(2005) Wrapped in Rain (14 page)

Whenever I got tired, when my eyes almost shut themselves, I'd remember Miss Ella lying up in the bed with Mutt and me and reading to us out of her Bible. One night when we were still young enough to wear pajamas with feet on them, I was tired and just didn't feel like listening, so I said, "Miss Ella, why do you read to us? I don't understand half that stuff."

She squinted one eye like she was thinking about her response. She walked over to the window where you could see most of Waverly and the accompanying grounds. It was a good perch. She said, "You boys come here." We slid off the bed and walked to the window while she waved her hand across the landscape. "You see all that?"

We nodded.

"All that, everything you see, looks orderly. The walls are straight, the corners are square, the buildings and terraces are level, and everything around here has an order to it. You see that?"

We nodded again, more confused than ever.

"That's because it was built in relation to a plumb line." She reached into her pocket and pulled out a brass engineer's plumb. "See, the engineers take this, hang it from a string, and that point, that place on the earth where it hangs, becomes the plumb from which everything else is built or measured. Without that point, that place, there's no order to nothing. It's just chaos. The plumb"-she waved it in front of our faces-"is the starting point, the beginning and the end, the ..."

Mutt broke in. "The alpha and omega?"

Miss Ella smiled. "Yes, honey." We jumped back in bed and she patted her Bible. "I'm trying to build you boys up straight ..." She paused, thinking for a minute. "With strong walls, square corners, and able to stand when the storms come. But I can't do it without a plumb line. So"she patted the pages again gingerly-"this is it. Our reading at night is so that-"

I interrupted her. "So we end up like you and not like Rex."

She shook her head. "No, child. So you end up like the men in this book. I ain't fit to be included in these pages. Ain't fit to untie the laces of their sandals."

Walking across the backyard through the rain, I remembered Miss Ella patting the pages and whispering, "Ain't fit at all."

I grabbed Whitey's two jugs, walked in the back door of Waverly, and went down the spiral staircase into the basement. I had no intention of getting tanked, but I didn't want them to spontaneously combust and blow up my truck. A good truck is hard to find. On the other hand, if they blew up the house, I'd pull up a chair and watch. Maybe even sell tickets.

When Rex built the house, he sunk the spiral staircase into the basement to allow quick kitchen access to storage, kindling wood, kerosene, and certainly, booze. Whenever he gave a tour of the house, he started in the basement next to his two-hundred-bottle dust collector. I landed in the basement and let my eyes adjust to the dark. Then I skirted the wine cellar and shuffled over to my bed, sliding Whitey's jugs beneath it.

On my bedside table, I kept three things: a picture of Miss Ella sitting on a bucket next to the barn which I had taken before she got sick; her Bible-tattered, dusty, and imprinted with the foreheads she had thumped with it; and that brass plumb.

"No ma'am," I said out loud. "I don't know what they're doing or why." I pulled the ceiling fan cord, setting it to "cyclone," and fell onto the pillow. "You know everything I do. Probably more." I pulled the cold sheets up around my neck and closed my eyes. "I'm just glad she can't shoot."

Despite her sermonizing, Miss Ella never took us to church. Not really. Not with a building, choir, pews, and a pastor. Rex would have beaten her silly. I remember I was still in kindergarten the first time she got her nerve up and tried to take us to church. He spotted us in the car from a second-story window. We were dressed up and buckled in with excitement and curiosity pasted across our faces. It was almost like an adventure. In truth, and given the fact that it was a black Cadillac, we probably looked like we were going to a funeral. Rex ran outside in his robe, hair sticking up, face bloated, eyes bloodshot, screaming as she backed out the drive. She stopped, rolled down the window, and said, "Yes sir, Mr. Rex? You want to go with us?"

He almost yanked her out of the front seat. "Woman, where do you think you're going?"

"Mr. Rex, why, don't you know what day it is?" Rex was still foggy, and even though it was close to eleven in the morning, he probably couldn't have passed a Breathalyzer test. He held on to the side of the car, steadying himself while perspiration began beading across his forehead. "Mr. Rex, it's Easter." Miss Ella pointed to the yard. "Can't you see all the lilies?" Months ago, Mose had given Miss Ella some of his own money to plant rows of lily bulbs in the front yard. He'd even spent part of a Sunday afternoon with us putting them in the ground. That morning they had opened and looked like a hundred tiny bugles all blowing toward heaven.

"Woman, I don't give two cents ..." Spit formed in the corner of Rex's mouth as he reached through the car window and gripped her around the collar, choking her airway.

"But, Mr. Rex, I asked you last night while you were eating dinner-"

He tightened his grip again. "I don't give a rat's butt what day it is. You will NOT, NOT EVER"-he was screaming now-"take those boys to church." He pulled her face out the driver's window and glared into her eyes. His knuckles grew white, and a vein popped out on the side of his head. "You understand me, woman?"

"Yes sir, Mr. Rex."

Rex threw her back inside the car, straightened his robe, and quickly walked over to the lilies, where he stomped as many as he could. He turned in circles, making wide, swathlike arcs with his feet, cutting down everything he touched. He looked like a kid on the playground having a temper tantrum after the teacher told him not to climb on the jungle gym. Breathing heavily and peeling sticky lily petals off his robe, he walked back inside and Miss Ella gently eased the car back into the garage, trying not to let us see her crying. I can remember hearing her sniff beneath the sound of the tires crunching the tiny pebbles on the drive. "Okay, boys, you two go on down and play."

