Month: February 2016

Sometimes souls here miss their first world experience, the way an old person misses childhood. But I’m glad to have moved on. My first-world experience was one I’m proud to have endured but am glad to be rid of.

In the first world, my body tensed itself up. It writhed constantly and fought against itself. My hands would find themselves in my mouth, teeth gnawing into my flesh. My own lips were also victim to my teeth, constantly being torn up until the area just above my chin was a mess of bloody flesh most of the time.

I could not walk, my body too twisted and tied up in pain. I could not talk, and when I did, no one understood me. Except for my cousin Tuesday, a girl born into that world six years before myself. Even my mother, though she loved me very much, couldn’t understand what I said. My tongue thrust itself in and out of my mouth continuously, and it was always swollen from being bitten so often. My head rolled and moved in different directions continuously, pulling my face muscles so that controlling speech was very difficult.

Tuesday was with me almost every moment since the day I was born. Hers was the voice that soothed me during the day; hers were often the hands that cleaned and clothed me. Hers were the eyes that saw who I was underneath the twisted, damaged body. And hers was the only first world soul that met me in my dreams.

Maybe it’s because my first life experience was so difficult that I was granted a glimpse into the second life, and could go there in dreams. I talked with many people there, while my body slept in my mother’s assigned tiny log cabin. My ancestors chatted with me, some of them so many generations removed from myself that they had been alive when the continents had not yet pulled into separate land masses on the surface of the earth.

These were the conversations that affected me the most. It was entirely clear that all of humanity had the same origin, and that we were all relatives, no matter how distant. I was shown analogies and patterns. I could see how a person was formed from one round, very tiny entity , a cell, that divided to become two, and from there four, then eight and so on. From one thing came a collection of many diverse things, organs and systems all working together to form a beautiful human creature.

I could see that all human beings were supposed to work together to form a whole, but that the world was not working properly. Just like parts of my body seemed intent on harming and even destroying other parts of my body, human beings would hurt other human beings, not letting them be themselves, but wounding them continuously instead. The strangest part was that it was justified by skin color. Some people thought people with darker skin color could be owned as slaves. But there were times when the so-called white master who owned me and my family had much darker skin than my own. I stayed inside, away from the sun most of the day, and by Fall, the Master had been outside so much that his skin had been roasted a deep brown beyond my own dark tan.

I didn’t have the mental capacity to develop this thought process during the day, but in dreams, when my spirit was free to roam on the threshold of the second world, I could understand. I could see the terrible trouble people were putting themselves through, hurting themselves by damaging others, like a body that ate its own fingers.

Despite understanding this sickness, I was so happy to be alive. And Tuesday was a big part of my joy. Her soul was one of the brightest I’ve ever met. She couldn’t let it shine too bright in the first world, though, or it would have been snuffed out. Just like my hands had to be covered with socks and sometimes even tied to my body so my angry mouth wouldn’t bite off my fingers.

Time is not the same in the second world as is it in the first, so Tuesday is many ages all at once from my perspective. She is young and old, single and married, and her children are babies and also giving her grandchildren. But her light has remained strong throughout. I still talk to her in dreams sometimes. And I continue to pray that her light, and the lights of other strong souls, will keep healing the first world, and thus all the worlds beyond.

I heard my Auntie Mim as if she was far away, but very clearly, as if she was near.

“Tuesday! Wake up! Tuesday! What happened?”

Her voice was strained with sadness, urgency, heartbreak. I thought my eyes were closed, but I could see her as if looking through a window into a dark room, her hand on a face I knew was mine, but which I couldn’t feel.

“I’m okay Auntie Mim,” I said, as if speaking through a tube. She couldn’t hear me. I could see/feel the uneven floorboards beneath me. I could see that my hand held the hand of another body about my size, and that we formed an “H” lying there, our arms the middle line.

Auntie Mim knelt between us, her body drooped and vibrating with sobs. “Cuffee,” she whispered. I felt Cuffee’s smile, like the thrumming of hummingbird wings, and then it flew away. When I turned to see where it was going, I instead woke up in my body, and opened my eyes.

Mimba was the sister of my mother, whose name was Bena. We both had the same name, really, because we were both born on the same day.  But we were born on the opposite ends of the ocean, so my Mom made the names different, even though they meant the same day of the week.

I don’t remember my father. Auntie Mim said he was a tall man with wide shoulders and big, strong arms. He was allotted to a landowner who needed someone strong on his farm.

I remember a little more of my mother, but not much. She was allotted to someone in Georgia who wanted a pretty house slave. I don’t have pictures of my mama, but I can see her face in my memory, so close to my mine, pretending to bite my chin and nose. “You’re so sweet, I could eat you up!” she would say. That’s mostly what I remember about my mama. She was taken away in the second year of my life.

Auntie Mim was pretty like my mama, and the master took a liking to her so much that he wouldn’t allow her to marry no one. He liked her so much that he let her keep me instead of selling me or allotting me to someone else. Auntie Mim and I were house slaves, then. I helped in the nursery, playing with the master’s children by his wife, helping change their diapers and doing the washing. Master John had children with some of the slave children, too, but he never claimed them as his. Mostly  Mistress Abigail looked the other way, unless she thought Master John was getting too attached to the child’s mama. Then she’d have the child sold, and no one ever saw the girl or boy again.

When I was 6 years old, Auntie Mim got pregnant with Master John’s child. Everybody pretended that the child belonged to Big Cuffee, the cook that Auntie Mim was friendly with. But everybody knew who the father really was. And one day, Cuffee was gone, and we never saw him again.

