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She said, “Sir, you don’t scare off easy, do you?”
He said, “I won’t take much of your time.”
From Mud he bought two bottles of Coca-Cola and carried them to the checkers table on the porch. Elma might have learned her lesson about daydreaming, but for a moment she imagined that they were on a date. That they were somewhere else and she was someone else and the man across from her was her fiancé. She thought a fiancé might be better than a husband. The promise of a mate, without the burden of one. The beginning without the end.
“How are the babies?” Mr. Boothby asked.
Elma twisted the cap off her Coke and watched its breath escape from the bottle. She’d had no more sleep than a mule the night before. Winna Jean had been up crying half the night, and she’d only sleep at Elma’s breast, with Elma propped straight up in bed. And Wilson had a case of the runs so bad that Nan had to cut more diapers out of an old sack apron and double them up, and slather lard on his poor red behind. It was best that Elma should be so tired, that she should sleepwalk through those nights. Then there wasn’t enough sleep between them to worry about which baby which of them cared for, or whether Elma should feel grateful or guilty or bitter that there were two of them to care for the babies, and two babies instead of one. Elma said, “The babies are fine.”
“Appears to me you must be plumb tired of all the attention those babies bring. Sweet as they are.”
Elma took a cautious sip of her soda. Yes, it did taste just as sweet as Heaven. He was warming her up, breaking her down, but it did feel good to sit on a porch and talk to a stranger. “I only want to keep them safe. All types of people coming in, it agg’avates em.”
Mr. Boothby held up his hands, as if to show they were empty. “I understand, I understand. I’ve got children of my own.”
Here Elma’s fantasy paled a little. Now she pictured Mrs. Boothby. Did she have an electric kitchen up in Macon, with a Frigidaire and an electric stove?
“I have no interest in your babies, Miss Jesup, miraculous or not. I’m a newspaperman. We call our publication the Testament, and we do pride ourselves on seeking the truth.” Mr. Boothby lowered his voice when he said, “It’s the Negro Mr. Jackson I have an interest in.”
Elma folded her hands in her lap to hide their shaking. Bill Cousins passed by on his way into the store, tipping his hat and saying, “Morning,” his eyes taking them in. Elma felt her heart speed up. No one, of course, would believe Mr. Boothby was a friendly acquaintance, let alone a suitor, but if Bill Cousins recognized the man in the suit, he didn’t say so. If he did, he might incite a mob against Elma herself. She might be burned at the stake for talking to a big-city reporter, even if they didn’t know his politics. There were things no one wanted known by the outside, and no one knew that better than Elma. When the door had closed behind Bill, she said, “Well, I’m sorry to tell you, Mr. Boothby, but the Negro Mr. Jackson died a few weeks back. Figure you would have read about it in that paper of yours.”
Mr. Boothby smiled. “You don’t say. How did he die?”
“I didn’t see it myself.”
“How did your father say he died?”
Elma paused. “He was swung up.”
“So your father was there.”
“Didn’t have to be there. There was a picture in your paper with the rope hanging from the gourd tree. It’s all accounted for.”
“And who is responsible for hanging the man? What do the accounts say?”
“Sir, don’t you have a Roosevelt to cover?”
Mr. Boothby cocked his head. “Pardon?”
“Your friend up in Warm Springs. The one you’re building the polio hospital with. Sounds awful important. It’s about alls your paper is like to talk about.”
Mr. Boothby laughed. “Well, you do keep up with the Testament, don’t you? I’m mighty pleased.”
Elma sipped her soda, then guzzled it. She could feel her defense dissolving, and she allowed herself not to care. Talking about it was better than not talking about it—it was the not talking about it, the silence her father had enforced, that was so heavy. “Freddie Wilson swung him up. He even traded shoes with him. But he ain’t my fiancé no more. I don’t know where he is, and I don’t care to know. He ain’t worth a milk bucket under a bull.”
Mr. Boothby smiled. He withdrew a pipe from a pocket inside his jacket and lit it. He had no notebook, no pen. “That’s what the autopsy confirmed. I know the man who performed it. I can attest to its accuracy. It would be one thing if the man were shot dead first, then hanged without protest. What I can’t seem to understand, but which everyone else in the state of Georgia seems to understand just fine, is how one man managed to hang another live man all by himself.”
