Chapter 13
The next morning, after dropping Jonah off and stopping by the church to fill out two government forms to be dropped in the mail and answer several phone calls, Becca loaded the rolling cooler with frozen meals and bagged toiletries and dragged it to her car. It was Tuesday morning, her field time.
The soil and pavement saturated from yesterday’s rain pumped water vapor into the air under the steamy sun, and several early thunderheads blossomed brilliant and white at the edge of blue sky along the eastern horizon. After loading the cooler into her trunk, Becca took a moment to breath in the hot moist air, then went around to all the doors and cranked down the windows. Unlike Zach, she loved North Carolina summers—bright humid mornings like this most of all, along with sultry, fetid nights with fireflies flashing and cicadas purring. There was so much life in this air, so much opportunity and growth implied. Today she felt especially alive; and the moisture and bright sun conspired for more life to come—right this minute, this very instant. She jumped in and started the car, turned the radio up loud, and drove off into her duties with the winds of promise swirling from all directions through her long blond hair.
She parked in front of Nina and Tina’s apartment. She’d had a message on her machine from Tina when she got to work Monday, telling her that Nina had passed away in her sleep late Saturday night. Father Mark had gone by to see Tina Sunday afternoon, and they were in the midst of making funeral arrangements. When Becca’d asked him if she should still make a visit to Tina on Tuesday morning, he’d replied, “By all means. She needs all the support we can give her during this difficult transition.” So Becca walked up the stairs to their second-floor apartment with a paper bag containing a week’s worth of meals and a sympathy card taped to the front. She wasn’t sure if she’d find Tina home, but was prepared to leave the bag with the next door neighbor, a retired nurse named Ruth, if Tina weren’t there.
But Tina, dressed in her Sunday-best navy dress and pumps and with her hair in a tight bun and her face tastefully made up, answered after the first knock. “Good morning, Becca. I’m so glad you kept the date.”
“You look beautiful, Tina,” Becca blurted out. Every other time she’d visited, Tina had looked haggard in her slacks and T-shirt, the dark circles of worry and fatigue weighing down her eyes.
Tina nodded thanks. “I just returned from viewing her body. She looked so peaceful, more at rest than in all these last weeks when she was fighting the whole time.” Tina shuddered at the painful memory.
Becca set her bag on the breezeway and gave the old woman a hug from where she stood one step below, her face pressing against the broach at the center of Tina’s chest. “I’m so sorry, Tina.”
“Don’t be, child. There are worse things than a peaceful death.”
Becca stood up straight. “I’ll try to understand that.” She grabbed the bag and stepped into the cool apartment, then handed it to Tina after she’d shut the door. “At least you won’t have to cook this week.”
Tina carried the bag to the nearby kitchen, which was open to the living room through an eating counter, and put the meals in the freezer. “Actually, I look forward to going to the market and cooking again,” she said over her shoulder. She came back into the living room. “Thank you for the card,” she said as she gestured for Becca to sit in the near arm chair. “I’ll open it later, if that’s O.K.”
“It just says I’m sorry, Tina. And I am. I’ll miss her.”
Tina nodded but didn’t try to speak. They both sat.
Becca said, “If you wanted to go to the store and get stuff to cook, why didn’t you let me know? I could’ve sat with Nina, or scheduled someone.”
“It wasn’t about getting someone to watch her, dear. Many offered.”
“You were afraid she might slip away while you were gone?”
“Not that either. I always knew she’d let me know when she was about to leave. And I was right. I’d drifted off to sleep in the chair by her bed but woke with a start at 1:42. No reason for me to wake except the only reason—she’d woke me, though she never uttered a sound or made a movement. She took her last breath at 1:53, my hand in hers.”
Becca fought back tears even as Tina’s voice never wavered and her clear gaze never faltered. “Then why didn’t you go out or cook, for a break?” she asked, trying to turn the conversation away from the deep sadness she suddenly felt welling up inside her.
Tina smiled. “I couldn’t enjoy life while Nina was suffering. It just didn’t feel right.”
“And now?”
“She’s at peace, and she wants me to be happy.”
“But you’ll use our meals?”
Tina nodded. “For company in a pinch, and to remember your kind care.”
“The Ministry’s,” Becca corrected.
“Yes, we appreciated that. But it’s you we’ll most remember—your kind face and open heart.”
Becca nodded thanks. “Can I come by occasionally?”
“I’d like that, but don’t take time from others to visit me. I’m fine now. You helped us through.”
Becca nodded. “Don’t know what I did, but thank you for saying so.”
“You know.”
