by Ann Tatlock
He glanced at Jane. She nodded for him to go on.
“In most of my dreams, I’m working again. I’m using the saw or the drill or the wood plane, and it’s all so real, I can feel the texture of the wood, and I can smell the sawdust.”
Jane remembered briefly how she used to kid him, how she used to say he loved the scent of sawdust more than any perfume she might wear. He laughed and said it wasn’t so, but she threatened to carry wood shavings in her pockets if he didn’t comment on her choice of fragrance once in a while. “So,” she said now, “you can smell the sawdust?”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “I can actually smell it, and I can tell whether the wood I’m working with is pine or cedar or walnut. But then I wake up . . .”
His voice trailed off. He blinked several times.
“You wake up,” Jane said, “and it must seem like real life is a nightmare.”
He nodded again. A small vein throbbed at his temple. “Sometimes, Jane, I dream I’m hugging you. And the thing that’s the most real is you put your cheek against mine, and I can feel your skin and how soft it is.” He moved his gaze to her again. “Will you put your cheek next to mine? I want to feel you again.”
Jane pulled her chair closer and leaned toward him. She pressed her cheek against one of his, while cupping his other cheek in the palm of her hand. Their tears met and mingled on the pallet of their warm flesh.
“I want to live, Jane,” Seth whispered. “I do want to live. But not like this.”
12
She went to the gazebo in the hopes that Truman Rockaway might be there. He wasn’t, not at first. But he showed up shortly afterward, as though he knew she needed his company.
He nodded as he sat down on the bench across from her. For a moment they sat in silence. Truman’s elbows rested on his thighs and his hands were folded, as though in prayer. Then he spoke. “You’ve just come from seeing Seth.”
“Yes.” She couldn’t look at him. If she did, she would cry.
Truman drew himself up and put a hand over each knee. He took a deep breath. “I’d like to tell you a story, if I may.”
“Sure,” Jane said quietly. “Go ahead.”
Truman rubbed his knees a moment and frowned in thought. Then he said, “It might explain . . . well . . . my behavior yesterday in the canteen.”
“All right. I’m listening.”
He cleared his throat. “It was 1946,” he began. “I was fifteen years old and the eldest of seven children. At that time my father was a bale breaker at one of the textile mills there in the Upcountry, and my mother was a maid in the house of the mill owner, a Mr. Evans. Now, my mother and father were both intelligent people, but being black in the South . . . well, they simply had no opportunity. Jim Crow was in full swing back then. Jim Crow was the law, designed to keep us Negro folk in our place.
“Our place was one of poverty, of course. We didn’t have much, other than each other, and my mother’s books. The little house we lived in just outside of Travelers Rest—it had no running water, no electricity, no heat other than the woodstove. But we had books. Plenty of those. See, Mrs. Evans—she saw my mother had an interest in reading and in learning. Since Mrs. Evans had been a teacher at one time, she knew the importance of a good education. For whatever reason, she decided she was going to see to it that Mamma’s children had a chance at learning. She was pretty forward thinking for a white woman, as most white folks thought blacks weren’t capable of learning much. But Mrs. Evans—she gave Mamma all kinds of books, told her to bring them home and read them to us, everything from literature to philosophy to science.”
“Truman,” Jane interrupted, “didn’t you go to school?”
“Oh yes.” Truman nodded. “We went to the school for Negro children. But tell you the truth, we learned more at home from those books Mrs. Evans sent us. Not that the teachers at the school weren’t good. They were. They were fine teachers and fine people. But we just didn’t have the resources that the white school had.
“So as I say, my family—we had each other, and we had a pile of books. I guess that’s about my best memory of those days, sitting around in the evenings, listening to Mamma and Daddy read to us by the light of the kerosene lamp. We’d memorize passages of Shakespeare and all kinds of poems and even chapters of the Bible. We’d make a contest out of it, see who could memorize the most and recite it without making any mistakes.” Truman paused and laughed lightly. “Being the oldest, I always thought I had to be the best, but my brothers and sisters, they gave me a run for my money. I had to work hard to outdo any of them. I spent hours by myself, reading and memorizing and reciting and—”
He stopped himself and looked up. “I’m getting sidetracked, Jane. This isn’t what I meant to tell you.”
