Читать книгу The Twelve-Mile Straight - Eleanor Henderson - Страница 14

MANFORD RAWLS’S OFFICE WAS ON MAIN STREET, NEXT DOOR to Pearsall’s Drugs and down the street from his home. It was the only doctor’s office in town. There, between the hours of eight and four, he gave shots, set breaks, dispensed medicine, depressed the spotted tongues of children with his wooden stick. He was a stubborn old white man, no traveling country doctor. If you went into labor in the middle of the night, you fetched a midwife. If you caught a fever in the evening, you waited until morning. One night when Nan was nine, returning home from delivering a baby with her mother, a man flagged down the truck they were in, his flannel shirt a bloody belt around his waist. His stomach had been cut with the glass of a broken bottle, and Nan watched as Ketty took out her satchel and sewed up the wound with a needle and thread, the man lying on the green corn husks in the bed of the truck. He was a colored man; the driver was too. The driver, who two hours before had become a father, left the man with a jar of Jesup’s Cotton Gin on Dr. Rawls’s step, where he slept until the morning, and even then the doctor made him wait until he saw a white woman with a rash on her legs.

But when Dr. Rawls learned about the twins, when word had reached him that their mother had no intention of parading them into town, he made an exception to his hours. On a Friday evening, he drove his beady black Plymouth out to the farm. The puppies heard the engine and went tearing out to see who it was. He was a white-mustached man who’d begun to stoop, the pale, shaven flesh of his neck wrinkled as a rooster’s comb. He wore a black suit and a black Homburg hat and carried a black satchel, listing to the left with its weight, his right ear listening toward the sky for some signal.

“Babies need to be seen,” said the doctor, coming through the breezeway to the back porch, where he lifted a towel from the rocker that had not been offered him and seated himself in it. Nan and Elma were giving the twins their weekly bath, both babies squeezed into the aluminum tub, their skin soapy blue in the last hour of sunlight. The day was cool and crisp, the first day that felt like fall. Nan had been enjoying the evening, her hands in the warm water, the babies splashing. The doctor looked at them admiringly, as though they were a pair of his own prize pigs.

Juke sat on the top porch step, his shaving bowl between his bare feet on the step below, a tumbler of gin at his hip. His left cheek was smooth, his right still bristly with red and silver and gold. When Dr. Rawls took a seat, Juke shuttled the glass to the third step. He turned and tipped his straw hat, but he didn’t take it off, and he didn’t stand up. “Doctor.”

“Mr. Jesup.”

“These younguns got a sickness I need to know about?”

The doctor lifted Wilson out of the water, slipped him straight out of Nan’s hands like a fish. Nan and Elma were still crouched behind the tub, and Nan moved to stand up, but Elma yanked her down by the hand that wasn’t holding Winna in the bath, then slipped it into hers. The doctor settled Wilson onto the towel on his lap. “I’m just here for some preventive care. Standard practice.”

Juke slipped his straight razor into the bowl of water and leveled it against his right cheekbone, scraping it down to the wedge of his jaw. You could hear the blade on his skin, rough as a rake over stony soil. He was not going to offer the doctor coffee. He was not going to tell any stories. “Is it standard practice to call on a patient after supper?”

“In exceptional cases it is.”

“Don’t make no exception for us, please. These babies are as standard as they come. They got ten fingers and ten toes, same as anybody.”

The doctor was combing through Wilson’s hair with his fingers, inspecting his scalp, and Nan had to squeeze Elma’s hand to keep from leaping up again. “Miss Jesup,” the doctor said, not looking up, “you want your children to be healthy, don’t you?”

“Course I do.” Elma let go of Nan’s hand, scooped up Winna Jean, and wrapped her in a towel. “That’s why I keep them at home, so they won’t catch nothing.”

