Promise

by Minrose Gwin

  But still here he came and there was no wishing him away, and after a few minutes he turned his attention to the stage where she lay and it was a matter of moments before he would spot her. So she raised her hand, hesitantly, as if she were in school and answering a particularly difficult question the teacher had posed, as if she weren’t sure of the answer.

  And then she called out “Daddy,” thinking, suddenly, with a rush of relief, that this man was her very own father, and surely there was some good reason he had not come to save them when they needed saving, some very good reason that he would soon divulge, and she, Jo, his one and only daughter, would understand.

  Now that he’d come under the lights, Jo got a good look. Mort needed a shave. There was a bandage on the side of his neck and a cleft the size of an earthworm between his eyebrows that hadn’t been there before. His cheeks hung in pouches and his eyes were rimmed in red.

  “Jo, thank God,” he called out and came toward her, winding between the maze of cots that separated them. When he reached her, he tried to gather her up into his arms, cast and all, knocking into the bassinet, jostling the baby, who whimpered, then began to kick and fuss. Her father didn’t look down at the baby, her brother, his son. “Where’s your mother?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody will tell me, but look, I found little Tommy and he’s just fine.”

  “Where? Where was he? I looked everywhere.” Mort McNabb snatched up the baby, who began to scream.

  “You’re scaring him,” Jo said.

  Her father ignored her. He held the baby high in the air and kissed his stomach. Tommy used to like it when their father came home from work and held him aloft and kissed his little belly. He would kick and giggle; now he just screamed louder, his face red, his little fists clinched as if to protect himself from the evil giant who dangled him in midair.

  Fe, fi, fo, fum, Jo thought.

  Mort handed her the baby. “I’m going to find your mother,” he said.

  He moved from cot to cot, working his way from one side of the room to the other. He stopped and spoke briefly to a few people who lay under the sheets, but he didn’t pause long at any one bed. Jo watched as he went about his search methodically, finally ending in a corner of the stage. Then, as Jo watched, he approached a nurse, who beckoned him to follow. They both disappeared behind a curtain into a side exit and it was as if he’d been swallowed whole, or worse yet, had never been there at all, as if Jo had conjured him up. She looked down at the baby, who had, mercifully, stopped crying and now looked up at her impassively, a slight and strangely unrecognizable smile playing at his lips.

  She wondered suddenly whether she even wanted her father to return. He was bossy and sometimes even rude. He slurped his coffee and lectured her ad nauseam on the merits of objective justice. He’d flat-out refused to let her go see Herb Bassett’s world-renowned air show. Herb had worn goggles and had a lazy smile and a curly lock of dark hair that hung over his eyes. She’d told her parents she was going to Lois’s and the two of them had sneaked off and gone anyway and she was eternally glad they had. The plane had done twirlies and curlicues and had made her heart stop when it landed on one wheel. A year later, when it came down in a blaze of glory in Biloxi, she grew to believe she’d seen that too, though she had only read about it in the newspaper and cried herself dry for Herb Bassett.

  Then too there was the fact that, until Son turned bad, Mort had always favored him because he was the boy, he was the son. In truth, she was generally sick and tired of her father’s ways, and especially his discourses on justice, how there was a right way and a wrong way for everything under the sun, how the path toward justice was always brightly lit and abundantly clear to him, how justice was clean as a whistle, blind as a bat to love and pity and selfishness, those ragtag beggars. (And such a paragon of virtue her father was, with his hidden stash of moonshine and that unspeakable book, the latter so disgustingly obscene Jo couldn’t bear to think about it: men with body parts the size of elephant tusks, women twisted in impossible positions, with smiles on their faces. No wonder her poor mother was beside herself!) To Jo, justice seemed more like a dark and foggy day, the kind Tupelo got in November, near her birthday, when the hills and the sky seemed indistinguishable. Oh, and good grief, here he came back again, striding up the aisle, followed by a man in a white coat, both of them climbing the steps to the stage and heading for her and Tommy, who’d just now drifted back off to sleep, thankfully. She hoped her father wouldn’t wake him a second time. She was tired of all the screaming, no matter how much she loved her baby brother.

  “Jo!” Mort’s voice rang out, causing several bandaged heads to rise off their cots.

  Jo put a finger to her lips. She had learned over the past few days how to be quiet.

  “Jo, they’ve got your mother over there.” He gestured toward the far back of the stage. “They took her straight into surgery.”

  Jo looked back and forth between her father and the man in white. She prepared herself to ask about the word surgery, what it meant, but then her father’s face crumbled and the man in white put his hand on her father’s shoulder and she knew without asking.

  She put her hands over her face and began to cry, and as if on cue, so did the baby. “Pick him up,” she commanded her father, but he was already gone, following the man in white, both of them making their way across the sea of white, leaving her with little Tommy to deal with, yet again.

