by Minrose Gwin
What had happened to that boy at the end of the hall? She needed to know because now she needed to make sure it didn’t happen to Tommy. She needed to be vigilant.
Because sometimes evil didn’t show its ugly self; it could put on the clothes of an ordinary boy. The boy could sit across the table from you, a stray lock of hair hanging in his eyes. He could be doing all the regular things boys do, shoveling in the mashed potatoes, pushing the peas around on his plate, preferring peach cobbler over rhubarb in the late summer while the wasps batted the window screen and the fan on the sideboard rotated.
Once, Jo’s father had received a box of pears at Christmas from a distant relative in California. When Jo unpeeled the foil, the pear she’d chosen looked and smelled like heaven. Then, when she cut into it, there was a monstrous green worm with horns curled up inside, and the core was hollow.
So she knew to be watchful. She would read Tommy stories about good boys doing good deeds; she would make sure an ugly thought never entered his sweet head and, if it did, she would swat it like a fly. She would read him the Bible, Genesis through Revelation and back to Genesis again. Every night she would get down on her knees with him to say his prayers. They would pray for the afflicted and feebleminded, the mean and the ugly, people with terrible deformities, sinners everywhere. They would pray to be good, and they would be, they would be nothing but good.
But now here Tommy came in the nurse’s arms, wailing forlornly, sniffling and squirming, pushing against the nurse with his legs.
“Here,” Jo said. “I’ll take him now. I’ll feed him.”
“Well, sit down somewhere,” the nurse said. “You can’t feed him standing up with only one good arm.”
Jo sat down on an empty cot and patted her lap. “Here. Put him here.”
When the nurse gave him to her, Tommy stopped in mid-scream and looked up at Jo expectantly. The nurse handed her the bottle and he followed its path with his eyes as it moved from one hand to the other above his head.
“He sure knows where his food comes from,” said the nurse.
“He does,” murmured Jo, pulling his legs down farther toward her middle, rocking him back and forth a little. “He sure does.”
He began to suck before the nipple touched his lips, a glazed look coming over his eyes. She gave him the bottle and they settled in.
When he finished, a bubble of milk erupted from his mouth and he grinned at her. She settled him back on her lap, and he looked at her and began to gurgle and pat his hands together.
The thought popped into her head that this would be a good time to take him to see their mother. She tried to dismiss it, but her conscience nagged at her. How could she not? And her poor mother must be lonely. Was she afraid? Did she know where she was? Was she wondering where her family had gone?
All right then. She took a deep breath and touched her hair. She could feel the tangles and tried to get her fingers through them. Her scalp felt oily and crusted over, with what she wasn’t sure; she hoped it wasn’t blood. She pulled a strand of hair to her nose; it smelled rank. She wished she had a comb. She wished she had a mirror.
Well, maybe not a mirror. She touched the row of stitches on her forehead. There would be a scar. She wasn’t a pretty girl to begin with. Her nose (how she despised it!) was larger than normal with a hint of a hump; her eyes were a nice green but a little bulging (well, maybe not bulging, but certainly prominent) and too far apart, giving her, she thought privately, the appearance of a praying mantis. Once she had passed a schoolhouse window after school where some older boys were watching girls go by on their way home and commenting back and forth among themselves. What about that one? Jo heard one say. Oh, about average, another answered, nothing special.
Nothing special was how she’d thought of herself ever since, and now when she walked to school and sometimes past those same boys, she’d tilt her head forward so her hair covered her face, making sure they couldn’t get a good look at her. The Wesson twins said she would grow into the nose and eyes; they said she had cheekbones like an Indian, high and broad. Her mother said Jo’s face had character, that when she grew up, she would find someone who thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.
Now, as Tommy looked up at her, she felt she’d already found that someone. He wanted her nose. He was reaching for it now.
She gathered him and rose. He gurgled at her, a river of drool cascading down the side of his mouth to his chin. She carried him up the steps to the stage and across to the curtain in the corner, skirting the cots. When she reached the curtain, she walked around to an opening where one sheet stopped and another began and elbowed her way through.
On the other side of the curtain, a large man with a stethoscope around his neck loomed in her path. “What are you doing in here?” he demanded. “No visitors.” His eyes, Jo noticed, were kinder than his voice.
“My mother,” Jo said. “I want to see my mother. Alice McNabb. The nurse sent me. How is she? Are you her doctor?”
