Sweeping Up Glass (26 page)

“I’ll be damned,” Wing says, grinning at Will’m. He hasn’t yet looked at me. “So what’s Doc saying?”

“The burns aren’t as bad as they might have been,” I tell him. “The worst is—”

Then he turns to me. His glasses have slid to the end of his nose and he studies me over the top of them. When I don’t answer, he says, “Of all the damn accidents.”

An accident
. This is something I have not wanted to think about. Whether it was or not, the timing was extraordinary, for my next words to Ida would have been,
Where the hell have you put my pap?

Wing puts out a hand and strokes the cub. “Olivia—I’d be glad to help. If there’s something I can do.”

I shake my head. The man has gumption.

“Listen, you and the boy ought to come down to the hotel tonight. You’d be closer to Doc’s place, each have your own room. There’s the telephone, and I could drive you up to Doc’s quick if the need arose.”

Will’m’s eyes grow round.

“We couldn’t—” I say.

“Double shocks today, of course you could. Besides, you can use the rest.”

So Junk has told him about the empty grave.

Wing pulls out a chair and sits down, splays his legs—seems at home, and I wonder how, after our last conversation.

Rest. At some point, I got past needing relief from Ida, and my body just kept on. Eventually, I forgot how hard it all was. But other things have worn me down, too. “Pauline was here.”

After a minute, Wing says, “I’d like to have seen her.”

I fetch the broom from the porch and sweep around his feet like I’ve just given him a haircut or something. “She came for the boy. I wouldn’t let her take him.”

“Well, good for you.” I think he wants to say more, I can feel it hanging in the air. “Please come to the hotel, Olivia.”

“Gran—”

“You’ve got to catch the bus in the morning—if your cold is better. Which reminds me, I’ve got to make you a mustard plaster. You can’t leave the cub, and tomorrow’s Colored Day. Will’m, don’t forget to write down that Love Alice has credit—”

“I already did.” Will’m is holding the cub and his shirt with one hand, pouring tinned milk in a pan with the other. But his eyes are on me.

“There’s so much to be done—the hole to fill in. I’m too tired to sort all this out tonight, Wing.”

“Then come and let me take care of you both. There’s no harm in one night.”

The greater part of me wants him to go. I should be putting thought into Phelps’ warning. But with Wing sitting in my kitchen, running his thumb over a crack in my tabletop, the whole idea of a threat slips away. I have no idea what I feel about Wing. One minute I’m one thing, the next something else. I shake my head.

“Well then,” he says, getting up. “You want me to stop by Doc’s, check on Ida?”

“I’ll go down first thing in the morning.”

He nods. “If you need anything. Will’m, Olivia.”

I look at Will’m’s face, sulking the way Pauline used to. I’ll have old molly hell to pay when Wing walks out the door.

I
n the morning, Will’m’s still mad at me. But I leave him with the store, start the truck, and drive down to Doc’s. Lights are on in the kitchen and in the tiny back room that he uses for overnight stays. It’s where Doc took Pauline’s tonsils out.

“Come on in, Olivia.” He holds open the door.

Ida is laid out on the cot in the back room, all right, and Doc is in the middle of changing her dressings. Her flesh is terrible to look at, puckered and red-black where she’s burnt, the rest of her old and wrinkled. And she’s so small. With fresh bandages on, she looks like a child playing at war, a soldier returning. Poor Ida. What an awful life she’s had, at least after she married Pap. Maybe he should have let her go on riding her donkey and preaching the gospel. I wonder if, back then, she was sane, if God really held her in the palm of his hand. But I know that’s wrong-thinking. God holds us all, Ida says, and she’s no different. What could her soul have been thinking when she volunteered for this body? Maybe it was birthing me that sent her over the edge.

“Olivia,” Doc says. “She hasn’t come around. Seems like she’s sunk inside herself. Shock victims do that.”

If things were different, I might weep. But I’ve been angry with
Ida so long, I don’t know anything else. Even now the only reason I wish she’d wake up is so I can ask her where she buried Pap.

“I can’t keep her in the house with me, Doc,” I say. “I’d go plumb out of my mind.”

“Nobody’s saying you ought to, Olivia. I think you should consider putting her where she’ll get the kind of care she needs.”

“Where would that be?”

“An institution,” he says.

Although the sun is bright, the room feels full of damp. “What kind of institution?”

