by Minrose Gwin
The baby across the way cried on, louder than ever.
“Wish somebody’d shut that child up,” said Dovey.
“You and me both.” Glendola fussed with the sheets that hung around Dovey and gathered some towels and took a basin of water off the floor. “Now it’s time for your bath.”
Dovey shut her eyes. When she was a young woman, just married, the aunt had woken up one morning unable to move. Dovey had to bathe her every other day, the aunt staring at her with one bulging eye, the other closed, guttural sounds erupting from her slashed mouth, whether of pleasure or rebuke Dovey never knew as she washed and powdered her. The aunt lived for two years, and when she died, Dovey felt such a surge of relief that she couldn’t suppress the smile that played at her lips during the funeral and gravesite services. She’d never felt such pure joy, not even when she and Virgil made their home together, not even, later on, when her very own baby was born.
Now here she was, getting bathed herself. She’d rather stay dirty.
Glendola said then, “Take that frown off your face, Miss Dovey. You going to be out of here before you know it. We’re going to get you up and walking in no time.”
“Folks a lot worse off, I expect.”
“Believe it. Did you hear about that family down in Milltown? Twelve of them, plus a little baby, every last one of them dead. Twelve caskets going into the ground at the same time. They put the twins in together. Raise your arm for me.”
“How many folks from up on the Hill?”
“No telling. Scarcest thing in town right now is pine boxes. Mr. Porter and them called in three undertakers from Holly Springs to help out. Three days now after the storm and there’s a burial every ten minutes up at Springhill and in the Porter cemetery too. Nobody knows who, though, nobody’s counting the colored.”
“How come?”
“Just a bunch of dead Negroes to them.”
“How we going to know whether one of ours is under ground or above it?”
“Turn over on your side. J. W. Porter knows just about everybody from up on the Hill, and a whole lot from Shake Rag too. He’s keeping the records. They’re being careful about where they plant folks.”
Dovey let Glendola’s good hands do their work. “I got to talk to Dreama and get her to go up there.”
“Don’t you think she thought of that? That girl’s been up there every morning, checking the lists. There was a baby boy nobody claimed, looked to have been walking already, but she looked at it just to make sure. You got a smart girl there, Miss Dovey. If that child’s to be found, she’s going to find him.”
Glendola washed Dovey’s good foot, then ran the cloth between her legs, a scrubbing and then a rinse, not remarking on the invasion of privacy, just doing what was necessary.
After Glendola put her in a clean gown, Dovey fell back on the cot. Why was she so tired? She hadn’t done a lick of work since the storm, just lolling about like the queen of Sheba. “I flew,” she murmured.
Glendola gathered the wet towel and basin. “You what?”
“I flew,” Dovey said again. Then, as if this had been a burdensome message she had needed to carry for a long distance and could now lay to rest, she entered the welcome dark.
She dreamed about Henry the guinea pig. He was fat and sassy, living in a hole underground like a mole. She could see only his twitchy little nose and those beady eyes peeking out at her. When she reached into the hole to take him up in her hand, he took her forefinger in his mouth and bit it off. It fell to the ground in a pile of leaves.
She woke up sucking the finger. Dreama was leaning over her, her hair gone wild and tangled, her eyes burnt coals.
“Searched high and low, Granny,” Dreama whispered. “He ain’t nowhere.”
“He bit me,” Dovey replied. “He bit my finger off.”
“What’s the matter with you, Granny? What you talking about?”
Dreama’s face floated above her, her wild hair a storm cloud against the white ceiling.
Dovey pushed her back and sat up in bed. This girl didn’t sound like Dreama. The girl who talked like Etherene Johnson had taught her to talk. Ain’t, Dreama used to tell Dovey, isn’t a word. Well, if it ain’t a word, what is it then? Dovey used to answer. Dreama didn’t smell right either, old sweat and something underneath, sour as buttermilk.
Why did she always have to be the one taking care of everybody? “Go find Glendola Harris and get yourself cleaned up, girl.”
