Oliver might not have seen it that morning had he not been waiting for the paper. He’d made a habit of waking early, before the rest of the house and before the sun, so he could fetch the paper from the porch steps where the newsboy thunked it, sit at the table with a cup of coffee, and slip out any news he deemed unsuitable for his wife. There was trouble in Scottsboro, Alabama, where a mob was set to lynch nine Negro youths for raping two white girls on a train. He didn’t need Elma reading that aloud over breakfast, nor any word about her father. But that morning the news was painted across 52 Main, in tar black letters ten inches tall, one word on each step:
NIGGER
LOVING
DOCTOR
Oliver’s legs didn’t like stairs. He had to hobble down, clinging to the railing, to reach the sidewalk. He raised himself on his legs and read the words, the dew on the pear blossoms above him glowing blue in the early light. Then he took his cane around back to the shed and found a stiff brush and a gallon of white house paint. He had to sit on the steps in order to paint them, and he got some paint on the cuffs of his pajama pants. By the time he’d dressed and left for work, his good leg was as tired as it was at the end of the day.
It was a Wednesday and not a wash day, and the pajamas lay in the wicker wash basket on the bedroom floor and Winna Jean crawled around it in the way she’d taken to, not on her knees but on her hands and feet, like a baby bear with her rump in the air. Her mother powdered her face, though she had no plans to leave the house or to answer the door to anyone. When the doorbell rang, the breakfast dishes still in the sink, the purged paper still on the table, she ignored it. She had taken to imagining it was a church bell, ringing on the hour as it seemed to, a distant sound from the street. In the back room, Wilson still slept through it. He was tired these days, like a warm, heavy doll, and some mornings he slept until his mother woke him. His mother was awake and dressed and reading the purged page of the newspaper, which Oliver hadn’t burned but simply stacked with the old newspapers on the hearth. She read standing up, with the page flat on the nightstand, so that if someone passed through the backyard and looked through the window she might appear not to be reading but to be giving the paper a passing look. That was what she was doing when Frank Colfax came around to the back door and knocked on it.
That was the sound that woke the baby, because the door was her door, the porch door, and because the crib was right there next to it. Frank’s face hung there behind the glass, his hands cupped around it, his breath steaming his spectacles. Nan went to the door and opened it. He looked as surprised as she was.
“Morning, miss. You remember me?”
Nan nodded.
“I’m Frank. Mrs. Wilson’s driver. You remember?”
Again she nodded.
“Excuse me for troubling you.” He had not stepped into the room but he looked at Wilson, who lay on his back in the crib, now crying. “You need to pick him up, miss?”
Nan shook her head. She didn’t know why. Did everyone now know he was her child? Did Frank know? If he did, what did it matter?
“I got Mrs. Wilson around front a the house, miss. No one answer the doorbell. She want to talk to Mrs. Rawls.”
Now Nan did pick up the baby. She nodded and closed the back door and went to find Elma, who couldn’t seem to understand what Nan was trying to tell her. Nan found a pencil in the kitchen and wrote on an edge of the newspaper, MRS WILSON. And then erased it. Elma stood up straight and touched both of her own cheeks, as though to see how hot or cold they were. Then she picked up Winna Jean, set her on her hip, and walked to the front door.
Frank was where Nan had left him, behind the closed back door, and when she opened it he began to talk again, as though he’d only been waiting for her to return. “Baby sound like he got something,” he said. “My cousin got her a son name February. Got a baby name August, a baby name July. Every baby named after the month it was born in. February had him a bad case of gas. His gut just crushed up like a fist. That baby cry all day long, even when he asleep. I got me a fiddle at home. Back on the farm. My people are farm people. My fiddle the only thing make February stop crying. Got me a fiddle. Made me a couple cigar-box banjos. Made me a lute from a gourd. My uncle taught me. He can make him about anything. That fiddle the only thing calm February down.” But in fact Wilson’s cries had quieted at the sound of Frank’s voice, and now when Frank lowered his face to his, Wilson got ahold of his glasses and lifted them right off his nose. Frank laughed and Nan laughed and Wilson gave a weak gasp of a laugh.
“My grandmomma had one a them porch swings,” Frank said, hitching a thumb over his shoulder. “Maybe the baby like the fresh air. Maybe the three of us ought to swing some.”
