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Authors: Mary Glickman

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BOOK: Home In The Morning
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It was not what his father intended. Dr. Howard Sassaport expected to establish a medical dynasty just as his grandfather had sired a retail one. This feat was meant to enshrine his name in the family narrative at a par with Jack and Joe, its heroes, the husbands of Bella and Hannah, they whose names were invoked repeatedly in the rearing of children, the constant discussions at the uncles’ roundtable on the expansion of market, and at holiday gatherings. In his grandiose moments, the doctor imagined himself as revered by the progeny as the great Baruch Sassaporta himself. Unfortunately, he chose Missy Fine as his bride, selected for her wide hips and thick bones, which he fancied indicated that a sturdy mother slept within them, awaiting his seed to waken her destiny. The daughter of a man who wholesaled shoes from factories up north, Missy Fine was plump and pretty, black-eyed, chestnut-haired, a bored, fierce-minded creature who dreaded more than anything else winding up like her mother behind a counter in some frigid warehouse figuring sums in a green eyeshade. When Dr. Howard Sassaport came to call, she saw her way out of four generations of shopkeeping. With a desperate energy the smitten doctor failed to notice, she divined his dreams and promoted his cause convincingly. Big families are the Lord’s greatest blessing, she avowed to him on moonlit nights until his ring was on her finger, then after popping out a paltry two doctoral candidates in seven years, she declared she was too frail to go through that ordeal again. She abandoned the nursery, leaving her second boy in the care of the hired help and Jackson to flounder on his own, retired to the kitchen, and did not come out until she’d gained forty pounds
three months later. Making do with the boys he had, Dr. Sassaport was ripe for colossal failure.

Jackson was the eldest. When he was small, the idea of following in his father’s footsteps appealed, largely because the man was rarely home while his son was awake. His person was entirely mysterious to the boy. Of the doctor’s activities, Jackson was aware only that they were adorned with his mother’s most intense respect. He knew Daddy helped sick people, but Jackson was always in perfect health himself— even childhood diseases passed over him like the Angel of Death in Egypt—so he had only the vaguest notions of what sick meant. By five, he’d had his share of scrapes and bruises, but he had no experience of wounds that gushed or festered. In his imagination, sick people had stomachaches or coughed like Cook.

If he’d bothered to share this perception, others could be excused for thinking the boy a bit slow, especially since he and Mama brought a covered supper to Daddy’s office every Thursday night. On Thursdays, Dr. Sassaport kept evening hours at the office, principally for the sake of local laborers too poor to take time from day work so that the goiters choking their throats could be measured or the thick yellow veil masking the whites of their eyes assessed. They tended to wait until thirty minutes before the knife was indicated before limping up to the doctor’s front door (or its rear, as custom demanded for some). Charity day, Mama called it, and at first Jackson thought “charity” was the proper name of the day of the week between Wednesday and Friday. Yet the child could not be blamed for these ideas. When they brought Daddy supper, they entered the office through the side door, which led directly into his examining room. If Daddy had a patient with him, he did not allow them over the threshold. On the occasions they were granted entry, Jackson found nothing unusual in the place. It might as well have been an office in the bank or Uncle Tom-Tom’s insurance company except for its tart, tangy smell, which the boy found similar
enough to what Sukie used to scrub the floors at home to consider it only occasionally.

When Jackson achieved the age of five, his father deemed it high time for the boy to be introduced more intimately to the medical arts. His mother disagreed. He’s too young for harsh realities, Mama said. Human beings can’t stomach much of it. Daddy countered: I can and I do. So will my son. If I acquaint him with reality during his tender years, he’ll take the nasty bits of life a heap more easily later on, Missy. I want him to grow a strong stomach. Hell, I want it crisscrossed with scars. Trust me, sweetheart. It’ll help him more later on than it’ll harm him now.

Asking for trust in such a situation was a dicey business with Missy Fine Sassaport. She trusted nothing but her own mind and—it should be admitted at the git-go—that curious entity’s homegrown conclusions were cast in stone as soon as they sprung from the gray matter and propelled themselves into the dull, waiting world. Studying her husband, gauging his determination, she drew in her chin making two of it. She crossed her arms above her chest using that colossal mass as a shelf on which to deposit her certitude.

You’re wrong, she declared emphatically in a tone that brooked no contradiction.