“Well, there’s the sanitarium …”

He means the asylum where Ida was a long time ago. “The crazy house.”

He makes a face, like I’ve said a bad word. “They’ll take care of her burns, too.”

I have never been to the place myself, but I’ve heard tales. A long time ago, I put those stories away from me, but I’ve always wondered how doctors deal with the mind. How they ever managed to put Ida back together—at least for this long.

I’m embarrassed to say: “I can’t pay for her care.”

“I can make a call.”

Then, behind me, Wing says, “If you like, I’ll drive you over there, Olivia.” I did not hear him come in.

“Morning, Wing, Olivia,” Doc’s wife says, coming in.

Wing looks me straight in the eye. He hasn’t slept a minute more than I have.

“Woman,” he says in a squared-off voice, “you can get mad all you want, but the way I see it, you need help. You’re too stubborn to ask for it. So I’ve been up to the highway and filled the station wagon with gasoline.”

“I—”

“I guess Will’m’s minding the store—when he closes, he can go up to Molly’s. I’ll fix it with Marta.”

Molly’s—a new hiding place, if his being there hasn’t set that whole family in danger.

“That’s a good idea, Wing,” Doc says. His eyes are watery, his face like crumpled paper. “Olivia—listen now. You were a tyke when I came around with that buggy. Tate and I drove her over there. It was the only thing to do. And I’ll tell you the truth—I was surprised she ever came home.”

Had he been reading my mind? I look at the floor, at the enamel cabinets and tongue depressors, wanting someone to take all this away from me. I’ve ignored Ida, hated her from the moment she came. I prayed that God would send her back. Now Doc says I can do it myself, and I don’t understand why I’m not jumping at the chance.

“You’re a grown woman, Olivia. You make the decisions, but I’m telling you plain. At least go and look.”

“All right,” I say.

Wing nods.

“Don’t be surprised by the place,” Doc says. “And let me know what you decide.”

I
’ve arranged for Will’m to spend the evening at Molly’s,” Wing says.

In the front seat of his green station wagon, I look over at him.

“Don’t worry. Marta and her husband will see to him. Molly’s got two sisters—they’ll love him.”

I remember Molly, the incessant chatter that delighted Will’m, how she had him under her thumb. “It’s not
that
I’m worried about.”

Wing laughs, and I’m embarrassed that maybe he remembers.

The asylum is actually Stipling State Hospital, surrounded by a high brick wall with broken glass imbedded on top. A gatehouse keeper takes my name, looks over his list, and waves us through. The building itself is a granite box. I count six rows of grilled windows, stacked like gray milk crates. We park and get out.

I do not take Wing’s arm, though he offers it. The door is unlocked and we go into a lobby with a glassed-in office, and a woman gets up and hurries away through an inner door. Wing touches my arm, says why don’t we take a seat over here.

Victrola music plays somewhere, whining and thin.

An egg-shaped man steps out of the office. He’s dressed in a
brown suit, with a fringe of pale hair and unpolished shoes. Even his skin is colorless.

“I’m Dr. Baird, from Evaluation and Assignment,” he says, shaking Wing’s hand and then mine. He carries a clipboard. “Dr. Pritchett phoned from Aurora and said you were in need of quick placement.”

“For my mother,” I tell him, lest he think it’s for me, or for Wing.

“Well,” he says, “we’ll have to accommodate her, of course. We’re a state institution. Although we’re understaffed and badly funded.”

It sounds like something he says all the time.

“Ida Harker. I understand she had a mishap with fire. A number of patients come to us that way. Scorched hair, chopped off fingers, gangrenous toes. She’ll be in our infirmary until she recovers or passes. I suppose you’ll want to see the place.”

He’s the most plainspoken man I’ve ever met.

“We’ll take care of her medications,” he says. “Three meals a day.”

“She’s picky about her food,” I tell him.

“They all are.” He leads us down a hall. “And should she reach levels One or Two, we have activities to keep her busy.”

I can’t picture Ida involved in activities.

“We have four psychiatrists on staff,” he says. “They see patients as often as they can. Along here are our kitchens, and the cafeteria. We bring One here for their meals. Levels One and Two do their own laundry.”

“How many patients?” Wing asks.

“Five hundred and fourteen at the moment, although we’re set up to accommodate two hundred and fifty. The state mandates that we take the overflow.”

