Toward three in the morning a new symptom manifested itself: her aching limbs began to make convulsive movements, something the doctors back home had not warned her to expect. Three times that night she soaked herself in the tub as hot as she could bear it and the third time, reaching for the bath towel, she fell upon the floor with a cry of anguish.
“Tomorrow I’m going home!” she declared to herself and she meant it. If only it were daytime she could immediately get in touch with the airline which had brought her from the States to Rome.
“Where’s my ticket? Have I lost my ticket?”
She found it folded in her Book of Common Prayer and then she found a thing that made her cry out again.
The ticket was a one-way ticket, it did not include return passage!
Oh, now, no, such a thing couldn’t be, she didn’t have on her reading glasses and wasn’t seeing the ticket clearly.
“Reading glasses, where?”
She located them, after several minutes of panicky search, in the drawer of the bedside table, pushed back so far that she hadn’t seen them the first two times she’d wrenched the drawer open.
Breathless and almost tottering like a crone, she hurried back to examine again the Pan Am ticket, and Lord have mercy, all that existed in the blue Pan Am ticket folder was a carbon copy of a one-way passage from New York to Rome, economy class.
All thought was suspended for some moments, as if she’d received a brain concussion.
Then she found herself, panting, in a seated position, on the straight-back chair on the balcony, and there she admitted the inadmissible realization that her friends at the junior college had not expected her to return from this vacation abroad; or simply couldn’t or wouldn’t endow her with more than a one-way economy passage…
“Nevertheless I shall make it, oh I’ll make it all right, I don’t know how but I will!”
Now at last, predictably. Our Lady had defeated the devil and the festa was over; and since it was late in June, it would soon be daybreak.
The shock of the one-way passage would permit no sleep, and with the sharp fox-teeth of loneliness gnawing away at her heart, she was now seated on the bed with something in her hands. It wasn’t the Book of Common Prayer, it was the embroidered reticule that old Cousin Ida had given her at her “going away” party in Macon, and she now recalled that only Cousin Ida had advised her against the holiday abroad.
“Barbara, let me speak to you alone for a minute, let’s go over there in a corner and discuss this impulse of yours to visit foreign countries, at this particular time.”
She recalled her impatience at the suggestion and also the firm grip of Cousin Ida’s hand on her elbow and how, when they had occupied chairs in a remote corner of the room, she had said, “Oh, Cousin Ida, I don’t understand why you oppose my plan to travel. Is it because you’re afraid that I can’t manage alone? Why, I’m about the most independent soul in the world and I am determined to remain that way and simply depend on myself.”
Now what had been Cousin Ida’s reply to that extravagant statement?
Nothing, at first, but the touch of Cousin Ida’s gnarled hand on her own hand that was trembling.
Oh? Now! The words came back to her, now!
“Barbara, to depend on yourself is to depend upon a broken stick. All of us need the devoted support of someone at certain times.”
“Whose support. Cousin Ida? Do you mean God’s? And you know that I’m agnostic?”
“No, dear, what I mean is—”
The delicate voice of the old lady had waited for the shrill voices of two quarreling faculty members to subside as they, Barbara and Cousin Ida, returned to the buffet table.
Then Cousin Ida had resumed her diffident counsel, and Barbara remembered, now, quite definitely what Cousin Ida had said.
“Just postpone the trip till next summer. Then you‘ll be stronger and traveling alone in foreign countries will be more practical, dear.”
“When they’ve given me the fare, postpone it, absurd!”
“Yes, I understand, Barbara, I do understand, but—”
She noticed that Cousin Ida was dabbing tears from her eyes.
“Cousin Ida, what are you weeping about? It isn’t as if I were going away for good. I’m certainly going to get back here days before registration for the fall term.”
“Of course,” said Cousin Ida. “I’m sure they’ll want you back for next term.”
“Can you think of any reason why they wouldn’t want me back? Why, I don’t want to seem immodest but I am really the only one in the English department that has made a reputation in national academic circles. Did you know I received a two-page letter last week from Robert Penn Warren? You know Robert Penn Warren, the greatest living novelist of the South. He wrote me this long letter of appreciation when I had informed him that I was including All the King’s Men in my required-reading list for my seminar in modern American classics.”
“Now that was real nice of him, Barbara, but didn’t you cause a little, well, dispute and friction and a little disagreeability among the other English-department members when you refused to include Gone with the Wind by that great Georgia lady writer that—?”
“Oh, yes, oh, yes. Naturally I respect Margaret Mitchell as a gifted storyteller but even though she was run down crossing a street in Atlanta, I just couldn’t live with my critical conscience if I put that big popular best-seller on my required reading list of American classics just because she was a lady writer of Georgia and her book was made into a film with Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh and it turned into what they call a blockbuster. Those standards are just not my standards, why if I had included that magnum opus in my list, I would probably have had to leave out All the King’s Men by Mr. Robert Penn Warren.”
