Jacko sat glaring up at us with a peculiar look of outrage. His jaw was working but no sound was coming out. His skin was a nonhuman gray, the color of fireplace ashes.
“The noise knocked him over,” I said. “You think it hurt him?”
“Jacko.” Dad snapped his fingers in front of his eyes. “Say something.”
Nothing.
“He doesn’t look so good,” I observed.
“You’re right. Oh for the love of — we better get somebody to look at him. Grab those chairs, hurry. Get in back with him.”
I shoved in the lawn chairs and crawled in beside Jacko. Dad stepped on the gas. The Country Squire bounded off across the pasture on wallowy shocks.
Jacko was barely breathing, a shallow pant.
“What, Jacko?” I patted his hand. “What do you need?”
“Water,” he croaked.
“I haven’t got any water. Here, drink my Coke.”
I poured some in his mouth. I could tell it hurt him to swallow.
“Did he drink it?” Dad called.
“A little. Most of it ran out.”
Jacko closed his eyes and slumped against the wheel well. “Jacko?”
“What’s he doing?” said Dad.
“Jacko? Come on, wake up.” Had I killed him with Coke?
“Don’t let him go to sleep,” Dad said. “They say if they’re having a stroke you’re supposed to try and keep ’em awake.”
“You think he’s having a stroke?”
“Well how should I know? Stop talking to me and watch him!”
We flew down the ramp onto I-20. All those years pulling himself across the floor had given Jacko huge leathery hands with knobby knuckles. I massaged those arthritic knobs until I got him to open his eyes, but he didn’t seem able to lift his head. He lay gazing up at me. I didn’t see any sign of fear in his eyes.
Up to now, I had thought of Jacko as mostly a nuisance. Now that he was dying, it was like leaving Mississippi — suddenly I realized I would miss him.
We raced around the Robinson Road off-ramp and into the emergency bay of the West Central Mississippi Regional Medical Center. Two guys in white hurried out.
Jacko’s eyes widened as they lifted him onto a gurney and whisked him away.
He must have thought he was entering heaven, all those people around him in white. They wheeled him into a stretcher bay, strapped a mask on his face, pulled a curtain.
Dad went to the nurses’ station to do the paperwork. I sprawled on a chair in the waiting room, leafing through Modern Medical Technology. Whenever I closed my eyes I saw a superbright flash, and Spanish moss burning in the trees.
A young doctor came out to tell us it wasn’t a stroke but viral pneumonia, very serious for an elderly man with all of Jacko’s infirmities. Probably he would be here a week, minimum.
Dad said, “I’ve got a daughter in this hospital too. Third floor.”
“Why don’t y’all go on up to her room? I’ll come find you when we get Mr. Bates admitted and settled into a room.” I’d forgotten Jacko even had a last name. Of course: Mom was a Bates originally, and Jacko was her mother’s brother.
In the elevator I said, “At least he’s not dying.”
“Yeah, pneumonia is better than a stroke,” Dad said. “I thought I’d killed him.”
“What are you gonna tell Mom?”
“About what?”
“The house. Don’t you think she’ll notice it’s gone? You’re gonna have to tell her.”
Dad got this exasperated gleam in his eye. “Why do you have to be such a smart aleck? No, it ain’t gonna be easy to tell her, and no she won’t like it. But it’s done. Nothing she or anybody else can do about it now.”
I considered a minute. “You want me to tell her it was an accident?”
He stared as if he could see my bones. “You think you could make her believe you?”
“I think so.”
He looked skeptical. “You would lie, to keep me out of Dutch with your mother?”
I was skeptical myself. I felt like a kitten that has wandered into the cage to play with the big tiger. It may seem at first as if everything’s going along okay, but you just know it’s not going to end well.
The elevator door slid open. Mom was in the third-floor waiting room with her palm pressed to the window, staring out at the interstate. When she saw us she began waving the smoke of her cigarette away with one hand, as if it didn’t belong to her. “What are y’all doing here? Who’s home with Jacko?”
Dad explained.
