Roxanna Slade Part 20

Just that long laugh brought up blood. Bright as any sunset, a crooked line of blood ran out of her lips on down her chin and stained her blue collar. She paid it no mind.

I had no special medical knowledge, but I'd lost a high school friend to TB, so I said "I'm afraid you've had a lung hemorrhage. Can I help you home?"

She looked less likely to have a home than any dead fox. And she shook her head No. Then she said "Tired as me?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"You as worn out as Roebuck Pittman? Look like you are." She half turned away from me and took a few steps, then stopped again and faced me. Any normal person would have wiped at the blood, but she let it stream. We were still no more than ten yards apart.

By then I'd realized I was struck. No wide car swerving round the bend could have slammed me

harder. Just the sound of that last name, the force of those eyes, told me I'd come face-to-face at last with someone I'd strained hard to avoid--avoid and forget. This woman had to be Palmer's woman from long years back. And though I'd prayed for her to vanish from anywhere near, I never once thought I might be wrong in this recognition.

She realized how much I knew. She said "You finally seen Roebuck, ain't you?" Her hand came up to her chin at last and scrubbed at the cooling blood.

I said "I'm sorry," meaning of course I was sorry to see her.

She took it as a request for pardon and said "Don't be. Too late. I couldn't hurt a child, much less old you in your new sporty britches." She laughed again. The blood repeated itself on her lips, and she drank it in.

From then on it caused me to feel cold fear, not pity or regret. Stunned as I was I wouldn't have offered to haul her out of the ditch if she'd fallen. I was even too shocked to comprehend how cruel I was. I couldn't speak.

She let me stand there utterly stalled by a sight that should have inspired no feeling in me but a dull recollection. Then she said "You living with my kin now."

I must have looked puzzled.

"My kin at Miss Olivia's house-- Mally, that girl."

I pointed behind me toward the house a long mile off. "Mally's a Shearin."

Roebuck waited a long bleak minute. And then as she turned her back on me finally, she said "Mally got any number of names."

By the time she was gone, I was telling my hurt mind over and over Don't let this sick witch ruin you now. But my mind told me in no uncertain terms that Roebuck Pittman was no harmless girl and that I'd been damaged right down to the quick, the day I learned of her existence nineteen years ago and then forgot her. When I made my own turn back toward the Slade house, I knew I'd be compelled to pay every cent I'd owed this miserable creature through all that time. Why I thought I was in her debt, I couldn't imagine. But I knew I was--I and my children and Palmer Slade and every piece of the safe world

we slept in.

I never told a soul, not the real story. But that night late--after Mally had finished in the kitchen and was gone and Miss Olivia and I were seated in the parlor, both sewing--I said "I've got a powerful hunch that Mally Shearin is kin to that Pittman woman you mentioned long ago."

Miss Olivia studied me like a red warning sign. She said "Anna, please don't push on that door."

I said "If the door is truly shut, I won't push, no."

Miss Olivia said "To the best of my knowledge--and I've had my eyes open--Palmer's kept his promise to you very strictly."

"But is your cook Roebuck Pittman's daughter?"

Miss Olivia nodded. "So I've always believed. Mally's offered no guarantees. Coy's long gone, as you well know; in her last years, she barely knew her name much less who she'd borne. And for years now Roebuck has been out of her mind. She wouldn't know whether Mally's a girl or a goose, much less who's her mother."

"Have you ever asked Mally?"

Miss Olivia shook her head. "That wouldn't be my business. Mally very likely couldn't know who her father is. The Pittman Negro that Roebuck lived with left her long years ago. He'd killed a fellow and fled the law."

I hauled my mind to the final jump. "Did it ever cross your mind she might be Palmer's child--Mally, I mean?"

Miss Olivia raised her endless fingers and made her web-clearing gesture again, the first time in years. Then a smile like a gash cut through her long face. She tapped her forehead hard and said "More things have crossed this mind, believe me, than the wide Pacific."

I managed to say I was sure that was true.

And I somehow managed to get through the whole planned visit as well and some days to come before I buckled. When I did, it came in the hardest way I'd ever known; and it came at home. It was late October, an afternoon of the kind of beauty that only the fall can show around here. The air was dry as parchment and the light a pure gilt that

seems to be the last of some treasure all but squandered by the end of summer with these few last hours saved just for you.

Palmer had been at work since dawn. I'd done my usual ch.o.r.es with no hitch and had lain down at three o'clock with Dinah, meaning to snooze and then be up by four to start our supper. But I didn't come to till four twenty-five--the clock was beside me ticking loudly--and I realized that what had waked me was not my own mind but the gentle sounds of a voice somewhere beyond me in the house.

