Dancing on the Edge (11 page)

“Opal, how could you?”

Grandaddy Opal lifted his head and spoke, his voice angry and his hair dancing wildly on his head. “Gigi, you can't do this. She has a right to follow her own . . .”

“No! No, it isn't her own, and you know it. You did this to spite me. To get back at me.”

“You listen here.” Grandaddy Opal pointed his shaky finger at Gigi. “That child has a right to . . .”

“I decide what rights she has.
I
decide!” Gigi's arms were flapping up and down as if she were drowning in a pool.

“You? You hardly know she's here.”

“You knew I didn't want her dancing. You knew it! How could you do this to me?” Gigi turned to Aunt Casey. “Do you believe this? Behind our backs?”

Aunt Casey looked up from Mama's picture and glanced at Opal and then Uncle Toole and finally settled on Gigi. “Just leave it, Gigi,” she said. “It's done, leave it.”

Then out of the blue, Uncle Toole jumped in, pointing at Miss Emmaline and saying, “Are we all just going to pretend she ain't black? Old man Opal's going around with a black woman at least twenty years too young and we're all just acting like . . .”

“Would you hush your mouth?” Aunt Casey said, slamming down Mama's picture. “Who are you to talk anyway? You always got some girl tagging along after you and not one of them's older than nineteen. Why, I ought to have you arrested is what I ought to do.”

Gigi jumped back in, accusing Aunt Casey of knowing about the lessons and yelling at Grandaddy Opal about their arrangement, and Miss Emmaline had a few loud words to say to Uncle Toole so that everyone was talking at once and no one was hearing anything. How could Mama and Dane return with all this commotion going on?

“Stop!” I yelled. “Everybody stop. You're messing up the vibrations. They're coming back and I can't hear. I can't feel. Just stop it!”

Everybody hushed but not because of me. The lights had gone out. Uncle Toole flicked on his lighter and lit some of the candle bottles. We all picked one up and moved to the center of the room. Outside was almost black and the sound of the wind whistled through the edges of the little pull-out window above Dane's desk. Then the sound grew louder and louder and Miss Emmaline began to sing again, competing with the thunderous noise outside, and when the whole house down to the foundation shook, I wasn't sure if it was the tornado hitting us or amazing grace.

T
HE SOUND OF
the tornado ripping Grandaddy Opal's house from its foundation and hurling the splintered pieces across the street left us deaf and stunned. Miss Emmaline Wilson had pushed me to the floor, and when the tornado struck, she was on top of me with her arms wrapped around me, holding on tight. I didn't think I'd ever want her to let go. It was a new experience being held like that, the way I figured Mama would have held me if she had lived, if she were there then. I knew right away Dane and Mama didn't make it. I knew something had gone wrong in the touchdown. I wanted to blame someone and I thought about Uncle Toole but he was curled up on the floor in a ball so tight we thought we were going to need one of Grandaddy Opal's carpentry tools to pry him open again.

Aunt Casey tried to get him to stand up or speak, but for a good long while he just stayed tight and wouldn't even look at her. The rest of us brushed ourselves off and examined our bodies and the basement for damage.

Water poured out of busted pipes and spread out over the floor, running toward Uncle Toole. Aunt Casey shouted at him to get up before he drowned. Uncle Toole lifted his head and said, “It's okay. It's okay, I'm alive.”

“Well, of course it is, baby,” Miss Emmaline said in a sweet, high-pitched voice that didn't sound like hers. Then she lowered it and said, “The Lord done saved your sorry soul 'cause you still got way too much learning to do. It's the good that die young, not folks like you.”

I think we all expected Uncle Toole to start cussing at her and calling her names I wasn't supposed to hear, but he didn't. He cried and wagged his head and bit by bit his body unfolded. He stood up, the tears still streaming down his face, the jagged scar on his forehead pale and shiny from sweat. He held his thick-muscled arms straight out in front of him and walked toward Aunt Casey, looking stiff, like a mummy. We all backed away, everyone except Aunt Casey. She stood there and let him throw himself on her and beg her forgiveness for all the hurt he'd ever caused her. “I swear, babe, I'll make it up to you.”

