Sweeping Up Glass (27 page)

Inside the cage, someone shrieks, “Lucy, come back here! Lucy?”

One woman slaps; one bursts into tears. “I can’t dance to this music!”

“Whatta you mean, charge too much? I never charged a penny more—”

A young girl squats on the floor.

Like a circus monkey, a thin one climbs the wire to the ceiling. “No more babies, Albert! I can’t, I can’t!”

An orderly comes with a bucket and a mop. He slaps at the cage.

They bang their heads as if their skulls need emptying, and perhaps that’s it. Or maybe they’ve hurt someone, or forgotten things like how to bake bread or milk the cow. Then there was nowhere to put them except on Five. All my life I’ve been afraid of insanity, and now I’m looking it in the face. It looks like Ida. Phelps. Me.

One of the nurses hurries over. I wonder if she’ll snatch my pocketbook and the pins from my hair and toss me a blanket, lock me away. More, I hope there’s a commode so I won’t have to squat on the floor.

What if this sickness runs in a family? Maybe Ida got it from her ma’am, and her ma’am before her. What an unholy waste of generations. I wish I could find the first woman who bore a child and then walked away from it. Maybe she wasn’t the Judas I’ve always thought her to be. Maybe, in her head, something just broke.

Inside the cage, a woman spins on the balls of her feet, her head cocked as if she hears something I can’t. I hook my fingers in the wire, and the ladies come like ducklings to crumbs. Their hands are pale, rigid claws, but they have calluses and broken nails just like me. A bit of a girl with tangled hair sits on the floor, elbows out, rocking. She looks up and sees me. Says, “Mama wants me home right now.”

Another murmurs, “That’s Bernice, rocking her baby….”

I wonder if Bernice’s infant died. Or maybe she put it down and forgot where she left it.

“Don’t wake the baby!”

“Olivia,” Wing says, taking my shoulders. He turns me gently. I hear him inhale, like he’s going to say something, but no words come out.

Mama wants me home right now
.

I’m too anguished to cry. “Oh, Wing, I see now—even though we grow to be women, we’re still little girls. We never stop wanting our mamas. I’ve always hoped Ida’d come to her senses, act like she loved us. But she couldn’t. She probably wanted her own ma’am—or someone—to tell her she was gonna be all right.”

Wing draws me into his soapy smell. My teeth are on his button. I feel his face in my hair.

“That’s what Pap used to tell me. And, oh, how I’ve ached for those words. If I’d known about this place, how bad it was, I could have made things easier for Ida.”

“Olivia, you were a child. You weren’t responsible for her. And not one day in your life have you been anything other than what God made you, which is wonderful and precious and beautiful.”

I rest my forehead on his collarbone. “But I didn’t do my best or anywhere near it.”

“Olivia, doing our best every minute would exhaust us. Whatever we do—it is what it is.”

“How do you know it’s enough?” I say, looking at him.

His grin is crooked. “God told me.”

“The way he told you to play the trumpet?”

Wing buttons my cape. I think of the night Will’m and I sat folded together, listening to the ragged breathing of the tiny wolf cub.

Dr. Baird says, “Miz Cross—shall I send someone to pick Miz Harker up, then?”

Wing lifts my chin and looks in my face. Life is given to us, and we do what we can. Ida cannot.

“Tomorrow morning?” he says. “Around nine?”

“Yes,” I say.

The nurses cluck like hens on a cold morning. Wing leads me down flight after flight of stairs to the street. My breath turns to frost. I’m amazed it’s still winter. I love the sight of his station wagon. We get into it and drive away.

T
he Kentuckian is quiet. There’s no one here but Wing and me. He gives me a flowered room on the second floor. The one with a front window and velvet drapes.

“When you get settled,” he says, “come downstairs, and I’ll put on the tea. I made apricot buns this morning—they’re still fresh.”

I lay out my nightgown and hairbrush. It’s been a long time since I’ve spent the night away from home. Thinking further, I once camped out at Reverend and Miz Culpepper’s when Pap was away on business. Whiskey business. Pap used to love saying that. And I’ve stayed over at the Hanleys’. Truth is, I’ve never slept in another white person’s home.

I go down for tea. Wing has set out silver spoons and napkins, and a china teapot. Two enormous fruit buns are fixed on a plate. He pours tea. I eat little; I’m overcome with the strangeness of things—state hospitals and empty graves, Ida gone from her cabin, and Alton Phelps on something worse than a Klan rampage. And now I’m drinking tea from Wing’s best china and sleeping upstairs in his place. I can only blink my eyes and look into my cup.

