Roxanna Slade Part 21

No man from my generation of kinfolk had to go. None of the younger cousins and nephews suffered real harm, even my elder brother's two boys who were stout and wide enough to be perfect targets failed to get hit by German fire. And Augustus Larkin Slade as well. He got all the way to downtown Berlin before Hitler killed himself underground. August said he'd been near enough at the time to hear the 's pistol shot. But of course he didn't. There was serious noise on every side, and August has never avoided the chance to improve a story with a harmless lie.

In fact, sad to say, August has shared his father's hereditary deafness in which war noise may well have played a part. And good as he's been to me through the years, he's increasingly lived in that same world of distance ever since he got back home in '46. That was way too young for a lovable man to succ.u.mb to an ancient family trait. And inappropriate as it may seem, I've always held it against the Germans that my son's dazed and uninformed smile was brought on early by their vicious hatred.

Since August stayed in the occupation force--he wound up in Frankfurt--we knew he'd be gone another few months. I told myself that might give me time to grasp the mood of the whole peaceful world so my son might recognize me. I'd kept my troubles out of all my letters and had begged everybody else to do the same. Since August never alluded to it in his letters home, I had to trust he was unaware. I also began to think in earnest of bringing myself to life again before the boy was back.

So in the extra fine days of October '45, Palmer took me to Duke for yet another hopeless session--hopeless for me when we left home anyhow. The doctor I'd seen periodically for three years received us kindly, seemed sorry to hear that my condition persisted and recommended more tests than I'd undergone before. He wanted to know if we could stay overnight and see him tomorrow when he'd have the results. Palmer wanted to stay and I agreed.

We knew Dinah was safe with Leela and Clarence; then Palmer called his mother and she was

agreeable to not consulting him for one more day. So late that afternoon we checked into the old Was.h.i.+ngton Duke Hotel, a likable place that was long since demolished. It had been a little more than twenty-two years since Palmer and I spent a whole night away from home together, since our Wilmington trip in 1923. That may sound incredible to restless modern ears. But it truly wasn't all that rare a thing in American lives back then, even lives like ours that had a decent income.

As we stepped into the elevator with a uniformed bellboy and our slim baggage (we'd packed an overnight kit in case of this happening), I waited for that first upward whoosh that old elevators made--your heart stayed behind for two more seconds--and my mind said It starts this minute. At once I wanted to ask what it was, but that seemed plain as my pale hands beside me. I would come back to life and be of some use to the ongoing Earth and the people I'd loved back when I had feelings.

It was the first trace of hope I'd felt for a very long time, and it almost stunned me, so I kept it from Palmer. I thought it was cruel to give him the smallest good expectation. But in fact that night in the hotel dining room, I ate for the only time in my life something called planked steak. It consisted of a cooked beefsteak laid on a seasoned plank of wood, surrounded by mashed potatoes and browned again. Palmer mentioned that I hadn't eaten that much in years.

And the doctor's tests all came back negative, a choice of term I've never understood. If you're well they give you a negative report, which has always scared me till I stop to think. Anyhow Dr. Menafee sat me and Palmer down in his office, gave us all the results and said that--apart from slightly low blood pressure and the need to gain weight I was in grand shape for a woman aged forty-five. Even my tenderest inner parts showed no significant damage from the pa.s.sage of three children in labor.

Grand was the last thing I'd felt for years. And hearing it now it sounded as foreign as a horse dialect from the wastes of Mongolia. But Palmer beamed to hear it--I always watched him when he was present, more than any doctor--so at that my own mind lifted again one further notch up off

the ground.

Then the doctor pushed on to the part you waited for in those less harried days, the part where the doctor didn't hesitate to give you the fruit of his whole adult common sense. Though I hadn't dwelt on my long depression when we'd met the day before, and though he hadn't talked privately with Palmer, Dr. Menafee took my right hand firmly in both his own hands and met my eyes. He said "Roxanna--let me call you that please; we're near the same age--you're in far better shape than you want to believe. With what you've told me about your parents and with what I've seen of the husband you've got, you could live another fifty years in full possession of your mind and the strength to walk about and do your work. My profession can't explain what's troubled you for so long. I don't low-rate your pain one iota. It's lasted longer than most such pain, but try to believe one fact I know--if you'll ride out this ache awhile longer, it'll pa.s.s you by. Or you'll pa.s.s it. Don't ever give up hoping, not for one hour. You are meant to live, to enjoy enough time to make life worthwhile and to treasure your family."

