The Salt Eaters (2 page)

“Just this morning, fore they rolled you in with your veins open and your face bloated, this great big overgrown woman came in here tearing at her clothes, clawing at her hair, wailing to beat the band, asking for some pills. Wanted a pill cause she was in pain, felt bad, wanted to feel good. You ready?”

Velma studied the woman’s posture, the rope veins in the back of her hands, the purple shadows in the folds of her dress spilling over the stool edge, draping down toward the floor. Velma tried not to get lost in the reds and purples. She understood she was being invited to play straight man in a routine she hadn’t rehearsed.

“So I say, ‘Sweetheart, what’s the matter?’ And she says ‘My mama died and I feel so bad, I can’t go on’ and dah dah dah. Her mama died, she’s
supposed
to feel bad. Expect to feel good when ya mama’s gone! Climbed right into my lap,” she was nudging Velma to check out the skimp of her lap. “Two
hundred pounds of grief and heft if she was one-fifty. Bless her heart, just a babe of the times. Wants to be smiling and feeling good all the time. Smooth sailing as they lower the mama into the ground. Then there’s you. What’s your story?”

Velma clutched the sides of the stool and wondered what she was supposed to say at this point. What she wanted to do was go away, be somewhere, anywhere, else. But where was there to go? Far as most folks knew, she was at work or out of town.

“As I said, folks come in here moaning and carrying on and
say
they want to be healed. But like the wisdom warns, ‘Doan letcha mouf gitcha in what ya backbone caint stand.’ ” This the old woman said loud enough for the others to hear.

The Infirmary staff, lounging in the rear of the treatment room, leaned away from the walls to grunt approval, though many privately thought this was one helluva way to conduct a healing. Others, who had witnessed the miracle of Minnie Ransom’s laying on the hands over the years, were worried. It wasn’t like her to be talking on and on, taking so long a time to get started. But then the whole day’s program that Doc Serge had arranged for the visitors had been slapdash and sloppy.

The visiting interns, nurses and technicians stood by in crisp white jackets and listened, some in disbelief, others with amusement. Others scratched around in their starchy pockets skeptical, most shifted from foot to foot embarrassed just to be there. And it looked as though the session would run overtime at the rate things were going. There’d never be enough time to get through the day’s itinerary. And the bus wasn’t going to wait. The driver had made that quite plain. He would be pulling in at 3:08 from his regular run, taking a dinner break, then pulling out sharply with the charter bus at 5:30. That too had been printed up on the itinerary, but the Infirmary hosts
did not seem to be alert to the demands of time.

The staff, asprawl behind the visitors on chairs, carts, table corners, swinging their legs and doing manicures with the edges of matchbooks, seemed to be content to watch the show for hours. But less than fifteen minutes ago they’d actually been on the front steps making bets, actually making cash bets with patients and various passers-by, that the healing session would take no more than five or ten minutes. And here it was already going on 3:00 with what could hardly be called an auspicious beginning. The administrator, Dr. Serge, had strolled out, various and sundry folk had come strolling in. The healer had sat there for the longest time playing with her bottom lip, jangling her bracelets, fiddling with the straps of the patient’s gown. And now she was goofing around, deliberately, it seemed, exasperating the patient. There seemed to be, many of the visitors concluded, a blatant lack of discipline at the Southwest Community Infirmary that made suspect the reputation it enjoyed in radical medical circles.

“Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.”

“That’s the truth,” muttered one of the “old-timers,” as all old folks around the Infirmary were called. “Don’t I know the truth of that?” the little woman continued, pushing up the sleeves of her bulky sweater as if home, as if readying up to haul her mother-in-law from wheelchair to toilet, or grab up the mop or tackle the laundry. She would have had more to say about the burdens of the healthy had she not been silenced by an elbow in her side pocket and noticed folks were cutting their eyes at her. Cora Rider hunched her shoulders sharply and tucked her head deep into the turtleneck by way of begging pardon from those around her, many of whom still held their clinic cards and appointment slips in their hands as if passing
through the room merely, with no intention of staying for the whole of it.