“Honey, if you did what you thought was most honest according to your standards, why, then I say you did right. Now before we go back and mix with the others, I have something to give you. Well, it was actually given me to give you by your doctor in Atlanta. It’s the name of a doctor in Rome that you should call this summer if you should have any recurrence of your back trouble, which God willing you won’t. Here it is. The name is peculiar but I guess it’s Italian.”
Cousin Ida had removed from her reticule, then, and handed to Barbara a slip of paper that bore the name “Dottore Emilio Fausto” and that also bore his address and his phone number at a Roman hospital called “Nostra Signora del Cielo.”
“Thank you. Cousin Ida, but I am going to be much closer to Naples than Rome and I really don’t think—”
“Well, what your Atlanta doctor says is that the Roman doctor can recommend a doctor in Naples and I think you ought to take it, just in case.”
“Thank you. Cousin Ida. I’ll take it with me but I promise you that I won’t have the least need of it. So let’s go back to the party.”
Now how very clear to Barbara was the discreetly veiled meaning of that little talk with Cousin Ida in a private corner of the “bon voyage” party.
Cousin Ida had been weeping because she was really informing her that Das Wasser was very cold indeed, and that nobody on the faculty of the Georgia college expected or wanted her back among them for the start of the fall term.
Dawn was breaking not only in her comprehension, now, but over the ominously dark volcanic mountains.
Is it possible that the blood in the arteries of the faculty of the college in—
Well, I suppose, thought Barbara, the answer to that is anybody’s guess, if it isn’t mine…
1973-79 (Published 1982)
Mother Yaws
Hey, Luther’n minister’s daughter!”
Barle turned from’the stove as if the stove had burned her.
“Did you speak to me, Tom?”
She raised a hand to her cheek.
“Who else around here is a Luther’n minister’s daughter?”
“Why, nobody but me.”
With the hand not covering her cheek, she was maki
ng a number of jerky, startled, purposeless motions, for this was the first time her husband, Tom McCorkle, of Triumph, Tennessee, had addressed her for a good while, possibly several weeks.
“Do you want something, Tom?”
“Yeh, I want to know what you got on your cheek that you put your hand over.”
“My cheek?”
“That’s right. What’s wrong there?”
“You mean on my face?”
“That’s right, not on your ass.”
Their nearly grown son, Tommy Two, chuckled at this, and the middle girl remarked indifferently, “She got a sore on her face.”
“I seen it on her face, too,” said the smaller girl, as if not to be outdone.
The boy, Tommy Two, gave his mother one of his contemptuous glances and confirmed his own awareness of the sore on his mother’s left cheek by a nod and another little chuckle of amusement.
“Go look at yuhself if you doubt it,” said McCorkle.
“Where?”
“There’s a lookin’ glass in the bedroom. Ain’t you ever seen it?”
“You want me to go take a look?”
McCorkle’s small eyes sharpened.
“Why the fuck else would I mention that sore on yuh face an’ the lookin’ glass in the bedroom if I didn’t mean to advise you to go take a look at yuhself in that glass?”
Then he turned to the middle girl and said, “She still ain’t moved. She don’t wanta look in the glass because I reckon she knows what she‘ll see. I think she already seen it or felt it an’ thought nobody would notice, but goddamn if it ain’t a punishment to the eye.”
“Punishment to the eye,” Tommy Two repeated with a mean chuckle.
“Mama, go look at yuhself like Dad tole you,” said the middle girl.
“I have looked at myself,” said the Lutheran minister’s daughter. “I don’t want to do it again.”
“She looks like a half-butchered hawg,” said McCorkle, as he shifted in his chair to let a fart.
“You oughtn’t to do that in front of the girls,” Barle protested faintly. Then she stumbled out of the kitchen door to the yard, feeling nausea.
“Don’t let her put a hand on nothin’ in the kitchen,” McCorkle warned. “Best she don’t touch nothin’ till that sore’s been looked at.”
After she had vomited the coffee, Barle started away from the house in no planned direction.
Tommy Two appeared twice in the back door.
“Dad says don’t throw up near the house.”
A minute later he called to her: “Dad wants you to come back to the kitchen.”
She came back in.
“Have you awready forgot I tole you to go upstairs and take a look at yuhself in the glass?”
“No.”
“Then go do it right now.”
She backed into a corner of the kitchen.
“Git her out of that corner, but don’t touch her—it could be somethin’ contagious.”
Then Barle moved out of the corner.
“I will go in the bedroom and look in the glass.”
She walked out of the kitchen and could be heard slowly mounting the steps in the hall. She was still up there when McCorkle had finished his breakfast and departed for his dry-goods store.
With nothing else to do, the girls picked up an old topic of discussion in the desultory fashion that an object is moved from one position to another for no apparent purpose.
“Mama’s name is Barle, but Dad nearly alurays calls her Luther’n minister’s daughter.”
“You knour urhy he does that? The Luther’n minister had a brother name Barle that Mama was named for because this brother Barle had a good piece of real estate, a corner lot with a house and a store built on it, and Dad expected this uncle of Mama to leave her the corner property when he died because she was his namesake. But he didn’t. He left this corner property to the whore that kept house for him.”
“Oh. Yeh.”
