Susan soberly looked at the elegant writing in black ink, surprisingly unfaded. “ ‘Hortensia Kelly Holloway, born 1842, died 1888. Cause unknown. Died in her sleep.’ She lost two children, she lost her husband in the war, but somehow she kept Big Rawly together and she never remarried. Amazing what people live through and still accomplish. Do you think we’re as tough as they were?”
“No.” Harry continued reading, then pulled over the diagram.
“Some of these names have a red cross by them. His grandfather. The thirteen-year-old who wasted away. Goes all the way back to Marcia West Holloway, and there’s a full red line under her name. She died at sixty-six. What’s it say in the Bible?”
“Fainted. Never awakened,” Susan read.
“What’s on the other sheets of paper?”
Susan unfolded two more sheets, her grandfather’s upright handwriting very legible. “He wrote out the symptoms of leukemia, when he began to feel tired, headachy. This went on for longer than I knew. Years. He drew squares for when he’d feel poorly then a line up to a plateau.”
“You think he knew?”
Susan pointed to the second diagram. “Sure looks like it.”
“Look at this third diagram.” Susan pulled out another page. It was like the first diagram with the names, births, and deaths of Holloways but this carried forward.
“Your name is on here!” Harry exclaimed.
“It’s like play it forward. He has his name, no death date yet, but that red cross by his name. Penny’s name then Mom and Pauline, a red cross and question mark, and then a red cross by Edward and Edward’s daughter. None for me, and he even cited our children. Look, there’s Danny.”
“ ‘Tested.’ ” Harry puzzled over this notation. “Each of the cousins’ children, his great-grandchildren, have ‘tested’ written by their name and”—she squinted, for the writing was small—“ ‘negative’ by some. Red cross by others.”
“What is this?” Susan threw up her hands.
“I have no idea, but your children and their cousins were all born within the last thirty years.”
“Right,” Susan affirmed. “But so what?”
“These are the only names with ‘tested’ by them. My guess is that everyone born before those thirty years could not be tested. Maybe that’s why he has a question mark by some with a red cross.”
“Died from what?” Susan wondered.
“Well, HIV, for one,” Harry replied.
Susan pulled up a chair, sat next to Harry, studied the diagrams, looked back over the careful citings in the beautiful family Bible. “None of us have HIV, and if we did, apart from sorrow, how could it affect G-Pop?”
“Maybe he had it?” Harry questioned. “Got it before tests.”
“Harry, G-Pop died of leukemia, a blood disorder, and if you go down the list of family deaths, it’s possible other ancestors died of it. Weakness, anemia, that sort of thing, could all be attributed to leukemia. They just didn’t have a name for it.”
Harry leaned back in the big chair.
“Cancer passes, doesn’t it?” Tucker questioned.
“Some do.” Owen seriously considered this. “Golden retrievers get a lot of cancer.”
“Susan”—Harry sat upright—“when Danny played football for Western Albemarle High, didn’t he have to have tests? Stuff so the coaches would be alert should he become dehydrated, collapse?”
“Yes. We also had to take him for allergy tests,” Susan added. “My daughter, too.”
“Do you remember the tests?”
“I do. For some parents they caused a problem, especially the HIV test. That sent a few right through the roof. There was a test for a heart murmur, what we always called an athletic heart, a heart that skips a beat. They had to blow in a paper bag. Some kind of lung-capacity thing. The list goes on. I suppose it’s for the good.”
“More. Tell me more tests.”
Susan, picking up on the urgency in Harry’s voice, focused intently. “If anyone had a fracture from the past, even early childhood, we had to deliver a current X-ray. I tell you, getting the kids on the teams wasn’t cheap.”
“More. Or let me put it this way, apart from the HIV test, do you remember anything that surprised you?”
A long, long pause followed this. “Come to think of it, there was one. The kids were screened for sickle-cell anemia and the sickle-cell trait at birth. It was quite hush-hush. Only the parents were informed of the results, but the sickle-cell trait could develop into sickle-cell anemia, which can cause sudden death, say, if a football player is training too vigorously in high heat. That was a test done at birth. So Ned and I copied them and gave them to the coach, who promised secrecy. We didn’t care.”
“What do you mean?”
“The administration and the coaches believed that if a student was known to carry sickle cell, they might suffer discrimination. They were responsible about it and went to all this trouble because of the recommendations by the National Collegiate Athletic Association.”
“Western Albemarle is a high school,” Harry responded.
“It might as well be a junior college. It’s not like when we went to high school. Those coaches watch these kids with a hawk eye. If anyone looks a tad peaked, they sit them down. They’re real bears about concussions. I never worried that my kids would suffer. The coaches were vigilant and so were their teachers. Luckily, my two didn’t take drugs and made good grades.”
“Much of that due to you and Ned.”
“Thanks, Harry, but remember when we were in junior high and high school? It was all our peers. Fall in with the wrong crowd and down you go.”
Harry pulled the more recent diagram to her, comparing it with those of the ancestors. “Susan, what if your grandfather was trying to trace a hereditary condition?”
Susan’s eyes widened. “Sickle-cell anemia?”
“Exactly. And there is discrimination. Sickle cell was considered a black person’s disease. In the old days, if your grandfather had it, they wouldn’t tell him. They never told any white person. Doctors always said the white patient had leukemia.”
Susan whispered, “Maybe Dr. Fishbein did tell him. It’s a different time now.”
Harry murmured, “And maybe the governor began to figure it out on his own. Susan, it’s a different time for some of us. Plenty of people are trying to hold back the clock.”
“Dr. Fishbein only told the family G-Pop had leukemia.” Susan now wondered about this. “Harry, this is so upsetting and so confusing. If my grandfather knew he had sickle-cell anemia, I think he would have told us.”
“I think he would, too. Maybe he was on the cusp of truly knowing it to be true. Maybe that’s why he crawled to the graveyard, to the Avenging Angel. It’s in the graves, in the family.”
“Dear God.” Susan began folding the papers back together.
“For a lot of people it wouldn’t matter anymore, but for some, sickle-cell anemia would still be a stigma. If you’re African American and you carry the trait, who will marry you? And what if the person you hope to marry has the trait? Big decisions. If a white person has it and being white is really important to you, if you’re also carrying that taint of racism, sickle-cell anemia could be considered a disaster.”
No sooner was that out of her mouth than Susan blurted out, “Eddie!”
Harry pondered this. “Given his political base, it would create huge problems. And given his ambition, who knows what he would do? I’m trying not to believe it.”
Mouth tightening, Susan replied, “What is the old saying? ‘Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ Not that Eddie has absolute power, but he is a rising star, he speaks to overflow audiences.” She paused. “I don’t know. I don’t really understand it.”
“If we did, I suppose we’d be in politics,” Harry realistically said.