Becca stopped by Ronique’s apartment with her magazines and toiletries. The crippled-up woman was in the same spot on the couch though dressed in a different sweat suit. Her face was even more taut in its grimace of pain and despair, her skin more gray and lifeless. Though the apartment had the same odor of musty air and sweaty clothes, Becca didn’t bother to raise the blinds or open the windows, as the thick humid air outdoors would do little to freshen the apartment. She set the toiletries beside the sink and the magazines on the coffee table, then spent a few minutes picking up clothes and toys scattered about the room, placing dirty dishes in the sink and food wrappers in the trash can. That can was overflowing; so she lifted out the full bag, sealed it with a twist tie, and inserted a new liner. She set the bag by the door to be tossed in the dumpster on her way back to her car. She wanted to rush out that door, with the trash and her morning’s enthusiasm and hope still intact. And she knew Ronique wanted her gone, insofar as she could want anything other than relief from her pain.
But Becca couldn’t just leave, couldn’t concede defeat to pain and suffering—even in this one place, this one defeated woman—without some token of resistance, for her as much as Ronique. She returned to the couch and knelt on the floor beside Ronique’s head, the woman’s face and eyes turned toward the back of the couch. “The Ministry is forming a Home Nursing Group of retired professionals from our churches. The focus will be on preventative care through testing and the like, but I realize now we may want to look into rehab and chronic pain management. If we get this group going, would you be interested in their help?”
Ronique said nothing, didn’t even move.
“Can I give them your name?”
Still no answer.
Becca shook her head and stood.
Beneath her in a whisper, the woman said, “I need help.”
Becca nodded and touched her lightly on the shoulder. “I’ll bring what I can.”
Becca had a new name on her list—Adam Tucker. He lived in the same project as Ronique, three buildings away. She grabbed her clipboard off the front seat and left the car where it was parked, choosing to walk the short distance to Mr. Tucker’s building through the parking lot’s sweltering oven. Though sweat quickly formed on her brow and she had to squint against the brutal sun, Becca felt the heat and glare as regenerative after the stale grayness of Ronique’s apartment and the life, if you could call it that, that apartment contained. By the time she reached the first floor apartment listed on her pad, she’d largely shed that cloud and found the way back to her earlier optimism.
In the relief from the sun (if not from the heat and humidity) offered by the breezeway above, Becca took a minute to review her notes before knocking on the door. Adam Tucker was a case that had come to her from County Social Services. He was a
twenty-two-year-old (her age) African-American man who had recently been paralyzed from the chest down. Medicaid had overseen his hospital care and in-patient rehab, and Social Services had set him up in this apartment with a wheelchair and food stamps. Becca was here to see what gaps existed in these government services (she knew there’d be many) and if the Ministry could assist in filling any of those gaps. She didn’t like what she called “reverse referrals”—Social Services sending her cases—when she had an overload of cases already. She preferred that the case flow go in the other direction—from her office to Social Services. But to preserve good will and cooperation, she accepted their occasional referrals and hoped this trickle would not one day become a flood.
After knocking loudly and firmly (an unnatural habit she’d been forced to learn), Becca heard a mechanized purr inside the apartment start then stop, start then stop. The door opened a crack.
“Wait a minute,” a voice said through the opening, then the purr, then a crash as something fell over. “Oh, shit,” the voice muttered. “You come in now.”
Becca pushed the door open with her foot. After a moment her eyes adjusted to the apartment’s dim entry hall, and she saw the neat cornrows at the top of a man’s head as he bent over from a mechanized wheelchair to pick up some magazines strewn across the foyer next to a toppled table.
Becca stepped inside, set the table up against the wall, put her clipboard on the table, then helped the man pick up his magazines and newspapers.
The man handed her the two magazines he’d retrieved, then sat upright in the chair and watched her finish the cleanup. “Didn’t know I got angel care with my food stamps and this raggedy chair.”
Becca set the pile of periodicals on the table then faced him. “No angel care, just Becca Coles from Ecumenical Outreach Ministries.”
“Ecu-what?” the man asked, soundless laughter animating his whole face with a child-like spontaneity and exuberance.
“Ecumenical,” Becca said, trying to suppress an urge to laugh. “It means from multiple denominational—oh, forget it! I’m from a church ministry that tries to provide services that the government doesn’t provide. County Social Services referred your name to me.” She burst into laughter. “I’m sorry,” she said when she’d caught her breath. “I’m not laughing at you; I’m laughing with you. Something about you makes me happy inside.”