“Pneumonia! My Lord! I knew he had a cold, but I had no idea it was that bad!” I could see droplets of guilt condensing on her instantly.
Dad said, “You know how old folks are with pneumonia.”
She frowned. “Half the time that’s what kills ’em. They get pneumonia, then they die.”
“As mean as that old man is, he will live to be a hunnerd,” said Dad. “Peg. Something else. There’s been a little accident at the house.”
Her head jerked around. “Accident.”
“Listen to me, now. Try not to get upset. There was a gas leak — a natural gas leak in the house. It must have started in the kitchen.” He was looking at me, talking to her. Looking directly into my eyes, as if that way, we were both saying the words, he was binding me to him with his Lie. “The gas company said to get out of the house. We got out in time. But honey . . . the house was destroyed.”
She shook her head as if she did not recognize the word. “Destroyed?”
Gravely he nodded. “It was a big explosion. There’s nothing left.”
Mom took a breath of smoke from the cigarette. “Really.”
Dad said, “I know it’s hard to believe, that it could happen to us again. And we have to start all over again, for the second time. But this time there’s a difference.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Insurance?”
He nodded. “Yes ma’am. Entire contents, full policy. Five-hundred-dollar deductible.”
Mom’s eyes welled. “Oh Lord, Lee, tell me it’s not true. Tell me this is April Fool’s Day . . . Why does everything bad have to happen to us?”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart. I know it does feel that way sometimes.”
“Our poor house,” she said. “Oh Daniel, you must have been so scared!”
I nodded. “It made this big noise.”
That made her cry harder. Dad and I stood on either side of her. He put his arms around her and let her sob into his shoulder.
“I don’t think we were meant to live in Mississippi,” she wailed. “God doesn’t want us to live here.”
I stood still and said nothing while Mom wept. This was the first time I’d ever conspired with Dad against Mom. I didn’t like it.
“My pictures of Mama,” she wailed, “all those things of Gran Bates, her Sheaf of Grain china, and oh Lord, not her tea service too?”
“I saved that box of old pictures,” Dad said. “And your mama’s Bible, and your jewelry box.”
“Thank God,” she said.
“And some of your shoes,” he said. “Dadgum fortune in shoes, I wasn’t about to let ’em all go. And Daniel packed a box for each of them, didn’t you?” He fixed me with a look.
“Wait a minute.” Mom sniffled, wiping her eye with a Kleenex. “When did y’all have time to do all this packing?”
“It wasn’t that much time,” Dad said. “We had to move fast.”
“You mean while the house was filling up with gas, you had time to run around packing boxes?”
Dad said, “More like grabbing what we could on our way out.”
“Why didn’t you open the windows and let the gas out?”
“There wasn’t time, sweetheart,” Dad said. “I mean the house was loaded with fumes. Opening one window was not gonna make any difference. We were lucky to get out of there at all.”
“Daniel, you’re mighty quiet,” said Mom. “You helped your father do this?”
“Ye
s ma’am. It’s just like he said.”
Mom frowned. “You’re a worse liar than Daddy. Lee, what have you done to our house?”
“What do you mean? I just explained to you what happened.” I don’t think he could have looked more guilty if he’d been wearing black and white stripes.
Her bitter smile. “You destroyed our home, didn’t you? Because they got Charlie Fabricant to fire you. And it belongs to the company, so you thought this would be a good way to get back at them.”
He thought about it a moment. “That’s about right.”
“I know you so well, Lee.” Her voice thickened. “How dare you lie to my face! To my face! How stupid do you think I am, that I wouldn’t see right through you?”
“You didn’t.” He stuck his thumb out at me. “You saw through him.”
I fought an urge to grab his thumb and sink my teeth into it. “I’m going to check on Janie,” I said, rushing out before they could stop me.
I went in to face the sight of my sister bleary-eyed, red-faced, nose running, jowls puffed up like Alvin the Chipmunk. You hear about tonsils like it’s no big deal, but Janie looked like someone who’d just had her throat cut out.
