by Minrose Gwin
Then she went over to the bed, wiped the baby’s runny nose and picked him up and descended the stairs and walked out the front door, not bothering to shut it. Maybe her father would be back, maybe not. She’d come to think of him as an island apart, appearing and disappearing with the tide, as insubstantial as the dead aunts and even less helpful. Not to be relied on.
She set out, heading back down Jefferson, back to the Lyric. There at least was shelter, people who could, if called upon, diaper a baby. Maybe her mother would be awake and know what to do. In the crook of her arm, the baby’s head lolled about like a cantaloupe. The laziness of his barely discernible neck worried her. Had she given him too much paregoric? His nose was running, his breath ragged. She touched his face to her cheek. It was hot.
She walked as fast as she could, the dress slipping out of the belt in back and growing longer so that she looked like a bride trailing a dingy train. She felt slightly dizzy; she wasn’t one to go without breakfast. She was a girl who ate three regular meals a day and sometimes had corn bread and molasses before going to sleep. She wasn’t fat, but she was tall for her age and she had her father’s shoulders and arms, which were muscular for a girl and useful in the situation she found herself in. She hoped she would grow into them.
To her left, the bell tower of First Presbyterian had been blown through the roof of the sanctuary, leaving a ragged hole. Next to the church, the parsonage, a stone structure like the church, had simply disappeared, and on its foundation lay the massive double doors of the church, frame and all.
Her good arm ached from the baby’s weight. A breeze blew across her face, smelling like dust and mildew and rotten meat. As she walked along, she grew homesick for her town, the easy come and go of the residential streets, the bustle of downtown on a Saturday morning, all the country folk in their wagons or on foot, buying groceries at Nesbitt’s and nails from Tupelo Hardware and, if there were anything left over, splitting a chocolate malt at the TKE lunch counter.
She missed the shade of the great towering oaks, some left over from Indian times. It had been exactly a century (was the storm a reminder?) since the Chickasaw had been removed. They left in dispirited clumps, saying good-bye forever, some to their plantation-style home places and some to smaller dwellings and all to the original paths up and down the Natchez Trace where for centuries they had hunted and traded and farmed and lived out their lives. A whole layer of life lay hidden under this town a hundred years later; and now that much of Tupelo and the country around it was stripped clean, the tornado having done in a few seconds what had taken the early settlers a century to accomplish, another layer would emerge. Time isn’t a river, Jo thought; time is ground and dirt and the roots of ancient trees and the bones of past things. Time is underfoot.
As she walked along, strangers came and went in the rubbish, skirting corkscrew tree trunks and debris. Young men, the white giving the black orders, cleared the street and stood precariously on ladders, restringing the precious electric line. Lil, who did Alice McNabb’s hair, sat in the middle of the street, staring into space and muttering to herself. Her dress was torn and filthy, and the peroxided hair on the left half of her head completely gone. Had it not been for little Tommy, Jo would have stopped and tried to help her. Instead she averted her eyes and pushed on through the debris.
As Jo turned the corner at Jefferson Street toward the Lyric on North Broadway, she almost collided with her father. Surprisingly, he was coming from the opposite direction of the theater, hurrying along, his eyes as neon red as the Lyric’s marquee, his face streaked where tears had plowed downward furrows through the dirt and grime.
He stopped short when he saw her. “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you back at the aunts’?”
Jo glared at him. “You mean the house you left us in without food or water or anybody to help me with this sick baby?”
“People died,” he said without preamble, as if that explained everything. “Good people died.” He looked at her then and there was a veil over his eyes. Something lost there.
He had come from the direction of the Hill where the colored people lived. Why had he gone up there when there was her mother to see about? Why had he gone wandering (again) when he should have been getting something for them to eat?
Then it dawned on her that he must have gone up to Glenwood Cemetery, at the base of the Hill, to see about Son, to see whether he’d had a proper burial. But was Son good people? Quite the opposite, and the opposite of good was Evil with a capital E. How do you tell a father his son was not good people, was anything but? And didn’t somewhere, in his heart of hearts, Mort McNabb know this already? He’d have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to.