When Auntie had her baby, I could feel that something was wrong with him. He seemed mostly normal, all toes and fingers accounted for, and Mama Sarah, who helped with the birthing, said he was handsome. Auntie Mim saw only her own little baby, wrapped up in a cloud of love. She named him Cuffee.

Cuffee stayed in the nursery where I could hold him and keep an eye on him. Mistress June wasn’t happy about it, but Master John had made a promise to Auntie Mim that little Cuffee wouldn’t ever be sent away. But a promise from a master don’t mean much, especially with a jealous mistress standing by. But Auntie Mim and I held onto that promise like a butterfly cupped in the palm of our hands, something we wanted to appreciate, but couldn’t look at for fear it would fly away.

Cuffee had the colic real bad, and Mistress Abigail complained about the noise, so I took to wrapping him up around my body with a sheet. Mama June showed me the best way, keeping him snug on my back so I could still change the white children’s diapers, still do the washing and cleaning and playing with the little ones when they was fussy. That way the mistress couldn’t complain that Cuffee needed to go because he was taking all my time.

That helped for awhile, but I still could feel that something was wrong with Li’l Cuffee. I could get him to stop crying, and I knew he felt better swaddled up on my back, or later, when he was older, on my hip. But I still felt the pain, something moving in him that was not right.

Auntie Mim said maybe it was something like what her dad had. He would be so ill sometimes, with pains all over, that he could hardly get out of bed or even move.

Once when I changed Cuffee’s diaper I found an orange sort of rock, like a clump of hardened sugar, and little spots of blood.  I hid any of those diapers, washed them right away so’s no one would see, ‘specially not Mistress Abigail.

I told Auntie Mim, though, and Mama June. We tried to give Cuffee different foods to help, like mashed milk curds, sprinkled with one of Mama Junes special herb powders. But I could tell Cuffee was just getting worse. He didn’t grow as fast as other children, which made it easier to hold him, but he also didn’t walk when other children did, which made holding him necessary sometimes. This made Mistress Abigail angry, so I tried to not to cross paths with her.

When Cuffee was almost two years old, he started biting himself. He had always had strange little hand and feet movements, jerking them here and there, sometimes banging his arms on the floor or the wall. And when he got stronger, he would lift his head and bang it on the floor, so we had to either put him on his stomach or put soft blankets under his head. He would put his hands in his mouth, too, but it seemed like normal baby behavior until he started making himself bleed, and biting himself so badly that the wounds would never heal, and never even scab up to heal, neither.

Strangely enough, the worse Cuffee got, the more Mistress Abigail settled down to liking him, it seemed. She stopped caring about how much time I spent with him, and she would even come up to him in his crib where he could sit up in the corner and see what was going on in the room, and she would bend over him, her big circle of skirt bunching up in waves on the floor as she cooed and fussed. One time I heard her say, quietly, “Little Cuffee. You are your father’s child, aren’t you?”

At first I was confused, since everybody, including the mistress, knew who Cuffee’s real father was. But Auntie Mim explained to me that it was the mistress’ way of bad-mouthing Master John without saying it plain. Auntie Mim said it was a blessing that Cuffee was the way he was, because it meant no one would want to take him, so he would never be sent away.

I tried so hard to get Cuffee to talk. But mostly he just mumbled and blurted out sounds that made no sense. “Say Tuesday,” I would tell him. We had cut off the legs of his crib so it could hold his weight once he got bigger, and since it was on the ground, it could also hold me. I would sit across from Cuffee playing hand games to the rhythm of whatever word I tried to teach him. “Cu” –clap- “Fee” –clap-, over and over. “Tues” –clap- “Day” –clap-. And repeat.

But it wasn’t until one day when I fell asleep in his crib with him that he finally talked to me.

The master and missus were gone to visit Granny Swan, who was ailing, and they had taken their four little ones with them. That meant that, even though I was supposed to be doing the laundry and diaper changing and such, or if not that, helping clean the house, the other house slaves plus Auntie Mim decided to give me a break and let me just be Cuffee’s caretaker for one day. I hadn’t known how worn out I was until I sat in the crib singing songs to Cuffee, and I started nodding off. Normally, that would be my cue to get up and move around, do something active and keep myself going. But instead, with nothing else pressing, and no one to protest, when Cuffee lay down for his nap, I lay down, too, just to rest my bones a bit.

And then I was standing in the cotton field, where the field slaves were bent over bolls, pulling at the white fluff. The new pickers always had bloody hands, where they had poked themselves with the burr that held the white fluff at its base. Pickers who had been at it a long time knew how to grab at the bolls without getting stuck by the burrs. Plus, they built up callouses on their fingers. I stood next to a girl about my age at the time, around 10 years old, who crouched down next to a cotton plant. I couldn’t see her face, as it was covered by a cloth wrapped around her forehead and tied under her hair at the base of her neck. But I could see that her fingers were bleeding as she put boll after boll of cotton into her shoulder bag.

I heard steps on the dirt behind me, so I turned to see a little boy of about four years old walking toward me. He held a stick that he dragged along the ground, making a little snake trail follow him up to me.

He looked up at me and smiled, and I immediately recognized him, with his tan skin and wavy black hair and his lovely toffee-colored eyes.
               
