“Keep away,” he said. “Nobody here wants what you got.”
“We’re dying,” I said.
“We don’t want it,” he said again, and went inside and locked his door. I looked around. Curtains jiggled and shadowy figures moved in windows in all directions. We were a spectacle. We were lepers.
The door to the hardware store opened, and for a wild moment I thought Sheriff Blake was going to come out. He did not, but one-armed Mike did. He had a wheelbarrow. A fucking wheelbarrow.
“Get away from there,” somebody yelled at him.
He dragged it behind him, unable to push it with just the one arm. He helped me put Dora in it. Then he went back to the hardware store and shut the door. He waved out the window at us. He was crying.
Staggering, praying, stopping to heave, stopping to rest. Somehow I got us home.
I piled Dora into the passenger seat of the Ford and then stumbled into the house to get the key and my spare pair of glasses, whose frames were slightly bent. I didn’t bother locking up as I left. As I opened the driver’s-side door, I saw my reflection in the glass and didn’t recognize it for a second. Beard nearly full grey now. Sunken eyes. Crooked glasses. A ghoul was trying to get into my car.
I pulled the gun out of my waistband and sat down. The car seemed strange to me, like I had forgotten how it worked. I had to think my way through every step. Key in the dash, turn it to On, check the gas, clutch in, stick in neutral, spark lever up (this hurt my broken finger), throttle down, choke, then the starter button. Spark lever down. Let her warm up. Don’t pass out. Brake. Reverse gear. Check mirror. Foot off brake. Now we’re moving.
I backed the car out.
Right into a throng of women.
Nearly hitting Mrs. Woodruff, Sarah’s mother. She was holding a large, mean-looking wrench. The other women had makeshift weapons, too. And at least one gun; a woman I didn’t recognize had a rifle.
Mrs. Woodruff’s face was tight and determined. She slapped her hand on my window. Her ring nearly chipped it.
“You open that window and talk to me!” she said.
Proceeding on the theory that angry women with wrenches rarely have nice things to say, I stepped on the gas. I believe I ran over her foot. A hoe flashed and broke a headlamp. The woman with the rifle shot, but I don’t know how many times because I was also honking the horn as I sped off. I can’t say why. I believe it was a reflex. One of the shots hit the body of the car, but I could only assume it didn’t damage anything important, because we kept moving. Now I saw Mr. Woodruff coming up the road on a horse, holding a pistol. God knows how the maenads had beaten him here; maybe he had gone ahead to try to cut me off.
He pointed the pistol, and I laid on the horn again, making straight for the horse, an ugly mottled thing. It did what I hoped it might do in ruining his shot, but then it surprised everybody with a proper rear and pitched the ignorant bastard into a tree.
And that was how we left Whitbrow.
I didn’t know where we were going, but that’s just as well.
We wouldn’t have arrived anyway.
A BABY WAS crying.
I was on my stomach.
I opened my eyes, but this took some effort; they were crusty and they hurt. Everything hurt. I saw words, and I tried to focus on them.
TALMADGE OPPOSES ROOSEVELT ON CCC
I didn’t understand why this was important, why it was right in front of my eyes. I picked up my head a little and it felt like an iceskater slid to a stop on my back and then wiggled there.
“God,” I said, and shut my eyes again.
The baby kept crying.
Why wasn’t Dora hushing it?
Why should she? She couldn’t have any.
Where was I?
“Gramma, that man awake now.”
“I told you he was fittin to wake up.”
“I thought he dead.”
“No, chile. Lots livin that look dead, and lots dead that look livin.”
“Can I look him in the face?”
“Sure enough, he won’t hurt you.”
I felt a small poke on my right arm.
“Dammit, Horace, I didn’t say you could touch im.”
“His face was agin the wall.”
I opened my eyes again. I saw that what I had looked at before was a newspaper that had been pasted to pine boards. Moving my head a little, I saw that there were others, covering the whole wall.
I was confused.
Where was my Dora?
“Don’t you roll over and mess up my work, now,” a woman said.
I edged up just a little on my forearms and looked to my right. Just about the cutest little black boy ever was staring at me with big eyes. Behind him was a huge older woman with a kerchief around her head, trying to bounce the bad humor out of a squalling baby in a burlap gown.
“You might just live,” she said.
“My wife.”
“I think she gonna live, too, but if you got any prayers, pray em hard. She bad hurt. She ain’t woke up yet.”
I saw something fall off my shoulder and wriggle on the fabric near my face. It was a maggot. I groaned.
“Horace, put that back under the man’ dressin, and mind you don’t kill im.”
“Yes’m,” said the boy, and he pinched it carefully between his little fingers and tucked it somewhere on my back. I felt sick.
“I know they ain’t pretty but they eat all the bad out. I’m a take em off today an put honey to you. Moss, hosstail, onion juice an comfrey, too. An you gonna drank hosstail tea. Do that an them licks gonna close right up. Don’t an you gonna be in the groun by Friday. What you think, can you drank a little tea?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“One thing you owe me to tell.”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Somebody lookin for you?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, you better live, cause if you die I’m a dump you in a hole and never tell nobody. You come from Whitbrow?”
“Yes, ma’am. Where am I?”
“You didn’t get too far. You in Chalk Ridge. We poor as bluejays, an twice as loud, but you better off here. The Good Lord done forgot where Whitbrow was a long time ago.”
“Gramamma?”
“Yes, chile.”
“I don’t like he face.”
“Hush with that. Somebody put a bullwhip to you, you make a bad face, too.”
I WAS WITH sharecroppers, poor tenant farmers who were working another man’s land for barely enough to survive. He could kick them off anytime he wanted. They bought their mules, tools and tankage from him at very unfriendly prices. He made them grow corn, cotton and tobacco, and the corn went right up to the door. No room for their own garden, but my benefactor, Miss Matilda, grew a few things in the pine trees near the road. When the crops were big they broke even and when they were small they went further into debt. Eventually the landowner would evict them, seize their tools and livestock and sell them to the next bunch foolish enough to move in. God bless America. We had abolished slavery and reinvented serfdom.
I spent the next two days on my stomach, except for trips to the privy, helped there and back again by different members of the family. Miss Matilda had five grown sons, four daughters and so many grandchildren that I couldn’t keep track and I was impressed that she could. Despite their lack of shoes, monotonous diet (almost nothing but corn and lard) and dew sores, the children were lively and game. Horace was my most loyal companion; I guess he had adjusted his position on the quality of my face. He would share with me from a big bag of white clay I was supposed to eat; it tasted gritty and foul to me, but the boy loved it. All of them ate it. They seemed to crave it. It wasn’t chalk, but it was just that white; I wonder if deposits of the stuff had been responsible for the town’s name.