Promise

by Minrose Gwin

  The Red Cross lady coughed once, then twice. Then she walked to the center of the car.

  “Well?” she said, looking up at the man.

  He opened his long arms, and the two of them came, Dreama flowing like water, Dovey pitching and stumbling like a drunkard.

  “All right then,” said the Red Cross lady, clearing her throat. “I’ll have to order another cot.”

  “Another chair too,” Dovey murmured into Virgil’s chest.

  They stood there locked together after she left. Then the burlap curtain flapped open, making the slightest ripple in the silence.

  Only Dovey heard it. She opened her eyes and looked out from under Virgil’s arm. The cat was back. She padded toward them, carrying in her mouth a little struggling sack of bones and fur. She dropped the kitten in the place between their feet, causing them to pull apart and look down in astonishment.

  “Well now,” said Virgil, bending down, his long, patient, everlasting fingers grazing the pocked floor of the boxcar. “What we got here?”

  FRIDAY,

  APRIL 10

  14

  6:32 P.M.

  Jo awoke in a front-row seat. She’d never sat up this close at the Lyric, not liking to be so near the screen. She eyed the back corner of the stage where a makeshift curtain of sheets, held in place with thumbtacks, stretched from the back wall to the side wall, forming a triangle. The curtained area, she surmised from the moans and occasional screams coming from that direction, was where the seriously wounded were being kept.

  Glendola Harris stood over her. “About time you woke up,” she said. “Look what I got here.” She pointed at the bassinet in the space between the front row and the stage, right in front of Jo’s feet.

  “What day is it?” Jo’s neck had a crick. She felt like she’d slept for a hundred years.

  “Friday. Good Friday,” said Glendola. “You flat slept right through Thursday, honey. Sitting straight up the whole time. You almost missed Friday too. It’s nighttime.”

  Her mother. Jo stood up suddenly. The theater swooped down on her like a bird of prey, caught her, and shook her. She collapsed back in her seat.

  “You need to eat.” Glendola put a ham sandwich in her lap. “And here’s a glass of water.”

  She ate and tried to decide how she was going to tell her mother all that had happened, how to form the words into one glorious sentence that Alice McNabb the English teacher would properly appreciate and maybe even applaud when all was said and done.

  Mother, she would say, I was the one who got you help and I found Tommy in a bush and took good care of him (despite the fact that Daddy left us high and dry, not once but twice, and my arm was in the cast and Tommy got a terrible cold and couldn’t eat), but (drum roll) he is alive and kicking (hard!), and here he is: I saved him for you.

  This version was self-serving and undiagrammable, mostly one long parenthesis, but she liked it for all of those reasons. What it lacked in sophistication and nuance (both Words to Keep), it captured in ebb and flow. It was a story in itself, lapping at the outer edges of factuality to be sure, but all of it there, stated, once and for all, roundly and soundly. Moreover, in the past few days, she’d found herself inhabiting the space of what seemed to be one long parenthesis, as if she had plunged into the middle of a sentence from which there was no escape, everything being contingent on everything else.

  Of course, the second part of the sentence wasn’t precisely true. She’d saved Tommy for herself, not for her mother; she’d saved him because he was hers. Each time she laid eyes on him he looked new. Even now she could hardly keep her eyes off him as he lay asleep in the crib beside her, his face flushed, his lips twitching slightly. She itched to pick him up and smell him. The top of his head carried the odor of fresh bread.

  Just as she’d finished the sandwich (and was wishing for another), her father wandered in and sat down in the seat next to hers and patted her hand as if she were the one who needed taking care of (what a joke!). Mort McNabb stank. His hair was shiny with grease. More shocking, there was hair on his face, wild and curly and surprisingly white, hair she’d never seen in her entire life. She didn’t like it. Her father was nothing if not fastidious. He bathed every night and shaved in the mornings. On nights when he went out, which was usually every night of the week but Saturday, he shaved a second time and put on a fresh shirt. On Thursday nights, he took a long second bath before leaving, humming in the tub. Now he just sat beside her like a bump on a log, oblivious to the fact that he smelled like a cross between salt fish and garbage. He was hunched over like an old man. He rubbed his eyes, which were still that startling shade of neon red.