* * *
Parthenia Wilson came bearing a Bundt cake, the center stuffed with a milkweed bouquet. The front door wasn’t all the way open before Elma said, “So, now we live in the First Ward, you come to meet Winna Jean?”
Mrs. Wilson was wearing a spring hat, lavender trimmed with rhinestones and pearls and little sprays of baby’s breath. It looked not unlike the cake she was holding. Her spectacles hung from a beaded chain around her neck. Though it was April and the sun shone behind her, she wore her beaver coat, a white ribbon pinned to its breast.
“I’m here on behalf of the Florence women of temperance, to welcome you in Christ.”
Elma smiled. She started to stand back and hold the door open, but she stopped. Behind Parthenia Wilson, the morning was coming to life, automobiles passing by in the street, a crossing guard with his whistle on the corner down the block, schoolchildren with their books under their arms. For weeks Elma had been living behind drawn curtains, and out here the branches were thick with blossoms, the air sun heavy and honey sweet.
“Well, it’s a fine morning,” Elma said. “Why don’t you welcome me in Christ out here on the porch.”
Mrs. Wilson looked about in confusion, as though she’d never sat on a porch before. She counted two rockers, dusted in pear blossoms but otherwise empty, waiting. “It’s a fine morning,” she agreed.
Elma brought the cake into the house and returned with two glasses of sweet tea, tumbling with ice cubes. “We’re clean out a lemonade,” she said. “I suppose this will have to do.”
Mrs. Wilson thanked her. The women sat and took their first long, quiet sips. A rust-breasted robin chirped in the pear tree. The crossing guard’s whistle chirped back. The grand ferns on their pedestals had gone brittle and brown at the edges, and Elma wished she had swept the porch ceiling for cobwebs. She had been waiting, with anticipation and with dread, she had been making up her face each morning, for Parthenia Wilson. She had not really believed she would come. And now she was here and Elma’s hair was unpinned and the baby’s fingernails were dirty, but she had a porch to sit on, a respectable house, Carlotta Rawls’s white house with the green shutters, and Elma sat as tall and proud as the pear tree in the front yard.
“Well, we had Frederick fitted for an eye patch,” Parthenia said, looking out at the road. “It’s made by a gentleman in Atlanta. Navy blue silk, very fine, very hardy.” She rubbed some invisible fabric between her frail fingers. “The gentleman makes them out of handkerchiefs. He sends each eye patch in a little package with a matching handkerchief.”
Elma had not one idea how to reply to this. As though Freddie was just a mutual acquaintance, or as though Elma was another member of the WCTU, with a grandson of her own to report on. Parthenia Wilson was nervous.
“He looks almost dapper in it, I must say. It hasn’t harmed his looks any. He looks even more like his daddy.”
“Mrs. Wilson, are you chatting with me?”
Mrs. Wilson waved her arm at the street. Elma watched her swallow. “That’s what we’re doing. We’re having us a chat.”
“You know who Freddie looks like?” Winna made happy sounds as her mother bounced her. “This child. His daughter.”
Mrs. Wilson tilted her head, studying the baby. Winna was in a dust-colored dress, but her hair was buttercup yellow, curling now in a tuft atop her head. “Oh, I don’t know about that. She’s a comely child. But it’s not for me to say who she takes after.”
In the street, a gray car passed, gleaming silver under the sun. It was Mrs. Nightingale Highland, the grocer’s wife, a colored man driving her. She squinted up at the porch, her eyes trying to read their faces, and then she was gone.
“Here. Hold her.”
“No, no.”
“Go ahead.” Elma stood and dangled the child by the armpits in front of the old woman. “Get her on your knee. See if you can’t tell who she takes after.”
“No, thank you! I won’t! Thank you! I can see her quite well from here.”
Elma waited for another car to pass in the street before she rested Winna on her hip. From around the other side of the house came another baby’s cry, Wilson’s jagged little moan. Mrs. Wilson looked about, confused.
“You think she might get your nice coat dirty?”
Mrs. Wilson dusted off her lap.
“Think she’s got colored on her? From sharing a crib with a colored child?” Elma kissed Winna’s ear. “Don’t worry. Colored don’t rub off.”
