by Minrose Gwin
“Granny, you wake up. Don’t you go dying on me. Don’t you dare go dying on me.”
Dreama stood over her again, her eyes wide and full and now running over. Lord, that girl could rain tears.
“What you know good, girl.”
Dreama made a sound like a puppy. “Nothing. Don’t know nothing good. Can’t find my baby.”
“I gone and wet the bed.”
“Oh Granny.” Dreama patted her shoulder. “You wait right here. I’ll be back.”
Dovey pushed herself up on her elbow. “Don’t want no white folks changing me. Get a colored nurse.”
“I been changing a lot of diapers lately. I can sure change one more.”
When Dreama came back, she had sheets and towels and a nurse who smiled at Dovey and said she was there to make her more comfortable. She pulled another screen around the stretcher and set about her task. Dreama helped roll Dovey over and pull the wet sheet out from under her. She didn’t look at her grandmother, just at the nurse, waiting for her next instructions. Then she helped roll her back onto the clean sheet. Dovey smelled bleach and smiled and went back to sleep.
SOMEBODY WAS ironing her foot. How come you to iron my foot? It was burning burning—would somebody please take that iron away? She shivered and shook. Now she was on a burning plain, lights in her eyes, stars falling like stones.
Dreama stood talking to a colored man in a blood-splattered gown. The nurse who’d changed Dovey came up behind him and untied it in back, then replaced it with a clean one. Then the nurse came forward with something in a glass that looked like maple syrup and told Dovey to drink it down. The liquid scalded her throat and she gagged. She tried to hand back the glass but the nurse frowned and put it back up to her lips.
Somebody rolled in a tray with small shiny knives on it and something that looked like the tongs she used to pull her clothes from the hot water. The doctor came toward her then, his shadow looming over her, and when she saw what was in his hand, she began to scream. The nurse came and held her leg and then the men who had carried her stretcher came around her. There was a slowness to their coming, as if they were ashamed. They surrounded her and took hold of her. Two on her arms, two on her legs, which were pulled apart.
Dreama leaned down and kissed her on the forehead and wet her face, that girl was going to drown her in tears before this was over. Then Dreama, that cat, was gone, and someone poured something liquid and strong smelling over her foot and ankle. For a moment she wondered if it were gas and they were going to burn the foot off. She floated somewhere above herself, looking down at her limbs splayed like Crosstown, where the Frisco and the M&O crossed in a perfect X. She thought for another moment that these serious-looking young men were holding her down for the man in the clean apron and after he’d taken his turn they’d each have theirs.
This is how Dreama must have felt, like Crosstown.
Then the man in the clean apron, who was colored but who she didn’t know from Adam—though maybe she did, maybe he was Dr. Juber after all—said to Dreama he was sorry that they’d run out of anesthesia but he had to do something about this foot. Dovey opened her mouth to tell him to take off the iron, but nothing came out. A piece of her covering had crept over one side of her face, and all the laundry of the past fifty years, all the laundry in her tally books once so neatly stacked and now cast to the four corners of the earth, came tumbling down on her, heavy and slick and gray with white folks’ dirt. There was more and more of it and it smothered her and she tried to fight it but her arms were gone and so were her legs.
So she didn’t notice when the knife made its first cut into her tree-trunk ankle. Only later would she remember that the touch of the blade was cold as ice, a blessed relief.
10
4 P.M.
The new cast was cool, smooth to the touch, not rough and ragtag and itchy like the old one. Jo’s head felt lighter too, and when she touched it, the horn was gone and in its place a massive bandage that covered all the way from the top of her eyebrows up into her scalp and from one side of her forehead to the other. She missed the horn, the heft of it. Without it, she was just a girl.
When she opened her eyes, the glare of the overhead lights blinded her and she quickly closed them. She yawned, and when she did, her bad ear popped once and then opened up and the hubbub around her rushed in. Something metallic fell to the floor, clattering and banging. There were cries for help and pitiful moans, the sound of heels hitting the floor; and underneath it all an insistent scurrying, as if large noisy rodents had been loosed. The low, intense murmur of voices. Here, there, give me this, take that, go, stay, no I mean go and go right now this minute.
