“Unless it was Dr. Jeremy Potts,” said Cyl. “Surgeons don’t mind blood, do they?”
* * *
After Dwight went off to bed in my old corner room upstairs, Cyl and I changed into gym shorts and baggy T-shirts for sleeping. I turned the lantern wick down real low, then went around blowing out all the candles.
Stan had crawled under the sheet next to his little sister’s feet and both children were breathing deeply.
I crawled onto my side of the couch. It felt wonderful to lie down.
I watched as Cyl untangled the top of the sheet from Lashanda’s arm and moved Ladybelle away from her face, then came and stretched out beside me.
“They’re really nice kids, aren’t they?” she sighed.
“You’re going to make a terrific mother someday,” I told her.
“But not their mother.” A great sadness was in her voice.
“They have a mother, Cyl.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“But you can’t help wishing—?”
“That they were mine?” She turned to me with a low moan. “Oh, God, Deborah, I’m such a horrible person!”
“No, you’re not,” I said, trying to comfort her. “You didn’t mean to fall in love with Ralph. You didn’t set out to snare him or anything. It just happened.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“What then?”
She was silent for a long moment and when she finally did speak, her voice was so hushed I had to strain to hear her.
“When I heard that she was hurt—in a coma—I thought, What if she never wakes up? What if she just goes ahead and dies?” She looked at me and her eyes were dark pools of despair in the dim light. “What kind of a monster could wish for something like that?”
“You’re no monster,” I said. “You’re only human.”
“I thought that . . . in the end, he’d choose love,” she whispered. “Our love. But now she’s hurt so bad. It could take her months, years, to recover. He’ll never leave her like that. He couldn’t do it to his children.”
Tears spilled down her cheeks.
“And neither could I.”
“What will you do?”
She shook her head helplessly. “All I know is that I can’t stay here. I can give him up, but not if I stay here.”
She began to cry and her muffled sobs tore at my heart.
I felt movement at the end of the couch, then Lashanda was there between us on the sofa bed. She patted Cyl’s cheek tenderly.
“Don’t cry, Miss Cyl. It’ll soon be morning.”
CHAPTER | 17
Is it at all wonderful that, after the strain was over and all danger gone, reason should finally be unseated and men and women break into the unmeaning gayety of the maniac?
We awoke on Friday morning to sunshine, dead still mugginess and the sound of chain saws and tractors. Trees were down all around the house. We’d had so much rain these last few weeks and the ground was so saturated that roots had pulled right out of the earth in Fran’s high sustained winds. The children were already outdoors and Cyl and I got a cup of coffee and went out to survey the damage more closely. Lashanda immediately ran to greet us.
Mother’s magnolias still stood tall and proud, although one had been skinned the full length of its trunk when a neighboring pine fell over.
“We’ll prune it up. See if we can save it,” said my brother Seth, giving me a sweaty morning hug.
His mother, Daddy’s first wife, hadn’t found the time to worry about landscaping, so it was my mother who planted azaleas and dogwoods and magnolias with the help of her stepsons who came to love her as their own. Seth could remember the first year the magnolias bloomed and how their fragrance drifted through the bedroom windows at night, bewitching their dreams.
He, Robert and Haywood were there to help Daddy clear the drive so we could get in and out. The tree across the porch looked awful, but the actual damage was minimal and would have to wait in line since there was worse to be taken care of on the farm.
Reese’s place was the hardest hit. Two sixty-foot pines had crashed down on the trailer he was renting from Seth and everything he owned was either smashed or waterlogged. Seth had insurance on the trailer itself, but Reese had nothing on the contents. “First my truck, now my trailer,” he said gloomily.
He’d already been over to the wreckage this morning and the back of his pickup was loaded with wet clothes, tapes and CDs, and other odds and ends that were salvageable. Daddy’d told him to come stay at the homeplace till he could figure out what he wanted to do.
Andrew and April were hard hit, too. A huge oak had taken out the whole northwest side of their house, shearing off the kitchen and dining room wall.
“You know April, though,” said Seth with a grin. “She’s already talking about how she’s been wanting to get more light into that part of the house and now the insurance money will help her do it.”
(April moves walls in that house like other women move furniture.)
In addition to Reese’s trailer, Seth was mourning four mature pecans. Haywood said he had nineteen trees down in his yard, but none of them hit the house. Robert hadn’t counted his downed trees, “but the yard’s full of ’em,” and they said that the farm’s biggest potato house had lost three sheets of tin off the roof.
(“I’ve heard of being three sheets in the wind,” Haywood chuckled, “but I didn’t know they was talking about tin sheets.”)
Other than a little water damage, most of the other houses on the farm, including my own, were pretty much unscathed.
The roads were blocked all around, they said, but neighbors were out, working on getting at least one lane cleared.
Power was still off and phones were out over most of the county. Even cell phones were spotty, depending on which company you were with. Dwight had already used his car radio to send word to Ralph Freeman at the hospital that Stan and Lashanda were fine, and word had come back that Ralph would try to get home to Cotton Grove by mid-morning to meet them there.
I managed to get through to Aunt Zell on my cell phone, even though it was staticky and other voices kept fading in and out. She said most of Dobbs was without power but the phones were still working. She’d been worried since she hadn’t heard from any of us. I assured her that we were all physically fine.
“What about y’all?” I asked. “Everything okay there?”
“Not exactly,” she admitted. “Your Uncle Ash put our new Lincoln in the garage last night and left the old one sitting in the drive. You remember that big elm out by the edge of the yard? It totalled the garage and our new car both. Not a scratch on the old one. Ash is so provoked.”
I could imagine.
“And Portland called this morning. Remember how she and Avery fetched their boat home to get it out of harm’s way?”
I had to laugh. “Don’t tell me.”
“Yep. A pine tree cut it right half in two.”
* * *
Lashanda followed us around the yard, chattering sixty to the dozen, but Stan stayed busy helping the menfolks till Maidie called us in for sausage and griddle cakes.
There was no school, of course, and no court either, for that matter. Seth had brought over a battery-powered radio for Daddy and we listened open-mouthed to the reports coming in from around the area. Fran never made it beyond a category 3 storm, but it had moved across the state so slowly that it did much more damage than a stronger, faster-moving hurricane would have. Even more than legendary Hazel, they were saying. Most of the problems seemed to have been caused by trees falling on cars, houses and power lines. And there was quite a bit of flooding in low-lying areas.
“You’ll probably have the most dramatic science project in your class,” Cyl told Stan.
“Sounds like an A to me, too,” I said.
“Maybe,” he said, not meeting our eyes.
Andrew and A.K arrived with news that at least one lane of Highway 48 was clear in either direction and that they’d also heard it was possible to drive to Cotton Grove on Old 48.