Читать книгу Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League - Jonathan Odell - Страница 14

Chapter Seven

MOTHER AND CHILD

Floyd made it to the hospital in Greenwood in less than thirty minutes.

“Now, everything is going to be OK,” he said, striding confidently beside Hazel as they rolled her down the corridor on a gurney. “All you got to do is lay back and let nature take its course. Do everything the doctor says, do you hear?”

“Yes,” she said, feeling a spark of irritation at her husband.

“And remember to push. That’s always a good thing.”

“Yes, I will,” she said. Yet what she wanted to say was, “How do you know? How many babies have you birthed between cotton picker deals?”

Mercifully, the nurse told Floyd he had to stop at the delivery room door. Hazel was more than relieved when she heard the sound of his footsteps retreating toward the waiting room.

With or without Floyd, Hazel could never have been ready for what came next. The pain was unlike anything she had ever imagined. Nothing anybody could possibly live through. And that wasn’t the scariest part. As she lay spread open and vulnerable on that table, pinned down and surrounded by a doctor and nurses who were demanding so much of her, her own body turning on her, with only her elbows to support her, the worst part was that this time there was no escape. No back door. No place to run. It had been put squarely on her shoulders. At eighteen she was expected to see it through all alone.

The bright lights that caromed off the sterile white walls were indifferent to her pain. The faceless doctor yelled at her, telling her to bear down. She didn’t think she could. Hazel shut her eyes against it and prayed to die.

“She’s crowning!” the doctor shouted. His tone was now jubilant, conveying to Hazel that she was doing something right. No, that they were doing it right—her and her baby, together. With the doctor’s words, from the center of her pitch-black world of hurt, flashed the most glorious realization. She could read it like lightning across the night sky. This baby was coming to save her, not to harm her.

Hazel gave in to the pain, no longer afraid, and thrilled by the prospect that somebody was arriving who, no matter what, would always be on her side. She welcomed her son into the world with a cry of joy.

Back in her room, Hazel held her baby, whispering softly to the newcomer in her arms, “My baby. My baby,” over and over, trying to get her ears used to the words. The nurse patted Hazel’s hand and said right there in front of Floyd, “You did a real good job, honey. Your son is healthy, whole, and one of the best-looking things ever to come out of the Greenwood Leflore Hospital.”

Hazel smiled at the baby. “He knew what he was doing, all right. I couldn’t a done it without him.”

“Well, little momma,” the nurse said after a short silence, “I guess I never looked at it that way. What y’all going to name him?”

Without batting an eye, Floyd announced his decision. “Johnny Earl Graham.”

“After who?” asked the nurse.

“After nobody,” he said proudly. “From neither side. Our boy ain’t gonna owe his future to nobody’s past.”

Hazel smiled, liking the sound of that. Maybe it was true. She hoped it was—that she and Floyd and Johnny Earl had been cut loose and were traveling free, floating high above all the doubts and fears that prowled the past. Maybe there was nothing ahead of them but a blue-sky future.

Five days later, as Floyd drove, neither he nor Hazel could take their eyes off the baby, which put Floyd all over the road. Peeking at the child in his wife’s arms for about the hundredth time, Floyd asked, “How’s my little monkey doing?”

“Floyd,” Hazel said, “I hate it when you call him that. He don’t look anything like a monkey.”

He patted Hazel on the knee. “That’s not what I mean by it. He’s just so cute and all.”

Narrowing her eyes at the baby, she said, “Floyd, he’s got your black hair. Your dark eyes. He even got them wide moccasin jaws. I swan, I don’t see me anywhere. Looks like you did the whole thing on your own.”

Floyd laughed, and without bothering to look he said, “He’s got your cute pug nose. Don’t you see?”

Hazel didn’t, but she figured Floyd was giving her the nose to be nice, which was perfectly fine. Right now she needed him to be real nice. Without a whole hospital of nurses backing her up, she was already struggling to keep on top of her fears. She was returning to Floyd’s world, and she was not going alone. She had a baby to keep alive. Here was this living, squirming, kicking, crying, puking, peeing, wordless ball of needs. Everything depended on her being able to decipher what he wanted quick enough to keep him breathing, so that he would grow up and love her enough to be grateful. Until then, she hoped Johnny Earl gave good directions.

“I’m so glad you went to get Momma,” she said. “I got a million questions to ask her about babies.”

Hazel’s mother brought little comfort the whole time she was there, insisting that there was nothing special to raising a child. “It’s only your first, Hazelene,” Baby Ishee said more than once. “I had fourteen. Twelve lived. Some make it and some don’t. It’s mostly up to them, I reckon.”

After her mother left, Hazel spent one sleepless night after the other, repeatedly getting up out of bed to check on Johnny in his crib. In the beginning she was afraid to touch him. Later, she was afraid to set him down. She studied him frantically for signs of intelligence, of hunger, of thirst, of infestation and blight, trying to read him like she would a field of corn, pleading with him to tell her what it was he wanted of her.

“What would a good mother be doing now?” she asked him over and over. He stared back silently with those big, dark, Indian eyes, not so much looking at her, she thought, as considering her, like he was sizing her up.

Floyd watched anxiously from the sidelines, hoping Hazel would find her gait and come around to the job. “Hazel,” he called to her one night, gently shaking her arm. “Honey, you’re doing it again. Wake up.”

