The Third Generation

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The Third Generation Page 25

by Chester B Himes


  Then there was light above him. The basement door to the elevator had been opened. Figures moved against the light like tribal dancers. Voices began penetrating his thoughts but the words had no meaning, as if they were all in a foreign tongue. He thought, “Now they’ll help me,” and relaxed. He felt queer inside and broken in a number of places. But it was not frightening now that help had come. A light was flashed into the pit. His body was huddled in a grotesque position against the heavy steel guard supported by a mammoth steel spring rising two feet from the center of the pit to catch the elevator should it plunge out of control. The front of his white jacket was splattered with blood. He was looking upward, faintly smiling.

  Someone called above, “HOLD THAT ELEVATOR!”

  A waiter and one of the garage attendants jumped down into the pit to lift him out.

  “Oh!” he exclaimed when the garageman sought to shift him. “I think my arm is broken,” he said weakly.

  “Watch his arm!” the waiter said roughly. The garage-man was sweating.

  They straightened him out with infinite care.

  “We need some help,” the waiter called.

  Two others jumped into the pit. The four of them, two on each side with arms beneath his body, the garageman at his head, his greasy hands beneath his armpits, the waiter at his foot, lifted him above where a number of others, lying flat on their stomachs, reached out and took him from the shaft.

  “Oh!” he cried faintly as they handled him. “Oh!” The blinding flashes were striking in his brain like April lightning.

  Some one had thought of blankets and they laid him gently on the basement floor. He looked up and saw the face of Mr. Small bending toward him. “We’ve sent for the ambulance, son, and I’ve sent for your parents.” His smile was gone; the headwaiter’s face was furrowed with anguish and concern.

  “I’m all right,” he whispered faintly.

  About him were the faces of many others, waiters and bus boys, chefs and many of the hotel’s guests, all marked with that morbid recognition of human helplessness. The two young women stood close, their bright, tear-filled eyes, enlarged with shock, against dead-white skin.

  “I’m all right,” he said again, the sound barely carrying beyond his lips. He felt as if he were crying inside, the tableau held breathless by some powerful emotion, but there was no pain. Way underneath he was remotely pleased, and couldn’t help it, to be the center of this absolute attention.

  The hotel doctor and nurse arrived and briskly took command. “Clear away these men,” he ordered. “Give me the shears, Miss Tate.”

  While two of the remaining waiters turned his body, the doctor cut away his clothes. He moved his head to look down at his body, which felt so queer. His left arm, he noticed, was broken off completely just above the wrist, blood spotting the white jagged ends of the bones as if the blood were being squeezed from them, and his hand projected away at a right angle, held only by flesh and skin. He studied the fracture carefully without thinking. His eyes were dark with shock, of a velvet, liquid mindlessness, immense in his pale tan face, reflecting no intelligence whatever. The pain had not come. Blood was seeping slowly from his chin, running down his throat. It felt as if he munched a mouthful of gravel. Only the upper part of his body felt covered but he could see his legs were covered also. He tried to move his foot but it didn’t respond.

  “Now,” the doctor said, lifting his right arm. He felt the sharp sting of the hypodermic needle. But he didn’t feel it when it went into his hip.

  He didn’t worry. He’d given himself into the hands of someone and felt content. Almost immediately a drowsiness affected him.

  “Is he in much pain?”

  “No, he’s still in shock. I’ve given him sufficient morphine for an hour or so of relief.”

  He heard the voices as from a distance.

  The ambulance came down the ramp almost silently.

  “Carefully, boys,” the doctor said.

  The blunt-faced driver looked at him. They were professionals. Charles barely felt it when they slid the stretcher beneath him. The doctor instructed them to take Charles to a large new hospital nearby.

  “And what’s your name, Doctor?”

  “He’s not my patient. He’s an Industrial Commission case. Instruct the hospital to notify the Industrial Commission.”

  The attendant looked disgusted. “We were called by the hotel.”