Elma was beginning to sweat. Even in the shade of the porch, the morning heat crept into her collar, under the braid pinned to the nape of her neck. Her mind stuck on the phrase from the paper, “Cervical spine.” She said, “Freddie, he had a gun. A rifle. Maybe he trained it on him.” She shrugged. “Like I say, I didn’t see it.”
“Appears to me, it’s hard to hang a man while holding a rifle to his head. If it were me, I’d put up a fight. Give him a kick with my alligator boots. What’s more likely is there were others who helped Freddie. Maybe many others.”
If Elma stepped down from the porch and looked over her right shoulder, she could see her father’s cotton coming up. No flowers yet—just green. She could stand up and walk home. If she called out, her father might even hear her voice.
“What I’m saying,” Mr. Boothby went on, “is that your fiancé may be taking the fall for his associates.”
“Associates? All Freddie associated with were drunks.”
“He worked for your father, Freddie did.”
“He was foreman at the mill. Freddie said farmwork was for coloreds. He was coming up under his grandfather.” That was all Freddie talked about, taking over the mill when his grandfather retired. This is all fixing to be ours, he’d say, parked on the hill overlooking the mill village.
“I’m not talking about farmwork,” said Mr. Boothby. “Or millwork, for that matter.”
Elma blinked out at the road. She wondered if Mr. Boothby had ever had a drink in his life, and if such a man was worthy of pity or admiration. A pickup passed, a green Chevy like Freddie’s, and for a moment she held her breath. Then she saw it had Alabama plates. “I don’t know about Macon,” she said, “but in Cotton County, that’s about the only kind of work we do.”
“Oh, I know about your industries here. What do you know about George Wilson? He owns the cotton and the cotton mill, does he? And the mill isn’t all he runs, what I hear. How’s he find time for it all, is what I wonder.”
“He’s got brothers up near Atlanta who help with the business. And Freddie helps him. Helped him.”
“With what part?”
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t spend much time at the mill. The village is full of riffraff.”
“Was Freddie part of the riffraff?”
Elma snorted a soda bubble. “Yes, sir.”
“How so?”
“He liked to carry on. Tear his truck around the village. Get into fistfights. Once he got shinnied up and shot the headlights out of his own grandfather’s Ford, and blamed it on some poor fool. Went and got him fired quick as you can say Wilson. He was the king of riffraff. He liked to call himself King Cotton, fancied himself royalty, fixing to take on the family business. But he couldn’t even take on a wife and child.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t ask me! Ask him! He had nine months to put his pants on, same as any daddy. His family’s got enough houses to put us in, that’s for sure. All we’d need was one.” Six months along, her father had carried her over to the Wilsons’ house, where Freddie had been raised up by his grandparents in his father’s old bedroom. Elma’s father had made her wait on the porch in front of the parlor window, her full figure framed like a picture. She saw Mr. Wilson, then his wife, heard Freddie’s voice deep within the house, and then the curtain was drawn and a colored girl brought her a lemonade, sour and full of seeds. After five minutes her father came through the door, jammed his cap on his head, and got in the truck. He didn’t say a word. By the time they turned onto the road, Elma knew that Freddie would not be marrying her. Her baby would not have a Christmas stocking on the Wilsons’ mantel.
She had given up on a reply from Freddie, but there it was in the mailbox a few days later, her name in his loopy, second-grade cursive: Dear Elma. It was both, he admitted: his grandmother didn’t want him tied down, and didn’t want him tied down to her. She don’t care for country people, was the way he put it, and she was almost grateful for his gentleness. He apologized not for dropping her but that her father had been sent away from the house. I did want to marry you, he wrote. That was all, and at least there was that.
“Least my own father took up for the babies,” she told Mr. Boothby. “Gave them a roof. I’d rather be in his house than any of those linthead shacks at the mill.” Of course her father’s house too was owned by the Wilsons, the house and the fields and the food they put in their bellies. They owned their shit and the outhouse they shit in. And a Wilson did not marry his property. He would just as soon marry a Negro in a cabin. That afternoon when her father had driven her to their house, the Wilsons didn’t yet know Winnafred, didn’t yet know that she was said to tumble around with a Negro for the nine dark months inside Elma’s belly. But even before she was born, they had disowned her.
