Читать книгу Bivouac - Kwame Dawes - Страница 8

TWO

A crow of a woman with gray patches of hair sticking out of a blue-and-gold silk scarf knotted in front had pushed her way through a crowd of visitors who were gathered around a bed at the other end of the ward, and moved toward Ferron and his mother. They had been standing there by the old man’s side for nearly an hour, not speaking. His mother used a cool rag to wipe the expressionless face. She kept whispering to the old man, asking him why he was doing this to her. The old man’s bed was the last one before the door to the nurses’ office.

The crow was dressed like the others in the group at the far end of the ward: church whites and blacks, which hung on her body at a slant. She held her Bible tight under her thin chest and looked from the bed to the faces of Ferron and his mother. The old man was having difficulty breathing. He looked thin. The woman stared at him knowingly. Two women from the other bed looked over. Soon they were all but ignoring their sick friend and watching this crow-faced woman standing before the old man’s bed. Ferron recognized the look. They were expecting a lesson—a sermon.

“’Im soon dead. ’Im soon dead. Yes. ’Im as good as dead, now,” she said, turning to them with a knowing gaze, as if expecting applause for her prophecy. “Them always put the worse one dem right side a de door. This one gone, Jesus.”

The other women nodded. Ferron felt his mother shaking.

“’Im soon dead. ’Im really look bad.” She walked closer to the old man, covering her face with a kerchief. “Soon gone.” She sniffed. The other people still nodded, but they kept their distance.

Ferron could hear his mother’s breathing quicken. He would have acted, but the woman’s audacity surprised him. His mind worked quickly, trying to understand the woman’s tone, to decipher something that made sense in it. Sympathy, perhaps, or concern. His mother did not wait.

“Move! Move your sour little body from here, do you understand? I said move! Now!” Ferron’s mother shouted into the face of the woman who seemed too startled to move. “If you don’t leave this minute I will wrap that scarf around your neck . . .”

“Sweet savior!” The crow-woman clutched her Bible tightly, her face breaking into a twisted network of wrinkles, her mouth hanging open in shock. She sloped her way to the other end of the room, offended, martyred, misunderstood. The others comforted her in low tones, sending admonishing glances toward his mother who kept glaring at them.

“Vultures. Stinking vultures,” his mother said, as if trying to help the old man understand. Ferron felt her shame and anger. This was death without dignity. They had no protection from the vultures. The nurse said she could do nothing and suggested that his mother had misunderstood the woman.

“These people mean well. Sometimes them bring a little solace to them what dying in sin,” she said with a smile. She was struggling with a syringe package. “When it come to death and damnation, sister, God is no respecter of person.” She shrugged her shoulders and walked back to her office. The crow-woman stared across the room with a triumphant smile on her face.

His mother wanted to move the body to Kingston, but there was no money to do so and the doctor said it would be too dangerous. So he would have to stay in this small country hospital, reduced to a simple old man—a peasant, a member of the lumpen proletariat. Ferron felt that the old man would have found it all quite funny; sweetly ironic and fitting. This would have been his end in a classless world, anyway. This was his dream.

He died that night. They got the call from the hospital while they were reading the ninety-first psalm together. His mother breathed what seemed to be a sigh, and then walked into the bedroom and changed into black. She would wear black for three years after the death.