Home Fires

16

CH CH

What’s missing?

U R

—Plymouth Christian Church

Wallace Adderly stared at Cyl as if she were a copperhead moccasin herself, coiled and ready to strike, and he unable to run. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about, Snake Man. Because of you, my uncle’s gone. Because of you, my grandmother’s grieved all these years. Because of you, she’s never known what happened to him. But you know and you’re going to tell her.”

“What you talking, lady?” His usual cool had slipped away, revealing the wary, street-smart kid he’d once been.

“You think I was too little to understand and remember how you carried him off to Boston?” Cyl was almost rigid with anger.

“Boston?” Adderly asked blankly. Apprehension suddenly left his face and he nodded as if distantly recalling something almost beyond the reach of memory. “Boston. Yes.”

People passing back and forth between the cookers and the tents gave the three of us curious glances but only Cyl’s body language betrayed the intensity of the moment. She may have lost her temper, but she didn’t lose control of her voice. Even enraged, her words were so low they could barely be heard above the clang of horseshoes against iron, the trash-talking kids at the volleyball net, and the lively buzz of a dozen or more conversations going on beneath the tents.

“Twenty-one years ago,” she snarled. “You came through here. You with your big hair and your big head, spouting about injustice and oppression and how black power was going to change all that. All these years of seeing ‘Black Advocate Wallace Adderly’ in the news and I never realized you were Snake until last Thursday.”

“I’ve never tried to hide my past,” said Adderly, recovering his urbanity, slipping back into it like a fifteen-hundred-dollar suit. “I was here to mobilize this area. To register black voters. Isaac agreed with what I was trying to do and so did your grandmother.”

“And look how you repaid her for taking you in, giving you a place to stay while you got Isaac stirred up. You helped him run off to Boston when he should have stayed here and straightened out his own life. If you’d left him alone, maybe he’d be here today. Maybe he’d be married now, with children of his own.”

Her brown eyes glistened with unshed tears and I followed her glance to the laughing, dark-skinned little girl who went flying by like a swallowtail butterfly in an orange-and-yellow-striped bathing suit, yellow barrettes bouncing in the sunshine as she flitted away from Dwight’s son Cal, who tried to tag her. It was Lashanda Freeman.

She glanced back over her shoulder to see how close he was, veered to elude him, and careened into Isabel, who was ladling hushpuppies from the deep-fat fryer.

Without thinking, Lashanda grabbed at the nearest object to keep from falling and her hand curled around the top of the cast-iron pot full of bubbling oil.

I watched in horror, expecting to see the whole pot come splashing over her, spilling hot grease that would fry that striped bathing suit right off her wiry little frame, but she was too small or it was too heavy. Even so, she howled in pain as her hand jerked away from the scorching iron.

Without thinking, I rushed over to her and thrust her small hand into my cup of iced tea. The only doctor out here was that veterinarian. Unless—? Atavistic memories clamored to be heard.

“Where’s Aunt Sister?” I screamed at Isabel over Lashanda’s screams. The girl’s hand writhed against mine as I held it under the icy liquid.

Isabel pointed back up the slope toward the tents and I scooped the child up in my arms.

“Find her daddy,” I told Cyl as I raced up the slope.

Lashanda was frantic in her pain, yet I couldn’t run and keep her hand in ice at the same time and every second counted.

People hurried toward us, but I pushed through them. “Aunt Sister! Where’s Aunt Sister?”

They pointed to the serving tent and there was my elderly aunt, Daddy’s white-haired baby sister, fixing herself a plate of barbecue. She turned to see what all the commotion was about and as soon as I cried, “Burns. She burned her hand,” Aunt Sister sat right down on the ground and held out her arms.

“It’s okay, Lashanda,” I crooned as I knelt to put her in Aunt Sister’s lap. “She’ll make the fire go away. It won’t hurt much longer. Shh-shh, honey, it’s all right.”

Aunt Sister took the child’s wounded hand between her own gnarled hands and bent her head over them till her lips almost touched her parted thumbs. Her eyes closed and I could see her wrinkled lips moving, but I quit trying years ago to hear what words she whispered into her hands when she cupped them around a burn.

“It’s okay, honey,” I said. “She’ll take away all the fire.”

Lashanda’s terrified screams dropped to a whimper. Her brother came running and hovered protectively if helplessly while I continued to pat her thin bare shoulders and murmur encouragement.

“Feel the hot going out of your hand?”