Mr. Boothby placed his pipe on the table between them. “I’m mighty sorry for the trouble you’ve been through.”
“I’m not the one in trouble. Now it’s Freddie. What’s he the king of now?”
“Well, I’d ask him if the law could find him. And his grandfather isn’t keen to talk to the papers. Nor none of the folks at the mill.”
“Can’t blame him entirely. Both his parents died when he was a tot. His daddy was a war hero. Freddie was always toting that shotgun around like a soldier.”
“And his mother?”
Elma told about how after his daddy died she went crazy with sadness and was sent to the lunatic asylum in Milledgeville. When she was little and acted up, her father would tell her, “Straighten out, or I’ll send you to Milledgeville.”
“The sanitarium,” Mr. Boothby clarified.
“She died of tuberculosis.” Freddie’d been ten years old and hardly knew his mother, had visited her only a handful of times. Elma thought his grandmother had made Freddie frightened of her. Parthenia Wilson had warned String not to marry a girl from the shop floor. It was one thing to play around under their skirts, another to set up house with them. All those hours standing at their machines made their minds weak, she said. She’d not give Freddie the same blessing. It was she who’d sent String’s widow away.
Mr. Boothby shook his head. “Pitiful place,” he muttered. He looked as though he was going to push further, then stopped. He drained his Coca-Cola and stood. Elma was filled with a funny combination of relief and regret. It was the feeling she had after getting a crying baby to sleep—even though she finally had some peace, she always felt a little lonesome.
“I have just one more question.” Mr. Boothby lowered his voice, looking down at Elma through the round lenses of his glasses. “You’ll have to excuse my directness. I don’t ask out of prurient curiosity, mind you. I ask because I’m after the truth. Miss Jesup, did that Negro do what they say he did?”
An automobile passed. Elma watched the dust rise behind it and then settle, listened to the rumble of the engine disappear. She would not answer. She would not nod.
“If he did, your fiancé might be handed a short sentence. Knowing the way they uphold the law in this state, he might even go free. I just want to see the proper people held accountable.”
Mr. Boothby stepped away from the table, and then Elma felt his shadow at her side, and his hand on her shoulder. “God bless you,” he said, and then his hand was gone, and then his shadow was gone. Elma sat at the table for a few minutes, then left her half-finished soda and led her wagon home, forgetting to bring a sack of flour in exchange for the eggs.
The next day, there was no mention of Genus Jackson or the twins in the Testament. But there was mention, in the three weeks that followed, of four more lynchings in Georgia. On September 8, a Negro accused of killing the chief of police was shot in his bullpen at the McIntosh County jail. The prisoner’s blood was said to drip through into a white woman’s cell below. On September 25 in Thomas County, a Negro accused of strangling a nine-year-old white girl on the roadside was seized by a mob at the county stockade, filled with bullets, and dragged behind a car from Magnolia Park to the courthouse. Some said the man had once raped a Negro woman, though his only convicted crime in the county was theft and concealment of stolen goods, for painting a black mule white. Three days later, in the same county, a Negro who had testified in court against two white men accused of raping a Negro woman was killed by four white men who came to his door. The men had been disguised by the women in their family with makeup and dark glasses. And on October 1, up in the Piedmont, another Negro accused of killing another chief of police was taken from his cell at the Bartow County jail, brought to the county fairgrounds, and swung up by the neck from an electric-light pole. The Negro’s brother, also held in the jail, hadn’t heard the mob come in the middle of the night, and didn’t learn of his death until the next morning, when his brother’s shoes were brought to his cell. After the last one—six lynchings, not counting Genus—Q. L. Boothby wrote in an editorial that an epidemic had returned. “The devil has settled in Georgia, and if we don’t exorcise him, I fear he’s here to stay.”
All of these things were in the paper, but Elma didn’t read them. She was forbidden from going back to the crossroads store. The day after she sat with Q. L. Boothby, when Juke stopped at the store for his chewing tobacco, Mud Turner wasted no time telling him about the Macon reporter. From then on, her father delivered the eggs instead.
