Roxanna Slade Part 22

I've hinted that anywhere G.o.d is concerned, I always wind up with far more questions than satisfying answers. In my darkest days when you might have thought that somebody from the church I'd belonged to since childhood would step forward to help me--even a fair-weather member like me--I got precisely nothing. Since I was reared a Methodist, I was subject to a trait of the Methodist church. If you've got a minister you like and respect, he'll almost surely be moved by the bishop before you can thoroughly focus your eyes on him. So maybe I'm being way too hard on plain human beings, but I did keep hoping that one of those highly trained men behind the pulpit might notice the bleak face I brought to church and volunteer to bring me the promises that he'd been particularly fitted to offer.

For instance in my second week at Leela's, I found myself mildly hoping for a visit from my pastor. I'd only met him three or four times on the very rare Sundays I turned up to hear him. His name was Alec Campbell, he was in his mid-thirties, and he had the kind of tall sharp face that looked at first as if he had honed it for years against the pages of hard wise books and the rocky walls of a normal life. The very fact that I now felt rescued made me all the more curious to see him. In sight of real healing, I may have felt strong enough to ask for the answers I'd feared to get in the valleys and troughs of the past four years.

And after a few more days, Mr. Campbell phoned Leela and asked if I were well enough for company. If you didn't want a dead-straight answer from Leela Dane Rooker, then you kept your mouth shut. I could hear Leela's end of the phone conversation. She said "Reverend Campbell, I thought your duty was to visit the sick, not wait till they're well." So I had to admire him for turning up as he did that same bright afternoon in the teeth of such a blast. Leela ushered him in, offered him a gla.s.s of sweet spring water, then left us alone.

The preacher had gently pressed my one good hand before sitting down. Then he took a straight chair in reach of my bed and waited silently for what seemed hours. I had to conclude he'd guessed the facts of what I'd done, and I

thought In a minute he'll lead us in prayer. Maybe I truly did need to say, in the hearing of G.o.d and one of his servants, that I was deeply sorry for harming my own body and risking the minds and hopes of my loved ones. But when he finally started to speak, it was what I'd have called mere chatter in a woman--what so and so had said last Sunday, the weather, the news on soldiers from our congregation who were still abroad.

After a long ten minutes of that, when he took a brief pause to drink his water, I sat up slightly and said "You know what happened, I trust."

He gulped and said "Ma'm?"

I said "You attended college, I believe."

He nodded eagerly. "Duke Divinity School, yes ma'm."

"Then you know I caused this whole event?" He said "Beg your pardon?" and looked genuinely baffled.

I said "Mr. Campbell, I wanted to die after years of mental agony. I threw myself out of my husband's car going fifty miles an hour."

I'll give it to him--that didn't throw him far. He met my eyes. "Is that so?" he said.

I wondered briefly if he thought I was crazy still. I'd show him I wasn't. I said "That's as true a claim as you'll ever hear."

He said "I believe you."

Then I shocked myself. I'd had no idea of being so bold, but it felt like a last credential I needed before I could go any further with this one man. "May I ask why you didn't fight in this war?"

He said "You mean this one that's just ended?" I nodded to him. "--Called the Second World War."

He lowered his voice and spoke just to me. "Mrs. Slade, I had tuberculosis when I was in high school. My lungs are badly scarred. Please keep that information to yourself. I'm no longer dangerous to anyone else, but I wouldn't want to alarm our members."

I a.s.sumed he was truthful. I knew he'd impressed me. I told him his secret was safe. Then I said "You'll have an answer ready then."

"To what?"

I said "Is there more than one question?"

When he looked puzzled I said "Why were you and I singled out for torment?" He said "Are you absolutely sure we were?"

It came to me slowly in a long quiet pause that n.o.body in my whole life had treated me with this much respect. This boy was a.s.suming I had good sense and was pitching me b.a.l.l.s as fast as my own. So after a while I said "I am, yes. I was recently shown the contents of h.e.l.l."

"In a vision?"

"Something like that. Entirely real. I mainly heard the groans of the d.a.m.ned in their weird language."

Mr. Campbell nodded. "I've heard that." "You agree with me then?"

He nodded. "I do, oh yes. Every human suffers at one time or other if only at birth. Some suffer every minute that they draw breath. I've known two of those. One was my mother. Some live almost entirely happy lives and die in their sleep after eating their millionth home-cooked meal. Then a few like you and me are somehow teased out of the crowd by a long hot finger and fried in anguish. You and I are apparently safe now. Some of our partners are burned to mere cinders. There's no explanation available on Earth."