The bedlam jolted her, and her eyes flew open again. She was lying on a cot of some sort, narrow and hard and dipped in the middle so that she rested in a trough. Now, thank heavens, the brouhaha faded gradually, as if she were cantering a horse into the distance, into a thicket of silence.
She dreamed about her cat. She saw Snowball glide through the house, where she had never been allowed, a long smooth strand of unraveling silk, darting and dashing, saving Jo from Son’s friends again and again. The cat took a leap and landed in Jo’s own bed, the three kittens the color of dirty snow right behind her. You, you, you, they said to her. Jo had worried about them finding food after the storm. Before she left the house, she’d opened a bag of dried food on the back porch. Now, in Jo’s dream, she saw the cat eating something under the bedcovers, something with fur that struggled. When Jo drew closer, she realized that the cat was killing one of her own kittens and eating it. She lurched toward the cat, intending to pull the kitten from her jaws, but before she could reach them the kitten disappeared into its mother’s mouth and that was that. Snowball began to purr and clean herself, as if nothing had happened.
When Jo awoke the second time, her hair clotted with sweat, there was a baby crying next to her, screaming to high heaven. She turned her head, slowly, carefully, still aware of the horn’s absent presence. How bad would the scar be?
The baby continued to scream. Jo opened her eyes and looked for the source of the sound. Red-faced and furious, the baby flailed about on his back in a bassinet rolled up next to her cot. Little Tommy? She pushed herself up with her good arm and leaned over and took a look. Yes. He still had the scratches from the bush running like train tracks across his face. She touched his cheek. He reached up and snatched at her finger and stuck it in his mouth and began to suck frantically. Bless his heart, he was hungry. How could these people—doctors and nurses from the looks of things—let a little baby go hungry? What a simple thing, warming a bottle. Why hadn’t someone thought of it? Where was her mother? The thought of Alice and Alice’s leg made her sit bolt upright. She’d done a report in history class earlier in the year about the Great War, how the soldiers’ shattered limbs could sometimes never be made whole: how, in cases of severe injury, the pieces could not, even with the best of intentions and expertise, be reassembled; how “drastic action” was required. She had interviewed Mr. Lewis, who had been a lieutenant colonel in the army. He taught French at Tupelo High School and had lost his arm from a piece of shrapnel. He spent his spare time on the front porch of his rented duplex, sitting in a rocking chair holding a book in one hand. He had to put it down in his lap each time he turned a page. That was the worst thing, he told Jo, having to put that book down every time he turned the page. What an infernal aggravation! Imagine it! She couldn’t, and especially now when it was her mother and a leg not an arm. How would Alice get up and down the stairs? How would she water her garden? Take care of little Tommy?
Jo wasn’t sure how long it had been since the night of the storm—two days? three?—but she suspected that too much time had elapsed for her mother’s leg, that “drastic action” would be required. How much of her poor wounded mother would be left?
What she couldn’t bear to think about was sepsis. She’d read about the creeping poisons that killed, how limbs were packed in ice to slow t
heir progression, how they continued to infuse the body after death, causing red streaks in the affected body part so that, oddly, the part that had been killed appeared the most alive. Back at the house, she’d thought of sepsis, of course she had, no one could say she’d hadn’t, but there’d been no ice. All she could have done—pouring alcohol over the wound, making the splint and wrap—she had done and done well. Nobody could say she hadn’t done the best she could—the best anyone could have done—under the circumstances.