Mrs. Wilson clucked her tongue. “I have no worries. That child is no more related to that colored child than she’s related to me.”
“She is related to you! She’s a Wilson!”
“It’s not for me to say. It’s not for you to say, either, the way you keep changing the story. First they were twins! Raped by a colored man! Poor girl! they said. That’s the way your story went.” She was wagging her finger. “Now come to say the child is your own father’s. Shameful! He’s been trouble since he was a barefooted boy. Both of you ought to be ashamed. Both of you ought to pray for forgiveness.”
“It wasn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t my story to change.”
“I knew you weren’t to be trusted, even before. Now, how my ever to believe that’s Freddie’s child? How my to believe she isn’t your husband’s?”
“She’s a Wilson. Her name is Winnafred Jean. After Freddie.”
Mrs. Wilson looked pained, the ropy muscles in her neck tensing, as though the strain of sitting up straight in her chair were going to break her.
“You’re a smart girl. You have a lying tongue, but you’re clever. You must know a name doesn’t make kin.”
Elma was kissing Winna’s ear repeatedly; she was standing and swaying and kissing her daughter’s ear. She said, “What makes kin, then?”
“Blood. Blood makes kin, child. I will tell you something. The truth will come out. Not your version of it. God’s truth. I will tell you something. Somewhere in your house there are three vials of blood. Blood. Your husband took the blood. He took it from your father and from Freddie and from that Negro, the father of your house girl, in your husband’s office, telling them it was part of the bond, and the fools believed it! My own grandson among them. I know this because my husband asked for my perfume bottles, three of them, itty-bitty, no bigger than an ounce”—she spread her finger and thumb an inch apart—“and when I wouldn’t give them to him, because I want no part in it, understand, no part, he emptied them in the sink. Perfume he bought me himself! One from Paris, France. A full bottle. He emptied them and rinsed them and he gave them to your husband. They were in my house and now they’re in your house, and now they have blood in them. And they will tell the truth.”
“What in Heaven.”
“Do you want to know why you can afford to live in Carlotta Rawls’s house another month, child? On a cripple’s paycheck? Because my husband paid your husband to take blood. Blood money.” She laughed. “That’s what they call it.”
“My husband hasn’t killed anyone! My husband is a good man! It’s your kin with blood on they hands.”
“My husband is no killer. I don’t aim for him to become one. A woman has got to do what she can to stop bloodshed.”
“The bloodshed’s already happened, Mrs. Wilson. It’s not what I wanted. If y’all had just opened your home to us. To Winna. It didn’t have to happen.”
“I’m talking about the blood that’s yet to be shed, child. I’m talking about your father.”
“What about my father?”
“I have no love for him. He’s a killer himself. Some might say an eye for an eye—that he should be killed for his crime. But I don’t intend on any more bloodshed. God doesn’t want it. I don’t intend for your kind to drag my kind down with you.”
“What about my father?” she repeated.
“Something’s fixing to happen on that farm. Men talk. When my husband has whiskey, he talks. He’s sent that Negro to do harm to your father.”
Elma sat down on the edge of her rocker. “Sterling wouldn’t harm my father. He wouldn’t harm anyone.”
“I don’t know who that man is. But I don’t aim for my husband to be involved in it. I want nothing more to do with it.”
“With what? What’s going to happen?”
“I’ve come to tell you that you must put an end to it, child. There isn’t much a woman can do in this world. But if there’s one thing she was made to do, it’s to keep men from shedding each other’s blood.”
Elma’s arms prickled. She thought of Ketty’s phrase: the all-overs. All over. She held the baby close.
“Why is it for me to do? He’s your husband. Tell him to call it off!”
Parthenia Wilson sat with her iced tea cradled in her hand, all but untouched. When she lifted her wrist, Elma could see that she had a tremor.
“Don’t you love your father, child?”
The old woman’s ice cubes rattled in her glass. From around the side of the house, from the other side of the world, came another weak cry.
“I pity you, raised with a father like that. But kin is kin. You could have stopped the killing before. Now you’re here sitting on this porch, wearing Carlotta Rawls’s ring on your finger. You should be ashamed of yourself. You must go to the farm and pray for God’s forgiveness. You must pray for Him to bring peace.”
