“Do it, then!” Jinx said. “Do it! Do it and get it over with, you old witch!”
“Y’all push back there, and I’m going to need you, woman,” she said, nodding at Mama. “And you two are going to have to do what I say when I call on you. Make sure that water’s hot.”
The old woman opened the wooden box. There was a leather strap in there, and she took it out and fastened it on Terry’s arm above the elbow and tightened it off with a metal screw from the box. She got out a little bottle and put it on the floor.
“That would have been ether,” she said, “but I ain’t got no more of it. He’ll have to do without it.”
“What is it for?” Jinx said.
“It puts a person under, makes them loopy,” she said. “They don’t feel so much pain.”
“So what’s Terry got for pain?” Jinx asked.
“He ain’t got nothing but me quick at work,” she said. “He might come out of his doze, and if he does, you got to hold him down. You got to hold his head, arms, and legs. You may have to put your butt on him, but you got to hold him down.” She laced her old, gnarly fingers together and cracked them gently. “Let’s get started.”
22
The old woman fastened the leather strap and twisted the screw. Pus oozed out all over Terry’s hand, wrist, and forearm.
“I’m going to cut beneath the elbow, down as far as seems smart. I’m going to cut a lot of bone and keep as much skin as I can, but a lot of it’s rotten. I may not get to flap it after all. I might have to nub it at the bone, which ain’t as good. But we got what we got.”
The old woman looked at us. “I’m going to push this pistol aside now, and you can wrestle it away if you have a mind to. I ain’t so strong anymore. But you do, this boy won’t get the surgery. If you nab it after the surgery, I may decide not to close it up right. You got to leave the gun to me. I see in your eyes you got plans, but I’m telling you, when he’s cut and sawed and sewed, you’re going to need me to make sure he don’t go under. He might anyway. But you got to leave me be, cause if he’s got any kind of chance, that chance is me.”
There were saws and an assortment of blades in the box. The old woman picked out what she needed, had us take them and dump them in the pot of water, which was now boiling something fierce. She cranked the screw some more, tightened the strap on his arm. Terry groaned once, and then lay silent and still.
There were tongs in the box, and she had us dunk those in the water and use them to get hold of the instruments, lift them out of the water, and place them across the box. I figured if she was trying to be clean, there was a chance the box wasn’t all that sanitary, but we was beyond that moment. This was as good as it was going to get, and I knew it.
When the instruments was cooled a mite, she clicked them into the saw handles with her hands, which didn’t look all that clean themselves, said, “Now you better hold him.”
It was as bad as you might think. She went with the knife first, and she cut into the meat, and deep, and when she did, Terry started to scream. He tried to sit up, but Jinx sat on his head, like an elephant on a stool. I had hold of his legs, Mama his good arm, and the old witch had the other arm by the oozing wrist. She cut around that arm like she was notching an arrow, and then she chunked the knife aside and grabbed a saw and went at it. She sawed fast. When the bone was near cut through, she stopped and sat back and sweated and breathed heavy.
Terry was screaming loud enough to wake the dead, and considering Jinx had her butt square on his head, it was quite a feat. He tried to get loose of us, but we held him down.
“I ain’t as young as I used to be,” said the old woman. “I’m tuckered out, but I ain’t through the bone yet. And the saw’s done got dull.”
Without a word, Mama grabbed up another blade, fastened it in the old blade’s place. She got to work, finishing up the job in a few seconds. When she had it done, the old woman, who had cut the arm in such a way as to leave a good-sized flap of good skin hanging, folded it over, got a needle and stout thread from the box, and went to sewing.
Somewhere during all this, Terry quit screaming or moving, and for a moment, I thought Jinx had smothered him with her butt. But when she got off of him I saw right off he was breathing. He was passed out.
The old woman was breathing heavily, and I thought I could hear her heart knocking against her chest like a moth beating its wings inside a jar.