“Cuffee!” I looked at him with wonder. He stood straight and tall, cute as a baby button, joy radiating from his body the way the buzz of cicadas emanated from the trees above and around us. He had no bite marks or scars of any kind, and he sparkled with something that made me cry and pick him up, hugging him and swinging him around, so much heavier than the Cuffee I knew.

When I set him down and looked at him, something had changed. His posture slumped a little, his spine slightly twisted. I noticed the blood running over the scars on his hands, and my tears stopped in the shock of moving so quickly from joy to concern. I took his hands in mine, inspecting them, then looked up to his face, with a smile still sparkling from his eyes.

“Why are your hands bleeding?” I asked.

His smile burst open into the warmth of unsung laughter.

“So yours don’t have to.”

I opened my eyes to see that I was lying on my side in the crib, facing Cuffee, who looked at me with what seemed like comprehension, thumping his feet on the crib’s floor and making the blurbling sound he often did.

When I was eleven years old, Auntie Mim got herself a sweetheart from amongst the field workers. He was an allotted slave by the name of Paul. It had been an especially big harvest that year, so Master John had hired him out from a mistress who only used him to keep her horses.

Paul was a quiet man, so Auntie Mim hardly noticed him when she brought out sandwiches to the workers one day. She pulled the wagon with the sandwiches while another kitchen slave pulled the wagon with the water barrels. Mim saw him there, with strong shoulders, like her first man, Cuffee, many years before, but she hardly gave him a thought, she would say many years later. It was only the next day, when Paul offered to pull the sandwich wagon for her that she noticed him. And that was mostly because she wondered why he would offer to pull the sandwich wagon, which wasn’t that heavy, instead of the water wagon, which the other kitchen girl was struggling with. She didn’t say anything, though, and that was the beginning of a courtship that heated up as slowly but as steadily as the days were cooling down.

By the end of harvest season, Auntie Mim and Paul had promised themselves to each other, in everything but their outward actions. They had to be very careful not to reveal their true feelings for each other to Master John, or to anyone who might tell Master John. So every lunch time, Paul would make sure to pull the water wagon instead of Auntie Mim’s sandwich wagon, though anyone who looked closely would notice that the wagons were always side by side, and though three figures walked ahead of them, two stood closer together.

By that time, I had been talking to Cuffee for years, almost always in dreams, though once in awhile I would catch a flash of what I knew must be one of his thoughts, or I would inexplicably know what he meant by a gesture or a gurgle that no one else could understand.

Cuffee’s pain kept getting worse, and sometimes I would ask him in dreams or altered states what I could do to help him. Sometimes he would suggest that I rub his feet, or say he needed to drink more water, and sometimes he would suggest that I exercise his limbs a certain way, like moving his legs in forward circles while he lay down. “Like Master John’s bicycle,” he said. And usually those things would help.

Around the time of the harvest of my twelfth year and Cuffee’s fifth, Cuffee’s pain got a lot worse. In dreams, where normally he was happy and playful like a normal child, he started to cry. First they were gentle tears, like sadness, as if he had lost a favorite stick he liked to play with. But more and more, Cuffee’s tears would be stronger, his body more twisted in pain.

“What can I do to help?” I would asked, hugging dream Cuffee in my arms.

“I don’t know, Tues,” he would say. More and more in dreams I would simply hold and comfort him, and then I would wake up sad that I had gotten no more information to help him with in the nondream world.

Harvest passed, and Paul went back to his Mistress on a neighboring farm. They hardly ever saw each other, except once when Auntie Mim was borrowed there for a party that the Mistress needed extra kitchen help for, and another time when Paul was borrowed to Master John to help with one of the horses who had thrown a shoe and was particularly hard to hold down. I remember Auntie Mim finding an excuse to peek outside for a bit to watch Paul as he shushed the shoeless horse and calmed him down so his foot could be fixed. I happened to be in the kitchen, getting sandwiches for the children up in the nursery. I walked in to see her on her tippy toes, a dreamy-eyed smile on her face as she gazed out the window above the tub sink.

That winter was rough for Cuffee, and therefore for me and Auntie Mim. Cuffee seemed to be at war with himself. He banged his head on the bars of his crib. He threw his arms and legs around like weapons striking anything solid. And hit bit his fingers so bad that some of his nails fell off, and the scars up and down his arms were constantly oozing blood and puss from never getting the chance to heal. We took to putting socks on his hands, tucking them under the long sleeves of his shirts and tying them with string. But even though he could no longer break the skin, he bruised himself continually, and often reopened scabs already formed.

Still, he would come to me in my dreams, and sometimes he would be calm enough to talk to me, in words more advanced than his age would suggest, and he would tell me things I wouldn’t have known otherwise.

“Mama loves Mr. Paul,” he said one time. That I knew, of course. But then he said, “He’ll come work for Master John this spring.”

“He will? For how long?”

“He’ll stay here. At least until the start of harvest.”

That didn’t make sense to me. Until, come spring, Old Lady Hutchins passed away. Since she had no children left alive of her own, she left Paul and a couple of her other slaves to Master John.

Auntie Mim was in heaven, knowing that Paul was just around some corner, only feet away from her, standing on the very same land. She would tell me this at night in our little cabin, when she and Cuffee and I lay side by side on a straw bed in our dark cabin, listening to the frogs singing and the crickets chirping along.

But it wasn’t long before Mistress Abigail noticed the spark between my Auntie and Paul. At long last saw her opportunity to get rid of Auntie Mim, the pretty kitchen slave who still tempted the affections of her husband. Her husband protested, of course, and took to visiting Auntie Mim more often, to spite his jealous wife.

