Charms for the Easy Life (17 page)

We took the old man home to his wife and thousand children, and my grandmother promised to visit him with medicine later that day, and the next day and the next, until he was out of danger of pneumonia. I could not imagine a gratitude more sincere unless it was that she had received from the hanging man. When we got home, Mr. Baines went right in and fixed a drink for himself and my mother. I wanted one dearly, and so did my grandmother, who told Mr. Baines not to be stingy when he poured for her. She took the glass from him and justified, as if she ever needed to justify anything to herself, a drink in the afternoon. “Somewhere on this planet,” she said, “it is five o’clock.”

The man she resuscitated became a religious zealot. Starting the next Sunday at the A.M.E. Zionist church and continuing until his death, he dedicated and rededicated his life to Jesus. It was said that during his loud and long testimonials he would recount the way my grandmother had pressed her mouth to his and saved his life. People never tired of hearing the tale. It enjoyed wide circulation, spilling out of his church and onto the streets, where it called up memories of the miracle of the lynched man. Had my grandmother not delivered the local leader of the Klan and sent him birthday cards and nickels and the pamphlet that spared him from pubescent fatherhood, I’m sure we would’ve awakened some night to find a blazing cross in our yard.

Dr. Nutter called each day to keep my grandmother up-to-date on several of the young men she had been concerned about. Although the hospital was greatly understaffed because of the weather, he made her promise she wouldn’t chance the drive to Durham. We didn’t get back there for six days, which was exactly how much time it took for a letter to reach Lumberton and a reply to reach the hospital by special delivery.

I went straight to Frank’s bedside when I got to the hospital. A letter from his mother was waiting on his nightstand. I read it through to myself before reading it aloud to him, unpleasant previous experience being the best teacher around. I saw from the letter that he had been adopted at age thirteen. His mother was concerned that the blow to his head had jiggled his memory. So much for his tender memory of this woman’s reading to him when he was a small boy. I realized that my grandmother’s plan for me to tell the truth as I believed the young men wished it to be could prove a very complicated business. I edited the letter as I read along. This is not what he heard:

After I finished reading everything except the lines concerning his adoption, he said, “Boy, that was a short one.”

He sounded so disappointed that I rattled the envelope and told him there was another letter inside, and as he lay there with, lucky for me, his eyes closed, I spun the best story I could about all the wonderful snow in Lumberton, how it had shone silver under the streetlights, how everyone was sad that it wouldn’t linger until Christmas. He was perfectly satisfied when I finished, but I was a wreck, having jumped off the roof of my sheltered life straight down into someone else’s. I felt as if I had this boy’s life all over me, and I had no idea how to extricate myself. I could see myself thirty years from then, driving to Lumberton every day to intercept letters between Frank and his mother. Where this would take me, how it would end, I had no idea. As I readied myself for his dictation, I tried but could not shake the image of me at fifty, hiding behind a tree, waiting for her mailman to come, eventually being caught and dragged off to tell a true-crime tale of good intentions gone berserk that would horrify everyone in the world, except possibly my mother and grandmother, who would come to my trial and proudly testify, “To have done it so well for so long—how grand!”

I
WAS ASSIGNED to another patient that first day back after the snowfall. He was from Mississippi, a place I was highly interested in, not only because I liked William Faulkner but also because I was at that time reading Eudora Welty’s A
Curtain
of Green. Right away I asked the young man a thousand questions about the Delta. Like so many people away from home, he was eager to tell me all about it, everything he missed: the cool black loam, the cool well water, the cool breeze his mother prayed aloud for before every summer supper. He asked me if I’d like to hear about his mom and pop. I told him I would. I listened carefully, as I knew the information would stand me in good stead if, or rather when, correspondence needed to be concocted. As he talked to me, I thought of how thoroughly normal my grandmother would seem in his world, even with her mothball-scented body and garlic-scented breath and antique pantaloons.

When he was growing up, his father had tended bar at a place called the Bucket of Blood Saloon. The man was a hard character, a severe alcoholic whose paychecks flew from his hands. To get spending money, the boy and his little brothers would go to the city maintenance lot near their home and pick change out of the dirt that was swept from the streetcars each week, and to make grocery money his mother kept retired plow horses in the backyard and rented them out when her neighbors had a call for them. They usually hired them to pull their possessions from house to house, trying to beat rent during the Depression, a time he described as his mother’s heyday. This mother never let her children ride the animals while they were alive, but as soon as an old horse died she would call her children out of the house and they’d all crawl up on top as the animal was hauled away. What a vision he was making for me!

Also, he told me that his mother lived for the parish lottery. He remembered her waking up one morning, screaming that she had dreamed of clear water, then rushing out of the house, still in her nightgown, to play the numbers 1, 2, and 3, which were specific for dreams of clear water. I expected him to say next that his mother lost the money, his father came home drunk and beat her and the children, and they all ate chickpeas for supper. Instead, he beamed and said that she won fifty dollars, bought a new icebox and filled it with food, and bought all the children new shoes. In spite of redeeming times like that, his life didn’t sound like anything to do a jig over.