“Thank you, Spirit” drifted toward her. She searched the faces of the circle of twelve that ringed the two women in the center of the room, wondering whether God was being thanked for giving Miz Minnie the gift or for shutting Cora up. The twelve, or The Master’s Mind as some folks called them, stood with heads bowed and hands clasped. Yellow seemed to predominate, yellow and white. Shirts, dresses, smocks, slacks—yellow and white were as much an announcement that a healing session had been scheduled as the notice on the board. The bobbing roses, pink and yellow chiffon flowerettes on Mrs. Sophie Heywood’s hat, seemed to suggest that she was the one who’d praised God. Though the gent humming in long meter, his striped tie looking suspiciously like a remnant from a lemonade-stand awning, could just as well have been the one, Cora Rider thought. Though what Mr. Daniels had to be so grateful for all the time was a mystery to her, what with an alcoholic wife, a fast and loose bunch of daughters, and a bedraggled shoeshine parlor.

Cora Rider shrugged and bowed her head in prayer, or at least in imitation of the circle folks, who seemed, as usual, lost in thought until several members looked up, suddenly aware that one of their number was inching away from the group. Cora looked up too, and like the old-timers and staffers who noticed, was astounded. For surely Sophie Heywood of all people, godmother of Velma Henry, co-convener of The Master’s Mind, could not actually be leaving.

Sophie Heywood had been in attendance at every other major event in Velma Henry’s life. No one could say for sure if Sophie had been there when Velma had tried to do herself in, that part of the girl’s story hadn’t been put together yet. But she’d been there at the beginning with her baby-catching
hands. There again urging “pretty please” on Velma’s behalf while Mama Mae, the blood mother, plaited peach switches to tear up some behind. Calling herself running away to China to seek her fortune like some character she’d read about in a book, young Velma had dug a hole in the landfill, then tunneled her way through a drainpipe that led to the highway connector past the marshes before her sister Palma could catch up with her and bring her back.

All those years Sophie had been turning a warm eye on the child’s triumphs, a glass eye on everything else, which was a lot, to hear the old folks tell it, as the girl, breaking her bonds and casting away the cord, was steady making her bed hard. For those old-timers, though, that walked the chalk, why a woman such as Sophie Heywood, chapter president of the Women’s Auxiliary of the Sleeping Car Porters for two decades running, would even cross the street for the likes of Velma Henry was a mystery anyway. But there it was, so must it be—the godmother ever ready to turn the lamp down low on the godchild’s indiscretions.

The prayer group moved closer to repair the circle, searching Sophie’s face for a clue to the break and the odd leavetaking. But the woman’s eyes were as still as water in the baptismal pit, reminding them that she had been there too the day the congregation had stood by waiting for a moving of the water, had shouted when Velma had come through religion, had cheered when she walked across the stage of Douglass High to get her diploma, had stood up at her first wedding, hasty as you please and in a night club too, and worn white to the railroad station as the rites of good riddance had been performed. And when Velma had swapped that out-of-town-who’s-his-people-anyway husband for a good home boy whose goodness could maybe lay her wildness down and urge her through college, there was Sophie in her best threads following the child down
the aisle, her needle still working in the hem of the gown.

And here she was now, Sophie Heywood, not only walking away from her godchild, but removing Scorpio from the Mind. Heads turned round as she reached the door and stood there gazing up, they thought, at the ceiling, drawing other heads up too to study the ceiling’s luster, the gleam of the fluorescent rods. And study they did, for Sophie was forever reading signs before they were even so.

“Every event is preceded by a sign,” she always instructed her students, or anyone else in her orbit who’d listen. “We’re all clairvoyant if we’d only know it.” The lesson was not lost on Cora Rider, whose bed, kitchen table and porch swing were forever cluttered with
Three Wise Men, Red Devil, Lucky Seven, Black Cat, Three Witches, Aunt Dinah’s Dream Book
, and other incense-fragrant softback books that sometimes resulted in a hit. Now, though, like some others, Cora studied the pockmarks in the plaster, the dance of light overhead, searching not so much for a number to box as for a clue to Sophie Heywood’s exit.