I'd asked for it, hadn't I? I couldn't complain. It was only a brisk clear statement of the truth. Maybe I should have corresponded with the Duke Divinity School years earlier. But then I saw that I had another question, maybe the last of all. So I said "--In which case, why are you working for G.o.d? Why haven't you turned your back and run to the end of the stars?"

Mr. Campbell looked as if I'd struck him. Then he burst out laughing. "Somebody's got to pay me."

I laughed with him but then had to lower my own voice and say "No, answer me please."

He actually got up--I thought he was leaving. But he went to the window and faced the late day for at least half a minute.

By then I was feeling as if I'd pressed him too hard. I started to say "I'm being discourteous--"

But he looked round, hot as a panther by night. Then he came back, stood behind his chair and gripped the top rail. What he said was "It may be a terrible thing to fall into the living

G.o.d's hands. But oh Roxanna, imagine falling out. He's the only hand there is."

That was some twenty years before younger people in America felt licensed to call you by your first name on slender acquaintance. I hate to admit it ruffled me slightly, but the fact that he hit on the one verse of scripture that I knew best and that he'd tried to imagine an answer--that smoothed my feathers. I'm glad to say I thanked him. None of which meant I believed him entirely. I was already well enough, though, to be mannerly.

Medicine back then largely consisted of your lying down, being fed bland food and taking naps till you'd either died or your jellyfish body produced an imitation of life sufficient to cause your doctor and kinfolk to raise you gently to your rubber legs and beg you to walk. Except for eventual trips to the toilet and a wobbly few minutes upright on a chair some days, I stayed in bed at Leela's for five weeks.

Earlier here I may have suggested that Leela was not my favorite family member. And in our girlhood she was a real pesterance as often as not. Her young mind was tied up in clothes and boys in a way that seemed flighty to grim old me, and I gave her far less credit than I should have for what was lurking below her silly surface. I've mentioned her patient attentions to me throughout my bad years. But what she gave me in those five bed-ridden weeks is still beyond praise.

Leela's bound to have guessed that I'd left that car intentionally. I could tell by looking at people's eyes that n.o.body but pitiful aged dogs ever believed mine and Palmer's explanation of cracking the door open to spare my coat and then losing control. But where some others would glance above my head at each other when I told that tale, Leela never so much as rolled her eyes. She never alluded to my poor coat which it turned out Palmer had burned that same night, blood-caked as it was.

Toward the end of the second week though, as I began to swim up to consciousness, whenever Leela and I were alone, she'd make brief references to what she'd read about shock and the good results it was having--insulin shock for dementia praec.o.x, electro-shock convulsive treatments for

melancholia. By the time I could actually take in more than two spoken sentences and nod in response, Leela was saying "You invented your own shock treatment. I know it in my bones. Things are very changed now."

For whatever reason I believed she was right. The awful blows my skull and brain took, the brutal scrambling of veins and nerves, the unbroken rest of those days with my sister and her peaceful son and maybe the choice (by whatever had driven me) to lift its hand and let me breathe-- in the third week at Leela's, I began to believe that all those things had fallen in place at the final moment and that I would heal now straight down to the core. I saved that belief to tell Palmer first.

When he and Dinah came to see me that evening, Palmer wound up alone with me for a minute. And while he didn't reach for my hand, I offered it to him. He took it almost reluctantly, looking tired and puzzled and hoping I wasn't about to pitch another wild curve. Then he rubbed his broad thumb along my fingernails, and that freed my mind to know what I meant.

At first I couldn't speak. My throat nearly closed so I had to look away. I faced the window which was nearly dark that far into winter. And I said to my husband "Excuse me having to turn away. But after what I did to you, I'm not strong enough yet to meet you head-on. What I want you to know is, I'm going to be. From this night on, my h.e.l.l is over."

Palmer reached out lightly, took my chin and turned me toward him. All he said was "G.o.d willing."

That galled me at once. I lowered my voice to spare the others who weren't far off, but I whispered fiercely "G.o.d did His G.o.dd.a.m.ned best to kill me--" The word G.o.dd.a.m.ned had never pa.s.sed my lips before, not out loud.

