Under a Dark Summer Sky (3 page)

She called from the bath, “He was there, Mama. He came to help.” The sounds of sloshing from the kitchen ceased.

“How he look?”

“Like Doc Williams.” Henry did not just look older, as Missy expected. More than that, he had the same look that Doc Williams had when he came back from the war. There were the deep, puffy bruises under the eyes that never went away, not even after years of home cooking and Florida sunshine. It was as if the soldiers had been tattooed, from the inside, by whatever they had seen.
It
had
to
come
out
somewhere
, Missy thought. It came out through their eyes.

The sloshing resumed in the kitchen. Mama called, “He gonna be there tonight?”

“I 'spect so,” she said, hoping Mama might not hear.

Mama's head appeared around the partition. “You didn't ask him?”

Missy could not admit she had run away without a word, like a silly little girl. She sank lower in the water. Red bits floated on top. She wanted to get out, but Mama stood there, hands on hips. “Not as such, no.”

Mama pulled her to her feet and began to rub her dry with a rough towel, each stroke emphasizing her words. “Have. I. Not. Taught. You. Any. Manners. Girl.” She turned Missy around to face her.

Missy saw herself in Mama's eyes, not as a grown woman, but as a child again. All the years of worry and hope were there, all they had endured together. Nothing had turned out good in a long, long time.

“Come here, chile.” Mama wrapped her in the towel. They stood like that for a few minutes, Missy's head on her shoulder. Mama rubbed her back. “Gonna be all right, everything gonna be all right, you see. Now,” Mama said, pulling back to look hard at her face, “big question: What you gonna wear?”

Missy stepped out of the water. “The yellow dress, with the daisies.”

Doc Williams put a roll of bandages into his old black leather medical bag, topped up the Mercurochrome antiseptic bottle, and put that in too. He snapped the latch shut, thought for a moment, then opened it again and added another roll of bandages. As he was forever telling the boys in his Scout troop, “It's always better to be prepared.” He shut the bag again and rested his weight on its familiar bulk. It had accompanied him to war and back, probably still had French mud in the hinges. And blood in the leather. “Almost time, old friend.” He patted it fondly.

Through his front window, he could see men carrying plywood and sawhorses, setting up for the barbecue that evening. Zeke went by on his old bicycle, Poncho the macaw in his usual place, clinging to Zeke's shoulder. The bird's flamboyant, cobalt tail brushed Zeke's scrawny haunches. Doc had been to Zeke's shack on the beach not long ago to treat his chronic leg ulcers, but as the man spent most of every day standing in seawater, yelling at the waves, there was little he could do to help. Zeke had not always been like that, he remembered. He used to work on his uncle's pineapple farm, spent all his free time in a little skiff, sat for hours on the still brown waters of the mangrove swamp, patiently waiting for a tug on his fishing line. He knew all the best spots, even took a few tourists out. And everywhere he went, Poncho went too. People said it was the storm of 1906 that did it. Zeke was the sole survivor of his family of sixteen. His little sister was torn right from his arms and crushed by flying timber. Ever since, he had raged at the sea, with only Poncho for company at his lonely shack.

As Zeke pedaled past, Doc noted that the leg ulcers had worsened. He worried that he had ceased to relate to patients as people. They had just become collections of ailments to him: Zeke was ulcers, Missy's Mama was uncontrolled diabetes, Dolores Mason was the clap (again). It had started during the war, of course. It was just wound after bloody wound. They could have been cadavers, except for the screaming. And then, when the war was all but won, the Spanish flu arrived to finish off many of the men who had survived the battles. Any faith that remained had left him as he watched them drown in their own fluids, helpless to ease their suffering.

Peacetime medicine, of course, was supposed to be about listening to the patients, but sometimes, even after all these years, they appeared from him simply as talking lumps of meat—no different from the hog that was even now being disinterred from its sandy grave.

He sighed, rubbed his glasses with his shirttail, tried to muster some enthusiasm. The heat made his head hurt. There was beer in the icebox, but he needed to stay sharp for the evening. He had been dreading the barbecue for a long time, and not just because of the inevitable stomach upsets from Mabel Hickson's potato salad or the minor burns from the reckless handling of fireworks. Someone would wander into the surf after too much beer and need rescuing, or maybe even resuscitation. The soft shush of the waves came to him through the open window. The ocean, which looked so innocent now in the afternoon sun, waited patiently to embrace the unwary.

