“Heading for the Territory.”
He looks at me, puzzled.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“Wasn’t trying to keep nothing from you, Seam. It’s just hard for me to recount. Cass weren’t worth much, I guess. But I miss her, still.”
“Uncle …”
“Anyways, you didn’t ‘member her, so I figgered the details didn’t matter to you. However you look at it, your daddy’s gone and I don’t know where. I honestly thought Elias could give you more of a picture of him than I could.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Hell it don’t.”
“No,” I say. “What matters is, I’ve got you back.”
He laughs ruefully, wheezing.
“I mean it. You’re going to be fine. Remember when Ariyeh and I were kids — we brought horned toads to you in a shoebox, and you said you absorbed their spirits through your skin? Do that now, okay? Soak up all the energy you can. Mine. Ariyeh’s. This old poot-butt beside you.”
“Careful. You sound like a hoodoo queen.”
“Queen Seam.”
“Queen of My Dreams.”
“I love you, Uncle.
“Love you, Seam. I think I’ma sleep now, okay?”
“Good.”
“Is that all right?”
“It’s good.
“Don’t let the Nazis get me.”
“Abracadabra. They’re gone.”
19
20
LONG NIGHT, no sleep. Restless mind … drifting, spinning, falling … one perspective to another.
A prison basement, cracks whorling through its dark green walls. A white-sheeted table with leather straps. Tubes, purring machines. I hover near the ceiling next to a bare, guttering bulb, my senses out-of-kilter, out-of-focus, out-of-body.
I gaze at myself lying prone. Splayed arms, still feet. Study the needles in my soft inner elbows. A man in an off-white coat leans close to inspect me, lifting my eyelids, resting his fingers on my jaw. “Mr. Woods,” he says. He repeats my name. Then he calls, “Time!” Pity washes through me. Not for me — for him. He has a tough job. Another man, one in shadows, who I can’t see clearly, states flatly, “Elias Woods was pronounced dead at 12:05 A.M., Monday, August — ”
Cold. Getting colder. Mud. Dead grass. Steaming earth. I’m still floating, awaiting another execution. “Andale! Andale!’ “Get those niggers covered up and let’s get the hell out of here!” Drifting, drifting … but now I’m outside somewhere, twisting through a misty, leaning oak. My neck burns — but I have no neck — and I’m weeping, in the highest limbs, over my lifeless body. Always, I’ve taken pride in my cleanliness, polishing my buttons and boots. But I must have pissed myself when the rope broke my windpipe, and now a scrawny Mexican boy pitches dirt onto my coffin. If I had arms I’d break the lid and snatch the goddam shovel out of his hands. “Move!” I shout at myself from above. “Cletus, get up! Smooth your uniform!” But my body lies still in a pine box, in soft, red clay. Already I feel it stiffen, grow more distant from me, elemental. Now I’m rising, a final breath through flittering leaves —
Cold. Colder. “Okay. Stop the heart.”
My eyes are closed. The room is warm. But this morning, as Frederick Douglass rolled Bitter away on a gurney, Doctor Buhler walked Ariyeh and me through each step of a double bypass. So now, while Ariyeh paces and chews her nails, and I sit in the waiting room, I see it all unfold. Mentally, I place myself in the cold OR, hovering in an unlighted corner. I give myself a clear perspective.
Today’s the day they do Elias down in Huntsville. I tell myself I don’t care. Still, I hold his last letter in my purse; punishments scissor my thoughts. Cletus. Elias. The Axeman’s blade. But I steady myself and witness the heart’s stopping — this killing of the man to save his life.
Cold. Getting colder.
“They gonna resurreck me?” Bitter had said this morning while the nurses shaved and prepped him.
“That’s right, Daddy,” Ariyeh had whispered, wiping her eyes.
“I be like the rabbit bounding out of the briarpatch?”
“Exactly.”
“I be Jack the Bear.”
“Pump on?” Buhler says.
“Yes sir.”
Bitter’s chest yawns like a trunk in an attic, full of mysteries. Pliable, shiny trinkets. A stiff, steel frame pins back his ribs. Stark, curving bones, like African drumsticks. Glistening tissue. A bag, ripped apart, full of roots and leaves and animal tails: mighty gris-gris. His heart, the size of two fists, a dense no-color — a shade without a name — pitches and rolls until the pump kicks in. Then it twitches. Once, twice, the ear of an agitated cat.
Quits.
An assisting surgeon steps forward, pours a pitcher of ice water into the chest cavity. Cold. Getting colder. Around the stilled, bubbling heart, steam gushes, morning mist.
“T core?”
30.6.
Buhler cradles Bitter’s heart in his yellow-gloved palm. He lifts it out of the chest. Near the top, he snips a tiny hole in an artery. A vein, harvested from Bittet’s leg, has been lying on a sheet like a piece of pasta scraped from the bottom of a bowl. Buhler takes the vein, inserts it into the artery, sews them together. A flat line streaks across the monitor. Suction. Ice water.
“Okay. Calcium.”
“T core?”
“34.5. 35.7 …”
A faint scribble on the EKG machine.
“Ventricular fib.”
“Paddles!”
“Okay. Stand clear. Good. Good …”
“Got him?”
“He’s back.”
And the rabbit bounds up and away, across the field.
Bitter lies in ICU, tubes taped to his mouth, IV lines snaking from his arms, and a long yellow hose winding from his belly just below his ribs. A machine breathes for him, sighing steadily — the surgeons collapsed his lungs to get a better shot at his heart — and he waggles in and out of consciousness.
I’ve been with him for three hours while Ariyeh was at school. Now she and Reggie arrive to spell me. “How is he?” she asks. Reggie holds her hand. The room smells stale.
“Resting well.”
“Go get some shut-eye.”
“Thanks, Telisha,” Reggie whispers and kisses my cheek.
I hug them both. Machines burble and beep. My night with Rue is wearing off: Reggie’s touch makes me tingle.