that she was master of her own fate, the way the poem said, captain of her own soul. But now she reconsidered. The storm was the master, and it had blown her and her little brother through the air without so much as a thought. And where did that storm come from? Who thought it up? Who said she lives and he dies? He comes and she goes? The baker but not the candlestick maker?

  She sat down in Essie’s chair, situating Tommy on her lap. She offered the nipple. The baby acted affronted by the offer. He spit it out, crying hard now, furious at the world. His face bloomed red, then purple with rage. He screamed louder, his body now thankfully warmer. Again, he turned to Jo’s breast; again that distracting, pleasant zing from stem to stern.

  She touched his lips with the bottle, let a bit of formula drip on them. He smacked them now and began to suck a little. Then he began to pull hard at the nipple and settled in, his eyes wide and watchful. For the first time since finding him, Jo relaxed a little. He was going to live. Which meant she had managed to save him. She shuddered to think what would have happened to him if she hadn’t followed the old washwoman out to the street.

  She thought of her trudging through the ruined town, wearing Son’s shoes and fedora, the one he was so proud of. When he’d run off with all those hats from Reed’s, which Jo thought at the time was by far the most amusing thing he’d ever done, he’d neglected to return the gray one. He’d put it on a top shelf in the downstairs hall closet, at the back, so that no one would notice. (Jo of course did because she watched him like a hawk, measured his every move.) After awhile, when the brouhaha died down, he began to wear it when he went out, the way a grown man would wear a hat to the office or church, except of course there was no office—no work of any kind that Jo could discern—and certainly no churchgoing.

  Jo wanted to cry over Son; he was, after all, her brother. She just needed time, was all. Now she was too busy taking care of everybody. She’d found herself rather good at it and wondered briefly what it would be like to be a nurse. A doctor was out of the question, of course, but she would have liked that even better: to have the knowledge to stop suffering in its tracks, to say, There now, take your medicine and you’ll be all better, I guarantee it, the way Dr. Campbell said a month ago when she was in his office for her tonsils, which were probably going to need to be removed, he told her mother this last time. How remarkable that there were doctors who cut you open and looked at your insides, took this or that offending organ out, then sewed you back up again, like you were a Christmas turkey. Jo would have liked to be that kind of doctor; there was a mystery about the body that intrigued her. Even her mother’s protruding bone thrilled her in some strange way, though, of course, she would never put such a thought into words, and shame on her that it had blown through her head. At first, when the bone was still wet, it had looked under the beam of the flashlight like wet rubber and she’d wanted to touch the shards, she’d wanted to fit them back together, to rummage around, touching the networks of blood vessels and tissue that seemed so irretrievable. The wound seemed somehow not connected to her mother at all.

  TOMMY HAD come to the end of the bottle and
gone to sleep, his mouth slack and twitching. The formula had dripped down his chin, but Jo didn’t have an extra hand to wipe his mouth. Toward the end of feeding, Jo felt the towel grow damper and smelled urine. A good sign.

  The sunlight had begun to creep across the kitchen floor, across the mud and debris. A crystal bowl from the dining room breakfront lay upside down on the counter, refracting the light, casting, in that moment, the whole kitchen in dappled color. Jo looked down at Tommy. Streaks of yellow and blue and red played across his sleeping face, making him suddenly unrecognizable, as if he were composed of pieces that didn’t quite fit.

  Was she hallucinating the colors? Such a wave of weariness washed over her that it was all she could do to walk back to the hall to see about her mother. As she rounded the corner, she saw that Alice lay still and quiet, her head turned to the steps as if she were waiting for someone important to descend, her face the color of chalk. There were lines around her mouth; a large maple leaf, still green and fresh, was plastered to her cheek.

  She began to mumble, then turned to Jo, her eyes burning. “Look in the buffet,” she whispered. “Get out the bottle of sherry in there.”