“They’s plenty a child can catch on a farm, even out here in the country air.” From his satchel he removed his stethoscope and fit the disk to the boy’s chest. “You folks don’t need me to remind you.” He turned his head and, for the first time since he’d arrived, met Nan’s eyes. “Tetanus. Smallpox. Diphtheria.” She remembered the first time he’d pressed that cold stethoscope to her skin, and the first time he’d pressed his tongue depressor to her bottom lip. When she opened her mouth and he saw there was nothing to depress, he jumped back as if she’d bitten him.

“They’re preventable diseases now,” the doctor said. “Medicine has come a long way.” In the doctor’s lap, Wilson stared transfixed at the shiny faces of his glasses. The doctor took a loaded syringe from his bag and sank it into the naked baby’s thigh, as casually as he might stick a cooked turkey. Wilson opened his mouth and released a cry.

Nan released a cry too. She shot up from the porch floor and clapped her hand over her mouth. It was the kind of cry she tried to keep inside, a lonesome, ugly cry, like an animal in pain. It had been so long since she’d made the sound that it sounded alien to her own ears. The others looked at her, eyes wide. She didn’t care. Without Elma to hold her back, she rushed to Wilson and took him in her arms.

“Doctor!” Elma said, and Nan was grateful for her voice. “What in Heaven!”

Wilson howled. Nan bounced him. Then Winna Jean, in Elma’s arms, began to howl too. Then, suddenly at Nan’s feet, Castor and Pollux joined them.

Now Juke did stand up. He took the final step up to the porch. He wasn’t a tall man, but his legs and scarred arms were ropy, and he had a way of making himself appear bigger, of filling a doorway with the wings of his shoulders. The skin at his open collar, already pink with sweat, went a shade redder, and his jaw, still wet, went stiff.

“Doctor, this mother would kindly like a warning. As a courtesy.”

The emptied syringe still dangled between the doctor’s fingers, his thumb on the depressor. Juke palmed the razor.

“Of course,” said the doctor. He dropped Juke’s glance and looked out at the fields, maybe looking at Genus Jackson’s shack, maybe looking for the still, maybe for the quarantine shack that had been burned when Nan and Elma were small. The babies had quieted a bit, the puppies with them. They lay down at Nan’s feet. The doctor said, “I reckon you grown folks are due for shots as well.”

“Ain’t no need for shots for no grown folks,” said Juke.

“A man’s impervious to no illness.” The doctor opened his case, displayed more glass vials. “I can do it here. No need to make the trip into town.”

“Put them shots away. Ain’t no one stuck me yet and I don’t intend to change that. You can stick the babies, but then you’ll be on your way.”

The doctor looked as if he might push further, but he replaced the vials in his bag. “You know something,” said the doctor. “All my years in medicine, I’ve never seen twins with separate paternity. I know some doctors who would be mighty interested in this case. It’s a rarity, I’ll tell you that. Something to be proud of.” He sat with his legs crossed at the knee, the creases of his pants legs sharp.

“Proud?” It looked to Nan like a smile curling the corner of Juke’s mouth. “I ain’t ashamed of my grandchildren, make no mistake. But I ain’t proud for one minute of their ‘paternity.’ Neither way.”

Dr. Rawls gave an ambiguous tilt of his head. He still seemed to be waiting for some sound from above. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

“I reckon He does,” said Juke.

Juke looked on as Dr. Rawls gave Winna her three shots and Wilson the last two, and in the middle of the howling, the baby boy, like a fountain cherub, sent an arc of urine across the doctor’s creased pants legs. Elma rushed over with another towel, but the doctor laughed. “Well, aren’t you just full of piss and vinegar?” Elma laughed a relieved and joyful laugh. Wilson laughed too, which made Juke laugh in turn. Nan made no sound at all. She stood with her hands behind her back, clasping each of her elbows to give her hands something to hold. What sound was there for the joylessness she felt then? Relief, yes, that the doctor was leaving, that he’d discovered nothing, but disappointment too, that he was leaving, that he’d discovered nothing.

