by Ann Tatlock
And then this morning, it was gone. When she awoke, the joy had been replaced by a bitter confusion wrapped around a huge empty chasm in the pit of her stomach.
She didn’t answer Truman’s question. Instead, she said, “When you make your rounds, Truman, you do stop and see Seth, don’t you?”
Truman nodded. “As with everyone, I stop by his room for a few minutes, ask him how he’s doing, see if I can do anything for him.”
“So how does he seem to you?”
Truman took a moment to think. “He’s willing to say more than two words to me now. That’s a step in the right direction.”
Jane took a deep breath. “Well, maybe if he keeps moving in that direction, everything will be all right.”
“I hope so,” Truman said. “I pray so.”
Jane looked at him, held his gaze. “Truman?”
“Yes, Jane?”
“Do you believe in God?”
“Of course.”
“But, I mean, one who has anything to do with us? Do you think He answers if we pray?”
Truman looked toward the window and back again. “Yes.”
“You hesitate.”
“No.”
“But you did.”
He shook his head. “No. I’ve been a praying man all my life. I’ve seen many answers to prayer. Why, Jane? What are you praying about?”
“Truman, I don’t even know how to pray. I don’t know how I’m supposed to go about doing it.”
“You don’t know how to talk to God?”
“Talk to God? We never even talked about God when I was growing up. My family didn’t go to church, though they’d allow Laney to take me with her from time to time. I went, but I wasn’t very interested. I liked the hymns, but as soon as the sermon started, my mind checked out.” Jane stopped and laughed, shook her head. “You know, my most vivid memory of church is actually getting mad at Laney because she wouldn’t let me take communion. She said I wasn’t ready, and it made me feel left out, like I wasn’t good enough, while everyone else around us was.”
“Hmm.” Truman rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Didn’t Laney tell you what communion was all about?”
“Sure, she told me. Not that it mattered to me at the time.”
“It ought to matter—”
“Yes.” Jane interrupted with a nod of her head. “I want to understand. Especially since Seth has always gone to church, and once we’re mar—”
She stopped, couldn’t finish the word. She looked hard at Truman, who was waiting patiently. “But that’s the thing, isn’t it?”
“Marrying Seth?” With a lift of his brows, Truman nodded.
“I don’t know what to do. If I thought it would make any difference, I’d ask God to tell me whether I should stay with Seth or just give up.”
“Well, why don’t you just go ahead and ask Him?”
“I’m afraid He won’t answer.”
“He will. Maybe you’ve never heard what they say about prayer. Sometimes God says yes, sometimes He says no. Sometimes He says wait. He’ll surely answer if he can.”
“What do you mean, if He can? Are there some prayers He can’t answer?”
Truman looked back toward the window. He was nodding, but more in thought than in answer to her question. When he looked back, he said, “I was just about to take a walk when you came by. There’s a path that runs the perimeter of the grounds. Do you want to join me?”
20
The day was warm, but not unbearably so. The heat was tempered by a mild breeze that blew off the mountains and down across the grounds of the VA complex. Jane, in a pale blue sundress, liked the feel of the sun on her bare shoulders and the fresh air on her face. It was good to be outside, out of the confines of the hospital with its populace of broken bodies and aging vets.
She glanced over at Truman walking beside her, tapping the ground with a cane. He carried one when he walked outside, he’d explained, so he didn’t lose his footing on the woodchips that covered the path. Too, he finally admitted to the arthritis in his knees that sometimes made walking difficult.
He wore a long-sleeved shirt with tarnished cuff links and slacks held up with suspenders. Beads of sweat broke out beneath the beak of his baseball cap and slid down the side of his face. He looked ahead intently as he walked, and Jane knew he had something he intended to say. She waited, not wanting to interrupt his train of thought.
Finally her patience was rewarded. “You asked about Maggie,” he said, “and what happened.”
“Yes. But you don’t have to tell me.”
“I know. But I want to. In a way, it’s the continuation of my story about my brother Daniel.”
