From his distance, Ralph introduced the minister to Bea Dot. “Reverend Sikes has agreed to say a few words for us.”
“I know it’s not the kind of memorial we’d prefer,” the reverend added, “but the gesture is the same in the eyes of the Lord. Shall we get started?”
Reverend Sikes led Bea Dot to the mass grave, and Ralph followed them several paces behind. Thaddeus followed slowly in the truck to bring Netta’s coffin closer to the pit.
From the corner of her eye, Bea Dot noticed a grave digger peering at her from over his bandana. Then she recognized the green eyes, and her heart jumped. She took one step in his direction, but he silently shook his head. Disappointed, she followed the reverend to a spot at the pit across from Will. He stood with slumped shoulders, and even in this chilly air, his forehead glistened with perspiration. He rubbed the back of his neck, rested his forehead on the handle of his shovel, then stood again as the minister began the short ceremony.
After a short speech about the sanctity of motherhood and a prayer blessing Netta’s soul, Will and another masked man stepped to the edge of the grave and used ropes to lower Netta’s coffin to the bottom. When they finished, Will caught Bea Dot’s eye and sadly put his hand to his heart. Tears spilled down her cheeks as she did the same. All she wanted was to rush to him and bury herself in his embrace. Though nothing would alleviate her grief, his arms would have strengthened her. She wished she could comfort him as well. All that wood work and then today’s grave digging had clearly worn him out.
Will turned and followed the other two men to the wagon. Ralph joined them. In pairs they lifted the remaining coffins, then the bundled bodies, and laid them in the dirt. Fear seized Bea Dot as she realized why Will had kept her from approaching him. Her heart pounded as she considered the danger of helping bury dozens of flu victims. She offered a silent prayer begging for Will’s safety. If she lost him as well as Netta, she might as well die herself.
Thaddeus gently took her elbow and guided her to the truck. She walked numbly to the door and sat like a lump in the passenger seat, dull with fatigue from the last thirty-six hours. Thaddeus got in behind the steering wheel.
“Miss Bea Dot?” he said gently.
Bea Dot lifted her heavy head in response, too tired to utter a word.
“Anybody told Miss Netta’s parents yet?”
In her confusion and grief, she’d forgotten about Aunt Lavinia and Uncle David. She’d let them down too. How would she ever be able to look them in the eye? She shook her head wearily, almost certain Ralph hadn’t sent word to Savannah.
“Eliza wrote down a message,” he said, pulling a slip of paper out of his coat pocket. “We’ll stop by the telegraph office before we go home.” He pulled a pencil out of his pocket and held it out to her. “Will you please write down Miss Netta’s parents’ names?”
Bea Dot took the pencil and paper and scribbled the information for Thaddeus. Before handing it back to him, she read the bad news bound for Savannah:
NETTA DIED IN CHILDBIRTH STOP
SO SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS STOP
LETTER FOLLOWS STOP
Bea Dot wished the world would stop.
Lola tossed the soiled linen napkin, dingy and moist from her breath and sweat, into the dining room fireplace. No point in wearing it now, what with sick folk coughing into her eyes and spitting up bloody froth onto her hands. By this point, she would either get the flu or she wouldn’t.
Next to the hearth, a two hundred pound sawmill worker lay motionless, his lips and fingers the color of a thundercloud. Netta felt on his neck for a pulse. Nothing. Sighing, she stood and grabbed both his feet and tugged on them. She’d have to put her back into dragging this one out to the back porch.
She’d only pulled him a couple of feet when a motion in the corner of her eye caught her attention. Through the window she spied Doc Coolidge dragging himself up the front steps.
He look like he just walk through the gates a hell
, Lola thought as the doctor entered his front door. The poor man had just buried his wife. Now here he was back to work like he’d just finished his lunch break.
Wonder if he even seen that baby yet. Probably not
.
Dr. Coolidge stepped over the patients lying on the parlor floor and walked straight down the hallway like a sleepwalker, not even acknowledging Lola’s presence. She dropped the dead man’s feet and followed him into his and Miss Netta’s bedroom. Three sick women lay on his bed, and four lay on the floor, but he ignored them as he went to Miss Netta’s bureau and opened her jewelry box on top. When he picked up his wife’s strand of pearls and rolled them between his thumb and forefinger, Lola asked, “You looking for something, Doc?”
