Betsy Richard, as she was known since she was an orphan boarding with the Richards at the mill, did go on to find a husband. She and her baby lived through the day after they boarded the Ponce de Leon in Florence, and the day after that, through Atlanta, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Lexington. That she made it all the way to Cincinnati, Ohio, the last stop on the Southern Railway, was due in no small part to the Pullman porter, whose name was Phillip, and who produced without the notice of other passengers orange juice and chicken legs from the dining car, and a blanket to cover her nursing breast, and from Betsy’s own suitcase, a clean dress to change into when her bleeding soaked the train seat. While she made her way to the hopper, he held the baby girl, who was named, halfway through the trip, Tennessee, and when the mother and daughter got off in Ohio, Phillip scrubbed the seat with the girl’s discarded dress and sent them to his mother, who owned a rooming house in Over-the-Rhine. It was there that the pair lived, first next door to Phillip, when the train brought him home, and then, when they married, in the two rooms together, the wall between them sledgehammered. She did not return to Florence, because her colored husband could not provide the disguise George Wilson expected. That was only one of the reasons she married him. He was kind and, mostly, he was gone. She had not realized it was his mother she would be marrying. On days when she knocked on the door at all hours, saying do this, try this, baby won’t grow if you feed her that, Betsy missed the Richards, their cold, quiet ways, her neat little bed in the mill village. The Richards left her bed untouched. They mourned her like a lost daughter. Her spite for George Wilson became theirs.
The baby did not sleep in Betsy’s open suitcase, as Nan had imagined, but it was Betsy Nan thought of her first night in Warm Springs, when she opened her own suitcase in the colored dormitory and made a nest of it for Wilson. Well, it was Carlotta Rawls’s suitcase, leather, with brass clasps, too large for all of Nan’s things. She lined one side of it with sackcloth diapers, stacked her clothes in the other side so it would lie flat on the floor. She slept lightly, as she always did, and woke with a start from a dream that the jaws of the suitcase had snapped shut, trapping Wilson inside. She was sleeping on the bottom of a bunk and slammed her head on the bed above as she sat up.
A light went on. A girl’s bare legs swung over the edge of the top bunk. “You all right, little momma?”
The girl was as little as Nan, a daughter or granddaughter or niece of Aubie’s, but she talked like she’d never not known everything there was to know. She hopped down from the bunk, landing easily on her two feet. She wore two swinging braids on either side of her lollipop neck. Her name was Elvie.
Nan nodded and leaned down to the suitcase, where Wilson was breathing roughly in his sleep. As he slept, his hands and feet floated and then fell, as though he were trying to keep from swimming up to the ceiling. He winced and stirred. Was it the light that was bothering him? She looked closer. Elvie knelt beside her. His hands were swollen hugely, two purple rubber mittens. Nan peeled off his socks—his feet too. His feet were swollen too.
She scooped him up and shuttled him to her bed, and as soon as he was in her lap he was awake, howling. His eyes opened and locked on to hers. He looked at her and he howled and his hot little body twisted in her lap and she had to struggle to hold him still, to keep him from slipping to the floor like a bar of soap. In waking he had remembered how to cry. He had remembered he was in pain. She shouldn’t have moved him. She shouldn’t have woken him.
“Poor baby,” Elvie said. “He’s got colic.”
Nan shook her head firmly. No. No, he did not have colic. His forehead was clammy, his whole body hot except his hands and feet, which were cold to the touch.
Holding Wilson to her shoulder, she nodded toward the door. Elvie looked at her blankly.
“You want me to leave?”
Nan pointed at the door, more fiercely. She made a loop—pointing, then returning her finger to the room.
“You want me to come back?”
Nan stomped. She walked her fingers, two racing legs, through the air. She leapt up and began to scribble with an invisible pen against the door, her eyes darting about for a real pen, some paper.
“You want me to get help and come back,” Elvie somehow managed. Proudly she got up and left the room. While she was gone Nan tried to quiet the baby with her breast, and though he latched on hungrily at first he began to cry again as soon as her milk was down, as though he’d forgotten how foul it tasted. Elvie came back with Aubie, stooped in a night bonnet, struggling to put on her eyeglasses. Once she had them on she took a long look at Wilson in Nan’s arms. She didn’t touch him.
She said over his howling, “This child got hand and mouth.”
Nan opened her eyes wide, asking for more.
“Hand, foot, and mouth?” Aubie wondered, looking at the fat bottom of Wilson’s foot. “One a them. Look at them feet. It’s a childhood illness.”