Jinx got the pistol off the floor. “Now that he’s sewed up,” she said, cocking it, “I figure I can just go on and put a bullet through your head.”
The old woman looked at her with the same excitement you show for a salad.
I got to say this for Jinx, she’s one of them can do what she says she’s going to do, cause she pulled the trigger. There was a snapping sound. She cocked and pulled it again, and nothing happened. She glanced down at the pistol.
The old woman scratched her chin, said, “It’s got shells in it, but ain’t none of them got loads in them. I screwed them loose and poured out the powder. I used that powder to burn out a wound I got on my knee one time. Works pretty good you know what you’re doing and can take the pain, and don’t use so much you catch on fire or blow your ass in the wind.”
Jinx lifted the pistol as if to hit the old woman. Mama caught her hand. “She’s bad; we don’t have to be.”
“I ain’t that bad,” said the old lady, looking truly surprised, her face drooping like wax melting off a candle. “I done saved that boy’s life. I’m just here alone and ain’t no one left to take care of me.”
“Ain’t nobody wants to,” Jinx said, jerking her hand free. “Why would they?”
“Everybody needs someone to help,” said the old woman. “Everyone’s got to have somebody.”
“They don’t always get it,” Jinx said.
“You have a point,” the old woman said, and tried to get off the floor, but couldn’t make it.
“I say we take her out and hang her from a tree and beat her head in with a stick,” Jinx said. “The way Sue Ellen said we ought to, the way this old witch said her daddy done that fella.”
“We won’t do that,” Mama said.
“You ain’t got no say in this thing,” Jinx said, but she didn’t get no farther. Mama reached out and snatched the pistol from Jinx’s hand and tossed it away, banging it up against the wall, causing some dusty knickknack of some kind to fall off a shelf and explode.
“I don’t want to hear that again,” Mama said. “I do have a say. I might not have at first, but there’s nothing you’ve been through that I haven’t. I say what I want, and if you think you can do what you want with her, then you got to start with me. We aren’t those kind of people. You had shot her, you would have regretted it. You don’t want to be that way. You aren’t that way.”
“I might be,” Jinx said.
“She’s right, Jinx,” I said. “We ain’t like that. We don’t want to be same as her.”
Jinx looked at the floor and Terry’s blood that had pooled there. She looked at the old woman, who was trying to appear pitiful. A dog with a thorn in its paw couldn’t have looked as miserable as she did.
Mama helped the old woman up, guided her to the rocking chair. Once in the rocker, the old woman rocked gently, glaring at us with her watery eyes, breathing heavily.
“You need to clean that blood off my floor,” she said between breaths. “I done your boy a favor, now do me one. You owe me.”
“You are something,” Mama said, and shook her head.
I looked at Terry, then at the old woman. “We’re going to put him in your bed, and that’s where he’s going to stay until he gets well enough we can haul him out. You’ll just have to sleep in that chair for a few days. I just hope him nesting in your bed won’t get him some kind of disease, or that some of your meanness is under the covers and crawls all over him.”
The old woman wrinkled her nose, closed her eyes, leaned back in the chair, and started rocking furiously.
&nbs
p; We went out to the well and got some water to clean up with. There was blood all over the floor, and we was all covered in it, too. Mama heated up some water and washed our clothes while we all stood around with the old woman’s blankets wrapped around us. Mama even helped the old woman change her clothes and wiped her down a bit, all of this done in privacy in the bedroom. We wiped up the blood on the floor and rolled up the bloody rug where Terry had been operated on and put it aside at the far side of the room.
We found some whiskey and poured that on Terry’s nub to keep out infection. The old woman had some aspirin, so we gave him a couple of those. He was still mostly out of it, and I doubt he remembered chewing them or sipping water. When Mama had him dressed in his freshly washed and dried clothes, we carried him to the bedroom and put him in the bed with a prop of pillows and a thin blanket over him.