  So she got up and reached for him. Damn her father’s hide, she would take care of her baby brother if no one else would. She would save him for her mother, and her mother would have to live because he would be there needing her every minute of every day, leg or no leg. Now he was wet again and there was a pile of clean diapers at the foot of the bassinet, so she opened each diaper pin one-handed, with the utmost care, then pulled out the wet and pushed in the dry. She drove each pin through the cloth with the utmost concentration, first the bottom piece of cloth, then the top, petrified that she might stick him, and after that, her bandaged brow furrowed with the effort, she managed to secure the left pin with her good right hand, then the right. All this despite the fact that Tommy was kicking the air and hollering like it was the end of the world. It was an accomplishment. When it was over, he stopped the brouhaha and smiled up at her and patted the bandage on her head where the horn had been. She smiled back because what else was there to do?

  He was still on his back, sucking hard at his bottom lip, his eyes glazed over.

  How odd that every time she looked closely at him, he seemed strangely altered from the time before. She could almost see his cells divide, his features shift and settle. His ears appeared larger than they had this morning, the lobes longer and more pointed, his almond eyes now tilted upward in a way they hadn’t before, a little Chinaman. She took his dimpled arm in her hand. He was nothing short of a miracle. Tomorrow she would bring him in to see their mother. Would Alice even know her own baby boy? If not, Jo would explain that this was the way of babies, and what a lark it would be for her poor maimed mother to wake up each morning and look into this dear little face and find that one mutation, that minute alteration.

  Obligation: it was the last word Alice had given Jo before Tommy was born. In Alice’s mouth, it had had a leaden ring.

  But Jo did not think of obligation as what bound her to the child before her. Because this was the one true thing: how she, Jo, could see through her brother’s own flesh and blood and bone in the most intimate way possible and watch time at work, as if he had come from her own body, her own cells. As if time were not something they shared but the clay they were made of. This above all else, not the third pew in the First Presbyterian Church, not the sweet by-and-by, not the Thou shalts and the Thou shalt nots. This was the storm, the tearing down and the building up, the coil and recoil of it all: this was the inscrutable. How she wanted to pierce it!

  He was asleep now. She pulled the covers over him and went back to her cot and shut her eyes and waited for mo
rning, her breath slow and steady as a purr.

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8

  11

  7:32 A.M.

  Dovey woke with a start, in the middle of a dream about the Devil’s shoes. They seemed to be nailed down and her feet glued inside. She couldn’t get her feet out and she couldn’t pick them up to walk. Now they’d begun to sink into mud. Then the mud became quicksand, sucking her under.

  She was up to her knees when she awoke. She lay on her left side, her hands curled under her chin, fingers tucked. At first she thought she was home, in her own bed, and it was morning. She tried to remember the day of the week, whose wash needed to be returned and whose needed picking up, whether she had ironing waiting on the board.

  What woke her was Promise and his big mouth. He was squalling and hollering to raise the dead. She knew his cry like she knew the tops of her own two hands, now staring her in the face, veiny, the knuckles covered in callused knots from the scrub board. He was mad as a hornet, hungry and wet and probably worse. Why didn’t Dreama get her backside out of that bed and see about her own child before he woke up everybody in the house? People needed their rest, especially Virgil, who faced a ten-hour day at the mill.

  She reached for Virgil and touched air. Then she opened her eyes and saw nothing but white all around her. It was as if she’d been swallowed whole by white folks’ laundry, her nightmare come true. The belly of the beast. What had she done to deserve this?

  She sat up and began waving her arms wildly in the air, pushing back at the sheeted enclosure that surrounded her. It hung there whitely indifferent.

  The baby hollered louder, a ragged cry, unraveling at the edges like rope, scarcely a breath between whoops of fury and something else: fear?

  Where was that girl?

  Dovey struggled to get her feet out from under the sheet that covered them. She liked her top sheet loose at the bottom. How had it gotten tucked so tight?

  Then the bad foot said, Whoa, horse, remember me? And, instantly, she knew.

  The foot felt lighter now. And the drum in her head was gone too. What a surprise to wake up so unburdened.

  Then she remembered the chill of the knife and her heart turned to ice. She looked down, expecting to see what she couldn’t bear to see, which was nothing where there had been something.

  What she saw was an enormous bandage made from strips of sheet. Elephant foot, you hiding in there? You playing pattyroller? Say yes. Say old sun, new day. Say you playing with me, old foot. Say you back, sassy and pretty like you used to be.

  She’d had the prettiest little feet, high-arched and size four and a half, the bottoms hard as hooves from her barefoot habit, but soft as a baby’s cheek on top. Even now, when she’d let him, Virgil liked to cup both of her feet in his one hand just to look at them. Back in the day he’d put them to his cheek and say poor little feet and play little piggy with them. Then he’d kiss them, one toe at a time. This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home.

  At the thought of Virgil, she began to cry, remembering the crushed house and under it the empty bed, or what used to be the bed where they’d slept for umpteen years. And no sign. Him gone, without a trace, like he’d never drawn breath.

  She deserved whatever she got, she’d been cold, she’d laid blame. She’d never forgiven him for Charlesetta. She’d made him carry that pine box for sixteen years. A heavy load.

