The Color of Your Skin Ain’t the Color of Your Heart (29 page)

I
KNEW MY EYES WERE RED AS
I
WALKED BACK INTO
the kitchen. There stood Henry, Jeremiah, Emma, and Aleta all silent, every eye on me, and the doctor awkwardly waiting.

The moment I appeared, he sort of nodded, then disappeared toward the parlor again. Without thinking I walked toward Jeremiah and a moment later found myself weeping in his arms.

It was Emma’s voice, so suddenly practical in the midst of our crisis, that finally brought me back to the present.

“Da water’s boilin’, Mayme,” she said.

I stepped back and turned toward her.

“Does you know what we’s ’pozed ter do?”

“No, Emma, I don’t,” I said. “But I don’t think I can bear to go back in there right now. Would you mind asking the doctor what he needs?”

“I kin do dat, Miz Mayme. You jes’ set yer mind t’ ease an’ I’ll take care ob everythin’.”

She was already on her way following the doctor toward the makeshift hospital in the parlor. I went the other direction and walked outside.

The fresh air felt good on my hot face. I was full of so many emotions I couldn’t think. I just had to walk. But I couldn’t go anywhere. I had to stay close in case they needed me or there was any change. And I couldn’t go toward the barn because I didn’t want to look at the two dead bodies. So I walked back and forth between the front and the back of the house. How long I walked I don’t know.

It might have been twenty minutes, it might have been an hour for all I could tell. My mind was numb.

Finally I went back inside. The others were still all silently standing and milling around in the kitchen. All except for Emma, who was bustling about, face sweating, sleeves rolled up. As I came in she was rinsing some cloths under the water in the sink while Aleta pumped the pump, rinsing blood out of them. Then Emma dumped them in the tub of water boiling on the stove and disappeared into the parlor again.

Four or five minutes later the doctor appeared with Emma following behind him. He was holding his surgical knife and wiping it with a white cloth. Both were stained with blood. My stomach lurched and I looked away.

He cleaned up at the sink, then went back to get his bag and coat. Ignoring the rest of us, he nodded to Henry as he walked to the door. Henry followed him. The doctor didn’t know that the man he had just operated on was my father.

He couldn’t possibly know how desperate I was for any news of his condition.

I stepped next to the window from which broken bits of glass still lay strewn all over the floor and strained to listen.

“… got the slug out …” he was saying. I saw him hand something to Henry.

“Doesn’t look good … hasn’t lost that much blood, but … too close to the heart …”

Henry nodded and said something I didn’t hear.

“… did what I could … wouldn’t hold out much hope …”

They stopped beside his buggy. He turned to face Henry and, at the same time, turned a little more toward the house so I could hear him better.

“I got him bandaged pretty good and gave that dimwitted girl some instructions,” he said. “When Mistress Clairborne is up, you tell her what I’ve said … about all we can do is try to make him comfortable. If he goes when you’re here, you and your son get the body out of there and bring it to me. Get him out of the house as soon as you can. We don’t want them seeing it go stiff and cold. I’ll come back tomorrow in the off chance he survives the night. But I’ll wait a day or two before talking to the family about burying arrangements … don’t want to alarm them yet. You’ll be along with the other two bodies?”

“We’ll git dem right away, Doc.”

“All right—tell the sheriff he can talk to me about it if he wants, but you saw it, I didn’t.”

He climbed into his buggy, took the reins, flicked them a couple of times and called out to his horse, and bounced off toward town.

Henry came back in and motioned to Jeremiah. They walked toward the barn. Jeremiah opened the barn doors and they began to hitch up one of Katie’s wagons. I stepped away from the window. I didn’t want to watch them load the two dead men.

A few minutes later I heard the wagon clattering out of the yard, and Jeremiah walked back inside.

T
HE
V
IGIL

44

A
S SOON AS THE ECHO FROM THE WAGON DIED
away in the distance, Rosewood became silent as a tomb.

It felt like a tomb too. In the center of its biggest and nicest room lay a man who was, to all appearances, already dead. And not just any man … he was my father and Katie’s uncle. It was intolerable to remain inside. But where else was there to go? The life had left the place. Yet there was no life anywhere else.

Eventually Katie woke up. At first she was overjoyed to find out that her uncle was alive. But after I had told her everything, especially what I’d overheard the doctor say, we had a long cry together.

For the rest of the day we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. Every time we went past the parlor we couldn’t help glancing into the room where he lay so lifeless and quiet and still. It was awful to look at him, face white, shirt torn away, and a big bandage over his chest with stains of red showing through.

But we
wanted
to look. We loved him.

Somehow the day passed. Henry came back. It helped to do a few chores, and of course the cows and other animals had to be tended to. Listlessly we tried to begin cleaning up the mess of broken glass and other things in the kitchen.

We fixed some supper and ate in silence.

“Y’all want me an’ Jeremiah ter stay da night in da barn, Miz Kathleen?” Henry asked.

“If you don’t mind, Henry,” replied Katie. “At least one of you. I just … we wouldn’t want to be alone if … you know, if—”

“We’s boff stay,” said Henry. “Mr. Guiness an’ Mr. Watson, dere biz’ness’ll keep, ain’t dat right, son?”