Nan nodded. Hand, foot, and mouth. A childhood illness.
“It’ll pass with the fever.”
Nan nodded. A fever. But Wilson was writhing in her arms. She couldn’t seem to get him still. He needed a doctor. He needed Oliver.
She nodded toward the door again. She scrawled more words on an imaginary pad. Did nobody read or write in this place? She knelt down to a seated position and wheeled an imaginary chair.
Elvie said, “You want a wheelchair?”
Nan spun her free hand encouragingly. The door opened, and behind it, two other maids, their heads wrapped, their robes tied, peeked in.
“Who’s crying?”
“It’s the nurse’s baby,” Elvie said. “Little momma.”
“She a nurse?”
“She don’t know we ain’t have no colored nurses here.”
“If she a nurse,” Aubie said, “she know it’s hand and mouth. Baby’s got a fever is all.”
“Close that door. Gone wake the whole house.”
“What time is it?”
“Time for that baby to quiet down.”
“He needs an ice bath.”
“Whose nurse is she?”
“Ain’t the time for no midnight ice bath.”
“Can’t she talk?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“She want a wheelchair,” Elvie told them.
Nan shook her head no.
“She want the governor?”
Nan stood still, considering. The governor would do.
Aubie laughed a tired laugh. “He won’t be keen on getting woke in the middle of the night by no sick colored child.”
“I ain’t keen on it, either,” another woman said, appearing in the door and opening it wider.
“He’s just a baby,” Elvie said.
“What’s he got?”
“Hand foot mouth,” Aubie said. “Just a fever. Y’all go back to bed.” The women left, Aubie the last of them. “Try to keep that baby quiet now. Ply him with milk. We ain’t need no attention called on us.” When the door was nearly closed, she put her head back in and said, “Don’t be getting no ideas about going to no crippled white folks’ hotel.”
Elvie swung herself up to the top bunk and turned out the light. “Good night, little momma. Good night, little man.”
For a moment the darkness seemed to startle Wilson’s cries quiet. His body stilled. Perhaps it had been the light after all that had set him off. Nan felt her heart slow and realized how madly it had been pounding. It was quiet enough to hear Elvie’s nose whistling like a child’s toy.
Carefully she slid back on the bed to the concrete wall and rested against it, not daring to move Wilson from her arms. For what might have been a few minutes, the two dozed together in peaceful exhaustion. But all the while her mind did the restless math it did through her dreams—where was Wilson, where was Winna, where was Elma, where was Juke, the distance to the closest bed, the closest door.
Then she woke suddenly in the darkness, understanding her mistake. The room was too quiet. Wilson lay still in her arms, too still. His body was boiling.
Without stopping to think it through, to question, to take a blanket, she leapt out of bed and stalked barefoot through the door and, closing it quietly behind her, through the hall. The hall was long and concrete and featureless and lit by a trail of high bulbs against which her eyes strained. She did not know her way. She turned to the left, tiptoeing fast, and when she couldn’t find a door, turned right. She tiptoed as though the concrete floor burned her feet. Finally she found the exit and went out into the night. There was a sidewalk under her feet and she followed it. There was a moon and she found it. In the shadowy distance, couched in a horizon of pines, she could see the shape of a house, large, dark, hulking. It wasn’t the governor’s house, but she went to it. Was it the crippled folks’ hotel? Was it where she would find Oliver? And was that a porch light on? The sky was swarming with stars, and she cranked her head back to drink them in. Orion, Cassiopeia, Castor and Pollux. She might have been walking the farm. She was under the same stars. She remembered the night she and Genus hid behind the bedsheet. And now she half-expected a clothesline to take off her head. Wilson lay hot and limp against her breast. He was sleeping. He was just sleeping. It seemed a mile between the dormitory and the inn, to the dim porch light swarmed with mosquitoes, and it seemed that was where she was going.
She must have been quiet as a shadow. She paused before the first porch step. In the white light, she thought she could make out a porch swing, and someone on it. She could hear the creaking of the chains. And then she must have made a sound, or Wilson did—was it Wilson?—because the someone moved, startled. The dark shape on the swing pulled apart and became two dark shapes. “Someone there?”
It was Q. L. Boothby’s voice. In answer, Nan took two steps up the stairs and there they could see each other clearly. He wore a bathrobe, his pipe peeking out of its pocket, and without his hat she could see his hair was thinning. The someone next to him was a young man. She thought he was one of the men who had been playing cards the day before. Now he wore a pair of pinstripe pajamas. His dark wet hair was combed neatly, his hands were on his knees, his Adam’s apple was trembling, and it was the first time Nan had seen a white man afraid. Beside the swing sat a black, empty wheelchair.
