Elaine nodded. “Yes, we’d just gotten married a month before sailing. Rich and I — we were on our way to work in a military hospital in Great Britain. I’m a nurse, you see. Yes, we have a little girl. She’s two.”
“What’s her name?” asked Olive, taking Elaine’s hand.
“Harriet. We decided to name her Harriet.”
The Tattersalls stood and the Donnells stood with them. The evening had come to an end.
“Please ring us up the next time you’re in town,” said the doctor, placing a hand warmly on Will’s shoulder.
“Of course,” said Will. “And we’ll speak of other things. I’m a saltwater taffy man, by the way. Olive and I run a couple of concessions down in Atlantic City.”
Later that night, after the Tattersalls had returned to their apartment in Gramercy Park, Elaine entered her daughter’s dark room and kissed her little girl as she slept. She wept for the first Harriet and for the two children whom the Donnells were unable to bring home. Elaine knew that, even though she’d finally brought herself to speak of it, she’d never be whole again. Not really. Yet that shared moment, standing sadly transfixed before a poster for the Cunard steamship line outside a Manhattan travel agency’s window — that moment that had brought Elaine and Olive together in silent, grieving kinship — had led to the chance to at least give a name to what they had communally endured: survival.
For those who can find within themselves the will to go on, there is no better consolation to tragedy.
1916 INCARCERATED IN OKLAHOMA
The younger of the two men, Ames, slept in the less-convenient upper bunk, and the older, Tyson, slept in the lower. This was as it should be; there were still twelve years left to Tyson’s sentence, while Ames, serving time for manslaughter, would be up for parole in four.
Tyson had big shoulders and beefy arms. He had a prognathous jaw and an overhanging forehead that gave him a slightly simian look. He was a smart man, though you couldn’t tell it just from looking at him. Ames, on the other hand, was tall and wiry, and the horn-rimmed eyeglasses and the arresting symmetry of his face gave him an owlish appearance.
It was a barroom brawl that put Ames into McAlester. He had delivered a fatal brain injury to a fellow roughneck by shoving him into a mirror. Ames’s father, a Bible salesman without a sense of humor, noted humorlessly the appropriateness of his son’s sentence of seven years, the crime having involved a broken mirror and all.
Tyson had never told his cellmate the details of the felony that had landed him in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. He’d only said that he’d taken the life of a man without malice aforethought, but clearly not by accident — the textbook definition of second-degree murder.
Both men were prepared to do their time, take their licks, and then, once released from McAlester, try to get on with their lives.
In the meantime, though, there were the stories.
Early in his sentence, Tyson, a storyteller of the first order, began to regale his cellblock neighbors with tales of his family and all the colorful, comical characters who populated the small western Oklahoma farming and ranching community where he’d grown up. Tyson saved his more personal tales, though, for Ames alone.
These tales got told just before sleep in that drowsy hour after lights-out. They were delivered in soft whispers from Tyson’s bed to the vicinity of the chair that Ames pulled up alongside it, so that not a word should get missed.
One muggy night in the summer of 1916, Tyson told the story of his youngest brother among a brood of eleven. Tyson had spoken often of his many siblings and how his tenant farmer father and mother struggled to keep all their young ’uns fed. He had spoken often of the lengths to which his parents and their older sons and daughters had gone to earn a few extra pennies to keep starvation away.
And how relentless and unmerciful was that struggle.
And even to this day, after the passage of over twenty years since Tyson was taken as a teenager and stood before a judge and sentenced to spend a good half of the rest of his life behind bars, he could still feel the gnaw of hunger in his gut and knew that this was what had motivated his father to do the unthinkable: seek to end the life of Tyson’s two-year-old brother.
This is the story that at long last got told in the thick, quiet air of the midnight prison cell, when, having offered up every other narrative from his childhood, Tyson finally decided to relate the one that until that night lived only within his darkest memories. Its telling had come about this way:
Ames had made a comment about the newest resident on their cellblock. The man — half Choctaw, it was said — appeared slow, of limited mental capability. Ames wondered if he would be treated cruelly by the other inmates — especially the hardened ones — or would he, instead, be shown compassion for his intellectual frailty?
Talk of Grinning Pete brought Tyson’s two-year-old brother to mind, and what became of him.
The boy’s name was Wink. There had been a fever going around, and the Tyson family had weathered it and kept themselves intact by either luck or God’s good grace, even as other families in the county had lost one, two, or even three beloved sons and daughters to the epidemic.
Seventeen-year-old Broderain Tyson, who at an early age had taken from his surname the nickname Tie, and his older brother and two older sisters were assembled by their parents upon the rickety wooden porch that fronted the family’s sharecropper shack to discuss a family matter to which the sleeping younger children would not be privy. Ma sat upon her rocker but did not rock. Pa sat uneasily upon his whittling chair with empty hands. The four oldest children, having found places for themselves upon the steps and floorboards, wore expressions that anticipated nothing good from this exclusive family conference.
“Now, children,” began the father in a serious, preacher-like tone, “times is hard for the poor man and they’s gettin’ harder. Crops are good this year as we all know, but Mr. Jimson, he don’t give us any more for ’em than the usual. He’s a Christian man, I figger, but it seems he ain’t looked in the Good Book in a long while. Else’n he’d see some verse or two about how a land-man’s miserly ways can put his croppers in a sorely bad place, and how that ain’t the sort of thing that Jesus would abide.”
“Amen,” said Tyson’s mother, who seemed naked to her son without a pan of shelling peas or a half-mended work shirt in her lap.
“Now your ma and me, we been talkin’ things over — talkin’ ’bout hard things we gotta do to get us all through this bad time. And there was a thing that got decided, and I gotta say that your ma ain’t for it, even though she’s agreein’ not to throw herself agin’ it.”
Tyson’s pa looked over at Tyson’s ma, as if expecting a nod of concurrence, but there wasn’t one — only an almost imperceptible movement of the head from side to side as if she had suddenly been seized by pangs of private, profound grief.
“Have any of you children told anybody of your younger brother Wink’s recovery from the high fever?”
Tyson and his brother and oldest sister shook their heads, while his next oldest sister said, “No, we ain’t, Pa. Warn’t more than two day since the fever broke and he got his little self back on the mend.”
“I wisht that he ha’n’t,” said Tyson’s father, his eyes searching for something that could not be found. “Would’ve been an easier thing if he’d a been taken by the Lord right there upon that sickbed.”
Tyson understood why his father had said this. Wink was an idiot boy who could hardly do a thing for himself. Most children with a mind like Wink’s would have died early on — would have died in the womb, for that matter — but Wink did not. He showed a remarkable resilience in spite of his deficiencies, and now extended his special facility for survival to beating back an illness that by all rights should have claimed him.