The Penny (18 page)

“Aurelia. Over here!” As I made my way toward Garland, Mr. Lancaster went into immediate rescue mode.

“Jenny Blake, get back. Let me lift him.”

“Is the A-bomb gone yet?” Garland asked me. “Was it the bomb that got us?”

What we saw when we approached stopped us, all three. Garland braced his head against a snarl of pipes, completely unaware that a piece of metal window frame had impaled itself in his head. A stream of sticky black, darker than his skin, ran down the length of his neck and encrusted the collar of his little shirt.

“Is the bomb gone yet?” he repeated.

“It wasn’t a bomb, Garland. It was a practice.”

“But the sirens kept going and going.”

“I know.”

“I thought we were supposed to hide because it was a bomb.”

Garland’s face was so dark and dirt-smudged. Even his brows and eyelashes were caked with soot.

“Don’t move him, child.” Mr. Lancaster touched my shoulder. “We’ll get an ambulance.”

“When are you coming to my house again?” Garland asked me. “Why were you looking at me mad the other day? I got something I been wanting to show you. Got a new broomball move—bouncing it off the front step at Carter’s so it curves across the street. You want to see that?”

“I’ll get help,” Mr. Lancaster told Aurelia. “You stay with your cousin.”

Aurelia nodded, too stunned to speak.

“I want to see your broomball move,” I said.

Garland reached his hand toward mine. “Would you hang onto me, Jenny?” he asked. “You want to hang onto me? Because if you do, it’ll make me feel better.”

Mr. Lancaster was babbling to Aurelia, distraught. “We’re going to get your aunt here . . . Not going to tell her what’s happened yet. . . . Not going to get her all worked up or anything.”

“Of course I’ll hang onto you,” I said, and the rush of blood in my ears came because, after all the lies I’d told, and me chasing Aurelia away from my flat, this one small boy was the one to make those missteps fade into the background. Garland’s little fingers, warm and sticky, slid against mine without hesitation. I wrapped my knuckles around his and stared at the knot we made together. If all my life had been shaped by other people’s hands, then Garland helped shape my life now because he’d offered me his hand so freely.

Mr. Lancaster left to get help, and as the three of us waited alone, we listened for sirens to run their scales, coming toward us. It had started with Garland asking me to hang onto him in that damaged portable. I hung on to this truth that I found in Garland’s grasp: that if you offered your hand to reassure and be of good use to someone, it went a long way toward helping you overcome how somebody else’s hand had done you harm.

Another slab of drywall collapsed, crumbling apart over us like a dry biscuit.

“Watch out!” Aurelia shielded her cousin with her arms. She and I met each other’s eyes, drywall dust spattering our faces. “If you hadn’t been the one to make them stop, Jenny, they wouldn’t have. They never would have listened to me.”

I ducked away so I could look at her straight. “Maybe they would have.”

“If you hadn’t been right there and all of a sudden started screaming . . .”

I just kept thinking,
But I shouldn’t have been right there in the first place.

Aurelia asked, “What’s gotten
into
people? Why are people so mean? I don’t understand it.”

I couldn’t say what had gotten into them. I couldn’t say what had gotten into me, either. But I kept my promise about hanging onto Garland even after Mr. Lancaster told me I had to step aside to make room for the emergency workers. I told Mr. Lancaster that I wouldn’t, and I just wedged myself closer in beside Aurelia’s little cousin. I wished I’d taken time to tell Garland how the pennies had come spraying out at me like hose water. He’d always been one to believe God was putting pennies in our paths to remind us about his love, ever since the day I got saved at Antioch Baptist Church. I realized God used pennies to say the same thing I’d told Garland:
I’m not letting go of you. No matter what happens.
Garland would have loved to hear that.

I kept my promise even when Mr. Lancaster pulled out his handkerchief and said, “Here, let’s clean you up some, boy. Just wipe some of that blood off. Wouldn’t do for those kids outside to get upset—”

“No.” It was the first time Aurelia had spoken since we’d gotten down there. Her answer was as firm as the ground, as sharp-edged as one of those bricks Del Henry was so proud of collecting. “You can’t clean that up, sir. You leave him the way he looks so everybody out there can see.”

“Let’s get him out,” a fireman said. Then everything started whirring fast, vague, and distant so that it’s hard to remember at all. We stuck together close, climbing up out of that portable. I didn’t let go of Garland’s hand until he got hoisted from the gaping hole ahead of me. I could see Aurelia’s lips moving, and although she’d talked lots about praying, that was the first time I’d seen her do it out of the pew. When the schoolyard crowd got a good look at what had happened to Garland, their murmurs subsided. It got so hushed, you could almost hear the grass grow.

