I was in the bed for six weeks with my legs drawn up, and I never expect to spend a longer six weeks in my life. The visits by the doctors became fewer and fewer, and finally, they did not come anymore. They had done all they knew to do. I think I was an embarrassment to them.
The fever was gone. There were cramps still in the middle of the night, but about all that could be done for them was to have Auntie rub my legs, which she did. The uncle who spoke in tongues came back and fell across my bed several times. Even that did not cure me.
For reasons nobody ever knew, toward the end of September my legs had loosened up a little and I was able to sit on the porch for a while every day if I wanted to. I was on the porch when the last load of cotton was hauled off to Blackshear in the back of the pickup truck, on the way to a huge open-sided warehouse where the buyers would walk among the high-stacked bales, followed by the farmers, many of them wearing new overalls and new brogans, their ancient black hats pulled low over their grim faces as they listened to the buyers tell what a year of their sweat and worry was worth.
Sam sat beside me on the porch, but he too was in a bad way. Old age had dropped on him sudden as a stone. He had lost the sight in both eyes within a period of less than a week, and he had started to bleed from his ears. The bleeding was not continuous, just a kind of spotting that left an irregular and inconstant blood spoor wherever he went.
Because my legs were loose enough to allow me to be carried about over the farm to the tobacco barn, out to sit under the oak tree, down to the abandoned barn to see my goats in the afternoon, I got to see the last catch Sam ever made before he had to be taken down behind the field and killed with a shotgun. Sam and I were taking the weak fall sun on the front porch one morning when daddy came walking up from the mule lot. He carried his left arm hooked up at the elbow, his hand held up in front of him. His hand was bloody, and blood had run down over the sleeve of his shirt.
He stopped at the edge of the porch and said: “Son, I believe I’m gone have to borry your dog. Will and me been trying to load that old brood sow and damned if she ain’t bout bit my finger off here.”
He took me off the porch, and Sam fell in behind us, following, as he had to do now, the sound daddy’s feet made over the dry sand down to the lot where the enormous sow stood grunting and snorting in the corner of the fence. Her eyes were red, and a light white froth fringed her snout. They opened the gate for Sam and whistled him inside. Once he was in the lot with the sow, daddy spoke softly to him.
“Git’er, Sam. Sic’er.”
Sam’s great solid head rose and his nostrils flared and his pointed ears struck forward on his head. Once he got a fix on the sow from the sound she was making backed in the corner, he did not hesitate but charged blindly. When he and the sow collided, he took a deep hold on one of her long, thick ears, and using all his weight, managing at the same time not to get caught on the tusks curling out of her mouth, he threw and held her fast, she squealing like the end of the world. Will and daddy went in and got an ear twist and nose twist on her and, after choking Sam off, led her like a lamb into the pickup truck which had high wooden livestock sides on it.
There was a snap in the air now and the winds every day grew higher than the day before and the leaves were beginning to thin on the oak tree. By the first of October I was able to ride around the farm in my goat cart pulled by Old Black Bill. Willalee Bookatee was not allowed to ride with me but had to walk alongside the cart instead. I felt very keenly how being a cripple had ruined our play, ruined all the things we used to do. That knowledge made me miserable and bad company. If Willalee minded it, he never said anything about it as he followed my cart around the fields in early fall.
We watched them bank sweet potatoes in pyramid-shaped mounds of earth and straw in such fashion that they would keep all winter long, and we watched them take the Irish potatoes to the cotton house (which would not be used again to store cotton for nearly a year) and spread them out in a single layer over the entire floor. And when the air got sharp enough, we watched daddy castrate twenty shoats in a single morning, watched him as he stood straddle of the pigs, one foot on their heads, their legs spread and he, bloody up to his elbows, reached and made two neat delicate incisions, removed the shoats’ gonads, first one, and then the other, and finally tossed them into a pan where later they would be deep-fried in a flour batter. With such skill and grace and precision did he move that the entire operation seemed a single movement.