Jane frowned, wondering how that could be. Surely by the time Truman was engaged, Daniel had been dead for years. She lifted a hand to her forehead to shade her eyes as she gazed at the distant mountains. “All right,” she said.
They took another few steps before Truman spoke again. “I grew up with Maggie,” he began. “We knew each other from grade school on, like you and Seth, though she was a couple years younger than I was.” He offered her a sideways glance. “’Course when you’re a kid, a couple years is a lifetime, so I never paid her much attention. In fact, I don’t guess I ever really gave her the time of day till after I graduated medical school and went back to Travelers Rest. That was in 1960. I went back home to open that practice I’d long dreamed about, and I brought back someone from Meharry to work alongside me. His name was Cyrus Dooley. He was a fine doctor and a good man. I considered him not just a business partner but a friend.
“Well, not long after we started our practice, I saw Maggie at one of the socials held down at the Negro VFW hall. By then, of course, she was all grown up and pretty as a picture.” He paused a moment and his eyes brightened, as though she stood there even now, smiling coyly in her new party dress, her white-gloved hands toying nervously with the bow at the small of her back. “You can be sure I finally took notice. I asked her to dance, and that was it. Before the night was over, we were in love, and I knew I was going to ask her to marry me.”
“Did you propose that night?”
“Oh no. I knew I had to wait, exercise a little patience. I waited a week, and that was all I could stand.” He glanced over at Jane again and sniffed out a small laugh. “I asked her to marry me, and she said yes, with one stipulation. We had to have a yearlong engagement so we could be sure we were doing the right thing.”
“And you went along with it?”
“I went along with it. Otherwise, she’d hold the I-told-you-so card if we ended up getting ornery with each other a few years into the marriage.”
Jane chuckled. “Well, I think she was wise.”
“That she was,” Truman agreed with a nod. “Besides, it gave me some time to save up so we could afford the down payment on a house. Cyrus and I roomed together in the small quarters above our office. It was hardly the place to bring your bride and start your married life. No, I was going to carry my bride over the threshold of a house and make a real home. So Maggie and I got engaged in the fall of ’60, and she began planning our wedding for the following year. But the next summer, the summer of 1961, something happened.”
He paused, as though reluctant to go on. His face took on a pained expression as he saw what was ahead in the telling.
Jane waited several long seconds before prodding gently, “What happened, Truman?”
He moistened his lips with his tongue and took a deep breath. “It was a Sunday, and the office was closed. That afternoon after church, Maggie and I packed a picnic lunch and took it to our favorite spot by the Saluda River. Pretty little river, not far from Travelers Rest. We’d go there often when the weather was nice. Sometimes we’d go with Cyrus and one of his girlfriends, but mostly we’d go by ourselves.
“So there we were, eating bologna sandwiches on the banks of the river when we heard a commotion coming from somewhere close by. Men shouting, a dog barking, and a minute later, a gunshot
. Just one, but it seemed to echo all up and down the river. I started to get up, and Maggie grabbed my wrist. ‘Is it a lynching?’ she asked. I told her it probably was, and I had to go see. She argued that it was too dangerous, but I told her maybe I could save him, whoever he was. ‘They’ll kill you too,’ she said, but I had to take that chance. Before I could take two steps, I heard a car start up and drive away, and I knew some poor colored man had been left for dead by the river. I ran toward where we’d heard the commotion, and Maggie followed. It wasn’t far. Quarter of a mile, maybe less. We found him moaning in the weeds on the riverbank. Only he wasn’t a black man. He was white. And I knew who he was.”
Truman paused and looked at Jane. “Jane,” he said, “he was the son of Dr. Coleman. He was the son of the doctor who turned my baby brother away fifteen years before. He lay there bleeding out of a chest wound, but at that point he was still conscious. I kneeled beside him, but I didn’t touch him. He looked at me with pleading eyes. He didn’t know who I was or what had happened all those years ago. Maggie kneeled too and she said, ‘It’s all right, mister. This man is Dr. Rockaway. He’s going to help you.’ Well, he reached up and grabbed my shirt and held on. ‘Help me,’ he said. Just like that. ‘Help me.’ Funny how in that moment he didn’t care whether I was white or black. He may not have even believed a colored man like me could be a doctor. All he knew was he didn’t want to die, and at that moment I was his only hope.
