Sweeping Up Glass (17 page)

Wing hears me, turns, and comes out of his chair like a very old man. “Olivia—”

I step back into the hall, but not before Miz Grace’s eyes open, enormous green eyes with lids like butterfly wings.

“Come in,” Wing says.

I know I must pay my respects, but I feel like I’ve stepped in quicksand.

Miz Grace turns her head, her eyes on my face. Her lips part slightly, and my name flutters out.

“Wing. Miz Grace,” I say with a nod.

Her fingers move, a command to sit. I unbutton my cape. Wing takes it, and I ease into the rocker.

“Well,” she says. “’Livia. Tell me—about yourself.”

I look to Wing, but he’s busy hanging my things in the wardrobe, like I’m going to stay. I have no idea what to say. Her eyes flutter down, and I think that when she opens them maybe she’ll have forgotten. Then I can talk about something else.

“Little Ruse has baked a chocolate cake,” I say. “We smelled it out in the street, Junk and I. Ruse buys his bars of cooking chocolate at our place.”

She nods, as if that was important information.

I look to the window. “It’s stopped raining, it’s ice that’s coming down now. Sleet. And—it’s near four o’clock. My grandbaby—Will’m—will be getting off the school bus. He’ll find the note I left him. He’ll be heaping jam on bread—two, three slices. Then he’ll eat it right off the spoon.”

Again, her eyes have closed, but she opens them when I stop. It seems a great effort for her, lifting those transparent lids, so I keep on. “I put up jam in summer—sandplum, apricot—he loves apricot. Not many strawberries around here, but plenty of blackberries. Love Alice Hanley and I go berry picking in summer. We take mustard sandwiches and—”

I don’t know whether she’s sleeping or not. I keep talking, mostly to cover the sound of her dying. “I’ve two wolf cubs in a paper box by my stove. Tucked into an old wool robe. They’re hungry all the time. They’ve lost their ma, and Will’m, he’s feeding them molasses and milk with a dropper. Thinks he can keep them alive—”

What an awful thing I have said.

She watches me through shuttered eyes.

“You should sleep now,” I say.

“No …”

I search my brain. “Love Alice Hanley. If you don’t know Love Alice, she’s a sight. Freckles on her nose, never hurt a soul. She’s got this gift—she can look at you and see your truth, that’s what she calls it. She had a baby once—”

“I know—who you are,” she says.

“Ma’am?”

“Wing—talks about you.”

I don’t know why this strikes terror in me. I look around, but Wing’s gone, and I wonder if she’s waited for this moment to
accuse me of something. I’m guilty of so many things. I wonder if she’s privy to Love Alice’s gift, and maybe I’m the only one in the world that can’t see the future. Or the past.

“I can’t imagine why,” I say.

She tries to cough. I want to clear my throat for her, cover her mouth with mine, breathe air into her. Her lips stretch out, a smile almost. It’s a moment when truth is all that’s left, and it passes between us with such force that I hang my head and close my eyes. I rock softly, and when her fingers flutter on the coverlet, I hitch the rocker forward and reach for them. Her hands are as cold as last month. I get up and go to the lobby, to the rack Wing’s set up in the window, and bring her my best pink quiltie, cover her gently, slide one pale hand underneath. Then I sit by her bed, and the rocker makes its cricket sounds while I hold her other hand.

She sleeps for a long time, long enough for me to think that when she’s gone into death, and rested sufficiently, she’ll come again. After all, if it’s intended for us to strive toward perfection, God wouldn’t expect us to get it right in just one try. And I wonder other things—like, standing at the gates of life, whether a soul chooses its own body, or if it knows what’s ahead. And, if
that’s
the case, why would I choose to be born to Ida? Lord knows, I’m no hero.

After a while I feel Miz Grace looking at me. “Livia—”

“Yes’m,” I say, leaning close.

“I want to go out in the snow,” she says.

“Oh no.” I tuck the quiltie tighter. “It’s fearfully cold.”

“Please.”

There’s a bowl of water on her bedside table, and a linen towel. I wring it out and wipe her forehead. There’s lavender, too, for dabbing her wrists, and I fix her hair.

She reaches for my hand. “Livia—please.”

My back is aching, and my heart is heavy. This is more than I can bear. As I pass through the lobby, Junk comes in, wrapped in a whirl of wet wind and stamping his feet. There’s snow on his coat, and I can see by the outside light that it’s coming down hard.

“Miz Livvy?” he says. “You-all need anything here?”