  Jo picked her way into the dining room. Outside the dining room windows, now all shattered, the nandina bushes had been stripped of their red berries. When Jo was a girl, she had watched wasps and yellow jackets fight over the little white blossoms while the bumblebees and honeybees crawled among them companionably. In winter her mother had taught her the names of the birds that ate the berries: Old Bully Bluejay, Mr. Robin Redbreast, Miss Rosie the Cardinal, Nutty Nuthatch, Loudmouth Uncle Wren. Alice relished birds; she grew sunflowers for the seeds and put them on trays during the short winters when food was scarce. She’d planted the nandinas for their berries, not their blossoms. All this, of course, BT: Before Tommy. Over the past winter, the birds had been on their own, just as Jo had been.

  Jo looked around the dining room for the buffet. It was a massive piece of furniture; the only wall that could accommodate it was directly under the row of shattered windows. It had presided over exactly one hundred years of holiday meals, from 1836 when her mother’s grandfather, then a boy of four, had traveled cross-country from Charleston to frontier Mississippi, empty then of all but a few straggler Indians, mostly Chickasaws in the northeast, the state having been recently cleared out for settlement. Jo and Son had found arrowheads in the garden out back. It was a game when they were little, to see who could gather the most by suppertime. The buffet had a story; it had been brought across country on a wagon drawn by mules the size of oxen. It had fallen off when a wheel cracked open and the wagon tipped and then Alice’s people’s people had had to fix the wheel and put the buffet back onto the wagon. When Jo first heard the story, she didn’t understand what her mother meant by people’s people. Servants, her mother had explained, they walked all the way, poor things, and with those heavy chains around their ankles, cut just long enough to walk, and then Jo had understood. In recent memory, the open coffin of Jo’s grandfather, Mort’s father, had been placed on the buffet for the visitation like a large piece of meat on a platter and then had sat there overnight until the funeral the next morning.

  Now, unbelievably, the buffet was not there, under the windows, the way it had always been. Nor was it anywhere else in the dining room. It had vanished into thin air. The dining room mirror was there, on its side, slammed up against a wall. Remains of the eight chairs were scattered about, legs and arms here, there, and everywhere. Even the tea table, Jo’s favorite piece of furniture in the house, was there, although it was turned over and one wheel was missing. But the buffet, it was simply gone. Jo rubbed her eyes, forgetting for a moment the thing in her head. A jolt of pain hit her between the eyes. The jaggedly broken windows glared at her like jack-o’-lantern faces.

  She turned wearily and headed back into the hall. Alice was pouring sweat and biting her lip. A splash of sunlight caught her nose and made it seem bulbous. “The sherry?” she asked.

  “It’s gone,” said Jo.

  Her mother’s eyes were still closed. “Just look in the buffet. It’s right there. I need some bad, honey.”

  “It’s gone too.”

  “What’s gone?”

  “The buffet, it blew away. It’s gone.”

  Alice opened her eyes. “No!”

  “Wait,” said Jo. “What about some paregoric?”

  “In the kitchen, up in the cabinet,” her mother whispered.

  Jo walked around her and headed back to the kitchen. Surprisingly, some bottles of paregoric, some partly full and some empty, were still on the shelf to the left of the icebox. She brought a bottle to her mother and lifted Alice’s head with her good right hand and placed the bottle in her hand. “I can’t open the cap.”

  “Use your teeth.”

  Jo put her mother’s head down and took back the bottle and gripped the top with her teeth. There was leakage around the top and a bitter taste. She twisted with her good hand, and the top came loose. She raised her mother’s head a second time. Alice took the bottle and brought it to her lips and drank down the brown liquid.

  “Wasn’t that a lot?” Jo asked.

  Her mother didn’t answer. Her eyelids fluttered and her head jerked once, then again, and then leapt with a life of its own from Jo’s right hand. By instinct, Jo leaned over and caught her mother’s head in her left hand so it wouldn’t slam to the floor. She felt something give way in her elbow. It was a crisp sound, like a twig that had been stepped on. She saw spots.

