She musta heard wrong.
“Me? He come to see me?”
“Yes, Miss Rose, there’s a man who would like to visit with you.” That was the ugly one Rosie called Stink Bug because she had a fat back. Who had a fat back? People were supposed to get fat in front, not down their spines, but Stink Bug looked like she’d shoved a pillow down the back of her shirt. Not that she was skinny everywhere else, of course. Mama always said that looks was skin deep but stupid went all the way to the bone. Well, Rosie’d discovered fat went all the way to the bone, too.
Stink Bug’s smile looked like she’d stuck it to her face with roofing nails. She was the one who pretended she didn’t notice when Rosie’d messed the bed and Rosie’d have to lie in it all night ‘til the next shift of “attendants” came on in the morning and cleaned her up. ‘Course the morning shift didn’t like Maudie Faye for doing that no more’n Rosie did. Sometimes, Rosie entertained herself as she lay in her own crap in the dark, fantasizing all the ways she was gonna kill Maudie Faye … if she could get out of the bed, which she could, but they didn’t know it. She could walk standin’ straight, no hump bending her over like a broke camel. She could fly, too, like a little sparrow, one tree to the next.
Or maybe not. The flyin’ part. Prob’ly not. Maybe that was part of the systems failure. She’d heard that phrase on television once and liked it, thought it had sounded more colorful than dementia or Alzheimer’s — which was what they said she had, depending on which one of ‘em you listened to. And she did, she knew it, watched as one batch of circuits after another in her head failed her. Names was the worst. The staff wore name tags, of course, but Rosie figured the day wasn’t far off when she wouldn’t be able to read ‘em.
It was awful to go like that, pieces of your mind missin’. Like you left somethin’ important in the attic and when you needed it, you couldn’t find it.
Days of the week, months, years, who was president, things like that washed through her head and out the other side slick as eating green apples and getting the squirts. But she hadn’t known any of those things when she was “wilding,” neither. That was the word she used for living in the woods, making do there with her mama. She and Mama never gave a fig what day it was so she sure as Jackson didn’t care now.
Some days was worse than others. The days when Rose understood that she really couldn’t get out of the bed, that her legs wouldn’t hold her up, days when she knew, was aware that she was shedding brain cells outta the inside of her head thick as the dandruff that rained down off the outside of Stink Bug’s.
She enjoyed life more on the days she wasn’t sure. Could convince herself wasn’t a thing wrong with her, thank you very much, and she was pulling a monumental prank on all them idiots out there who thought there was. On days like that her mind felt too bright, like it was lit up with football stadium lights, and her ‘magination took her on wild rides. Then she’d conjure up stories that she was almost sure weren’t real … but maybe. Most of ‘em was ‘bout how she was gonna kill them as done her dirty.
She imagined pouring lighter fluid all over the orderly who was so rough when he moved her from the bed to the wheelchair that he left bruises on her arms. Chain him up and light a candle and set it next to him and watch it burn down to nothing ‘til it finally lit the trail of lighter fluid. He’d watch the candle burn down, too, knowing what was going to happen to him when it did. Scared of how bad it would hurt. That’s why she’d picked that fate for him, ‘cause every time she saw him come into the room, she knew how bad it would hurt when he dumped her like a sack of flour into the chair.
“… listening to me?”
Stink Bug had been talking. Rosie spent so much time in her head, imagining a world that wasn’t there, that she sometimes found it difficult to attend to the one that was. On-purpose dementia. Dementia she’d picked her own self ‘cause it was better’n living in a reality that wasn’t worth living in, hadn’t been for so long she could barely even recall that time.
Rosie looked past Stink Bug to the man standing in the doorway, a big black man with a pleasant face.
Last name Jackson.
“You know Thelma Jackson, do ya?” Rosie asked him.
He looked so surprised she thought at first he didn’t know who she was talking about. Then she realized he was surprised that she did know.
“She’s my wife,” he said, venturing into the room and doing a remarkably good job of pretending he didn’t notice how much the room looked like some hole a creature’d dug in the ground where it dragged all its prey to kill and eat them.
“Mr. Jackson, Miss Rosie has to agree to—”
“I agree, I agree. Go on now and leave us be. I decide to die while you’re gone, I’ll send him to fetch you.”
Cotton Jackson. A visitor. The husband of one of only a handful of other visitors Rosie had had since she was admitted to Sunny Acres, or Moonlit Fields or whatever they called the place these days. Every five years or so they changed the name.
“You gonna sit down or you gonna make me to look up at you til I get a crick in my neck and have to look at my lap for a week ‘cause I can’t move my head?”
He sat. The look of surprise remained on his face, so he musta expected to meet somebody ‘thout the sharp edges Rose Topple had. Most people wasn’t expecting what they got when they first seen her — “attendants,” and orderlies and the occasional actual, no-kidding, stethoscope-wearing doctor in a white coat. She had fantasies about how she’d kill them, too, every last one of ‘em, rid the earth of the bottom-feedin’ carp, scavengers, white-coated monsters who thought they was God and had the power to prove it.
Doctors who could unhook machines so people would “die with dignity.”
Her mama didn’t want to die with dignity. She wanted to live — any way that presented itself. If she’d wanted to die with dignity she’d have gone off into the woods after the Vanishing and kilt herself somehow. She didn’t. Just ten years old, but she clawed and scratched out a life ‘thout no help from nobody. Had got pregnant after them men caught her that time, and raised up her baby girl in an unforgiving world where you had to scrape out a life best as you could, taught Rosie all about that and all the rest of it, the private stuff, the magic stuff. And then she give up Rosie for the Hendersons, who lived on the other side of Hazard Bluff in Crawford County, to raise so the little girl’d have a decent life. That was dignity.
In the end, Rosie’d gone home, though, to her mama. When she was a woman growed, had gone to school and worked a job and had a life … she went back to the mountains, to Fearsome Hollow. And Mama would have lived a right smart while after that if Rose’d had the sense not to trust the white-coated monsters. Mama didn’t have to die at eighty-seven — shoot, Rosie was ninety now and still kicking and her mama was tougher than Rosie’d ever be. Rosie’d learned, of course, but it’d been too late to save Mama.
Rosie wouldn’t need savin’. She’d step on outta this life whenever and however it suited her. But right now it didn’t suit her. Right now what suited her was talking to this Cotton Jackson fella who’d come here to pick her brain about Mama. That’s all anybody ever wanted to talk about and he was upfront about it, said right out that he wanted to hear about the Witch of Gideon.