Palmer smiled but put up a broad hand for silence. When I accepted the brake he requested, all he did was nod one time and say "I'll be looking forward to tomorrow."

Not till then could I see, in clear late light, how much wear he'd taken in these years. Oh I could recognize him; he was plainly himself. But his eyes had very nearly died. If there

was any trace of hope left in him, it was dim as a candle on a flat field miles off. And there on the brink of my own rescue, I had to start dealing with the fact that my one partner alive on Earth was mostly gone. While I wasn't watching anything but myself, he'd slipped on away. Could anything reclaim him?

I'd quoted our wedding vows to him that single time he bruised them so badly with Roebuck Pittman. Could I start back now where I left off and begin on my old promises again? It was part of the wonder in my mind that--weak as water, still in a sickbed--I thought I could. I said "Do you think you could carry me to supper?" Leela would come with my tray in a minute, but what if I tried to sit at the table like a sane human being?

Palmer said "I could carry you to Birmingham and back if the need arose. You think you could sit up and hold a fork?"

I said "We won't ever know till we try." So he went to Leela, Clarence, Wilton and big-eyed Dinah with that odd news. And none of them tried to stop the gamble.

I could hear them all through my open door.

Leela was always good at giving orders, and she didn't miss a beat. She ordered Clarence to bring a strong armchair from the living room and brace it with pillows. She ordered young Dinah to set me a place. She lowered her voice and ordered Wilton to be extra sweet.

So once I'd got my new bathrobe and slippers on, my husband carried me through half the house and set me down safely. I could see from all the others' faces how frail I looked, but--though I think I may have taken a catnap or two--I managed to sit upright in that chair for a good twenty minutes and eat baked chicken with b.u.t.tered rice, corn pudding, home canned squash and English peas with excellent biscuits followed by Jell-O.

Leela was the world's chief Jell-O provider. She claimed it was still made from baby calf's hooves, all of which kept her fingernails strong as any ox horn: She did have the longest nails in the upper South, unbreakable as leather and painted Blushing Pink till the early 1960's when she switched to Jungle Drums, a lazy deep red.

Dinah's and Wilton's faces were all eyes and, for now at least, not entirely happy.

If I hadn't known I was Roxanna Slade alive and tasting food again, I'd have guessed they were seeing an actual ghost.

SIX.

That was fifty years ago. And I lived through every minute of the time as my family did near me. I only slept when the others slept in the dark at night. And even in sleep I went on facing life in my dreams. So does everybody in the world of course. I'm not requesting an ounce of pity. I only mean to stress the fact that, though those decades were calm as my hand, I wasn't conscious of being bored for more than a few short stretches of minutes.

But I'm also aware in telling my story that there have been only five more happenings of any serious interest to others--till now at least. And it scarcely seems likely that any woman well on in her nineties is scheduled for thrills. I a.s.sume the sixth thing will be my departure for whatever comes next. That will be of great interest to me but very likely n.o.body else, give or take a funeral tear or two.

Somebody else will have to write my ending, if anybody sees a need. n.o.body will of course and that's fine with me. I wouldn't have used all this much expensive ink if there were a chance that some young scholar eons from now would dig Roxanna Slade's small life back out of the dust and make her a model of wrong wrong wrong to ages unborn.

I'm perfectly prepared to discover that death may turn out to be extinction as plain as blowing out a match or some agreeable form of reward like meeting a few choice souls gone before me. (wonder if you get to choose which souls?) I'm tired enough to let it be either, though of course I'm aware I have no choice in the matter as in so many others. Or does some distant switchbox in the universe make a decision after learning the hopes of your old age?

Maybe h.e.l.l is only the opposite of what you'd prefer--not thumb screws and brimstone but an endless low-grade headache or abscess, a single middling disappointment that lasts forever like a

friend's promised visit that never comes. Some days I think that mere oblivion would be the highest bliss. Other days I find myself already talking with my long-gone parents in their fresh-ironed clothes and all of us at our youthful best in lawn chairs with gla.s.ses of cool grape juice and my father playing the old mouth harp that he'd bring out on long summer nights to sadden us down as he always called it before bedtime.