The man nodded wearily. “The leg, it’s set her back. We had to remove it all the way up to the thigh. She’s pretty low. We’re having trouble getting her to eat.”
The word remove (such an innocuous, first-grade sort of word) knocked the breath out of her. For a moment, she felt woozy and took a deep breath. She absolutely could not faint with Tommy in her arms.
The doctor took her elbow. “Are you all right? Where’s your father?”
“I don’t know. He was here, but then he left.”
“Well, let’s see if a visit from you and the little one won’t cheer her up. This is her baby?”
“He’s all of ours.” Jo looked down at Tommy. He’d fallen asleep again, his breathing still a wheeze.
“He sounds croupy,” said the doctor. He pointed to a long table and took his stethoscope from his neck. “Let me give a listen.”
Jo looked down at the table. It looked like their kitchen table at home but large, some form of metal with a speckled white top. It didn’t look clean.
“I’ll just hold him. He gets to crying when I put him down.”
The doctor came closer and pulled up Tommy’s nightshirt. When the stethoscope touched the baby’s chest, he startled and began to whimper.
“He doesn’t like anything cold,” Jo said. Tommy’s face contorted, his bottom lip trembling. Now that blasted doctor had gone and done it.
The doctor pressed the stethoscope here and there on Tommy’s chest, listening. He lifted Tommy a little and put the stethoscope around his side, under his right arm, where the gash was. Tommy let out a whoop of surprise and began to kick and squirm.
“That’s quite a cut he has under the arm,” said the doctor, pulling back. “Someone should have stitched that up. It’s going to take awhile to heal. I’m going to bandage it up.”
“Is he all right?” Jo whispered. How could she have forgotten the wound under Tommy’s arm? What a terrible nurse she was!
“He’s going to be fine if you take good care of him. He’s got bronchitis, but that should clear up. You just don’t want this going into pneumonia. Now, put him on the table so I can bandage him up.”
Jo eyed a stack of towels on a smaller table. “He needs something under him. He hates the cold.”
The doctor took a towel and spread it on the examining table. He turned to her, expectantly.
“I’ll wait until you’re all ready,” Jo said. “He’s going to cry.”
The doctor reached for some gauze and tape and a bottle of iodine. He turned back to her.
“Aren’t you going to wash your hands?” It was not a question a girl should ask of a doctor but she didn’t care; she had read about wounds getting infected.
“Quite the little mother, aren’t you?” He went over to a basin and took a jug of water and passed it over his hands and turned back to her. “Now put him down.”
Jo took Tommy over to the table and laid him down carefully. “You’ll have to pull off the shirt,” she told the doct
or.
He pulled it over the baby’s head, and Tommy began to flail about and shriek.
“Hold him steady,” said the doctor. “Hold that arm up.”
Tommy was like a rubber band now, stretching every which way. Jo hadn’t realized how long his limbs were. Had they grown since the storm? He was strong, stronger than she’d ever imagined him to be. One day, he’d be stronger than she herself was; one day, he’d be a man. How remarkable!
“What’s this?” asked the doctor. “Is this part of a birthmark under here?”
“It’s a bruise.” What was wrong with this doctor?
“Whatever it is, the scar will grow over it,” the doctor said. “It’s overtaking it already.”
He swabbed iodine on the wound until Tommy’s right side looked drenched in blood and wrapped a bandage around the baby’s chest, taping it in place. “Let’s leave this on at least a week. It’ll keep that gash clean and dry.” He put Tommy’s nightshirt back on. “Just give him sponge baths.”
Jo nodded. She was more concerned about Tommy’s state of mind. He was screaming bloody murder. As she gathered him up again, she debated whether she should take him to see their mother. Did her mother really need a bellowing, writhing baby right now?
As if in answer to her question, Tommy drew two shaky breaths and fell into an exhausted sleep, turning his head so that he could rest his cheek on her breast.
“He’s going to be fine,” said the doctor a second time. “A lot of stories haven’t ended this well. This town has had a lot of flying babies. There’re children still missing.”