It was Dinah's voice, a three-year-old child's normal soft voice talking to herself in two or more tones imitating a mother and child in a long imaginary conversation. Dinah had more such conversations than any child I'd ever known. And while it had never troubled me before, I lay there a long hot moment thinking my child had somehow pierced my ear and was pouring in hatred through a clear gla.s.s funnel. With very nearly half of my mind, I knew the idea was laughably crazy.

With the larger part, though, I thought my child was not only hateful and trying to kill me but a demon as well. Now was my last chance to stop her and save my home. I thought it in those crazy terms, which seemed entirely sane; then I rose up to do it with as much resolve as I'd have had for peeling potatoes to cook in pure water. On the top of the bureau was a large pair of scissors. I've always wondered why they caught my eye and not the knife Fern had given me years before--it was in the bureau drawer. Anyhow I took up those scissors and took three steps toward the door in Dinah's direction.

She heard me and paused in her low singsong. Then she said "Mother, quick."

I've never known what she meant by quick. But as I heard that single syllable, I looked to my right in the bright hallway.

A tall mirror hung there, an old piergla.s.s that had been my mother's. When I saw my whole self bound on harm, something stopped me. It was not my will but some outside power, more than half merciful apparently. I turned back to where I'd found the scissors, laid them down very carefully and called Dinah to me in my gentlest voice.

By the time she got there--her face still addled from her own long nap--my mind had closed its

halves together as silently as clouds cross the moon. I couldn't touch my own lovely daughter, not directly, for the best part of an hour. But I knelt beside her. And with Muddie's ivory hairbrush, I slowly stroked Dinah Slade's brown curls, fine as spider silk.

I well understand that to anyone who's never experienced a similar fright that will sound like the cheapest TV. It does to me now. But in late October 1942, I repeat I was forty-two years old, a woman whose body still seemed to work. I menstruated for another twelve years. I had no visible signs of illness. And that brief craving to stop my own child, a beautiful girl who has blessed my old age, was only the starting gun of a long siege of punishment.

I've mentioned how much people today talk on about depression. So I won't go on for much longer here about my own experience in the next four years after that day with Dinah. But to have the rest of my life make any sense, I'll need to lay out the chief events of that hard later time--hard for me and at least as hard for my loved ones. And I'll try to boil down into one sentence what those years felt like from inside my mind. Maybe the truest way would be this.

Imagine that every time daybreak strikes your eyelids and wakes you, you have three seconds of normal time to think some average trivial thought-- "Time to wax the kitchen floor." Then your mind strikes a note like thumping the side of a big dead animal. And the voice in your head says "One more day you've got to live through, and you almost surely can't last ten minutes." And by "every daybreak," I mean every day that breaks over you, not one exception. The dark wind clamping your eyes never quits--not entirely, not for me, not once in four years of endless days each followed by its night.

When that wind blinded and smothered me, it was thought by everybody I knew to be a terrible trait that you were personally responsible for having. You tended to look on the dark side of everything, you were sadly ungrateful for life's simple gifts, you were selfishly choosing to shut the window and doors of your mind and refuse air and light. You could choose to quit on a moment's notice. The other

common thought was visible in the eyes of almost everybody in my part of the world including even Palmer finally--You are scalding in the hands of G.o.d. At my own worst I'd open the Bible many times a week and look at that hardest verse of all in the tenth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews--"It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living G.o.d." All I could ever say back was Amen.

Whatever you believed, whoever you were in the 1940's where I lived, medical science had no cure for you--just the eventually exasperated faces of however many doctors you saw. Your church had very little more to offer except to say "Most everybody will be as bad off as you before they die." They also had to add as a postscript "Don't kill yourself. You'll go straight to h.e.l.l"--and all that when you were sitting by the absolute instant in a private h.e.l.l you'd gladly have swapped for Satan's worst grill.

That was the atmosphere. Here's what I did. I bought the groceries and cooked every meal my family ate except on the rare occasions I had a doctor's appointment, maybe three times a year. We never went out to eat, though by then the town had a decent cafe run by four sisters ugly as elbows but sensible cooks. I couldn't stand visiting other people's houses however well-meaning. I made at least three beds every morning and changed them once a week. I cleaned a sizable house with two porches and never heard one single complaint.

I did what I could to continue the job of raising my children. I wrote to August once a week when he was in England, France and Germany. And I think I concealed the great part of my burden. I know I strained not to tell him bad news when he was facing the Normandy invasion and hand-to-hand combat. I kept Dinah Slade as clean as any rock in a mountain stream, I kept her clothes neat (we'd had a good woman we took our wash to), I answered Dinah's childish questions to the best of my knowledge, and I gave her whatever love I could find in a heart as dry as any baked leather. I'd go to the meaningless meetings at school that showed I cared. I also took deep secret care every hour of the day not to think about Dinah's welfare too much. I was scared if I dwelled on her loneliness, I'd find some other

common household tool and set out to save her by stopping her life. Bald as it sounds that is nothing but the truth.