“But Granny, didn’t you hear me? I can’t find him. And Miss Etherene, she drowned.”
“Drowned?”
“She was wandering around in the dark and fell into one those big old holes. One of those holes where the tree root came up out of the ground. That big old tree up at the top of the Hill where the water tower used to be before it blew away too. Remember that tree with the big pointy leaves?”
Dovey struggled to sit up. “Sweet Jesus. I saw her right after the storm. She told me about you and the baby getting caught on the way home from church. She drowned?”
“She drowned. They found her floating facedown, bald as an egg. She was laid out up at Porter’s. Nobody claimed her, so they buried her yesterday.” Dreama began to sob and pull at Dovey’s arm.
Dovey pushed herself up on the cot. “Which just means somebody’s got that baby of ours somewhere. Nobody’s making a list except the undertakers, and that’s not a list you want him on. Maybe somebody put him on the train to Memphis.”
“They didn’t keep a list of the Negroes they put on the train, just the whites.”
Dovey raised her eyebrows.
“You think I didn’t think of that? Not a single baby boy without a name on the white list. Two no-name girls but no boy.”
Dovey considered the muck of Gum Pond, the tree roots and lumber and trash under the water. The hollows in trees where a baby could easily lodge and bramble bushes and holes in the ground and secret places under cars and wagons and wrecked houses. Nooks and crannies, high and low. The world was large and dangerous and surprising.
“Quit that. We got a long way to go. We ain’t done yet.” She reached over and wrestled Dreama’s hands from her arm.
Dreama began to wail.
Glendola Harris pulled back the hanging sheets enclosing Dovey’s cot and stuck in her head. “Still can’t find him?” she asked Dreama.
“I searched high and low. Nobody’s keeping records. Negroes wandering the streets looking for their people. Can’t find anybody.”
“Burns me up,” said Glendola.
Dovey pulled her feet out of the covers and dangled them over the side of the cot. “I got to get out of here. I need me some crutches.”
Glendola came and stood over her, her hands on her hips. “You need to stay right there in that bed, Miss Dovey. No way you going anywhere.”
“Watch me,” Dovey said, and she rose. The needles did their business but this time she was ready for them. “I’m going to walk out of here with crutches or without. I got business to take care of.”
“If you so bound and determined, hold your horses and I’ll get you some crutches. Sit back down. Might be nice to have some clothes on your back too before you go hitting the streets. You planning on heading out in that nightgown?”
“All right then,” Dovey said. “Bring me some clothes and a pair of crutches and I’ll be out of your hair.”
“Only if you promise to come back tonight and let me change that bandage. And don’t let that foot touch ground. I’m going to keep your cot here for you to sleep on. Nobody needs to know you’re gone. I want you to come back tonight and sleep, you hear me, Miss Dovey? You too, girl. I’ll get some blankets for you to put on the floor.”
Dovey and Dreama nodded.
“Hold your horses. I’ll be back.” Glendola sniffed once, then again. “Girl, you look like you been crawling around in a pigpen. Smell like it too. I’ll be back with a washtub and some more clothes for you too. And, Lord, a comb. Where you been sleeping?”<
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“Here and there.”
“You sleeping right here with your granny tonight. Dangerous for a young girl to be wandering around by herself. People talking about a band of no-count white boys roaming around.”
Dreama shuddered, then collapsed in the chair next to Dovey’s cot and laid her head down on Dovey’s hip bone, her hair splayed across Dovey’s lap. Dovey gathered a piece of it and began to braid it, which was pointless since there was no thread or ribbon to tie it off. But the hair play soothed the girl, and by the time Glendola returned with the basin and towel and clothes, Dreama was dead to the world.
“Let her be,” Dovey said.
“Water be cold shortly,” said Glendola.
“Look at her.”
Glendola sighed. “All she’s been through and then to lose that baby.”
“He ain’t lost,” said Dovey. “He’s just missing, like that husband of mine.”
“I forgot about him.”
“I haven’t.”
The baby across the way started up again, but then stopped abruptly.