  “We need to take Tommy in to see your mother.” He mumbled the words, his head down as if he were talking to his lap.

  Jo leaned over. “What?”

  Now he looked at her, his eyes vacant and unfocused, as if he’d been struck blind. “We need to take the baby to your mother. He’ll cheer her up.”

  Yes, it was time. Oddly, though, Jo hesitated. For one thing, she was coming around to the belief that her mother had not taken particularly good care of Tommy before the storm. Witness how little he had cried when he was with Jo. As if by magic, he’d become the perfect baby. Either the storm had blown all the badness out of him, which Jo believed highly unlikely, or her care of him, under the most intolerable of circumstances, had been far superior to Alice’s when there had been a roof over their heads and one day had followed the next, as predictable and dull and ordinary as peach cobbler on Sunday.

  Was her mother ill-suited to motherhood? Were some women just not natural mothers?

  Jo’s first memory was of peering through the bars of her crib and seeing her mother’s face; she couldn’t remember her mother’s expression as she looked back, if she indeed did look back, only the red red bow of Alice’s mouth, which, when Jo reached through the bars for it, had already receded into the distance until it was only a red fleck at the end of her wobbly line of vision. Something that had once been there and then was gone. When she grew older and noticed how her mother seemed to look through her as if she were a window to something else, she came to know instinctively that her mother saw in her, not a daughter, not Josephine Alice McNabb (the middle name her mother’s own so that her mother somehow squatted inside and between the Jo McNabb that she saw as her own dwelling place), but a different life, another life, waiting out there far ahead of her, a horizon she could never quite catch up to, a life that could only be watched from afar the way you’d watch a sunset or heat lightning. Absent was that ripple in her mother’s eyes, that telltale bubble from something submerged but deeply present, something that moved under the surface.

  Her mother, she’d been told, came alive in the classroom. She’d heard the students laugh (but not in a mean way) at how Mrs. McNabb wept when she read Shakespeare and Keats, how she paced out Lord Tennyson’s lines half a league, half a league, half a league onward, marching like a soldier around and around the classroom, flinging over her shoulder a maelstrom of martial words at her students until they felt dizzy and giddy and ready to go out and do battle with any foe imaginable; how once, toward the end of the term, she’d sneaked in a story from The Forum magazine by some crazy writer from over in Oxford, Bill Somebody, about an old woman killing her boyfriend and then sleeping, sleeping in the bed, with his icky, stinky, putrefied corpse for a good long time. Alice, moreover, had read the story out loud, the latter getting her in deep you-know-what with not only the principal but also the school board. In the classroom, at least, Alice McNabb was never dull.

  But Jo’s quiet, matter-of-fact, and, most recently, wretchedly sad mother was as different as daylight from dark from the fiery, passionate Mrs. McNabb of Tupelo High School. Now that Jo thought about it, there was something about her mother that simply wasn’t, well, particularly motherly. Not that Jo had ever felt deprived of anything important, not that she didn’t believe her mother harbored the best of intentions toward her childr
en. Naturally her mother loved her one and only daughter. Of course she did. But there wasn’t an easiness between the two of them that Jo saw between some of her girlfriends and their mothers. Alice and Jo’s autumn trips to Reed’s or Black’s or Pryor’s for school clothing didn’t result in giggles at how hilarious one of them looked in an outrageously feathered hat or a badly fitted dress. No shenanigans with the sample sprays at the Reed’s perfume counter, no chitchat with the other mothers and daughters on similar missions.

  When Jo got old enough to handle money, she preferred to go shopping alone or to tag along with her girlfriends, Taffy Spicer and Lois Clayburn and the adorable Wesson twins, and their normal mothers. These other mothers went to bridge parties where aspic with eyeball olives and tea sandwiches of cream cheese and cucumber and towering slices of Mrs. Polk’s caramel pie were served on card tables covered in linen cloths, which were later removed when the cards came out. These other mothers volunteered at the hospital, delivering coloring books to sick children, bouquets of hand-cut jonquils from their own flower beds to old ladies. They baked hams for the poor at Christmas and made flower arrangements for funerals and weddings. On special occasions they took their daughters to Memphis, where they stayed at the Peabody Hotel and drank gin fizzes and watched the ducks come and go from the pond inside the lobby.