“Heaven’s sake,” said Mr. Boothby, standing up from the swing and coming down a step. “What in Heaven are you doing, girl, roaming about here in the middle of the night?”
He stood over her, hands on his hips, and she could see that his hands too were trembling.
By way of explanation, she shifted Wilson in her arms, showing him.
“What have you there?” he whispered, as though he had not seen a human child before. He did not understand because he was looking about, over her head, worried that someone else had heard, was coming. “Come inside,” he said. “Get the hell out of the dark.”
The young man had shifted himself into the wheelchair. “It’s all right,” Mr. Boothby told him, holding a finger to his lips. “It’s all right. Better take care of this. Time to turn in. I’m sorry,” he said. “Get some sleep.”
Without a word, the man bowed his head and wheeled himself through the door Mr. Boothby held open for him, and then he wheeled himself across the black-and-white tiled lobby and disappeared down the hall. Nan stood looking after him. She found she wondered what it was his voice sounded like.
Mr. Boothby settled himself behind the great fortress of the front desk and lit his pipe. He picked up a pen and the pad of paper in front of him and pulled the telephone close, as though he’d been in the middle of a story and that was what she’d interrupted.
“I have a call to make.”
She looked from the telephone to his face, and he looked away.
“It’s three in the afternoon in Tokyo.” Then: “I was interviewing that young man.” He started to say more, then stopped. “What is it?” he asked her. “What are you looking for in the middle of the night? You’ll get us both in hot water!”
Again she showed him the baby.
“You can’t speak a word, can you?”
She gave her head a single shake.
“Not a word?”
She put her hand to Wilson’s cheek, his feverish forehead, but Q. L. Boothby was now looking past her, down the hall, and a smile came to his face. “I’m not the one who should be worried. Why should I be worried? You can’t say a word.”
She would not waste another minute. She leaned over the desk, spun the pad of paper around, and took the pen from the man’s hand. Flipping to a new sheet, she wrote in clear and tall letters, NEED DR. RAWLS.
He removed the pipe from his mouth. Slowly the smile fell from his face.
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
She did not have time for his admiration.
On a new line, she wrote, MY SON IS DYING.
* * *
He was a doctor, and so it was his job to solve. To find a solution.
From the Latin solutionem—a loosening or unfastening. And from the Old French solucion—division, dissolving. It was the kind of division he could understand. Solving for x. Dissolving the tablets. Resolving. But also: the termination of a disease by a crisis. There were cases where crisis was the only cure.
He loved a crisis. He loved an emergency. When he was six, his sister had fallen from the roof, where she had climbed to rescue a lodged kite, and he had run to his father’s office to fetch him, bare feet slapping the sidewalk, the adrenaline ballooning his lungs. He had never been happier. There was no high higher than saving someone, than solving.
Before a crisis could be solved, it had to be identified as a crisis. For Oliver, this was normally no difficulty. He would declare a sprain a crisis if it meant he could solve it. But when Quincy Boothby roused him from his bed with the note, he refused to accept the emergency.
“It’s from the girl. Nancy. Did you know she writes?”
Maybe it was that shame of not knowing—he couldn’t accept Nan’s message because he couldn’t believe that she’d written it. “No, no,” he said without thinking. There had to be another explanation. He fumbled for his glasses. Then, as his bearings came to him, reading the note a third time, he said, “Yes, of course I knew. But it can’t be so dire.” He had just seen Wilson yesterday—he was feverish, but not dying. “Let’s see the child.”
It wouldn’t do to bring him into Oliver’s room. It was strange enough that both men were there in their pajamas. “Bring him into the exam room,” Oliver said.
“Oliver. You know you can’t do a thing like that.”
Oliver shifted his legs over the edge of the bed, the good one and then the bad. “Is there no colored exam room?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Well, do they see no colored children here?” He reached for his wheelchair, his mind paging back through his summers, and dropped his arm. Of course he could not remember a single colored child in the waters.
“I’m afraid not.”
Only now did he adopt the necessary outrage. “Quincy, my God. This is an emergency! It’s the middle of the night! I will see him in the lobby.”