Aunt Casey, straining under the weight of his arms flung over her, pointed toward the sky. “Can't you see we got bigger problems than you to worry about right now?” she said. “Now, pull yourself together and help Opal out. I swear, of all the times to have some kind of conversion experience.” Aunt Casey pushed him off her, but I could tell she was hopeful.

The steps leading upstairs had collapsed in the pressure of the house being sucked away. Dane's bookshelves had fallen over and most of the candle bottles were crushed beneath them.

Grandaddy Opal kicked his way through the debris and was on the other side of the room with Mr. Eugene Wadell, tugging at some big piece of something blocking the exit from the basement to the backyard. Gigi cheered them on. Finally they got the way clear enough for them to reach the door. Grandaddy Opal opened it and we burst through to the outside, relieved to find the world still there. I lifted my face to the rain and saw the sun trying to break through the silvery clouds.

Grandaddy Opal pointed to his garage. “Well look-a there, it's still standing! The tornado skipped right over it.”

We all trudged up the slope of Grandaddy's backyard to the front of the garage. Miss Emmaline's car, the car Grandaddy Opal had been working on before the tornado hit, Uncle Toole's pickup, and Gigi's van were all still lined up in the driveway. Gigi declared she was grateful that for once she hadn't parked her van in front of the house. Mr. Eugene Wadell said it was because he was the one who had been driving. He was the one who had saved her car. He looked around at us all, I think expecting us to get down on our knees and thank him. Gigi took his hand and smiled, but the rest of us followed Grandaddy Opal out to the street to see what other damage had been done to the neighborhood.

Grandaddy Opal's house had been hit the worst but shingles and siding had been thrown all over the neighborhood, damaging other people's roofs and breaking windows. Most of his house landed on the lawns across the street, and that's where Grandaddy Opal headed. The rest of us trotted along behind him.

He jumped onto the heap that was his house and started picking through his belongings, picking up books and equipment and setting them in a pile to one side. People came out of their houses and joined us, and because Grandaddy Opal didn't say anything, neither did anyone else. They just climbed on top of the heap and pulled out anything they could. When they had an armload, they brought it across the street and set it in Grandaddy Opal's garage.

We all worked in that strange silence for almost an hour, digging and carrying and setting down, and digging some more. It felt as if we were still waiting for the storm, still tense, holding our breath. Then Grandaddy Opal jumped up and shouted, “Found them, by golly!”

We all looked up from our digging posts to see what he held above his head. It looked like three mashed boxes of typing paper held together with a piece of rope.

Then Gigi said, “His manuscripts! The original manuscripts. What are you doing with them?”

“He gave 'em to me, that's what,” Grandaddy Opal said. He hopped off the house pile and marched back to his garage, hugging Dane's manuscripts in his arms. Then he flopped down in one of the rockers someone had carried over and had himself a heart attack.

I
HAD TO RIDE
in the van with Gigi and Mr. Eugene Wadell. We were the first ones behind the ambulance. Then came Aunt Casey and Uncle Toole, and behind them Miss Emmaline Wilson.

Gigi kept real quiet in the van. She sat in the passenger seat next to Mr. Wadell and stared out the window. I didn't see her blink even once. Mr. Wadell told her everything would be all right, and I wondered how he knew.

Grandaddy Opal arrived at the emergency room a good fifteen minutes before us, and a nurse said doctors were already with him. We waited in the crowded waiting room. Gigi stood at the desk filling out forms, Mr. Wadell had taken orders for sodas and was popping money into the vending machine, and Uncle Toole and Aunt Casey were standing in a corner real close to each other talking sweet. I stood at the window and looked out at all the cars in the parking lot. I tried to keep my mind on the cars, on the lady carrying flowers hurrying toward the building. I watched a bald-headed man leaving the hospital looking as if he, too, had once carried flowers to someone he loved and now looking lost without them to carry back out again. I tried to think about them, wonder about them, but my mind kept taking me back to my own troubles. What had happened? Why hadn't Mama and Dane come back? Why did Grandaddy Opal have a heart attack? What had I done? Would he die? Where would he go if he did die? Would he see Mama? What had I done wrong?