“I do that to folks,” he said. “All my life. First they call me Tuck, then Yuck, then Luck, then Fuck. Always say it with a laugh. Then they call me Toot and think that funny as hell. ‘Dance, Toot’ they say. ‘Show us you moves, Toot.’ Now this,” he said and looked down at the scrawny lifeless legs emerging from his cut-off jeans—emaciated thighs and calves, thin dry skin covering his bony knees and shins down to his limp swollen feet pushed into brown leather slippers. “Now I guess I be Tuck again.”
“I’m sorry,” Becca said, though a smile still curled up from her lips and lightly pinched the skin around her eyes.
“No need. I better off. And I still make people laugh. In rehab, they always put me out front during group exercise—make everybody laugh through they pain and suffering. I tell the man they should pay me. He say they is—‘in the joy of helping others’. Maybe he from you Ecu Ministry. Thing is, he right. I always like to make folks laugh. Why stop now?”
“Why indeed, Mr. Tucker?” Becca said. “Thanks for making me laugh. I needed it.”
“They always do,” he said. “Come in and sit down, but let me go first. This crazy chair like to run you over if you get in the way. They say it rebuilt like new. I say it got a gremlin.”
Becca followed in his herky-jerky wake to the small den off the narrow hallway barely wide enough for his chair and clearly not designed for wheelchair accessibility. He turned the chair into the den and parked it in a wide space in front of the window with a series of disjointed maneuvers. She waited for him to come to a full stop before stepping into the room and sitting in the one seat available—a thrift-shop version of a Queen Anne chair with wooden arms and legs and an upholstered (and stained) seat and back.
He looked at her with his sweet and open face of coffee-colored skin, droopy eyes and big ears but thin lips that seemed to always be moving, even when they were still. “I’d offer you something to drink but you’ll have to get it youself. I’d spill every drop for I got back.”
Becca said, “I’m fine, but thank you. Can I get you something?”
“Tuck fine. Glad for the company.”
Becca nodded. “Tell me a little about yourself, Mr. Tucker.” She balanced her clipboard on the right arm of the chair.
“Tuck,” he said. “Ain’t never been Mister. Ain’t going to start now.”
Becca nodded. “Tell me what happened to you, Tuck.”
“Drive-by. Twenty-two slug smaller than a pea hit between T-6 and T-7 and cut my cord, it and pieces of bone it shatter. I hit the floor hard but everybody on the floor. That what you do when you hear the pop-pop-pop. You hit the floor. Then the pops stop and the tires screech and the homeys gone and everybody get up cept Toot. They say ‘Come on, Toot. Get up, Toot. Show us you dance.’ And I be trying to stand but my legs don’t move. I hit ’em with my fists. I drag ’em side to side. Nothing. Ain’t no pain. Didn’t even see no blood till the medics cut off my shirt and find this little old hole in my side. And just like that Toot don’t dance.”
Becca shook her head. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be, angel. This Tuck’s ticket out—this or dead. I like this.”
“Nobody deserves to be shot and paralyzed at twenty-two.”
“I did, much as anybody. I hang with the boys. I enjoy they protection and they pleasure. You don’t think I get my nickname from playing the trumpet, do you?” His droopy eyes sparkled at the joke and his face dissolved in that silent laughter.
In fact Becca had hoped that horn playing was the reference, despite a more accurate realization born of these weeks in the trenches of poverty and drug plague. She kept silent and resisted her desire to laugh with him at the joke.
Tuck’s silent laugh faded and he held her eyes in a moment of gravity all the more weighty in that light-hearted face. “I don’t do dope no more. Don’t got the money or the stash; wouldn’t want it even if I did. Thing is, I never wanted it. Just a life to live. Don’t ever think about it till that pea cut you cord.”
“And all those friends you had?”
“Gone. They don’t want to see me. They see me, they think. They think, they get killed. Nobody think in the hood, just act and react.”
“Maybe if they’d think, they’d change.”
“To what—banker? teacher? store clerk? They but one game in town; you play it till it ends or you get yanked.”
“Like you.” The words were harsher than she’d intended, harsher than she knew she had in her.
Tuck nodded. “Like I say—this a good thing, better than the other.”
“What do you need for your new life, Mr. Tucker?”
“New friends to replace the old.”
Becca smiled. “White O.K.?”
“White better.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know Toot.”
Becca nodded. “Ecu Ministry types O.K.?”
“I’ll practice the word.”
“I visit on Tuesday mornings. I’ll let other volunteers make their own arrangements. Your phone work?”
“If this chair don’t bust it first.”
“I’ll see if I can get a serviceman to check those controls.”