In Nan’s arms, Wilson looked smaller, like Winna Jean’s rag doll. He was sleeping. Nan looked relieved and terrified all at once. She sat down in the chair across from the desk and Oliver wheeled over to her, his satchel in his lap, Wilson in hers. Quincy stood over his shoulder, puffing furiously on his pipe. Oliver took the baby’s temperature; even the thermometer hung limply from his mouth. While they watched the mercury rise, Oliver counted his pulse. Listened to his heart. His lungs. He handled his poor swollen hands, his feet. He had the strange feeling that he was holding Daisy’s hand—her hands too had been swollen, had been cold. His mind paged through the solutions. His own pulse raced. He knew nothing, he was a fraud—it was what he thought every time he fitted the stethoscope to his ears—but he knew enough to know that a quiet baby was worse than a crying one.
For many breaths they all waited in the cloud of pipe smoke, in the light of the tea-colored bulb. Nan sat in the wooden chair that was like the chair where he had first seen her with Wilson in her lap. He had thought he had known her then, that first day. He had thought he could save her. He had thought he could speak for her. And look—all this time she could speak for herself.
He reached out a hand and placed it on hers, which lay over Wilson’s gently rising ribs. Then he slipped the thermometer from the baby’s mouth and shook it. “He’s not dying.”
He felt her exhale.
“But he’s sick. He’s got an infection. What we call hand-foot syndrome. That’s why he’s so swelled up. The oxygen isn’t getting to his extremities.”
Nan nodded steadily.
“He needs fluids. When did he last eat?”
She weaved her head ambiguously.
Quincy tapped his shoulder. He handed him the pad of paper and a pen. Oliver considered. Then he rested the pad on his knees and fit the pen into her hand. She looked at him, as though to ask if he was sure. She wasn’t so desperate now. She took her time to make the letters straight. On a clean sheet, she wrote, Wont take my milk.
Oliver swallowed. “All right, then. We’ll see if he won’t take some sugar water from a spoon. And we’ll give him something to make him more comfortable.” He zipped his bag. “Mr. Boothby, will you help me in the kitchen?”
Nan closed her hand around Oliver’s wrist, keeping him there. With her pen, she wrote something else, and then she turned the pad toward him.
Thank you.
Oliver closed his eyes. He found he couldn’t look at her. He nodded.
The kitchen reeked of boiled eggs. They fumbled along the wall until they found the light switch. They fumbled in the pantry until they found the sugar. Quincy warmed a kettle of water on the stove and Oliver tested the temperature on his wrist. Too hot. They added more cold water until Oliver was satisfied.
“Is he going to make it?” Quincy asked.
Oliver measured out a teaspoon of the morphine powder, its crystals feathery in the low kitchen light. “I believe so.”
“What is it? What kind of infection?”
He released the powder into the water and stirred. “Splenic.”
Quincy stared. Oliver turned to him.
“An infection of the spleen.”
Quincy nodded. It meant nothing to him. Oliver’s mind too still hadn’t caught up. It was focused on performing the steps. He dried the spoon on his robe. He lowered it into the sugar. His mind was dosing out the word to him: crisis crisis crisis.
He plunged the sugar into the tumbler and stirred. He watched the cloud evaporate and the water clear.
“Splenic crisis,” he said.
Quincy did not understand. He turned away and lifted the piece of paper he had brought to Oliver’s room. He held it to the light. MY SON.
“What are we to believe here, Oliver? She’s the child’s mother all along?” Even at three o’clock in the morning, he was a newspaper reporter first.
Oliver stared through the tumbler on the counter.
“And Jesup is the father? Is that what we’re to believe?”
Quincy studied the words as though they contained some kind of code. Oliver was as misguided as he was. For years he had studied the cells under slides, for years they had wallpapered his dreams. But never since Daisy had he seen the signs in a child in his care. Now he allowed it to settle over him, the satisfaction of the solution, the great dissolving relief of diagnosis, even with its deathly new weight.
No. Oliver thought the word but didn’t say it. No, they weren’t to believe it.
* * *
The next day is Easter. The maids are up early to dye the eggs. The eggs are blue and yellow and cotton-candy pink, but the kitchen still smells of them, of boiled eggs, which is to say rotten eggs, and will smell rotten for three more days, so that on Wednesday Aubie will go looking under the sink, in the cupboards, to be sure that a possum has not gone and died. By that time they will be gone from this place, Oliver and Wilson and Nan. Now the maids prepare coffee and grapefruit and bacon and eggs and, in small crystal bowls, grits, which Aubie says the governor enjoys with brown sugar. The maids laugh wickedly at this. One by one the trays disappear from the kitchen. Nan listens from her room for the kitchen to empty, and then she takes Wilson and tiptoes down the hall. Oliver has said he will meet her there. He will check on Wilson at eight o’clock. She will wait for him.