She was furious at Mom. “She practically kidnapped me,” she whisper-croaked. “She said we were going to the doctor. She didn’t say a word about tonsils till we got here!”
“Yeah, I thought it was stupid,” I said, “but she didn’t want you getting all flipped out in advance.”
She blinked. “You knew about it too? Thanks, traitor!”
“I was going to tell you, Idjit. Really. I forgot.”
“If you knew how much it hurts —”
“Stop talking, then,” I said. “You’re the only person dumb enough to keep talking even when it hurts.”
I told her Jacko was in this very hospital at this moment, breathing through an oxygen mask. I told her Dad blew up our house and everything in it, a fact we had to keep to ourselves so the insurance would pay. Janie didn’t seem all that surprised. “Mommy said he lost his job,” she croaked. “He was really mad last night.”
“He still is,” I said. “Although he looked pretty happy when it exploded.”
Janie sipped 7-Up through a straw. Mom was a strong believer in the magic healing powers of 7-Up. Janie said, “Does this mean Dad is crazy?”
“No more than usual,” I said. We shared a grim humor — the quiet jokes of prisoners sharing a cell for life. “Think how it’s gonna be when they try to put him in a straitjacket.”
“You think they will?” she whispered, in awe of the idea.
“I wouldn’t be surprised. This is big. He blew up our house.”
“Does this mean we’ll be poor now?” said Janie. “He always said we were driving him to the poorhouse.”
I told her to stop talking. For once in her life, she did.
In the waiting room I found Mom and Dad watching the five o’clock news. Kent Williams of Channel 12 stood before our house, the smoking hole in the ground. The camera zoomed in on the blown-out windows of Mrs. Wagner’s house across the street.
There was Mrs. Wagner, trembling. “They were the nicest family,” she quavered. “I was over there this morning. It’s a wonder I wasn’t killed too!”
“She thinks we’re dead,” Mom cried. “Lee, they think we’re dead on the news!”
“Well, we’re not,” he said. “That just goes to show you.”
“But you’ve got to call somebody!”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, the TV station, the police! How should I know?” There she went, crying again. “Oh Lee, what have you done?”
Mom asked me to please go find Jacko, since everyone seemed to have forgotten all about him. I navigated the maze of elevators and hallways to the information desk. The lady told me Jacko had been admitted to a ward on the fifth floor. The nurses on five would know the room number.
The nurse at the desk on five was a wide woman with that orange-reddish hair black women get when they bleach it. When I said, “Jack Otis Bates,” she stiffened. “Oh, are you connected with him? Cause we been looking for whoever brought that old man in here to tell you, if you can’t get him to control that nasty mouth of his, he ain’t gonna be able to stay on this flo.”
“Ma’am?”
“Yeah, I was the first one got tangled up with him, went in there trying to settle him in, nasty old thang starts to calling me nigger, well I tell you right now I don’t care who he is, I ain’t putting up with that bullshit! Cause that’s all that is, racist cracker bullshit. Ain’t nothing in my job description says I have to put up with it! I told him to stuff it up his old ass, then another girl went in there, he start up with her too. Say he don’t want to be took care of by no niggers, for us to go get him a white nurse.”
“Look, I’m sorry, if I could explain,” I said.
She made a face. “Yeah, go on. I want to hear you explain.”
I swallowed. “Well — Jacko’s real old. He’s from out in the country. And he says that word, but he doesn’t really mean it — not like, you know, if I was to say it.”
She lifted her chin. “If you was to say it, I would kick yo white ass down the stairs. And if he wadn’t crippled, I’d kick his white ass down there too.”
“He’s got all these black friends back home,” I said. “That’s what he used to call them, and they liked it.”
“Well, I don’t like it. Nobody here like it. Are you tellin’ me we supposed to like it?”
“No,” I said. “Just, he doesn’t mean it in a bad way.”
“Honey, there ain’t no good way you can say nigger.”
Another nurse came to join in. “This one related to 503?”