He was prepared for all of that. He was also prepared for the violence that would well up after whites and coloreds had been marinating in liquor and old grievances for hours, each in their separate areas on the beach. You could set your watch by the fight that would break out between Ike Freeman and Ronald LeJeune. No one remembered where the hatred stemmed from, including Ike and Ronald. Some folks thought a milk cow was involved. And it didn't help that Ike's grandfather had been owned by Ronald's grandfather, and not very well treated at that. So once a year, they pounded the tar out of each other. It was a kind of ritual. And Doc would be there to patch them up.

He poured a glass of lemonade and allowed himself to remember the little migrant girl, as he did once a year. He had only been back from the war for six months, still waking Leann every night in the grip of his terrors, still haunted by visions of horror during the day. They were always with him. Even when he played with baby Cora, he saw the piles of amputated limbs like a grotesque doll factory, felt the sinuous coils of intestines twined around his ankles, heard the screams from a hundred shattered faces. The Fourth of July barbecue that year had promised to be a much-needed dose of wholesome good fun, to help ease him back into normal society. He almost looked forward to dealing with the everyday sorts of injuries that would occur, so unlike the industrial destruction of bodies during the war.

The girl was only six years old, with an innocuous-looking puncture wound on the sole of her foot. She had stepped on a rusty nail while running around with the other children during the fireworks display. Her mother, one of the many who came to harvest the Key lime crop, simply washed the wound and applied honey to it. By the time Doc was called, the child's jaw was locked tight. There was nothing he could do but hold her while the paralysis raced up her little body and finally stopped her lungs. He had heard rumors from an old army buddy that someone was working on a tetanus vaccine, but it would be far too late to help this girl. After that, his nightmares took on a new dimension, much closer to home. And he would never again look forward to the Fourth of July barbecue.

This year promised to be the most difficult yet, thanks to the arrival of the veterans. Against his advice, the town had invited them to the celebrations. It had been hard for him to take such a stance, given his service record, but his frequent visits to the camp had convinced him that it was unwise to include them. His eyes fell on the
Heron
Key
Bugle
, with yet another outraged headline: VETERANS ARRESTED AFTER PAYDAY BRAWL. Such headlines had become depressingly regular, although the damage had been limited to property. So far.

He pressed the cool glass against his throat, remembered his shock on the first visit to the veterans' camp, the utter squalor of it. He had been called to aid a poor old sergeant from Minnesota who had been poisoned by the deadly smoke of the oleander wood used for his cooking fire. Doc could not imagine why no one had warned him against the innocent-looking shrub with the pretty pink flowers that grew wild all along the coast. The men were housed in stifling, overcrowded “cabins,” which sounded quaint but were actually just flimsy wooden partitions held together with a canvas roof. Whites and coloreds still had separate quarters, equal for once in their misery; the latrines would have disgraced the trenches of France—the stench alone was a real health hazard. Doc had shared his concerns with the superintendent, Trent Watts, but it was like talking to a block of granite. The men had nothing to do but drink when they weren't working on the bridge to Fremont in the awful heat and humidity. And it was clear they felt they were being punished by Washington for marching on the Capitol to demand the bonus promised to them. And now this, the final insult: condemned to a close approximation of hell, in a place no one knew existed, where the country could forget what it owed them.

Doc's contemplation was interrupted by a face at the screened door. “You decent?” It was the voice of Deputy Sheriff Dwayne Campbell. Amiable, shambling Dwayne, his uniform always unkempt, buttons straining at the belly. Doc had seen little of Dwayne since he attended the birth of Dwayne's mulatto baby, Roy. He had heard that Dwayne seemed to accept the child, which many men would not have done. Noreen Campbell, by all accounts, had not fared so well. There was talk of savage beatings that left no visible marks—Dwayne was careful—but since she did not seek medical help, Doc could do nothing. He had always liked Dwayne, whose open, freckled face carried a permanent look of mild surprise. The deputy was not blessed with great mental agility, but he usually took a sensible approach to conflict, and his physical bulk on its own seemed to calm most situations.

“In here, Dwayne. Just getting ready.”

“Not sure there is such a thing, Doc, not this year.” Dwayne had also advised against including the veterans in the barbecue. He removed his hat and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. The skin at his hairline showed white where the hat's brim protected it from the sun.

Doc had hoped to be reassured that Dwayne would draw on his years of experience to face the evening with the same ease and calm he brought to most problems. The tension in the big man's jaw and shoulders said otherwise. Doc wondered if something had happened at home but decided it was the wrong moment to delve into Dwayne's domestic situation. The priority was to get through the next twelve hours.

Dwayne took a seat at the kitchen table. “Got any more of that lemonade?”

