The Third Generation

by Chester B Himes

  Later that night, when Charles awakened in the dark, he felt abandoned and alone. But he was not alone; no one can ever be hurt alone. Others are always hurt by the hurt of anyone. Had he known this, it would have made a difference.

  21

  THE NEXT DAY REACTION SET IN. Thought patterns returned and the discomfort of lying in one stiff position was now clearly felt. Doubt and fear began to gnaw at his mind, and pain, more imagined than experienced, came throbbingly into his consciousness. As he began to realize the extent of his injury, self-pity settled slowly over his emotions. He tried not to think of himself being a cripple, of all the things he might never do again. But he couldn’t restrain himself.

  The nurse noticed it. “Our patient is blue,” she smiled.

  “Just thinking.”

  “Don’t think about yourself. Think of all your pretty girls and what good times you’re going to have this summer.”

  He tried to smile. But that was thinking about himself in the worst possible way.

  For a time the visitors helped divert his thoughts. The doctor called early, glancing at his chart.

  “How is it today, Charles?”

  “All right.”

  And then his mother came. “Is there anything Mother can get for you?”

  “Some cigarettes.”

  She tried not to appear shocked, but her silence revealed it. “Do you smoke, son?”

  “Not often.”

  “Did you ask the doctor?”

  “I don’t think it matters.”

  She sighed. “Ill ask him and if he says it won’t hurt you I’ll bring them to you. Is there any particular kind?”

  “Any kind.”

  Mr. Small and the hotel manager, Mr. Cochran, called before noon. They’d brought along a waiter loaded down with lunch, but he was not permitted in the room and the lunch was given to the nurses. The grip of tragedy still had its hold on Mr. Small. He smiled, but it was different. His poise was gone.

  “There’s no need for me trying to tell you how I feel about this, son. I couldn’t feel any worse if it had happened to my own son.”

  “I know.” He wished they wouldn’t talk about it.

  “The hotel is at your disposal,” Mr. Cochran said. The tragedy hadn’t touched him as it had the others.

  “Thank you.” After a moment he added, “Thank you for the flowers.” And then to Mr. Small, “Thank the fellows for the fruit.”

  “We just learned you can only have liquids,” Mr. Small observed. “Is there anything you prefer?”

  “Not particularly.”

  Mr. Small placed a check on the bedstand. “This is a collection the boys took up for you.”

  “There’ll be something coming from the hotel too,” Mr. Cochran added. “I think you’d like to know we’re going to continue your salary, and we’ll see to it that you receive the highest rate of compensation.”

  The reference to money was meaningless to him. “Thank you,” he said again. “I’d like to have some cigarettes.”

  “Right!” Mr. Cochran beamed. This was something tangible, something he could do immediately. “What’s your brand, Chuck?”

  “Any brand, sir.”

  “Right! I’ll send them right away.”

  They stood, smiling, the smiles different, and Mr. Small made one last effort, “I’ll send one of the boys over with a thermos of clear turtle soup; and perhaps you’d like some eggnog and juices on hand.”

  “Yes, sir, that’ll be fine.”

  During lunch hour yellow roses came from the two young women at the hotel and all afternoon the bouquets of flowers and baskets of fruit came from his parents’ churches, his Sunday school, the members of his club, and from people he couldn’t remember. News of his accident had been reported in the daily papers and all the people who had known him only vaguely felt obligated to send condolences.

  The members of his club came during the late afternoon and then his father’s relatives and afterwards his own family came and sat with him until the time for visiting was over. The small room overflowed with tokens and flowers were banked about the walls as if it was a florist’s shop. He’d had no time to think.

  It was late that night, while the hospital slept, that the first blind panic shattered him. He was going to be a cripple, confined to a wheel chair, with a wizened, useless arm. He lit a cigarette, fighting a losing battle. He couldn’t bear it. Everything he’d ever dreamed of doing depended on his body. How could one be brave, noble, gallant, without physical perfection? He might never be in love, because it was of the flesh also; might never know what it was like to be with a woman. That was the bitterest thought of all. He pulled the covers over his head to muffle his sobbing.