“Yeah, tellin’ me how some that old cracker’s best friends is black, so that give him the right to say nigger whenever he wants.”
“That’s not what I meant!”
“What it sound like to me,” said the orange-haired nurse.
I raised my hands in surrender. “I’ll tell him to shut up.”
“Yeah, you tell him,” she said. “Five-oh-three.”
The door stood wide open. Jacko lay crumpled on his side, his nose and mouth covered by a yellow oxygen mask. Tubes ran up under his hospital gown.
I went around the end of the bed. “How you feeling, old man?”
He looked pale, decrepit. He pulled the mask an inch from his face. “Hey Danums. They got nothing in this place but nigger nurses.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” I said. “But they don’t like you calling ’em nigger. If you keep it up, they’re gonna kick your white ass down the stairs. That’s what they said.”
“Take me on home, Danums.”
“I can’t. Home is gone. Dad blew it up.”
“Not there,” he said. “I mean home.”
“Sorry, Jacko. You’re sick. Doctor says you gotta stay here.”
“Yo daddy didn’t blow up no house,” Jacko said. “It was Miz Wagna, I done tole you. She come from the devil. She is trying to murder us all.”
“Shut up and breathe your oxygen, old man. It wasn’t Miz Wagner.”
His cackle turned into a coughing fit.
Both nurses kept their eye on me all the way to the elevator lobby. They watched me the whole time I stood waiting for the elevator. The bell went ding! and I got on, and they kept watching me until the doors slid shut.
18
I RODE IN the back of the station wagon. Mom yelled. Dad drove. He kept saying “Calm down, now” and “Would you calm yourself?” I tried to say something, but Mom whirled on me and told me to shut my mouth, it was just as much my fault as Daddy’s for not lifting one finger to stop him.
“It’s one thing when a moving van tumps over in the highway and everything burns,” she cried. “That’s fate! That’s an act of God, and nothing you can do about it. But to do it on purpose, Lee, to set out to destroy our home, all the things we — my God, what am I supposed to wear? I don’t have any clothes!?
??
“You can get new clothes with the insurance money. You can get a mink coat.”
“What would I do with a mink coat in Mississippi?” Mom shouted. “I don’t want new clothes — I want my clothes! I want to go home and get in my bed and pull the covers over my head and forget about you!”
Dad shrugged. “I said I was sorry. What else do you want?”
“Oh please — like one ‘sorry’ is supposed to make up for this? Forget it! I am not forgiving you this time!” She was really wound up. “I’ll tell you who’s sorry — I am, that I ever met you! And didn’t have the sense to keep from marrying you, like Mary Nell tried to warn me. No, I’ve stuck it out all these years, and for what? Thinking maybe you’d change, but you never do. Your bad side just gets worse.”
Dad said Mom was damn lucky to have him, he could have married any girl in Alabama.
She laughed. “Lucky is not the word. I have just about had it with you. You let your temper run away with you, and now you’ve done this foolish thing, Lee, this childish, idiotic —”
“Watch out.” He darkened.
Mom gave birth to a healthy nine-pound sigh. “This stupid thing,” she said, “which leaves us with nothing.”
“Insurance,” he said. “Fifty thousand on the contents, full cash payout.”
“All of life is not about insurance!”
“At least you could give me some credit for taking it,” he said, “after the hell you gave me for turning it down before.”
“Credit?” she shrieked. “You want me to give you credit?”
“Guys, would y’all please shut up?” I said, as nicely as I could.
They left off yelling at each other to turn around in their seats and yell at me. What finally shut them up was the first whiff, at the foot of Buena Vista Drive: a scorchy electrical-fire odor.
“Look at all these cars,” Mom said. “What in the world?”
“Bunch of durn rubberneckers,” said Dad. “Annabelle Wagner is not gonna like them parking all over her grass.”
Mom gasped, “Oh my God!” and fell back in her seat.
The snowlike scattering on the landscape was our disintegrated stuff. The explosion had taken down both of the big oaks. Great heaps of greenery lay all over the yard, as if Hurricane Camille had swept up our street.