The Salt Eaters (8 page)

“We going in the chapel, or you plan to talk these here flowers to death?”

It seemed to Dr. Julius Meadows, leaning against the desk chagrined, playing with the buttons of the stereo, that the right hand of the healer woman was on its own, that she had gone off somewhere and left it absent-mindedly behind on the patient’s shoulder. And it seemed that the patient was elsewhere as well. So like the catatonics he’d observed in psychiatric. The essential self gone off, the shell left behind. Dr. Meadows ran a hand through his hair and it crackled as though there were a storm brewing outside the window. He gazed out wondering where catatonia was, if it might be in the woods behind the Infirmary. Wondered if the two women had arranged a secret rendezvous in the hills and if going there he would find them both transformed, the older woman in full lotus under a blanket like the weathered photos his roommate had brought back from India. The younger a laurel bush, as in some legend,
blooming in pieces somewhere in storybook memory.

He wanted to leave, but how to go without telling himself he was on a fool’s errand, how to find some rational reason for leaving that would answer any question he might pose to himself? Need some air, he thought, rubbing the starchy jacket. Need a smoke, he thought, patting his pocket. Inching toward the exit door, he noticed that no one was paying him the slightest attention. But then that was usually the way. His presence or absence mattered to no one, not even to his patients he worried over through the nights. The knob was cold, chilled him through and through. The new paint job, finished in time for this round of visitors he was sure, was blinding.

Buster, walking himself and Nadeen closer, his right palm warm, alert to any movement on that side of her stomach, was certain that something was finally happening. He walked them still closer to see what. Mrs. Henry, his neighbor till she left bed and board, as his parents said sadly, twitched her face, cracked and crazed like the soup tureen in his aunt’s china cabinet, then it was emptied out suddenly of anything he could give a name to. It was just as though Aunt Sudie had gotten up from an unsatisfactory dinner and removed the ladle from the chipped bowl, muttering, then walked to the back door, inched her foot in the crack, then swung it wide with her hip, holding the door back flat with her behind while she dumped the contents into the yard. And for a second there, he’d have been willing to swear that he saw two faces at once on Mrs. Henry. Like in an artsy photograph or like when he took his glasses off too fast. Or like he felt sometimes waking with a bump, his night face sinking down behind the day one and him touching himself to be sure he was there.

He patted the mother of his child while he searched for a “like” that would pin it down so he could be done with it and
leave. He would have to be on his toes for the interviews with Dr. Serge and Mr. Cleotus. They had no patience with students who weren’t wide awake and all there. Like. Mrs. Henry’s double-exposure face was like. He bit his lip and sucked at the mustache coming in. Like at the airport at Christmas when his father, home from the Islands, turned at the glass and waved. And his father’s sun tan, like a carnival mask with loose stringing, slipped a bit to the side of his face and Buster thought it might be time to check his prescription. That wasn’t exactly the like. But to hell with like. It always got him in trouble. “Never mind what it’s like,” his father told him and Nadeen told him too. “Deal with what is, Buster, with what is.”

He tucked in his top lip and scraped his teeth against the growth he was sure was a manly mustache and pondered the next question. How to be in two places at once? He needed to write up the interviews and hand them in next day, then he’d be done with his course work until finals. But how to be there in Dr. Serge’s office and be there in the treatment room too when Mrs. Henry came round? He glanced at Nadeen, so intent yet self-preoccupied. She wasn’t the most observant or lively reporter. She would no doubt shrug and say nothing much happened. “Mrs. Henry just got well that’s all and then everybody left.” He wondered if he really meant to go through with it, marry this girl who was barely his kid sister’s age. He grazed his lips and mustache against her temples and hugged her. “Gotta go,” he whispered. She never looked up his way.

Old Wife was pulling at Minnie’s sleeve. “You’re losing your audience, Min. Folks walking out.”

“I’m gonna lose the patient too if you don’t give me some directions. She’s lost a lot of blood and her system’s still full of gas. I just can’t seem to generate the energy to bring her back and restore her.”

“It’ll be all right, Min. Is all right right now. Then you can go home and see about yo sef.”