I remember that as I listened to him my eyes would wander up over his bed, where a crucifix was displayed upon which hung a Christ wearing what looked to be horsehair, or worse I feared, and a muslin wrap held together by a diaper pin. The look on His face was not so much the usual agony as surprise. (To this day, I have yet to see the Savior depicted with his mouth open to that extent, all his teeth showing.) His mother had sent it with an outsize birthday card, which was taped to the wall open for everyone to read. She had written:

The young man was recuperating from a massive skin-grafting procedure; he had been burned mightily on his chest and stomach in a boiler accident on his ship. He needed my assistance because he was illiterate. He seemed bright enough to have absorbed something from school, even if his home life had erased his slate each evening. He debated the fellow in the bed next to his over Mr. Roosevelt’s support of the soldier vote, and he followed all the comic strips by reading the pictures only, just as I had done as a child. So I felt compelled to ask him why he hadn’t learned to read and write. (One must bear in mind that one Southerner can ask another Southerner this with little fear of recrimination, as long, of course, as it isn’t asked in a condescending manner. Had he heard New Jersey or even Baltimore in my accent, he would’ve told me to mind my own affairs.)

When I asked about his illiteracy, he shrugged and told me, “Like I said, I’m from Mississippi.”

I said, “Do you mean that as an excuse?”

He laughed and said something to the effect that nobody in Mississippi could read or write.

I asked him if he had heard of William Faulkner. He asked me who he was.

I said, “He happens to be a Mississippian who reads and writes very nicely. He writes about a place called Yoknapatawpha.”

He told me there was no such place, that he had been everywhere in Mississippi, and then I explained that Faulkner had created and populated it in his imagination. The patient seemed content enough with the explanation, and so I moved on. I asked if he was ready to dictate a letter home. He said he didn’t want to. I showed him the stack of letters he had been fortunate enough to receive recently, and he said, “Mom
made
them write me.” Her parish was involved in a letter-writing campaign to servicemen, and he seemed to have gotten the bulk of their efforts. I could see this woman lording over card tables of women in a church fellowship hall, making sure her boy got more than his due.

When I pressed him to tell me why he wouldn’t send anything home, he asked, “What’s there to say except my temperature’s ninety-nine and I haven’t had a b.m. on my own yet?”

I said, “Granted, that isn’t big news, but you should send something home anyway.”

He said if I really wanted to do him a favor, I would send his mother last Sunday’s funny pages, but I was first to clip out
Little Orphan Annie.
Daddy Warbucks made her crazy. Like my grandmother, she considered him a hate-spreading Republican of the Hoover variety and spoke of him as if he were real. I agreed to do this, and then I read him all the letters from the parishioners. In the main, they were nothing more than form letters. It seemed as if the women had copied down a letter put before them on a blackboard.

When I finished, I excused myself and went to find my grandmother. She was changing the dressing on a nasty burn on a patient’s thigh, telling him how lucky he was that it wasn’t closer to his crotch. I sat down by her and told her about the Bucket of Blood, the crucifix, and the way the young man hadn’t been able to place Yoknapatawpha. She nodded as she folded the dressing and taped it down, and then she squeezed the patient’s knee and said, “This one’s from Pittsburgh. From what I hear about Pittsburgh, half the people there’d prefer it was something made up in somebody’s head. Am I correct?” He understood he was to agree, so he did.

He was her last patient of the day. She had been assigned two aisles, and she had finished them both, working at top speed so she could have lunch with Dr. Nutter in his office. I had one more patient left. We agreed to meet after she was through with lunch. Before I went into my ward, I noticed on the next patient’s information card that he was from Raleigh. Although he was a graduate of Washington and Lee, he was a noncommissioned officer. His name was Tom Hawkings III. He was recovering from surgery performed aboard a hospital ship to remove shrapnel from his back, and his right hand was splinted. His condition was listed as excellent.

His family was well-known, as was their residence. The house was based on Monticello, only it was larger. The Hawkings family lived across the street from the doctor whom my grandmother had retired. Their name was particularly fresh in my mind, as I had read just a few months before about the three Hawkings sisters who were married in a lavish triple ceremony. Their father owned the largest office supply firm in the state, and every now and then he received mention in the business pages for having acquired another furniture store or shoe store or grocery store. The patient’s mother had written the “Under the Dome” political column in the Raleigh newspaper for the past ten years or so, and she was often listed as a speaker at teas and book club and alumni meetings. The younger son was always getting his picture in the paper for hanging about at high-tone New York social events with the Daniel boy, also from Raleigh, who later married Margaret Truman. And the one sister who didn’t get married in the triple ceremony was famous for being the first resident of Raleigh to attend Juilliard. Why someone like this Tom Hawkings III didn’t have a commission puzzled me. Either he had unconventional, highly democratic ideals or was trying to prove something to his overachieving family, or there was simply something wrong with him.