At the sound of somebody being that careful with simple words, the upward moves my mind had taken in recent weeks were dwarfed by what felt like a huge breath of air rus.h.i.+ng into my body as I sat there, the doctor still holding onto my hand and his brown spaniel eyes locked on me. Then he bent, set a quick dry kiss on the back of my wrist and said to Palmer "You'll give me that much, won't you?"

Palmer said "Very gladly" and came to lay his own hand on my shoulder.

My eyes were br.i.m.m.i.n.g for the first time in years. What felt like relief came on me so strongly that it tasted like a rupture, as if some wall had suddenly collapsed in my heart and was spilling its long-held all-but-frozen contents. If these two good men were to be trusted, I'd be a human one more time, a wife to Palmer and mother to Dinah and August again--and in plenty of time for August's homecoming.

There was nothing left between me and healing but to drive back home, open the shutters, raise the shades, wash all the curtains--even now this late in the year--maybe repaint the kitchen, outfit Dinah from stem to stern in the new belongings

she'd deserved for years and give my husband the go-word finally to put in the plumbing he'd delayed for so long.

G.o.d or Fate or my private chemicals utterly forbade me (and didn't G.o.d make my chemicals?). No Hebrew prophet on a cold bed of nails ever searched his soul more meticulously than I would be forced to in weeks to come. Despite my not being noticeably pious, I've never spent five minutes doubting G.o.d's existence or the truth of Jesus' claims that G.o.d is a loving father to us all. But what was I--what is any human being--expected to do when you think you're pardoned and saved from h.e.l.l, when you're shown the black clouds clearing above, the glare of clean daylight and then the sky clangs shut again and you're thrust deeper down than you've been?

Does G.o.d just turn His back and let Fate or Satan or blind dumb chemicals rule the road? If so in what way can that amount to true love? If so what would you suggest was hate? Wouldn't a father who behaved that inexplicably be cited today for unspeakable child abuse and rightly jailed for decades to come? And as for my being a subject worthy of punishment, I'll grant my many failures through the years. But we're not speaking of Hitler here or some cankered s.l.u.t that's cheating her husband and mauling her child.

Even when I was deep in the pit, I'd rake my soul like a deep gravel yard. And I never found one sin or felony that any sensible human, man or woman, would have paused beside for more than five minutes of hot reproval aimed at my eyes. Even the day I took those scissors and walked toward Dinah--I stopped, don't forget. I'm as clean of that as you are.

In any case after three weeks at home and steady small improvements on all sides, I set my face toward the oncoming Thanksgiving meal I'd planned for Leela and Clarence and Miss Olivia. I'd invited them freely to help celebrate my recovery. And it was then I began to feel the ground that was firming under my feet start to soften and s.h.i.+ft aside. I still can't point to any one moment when the slide recommenced. I know I got through the holiday itself

with all the company and cooking and was.h.i.+ng.

Leela's son Wilton was big for his age, and he was smart enough to take the day in and laugh along with us. I recall there were moments when I felt shaky at the dinner table, and I'd look to Wilton and find his eyes on me. I'd feel a little guilty that I loved him so much, so then I'd look to Dinah, and she'd be fixed right on me too. I could see straight into the floor of her mind. And young as it was, I could see I'd given her so very little that she was near starving and would always be.

She was six years old and, whatever I thought I saw and knew about her soul, I was wrong. Thank G.o.d, I was desperately wrong.

However hard a time she'd had, trapped in a house with a mother like me, Dinah Slade was growing up undeterred with a heart as steady as any great clock with its inner works wound unfailingly by some benign invisible hand. I've never forgot what a handsome part Palmer must have had in keeping Dinah human--and a human with a s.p.a.cious soul. In those days no part of child rearing was considered man's work. But Palmer did it with no audible sigh.