She nodded, her fearful wide eyes intently focussed on Aunt Sister.

“Soon it’ll be all gone. I promise you.”

All around us, people watched with held breaths as Aunt Sister’s lips kept moving.

Reverend Freeman burst through the ring, Cyl just behind him. “Baby—?”

He knelt beside us and put his arm around his daughter and she leaned against his chest with a little moan, but didn’t pull her injured hand away. “She’s making it better, Daddy.”

At last Aunt Sister raised her head and pushed back a strand of white hair that had escaped from her bun. Old and faded blue eyes looked deeply into young brown ones.

“All the fire is gone,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

Lashanda looked at her hand and flexed her small fingers. “Yes, ma’am.”

Her palm and fingertips were smooth and unmarked. No blisters, faint redness.

A collective sigh erupted from the crowd and so many people started talking then that I was probably the only one who heard when Lashanda smiled up at her father and said, “Mommy’s wrong, Daddy. There white people are nice.”

I stood up, feeling suddenly drained and weary. A whole lifetime of knowing, yet I’m surprised every time I get reminded that racism isn’t a whites-only monopoly.

Someone handed me a welcome cup of iced lemonade. One of the newcomers, Allison Lazarus.

“Remarkable said,” Dr. Gevirtz in a clipped New York accent. “I’ve heard of fire-talkers, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen it done.”

“The colorful natives performing their ritual ceremonies?” I snapped. “Too bad you didn’t have a camera.”

“Was I sounding like a tourist?” he asked mildly. “Sorry.”

Abashed, I apologized for my bad manners. “I’d be curious and skeptical, too, if I hadn’t seen Aunt Sister do it enough times.”

“But surely it was putting her hand in cold liquid so quickly?” protested Ms. Lazarus.

“No, no,” he said. “It’s a true type of sympathetic healing. The practitioner believes so strongly that those around her—especially the patient—also believe and that in turn causes—”

I excused myself and left them to it. I know all the intellectual arguments: the burn wasn’t that bad, the prompt application of ice kept the tissue from blistering, the power of positive thinking, psychosomatic syndromes, et cetera, et cetera. As with old Mr. Randall, who dosed my well, or Miss Kitty Perkins, who talked seven warts off my hands when I was fourteen, I no longer questioned how such things worked. It was enough to know that they did work, that there were people like Aunt Sister who had the gift and used it freely when called upon.

I was walking away from the tent when Ralph Freeman called to me, “Judge Knott? Deborah?”

“Yes?”

“I hope you didn’t misunderstand back there.”

“I don’t think I did,” I said evenly.

His eyes met mine and he nodded. “No, I reckon you didn’t. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. We can’t be responsible for everybody else’s gut feelings. Your wife probably has better reasons than some of my relatives.”

He gave a wry smile and we fell in step together.

“Must make it awkward for you,” I probed.

“Not really,” He walked along beside me with his hands clasped behind his back. “If you don’t work outside the home, if you confine your social interactions to the African-American community, it’s amazing how long you can go without having to speak to an ofay.”

His voice parodied the offensive word and took the sting from it.

“School?” I asked. “PTA?”

The excitement over, the kids had resumed their volleyball game. We watched as Ralph’s son took the setup and spiked the ball for another point.

“Sports?”

“Well, yes, there are those times,” he conceded.

Despite a certain sadness in his voice, I sensed that he felt disloyal to say even this much about his wife and I quit pushing.

“Lashanda’s okay?”

He seized gratefully on the change of subject. “Oh, yes. Ms. DeGraffenried—Cylvia? The prosecutor?—she took Lashanda up to your house to change out of her bathing suit and then there was some mention of a lemon meringue pie. I can’t thank you enough for what you did.”

“Not me. My aunt.”

“She might have prayed the fire out, but you were the one got her to your aunt so quickly.”

I shrugged.

Ralph Freeman stopped and smiled down at me, a smile as warm and uncomplicated as July sunshine. “You don’t like to be thanked, do you?”

“Sure I do, but not when it’s for something as elemental as helping a hurt child.”

He brushed aside my demurral as if I hadn’t spoken. “All you have to do is say ‘you’re welcome.’”

“Excuse me?”

“I say ‘thank you,’ you say ‘you’re welcome.’ What’s so hard about that?” There was such genuine goodness in his smile.

Goodness, and yet a touch of mischief, too, in the tilt of his head.

“Thank you for helping my baby girl,” he said.

I smiled back at him.

“You’re welcome,” I said.