  “Bill the hotel then. But get on with the boy for God’s sake.”

  “As you say, chief,” the driver said, shifting into gear.

  Charles heard the conversation clearly as he lay drowsily on the stretcher. Just before the siren sounded he heard one of the attendants say, “What kind of goddamn crap is this—no doctor!” He didn’t worry. He was confident of being cared for. Underneath all else, consciousness that he possessed a father and mother supported his indefinable faith in the outcome. Now he felt the ambulance slow and turn and stop before the emergency entrance to the hospital.

  The attendants opened the door and lifted him out into the bright cold sunshine. He turned his head and saw a dark-haired young doctor step from the doorway and hold up his hand to stop them.

  “Ho! What have you got there?” He had dark, well-cut features and his hair was slicked like patent leather in the sun.

  “Accident!” the driver said. He was a big, red-faced man with pug features and sandy hair. “Fell down an elevator shaft.”

  The doctor sobered. He wore heavy, dark-rimmed glasses. He came over and looked down at Charles with sudden interest. His expression went entirely blank. He turned back to the driver. “Where did this happen?”

  “Park End.”

  “Who’s the doctor?”

  “Commission case.”

  “Hold him,” the doctor said impassively, turning back inside. “I’ll see.”

  “Hold him!” the driver exploded. “What the hell you mean hold him? What the hell you got to see? You can see! It’s an accident! You can see that! What the hell else you got to see?”

  “I said hold him here,” the doctor instructed in a cold, controlled voice. Sunlight glinted on his glasses.

  “You said!” the driver shouted. “So you said! Who the hell are you?” The doctor closed the door behind him. “What the hell’s the matter with that son of a bitch?” the driver raved.

  A moment later the young doctor returned with the resident doctor, an older man with graying hair, also of dark aquiline features. As he came, wearing a peculiar expression, he slowly shook his head, looking at the driver with confidential eyes. He carried a hypodermic syringe.

  “What do you mean?” the driver challenged.

  The resident doctor spread his hands with eloquent appeal. “We can’t take him.”

  Charles watched the red climb up the back of the driver’s neck. “What the hell you mean you can’t take him?”

  “We have no room,” the doctor said, emphasizing the statement with spreading hands.

  “What the hell you mean no room? In all this goddamn hospital you ain’t got no room for an accident case?”

  “We have no beds,” the doctor said, closing his hands abruptly to end the discussion. “I’ll give the patient an injection.”

  “You’ll give this patient not a goddamned thing. He’s had an injection. That’s all you goddamn bastards want to do, give the man an injection.”

  The eyes of the resident doctor glinted with anger. “Don’t call me a bastard.”

  “Yes, I’ll call you a bastard you bastard. You’re not only a bastard but you’re both bastards. What’s this, a goddamned private exclusive hospital, you bastard?”

  The lips of the two doctors folded tightly in anger as they turned, without replying, and re-entered the hospital. For a moment the two ambulance attendants stood outside holding Charles in the stretcher and raved. “Jesus Christ, sweet Holy Mary, these bastards’ll leave a man croak right outside their door.”

  The other one looked at Charles. “Let
’s go,” he urged.

  Charles felt the sense of motion. He’d been unaffected by the harsh exchange. It seemed vaguely as if years were passing. He wished they’d stop somewhere so he could go to bed.

  He was taken to a hospital on Euclid where Negroes were admitted. The firm of doctors who treated accident cases for the Industrial Commission were notified. He was sponged and prepared for X-rays and given additional injections of morphine. Everyone was cheerful and efficient. He felt safer. But until his mother came he could only wait.