“How many go home from here?” I ask him.

“Staff meets quarterly, releases twenty-five each time.”

Twenty-five people, ready or not.

Baird looks at the clipboard. “Ida Harker was young when she was here. The younger they are, the better chance they have.”

I recall how Pap labored to pay the bills.

“We have five levels here,” Baird is telling Wing. “Miz Harker was on Two, then we moved her to Four.”

“I’d like to see those, please.”

He sighs. “All right. Come this way.”

Is he wondering,
How long before we must accommodate you, too?

He takes us down corridors, punches a button. Baird pushes back grillwork and we step into the elevator. The walls and ceiling are canvas and padded. When it stops, he takes a key from his pocket and unlocks the door. “Three is our sleepers. This is the men’s side.”

A long corridor opens before us, with cots lined up, and mattresses between. The place is old, and a lot of the plaster is gone from the walls. The antiseptic is so strong it makes my stomach hurt. At least fifty men lie here, stiff as corpses, though few are sleeping. Eyes are lost in dark sockets; jaws sag, most with no teeth. The sheets are thin with constant laundering, and the arms bone thin and spotted with purple. Nurses glide up and down on rubbery shoes. The snoring is terrible. I find Wing’s hand.

“Some are comatose,” Baird says. “A few catatonic. Most fade in and out. We take their dentures so they won’t choke on them.”

“I want to see Four.”

“Miz Cross,” he says, “that’s a bit premature.”

But Ida might live here the rest of her life, and right now I’m in a foul mood.

We get back in the elevator and go up one floor. Immediately
opposite us is a thickly grilled screen, and behind that, a radio’s playing.

“This is the dayroom,” Baird says. “As you can see, we’ve cut down on size to accommodate more cells.”

Cells
.

In the dayroom, patients sit stiffly on straight-backed chairs or shuffle up and down in pajamas or bathrobes. An elderly man rushes to press his face to the screen. His eyes are milky, the pupils like pinpricks. His head is shaved, and there are purple ink marks on his temples. “Why am I here?” he asks me.

Baird says, “Mr. Franks asks everyone that. He knows why he’s here.”

“Why is he?” Wing asks.

Baird sighs. “He strangled his wife with a nylon stocking, then tucked her in bed in the spare room and left her for three weeks. By the time police found her, he’d bought her eighty-one pairs of stockings to compensate.

“The women’s dayroom is on the other side. And down there are the ladies on Four who can’t get along.”

Down there
is a narrow hall with equally narrow doors with low, slotted openings. I wonder what the slots are for.

Behind almost every one I see papery skin on a skeleton face. The racket is deafening. It’s amazing how much they look alike—terribly old, even the young ones. Fingers poke out. Two put their lips to the space. One blows a kiss.

Down the hall, an orderly turns a key in a lock. I hear shrieking, then a tired argument.

“Bath time,” Baird says with a sigh.

I try to imagine Ida being here while Pap and I bound torn paws and peddled brown jugs. While we grew corn and beans and ate flapjacks with syrup so sweet it made our teeth ache.

Orderlies have pried the screaming woman from her cell. Inside the bathroom, some tubs are covered with rubber sheets. An old woman shakes violently in a trough full of ice, and a nurse jams a twist of something in her mouth. Along the far wall are leather swings with leg holes like the kind they put babies in. A woman sits on a toilet. She wears a canvas coat with long, strapped arms—a straitjacket, I think. To my right is a staircase.

“There’s another level?” I say.

Down the hall Wing is asking about staff—how many of this, what number of that. From above comes a wailing such as tomcats make. I go up, turn at the landing, and listen. Screams and keening in a dozen pitches.

Here are rows and rows of metal wire runs, each holding maybe twenty women—these ladies’ chins are wet with spittle, noses crusted. One has no eyes, just lids sewn shut, and I look away. Without exception, their faces are bone, some heads shorn, a few with long, matted hair, but not for long, I think. They’ll be bound and bathed and shaved and God knows what else.

Most wear sacks with holes cut out—or nothing at all. Their faces aren’t vacant like the sleepers on Three or the walkers on Four, but wrenched into grins, or twisted with a personal terror that came and stayed. Their screams fill cracks in the plaster and bounce off beams. When a dozen stop weeping, a dozen more pick it up, and they move all the time, like a pot of something alive and stirred. Their eyes are dark holes filled with splintered glass.