Jane offered him an encouraging smile. “That’s all right. I like the picture of all of you gathered together like that. I don’t imagine that kind of thing happens very much today.”
“No, I suppose not. Times have changed since then, some ways for the better, some ways not. But here’s what I wanted to tell you,” Truman said. “That autumn of 1946, the youngest of us, my brother Daniel, was two years old. He was a little fellow. He’d been born somewhat prematurely, but otherwise he was all right. And he was a happy boy. He had a way of lighting up the room when he smiled, and he smiled a lot.
“Well, one night when we were eating supper, something hit him. One minute he was fine and the next he was shaking with fever and complaining of an ache in his jaw. We didn’t have any real medicines at home back then, just some herbs my grandmother collected and made teas out of. She had a tea for whatever ailed you, whether it was toothache or migraine or a sprained ankle. That’s how it was for us, and it was the old women mostly who kept the traditions alive, picking leaves and making poultices out of this or that. You had pneumonia, your grandmother would take a rag and cook some meal on it and put turpentine in that and then wrap your chest up with it and wait for you to get better.”
“Did it work?” Jane asked.
“Sometimes,” Truman said with a shrug. “Sometimes not. There’s no medical reason for some of these things to work, other than the power of suggestion.”
Jane hesitated, both wanting and not wanting to know. Finally, she asked, “What about Daniel? What happened to him?”
Truman nodded curtly, looked down at his hands. They were clenched together in his lap now. “We tried everything.”
“What about a doctor?”
“That’s what I’m getting at, Jane. Two days of herbal tea and poultices, and he was only getting worse. The skin on the side of his face was red and tight, and his fever was raging. He was really only semiconscious the morning Mamma took him to the doctor. We didn’t have a car. I had to push him to the doctor’s office in a wheelbarrow. We laid him in blankets, and he whimpered as I pushed him along the dirt road toward town.
“We had no black doctor to take him to, of course. There was only the white doctor. There were two waiting rooms, one for whites, the other for blacks. Only after all the whites had been attended to would the doctor see any of the black folks who’d come in. That is, he’d see them if there was time. If it was late in the day and time for his supper, he’d send the Negro folk home and tell them to come back in the morning.”
“Is that what happened, Truman?”
“Yes. He wouldn’t see Daniel, though my mother begged him. ‘Just take a minute, sir. Please, just give us a minute of your time, Dr. Coleman, sir.’ But he refused. He sent us away, along with the other black folks in the office that day. He said we could try the county hospital if we wanted to. Well, instead of going to the hospital directly, we walked three miles to Mrs. Evans’s house near the mill village. Mamma thought Mrs. Evans might be able to help.”
“And did she?”
“She took one look at Daniel, and she piled all of us into her car and drove us to the county hospital herself. We turned some heads that day, the four of us coming into the emergency room,
three Negroes and a white woman demanding we be seen. She was a brave woman, that Mrs. Evans.” Truman almost smiled. “One of the earliest pioneers in civil rights in the Upcountry. Not many would have stormed the ER, demanding that a little Negro boy be seen.”
Jane leaned forward on the bench. She gazed at Truman intently. “So was he seen? Did a doctor see him?”
“Eventually. We were there about two hours when a doctor came out to the waiting room and looked at him. That was all he did. Didn’t even touch him, just looked down at him lying there in Mamma’s lap and said, ‘Take him home and keep him hydrated. He should be better in twenty-four hours.’
