Autumn Street (15 page)

It was Tatie who picked me up and held me close in her massive, inviolate arms. I remember that. I remember that her low moans filled the high-ceilinged hallway, that she clasped me against her, nearly crushing me as if to crush my pain and hers, as if to ward off more. She murmured unintelligible words to me, rocking me against her; and the words became wails, high-pitched chants, almost songs, almost magic: they were wails I had never heard before, wails not part of my own heritage or understanding. But they blurred and softened the edges of my terror.

The others stood motionless, silent, and watched. Her sounds were a litany for which, in the dim early morning winter light of the high-ceilinged hallway, there was no response.

Finally she lifted her head. Her body was shuddering, still, but her voice, when she spoke, was very firm.

"Call a doctor," she said. "This child's on fire. Let's not lose this one, too."

My mother, her face pale and stricken, moved quickly to the telephone.

F
OR DAYS THERE
was a haze in the room, so that everything was veiled; but the haze seemed to be behind my own eyes, deep in the hot part of my head, where something ached and throbbed with the same rhythm as my pulse.

My whole body was burning. I thrashed and kicked the blankets aside and then shook uncontrollably with chills. Through the haze, someone replaced the blankets again and again, and wiped my face with a damp cloth. From time to time a cool spoon was placed against my mouth; someone held a firm, supporting arm to my back, lifting me, and liquids I couldn't taste
were given to me from the spoon. I turned my head from side to side, trying to refuse; it took all my energy to breathe, and I couldn't summon the strength to swallow. Phantoms pressed against my chest. Each breath was pain. I couldn't dislodge the heaviness that gripped my ribs; through the darkness and the haze, I planned each breath, trying to find a way around the weight. Finally, desperate, I would take the breath, gasping, but the weight and pain were always there; and I cried, fighting it, fighting the breathing itself, unable not to breathe, frantic to escape the pain, the heat, and the monstrous things that screamed and raked their claws inside my head.

Sometimes there were bright lights. There was a man who came, who spoke to me, who said, "Elizabeth, Elizabeth," in a deep, demanding voice from which I turned away, and who raised my nightgown gently and then stabbed my shaking bottom with needles.

But mostly there were shadows and darkness and dreams. I could see Charles in the dreams, and I could see him again when my eyes were open, looking at me through the haze; I could see his dark face with the mouth molded into a scream. His mouth was like Grandfather's, open and black; but the eyes were Charles' eyes, little-boy eyes, wide and frightened, not at all like the tired, puzzled stare of an old man.

I could see his neck, red and open as a grin.

I shrieked into the dark room, into the night, into my own dreams, shrieked even through the pain that pulled tighter around my chest. And they came again, people whose names I no longer knew; lights went on, and the cool hands sponged my face one more time, and one more time, and one more time.

Through the haze I could hear my mother cry. It may have been a dream; there was a time when the dreams were as real as the other, when night and day were the same, and when no one's tears mattered but my own.

Then the weight and pain began to lift. Breathing began to happen without thought. I was able, now and then, to focus on things through the lifted haze: my mother's face, swimming into my sight and disappearing again; a glass of water on the table; a picture hanging, as it always had, on my bedroom wall. Everything I had known was the same, and yet it was all different. It all seemed new and flat, without interest. And I was more tired than I had ever been. Too tired to keep my eyes open, but too frightened of my dreams to sleep. I lay stunned and mute, awake, silent, waiting. I let them lift me, wash me, feed me; but my eyes stayed closed while I waited for the next unspeakable thing, not knowing what it would be, or how it would come, but certain that it would happen and that I would not be able to keep it away.

One morning it was my mother's voice that I heard through the secret darkness of my closed eyes. "Elizabeth," she said to me, "it's the first day of spring."

I let her words float, pulsing, through my head, searching for the unwounded place where they would have meaning.

"It's your birthday," she said gently. "You're seven years old today."

And the meaning pierced my consciousness, inside where the sounds had subsided. February was gone. March had come and was almost past. Charles had been seven. Now I was. I turned my head away from Mama's words.

But she touched my shoulders and shook me softly. "I have a surprise for you," she said. "Will you open your eyes to see it?"

I kept my eyes tightly closed and said nothing.

"Your daddy's back," she told me. "Open your eyes now, Elizabeth."

So I did, at last; and the first thing I saw on my seventh birthday was my father. He stood in the doorway, wearing the uniform that I remembered, smiling at me; and I remembered his smile, I remembered his face, I remembered in a rush all the things about my father that I had thought gone forever.

When he walked toward my bed, it was slowly, and I saw that he was leaning on a cane. The sight made
me curiously happy; it linked him to my grandfather, redeeming the dignity of the old man who now sat slumped and helpless in the house he had always commanded. Somehow the cane, and my father's slow, uneven steps, gave a continuity to the world and made it seem firm enough to hold me once again.

He sat on my bed and put his arms around me, nuzzling my neck with his nose the way he always had. I held tightly to him.

"Daddy, bad things have happened to me," I whispered, my hands knotted together behind his shoulders so that he could never leave again.

"I know," he whispered back. "But they're all over now. Bad things won't happen any more."

I believed him, when he told me that. I think that he believed it, too.

Bad things had happened to my father, so I knew that he understood. Part of his leg was gone. He had a new lower leg, made of wood and metal in fascinating, complicated combinations. After the first, startling sight of the place where his real leg ended and the new one began, it didn't seem terrible any more. He taught me, while I was still in bed, recovering, to say "prosthesis," and it was only then, when I tried to say it and failed in a wonderful mixture of spit and giggles, that I realized my two front teeth were gone. Sometime
during the time of nightmares and pneumonia they had fallen out; so I had continued to grow, and it was true, what my father had said, that the bad things were all over. I was seven and safe.

