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  The mule ducked its head, then pranced with its back legs. Then it stood still and twitched its ears while Robert and Hyacinth struggled.

  I went close to them. “You better let go,” I told him. “You better stop it.”

  “It’s this fool girl better let go,” he said. “Pretty soon my patience is going to wear out,” he told her. “Then I’m gonna break your neck.”

  She lunged at him and caught him hard across the face with the flat of her hand. “That’s it,” he said. “You done it now. Injun, hold this mule while I find me a stick.”

  “No,” I told him.

  “I said hold him. Or you’ll be the same color as her when I’m finished.”

  “That ain’t your mule,” I said. “This ain’t your house. I don’t have to do anything you tell me.”

  Robert let go of the halter, and he dropped the hand that was holding off Hyacinth. The harness slid to the ground, and the mule nosed at it. Hyacinth stood ready to jump Robert. But Robert looked like the air had just been let out of him.

  “Well, ain’t this a pretty picture?” he said. “Ain’t this one son-of-a-goddamn beautiful picture?” Then he turned angry again. “Listen here, I’m not walking nowhere in this heat. I’m taking this mule, you like it or not.”

  “You don’t ride a mule with no plow harness,” Hyacinth told him. “Besides, you don’t have to go now.”

  “You been aggravating me since I laid eyes on you,” Robert said. He looked her up and down with that look that made me sick. “You could use some straightening out, all right.”

  She ran her hand along the mule’s muzzle. Then she lifted the harness from the ground saying, “Mister, trouble’s coming your way.”

  Robert kept his eyes on the girl. When she turned to carry the harness into the shed, he told me, “Go in the house. This is none of your business.”

  I walked away a few steps, then stopped to see what would happen. Hyacinth went into the shed. Robert followed her to the doorway and stopped. Then he went inside.

  A minute later, Robert jumped back out. He stumbled against the mule, and the mule stepped aside. Hyacinth stood in the doorway and pointed the blade end of a shovel at Robert. He backed up some more.

  She didn’t look like a girl anymore. She looked old and deep and too mean to tangle with.

  Robert watched her, like he was trying to figure her out. Then he laughed and called her a “fool bitch.” She swung the shovel across his knees, and he fell to the ground. First he looked dazed. Then his face broke with the pain. He held on to his legs and cried out. Hyacinth stood holding the shovel, watching him.

  I thought he was faking. But then I saw he was hurt. I ran to the house and called out for Ma. They all came to the door, and when they saw Robert on the ground and Hyacinth with the shovel, they ran down to see what had happened.

  “Get a doctor,” Robert kept moaning. “It’s broke.” “Hyacinth,” the woman said. She raised her arm, as if to shield the girl.

  Naomi and I looked at Hyacinth as she stood over Robert with the shovel. When our eyes met hers, all three of us almost laughed, but we stopped ourselves. Hyacinth turned her face away, smiling.

  “Robert, what fool thing have you done now?” Ma said. She looked down at him. Her face turned cold, like she was just seeing something. “Robert, I cannot stand for any more of this,” she said.

  “My leg,” he said.

  She knelt down, with that look on her face. When she touched his leg, he cried out.

  Ma and the woman lifted Robert under the arms and moved him to the shade tree. He wouldn’t let them take him in the house.

  “Don’t break my arm, too,” he told the woman. He leaned back against the tree and held his legs.

  The woman looked hard at Robert. Then she told Ma, “I will be back shortly.”

  “Bring me some whiskey,” Robert told her. Hyacinth followed her mother into the house.

  Robert quieted down after a while.

  “Do you want to try to stand?” Ma asked him.

  “Get me the hell out of here,” he told her.

  “I wish I could do that,” she said. Her face was like stone.

  We waited for the woman to return. Robert sat with his eyes closed, moaning. “I’ll kill that bitch,” he said. His head rested against the tree. His face was flushed and sweating.