“There go that child again.”
“He’s over there with that McNabb girl.”
“Up here on the stage too?”
“Yes.”
“She must have found him after I left.”
“What you doing up at the McNabb place?”
“I was there with the mother and the girl. That Devil too, laying up on the living room floor getting deader by the minute. Ought to be ripe by now.”
“Tornado did some good then. Where was the daddy?”
“I ran into him walking around looking for the baby.”
Glendola snapped her eyes at Dovey. “Probably looking for Etherene too.”
“Say what?”
“You don’t know about them two? The Judge been visiting Etherene every Thursday night for the past eight years.”
“Visiting? Our Etherene?”
“Yes ma’am. That boy of his just a chip off the old block except he took what he wanted instead of asking for it.”
“How come nobody told me?”
“I don’t know, Miss Dovey. You all the time busy with the laundry, not the talking sort.”
“You mean not the gossiping sort.”
“I don’t mean nothing I ain’t said, Miss Dovey. But here’s a fact: Etherene Johnson and Mort McNabb. That Plymouth of his parked up in front of her house every Thursday night of the world, come hell or high water.”
“Not now.”
“No, not now.”
“Maybe when I saw him he was looking for Etherene, instead of his child.”
“Maybe he was looking for both.”
“Maybe.”
“And there she was, telling Dreama she needed to talk right. What she meant was talk white.”
“Nothing wrong with an education, Miss Dovey. Wish I’d gotten myself more. I’d liked to have made a teacher like Etherene.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Oh, the usual reasons. I was lucky to get to be a nurse. Only way I did was my Ray. He worked sanitation to pay the bills while I got my schooling up in Memphis. I cleaned houses weekends and nights. About killed us both but we made it through two years.”
Dreama stirred in Dovey’s lap, then lifted her head and looked around, bleary eyed.
“Time for a bath,” said Glendola and thrust a bar of soap and a washcloth at Dreama. “I’ll be back with some clothes. Red Cross has a pile of them out back. Going to bring you a rag for that head of hair too.”
When Glendola left, Dreama drew the hanging sheets together and took off her shoes. The shoes were twice the size of her foot and covered in muck.
“Where’d you get them things?”
“Off a dead man in a ditch. Storm took mine.”
Dreama pulled off a jacket that Dovey didn’t recognize. Under it, two dark spots on the front of her Sunday dress. She pulled her dress over her head and started on her slip. “Turn your head.”
Dovey turned but she couldn’t stop looking. The girl was beautiful. Her motherhood showed. Small high breasts, now sagging a little, with tracks of stretch marks running from the outside to the nipples, the sweet loose spot in the stomach, the firm backbone and dappled buttocks. Girl mother.
Dreama washed her face first and the washcloth came away brown. Then she worked her way down from underarms and breasts to between her legs and finally her feet. By the time she wrapped herself in the towel and came to sit in the chair beside the cot, the water in the basin was muddy.
“Need some fresh water if you going to do anything about that hair,” said Dovey.
“The hair can wait.”
“You hungry?” asked Dovey, who couldn’t remember the last time she herself had eaten.
“I got some soup at the food kitchen. When I saw Miss Etherene, it came up.”
“When I saw her the night of the storm, she tried to get me to go along with her. Good thing I didn’t.”
“Of all people, why her?”
“No telling.”
Dreama shivered in the towel. “Ain’t no justice in the world. Where’re them clothes?”
Dovey frowned. “You know what Etherene Johnson would say to that? She’d say talk right, Dreama Grand’homme, you got a future.” She hoped Dreama would never hear about Etherene and Mort McNabb. The girl needed somebody to look up to.
The sheet parted and Glendola came in with the clothes and three pairs of shoes, one for Dovey to try for her one good foot and two for Dreama to choose from; then she bustled out to get Dovey something to eat.
Dreama dressed herself, then her grandmother. She was buttoning up Dovey’s sweater when the baby began to cry.
Dreama froze, head cocked, in an attitude of listening. She put her hand on her left breast.
