The Healing (17 page)

Polly shook her head. “Suit yourself,” she sighed. “But remember this. When God wants to punish us, he gives us just ourselves to care
for.” She turned her back on Granada. “Excuse me, I got folks need tending.” She dipped a gourd into the water pail and then proceeded in a stiff shuffle into the next room where the woman was crying out.

Granada stood there with the diseased and disfigured all around her. There was no sound except for their breathing, but the silence was potent. It demanded that she answer the question, to tell them where she belonged. For a moment she believed if she did not answer, the ground would open up and swallow her whole.

In a rising panic, Granada found her legs and bolted after Polly.

T
he days settled into an unbroken routine of watching, listening, and staying out of Polly’s way. Granada did what the woman had asked. She studied Polly as she treated the sick using the smelly remedies she had concocted right there in the hospital. From a safe distance Granada looked on as Polly tended to ruptured flesh; wiped mouths and noses that seeped blood; salved eyes that had been blinded from grotesque swelling. But none of this seemed to hold any witch’s magic.

The girl noticed that before Polly left the bedside of one person to move on to the next, she leaned over and whispered into the sick person’s ear. Without fail this quieted the anxious, brightened the miserable, settled the violent, and gave fight to those who appeared to be on the downslope to death.

Granada suspected the words were some kind of hoodoo magic or conjure spell. Figuring if she got nothing else from Polly Shine, a few magic tricks might come in handy, she tried her best to overhear. But Granada was never allowed to get close to the person being treated, and strain as she might she failed to make out the words.

Then something unexpected drew her interest.

The real magic appeared to be happening outside the hospital. People were beginning to act oddly. Servants were mysteriously drawn to Polly. The spinners and the stableboys and the milkers and the sawmill workers and everybody else who labored in the yard eagerly took
on any task that put them in the vicinity of the old woman. Even the mistress’s maid, Lizzie, became a frequent visitor. The boldest stood at Polly’s windows and gawked at the goings-on inside, shaking their heads and walking off in muttering amazement.

Polly Shine could have stopped the inquisitive from peeking into her sick house, but instead of shooing them off from the windows, she flung wide the doors to give them an even better look. To assist her, she drafted as many hands as could fit into the cabin. It was like she
wanted
the entire plantation to witness what she was up to.

And the things Granada heard them say! They whispered to each other about how they couldn’t get over the spoon-feeding, baby-loving ways of this woman—like she was making herself a mother to every one of them. They were astounded that Master Ben himself came to the hospital to consult with the old woman like she was a big bug herself.

But not everybody was in agreement about the old woman. There seemed to be a storm brewing.

Granada overheard Barnabas, the carpenter, arguing loudly with his woman, one of the weavers. Barnabas told Charity that Polly couldn’t be any better than Dr. Barbour, or even Bridger who treated the slaves with a few common curatives from a medicine chest provided by the master.

“She ain’t nothing but a used-up nigger woman,” he said.

That stopped Charity dead in her tracks. She replied, “That woman sure can’t do no worse than the white doctor.” She said all Dr. Barbour knew was to dose the ailing with his violent medicines, purging and bleeding and blistering them and making them throw up their insides by forcing salt and mustard down their throats.

She told her husband, “Mr. Bridger is worse than that! You don’t dare tell him you got miseries.” Then in an angry undertone she growled, “If you a woman he tells you to get naked in front of God and everybody and then he poke and prods you like a field animal. Yes sir, he especially fond of his doctoring if you got titties.” She spat on the ground in disgust. “I shouldn’t have to be telling you this, Barnabas.”

Stumbling to get out of the way of his wife’s stream of spittle, Barnabas was clearly startled by the strength of her feelings.

She hissed, “You know good and well what the truth of it is. White man think he can scare a body out of getting sick and starve a body into getting well. I put my faith in what you call a ‘nigger woman’ any day.”

“Lord, girl.” Barnabas flinched. “You taking her side ’cause she’s black or ’cause she’s a woman?”

“One good and the other better,” she shot back and walked off, leaving her husband to scratch his head.

And it wasn’t just Barnabas and Charity. It was as if Polly were turning women against men. Chester suggested she might be casting spells on the sick, perhaps stealing their souls or siphoning off their blood to make black-bottle potions. Pomp said she was nothing but a charlatan. Old Silas said, “A big possum was bound to pick a little tree,” meaning the woman was nothing but a show-off.

But the women had altogether different ideas. They were struck by the way she anointed the broken flesh of the blackest of Negroes with hot oils and soothing salves. The way she held their hands and whispered secrets into their ears, even the ones who had slipped into comas. It came near to breaking the women’s hearts. Some wept.

While Granada’s attention was on what was going on outside in the yard, she nearly missed the miracle on the inside. The sick, one by one, left the hospital, exactly like Polly had predicted. Even the big man, who Granada could swear came in on the wagon already dead, Big Dante himself, got up and walked away on his own two feet, like the lame beggar in the Bible. He was the last. Three weeks after Polly arrived, she had delivered every last soul from the blacktongue.

• • •

But even a mass healing didn’t please some people on the plantation. Polly, who had begun to trust Granada with small tasks like fetching and carrying, needed some supplies from the master’s pantry one night. She sent the girl to the great house with a list, but when
Granada got to the kitchen, the lanterns were dark. Sylvie was probably asleep. Aunt Sylvie carried the master’s pantry key and never took it from around her neck.