“Well, he turned to go, and Mrs. Evans jumped up from her chair and grabbed his arm and said, ‘Is that all?’ He looked angry and said, ‘What more do you want?’ Mrs. Evans said, ‘I want tests done. I want to know what’s wrong with this baby.’ And the doctor said, ‘Who are you anyway, that you come in here telling us what to do?’ Well, that Mrs. Evans, she straightened herself up real tall and said, ‘I’m Mrs. Ernest Evans. My husband owns the mill where half this town is employed.’ We were all hoping that might impress the doctor, but it didn’t. ‘Well, that doesn’t make you or Mr. Evans a doctor, now does it?’ he said. ‘I don’t need to do any tests to know this boy has a common fever and all he needs is rest and fluids. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have sick people to attend to.’ ‘Sick white people, I suppose,’ Mrs. Evans said, but by the time she got the words out, the doctor was already gone.
“Mrs. Evans drove us home. She gave us a bottle of aspirin that she had in her pocketbook, and she told Mamma she didn’t have to come to work until Daniel was better. She said she’d come back the next day to see how Daniel was doing.
“Mamma, Daddy, and I took turns holding Daniel all night. We held him and prayed. Oh, how we prayed, asking God to take the fever away, to make our little Daniel better. We sent the other children to bed, but the three of us stayed awake, rocking Daniel, keeping watch, praying. We knew he needed water, and we tried to give him something to drink, but we couldn’t get him to wake up. He had slipped into something of a coma. We couldn’t even give him any of the aspirin Mrs. Evans had left with us.
“The kerosene lamp burned all night. I was holding Daniel, rocking him, when he died at daybreak. He died in my arms, and I felt him go. I pulled his body to me, and I begged him to come back, but he was gone. Mamma and Daddy had both been trying to get a little rest, but soon as they heard me crying, they came and saw that Daniel was dead. You never heard such wailing, Jane. You never heard such heartbreak.” When Truman looked up at Jane, he had tears in his eyes.
“Oh, Truman,” Jane said, “I’m so sorry. I can’t begin to imagine. Do you think, if he was sick today—do you think he might have lived?”
“He would have lived then, Jane, if he’d been properly diagnosed and treated.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, looking back, my guess is that Daniel had cellulitis. It’s a simple bacterial infection that today is treated with any number of antibiotics, but even back then, it might have been treated with penicillin or even quinine or sulfa. If it isn’t treated, the infection can spread and become septic. That alone can kill you. I don’t know for sure, but in Daniel’s case, since the infection was on his face, it might have spread to his brain and developed into meningitis. I’m not sure he showed all the symptoms of meningitis, but I don’t know, I wasn’t a doctor then. I was just a kid myself. A kid who had to watch his brother die for no good reason other than that he was black.”
Jane waited a moment before asking, “Is that why you became a doctor?”
Truman gazed beyond her shoulder as he answered. “When Daniel died, that started me thinking maybe I could become a doctor so I could be there for the black folks, so they could see a doctor when they needed one. When I went to Korea and lived day in and day out with the wounded and the dying—that’s when I really became serious about medicine. After I was discharged, I went to Fisk University on the GI Bill, and eventually I attended Meharry Medical College, both in Nashville.” He put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward. “But my point is this, Jane. We don’t let people die, not so long as there’s still hope. No matter how you look at it, it’s just plain wrong.”
Jane thought a moment. “We don’t let children die, of course. Not children who could go on and live normal lives.”
“And what’s a normal life? Life in any form is precious.”
“Truman, I know you’re talking about Seth. But for someone like him, someone who can’t do anything for himself—wouldn’t it be more merciful just to let him go?”
Truman looked at Jane a long time before saying, “What do you think, Jane?”
“Honestly, I don’t know what to think.” She shook her head. “He says he wants to live, but not the way he is now. I mean, he’s a carpenter who can’t use his hands. That part of his life is over for good. That part of him is dead. Maybe it would be better, more merciful . . .”
When she didn’t finish, Truman said, “Who’s to say what mercy is? Maybe mercy kept him alive instead of allowing him to die.”
“Oh, I know, I know.” Jane put her head back and sighed. “I should be happy he’s alive. He should be happy he’s alive. But maybe mercy, whatever that is, should have kept him from being shot in the first place. I tried to pray for Seth, I really did. I asked God to protect him. They always talk about God being merciful, and yet it seems no matter what you ask for, He always lets the hardest things happen.”