The five real things, though, are worth a brief look. The first thing centers on Leela's son Wilton. As I've mentioned he was a very smart four-year-old when I fell from the car. When the doctor said I was strong enough to leave his parents' place and go back home with Palmer and Dinah, I was nearly strong enough to live a new life. Of course mornings were the danger spots as always. But if I told myself to take a firm grip and say a quick prayer for living water to refresh my mind, I'd almost surely have a pa.s.sable day if not something better. The problem again, though, was how to pa.s.s time. Palmer had absolutely insisted on hiring a woman to do housework till I was restored to full capacity.

With my head wounds still subject to pain and wooziness, I realized I needed the help. So I told Palmer Yes but begged him to find an older settled white woman for the job. With all my old reasons, I still couldn't bear to bring in a black maid and watch her patient acceptance of her fate. So from out in the country Palmer found a white woman named Henrietta Burwell. She was seventy-two years old as she never ceased telling you, stronger than a mule team, and she'd had a busy life--two husbands and a total of eleven children.

The children were scattered to the far winds now, and her second husband had recently killed himself in two awful stages that she relished describing. First he put a shotgun to what he thought was his heart but only managed to blow off his left arm. After eight months when he'd healed from that--and "him as cheerful as a fat jaybird"--he went to the smokehouse, shut himself in with his gun and a quant.i.ty of fresh-smoked pork and that time he managed to hit his target. Henrietta would say several times a week "I know he was suffering in his

mind mighty badly, but I wish he hadn't made bacon too painful to eat again. I used to love bacon, and now I can't touch it."

But she'd cook it for my breakfast and watch me eat it. And before I could wash myself and dress, she'd be in the parlor with the paper waiting for me. She'd tell all the news (getting badly mixed up) before I could read it, then want to ask me intimate questions about my past till time for dinner. Still I somehow liked her and I answered every question to the best of my knowledge--all the secrets such as they were of my love life with Palmer, every dream I'd ever had, every man I'd ever glanced at, all the problems I'd had with our s.e.x's perilously designed private equipment.

By the time Henrietta had been with me for less than a month, she knew more than I did about my road through life. All but one thing. In some kind of silent delicacy, she never mentioned my fall from the car. You might have thought I crushed my head on a low door frame. Otherwise my story, through Henrietta's eyes, would be a lot more fun listening to than my own version if you have no serious interest in the truth.

She was no fool though. In under a week she understood my situation better than anyone else had yet. And in the third week when we had a premature spell of lovely spring weather and she found me on the porch looking grim in the sunshine, she stood square before me and said "Can I tell you what both of us need?"

Till she asked, I wasn't aware I was gloomy. So of course I said "Tell me."

Henrietta said "Bring that child of your sister's over here to stay with us."

For a minute it floored me. I said "Oh no." She'd hardly seen Wilton more than four or five times since she'd been with me. But then I pulled back and asked her why?

She said "Several reasons." Then she counted them off on her powerful fingers. "First his mother is whupped from nursing you so long. Second he's lonesome with no children round him. Third you love him like a rose in the desert."

I had to laugh. "Are there roses in the desert?"

She nodded. "Rose of Sharon--read about it in the Bible. Anna, I'm not joking."

She'd called me Mrs. Slade up till now, so the Anna surprised me, but she was old enough to be my mother. Then I knew she was right. Dinah was away from the house in school from eight till four o'clock. The house was too quiet. In ten more seconds of careful thought, I saw how Henrietta's idea might work on all our behalves.

Leela took to the idea with little persuasion. When she consulted Clarence and Wilton and they said Yes, I understood I was counting on a child--my nearest nephew--to brace my recovery when I had a sweet needy daughter of my own. By then though, Henrietta had strengthened my will to the point where I forged on ahead to take what I thought would brace me best. I was like a sick dog hunting the right gra.s.s out in the woods.

When Palmer asked me how long Wilton would stay, I said "No more than a week, I expect." He looked a little glum. I a.s.sume he would have liked to be my main prop, but we don't make those choices for ourselves. Palmer said nothing else though. And Dinah showed no reluctance whatever. She loved Wilton almost as much as I did, and they'd literally never had a cross word between them.

Wilton stayed till Easter which was late that year, the 21/ of April. His parents would visit us frequently. He even went home and spent two weekends. But in those days white people hadn't bit down as hard as they have now on the idea that children belong with their own blood-parents every minute of the day and night. In big old families children were reared by numerous hands of sisters, aunts, old bachelor uncles. And mostly I think they benefited from it. They didn't get hipped on two lone creatures who might suddenly fail them as modern parents so often do--divorce, death, drugs or drunkenness.