“So Dad was cheated, he thought, after he married Mama and didn’t git the corner lot with the store but had to buy some ground an’ put up a building hisself.”
“Oh, yeh, that’s right. So that’s why he calls her Luther’n minister’s daughter.”
“That’s right,” said the other.
Later on that morning the two girls began to speculate on why their mother had not returned downstairs.
“Why ain’t she come down to clean the breakfast dishes an’ feed the yard dog like she always does? It expecks her to. It’s lookin’ in the door.”
“Dawg, git out!” said the girl, and when the dog had reluctantly backed away, she said, “I reckon she is ashame to come back down.”
McCorkle took his wife to the depot and put her on a day coach to Gatlinburg, the biggest town in the county, to have a doctor there look at the sore on the face and determine if it was contagious.
The day-coach fare to Gatlinburg cost McCorkle four dollars and eighty-five cents, and he marked down that expense on the first page of a black notebook he had purchased at the five-and-ten on their way to the depot. His wife observed him marking it down and she surmised rightly that the black notebook had been purchased for no other reason than to keep an account of all expenditures that her affliction might cost him.
After closing the notebook, McCorkle said, “A’ course you know that if the Gatlinburg doctor says this thing is contagious, you got to go back to the Luther’n minister’s house and stay there.”
“I don’t think Papa would like me to stay there, neither,” said Barle.
“I don’t give a shit if he likes it or not. That’s where you go if they say this thing is contagious, and if the Luther’n minister throws you out, well, then, you take it from there.”
“Take what from there, Tom?”
“Your plans for the future, if any.”
When Barle arrived at the office of the Gatlinburg doctor, nine other patients were there waiting to see him. All of them looked at her and despite the fact that silence had prevailed among them until she entered, they now began to exchange looks and whispers and to shift the positions of their chairs. One fat, sweaty woman with two children occupied a sofa that couldn’t be moved. She stared at Barle with undisguised repugnance, steadily, for about two minutes. Then she sprang up from the sofa. “Don’t move,” she said to the children, and she went to the inner door and pounded heavily on it till the doctor’s nurse appeared.
“Tha’s a woman out here with a terrible sore on her face. Nobody wants to be sittin’ in the room with her, so why don’t you tell her to wait outside on the steps. I got two children with me.”
She continued speaking to the nurse who had shut the door on the waiting room so the rest of the complaint could not be heard plainly until the door opened again and the fat woman’s voice, higher in volume, more vehement in protest, was again very distinct as she told the nurse that either Barle had to wait outside or she, the fat woman, was going to leave with her children, it was one or the other. Then the nurse came out grimly and stood in the center of the room to look at Barle.
“You see what I mean?” the fat woman shouted.
“Yes, I see what you mean. Will you gimme your name, ma’am?” she asked Barle.
Barle was barely able to whisper. “Mrs. McCorkle.”
“Where do you live?”
“Triumph.”
“What is that on your face?”
“That’s what I come to find out.”
“What is the history of it?”
“What is the what?”
“How long is it been on your face and has it been there before or is this the first time you had it?”
“Oh. I see. I noticed it beginnin’ about two weeks ago.”
“Appeared for the first time then?”
“That’s right. Never before.”
“Well, it looks like nothing I ever seen before, and since these other patients are regular and local, I think you better wait outside till I call you back in.”
r /> The other patients raised their voices in agreement with the nurse’s suggestion.
Barle stood up.
“Where do you want me to wait?”
“Outside! She said outside!” the other patients shouted.
“Can I take my chair with me? I had to git on the train without breakfast, so I’m not feelin’ too good.”
“Ordinarily no.”
Barle was puzzled by this answer. Her head was swimming; she felt she was going to faint.
“Is anyone willin’ to carry a chair out for her?” the nurse said.
A man took a blue handkerchief out of his pocket and, using it to protect the hand from contact with the chair, hauled it outside, Barle stumbling after him.
Outside it was hot and yellow and her vision was blurred by sweat running into her eyes, but she noticed that the man had thrown his handkerchief down next to the chair. She bent over, intending to return it to him. But as she bent she blacked out and didn’t come to till the nurse was shouting at her from the front door.
“Mizz McCorkle, the doctor will look at you now!”
As Barle entered the office, the nurse stood back a good distance with a look that contained no comfort.
All the patients were gone; the inner door was open.
Barle crossed to it in a slow, irregular way.
“Watch out,” the nurse said, but Barle collided with the doorframe and stumbled back a few paces.
Then Barle was inside the office in the doctor’s presence, but a table was between them. He pushed his chair back and scrutinized her through his glasses.
“You are Mrs. McCorkle from Triumph?”
“Yes, sir, I am the wife of Tom McCorkle of Triumph and the Lutheran minister’s daughter.”
“Hmm. Well. I will phone a hospital to see if they’ve got a bed for you there, because a condition like yours needs several days of examination and tests. You got Blue Cross?”
“I got blue cross! Is that what this is?”
“I meant does the government pay your medical expenses?”
“Oh.”
“That’s not a reply to the question.”
“I thought maybe you’d tell me what I got.”