I watched Palmer drift away from me by the inch, though his eyes stayed concerned and though his voice would offer me daily--every few days at least--the firm a.s.surance that he'd take me anywhere I needed to go, that he'd spend his last penny to save my mind if we could find a cure and that I was all he loved on this Earth except for his own mother and our children. I slept beside him in the same bed nightly. Given the nature of men in general, in all I've seen or read about them, one of the most remarkable things was how Palmer managed any s.e.xual feelings he might have still had for a body as cloudy and distant as mine.

It wasn't that he'd turned repulsive or filthy. I could still see he was a well-formed man who might be attractive to a number of others. And I tried to agree when he asked to join me at reasonable times. But then I reached the point where I could no more respond to his body than to anything else. After a few weeks of hoping to persuade me, he quietly put that out of his mind--for all the trouble he caused me at least. I understood that he thought he was showing me continued love. But I mostly had to refuse him for the time being anyhow. I remember using exactly those words the first night I stopped him. And he seldom tried to touch me again beyond a light kiss when he went to work for years thereafter.

I know that it's common in some quarters now to see every husband as his wife's chief rival or at the very least her suffocator. I've had my causes, great and small, for anger at Palmer and resentment of the thousand times when hopes of mine were the last thing on Earth he seemed to notice, even when I finally brought the hopes up and requested attention. You might expect that, when I was scouring the floor of my mind, I might well have turned on Palmer as a possible cause of my pain. He was no more innocent than anyone else who'd crossed my path.

But I honest to G.o.d don't recall ever turning round and letting him have a piece of my mind. Maybe there were too few pieces to share. There were times to be sure, hundreds of times, when Palmer looked and felt like a high gray boulder that was blocking my path and sometimes even pressing

its grim weight down my bruised mind and body but never intentionally. You don't blame a rock for being heavy. Oh a few times I'd stand with my back to Palmer in the kitchen or bedroom and wish in silence that I could just look around in two seconds and discover that he'd evaporated from the world entirely and would never be back.

Sooner or later in the long ordeal, I wished the same thing about everybody I used to love. But after I pulled back from Dinah that time, I never again tried to speed that process with anyone in particular, though many times the air around me might well have driven off the strongest polecat. And sometimes my poor husband's growing deafness helped me feel a little pity.

It may not have been much more than pity, but pity was a feeling, and I had few other feelings. Sometimes I'd shed actual tears, just longing to feel some human sensation like the good smell of bread or the brush of the hair on the back of a man's neck when he bends to kiss you and you reach to hold him a second longer than he intends.

One of the small-sounding things that may have saved me was the fact that Palmer never seemed to hate my skin. On the contrary when I was at my worst, I'd sometimes stand at the bureau mirror and tell Palmer that even my hair hurt badly. I could hardly bear to pull a wide-toothed comb through my hair. It hurt right down to the farthest root and on into my skull. The first time I mentioned it, Palmer didn't speak but came to me slowly, reached out for the comb andwitha touch as light as a baby's, he combed out the tangles, then brushed it as long as I could stand there and let him.

Even then, unhinged as I was I knew I'd just witnessed love as strong as humans get this side of the grave. I know it today and I miss it still, though I regret bitterly that Palmer possessed so little that I could actually use when I was turning on my long spit.

Maybe it's not strange looking back, but it's always seemed unexpected to me--the only two people who offered real help on a steady basis were my sister Leela and my brother Ferny Dane. I've mentioned that Leela had finally married Clarence Rooker and had a son Wilton in '42. The Rookers lived just four miles away. And at least once a week, Leela

drove herself and Wilton over and spent the shank of the afternoon with me. She'd been acquainted with my blues all her life, she understood this siege was far worse than ever, and she never once said the idiotic hollow things that made you want to gouge out other people's vocal cords and fling them in their face when they came at you babbling Christian tripe.

Once a week Leela would just walk in and say, as the most natural thing on Earth, "Anna, it's time we washed your hair." Taking care of myself was the last thing that mattered, though I tried to stay clean enough for my family at least to bear. I neglected my hair though, so every Friday morning Leela would turn up with the shampoo and towel, and I'd let her take me like an upright baby and scrub me clean with fingers as kind as a year-old child's.

Or she'd sit still beside me and work at something-- she'd taken up needlepoint--and if I began to wring my hands (as I literally did in my worst moments), she'd just lean forward far enough to tap me once. Then she'd say "You've got to trust this pain will pa.s.s on." For that little moment I'd almost believe her.