The baby paused in his sucking and cried out, one foreshortened pathetic little cry, then resumed with her finger. Jo looked around for someone who might bring a bottle. She squinted against the glare of the lights, which made things worse since squinting caused her bandage to ride down over her eyes. From what she could tell, there was a sea of white, some of it splattered in red, and lumps of people covered in bandages. Doctors and nurses and other people who wore uniforms and seemed to know what they were doing, moved among the cots and the wounded lying on them as if they were a smorgasbord, spread out before them. They were all on a stage of some sort. From her cot Jo could reach over and touch a crumbling velvet curtain. She could smell the old dust in it. She sneezed and wiped her nose on the sleeve of what appeared to be a man’s dress shirt that someone had put on her. The other sleeve had been cut off to make room for the cast. She blushed to think she’d been undressed (and bathed?) top to bottom and then repositioned inside the strange garment, which smelled of bleach. Even her underpants were gone. On the bottom she was wearing only a man’s pajama pants of scratchy white cotton.
The baby spit out her finger again, his face purple with rage. He took a shaky breath and opened his mouth to scream. Jo kicked off her sheet and threw her legs over the side of the cot. She leaned over his bassinet and gathered him up just as the scream burst forth, using the cast to nudge him into her good arm and then hold him in place.
“Oh Tommy,” she said. “It’s going to be all right. You’re going to be all right.” She jounced him in her good arm the way she’d seen her mother do.
The baby stopped in mid-scream and regarded her, his head bobbling on his neck as he fought the glare of the overhead lights, his eyes strangely iridescent, the color of pennies, momentarily mysterious and foreign. She’d heard somebody say that all babies were born with blue eyes and that they changed color, if they were going to change, later on. Little Tommy’s eyes must have changed in the midst of all this. How remarkable the way the body goes on when everything else comes to a screeching halt, how resolutely it makes its way through time. She’d read somewhere that hair and nails grew after death and the horror of Son with Dracula fingernails flashed unbidden in her mind.
To dispel the image, she kissed the baby on his nose. Then she rose with him in her arms, her knees wobbly and sore. The soles of her feet burned when she put her weight on them. Once, when she was little, Son had dared her to climb barefooted onto a pile of gravel. The two of them were in the back alley of the Leake & Goodlett lumberyard while their father was inside getting some boards to put up shelves in the garage. She had fought hard to go along with the two of them, her father having asked Son, but not her, to come on the errand. It was July and early afternoon, the sun blazing, the gravel dark and hot. Of course she’d taken Son’s dare and run right up to the top of the pile, burning and scratching the soles of her feet. After that, her feet had turned sensitive and easily aggravated. She never went barefoot again, and when it came time to wear stockings and high heels, they became her tormentors. Over the years, the burn would rise to the surface from time to time to plague her. It had come back after Son and his friends had played the trick that day, and then again after she fell off the horse. Once, too, when she made a C in algebra, which she got because her teacher, the high school football coach, was stupid. Now here they were again, raising their ugly heads, her sad mad feet, burning and throbbing, just because she didn’t have enough on her plate right now, just because she didn’t have more than enough to contend with.
Some CCC boys carrying a stretcher passed by; on it was a small form the size and shape of a Thanksgiving turkey, covered with a blue-and-white-checked dish towel. An arm or leg? A baby? What had the CCC boys done with Son? There was a family plot in Glenwood Cemetery at the end of North Church Street. The aunts were there, under a stinky gingko tree that flared a brilliant yellow in the fall and dropped its rank fruit—a mucky cross between shit and vomit, Son used to say—that adhered to the soles of your shoes.
Aunt Fan had gone first. She had a nagging cough, Aunt Sister said, and in the middle of the night, she turned on the light and got a peppermint to soothe her throat. The aunts shared a bedroom in the old house. It was a large room and they had two double beds with a table between, where they placed their nighttime glasses of water and peppermints and whatever books they were reading at the time. The door to the room they kept locked at night because they worried about bands of Negro men breaking in and preying on innocent ladies like themselves. To Jo’s knowledge they knew only one, Joshua Moses, who brought them eggs from his farm out in the country. Once he’d fixed a loose shingle on their roof and pulled down the ivy on the side of the house. He was nice as nice could be. But they’d heard stories. They needed to protect themselves.