Gordon, the baby, had grown two new front teeth in exactly the same place where mine were missing, during the month that I was sick. And he could stand by himself, startled and wobbly, for a few seconds before he fell. Jess brought him to my room to show me, and she was kind to me, glad I was well. She had a bedroom of her own now, because I'd been sick; but it was not for that reason that she was kind, I knew.

Grandmother appeared in my doorway now and then, with her stiff face, to inquire how I felt. I answered her politely, but I didn't think she really cared. All of her time was still spent with Grandfather; when she came to my doorway, it was always with his medicine, or the book that she was reading to him, in one hand.

Finally I was allowed to go downstairs alone. I put on my bathrobe and my pink slippers of soft fur and went to visit Tatie in the kitchen. I vowed that I would never speak to her, or anyone, of Charles.

She welcomed me with a hug, oatmeal cookies, and tears that she thought I didn't see in her dark eyes.

"Child," she said, "I was so worried about you."

There was in having been sick a wonderful status that I had never enjoyed before. "Everyone was worried about me," I said proudly.

"Lord, that's true all right. Your mama, she was up nights pacing the floor..."

"
Really?
" I was delighted.

"Really. Course, she was worried about your daddy, too, when he got hisself injured..."

"But it was just his leg. Mine was my
whole body
that was sick."

"That's surely true, Elizabeth."

"And Jessica was worried too, I bet."

"My goodness, that Jessica, she up in her room every ' night, making get-well cards, and then you too sick to look at them, sometimes she cried."

"Oh, yes, Jessica must have been very upset." I savored it all, along with the oatmeal cookies.

"And your grandma..."

"Ha," I interrupted. "Grandmother doesn't care about
anybody,
except Grandfather."

There was a silence, and then Tatie turned on me furiously, something she had never done before.

"Don't you speak of your grandma that way, Elizabeth."

"But she doesn't, Tatie. She..."

"Let me just tell you something. And then I don't want to talk of it no more, do you understand?"

I nodded.

"Your grandma, on the day that we bury Charles ..."

"Oh, Tatie, I don't want to talk about that. I really don't."

"Then you just listen. You don't have to do no talking. Your grandma, on that day, she go up to her room and she puts on her black coat and her black hat with them feathers, and she calls her a taxi, and she tells the taxi to take her to the Full Gospel Church.

"Now you don't know this, Elizabeth, 'cause you too little, but in this town there ain't a cab driver that's gonna take a white lady to the Full Gospel without arguing. And I know this happened, because the cab driver, he told Gwendolyn. He told Gwendolyn that he try to talk your grandma out of going to the Full Gospel Church on the day we buried Charles, and your grandma, she put on that mad face she gets sometimes, and she tell that cabbie to shut his mouth and start driving.

"Me, I'm sitting in the Full Gospel sanctuary, already starting my grieving, and the whole church full by then, and in walks your grandma, Elizabeth, in her black feathered hat, and she the only white person in that whole place. Your grandma in her whole life, child, never been the only white person in a room. But she walks right up that aisle and she sees there's a place right near to me, and she sits herself down in it, sitting
just as straight as she sits at that dinner table when I'm passing the meal around.

"And when we singing 'Sweet Child Jesus' I looks over at your grandma, sitting right there amidst all the Hallelujahs and the Praise Lords—and they don't have none of those at that church your grandma goes to every Sunday; I know that for a real fact, Elizabeth—and she's sitting there singing the words right out of the book. And there are tears coming down your grandma's cheeks, just the same as there are tears coming down all the colored cheeks in that church, for Charles, and she no more care, right then, what color she is, or I am."

I was watching Tatie, but she wasn't looking at me. She was looking somewhere inside her own head.

"
You,
" she said suddenly, scornfully, "tears come easy to you, Elizabeth. You cry when you get into trouble and get caught. You cry when you stub your toe.

"And me—well, tears come easy to me, too.

"But for your grandma to come to the Full Gospel Church and weep for Charles: that didn't come easy for her. And your mama don't know that she did that. Your daddy don't know it, and your sister don't know it. The only reason I'm telling you is because you got a hateful kind of bigotry for your grandma, and I don't want to hear no more of it."

She was correct, that tears came easily to me. I began to cry then. It was not for my grandmother that I cried, or even for Charles; it was for me and Tatie, and that there was anger between us for the first time.

"I don't have a hateful bigotry, Tatie," I sobbed. "Really, I don't."

"Your grandma don't know how to show her heart is all," Tatie said. "Do you understand that?"

"Yes," I wept. "But I know how. And you do."

She relented, then, and took me into her lap. My legs had grown longer, it seemed, while I was sick; they were in the way, suddenly, outgrowing Tatie, and I sat awkwardly, my backside still bruised and aching from the needles. But my arms felt their familiar way around her wide bosom, and I put my head against her shoulder while I cried. She rocked me back and forth, forgiving me, and through the starched clean cotton of her uniform I could feel the strong arid stable rhythm of her heart.

***

It was such a long time ago. Probably my father and I both knew, even then, that it was not true, what we told each other, that bad things would never happen again. But we needed that lie, that pretending, the spring that I was seven. We had both lost so much. He had told me his secret: that sometimes, in the night, he felt a deep, unassuageable pain in the place where his leg had been; and I had whispered to him of mine, of the hollow place inside me where I ached with memory and with fear. We told each other, promised each other, that the pain and the fear would go away. It was not ever to be true. But there are times—times of anguish—when an impossible promise to someone you love is as sweet as a cinnamon-smudged fingertip, as nourishing and necessary as the sunlight that comes, still, to consecrate Autumn Street in summer.