In the kitchen the dozen dozen eggs are drying on racks, and the breeze coming in the open window seems to make the smell not better but worse. The smell of the eggs makes Nan feel restless and crazed. Is she the only one who smells the smell of a dozen dozen boiled eggs? Wilson has slept a few hours that morning—he took the sugar water the night before; perhaps the medicine is working—but now he begins to cry again. Nan believes he is in pain and she is right, but he is also crying over the insult of the eggs in his nostrils, eggs which in another hour will be hidden by the maids under jutting rocks, in mounds of grass, at the webbed feet of pines, to be discovered another hour later by white children too lame to reach them: with this too the maids will help. There will be a child Elvie’s age, twelve and a half, with two braids just like hers, who will sit perched in the throne of her wheelchair and point to an egg Elvie herself has hidden, clever girl, in a metal rainspout, and Elvie will clap her hands gamely for the child until she finds she can’t get the egg out of the gutter, can’t coax it out with a stick, can’t shake it out, until she does, and the egg rolls out and falls to the ground and, to Elvie’s disappointment, does not break. She will place it in the girl’s basket on a cloud of Easter grass.
While Wilson sleeps in his suitcase and Nan in her bunk, Oliver has been lying in his room down the hall from the kitchen, not sleeping. The rotten smell hangs over his bed. At seven he is awake and dressed and on the telephone at the front desk of the lobby. The receiver tastes of Quincy Boothby’s pipe tobacco. He is dialing Charles Mercer. It is a Sunday morning at seven o’clock, Easter Sunday. Charles Mercer does not answer the telephone at the office. He does not answer the telephone at his home. Charles Mercer is most likely eating Easter brunch in his mother’s dining room. Oliver returns to his room and rolls his chair back and forth across its length. He is pacing. He returns to the front desk, places two more calls, returns to his room. What has kept Oliver awake, what keeps him pacing now, is not Wilson’s illness—the baby will live, of that much he is sure—but his face. He tries to piece it together. Are his eyes hazel or green? His brow narrow or wide? He wants to know how a baby who has sickle cell disease could have the face of Juke Jesup. Because it is Juke Jesup’s face that the baby has.
It is Elma’s face. He closes his eyes. He tries for a moment to piece her face together. He can only see pieces at a time. He knows nothing at all.
Does she know? Elma? Does Nan know? Have they known all this time, and it’s he who’s been in the dark? Has his wife kept him—cruelly, unforgivably—in the dark?
He opens his eyes. He’s getting ahead of himself: he needs more facts. He needs the blood.
There are seventeen Mercers in the Atlanta telephone directory he finds in a drawer of the desk. He has apologized to six of them by seven fifty in the morning, at which point he reaches a Mercer, Mrs. Harold, of Crescent Avenue, and is connected to Charles Mercer, his mentor and friend, who sounds as tired as Oliver is awake.
“Mercer!” he laughs. “I’ve found you!”
It’s such a relief, such a victory, he forgets for a moment his reason for calling. He clears his throat.
“Mercer, the samples I sent you.”
“Did you get them?”
“Did I get the samples?”
“Did you get the results.”
“You tested them?”
“Sure I did. I’ve got the results here in my briefcase. I mailed them days ago. You didn’t get them?”
He pictures the mail slot back on Main Street, the letters piling up on the mat.
“I’ll be damned,” says Oliver. “I’ve left that address, Mercer.” Only as he says it does he understand it’s true: he has left.
“I’ve been trying to reach you, Oliver. I called and called.”
He had expected Mercer to be short-tempered, reluctant. “I’m sorry, Mercer.”
“Listen. You want me to read them to you?”
“Please. Please, Mercer, if you don’t mind.”
Oliver can hear stirring on the other end of the line. “Hold on a minute.” The sounds seem like kitchen sounds, and then he realizes he is hearing the sounds from the dining hall. The guests are coming down the stairs for their breakfast. Oliver looks at his watch. Nearly eight o’clock.
“All right,” says Charles Mercer, “I’ve got them here.”
“I’m ready,” says Oliver.