After her coughing spell passed, Aunt Fan turned the light back off and unwrapped the peppermint and sucked on it for a minute or two; Aunt Sister could hear her. But then, just as Aunt Sister was drifting back to sleep, Fan bolted out of the bed and poked her hard on the shoulder. Aunt Sister sat up and turned on the light to find Fan standing over her, her face turned a horrible shade of plum; she was slapping her own chest frantically. Frantically, Aunt Sister said, over and over she slapped herself and looked at her, Sister, with eyes like plates. Sister didn’t know what to do, but she got up and went over and patted Fan on the back, timidly at first, then harder, all the while fussing at her for waking her up from a dead sleep. Fan knew she had insomnia. How was she expected to get her rest?
Then Fan collapsed on the threadbare Oriental rug and stopped breathing or moving or doing anything but staring that awful stare.
That was October. The gingko was in flames and the fruit had dropped and stunk to high heaven. The men from Pegues Funeral Home placed the chairs in a semicircle on the opposite side of the tree, but the smell made Jo gag. Her mother handed her a lavender-scented handkerchief to put over her nose, and thankfully the graveside service consisted of “The Lord Is My Shepherd” and a hasty prayer, though by the time it was over Jo had upchucked into the handkerchief.
Two weeks later Alice sent Jo down the street with a plate of fried chicken and mashed potatoes for Aunt Sister. The front door was locked so Jo picked up the pot of mums on the front porch and retrieved the key from its hiding place. The flowers changed with the season, but the key had been under the pot since the beginning of time, always warm to the touch.
The living room was cold and dark and quiet, the drapes closed as if Aunt Sister had gone on a trip. There were dead flowers in vases of brown water everywhere, on the floor and dining room table and buffet. The aunts’ two rocking chairs sat dreaming in their place by the window, the crystal bowl of peppermints on the scalloped marble-top table between them.
Jo stopped midway through the living room and called out, “Aunt Sister? Are you home?”
The silence of the house reached out and patted her cheek the way Aunt Sister used to when she was little. What a beautiful child, Aunt Sister would say, her touch papery and smelling of talcum and ginger. It was the only time Jo had ever been called beautiful.
Once, after the trick and when she’d started coming by every afternoon after school, Aunt Sister had patted her cheek again and said, Don’t you worry about a thing.
The house pushed Jo backward. After what seemed like an eternity, she touched the doorknob behind her and then turned her back on the house and dead flowers and Aunt Sister’s silence and streaked across the porch and then the yard and then up C
hurch Street to get her mother.
NOW, SHE thought, there might well be more of her family underground in Glenwood than aboveground in the house on Church Street. Also buried under the gingko were her father’s parents and another baby brother named Henry, after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, her mother’s favorite poet, born blue when Jo was two years old. Over the years Jo had come to think of him as Baby Blue. She pictured him floating up beyond the clouds, translucent and motionless, like a jellyfish.
After Baby Blue, Jo’s mother had borrowed Imogene Gillespie’s Charley and wouldn’t give him back. Aunt Fan was a firsthand witness and told the story to Jo one dark winter afternoon. Imogene had taken little Charley with her to Lil’s Beauty Parlor and parked him in his carriage by the sunny window up front next to Lil’s overgrown philodendron. Unfortunately, Alice was there getting her first wash and set after losing her little Henry. You could tell, Aunt Fan said, that Lil was kicking herself for booking the two of them back to back; it was a terrible mistake and Lil’s face turned white as a sheet when Imogene came sashaying in with that perky little baby boy of hers and all the ladies in the shop except Alice ran over and began to ooh and ahh over little Charley, who, Aunt Fan said, was a particularly well-formed child.
Alice got out from under the dryer for her comb-out, her cheeks flame red. She glared straight into the mirror while Lil took out her rollers and combed her out. She handed Lil two quarters, no tip. Then, as she headed out the door, she took the handle of the carriage like it and what it contained were hers, and twirled it around and opened the front door and had the baby out on the sidewalk before anyone could ask her what she had in mind. Just as the door closed, she said, “A bit of air.” Just that, Aunt Fan said. A bit of air. Even the words sounded airy.