Awake now, she continued to cry. “Oh, Floyd! It was awful,” she sobbed. “I was trapped in Daddy’s storm pit and I couldn’t find the door. I knew it was there somewhere and it was so dark and I heard Johnny crying on the other side and I couldn’t get a match lit and he. . .and. . .”

Floyd pulled her to him and soothed her with his words, letting her cry until she was all cried out. He said all the right things. That they were in it together. He would always be there for her. They had come a long way and had a wonderful life still ahead. He said even he had his doubts sometimes.

“You, Floyd?” she asked, feeling an immense comfort in his confession.

“Uh-huh. Everybody does.”

“Tell ’em to me, Floyd.” She anxiously waited to hear what they were. Maybe she could comfort him for a change.

Floyd switched on the light and smiled at her sympathetically. At first she thought he was going to say that he loved her. Maybe without the “anyway”—his expression was just that tender.

“Hazel, honey?” he said.

“Yes, sweetheart,” she answered, feeling comforted. “I’m listening.” She nuzzled up to his neck.

“Hazel, honey,” he said again, “I think it’s time you learned about the Science of Controlled Thinking.”

“Wha—?”

“Now, hear me out,” Floyd said, taking her hand. “Controlled Thinking is the way to get rid of all the second-guessing you been doing. It’s the reason why I’m selling more equipment than any John Deere salesman in the Delta.”

“Floyd, what has that got to do—”

“Now, I’ve been considering it for a while, and I don’t think raising a baby is no different. Sure, you’re having a little problem adjusting to it all,” Floyd said. “Any change is hard. But change is also opportunity. If you let me help, I promise you’ll come around.”

Floyd reached beside him on the nightstand and brought his book into bed with them. “Like I was reading last night, ‘Enthusiasm is contagious.’ And Hazel,” he said with a grin, “probably nobody around is more catching than me.”

He began flipping through the pages and pointing out his favorite little sayings. “Listen to this,” he said excitedly. ‘. . .To a controlled thinker, every problem is an opportunity.’ ”

“And here’s a good ’un: ‘Attitude determines altitude.’ And, ‘If life serves you a bum steer, eat steaks.’ How about this one: ‘If you get a raw deal—’ ”

By then she had stopped listening. Those things didn’t make any sense to her at all, and she sure didn’t see what they had to do with Johnny Earl. So instead of looking at the book as he pointed out the words, she stared at the purple burn scars on his fingers and remembered the story he had told her when they were still getting to know each other. She had finally got up the nerve to ask about his mother. Without blinking, he said, “Died when I was six months old.”

Hazel didn’t know what to say. She must have looked sad because Floyd quickly tried to reassure her. “It’s not like I knew her or anything.”

“How’d she die?” Hazel asked, sounding a lot more sorrowful about the loss than he.

Floyd looked down at his hands and began to rub the little purple blotches on his fingers that Hazel had always assumed were birthmarks. “Well, what they tell me is Momma was holding me in her arms, warming herself in front of the fireplace, when she had a stroke and fell out.” He held out his hands for her to see. “Daddy said I got these scars when I grabbed aholt of a burning log.”

Hazel’s eyes had welled up with tears, not knowing what it would do to a person to reach out for his mother and touch fire instead. Yet Floyd told it as if it had happened to somebody else, somebody he had little patience for.

Now she wondered why he wasn’t the one having nightmares, too. What was wrong with her that she couldn’t get past it all?

Over the next few months, the more fearful she became, the more Floyd preached his religion of success at her. He told her in every failure is a seed for the next victory; it’s all in a person’s thinking. Then he began to write the sayings down on tablet paper and hung them around the house for her to find.

“DON’T SPEND A SECOND OF TODAY FRETTING TOMORROW OR REGRETTING YESTERDAY,” the bathroom mirror warned her. The Philco greeted her with, “IT’S A MATTER OF MENTAL MAGNETISM: WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ATTRACTING TODAY?” “BE A CONTROLLED THINKER!” the hall closet door hollered.

The last words she heard at night were from the lamp by her bed. The paper taped to its shade chided, “HOW FAST YOU TRAVEL ON THE TRACK TO SUCCESS IS DETERMINED BY YOUR TRAIN OF THOUGHT,” and to hear Floyd tell it, they were still only in slow motion. He had big plans for his family and was keeping a positive mind on the future, and she needed to be there with him.

Hazel tried to live by his words, wanting desperately to be a good wife and a good mother, yet couldn’t gain that Floyd-Graham-rock-solid certainty. She watched with a mixture of wonderment and trepidation as Johnny ate regular, never got sick, learned to walk, and grew like he was supposed to. Best of all, he loved his mother and knew how to show it. That especially was a comfort. Of course Hazel loved him, too, but love took its toll. Hazel’s stabbing anxiety dulled to a constant dread.

Not long after Johnny’s first birthday, Floyd talked her into getting pregnant again. He figured that with two children she wouldn’t have time to fret over things that didn’t matter. Another child would help prioritize her thinking, he advised.

Hazel did as Floyd asked. She got pregnant and had another boy, Davie. She memorized more sayings. She recited them to her children like nursery rhymes. As much as she tried changing her thinking, she couldn’t get over feeling that she had only the loosest of handholds on the caboose of Floyd’s speeding train of success.