The Painted Drum (22 page)

Ira went searching down the hall on the adult ward. But she was too shy to actually look into the rooms. Quick, casual glances through each door did not reveal Morris, so she asked about him and a nurse took her all the way to the end of the hall. The room was dark, the curtains drawn, and Morris’s eyes were covered, as Ira had thought they would be.

“You have a lady visitor,” the nurse said.

“Seraphine?” said Morris.

“No, Ira.”

“Boozhoo!” Morris put out his hand. “How are your kids? Come in here. Siddown. There’s crackers.” He didn’t grope, but put his hand precisely on the table pushed up next to him. He lightly touched a stack of cellophane-wrapped saltines. “Would you like some?”

Ira took a package, opened it, and ate both saltines. They melted on her tongue.

“Have more,” said Morris.

“No, I gotta get back. My kids’ lunch trays are coming. My kids are doing good. Apitchi’s got pneumonia, except.”

“They can treat pneumonia, it’s safer to get pneumonia than a lot of things.”

“Yeah,” said Ira. “I was scared though. How about you?”

“Me,” said Morris, touching his hair, which was bunched up over the bandages, “I think I have finally done it. Maybe I’ll go blind now, all the way blind. One of my cornea’s all scratched up, the other got ulcerated. They just told me. Anyway, the suspense will be over.”

“You won’t be able to drive,” said Ira.

“Well, I wasn’t supposed to, really, I should have told you. I’m sorry about that.”

“You tried,” Ira said. “If you hadn’t gone in the woods after my kids and the snow got so bright, maybe your eyes wouldn’t have quit on you.”

“It was gonna happen,” Morris said. He patted the covering on his eyes, adjusted the bandages. “So, your kids okay, really?”

“The girls won’t talk to me yet.”

Morris nodded, as if that made sense. “Give them time to come out of it,” he said. “There’s water, too, in that pitcher. The nurse just put new ice in.”

“They taking good care of you?”

“Yes,” said Morris. “Morphine. They know me from before.”

“You been in for your eyes then?”

“Other things, too,” said Morris. “Where you supposed to live now?”

“I don’t know yet. Bernard, maybe. I never asked him though.”

“Your mom’s dead.”

“Long time ago.”

“And I heard about it when your dad died. He was a spiritual man, I knew him.”

“My dad knew how to give names. They gave him the ceremony. It was because he had dreams. He couldn’t stop his dreams. They kept coming at him. It turned out he was meant to do certain things that would put his dreams to use.”

She stopped. “Ma’iingan,” she said. “He gave that name to you.”

“Your dad said that was the only time he ever gave that name out.”

“That name meant a lot to him because wolves saved his life, once, I guess.”

“Amen,” said Morris. “My name saved me, too.”

“How?” said Ira.

“That’s for another visit,” Morris said. “I got to hook you in somehow.”

Ira went quiet because she didn’t know what to say to that. She didn’t know whether she wanted to be hooked in or left on her own. “Anyway,” she said, “Popeye?”

“Yeah, too bad about that.”

“You don’t like your nickname?”

They both laughed.

“Well, I must go,” said Ira. “Bye.” She leaned over and put her hand in Morris’s open hand. He held her hand a minute. Just held her fingers with his fingers. Then he carefully let go.

Had she missed the lunch trays? Ira was so hungry that she was beginning to feel all wobbly down the center. She walked quickly back to her children and first checked on Apitchi, then went to Shawnee and Alice’s room. There was no sign of lunch yet. She lowered herself into a chair. She noticed a little box of Sugar Pops on the table next to Shawnee’s bed, and she wanted to say, “Are you going to eat those?” But she thought that Shawnee might give her that stare that she had given her before.

“What are you watching?” she asked.

“Powerpuffs.”

“It’s stupid,” Shawnee said.

“No, they’re good!” said Alice.

I’d better call up Bernard, thought Ira. Or maybe go look for him when he comes on his shift. She heard the rumble of the lunch cart coming down the corridor and her stomach pinched hard. An aide brought two trays in, each with a piece of skinless chicken, a spoonful of rice with some vegetables mixed in, a salad with pale pink tomatoes, and green Jell-O. There was a carton of milk and a few sticks of celery and carrots. Ira cut up Alice’s meat. The girls ate everything. When they were done, Ira put their trays back outside, on the cart.