* * *
Oliver was at the office. A scrim of white paint ridged the print of his right thumb. He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. It was nearly five o’clock and his waiting room was empty but he did not want to go home. Before him on the desk sat the telephone, a box of wood and chrome, which he had unplugged from the wall; three dollars and fourteen cents; and a ledger, on which he had written “$3.14.” He understood that there were other numbers he should be writing—expenses, estimates, projections—but he did not know what those numbers were. They were abstractions, as inconceivable as outer space. The maths he had taken at Emory had been the maths one took to learn the optimal angle of an incision. Concrete math, the math of the physical world. Not economics, not accounting, not the math of running a business, of keeping the water flowing in the pipes and electricity flowing in the wires. What was electricity? An abstraction. His father had kept meticulous records, every patient, every visit, every dollar, but they were indecipherable to Oliver. At moments he wished his father alive so that he might ask him the difference between an amortizing mortgage and a balloon mortgage—there was something almost heartening, aortic, about the words, something buoyant—and what happened to each when the name of the bank on the envelope changed, and how to budget, how to balance, in a time when his dwindling patients paid in coins rummaged from their linty pockets, or with IOUs, or not at all. He extended credit to them because he himself had been extended credit, which was in turn an extension of his father’s credit. It was the credit which in fact kept his father alive, corporeal. What was credit? It was a helium balloon that you held in your hand like a child. Then you added another balloon, and another, and your feet lifted off the ground, and the more balloons you added, the higher you rose in the sky, and the farther you had to fall.
It was more house than they could manage, and more than they needed. What use did they have for two fireplaces, two staircases? How might a man in his condition manage to fill all those bedrooms with children?
He opened the desk drawer, and his father’s little leather apothecary case inside it. He had never not known the case, its brass corners and worn leather strap, the little corked vials of powdered camphor and codeine—it had been the toy box, the treasure chest, of his youth, though he was not to open any of the bottles, ever, and he didn’t, he had a reverence for them, they were powerful, and pinching them between his fingers was enough.
A colleague from Atlanta, he had done his dental residency at Emory, he had filled a tooth for Oliver once, he had lost all his savings through a thrift, he owed money for his tuition, he had sat back in his hydraulic dental chair one day and sifted two hundred milligrams of camphor down his throat. A patient had found him there the next day.
He lifted the vial of camphor now. It was ancient, the label yellowed; it might have been filled with dust. He unscrewed the cap. He drew it up to his nose. It would be like eating dust, dirt. He smelled, to his horror, the herbal burn of Pears soap.
He closed his eyes. He saw Elma’s wedding dress falling to the floor. He saw his own legs lying helplessly before him. He saw the mask of regret on her face.
Parsnip, shrink, rot.
He wasn’t man enough. Was he man enough? He dipped his fingers into the empty slots of the case, leaving the camphor uncapped. He had not been a man here in his office the other day. He had not used the perfume bottles, they were contaminated, ignorant; he had sterilized three new glass vials and taken the men’s blood with a lancet, from their fingertips, one, two, three of them, and applied the glucose solution to keep it from coagulating, and labeled the vials himself, meticulously. The men had not protested. They had not flinched. They were men. What was a little blood? It was a small payment for their freedom, a deposit to the state. They did not believe that their blood was theirs, that anything in it told it was theirs apart from the label on the vial. And yet there was the unavoidable intimacy, Oliver’s hands holding each of their hands loosely, by the wrist, the knuckles resting on his own wrist, their blood beating there together, both of them concentrating for a moment on the same silent task. The Negro, Nan’s father, had thanked him. Jesup had said, “Your daddy wanted to stick me. I guess he got me after all.” He said, “Tell Elma not to worry. Tell her not to be a stranger.”
When it was Freddie Wilson’s turn, he said, “That wife of yours more clever than I thought. She done lied all the way to the doctor’s house.”
Oliver gripped Freddie’s wrist tighter, so his own wouldn’t shake.
“Reckon you got you two babies now.”
He imagined these hands on his wife. His wife letting him put these hands on her. His wife liking these hands on her. He gripped harder.
“Ain’t you able to make your own, Doc?”
He could have opened one of the man’s veins. He was a cripple but he held a blood lancet; he could have let the man’s blood out on the floor.