She didn’t know that, in the years that followed, when folks said, with admiration for a fellow’s cleverness, “He could paint a black mule white,” they were referring to a Negro dragged through the streets behind an automobile, not three months after Genus Jackson was dragged down the Twelve-Mile Straight.
After she returned from the crossroads store, exhausted, overheated, Elma found both babies napping. She lay down on her bed in her clothes, didn’t even take off her shoes, and with the crook of her arm laid over her eyes, fell into sleep. She dreamt of Freddie’s truck, a row of tin cans tied to the back of it after their wedding, the two of them driving down the Twelve-Mile Straight, man and wife, and then tied to the truck was Genus, and the cans and his body were dragged down the road together, tangled, clanging, the sound the sound of her wickedness, for there was Elma in the passenger seat.
She shot up in bed, fist to her heart. The clanging went on. Was she still sleeping? She stood and walked to the window, following the sound, and as she crossed the room she allowed herself to hope that she had dreamt it all, that none of it was real.
No—she was awake. It was the gourds in the wind, rattling like skulls.
SIX (#ulink_adef77fa-e9c2-56b2-be96-401b1def62cd)
GEORGIA WAS BORN DRY,” THE WHITE-RIBBONERS LIKED TO say. “The pity of it is, she did not stay that way.” The colony of England’s poor and persecuted, every schoolchild knew well, was the first state to try Prohibition. It lasted only seven years. By the time it came around again, in 1908, most of the counties, including Cotton, had already voted themselves dry, but that fact didn’t stop Reverend Quick’s wife, the choral director and a prominent member of the Florence chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, from singing every Sunday, to the tune of “Dixie”:
From Georgia Land so fair and bright
King Alcohol has taken flight,
Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!
Praise the Lord! Georgia Land!
Juke Jesup had before then become well acquainted with King Alcohol. He was eleven and still called John when he took his first sip of moonshine under the railroad trestle behind the cotton mill, then spit it in the river. “Taste like turpentine,” he said, but he went back the next afternoon and took another sip and didn’t spit it out. String Wilson’s older cousins, who visited each summer from the piney woods of north Georgia, had built a crude still in a shed behind the mill. Down by the railroad, they liked to get String and Juke drunk, then spin them in circles and watch them fall to the ground, laughing. Once String landed in the fire pit and nearly burned his left leg off. Juke had to drag him into the river. Another time, the cousins dared String to cross the mill dam and he slipped and fell twelve feet into the water and nearly smashed his head like a watermelon on the rocks below. Then Juke had to drag him out of the river. String was always getting into trouble. It wasn’t his fault; he was too good-natured, too game, too skinny—that was why he was called String. He liked to let folks spin him around. He grew up helping his father in the mill, then, like Juke, married a spinner and had himself a baby. When the war started he got it in his mind to go across the waters and fight, and he came back to Georgia in a coffin made of such fine mahogany that Juke couldn’t help but run his hands over it. String did love to whittle a piece of wood.
It was the same year the boll weevil came to Cotton County. No one knew where it came from. For all Juke knew it had stowed away in String’s coffin and traveled all the way from Europe. Juke remembered the first time he’d seen one, on the pink petal of a cotton flower, common as a cockroach, but with a snout as long as its legs. He’d plucked it off and crushed it between his fingers. That was May. By June, the field was full of them, the grubs eating through the bolls the moment they hatched. In September, String’s father, George Wilson, drove his automobile out to the farm. He snapped a boll of cotton and cupped it in his palm, studying the pod of seeds that never grew. “It ain’t your fault, honey,” George said. “It ain’t no one’s fault.” They stood out there until the sun went down, Juke in his straw hat, George in his white suit and bowler, looking over the ruined field. That year they lost nearly all the crop.
