the road edge, awaiting its next instinct. The white rock road writhed and shimmered in mirage toward its shining point of disappearance miles ahead.
Southeast of Immokalee, a stringy black man walked the shoulder of the road. Though he had not signaled or broken his stride, Lucius slowed the car. “Pretty hot to be out walking the road,” he murmured, and House said easily, “Give him a lift, then. I rode with plenty of ’em.”
The car drew up on the road shoulder with a rattle of limestone bits under the fenders; the figure sprang sideways as if startled by a snake. Alarmed that these white men had stopped, he was smiling hard, braced for some loud jape and set to run. When Lucius smiled-“Good morning!”-he doffed a dusty cap. “Yassuh,” he said. “Mornin.” He took out a bandanna and wiped his brow, not quite meeting their gaze.
“Headed for Immokalee?”
“Yassuh, dass right, suh.”
“Get in,” House told him, reaching back to find the door handle.
Still wary, the man raised a hard-veined gray-brown hand to the bill of his soiled cap. Slow and careful as a lizard, seeking entry without touching anything, he eased into the backseat in a waft of humid heat and hard-earned odors. Closing the door gingerly behind him, he perched on the fore edge of the seat, ready to fly. “You genlemans ain’t slavuhs, is you?” he inquired, daring a little smile when the white men laughed.
Asked how he liked Immokalee, the man chuckled,
When the white men grinned, their passenger relaxed a little, sat back a little, hummed a little, peering out at the savannah to evade their white man’s curiosity. Over the pinelands, vultures swirled like cinders on the smoky sky. “Yassuh. Gone be fryin hot t’day.”
At a corner at the edge of town, the man tapped a gray fingernail on the window, crooning “Thank’ee kin’ly, kin’ly,” soft as a lullaby, “kin’ly, kin’ly,” until the car stopped and he got out. He was recognized at once and cheered by a pair of celebrants brandishing small flat bottles in brown paper bags; he hesitation-stepped in a kind of greeting dance. All smiles, he turned to wave. “I’se in good hands now as you kin see!” he cried. “I thank’ee kin’ly, white folks!”
“Kin’ly, kin’ly,” Bill House said, amused. “Think they’re laughing at us?”
“I do, I really do.” Lucius’s heart cheered the man’s mischievous ironies and buoyant spirit, the poignance and dogged love of life that was so moving in people who owned nothing, and also that in-the-bone endurance that in its way was a shaming of the whites and a profound rebuke.
House asked the men if they might know a man named Henry Short.
“
They told him that Deacon Short was in the hospital. Torching cane fields for the Okeechobee harvest, he’d been caught in a back burn when the wind shifted, and burned severely over most of his body; he was not recuperating and was not expected to live.
“I mean, damn it all,” Bill House burst out on the way to the hospital. “Henry’s very experienced and he ain’t a drinker but that don’t mean he should work alone around big fires!” Lucius had never thought to see this man so agitated. “Big Sugar don’t care nothin about workers’ rights or the damn risks so long as they’re rakin in big profits. Know who got convicted on a slavery charge just lately? United Sugar! U.S.A.!
They crossed the railroad tracks and headed west on a main street of auto junkyards, body shops, a dealership in bright green farm machinery, a brown whistle-stop saloon: they were nearing the hospital when Lucius said, “Did Henry ever mention finding bones? On Chatham Bend, I mean?”
“You back on that again? Speck Daniels tell you that or was it Hardens? Either way, don’t pay no attention, Colonel. If Henry ever run across something like that, our family surely would’ve heard about it.”
THE BURNED MAN
With no staff around on Sunday to direct them, they had to hunt for the old negro ward, a long room parted by narrow shafts of dusty sunlight. Its sepia cast and weary atmosphere, its creaking fans, its leaning cabinets and streaked stained walls, reminded Lucius of the soldiers’ wards in old daguerreotypes from the Civil War. The discreet slow figures wandering the ward were patients and their visitors-women who had walked here after church, Lucius supposed, since most wore Sunday habits. Perched on small chairs by the door were two white men of middle age with weathered faces. Recognizing Bill House, they smiled shyly and stood up to shake hands, but so upset was House by the sight of the patient across the room that he brushed blindly past.
On the narrow cot, pinned to the coarse sheets like a plant specimen, the figure lay still as if extinguished by the heat. His worn blue cotton nightshirt was open down the front and his chest was patched with cracked and crusted scabs leaking thin red fluid. From his iron bed rose a peculiar odor of broiled flesh and disinfectant tinged with sweat and urine.
Peering out from beneath head bandages, Henry Short did not see his visitors until they loomed over his bed, one on each side. Dimly aware of a presence in the light, he muttered, “Them ain’t angels. Them ain’t angels.” The voice emerged so cracked and thin, with scarcely a twitch of the scabbed lips, that his visitors did not realize at first that he had spoken.
House was stricken speechless by Short’s condition, and in the end it was Lucius who said, “Henry?” He spoke softly so as not to intrude on the hush over the ward. “Can you hear us?” Henry stared out of fiery red eyes. Through broken lips, the burned man whispered, “That you, Mist’ Lucius? How
Henry had first known Lucius as a boy of eight, down in the rivers, yet it astonished Lucius that a man dying had recognized somebody he had not seen in years and could not have imagined he would ever see again. With his forefinger he pressed an unburned patch of skin on the ropy forearm by way of affirmation and encouragement and Henry responded by raising that arm minutely to press his touch.
Seeing this, House reached across the cot to touch the arm where Lucius had touched it but hesitated and withdrew his hand just as Henry lifted his forearm in response-too high to bear, it seemed, for he clenched his jaw not to cry out. The pain turned his gaze murky. He closed his eyes and gasped out, “Lo’d A’mighty!” Hearing those words, an old woman two beds away called on his visitors to witness that Deacon Short was a true man of God; if he had ever sinned, none could recall it. “Praise de Lo’d!” the woman cried. A shy chorus of assent rose from the ward. The ambulatory patients and their visitors walked past like mourners in a slow procession, crooning warm harmonies. “Hear them angels?” Henry whispered. “Think they comin after me?” Henry Short produced a stillborn smile as his visitors tried to smile back, sick at heart.
Bill House looked around the ancient ward. “Well, now, Henry, these folks treatin you okay?” Short’s red eyes watched Lucius. “As best black folks knows how, Mist’ Bill.” As a dying man in dreadful pain, he did not bother to conceal his sarcasm. House stared at him, shocked that this man he’d known so well could speak so bitterly. He tried to jolly him: how could an old hand like Henry get caught in a back burn? Short had no time for this. Urgently, he said, “Mist’ Bill? You member when that man come huntin me? Ochopee?” That same man had come for him again, he told them. He’d seen him assembling a weapon on the dike road. Then he came toward him down the rows, in and out of the molasses smoke of burning cane.
Henry dropped his fire rake and ran, dodging in and out amongst the cane. The smoke that obscured him from his pursuer shrouded the ditch, too; peering back over his shoulder, he had pitched right into it and fallen hard, hitting his head. Lying there stunned, he only came to when the burn overtook him and he woke up choking on the smoke, clothes singed by fire. Afraid to holler out for help, he rolled and crawled along the ditch to the mud puddle where he was found toward twilight. Since the local clinic lacked a ward for coloreds, he’d been shipped here.
Lucius said, “Can you tell us what he looked like?”
“Too much smoke. Seen the big bulk of him, is all. Seen how he walk back on his heels, toes out-”
“That’s him!” House cried. “That’s the same man we saw in Ochopee!”
“Yessuh. Scairt me so bad I never watched where I was runnin.”