  She felt her knees give and tried to ease herself and the baby down to the floor. In her arm little Tommy flinched, then he stretched first one arm then the other, and, just as her gorge rose from the pain in her arm and saliva flooded her mouth and she leaned to the side to retch, he smiled up at her benevolently and urinated through the towel. Jo didn’t remember Tommy having such a fetching smile. She wanted to laugh at the absurdity of that smile and smile back, but the pain pressed down like a vise. In order not to scream and scare the baby, in order not to faint and perhaps collapse on top of the baby, she instead began to hum and her humming quickly got louder and louder until she began to sound like an aggravated hornet, like a whole nest of aggravated hornets.

  Was there no one coming to save them? Where was her father? Here he’d gone and left them high and dry with nothing to hope for, except whatever a little colored woman with a bad foot and her own fish to fry could rustle up. If a girl couldn’t count on her own father, who could she count on?

  Whom, her mother would have said had she been in any shape to worry about grammar and dangling prepositions: On whom can you count?

  7

  8 A.M.

  Dovey walked in a dream. Her head throbbed and her foot throbbed. After a while, they throbbed together, at the same time.

  From under the big fedora, which smelled like Brylcreem and cheese, she heard drums. She touched her ear and came away with blood on her fingers.

  The drums drummed on. Before Virgil there’d been a Shake Rag man who played a pair of bongos. Played them hard and fast, with his palms, and one time, when he really got into it, his elbows, deep into the wet-hot summer nights, down at Freddie’s juke joint on East Main. She would sneak down there, waiting until her aunt was asleep then tiptoeing on bare feet out the back, careful not to rattle the kettle on the woodstove as she clicked shut the door. She would feel those drumbeats in her chest even before getting within earshot of Freddie’s. She was just a girl then, but they rocked her and she’d get up before God and everybody and dance, hopping up and down in her bare feet on the splintery wood dance floor, not a thought in her head. No why and why and why. No Mama or Daddy. No Janesy or Uldine or little Blue, sweet boy Blue. The Shake Rag man said she looked like a little jackrabbit out there, hopping high in the air, like she was getting ready to take to the sky. “You got a cottontail?” he asked with a wink.

  What was it she listened for when she listened to the Shake Rag man play? Was
it the sound of the drums or something lodged deep inside the belly of the sound, under the heart?

  When the Shake Rag man left Shake Rag, he left alone, in the dead of early morning, leaving even his drums behind, scared off by who knows what. Something about a woman, somebody’s wife, maybe white, maybe not. Chasing tail all right, but somebody else’s.

  It was said he had a wife and some children over in Itawamba County. By day, he’d worked as a yard man all over town so who knows what some white lady might have decided she wanted when she looked out the window and saw him bent over her irises, shiny with sweat. Or maybe it was just the Itawamba wife getting crazy from all that sitting at home nights. Maybe she’d sharpened her knife.

  THANKFULLY, THE walk into town was downhill. Dovey put her good foot down and slid the other one to follow, the huge shoe getting smaller and smaller as the cut foot swelled. No hopping or dancing now, maybe never again. She skirted huge water-filled holes on the ground where the root balls of giant trees had come up. One of them had a man in it. He was floating facedown on top of the water. A blessing she hadn’t wandered down this way in the dead of night and driving rain. A blessing the white girl had given her the shoes. No telling what kind of trouble might have found her.

  Now she walked through a desert where there were no trees, just pieces of leftover trunks from the storm, bare-limbed against the sky. Piles of ruined, broken things two stories high, not just the trees but houses and cars and wagons and doll babies and toy trains and diapers and broken china and dead birds and squirrels.

  There was something about the walking that seemed old. Her grandmother from Alabama had come to northeast Mississippi in a wagon train, having been sold to the young couple from South Carolina. It was three years after the stars fell. She skipped her way to the new territory, out ahead of her mother and daddy and older brother, who walked clip-clop alongside the wagons.