Auntie Mim would carry Cuffee into the cooking room of our cabin whenever Master John came for a visit. Once, in my fourteenth year, when the tulips started blooming, I noticed the master looking at me differently than I had remembered. Auntie Mim was carrying Cuffee into the cooking room, temporarily separated from the main room by a blanket, and I was gathering up blankets to follow her. I was startled my a touch on my shoulder, and I looked up to see the Master with a strange look on his face. “You sure are growing up nice, Tuesday.”

It put an uncomfortable shiver down my spine that stopped my voice for a second, until I made myself say, “Thank you, Master John, sir.” Then I hurried myself into my temporary sleeping spot with Cuffee.

Cuffee and I always had conversations during those visits. They weren’t exactly dream talks, I guess, because I could see/feel the room around me, and I knew that my body was between the stove and the quilted blanket that we would put up to keep smoke from going all into the house and which otherwise would be night covers. But I couldn’t hear the sounds beyond the blanket in this state, only the voice of Cuffee.

“I want mama and you and Paul to run away,” he told me one of those cold, uncomfortable nights with Auntie Mim and Master John in the other room.

“And you, too, Cuffee,” I said. I had assumed it was a child’s wishing game, and treated it as such. But Cuffee very seriously replied, the dark room surrounding us like a blanket for our voices, “I can’t.”

Come harvest time, rumors started spreading like flies about Mistress Abigail having had enough of her husband’s wandering ways, and that she was going to hurt him the worst way she knew how – by selling Auntie Mim.

In dreams and in nighttime cook room escapes, Cuffee told me over and over that Paul needed to take a horse and Auntie Mim and me and ride north. He told me what town we needed to go to, what day, what time. It would be when the harvest was in full-swing, when Master John wouldn’t be able to spare any worker for fear of his cotton crop spoiling before it could be picked.

“You can’t take me,” he would insist. “Besides, I’ll be home by then.”

I didn’t understand what he meant by being home, but I told Auntie Mim everything to see what she would say. By now she knew that I spoke with Cuffee, and she had seen enough proof to know that it wasn’t just my fantasy. When she heard the plan, she cried and held Cuffee, telling him, even though he couldn’t speak to her, that she could never leave him behind.

After that, Cuffee mentioned “going home” almost every time I spoke to him.

And on that day, before Auntie Mim found me and Cuffee on the floor, I had been fully awake when the conversation began.

It was early in the morning, but an hour or so after Auntie Mim had left for her kitchen duties. I had gotten up when she did, changed and cleaned up Cuffee, dressed him in unsoiled clothes and fed him a little of the gruel auntie had cooked up. I was just bending over to put him on my hip to carry him up to the Master’s house, when I heard, as loud as if it was right in my ear, Cuffee’s voice shouting, “No!”

I fell to my knees with the force of it, then found myself in the crook of the big redbud tree in the front yard, sitting on a low horizontal branch next to Cuffee, both of us swinging our legs in the fading light of a setting sun.

Cuffee looked at me and smiled, happier than I had seen him in a long time.

“It’s time for me to go home!”

I never protested anymore, since he always insisted, so I said, “Really? That seems to make you very happy.”

“I am happy,” he said. Except I don’t really know where it is.”

“You don’t?” I said. “Then how do you know it’s your home?”

He laughed at me, a child’s giggle, as if I was the silliest person in the world. Then, more serious, he said, “Will you help me find it, Tuesday? It’s so close, but I just don’t know where to look.”

I felt sorry for him, not knowing what to say. “I want to help you,” I finally said. “Let’s get down and look.”

As soon as we jumped down from the branch (I helped him down), the sun began to light up the sky, so bright, that I held up my hand to shelter my eyes. My little cousin, danced beside me, joy in his voice and in the movements I couldn’t see as much as I could feel in my heart.

“Home!”  Cuffee hugged me. “I love you, Tuesday,” he said. “You will love it where you and Paul and Mama are going. I’ll come talk to you when I can.”

As he walked into the bright light, the world around me darkened, little by little, and I heard Auntie Mim’s voice asking me what I had done.

Paul and Mim and I made our way to a place where other maroons lived. It was a rough journey. But whenever I was worried or sad or just felt bad for leaving Cuffee behind, he would visit me in a dream and tell me, “Tuesday, everything will work out just fine.”

And it did.

 “Harvey,” I said, “Don’t touch the curtains.” His hands were black and oil-stained – never clean, no matter how much he washed – the hallmark of being a mechanic.

“Hush, woman!” He whisper-yelled at me without moving.

I had just come out of the kitchen after washing dishes, wiping my hands on my apron. Harvey stood at the living room window, pulling aside lace curtains to see into our front yard. The bald spot at the back of his head shone with high-noon July heat sweat through thin strands of black hair. I could see the fat that had accumulated around his middle in our six years of marriage, bulges that stretched out his white undershirt and had necessitated poking more holes in his belt. I was surprised at how old he looked for being 24.

“The curtains are lace, for crying out loud,” I said, walking toward him. “You can see through without touching them.”

He ignored me, as usual, as if I wasn’t worth listening to. That was one of the first things to go after we got married. I hadn’t expected it because his listening to me was part of why I fell for him in the first place.

 My mother had told me to wait, that someone else would come along. But who could tell me anything at the age of fourteen? Besides, I wanted to leave home in the worst way. Ever since Dad had died, Mom had been sick – at least that’s what we called it – and I had to raise the younger children. I ran away with Harvey, because he was the first one who asked me.