Then the ride ended one day because mama decided it was too cold even though I was bundled up nicely there behind Old Black Bill. I felt relief as much as anything else, grateful as I was to get inside where nobody else could see me. More than one mule and wagon passing on the high road had stopped while a gaunt farmer and his wife—sometimes with a wagon bed full of children—stared at me. Looking the way I did, I knew it was inevitable that the county begin thinking of me not as a cripple but as “that way.” And I desperately did not want to be that way.
So I had to go back to my bed, which had been moved by the fireplace in the living room. But I didn’t have to stay in the bed all the time. My heels were no longer drawn up tightly against me. I could crab about over the house in surprisingly quick lateral movement.
One of my favorite places to be was in the corner of the room where the ladies were quilting. God, I loved the click of needles on thimbles, a sound that will always make me think of stories. When I was a boy, stories were conversation and conversation was stories. For me it was a time of magic.
It was always the women who scared me. The stories that women told and that men told were full of violence, sickness, and death. But it was the women whose stories were unrelieved by humor and filled with apocalyptic vision. No matter how awful the stories were that the men told they were always funny. The men’s stories were stories of character, rather than of circumstance, and they always knew the people the stories were about. But women would repeat stories about folks they did not know and had never seen, and consequently, without character counting for anything, the stories were as stark and cold as legend or myth.
It is midmorning, and the women have been sewing since right after breakfast when the light first came up. They are quilting, four women, one on each side of a square frame that has been suspended from the ceiling to hold the quilt. When they are through for the day, the frame can be drawn up to the ceiling out of the way, but for now the needles and thimbles click over the quiet, persistent drone of their voices.
I sit on the floor, and with me are two white-haired children, brightly decorated with purple medicine used for impetigo, and we sit there on the floor, the three of us, sucking on sugar tits, trying to avoid the notice of our mothers, who will only stop long enough to slap us if the noise of our play gets in the way of the necessary work of making quilts.
The sugar tits we are sucking on are to quiet and pacify us through the long day. They could not have worked better if they had been opium instead of flour soaked with syrup or sometimes plain sugar wrapped in a piece of cloth. We chew on the cloth and slowly the melting sweetness seeps onto our tongues and it puts us into a kind of stupor of delight, just the mood to receive the horror story when it comes.
“The Lord works in mysterious ways.”
The needles click; the heavy, stockinged legs shift almost imperceptibly.
“None of us knows the reason.”
They start talking about God. We know the horror story’s coming.
“But it is a reason.”
“Like the song says: Farther along we’ll understand why.”
“In heaven it’ll all be clearer, but here on earth He works in mysterious ways His many miracles to perform.”
“It’s no way to understand how things can sometimes be so awful. We jest got to take the good with the bad.”
“I reckon.”
“A week ago tomorrow I heard tell of something that do make a body wonder, though.”
Nobody asks what she heard. They know she’ll tell. The needles click over the thimbles in the stretching silence. Down on the floor we stop sucking and have the sugar tits caught between our teeth.
Here it comes.
“You all member Bernice’s next to youngest girl, Flo?”
“Is it the one with that pretty yeller hair saved at Ten Mile Baptist Church when Reverend Harvey was in to preach?”
“That’s the one, always smart as a whip and they sent her to Waycross, all the way there, after graduation to college, took a business course and she’s been working with Dr. Barnes in Almer since she had to quit school when that youngest of theirs was born. Anyway, I was over there a week ago tomorrow when Flo come in from work—got a real good job answering the telephone and typing up things. She took the typewriter in college, you know. She come on in from work and told me and Bernice the whole thing.”
She stopped to draw a long good breath, and the clicking needles hesitate while the breath is drawn and then click furiously, faster than ever.
“A womern come in off the street and set down. Flo didn’t know her but thought she might could have been a Woodbine womern, course it could a been any of’m at all or somebody else from down in there. Dr. Barnes, you know, done a lot of charity in Woodbine. Didn’t give her name to Flo, that is one of Flo’s jobs to git their names, but the womern didn’t give it or nothing, jest set down there and Flo seen blood running down her laig.