I’m the daddy, woman. I’ll do what I see fit.

Missy Fine Sassaport snorted her contempt.

Take the child, then. Ruin him if you need to. But when you return him to me, if that child’s in any way damaged, he is mine, ya hear? Mine.

She quit his company in a huff, marching upstairs for a lie-down, as she was tired from shopping all day and had no intention of wasting her precious energies on the losing side of a cockeyed dialectic.

That same night a terrible pounding on the back door roused the household after everyone had gone to bed. It woke Jackson immediately
and his father as well. Mama snored on even after Sukie, who slept in the kitchen on a cot near the stove, bounded upstairs and burst into the master bedroom without knocking to relay the news that there was an emergency down by River Road, a matter of life and death, life and death! The doctor raised a hand to quiet her, got out of bed, and put on his pants. Grabbing his black bag and a suit jacket as the times were yet formal about such matters whether at three a.m. or four in the afternoon, he hurried into the hall, nearly taking a header down the staircase after bumping into Jackson, who’d wandered from his bedroom to see what the commotion was about. Daddy righted himself, regarded his son. Get your chinos on, boy, he ordered, and your corduroy shirt. You’re coming with me. Don’t forget your shoes.

It was a boneheaded move, the move of a man still angry over an afternoon’s spat with his wife. The doctor had no idea what he was taking the boy to, only that there was an accident, a wound to be closed. How long it been open?, he asked the one who had been sent to fetch him. Just a short while, Doctor. A short while. Forgetting in his heat the appetite of his patients for falsehood and deception, it seemed to Jackson’s daddy that a fresh wound was not a bad introduction to the healing profession for a child. The shame of it was he knew better. For fifteen years, he’d taken histories from patients that were fairy tales from beginning to end. “Mama wasn’t feeling well last Thanksgiving” would prove after further investigation to translate: “Mama was riddled with cancer and starved at home for six months before she was dispatched by a merciful Lord.”

Hastily attired, off the pair went into the dark, humming night. Daddy’s Studebaker followed a rickety red pickup down the three or four roads Jackson knew and then down a tree-lined strip of dirt he did not. After several lefts, a few rights, the road got darker and bumpier, which conditions might ordinarily have frighted the boy but on this occasion caused only exhilaration. He was, after all, out and about in
the dead of night in the brilliant company of a personal god. For reasons unknown to him, reasons he suspected were seriously grown-up, Daddy had requested his presence on an important errand. What could be more exciting, more intoxicating? Then there was the way Daddy spoke to him, in tones unheard before: hushed, seductive tones meant to color the experience awaiting him. You are about to have your eyes opened, child of mine, for they have been closed, Daddy said. You are about to be welcomed into a world of miracle and mystery where I will guide you to the foot of the mountain it will be your joy to climb. Mama thinks you’re too young, but we know better, don’t we, Jackson. Mama is only a woman, and this is the business of men. Are you not a man, if a small one? Are you not a man?

Up until that moment, Jackson felt for certain he was not a man, but if Daddy said so then he must be. His narrow chest puffed up, his neck went straight and long to support a head swollen with pride.

Yes, Daddy, I am a man. I am.

Dr. Howard Sassaport laughed from deep in his proper belly and its sound, full and rich, filled up the cab of the Studebaker wrapping around the boy in a thick, affectionate cloak. Jackson near burst with happiness.

The pickup stopped, the Studebaker also. Before the headlights dimmed, Jackson caught sight of a tar-paper shack set near the banks of the Pearl, then all went black except for the small yellow glow of oil lamps lit within. He got confused for a bit thinking they were fireflies, very large ones, flickering where the shack stood, maybe hovering in front of it. Daddy said: Alright, Jackson. Follow me and keep your eyes open. Look and listen, child. That’s all you need to do the first time. Keep a good distance back from the sickbed. But look and listen to everything. Can you do that?

Jackson nodded with all the gravitas a five-year-old can achieve. They got out of the car, Jackson jumping from his high seat. His feet
sloshed into mud. He took a deep breath of air that was familiar and yet not: a moist air, noisy with insects, heavy with peculiar scents. Crabapple, he thought, like Mama’s favorite tree mixed with the lively stench of gumbo mud and underneath something else that caused his nostrils to pinch. A gaunt black woman stood at the entrance to the shack, holding a lamp aloft so they could wend their way safely through a pile of junk, a tiny vegetable garden. The pinching smell got stronger with his every step until he was nearly suffocated by the time they entered the place. Yet bravely, because Daddy expected such, he crossed the threshold with his eyes open and his senses pricked.