I got a rag and went back to the other room and picked up Terry’s cut-off arm and put it in the box with the saws, then closed it up. I put it on the mantel over the fireplace. I didn’t know what else to do with it.
I went in and looked at Terry, sat in a chair by the bed for a while, then Jinx took over for a stretch.
Out in the other room the old woman was still in her rocker. Mama put some pillows in the chair to make her more comfortable, got a blanket to drape over her knees. The old woman was cleaned up now, but she still had on that stupid bonnet, and there were drops of Terry’s blood on it where the wound had spewed when she first cut through the arm. She rocked and looked at the fire in the fireplace.
Mama was using the fire and one of the big black pots to cook up some dandelion greens she had gathered near the front door of the house. She found a bottle of vinegar, and some salt and black pepper, and done as much as she could with it.
While it cooked, night fell solid. I went over and made sure the door lock was thrown. There was little wooden doors that closed from inside over the windows. I closed them all and threw the latches on them.
“There’s screens over a couple of them windows,” the old woman said. “You could leave them shutters open. It’ll be cooler.”
I didn’t answer her. I would have preferred cool air, but I was thinking about Skunk. I had let thought of him slip away for a while, but now he was back on my mind.
I took Jinx a bowl of greens, came back, and got my own. I sat on the floor near Mama and the old woman, who smacked over those cooked weeds with her gummy mouth so loud a hog would have left the room in embarrassment. But we couldn’t leave; we had to bear it. So we sat and ate. It tasted good, though anything would have tasted good about then that wouldn’t break a tooth off.
When the old woman was finished, she gave me her bowl to put aside, leaned back, and rested her hands on her belly. “I ain’t always lived like this. We was cotton money. Had slaves. I remember it. I was, let me see…ten years old when the War Between the States come to its unfortunate end. We went to growing corn when the cotton was played out, and we did all right for a time. Then this and that happened, a few hot years with not enough rain, and we was in a hole we couldn’t never get out of again. Daddy eventually had enough of it and shot himself. Mama run off with someone, and my sister got married and moved up north. Married a damn Yankee, can you imagine? And him a former solider against the South. I had just as soon seen her take up with a horse thief.
“Anyway, cause of that, we didn’t never speak again, never exchanged a letter. My brother went off to the war and didn’t come back. He might have got killed, or he might have stayed over there. Ain’t nobody knows. Wasn’t never heard of again. I eventually had to sell the house and the land. I kept this piece on the back end of it, had a house built, been here for years. Them that owned the land that had been mine gave up and moved on, and the woods claimed it. So I guess it’s same as if it all still belonged to me. Married once, but Hiram liked to mess with other women. I shot the son of a bitch, told everyone he run off.”
“You killed him?”
“Deader than a doornail,” she said. “Ain’t nobody knows but me and ya’ll. I’ve kept it to myself, for reasons I figure are clear. Now, though, at my age, what’s it matter who knows what? He was buried out near where the woods start to grow up some thirty-five years ago. About five years ago I found a skull out in the yard, dug up and gnawed on by a coyote from the looks of it. I’m pretty sure it was Hiram. I broke it up with the ax. I was still strong enough then to do it. Lately, I’ve got down in my back some. Ain’t got the energy to get nothing done. Last thing I done was kill that mule and skin it up and eat it. I wouldn’t have done it, except I couldn’t feed it no more, and I was hungry myself. It was a good old mule, and me and him done a lot of plowing in our time. I figured if he could have figured out some way to kill me and eat me for corn, he would have. I reckon I just got to him first.”
I grinned in spite of myself.
“Killing that mule tuckered me out such, I ain’t never come back to myself. That’s why I was glad to see ya’ll.”
“We could have cleaned the place for a meal,” I said. “You didn’t need to threaten us with a pistol.”
“The gun was empty.”
“We didn’t know that.”
“I wanted to keep you around. I guess at the bottom of it, I knew it wouldn’t work out. But it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
In that moment, I surprised myself by feeling sorry for her.
