The Sweetest Thing (36 page)

Dobbs

Aunt Josie, Perri, Mae Pearl, and I finally got to Piedmont Hospital at about two a.m. Hosea and Cornelius and Mother and Father were still there. Mrs. Singleton had come and taken Barbara and Irvin and Frances home with her. Uncle Robert was still at the house with the firemen.

“Any news?” I asked.

“Coobie's resting fine,” Father said. “They got the coughing stopped, and she's asleep.”

Mother took my hand and whispered, out of Hosea and Cornelius' hearing, “Parthenia was burned pretty badly. They're not sure the extent yet. They're trying to ease the pain, and the nurses haven't said much else.”

“And Hank? How's Hank?”

Father had a queer look on his face. “They haven't said much about Hank, sweetie. I'm sorry.”

“What do you mean? He's okay, isn't he? He was carrying her out of the fire. He's gotta be okay.”

Mother looked over at Father and put her arms around me. “There's an awful lot of smoke in his lungs, they say. He's having a hard time of it.”

“No!” I screamed and buried my face in my father's broad chest.

“They're trying hard to stabilize him. Hank's a fighter. He'll pull through.”

I paced back and forth, back and forth. Perri tried to get me to sit down, but when I refused, she came and walked beside me, up and down the long hospital halls.

You learn how much you love someone when you think that person is going to be taken away. So while I paced the halls, I realized in a blink what life would be like without Hank Wilson. Meaningless. The slow ache I had felt in my heart ever since he returned to Chicago had not healed through parties or dates with Andrew or the prospect of college or financial security or anything else. It took a year's worth of life for me to realize the truth. I wanted Hank more than I wanted anything else on earth. He'd said,
“Love is strong as death,”
and he was right. That was what I had learned.

I only hoped I had not learned it too late.

In those halls, I felt my heart come full circle—from zeal and belief to doubt and despair to belief again. But it was a different kind of belief. More mature, maybe. All I knew was that the waiting was agony, but it was an agony buoyed up by a supernatural peace. I had absolutely no way to explain it or even to try, but in the hospital, peace descended on me in a rush of fatigue, and I fell asleep right in my father's lap.

Later, I wondered if sleeping like a child in my father's lap in the midst of fear and uncertainty was not the perfect image of the trust the Lord wanted me to have toward Him.

While I drifted in and out of sleep, my aunt sat next to my father, their heads bent together, whispering away in the night. I caught snatches of the conversation—Father explaining some piece of Jackie and Irene's story, and how he stayed away from Atlanta because he was so very ashamed. It was the saddest story, but as he told it, Aunt Josie scooted closer to him, and when I woke up hours later, they were still talking.

I stood up and stretched and left them there, but I noticed that Aunt Josie had tears in her eyes, and I think that Father finally felt forgiven, finally accepted it from his sister and his God. Surely, it had been granted long before, but I guess sometimes it takes most of a lifetime to accept.

So when the nurse came to the waiting room and said, “They're gonna make it, all of them,” the first thing that Father did was pick Aunt Josie up off the ground—no small feat—and engulf her in a hug, while he kept repeating, “Thank the Lord, thank the Good Lord.”

I tiptoed into Hank's room. He was hooked up to some machine that looked like it was breathing for him. His eyes were closed. I went over and sat by the bed and took his hand. “Hank, it's me,” I whispered. “Don't try to open your eyes. Just listen. Can you hear me?”

He gave my hand the faintest squeeze.

“I'm so sorry, Hank. I don't know what I was thinking during these past months. Maybe it took this horrible fire to make me grow up enough and realize I don't want to stay in Atlanta. All I want is to be by your side, in every moment of life, the soul-soaring times when youth respond to Christ and the times when we have nothing to eat in the pantry and we're down on our knees, counting on the Lord. I just want to be with you.”

His eyes didn't open, but he squeezed my hand again and his lips moved a tiny bit, forming a lopsided grin.

Somehow I think that it helped Coobie to have the attention off of her for a while. The fact that two of her favorite people were in the very same hospital, and for the time being were in worse shape than she, gave her the perfect excuse to be mischievous. Twice on the second day, she sneaked out of her hospital room and pattered around the hallways, like a lost puppy, until she found Hank's room.