Maybe it was my will. Maybe my will wasn't strong enough. Maybe it was like what Gigi had said to me once back when she caught me with her Ouija board. She had grabbed it away from me and told me not to go getting into her stuff and calling on the dead without knowing what I was doing. Then she hid the Ouija board away. Is that what I had done? Had I called up the dead and messed it up somehow?

Maybe I had wanted Dane and Mama back so much that I willed them to try to come before they were ready. Maybe my will was strong enough to call on the tornado but not strong enough for Dane and Mama to return in one piece. Or maybe it was my dancing. The dancing started everyone fighting, got Grandaddy Opal upset, stirred things up. I shouldn't have danced; it confused things, confused Mama and Dane.

I heard Miss Emmaline Wilson behind me. “Why don't you come sit by me, angel?”

I turned around. She was sitting on a couch and patting the seat beside her.

I hesitated. Maybe it was her holding on to me down there in that basement, blocking me so Dane and Mama couldn't even see me there. Maybe it was me loving her voice and her protecting me, loving the soft way her body pressed against mine.

“It's going to be all right,” she said, same as Mr. Wadell.

What would I do without Grandaddy Opal?

“Don't you worry, he'll be all right,” Miss Emmaline said, as if I'd asked the question out loud. “That man rides his bicycle miles every day. Why, my house is more than five miles from his, and he rides to there and back and still has energy to turn cartwheels. He'll be all right, you'll see. We just have to wait through this bad time, that's all.”

I lifted my head, startled. “Dane used to say that,” I said.

“Dane?”

I nodded. “Dane used to say, ‘I just got to wait through this bad time. Just wait it out, and things will be all right.'”

Miss Emmaline Wilson patted the seat beside her again. “That's right, angel, we'll wait through the bad times together. Come on and sit down beside me.”

I sat down and let her take my hand in hers. I didn't know how cold my hand was until she took it and massaged it. I didn't know the joints ached.

I pretended she wasn't holding it. I pretended I wasn't there. That's what I should have done in the basement. I should have ignored everything but the storm. We all should have. We weren't concentrating. That was the answer. I needed to wait until Dane gave me a sign that it was all right to be with Miss Emmaline. But then maybe her saying we had to wait through the bad times was the sign. Maybe.

I remembered how I used to hear Dane pacing in his cave and talking to himself. He'd say the same thing about waiting through the bad times, and I'd hear him tearing up his papers, whatever he had been working on. Once even, I thought I heard him crying.

I shifted closer to Miss Emmaline and she put her arm around my shoulders. I could smell her sweet perfume, like lily flowers. I closed my eyes and pretended Mama was holding me. It was probably all right if I thought it was Mama. If things had worked out right, if I had done it right, it would have been her holding me just that way, and Dane would be pacing the hospital floor waiting for news of his daddy and saying we just got to wait through this bad time. Mama and Dane, Dane and Mama, where were they? What's going to happen to Grandaddy Opal—and me?

Mr. Eugene Wadell came over with our drinks and handed them to us.

“I think if we could get together in a circle and focus on Mr. McCloy's heart and circulatory system—I mean, if we could just visualize healing . . .” Mr. Wadell's voice trailed off and he looked around for Gigi.

“Prayer, you mean,” said Miss Emmaline.

“Uh—” Mr. Wadell pulled open his can of Sprite and took a sip.

Gigi came up behind him. “No,” she said. “It's more like a séance where you visualize the person you're trying to contact, only this time we'll be contacting Opal's heart and telling it to start beating again.” She looked at Mr. Wadell. “But I don't think Opal would want . . .”

Miss Emmaline stood, pulling me up with her. “Honey, if it ain't beating by now, he's long dead.”

Aunt Casey and Uncle Toole heard her and rushed over to us. “He's dead?” they both said, looking at all our faces for the answer.

The doctor answered them. He had come up behind us, looking tired and grizzled as if he had been on duty for days. He sighed with his words when he spoke. “Mr. McCloy's fine.”

“Praise the Lord,” said Miss Emmaline.

The doctor turned to her and spoke as if it were just the two of them standing there.

“It was a mild attack, but of course we'll keep him here a few days for observation. If you want to see him, check at the information station and they'll give you his room number.” Then he bowed to her and left.