  But he was alive. She knew it. If he’d been gone for good, she would have known, she would have felt him pass, he would be with her now, touching her here and there with ghost fingers, toes to nose, playing fast and loose, not wanting to go, asking for her forgiveness. And he wouldn’t go, she wouldn’t let him. She would tuck him into the pocket of her old sweater, next to her rib cage. She would keep him warm with her own heat, and he would stay.

  But she didn’t feel a thing, no sense of him at all, which meant he was still somewhere out there in the world, still flesh and blood and bone. He’d be looking for her. She needed to be watchful.

  Promise cried on.

  She wiped her eyes and tried to wiggle what she thought were her toes. The motion set off the needles. Good. She bent over and assessed the bandage. Was there a foot under there, or just a stub? She knew from old Leroy Moore across the street, whose leg had been taken by the sugar sickness, that a lost foot can become a ghost, make itself felt, make demands. Old thing keeps telling me it hurts, needs rubbing with Dr. Tichenor’s, Leroy Moore would tell anybody who would listen. Sometimes I want to beat it with a stick, make it behave, but I look down and ain’t nothing left down there to beat.

  She willed the bandage to give her a sign. Move.

  Nothing. She wiggled the imaginary toes again, this time harder.

  Was she seeing things or did the tip end of the bandage, right where the toes should have been, sure enough move? Was there a foot under that monster bandage, hiding out from the pattyrollers? Did she, please Lord, still have two feet and they could make a party?

  Hello, foot. Is that you?

  I’m here, old woman.

  She felt like planning a party, hopping up from her cot and dancing the way she used to when she was a girl and the Shake Rag man beat on his drums.

  A little yip and the baby stopped crying, as if someone had stuffed a rag in his mouth.

  About time somebody paid him some mind. She lowered her good foot to the floor. She would claim him. She wanted him safe in her arms more than she’d ever wanted anything.

  First she had to find him. She followed the good foot with the bandaged one. It hit the floor and here came the needles again, pricking and slicing, worse than before. They took her breath away, made her heart race. She lay back down, hoisting the bad leg back onto the cot. She lay back and waited for someone to come and see about her. She needed a set of crutches.

  She cried out and a nurse came through the sheets. “You looking good, Miss Dovey.”

  “It’s an improvement.” She recognized the woman as one of Dr. Juber’s nurses. She was a young married woman, pretty, with no children yet, one of the Heroines of Jericho at Saint John’s. She played canasta on Wednesday nights after prayer meeting. Dovey wanted to call her by name but couldn’t remember it.

  Dovey lifted the foot. “How come I still got this thing?”

  “You living right, Miss Dovey. The doctor drained off the infection, and that elephant foot of yours started going down like a balloon out of gas. Now you get your pretty little foot back. The white doctors, they were going to chop it off like a hunk of meat, but Dr. Juber he say, now everybody just hold your horses, she’s been my patient for forty years. Let me see about this, and when he say that, they say, fine, kill her then, no skin off our nose.”

  “What he say back?”

  “He say I don’t aim to kill her.”

  “He cut it.”

  “Opened it up like he was filleting a catfish. You going to need that bandage for a while. Going to have some scars. Long white threads, like runs in your hose. Cheap price to pay.”

  Dovey smiled a little. She’d never worn hose a day in her life. She always meant to buy a pair but then once she’d tried on Charlesetta’s. The garters had felt like bits of ice against her legs and thighs, and the stockings themselves were clammy and unsettling. Under her long skirts, she wrapped her legs in rags when it was cold. Most of the year, she went bare-legged.

  Promise again, hollering his head off. She needed to see about him.

  “That’s my great-grandbaby doing that hollering,” she said to the nurse, whose name she suddenly remembered was Glendola Harris, married to Raymo Harris from over in Iuka. “Can you bring him over here so I can watch him until Dreama comes back from wherever she’s off to?” She said it all in a rush. She wanted to be the one who said to Dreama, He’s found, he’s alive, look. She wanted the words to spill from her lips like a pretty little waterfall.

  “Miss Dovey, honey, that baby’s not yours,” said Glendola. “That’s some white baby cross the way.
Him and his big sister. The mother’s bad off, doctor cut off her whole leg.”

  Dovey pushed herself up on her elbow. “You don’t think I know my own grandchild’s cry?”

  “You been through a lot, Miss Dovey.”

  The McNabb lady. She remembered the lady’s broken leg and she remembered the girl’s bad arm. The girl must have found theirs, the boy she was looking for.

  A piece of granite settled on Dovey’s chest. Promise.

  “Your granddaughter’s all right, though,” Glendola said quickly. “Been in and out, seeing about you, then running back out again to try to find her baby and Mr. Virgil. We’re hoping they’re in the hospital up in Memphis or Holly Springs. That’s what we’re hoping. Nobody made a list of the colored they put on the trains.”

  “You sure that one over there ain’t ours?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Any word of ours?” A little baby. No telling.

  “Afraid not.” Glendola cleared her throat. “The paper’s running lists of the deceased, but only the white folks. Ain’t bothered to count our people.”