You Believers (12 page)

While we were all sitting in traffic, crowding up on bumpers and honking our horns, I thought we could use a reminder of where were going in the end. I looked ahead to try to guess how many cars were between me and the stoplight, tried to figure how many rounds of that light changing it would take before I could get through, and I saw what I thought was a pile of rags on the side of the road, right there on the sidewalk. Then, moving up, I saw it was a woman, a little old black woman sitting on the sidewalk, and the cars were just going by. I punched my hazard lights on, knowing what I’d do and how it would piss off everybody behind me.

I got close and saw that she was propped against a light post, and she was staring out as if there wasn’t a thing she needed from this world. I got out, gave the finger to the car honking behind me. He went around me and yelled, but I just smiled and went to the woman sitting there. She was dark and gnarled as a tree blown down by a storm. I bent to her, said, “Ma’am, are you all right?”

She looked up at me with cloudy blue eyes, said, “Baby, I was praying you’d come back to me.”

I crouched beside her, studied her face etched with deep lines, tried to remember if I knew her, how she knew me. She smelled like bread; she smelled like cotton sheets in hot sunlight. She smelled like heat and skin and leaves. She smelled like my mother. And for the first time in years the knot loosened in my chest and I wanted to cry. I remembered my tiny little mother, shrunken and weak with disease. She had said, “I’m leaving you this time, baby.” I felt like I’d found her in a little black woman leaning on a light post near the oldest cemetery in town. Strangers stared from their cars, and the traffic crept by.

Sweat was rolling down my face, and I saw that she was dry as, yes, a bone. “How did you get here?” I asked. “I don’t know, baby,” she said. “I’m just visiting.” I scanned through the “Missing” files in my brain. No one had reported an old black woman lost. I asked if she knew where she lived. And she gave me this surprised kind of look and said, “Why, baby, I live here.” I looked around, saw nothing but the graveyard and the Kwik Mart across the street. “I mean your home,” I said. “Your address, where you live.” She nodded, said, “Five oh nine Wabash Street. That’s where I live.” When I asked if she wanted me to take her home, she said her boy was coming to get her, that he had gone to get some bread. I looked around, knowing you didn’t buy bread in that part of town and you sure as hell didn’t dump your momma on the street. So I asked her would she mind
sitting in my truck while I tried to figure out how to get her back to where she lived. And she blessed me and blessed me, the way they do back home. She let me help her into my truck, and she clutched this old shopping bag to her chest. I was thinking she was homeless. She watched me get my map and said again, “Five oh nine Wabash; that’s where I live.”

I doubted it, but still I found the street. I gave her a bottle of water from the cooler in the backseat, and she blessed me again. I thought maybe this day would have a happy ending, with some woman disoriented, lost, and I would get her home. I like a story with an ending like that. But Wabash Street was a good eight miles away in the worst part of town. All crack houses. So I asked her name, and she sat up all ladylike, said, “Patricia England, and five oh nine Wabash is where I live.” She reached in that plastic bag and gave me an old envelope that had her name and address written there in perfect handwriting, the way your grandmother writes, in the old-fashioned loops in all the right places kind of way.

I told her okay, and I was feeling hopeful as I opened it to see nothing inside. She looked in the backseat, smiled, said, “Oh, what pretty babies you have back there. Such good babies too.” She said it so real that I glanced back. There was nothing but the cooler, an atlas, a black umbrella, and a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup. She was smiling and waving so happy that I wondered for a second if she was real, maybe a spirit being I’d found at the cemetery. I figured she was just crazy—not bad crazy, just confused. So I thanked her for complimenting my babies, and I said yes, they were very good babies. She kept smiling at them while I drove. Then I heard her singing in this creaky soft voice, “Jesus loves the little children.” She seemed too tired to finish the song. She straightened in her seat, leaned back, closed her eyes. I clicked my phone on silent so Patricia England could sleep.

When we got to 509 Wabash Street, there was a “Condemned” notice nailed to the door. The front porch was falling in. Paint blistered and peeling off the side of the house. A vase of pink plastic flowers sat in the window covered in yellow drapes. Whoever had lived there hadn’t gotten a chance to pack the flowers, that vase that must have meant something at some time.