Only the bluebird tuned up again, proclaiming its strident, clear song from the ash tree.

Chapter Twenty

A
t home that night, my mind ran so fast that I felt like I had lightning trapped inside my skull. But everything around me moved as slow as the water in the Mississippi. Daddy cutting his Salisbury steak one-handed, rocking his fork in a slow see-saw. Me rinsing the plates before I propped them in the drainboard, the bubbles sliding away from me in slow circles. Mama bouncing the clean laundry in its basket, asking me to help her fold the bedsheets. Our slow dance, matching corner to corner, seam to seam.

Other than leaving right in front of Daddy or making a phone call that would get me hit again, I didn’t have any way to find out how Garland had fared. Our principal had sent the portable kids home early; I’d overheard him say to Mrs. Connor that he didn’t know where to put them. Our class had been rounded up, returned to our room, and made to sit through Mrs. Huffines’ insufferable lesson on which American colonies were involved in the First Continental Congress, scripting the
Declaration of Rights and Grievances
to be sent to King George III. A lucky few of us got to escape our seats for a few minutes to have Mercurochrome smeared on various scrapes and cuts by the school nurse. Getting out of Mrs. Huffines’ lecture was “a right and a grievance” I would take any time.

Normally I could walk around the flat with Daddy’s finger-sized bruises on my arms and Mama never said a word. I was so used to her looking the other way that it shocked me when she noticed the red smears of antiseptic on my hands and started lecturing.

“You don’t get any of that Mercurochrome dye on those bedcovers, you hear me?” She nodded her head in the direction of my hands while we were folding sheets together. “Just patched the one and bleached them all, and I don’t want to see any spots anywhere.”

I stopped altogether and looked at her for a minute. “I tried to wash it off, Mama,” I told her, “but it wouldn’t come.”

“I didn’t say to stop helping me.” She shook her end of the sheet at me like a matador urging me to charge. The sheet sounded a
snap
in midair. “I just said you need to watch out.” Then, “You could try again. Wash harder this time.”

A wave of weariness broke over me. “There are some things that don’t wash off, Mama.” It made me so tired that she never changed.

“It seems to me you could take better care of your hands. How could you let them get all cut up like that?”

“Maybe you don’t want to know how I got all cut up,” I said. “Maybe you don’t want to know
anything.
”

“Knowing isn’t what hurts the most,” she said. “It’s trying to do something about it.”

Daddy thumped into the den then, carrying his workboots and a tin of saddle soap. “Trying to do something about what?” He dropped the polish and the boots on the floor and waited for Mama’s answer.

The cat clock in the kitchen ticked off the seconds between us. The longer Mama stayed silent, the more my heart twisted tight. Mama wasn’t going to respond the way I still stubbornly hoped she would. My chin dropped in disappointment. And that’s the minute the phone rang.

Daddy plopped on the couch, twisted the lid off the saddle soap. He dipped his brush into the soap and daubed it across the leather upper. “They’ll have to call back tomorrow at a decent hour,” he said. “Why would anybody think we’d be answering the telephone this late?”

“Maybe it’s Jean,” Mama suggested.

“She knows we wouldn’t want to be interrupted.”

“But Jean’s our
daughter.
”

Daddy got his rag and polished his boot toe to a shine while the telephone kept up its shrill ringing. I knew who was on the line. I knew it must be Aurelia calling to tell me about Garland. And no matter what happened to me because of it, I sure wasn’t going to miss talking to the Crocketts. Not this time.

When I stepped toward the phone, Daddy’s shoe-polish rag froze. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m answering it,” I said.

Mama tucked the sheet under her arm, trying to head him off. “Jenny. They’ll call back, whoever it is.”

I didn’t say another word. Any minute now he’d be up from his seat swinging, and heaven only knew what he’d do to me with his workboot. When I reached for the receiver, Mama’s hand clamped over mine. “Don’t do it.”

Who can say what makes a person scared to do something one day and willing to stand up and do that same thing the next? Maybe it’s just frustration or disappointment. Maybe it’s getting tired. But I don’t think so, really. Because those are all the same things that make a person give up. I’d decided it would be a mistake to give up just yet. “This is somebody I have to talk to.”