Tuck nodded. “Don’t want to plow over my angel.”
Becca stood. “She can run pretty fast if she has to.”
“I see that.”
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Tucker.” She shook his hand. It was as strong and sure as his legs were limp and helpless. “I’ll let myself out—deprive your gremlin of the fun.”
“He lonely already.”
Becca skipped her visit to Marlene Saunders. Father Mark had t
old her that Mrs. Saunders was in the process of moving into a cottage in a newly opened retirement community south of town. She’d be sure to get Marlene’s new address and stop by for a visit next Tuesday.
That left only Solomon Murphy. She had a week’s worth of newspapers for him along with a battery-powered cassette player. She hoped to one day coordinate the sharing of cassettes between Solomon and his grandson Isaiah while Isaiah was on active duty; but for now she had to settle for cassettes of weekly news features and books on tape that she’d got from the Library for the Blind downtown. Though Solomon wasn’t blind and apparently could read well enough, she guessed he’d appreciate the sound of a voice when hers, or the occasional neighbor’s, wasn’t available. She hoped he’d like readings of Haley’s Roots and White’s In Search of History. Both cassettes were first volumes of multi-volume sets, so she could add to them or end the experiment if he weren’t interested.
The twenty-minute ride into the county gave her a chance to reflect on her already full morning. The visit with Tuck left her confused and uneasy. On the one hand, she was encouraged by his apparent resilience and equanimity in the wake of a horrific tragedy. On the other hand, she couldn’t help but see a possible future for Jonah, and countless promising young boys like Jonah, in Tuck’s inexorable implosion—a precious life pushed along by forces outside anyone’s control till that life crashes one time, not to rise. The sound of Tuck’s voice with its matter-of-fact pop-pop-pop sent a shudder of foreboding down her spine.
But the sun and the hot wind blowing through her hair and the pine woods and intermittent tobacco fields racing past steadily shouldered her confusion and doubts aside. Soon she was singing along with the radio, chanting the words of Pat Benetar’s “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” and trying hard not to take the refrain’s dare too much to heart.
When she stopped in front of Solomon’s shack, the farmstead again appeared deserted. She climbed out of the car with a canvas tote containing the newspapers and cassette player and tapes, and peeked around the shady end of the house expecting to find him in his former place on the rough-hewn bench. But the bench was empty. She walked all the way around the shack—it didn’t take long—but saw no one. She stepped up on the creaking porch and knocked on the plank door that didn’t have a lock, just some leather hinges and a crude but ingenious wooden latch controlled by a wooden lever cut through a snug hole in the door.
“Mr. Murphy,” she said softly. “Anybody home?”
No answer.
She lifted the latch and pushed the door open partway. “Hello?”
Still no answer.
She glanced around the inside of the shack. There wasn’t much to see—a couple wooden chairs, a simple board table, a galvanized tub on a tall bench, a couple shelves nailed to the pine-log walls, a cot off in one corner, a woodstove at the back with a rusty pipe extending through the roof, a few lanterns placed strategically around the room. It was only then that Becca realized that one of the buildings behind the house must be a privy—Mr. Murphy had neither plumbing nor electricity. She was glad she’d got a battery-powered cassette player from the church supply room and bought extra batteries.
She pulled the door shut till the wood latch fell securely into its wooden strike. She turned and looked out across the farm and drive from the shade of the narrow porch. The only bright color in the entire landscape was the teal blue of her car, and she couldn’t help but wonder—her mind drifting outside itself—how that color had found its way into this time-frozen place, who had let it into this world of muted earth tones, everything a shade of brown or green or gray, even the sky a hazy dull steel gray despite the full sun.
Becca sighed. It really was a stage set from a Caldwell drama, and Solomon an actor playing the role last week, off today. So what were these newspapers, these tapes? And what was her mission? Like last week, her head swirled, though in a crisis of identity this time. What did she think she was doing, playing in a world so far from home, on this vast stage for which she had no training, no history or instinct? And if this were a stage set—a place for her to visit but not live, certainly not impact or reshape—then what about Tuck and Ronique and even Jonah? What right did she have entering these other worlds, trying to change these foreign lives, and at whose invitation? The canvas bag felt like a lead weight. She couldn’t budge from where she stood.