After her son died, Parthenia Wilson never missed a day of church; her husband never went back. String’s widow threw herself off the mill dam and broke her leg and smashed up her face and was sent to the sanitarium, and Freddie, seven years old, moved into the mill house with his grandparents. The old copper still on the river rusted over, until Juke, coming by each evening to sit with George, remembering what String’s cousins had taught him, got it running again. In the upstairs office of the cotton mill, George and Juke drank peach brandy, talking about String and about the farm where, as boys, the two had played. Juke said, “You weren’t too keen on me painting him with tar,” and George laughed and said he didn’t remember. “You ain’t remember? You said he weren’t to play with me no more.” George waved his hand. Back then, he said, the world was no bigger than the farm. On a farm, you played with who was there. On the phonograph, George played the same song, dragging the needle back to the beginning as soon as it ended. They’ll never want to see a rake or plow, and who the deuce can parleyvous a cow? How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?
George’s son was dead; Juke’s wife and his father, a sharecropper on the Wilsons’ land long before Juke was born, were dead too. Liquor had a way of making tender feelings duller and sharper at the same time. After a long day plowing, a farmer liked to enjoy a whiskey as much as anyone. Those who were vets liked gin. They’d gotten a taste for it in Europe. George and Juke got a taste for it too. George taught Juke to care more about the liquid in his glass than how fast it got him pissed, and Juke could play fancy as George Wilson. He imagined String in a bar in France, where the gin flowed freely, a pretty girl on the bar stool next to him. For the mash he tried barley, then red wheat, then rye, alternating the cover crops winter after winter; he planted a grove of juniper trees. In the west hundred, which had been cotton, he planted peanuts and corn and the sorghum cane that went into the gin. “Diversify, son,” said George. “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. That’s the key to staying ahead of nature.” In with the berries Juke tried everything he could find on the farm—rabbit tobacco, blackberries, tea leaves, pecan paper shells, then on one inspired summer morning settled on the silky white petals of a cotton flower. He brought a jar from that batch to George and George smacked his lips like an English lord and said, “By God, it tastes clean as a cotton field.” The cotton might have closed its fists to Juke but he’d take of it what he could. That was the kind of goddamn ingenuity only a poor man was capable of, but Juke Jesup, goddamn if he would be a poor man one more day.
Sheriff Cleave shut down the still within a few years, claiming it belonged to an unknown group of mill workers; the Messenger ran a photograph of him hacking into it with an ax. But it was Parthenia Wilson, not the law, they needed to divert, along with Camilla Rawls, the doctor’s wife, and Tabitha Quick, the reverend’s wife, and their whole bonneted mob of the WCTU. The operation had outgrown the shed, anyway. In the wooded acres in the southwest corner of the crossroads farm, just up the bank of the creek, Juke Jesup built a log cabin with a new copper still so shiny he could see his face in it, and one night in 1921 the first cases of Cotton Gin, as it came to be known, were driven into the mill yard in Juke’s brand-new Model T truck. George Wilson was there to receive the shipment, which was warehoused in an upstairs storage room of the mill, just inside the office. George never called it a partnership, but that’s what it was, with agreements like any other. Juke carried out the production. George handled the business. Farmers drove their cotton into the yard and left with their truck beds full of gin, the cases clothed in the mill’s cotton seconds. Just keep it out of the hands of the mill folks, George warned. They had to be in the right mind to work.
That first year, while the boll weevil grubs still wormed their way through the fields of Georgia and the price of cotton dropped from forty-two cents to ten, Juke and George made four times as much on King Alcohol as they did on King Cotton. Enough to give Sheriff a case on the first of every month.
When the Wilsons left the farm and moved into town to the mill, Juke’s father said they needed some womankind about, so he married a girl he’d met at a camp meeting in Coffee County, a dark-haired, thin-lipped creature closer to Juke’s age than his father’s who liked to clean Juke’s pecker in the washbasin. Tug, tug, tug, the same dazed satisfaction with which she milked a cow, and when to Juke’s astonishment he yielded into the water his own milk, “There you go,” she’d say, “all clean.” Sometimes she seemed almost to laugh over him, a joke between her and herself, and Juke wanted to be in on the joke. “You bigger than your daddy,” she said once, “but he ain’t no bigger than a boy’s,” and all at once in his chest came a feeling as unstoppable as the one between his legs—as much pride as hate, hate for her and her ugly thin-lipped mouth, hate for his small-peckered father, hate for himself for the way his body went limp and helpless under her hand.