  The next day he was moved into a ward. His doctors thought the activity might distract his morbid self-obsession. There were twenty-three other patients. Something was always happening. Bitter quarrels ensued between the patients and the orderlies over bedpans. Internes flirted with the nurses, strutted importantly when alone, fawned in the presence of the doctors, and condescended toward the patients with sage demeanors. The doctors came each day, bringing their tidings of good and evil. Food, baths and dressings helped while away the time.

  The patient to Charles’s right was convalescing from pneumonia; the one to his left slowly dying from a gangrenous arm. Charles watched with morbid fascination the slow decomposition of the horribly bloated arm as it lay floating in a tank of warm solution, the slimy fins of drainage tapes hanging from the rotten flesh like eels feeding on a piece of floating carrion. He shook with fear. Suppose blood poison should set into his arm. Extending from the bandaged splints were the fingers of his hand, waxen and atrophied as were a paralytic’s. He thought of the twisted, deformed limbs of beggars he’d seen down on the Square. Tears squeezed through his eyes.

  Outside, the gray, dismal days of March’s end passed so slowly by the windows time seemed to be standing still. He kept his sight indrawn. From seven until eight each evening was the visiting hour. His parents always came. Sometimes they brought relief, more often not.

  His mother had struck up an acquaintance with the wife of the patient who was convalescing from pneumonia. Her conversation consisted for the most part in denouncing the hotel. Charles was tired of hearing it. But the woman was a patient listener.

  One night she said, “My man is going home tomorrow.”

  “Oh, how nice. Then I won’t be seeing you again.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “I know your husband will be glad to get away from here.”

  The patient looked up. “You can say that again.” Afterward he was restless, anxious for the night to pass.

  Charles loaned him one of his western story magazines. The cover held a lurid picture of gunfighting, and the stories were equally gory.

  Later Charles heard a weird, inhuman gasp and turned his head. The patient, sitting half upright, sucked desperately for breath. His neck was stretched, elongated, the thin neck muscles taut as cables; his hands clawed at his throat.

  “Nurse!” Charles screamed. “Doctor!”

  The other patients yelled. For a moment there was bedlam. The nurses came running and drew a screen about the patient. Then the resident doctor and his assistants arrived. Charles heard the low urgency of their voices, the rustle of swift movement. An oxygen tent was ordered. But before it arrived, the doctor came slowly from behind the screen.

  “Sometimes it happens like that,” he said to his assistants. “Undue excitement. The heart can’t take it.”

  The nurses retired. A few minutes later two orderlies removed the screen and wheeled the cot, on which the covered body rested, from the ward. Now in the empty space beside Charles’s bed, where a few short minutes before there’d been a man going home next day, was death. A frightened silence fell upon the ward. After a time the patients talked intermittently in whispers. Shortly the lights were turned off for the night. Charles lay in the darkness contemplating death. It seemed to
him then, in the wake of shock, as if death negated all life. All the splendid glory that life offered and people dreamed came to nothing in death. All the talk of good and bad he’d endured throughout his life, everything that he’d been taught, chemistry, Latin, religion, good manners, were senseless, he concluded. There was nothing in the end but nothing anyway.

  Finally he slept and dreamed that he was falling. Three nights in a row he dreamed that he was falling. The death had softened his emotions, left them in a state of flux torn between fear and protest. He didn’t want to die himself; he didn’t want to see anyone die; he didn’t want to think about it.

  But the patient with the gangrenous arm died, and death came again into his thoughts. During the day a blood clot had become dislodged and moved slowly up a vein toward his heart. The doctors gathered about his bed and worked desperately to dissolve it.