Mercer reads the results with a level voice. Eight types, all told. Oliver records them on the notepad, hand trembling, ink pen bleeding, a column of letters down the right side—
For several moments, the letters are as meaningless to Oliver as they are to Mercer. A report card of sorts. The characters might as well be numbers, or another language. Oliver cups his hand around them, to protect them from view. “All right,” he says. He must focus. He must eliminate. He circles three of the names:
He draws a chart, arrows; he underlines. Nobody, including Oliver himself, could be asked to make any sense of them. He adds a final name and a final letter, which he has memorized from the autopsy report:
“Mercer, I don’t have my books with me. I’m a little foggy on the types. The child. Wilson Jesup.”
“He’s a B.”
“Which means . . .” He doesn’t want to say it out loud, but he feels he must make certain. “Which means he can’t be son to an A.”
“That’s right,” says Mercer.
“But a B.”
“He could be son to a B.”
“All right,” says Oliver. He swallows. “All right, then. You’re sure, Mercer?”
“We ran all the slides twice. We were slow around the lab, needed something for the new technician to get her hands on.”
“You got a new technician? A woman?”
“Don’t be sore, Oliver. We ain’t paying her much. She’s just a kid, needed the hours.”
“I’ll be damned,” says Oliver.
“Don’t be sore. It’s a good thing we did. I had a feeling. We ran the child’s sample.”
“Wilson?”
“Never seen sickles sharp as that, Oliver. Telltale.” Mercer can hardly keep the excitement out of his voice. “Poor pickaninny’s inherited more than a blood type.”
“I suspected,” Oliver says.
“I was calling and calling. He’s going to need care.”
“He’ll get care.”
“I’m glad you reached me, Oliver.”
“Mercer, you’ll keep it confidential. I don’t have to ask you—”
“Of course, of course.”
He sits for a moment, looking at the pad. From the dining hall comes the ringing of forks and spoons. The letters merge and part like cells under a slide. He is happening on something, something frightful. His mind is working against it as hard as it is working toward it.
“Oliver.”
When he looks up, Quincy Boothby is standing beside the front desk, wearing a fresh gray suit with a red handkerchief blooming from its pocket. He stands with his hands behind his back, his mouth around an unlit pipe, waiting.
“All right then,” Oliver says into the phone. “Thank you kindly.”
He hangs up, folds the paper into quarters, and places it in the breast pocket of his own suit.
“What you got there?”
He stands. “Nothing of worldly concern.” What is recorded in his pocket will not be printed in a newspaper. He will not burn it. He is too afraid he’ll forget it. But he will keep it hidden, a code only he can discern.
“We all want to know the truth, Oliver.”
“Why? Why do we? What good does it do us?”
“It doesn’t. It doesn’t do us any good.”
“Stop being a reporter, Quincy. For Heaven’s sake, for five minutes, stop being a reporter.”
Quincy removes his pipe and smiles. “What shall I be?”
Oliver says, “Be a man.”
* * *
So for the hour after breakfast, while the children inch their chairs across the green lawn and the maids follow behind them, their white aprons feather-dusting the grass, the baskets filling contentedly with eggs, the sky above them all a fragile Easter-egg blue, the distant radio singing “The Old Rugged Cross,” Q. L. Boothby stands guard outside the white walls of the springs and Aubie stands guard inside them. They each know something about sneaking into the springs at night, and they don’t ask questions. Oliver once daydreamt about doing the same with his wife. Or they’d slip out to the lawn, and Elma would lay out a blanket and undress with him under the stars and at last they’d be husband and wife to each other. That was the kind of place it was, he thought. He was a man of medicine, and yet he had seen lame children stand from their wheelchairs and walk. What might it have done for him, had his wife been there?
Now Nan helps him slide out of his chair and into the water. There might be an hour left of its magic, he hopes, before it turns cold and bitter, drained of its healing powers. He wears the bathing suit he’s packed in his suitcase, the one he’s worn season after season, when he was a man young enough to believe that this place was any better than any other. Nan wears an old suit borrowed from the young maid named Elvie, though the only occasion Elvie ever has to wear it is to a swimming hole carved out of the woods not far off, where she likes to slip away to meet the boy who shoes horses on the neighboring farm, lying on the flat rock like a lizard drying in the sun. It’s a white suit with a full flounced skirt, and in it Nan’s long, thin arms and legs look darker, and in his black suit, Oliver’s thin arms and legs look lighter. His left leg is as thin as Nan’s. He watches her watch him. They slip their slim bodies into the pool. And then Aubie slips Wilson, naked, into his mother’s arms.