Finally, he turned to face her with despondent, swollen eyes. Then he burst into tears like a little boy who’d just lost his lollipop.
Sighing heavily, Lola took his arm and let him lean on her—he was about to collapse all over the suffering women. With nowhere to let him sit, Lola led the doctor to the bathroom, where she seated him on the toilet. Still clutching his wife’s pearls, he put his elbows on his knees and wept while Lola rubbed her palm across his shoulders. She even spilled a few tears herself over her mistress’s death, but after about five minutes, she left him alone. She had a dead man to drag to the porch, and sick folk needed her attention. Besides, that few minutes of comfort was more sympathy than Doc Coolidge had shown her when she lost her Jim Henry.
She worked up a little sweat dragging that body out, but she finally got it to the porch and lay it next to the others. Holding her hand over her nose, she said to nobody, “These bodies starting to smell.”
She peered across the yard, hoping to see Oily Harley’s wagon. Instead a lone, long-legged boy loped down the road toward the black section of town. She recognized him as Quilly Jackson, the first black face she’d seen in weeks. She stepped onto the back steps and hollered for him to come to the fence.
He came toward her a few steps, but when he saw Lola approaching, he stopped, and Lola recognized his fear of getting too close to her. She halted in the middle of the yard and called to him.
“You seen my mama lately? Or my sisters?” She rubbed her arms and stomped her feet to chase away the chill.
He nodded with a slight frown, as if he weren’t sure of his answers.
“How they doing?” Lola asked. “They all right?”
Quilly dug the toe of his shabby boot in the road, as if the dirt would answer the question for him. At his hesitation, Lola felt queasy.
“You can tell me, Quilly,” she called. “It’s all right.” It really wasn’t. She dreaded bad news, but at the same time she just had to know, much in the same way she always felt compelled to stick her tongue against an aching tooth.
“Well,” he said, reluctant to meet her gaze, “you mama n daddy’s fine, but Julia done come down with flu.”
Lola’s chest tightened, and her chin wrinkled and shook, but she breathed in deeply, trying not to cry. “How long ago?” she asked. “She started coughing real bad yet?” If she wasn’t coughing up that thick spit-up, maybe she’d pull through.
“Don’t know much more n that, Miss Lola,” he said. “My mama say to stay away from there.”
His mama was right about that, but Lola’s heart sank when Quilly ran along his way. How many other black folk had taken sick, and who was taking care of them? Was Oily Harley collecting their dead too? With slumped shoulders, Lola returned to the house. She searched the kitchen cabinets for something to eat. She’d already been through all the bread and meat, and although she regretted using up Miss Netta’s food, she had no choice since Doc Coolidge rarely thought to send over supplies. And with Miss Charlotte and her family lying in the dining room, Lola could no longer use Miss Netta’s phone to call the mercantile for grocery deliveries.
Lola found a package of soda crackers and a tin of raisins in the cupboard. They’d have to do. She ate enough to make her stomach stop growling; then she washed them down with water. Good thing flu patients were too sick to eat. They would have starved to death. As it was, Lola was simply babysitting them until they died. Only a handful recovered.
As she brushed the soda cracker crumbs off her fingers, she spied Doc Coolidge through the kitchen door. He came out of the bathroom and stepped over the sick people in the hallway. Some moaned, some coughed, some rattled as they sucked in air. All were too sick to notice his presence, and he simply passed over them like they were logs.
Lola met him in the parlor. “I sure could use an extra pair a hands over here, Doc, if you could send someone over from the hospital.”
He ignored her and slowly grasped the front door knob.
“Well, could you at least send over some bottles a rubbing alcohol so I can keep these fevers down? Doc, you listening to me?”
Still no response. Instead, he slowly pulled the door open and shuffled out. Today was the first time he’d come over since sticking Lola in his house to tend the sick white folk, and he hadn’t looked at one patient.
Lola hated him for it, but she also knew how he felt, losing his wife and all. Poor Miss Netta. She’d tried four times to have a baby, and now that one of them lived, she died. God sure had a strange sense of humor.