“Said the womern looked in her face like she was asleep or something, not crying or moaning, and all the time blood—an I don’t mean a little blood but I mean blood everywhere—was puddling in the floor like you’d taken and cut a hog’s throat and it was coming from under this woman’s dress and a running down her laig.”
And us there on the floor thinking, Merciful God, we’ll all drown in blood before this is over.
“Flo didn’t do a thing but go back there and tell Dr. Barnes it was a womern out there a setting in the chair a bleeding. Course, Dr. Barnes, he went right and got her and tuck her in his little room and it weren’t but a minute before Flo said she heard screaming and she known right off what it was and she run back there and opened the door to that little room. It was then that she seen it.”
Under the frame we can see all movement leave the stockinged legs, the knees tense, flex—all except the legs of the woman telling the story. Hers move in a timely, monotonous rhythm with the sound of her voice. And then the voice stopped, I remember her legs never missing a beat in the curious little dance she is doing.
“What Flo seen was the doctor had bent the womern over a table and had her dress flung up over her head and from between. . . .”
Here a nervous glance at us, sitting rigid now against the wall, our teeth caught in the sugar tits in a spasm of horror.
“. . . between her cheeks—and I’m talking about the aner—out of her very aner came this little arm with a little hand on the end of it.
“It was a little baby arm. Flo said she couldn’t breathe, talk, or do nothing but just stand there staring at that little arm with that little hand on the end of it. Flo said them little fingers commenced to move, wrinkled as prunes, and them little fingers seemed like they was a beckoning at Flo. Them’s her very words: a beckoning.
“Flo said she felt like she was gone faint, but before she could do it, the doctor took hold of that little arm, and when he did, that womern taken and given another scream and jumped from where he had her flung over the table and run out of the room. Flo almost fainted, she said, but she didn’t till she saw how it all come out. The doctor run after her and it taken three men to catch her in the street and hold her while the doctor taken and given her a shot.”
Down on the floor I would have sucked all the sweetness out of the sugar tit and by then eaten most of the sacking that held it.
At night it was a different story. Since I had become sick, we had a lot of company, especially at night. The people in the county had never seen such legs as mine. The first thing they had to do was inspect my legs, staring at me where I lay, often wanting to touch me, sometimes actually doing it, ten or twelve people in a row.
Then some of them would leave and some would stay to sit by the fireplace late into the night, listening to the men talk, staying so late now and then they would end up staying all night, particularly if it was a weekend.
Because the only fireplace was in the living room where I lay, everybody gathered there after supper to watch the fire and eventually wash their feet and go off to bed. If it was a very cold night, they would carry a heated quilt from the fire to put over the icy sheets.
The stories start early in the night when the fire is as big as the hearth will hold, making its own sucking roar counterpoint to the roar of the wind under the shingled eaves of the house. Men and women and children sit in a wide semicircle, faces cast red and hollow-eyed by the fire. Auntie, who still stayed with me at night, floats into and out of the room, sometimes settling by my bed, sometimes going back to the kitchen to get something for me. Now and again, a woman or young girl will rise from her chair, back up to the hearthstone and discreetly lift her skirt from behind to receive the fire. My legs have loosened now to the point where I could, if I really tried, sit in a chair, and the doctors have begun to revise their original opinion and say that, yes, there was a real chance that I might walk again.
The galvanized foot tub, holding perhaps two and a half gallons of water, captures the light on its dull surface. It is sitting in front of the first man in the semicircle. The water is getting hot. At some time during the evening, the man in front of whom it sits will slip his feet into the tub and wash. Then he will slide it to the person sitting next to him, maybe a woman, or a young girl, and that person will wash.
While the men talk, the tub makes its way around the line of people warming from the fire. After the last person washes his feet, it is only minutes before the other children will have to go off to bed and leave their daddies and uncles and older brothers to sit and talk late into the night. But I, safely in my fireroom bed, am privileged to hear whatever is said.
“Well, he was always like that.”
“Had to happen like it had to happen.”