“What are all of you afraid of?” she said. “What are you running from?”
“Who says we’re running or afraid?” Mama said.
“Your eyes,” said the old woman. “Way you look around. Check the door and the windows.”
“Why would it matter to you?” I said.
“It don’t, except if they come for you, they might come for me,” the old woman said. “I figure I got a right to know on account of that.”
“You lost your rights to much of anything when you held us prisoner,” I said.
“Maybe she ought to know,” Mama said. “Maybe she’s earned that by saving Terry.”
“She just wanted to see she could still cut someone’s arm off,” I said.
“Me and your mama together did a good job, didn’t we?” the old woman said. “Me and her saved that boy.”
“I still hate you,” Jinx called from the other room.
“All right, here’s the short version,” I said. “We made some people mad. We’re on our way to California, and they got a man named Skunk on our tail. That’s as much as you need to know.”
“Skunk?” the old woman said, and I swear, even there in the near dark, the room lit only by the fire in the fireplace, I was sure I could see her turn pale.
“You know of him?” I asked.
She nodded. “If that hellhound is on your trail, then you’re already dead and just walking around.”
“I don’t plan to just roll over and let him have me,” I said.
“It don’t matter,” said the old woman.
“It matters to me,” I said.
“What you need to do is go in the bedroom there, look in the chifforobe and get the pistol shells, and load up that pistol. Then you ought to get the shotgun out of the closet. It’s loaded and there’s a box of shells in there for it. I was going to try and get to it later and blow your head off, but I don’t think I can get out of this chair again, and I doubt you’ll help me over there so I can take hold of it.”
“You got that right,” Jinx called out.
I went and got the shells for the pistol, pulled the shotgun and shells for it from the closet. I gave the pistol to Jinx and she loaded it while I went back in the main room with the shotgun. It was a double-barrel. A twelve-gauge. I had the box of shells for it with me, and I sat down on the floor and laid the shotgun across my legs and set the box of shells nearby.
“Surely,” Mama said, “he’s given up by now.”
“He don’t give up,” the old woman said. “He might take a break, get bored, or decide to go off and look at something he ain?
??t seen for a day or two, but he’ll come back.”
“You’re just going on old stories,” I said.
She shook her head. She licked her lips, said, “I heard tell my mama and daddy knew Skunk’s mama. That after the slaves was freed, she used to work for our family, doing laundry and stuff, cooking. She lived in a shack on the back end of her former master’s property, Eval Turpin. The master was long dead, but his grandson, Justin, lived there without no living kin. But them that had been slaves he let live on the farm, let their children and their children’s children live there, too. He didn’t hire them or pay them nothing, cause he didn’t have nothing himself. Like my family, when cotton wasn’t king no more, his family went broke, and stayed that way.
“One of the women living there was named Mary, and she got with baby by a half-Comanche nigger, and had a child. She called him Absalom. He wasn’t never right, would stir the ground with a stick, killing ants, just grinning. That’s what Daddy said. Said he talked all the time, but a lot of it was nonsense. He was even suspected of killing one of Daddy’s prize coonhounds by feeding it meat with broken glass in it. Daddy said he never knew for sure, but suspected it. Said that old dog was just as good a dog as there was, and followed Absalom around like he was the boy’s pet, and then the boy did that to him. Probably just to see him suffer.
“When Absalom was little, his daddy, the half-breed, got tired of hearing his babble, and held him down and pulled out his tongue with a pair of pliers, and run off, and wasn’t never seen again. Wasn’t but a few years later, when the boy was ten or so, his mama got scared of him. Said she’d wake up at night and he’d be standing over her, just looking down at her the way he looked at those ants. One morning she gathered him up and took him out in a boat. It was the boy’s birthday, and she later said she thought that was about the right time to do it. She told him they was going fishing, but what she did was she shoved him out of the boat, and pushed him in the water, leaned out of the boat and held him under.