Despite the thousands of words I've used here, I don't know how to proceed in credible words to what comes next. I've said that the ground broke under me again from Thanksgiving onward through fall and winter. So it did and so I made it upright and working somehow till Christmas evening. Though the day had been as exhausting as any Christmas yet, that endless cold night I never shut an eye. Unlike some whom I've watched in deep melancholy, I'd slept a few hours most nights through the bad years. And I almost always slept without dreams, no dreams I recalled on waking anyhow. Till that final night, December 25th of 1945, I'd never been a victim of discouraging pictures and horror stories. I'd never heard voices that weren't truly present.

In fact the big problem for most of my time was that all my mind was seeing was blank. By far the greatest share of my time was spent as if I were walking through endless unfurnished rooms that were filled with an air that was one gray liquid which by special arrangement with h.e.l.l my lungs could breathe. That last Christmas night as I lay

by Palmer in our same bed, I made every effort not to bother his sleep.

But as I lay on staring toward the ceiling at nothing but a total dim gray blank, I soon began to feel a deep howl forming in my throat. I gathered all the force I could muster to strangle it down. And for a long time I succeeded. Then at maybe four a.m., it started again to swell in my mouth. So I got up thinking I'd heard Dinah coughing and that maybe the short walk to her room would calm me down.

I didn't walk straight in through Dinah's open door but stood outside on the doorsill listening. She moved an occasional arm or leg. But no, her breathing was calm and healthy. If she'd coughed it was only a pa.s.sing thing. I may have stood there fifteen minutes. And toward the end of that long wait, I'd reached a state that was almost peaceful. Not happy, not feeling I was suddenly cured but not harrowed either--just a momentary mercy. It (again, whatever it was) must have been preparing me for what came now.

I mentioned far back having only one vision in my early life, the night when drowned Larkin Slade came to show me he was alive and content and that Palmer might need me. That was truly a vision. My real eyes saw it, not the eyes of my mind but the two round jellies that sit in my skull either side of my nose. The thing that came on Christmas night 1945 was--what?--more like an audition, I guess. No satisfactory word exists. I stood on there in my young daughter's doorway and heard--just beyond her narrow bed between her and the window as if that were all the remainder of s.p.a.ce--the individual voices of the d.a.m.ned.

Not one of them ever spoke a personal name, though I could hear both men's and women's voices and--dreadful to tell--even the voice of a child now and then that I was all but sure was somehow my nameless dead infant. They were not speaking English nor any other language I'd heard (i'd studied two years of French in high school), but somehow I understood every word. That was part of the horror. I quickly realized that, if their words were reaching me and making clear sense, then I was one of them and must join them soon.

What was worse, or worst, was the fact that--while they spoke no names--I could

recognize for certain at least four voices among them. To this very day I've never told that to a living soul. Even now I can't make myself say who they were. Or who I knew I recognized, though not one of them was an enemy of mine. I'm still not sure they weren't truly there, beyond sleeping Dinah, in perpetual flames. And I'd never thought of any one of them as deserving endless torment.

Toward the end of their voices, they almost pressed on forward into sight. As their words grew weaker and farther off, it seemed I was starting to see their shapes--that there was this dull black screen stretched from floor to ceiling just beyond Dinah and that the dying voices were pressing hard to reach me. I almost saw the outlines of fingers thrusting from the other side. I know I saw the pitch-dark shapes of whole arms, shoulders and profiles of howling faces but never a thing I could call true sight.

I couldn't doubt for a moment they were there and that they wanted to reach me now, whether to fend me off or seize me. But for the present they lacked the last ounce of strength they needed to burst through toward me and lead me down. Next time they'd succeed. They made that clear before they faded.

That saved me for seven days longer, an endless week of gorgeous weather. In those times, merchants like everybody else seldom took holidays. So New Year's Day of 1946 was like most days in its air and purpose. In our part of the state, you were supposed to eat black-eyed peas and hog jowl on the first day of the year. I usually kept the custom and cooked both, though it had got harder and harder to find hog jowls anywhere except the few groceries that catered to blacks. At breakfast that morning Palmer said "I'm looking forward to those black-eyed peas." And then I realized that, for the whole week, I'd put off buying more than the urgent quart of milk or loaf of bread to see Dinah and Palmer through the post-Christmas purge.

From my bad night on, I'd scarcely eaten a morsel, though n.o.body seemed to have noticed the fact. So now I had to reveal my slackness.

I begged Palmer's pardon--there'd been so little I could offer him lately--and I said "In that case we'll have to drive to Henderson."

"Why so far?"

