Ma was peering over my other shoulder. “It looks like it mighty far away.”
“It ain’t close,” Chris said.
“You plain want to go there—” Ma was frowning at the map, straining to see without her glasses.
“Yes,” Chris said, still popping the tops off bottles.
“And be white,” Lena added very softly.
“Sure,” Chris said. “No trouble at all to cross over.”
“And you going there,” Ma said again. She couldn’t quite believe that anybody she was looking at right now could ever go that far away.
“Yea,” Chris said, and put the last opened bottle with the others in a row on the table. “When I get out the army, we sure as hell going there.”
“Who’s we?” I asked.
“Lena and me.”
Ma looked up at him so quickly that a hairpin tumbled out of her head and clicked down on the table.
“When we get married,” he said.
Lena was looking at him, chewing her lower lip. “We going to do that?”
“Yea,” he said. “Leastways if that what you want to do.”
And Lena dropped her eyes down to the map again, though I’d swear this time she didn’t know what she was seeing. Or maybe everywhere she’d look she was seeing Chris. Maybe that was it. She was smiling very slightly to herself, with just the corners of her lips, and they were trembling.
They got married that week in St. Michel’s Church. It was in the morning — nine thirty, I remember — so the church was cold: biting empty cold. Even the two candles burning on the altar didn’t look like they’d be warm. Though it only took a couple of minutes, my teeth were chattering so that I could hardly talk. Ma cried and Pete scowled and grinned by turns and Lena and Chris didn’t seem to notice anything much.
The cold and the damp had made a bright strip of flush across Lena’s cheeks. Old Mrs. Roberts, who lived next door, bent forward — she was sitting in the pew behind us — and tapped Ma on the shoulder. “I never seen her look prettier.”
Lena had bought herself a new suit, with the money she’d earned over the summer: a cream-colored suit, with small black braiding on the cuffs and collar. She’d got a hat too, of the same color velvet. Cream was a good color for her; it was lighter than her skin somehow, so that it made her face stand out.
(“She ought to always have clothes like that,” Mayme Roberts said later, back at our house. She was old Mrs. Roberts’s daughter, and seven kids had broken her up so that she wasn’t even jealous of pretty girls anymore. “Maybe Chris’ll make enough money to let her have pretty clothes like that.”)
Lena and Chris went away because he had to get back to camp. And for the first time since I could remember, I had a room all to myself. So I made Lena’s bed all nice and careful and put the fancy spread that Ma had crocheted on it — the one we hardly ever used. And put the little pink celluloid doll in the middle.
Sometime after the wedding, I don’t remember exactly when, Pete had an accident. He’d been out on a long run, all the way up to Abiline. It was a long hard job and by the time he got back to town he was dead tired, and so he got a little careless. In the switch yards he got his hand caught in a loose coupling.
He was in the hospital for two weeks or so, in the colored surgical ward on the second floor of a huge cement building that said Charity Hospital in carved letters over the big front door. Ma went to see him on Tuesdays and Saturdays and I just went on Saturdays. Walking over from the bus, we’d pass Lefty’s Restaurant and Café. Ma would turn her head away so that she wouldn’t see it.
One time, the first Saturday I went with Ma, we brought Pete a letter, his induction notice. He read it and started laughing and crying all at once — until the ward nurse got worried and called an intern and together they gave him a shot. Right up till he passed out, he kept laughing.
And I began to wonder if it had been an accident...
After two weeks he came home. We hadn’t expected him; we hadn’t thought he was well enough to leave. Late one afternoon we heard steps in the side alley; Ma looked at me, quick and funny, and rushed over to open the door: it was Pete. He had come home alone on the streetcar and walked the three blocks from the car stop. By the time he got to the house he was ready to pass out: he had to sit down and rest his head on the table right there in the kitchen. But he’d held his arm careful so that it didn’t start to bleed again. He’d always been afraid of blood.
Accidents like that happened a lot on the road. Maybe that was why the pay was so good. The fellows who sat around the grocery all day or the bar all had pensions because they’d lost an arm or a hand or a leg. It happened a lot; we knew that, but it didn’t seem to make any difference.
Ma cried very softly to herself when she saw him so dizzy and weak he couldn’t stand up. And I went out in the backyard, where he couldn’t see, and was sick to my stomach.
He stayed in the house until he got some strength back and then he was out all day long. He left every morning just like he was working and he came back for dinner at night. Ma asked him once where he went, but he wouldn’t say; and there was never any trouble about it. A check came from the railroad every month, regular; and he still gave Ma part of it.
Pete talked about his accident, though. It was all he’d talk about. “I seen my hand,” he’d tell anybody who’d listen. “After they got it free, with the blood running down it, I seen it. And it wasn’t cut off. My fingers was moving. I seen ’em. Was no call for them to go cut the hand off. There wasn’t any call for them to do that, not even with all it hurting.” (And it had hurt so bad that he’d passed out. They’d told us he just tumbled down all of a sudden — so that the cinders along the tracks cut in his cheek.)
He’d say: “Iffen it wasn’t a man my color they wouldn’t done it. They wouldn’t go cut off a white man’s hand.”
He’d say: “It was only just one finger that was caught, they didn’t have cause to take off the whole hand.”
And when I heard him I couldn’t help wondering. Wondering if maybe Pete hadn’t tried to get one finger caught. The army wouldn’t take a man with one finger missing. But just one finger gone wouldn’t hamper a man much. The way Pete was acting wasn’t like a man that had an accident he wasn’t expecting. But like a man who’d got double-crossed somehow.
And looking at Ma, I could see that she was thinking the same thing.
Lena came home after a couple of months — Chris had been sent overseas.
She used to spend most of her days lying on the bed in our room, reading a magazine maybe, or writing to Chris, or just staring at the ceiling. When the winter sun came in through the window and fell on her, her skin turned gold and burning.
Since she slept so much during the days, often in the night she’d wake up and be lonesome. Then she’d call me. “Celia,” she’d call real soft so that the sound wouldn’t carry through the paperboard walls. “Celia, you awake?” And I’d tell her yes and wake up quick as I could.
Then she’d snap on the little lamp that Chris had given her for a wedding present. And she’d climb out of bed, wrapping one of the blankets around her because it was cold. And she’d sit on the cane-bottomed old chair and rock it slowly back and forth while she told me just what it would be like when Chris came back for her.
Sometimes Pete would hear us talking and would calclass="underline" “Shut up in there.” And Lena would only toss her head and say that he was an old grouch and not to pay any attention to him.
Pete had been in a terrible temper for weeks, the cold made his arm hurt so. He scarcely spoke anymore. And he didn’t bother going out after supper; instead he stayed in his room, sitting in a chair with his feet propped up on the windowsill, looking out where there wasn’t anything to see. Once I’d peeped in through the half-opened door. He was standing in the middle of the room, at the foot of the bed, and he was looking at his stub arm, which was still bright-red-colored. His lips were drawn back tight against his teeth, and his eyes were almost closed, they were so squinted.