He grunts louder, shakes his head, bringing hisself terrible pain.
“Have it your way,” she say.
She raises white sheets around him like a tent and tells him, “It’ll keep the soot in the air from blowing in your wounds.”
She wrenches the bottle of whiskey from his hand, turns her back to him and pours something else in it — a syrup — and shakes it up. “Drink some whiskey,” she say and tilts the bottle to his lips while keeping the flow of it away from his burnt top lip. The double heavy syrup is already separating from the liquor and it snakes though the neck of the bottle and into his mouth.
After a few minutes, he stops shivering.
We wait for him to sleep before she asks me to help wash him. Real gentle. Tapping him with warm water. Took us both a hour to do everything. But she the only one who could help us now.
“Don’t burst the blisters,” Cynthia say, getting up to leave. “Don’t use healing oils. And don’t move him ’til tomorrow. But tomorrow he’s gon’ need to walk. Just back and forth to the end of the shop. Outside, if he can stand the light. You’ll have to hold him up by his unburnt parts — his forearm. .” I start crying when I look at him again. He’s hurting and I cain’t do this. I cain’t take care of nobody.
Cynthia looks at me softly and waits for my tears to finish and when they don’t she say, “The stuff I gave him is gon’ make him wrong in the head so when he wake up, he might want to fight you. You need to protect yourself and the baby, so give him more of that drink the second you hear him waking.”
I wipe my tears, nod.
“And it’s fine to double the amount of syrup if you need to. It’ll keep his face numb, stop him from cracking the blisters and skin. He don’t need an infection.”
She gives me the vial of her syrup and stops at the door before she go. That soft look again but she say, “This don’t make us friends.”
38 / FLASH, Conyers, Georgia, 1847
ALBERT AIN’T WOKE up for more than thirty minutes in the last week.
I walk him and give him more medicine, change his towels and sheets, bring him a pot to empty hisself and wipe his messes away. I can hear him rustling under his tent now. He’ll need some new water.
I go to get it fresh ’cause I fell asleep and left the cover off the pitcher. It’s already filthy with soot so I hurry outside with it, pour it out, and fill it again.
When I walk back through the door, Albert’s sitting up. He’s got his tent off, huffing. “Who’s there?” he say, his eyes still swollen. He groans from speaking. “Don’t come no closer.”
“It’s just me,” I say. “But you don’t need to talk. Your scabs need to heal.”
His lava face has stretched out on one side and his skin is pinned up and back by hardened puss crystals like crunchy new skin. He shifts in his seat.
“I have water for you,” I say. He raises a hand to take the cup. His hand is trembling and his arm he brings up only halfway. I stare at the freckles on the back of his hand. The shaking seems to join the dots together in a line. Tears crowd my eyes but I won’t cry for him again. He deserves better than weak.
I put the cup in his hand and sit next to him, help him hold it to his bottom lip only. He can hardly part his lips to drink. He swallows.
“Cynthia’s been by to see you,” I say. “Took care of you on and off. But now you just got me.”
I don’t want him to die.
I cain’t see his eyes good enough to tell if that’s what he wants to do.
Hazel used to say that you could tell when a person’s ready to go. There’s a stepping away from their own body that happens and you can see it in their eyes. She said people know when it’s time.
Like I know.
I know I’ll die by thirty-five because I’m not worthy of more than what Momma had.
I’ve been thinking about what Albert said. About the most valuable thing — time and health. Love being what we leave behind. Family, what we make it. Maybe when this baby comes, I’ll go with the Railroad. And maybe, if Albert’s well enough, the both of us, all three of us, could go together and be family. North, south. No matter.
I give him another sip of his water and he flinches ’cause the cup touched the wrong part of his lip. I cringe, too. He takes deep breaths to calm his pain.
“Here,” I say. “Drink some more whiskey.”
He pushes it away.
“Don’t you want to get better? Not get the infection?”
He tries to speak.
“Don’t talk. Just scrunch your eyes. . blink once for no, twice for yes.” I look at him. “You understand?”
He blinks twice.
“Good. I need you to drink your whiskey. Just ’til you’re better, then you don’t have to drink it no more.”
He looks around his shop one-eyed. A line of gray puss is caught on his lashes joining the top and bottom together. He starts huffing and crying.
I say, “I been keeping it clean for you. I plan to do more sewing and hemming work from Cynthia and maybe when you’re healed, you can show me how to do what you do. Make pretty metal. Don’t matter I’m a girl.”
He blinks once, then shakes his head, a little, then forces words out even though he promised not to. “I don’t need no more of your help,” he say.
“Stop talking. You gon’ crack your face and get the infection.”
“You don’t owe me nothing,” he say, his words cracking the skin at his temples. Blood starts running down the side of his face.
Damn.
39 / 1870, Tallassee, Alabama
I BELIEVE IN REDEMPTION.
And Tallassee, Alabama, is redeeming herself, making the bad things that happened here better. Greening it over with her vines folded into walking paths, and climbing them up tall and wide things, erasing the brown of dirt and dead with the living. Full trees and bushes are crowding open skies, turning once-blue spaces to shade. Everything around her is coming back. Sagging limbs and leafs of many kinds — square and round, prickly and straight — are weighty on her branches like jewelry. Her mosses are furs. Tallassee is finding her way. Reclaiming her land. There’s no one to cut her to pieces or temper her spirit now. Five years since freedom, just over four since my grandbabies birth, and now benches and tools are swallowed by her rising tide. Fence posts and garden statues consumed. Redemption is taking place. It’s what happens to a plantation with no slaves. Where there were once fifty bodies and a hundred hands, there are now only four — two hands for Norah and two for Gwen. They’re sharecroppers who used to be slaves and still live on this plantation but get paid with crops and are free to leave.
It’s her time and Tallassee don’t owe nobody nothing.
I follow Josey through her, along a double-wide path worn by possums and prey. Possums, ’cause don’t nothing eat possums but people. Possums have nothing to fear ’til it’s too late.
Josey fast-walks beneath low-hanging branches that have grown back since Jackson’s ax last touched ’em. Their shade makes darkness here now. They’re only cut by white-tailed deer in winter while they’re shedding their antlers for summer horns. In the end, those horns’ll look like the unclenched hand bones of giants.
Josey keeps her head down, pushing forward past pine. She’s got paper stamps hanging out the side of her shoe that she’ll use at market to pay for food. The drought here has lasted too long.
She still got Charles’s three coins that he left her with before he went. She won’t spend it. She’s made her own money trading stamps for things she make with cotton — socks and under clothes. Cotton is everywhere and the cost is free.