“My truck—”

“It’s done buried out here. You ain’t goin’ no place this night.”

“But Will’m’s alone at the house—and Ida.”

Junk rubs his hands together. Blows on them. “Doc Pritchett’s boy brung his sleigh down. I’ll catch a ride up with him, an’ say you’re still here.”

“Thank you, and—would you mind staying on at the house tonight?”

“Don’t mind at all. I’ll send word to Love Alice.”

“And, Junk, there are eggs and bread in the larder. And you sleep in the four-poster.”

“All right, then,” he says, although I know he won’t. He’ll have brown bread and coffee, and spend the night on the kitchen floor, but Will’m will see to blankets and a pillow. Junk hunches his shoulders and goes out in the storm. I close the front doors and slide the bolt.

Wing is in the kitchen, his chair drawn up to the dark window, elbows on the sill. The glass is frosted over, and snow has piled up, outside and in. I put the kettle on, and set out cups, rummage in the icebox for supper things. There’s ham for slicing, and bread and butter, and some cold potatoes that I chop with butter in a skillet. It’s odd, cooking in this kitchen.

“Wing?” I say after a while, and he comes to the table, sits with his shoulders slumped, staring at his plate. I slide his tea across. “Please eat something.”

“She won’t last the night,” he says.

“Probably not.”

“Twenty-two years.”

“Yes.”

“Life is hellaciously strange,” he says.

I pick up my fork, but Wing hunches over, and his hands fold over his face. A terrible sound rises out of him, so that I stumble from my chair to stand helplessly behind him, then wrap my arms around him. We rock a little, him shaking and me holding on.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he says. “I shouldn’t have—”

“Hush.”

“’Livia—”

“Wing. She wants to go outside.”

He looks at me as if I’m speaking Chinese.

“She wants to see the snow.”

“What for?”

I shrug. “I think we ought to take her. We could wrap her up, just for a few minutes.”

“Olivia—”

“Wing—how many things has she asked for?”

From the attic, Wing brings down her wheeled wicker chair, and I dust it and line it with a woolen blanket. We wheel it in, and she sees, and smiles, and Wing turns back the covers. She reminds me of one of Will’m’s cubs. Wing lifts her as easily as if she were a baby. He puts her in the chair, and I wrap a towel around her feet and add the quiltie, folded into six, she’s that small. Then we trundle her into the lobby, and Wing stops while I lift the blanket around her ears and over her head. She looks like the Mother Mary from the Christmas pageant at the Methodist church. I open the door, and a great swoop of snow
rushes in. Wing wheels her out backward, shielding her from the wind.

Every light in town is on—Ruse’s Cafe lit up inside and out even though it’s closed, colored lights over the old newspaper office, the general store, and another row on the barber pole. Left from the holidays, I guess. A lamppost burns at the end of the block, and lights shine from a few windows on the northern slope. Headlights move slow out on the highway. The whiteness of the snow multiplies all that by a hundred, and Miz Grace Harris frees her hands to clap them like a child.

She pushes back the woolen hood, and lifts her face. Snow settles on her pale brows and lashes, and she licks a flake from her lip, and a sigh escapes, sailing up past the top floors of the hotel and into the inky sky.

Easy as that, Miz Grace Harris passes, on Main Street, with every light winking and blinking, and Wing trembling at her feet, his face buried in her lap.

T
here comes a thaw over the next day and a half that surpasses record, and I am able to trek down and bring home the truck. The sun is brilliant, and it warms the kitchen, even though we’ve still only one window because I’ve not fixed the other. In the box by the stove, the cubs are fading. Will’m’s anxiety is enormous. Something has shifted in me, too, maybe from watching Grace Harris leave this earth. I believe she wanted to go on and be done with it—for herself and so’s Wing could get on with his life. Maybe she contrived the whole thing, and if that’s the case, I admire her more than I’ve admired another soul.

All this coming after so many years of don’t-utter-his-name, when I’d have fallen to the floor in a lovesick heap if Wing had so much as walked through my door.

We are quiet, the two of us, Will’m with a bit of a cold—and me ladling up oats. I’ve kept him home from school today, lest he take the croup, the possibility of which he’s not yet outgrown.