The doctor bounced Wilson on his knee. “That’s a good quality, son. You keep pissing and spitting, you hear? You’re gone need to in this life.” The doctor blotted his pants with his handkerchief, kissed the top of Wilson’s head, and handed the baby back to Nan.

“I’ll send a bill.”

After the doctor’s black car disappeared down the road, though, after Juke downed the rest of his gin and stuffed his gums with tobacco, he took Wilson from her again. He wrapped him tight in his towel and rocked him back and forth. He wasn’t laughing anymore. “Seems I told you not to open that door to nobody,” he said to Elma.

“He ain’t nobody. He’s Dr. Rawls. And he walked straight to the porch himself!”

“He ain’t to set foot in this house again, you hearing me? He ain’t to set foot on the porch.”

“I thought you said we got nothing to hide. He ain’t the police. He ain’t the papers.”

“I ain’t ascaired of the police or the papers.”

“But you ascaired of an old man?” Elma put a little smile on her face to show she was teasing.

Juke shifted Wilson in his arms and gave her a serious look. “That old man knows people. George Wilson, for one. People in Atlanta. All the way to Washington. He’s an old man with a ticket to Heaven—he ain’t got nothing to lose. He’s been sniffing around here before and I don’t need him sniffing around again.”

“You don’t want him knowing you’re a shiner or you don’t want him knowing you’re daddy to a Negro?”

Juke was looking out to the field. Perhaps he was listening for a passing car, for other listening ears. Nan waited for him to reply. She thought he might strike one of them, or both. Then she saw him remember not to. When he spoke, his voice was low. “Neither one his business, and I reckon they ain’t yourn, either.”

“One of them is,” said Elma. “You made it my business.”

“Quiet. We don’t talk of it. Even in this house, on this porch, we don’t talk of it. You hearing?” He cupped a hand over Wilson’s ear. It was true—they did not talk of it, had not talked of it since the day Wilson was born. “And you,” he said, turning to Nan, “alls you gotta do is keep quiet, and you ain’t even do that?” He spit his chaw over the porch railing, shaking his head, and returned Wilson to her arms. “Put a diaper on this child.”

They retired to their side of the house, Nan to hers. There was no window in the pantry where she slept. For that she was glad. She could sit on her pallet and nurse Wilson without any eyes on her but his.

Juke would have liked both babies to stay all night in Elma’s room, and for Elma to tend to them when they cried. “You can feed him just as easy,” he’d said to Elma when the babies were a few weeks old.

“You worried we gone have midnight visitors, Daddy?” Nan thought Elma suspected what she did—that the only midnight visitor Nan might have was Juke himself, that he wanted to be able to come to her room again, without Elma or the babies getting in the way. He had not come to her room since the babies were born, and she had Elma to thank for that. “I ain’t agreed to be no wet nurse,” she told him. “He don’t like my milk none anyway.”

During the day, when folks might be about—the neighbors, the hands, visitors dropping in—they had to be careful. Nan couldn’t pay Wilson undue attention. If folks came by, sometimes Juke would make Elma suckle Wilson right there on the porch, just to show, though it was true he didn’t take well to her breast. Mostly he turned his head and cried. Folks turned their heads too. So did Nan.

But mostly it was all right. She liked it best when she and Elma cooked together in the kitchen, the babies lying on their bellies on the rag rug at their feet—didn’t matter then whose baby was whose. Didn’t matter if Elma said “your baby” or “my baby” or “the twins”—they were the babies, and they didn’t care what they were called. If Nan had her hands in a pie crust, Elma changed Wilson’s diaper. If Elma was out in the garden, and Winna woke from a nap crying, Nan didn’t think twice before she put her own nipple in the girl’s mouth to calm her. (Well, maybe she thought twice, but rarely three times.) Winna liked Nan’s milk as much as her own mother’s. It was Wilson who was particular, though when Nan was out on a call all day and night, and he was hungry enough, he relented.