“He jest had to win.”
“He would win.”
“Kill him to lose, jest kill’m is all.”
“I remember. . . .”
Here the man would lean back and chew on a kitchen match, and the skin would draw tight around his eyes. He might not say anything for several minutes, but those of us sitting there, watching him chew on the match stick, didn’t care how long he took to start the story because we knew that he was about to make what had been only gossip before personal and immediate now. The magic words had been spoken: “I remember. . . .”
“I remember the day it happened. I wasn’t sitting more than five or six feet from them when they got started talking on it. But I guess it was meant to happen. Both of them doing the same kind of work and him being like he was, it was bound to come to blood sooner or later.
“The hell of it was they liked each other. Nearabout like brothers as two people who ain’t blood likely to git. It’s how come them both to git on the same job at the same time climbing and topping trees for the REA right-of-way. They was both good at it, too. Jest about the god-awfulest climbers you ever seen. Like monkeys nearabout where climbing was concerned.
“First time I notice them talking about it, they was eating out of their dinner buckets, and I heard Leroy say, ‘You cain’t beat me at nothing. That’s what you can beat me at, Pete, nothing.’
“What they was arguing about was which one of them could climb the fastest, and Leroy, of course, right away said it was him, said there was nobody in the state of Georgia could climb a tree or nothing else as fast as him, Leroy, could. Leroy’s face was all red, the veins standing out in his neck, and he was kind of slobbering like a dog. You remember, he was bad to slobber. Oh, he was hot about it, he was.
“Pete musta said he could climb faster than Leroy—I didn’t hear it, but that musta been what he said—and now Leroy was inviting him out to see which one of them was the best at it. You see, we’d put up light poles down the middle of the right-of-way we’d cut, but it weren’t no insulation knobs or crosspieces on them yetawhile.
“Nothing wouldn’t do Leroy, soon as Pete said he could climb faster’n him, but the two of’m go on out there and both of’m git at the bottom of two different poles and somebody else git between the two poles to start’m climbing by clapping his hands. First one to the top could be the winner. Leroy wouldn’t have it no other way.
“Pete tried to back out of it three times, but Leroy said: ‘No, goddammit, you ought not to a gone and said I couldn’t do it. Said I was slower’n you. Now we got to see whose ass is the blackest.’
“That boy had a bad mouth, he did. Always had one, jest like his daddy. Anyway, they got up from their dinner buckets and put on their climbing rigs: big thick safety belts that loop around the pole, then inch-and-a-half climbing jack-spikes buckled to their boots. Leroy walked off down the line and got at the bottom of one of them lectric poles and Pete, he got on the Nigh pole. On account of I was the closest one to him, they said: ‘You get in the middle there, Bob, and do it for us. You clap the third time, we go.’
“Well, I didn’t want to do it cause I was afraid Pete might somehow beat him, and if he did, Leroy might kill somebody, maybe hisself. He was crazy about winning. At anything. I’d heard him myself say he’d jest as soon die as lose. Nothing wouldn’t do him, though, but I git in the middle and start them off, which I did.
“They had the wide safety belts looped around the poles and their spikes set when I clapped my hand. They started climbing, and I seen right away that Leroy didn’t have nothing to worry about. It made me feel better that nobody was gone git hurt, and I stood back to watch the climb.
“Before his spikes hit the pole six times, he was already a foot higher than Pete was. What he was doing, see, was going for it, gonna win or bust.
“He was holding onto the safety belt that went around the pole with both hands and he was a climbing, puffing, his feet working, hitting that lectric pole with them spikes, driving up it, and when his feet would come up to take a fresh hold, he’d flip that leather belt with both hands and he was looking down, straight down between his pumping knees, and never looking up and flipping that belt and driving with his feet, and when he got to the top of the pole, well, bless Pat, he didn’t do a thing but flip that leather belt right over the top of that pole and come sailing back down on the back of his head and broke his neck. Dead fore we could git there. Damn boy’d do anything to win. It was so smooth, it looked like a goddamn trick. It mighta been, too.”