I cross the room and kneel next to the bed, unwinding the scarf from my hair and locking eyes with Mr. Bledsoe. “Now listen here, sir. You ain’t dyin’。 You just need a good shit.”
“It hurts! Bloody Judas, it hurts!”
He rolls again, clutching at his pajamas. Ah, hell. Granny once told me Mr. Bledsoe had a tragic past, and that’s what’s made him the way he is, but all I see is a bitter old man with too much money and time on his hands. I rummage through my bag and pull out the jar with its fern frond tisane. “Drink as much of this as you can muster. It won’t taste good. But it’ll get things to moving.”
Calvina holds out a teacup, and I fill it with the thick green liquid. She offers it to him. He takes the smallest of sips, then pulls a face like a gargoyle. Another cramp rolls through him, and he flails around, cursing a stream of filthy words. The flimsy teacup nearly flies from Calvina’s hand. She purses her lips and shakes her head.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years I been helping Granny deliver babies and work her cures, it’s that ladies are miles tougher than menfolk, and much nicer patients, too.
“Now, Mr. Bledsoe,” I say, “if you don’t drink that, you’ll have to go see Doc Gallagher. He’ll give you something called an enema. That means up the rear with a rubber hose.” His eyes get real wide. “I don’t reckon you want that, or the bill that’ll come with it, so if I were you, I’d drink up.”
He pushes out his lower lip like a pouting baby, but this time, when Calvina offers the cup, he chugs it down. A few minutes later, a rumbling sound comes from under the covers. A stench stronger than a day-old bloated deer wafts through the room.
Old Bledsoe really starts howling then.
“Them cramps just mean it’s working! I’ll help you get him to the privy, Calvina. Otherwise, you’ll be washin’ his sheets for a week.”
After we’ve gotten Mr. Bledsoe settled back in bed, Calvina presses a silver dollar in my palm and walks me out to the street. “You heard anything about that evangelist comin’ to town tomorrow night?”
“I sure haven’t.”
Calvina reaches into her apron pocket and pulls out a folded sheet of paper, smoothing it with long brown fingers. I take it, scanning the boldface headline:
Reverend Josiah Bellflower
Miracles and Wonders
Are you sick? Crippled in body or touched with infirmities of the mind?
Reverend Bellflower has a message of healing and prosperity from The Lord.
Below the circus-like script is a date, May 1, and a photo of a tall man with longish hair and sharp features, one hand pressed to the forehead of the woman kneeling before him, the other up to God. I sniff and hand it back to Calvina. “Looks like a bunch of Holy Roller hogwash to me.”
“All the same, I’m thinking about bringing Mama. Her hip won’t stop gripin’ her.”
Something prideful in me rears up. “She been doing the Epsom soaks and taking the willow bark Granny prescribed?”
Calvina looks off somewhere above my shoulder and nods. “Been following your granny’s advice to the letter, but there ain’t no change. And we can’t afford no doctor.”
I gesture up to the bedroom window, where Mr. Bledsoe’s lying in a bed bigger than our kitchen, on down pillows and satin sheets. “You can’t, but he can. Pardon me, Calvina, but you sure do put up with a lot from that old man.”
She shakes her head. “He lost most of his money in the crash, just like them city folk did. I’m thankful to have the work. Mr. Bledsoe is cranky, sure enough, but at least he keeps me fed—keeps Mama fed, too.”
She ain’t wrong. Any work is better than no work in these times.
By now, the sun is sliding under the broad-hipped roof of Mr. Bledsoe’s big, soulless house. I’ve got about an hour to do our trading at the mercantile before it closes. If I hurry, there’ll be just enough time to see Abby before Aunt Val and the cousins get home from the fields, their bellies aching for dinner. I reach for Calvina’s hand. “Don’t you worry about your mama. Granny’ll figure something out. She always does.”
I hear Abby before I see her.
“Dang it, Hortense! Come on!”
An angry mooing echoes over the hillside. Hortense is a cow. A temperamental, milk-poor Guernsey that Abby raised from a calf. If she were mine, she’d have been stew meat a long time ago.
I undo my braids as I walk, letting my hair spill down in waves over my back. I’m wearing my best dress—the one I made two years ago with daisy-print fabric from the Woolworth’s down in Fayetteville. I try to look as pretty as I can when I go to see Abby.
Up the hill, I spy her tugging on Hortense’s lead. She has on her work bibs, the patched denim straining over her curves.
“If you wait a minute, I’ll fetch Morris’s shotgun,” I holler. “We’ll have steak for dinner.”
Abby turns. The setting sun catches on her dark curls. Her lips widen into a grin. Ah, hell. That smile. “Gracelynn Doherty, quit your damn gawkin’ and come help me.”
I shrug off my bag and hang it on the fence post, relieved to be free of its weight. The mercantile was stocked full today. With what I earned from the morels, I got salt pork and three whole pounds of navy beans. There was even half a loaf of rye bread left from the weekly breadline.
I join Abby in the corral and take hold of Hortense’s leather bridle. The cow blows a huff of steamy air into my face and rolls her eyes. “Now you listen here, you bitchy old heifer, you’re gonna get in that barn and bed down for the night. Hear me?” I give the bridle a shake, and Hortense takes one measly step forward, her tail swishing like a mad cat, but she starts moving steadily, bony hips swaying from side to side. We tether her inside the barn, where she promptly lowers her head to chomp on the hay.
“She’s been more cross than usual. Ain’t givin’ any milk at all now,” Abby says.
“Animals act up when there’s something brewing.”
“Weather?”
I nod. “Maybe.”
Abby gives me a long, sweeping look. “You sure look nice. Go to town today?”
“Yep. Bledsoe’s bowels.”
“Again?”
“He won’t eat his damned prunes. Locked up tighter than the county jail.”
“At least his money’s good, ain’t it?” Abby shakes her head. “Come up the tower with me. I got some cigarettes. Pall Malls. Chocolate, too.” There’s a naughty quirk to her grin that makes me go all warm inside.
“Lands, Abby. That’s rich. You rob a bank?”
“No, but I can save a dime for somethin’ special now and then, just like you can.”
We pass through the back pasture, nodding with cow parsley, and top the hill, the shadow of the lighthouse long and narrow on the grass. It’s at least a hundred feet high and made of whitewashed field rock Abby’s great-great-granddaddy Hiram Cash quarried from the hillside, its peaked top crowned with copper shingles. High windows blink in the setting sun, reflecting the clouds and purple-tinged sky. It’s like something from a fairy tale—out of place compared to the dusty shantytown feel the rest of Tin Mountain has.