Promise

by Minrose Gwin

  So, in the middle of everything, in front of this family she’d never met, she’d embarrassed Virgil by sleeping hard, her head thrown back and her mouth open. Finally, he shook her and told her to get up, they were going to see the ocean. His tone stern.

  They walked under the live oaks up Esplanade into the Marigny, and boarded the Pontchartrain Express to Milneburg, ten cents for a round trip. At the end of the line, they got off and he pointed the way and they walked the remaining blocks to the water.

  It wasn’t what she expected. Swampy and rank with garbage from the ramshackle fish camps up and down the piers. No beach and the water a dingy brown rather than the clear green she’d imagined. There was a long pier where a vessel the size of a mountain was docked and men were unloading pineapples. Up and down, men in enormous straw hats were fishing. But there were waves, little ones but regular and steady as a heartbeat, and they came in and swished up on the wood pilings, making a nice sound. See, Virgil said with a sweep of his hand and she could tell he was proud of that brown water and the fact that he could take her to it and she said yes she did see and they were right pretty, those waves, she was pleased to make their acquaintance.

  NOW THE waves that made everything slip and slide before her eyes had calmed. The one baby’s cry had turned into a chorus and not far from her. They must have put them all together, all the lost babies.

  She pushed herself up on the pallet and got to her knees. If she could just get up into a seat, she could see around the theater. She walked on her knees over to a seat at the end of the closest row and took hold of the chair arm and pulled herself up. When her foot took on weight, it felt like somebody had stuck a knitting needle in it. She gasped and fumbled with the upturned seat and sat down hard, before it was all the way down. She sat with tears streaming down her cheeks, gritting her teeth against the needle, scanning the theater for the babies. In the middle aisle, some ladies were bending down and coming up with writhing blankets. She rose again, this time not putting weight on the foot, steadying herself on the back of the seat in front of her, and hopped her way over to the middle aisle. She dropped into the last seat. There was a cluster of bassinets in the aisle and some children were sitting in seats next to them. A Red Cross lady, not hers, stood talking to some of the older children and writing things into a notebook.

  Got to get back up. Got to see. Clutching the backs of seats, she hopped up the aisle until she came to where the babies were. One of the ladies holding a baby asked her what she needed, and she told her about Promise. These here are the white babies, the lady said, holding the one in her arms toward Dovey to make her point. The baby was splotched bright red. It gasped for breath between screams. Some folks don’t know how to fix a baby. When she was little, her mother always handed the youngest to her. First Janesy, who whimpered like a puppy; then Uldine with her colic; and finally little Blue, who took the cake with his hollering. But even him she could calm. Her grandmother had taught her. It was all in the grip, a firm hand on the seat of the britches; that, and holding the screamer next to your liver. The liver is full of blood and blood calls out to blood, her grandmother had said.

  Dovey didn’t know what to say back to the woman who held the baby. That Promise was, by hook or crook, almost all white and sure enough looked it? Would the woman then say, a drop is a drop? And what then? Should Dovey say a drop may be a drop but this baby’s drop don’t show, she wished it showed more? Life would be less complicated. Should she tell the woman to get out of her way and run the risk of the woman slapping her? None of it seemed right or wise. Instead she ignored the woman and hopped by her and peered down at the little ones in their bassinets, examining each face to make sure. Oddly, Promise’s face had clotted in her mind. Was his mouth full or straight? His hair, she seemed to remember, was chestnut, but his fingers, long and slender or thick? All she could remember, really see in her mind’s eye, were those copper eyes. These babies here were most definitely not her great-grandbaby. Promise had something special about him, a little added extra thing. Virgil called it salt, that baby’s got salt, he’d say. She thought it was more like sugar, a sweetness that lifted them all up and made them wonder how in the world it had happened, given the ugliness he’d come out of. She’d always wanted to see her Charlesetta in him, some little something, the shape of the cheek or Charlesetta’s bow of a hairline, just a whisper to remember her by, but she never had, just like she’d never seen Charlesetta in Dreama.