I was there when Coobie appeared.

“What in the world are you doing?” My tone sounded exactly like our neighbor's in Chicago when he scolded his dog for some misdemeanor.

Coobie padded over to me, feet in slippers, and climbed into my lap. “Bored stiff. Looking for company. Needed to see if my date was okay.”

I tickled her a little, and she squealed, and Hank actually opened his eyes for a few seconds, turning his head toward us and holding out his big hand for Coobie to grab on to.

Next, Coobie wiggled her way into Parthenia's room—yes, I helped her find the ward for colored patients—and perched herself carefully on Parthie's bed, and Aunt Josie and Hosea did not object. Parthenia was heavily sedated, drifting in and out of sleep, but when Coobie started describing in minute detail everything she had observed about the fire, and added several lengthy phrases about how amazingly brave Parthenia was, Parthenia struggled to open her eyes and said, “Kin ya tell me that part of the story again?”

Parthenia's worst burns were located on her hands, her little hands that kept digging through flames and wood until she found her photos, photos that seared into her palms as she clutched them. Stubborn Parthenia! Her arms and torso were burned badly too, but somehow her face was not. She was often in great pain, but she rarely cried, just biting her lips and squeezing her eyes shut and moaning, “It hurts something awful, jus' awful.”

Though she was soon discharged, Coobie spent hours and hours in Parthenia's hospital room, sitting by her bed and reading to her from
The Secret Garden.
When we told Parthenia that Officer Withers needed to talk with her at some point, she struggled to sit up a little in her bed and asked, “What's the matter with right now?”

It seemed that the thought of getting to talk to a “po-leece-man” perked her up even more than Coobie's visits. So a few days after the fire, Officer Withers came to Parthenia's hospital room. Hosea, Aunt Josie, Coobie, and I were there with her.

“Hello, Miz Parthenia,” the officer said, pulling his chair right up by the bed, where she lay with her hands and arms swaddled in clean white gauze.

“Hello, Officer,” she said in a tiny voice and tried to smile.

“I'm going to show you some photographs, and all you have to do is either nod or shake your head. You understand?”

She nodded.

He held up a photo of Spalding. “Is this the man you saw stealing knives at the Chandlers' Valentine's party last year?”

Parthenia's eyes grew wide. She glanced at Aunt Josie, who said, “It's all right, Parthie. You can tell the truth this time.”

She looked at the photo, then forcefully shook her head. “No, sir, it ain't him. That's jus' Miz Perri's boyfriend, and he is shore handsome. Waddn't him that stole them knives. But he's mean as a wasp if he's the one that started that fire.”

Hosea patted his daughter's forehead and said, “Parthie, you stay calm now, or I'll haveta ask Officer Withers to leave.”

Parthenia frowned and nodded at her father.

Officer Withers then said, “The man in the photo you brought out of the barn was unrecognizable—the photo had pretty much been destroyed.”

Here Parthenia let out a moan. “It kain't be! It jus' kain't be!”

“But I have another photograph, which I believe is of the same man.” He held out the photograph for her to look at.

She stared at it for only a few seconds, and her face became a tight frown. “That's him. He's the one.”

It was a photo of Bill Robinson.

“Bill!” cried Aunt Josie. “Oh, my heavens. It was Bill.” She was standing by the window, and her face went pale—exactly as it had on my first day in Atlanta, when she'd gotten the phone call about Holden Singleton. Hosea went to her side, and she held on to him and almost looked small beside big ol' Hosea.

“It's gonna be all right now, Miz Chandler. It's gonna be all right,” he kept repeating to her as she collapsed in a chair.

Even though Officer Withers told her she didn't have to say anything else, Parthenia got riled up again and began talking in jumbled phrases, and no one could keep her quiet. “He's the one that done stole all those things. I saw him at the Valentine's party, and he saw me too. And he was real mean ta me—so mean, my legs done turned to jelly. And I neva' did breathe a word, 'cuz he said if I did, he'd hang us all, me and Mama and Papa and Cornelius—said he'd hang us from the hickory tree right by our house, and I believed him, I did. He looks all scrawny, but he ain't. He's worse than mean. He's evil. And so I's been waiting and waiting, 'cuz Miz Chandler said we hadda have proof.