Perhaps if he had been a man, if he had not already been a disappointment to his wife, he would have. But he had seen the look on his bride’s face the night of their wedding, a resignation that did not ease, no matter how many packages she brought home from Cantor’s. And there in the corner of the office sat Freddie Wilson’s grandfather, watching to see that he was thorough. He wanted it done right this time. It was too late to recover his manhood, and so he would do the next best thing. He would pay the mortgage.
After George Wilson dismissed the three men to their waiting rooms, he handed Oliver the fifty-dollar bill. Nearly half of that money would pay for the transportation of the samples to the lab in Atlanta. The other half Oliver would mail to the mortgage company, hoping it was the right address on the envelope, that indeed it would hold them off another month.
“I can’t test it here myself, you understand,” he’d told George Wilson. The samples would have to be driven to the city directly, and tested by Mercer, his mentor at Emory, who would do it as a favor to Oliver, to ease his own guilt for letting him go, but only when he got around to it. The results could take weeks.
A funny little country mystery, Mercer seemed to think. “What you up to with all this blood?” he asked when Oliver rang him up. “You bloodletting all the farmers in that jerkwater town?”
Oliver laughed it off. “Just tell me the types,” he said. He told Mercer he didn’t know why the tests were necessary, and it was true. He’d told Mr. Wilson in this office that blood typing was in its infancy, that it was inconclusive. Mr. Wilson had answered by sitting down across from Oliver, leaning his elbow on the desk, and as if readying to arm wrestle, proferring his own hand. “Whyn’t you go on and stick me too, then.”
Oliver pushed away from the desk. The old man was more desperate than he’d thought. “Why?”
“Go on. You said we needed more samples,” Mr. Wilson said. “Now we have the samples. I want you to have all the blood you need. No mistakes this time.”
“Yes, but as a method of identifying paternity,” Oliver said, readying the lancet again, despite himself, “it can only prove impossibility, not possibility. It’s an imperfect process. It’s guesswork.” There was math involved. Probabilities. Nothing more concrete than blood, its platelets and cells clearly outlined under a slide, and yet the story the blood told—that was still a human abstraction.
“Then guess,” Mr. Wilson said. “That’s what a doctor does, isn’t it? Diagnose. No one knows what goes on in a woman’s womb but God. But you can guess.”
Oliver took the lancet and eased it into the soft flesh of the old man’s forefinger. He would do what the man asked for. Like his father, he would do what he had to do to take care of his family. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t ask questions. “Why do you need to know?”
He removed the needle and Mr. Wilson put the pricked finger in his mouth. Oliver handed him a bandage, but he waved his hand. He said, “An old man wants to sleep.”
For the life of him, he still didn’t understand. Why did he need George Wilson’s blood? “Even if I can tell you, if I can make a guess—what would it matter? Jesup’s gone and claimed the Negro child as his own, in a court of law. Isn’t that all you wanted to prove?”
“I got no interest in what the courts say. The courts don’t say what father a child belongs to. A Wilson takes care of his own, but only if they blood.”
“Is it Winnafred? You want to know if she’s a Wilson? You want me to stick that baby because you can’t take her mother’s word?”
George Wilson stood and pulled his business card out of his billfold and handed it to Oliver, spotted with his blood. “A word is nothing, son. What’s a word? Tell me what the blood says. All of it. Make it talk.”
He’d tried to explain it to the girls this way. He told them, drawing their samples at the kitchen table that night, that it would keep them safe. It would help to prove, if it came to it, that their children were their own. It would help to make sure that no one could take them away. Each sat her own child in her lap and lowered her head, and he took the babies’ blood next, siphoning it from their earlobes. They cried. He did not tell them that George Wilson had ordered it, that he had paid for it. He did not tell them that he had taken the fathers’ blood, and George Wilson’s own blood, that he would add their vials to the others. He would lay them flat in an egg crate and pack it in ice, and together the bottles of blood would make the journey by courier to Atlanta. And part of him, the part that was still a child pinching the medicine vials between his little fingers, believed that they might in fact reveal some answers, that they would speak the truth. And because he knew the truth was nothing to fear, they could put all of this behind them.
