Tina Mcelroy Ansa (8 page)

“Lena, you were laid out on this floor when I come in!” Mr. Jackson argued. Lena watched him stand there tossing his age-softened plaid wool jockey’s cap from one hand to another. She was grateful for the ingenious contraption that allowed fresh air to flow into the room. As long as she continued to take deep breaths, she kept feeling stronger and stronger. And she needed her strength because she had no intention of letting Mr. Jackson make a big deal about this little scrape. Besides, she could barely concentrate on her health because the breeze that had only fondled her before was now enveloping her in its gusts. She just hoped nothing happened while the building contractor was there.

“Mr. Jackson, I think I must have just tripped over the entrance or something. I fell, but I didn’t hurt myself or anything,” she continued as she looked down really examining herself for the first time since she came to, with Mr. Jackson lifting her off the floor of the secret room. She had a small run in one of her pale stockings that looked like a sexy sheer seam up the back of her right leg. But other than being a bit dusty, that was all. Sister would have said bluntly, “Serves you right for trying to show off those legs with those short skirts.”

Lena looked up at the worried man and smiled her most persuasive smile. But then he insisted that she at least go by the emergency room of the Mulberry Medical Center just a few blocks away. The smile faded, and she balked again, but he would not be moved.

When they got to the parking lot behind The Place, Mr. Jackson had asked if it was okay to let one of his men follow them in her car. She saw the man, a boy practically, tall and lanky, running his hand tenderly along the lines of her sleek one-of-a-kind Mercedes as she
gave over her car keys. Um, Lena thought, now the inside of my car is going to smell like a strange man.

The contractor led her to the passenger’s side of his big white Ford truck and gave her an arm up into the cab.

It’s a good thing it’s not an emergency, Lena thought as Mr. Jackson pulled slowly out of the parking lot into the alley, taking special care not to hit the curb at Cherry Street and possibly jar his passenger any further, then crept along the nearly deserted street like an old lady.

Once at the busy city hospital, after a couple of hours, he almost started a fight in the waiting room. Lena was still lying fully clothed on a cot in an examining area of the emergency room, but she heard him raising his voice outside her room.

“What you mean no
evidence
of a contusion or concussion? The girl was hit in the head. I tell you, a loose board was hanging right over her head when I found her laying out on the floor,” Mr. Jackson insisted.

“There’s got to be at least a bump on her head or some dizziness or something on one of those head scans ya’ll do,” he continued over the calm explanation of the attending physician. “And you gon’ just stand there and let her walk out of here when she just might fall over and
die
at any moment?”

The physician raised his voice at that and Lena finally remembered she had talked with this young doctor and his wife after Mass one Sunday at St. Martin de Porres.

“Now, Mr. Jackson, don’t be having folks in town thinking I ain’t taking care of Lena McPherson,” the young E.R. physician said uneasily. He had meant it to sound like a joke, but the northern boy had gone to medical school in Birmingham and knew enough about small southern towns to know not to mess with a leading and beloved citizen.

Lena lay back on the cot and wished she could still go to St. Luke’s Hospital, where she was born. She had never been in any
hospital overnight since then. Never in for a baby’s birth. Or a broken bone. Or to have her tonsils taken out. Or for an emergency D&C She was in and out of hospitals all the time visiting this one and that one, but she had never had to stay there herself.

She closed her eyes and pictured the little one-story building with the simple professional black and white sign out front stating:
ST. LUKE’S HOSPITAL
. Then, in smaller letters: Front Entrance. The rear entrance had nearly been obscured by the mass of pink and white and red roses growing in back. She could see the faces of the nurses and orderlies, dressed in starched white cotton, scurrying around silently, trying to keep up the high standard of the founder and owner, Dr. William A. Williams.

But in the little town’s rush to be a part of the world back in the sixties and seventies, Mulberry—in the name of revitalization, growth and urban renewal—had allowed and encouraged wholesale razing of neighborhoods and streets and historically significant buildings, as if the tiny burg had a real urban section to renew. And the private hospital that had served Mulberry’s black community for more than half a century was torn down like a pile of trash to make way for a little-used urban playground. At the last minute, there was talk of a protest and the town officials moved up the scheduled demolition in response to the rumors. Lena’s gardener, Mr. Renfroe, and his crew barely got to the site in time to save the roses.