  Early in the evening, when the patient became aware that he was dying, he began reciting the Lord’s Prayer, over and over and over, and after the lights were turned off, only the night lamp left above his bed, the voice went on and on in the strained, rigid darkness. Doctors and nurses tiptoed through the ward, sibilant whispers came from behind the screen, but the praying voice continued, indifferent to the fuss and bother, growing weaker as the night wore on. A shroud of horror descended on the ward. No one slept. When one dies prayerfully it is always infinitely more despairing to those who have to listen.

  Slowly, inexorably, Charles’s mind hardened toward the voice; some defense had been erected; his anger and resentment crystallized. After that he thought only of getting well, getting out, getting what he could and enjoying it while he still lived. He fought bitterly, desperately, against acceptance of infirmity. Inside he cried continuously.

  But outwardly he was cheerful. He learned to smile to hide his inner feelings. When the panic came and fear rose like bile from a ruptured bladder, he spread his lips so the dimples showed and widened his senseless eyes. He smoked incessantly to combat the driving irritation of his confinement. He laughed in quick, staccato bursts. He was so brave, they said.

  “And how’s our cheerful young patient this morning?” the nurses greeted him, bringing the monotonous trays of juices and milk toast.

  “As ever,” he smiled.

  Only his mother could kill the smile. Slowly his heart turned against her. Now when she called he hated the sight of the grief that lived in her face; he was repulsed by her bickering and denouncements. ?

  “Mother, will you please-please-please shut up,” he’d say whenever she launched into a tirade against the hotel. “You’re as much to blame as anyone.”

  These outbursts cut to her heart. “Mother’s doing the best she can, son,” she’d plead, tears brimming in her reddened eyes.

  She had tried to sue the hotel, but the day after the accident the hotel had filed for bankruptcy and declared itself insolvent. She meddled with the hotel employees, seeking those who might testify to the hotel’s solvency. The tiny woman with rouged and powdered face, strange deep-set gray-green eyes glinting behind nose glasses, dressed in the old brown fur coat, the brown felt hat pulled low across her forehead, became a familiar sight, incongruous and pathetic, somehow frightening too, at the back entrance where the colored waiters came and went. They knew her as Charles’s mother and greeted her courteously with furtive sidewise glances as they passed. She’d become such a nuisance that Mr. Small had requested Professor Taylor to keep her away.

  “You’re just making a fool of yourself,” he charged.

  She flew into a rage. “You’re just as bad as they are. You’d see your own son a cripple, broken and penniless for life.”

  “What you’re doing isn’t helping any. Do you think you’re helping him to walk?”

  “At least I’m not just sitting down and letting everyone run over me.”

  “No, you’re just antagonizing everyone who might help us.”

  They began shouting at each other. The neighbors came to the windows to listen. One stepped out on the porch, debating whether to interfere. William sat in his room, engulfed in shame. Finally he went down to the kitchen.

  “Dad! Mother! Please. That isn’t doing any good.”

  The sight of him standing there, blind and helpless, his face shadowed in humiliation, quieted them for the time.

  But she couldn’t rest. She had to do something. She couldn’t bear the waiting, the praying, the hoping. She felt compelled to exculpate herself of blame. It was as if she believed that by some self-sacrificial act she could at once restore her son, free herself of guilt and win him back to her.

  She called upon the district attorney to prosecute the hotel for negligence.

  “Do you wish to swear out a warrant, Mrs. Taylor?”

  “They’re so full of tricks I don’t know who to charge. It’s your duty, anyway; it’s not mine. You’re required to prosecute lawbreakers.”

  “Our office has no evidence to act on, Mrs. Taylor.”

  She was enraged. All evening she fumed. ‘They’re not going to get away with it,” she informed her husband.

  “They’re not trying to get away with anything,” he defended them. “The Industrial Commission takes care of these cases. That’s the law. The hotel is paying the boy his salary.” But even as he said it he felt himself a traitor.