A deep weariness crept over her. Once, when she’d gone with her family to visit her uncle in his ramshackle place out near Pontotoc, she had witnessed a terrible sight: an ox under yoke pulling a plow in the field next to her uncle’s land. A man beating and beating the ox, which moved slower and slower down the row, its head down. Then, in one unbelievably slow motion, the animal’s front legs folded and it went down, then flipped on its side, its eyes rolling back in its head, showing its teeth, exhaustion overpowering fear and pain. She felt suddenly as beaten up and bone-weary as that ox, her arms and legs leaden. If only she could crawl up on that hard cold metal table and sleep. Just half an hour. That’s all she would ask.
But now the doctor was speaking to her. He was telling her where to find her mother. The back corner. She would be able to spot her easily; the bandage on her abbreviated leg, the leg elevated.
She shuddered at the mention of the leg, then began to make her way through the beds, not cots here, but actual hospital beds, brought in, she assumed, from the hospital. Some of the people in them were deep in sleep, some in something deeper than sleep.
As she passed through the maze of beds, an old man, just skin and bones, poor thing, smiled a toothless smile at her, then reached out and grasped her wrist and held on. “Hold my hand, girlie, I’m getting ready to die,” he croaked, his breath smelling of cider.
She tried to pull away. “I have the baby.”
“You, girlie. Take hold of me. Hold me down. I’m about to fly away.”
She remembered the woman who had cried out for Jenny. “All right,” she said. She stopped next to his bed, and he tightened his grip. She leaned against the bed for a moment. Just when she was preparing to pull away, his eyes closed and the hand slipped from her arm, grazing her hip, and fell to the side of his bed.
SHE FOUND her mother in the corner, the stump of a leg suspended by a pulley and cords, the rest of Alice swathed in white. She was staring at the ceiling. She had a dreamy look, as if she were looking at something through and above the ceiling. The blue sky, birds and trees and clouds. Alice had always had a high, wide brow, and now, with her hair pulled back in some sort of barrette, the brow seemed to take up most of her face, lending it a blankness, the sense of an unwritten-upon page.
“May-May?” Jo whispered. Her voice quavered.
Alice continue to stare upward. “Oh,” she said.
Jo came closer. “Mother, we’re here. Tommy and I are here to see you.”
Alice blinked once and then twice. “Oh,” she said again. It seemed to be the only word she could manage. She seemed to be trying to summon herself, the way you’d summon a child from play as the twilight fell, the child reluctant to come back into the lighted, busy house.
Then slowly, slowly, she turned her head toward them. There was something reptilian in the way her head moved, a deliberateness.
Jo tried to smile. “May-May, how are you feeling? Are you in pain?”
“Not anymore,” her mother said. That was all she said.
“That’s good,” said Jo. “I’m so sorry about your . . .” Something in her mother’s face, a slight frown, stopped her.
Then Alice turned back to her contemplation of the ceiling.
Jo decided on a more authoritative tone: “Mother, we are here to see you. Tommy and I. We are here to visit you and help you.” She moved closer to her mother’s head. She wanted to stroke that broad high forehead but she didn’t have an extra hand.
Alice closed her eyes, the slight frown reappearing, two parentheses between her eyebrows.
With her hip Jo pushed on the bar of the bed, jostling it. “Mother! Wake up! I want to talk to you.”
The two parentheses deepened. Alice turned her head, eyes still closed. “Please,” she said. “I want to sleep now.”
“But I’ve got little Tommy right here safe and sound.” She wanted to say the sentence she’d memorized, but then her mother opened her eyes and what Jo saw there stopped her.
Just then the nurse with the turnip face came over. “Oh look, Mrs. McNabb, isn’t this wonderful? Your daughter and your little boy, here they are all safe and sound.” She turned to Jo. “Your mother came in asking about you.” She turned back to Alice: “Oh honey, here are your sweet children. Blessings from God!”
Suddenly, in an odd scramble, Alice bolted upright in the bed and turned as if to strike the woman, her eyes flashing, her mouth slightly open, incisors bared. “Don’t talk to me about God. I lost my firstborn son,” she snarled. “Now I’ve lost this.” She gestured at the stump.
Jo jumped back, almost stumbling. The baby was getting heavier by the second, her arms had long ago gone numb. Now her legs had begun to tremble.