“Elle, look at this!” Harvey turned to me with eyes that seemed to believe he had the charm of Marlon Brando, despite his missing front tooth and the rest of his appearance. He pulled the curtain aside, and I stepped toward the window. I saw our 5-year-old son, William, standing with his back to us, bent over the lowbush blueberries that grew near the sidewalk.

“So what,” I said. “He’s eating blueberries. That’s nothing new.”

While I spoke, I saw William’s little hand shoot up in a wave to a neighbor boy across the street. As William ran away to play with his friend, Harvey grabbed my hand and pulled me outside, the screen door slamming behind us.

Harvey put a finger to his mouth to quiet me as his gaze turned to the figure of William and his friend running behind a house. He bent down with a smile and bright eyes, then pointed to the bush and look at me triumphantly. “See?”

I was confused. I saw a blueberry bush, plain and simple. Grey brown sticks covered with dark green leaves and dappled with blueberry dots. “What?”

“It’s the blueberries! William has been standing here eating blueberries for half an hour. Look at how many are still left on the bush!”

 I was confounded. “Uh, so the bushes have been very productive this year?”

He stood up, grinning and shaking his head. “There shouldn’t be that many blueberries on that bush.” He pulled me over to the bush on the other side of our walkway. “Look at this one. Hardly any here.”

During my next in-breath I considered that Harvey was insane, but with my outbreath I recognized that this was how he always acted on the verge of a money-making scheme. It took me years to realize, from experience, that they were always bad ideas. But that was poor judgment, not insanity.

“Here’s the thing…” He got his face close to mine, and I could smell beer on his breath. Of course, while William and I had been at church, he had participated in his own form of worship. He whispered conspiratorially. “I’ve been watching him. He eats these blueberries, and they grow back almost as soon as he eats them.”

“How much beer did you drink this morning?”

I turned to walk away, but he turned me back around, his excitement-filled eyes tempered with the stirring of his temper.

“I’m telling you Elle, there is something going on here. I think maybe William got that thing from your Dad.” He tilted his head at me to bring me back in, a sign of forgiving or forgetting my belligerence. “This could be huge for us. Think of it, Elle!”

He said more after that, but I wasn’t listening. I was thinking of my Dad. And I didn’t stop thinking of him for the next week.

I loved my Dad. Everybody had loved my Dad. He had been a doctor. But not like Dr. Konrad Steiner on the TV show Medic, all serious and speaking in a monotone.  Never smiling. My Dad smiled all the time. And not just with us kids and with Mom. Sometimes he would take me with him on a call to the neighbor’s. We’d walk for miles, and make up jokes as we’d go along. Here’s one I remember. Why did the little boy have the sniffles? Nobody nose! I made up that one; I pointed to my nose when I said it. It made my dad laugh – he laughed at all my jokes. It was hard on the whole family when Dad died. Except for baby Joseph, of course. He was too young to miss him.

Harvey devised tests to see if William had the healing touch. But he didn’t even know what the healing touch was, for crying out loud. He had this idea that it was like some sort of miracle thing that could save people’s lives. But it was more than that. Dad didn’t just go up and touch a sick person and then suddenly they were healthy again. He listened to people. He cared about people. Harvey didn’t care about anyone but himself. If he cared about someone it was because they might make him some money.

Anyway, Harvey thought he was being so sneaky, not telling William what he was doing. He would go out to the flower bed by the side of the house – my flower bed, that I had planted and nurtured and was very proud of – and he’d go out and wreck the flowers one by one using different methods. He even tried to be scientific about it. He poured bleach on one dahlia, one zinnia, one lilly, then he’d ruin more flowers, one each of the different kinds, with some other method. He’d uproot them then set them back on the ground. He’d light some of the leaves on fire. He’d cut holes into the stems with his pocket knife. My God, I had never seen that man be so creative as when he was destroying my flower bed.

And he was thorough, too. He made a little chart, or maybe you’d say a map? –  of the flowers and what he had done to them. He didn’t go to the auto shop where he worked, either. I guess he figured he wouldn’t need to with the money he’d make from William’s talent. So after a couple of days, once the flowers got particularly droopy, he called out “Billy! Come help me out, will ya?”

William was only five, but even a little kid could tell something was up with a man whose idea of yardwork up to that point had been drinking beer until his wife or his neighbors finally nagged him into mowing the lawn. This Dad who never even played ball with his kid is all of a sudden spending all day with him?

Yeah, William knew something was going on. Harvey would make William touch a burned leaf or pick up a limp stem – had him touch all the flowers, one by one. At first he’d ask questions like, “What do you think happened to this flower? How would you fix it?” 

William was confused. And just a kid. At one point, he saw his friend, Tim across the street and he got up from the ground – filthy , by the way; nobody cared that I had to wash those clothes – and he started to go over to Tim. Harvey snapped. All of a sudden that smile was gone, and he yelled out, “William Harvey Dobson, you get your ass over here RIGHT NOW!”

I had been looking out the kitchen window, but I had to go away, do something else.

I wanted to stand up for William and say, “Leave him alone!” I wanted to tell Harvey that he was being stupid. But believe me, the only way Harvey was going to let this go was for me to let it run its course. Years of experience had taught me that. If I complained about something he did, he’d go at it twice as gung-ho, just to spite me. And when it came to William, if I defended him, same thing.  He’d get it twice as bad.

