Under the Same Blue Sky (10 page)

Ben drew back in alarm—for my sake. “Miss Hazel, what’s wrong?”
He dragged over the chopping block for kindling. I sank down as he watched, the gentle face filled with compassion. “You want a drink?” Then he hesitated, for water was in my house, where he never went.

“No, Ben, I’m fine. Just a little tired. I haven’t been sleeping well. There’s some potato soup. Do you want some?” I got up. He hovered like a gentleman, offering his arm. Had this much time ever passed without his scratching or twitching? Perhaps not. I raced to heat the soup and bring out two bowls. “It’s a lovely evening.” He nodded. This wasn’t one of his talking evenings. We were often silent together, but finally I couldn’t hold my tongue. “Ben, does—are you always scratching?” He nodded, looking down at the piteous arms, then at his hands, lying still in his lap.

A wondering whisper, light as a breeze. “I’m not scratching. And I’m not—”

“Twitching?”

“No.” He gave me his soup bowl. “Miss Hazel, I think I’ll go now.” And he melted into the woods. A cut of winter chill slipped through the autumn balm. I shivered. Had Ben’s twitching come to me? The bowls rattled as I brought them inside. Of course, I was glad if Ben had been helped, even briefly, but what did this mean for
my
life? What was expected of me in a world of hurt and pain? Of course I wanted to help. Any pastor would say that those given gifts must use them selflessly for good. Did this mean that I must stop teaching, drawing, doing anything else but press hands to the walls of my house? Forever? Yet this power that came so unexpectedly could leave without warning or prove fickle. What would people say of me then?

I’d never been so grateful for the press of schoolwork: themes of the older students to grade, lessons to prepare, lists for the week’s spelling and geography bees, Susanna’s portrait to finish. I worked long past midnight, sweating freely with the effort of driving out thoughts of
Ben. The next days were a madness of rises and falls, wondering confidence and shame for this very confidence. Ben appeared with a string of fish he’d caught in Red Gorge, not scratching, not twitching. Cured? Which meant what, exactly?

Henry came to deliver the globe and an apple pie from Agnes. “Haven’t told a soul,” he whispered, although we were alone on my porch. “But I had some back pain last night. Let’s go check the paint.” That wink again. I followed him outside. He placed my hand on his hip. A hand on a man’s hip—my mother would be appalled, as I would have been myself—before. We touched the paint together. Nothing. No tremor or pain for me, and apparently no relief for Henry.

“Well,” he said philosophically, “maybe it comes and goes. We’ll try again, right?”

I nodded, caught by opposites: my own relief to be back at the ordinary
before
and despair that the gift was so unpredictable—or temporary.

A
T FIRST
A
GNES
and Henry kept the secret of my blue house, or else those they told kept this knowledge secret. Ben still wasn’t scratching or twitching. Perhaps nobody noticed changes in Crazy Ben or didn’t connect them with me. Schoolwork was exhausting enough even without costumes, scenery, and masks to prepare for our elaborate pageant: “Around the World at Christmastime.” At least I’d grown more adept at having the older children help the younger ones. Simple tunes that Horace and Emma suggested eased our way through the McGuffey Reader’s endless lists to memorize. Even without a gift of healing, I was at least serving Galway as a teacher.

Just before Halloween, in the midst of a late afternoon spelling bee, Alice stiffened and fell, writhing and flailing on the floor. I was proud of my class. The older boys shoved benches and desks away. Four girls
knelt around her, making bolsters of their bodies. A jacket was wedged under her head. Frances hurried the youngest children outside for a game of Duck-Duck-Goose. But this fit went on and on, frightening even those who had seen them often. Alice’s head slammed the floor with sickening thuds. Her eyes rolled back. She wet herself. When the shaking finally ceased, she looked up, so bewildered and piteous that I took her in my arms and rocked her. Nobody laughed. I commissioned Charlie and Emma to send everyone home. “Have them leave quietly,” I said, and they did.

The Burnetts had given me another set of clothes for Alice. I helped her wash and change. Then I walked her home. “It’s getting worse,” she moaned. “I have more fits all the time as bad as this one.” Between gulping sobs, she said Dr. Bentley had warned her parents that worsening epilepsy could shorten her life, damage her brain, and at the least, close off many occupations. “I’m so afraid, Miss Renner.”

My secret time was over. I’d have to tell the Burnetts about my blue house, no matter what they thought of me. Perhaps this was my paint’s purpose—and now mine. “Alice, I’ll try to help.”

