“Uh-uh,” Phoebe said. “Miss Giselle kilt herself.”
“How? Why?” I may’ve known the answer to at least one of those questions, but I needed to hear it said. No, I needed a denial, a lie that didn’t impeach my roommate. Now, too, I began to understand the bouts of dumbness that’d fallen on Phoebe and Miss LaRaina when I mentioned Miss Giselle or asked about Mister JayMac. Someone’d told them not to drop any more bad news on me than Dr Nesheim already had.
“What about Henry? Is Henry all right?”
Another uh-oh look between Phoebe and her mama.
“What’s happened to him?” I demanded.
“He’s fine,” Miss LaRaina said quickly. “He’s just-fine.”
“Uh-uh,” I said. “I’m owed some truth. Let’s have it.”
“Listen to him, Mama,” Phoebe said. “He’s done got shut of his stutter. Completely, nearlybout.”
“Phoebe, it’s either completely or it aint,” I said.
“Why, you’re right,” Miss LaRaina said. “He’s become a regular Demosthenian.” They marveled over me.
“Tell me what’s happened to Henry, blast it.”
Miss LaRaina said, “Once he knew how bad Buck Hoey’d hurt you, he left and got just sloppy drunk over it.”
“Yesterday was Sunday,” I said. “And Henry don’t drink.”
“Ordinarily, no,” Miss LaRaina said, “but this spiking business unnerved him, and I’ve never known a Hellbender who wanted a bottle not to find one. Reese-Mr Curriden-always had two or three hidden in his room. He’d distribute too. Hoarding’s not his way, even in a whiskey drought.”
“Mama,” Phoebe said, looking at her feet.
“It’s all right, child. Major Blumlein said to own up to my trespasses, not to cache them under a lamp-stand.”
“He didn’t tell you to parade em in front of Daddy.”
“Your daddy isn’t here.” Miss LaRaina surveyed my room. “That young man there answers to Danny, not Daddy, and I assume him chivalrous enough to keep his own counsel.” She blew smoke sidelong, holding her cigarette Bette Davis style. “Are you?” she asked me.
“Yessum.”
“Well, then. Henry sends his regrets.”
“Will he visit me before he leaves for Philly?”
“That’s probably up to him and the railway timetable.” Miss LaRaina smiled and took another sexy drag on the nub of her Lucky. She caught a knuckle’s length of falling ash in one palm and dumped it in the terra-cotta pot of crape myrtle and hydrangea blossoms at her feet.
We talked another ten or fifteen minutes, mostly about Miss Giselle-her generosity, her loving-kindness, her sacrifices for Mister JayMac and the Hellbenders. Then Miss LaRaina said I looked peaked. She and Phoebe had better go. The staff didn’t want me overtaxed.
“Then tell em to write their congressmen,” I said. “Look, I’m strong enough for yall to stay.”
“Not if we fuss,” Miss LaRaina said. “Fussin’ll lay you down faster than a mile-long footrace.”
Phoebe kissed me on the forehead. “I’ll be back. Ever day till yo’re out.”
I held Phoebe’s hand briefly before she slipped away, over to the door. “Miss LaRaina, leave me those cigarettes, okay? You can get some more.”
Miss LaRaina walked over and laid her pack on my stomach.
“When’s the funeral?” I asked her. When she just stared at me, like she’d forgotten an earlier part of our talk, I added, “Miss Giselle’s?”
“Oh. Tomorrow, at Alligator Park. A memorial service. No burial. The body’s being cremated.”
“I can’t go,” I said. “I’d like to, but I-” I dropped my cigarette butt in the water glass on my bedside table and watched it fizzle and saturate. Miss Giselle dead. Henry not accounted for. My career an injury-blasted memory. The weight of all this wreckage squeezed tears from me. “Okay. Yall go on. Leave me be.” I fumbled another cigarette out and got Phoebe to light it-to keep her from planting another wet sympathy buss over my eye. She and Miss LaRaina went to the door.
“Matches!” I called after them. “Please.”
Phoebe tossed them onto the bed, not really within easy reach, and then I was alone again.
During September, every day until my release on the twenty-seventh, Phoebe kept her word and came to see me, usually in the afternoon after school. With the end of the CVL season, though, visits from other Hellbenders dwindled to one or two a week, for most of my teammates left Highbridge for their own hometowns or farms, or rode away to take winter-long defense jobs in shipyards, munitions factories, and bomber plants. Nutter, Hay, Sloan, Sudikoff, and Fanning stayed, with jobs at Foremost Forge or Highbridge Box & Crate-but only Nutter ever actually dropped by, usually with newspapers, his motor-mouthed five-year-old Carl, and a fresh-to me, anyway-anecdote about his days with the St. Louis Browns.
Mister JayMac visited me on Sunday afternoons at three o’clock and stayed fifteen minutes, tops. He never mentioned Miss Giselle, Darius, or Henry, but concentrated on asking how I seemed to be healing up and second-guessing Allied command decisions in Italy and the Solomons. By telephone, of course, he’d told Mama Laurel of my injuries, and of their severity, without trying to soft-pedal the truth or to weasel out of the club’s financial obligations-even though my contract didn’t say a word about insuring me for game-acquired or aggravated hurts. He’d’ve paid Mama Laurel’s way to Highbridge, but Mama told him tearfully in one call that coming to see me might make her lose her job. Colonel Elshtain had helped Deck Glider get its military conversion contract, but he didn’t seem to have any leftover pull with the management at the Tenkiller factory, and Mama couldn’t put her job up for grabs by asking for an emergency leave of absence.
“Then don’t come, Mrs Boles,” Mister JayMac told me he’d told Mama. “I’ll take care of Danny jes like he was my own.”
Imagine my gratitude.
Anyway, Mama and I also talked occasionally. I told her to stay on the job and to pray for me. Ordinarily, we talked on Sundays, after Mister JayMac’s humdrum visits, when he sat in a chair near the door, a black arm band on one sleeve and a look of heavy confusion on his booze-swollen face. Sometimes we’d talk, Mama and I, while Mister JayMac, who’d had the phone brought in, sat nearby in his rumpled widower’s weeds and his deep-purple heartache.
“Yessurn, they’re treating me just fine,” I’d say. “Yessum, he is.” What else could I say-though it did pretty much tally with the truth-with Mister JayMac sharing my room?
Nobody brought me a copy of the Highbridge Herald until the Friday of my first week in the hospital. And when Nutter came in with it, he brought me only the sports page, which had a few major-league box scores and a whole section about a GI track meet at Camp Penticuff. I’d already read my Saturday Evening Posts from cover to cover.
“Where’s the rest of this rag? Nobody here’ll give me a copy and you come in with a piddlin snippet.”
“Didn’t think you’d care about anything but the sports,” Nutter said. “After ball season, nothing worth preserving in type happens in this burg.”