“I think I know how you feel, Olivia,” he says. “Life takes the damnedest turns.”

As Love Alice would say, that’s a truth. I open my mouth and begin to talk. I tell Wing about my quilts, and how I plan to rebuild the outdoor stall in spring.

He talks about the hotel, and his plan for a dining room, his gift shop window, and that he thinks—no, he
feels
—good things will come to Aurora before long. He’s been to the cemetery and removed the dead flowers from Grace’s grave. He’ll put up a stone. And that brings me to Pap and the problem I face. I may never know where Ida has laid him.

“Crazy old woman,” I say. “There’s no telling what she’s done. It was so long ago.”

“We’ll take one day at a time,” Wing says, as if we’re partners. “Fill in the holes.”

There’s more meaning in that statement than I am able to fathom. Thirty years of not speaking has left great gaps in what we know about each other, what we feel.

Out in the lobby, the telephone rings, and Wing gets up to answer it.

“That was Marta Havlicek,” he says when he comes back. “Will’m and the cub are settled in just fine, but the new snow’s closed the bridge and the road to their place. They think he ought to stay a couple of nights.”

I look up.

“I told her I’d ask you,” Wing says. “But the phone lines will probably go down soon, so if it’s not OK, I need to call her back now.”

I’m grateful that Will’m is out of reach. I nod and push back my chair. “If you don’t mind, Wing, I’m going to bed.”

“’Course I don’t mind,” he says. “You want another blanket? Extra pillow?”

“I don’t need a thing.”

He nods. “Just sleep.”

“That would be good. And, Wing—”

“Mm?”

“I don’t know how to thank you—”

“Don’t,” he says. “It all evens out. I’ll drive you up to Doc’s around eight. We’ll have breakfast first. That all right?”

Yes. Makes me wonder how I got through these years without anyone else. I must not, now, become dependent on him. Until all this is past I must keep some distance.

When I have brushed out my hair and gotten ready for bed, I punch the electric light button and the room falls into darkness. I can’t resist going to the window and looking out. Below, everything sleeps in the white of a new snow. It drifts down, thick and lazy. Through the fat flakes, I see that a truck is parked in front of Ruse’s. There’s someone behind the wheel—a man thick of body and wearing a stocking cap. Buford.

My stomach rolls and settles in a hard knot. My chest aches with each rise and fall. Phelps has sent him to keep watch on me. He probably thinks Will’m’s here, too.

God bless the storm and Molly. God bless first love. I have mixed feelings about that last, for my own first love is sleeping not twenty feet away.

T
he snowfall has lightened by morning, but the sky is the color of old dishwater. The truck is gone from in front of Ruse’s.

Wing scrambles eggs and makes a pot of coffee, toasts cinnamon bread, and we eat without saying much. Then we bundle up, Wing starts the station wagon, and we head out.

Someone’s had the foresight to shovel Doc’s driveway, and right now, Doc’s wife is sitting with Ida. Miz Pritchett tells me Ida’s fading. Her mouth is open and her breath comes and goes in quick puffs. It reminds me of the breath of Will’m’s dying cubs. On one hand, I’m sorry he’s not here to say good-bye to his great gran. On the other, I’m glad he can’t see her this way. Her soul has already taken flight.

Doc brings me creamed coffee. Wing says no thanks, and Doc goes about his business. A half dozen patients are in his waiting room, and I’m sure that, by now, they all know what’s happening. After a while I go outside and walk up and down the drive.

Before long, a panel truck with a bright-painted red cross pulls up. I hurry in, to the back room. Miz Pritchett, probably thinking I want a moment alone, scuttles out. I touch Ida’s shoulder, shake her a little.

“Ida?”

I’m glad there’s no one to hear me, for although maybe I should say good-bye, or tell her she’ll be cared for, there’s something else I’ve got to know. “Ida,
tell me what you did with Pap
!”

Two men in white uniforms come in. One has a folded sheet, the other carries a stretcher. They lift Ida, slack-jawed, arms dangling. The one with the sheet snaps it open, tucks it around her. Doc’s wife hurries to cover her with a blanket, and there’s a paper for me to sign. I follow them out.

Love Alice is there in the road, and she comes to stand with me. We watch as they lift Ida up, the light snow falling on her colorless lashes. In that instant, her eyes pop open, and she stares straight at me. Then she snaps them shut, and they shove her inside.