The worst part of the whole thing was seeing that William really did have the healing touch. The thing my dad had. Those flowers, all the ones he touched, started to get better, and Harvey got dollar signs in his eyes. I was so nervous, worried about what would happen.

One time Harvey had this idea to make money fighting dogs. I hated it so much. He brought four dogs to our house. I don’t know what breeds they were. But they were such precious puppies when he first brought them home, so energetic and bouncy. William was just a baby – he laughed so much then. He and the puppies played together those first few weeks, rolling around on a blanket on the floor. It was like I had five little babies.

But when the puppies got bigger, about the same size William was at the time, Harvey took them to the shed out back and told me to leave them alone. They whined all day while Harvey was at work – he put a lock on the door so I couldn’t get to them. Then when he came home, he beat them. Every night. So they’d turn mean. I tried to stop him, but when I did, he’d beat them even harder. I just had to stay away. He’d take them somewhere late at night, bring them back, lock them up. I’d see the trail of blood leading to the shed.

One day the dogs didn’t come back. Maybe Harvey sold them. Or they died.

It’s not like I thought Harvey was going to kill William with his money-making plan. But I knew it wouldn’t be good.  At night in bed, Harvey would tell me about how he would make this miracle scheme work. I didn’t really understand it. I said maybe our boy could become a doctor, like my dad did. Harvey laughed at me. Like I was an idiot.

I wanted to sabotage Harvey’s plan, try to make the flowers wilt again, maybe spray them with poison. But he watched the flowers very carefully. I couldn’t get near them, even at night. He set booby traps, too. He took my knitting yarn and made a kind of yarn web held up by sticks poked into the ground all around the flowers. Then he hung little bells from the yarn. And mouse traps all around that – hidden in the grass that he wouldn’t mow. Only he knew where they were. He also nailed the kitchen window shut, so I couldn’t do something to the flowers from above.

The worst part was thinking about what tests Harvey would conduct next. These were just plants, but I couldn’t imagine he would stop there. How much money would William make him bringing plants back to life? Somehow he would have to work his way up to healing people. How? Get more dogs? I didn’t even want to think about the possibilities. I was sick with worry.

And then, it just stopped. It felt like a miracle. Five days into the week, the flowers started dying. I couldn’t talk to William about it, so I don’t know for sure, but I think he just stopped healing them. I mean, he still did the same things as before, holding the wilted stems like his dad told him to, listening to his Dad tell him to make the plants healthy again. But nothing happened.

I felt a wave of relief when I saw those dying flowers. I thought Harvey would finally drop the idea and leave William alone. But he didn’t.

One day, when almost all of the flowers were dead, I was making breakfast in the kitchen, and I looked out the window to see Harvey standing with his hands on his hips and staring down through the yarn web at the dirt and decaying plants. His neck was red with sunburn, and he wore a white shirt with yellow sweat stains under the armpits. His face seemed peaceful, his breathing slow. Then all of a sudden, he started tearing at the yarn, pulling out sticks, throwing the mess of them around the yard while he yelled and screamed and bells banged around, clinking and ringing. His arms flailed around like the Tasmanian devil cartoon. I almost laughed. But when he bellowed, “William!”My heart stopped.

Harvey ran out of my view, and I turned and ran, too, following his pounding footsteps up the stairs to William’s room.

I got there just as Harvey was holding him up by his collar with one hand and hitting the side of his head with the other, yelling, “What kind of game do you think you’re playing, boy?” William and I were both crying as Harvey pushed past me, dragging our little boy down the stairs by his shirt. I ran behind them, to the flowers, where Harvey shoved William’s face into the dirt. “What is this?” He yelled. “Why are they dying? What did you do to them?”

Seeing William’s face smashed into the ground, I screamed “STOP!”

For a moment, there was silence except for William’s quiet whimpers. Harvey seemed to move in slow motion, and his face gradually changed from full-on anger into a dead-eyed smile which he directed at me. He reminded me of a cat stalking its prey – you know, the slow walk it does right before it crouches down to get ready to pounce?

He looked me in the eyes and said, real quiet, “What did you say?”

I didn’t plan it – I just blurted out, “He doesn’t have it.”

Harvey cocked his sweaty head, eyes still locked on me and said, as if I were a child to be humored, “Doesn’t have what, Elle?”

I looked at William, who was sobbing softly and looking up at me, still sprawled out amongst the ruins of my once beautiful flowers. I whispered, “He doesn’t have the healing touch.”

Harvey’s eyes widened in surprise, and he glanced at William as if sharing a joke with him. “Really? How do you know this, Elle?”

I looked at him and gathered my voice. “He didn’t heal the flowers. I just watered them, put fertilizer on them, did whatever I could.”

It wasn’t a good explanation. But I knew that, in that moment, Harvey just needed someone to blame. And I didn’t want it to be William.

Harvey put his hands on his hips, looking down. Then he looked up at me, nodding slightly as if he understood. “And you couldn’t get to the flowers after I put up the netting.” He called it netting, that mess of yarn. “So after that, the flowers started to die again.”

He pointed at his head, staring at me. “I knew it.” He tapped his head a few times, looking at William. “See Billy? Science. That’s why we use science. To figure out the truth.”

Well, things weren’t so good for awhile after that. I mean, they were worse. At least Harvey left William alone. Though after that he would tell William stories about how my Dad was stupid – how people thought he was so honorable, such a good person being a doctor and all, but that he left his family and died in the war, leaving his wife to raise four kids on his own. And how honorable was that? That wasn’t how it happened, but I kept quiet.