  When the woman came back she handed Robert a cup. Robert tasted it and spit it out. “Tea?” he said. “Get me out of here.”

  Hyacinth returned, too, and stood next to her mother.

  “What the hell you all standing around for?” Robert said.

  The woman told Ma, “I am fixing you some food to take.”

  “Take?” Ma said.

  Hyacinth nodded toward Robert and said to Ma, “There’s a doctor in town. Or else the hospital is an hour and a half more.”

  Ma looked at her and shook her head.

  “You can drive, can’t you?” Hyacinth said.

  “Is the car running?” Ma asked.

  “It’s fixed,” Hyacinth told her.

  “I told you the son of a bitches were up to no good,” Robert said. The black woman looked hard at him.

  “I don’t understand,” Ma said. “We can leave, then?” she asked the girl. Then, “Robert, are you able to move?”

  “Get me the hell out of here,” he said again. He tried to push himself up from the tree, but he fell back.

  “How’d it get fixed,” Ma said, “without the new part?” “Did you fix it?”

  “I told you they were lying,” Robert said.

  Hyacinth motioned for me to help Ma get Robert to his feet. Ma pulled on one side and I pulled on the other. “What for?” Robert asked the woman and her daughter. “What I ever do to you?”

  We got him to the car. Ma had him get in the backseat, where he’d have more room. “You brought this on yourself,” she told him.

  We left Robert groaning in the car and followed the black woman into the house. I helped her wrap the food in waxed paper. She put a loaf of bread and cheese into a brown paper bag. I looked over at the stand near the door, the one where the broken car part had been. In place of the coil and folded newspaper was a potted geranium, its flowers bright red in the sunlight.

  The woman said, “Ma’am, you will do fine where you go.”

  Ma stared hard at the food on the table. She said, “He’s a good man. I want you to know that. Somewhere inside him, he’s a good man.”

  The woman straightened up and looked a long time at Ma. “There’s plenty crying to be saved,” she said. “Why you working so hard on one who don’t want it?”

  Ma shook her head. Then she said, “Maybe he does want it.”

  “Maybe,” the woman said. “But it looks to me like you have done what you can do. The horse knows by now where the water is. If he won’t drink of it, that’s between him and God.” She folded shut the paper bag. She said, “Be thankful you got your babies here.” She stretched her arms out toward me and Naomi. I could almost feel her hand touch my shoulder.

  The sun was high and bright. The mule and cow stood near the shed, grazing. Robert sat with his legs drawn up onto the backseat. He looked out and was quiet.

  Ma said, “Audrey, Naomi. I want you girls to get in front.”

  “You want me to?” I said.

  I got in the front seat, between Ma and Naomi.

  Hyacinth poked her head in the window. She winked, first at me, then at Naomi, with her big, shiny, serious face. “Stay smart,” she told us. Naomi lowered her eyes to the paper bag at her feet.

  The black woman stood on the other side of the car. She squeezed Ma’s hand good-bye.

  Ma started the car. It sputtered, but it stayed running. Ma pulled the car out the long driveway. The sun burned down on the white road, making it shimmer. When we turned onto the paved road, I looked back. They were all there, standing in a circle of green – the woman, the girl, the animals.

  Hyacinth raised her hand to wave at us, and
the woman, too, waved.

  We headed down the road. We were quiet for a while. Then Robert moaned. He said, “Where you taking me?”

  “I will take you to a hospital,” Ma said.

  “That’s all I need now is a broken leg.”

  Ma looked into the rear view mirror at him. “Robert,” she said, “I don’t know what’s going to happen to you.”

  “What you talking about?” he said. He laughed. Then his voice got worried. “What do you mean, Es?”

  Ma looked up into the mirror again. Then she looked straight ahead at the road while she drove.

  “Essie,” Robert said.

  “Robert, the girls and I are going to stay with my cousin.”

  “Cousin? What cousin?” he said. “Where? What are you talking about?”