Within seconds, he stood immobile, drop-jawed, a mouth-breathing fool. There was a great putrefaction in that house with its dirt floor covered by overlapping mats of plaited river grass and the sickbed set plunk in the middle of what was kitchen, bedroom, and parlor all together. Through eyes stung by loathsome fumes, Jackson saw a man, perhaps once black, now mostly gray with impending morbidity, lying on a bare mattress ripped at the sides with its straw sticking out. The man groaned nonstop. His left leg was split from mid-thigh to groin. Around the edges of the wound, black blood puddled purple in the oily light, and at its center were bubbles of noxious pus from which flies fed greedily. Horrified, Jackson stared, choked, screamed, and ran from the house to the riverbank where he collapsed, gasping, in the muck.

It’s questionable whether a boy so young could logically process what had happened to him or what its ramifications might be. In later years, Jackson recalled only that he was rife with guilt at disappointing his father, humiliated that obviously he was not a man, never would be, and plain damn sick from too much reality. While his father did what he could for the wretched man within, Jackson shivered and trembled without. He quaked on his knees, his head buried in his hands. And then Daddy’s promised miracle happened. A soft small hand touched
his shoulder, a high sweet voice whispered: You’re alright. You’re alright. Don’t cry, boy. You’re alright.

Jackson lifted his head to look into two black eyes, round and luminous, eyes that held a world of knowing his did not. They belonged to a young, dark-skinned girl, a smidgen older than he. They were twin beams of light pulling him out of himself into a universe where he was, indeed, alright, which is where the miracle lay. He wanted to ask her dozens of questions, but they would not form on his tongue nor issue from his mouth, so he put his arms around her and hugged for all he was worth. For her own reasons—it was her granddaddy perishing inside—she hugged back just as fiercely. The two stayed that way, united, united so for an eternity, until a voice called from the shack: Katherine! Katherine Marie! Bring that child back up the house. His daddy’s gettin’ ready to leave.

It was a toss-up which of the children was more reluctant to move, but move they did, each propelled by the other’s necessity. Jackson halted at the passenger door of the Studebaker. I’ll wait here, he mumbled. I’ll wait with you, Katherine Marie said. She stuck her small pointed chin out and pursed her lips as if in defiance or rather, as Jackson imagined, like an angel of God created especially to protect him, to give him strength to keep standing there upright though his knees knocked mightily in anticipation of his father’s displeasure.

The doctor emerged from the shack, followed by the woman who’d granted them entry, her hands weighted with slop buckets the contents of which she tossed to the side of the door. Daddy’s suit jacket was off, his shirtsleeves rolled up. Even through the dark, Jackson could see his father’s clothes were plastered to his skin. The adults spoke quietly together, then Daddy put his hand on the woman’s bony shoulder, squeezed, and quit her company, walking briskly to the car with his head down. Get in, he said, ignoring the presence of Katherine Marie entirely, but the girl was having none of it. She left Jackson’s side and
ran around the car to pull at the back of the doctor’s shirt. Is he dead? she asked. Daddy didn’t answer. She pulled harder, shouted as if Daddy were deaf. I said, is he dead! The doctor twisted his torso to regard her fierce mouth, her narrowed eyes. Not yet, he said. Father and son got in the car, Daddy turned the motor, stuck his head out the window. He will be pretty quick, though. You best get in there and say your goodbyes. The girl started, her shoulders heaved. Then she turned with a grace, a dignity unnatural in a child so young, to walk slowly back into the house of death.

They rode in silence a long while. Jackson did not dare speak, his father had much on his mind and kept his own counsel. The boy prayed that he would continue to do so until they were home, where he could run upstairs and hide in his room. He put his mind on the toys there and the picture books, on his clean, cool sheets, on the seventy-four cowboys painted on the wallpaper. When the car turned down their street and it was maybe a minute before he was home free, Daddy spoke. Or rather he spat his words as if they’d been stuck in his throat the whole time and it needed clearing or he would not breathe another breath—spat them out in a fan of juice that sprayed against the windshield.

BOOK: Home In The Morning
2.68Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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