He screwed the cap back on the vial of camphor. He closed the apothecary case. The child’s reverence for the treasure chest of medicines—was that what kept him from doing it? Was it the same innocence and ineptitude that kept him clinging helplessly to the tail of the balloon? Or was it just that he too was out of choices?
He thought of something. He wheeled his chair around and over to the far-right file cabinet. In the drawer marked W-Z, in between Freddie and Parthenia, he found a folder—he would have bet his life on that folder being there—for George Wilson I. It was thick with a healthy man’s lifetime of checkups, so thick Oliver felt a touch of tenderness flipping through them. His vaccinations—he had no fear of needles; a case of scarlet fever as a child; a fractured wrist in 1908. Oliver had thought he might find some clue to the man’s mystery, but there was nothing at all of note until the final page in the file, October 5, 1930. In his father’s barely legible scrawl: “Brown Lung Disease. Prognosis 6–12 months.”
Oliver looked up. George Wilson was sick. He had been sick when he’d paid a visit to his father’s deathbed, and his father had known. And now it was April.
Then came the sound of the bell on the outer waiting room door. It was past five o’clock, after his office hours, but he was grateful, momentarily, for the distraction, another patient to delay his return home. Oliver returned the folder to the drawer and wheeled himself into the waiting room, where a man stood in a fedora and tidy suit, his overcoat already over his arm. The way he held his briefcase at his side, with finality, fatality, the way a police officer comes to the door with his hat over his heart, made Oliver understand that it was heavy with papers bearing empty lines, where Oliver would be made, at long last, to sign his name.
“Dr. Oliver Rawls,” the man said. He too produced a business card, which in fact bore the name of the bank that owned the mortgage on his father’s house, which he would be forced to empty by the end of the month. The business card sliced a paper cut in the bank man’s middle finger, and he put it in his mouth. He looked at Oliver for a moment, as though expecting him to offer to bandage it. Then together they realized there was nothing to be done.
* * *
He could smell dinner before he was all the way in the back door, Brunswick stew and cornbread, the air in the closed-up house dense with it. “Nan made a Bundt cake,” Elma said. On any other occasion, it would have made for a sweet end to a long day, a soft place to land, but the smell made Oliver’s stomach ache. “I got a stomachache,” he told Elma. “And a headache.” He was done with lying. He hung his jacket by the back door and wheeled himself to the refrigerator. He opened it and sat before it for a moment, his forehead resting on a cold bottle of milk. Then he closed the icebox and wheeled to the telephone on the wall. He had to prop himself up on his good leg in order to reach the coat hanger hanging from the hook. He tugged on Elma’s overcoat. It tumbled down to the floor. He replaced the receiver on its cradle.
“What you do that for?” Elma asked, picking up the coat.
“No more need to hide.”
“That phone’s gone be ringing any minute.”
And it did. A long, dissenting wail of a tone, and then a short, surprised one. There were two more long rings coming and Oliver could not bear to hear them. He lifted the phone from the wall.
“Oliver.”
It was his mother’s voice. She sounded surprised, as though he had been the one to call her.
“Darling, I’ve been ringing you and ringing you.”
“Hello, Momma. How you feeling?”
“For days and days! I thought the line might be disconnected.”
“No, no. The line still works. I’ve paid for the line.” He closed his eyes. “But we’ve lost the house.”
He opened them. Elma stood looking at him, the coat on its hanger folded over her arm. Nan stood at the kitchen sink. The babies sat in their new high chairs.
“What do you mean, you’ve lost the house?”
“The bank’s taking it, Momma. I’m sorry.”
“Oliver. It’s that woman.”
“Who?”
“That wife of yours. She has charged up all my accounts. Every account in town. She is the problem, Oliver.”
“No, no. Daddy was behind on the house. He had two mortgages on the place.”
“You’ve been married two months and already she has driven you to this.”
“Momma—”
“You’ve got to leave, Oliver. Get out of there. Come to Savannah.”
From where he sat he could see one of Irene’s notes on his father’s prescription pad taped to the wall beside the phone. He could not read the words—his eyes felt loose and bleary in their sockets—but he saw the constancy of her handwriting, her always-there, never-gone shape in this room. He had a sick, sorry feeling he knew to be true. She had not abandoned them. It was she who’d been betrayed. His father had let her go, after thirty years, because he could no longer afford to pay her. He wondered if his mother even knew.