“I’m going to see Apitchi now,” she told Shawnee and Alice. On the way out she asked a nurse if there was an extra tray. The nurse said no. Ira said that if anybody didn’t eat their tray could she have it, and the nurse looked closely at her.

“You got money for the cafeteria?”

“No,” said Ira. “I’m here with my children.”

“I’ll make sure they order a supper tray for you,” the nurse said. “In the meantime, come over here.” She took Ira to a small closet kitchen. From the little refrigerator, she took two cartons of chocolate milk, two yogurts, and a bowl of peaches covered with plastic wrap. She balanced a handful of wrapped crackers on top of the plastic wrapped bowl. “Those peaches are from just yesterday,” she said.

Ira took the food to Apitchi’s room. He was still sleeping, his arms tucked close. He huddled in the sheets. Ira arranged the food on the windowsill and then she sat down next to Apitchi’s bed. Slowly, she reached over, selected a carton of milk, and sipped it. The chocolate milk was rich, cold, and she felt it trickle all the way down to her stomach. Next, she ate the yogurts—first the blueberry then strawberry—taking little precise scoops with a plastic spoon. She put her head back on the chair and rested for a while. She ate the peaches and the crackers. Then she drank the last milk. When Apitchi woke, he looked anxiously all around the room and let his gaze rest, at last, on his mother’s face. I don’t know what I will do if he hates me too, Ira thought, but when he realized it was she, he burst into tears and tried to hold his arms out. Ira went to him gratefully. His arm was strapped to a board along with the IV and his other hand was taped to a little paddle so he couldn’t reach over and pull out the needle. Ira carefully positioned him against her so that she could read a picture book to him. She read it six times, the same book, until it made her sleepy. She leaned back in the bed with Apitchi and felt his heart beating right over her heart.

When she woke from her light sleep with Apitchi, it was late afternoon. All of her children were still asleep. She went to Morris’s room and stood in the entrance. He was looking at her with his lids half shut. His bandages had fallen off. She said hello, and he seemed to acknowledge her by gazing at her peacefully, but when his expression did not change, she realized from his deep breathing that he was actually asleep with his eyes open. This sight startled and made her want to turn away, but she was held by the strangeness of exchanging this calm regard with a person who was unconscious and maybe even dreaming.

“It’s Ira,” she said, when he stirred. “If you want to keep sleeping, I’ll go.”

“No, I’m not tired.” He sat up and fixed the bandages back over his eyes. “Just bored. They’re gonna bring my tape player and my tapes in later.”

“Maybe I could read to you,” said Ira. “I just finished reading to my little boy.”

“What did you read him?”

“Green Eggs and Ham.”

“I’ve heard that one,” said Morris.

“Well, I could get you another,” said Ira. “Probably they have a bunch of books somewhere.”

“Okay,” said Morris, “if you find a good one, you read it to me. It’s a deal.”

“I’ll check downstairs later.”

Ira stood awkwardly in the doorway, not sure whether to sit down or to leave.

“Look,” said Morris. “I gotta say, I’m sorry. It’s about what I was thinking, what I implied, when I stopped the truck on the road.”

Ira dragged a chair next to the bed, sat down. She put her elbows on her knees, her head in her hands. Now that the bandages were on he couldn’t see, so what did it matter. She had wondered if he was going to mention that moment.

“You were lonely, and me, I was desperate,” she said at last. “And it’s true, I was after some money. If somebody had offered me money to fuck them, I would have done it earlier, but then your brother gave me money for some groceries, so I wasn’t that desperate anymore.”

“He screwed me, then!”

She laughed a little. “We should let it go, I mean, because the kids are gonna be alive and they could have…whatever. But they’re okay. Your sister-in-law visited me.”

“Seraphine. War wounds.”

“She was in the army? Which one?”

“The one that was conducted on us where they took our children prisoner.”

“She went to boarding school then.”

“Yes. And now as I have scratched up my corneas to the point of ulceration, I truly see through a glass darkly, as in Corinthians.”

“That’s the Bible,” said Ira.

“Yes, the New Testament, which is on twenty-four double sided tapes.”

“So you lay in the dark and you listen to the Bible.”

“That Old Testament, especially, rated R for sex and violence. Don’t let your kids near that book.”

Ira laughed. “Wow.”

“You’re impressed?”

“I’m kind of scared of you.”

