Charms for the Easy Life (7 page)

My grandmother had placed the baby on her stomach, and I was still holding the legs. She was on her knees by the settee, with one ear pressed into the baby’s back. The windowpanes rattled with the child’s screaming, but my grandmother heard the young woman’s response, lifted her head from the baby’s back, and asked, “Did he say anything to you?”

The young woman nodded. “Yes ma‘am. He said, ‘Damn it all to hell.’”

My grandmother didn’t ask anything else. My mother stopped her questioning as well and went into the kitchen and started in on the considerable stack of dishes. The young woman didn’t stop her.

When my mother and I went out on house calls, we usually walked into a mess, though never one as severe as this, and part of our duty was to clean. My grandmother asked me to boil a croup kettle and to heat the plaster she had brought already mixed, and while I stood stirring at the stove, trying to keep the plaster from sticking to the pan, she walked up and down the room with the baby. The young woman stood with her back against the wall, looking at the three of us as if we were taking over her life. She seemed indifferent to it. When the plaster was warm enough, my grandmother spread the mixture on a width of torn sheet and swaddled and pinned the baby up in the wrapping like a little cocoon. As she did this, she asked where the baby’s father was.

The young woman said, “He’s drunk.”

My grandmother said, “Drunk is not a place. Where is he?”

The young woman said he was at a pool parlor in an even worse part of town than this one. My grandmother told my mother and me to go home and to return with food and more medicine the next day. We went out to the automobile and brought in the satchel of extra clothes she kept in the trunk during whooping cough season, and then we went home, stopping as we had done before to salt the icy places. My grandmother stayed in that house with the blind baby and her washed-out mother and her hard-drinking father for two nights and three days, administering half a grain of antipyrine to the child every few hours. She never left anybody alone who was taking this drug. When she finally returned home, she fixed herself up on a little laudanum and slept like a bear, on top of her covers with all her clothes on.

The next afternoon she emptied out a startling handful of suma, for energy, and sarsaparilla, for courage and vigor, swallowed them without water, and then dictated a letter for my mother to take down, addressed to the real doctor. My mother used her best linen stationery and her best Palmer penmanship. In this letter my grandmother called him a thug, a hoodlum, a coward, and an overall disgrace to their profession. She suggested that the baby be afforded every future comfort that a blind child could have, including but not limited to entry into the Governor Morehead School for the Blind. She suggested that an account be set up in the mother’s name at the general store nearest her home and that all bootleggers in the region be put on notice to deny the father alcohol under penalty of having their livelihoods exposed and their families ruined.

The doctor wrote her back a tortured and near-incoherent letter in which he confessed to having spilled silver nitrate in the baby’s eyes. He said he despised himself and deserved to die, things of that nature. He consented to everything my grandmother suggested, and then swore to do all he could to advance her career. He wasn’t kidding. The next week things started happening for her. She was appointed to the War Orphan Board, the State Committee on Inter-racial Cooperation, and the Rural Midwifery Council. She was given a lifetime subscription to
The New England Journal of Medicine
as well as permission to have her patients’ prescriptions filled at Hayes Barton Pharmacy. She wanted one more thing, which, however, would always be denied: the power to admit patients into Mary Elizabeth’s Hospital. The doctor did, though, promise to admit her cases on his authority. My mother asked her how she could take things from this doctor, and my grandmother said, “Nothing is happening I do not already deserve and have not deserved for some time.”

But an achievement some months afterward that won her a feature interview in the Sunday paper as well as a biographical sketch in the next year’s edition of
Busy North Carolina Women
had nothing to do with the real doctor’s gratitude. She single-handedly saved five children in a backwoods family from malaria. She was called to the family’s home, a filthy cabin on a stagnant loop of the Tar River, on the evening of the Fourth of July. She had just walked back in from reprimanding our neighbor’s four children for exploding firecrackers underneath a tin tub, when Marvin Jenkins, a tall, oafish boy who came to school every three months or so, banged up the steps and shouted through the screen door into the kitchen, “I’ve come for the doctor! Come on! Everybody’s going to be dead! Mama said tell you they’re too hot!”

We knew the boy was talking about malaria, because it had been a dangerously hot summer, and we knew where and how his family lived. Every once in a while malaria roared through the lower-lying areas of this part of the state, and those with a mind to helping themselves as God commanded had long since moved to higher ground. This particular family was of the variety made famous in
Tobacco Road
, so one fairly easily gets the point that they suffered everything from close-breeding to ticks. My grandmother loaded her satchel, cursing the fact that she had only two quinine tablets left. Knowing she was useless sick, she swallowed them and said she would send out for more once she got to the boy’s house, and realizing the trip there would be a muddy ordeal for her, my mother and I wanted to go with her, even without quinine, but she assured us that she would be fine.

When she walked past us, we noticed her shoes were missing the laces. “They’re soaking,” she said. “I’ll keep my toes bunched.” The laces were soaking, as they were every Sunday night, in a bowl of linseed oil. By doing this, she had made them last thirty years. “My shoestrings,” she told me once, “have lasted years longer than most people can stand each other.” As we watched her climb into the rickety buggy, my mother said how worried she was that the boy wouldn’t get my grandmother to his house before dark. There was to be no moon that night, and nights on the back loop of the river were said to be darker than black, darker than the Earl of Hell himself.