I give him blackstrap molasses on a spoon, and there’ll be a poultice around his neck at bedtime. Come right down to it, I’m terrified of losing him. He says nothing when I set his bowl in front of him, and I put on my cape and carry Ida’s dollop of oats and a bit of bread. A cup of weak coffee. I cross the yard. It’s dark
in her cabin, the single window covered with an old sheet. Inside, I pull it back to let in some light. But Ida’s not in her bed, nor in the chair, nor rooting around in her moldy boxes. She’s not in the cabin at all—and she wasn’t in the outhouse, which I’ve just passed. I set down the breakfast things and go back out, calling her name.

“Ida?” I stump off to the barn. “For God’s sake, Ida, where’ve you gotten yourself off to?”

But she is not there, nor in the toolshed, or sitting in the truck—places I’ve sometimes found her when she was mad at me. I study my own boot tracks, winding ’round and messing up the snow, which is rapidly turning to water in the sun. There are no clear prints that match Ida’s tiny feet, and that turns my stomach cold. It’s still early. She may have been gone for a while—but where? Up the mountain?

“Ida!”

Along the road? Maybe she’s taken off across some pasture, forgotten where she lives, gotten into a car.

“I’m going to look for her,” I tell the boy.

He sniffles and runs his hand under his nose.

“Use your handkerchief, Will’m. She’s wandered off, I guess. Can’t imagine anyone taking her.”

He’s done with his oats, and pushes back his chair. “I’ll help.”

“No you won’t,” I say. I can feel the pulse hammering in my neck. “I’ll take the truck, ask if anyone’s seen her. Get dressed, Will’m, and mind the store. Weather’s broken, there ought to be customers today.”

He nods.

I back the truck out and head into town. There are cars everywhere, women taking covered dishes into the hotel. Doc, who doubles as undertaker, came early yesterday and filled out a
death certificate. I’m sure a half dozen ladies have already arranged Miz Grace Harris for viewing. I wonder if all this puts a damper on Wing’s business, and if he’ll ever sleep in the rosebud room again.

I stop in at the drugstore, but Dooby shakes his head. “Ain’t seen her, Olivia. But I’ll put out the word.”

“Dooby, Will’m’s got a cold, don’t know if he’ll be worth anything tomorrow—”

“With the funeral and all, there won’t be much business. I’ll send a powder up for him. It’ll ease his throat.”

I take my coin purse from my pocket and open it.

“No, no,” Dooby says, handing me the paper. “I take care of my employees.”

If Ida has walked the highway, I cannot tell. There are no boot tracks along the side of the road. No one at the gas station has seen her, nor at any of the other places where I stop. I head back, this time taking the county road, stopping three or four times to shade my eyes and study the fields. I pull into our driveway, imagining her tucked in her smelly bed, complaining of cold coffee and sucking on her pipe—but she has not come home.

Will’m has two customers, and is doing well behind the register, even with his red nose and watery eyes. He sees my question and shakes his head. I take off in the other direction.

No one on Rowe Street has seen her. She has not been to Doc’s, nor the schoolhouse where the teacher looks up at me but goes on reading aloud. Nor is she at Meltons’ Garage, nor the pawn shop, nor Ashy Rosie’s, which is a juke joint for coloreds. She’s not wandering in the graveyard or along the creek bed. There are no holes in the ice so she hasn’t fallen through and drowned. I pass Phelps’ place, its driveways all cleared and looking like a
postcard, and on out the winding road. About a half mile east, on the steps of the First Baptist Church, I see Ida hunkered down with her nightgown tucked around her ankles. I pull in and park next to the porch.

“About time you got here,” she says when I get out and come around. “My feet are cold.”

“For God’s sake, what are you doing here? And where are your boots?”

She looks at her feet. They’re dirty and bleeding and purpled up, great gashes crusted with mud and grime, the nails broken off. “I’ve lost my boots—”

I take off my cape, wrap it around her twice. “You can’t go wandering off like this. You scared the bejesus out of us. What were you thinking?”

“You never take me anywhere, Olivia. God knows what a disappointing daughter you turned out to be.”

“For the love of God—”

How ragged she is, so sad and lost that I can’t even look at her. How has it come to this—Ida with her accusations and me hating her so much I can’t be anything other than what she says I am. “Let’s get you in the truck—”

“I can’t walk in bare feet!”

“You got this far, didn’t you?”

But I lift her in. Her nightgown is muddy, her hair matted. She weighs almost nothing, her legs so thin I could snap them like twigs. When did this happen, all this thinness, this loss? And how am I to keep this from happening again? I imagine tying Ida to her bed, putting her on a tether like the goats, running chicken wire around her place. She huddles on the other side of the seat, and I drive carefully so as not to jolt her, or break her.