  The thought occurred to her that maybe there was something about Promise that white folks could see that she couldn’t, maybe they could see blood where she couldn’t.

  “Where the colored babies at?” she asked the woman.

  The woman shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe ask the Red Cross people?”

  The waves crashed in now, splattered the pier. Everything went under: the seats, the stage, the lined-up lost babies. Dovey collapsed into a seat.

  The woman leaned over her. “You all right, auntie?”

  Dovey tried to nod but her chin had stationed itself on her chest and wouldn’t move. Old chin. Then there was the underwater gurgle of the woman’s voice calling for help. Some hands took her arms and then she was flat on her back again and they carried her somewhere, and then there was nothing but time.

  WHEN SHE awoke again she was back on her pallet in the corner. Things had quietened down. Moans but no screams, no babies hollering. The lights had been dimmed, and there was the hum of a motor. It was true dark in her corner now but she could see the shapes of people lying around her. Some talked quietly among themselves. All colored people. Their voices rose and fell, rose and fell, and lulled her back to sleep.

  The second time she woke up the lights were back on and shone in her eyes. A girl she didn’t know stood over her.

  “What are we going to do, Granny? You hear anything about Papa?” The girl bent over her, took her hands and held them up to her face. Who? Rain from the girl’s eyes splattered Dovey’s face. “I searched high and low for him, Granny, and he’s nowhere. I can’t find him. I had him under me in the road. How’d he get out from under me? I looked and looked. He’s not anywhere.”

  Dovey could smell the rain on the girl’s face, it smelled like swamp, salty and coming from a dark and mysterious place. It splattered Dovey’s face, pooled between the chords of her neck. It tickled her good ear and soaked into her hair. “Everybody’s somewhere,” she said to the girl.

  “But I’ve been looking two days and two nights.”

  Two days? Where was Virgil? “Maybe three’s the charm.”

  The girl drew closer. “They say your foot’s bad and you’ve got a loose brain. They say they’ve got to keep you. You got to tell me what to do, Granny.”

  Sweet, Dovey thought. She could just lie here now and somebody else would do the laundry and she could rest. She flexed the foot and the needle found its mark. No point in fighting it. Who was this girl with her thicket of words? Her outrageous demands? It occurred to Dovey that she herself might be dead and this girl someone she’d known from a long time ago, maybe a girl from the one-room schoolhouse where Dovey had learned to read and make her numbers. Most of Dovey’s classmates, the ones she’d kept up with, had passed; maybe this girl was one of the early ones who’d succumbed to whooping cough or typhoid or polio or TB or just a chest cold.

  But now this girl, this irritating girl, poked her on the shoulder, once, then again, and the rain on Dovey’s face turned into a downpour.

  “Granny, you got to wake up. The nurse says I got to wake you up every two hours.” Now the girl patted Dovey’s cheek, gently at first, then harder. “Open your eyes, Granny.”

  Her eyes were open, was the girl blind? As to that old dog Virgil, well, he’d just have to find her. She’d looked for him long enough, she was flat worn out with looking for him, sick to death of him running off and leaving her like that. How come him to go and do that? Was he catting around with some woman? After all those loads of laundry and all the
corn bread and biscuits and pulling some flavor out of the beans and staying awake in bed for him to do his business on nights when she was dead on her feet? What had he done for her?

  The girl was pure aggravation. A pesky mosquito, jawing at her, keeping her from taking her rest.

  Another Red Cross lady came up. “You two want some sandwiches?”

  The girl reached out and took two, then poked Dovey again. “Wake up, Granny.”

  “Let me be.” As if she hadn’t worked hard all her life. As if she didn’t deserve a little rest. The girl vexed her. Who did she think she was?

  The girl put a cool hand to Dovey’s forehead. “You’re hot. Let me look at that foot.” The girl pulled the covers off of Dovey’s leg. Then Dovey felt air as the girl unraveled some of the bandages. There was a long silence, then the girl put the covers back so lightly Dovey could hardly feel them. “I’m getting somebody to look at this leg.”