My grandmother had to help the boy dig the buggy out of the river mud twice. They didn’t get to his house until after ten o’clock. She went right in and immediately confirmed five roaring cases of malaria. She had left so hurriedly that she forgot her prescription pad. When she searched the Jenkins house for a piece of paper, she found nothing. She told me later, “I looked up and I looked down, and then I looked up and I looked down again. The mother of this gang told me they never had a call for paper, and whenever they got any it was highly appreciated in the outbuilding.” What did my grandmother do? She wrote out a lengthy prescription on the side frame of the bedroom door and instructed the oldest boy to rip the piece of wood off the wall and take it to Hayes Barton and wake up the pharmacist, who lived over the store. While the boy was gone, she chastised the mother for keeping her children in a filthy hotbox, and then sent another boy to our house to collect clean linens.

The five children survived, though sorry to tell, they didn’t amount to anything worthy of the heroic effort that had been put forth to save their lives.

I kept the newspaper photograph of these recuperating children, all of them sitting up in one bed with the famous door frame displayed across their legs. For years, the piece of wood hung over the soda fountain at the Hayes Barton Pharmacy, where I ate lunch every day. On a particularly lonesome anniversary of my grandmother’s death I decided the frame was mine, and I crawled up among the milk shake machines and juice presses, took it down, and carried it home. The sympathetic old pharmacist, full of memory as he was, let me go without a word. I marched home down Glenwood Avenue with it underneath my arm, in a frenzy of relentless grief.

My grandmother had been with us for two years when her life changed. One afternoon she, my mother, and I were hanging out laundry in our backyard. The week before, Maveen had told us, “I feel too old to work,” and had gone to the next county to live with her sister. It was a perfect day for drying laundry, a day with a hot, stern wind. That was as much as we were discussing. For some reason, I felt compelled to look across the wide cotton field by our house. It meant looking directly into the sun, but I did it anyway. And there, on the edge of the field, was an old man, suitcase in hand. I knew in my heart he had not been there two seconds before. He had appeared to me perfectly at once, as if he had been dropped standing upright from the clouds. I told my mother and grandmother to look at him. He was so still, staring at us. My grandmother looked up from the clothes basket, and without a word she started to run for him. At fifty-six, she ran to him like a young girl. He had given her nothing except sadness for so many years, but as I watched her fly into his arms, my thought was this: Oh, how she loves him is untelling.

He acted like the stranger he was. He was cordial to my mother, cordial to me, and one would’ve thought he’d have brought us presents, but he didn’t. He drank our coffee and ate everything in the house while my mother stood by the kitchen sink, regarding him and the way he ate without stopping. He looked to be all gristle, and he smelled—to be blunt—of bourbon and urine. My grandmother began pouring on the coffee and the charm. She seemed to have come completely out of herself. It was startling. After he swore on the Holy Bible that he could not eat another bite, he asked my mother what time the next bus for Raleigh drove by our house. She told him, and my grandmother said, “In that case, I’d better get ready.”

She packed all her necessities with great speed, standing at the dresser and tossing garments into the open satchel on her bed. My mother asked her in a thousand different ways if she knew what she was doing. My grandmother kept saying she was in a hurry and could not talk. I went back into the kitchen and watched this man, this grayed and stinking man, and convinced myself that he looked like the sort of man who wouldn’t mind answering a personal question.

I said, “Excuse me, but you know, my mother is pretty shaken up by all this. Can you please tell me what you’re doing here?”

He said, “She doesn’t look upset to me. She looks fine. I just came back to get Charlie Kate.”

I told him my mother didn’t show these things, but I knew her well enough to know how she felt.

He said, “You can get in a world of trouble reading minds. It is a truly hazardous hobby.” Then he wanted to know if I could wrap up the rest of our delicious pineapple cake in some wax paper for him and his bride to enjoy at the hotel.

A few minutes before the bus was due to pass by, we all went outside, and when we saw the top of it in the distance, shining like a new dime, my grandfather walked into the middle of the road and stood there, looking ready to be run over. He glanced back over his shoulder at my mother, who was jiggled up tight with alarm and fury, and he said, “Sugar, I mean not to miss this bus.”

My grandmother wasn’t a hugger, so the fact that she boarded the bus to Raleigh without so much as giving us a peck on the cheek did not hurt our feelings. The bus hissed and pulled away and left my mother and me standing in our front yard, not knowing whether we were supposed to wave them off, or stand there and cry, or what. We went back inside and asked each other for the rest of the day if what had just happened had truly happened. If we had not remembered the laundry outside, all the wet things we’d left to sour in the basket, we would have had nothing to do but sit and wonder. My mother said, “Thank God for laundry.” We rewashed everything left in the basket, so grateful to have something to do with our hands.

We did not hear anything from my grandmother for three days. Then the phone rang at four o’clock in the morning.

My grandmother shouted, “Margaret? Margaret?”

I shouted back, “Where are you?”

She told me she was at the Sir Walter Hotel, which was the best place in town, and she would be waiting out front for us to come pick her up right away. Then she hung up. I awakened my mother, and she got dressed, and off we went. From five blocks away, we could see my grandmother on the sidewalk. We pulled up beside her and jumped out and rushed at her, asking what was wrong, was she hurt, things of that nature. She said she was not hurt, and without another word she opened the back door and crawled onto the seat.

As we drove back home, my mother tried again and again to make her tell us what was going on. My grandmother said it was none of our business. When my mother would not stop, she sighed and said, “Well, if it’ll make you be quiet, I’ll tell you.”

My mother said, “That would be nice.”

My grandmother opened her black satchel and pulled out a great power of money, a gangster wad actually. She held it up to my mother’s face and said, “You see this? This is your father’s. Or it
was
his. It’s mine now.”