When the babies were just a few weeks old, she had left Wilson with Elma to go on a call in Rocky Bottom. The woman—she was more like a girl, Nan’s age, with no children yet—was just seven months along, and Nan knew before the baby was out that it would be born dead. “It ain’t been moving,” the girl said. “Used to hiccup. Ain’t hiccupped in two weeks.” Afterward, after she had delivered the baby, the girl had been shocked and silent, and there was little Nan could do except wrap the baby in a blanket. It was a boy no bigger than a swamp rabbit, and covered in a pelt of rabbit fur. But four days later, after the girl’s milk had started to come in, her mother and father drove her out to the farm to ask Nan what to do. “She’s swolled up awful,” the mother said, and the girl, still in the wagon, sat up straight to show her. It was a trip of perhaps nine miles, a long way to come, Nan thought, for such a question. But then the mother looked around her toward the big house. “I hear the girl got twins up in there. She could use the help of a wet nurse, I expect. The boy really colored?” Nan shook her head firmly. “Can’t you ask her?” the mother went on. “We wouldn’t ask for much.” But Nan refused, and Juke did not come out, and Elma did not come out, and she knew that the family would come no closer to the house. And though she had sent away the poor girl with her poor bloated breasts, still she had nightmares of the family returning to take Wilson, not just to nurse him but to keep him, to replace the swamp rabbit baby, who had been buried, the mother told her, in an apple crate. He wouldn’t take it, Nan wanted to tell her. He wouldn’t drink from you.

Tonight, even Nan’s milk didn’t calm him. He was fussing, ornery from his shots. Or was he cutting a tooth already? When did they start to come in? She wished she could ask the doctor, for she knew nothing about how babies grew after they came into the world. Everything she knew she had learned with her own eyes, watching Winna and Wilson. They were as unalike as any two babies ever were, and their skin was the least of it. Were they foolish to think that the world would believe they were twins, or was it just that every two babies were as unalike as these, with their own faces, their own fingers and toes, some webbed with dirt, like eraser dust, some instead flecked with the white dust of snake skin?

Without putting down the baby, she stood and stepped over her pallet to the pantry shelves, where she found a jar of sorghum syrup. Still holding him, she unscrewed the cap and dipped in a finger and pressed it against his gums. He closed his mouth and sucked. She knew nothing about babies, but she knew Wilson. She knew he was hers, as much as she was his.

She lay down on the pallet, Wilson pressed against her side, her finger still in his mouth. His eyes were glassy with tears but still now, his nostrils caked with dried mucus, like flakes of pastry crust. He smelled of pastry crust, of honey wax and vinegar. She put her own nose inside the tiny bud of his ear, where he had a heartbeat, steady and distant. He was her companion now. He had replaced Juke in her bed. For this she loved him, despite herself. She hadn’t asked for it, she hadn’t expected it, but it wasn’t to be denied, the surge of milk so strong she felt the blood in her veins run faster. Here it came, swift and certain, like the full bucket at the well after you gave it a few strong tugs. If that wasn’t love, what was it?

His eyelids were fluttering closed, fighting sleep, like a trapped moth’s wings. She lifted her gown and dabbed another bit of syrup on her nipple. Slowly, she slipped her finger out of the baby’s warm mouth and slipped her nipple in. He took to it blindly, his eyelids resting now. And then the love filled her chest and she was helpless against it. A sleeping child was easier to love than a waking one, she’d learned. Or maybe it was that, with his green eyes closed, it was easier to pretend he belonged to Genus.

Would she have loved the baby more if Genus were his father? Or was this the only way, that God took something for every gift He granted? He had taken her mother home but had made Nan a mother. He’d taken Genus, but He’d freed her from Juke. Would she go back, and agree to spend her life under Juke, if it meant Genus would still walk the earth?

Yes, she told herself, yes. She’d spend a thousand lifetimes on her back. She’d walk herself backward out of his shack, out of his life, to see him again framed in the window in his corn-shuck hat, shaking the rug, the moment before his eyes discovered hers. She would watch him from a distance. That would be enough.