“How? You’re just a teacher.”

When Jim saw us coming with Alice in a different dress, bruised and tear-streaked, he closed the store, called Ellen, and brought me to the kitchen. Alice sat on Ellen’s lap as I explained my night visitor, the paint’s marvelously easy application, and the seeming cures of Henry, Agnes, and Ben. The Burnetts looked at me, openmouthed. “I don’t know why this is happening,” I finished. “I can’t promise anything. And whatever it is didn’t work for Henry’s back. But it did help other problems.”

Jim cleared his throat. “Hazel, are you telling us the
paint
on your house has special powers?” I was crazy, he surely thought, crazier than Ben, perhaps too crazy to teach children.

“We saw Ben this morning,” Ellen said slowly. “He wasn’t scratching. Remember, we noticed that? Henry walks different now, you said so yourself. He’s not coughing, and Agnes hasn’t ordered any more patent medicines.”

“Yes, but . . . touching
paint
?”

“You heard Doc Bentley. The best specialist in America can’t help her. Jim, what do we have to lose?”

Alice reached across the kitchen table to her father. “Please, Poppa, let Miss Renner try. I’m so scared of these fits.”

“But—
paint
?”

“Jim, please. Let’s just try.”

He looked at his wife, his daughter, at me. “We’ll bring her tonight after dark.”

It was Friday, so there were no lessons to prepare. At home, I paced, I prayed, I envisioned every detail of how I’d stood with Henry, Agnes, and Ben, how I’d held their hands, and where they touched the paint. Then I sat outside and waited for the Burnetts.

They came solemnly, as if to church. We walked in single file to the side of the house. Leaves might have crunched under our feet, but all I heard was a drumming voice in my head:
Heal her, heal her, heal her.
At the spot I’d marked, we stopped. Wind whipped past us.
Heal her, heal her, heal her
. Alice’s hand was given to me; I pressed it against the slick wood that glimmered black in moonlight and put my other hand on her head. As soon as I closed my eyes, the tremor began. My body shook.

“She’s taking it in herself,” someone said. Ellen? Another tremor. Heaviness like lead again. Alice was drawn away. An arm beat against my body. I opened my eyes. I stumbled. Jim caught me.

Held against her mother, Alice’s dark eyes flashed in the darkness. “Did it work, Miss Renner?”

“We’ll have to wait and see,” I moved my mouth to say. “I need to lie down.” They helped me to bed.

“Thank you, Hazel,” Ellen said over and over. “Do you need anything?” I shook my head. “Then we’ll take Alice home.” I was awake just long enough to hear their car pull away.

A week passed and Alice had no fits at all, which was unusual, Jim said. “We haven’t told anybody,” he assured me. But word was leaking out, perhaps from Henry and Agnes. What secrets can endure in a town so small? Soon after Halloween, nets of wheel ruts began appearing in my yard. Bare spots on the wall showed where paint had been chipped off. Walking home from school, I might hear engines start or a quick “gee up.”

“Folks come sneaking around,” Ben said as we shared breakfast on the porch one frosty morning. I’d made him fried eggs, sausage, and coffee in return for chopping firewood. “I tell them: ‘Leave the schoolmarm’s house alone.’ But they don’t listen. Crazy Ben, they call me.”

“I know, Ben. I’m sorry.” Would some resent his apparent cure if my house didn’t help their own ills? Would Alice’s fits return? Every task—cooking, cleaning, drawing, teaching, and preparing lessons—was weighted by the matter of paint.

In this anxious time, war news brought a strange relief. My father sent a map of Europe with battles and casualties noted in his precise hand. The children gathered around, wide-eyed. “All for an archduke?” Horace marveled. “What was so all-fired wonderful about
him
?” I explained the web of alliances that pulled countries into war and described battlefields scored with trenches, pocked by mortar shells, and lumped with bodies.

“The good thing,” Emma said, “is that it’s not our problem.”

During recess, Susanna tapped my arm and whispered: “Have you noticed that Alice hasn’t had a fit lately?”

“Perhaps she’s growing out of them. We can hope so, Susanna.”

E
DNA
F
ULLER WAS
the first to come directly to me. She’d walked five miles through the woods. She was rarely seen, but everyone knew of her husband’s cruelty and drunkenness, the family’s poverty, and the froth of warts on her face. I’d caught children playing “Ugly Edna.” One of the younger girls reported a nightmare of Edna “sticking her warts on me.” When I saw the real Edna at my door, I nearly stepped back in horror at the monstrous face pasted on a normal woman’s form.