  “I’m taking the car. You’ll manage. You always do.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Robert said. “Goddamnit. Essie.”

  Ma didn’t answer. She kept driving.

  I could feel him in the backseat, staring at her. I was afraid to turn and look at him, afraid to see his face. For a minute, I felt sorry for him. But then my throat tightened, and everything fell away.

  Naomi nudged me. “Show her,” she said. She put the carved soap in my hand. I held it for a minute, feeling its smoothness. Then I handed it to Ma.

  BREAD

  So still and cool, everything, with the sunlight coming through the bedroom window, and the dust moving in the beam of sunlight. She could see the dust. At the hospital everything was white – or steel, if that was a color. And the air was empty. Here the air was full, and there were colors: pink and yellow in the curtain, and a pale blue wall. But the colors seemed out of place.

  She smelled sauce. Yesterday her mother told her father on the way home, “You’d better get an extra pound of macaroni.”

  He muttered under his breath about it. “That’s what Josie wants,” her mother said to him, “so you be quiet about it.”

  After the hospital, it had felt so queer riding in the car, with the hollow sound of the tires going around and around on the pavement, and the loud engine, and everything flashing by.

  When she got home, she lay down on the couch. Her mother turned on the TV and covered her with a blanket. Josie heard her brothers arguing in the hall on their way outdoors, and the TV getting louder and softer. Everything got louder and softer. She was tumbling through air.

  And then she woke up in her bed and it was Sunday morning. When she tried to get out of bed, the pain jumped in her side. She put her hand over the scar. It didn’t hurt so much.

  She could have died

  She could have died, she thought, and that funny feeling went through her stomach again. But her dresser was there, and the lamp, and the books.

  She heard voices downstairs – her father and mother and once in a while her brothers. Mostly she heard pans and dishes.

  Her mother hadn’t called to her this morning, “Josie! You’ll make us late for church.” And now it must be almost noon.

  She got out of bed. She had never noticed how big her room was. Her bathrobe hung on the bedpost, and she put it on. But she couldn’t find her slippers. She looked under the bed. There was nothing there, not even dust.

  Poison , they had said. The nurse told her it was like pus. If the appendix exploded, the poison went all through your body and you were dead. Last year, when Robbie got the sliver in his foot, the doctor used tweezers to take it out, and gave him a shot to make the pus go away.

  But this was different. This was inside and tweezers couldn’t take it out. Robbie had run barefoot over old boards. What had she done?

  She peered into the mirror. How spooky she looked, with the robe hanging open and her hair flying every which way, and her eyes round and dark, as if they belonged to somebody else.

  Usually she dressed as soon as she got up. But today it didn’t seem right. At the hospital everyone wore gowns and white robes, all day long, even the doctors and nurses. They reminded her of angels.

  And she had missed the church play. Nobody said a word about it, either, all the time she was in the hospital, and she had been afraid to ask. She was supposed to be the angel who said “Glory, Glory, Glory” when they crowned Mary. Her mother had finished making the angel’s wings just in time. And then Josie got sick.

  She could just hear what her mother had to say about it, how she had to find somebody at the last minute to take Josie’s place, how it was always one thing after another.

  But she hadn’t meant to get sick.

  She had seen the hospital from the outside lots of times. She couldn’t have imagined what was in there, though: so many beds and curtains and people; metal sounds and beeps and footsteps; all those TVs going, and stretchers and carts clanging through the halls, day and night.

  The other girls in her ward showed her their scars and parts of their bodies that she’d always been told were private. And sometimes they used bedpans.

  Then Josie had to use the bedpan, too.

  But it was nothing. It was nothing because they were all there together, and the doctor came in and called her “Chickadee,” and the nurse bent over and smiled, and the high school girl chewed bubble gum and brought them cards and flowers.

  The other girls had their stuffed animals and dolls with them.

  “Will you bring my doll?” Josie asked her mother.