  Jo wondered how Taffy and Lois and the twins, Sally and Stella, had fared in the storm. She had caught glimpses of lists from the Tupelo Journal posted in the lobby of the Lyric. The papers printed the names of the displaced and where they were staying and with whom, along with lists of the dead and injured, but she hadn’t had time to pore over them.

  She wondered too what had happened to the washwoman with the bird name (Oh please! Why couldn’t she remember it, and after the dear woman had sent help to her mother and little Tommy? How things blew in and out of her head!) and, for that matter, the washwoman’s granddaughter (Dream? No, that wasn’t quite it). Had the girl ever found her baby? How terrible to think of one’s own child, a little baby, hurt and alone.

  And if she thought hard about that little baby, she must not forget it was her own niece or nephew. A colored baby! (If, by some miracle, it was found, should she send it toys and worry about its welfare, the way she’d worry about a regular nephew or niece, a child who would come with his mother at Christmas and Easter and maybe be a little ring bearer at her wedding, alongside her darling Tommy? A colored child in her wedding? She couldn’t picture it.) Into her head the child crawled like a nocturnal animal: she saw herself all grown up and beautiful with her own family, her mother’s round oak table extended to an oval, the washwoman at one end, Jo and her (handsome) husband at the other, the children dark and light in between, dressed nicely of course, clean and fresh. It would be a private gathering. No one need know. She didn’t think she’d mind that so much, she rather relished the idea in fact; but what would people say? What would Taffy, Lois, and the twins think? They’d think it was as wrong as two left shoes, that’s what they’d think. They’d say she’d gone mental.

  But she couldn’t help but wonder about the two of them, the washwoman and her granddaughter, sister wanderers of a ruined landscape, cast out from home and loved ones, searching for that little child. Both of them as small-boned and fragile as birds. Jo towered over them. The papers, she noticed, hadn’t published the whereabouts of the colored and there were no death and injury lists for them either. It was as if the people who had made the households and yards and barnyards hum all over town had vanished from the face of the earth without a trace. How could anyone who lived up on the Hill in one of those flimsy houses have survived that wind? Most of those folks were probably still stuck headfirst in the muck of Gum Pond (she pictured rows of brown legs turned skyward) or blown clear across the railroad tracks to the east, strung up in trees like Christmas ornaments up and down the county and maybe even beyond. And the dogtrots and shotguns (one family of six lived in an abandoned school bus!) up on the Hill, they were palaces compared to those shanties down in Shake Rag. The washwoman and her granddaughter must have been among the few who survived.

  JO’S FATHER stood up and ran his hands through his hair, which made it stand on end in whipped peaks of grease and filth. “I’m going to go see about your mother.” He spoke in a vague murmur, still speaking so low she could barely make out his words. She leaned in to hear him, his newly sprouted whiskers almost grazing her cheek. Then she nodded, relieved he wasn’t demanding that she wake up Tommy quite yet.

  Mort rose to go, but instead of climbing the steps to the stage, he headed up the aisle to the front of the theater and assumedly right out the front door to wherever it was he kept disappearing to. Jo wasn’t surprised. As she watched him go, she thought he looked shorter than she remembered. He sagged, he bagged. Was it the angle from which she viewed him? But no, it couldn’t be; the front of the theater was lower than the back, of course, silly her. He should appear taller, larger than life, not smaller. People did shrink as they got older, she’d heard, and certainly this had been true in the aunts’ cases; the two of them had even cheerfully remarked on it. But this shrinkage of her father’s, it seemed sudden and acute. Had this happened over time and Jo just hadn’t noticed? Her father was forty-six and while that seemed terribly old to her, she knew it wasn’t really old old. Not old like the little wizened washwoman, not old like the aunts had been.