“Jacob don’t give me any money, Miss Renner, but I was hoping you could fix my face for this.” She thrust out a Mason jar of jam and insisted I take it. I’ll have to touch that toad face, I thought, immediately disgusted by my own disgust. Suppose I was Edna, seeing others shrink from me, trapped with a man like Jacob? How could I
not
try to help?

I took her to the side of the house and touched the paint, pressing my other hand against her fleshy lumps. And the tremor came, weaker than with Alice, but constant. When I pulled away, Edna steadied me. In the dimming light, I noticed first her lithe, proud body, and only after that the few square inches of brow, cheeks, nose, and chin plagued by lumps and bulbs.

“Good luck, Edna. I hope it works.”

“Bless you for trying, Miss Renner. I’ve got to get back now. I left my babies alone.” She hurried into the woods, melting away as Ben did. Was it he who sent her to me?

Three days later at Bennett’s store, I saw a vaguely familiar, faded cotton jacket from the back. When the woman turned, only the posture
linked this woman to the one who’d come to my house. There were no warts or scars, just a handsome face framed by auburn curls. I stepped back, stunned. Edna had the grace to merely wish me good day, put her groceries in a basket, and hurry out of the store. By Sunday, Galway burned with news: Edna and her three children had left town on the night train, headed west. Raving about a stolen wife, Jacob had been arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct.

After church, people churned around me, softly asking when they could “come by.” Parents had a sudden need to discuss their child. Others had a pie, preserves, dressed game meat, needlepoint, or flower bulbs they’d been meaning to drop off as welcome gifts. Some mentioned pains I’d never imagined behind the smiling Sunday faces.

They came all afternoon. Buggies, wagons, and cars filled my yard. The postman’s wife had sick headaches. There were bad hips, racking coughs, bodies cruelly twisted by arthritis and deep pains of rheumatism. Charlie brought me his childish grandmother, tenderly prying open her burned and blistered hands. “She keeps playing with live coals.”

A woman brought a young boy with a deep, suppurating wound on his leg. “Take him to Dr. Bentley,” I pleaded. “Please, before the infection gets worse. Don’t count on me. Your son needs a doctor now.”

“I can’t,” she sobbed. “I don’t have no two dollars.” Coins passed silently up the line for her, and she hurried away.

The line curved around the house, slowly inching forward. The tremor didn’t come regularly, or always with the same intensity. It seemed indifferent to the severity of cases. When it came, strength ran out of me and I sank into a kitchen chair someone brought outside. Women fluttered around, offering tea and sweets until I could stand again. Each time I felt weaker. When the tremor didn’t come, some got back in line for better luck next time. I worked until dusk, when Henry came. “You all go home now, and let Miss Renner rest.” The crowd
left slowly, some muttering: “Easy for
him
to say.
It
worked for him.” Others consoled me: “Don’t feel bad, we’ll come back.” Henry helped me into my house, reluctantly agreed to take money left by seekers to the Galway Benevolent Society, and then turned back.

“It’s yours, Hazel. You earned it.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Well, maybe not,” he said thoughtfully, “if the touch comes from the Lord, like Agnes says. I wonder what Reverend Collins thinks of all this.”

“I don’t know.” Finally he left. I could barely recognize myself in the mirror. Was I Hazel the schoolmarm or the Lord’s vessel? Did Margit Brandt, catching sight of herself in Heidelberg, Dogwood, or New York City, ever wonder: Who is this woman? I dreamt of men in scarlet jackets chasing me through an endless hall of mirrors, calling for Hilde.

Of course I came to school tired and poorly prepared, with no clever learning games or contests. We passed the day in dreary drills. “Like when Miss Clay was here,” Frances whispered. I’d have to do better. The students shouldn’t suffer because farmers’ joints ached. Seekers did come after school, seven who hadn’t been helped on Sunday, and another five. Tremors came for half of them. When night fell, I excused myself to work and stayed up late planning better lessons for the week.

The next two weeks took their toll on my house and me. Even if no “cures” were attributed to the paint alone, great patches of it were being chipped away. The boards themselves grew nicked as if gnawed by mice. In cold or rainy days, people took to waiting on my porch or in the house, tracking in mud, sometimes helping themselves to food left as gifts or to my own provisions. Those who hadn’t been helped perhaps felt their pains and disappointments merited this recompense. Each day I grew more weary and drained, as if both cures and failures were sucking away my strength.