“Mmm,” thinking about home, her slippers, the cushy couch, the throw rugs that would be bright and clean of cat fur and nut shells. The widow lady and her lodger had been at it all morning and she’d be overwhelmed at the door with lemon oil and ammonia. Or if the lodger had been allowed a free hand, the floors would be slick with van van polish and the whole house reeking of Peaceful House Incense #9. They did their best, but all she really wanted was for someone to drive the porch nails down so she could go barefoot. And for someone to move the cord of wood from the yard to the window within reach of the couch. And for someone to fix her kitchen window, propped up since Christmas with a stick of firewood. It didn’t seem too much to ask. It didn’t seem too much to get done for a woman who could get patients up off the surgeon’s table, for a woman who could get patients to throw off their stitches, for a woman who could drive snakes out of folks’ heads. But she wanted someone to do it without her leading them.

She thought of Dr. Meadows, wandering about in front of the Infirmary, studying the glyphs the old masons had chiseled into its face, reading the memorial plaques and glancing about toward the bus terminal, toward the park, as if not sure which way to ramble. And she saw herself on the porch with her silver tea set, legs crossed, swinging her new beige T-strap suedes, brushing the crease in his gray slacks. The doctor leaning in the rocker telling her all about himself.

“Free to go anywhere at all in the universe,” Minnie muttered. “So why do I choose to be bothered with this gal?” But knowing that at the first sign of a shift on the stool, or a signal from Old Wife or a word from within, she would tear past the flower beds, race back along the path, sunk up to her hem in
hot sand, and tilting would race down the cliffs to Velma Henry’s side to take up the yoke and pull toward life.

“Love, Min. Love won’t let you let her go. I’m not the leastways worried. Cause it’s got everything to do with good.”

“Love. Good. God. She don’t want that. Getting so none of them want that. The children are spoiling, Old Wife. Want their loving done with sweet-tooth cupcakes and shiny cars and credit cards and grins from white folks.”

“You believe that or just carryin on like your patients?”

“Oh, you’ve seen’m. Out there in deep waters showing off, forgetting everything they ever knew about sharks and the undertow.”

“Why then you rip them fancy clothes off, Min, and thrash out into them waters, churn up all them bones we dropped from the old ships, churn up all that brine from the salty deep where our tears sank, and you grab them chirren by the neck and bop’m a good one and drag’m on back to shore and fling’m down and jump to it, pumping and cussing, fussing and cracking they ribs if ya have to to let’m live, Min. Cause love won’t let you let’m go.”

“But they want to go, that’s the hurting part.”

“Like you tole the lap sitter this morning, Min, when you hurt, hurt. But when you see the chirren calling down thunder and going up in flames, Min. Why then you snatch you a blanket—”

“A scabby, foul-smelling blanket off one of them mules we nary saw hide nor hair of, nor acres neither.”

“Whatchu know about a mule blanket, Minnie Ransom? What on earth would you do with a mule and some acres? You was raised on eiderdowns and girls on wages fixing your breakfast on a tray. You sittin up here with your special-made clothes on and lingerie with letters on’m talking about you’d know how to get next to a mule long enough to get they blanket.”

“And I’d throw that blanket over them chirren’s head like a kidnap snatching sack and throw’m on the ground and roll’m in the dirt and jump all over them to smother out the flames till fire turn’m loose and they can live. Like you say, ole gal, the chirren are our glory.”

“See, I told you, Min, you’d be feeling better once we got to chapel.”

“We can’t stay long now. The loa are setting up to make music for Velma to dance by. We got to free her up from fire and water so she don’t drown in air like some backass fish.”

“Min—”

“Then we got to summon one of the loa to see after the Henry gal’s recuperation fore some God-slight notion lurking around near her master brain turn her water wrong.”

“Min—”

“Check the moon, Old Wife, something’s up in a fiercesome way between the men and the women and I don’t want to get caught short of teas and things. Sophie gonna have to recruit some of these youngsters and train’m at gathering.”

“I’ma get my walking shoes soon, Min, cause them haints fixing to beat on them drums with them cat bones and raise a ruckus. So you just leave me here and I’ll talk to you after while. I can’t stand all that commotion them haints calling music.”

“Old Wife, what are you but a haint?”

“I’m a servant of the Lord, beggin your pardon.”

“I know that. But you a haint. You dead ain’t you?”

