I got out of the car and stepped into a huddle of gnats. The air smelled of burning wood. Something told me these girls couldn’t be in school. If they were, they didn’t go every day. They should have been expecting me, but they didn’t have a phone and I wasn’t confident they even knew about our appointment. They had initially been assigned another nurse who had quit the clinic the month before. I was there to pick up where she left off.
A girl wearing grubby pants and an orange T-shirt shaded her eyes with a hand. The backlight of the sun darkened her face.
“How you doing? I’m Civil Townsend from the Family Planning Clinic.” It didn’t make sense for us to be out here in our uniforms, but Mrs. Seager insisted. It was March chilly and I had left my sweater in the car. The wind reached my neck.
I stepped up closer. Someone had tried to braid the girl’s hair, but the roots were so matted with dirt that only the ends of the hair could be plaited. I clutched the file under my arm and tried to remember what I’d read. “Are you India?”
The dog rubbed against my leg, and I fought an urge to push the animal off. It sidled away. I looked down, and sure enough, it had left a brown mark on my white pantyhose.
“She don’t talk.”
I jumped. I hadn’t seen the other girl standing inside the screen door. I remembered the contents of the file. The younger sister was mute. I had skimmed that detail, but it came back to me now.
“Oh, okay. I’m Civil Townsend. I’m the nurse sent to give y’all shots today.”
“What happened to the other one?”
“I-I don’t know,” I stuttered. The nurse’s leave-taking baffled me, too. Maybe the demands of the job had been too much. Maybe she’d found something that paid more. Being out here on this farm wasn’t anybody’s idea of a good time. Even so, there weren’t government jobs just laying around, waiting to be picked up.
“Is your daddy home?”
“No, ma’am.”
I blinked as I pieced together their story in my head. Mace Williams, father, thirty-three. Milked cows, tilled the land, did whatever the white man told him to do in exchange for this shanty and a pittance of money. Constance Williams, mother, deceased. Patricia Williams, grandmother, sixty-two. In the distance, the inky outline of grazing cows flickered in the light.
“Your grandmama here?”
“Grandma, the nurse here!”
I tried to smile, but I wasn’t sure if my expression passed for polite. I didn’t know whether I should ask to come inside or if I should wait for the grandmother to come out.
The older sister settled it. I remembered now that her name was Erica. “You can come in if you want.”
She opened the door for me. The screen pulled away from the edge of the wooden frame, not much protection against the flies. It creaked on its hinges. I’m not sure if I said this before, but walking into that house changed my life. And yes, it changed theirs, too. I walked right up in there with my file and bag of medicine, ready to save somebody. Little old me. Five foot five inches of know-it-all.
The first thing that hit me was the odor. Urine. Body funk. Dog. All mixed with the stench of something salty stewing in a pot. A one-room house encased in rotted boards. A single window with a piece of sheet hanging over it. It was dark except for the sun streaming through the screen door and peeking through the holes in the walls. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that there were clothes piled on the bed, as if somebody had stopped by and dumped them. Pots, pans, and shoes lay strewn about on the dirt floor. Flies buzzed and circled the air. Four people lived in one room, and there wasn’t enough space. A lot of people in Alabama didn’t have running water, but this went beyond that. I had to fight back vomit.
In the middle of it all, their grandmother sat stirring a big pot of steaming something or other. I stepped closer to a hole in the ground in the middle of the room. A wire grating covered the hole and the pot sat on top. The heat rising from it warmed the cool air. Up close, she looked older than her sixty-two years, but she was still a good-looking woman with a bronze complexion and high cheekbones. Her eyes were hazel, but they had lost their glow; the surrounding whites were dark and yellow-tinged.
“You want something to eat? You don’t look none too hungry to me.”
In Alabama, comments about my size weren’t usually meant to insult. Weight was a sign of prosperity. But it made me self-conscious around people I didn’t know well.
She wiped her hands on her dress. Her armpits were stained. She opened her mouth and revealed the dark of missing teeth.
I stuck out my hand. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Williams. My name is Civil Townsend. I’m the new nurse assigned to India and Erica. I’m here to give their shots.”
“I suppose that mean you don’t want none of this here stew.”
“I’d love to stop by and try some another day, ma’am. It’s just that I got to get back to the clinic within a certain time. I tried to come after the girls got out of school.” I was talking quickly. This was exactly the kind of thing I’d worried about. Refusing food or drink in somebody’s home could be taken as an insult.
She didn’t say anything, just stared curiously at me.
“They make me sign a logbook,” I added.
“A log what?”
“A logbook.”
She squinted her eyes, then broke into a laugh. “You stay around here?”
“Yes, ma’am. Well, no, ma’am. I live in town.”
“And what you say your name was?”
“Civil.”
“Sybil.”
“Civil.”
“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Miss Civil.” She pointed a crooked finger. “Y’all clear a space for the woman to sit now.”
“Thank you. I appreciate that.”
The two sisters sat down on top of the clothes. I perched on the bed beside them on top of a pair of men’s shorts. My throat clenched. A deep odor that went beyond a few missed baths filled my nostrils. These girls smelled like they hadn’t cleaned up in weeks. Surely there was a pump outside?
I breathed through my mouth and tried to make small talk to get them comfortable. “Did y’all go to school today?”
“No, ma’am,” responded the older sister. A broad forehead covered in acne narrowed into steep cheekbones that ended in the point of a chin. When she talked, she did not show teeth, and the words came out tight-lipped and mumbled. There was something defeated about her, and it made me want to draw her out.
“Why not?”
“We don’t go.”
“Your daddy don’t make you?”
“No, ma’am.”
Parents in Alabama who did not send their children to school could get in trouble with the law. To the best of my knowledge, the days of children dropping out of school to work on the farm had ended.
It was difficult to work without a table, but I went ahead and uncapped the first needle. The older sister slid down her sleeve and exposed a meaty bicep. “You might feel a pinch,” I said, but the girl just looked at me. The needle slid easily into her flesh. Erica held her younger sister by the waist after they switched places. India’s skin was the same soft shade of deep brown, but her face was rounder, the lines softer. The sides of her hair were pulled too tightly into rubber bands, the edges of her hairline ridged by tiny white bumps. She did not flinch when I inserted the needle.