All Mr. Jackson’s fussing had accomplished was to keep Lena at the city hospital all day and into the evening having a battery of tests run on her to prove she had not sustained trauma to the head.

By the time Lena just insisted that they find something wrong with her or let her go, the hospital staff was as ready for her to depart as she was to leave. They had taken her purse and her little black cellular phone away from her at the start of her visit. But they gladly returned both to her a couple of hours later. All morning long, the nurses had been kept busy bringing phones to Lena or calling her to the phone because “they say it’s vitally important,” the women and one male nurse intoned flatly for the twentieth time. Precious and
some of her office and department managers—Wanda, Brenda, Carroll, Marilyn—slipped in and out all day with papers resting on leather attaché cases with “LLL” marking the spots for Lena to sign.

“Here, Miss McPherson, put your magic on this for me.”

“Here, Lena, sign off on this, and we’ll be through.”

“Here, Miss Mac, I replaced the tape in your recorder.”

Lena kept smiling and shrugging and saying resignedly to the hospital staff, “Business.”

In the final analysis, the doctors couldn’t tell her any more than she had known that morning: Her cholesterol count was high, not over 200, but high. Her pressure was slightly elevated. And she needed to find a stress reliever in her life. But she was in pretty good shape for a woman her age and was basically healthy as a horse.

The young doctor told her, “Ms. McPherson, we did an EKG, ran CAT scan, did X-ray and blood work and rushed it all through. But didn’t find a thing.”

So the young nervous doctor gave Lena a shot for the pain she still felt in her head and sent her home with some pills, a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet guide, and an admonition to be watchful for signs of dizziness, headaches or blurred vision.

She wasn’t a bit surprised to find Mr. Jackson still waiting for her outside the doctor’s office. He didn’t even ask Lena if she needed a ride. He just guided her to his truck and cranked up the engine.

But instead of driving straight out Riverside Drive toward Lena’s house, the unsettled man turned back toward downtown and headed for Pleasant Hill. Lena just looked at the determined man behind the wheel. Now, Mr. Jackson knows good and damn well I don’t live at Mama and Daddy’s house, Lena thought. But she felt a little woozy, and she was just too weary to correct him.

“By rights, I ain’t got no business taking you home, Lena. You need to stay in that hospital overnight,” Mr. Jackson said, oblivious to his mistake as he drove toward the big three-story red brick house trimmed in dark green paint on Forest Avenue. Mr. Jackson called the color “country green.” It reminded him of when he was a boy and city
folks painted their porches that hue. He had painted many a porch in that color himself when he was making his way up in the business.

As Mr. Jackson drove down Forest Avenue, he suddenly slammed on the brakes, throwing Lena against her seat belt.

“Damn,” he said as both of them watched a line of snapping turtles, slow and heavy with eggs nearly two months earlier than normal, making their way across the road from the stream in the direction of the river.

“Umph, never seen so many turtles and other water creatures in my life,” Mr. Jackson said as he brought the car back on his side of the road and turned into the long drive leading to her family’s large brick house. “You hit a couple of those bad boys on the road going ’bout fifty or sixty and you can kiss your sweet behind goodbye.”

Lena raised her head a bit as the truck shimmied on the road and thought, Well, damn, it looks like
something
is determined to get me today.

She shook her head gently a couple of times like one of her horses to clear her thoughts. The medication they had given her at the hospital had finally kicked in, taking the edge off the strange pain in her head. She didn’t even want to think it for fear that Mr. Jackson might hear her thoughts and take her back to the hospital, but Lena knew he was right. She
had
been hit with something back at The Place that morning.

When Mr. Jackson pulled up to the end of the driveway of her parents’ deserted home, Lena just rested her head back on the truck’s seat and did not make a move.

She didn’t really ever want to go back inside the house on Forest Avenue. Indeed, it was her childhood home. Her mother and father’s only home. The house that they had run together with her loving bossy grandmother. The house she left and returned to briefly before, during and directly after her college days.