I think I said "It's that far off," not knowing

entirely what I meant.

In fact even that near the end of the war, our little downtown had begun the shrinkage that would kill it dead in twenty years. The man who'd run our one real grocery store had died in Guam from a sharpshooter's bullet in the war's last week, and his wife had promptly shut the store and moved to Georgia, so all we had was a sorry curbmarket. The two real stores were twelve miles away. We'd have to go there. And since I'd always resisted driving lessons and was one of the last white women left who couldn't run a car, I'd need to be driven.

Since Palmer's work was pretty much at his own discretion, he said "All right, get your coat and hat on--it's cold out there."

That was the instant I glimpsed my destination. I could plainly see that I hadn't planned this. n.o.body living could ever look back and say Roxanna Slade planned what happened. It was handed to her by Fate or mere circ.u.mstance relating to a New Year's meal. Whether some hand was shepherding Palmer to make his request and likewise making me guilty enough to agree to ride to Henderson for peas and pork on a freezing day --I've often wondered how much of it had any prior meaning, kindly or vicious. In any case with Dinah still at Leela's house (leela had seen, with no word from me, how bad off I was and had taken Dinah home with her two days ago), I had nothing to do but ready my lone self.

Three years before in a well-meant effort to lift my spirits, Palmer had given me a lavish Christmas present--a sealskin coat so long it almost reached to my ankles. It was a curious color of light brown. And it had genuinely come off a seal's back, not one of these wharf-rat-dyed-mink frauds that are still so common. Unfortunately for the seals, in those days their fur was not expensive. Even so I knew that Palmer had splurged way past our means. Furthermore the coat had half-dollar-sized bone b.u.t.tons carved in the likeness of a young seal's head.

The day I opened the gift-wrapped box, I tried to pretend that the coat gave me pleasure when only the b.u.t.tons did. I liked to read their surface with my fingers, like the real blind woman I was fast becoming. At least I didn't blame

Palmer for waste, and somehow I went on prizing those b.u.t.tons when I liked little else in the world. I'd had few occasions to wear it in the meanwhile. But this New Year's Day as I opened the closet, I saw the pale sealskin and thought "That's it." Again I've never known what or who made me say the words--I had no clear idea of what it was--but the curious fact of saying the words played a big part in what happened two hours later.

By that time it was past mid-morning, and the clear sun had yielded to clouds that made the cold air even harder to take. The fields on either side as we rode home were still locked in the frozen dew of last night. The brief sun hadn't been strong enough for a serious thaw. And the dead cornstalks were especially stark like a tribe of newly invented weapons stuck upright in the ground and waiting for soldiers who'd know how to use them.

I was almost tempted to speak out to them in the language I'd heard a week ago from the actual h.e.l.l beyond Dinah's bed. I think I even took a breath and opened my mouth to say one sentence. The mysterious words had already formed in my head.

But Palmer stopped me. He glanced over, smiling, and said "This is it."

As so often in my life, I wondered again what was this it? But I only waited for him to explain.

He said "This year--darling, I know you'll be better. By the time we go for New Year's food again, you'll be your old self."

I watched Palmer till I could finally say "Who told you so?" I had no reason to think he was fed by anything more than empty hope, a feeling I'd lost entirely last week when Dr. Menafee's lies fell off me like a rotten blouse.

Palmer knew right off. "Inspiration," he said. "It just came to me."

I gave him a short little smile and nodded. That was the trigger, his word inspiration. Two or three minutes before Palmer said it, I'd noticed that the bottom hem of my coat was caught in the car door. That had meant nothing to me. I couldn't have roused myself to retrieve it but for Palmer's one word inspiration. I heard it as an idea aimed at me more keenly than any flaming arrow, and it lit my body with a kind of hot joy I hadn't known for years. I looked ahead and saw the sharp curve we'd enter just before the outskirts of home. I looked to the panel behind the steering wheel. Palmer was always a fast safe driver, and we were going fifty.

I counted the seconds till the car got well within the grip of the curve. My left hand was stroking one of the big carved b.u.t.tons on the coat, but my right hand went of its own accord to the cold door handle. I took a last glimpse of Palmer who was watching the road, and I thought of no other person or thing--live or dead.