  Little Tommy slept on. She leaned down and touched his hand. When his fingers closed like a clam shell on her index finger (as she knew they would), her chest clenched and then unclenched in a motion that was so violent it caused tears to spring to her eyes, tears of fear and surprise. How hurtful love was, how terrifying.

  And to think she could have lost him forever, to think he might still be hanging in that bush like a strange blossom, still and cold.

  She took a shaky breath and looked behind her. The theater had cleared out a bit since the first day she and Tommy and Alice had been brought here, the walking wounded having gone their way, heaven knows where, people being so flung about. How many days since the storm? Had she really slept over twenty-four hours? How many days and nights in their house with most of the roof gone, the rain pouring in and Son taking on the shape of a seal on the living room floor and her mother’s raw bone gleaming wetly in the night? Time had gotten so jostled about in her head.

  After Son’s friends came and went, cloaked in pure evil, she had sunk into a swamp she might not have crawled out of had it not been for the baby. And how many days and nights in the theater before her father showed up? Then that awful night in the aunts’ noisy house. It seemed like a hundred years had passed since the storm. For all she knew, she might be as old as the aunts now. She felt it.

  The baby’s eyelids began to twitch. She pulled her finger from his sticky grasp and checked the towel between his legs. Wet. And he would be hungry. She needed to find the nurse, but she didn’t want to leave him alone. She stood up and scanned the theater for a white uniform. At that moment Tommy began to fret and cough a little. She saw a nurse moving between cots up on the stage. She raised her good arm as if summoning a waiter, but the woman didn’t look up.

  Now Tommy let out an alarming sound, something between a scream and a strangle. Quickly, she put her hand under his neck and brought him upright. He coughed a phlegmy cough. She leaned down and gathered him in her good arm, pushing him into place with the cast on the other, and rose with him writhing and fretting in her grasp. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the white of the nurse’s uniform and climbed the steps up to the stage slowly and presented him to the woman, who, when she turned toward Jo, revealed a face like a turnip, pinkish gray, pinched and tucked at the edges.

  “He needs changing and feeding,” Jo said.

  “Ah, and here’s the little one with the cold. They told me to watch out for you,” said the nurse. “Let’s see about you, little tidbit.” The pinches and tucks deepened, and a dimple appeared on the nurse’s cheek. “I know somebody w
ho wants to see you.” She gestured with her head toward the curtained area at the back corner of the stage. “Your own dear mother.”

  “Is she awake?” Jo asked as she handed the baby over. Tommy seemed unwilling to be taken, his face tightening with alarm, his bottom lip downturned and trembling.

  “She was a few minutes ago. She’s still groggy, but I told her we’d bring the baby back to her when he woke up. I’ll take him when I finish cleaning him up. She’ll want to feed him.”

  “No!” Jo didn’t appreciate being rushed by some busybody nurse. She’d bring Tommy to her mother in her own good time. “We’ll wait for my father to come back,” she said in what she hoped was a firm voice.

  “Your poor mama is all by her lonesome in there. Where’s that daddy of yours anyway? We haven’t seen much of him.”

  “I think he went to see about our house,” Jo lied. She wished it were true; their house needed a new roof, maybe a new everything, and the sooner the better. She didn’t relish the idea of going back to the aunts’ old dust-clotted place, noisy with ghosts. She was sorry her father had suggested it, for Tommy’s sake and her own; at least the boxcars had been swept out (surely!).

  She looked at Tommy in the nurse’s arms. He was thrashing and kicking. He was getting stronger. Now, suddenly, he looked like Son, something about the cheekbones, the position of the eyes, wide-set and amber, darker than Son’s, the color of a worn penny. When Jo was little, she’d loved Son’s eyes. They’d sparkled with fun. Son didn’t seem to mind her then. He’d insisted on teaching her to walk. She remembered his arms reaching out at the end of a long unsteady stagger down the hall. He held her up when she got to him, and his arms were sturdy and true. That memory was why she had trusted him, why she came around to the back of the garage when he called to her that day.