“—home no more. Them Baxters has near ruint it for me…”
“When Clara cries, it sounds more like Balaam’s donkey.” Bernice Filbert, using the private phone in Mr. Suggs’ room during one of his blanked-out times, is describing Clara’s newest crisis to Florrie Cox. When Bernice took a break from her bedside duties in Mr. Suggs’ room a while ago, she walked down the corridor to see how Elaine was doing, and she found Clara down on her knobby knees, looking red-eyed and broken. “Near worse off than her own child,” she tells Florrie. Clara wouldn’t say anything past the noises she was making, but Bernice guessed the problem right away, for she had picked up rumors from the nurses — and the girl’s face breaking out like that, those tiny give-away bumps on her nubbles — rumors confirming what she had been worried about since the day it all happened. She tried to help that day with her nursing skills and miracle water, which does not work for everything, but which, if she could have used enough of it, might have worked for that, but Elaine fought back like a wild thing. Of course, she was scared to death and hurting, but it was more than that; something had got inside little Elaine and it was changing her. “Now the prognosis are that the child is on a straight path to the madhouse if she don’t die first.”
“That’d be a shame,” Florrie says. “I hardly don’t know what to think.”
Bernice remembered that Reverend Hiram Clegg has worked some exorcisms, from what they were saying when he was here a couple of months ago, though when she said to Clara they should ask him back, Clara squeezed up her face like she was having gas pains and shook her head no. She hasn’t told Florrie any of this, simply saying that Elaine has taken a turn for the worse, is back on the feeding tube, and Clara is in a dreadful state. Mr. Suggs is shifting out of his more or less silent seven-sleepers state into his lively speaking-in-tongues mode, which is sometimes followed by a short period of furious clarity, but more often is not. The one thing he seems to appreciate at those times is when she dabs his forehead with her miracle water and recites the magic words, something she did every day back when he was unconscious in his coma, and it does seem to make him better, if only for a moment. She also sometimes adds a drop of miracle water to his bath water, but this so far seems less efficacious. Florrie, hearing him carrying on in the background, asks after him, and Bernice says he’s about the same, though some parts of him are shriveling up and some parts are getting longer. She can hear Florrie trying to imagine what parts she is talking about, so she adds: “His nose, for example,” and doesn’t say whether it’s growing or shrinking.
“Mostly, he looks next thing to a dead man, Florrie. He’s outa his head more than he’s in it, but at them moments when he’s got his wits about him, he’s full up with notions, and he keeps me trotting.” At such times, they use an eye-blink code, which she proceeds to explain to Florrie. “We got blinks for numbers and letters and all that, but mostly we do it by me asking him questions and him blinking once for yes and contrariwise not blinking at all. Like, I say does it begin with A, and he just lays there, and I try other letters and finally I say does it begin with F, and he blinks, and I try A again, and he just lays there again until I get to L, and he blinks, and I ask, you mean Florrie? And if he blinks we go on to the next word, and if he don’t we keep working on that one.”
“Really? He ast about me?”
“No, for goodness’ sake, I was just giving a for sample, Florrie. Showing you how hard this is.” When Mr. Suggs’ brain attack struck him down, Bernice felt struck down too, for he was what stood between her and a life in prison. But one day a lawyer from the city turned up. Big ballooned-out gentleman with a bunch of chins, dressed in a tailored suit with a hankie in the pocket, and a tailored shirt, too, because all his buttons were fitting just right. Shiny shoes and shiny up on top as well, with just a few yellow-dyed hairs pasted down. He said he knew the sick lady she and Florrie had been caring for, but, no, he wasn’t a friend of the family. It took a lot of eye-blinking, but eventually Mr. Suggs gave the lawyer limited power of attorney, witnessed by her and Maudie and the physical theropest who sits him up every day. The lawyer, whose name was Mr. Thornton, worked out a salary for her, saying she was sort of like a private secretary, taking dictation in this special way, and he seemed to hint that if all went well, there’d be more for her, though he didn’t say exactly what “well” was. He also promised her he’d fight all the thieving and embezzlement charges against her and he did not expect any of them to even get to court because everything was on the up and up, he himself had seen to that. At first she’d thought he might be one of those rascally humanits, but now she knew who he was because she had helped Mrs. Cavanaugh place the calls. Mr. Suggs was so tired out by all these negotiations that he slept for a whole day after, and the first thing he asked when he woke up the next day was where did that lawyer go he was just talking to? “I only wisht I was a better speller, Florrie.”
“I can’t, Billy Don. I’ve promised a friend I’d go for a ride with her this afternoon. But let’s meet up later. It’ll be light until nearly midnight. My folks are going out with friends and have given me the car and supper money, so instead of ice cream, we can go share a pizza or something.”
“Well, I’ll have to miss the evening prayer meeting, but sure, why the heck not?”
“Okay. Tucker City, in front of the drugstore at eight. Got that hole dug for your prophet?”
“Yup. Two weeks tomorrow.”
“Sounds like a crazy party. I may put on a party hat and sneak in.”
“Well, huh, I wouldn’t…”
“Yes, we heard from the governor, and I suppose we can do this, if proper precautions are taken. But, well, we, ah, treated him surgically to ease his anxieties, Mr. Cavanaugh. The patient won’t give you any trouble, but he may not be of much use to you…”
When Debra opens up the garden shed, she notices that things have been moved around again, but the lock wasn’t broken and nothing seems to be missing. Hazel Dunlevy, who sometimes helps out, has the only other key, so when she turns up, still looking half asleep, Debra tells her about what she found and asks if she saw anyone going in or out. “No, that was probly me,” Hazel says, yawning. “I was jist only tryin’ to ease the wheelbarra out.” Hazel doesn’t do much work, but she’s good to Colin. He shows her his hands every day, and Hazel, with her dreamy freckle-faced smile, tells him something a little different each time. She likes to say that the way the lines cross in his palms is not like other people’s, meaning that he will always have a life different from theirs, and certainly that is true and does not need a palm reader to prophesy it.