Then the sound of metal striking metal rang out across the land—ping, ping, ping. She gazed in the direction of the sound, across the long tobacco rows out into the hazy distance where pines that looked like gray feathers brushing the hair of a silver horizon marked the end of one field, start of another. Ping, ping, ping—the sound rang out again. This time she saw a silver glint there near the pine shadows, beyond the tobacco. She dropped her canvas bag near the door and started across the drive and through the field toward the sound, toward that flash in the gray, walking slowly at first then faster, then jogging through the tobacco plants, down the long and dusty fresh cultivated rows, jogging faster and faster till she could make out the tractor in the shade of the trees at the edge of the field and a dark arm rising above the body of the tractor with that glinting object and the ping, ping, ping of metal on metal clearer now, louder, like a homing beacon—in sound, in the glint of sun on chromed steel.
She slowed her jog to a fast walk to a slow walk. And her heart slowed too, eased as her panting breaths gradually calmed to long gulps of the close and humid air tainted by the acrid scent of the tobacco sap that clung to the skin of her calves where the leaves had brushed against them. By the time she reached the near side of the tractor parked in the shade of those pines she was laughing at herself—at her sudden irrational fear, at her panting run through the tobacco, at the sweat pouring off her face, staining her pink T-shirt. Looking at that shirt she realized now, a little late, that it wasn’t just the teal-blue car that disrupted the earth tones of this ancient scene.
“Mr. Murphy?” Becca said tentatively.
The old black man stood on the far side of the tractor and squinted her way.
“It’s Becca Coles, from the Ministry. It’s Tuesday morning. I brought you your news from the outside world.”
Solomon chuckled. “The fainting girl.” He shook his head but didn’t come around the tractor. “I’m glad to see you. I’d decided you was all in my imagination—some kind of mirage like they say they have in the desert. I’m glad you’re real and glad I’m not as addled as I feared.”
Becca circled around the tractor and extended her hand. “You’re not half as glad to see me as I am to see you.”
Solomon held up his grease-covered hands in explanation for why he didn’t accept hers. “You do look a little out of sorts. Sun get to you again? That’s a long hike from the house and not a lick of shade.”
“Sir, I don’t know what got to me!” she said with the glee and relief of one spared. “But I’m O.K. now—no fainting today. What’s wrong with your tractor?”
“Nothing wrong with the tractor. Cultivator hooked a rock and bent the tine so it don’t pull even. I knew that rock was there, hit it every year since I had this tractor and on back to when I trailed mules. I told myself this year I ain’t going to hit it. And what I do? Hit it. I reckon the year I don’t hit that rock will be the year they plant me in the ground—and probably be rocks down there too.”
Becca laughed. “Not where you’re going, sir.”
Solomon fixed her in his steady gaze. “I thank you for the kindness and will hope it’s true.” He paused then added, “I would like to see Lilith again—and I know where she’s at.”
Becca nodded. “You’ll see her, Mr. Murphy.” And just like that, she was whole again—sure of herself and her calling.
“In the meantime, I got this broke cultivator. You see how to fix that in my future?”
Becca laughed. “I can tell good souls when I see them, but I’m no mechanic. Afraid you’re on your own.”
Solomon shrugged. “I’ll straighten it enough
to finish this cultivating. Maybe Isaiah be back before I need it again.”
Becca’s eyes lit up. “My boyfriend grew up on a farm. He’s got a truck full of tools. He could give you a hand—not only with this but with other chores, till your grandson gets back.”
Solomon laughed. “Most boys that get off the farm don’t ever want to see one again.”
“Not Zach. He misses the farm, talks all the time about plowing and planting and harvesting. They even raised tobacco, but not this type.”
“Tobacco’s tobacco—all grow about the same, I believe.”
“And all needs cultivating. I bet Zach has plenty of experience fixing cultivators. He could help straighten that tine, or put a new one on.”
“You got a lot of confidence in your boyfriend.”
“Zach can do anything.”
“Like his girlfriend.”
Becca shook her head. “I can’t do anything without help from people like you, Mr. Murphy.”
“I’m just a farmer, child. Been one all my life.”
“Saved my life last week, my hopes today.”
“Just being me.”
“All I could ask for.” She pointed back toward the house. “I left you some newspapers and a tape player by your door. Try it out. If you like it, I’ll bring more tapes, maybe see if I can get Isaiah to send some.”
“Now you talking gibberish, girl.”
“Just try it, Mr. Murphy,” Becca said over her shoulder as she headed back down the tobacco rows. “I’ll ask Zach to stop out.”
Solomon waved above the tractor with the hammer in his hand, its shiny head glinting in the sun.
“Thank you, Mr. Murphy,” she shouted—to the tobacco and the day as much as to the man.
“Anytime, child,” Solomon said quietly before giving the cultivator tine a few more well-placed whacks, the metal striking metal ringing out over the field of pungent green.