Oddly, Alice didn’t look at Jo and Tommy, or even at the nurse anymore. Instead she scanned the room as if searching for an escape route, as if she were planning on leaping from her bed and crawling away from them all like a wounded animal. Poor thing, Jo thought, now she’ll never be able to escape us; she’ll never be able to go back to who she was. Once, when Snowball was little, Jo couldn’t find her for days; then one Saturday morning, when she and her mother were getting in the car to go shopping, she had heard a feeble you, you, you at the back of the garage. It came from a cabinet where paint was kept. When she opened the cabinet door, she saw two eyes staring out from the dark, searching for a way to get out, afraid of her, afraid of getting closed up again. (Son, Jo had thought at the time.) That look spoke of betrayal, the way her mother’s did now.
Alice remained rigidly upright, her eyes on Jo. Then, Alice sighed and sagged and shook her head as if to clear it. Jo took a step toward her then, lowering the cast so Alice could get a good look at Tommy. The baby opened his eyes at the movement, drawing closer to Jo, still wheezing a little. “Isn’t he a sight for sore eyes?” Jo asked her mother. Jo drew her breath to begin her lovely, perfectly memorized sentence.
“Your boy is sure enough the pretty one,” interrupted the nurse, hovering at Jo’s elbow. “Look at that head of hair.”
“Sweet too,” said Jo to her mother. “He’s been good as gold.”
Jo took a deep breath, preparing now, finally, to launch into her story, but, then, as if her words had summoned them, the ants were back and busy. They pounced, vicious and full of heat, preoccupying her for the moment, so that she didn’t see her mother lean over and peer at the baby in her arms.
&n
bsp; When she looked again, her mother was glaring up at her, her brow looming large as a plate, a drop of spittle on her upper lip. “That’s not my Tommy,” Alice hissed. “How many times do I have to tell you? That baby is not mine. You, Jo. Go get your notebook. Write it down. That is not my baby. Charlatan.”
Jo flinched and tightened her grip on the baby, who, without warning, gave a sudden and surprisingly powerful lurch backward, as if he too were reacting to Alice’s (his own mother’s!) words. Jo’s shoulders, by their own volition, folded around the baby like wings, as if to ward off a blow. She took one final look at her mother, who had undoubtedly gone and lost her mind. The sight chilled her. Alice, her mother, had thrown herself back on her pillow and now glared up at Jo, her eyes darkly accusatory, as if her daughter were somehow to blame for all of this, as if Jo had summoned the tornado that had done them all in, as if she had snatched some strange baby out of the sky to trick and torment her poor mother with.
“Oh dear,” said the nurse. “Why don’t you give me the baby? I’ll take him back in after awhile. We’ll sort this out.”
Jo shrank from her too and pushed back against the curtain surrounding her mother’s bed and then let it fall in front of her, leaving a dingy opaque whiteness in place of her mother’s face.
Why would any mother deny her own child?
Why?
Jo turned and carried Tommy back by the old man’s bed. His mouth was open and he seemed to be sleeping, not dead, but one never knew, did one? She pictured piles of dead people, stacks of severed limbs, common as the limbs of trees, littering the landscape, the piles reaching to the sky. (What had they done with her mother’s lost leg? She suspected they tossed it aside like garbage, which didn’t seem right.) She pictured little babies flying in lazy circles like buzzards, then settling on top of the piles, sucking and pecking and burrowing down.
The turnip-faced nurse followed her. “You. Bring that baby back here. A baby needs its mother.”
Jo clutched Tommy and hurried down the aisle of the theater; then, outside, she headed up Broadway. When she turned the corner onto Jefferson and looked back and the nurse was nowhere in sight, she stopped to get her breath. She looked down at Tommy, who, oddly, didn’t seem bothered by the jostling. It was the nose that worried Jo, that and the hair. She tried to take a closer look but now the ants had set up shop in her left eye, burning and stinging. Her eye stuttered, and then began to speak, haltingly telling her things she didn’t want to hear. If her mental mother said Tommy wasn’t theirs and her equally mental father believed Alice (and there was no reason to think he would not because, really, her father didn’t give a flying flip about Tommy or Jo or any of them), then Tommy would be taken, taken, from her, Jo McNabb, his loving sister. And that would never do. She (her eye told her) could not, would not, countenance the idea of losing him, not if she had to take him and run away and live forever in exile from Tupelo and her mother and father and Taffy Spicer and Lois Clayburn and the Wesson twins and everyone else in the whole wide world she knew. She must take Tommy and run for her life, and his. She must leave now, before her father returned and the trap shut. She had never felt more certain of anything in her life.