Then the baby stopped.
“That’s that McNabb child,” said Dovey quickly.
Dreama didn’t answer, her head still cocked.
“I know what you’re thinking. I’m telling you that’s that McNabb baby.”
“Say who?”
“Say Glendola Harris. She seen him.”
Dreama stepped away from her grandmother. “I’m going over there and see with my own eyes.” Her bottom lip trembled and she glared at Dovey.
“Whoa, horse. I’m coming too.” Dovey took up the crutches.
Just as she hit the floor, Glendola came back with the tray. “Got you some tomato soup and saltines and a glass of milk, Miss Dovey. It’s not much, but it’s all I could rustle up until supper. Got you some good news too. They’re setting up a few boxcars for Negroes down on Spring Street on the M&O line. I gave the Red Cross lady your name and she’s saving you and Dreama half of one. They’re bringing bedding and a table and chairs in now, so you can sleep there tonight if you go on down and claim it. Don’t mistake it for the one on up the tracks. That’s for whites.”
Glendola stopped and looked at them both. “You two look like bird dogs on the scent.”
“That baby crying across the way,” said Dovey.
Glendola turned to Dreama. “I told your grandmother, that’s the McNabb baby. The sister is taking care of him.”
“He sounds like Promise,” Dreama said.
“He do,” said Dovey. She didn’t mention the outrageous fact that the McNabb baby might be expected to sound like Promise because he was kin to Promise, was, in fact, Promise’s uncle.
“I can see y’all ain’t going to be satisfied until you take a look,” Glendola said.
“You see right,” said Dovey, gathering her crutches again.
Glendola put her hand on Dovey’s shoulder. “Eat first. I about had to wrestle somebody to the ground to get that cup of soup.”
The soup was lukewarm, so she brought the cup to her lips and drank it down, then turned up the glass of milk and put the crackers in her sweater pocket. None of it tasted good to her, but the surge of heat in her midsection was welcome.
“All right,” she said to Dreama. “
Let’s us go see. Settle this once and for all.”
Glendola had been stacking the dishes on the tray. She put the tray down. “I’m going to take you two over to where that child is, but watch yourselves. No trouble.”
The crutches were too tall for Dovey. On the first swing, she sailed through the air.
“Watch out, Granny,” Dreama said. “You’re swinging up too high.”
Dovey liked the feeling. It was a bit like flying.
“You going to kill yourself on those things, Miss Dovey. You stay right here.” Glendola disappeared again. This time she came back fast with a pair of child’s crutches. Then she lifted a piece of the hanging sheet and the three of them emerged onto the stage.
Dovey blinked. More white. Cots lined up with only narrow passages between. White nurses and doctors in white uniforms going about their work, bending over the cots, moving quickly from one to the next.
Sick to death of white. She wanted color. Red poppies and yellow forsythia, the blue of hydrangeas, orange maple leaves and purple plums, the airy blue of the sky and the smoky blue of the jaybird. She considered how many shades of green you could see in spring, from the yellow-green sprigs of first grass to the waxy dark of the camellia bushes to the lively emerald moss that covered the dead up at Springhill.
“Come on now,” said Glendola over her shoulder. “Make it quick. They’re over here.” She threaded her way through a main passage, then cut toward the back corner, near the piano.
Then she stopped in her tracks. “Right here, they were right here.”
Dreama peered out over the cots. “Was the baby in a crib?”
“He was right here in a little bassinet, next to the curtain. That girl right here beside him on a cot. The baby came in with the mother. Her eyes rolling back in her head, half alive. Had him in a death grip with her on the stretcher and he was mad as a hornet, filthy and hungry and scared. The daddy still on the lam. No telling where he was, chasing down . . .” Dovey cut her eyes at Glendola and they both looked at Dreama. Glendola took a breath. “Then they took off the mother’s leg and the daddy he finally shows up, and they’re all here now, except for the dead one.”
“Satan,” Dovey said.
“You think they’re all here now,” said Dreama.