Then I opened the door and, taking a last warm breath through my teeth, I hurled myself with every ounce of force I had into freezing air. I seemed to spend whole minutes in the air. So before I hit I had time to think "Oh Christ, I haven't prayed one single word." But no prayer came. There was no more time.

The back of my skull hit the road first and terribly--cold concrete. I thought "That'll do it." But then my whole body rolled two complete turns backward. I wound up on my hands and knees with the seal coat thrown forward over my head which meant I was trapped in a dense dark tent. A piece of the collar was somehow clamped between my teeth. I was chewing dry fur.

Oh G.o.d, that proved it. I'd made it at last. I was at my rightful destination. This had to be h.e.l.l. The second jolt of unmitigated pleasure that flew down through me from my wrecked skull was potent as lightning.

From then on I have no recollection of the next several days. From the next two weeks in fact, I only have the faintest pictures of small quiet moments and visits from Dinah. Palmer always said that when I jumped there was no other car in sight, ahead or behind us; so he stopped as quick as he could in the midst of the road and ran back toward me. By then, he said, I'd sunk down to where I was almost lying flat on the concrete. The coat was still all over my head.

And when Palmer carefully lifted it back, he said my b.l.o.o.d.y face was calmer than he'd ever seen it and was smiling slightly. He never guessed why, I never confessed; and for the rest of his life whenever he told anybody the story, he stressed the fact that I'd fallen by accident, just freeing my coat. I never corrected him in public or private.

I was wrong to be smiling anyhow. Far from being in deep d.a.m.nation, I landed in rescue. The only doctor in town was young and had no more than a two-room office. To be sure, in Henderson they had the hospital where Dinah was born. Palmer had never trusted it because his favorite cousin died there of apparent negligence. But the day I split my head like a melon, there were no such things as emergency squads with sensible help for many miles and years to come. And I was plainly hurt very gravely.

Palmer could never again describe it without going gray as ash all over. He said my head looked like some porcelain cup you'd prized and were holding most of the pieces of but could not find the rest. So what came to him on the spur of the moment was to pick me up, lay me gently in the car and get to Leela and Clarence's fast.

Leela was home when we got there, and a further blessing was that Clarence had taken Dinah fox hunting with his numerous well-bred cheerful beagles. (it was no real hunt. They'd turn the hounds loose, stand by the road and listen to twenty dogs chase a poor fox for hours through impenetrable woods till they caught him or gave up.) Leela instantly called the doctor, then quickly made up a downstairs bed.

And again Palmer carried me in his arms.

As I said I have no memory of this. It was told to me many times in later years. So I see it still through the eyes of people who wanted to save me and wanted me to live. I wonder if, in my own stunned mind, I wasn't begging to slip through their dumb b.u.mbling hands and go my way. I hadn't prayed for pardon when I jumped, but I'm almost certain I prayed now to die.

I do know that my first realistic memory is of Leela's boy Wilton who was almost four. Everybody said I spoke to Wilton first, though any number of family and friends and the pitiful doctor had trooped in and out. I recall I was propped up on several thick pillows, that my head was still aching very badly and that Wilton's hair was straight as hemp fiber--a pale cap of tow hair that made him look almost like a star in the dark sky when he'd steal in to see me. Where had he got that powerful s.h.i.+ne? Both his parents were dark brunettes.

The thing I remember first is him coming in and handing me a fan he'd made by folding red paper into neat narrow pleats. And in fact I was overheated with fever from various infected sc.r.a.pe wounds on my body and limbs. He must have heard his mother say as much and acted on my need with something he knew how to make. Sore as I was I tried to fan with my left arm. The right arm was broken and in a hard cast.

But then Wilton asked what n.o.body else had the gall to ask. "Why did you do it?"

When I'd looked out from my helmet of gauze and seen there was n.o.body else nearby, I answered him true. I said "I was trying to fly on off."

Wilton laughed high and clear, then shook his head and said "People can't fly."

Then I think I laughed for the first full time since before he was born. It hurt my skull like hammer blows, but I let it roll as long as it lasted.

And Wil laughed with me--his childish, not-quite-understanding laugh that bound my heart to his more closely than ever before.

By then I was saved. The boy was going on four years old. He'd outlast me. He'd be in the world as long as I lasted and way beyond. I could count on him the next time I failed. I almost knew I'd been truly saved.