One time Harvey said, “Billy, your grandfather had such a big ego that he named all four of his children ‘Joe’ after himself. Even your mom.” He looked at me and smirked, like it was a joke on me.

William asked, “Is that true Mom?”

I couldn’t show how sad I was, how much I missed my family. I don’t know why Mom and Dad named us Joelle, Joline, Johanna and Joseph. I know it wasn’t dad’s ego. But I just made myself smile and say, “Yes, William. It’s true.”

Sylvia slowly sat up in the hospital bed, pillows tucked behind her back. She felt sore in a way she didn’t remember from her other three births. Her exhaustion mixed with a shimmer of energy – that was familiar. But something was wrong.

To her right, a window as tall as herself let in bright sunlight that made her eyes blink. Where was Joe? Where was anybody?

It had been a problematic birth. The baby’s heart had stopped beating, and Joe had been there to calm her, to help her sleep through the worst of the pain, through the worry.

She knew she was extremely lucky to have her husband with her during the birth. He had known something was wrong and had insisted on joining her in the birthing room. “I’m a doctor,” he had said calmly when told to go to the waiting room. “And she’s my wife. I’m not leaving.”

Their three previous children had been born without complication. In fact, they had gone quickly and smoothly. Joe had been with her through every one, holding her hand, stroking the dark, wet strands of hair from her forehead. She loved this man who cared more for her comfort and reassurance than for what other people thought was normal.

Her woman friends looked at her in disbelief when she first told them Joe had been there for the delivery. “Why?” They asked, so much judgment in that one word.

“He’s a doctor,” she replied, though she knew it was more than that. He was Joe. He was special.

Sylvia had met Joe walking to school. He had introduced himself as, “Joseph Aaron Spivey”. There was something about him that pulled her in. He had rich, caramel-colored eyes shiny, brown curly hair, thick brown lashes. She might have fallen in love with him for his looks alone. But his smile sealed it. It was more than a smile. It was a question and reassuring statement, together. It was kindness, caring, a strong gentleness that magnetized and warmed her.

One day Sylvia had tripped and scraped her knee badly. He had led her to the nearby stream to wash out the wound. As he cupped water in his hands and splashed it onto her knee, she felt so calmed, and barely felt any pain. She assumed it was because she was falling in love. But another factor had probably been what he eventually told her was “the healing touch”, something that ran in his family. She made him keep it a secret, though, for reasons she hadn’t understood until decades later. Only she and his parents knew about it.

 “I want to be a doctor someday,” he had confided in her. And it broke her heart to hear, given the extreme unlikelihood that it would happen. It was during the Depression. His family didn’t have money, and they needed him on the farm just to get by. Even if he could leave his folks, he would never be able to afford the cost of medical school.

They married five years later, and in that time, she saw what Joe meant by “the healing touch”. He had a way with living things – which was one reason why his parents wanted him on the farm. Crops grew better when he tilled the soil, the milk tasted noticeably better when he milked the cows, chickens produced more eggs, etc. But people were Joe’s specialty. And not being able to help them in an official capacity was like a punishment for him. He was happy on one level, but she saw something in the way he walked, a little more hunched over than usual, like he had just finished a deep sigh that kept getting a little deeper every day.

One day she felt it so acutely, this suffering, like a hangnail she feared would fester and spread, that she prayed while hanging up laundry on the line, three tiny children within sight, a breeze blowing through her long, dark hair. “Please God,” she whispered, eyes closing with concentrated emotion. “Help Joe to become a doctor.”

It would be ridiculous to think that her prayer had started the war, but it was the war that gave Joe his chance to study medicine. Pearl Harbor set many things in motion, one of which was a fast track medical degree program. If you could keep up with studies, you got your education free of charge. Joe graduated, along with a small percentage of his original class. And, of course, he was sent off to the war.

Those were tough years, with him gone. Her parents were not well, and Joe’s parents were slowing down, meaning she had to do more on the farm.

Again, how could she have been responsible for him coming home, just because she had cried one lonely evening, praying for Joe’s return? But one week after that prayer, he had returned, a bandage over one eye. As always, he comforted her, even though he was the one with one blind eye.

“Actually, I’m relieved,” he had told her. “You are way too pretty for me to look at with two eyes.”

Much changed that first year Joe was back. He established a practice that served country folk, making the rounds every day. Every morning, before he set out on his horse, Sylvia would make him a lunch of bread and cheese, an apple from one of their trees, or apricots or pears she had canned, maybe a pickled cucumber from her stock. She walked the kids to school, helped the teacher with tasks around the school building, came home, did housework, and made dinner. The kids walked themselves back home, and Joe came home by six o’clock every evening.

One day, when Sylvia was feeling particularly weighed down with her fourth pregnancy, Joe rode up with a passenger  – a young woman from one of the more isolated farms down the road.

“This is Lilly,” he said unceremoniously. As Sylvia came to the horse, he had just dismounted. He helped the frail-looking young woman down off the horse next, and Sylvia noticed her wince upon landing, despite Joe’s careful support. Their three girls came to greet their Papa, jumping up to hug him.”

“Kids, please show Lilly where to wash up for dinner. Sylvia, would you help me with Philly here?” He patted the horse’s neck and headed towards the barn as the three kids jumped and ran and chattered, leading Lilly to the house.

“I’m sorry for the last-minute guest,” he had told her, voice low, hand on her shoulder. There was both urgency and calm in his voice. “Ed’s on a bender, and she’s still recovering from the last time he came home drunk.”