I reached and touched her arm. “Miss England,” I said. “Miss England, you need to wake up now.” It took her a while. Then her eyes popped open, and she said it again: “Bless you, baby, I’ve been waiting for you.” I pointed to the house, asked if it was where she lived. She nodded, waved the envelope at me, said, “Five oh nine Wabash.” Then she pointed to the numbers nailed to the banister of the porch. I looked at the envelope. There was no return address in the corner, just the smudged remains of where a label had been. Whoever had written the letter could afford address labels, wrote neatly. I asked who had sent her the letter, and she said it was a Mother’s Day card from one of her babies, but all she had left was the envelope.

I asked if I could look in her bag to see if anything could help me get her home. She said firmly that this house was home, and I had to explain that it wasn’t her home anymore, that it was condemned. She nodded and quoted, “‘In my father’s house are many mansions, if it were not so I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.’” She said I’d understand one day, and then I’d find peace.

When I looked in her bag I found a pink sweater, a clean dish towel, a green satin–covered cardboard jewelry box with broken strings of beads, a brooch in the shape of a Christmas tree, and an embroidered handkerchief all knotted up to hide a dollar and some change. I asked if that was all she had. While she sat nodding, I took a twenty from my purse and put it with the dollar, knotted it all up tight, and told her to be careful with who she trusted to go through her things.

She said, “Bless you, baby,” and turned back toward the house like she was happy just to sit there and look at it. I speed-dialed Bitsy the research queen, told her to look up Patricia England, anything and everything about the woman and the address. I clicked the phone off, looked in the rearview mirror, and saw a couple of thugs standing at the corner watching us, nothing but trouble on their minds. I put the car in gear and headed for the police station, hoping maybe she was in a system that could tell us where she was supposed to be. I told her I wanted to get her back to her own babies, and she just gave a little sigh, said her babies were with Jesus now.

I was thinking she was crazy with grief and age and just being worn out by the world, and I was thinking what a sad place this world can be. Then she laughed a soft sound and said, “I can see you are a troubled child. In the name of Jesus, baby, I’m blessing you. You will find what you’re looking for in this world.”

The light turned green. I told her thank you and drove. She asked if I was a believer, if I had found the Lord, and I told her I tried. When I saw the police station, I told her I had great faith that we’d get her home. She just nodded and said with great certainty that she was going home.

At the station she looked around the parking lot. She shook her head and said it wasn’t the right place. I told her we had to find where she lived, and she gave a little shrug. She said, “You won’t find what you think you’re gonna find.” She looked up as if hearing a voice. Then she smiled and said, “One day, baby, you’ll know what I mean.”

Helping her out of the truck, I saw her tuck her white blouse into her big floral skirt. She was clean. Once out of the truck, she went weak, and I saw that the weight of standing pained her. Her ankles were so swollen, it seemed as if her legs had been stuffed into her shoes. Her skin was ashy, flaky. I thought of sycamores, the way the bark
lightens, sheds as it grows. She leaned on me, and I walked her toward the door.

We walked in, and the cop behind the counter rolled his eyes. He didn’t see me, just saw a hard-looking little woman in tight jeans and a tank top, big hair gone wild from the humidity. He saw some useless old black woman. He didn’t give a shit.

I settled her in a chair and headed straight to him. When I told him who I was, he gave me a look like I was a stray dog just peed on his floor, said he knew who I was, the one who thinks cops can’t do their job. I told him I’d never said that, but I was thinking,
Little Cub Scout cop, you don’t know a thing about me
. But I played polite and admitted that on occasion I’d criticized the police work in town, but I always came around to the fact that we all work best when we work together. That was when Patricia England leaned forward and looked up to the ceiling and quoted, “‘And we know that all things work together for good to them that love the Lord, to them who are the called according to his purpose.’” Then she sat back and closed her eyes like she was resting for the next little speech.

He shrugged and said, “Where’d you find this?” I looked past him to a guy at a desk who was pretending to be reading something, but I could tell by the little tilt of his head that his mind was on me. I said, so he’d hear it, Patricia England’s name and where I’d found her and where she was supposed to live.