At first, he braces. His little back buckles. He cries out, and Nan tenses, and he tenses too. The water is warm, heavenly warm to Nan—she understands all at once its allure, understands how chilly the air was—but how does it feel against the baby’s feverish skin? Too hot? Too cold? She holds him at chest height, one arm behind his head, trying to help him float on his back. He squirms, then stills, his eyes rolling back, and then he pisses, startled, legs churning, into the holy water. They laugh with relief because his body is doing the most ordinary thing it knows how to do.
“The water will regulate his temperature,” Oliver tells her.
She nods. She can see what the water does to Oliver too—how steady he is, how straight.
“It will help with the circulation. The swelling.”
She nods.
“Inflammation. The pain.”
She nods.
“It’s the magnesium. It’s not like bathwater,” he says, as though she has objected. Too often her silence is mistaken for objection. Too often her silence is mistaken for assent. She is assenting. What other choice does she have? She is wondering what her mother would do if she were here. What herbs she would stuff into a poultice for Wilson’s hands and feet. Why not believe in the magic waters? She senses Oliver is stalling, and he is. The truth is, there is not yet much to be done. Even at the colored hospital in Americus, where they will find themselves by the end of the day, where Wilson will be admitted to his own room, where they will not need anyone to stand guard at the door, they will only be able to administer the morphine Oliver has already given him, and pump his little body full of fluids. It will be years before transfusions will become common for sickle cell, but already Oliver is thinking, I would give him my blood if I could, imagines it coursing, oxygen-blue, through the little boy’s veins, though he knows very well that his blood would not take, that Wilson is a B—how will he tell her?—and that he, like Juke Jesup, like George Wilson—curse his blood—is an A.
He cannot save him. Wilson has his own blood, with its own curse.
“Nan,” he begins.
Nan is cupping her hands with the silky water and letting it slide over the boy’s belly. The boy likes this. It calms him. In another time, in another country, they might have been a family. They might have been lovers. Aubie, indeed, watching from afar, believes that Oliver is the child’s father. She sees the child’s light skin, his green eyes, his red hair, sees the way the doctor is studying the child’s face, reading it, as though looking for his own. But it’s another man’s face the doctor is looking for. Problem is, he doesn’t know what that man’s face looks like. Only Nan knows for sure anymore. Aubie cannot hear the words that pass between them. She watches from the deck, folding the white towels that are warm from the line. The radio floats over the wall and ripples on the water. She believes they’re the words of star-crossed lovers stealing a few minutes together with their sick child, and who is she to deprive them of their privacy? She doesn’t know that his words are bringing her the greatest sadness and the greatest joy of her life—the name of the child’s illness, and the name of his father.
She sees the girl cry. She hears her. It is a hard sound to hear, the sound of a mute girl crying. Even if the girl did not have such a hard time making sounds, it would be hard to know what pain brought them. If Aubie had to bet, and she makes a bet with herself, folding a towel over her arm, she’d bet that the crying is the crying of a girl who must leave her lover.
Oliver puts his arm on Nan’s shoulder. Her tears bring him pain, but also relief: She did not know. She did not lie. Elma did not lie. Together they help to hold Wilson in the water. For a moment he seems to float between them, a turtle on his back. His eyes shine up at the sky, glass-bottle green. Jesup eyes. Looking at the child, his wife’s face finally takes form in front of him.
There is something else he must tell Nan. Something else the letters have spelled. Sitting at the front desk, after Quincy had left, he took a final look at the notepaper, unfolding it from his jacket pocket, to be certain.
It was the rarest of the types, rare enough that he knew no man of that type could be father to a child of O.
There at the desk, he let the force of the fact come to him. From the kitchen, the smell of the hard-boiled eggs turned his stomach.
“Good God,” he said aloud.
Now, in the water, he watches Nan watch her child.
Must he tell her? That the father she has loved, who has returned to her, isn’t her father at all? That the reason her baby has Juke Jesup’s face is that he isn’t her baby’s father, but hers?
In the coming years, as her face fills out to its womanly proportions, the possibility will cross her mind—skate over it, never landing on its feet. She will look at her own face in the mirror and see Juke. She will see George Wilson. She will see the face of the mule breeder, whose name, she does not know, is Early Bledsoe, whose face she doesn’t know, either. She will see in her face the face of old white men. By then, she’ll be old enough, she’ll have loved enough, to imagine what sins might have driven her mother mad enough to take her own child’s voice. She’ll think of her not with judgment but sympathy as she looks at the men in the market, at the swimming pool, at the many doctors’ offices she will visit with Wilson, in cities in the South and cities in the North, colored men, white men, Indian men, men from distant continents. In them she will see her face. She will think that, if you go deep enough into history, anybody could be your father, and each time she is surprised when the thought brings her not just despair but comfort.