Doc poured him a tall glass and thought he noticed a slight tremor in Dwayne's hand as he took it. Dwayne drank the liquid down without pause or breath and set the empty glass on the table.

“We warned 'em,” he said as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “And they went ahead anyway. Leaving you and me to pick up the pieces.”

Doc could see both sides of the argument. How could the veterans be excluded, on this of all nights, when the nation celebrated the people who gave it its freedom? They had given their limbs and, in many cases, their sanity in the service of their country. Yet he was convinced they were a danger to others—and themselves. “Maybe it will be all right,” he said and heard the note of foolish optimism in his voice. “Maybe everyone will just get along. Is that really so impossible?”

Dwayne regarded him in silence, eyebrows raised. The man was wound tighter than Doc had ever seen him.

“Okay, then,” Doc continued. “What's the worst that can happen?”

Dwayne tipped his chair back, hands folded on his paunch. “Oh, I don't know, how about this: maybe they drink the place dry and then go looking for more in folks' houses. Maybe they decide to take what they want from the women. My guess is it's been a mighty long time since those boys got any. They're psychos. You know that better than anyone. Drunks and psychos.” He leaned forward, arms on the table. “Would you want them in your house, if you had a wife and child?”

Doc made no reply, just cleaned his already spotless glasses again.

“Sorry, Doc,” Dwayne mumbled. “I know it ain't easy for you.”

“Never mind, Dwayne. That was a long time ago now.”
Five
years, four months, thirteen days, to be precise.
He could probably even give an accurate account of the number of minutes since Leann had left, taking Cora with her. He had changed, she'd said. He'd seemed numb to the world and everyone in it, even her and Cora, except at night, when he screamed and screamed. They had tried separate bedrooms. He woke once to find his hands around Leann's throat, her eyes wide with terror, her fingers trying to pry his away, Cora wailing in her crib, and no idea at all how he had gotten there. She left soon after. They lived with her parents now in Georgia. He got regular notes from Cora, in her achingly precise child's hand. She did well in school, Leann said, in her infrequent letters.

Doc blinked hard, tried to focus. Dwayne said something about getting some extra police in for the barbecue. Doc regarded him over the top of his glasses. “You say you got help coming?”

“Yep, some fellas from over Fremont way.”

“But they'll hang back, right? Just come in if there's trouble?” He could imagine the effect of a group of unfamiliar cops, bored and milling around with nothing to do. Incendiary didn't begin to cover it.

Dwayne suddenly scraped his chair back and stood up. “I'll do my job,” he said and jabbed a finger in Doc's chest. “You do yours.” He grabbed his hat and left by the back door, allowing it to smack loudly into the frame.

Doc watched Dwayne stomp across the hot asphalt toward the beach and rubbed his chest. Only a few nights ago, that same kitchen chair had been occupied by another angry man. Henry Roberts had been drinking stronger stuff than lemonade. Their service in France together had created a bond of shared memories that even Jim Crow couldn't break. Henry had sat there, making slow work of a glass of bourbon while the mosquitoes droned and the crickets sang and moths pirouetted around the bare bulb overhead. Henry had the loping shuffle of the hobo on the rail. His clothes had been washed to a noncolor between brown and gray. They smelled musty. The skin of his face, stretched tight over his bones, spoke of a long habit of hunger…so different from the cocky young man who had boarded the train to war with him all those years ago.

Doc had recognized the look in Henry's eyes. It was the same look he saw in the mirror each morning. It did not invite questions. The past was the stuff of nightmares; the present was something to be endured; the future was… Well, Doc had learned hard lessons about the foolishness of having a plan. His plan had been simple: raise his family, treat his patients, and grow old peacefully alongside Leann. But it seemed the universe had other ideas.

Doc had thought Henry was different. He always had a plan, always some scheme or other. Doc had no doubt he would succeed at something. But then he had disappeared after the war, and no one, not even Selma, knew where he was. He was just one of the tens of thousands adrift on the backwash of the war. As Henry sat at the kitchen table and turned the glass slowly between his hands, Doc noticed the shadows in his eyes, of defeat, of hopes destroyed, of shame…the bitter ashes that remained when anger burned up a person's heart.

“So what's the plan these days, Henry?” Doc had asked.

“No plan, Doc,” he said with a swirl of his glass. “I used to think I'd make some money, enough to see Grace and Selma right, and then go back to France.”

“You got a sweetheart there?”

“Yeah.” Henry's smile split the somber planes of his face. “Thérèse. Met her when we were camped outside her village, told her I'd come back. One day.” Then the shadows returned. “Although I guess she's long married by now.”