As Granada turned to go back to the hospital, she heard Sylvie’s voice drifting from the direction of Silas’s cabin, and when she glanced that way, she saw the two of them sitting in a soft glow of lantern light out on the porch. Old Silas, pipe clutched in his mouth, appeared to have his feet soaking in a pan of what Granada guessed to be hot water and salts, something Sylvie would fix for him when his dropsy acted up. Their words were solemn and low.

Granada didn’t think it would hurt if she lingered a little longer and drew a bit closer into the shadows.

“You got to tell him, Silas,” Sylvie was saying in an urgent tone. “Might be your way back in the master’s graces. Put the bottom rail back on the top.”

Old Silas removed his pipe from his mouth and began shaking his head. “He’s not going to listen to me. Thinks I’m too old. Thinks I got mush for brains. And worse, after what I did, telling him the truth about the mistress, he doesn’t confide in me any longer.”

“But you see the danger!”

“Of course I see it. Been seeing it the minute Polly Shine stepped her meddling foot on the place.”

Silas went on to tell how he was growing more concerned every day. When the fragrance of roasted lamb hung over the plantation like a heavenly cloud, he heard that the swamp slaves living miles away in the master’s settlements had smelled the aromas and fell under its spell, savoring the sweet odor of something they had never known.

“Sylvie, without a preacher to tell them, some dropped to their knees in the field, risking the driver’s whip, to pray for the healing of the sick. They prayed with so much zeal, you’d think they were praying for themselves.”

Granada couldn’t get over how smart Silas talked, using such fine words. Usually he sat at the table and gummed his food and slurped
his coffee from a saucer. She often thought he might be addle-minded. But tonight his words were strong and fine.

“I don’t know if the stories from out in the settlements are true, but what little bit I’ve seen from this rocking chair tells me there is great danger afoot.”

“Danger afoot!” Sylvie exclaimed. “That’s what I’m saying. You the one who sees it. The
onliest
one!”

“Yes, I’ve seen them gathering in the shadows, Sylvie, whispering to each other the bits and scraps of what they’ve seen or thought they’ve seen, piecing together a tale full of treachery.”

Granada had never heard a slave use such big words and she wasn’t exactly sure what he meant, but the scary way he said them raised chill bumps on her arms.

“I’ve managed slave stock long enough to read the signs. I know in my bones what that woman is up to. She’s doing more than tending to their bodies. She’s meddling with their minds. If the master’s not careful, this tale that’s being brewed will let loose a plague among his slaves a lot more dangerous than the cholera or the blacktongue or the yellow fever.”

“What’s got in the master’s head?” Sylvie asked. “Time was he wouldn’t go off half-cocked and pay a pot of gold for some broke-down woman who sure as the world is going to turn this whole place on its head. Course back then the master wouldn’t buy a cow without my man’s say-so. Ain’t that right, Silas?”

Granada had heard Sylvie say this before, how Silas was closer to the master than nineteen was to twenty. Accompanied him when the master went off to college. Some say tutored him. Maybe Silas learned to read like she had, by watching white people learn. Now Granada could understand how he could have run the entire plantation.

“How long Master Ben going to hold it against you? It was your duty to tell him how the mistress was acting. Taking in a baby from the quarter and dressing her up like a play doll.”

“He’s not holding it against me because I told him. He’s holding
it against me because I was right. And I get righter every day. Shames him. I should have known better. Never shame a white man.”

“But for how long?”

“When his hurt gets bigger than his pride,” Silas said. “That’s when he’ll come to me and I’ll tell him what to do. Until then, all I can do is keep watch, bite my tongue, and bide my time.”

“It ain’t fair,” Sylvie said.

“I did my best to teach the master about slaves. Told him a hundred times when he was a boy that it wasn’t a black skin that made a man a slave. It’s the other skin, the one that grows on the outside, that second hide made of fear and obedience. What a good master does is every once in a while prick that skin, to remind folks that it’s still there and always will be. I told him if a slave was to molt that outside skin, you no longer have a slave. ‘Mark my words,’ I said, ‘when a man’s not afraid, then he’s hoping. And that’s when all hell breaks loose.’ ”

Silas reached over and patted Sylvie’s ample thigh. “When the master’s hurt outgrows his pride, I’ll remind him of these things again.”

He lifted his foot from the pan and smiled. “And I can see clear as my big toe, plenty of hurt is on the way.”

Sylvie laughed. “That why you say there is danger
afoot?
”

Silas slapped Sylvie on the thigh, laughing so hard he nearly choked on his tobacco.

Granada didn’t understand the joke, but what Silas said made her skin creep. She had never heard a declaration of war, but she was certain that Polly had found herself her first enemy.

G
ran Gran eased up from her rocker and took hold of the poker to stoke the smoldering embers in the stove. For once, Violet’s eyes were not on the old lady. The girl sat in her straight-backed chair, pulled up close to the rocker, looking down in her lap at the snapping eyes of Polly Shine.

“Well,” Gran Gran said, turning her backside to a revived fire, “I can’t tell how much you understanding of what I’m telling you, but you sure didn’t shout for me to hush up! Or run away with your hands over your ears. So I reckon it’s fine by you.”