“Well, I looked at him long and hard, but I wasn’t really seeing him. All I could think about was Daniel. I was seeing the agony Daniel went through in the days before he died. And I was angry. So angry I was blind with it. We’d gone to this man’s father when Daniel was sick, and we’d been turned away. Dr. Coleman had let my baby brother die. I grabbed the man’s wrist and pulled his hand away from my shirt.
“Then I stood up. Maggie asked me where I was going, and I said, ‘Maggie, come on, we’re getting out of here.’ She said, ‘What do you mean, Truman? You can’t just leave and let this man bleed to death.’ ‘I can’t help him,’ I said. ‘Anyone finds us near him, they’ll think we shot him ourselves, and they’ll kill us.’ At that point I looked down at my hand. The man’s blood was all over it and all over the front of my shirt. I stepped to the river and washed my hands. Maggie came up behind me and said, ‘Truman, you can’t do this. You’re going to let him die because he’s white, aren’t you?’ I turned to her and said, ‘Maggie, I can’t save him. He won’t survive till we could get him to the hospital. It’s too late.’ She protested, saying we could at least try. She said it was wrong not to try.
“It was wrong and I knew it. But I chose to leave him there to die. It was payback for what his daddy had done to Daniel and to my family. And to me.”
“So what happened after he died?”
“Well, that’s the thing, see. He didn’t die. I underestimated his will to live and overestimated the severity of his wound. I felt sure he’d be dead within a few minutes, but after we left he dragged himself a hundred feet or so to the road where someone in a passing car found him. They made it to the hospital in time. Tommy Lee Coleman lived. And from that moment on, I was a marked man. Tommy Lee had seen me and could identify me. I had to flee or risk being killed.”
“So you fled?” Jane asked.
Truman nodded. “I turned the practice over to Cyrus and disappeared into upstate New York. Some distant relatives took me in until I could get myself established. Even then, I didn’t stay long. For years I was on the move, swinging back and forth between the East Coast and the Midwest. Just in case.”
“And Maggie?”
“Before I left Travelers Rest, I asked her to come with me, but she said no. She said she needed some time to think. She needed to forgive me, she said, for leaving a man to die. She’d seen a part of me she didn’t like. It was a part of me she wasn’t sure she could live with. I told her I’d give her as much time as she needed to forgive me, and when she was ready, I’d send for her and we’d be married.”
Truman stopped, sighing heavily.
Jane said, “You never sent for her?”
He shook his head. “I got to thinking of what I was asking of her. To come with me, I’d be asking her to leave her family, her home, everything she ever knew, just so she could be with a man who was on the run for who-knew-how-long. But the more important reason was, of course, that she’d lost faith in me, not so much as a doctor but as a man. She said there can’t be a marriage where the trust has been tampered with. I wanted to hear her say she forgave me, but she never did. For a while, she knew how to contact me through my relatives in New York, should she change her mind. But I didn’t hear from her. About a year or so after I left Travelers Rest, she married Cyrus Dooley.”
Jane frowned as she thought about that. Finally she said, “I’m sorry, Truman. It seems almost unfair. You know, like the punishment doesn’t fit the crime.”
He shook his head and narrowed his eyes. “Maggie was right. You don’t simply let someone die. Especially when you’re in a position to save him. I was a doctor, but I did nothing. I left Tommy Lee to die because of who he was. The son of a white man I hated.”
“That’s why you feel so strongly about not going along with Seth’s death wish?”
“Yes.”
“I understand.”
“One more thing. Even after she married Cyrus, I went on praying for years that I might hear Maggie say she’d forgiven me for what I’d done. But now it’s a prayer that God can’t answer.”
“Why not?”