“And then Miz Perri taught me how to take photos, and I went to those parties with her, 'cuz I said to myse'f that once there's a bad weed in ya—well, apart from the Good Lawd ripping it out—it's gonna stay. And that Mista Robinson, well, I was pretty shore he wuz full a weeds.”

Parthenia seemed to forget the pain from her burns for a time, enjoying the attention of Officer Withers and the rest of her audience. “And sure 'nuf, at another party last week, well, I saw him again, and I followed him around all that night, and he never once saw me. He didn't. Until he started slipping things in his pocket—and that's when I took his photo. And he heard it. He heard the camera when I pressed the shutter, and he saw me, I'm sure he did. But he didn't come after me, 'cuz I was safe with Miz Perri.”

I could perfectly well imagine feisty Parthenia crawling through bushes and hiding and waiting, biding her time until she could catch Bill Robinson stealing again, as she'd seen him do that first time at the Valentine's party in February of 1933.

“And I wuz so afraid of him showing up at Miz Mary Dobbs's party, but I wuz even more afraid of something happenin' to my photos. We developed them—Miz Perri and Miz Mary Dobbs and me—but they wuz all worked up about the photographs they done taken at the otha' party, the ones of Mista Singleton, so as they didn't pay no neva' mind to my photos. I didn't breathe a word, but I wuz getting ready to tell Miz Chandler, wuz gonna do it after the party, and that's why I wuz all high-strung and such afore it started.”

She paused, her voice raspy. Hosea held a glass of water to her lips, and she took a sip.

“So I had it, finally, finally, I had what they needed—the proof that Mista Robinson was the bad man who'd done all the stealin'. And when he showed up at Miz Mary Dobbs's party, well, I knew he wuz gonna hurt me good then, mebbe even hang me up by my neck. But he didn't. He didn't even look at me which-a-ways. Jus up an' ignored me completely.

“Then Papa come runnin' and sayin' about the smoke, and I knew what that awful man had done—started a fire in the darkroom. So I had to do somethin', didn't I? I had to git that photo. I jus' had to. For my mama.”

Dear brave and brash Parthenia Jeffries ran back into the burning barn and into that darkroom to save the photograph. And it nearly cost her her life.

Miracles happen every day. They really do. They come in all different shapes: a rich lady feeling God's tug on her heart to feed a swarm of hungry people, or a photograph from years earlier appearing at the right time to convince a grieving young woman of God's presence, or a father saying he's sorry after so many years of silence, or a little girl giving a bag full of coins to me so I would come back to my heavenly Father.

But on the night of my party, the miracle was this: a mute boy saved his little sister's life by pronouncing two words. I don't know if Cornelius ever said anything else, but it didn't matter—the miracle was that on that night, he did.

Perri

Thank goodness Mr. and Mrs. Chandler were at the house with us when Mamma first learned about Bill Robinson. It was Mr. Chandler who broke the news to her. Mamma went completely pale, and she sat for the longest time in a trance, and then she reached out to Mrs. Chandler, and she cried for a good long time. Then she kept repeating, “He was Holden's friend; we trusted Bill. We trusted him with everything.”

What we learned from Spalding's testimony and then from Bill Robinson himself—who broke down in tears in front of Uncle Robert and Aunt Josie and Officer Withers on the day he was arrested—was that Bill Robinson had been stealing from my father for several years. Very slowly at first, little by little, he changed the figures in Daddy's books. And because Daddy trusted him and it was just little bits here and there, Daddy thought he had somehow miscalculated.

Daddy had lost all his stock holdings in the Depression, but the rest, his savings and other investments, and eventually the house itself, were lost to Mr. Robinson, who was sucking Daddy dry and then making my poor father think he was the one slowly going crazy.

I don't believe that Mr. Robinson set out to have Daddy hang himself. I believe that Mr. Robinson was a very sick man, caught up in a terrible addiction and looking for a way out.

Mr. Robinson had said it to me. “
Desperate people do desperate things.”
How well he knew it.