How smoothly the coat hanger had gone in, how slight the resistance, as if she were piercing butter.
Now here her father was with his filthy face (even she, a girl on her own, had been able to keep herself and Tommy decent) and his torn clothes and that wild hair crying, a man bawling his eyes out like a baby when he should have been taking care of the living, being a father. Had he lost his marbles? When this was over she would have to talk to her mother about sending him down to Whitfield for a rest cure. Well, maybe not Whitfield where the truly crazy people went, maybe a nice private place out in the country where he could pull himself together.
“You love people and then they die,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “I know some good people have died. And more could die too, this baby could die right now this very minute.” She gestured at little Tommy with her chin, her bandage now loose and slipping down farther over her eyes, aggravating her, infuriating her. She tilted her head downward and reached up with the hand on her bad side and ripped it off. She was immediately blinded by the sun, a cruel sun now that there were no more trees, no more blessed shade.
Standing between her and the morning sun, her father had become a dark shape. She could not see his face, only the motion of his gesture when he reached out. “Give him to me,” he ordered.
In her arm Tommy’s head seemed to have grown heavier and even less attached to his neck than it had been before. Jo squinted at the dark shape that was her father. How she wanted to let go of this heavy heavy child, turn him over, give him to somebody responsible, somebody with two good arms.
But there was something about her father’s reach that put her off; it seemed halfhearted, insubstantial. The little hot cantaloupe head now resting on her arm, her aching arm, demanded more. She backed away from her father and turned and began to walk fast toward the Lyric. Over her shoulder she said to him, “The baby’s asleep. I just want to get him to a doctor.”
She hurried along, afraid her father would catch up with her and take the baby. She had never defied her own father so completely. Her feet, her strong able feet in her father’s wingtips, took on a life of their own.
Behind her, she could hear his footsteps; but as she walked along, as fast as she could, almost running in fact (now she was the engine, she was the Frisco carrying precious cargo), she could hear him falling behind. She didn’t turn to look. After a few minutes, the footsteps faded into silence.
When she reached the double doors of the Lyric, she turned to look. He had slowed down and was strolling along the sidewalk, his hands in his pockets, as though he had all the time in the world. Then he crossed the street and sat down on a bench in the little park across from the theater and leaned down and retied first one shoe and then the other. He still had on his Sunday shoes, now caked in mud.
Then he buried his face in his hands and his shoulders began to heave.
When Jo turned to pull open the door to the theater (she didn’t remember it being this heavy), she caught sight of two small figures walking away, in the opposite direction of her father, south toward Main. She saw their skirts, so she assumed they were girls together, surely no older than twelve or thirteen, one dark-skinned, one light, the first on crutches, the other carrying a large sack in one hand, holding the first girl’s arm with
the other. Both thin as rails.
Colored girls alone! Where were they off to? Where were their parents? Jo wished she had a house to offer them; she wished she had the biggest mansion money could buy and she could say to everyone in poor wrecked Tupelo (everyone except those terrible friends of Son’s), Come in, stay as long as you like, we are all going to be all right. And then, glory, the word would get out and every poor homeless soul would come. Everybody in creation, white and Negro, rich and poor, smart and feebleminded, everybody in Lee County would sit down together and be safe and warm and comfortable and good-hearted and grateful, and there would be dogs and cats and cows and birds and goats eating and drinking too, and nobody would say you come and you go, or you go first and you go last. The last would be first, the way Jesus said, and it would be as if God had planned the storm all along to bring them together.
Pausing at the door, Jo watched the two figures grow smaller in the distance. There was something about them that looked familiar, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. In that moment, just as she was turning away and going through the door, the one on crutches stumbled and almost fell. Jo caught her breath, but the other one, the light-skinned girl (white or Negro, Jo was actually not sure), caught the one on crutches before she could fall.