She shut the door that Doc Coolidge left wide open and turned back to her house full of patients, no longer worrying about whether somebody spit up on Miss Netta’s sofa. She wouldn’t be using it anymore. After returning to the kitchen, Lola poured water into a bucket for her next round of cold water compresses. It was half full when she glanced out the window and noticed Oily Harley driving his wagon down the path he’d worn across the lawn and through Miss Netta’s flower bed. She watched him pull all the way up to the house, trudge onto the back porch, and carry the corpses one by one to the wagon, where he dropped them into the back. Knowing he’d ask her to help him carry the bodies, she waited until they were all loaded before she stepped out to greet him.
“Mr. Harley,” she began, “I’m glad you here. I starting to run outa room on this porch.”
He didn’t reply from behind his gauze mask, just stepped to the end of the wagon bed and leaned in to pull something out.
Lola continued. “We short on everything here, Mr. Harley. I wonder could you please have some food and rubbing alcohol sent over here as soon as you can?”
“I’ll see what I can do for you, Lola,” he grunted.
She didn’t put much stock in that answer, but it was her best hope for some relief.
Harley pushed his arms under a man’s legs and torso and lifted him off the wagon bed. Then he carried the patient toward the back door. “I got one more patient for you, though.”
Lola sucked her teeth with resentment. All these white men brought her more and more work. “We really need your help,” Doc Coolidge had said. But how could she help anybody if she didn’t have the supplies she needed?
Harley carried the man up the steps and Lola held the screen door wide to let him pass. “Just bring him in the dining room,” she said. “I got a free spot on the floor next to the hearth.”
Harley carried the man into the house and lay him in the spot just vacated by the sawmill worker. Lola knelt next to her new patient and felt his forehead to see how high his fever was. That’s when she noticed the patient’s face. Staring deliriously through her were the glassy green eyes of Will Dunaway.
Somewhere in the distance a baby cried. Bea Dot opened her eyes and found herself lying on a single bed under a homemade quilt. She inhaled deeply and stretched as she scanned the room. Next to the door stood another single bed with Will Dunaway’s old wool coat, the one she’d been wearing, on top. On the floor next to the bed sat her shoes.
Again a baby cried, and instantly she remembered where she was. The Taylors’ house. Thaddeus had brought her here after Netta’s burial yesterday. Bea Dot’s throat clinched and her chest ached at the memory of that horrible day in Pinevew. When they’d returned to the country at dusk, she’d been so drained that Thaddeus carried her into the house. She didn’t remember being put to bed. When she pulled the quilt off her, she saw she was still wearing the riding pants she’d worn to Pineview.
She rose, stretched again, and peered out the window, the October frost emanating from the glass and onto her cheeks and nose. The sun, low in the bright blue sky, cast long shadows from the pine trees across the grass behind the house. She couldn’t tell if it was early morning or late afternoon. How long had she been asleep?
Padding on bare feet downstairs, Bea Dot found Eliza at the fireplace with two infants. Baby Netta lay in Eliza’s arms, suckling at her breast. Troy, a couple months older, lay on a quilt on his back, kicking his little leg over his torso in attempt to roll over. Eliza smiled with delight as she watched her son’s exertions. Bea Dot smiled sadly too, realizing all the milestones Netta would never see her baby reach.
“Good morning,” Eliza said with a smile. “You was mighty tired. You been asleep almost twenty-four hours. You hungry?”
Bea Dot’s stomach grumbled at Eliza’s question, and she nodded. “Yes, a little.”
The infant at Eliza’s breast had drifted off to sleep, so Eliza lay her in a bureau drawer lined with baby blankets. She picked up Troy and carried him into the kitchen, where she put together a plate of biscuits, ham and honey with one hand while using the other to hold Troy on one hip. While Bea Dot ate, Eliza played patty cake with Troy, then put three pots of water on the stove, all the while chattering about mundane topics, such as this year’s cotton crop, the recent drop in temperature, and her new bathroom that Thaddeus had built onto the house last spring. Bea Dot listened as she ate, grateful that Eliza monopolized the conversation, as if she knew not to remind Bea Dot of the turmoil of the past two days. While Bea Dot cleaned her plate in the dish pan, Eliza stepped out of the room momentarily and returned without her baby.