“Because Maggie’s dead. She died two years ago. I’ve seen plenty of strange things in my day, but far as I know, words of forgiveness have never fallen from the lips of someone who’s dead.”
21
Neither do the words I’m sorry, Jane thought. Those who were dead could never rise up and tell you they were sorry. If they were sorry, which she wasn’t sure her mother was.
It was Sunday morning, a quiet unhurried morning on Montford Avenue. Jane, still in her cotton robe, carried a cup of coffee into the den. She stopped at the stereo player and put in a CD of Brahms, then curled up in the overstuffed chair by the fireplace. Roscoe and Juniper followed, settling themselves on the floor at her feet.
Jane sipped the coffee, then put her head back against the cushioned chair and shut her eyes. Oh, how in making one solitary decision a person affected so many lives. Her mother, who decided not to live. Dr. Coleman, who decided not to heal. Maggie, who decided not to forgive.
Bad enough that a person had to bear the consequences of her own choices, but when the blow came from another, and when that person didn’t know or didn’t care . . .
———
“You’re going to have to find it in yourself to forgive your mamma,” Laney had said. Jane remembered that now. Almost six months had passed since Meredith Morrow’s funeral. In that time, Jane had turned thirteen, she had started eighth grade, and she had become alarmingly aware of her new role in Troy: She was the daughter of the town suicide. She saw the stares at school, noted the whispers, heard the rumors about how the Rayburn House was now haunted. A couple of boys claimed to have seen the ghost of a woman in an upstairs window. At the thought of it, even Jane shivered. She didn’t really believe in ghosts, but then again . . .
“Why should I forgive her, Laney?” she’d asked. They were sitting on the front porch on a warm Friday evening in late October, waiting for Laney’s husband to pick her up. Laney’s mother and father were visiting for the weekend, and the elder couple was taking the younger out to dinner.
“She left you in a world of hurt, child,” Laney said, “and it’ll kill you if you let it.”
Jane didn’t want to talk about that. She looked out over the yard at the last vestiges of Grandmother’s summer garden, at the trees tinged with autumn, at the lengthening shadows on the lawn. It was the kind of evening that had called her to dance pirouettes in the grass when she was a child. But those days were gone. “They s
ay our house is haunted now,” she said.
“So I heard.” Laney swatted at a gnat circling her head. “No such thing as ghosts.”
Jane took a long sip of the sweet tea Laney had poured for her. Then she said, “But if there was, and if Mom came back, would she tell me she was sorry?”
Laney shook her head. “Child, if your mother came back, even as a ghost, she’d sit herself down on the couch and go on watching herself on television. Nothing would change.”
“Then why should I forgive her?” Jane asked again.
“Because that’s what the Lord Jesus did when He was up on the cross. His body was broken, and His life was slipping away, and still He said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’”
Another sip of tea gave her a moment to think. “You know, Laney, I’ve never understood why they killed Jesus.”
“It wasn’t a killing, Janie. It was a sacrifice. Only them that put Him on the cross didn’t know it. That’s why Jesus said they didn’t know what they were doing.”
“It was a sacrifice?”
“That’s right. The only one that ever mattered. The only one that ever made peace between us and God.”
Jane didn’t understand. She wasn’t sure she wanted to. She just wanted to be like all the other kids—kids whose mothers were alive and normal, volunteering for the PTA, and making suppers for their families at night.
“If Mom loved me,” Jane said, “she wouldn’t have done it.”
Laney turned toward her and fixed her gaze firmly on Jane. “Now listen, child, there’s one thing you’ve got to understand. What your mamma did had nothing to do with you. I believe she loved you, but she just didn’t know how to live. Some people are like that. They strive and they strive and they never can figure out how to live. That was your mamma. She just couldn’t find any peace.”
“But, Laney?”
“Yes, honey?”
“Could you ever leave Eugene and Sarah and Frankie?”
Laney smiled at the mention of her children. “Of course not,” she responded quietly. “I’d keep them all with me forever, if I could.”