“Why, because my eyes bug out? Most cases like mine do not persist, but I even had surgery and they still popped out again, and the treatments haven’t worked. The doctors say I’m just stubborn. The whole thing stems out of my thyroid gland, and I know it got fucked up in Kuwait. They’re going to paralyze my eyelids with Botox and see if they drop.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’ll be young forever. I’ll have young eyes.”

Ira looked down at her hands.

“I don’t know what I’d do. I feel for you.”

“I’d rather you just feel me,” said Morris. “Up.”

“Sad.”

“I know it, I’m so out of practice.”

“Yes, you are. But that’s a plus in my mind.”

“Good.” Morris paused. “Are you used to your house being gone yet?”

“I am trying to get used to remembering that I have no house, nothing, just what I have on me.”

“Which is?”

Ira began to rummage in her purse. “A comb, a compact, a stick of gum, an extra diaper, some bills, food vouchers, old mascara, a bunch of toilet paper, photographs, which now I’m very glad I always carry, and lots of lint balls.”

“That’s in your purse.”

“Right. Oh, and I also have a beadwork clip and a bag of earrings I was hoping to sell. Here,” she handed him the clip, which was a sunburst design picked out in extra-small fancy cutbeads. “This is an example of my work. You can feel how I made it anyway.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah, I’m real careful. I do good, tight, work, me.”

Morris held the clip, running his fingers over it. “Can I keep it?”

Ira hesitated, “Well, I’d like to give it to you. But I could maybe get forty for it. I was gonna show the nurses.”

“I’ve got fifty.”

“Trying to give me money again.” Ira pushed the clip back at Morris. “Just take it. Keep it. I want you to have it.”

“No,” said Morris. He tried to give it back, but Ira had left the room. So he lay back with the beaded sunburst in the palm of his hand, running his fingers across the perfect, smooth, curved rows of beads.

“We’re none of us perfect,” said Honey. Ira’s cousin was round, cute, and full of satisfaction about her house and children and hardworking husband. She had it all. She was sitting in the girls’ room on the plastic recliner. Ira came in and sat on the end of Alice’s bed and wondered if Honey had found them a place to stay.

“You blame your mom,” said Honey to Shawnee. “But you shouldn’t. Your mother is a human being. She has her faults, as do all of us.”

Shawnee had been staring at the blank TV. Now she looked at Honey. She saw her so clearly. She saw her thin brown hair with the floss cut so it curled around her ears. She saw the heaviness in her face and neck, her strong little black eyes. She saw how Honey liked to visit them because they made her feel so much better about her own children and her situation in this life. She wondered if Honey went to school or just practiced until she got the job of nurse. Anyway, even if she’d learned all there was to know, she didn’t know her mother or have the right to tell Shawnee to blame or not to blame her. And her mother was a human being, that was true, anybody could see that. This woman had not been to the edge of life.

“I’m not stupid,” said Shawnee to her mother’s cousin.

After that, although Honey tried to talk to her, held her hands out, Shawnee did a thing she discovered she could do with her mind. She clicked the woman’s mute button. She had just learned about the mute button on the television’s remote control. So it was comical—nothing she said came through—just her mouth moving, her eyebrows wiggling up and down, her finger pointing, waving, her arms finally flapping at Shawnee’s mother, who went out the door with Honey and came back alone and said, “So much for that.”

“What?” said Shawnee.

“She hasn’t got a place for us.” Ira laughed suddenly. “You told her, I guess,” she said. “We’re not stupid. You got that right, baby girl.”

Ira sat back down on Alice’s bed.

“That woman came,” Shawnee said, “and Alice asked her how she got that scar on her face.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t have asked that, Alice.”

“But it was interesting,” said Shawnee.

“It was?” Ira could not help it, she was curious and still could not remember.

“A matron,” said Shawnee. “What’s that?”

“Oh, that’s in boarding school,” Ira said. “I’m not going to send you kids to boarding school.”

“That’s good,” Shawnee said.

“Bernard came,” said Alice.

“He said to tell you he has our food. He’ll bring it to wherever we go,” said Shawnee. Then stopped. Bernard had patted her shoulder and told her that she was a strong little girl, a good sister. Her mother had tried to touch her only that one time, since the fire. Shawnee almost wanted to force her mother to get angry with her just to get it over with, but at the same time she hoped her mother would say that Shawnee had saved her brother and sister, that she had dragged them through the snow, that she had refused to let them fly away as black skeletons.