“I ain’t coming to Savannah, Momma. I got to hang up. I got a headache. I’ll call you later.”
“Oliver!”
He half-stood in his wheelchair and returned the phone to its cradle.
Elma and Nan stood looking at him.
“Oliver,” Elma said.
Oliver clapped his hands. “All right. We gone talk about this. But we gone wait till tomorrow. My head can’t hold another word today.”
His head felt like a balloon. One of those Chinese paper lanterns let loose in the sky.
He excused himself to lie down. He was halfway to the bedroom when the doorbell rang. Oliver leaned over and laughed into his lap. He sat up and rubbed the top of his head.
“Open it,” he said to Elma.
Elma did. At the door was a mustached man in a suit. He stood back on the porch, turned to the street and puffing on a pipe, as though he didn’t expect anyone to answer the door. It took a moment for Elma to recognize him; she hadn’t seen him up close since that day in August, when they’d sat at the table in front of the crossroads store. But Oliver knew Q. L. Boothby before he turned around; he’d smelled that pipe tobacco the last three summers in Warm Springs, and seeing him there was enough to make Oliver relax his shoulders, take a breath; he smelled the magnesium waters and the pines, the fresh-cut grass.
“Mr. Boothby,” Elma greeted him. “We have nothing to put in the papers, thank you kindly.”
“Mrs. Rawls.” Mr. Boothby tipped his hat. “Good evening to you. Dr. Rawls.”
“Quincy! Glad to see you.”
“I haven’t come on behalf of the Testament. This is a friendly visit.”
And then suddenly it was. Q. L. Boothby was Uncle Quincy come to visit, Uncle Quincy who smelled of pipe tobacco, who talked like the city. Oliver introduced him to Nan, who waved from the sink—there were no shadows for her to hide in here, the kitchen bright with electric lights—and when Mr. Boothby stepped forward and extended his hand for her to shake, she looked the most surprised of any of them. He did the same to the babies, kneeling down to the floor and putting out his large hand to them, and Wilson clapped both his around it and Winna put it in her mouth, and they all laughed. Nan made coffee and Oliver wheeled himself over the threshold and out to the porch, and the two men drank it, Oliver in his wheelchair, Mr. Boothby in the rocker where Parthenia Wilson had sat that morning. The mild day had given way to a mild evening, the sky going quietly pink over the neat brick houses across the street, the robins and sparrows chattering in the pear trees. It was the moment the sky seemed most alive, most in need of attention, just before the sun sank behind the trees. For a few breaths Oliver sat in the kind of peace that grows from enervation, every cell of his body aching for rest but his mind dizzyingly, glowingly awake. He felt the gas in his head slowly begin to release, the door shutting on the long and terrible day.
“Night like this brings my mind around to Warm Springs,” Mr. Boothby said.
But already Oliver’s mind was there, the tall pines and the long, sloping lawn—
“You know your father was on the board at the institute.”
“I do.”
“Valued member. A trusted physician, and the medical knowledge he brought. Kept up with the latest in polio research.”
“He did.”
“You’ve taken his place here at his practice.” Mr. Boothby puffed on his pipe. “I come to ask—being as you aren’t inclined to answer your mail or your telephone—if you’d take his place on the board.”
Well, of course he would, Oliver said. He’d be honored.
“Marvelous,” said Mr. Boothby. He started to tell him about the meetings, the research, the fund-raising, but Oliver was thinking about the waters, about lowering himself into them, and floating, weightless, under the clouds.
“When can I get up there, Quincy?”
Well, he was welcome anytime, Mr. Boothby said.
He had a need to get away for a while, Oliver told him.
Mr. Boothby said he understood. When you were married as long as he was, he said, there came a need to get away from the Mrs.
Oh, no, Oliver said. He would bring the Mrs. with him. Just a little retreat with his family. He did not tell him about the foreclosure. That would find its way to the papers in time.
Well, of course, Mr. Boothby said. They’d all been through a trying time. Of course they had need to escape. Mr. Boothby himself was heading there on Saturday to spend Easter weekend with the Roosevelts before returning home to Macon. Would Oliver like to join them?
Oliver laughed. He laughed his thanks.
Mr. Boothby extended his hand, and again they shook.