23
It was early morning, the sun leaking light through the edges of the shutters like river water, but that wasn’t what brought me awake. It was the screaming.
I sprung to my feet, holding the shotgun. The screaming was coming from the bedroom. The door was still open and I could see Terry, awake and aware now. Feeling pain and knowing he had lost an arm and hadn’t had a say in the matter. He was sitting up, trying to throw a foot out of bed.
Jinx was on the bed with him, holding him back by his good arm. But he was showing some serious strength for a worn-out, one-armed fella.
Me and Mama rushed in there, tried to comfort him, but it wasn’t no use. He went on like that, screaming and yelling about his arm, struggling. It took all three of us to pin him to the mattress. Finally he was just so weak from all that had gone on, he fell back on the bed unconscious.
The three of us was shaken bad. We made sure he was all right, not bleeding from the stump, then went out and closed the door.
“He woke up screaming for me to put his arm back on,” Jinx said. “I tried to tell him we had to do it. I hope I was telling him right.”
The old woman in her rocker, her back to us, hadn’t stirred through any of this. That infuriated Jinx.
“You don’t care about him or nobody,” Jinx said to the old woman’s back. “You could hear him scream all night, and it wouldn’t be anything to you.”
The old woman didn’t respond, just sat still in her rocker.
Jinx was really mad. She went around front of the rocker, started to say something to her, and stopped. The look on Jinx’s face made us come around to look at her. We looked closer at the old woman, seen her mouth was hanging open. Her eyes looked like they was filmed over with candle wax. She was dead.
“That figures.” Jinx put her hands on her hips. “She didn’t die bad at all. She just went in her sleep after three hundred and fifty million years of meanness.”
“Poor thing,” Mama said.
Jinx looked at Mama with a look of confusion, shook her head. “You white people are something.”
“Don’t make us a pair,” I said. “I can’t feel no sympathy for her, neither.”
“She’s still a human being,” Mama said. “God makes all human beings, no matter who they are.”
“Well, he needs him a better mold,” Jinx said, “cause some of these he’s making ain’t worth the waste of material.”
Now, I ain’t proud of this next part, but we wasn’t sure what to do with the old woman. We didn’t even know her name, and really didn’t want to. We was also scared right then of going outside after all that talk about Skunk, and though we knew we’d have to in time, we decided it was more than we was ready to handle right then. So what we done was we took that bloody rug we had rolled up and laid aside, unrolled it, and wrapped her up in it. We done it so good you couldn’t see nothing left of her but the bottoms of her shoes on one end and the top of her cotton bonnet on the other. Then we put her and the rug in the closet and shut the door. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
So now the day wore on, and we looked around the house for some food and found some dried-out biscuits in the stove warmer. If there had been enough of them, we could have used them to build a wall around the house-and it would have been solid, too. We soaked the biscuits in water till they wouldn’t break your teeth off, and ate what we could of them.
I took some of the wet bread into Terry, who was starting to stir. He was covered in sweat, but then again, it wasn’t just his condition. We all were sweating. It was summer hot and the house was closed up tight as an old maid’s purse. The idea of opening some windows was mentioned, but no one wanted to be the one that let Skunk in, so we just grinned and stood it.
By the time I come into Terry’s room with the biscuits, Mama and Jinx had stretched out on some pallets in the living room, cause it was my time with him, and as that was the case, and as he was awake and needed to be fed, I closed the door and sat down in the chair next to the bed.
I tried to give him some of them softened biscuits, but he wouldn’t have none of it. He pushed the tin plate to the other side of the bed. He said, “You shouldn’t have allowed my arm to be removed.”
“There wasn’t no choice. You had been out of it for some time, and was sick and feverish, and that arm of yours was black as a hole in the ground, and juicy-like with pus.”
He sat there for a while, said, “What did you do with it?”
“We put it in a box,” I said.
“Where is it now?”
“It’s in the other room on a shelf.”
“On a shelf?”
“We hadn’t been wanting to go outside no more because of Skunk. The old lady knew about him.” I told Terry all she had said. I finished with: “The old lady is dead and rolled up in a rug and stuck in the closet.”
“What happened to the money and May Lynn?”
“Down by the river pushed up under some blackberry bushes.”
“You sure there wasn’t another alternative when it came to my arm?” Terry asked.
“If that means another choice, I don’t think so.”
“May I see it?”
“Your arm?”
“Yes.”
“What for?”
“I want to see the shape it was in.”
“It’s been cut off all day and it’s warm,” I said.
“I understand that,” he said.
“All right,” I said, and went quietly out the door and got the box. I went back to the bedroom, closed the door again, and set the box on the bed, opened it up. Stink came out of it like a dead fish. Terry wrinkled his nose, looked in.
“Close it up, Sue Ellen.”
I did.
“You did right,” he said. “It had progressed to an irreparable stage.”
“It would have killed you,” I said. “Old woman who kept us here was as rotten as they come, rotten as that arm, but she knew how to cut it off, though Mama had to finish up the job.”
“There’s an old woman wrapped in a rug?”
“In the closet.”
“After all we have been through,” Terry said, “something like that shouldn’t astonish me.”
“Terry, I got to ask you about something I think I’ve figured out, and I wish I hadn’t.”
He looked at me while I tried to find the words. I couldn’t find them, least not right away.
“I thought you might have something on your mind,” he said. “Way you’re staring at me, I doubt it’s just because I am a cripple.”
“It ain’t that at all.”
“Then let loose with it.”
“May Lynn, when we found her body, it had a sewing machine wired to it, tied off in a bow. Later, when I was down by the river, I came upon a bag you had tied. I had seen it before, the way you tied it off, but it didn’t hit me because I couldn’t believe such a thing. But it struck me then, way that bow looked. It wasn’t wire, but it had the same look about it that wire bow had. It got me to thinking. You was sure all fired up about burning her to ash and taking her off to Hollywood. Also, your mama, she was a seamstress, and your stepdaddy made her get rid of her stuff, and then it all come together.”
Terry looked at the wall the way you would if you could see enemy soldiers marching toward you.
“I don’t know why you done it, Terry,” I said. “That’s what’s been hard for me to cipher, but I think you done it. I feel bad for thinking that way, but it sure looks like-”
“I did it,” he said. “I am responsible.”
Even though I figured as much, hearing him say it made it feel like someone had ripped the bottom out of the world.
“Why?” I said.
“It isn’t what you might conjecture,” he said.
“Then what kind of ’jecture is it?”
Terry leaned back heavily against the pillows. The air in the room was as stuffy as if we was in a tow sack with a bunch of chicken feathers.
“We have all been so close for years,” he said, “and now it’s come to this.”
“How did it happen?” I said. “And why?”
“Me and her had begun to talk privately. I had come to the conclusion that she was on her way to Hollywood. I was glad for her, really, and even then I thought I might go with her. She confided in me about a lot of things, and one of those things was she was certain that she could cure me.”