Then the one on crutches pointed to an object on the ground, and the other one picked it up and handed it to her. It was, Jo saw, a tattered umbrella. Just then the one on crutches dropped them on the ground. They landed in a heap. She pointed the tip of the umbrella down and began walking again, using the umbrella as a cane, and the other one kicked aside the crutches and followed.
THE FIRST thing Jo did when she entered the theater was to look for someone in white and the first person she saw was a colored nurse (if she was a real nurse; was there such a thing as a colored nurse?). The woman looked like a nurse; she had on a little name pin that said GLENDOLA HARRIS, RN, and she was carrying a pail of dirty diapers to the exit where a woman from the Red Cross sanitation staff awaited them. Behind her, four white babies lay sleeping in bassinets. Briefly Jo wondered how the colored nurse had managed to get four babies to sleep at one time. She would have to ask Glendola Harris how she did it. Before the tornado, Jo had entertained the idea of someday having quintuplets like the Dionne babies up in Canada. Rowed up in their pretty lace dresses, the baby girls looked completely manageable, like dolls. Now she knew better; she could barely manage one baby, much less five.
Glendola Harris. Jo rolled the name off her tongue. She was determined to remember it. She’d already forgotten the name of the washwoman, something to do with a bird, and that girl, her granddaughter, was her name Dream?
JO THRUST Tommy at Glendola Harris. “Please,” she said, “he’s sick.”
Glendola dropped her pail and picked up a bottle of clear liquid and poured it over her hands. The smell of alcohol knocked Jo back on her heels.
Glendola touched the baby’s cheek. “Fever,” she said and took him from Jo’s arm. “When did this come on?”
“This morning. He was fine yesterday.”
The nurse gave the baby a little shake and patted his cheek. Tommy didn’t move. His dark curls were damp, the back of his head soaked. She took him to an empty bassinet and picked up a jug of water on the floor and a towel from one of the seats and thrust them at Jo. Then she pulled off the baby’s gown and laid him on his back and turned to Jo. “Bathe him. Cool him down. He ought to wake up.”
“He might not. I gave him paregoric,” said Jo.
Glendola Harris frowned. “Paregoric? What on earth for? Was he upchucking? Does he have diarrhea?”
“He had a cough and his nose is runny. He wouldn’t take his bottle.”
“You don’t give a baby paregoric for that. You don’t give a baby paregoric period. How much you give him?”
Who’d this nurse think she was? Jo had never had a Negro talk to her this way, pepper her with questions. It set her teeth on edge. “Just a little,” she snapped. “A capful.”
The nurse went back to Tommy. She looked at him from several different angles. His head had flopped to one side. She pulled open his eyelids, tapped his cheek, turned his head this way and that. “I’m going for the doctor. Do like I say now. Wet him down. And watch the other little ones while I’m gone. You hear me?”
Jo nodded. Responsibility: her mother had given her that one when she entered first grade. Before the storm, Jo had associated it with picking up her dirty clothes and making As.
Speaking of responsibility, where had her father gotten off to? He should have come in by now, no matter how much shoe-tying and boohooing he had to do. She wet the towel and began to blot little Tommy. She got him soaking wet on his front, and turned him to wet his back. He was still limp as a dishrag but had started shivering. Then, to her horror, it was as if some rough hand seized him by the shoulders and shook him violently. She screamed for help, waking all four babies in their bassinets. On the stage, the white people sat up in their cots. On the floor, the colored popped their heads up between rows to look in her direction.
Glendola Harris, up on the stage, waiting for one white doctor to stop talking to another, was drawn by the commotion and looked across the theater at her. Jo saw something in her face, a tightening of the lips, a whisper under her breath, that mirrored all of Jo’s fears. Then the nurse tapped the doctor on the shoulder, interrupting his conversation, causing him to look up at her impatiently. Jo knew that look. It said: How dare you? It said: This better be good. She screamed louder and waved with her good hand. Please come.