Jeremiah nodded.

“We be here jes’ as long as you wants, Miz Kathleen,” he said.

It got dark. It was a relief to go to bed. Mercifully I managed to sleep.

It wasn’t till the next day that I even thought about the gold again. I came upon Katie out in the yard on her hands and knees trying to pick up what she could from the dirt.

“There was only a little of it left in the bag, Mayme,” she said. “It’s all mixed in with the dirt and gravel. All I can get is the bigger pieces.”

Right then the thought of gold made me sick. How could something so lifeless be so powerful as to cause death? Who cared about the gold? Who cared about the bank and the loan and Rosewood?

What did it matter if they took it all away! Katie and I would have traded the whole plantation and the bag of gold and everything else just to have our father and uncle back.

He had been right—it wasn’t worth anyone’s getting killed over. His words from yesterday kept coming back to me over and over, and made me start crying every time I thought of them.

“
It’s not worth anyone’s getting killed over. We can take
care of it. We’re a family now … we don’t need gold … all
we need is each other.

” The day brought no change. The doctor came as promised, changed Templeton’s dressing, and left again, his face grim. He offered no words of hope, saying only “time will tell,” and instructed us to talk to him and wipe his face with a damp cloth in hopes that it might help revive him.

We did as the doctor said, but every minute Katie and I were desperately hoping he’d wake up, even just for a moment, so that we could tell him we loved him. There’s nothing else that seems to matter when a person is dying than that they know you love them.

Slowly the afternoon passed and another evening came.

By the following morning, the fearsomeness of his white form in the parlor wasn’t so great as at first. We were accustomed to it now and that made it less frightening. Katie and I just wanted to be near him.

Like the doctor had suggested, we began sitting beside him, sometimes together as we quietly talked, sometimes alone. By that afternoon we were taking turns so that one of us would be with him every minute. Sometimes we just sat, sometimes we spoke softly or sang to him, sometimes we held his limp hand … sometimes we prayed.

But the longer it went on, the harder the waiting became, and the less likely it seemed that we would ever have the chance to say to him again what our hearts ached to say.

C
RYING
O
UT
TO
G
OD

45

O
N THE MORNING OF THE THIRD DAY
, I
DOZED
off in the chair. I had been sitting with him most of the night. Katie came in and the sound of her steps awakened me.

“You need some sleep,” she said. “I’ll sit with him awhile.”

But I didn’t feel like sleeping. I went out for a walk.

Instead of walking toward the woods, I found myself heading along the border of one of the newly planted fields. I walked all the way around the length of the field, and before long was standing at the river. I sat down on the bank overlooking it and watched the water silently moving by. It looked so different now than a few months earlier when it had stretched from here nearly all the way to Rosewood, and just as far on the other side.

The words of Henry’s prayer I had overheard as he knelt over Bilsby’s body came back to me.

“I pray you won’ be so muleheaded as you wuz on dis side
ob dat ole ribber… .”

Was death like crossing a river, I wondered—a river like this? What was it like to die? What was my father going through right now? Was he aware in some corner of his being of standing on one side of a river and getting ready to step into the water, never to come out in this life again?

And what would it be like to come out on the other side? Would Jesus be waiting for him?

Slowly tears filled my eyes.

“Oh, God,” I said softly as I began to weep, “I don’t want him to die. I’m sorry if I’m not trusting you to do what’s best … but I can’t help it … I’m not ready to say good-bye to him forever!”

I was glad I was alone. It felt good just to cry as loud as I needed to without worrying that anybody could hear me.

So many things filled my mind. Strange as it is to say it since our time together had been so brief, mostly they were thoughts of the man I had always thought of as Mr. Daniels since the first day I laid eyes on him in his ruffled white shirt and moustache and winning smile, and only recently had finally been able to call
Papa
.

I thought about what he’d said.

“I had a few more things that I wanted to say to you.”

As weak as he’d been, he had said what he needed to say, and was now at peace with me. I hoped he was also at peace with my mama, with himself, and with God.

But I had things to say too … things I
hadn’t
said yet … hadn’t said when I had the opportunity.

And now I was afraid it might be too late.

“Please, God …” I said, “please give me another chance. I’m so sorry for the things I said that hurt him before, and for my wrong attitudes. Forgive my anger and selfishness. Please give me a chance to apologize to him, to really say I’m sorry so he knows I mean it, so he knows what a fine man I think he is. Please, God, give me another chance … don’t let him die … I don’t want to lose him now!”

Again I began to cry.

For so many years, tears had not come easily to me. I was practical, even stoic. I’d thought of Katie as the tender and emotional one, me as the practical one.

Now it seemed all I could do was cry! What had become of me? What was going on inside me! Who was this person I’d always thought I knew who now seemed so different, so full of feelings I didn’t understand!

Was this what it was like to stop being a girl and gradually become a woman? Was growing up more than watching your body change, but watching your heart and feelings and thoughts change too?

Was this what happened when a girl discovered God … when she discovered love … when she discovered her father … when she discovered that she was feeling strange new things toward people and herself and life and the future?