  When the girl got up to leave, Dovey opened her eyes, missing this aggravating girl already. The girl walked with a firm step toward a cluster of women in white. She spoke to the women and pointed back to where Dovey lay and the women looked. One broke away from the group and followed the girl back. The woman pulled a thermometer out of her pocket and put it in Dovey’s mouth and took Dovey’s wrist and looked at a watch on her arm.

  “She’s got a fever,” the girl said to the woman. “And the foot, it’s swelled up all the way to her knee. Don’t you have any medicine you can give her?”

  The Red Cross lady brought out a stethoscope. When the cold instrument touched her chest, Dovey’s heart kicked back. The woman listened for what seemed like a long time, then turned back to the girl. “Who are you? Are you kin to her?”

  “My name is Dreama Grand’homme. She’s my grandmother. She has a husband, but we can’t find him.”

  Dreama. It was a pretty name, Dovey thought, a pretty name for a pretty little girl. How old was she? Eleven, twelve, maybe younger?

  The nurse pulled back the covers. She poked at Dovey’s leg and the bottom of her foot.

  “Do you feel that?” she asked Dovey.

  Dovey shook her head. The foot felt like a piece of meat attached to her leg. An improvement over the knitting needle.

  “I’m going to get somebody to take a look. It may have to come off.” Then the nurse was gone and Dovey was glad because that meant she had the aggravating girl to herself again.

  The girl hovered over her, clucking over Dovey and raining on her face again. Dovey licked her lips, coming up with salt.

  “You got the nurse,” she said to the girl.

  “Probably would never have come over here if somebody hadn’t. Probably wouldn’t have given you a second thought.”

  “But you got her.”

  The girl’s almond eyes hardened. “I did. I got her and I’ll go get her again if she doesn’t get back here and see about you.”

  “What she say about my foot?”

  “She said it looked bad.”

  “What they going to do with it?”

  “I don’t know, Granny.”

  “Don’t let them . . .” Dovey fell back into a doze, forgetting what she didn’t want them to do, and here came the storm again and took her up in its long, cold arms and flew her all over town, except that the town was bare as a bone and there were no children anywhere, only old folks, white and black, skin and bone and naked as jaybirds, rummaging around in what was left, which was nothing but garbage, piles and piles of it. An upside-down cow sailed by, barely missing her. The cow had no hair and it looked surprised, not fearful but just surprised. “Morning,” she said to the cow. “Morning,” it said back to her before it was swept away. Then she looked down and saw a little child, a baby, naked too, in a bush, bawling its eyes out. “Morning,” she said to it too, but it screamed on, shaking its little fists at her. She reached out to take it but the storm was jealous and swooped her up and her mouth opened to tell the wind to stop but the words fell like stones onto the doomed landscape below, into deep pools of water and twisted, sheared tree trunks and piles and piles of ruined houses and cars and stores and churches and all the other things that people build or buy to make themselves feel at home in the world.

  The girl pushed at her again. “Don’t be going back to sleep. You hear me? I told you about that. What am I going to do with you, Granny?”

  Now it all came back to her.

  Dreama. Oh.

  Dreama bent over her. “You remember me? I was afraid you didn’t know who I was. I was afraid you’d gone mental.”

  They both laughed a little, and Dreama put her hand on Dovey’s head. When the doctor came, he squatted down and lifted the covers and took off all the bandages and looked at the foot, turning it this way and that. He was a plump man. There were beads of sweat on his brow.

  “Why don’t you take her up there on the stage so you can see what you’re doing?” Dreama asked him.

  “Crowded up there,” he murmured. “No need for that.”

  Dreama’s eyes narrowed. “Looks to me like there’s room for an elephant up there on that stage.”

  “Don’t you sass me, girl.” He didn’t look up at Dreama when he said it, and Dovey barely caught the words.

  “You just going to let my granny die back here on the floor in this corner? You can’t see a thing. Floor’s filthy. Dirt and roaches and probably rats. No place for somebody who’s sick as she is.” Dreama’s voice rose and people started to look.