Each month, on certain afternoons, he was sent down to the creek to fish—“Go catch supper”—while his father and stepmother thrashed about in their bed like a couple of trout in a pail. When the red rags appeared over the ledge of the outhouse, it meant his father would disappear into the woods and shoot squirrels. From this game his stepmother would produce a stony kind of stew, which the family would consume in penitent silence, the stew thinning to a squirrel-colored broth, until the next time Juke was sent to the creek, and then it was fish cakes for supper, battered with hope, crispy. After the meal, she drank primrose tea, and then at last the tea did its work. Juke was to be a brother. For a time there was bacon and cobbler and warm beaten biscuits from their own wheat—it was the year they grew wheat—and fish fry and fish cakes and fish stew, for Juke was sent down to the creek every day, for hours. He began to take his baths there. His stepmother told him he was old enough to wash himself. He took off his shoes and rolled up his pants legs and waded in and pretended String was still there with him. Their feet knew every stone in the creek. The sun was warm. The fish were small but they were plentiful. They filled the bucket. Juke carried it down the road back to the farm, where one afternoon he returned to a red rag hanging over the outhouse ledge, the bloodiest yet. In church, the neighbors offered a prayer for the Jesup family’s loss.
Not long after that, on a Sunday morning, Juke’s stepmother packed her things. His father didn’t try to stop her—she could take her worthless womb back to Coffee County—but first he sent Juke out to the creek for another hour and took the stepmother, whose name was Jenny, to their narrow bed. Juke could hear her screams from there. If anyone else heard, they pretended they didn’t. When Juke came back his father told him to go in the house, it was his turn in the bed with her. Juke was about twelve by then and he reckoned it was. He had not had to tell his father about the washbasin—his father seemed to know that she should be punished, and in this knowledge Juke was assured of the righteous order of things.
So the ghosts Juke lived with were many, and they still inhabited the big house when Elma was born into it and Jessa joined the ghosts. Juke would not remarry. A mother was a mother; she couldn’t be swapped out for a suitable substitute. “Go forth and multiply,” the Reverend Quick reminded him. “Have you some sons.” But childbearing was the bloodiest business Juke had known, bloodier than the slaying of hogs, which didn’t profess to be anything but slaying. His father had survived on the farm with one child; so would Juke.
This was a gift, Elma was meant to know, a sacrificial offering dangled by her father so often it became like a dark, shiny fruit. She was inclined to reach for it and snap it off the branch. What was so wicked about a stepmother? A momma to plait her hair like Ketty did Nan’s, to let down her hem, scrub behind her ears? In church, she busied herself by fancying all the ladies who might make her daddy a good wife. Each family took up a whole pew, eight sandy heads, ten, a dozen. No one got lonesome in a family like that. Elma and Juke knew what it was to be the only child in a house, to roll over in bed without knocking into someone else. They knew the power of ghosts, and imaginary friends, and real ones. They knew how easy it was to fashion a sibling, even when the sibling slept under another roof, with a family of its own, even if it was a family hired and not born by blood.
Good night, my sister, my brother, they thought, from under the other roof. Tomorrow we will meet at the creek.
SEVEN (#ulink_601781ee-b2e9-5df3-a3db-5646efd8e2fb)
MANFORD RAWLS’S OFFICE WAS ON MAIN STREET, NEXT DOOR to Pearsall’s Drugs and down the street from his home. It was the only doctor’s office in town. There, between the hours of eight and four, he gave shots, set breaks, dispensed medicine, depressed the spotted tongues of children with his wooden stick. He was a stubborn old white man, no traveling country doctor. If you went into labor in the middle of the night, you fetched a midwife. If you caught a fever in the evening, you waited until morning. One night when Nan was nine, returning home from delivering a baby with her mother, a man flagged down the truck they were in, his flannel shirt a bloody belt around his waist. His stomach had been cut with the glass of a broken bottle, and Nan watched as Ketty took out her satchel and sewed up the wound with a needle and thread, the man lying on the green corn husks in the bed of the truck. He was a colored man; the driver was too. The driver, who two hours before had become a father, left the man with a jar of Jesup’s Cotton Gin on Dr. Rawls’s step, where he slept until the morning, and even then the doctor made him wait until he saw a white woman with a rash on her legs.