“Don’t give him any more reasons to hurt you,” Mama whispered. “It’s your fault, you giving him so many reasons.”

“I’m not giving him any reasons at all, Mama.” I lifted the receiver in defiance. “It’s about time you started seeing that.”

The voice that came through the earpiece sounded tinny and distant, as if it came from a different world. Indeed, for me, it did. Aurelia wasn’t on the line. I heard Aunt Maureen’s disjointed words instead.
Got the metal out of his head . . . Keeps forgetting things . . . There’s some miracles that happen and there’s some that don’t, child.

I stood with my feet apart, my knees bent, watching my daddy, waiting for him to manhandle me. Aunt Maureen’s voice, as dark as her skin, lured my heart to a different place.
Homer Phillips Hospital . . . Sure want you with us . . . Garland says . . .

I held onto the receiver with two hands, knowing anything I uttered (“I’ll be there.” “Is he okay?”) would cut my time before Daddy started swinging. “I hear you,” is all I said before I hit the button and opened the line again. And I
did
hear her.
We want you with us.
Daddy laid his rag aside as I dialed TA2-5065. The dial clicked through its exchange in slow motion, slower than Christmas. Daddy twisted the lid shut on the soap, set it firmly on the coffee table, and rose.

“Will you get me at my house?” I asked urgently when the call went through. “I need you to help me.” And that’s the last thing I uttered before Daddy tore the phone out of my hand.

When the baby-blue convertible swept up in front of our flat, Miss Shaw found me waiting on the front curb. She didn’t drive off right away when I climbed into the front seat beside her. “What happened, Jenny?”

She leaned forward to get a better look at me. My shoulder was throbbing where Daddy had punched me, but if she was judging by my face, Miss Shaw couldn’t tell a thing.

“Nothing happened,” I lied. “Can you just drive me somewhere?”

Miss Shaw shifted into first and we edged forward. “Somewhere?” she asked. “Anywhere?”

The white leather seat felt cool on my backside. The last time we’d driven together like this, we’d been racing up the road, Miss Shaw in her sunglasses with her hair battened down by her headscarf, and me with my curls flying in so many directions I might have been mistaken for a brush bush. Last time I’d been in a tizzy with the thought of riding in a Grace Kelly convertible and making Jean jealous.

It was no use, fighting down the sudden longing I felt for my sister as I sat in Miss Shaw’s car again. I wanted Jean with us so bad that I thought my insides would bust open. I wanted to stand up and cheer for her, I was so proud of my sister for getting away.

“Drive me to Homer Phillips Hospital?”

I expected Miss Shaw to put on the brakes, steer toward the curb and start asking all sorts of questions. But once again she surprised me. She didn’t make any argument about driving me to the colored hospital. We drove in flashes of chrome as the streetlights flickered on and the last tendrils of daylight disappeared below the horizon. I’d thought she’d drop me off at the front walkway, but instead, we crept along the rows of cars, looking for a parking place.

“You don’t have to come in. I can find my own way home,” I told her. “I’ll bet someone would give me a ride back or something.”

“I won’t let you find your own way anywhere,” she said. “Do you think I’d let you go through this by yourself? Besides, do you think they’ll let you past the nurse’s station without a grown-up to escort you?”

She steered the sleek convertible into a narrow parking space, punched a button with her gloved finger, and watched in the mirror as the white top curled over us like a cresting wave. “Did you think I wouldn’t want to come in with you?”

I shrugged.

“Do you mind if I do?”

I told Miss Shaw, “I figured you had other things to do. I don’t want to be trouble.”

“Well,” she said, “what would those other things be? What would be more important than helping you?”

When we walked inside, the admittance nurse wore a cap fastened to her head with at least six bobby pins that I could count. She scribbled on a chart in sharp scratches even as she glanced our way. Then she tapped her pen. I could tell she expected Miss Shaw to ask the questions. I guess maybe I did, too, but then I realized that, although Miss Shaw had probably guessed, I’d never told her who we were coming to visit.

I did a double-take when I saw what held Miss Shaw’s attention. I’d certainly never seen her do something like this in public before. I watched, disbelieving, my mind commending her with each finger she tugged loose.

Miss Shaw acted like nothing out of the ordinary had happened when she finished taking off her gloves. She simply stood there and held both of her gloves in a bunch beneath the handle of her pocket-book. She nodded for me to get ahold of my amazement and speak for the both of us.

“We’re looking for Garland. Garland Crockett,” I said.