  Girl got her sass from her mama, Dovey thought.

  Another Red Cross lady, this one a Yankee by the sound of her, came over and asked if she could help.

  Dreama turned to her. “My grandmother needs to be up off this dirty floor and in the light where somebody can see about her. She’s about to lose this foot if somebody doesn’t do something.”

  “Don’t let them,” Dovey murmured.

  “Is this woman in sepsis?” the Yankee Red Cross lady asked the doctor.

  “Her foot’s pretty bad.”

  “No,” Dovey said. She’d come into the world with that foot. It was small like her and slender and high-arched. Once she’d been vain about her feet, the way the toes lined up from big toe to little, as regular as stair steps. Promise had her toes.

  “Well then, I think the girl has a point, don’t you? Now why don’t I get someone to take this lady up onto the stage so you can keep a better eye on her? Looks like you have plenty of room up there.”

  “Down here we don’t mix,” the doctor said under his breath. He still hadn’t looked up.

  “Oh dear, that’s not emergency protocol,” the Yankee Red Cross lady said. She said it as pleasantly as if she were talking about what to have for supper or inquiring about the weather. Her mouth smiled, but her eyes were fiery. “We treat everyone by the severity of the injury. Now let’s get this poor unfortunate woman up into the light. Honey, have you had a tetanus?”

  Protocol? The unfamiliar word frightened Dovey in some deep way, conjuring endless lines of people waiting and waiting, bloodied and ragged, the lines in their faces train tracks on a map. The lines turned a corner and went into a building of some sort and folks were being told to take off their clothes and go inside. Then there were rows instead of lines, endless rows of them, naked as jailbirds, skin and bone, like crackers in a box. She’d never seen such a thing, though she’d heard about whole villages in Europe wiped out in the Great War, the dead lined up in open trenches they themselves had been forced to dig. The evil in this world, how it dipped and swooped! Her grandmother who saw the stars fall in Alabama used to talk about pattyrollers. If you walked out at night, there might be no coming back, or at least no coming back without damage. They patrolled the countryside and took you by surprise, and if you were a girl it was your lookout. On hot summer nights Dovey and her sisters and brother used to play pattyroller, one of them on the lam, scuttling from tree to tree, the rest tearing around on imaginary horses beating whips made from forsythia branches, and h
ollering about what they were going to do when they caught the one who ran.

  Dreama leaned down and touched Dovey’s shoulder. “There’s babies everywhere, Granny. The place is running over with them. I’m going to see if I can find Promise. I’ll be back.”

  Dovey opened her mouth to tell her there was no point, she’d already looked at the babies, not to worry, though—there was a baby to match everybody who was looking for one, you just had to find the right fit—but then some men came with a stretcher and slid her over onto it and lifted her up and the needle in her foot pitched and plunged. She cried out, couldn’t help it, and one of them put his hand on her belly to hold her steady. The bare underside of his arm, white with freckles and little brown hairs everywhere, blocked her view. The hand was heavier than it ought to have been and it pressed down. Her bladder was full and the pressure unbearable. She pushed the hand away but it came back. “Got to hold you steady,” the man murmured. She stopped fighting then and let her bladder empty, turning her face away from the man.

  When the men began to ascend the stairs to the stage, the stretcher lurched and she slid down on it, sliding into the pool of her own urine, which had gone from warm to cold. For a sickening moment she thought she was going to fall off, but the hand steadied her. One of the men brushed the foot and the needle twisted and she cried out again.

  The hand patted her belly and the man on the end of it said they were there now, somebody was going to take a look at that leg. They put her in a corner of the stage behind a screen. She opened her mouth to ask for her doctor, Dr. Juber, but then the storm took her up again and blew her backward, back to yesterday and then the whole blessed day before when there was no weather and it was Palm Sunday and Dreama and Promise were on their way home from church and Virgil was dead to the world in his bed and the children were dancing in the street and the worst thing that had happened was the McNabb wash about to get rained on.