But when Dr. Rawls learned about the twins, when word had reached him that their mother had no intention of parading them into town, he made an exception to his hours. On a Friday evening, he drove his beady black Plymouth out to the farm. The puppies heard the engine and went tearing out to see who it was. He was a white-mustached man who’d begun to stoop, the pale, shaven flesh of his neck wrinkled as a rooster’s comb. He wore a black suit and a black Homburg hat and carried a black satchel, listing to the left with its weight, his right ear listening toward the sky for some signal.
“Babies need to be seen,” said the doctor, coming through the breezeway to the back porch, where he lifted a towel from the rocker that had not been offered him and seated himself in it. Nan and Elma were giving the twins their weekly bath, both babies squeezed into the aluminum tub, their skin soapy blue in the last hour of sunlight. The day was cool and crisp, the first day that felt like fall. Nan had been enjoying the evening, her hands in the warm water, the babies splashing. The doctor looked at them admiringly, as though they were a pair of his own prize pigs.
Juke sat on the top porch step, his shaving bowl between his bare feet on the step below, a tumbler of gin at his hip. His left cheek was smooth, his right still bristly with red and silver and gold. When Dr. Rawls took a seat, Juke shuttled the glass to the third step. He turned and tipped his straw hat, but he didn’t take it off, and he didn’t stand up. “Doctor.”
“Mr. Jesup.”
“These younguns got a sickness I need to know about?”
The doctor lifted Wilson out of the water, slipped him straight out of Nan’s hands like a fish. Nan and Elma were still crouched behind the tub, and Nan moved to stand up, but Elma yanked her down by the hand that wasn’t holding Winna in the bath, then slipped it into hers. The doctor settled Wilson onto the towel on his lap. “I’m just here for some preventive care. Standard practice.”
Juke slipped his straight razor into the bowl of water and leveled it against his right cheekbone, scraping it down to the wedge of his jaw. You could hear the blade on his skin, rough as a rake over stony soil. He was not going to offer the doctor coffee. He was not going to tell any stories. “Is it standard practice to call on a patient after supper?”
“In exceptional cases it is.”
“Don’t make no exception for us, please. These babies are as standard as they come. They got ten fingers and ten toes, same as anybody.”
The doctor was combing through Wilson’s hair with his fingers, inspecting his scalp, and Nan had to squeeze Elma’s hand to keep from leaping up again. “Miss Jesup,” the doctor said, not looking up, “you want your children to be healthy, don’t you?”
“Course I do.” Elma let go of Nan’s hand, scooped up Winna Jean, and wrapped her in a towel. “That’s why I keep them at home, so they won’t catch nothing.”
“They’s plenty a child can catch on a farm, even out here in the country air.” From his satchel he removed his stethoscope and fit the disk to the boy’s chest. “You folks don’t need me to remind you.” He turned his head and, for the first time since he’d arrived, met Nan’s eyes. “Tetanus. Smallpox. Diphtheria.” She remembered the first time he’d pressed that cold stethoscope to her skin, and the first time he’d pressed his tongue depressor to her bottom lip. When she opened her mouth and he saw there was nothing to depress, he jumped back as if she’d bitten him.
“They’re preventable diseases now,” the doctor said. “Medicine has come a long way.” In the doctor’s lap, Wilson stared transfixed at the shiny faces of his glasses. The doctor took a loaded syringe from his bag and sank it into the naked baby’s thigh, as casually as he might stick a cooked turkey. Wilson opened his mouth and released a cry.
Nan released a cry too. She shot up from the porch floor and clapped her hand over her mouth. It was the kind of cry she tried to keep inside, a lonesome, ugly cry, like an animal in pain. It had been so long since she’d made the sound that it sounded alien to her own ears. The others looked at her, eyes wide. She didn’t care. Without Elma to hold her back, she rushed to Wilson and took him in her arms.
“Doctor!” Elma said, and Nan was grateful for her voice. “What in Heaven!”
Wilson howled. Nan bounced him. Then Winna Jean, in Elma’s arms, began to howl too. Then, suddenly at Nan’s feet, Castor and Pollux joined them.