  She was out of the house that morning, shopping. His father was at work, and William was in school. So he went through it alone. They were there, anyway, as much as they would ever be. He had never gone to them in his deepest hurts, or shared with them any of his fullest triumphs or his bitterest defeats. They were his parents who had given him birth, and because of this more than for any other reason he loved them with his life and would have died for them. And the fact that he was tied to them by being born of them prevented him from ever being physically alone. There had been many times in his young life when this had been important. It was important now. He needed the nearness and comfort of their physical presence more than he had ever needed it. But inside his spiritual being, where it was still empty of the emotions that would come—fear and panic and despair—they had never touched. His mother had come closest, but always she’d drawn back from the intensity of his longing when it reached that point where he needed someone most. In that respect he’d always been alone.

  Shortly, three doctors arrived and he was wheeled into the X-ray room.

  “How’d this happen, lad?” one asked.

  Charles avoided the bright blue, inquisitive eyes. “I wasn’t looking,” he answered faintly.

  The doctor chuckled. ‘That epitaph should adorn half the tombstones in this civilized world.”

  The findings showed that he had three fractured vertebrae at the base of his spine, a compound fracture of the left arm above the wrist, a fractured jaw and twenty-two chipped and broken teeth. The extent of the internal injuries was indeterminable, but there was no indication of internal hemorrhage. He’d landed partly on the elevator guard and partly on the concrete floor of the shaft. His chin, back, and left arm had struck simultaneously.

  He was given a local anesthetic and his arm set. They didn’t think it was necessary to wire his jaw. His torso was wrapped in a cast. The vertebrae could not be set without endangering the spinal column. As far as they could determine, the spinal column had not been injured, although the bone pressing against it caused paralysis of the lower limbs. The purpose of the cast was to hold the vertebrae in place and give the fracture a chance to heal. They hoped that the spinal column would eventually adjust to the curvature and the pressure be relieved, restoring movement to the lower limbs. His chin was dressed, his mouth washed, and he was wheeled into a private room. The rest was up to God.

  Lying quietly on the wheel stretcher, his huge, incandescent eyes drug-widened and remote, he seemed a disembodied spirit floating in a world of unreality. He heard the voices distinctly and watched with mindless fascination. As yet he’d felt no pain.

  His mother was the first to come. She was carrying a shopping bag of groceries and her face, devastated as it had been when William lost his sight, older now and haggard to the bone, was held stiffly from within by tremendous will power.

  “It’s Mother, Charles. It’s Mother, son.” Only her voice gave her away, so high and light and dead.

  Out of his drugged remoteness he saw the grief there again as it had been the night she came from the hospital with William and walked into the light. Now as the seamed and powdered flesh, the tortured mouth, bent forward to kiss him, he braced himself as if against the kiss of death. All the kinds of mothers he’d wanted her to be bloomed in his mind; the tenderness of doing her nails, the soft delight of fingering her hair, the passion of her whippings—his beautiful mother disfigured with grief. It was not physical hurt but spiritual anguish that came up in him in waves. He closed his eyes as if shutting out the sight of her would dam the flood. But when her cold dry lips touched his forehead, tears made a sudden fringe beneath his tightly pressed lids. He began crying all down inside himself.

  “I’m all right, Mama. I’m all right,” he said in his faint, indistinct voice. “Don’t worry, I’m all right.”

  She sat down beside the bed, holding herself from within, and tightly clasped her hands. She was struck by the immobility of his posture; his body was held so straight and rigid in the cast, laid out almost for burial, his soft, tan face pale as death. He looked final, permanent, as if he might never rise again. The one who’d been so active, so physically assured, whose body had been more expressive of himself than all else, now broken. It seemed a sacrilege against nature. Her baby, she thought, the last of all her sons, the one—She didn’t dare think it. And yet the loss to her, then, as she first suffered it, him lying there in such total disability, was everything, the final, bitter end of all her high and eager dreams. But desperately she tried to hold it, to keep it from her thoughts. If she once thought it she couldn’t hold herself. She tried not to think beyond the room.

  “Go to sleep, son,” she said. “Mother’s here. Mother will look after you.” Now there was this other thought that she was being punished for having forced him back to work against his will. “You mustn’t worry, son.” She stroked his forehead. “God always has a purpose and we must trust in Him.” But it wouldn’t come that God had any other purpose but to punish her for her own incontinent vanity.