She will not see her face in Sterling’s face, but she will see Sterling’s face in Sterling’s face, for he won’t be just a memory to her, not for a long time. She will have him there with her, his face, his own face, and that is enough.
But she will never again doubt that Genus is her child’s father. What Oliver tells her in Warm Springs will settle in her like clay. Of course: of course he is. Despite the shape of the cells in his blood, Wilson will grow up to live longer than his blood-cursed father, longer than his grandmother with her poisoned tongue. He will eat grapefruit, travel across the ocean, read English and Latin and Greek, play baseball, build a house, watch a movie in a darkened theater with a white girl he loves. He will be tall like his father, with his father’s soft voice and deep laugh and large hands, and he will become a father himself. He will walk his father’s walk, long, loping steps, bending his back like a sickle to ease the pain in his gut, though he will try not to, because it makes his mother close her eyes. He will try not to drink alcohol, because that makes his mother close her eyes too. It will be the morphine, then, he comes to depend on, the morphine fed to him since he was a baby, mixed with a sugar spoon, morphine he can find all too easily from the doctor who for a short time is a kind of father to him. The doctor will spend many years shaking his head sadly. More than once he will have to close the door to the boy, when he is not a boy any longer. More than once the mother will have to find a new hiding place for her coin purse. The mother too will have to send the boy away. She will always open the door again, because she will always be sorry that, when he was born, when she saw his face emerge from her, she did not have the faith to believe his father was his father. And because of these things she will love him too much.
Now the mother and the doctor hold the boy in the water. He is breathing in the sky. The boy is hers, and he is his father’s. Why deny her what blessing there is to find in this moment? Why must blood be thicker than water?
So he doesn’t tell her the rest. No one else will know what Oliver knows—not Nan or Elma or, he must believe, Juke himself. Even a beast as great as he could not know his own beastliness.
Oliver has already told one lie that morning, and now it will be two. After he hung up with Mercer, after he was free of Quincy, and after he looked once more at the folded paper, he sat for a moment in the front lobby, the plates and glasses still clattering down the hall. He steadied his breath. He thought about what George Wilson had told him in his office. He’d said, “A Wilson takes care of his own, but only if they blood.” He thought about the way his own father had tried and failed to leave something for his children. Oliver had thought George was talking about Freddie, but now he understood the only thing that would drive a dying man to such lengths, why he’d insisted on Oliver taking his own blood: he was talking about himself.
Before he lost his nerve, he picked up the telephone again and dialed the number on George Wilson’s card. When he answered, Oliver said, “You told me to guess. This is me guessing.” He said, “You want to know if Nancy Smith is your daughter.” George was silent. Was he pleased? Fearful? He told the old man what he thought he wanted, despite himself, to hear. There were two men who could have been father to Nan, and though he believed with all he knew that it wasn’t George Wilson, he gave her the father who might do her more good than harm. “You aren’t to tell her. She already has a father she loves. But if you don’t see that she’s provided for, I will see that every paper in Georgia knows what God knows.”
The springs are more like blood than water anyway, placental, plasmic, magnesium rich. The three of them are bathing in it, Oliver, Nan, and Wilson, this fluid their bodies are not supposed to share. Over the white wall, the Easter egg hunt goes on. The children shriek happily. The radio asks, Are you washed in the blood of the lamb? They are washed. They are washing Wilson, making him new. A verse comes to Oliver, a bit of Scripture Irene has written for him to find in his memory right now: This is He who came by water and blood. He finds the rest of the words, speaks them out loud: “‘And this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.’”
Nan isn’t thinking of Scripture. She is thinking of Genus, standing in the cool creek with him, the water up to their ribs—like this—the stones under their feet.
She is thinking of Wilson, his baptism in that creek. He was in another mother’s arms then. He was given another man’s name.
Now she lifts the slippery baby and asks his forgiveness. She will not allow that to happen again. She will give him a new name. She does not wait for the doctor to anoint them. She holds Wilson to her breast and together they go under.
They are safe. They are underwater. They are washed in the warm womb of the springs. She opens her eyes. She speaks his name to him through the water: Wilson Jackson. Wilson Jackson. Wilson Jackson. His eyes are open too. The walls of the pool are the smooth white inside of an eggshell. The blue sky is very far away.
And then they rise.