“Ida!” I shout and scramble in after her.

But they reach for my arms, mistaking this for grief.

“Ida, you tell me! You tell me now!”

“Lord Jesus,” Love Alice says, and her voice rises sweetly, with some distant hymn.

The doors slam shut, and I stand there watching while the pure white truck with the painted cross moves along the pure white road toward the highway. The clouds are as dark as a pan of burnt biscuits.

Ida has played the last hand. Is she faking? Or is it possible, as Dr. Baird said, she’s fading in and out? Maybe, at Stipling, she’ll keep her eyes open, go to Four and spend the rest of her life in her nightgown, wandering. Not a life so different from what she’s had. Right now I’m so angry, I hope she ends up on Five. One thing’s certain—she won’t make it below Three, because they’ll never get her to fold laundry.

Love Alice looks past me to the ditch. “I know about losin’ thangs, O-livvy.”

I put my arms around her tight.

She croons in my ear, “That li’l girl of mine—I calls her Baby—she the reason I see my truths. She gave me that.”

Oh, my precious Love Alice. I never knew. I wonder, wrapped in the miseries of my own life, what else I have missed.

Wing comes, then, and puts his arms around both of us.

I
t was good of you to take me home.” “You keep doing that,” Wing says softly.

“Doing what?”

“Letting me get close, and then—turning polite.” After a few minutes, he says, “Don’t worry about it. You’re going through a lot right now.”

“So have you been,” I say. “These last few weeks. Few years, I guess.”

He nods and gives his glasses a nudge. Turns off Doc’s road and heads toward town.

“Wing, I’ve got the store to mind, and the goats. Eggs to gather.”

“Olivia, on this I am firm. One more night. You’ve earned it.”

It’s hard to argue when I’m damn near hostage in his car. My mouth’s open to say,
Then take me up for an hour. While I do a few things
. But I don’t because I remember the surprise Will’m and I came home to the night before last. If there’s more of that, Wing will ask questions.

How close, exactly, is Wing to his guests?

He pulls in the alley beside the hotel and parks the car. “You rest today, then tonight we’ll go over to Ruse’s for supper.”

Wing sends Junk to milk the goats and scatter corn. Other than that, my house stands empty and ripe for more vandalism while I sit drinking tea and watching Wing roll out sticky buns. He coats them with cinnamon, sprinkles on pecans, and shoves forty-eight at a time in the big oven. While they bake, he checks on the bread he’s set to rise. His shirtsleeves are rolled up and he’s got flour from one end of the kitchen to the other. He beats the bread dough and turns it in its bowl. Then he pours himself coffee, but the timer goes off and he leaps up to pull out the buns. While they’re piping hot, he spreads on brown sugar icing.

He glances up. “Olivia Cross smiled,” he says. “I believe the world will stop turning. Take these pot holders, will you, and carry this pan.”

He takes a second tray, and in short order we’re headed across the street. “Come on, woman!” he shouts over his shoulder. “Ruse has got folks lined up for these.”

And he does. This is quite a business Wing’s started. He needs to add a coffee shop to the hotel. I help him scrub down the kitchen, and at noon he slices hot bread to eat with pieces of fish he’s fried in corn meal. While he works he tells me that Sampson’s boy, who’s nearly sixty, goes ice fishing up north. He brings back more halibut than a body can wrap in waxed paper and bury in snow. “I’ve got to get three rooms ready,” he adds. “Guests arriving late tonight. They’ll need sandwiches and coffee, some pastry—”

“I’ll help.”

“Good. But you’ve done enough for now. Why don’t you turn on the radio and listen to Ma Perkins or whatever it is that you women like?”

As it turns out, I fall asleep on my bed, and Wing has to wake me for supper. I wash my face and tuck my hair in its braid. I
argue with him that, all day, I’ve done nothing but eat. Still, he puts his arm around me, and once more we hustle across the street, coatless, to Ruse’s where he orders steak and potatoes and pecan pie. We sit at the corner table, leaning on our elbows and speaking in hushed voices like we’ve been doing this for years. Wing tells me funny things about folks in town. I confide that I miss Will’m. He tells me about Saturday night when Will’m stayed over, how he fed the cub thick cream whipped with egg yolks. I think—no wonder the furry little devil’s growing. I’m embarrassed for such a wastefulness of good food, but Wing laughs. I wonder if he knows how the cub came to live with us, the way its brothers died of hunger or loneliness, and that Ida shot its ma’am.