  “What do you want that for? You’ll lose it,” her mother answered. “Somebody will steal it on you.”

  She talked so loud that Josie was embarrassed.

  “But I want it.”

  “Don’t think I’m getting you another one if you lose this one,” her mother said. “I don’t want to hear about it if you lose it.”

  But she hadn’t lost it. Josie picked up the doll from the chair next to her dresser. Then she remembered: That’s where her costume had been hanging the night she got sick.

  She smoothed the doll’s dress and lay her down in the warm bedcovers. She tucked the covers around her doll. Then she stepped out into the hall.

  A chickadee was a bird.

  Her side ached when she walked. When she flushed the toilet, her mother called from far away, “Josephine, is that you?”

  Josie stopped at the head of the stairs and rested her hand on the cool, smooth railing. The bottom looked so far away. Every time she let herself down a step, she felt a tug in her side.

  Robbie and Al sprawled in the living room watching the Tarzan movie. She only saw their legs when she went by the door, and parts of the Sunday comics. They hadn’t come to visit her. They hadn’t even come to say hello when she got home yesterday.

  The funny thing was, she had been feeling so well at the hospital. But now she felt groggy, like right after the operation. And the house seemed so big.

  But the air felt warmer as she got closer to the kitchen, and that made her feel better.

  She stopped in the doorway, startled. A hulking grizzly bear, dressed in a blue suit, sat at the kitchen table.

  But it was only her father, with his ledger and paper and pencil. He glanced at her. “She’s up,” he said, and then he wrote something in the ledger.

  Josie’s mother stood on her step stool in front of the stove. She looked over her shoulder at Josie. “Good,” she said, but she didn’t sound very happy about it. She turned back to stirring the pot of sauce. “We thought you were going to sleep all day.”

  Josie watched her mother’s shoulders move. She was almost as short as Josie. But strong, like a boxer. “A solid woman,” that’s what her father called her.

  One nurse called Josie “Honey.” Another called her “Sweetie.” They used such funny names there.

  Her mother looked around at her again. “You better put something on your feet.”

  “Christ,” her father said. He bent close to the table and erased something from the ledger. Then he wrote something else down.

  Josie and her mother and brothers always went to early Ma
ss together so that her mother could get back to cook. Her father went alone later at ten. But Josie and her brothers knew he didn’t go to church, even though he put his suit on, because they’d had to go with him when their mother had the flu. The first time he left them off and picked them up afterward. The other time he took them right to the diner and they ate pancakes with syrup while their father drank coffee and made smart remarks to everybody.

  “What kind of sin is it,” Josie had asked her mother, “if you’re on your way to church but don’t get there, but it’s not your fault?”

  “Don’t talk such foolishness,” her mother scolded.

  And now Al and Robbie wanted to go to church with their father all the time, but their mother wouldn’t let them.

  “Do you hear me?” her mother said. “Put something on your feet.”

  How could Josie tell her that she hadn’t lost the doll, but she’d lost the slippers?

  “Does your operation hurt?” her mother asked.

  “No.”

  “That’s good.” She reached to the back of the stove and took the lid off the pot of water to check it.

  “I hope you’re hungry,” she said. “There’s lots to eat.”

  Once Josie’s friend Evelyn slept over. When she saw Josie’s mother on the step stool, cooking dinner, she clapped her hand over her mouth and ran out of the room. “A witch,” Evelyn giggled. Josie laughed with her a little bit. Then Evelyn had to hurry to the bathroom because she was going to wet her pants from laughing, and Josie stood in the hallway digging her fingernails into her arms while she waited for the door to open again.

  Her father slapped his hand on the table. “That does it,” he said. “I have to get rid of the Lorelli kid.”

  Her mother let out a sigh.

  “He takes the truck for a job and then goes driving all over hell,” her father said. “I’m losing money.”

  He shook his head and looked straight at Josie. “What can I do?” he asked. “I’ve got a business to run, don’t I?”