The cop at the back desk came over, gave a little tap to Cub Scout cop’s shoulder. “This is Shelby Waters,” he said. “Give her whatever she needs.” Then he gave me a grin, said, “My name’s Jack Walker. I’ll see to your friend over there.”

I handed the envelope to the Cub Scout. He took it, made a what-the-hell face, turned to his monitor, fingers pecking at the keyboard. I looked over, saw Walker offering the old woman a Coke, asking when was the last time she’d had a meal.

She shook her head, said, “Whatever I take just runs right through me.”

Cub Scout motioned to me to bend close and said, “Patricia England is dead.” I looked at the old woman sipping her Coke, asked the cop, “Did she have a sister?”

He grinned all smart-ass at me, said, “It’s not like I have a obit here. Want me to pull out my crystal ball?” He pushed back from the desk, walked away. I called Bitsy. She had it all: Yes, Patricia England was dead. She had a daughter who’d died as a kid. And a son. A thief. Did some time. Last known residence 509 Wabash Street. Patricia England was buried, yes, at Calvary on Oleander Boulevard. My guess was that this woman had been a family friend. Maybe had lived there a while. Maybe the son took this woman to visit his mother’s grave and left her there.

Walker said to leave her and they’d call Social Services, and I knew what that meant. Nothing would happen for hours. It meant they would just dump her at the Magnolia Street shelter and leave her sitting around until someone figured something out.

I told him to work on getting her a bed somewhere and I’d take care of Patricia England. I told him I had a doctor friend who’d look her over, get her what she needed.

“That’s not procedure, and you know it,” he said, but he was grinning. He knew my ways, and he was enjoying the view down my tank top. I gave him my card and said, “Call me.”

“You bet,” he said, and he opened the door, followed us out to the truck. He helped the old woman up into the seat, steadied the crackers in her lap and the Coke in her hand. I gave him a little salute and got going.

I called my friend Dr. Bev to set up the exam for the old woman, and she of course said to come on. Bev is good that way; she’ll be on call around the clock and never charge a dime. I just had to make it
up to her office in Castle Hayne, a farm town north of the city. So I settled in for the long drive. I was supposed to be meeting Billy Jenkins about Katy, and I needed to be calling Roy because this Billy had said Katy liked to spend time at Lake Waccamaw. Roy is sheriff in that county, and I was thinking I should get him on the Katy case, and I was thinking I had to make more calls about those Ohio kids, and I was thinking there were a hundred things I needed to be doing. She sat there looking out the window and nibbling a cracker like a little bird. But what can you do when a broken little old woman appears by the side of the road?

My cell phone buzzed. It was Bitsy at REV. She said the Ohio man had just charged a bunch of breakfasts at a McDonald’s up in Rocky Point, and I couldn’t help grinning, knowing he was just north of where I was heading, and most likely he was coming my way. I figured he was heading for the coast. Myrtle Beach, most likely; it’s a place where losers like to go. Or he was taking some kind of long way to Miami. I got Bitsy making calls to try to get volunteers at every rest stop and gas station between Rocky Point and Myrtle Beach. And I watched the highway ahead of me with what my daddy called hunter’s eyes. You go still somewhere in your brain and look out, eyes open to everything but seeing what you need to see, some movement, a color, a little flash of what you want out there. I called Bitsy to call Billy Jenkins and remind him that I wanted to see Katy’s momma when she hit town. The old woman was sleeping, her breath making a rattling sound, and I thought she had walking pneumonia or bronchitis. I pressed the engine harder to get her to Dr. Bev.

The phone buzzed, and I was happy to see it was Roy. Patricia England sat up and patted at the seat around her. “I’m sorry, so sorry,” she said. “I’ve had an accident here.” She tried to lift up and get away from the wetness on the seat but sank back into it and looked at me, all tearful.

“It’s all right,” I said. “We’ll get you cleaned.” Out on the highway I saw nothing but gas stations and diners. I remembered there was a Walmart at the next exit.

She was bent over, making these little crying sounds. I kept telling her it’d be all right, that I’d get her clean things at the Walmart. Then she just kind of gave up and leaned against the door and tried to sit on the edge of the seat.