“There is no death in spirit, Min, I keep telling you. Why you so hard head? You and that gal on the stool cut from the same cloth. And a rough bolt of dry goods it is too.”

“Yes, well, I’ll hold that thought. But meanwhile let’s get on with the business at hand. I want to go home, set my hair and brew some tea. Expecting company tonight,” winking.

“Minnie Ransom, I’m gonna be right there on the porch with you. So you best be prepared to put aside any hussy notions about messing with that doctor man, you heifer.”

“Lord, I hope you are recording this all. I hope you are beaming down on this scene I never auditioned for, Lord. Hope you see how your humble servant got her hands overfull with both the quick, not so quick and the dead. So when I petition you, Lord, with feeble praise and bold requests, don’t turn me down now, gotta help me and answer my prayers.”

“So little faith? Your prayers are always answered, Min.”

“This I know. But sometimes the answer is no, Old Wife. Look who I got for a spirit guide, an old stick-in-the-mud who don’t even remember from one session to the next the diagnoses and the treatment. Sweet Jesus.”

“Be careful, Min Ransom, you heading for a fall. I’m not even sure you deserve your gift.”

“Old Wife, good and bad and deserve and the rest of that stuff have got nothing, I’m telling you, nothing to do with it. Now you hold that thought while I get on back there and put on some music for the folks.”

“What’s with Palma?” Cecile had been looking out the bus window.

“Had a vexing dream about Velma. I guess that’s why we’re on our way to the Claybourne Festival.”

“What’s her sign—Palma’s?”

“Kiss me neck. You, the staunch Marxist-Maoist-dialectical-historical-materialist who is always plenty short mouthed about the buzhwahh elements in the improvisations? You, the hard-nosed scientific bullshit detector? You, Inez, want to know Palma’s sign? Backside!”

“But I’m not a materialist. I’m Chicana. No, hear me out.”

Mai leaned forward. “Who’s got the color film for the Bell and Howell?”

“Pass the thermos,” one of the members of the troupe said.

“Cecile, you got your screwdriver handy, or a nail file?”

“Because the material without the spiritual and psychic does not a dialectic make.”

“Gotcha.”

“What’s this vile and loathsome brew, Chezia?”

“Yerba mate, nectar of the gods.”

“Her gods, Inez, are not our gods, O sister of the corn.”

“Obviously. Your gods still alive, Chezia?”

“The screwdriver’s married to the hammer, Nilda. You must take the whole sack and return it in one lump, if you please.”

“Ask the driver if we can open the windows. The air conditioning is off, I think.”

The driver was listening to the young woman just behind him. The front of her T-shirt read: Seven Sisters.

“Lonnie, my ole comrade at the barricades, sitting on a mat with a shaved head, nibbling on a communion wafer and sipping distilled water through a glass straw, Tibetan wind-chime music on the box, no Coltrane in sight, and no conversation except an occasional
Om
. It trips me out. The changes. And meanwhile Bakke and Carter and the KKK and the Nazis and COINTELPRO not skipping a beat.”

“Any chance of our doing a mural for the Academy of the 7 Arts?” Mai was trying to get Palma’s attention. “We’ve got a suitcaseful of paints under the bus.”

“We’re staying on after carnival or whatever it is, yes?”

“Palma, when exactly does the Claybourne Festival start?”

The bus driver, halting at the railroad crossing, eavesdropped on the conversations around him. In the seats to the side and behind were the colored women who’d gotten on in Barnwell with satchels and bags and knapsacks. All in bossy T-shirts—
No Nukes, Stop the Esmeralda, Get the U.S. Out Of
 … It would have meant staring at unbridled bosoms to read it all. He guessed he was old-fashioned, like his son said, only that wasn’t the term his son had used.

The clang clang and winking lights, left right, left right, were doing something to him. He searched through his crossword
puzzle repertoire for the word, any word, a word to worry over the spelling of to distract him from the lights. He might have found one, but it was too damn hot to think and it was overheating underfoot too, scorched metal fumes in his face scraping his throat, burning his eyes. He slid the window open and hung his cap on the hook. He’d have to do something about his hair. The office was leaning on all the gray hairs. For years they hadn’t hired colored guys. Now, just when he was getting some seniority, they were talking about early retirement.