"But, Miss Ella," I broke in, "we want to go to church."

"Child." Miss Ella knelt down, a tear hanging off her chin and her eyes checking the back door for any sign of Rex. "Sweet boys." She took us both in her arms. "If I take you to church, that'll be the last time you ever see me."

I nodded because, even at six, I understood. Mutt stood blankly, blinking a lot, his brow wrinkled, looking at the back door through which Rex had disappeared. Mutt and I headed toward the quarry, where we knew to make ourselves invisible and stay out of Rex's way. It usually took him until after lunch to get over his hangover, or at least start working on another one, rid the house of his latest bedmate, and get on his way back to Atlanta.

"Maybe later"-Miss Ella brushed the hair out of my eyes and tried to smile-"we'll go get some ice cream."

We passed the barn, and out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Mose. Mose came around once a week to check on the horses and about every other day to check on his sister.

When Miss Ella sent Mose to college, South Alabama was a little short on black medical professionals, so he set his sights, flew through school in two and a half years, graduated, and spent two years in medical school learning to become a surgeon. Something most of his professors told him he would never be. Mose was tall, lanky, and so skinny that his belt hung on his hipbones. He had gnarled farm-boy hands, big ears, big eyes, and skin that was not white. But while his professors could control their medical school and who became what, they could not control a man named Adolf Hitler. WWII erupted, and Mose received his draft notice, checked out of school, raised his right hand, joined the army, and was promptly sent to the MASH units on the front lines of the European theater, where he learned to operate wearing a helmet-working two days on and four hours off. Oddly enough, while Mose was learning to doctor men, he also spent considerable time doctoring horses. In the European theater, veterinarians were in short supply; when one of the commanding officer's stable of four magnificent stallions-which he "found" in an abandoned estate in the wake of the 101st-came down with a cold or got the colic, Mose learned to doctor horses. Covered in American blood, screams, and dying confessions, Mose learned to sew, amputate, and remove shrapnel, but most important, he learned to heal. And Moses Rain was a good healer, not to mention a not-half-bad veterinarian.

After the war, Mose flew home, his chest covered with medals-including the Purple Heart. He returned to school, by that point a perfunctory obligation because he already knew how to be a doctor. With the help of the GI bill, he spent his residency at Emory in Atlanta, where his reputation preceded him and everyone called him "sir." At Emory, Moses learned to deliver babiessomething he didn't do much in Europe. He finished school, refused a half dozen offers, married a cute nurse out of Mobile named Anna, and returned home just south of Montgomery, where the two set up a family practice. When most of his colleagues were decorating their walls with diplomas, degrees, and this-or-that awards, Moses Rain hung a name tag on his door that simply read, "Mose."

His practice policy was simple: come one, come all. And they did. From everywhere. Mose never made much money, but he never went hungry either. He never lacked anything. When his car didn't start, he found a grateful father underneath the hood, turning a torque wrench, who wouldn't take a penny for his services. When the weather turned 16 degrees Fahrenheit and his heater went out, he found a load of firewood stacked up next to his back door and a man downstairs working beneath his furnace. When his refrigerator quit, spoiling dinner and tomorrow morning's breakfast, he and Anna came home from work to find a house full of saran-wrapped plates piled high with roasted chicken, lima beans, scalloped potatoes, and meat loaf. Cooling off in place of the old one, they found a new refrigerator, filled with a few dozen eggs, bacon, milk, and a key lime pie. And when a storm blew in, toppling a sycamore tree that split his house in half, the Rains came home to find a crew of eight men cutting away the tree and stacking firewood. Five days later, they had repaired the damage, nailed an entirely new roof across the house, and begun a small addition off the back porch. And when Anna died at the tender age of fifty-seven, the funeral procession was three miles long and took an hour to congregate, and the funeral home wouldn't take a penny of his money.

For fifty years, Moses Rain walked three blocks to work, stayed until the patients were all gone, and went home, often making five or six house calls on his way. Most poor babies, both black and white-not to mention a few horses-born within a fifty-mile radius, and some farther, were born under the close direction and protection of Dr. Moses Rain.

From the moment Mose met Rex, he didn't like him and he sure didn't trust him. I saw it on Mose's face. Rex, shorter by almost a foot and younger by a few years, huffed, looked down his nose, and not surprisingly, called him "boy." Mose, ever the gentleman, just smiled and never ceased to check on his horses.

Being Rex's vet as well as part-time physicianbecause no one else would take a look at him-kept Mose around the house a good bit. The fact that Mose met a need for Rex gave his sister some job security she otherwise might not have had. It also gave Mose a bird'seye view of his sister.

Many nights, I stood outside Miss Ella's window and listened to Mose try to talk her into calling the state to come pick us up and leaving Waverly altogether. She'd have none of it and waved him off with her palm. Finally, one night after it grew rather heated, she opened the front door and pointed him out. "Mose, I'm not leaving these boys. I've made my peace with that-no matter what he does to me. He may kill me and I may kill him, but I'm not leaving those two boys and I'm not turning them over to the state. Not today. Not ever." From then on, we saw Mose every other day. More often if Rex was in town. Mose would drive around back of the house, check all our faces and backs for bruises, drink a cup of coffee, and then idle back to work.