The house held many of her memories of being loved and spoiled and catered to and protected and babied. The only problem for Lena was that the big old brick house on Forest Avenue also held most of
her memories of being tormented and bedeviled, stalked and terrorized, manipulated and confused. The elegant old house haunted her with those memories whenever she entered. Lena agreed with the children of Pleasant Hill and most of the rest of Mulberry. The house was haunted.

Lena had done everything she could from what she had heard and read to calm the spirits of her family’s house: burning candles, splashing holy water around, burying one of her braids in the backyard near the stream. Nothing worked.

She knew that part of the problem was hers. Not only had Nellie thrown Lena’s caul tea out, but her birth caul had not been saved or preserved with any kind of respect, either. She knew that because her grandmama’s ghost had told her so on the night of her funeral the only time she had ever come back to her.

Her grandmama’s ghost had made her put on her slippers first, and taking her outside in the night, had pointed to the very spot behind the house down by the little stream that ran into the woods where Nellie, in disgust and ignorance, had burned the dried skin from her daughter’s birth.

“Your caul is gone forever,” Grandmama’s ghost had lamented the loss of Lena’s treasure. But Lena had not seen it as a loss. Now she could hardly bear to look down toward the stream and woods behind her family house.

She would have sold the house and property in a minute if the town had let her. But she couldn’t bear the thought of being questioned about her actions every time she showed her face.

“So you
sold
your mama and daddy’s house to
strangers
!??!” she could just hear people inquiring over and over.

“Shoot, if it wasn’t for Mama and Daddy, I don’t think I’d ever go back into that house,” she’d told Sister one day over the phone.

But she had to fight like a madwoman ten years before to keep townspeople from assuming she was moving back there when Jonah and Nellie were killed in the crash of Miss
Lizzie
, their twin-engine Beechcraft.

They flew around so much. Jonah, proud of his pilot’s wings and of Nellie’s acuity in learning to fly, and navigate, too, would jump in that plane and fly off at the drop of a hat. He had taken to flying in the same way he had embraced railroad travel. They flew to Washington, D.C., for the weekend. They flew to Atlanta for dinner at Jonah’s favorite restaurant. They flew to the Georgia coast for fresh seafood. They flew to the Florida Keys to watch the sun set into the waters of the Gulf. They flew to Miami to take a three-day cruise to the Bahamas. They even flew to Las Vegas and came back richer.

Jonah—still handsome and charming, his dark brown skin unlined, his thick black hair graying at the temples along with his bushy mustache, his black eyes still dancing—had, as people in Mulberry said, “come in.”

“Well, it look like Nellie hung in there long enough with Jonah ’til he stop running around all over Mulberry with other women and come on in,” one woman would shout to another as they sat under beauty shop hair dryers.

“Yeah, and the two of them actually seem to be enjoying theyselves,” the other would add. “I know I wouldn’t be getting in no little plane like that at the drop of a hat. I guess you have to live with a man that long before you can trust him with your very life like that.”

In the same way that people in Mulberry had said all his life, “Jonah know he love a train,” they later said, “Jonah know he love him a plane.”

Years before their death, Frank Petersen, Lena’s friend and confidant who had worked as a houseman for Jonah and Nellie and then in Lena’s own home until he weakened and died, had predicted their demise. He would say to the room in general from time to time, as he moved around the house on Forest Avenue or her house out by the river, cleaning and washing and sweeping with his brown felt hat pulled down on his head, “They probably gon’ die in that plane.”

The one time Lena heard him mutter this as she raced around looking for the white silk scarves Jonah and Nellie liked to wear when they flew, she had to restrain herself from hitting the grizzled old man.

“Don’t ever say that again, Frank Petersen,” she practically hissed at him, and stormed off to wish her parents clear skies. His feelings were hurt for a while, and he left the house early that day without saying goodbye to Lena, which was unusual. But Lena couldn’t help herself. Hearing her friend pronounce her parents dead from a flaming crash, their bodies fused with bent, twisted shards of metal and melted scraps of plastic scattered among a stand of scorched and toppled pine and palm trees, made her face her own visions.