“What happened?” she asked.

“He hits her, Sylvie. Fractured her leg. He might come here to find her.”

Joe didn’t make his rounds as usual for the next few days. It was lovely having him home, having lunch with him, watching him with the kids. She even appreciated having another woman in the house. Though she didn’t like the looks Lilly had for Joe. Sylvia wanted to say, “Stop looking at my husband.” But she bit her tongue.

A couple days later, Ed, came riding up on a horse. Joe told Sylvia to stay in the kitchen and keep Lilly from coming outside. Sylvia peeked out the window from behind the curtains just in time to see Ed dismount clumsily, then run to Joe, swinging his fist. Sylvia had never seen Joe fight, but there he was ducking expertly, jabbing and jumping, side to side. He landed a blow on Ed’s jaw, sprawling him into the grassy dirt.

Calmly, Joe came back in, “Can I have two cups of coffee, Please Sylvie?” She obediently poured two cups from the pot on the cook stove, handed them over. He kissed her on the cheek and went back outside.

Joe and Ed sat outside talking, and later Sylvia brought them bowls of stew. Several hours later, Ed and Lilly rode off on Ed’s horse. When Joe finally came in, he looked exhausted, with dark shadows under his eyes, which he could barely keep open.

“Lilly and Ed will be fine,” he said, seeing the question on her face.

“What about when Ed drinks again?”

“He won’t.” Joe walked to their bedroom, where she found him hours later, fast asleep, sprawled face-down on top of the covers, still wearing the same clothes. He didn’t wake up until after noon the next day.

That was the first time she had been worried for his safety since the war. Sylvia had always revered Joe’s healing talents, but now she feared them as well, how they drained him of energy, knocking him down.

“Hello?” A nurse in with a white rectangle hat had appeared at the foot of her bed, holding a tightly-blanketed bundle about the size of a loaf of bread. “Are you ready to see your baby, Mrs. Spivey? He’s been fed and is sleeping like a baby,” she said with a smile.

“He’s a boy,” whispered Sylvia. Joe had thought it would be a boy. Their first. “Where’s Joe?” Sylvia’s voice raised in concern.

The nurse kept her practiced smile on as she adjusted the lilac-filled vase on the bedside table, then put a glass of water next to it. “The doctor will be with you shortly,” said the nurse as she left, calmly but quickly.

Sylvia’s heart froze. The nurse was following the edict, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” Her throat tightened, and words squeezed out of her mouth into urgent calls that eventually turned into screams when no one responded. “Where’s Joe! Where’s my husband? Damnit, somebody tell me where Joe is!”

A kerfuffle of nurse activity showed itself beyond the windowed wall at the end of her room. Soon a white-coated, gray-haired doctor walked through the door.

“Please, Mrs. Spivey! You’re alarming the other patients.”

“Dr. Pike! Tell me where my husband is!”

She could see the impatience and disdain in his eyes. If Joe were here, he would know how to calm her down. He did that with all his patients, and the contrast between the two doctor’s manners made her hate the doctor before her and resent the absent one.

“Please, I will tell you, but you must first calm down.”

Sylvia held her breath immediately.

“And calm your baby, for goodness sake.”

Sylvia’s breath came back in a whoosh, and she suddenly noticed the wailing little lump in her lap. Instinct led her to unwrap the head of the little bundle, to open her robe and offer the little boy her breast.

The boy latched onto her nipple and sucked vigorously and slurpily, gradually slowing with sleepiness. “Must you? the nurses just fed him.”

Sylvia’s stare became murderous, but she kept her heart beat still, the way Joe had taught her. She almost growled “I calmed my baby. Now tell me, where is my husband?”

Dr. Pike stuck his hands in his large white jacket pockets and looked away, his calm, in-charge demeanor now slightly cracked.

“You remember the birth?”

“Something was wrong with the baby,” Sylvia replied, looking down at her little boy’s head covered with dark peach fuzz hair.

“Yes. We couldn’t hear a heartbeat. At one point you passed out…”

Joe helped me fall asleep, she corrected him in her head, but said nothing, not wanting to delay his point.

He pushed his glasses up his nose, looking at the baby at her breast, then away.

“The umbilical cord was around the baby’s neck. We got him out as quickly as possible, but he was blue.”

Tell me where Joe is. She didn’t dare speak it, but her mind was screaming.

Dr. Pike cleared his throat in a fist-covered cough, then forced himself to look into her eyes.

“Joe insisted on helping with the birth, practically pushing me aside. As soon as the baby came out, he unwrapped the cord from around the baby’s neck, then – the nurses tried to take the baby…” Dr. Pike’s eyes wandered up, into a memory. “But he elbowed everyone away and held the baby. I – I would have held the baby by the feet, upside down, slapped its bottom. But he…” his hands recreated Joe’s unfathomable actions. “…he sat down on the floor, demanded a warm blanket. Nurse Sally brought it, and he had her put it under baby, on his lap. He just – sort of rubbed the little feet, massaged the back, rocked back and forth.”

Tears were welling and falling from her eyes, her lips fluttering.

“That baby was not alive, Sylvia,” he said conspiratorially . “And then, five minutes later…”

Sylvia knew what had happened. She hugged the now-sleeping baby a little closer.

She tried to hold the emotions in by squeezing her eyes shut, but the tears flowed, drops falling gently onto the face of little boy who would be named after his dead father.