Buster and Nadeen, the couple from the Teenage Parent Clinic, studied the ceiling too, recalling the counsel of Mrs. Heywood. Close enough to hear each other’s breathing, his arm around her, palm resting on the side of her bulging belly, he reviewed the way “sign reading” had been applied by the political theorists at the Academy of the 7 Arts, while she, palms resting on the rise of her stomach, remained attentive to the movement beneath her hands.

What anyone made of the shadows on the ceiling or of the fissures in the plaster overhead was not well telegraphed around the room, though many were visibly intent on decoding the flickering touch of mind on mind and looking about for someone to head Sophie Heywood off at the pass. What did bounce around the circle of eleven was the opinion that Sophie should
return and restore the group intact. But what jumped the circle to pass through bone, white jackets, wood chairs and air for Sophie to contemplate, did not bounce back. The only answer was the high-pitch wail of birds overhead like whistling knives in the sky.

Sophie opened the door without a backward glance at the group or at the godchild huddled on the stool so mournful and forlorn. The child Sophie grieved for took another form altogether. So stepping over the threshold into the hall she was stepping over that sack of work tools by his bedroom door again, a heavy gray canvas sack spilling out before enemy eyes—screwdriver, syringe, clockworks, dynamite. She looked out into the hall of the Southwest Community Infirmary, fresh white paint dizzying her, temples buzzing, eyes stinging. Smitty.

Smitty climbing the leg of the statue. The other students running down the street waving banners made from sheets. Mrs. Taylor watching from the window, leaning on pillows she’d made from rally banners. Smitty on the arm of the war hero chanting “Hell, no, we won’t go.” Sirens scattering the marchers. TV cameras and trucks shoving through the crowd. Mrs. Taylor screaming in the window. A boy face down in the street, his book bag flattened. The police rushing the statue like a tank. The package up under Smitty’s arm. The other flung across the hind of the first brass horse. The blow that caught him in the shins.

Sophie face down in the jailhouse bed springs. Portland Edgers, her neighbor, handed a billy club. The sheriff threatening.

Mrs. Taylor moaning in the window. The boy gagging on his own blood face down in the street, the cameras on him. Smitty with a bull horn. A Black TV announcer misnumbering the crowd, mixmatching the facts, lost to the community.
Smitty. The blow that caught him in the groin.

The blow that caught her in the kidney. Someone howling in the next cell. A delegation from the church out front talking reasonably. Sophie face down on the jailhouse bed springs, the rusty metal cutting biscuits out of her cheeks.

Smitty kicking at the clubs, the hands. Smitty jammed between the second brass horse and the flagpole. The package balanced in the crook of the bayonet. The blow that caught him from behind.

Portland Edgers turning on the sheriff and wrestled down on her back and beaten. Sophie mashed into the springs. Portland Edgers screaming into her neck.

Smitty pulled down against the cement pedestal, slammed against the horses’ hooves, dragged on his stomach to the van. A boot in his neck. Child. Four knees in his back. Son. The package ripped from his grip. The policeman racing on his own path and none other’s. The man, the statue going up Pegasus. Manes, hooves, hinds, the brass head of some dead soldier and a limb of one once-live officer airborne over city hall. A flagpole buckling at the knees.

And a tall building tottering trembling falling down inside her face down in the jailhouse bed springs teeth splintering and soul groaning. Smitty. Edgers. Reverend Michaels in the corridor being reasonable.

Sophie Heywood closed the door of the treatment room. And there was something in the click of it that made many of the old-timers, veterans of the incessant war—Garveyites, Southern Tenant Associates, trade unionists, Party members, Pan-Africanists—remembering night riders and day traitors and the cocking of guns, shudder.

“Are you sure, sweetheart? I’m just asking is all,” Minnie Ransom was saying, playfully pulling at her lower lip till three
different shades of purple showed. “Take away the miseries and you take away some folks’ reason for living. Their conversation piece anyway.”

“I been there,” Cora Rider testified, wagging both hands by the wrists overhead. “I know exactly what the good woman means,” she assured all around her.

“We all been there, one way or t’other,” the old gent with the lemonade tie said, hummed, chanted and was echoed by his twin from the other side of the circle, singing in common meter just like it was church.

Minnie Ransom’s hands went out at last, and the visitors, noting the way several people around them checked their watches, concluded that this was either the official beginning of the healing or the end, it was hard to tell.