  Both suffered in their own individual manner. It robbed their efforts of all purpose, turned all the long years of struggle into bitter waste. They had no direction for their anger, no outlet for their hurt; their emotions turned against themselves.

  Mrs. Taylor’s long and bitter fight was to save herself as much as anything. She didn’t realize this. She thought of herself as doing what a mother should. And yet, in the end, she lost herself. Both lost themselves. She became mean and petty. And although Professor Taylor had been without a teaching post for four long years, he had still felt he belonged. Deep down he had still considered himself a teacher. Now he didn’t. It broke him inside where it counted. He gave up. He lost his will to try. In many ways, the effect on this little black man born in a Georgia cabin, who’d tried so hard to be someone of consequence in this world, to live a respectable life, rear his children to be good, and teach his backward people, was the greatest tragedy of all. Mrs. Taylor never gave up as he did. But she had to feel the world was turned against her to justify herself.

  In turn Charles was affected by the change in them. The essence of their defeat was insidiously transmitted to his consciousness. His confidence was shaken. The fact of having parents was no longer reassuring. He became frightened of the world. He dreaded their visits and wished they’d never come.

  His mother’s eyes were always red-rimmed and something had happened to her face; something was missing, some quality that had given it distinction. Two red spots of rouge stood out on her high cheekbones in startling fashion.

  “They ought to be made to pay for what they’ve done to you,” she’d say piteously.

  “Let it alone!” he’d shout. “For God’s sake let it alone!”

  22

  AFTER SIX WEEKS SLIGHT articulation had returned to his fingers.

  “Keep kneading them,” his doctor instructed. “Pretty soon we’ll have those splints off and see how it looks.”

  One morning he discovered he could move his feet. He was afraid to mention it. For two days he kept his secret, wiggling his toes and finally moving his legs.

  “Look,” he showed the doctor.

  The doctor was amazed. “Wonderful!” he exclaimed. He tapped the knees for reflexes. “Wonderful! Wonderful!”

  From then on Charles knew that he would walk again.

  Several weeks following, the splints were removed. His arm was slightly bent, terribly emaciated; it was attached to a brown, atrophied hand. On the inside of the forearm, where a bruise had festered, was a large dark area of rotted flesh, and below the red serrated ridge of the scar where the bones had protruded. At first sight he was frightened, but the doctors seemed well pl
eased. They gave him cocoa butter for massaging and a ball of putty to knead. He followed their instructions zealously. For long hours while reading, holding the book with his right hand, he kneaded the putty with his left, unthinkingly. The strength came back without his realizing it.

  One day he looked outside and noticed it was summer. Three months had passed. He decided he would walk. Waiting until the ward was unattended, he threw aside the covers, inched his body to the edge and stood. He was exceedingly weak, his knees buckled and his legs felt numb, half-asleep. The cast cut into his flesh. But his back did not hurt at all.

  The nurse returned and caught him standing. Her face whitened. “What are you doing out of bed?”

  He grinned at her. “I’m just trying out my legs.”

  Several of the other patients laughed. She flushed with anger.

  “Help him, Clyde. Don’t let him fall,” she called to one of the convalescents while she ran for help.

  Clyde came over and grasped him about the cast. “Steady, boy, steady.”

  “I wasn’t going to fall,” he protested, but by then he could barely stand.

  The nurse returned with the resident doctor, several internes and the orderly.

  “The army,” Clyde murmured.

  They lifted him back to bed. He felt a high, lightheaded exhilaration. Laughter bubbled from his lips.

  “How does the back feel?” the doctor asked.

  “It doesn’t hurt a bit.” Excitement slurred his voice; his face was flushed and his eyes were bright as fire.

  His own doctors were incredulous. They ordered X-rays and warned him not to move. But several mornings later they came in grinning.

  “We’re going to let you walk a bit, Charles. See how you like it.”

  With their help he walked across the ward and back. They looked at one another.