  “Don’t worry, Mama,” she heard him saying in that faint, pebbly voice. “I don’t feel anything at all.”

  It was his saying that that broke her. All of her body began to cry, shaking. “Forgive me, son,” she cried in agony. “Forgive your mother.”

  He couldn’t bear it either, and turned his face away, crying toward the wall, A nurse entered.

  “You shouldn’t disturb him. The shock should wear off gradually.”

  The spell of exquisite agony was shattered. Mrs. Taylor exerted a semblance of control.

  “I know.” She tried to hold herself in, turning to her son. “You must try to sleep, Charles. Mother will sit here quietly.”

  Her presence, the nearness of her, became uppermost now, and he gave in to her, ceased struggling against her grief, and the anguish slowly ebbed from him, and he became her baby, drowsily in her arms. He went to sleep.

  When he awakened it was evening. She sat as if she hadn’t moved. His father and William were there now, dressed for work and school. In his father’s face, also, were the ravages of grief; these two elderly people at this time in their lives having to carry the burden of his hurt because he was born to them.

  With William it was different. He sat silent, his face furrowed with an intensity of emotion, his head cocked in an attitude of listening. Over his shocked sorrow he felt a rage of protest. First himself and now Charles. It was unfair—unfair to all of them. It was as if he was hurt again; and poor Charles, so dependent on his physical prowess in all the things he did. He was the first to sense that Charles was back with them.

  “Chuck?”

  “Will.”

  “What happened, Chuck?”

  “I fell down the elevator shaft.”

  “What’s the matter with your voice? Does it hurt you to talk?”

  “Naw, not much. I broke my jaw a little and broke some teeth.”

  “Then you can’t eat anything?”

  “Just liquids.” He looked about the room. There was a great bouquet of flowers from the hotel and the waiters had chipped in and sent an enormous basket of fruit. Professor Taylor had stopped on the way and bought a bag of oranges which looked so pathetic beside the others. He noticed that his father was crying, tears slipping unobtrusively down his black, seamed face.

  “Don’t cry, Dad,” he said impulsively.

  “Son!”

  All were silent for a time. The sons were ashamed and
embarrassed for their father, as if he didn’t have a right to cry.

  “Wasn’t there a door or guard or something?” William asked.

  “It had a door but it was open.”

  “Oh!”

  “It’s a shame,” his mother said. “It’s criminal negligence. I should think Mr. Small would be more careful.”

  “It wasn’t his fault,” his father said. “They have an engineer who attends to that.”

  “I don’t care who attends to it. It was someone’s fault and they’re not going to get away with it.”

  William cut it off. “Is there anything you want before we go?”

  “No, I don’t want anything.”

  They rose. His father leaned down and patted his shoulder. “We’ll go now, son, and let you rest.”

  “Mother will pray for you, son.”

  William became tense again. “Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!” he said.

  It was dismal in the Taylor house that night. The grief was settling down into the soul, widening into worry, fear, horror. Self-blame attaches inconsistently, and the soul accepts full guilt even when no sin has been committed. If she just hadn’t forced him to go back, Mrs. Taylor grieved. She couldn’t rid herself of the conclusion that she’d gone against God’s will. She’d always tried to force him into doing things he didn’t like, and now she knew it had been to feed her own ambition. On the other hand, his father mercilessly condemned himself for having sent his son to Mr. Small in the first place. He’d known, even then, it wasn’t the kind of work the boy would like. But because he had had to do it, he’d wanted his son to do it too, telling himself at the time it was for the sake of discipline. Mr. Small blamed himself for not having prohibited the elevator being used when it was first discovered that the door was faulty. He’d simply reported it to the engineer. That had been a week before. The engineer blamed himself for not having fixed it immediately when it was called to his attention. The two young women blamed themselves for having distracted Charles’s attention. Both had gone home directly following the accident, prostrated with grief. They had seen him fall.

 

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