And though young Wilton was still a near infant, he'd plainly chosen me from the world--right from his cradle--as a primary pet. I couldn't look at him and not cause a smile on his winning face. I could almost tell myself he was falling in love with me as August had with Muddie, like a blessing from the skies. But I couldn't let myself quite believe it. When I wanted to take young Wilton and hold him close up against me, I'd stop myself and think You'll be dead before this boy can talk. Don't break his heart early. Stand back. Let him run.

My dear brother Ferny came once a month from Raleigh for Sunday dinner and then a drive, just Fern and I. Palmer would take Dinah up to Miss Olivia's for the afternoon, and Fern would take me riding through the country. He knew I understood about his dope-taking and never brought it up. He knew I'd always a.s.sumed he had some other private life that he kept secret and I never asked about. And he knew neither one of us cared one whit for the news of the past week or the years to come. So he and I would sit apart in his aging car and pretend we were studying nature, by the leaf and the

smallest feather.

The main way you could tell when Fern was on his medication was his power of attention. He'd always been a focused child, but now he could stop the car and stare at a horse in a field for as long as you let him as if it bore a message he'd waited years to get. Even when we were moving, he'd put his hand up every five minutes or so to point and say "Look yonder" at a tree or a crow.

Fern's eyes would be almost br.i.m.m.i.n.g with that simple joy or bottomless pity. I never knew which.

But far the greater part of the time, we sat through our trips in absolute silence inches apart, though nourished by the other's nameless desperation. I'd glance his way at least once a mile and recall what Muddie would say about people who were prematurely ill. She'd frown and say "Poor Albert Parker's neck is so frail, and his hair in the back is standing out like taffeta ribbon. He can't last long." Poor Ferny's neck was shrinking by the month, and his hair was lifeless as any doll's hair.

In the fall of 1944 on one of our rides, Fern suddenly felt the need to tell me why he hadn't been drafted. He said "You remember my childhood asthma?"

I told him I did, though in fact he'd never had it, not that I'd ever heard of.

In any case that broke the ice sufficiently for him to say "Is it Larkin you're still missing so badly?"

I could smile for the first time in what seemed years and tell him "No." I wanted to say "If it only were that, Fern, I'd weep for pure grat.i.tude." I suspected, though, that the loss of Larkin still burned Fern's mind. But I was too trapped in my own misery to seek his out and aim to calm it.

He drove awhile longer in silence. Then he only said "But that would do it, wouldn't it? The sight of Lark would ease your pain. It's Lark, I mean, that you've been missing?"

Despite the fact that everything he'd said on the ride had come in the form of sidelong questions, still I thought I knew what Ferny meant, for himself if not for me. And lost as we both were, sealed in his car way out in the country, it didn't seem a childish thing to ask. So I told Fern "Yes, Larkin's drowning would be big enough to cause most any sorrow."

The whole way back home, we scarcely made a sound--just the breathing of two familiar animals who trusted each other in the same dry stall. I can isolate that single hour even now and recall it as the most peaceful time of those bad years. Sick as I was, and drowning in my sickness, I could tell myself for that brief stretch that Ferny Dane was worse off than me and that there was no chance on G.o.d's green Earth he'd ever improve. That was only pure truth.

He'd been truly abandoned by life itself; there was none left in him. I was falling too fast to offer him help. Leela and our cold elder brother had given up long since, and Fern was all but dead. He hung on however till August 1945, the end of the Second War right after Hiroshima and the bomb that melted people. On the day old stuck-up General MacArthur accepted the j.a.panese surrender, Fern's landlady found him laid neatly on the bed in his one rented room apparently dressed for that day's work, though he never got there. Since our elder brother was the senior kin, they called him first at his home in Charlotte.

And he made the choice, not asking me or Leela, to seek no autopsy but to bury Fern fast next to Muddie and Father.

He lies there still way out of place. And as for him having any private life, not one stranger showed a face at the funeral, male or female. If I'd had any say at all, I'd have wanted to know what killed the kind boy. I suspect his heart just gave up, daunted, as Muddie's had done. And I'd have suggested that his grave be up by the Roanoke River in that bright strip of ground where he and Larkin and Palmer Slade had paused on what must have been the pitch of Fern's life before they launched on the race back toward me when Larkin drowned.

I'd known--everybody in the world had known--that the war would end eventually and that our side would win. I'd even let myself believe that somehow the final surrender day would be the start of my recovery. I was h.o.a.rding the strength to grab onto that day like an iron bar and start to haul myself up to light. With the exception of Ferny's death on the day the great bomb made peace a necessity, the Second War was kind to my family. I'd like to think that even Fern died of happiness. The landlady said his

radio was on when she found him and that his face was pleasantly composed.