“He is merciful, Jane, and He lets the hardest things happen, which in itself might be a mercy. Who are we to say?”
Jane didn’t respond. Truman stood. “I’m going to go finish my rounds now. I’ll stop by Seth’s room, see how he’s doing.”
Jane nodded.
“You’ll be all right?” he asked.
She looked at him then, directly in the eye. “You say we don’t let people die so long as there’s hope. Where is Seth’s hope now, Truman?”
Truman, looking thoughtful, nodded once. “That’s exactly the right question, Jane,” he said. “But only Seth himself can tell you the answer.”
He laid a strong hand on Jane’s shoulder, then left to make his rounds.
13
Roscoe and Juniper, tails wagging, met Jane at the door. Otherwise the house was quiet. Diana and Carl had caught the seven o’clock flight to Heathrow that morning and would be in Europe the rest of the summer. Jane was on her own now, free to make herself at home in the big rambling house on Montford Avenue.
Jane shivered. The house was filled with books, Carl’s paintings and sculptures, antique furniture collected by Diana and her parents, and yet it seemed overwhelmingly empty. She wasn’t afraid to be alone, but she deeply feared loneliness. It was a sinkhole, sure to trap her if she wasn’t careful.
She dropped her pocketbook on the kitchen table and looked around the room. Where to go? What to do? She moved from the kitchen to the dining room to the den at the back of the house, where she sat down in the overstuffed chair by the empty fireplace. The room was small and cozy, with a fieldstone hearth, large braided rug, built-in bookcases jammed with aging volumes. She called for the dogs, who came running. She patted her lap and they both jumped up, licking her chin briefly before curling into a nap.
“Well, at least I have you guys,” Jane said, stroking their fur. Both dogs sighed contentedly.
Jane leaned her head back and shut her eyes. What an amazing thing contentment was! She remembered the day she felt all was right with her world, the day her dreams and her life lined up with each other and fell into place. It was the day Seth proposed, not quite a year ago.
———
“I’ll pick you up at nine tomorrow morning,” he’d said the night before. “And be sure to wear your walking shoes.”
“But where are we going?”
He shook his head and gave her a crooked smile. “You’ll see.”
At nine
o’clock on that July morning, he pulled into the circular drive of the Rayburn House and honked the horn.
“When will you be back?” Gram asked.
“I don’t know,” Jane said with a laugh. “I don’t even know where we’re going.”
And so they had driven, on and on, taking Route 40 more than a hundred miles toward Asheville, but cutting off onto 64 and heading south toward Ruth and west again toward Lake Lure before finally arriving in the little tourist town of Chimney Rock. The town was a narrow strip of restaurants and souvenir shops nestled in a gorge with an expanse of mountains on either side. The Rocky Broad River cut a natural divide between the town and Chimney Rock Park, a vast stretch of mountain trails and waterfalls, the pinnacle of which was the 315-foot monolith for which the park was named.
Seth drove through the entrance to the park and over the bridge to the parking lot. When he opened the door for Jane, he pointed to the rocky spire and said, “That’s our destination.”
Jane put her head back full tilt and shielded her eyes from the sun. She had long known about Chimney Rock, of course, but she’d never been there. More than two thousand feet up, on top of the jut of rock that, in fact, looked like a chimney sprouting up out of the mountain, an enormous American flag rippled in the wind. “We’re going up there?” she asked.
“Come on,” he said, taking her hand and twining her fingers with his.
To get there, they walked through a lighted tunnel cut into the mountain and entered the elevator that would take them to the Sky Lounge at the base of the spire.
“I’ve heard this elevator goes up the height of twenty-six stories,” Seth said casually.
“Really?” Jane said, chewing her lip. “Did I ever tell you I’m scared of heights?”
Seth only smiled. The elevator doors opened, and they walked through the Sky Lounge out into the open air and the wind. The sun was high in the sky, reaching toward noon. Jane squeezed Seth’s hand more tightly as they walked the trail to the base of the metal stairway leading up to the top of the rock.