Then she could tell the doctor was listening hard, not to her, but to Glendola, who now pointed at Jo. This time he paid attention and strode across the stage, not running but almost, jumping easily from the stage and coming down the aisle toward Jo. By now Tommy had conked out, the fit over. He oozed sweat, his skin as shiny with it as if he’d been oiled; it collected over his closed eyelids, in the rolls of his neck, in the indentation between his nipples. His hair was soaked and stuck to his head, his eyes were glassy. He coughed weakly and then was quiet.
The doctor pulled open the lid on one of Tommy’s eyes and then put a stethoscope to his chest. “Shut those other ones up,” he snapped at the nurse. “Can’t hear myself think.”
Glendola cut her eyes at Jo. “They were all sleeping when I left.”
The doctor removed Tommy’s diaper and turned to Glendola. “Find me a thermometer in this mess. Sterilize it in alcohol.”
“I always do,” said Glendola under her breath. She whipped a thermometer from her pocket, shook it down, and dipped it in the bottle of alcohol.
The doctor turned Tommy on his stomach and inserted the thermometer. He looked up at Jo, his eyes full of trouble. “How much? How much paregoric did you give him?”
Jo could barely utter the words. “Just a little.” The truth was everything since the storm seemed like a dream. Maybe she’d poured the whole bottle down Tommy’s throat. Maybe she had killed him. Maybe she had made him feebleminded. What an idiot she was!
“Less than a teaspoon?”
“I think so.”
“Do not ever give this baby paregoric.”
Jo wanted to say her mother had done it. Done it more than once. She never would have done it without her mother doing it first. But that seemed disloyal somehow.
The doctor pulled out the thermometer and read it. “Not too bad,” he said to the nurse. “I think he’s sweating it off. And no pneumonia. He’s going to be all right, just needs some nursing. He needs to eat, so let’s get that nose unplugged.”
A wave of relief washed Jo under and she staggered sideways, up against the outside seat of the row.
Just then she felt a heaviness at her side: her father.
“Are you the father?” asked the doctor. Jo heard the question but not the answer. Instead she saw a white light in the midst of darkness; then someone blew out the light.
SHE WOKE flat on her back with the nurse (What was her na
me?) leaning over her, patting her cheek, and behind the nurse’s dark face, her father’s streaked one. The babies were still crying. Beside her the doctor, on his knees, held the wrist of her good arm and looked at his watch, his lips counting. Then, as Jo still lay on the floor, gazing up at the three of them, the nurse turned and looked at Mort McNabb head-on. Her jawline hardened, and there was such an expression of disgust on her face that Jo flinched and closed her eyes.
“Your wife is awake, Mr. McNabb,” said the nurse, “been awake all morning, asking after you.”
Lying there, underneath the two of them, Jo looked up and saw the word wife fly from the woman’s mouth. It struck her father on his left cheek and its fangs struck and struck again. Mort’s mangled face dipped and plunged, his neon eyes flashed and flickered.
“Please,” said Jo. “Does anybody have a cracker or bread or just something I can eat?” Her own voice sang high and wide in her own ears. It blended with the chorus of the four babies (not her Tommy, who was still limp as a dishrag, but not dead, hopefully not dead) and echoed again and again until she could not tell where her voice ended and theirs began.
“Get this girl something to eat,” the doctor said to the nurse, that awful woman, and the snake (It was the color of dead leaves in autumn. A copperhead?) let go of Mort McNabb’s face and dropped to the floor. There it recoiled itself and remained motionless, staring at her, flicking its tongue as if deciding whether to bite her too. Then, oh glory!, it slithered away.
THURSDAY,
APRIL 9
13
11:13 A.M.
The boxcars for the colored were rowed up at attention, the two doors of each one facing the back of the car next to it, blocking the light of its neighbor. Portable steps of splintery pine had been placed in front of each set of doors, a cookstove and an oil can for trash outside every car to the right of the steps. Two privies squatted like twin guard dogs at either end of the rows. Stretching out in the midday sun, the ground between rows was the color of dried blood and hard-packed in gravel, as if everything were resting on a large piece of raw meat sprinkled in salt.