“Can you describe what happened last night?”
“The church blew up as we were leaving.”
“Why did you attend the meeting, Miss Bard?”
“I didn’t like the blue sheets.”
He looked at me as if I were insane.
“Blue sheets…”
“The papers,” I said, beginning to be angry. “The blue sheets of paper they were putting under everyone’s windshield wipers.”
“Are you a civil rights activist, Miss Bard?”
“No.”
“You have friends in the black community?”
I wondered if Raphael would consider himself my friend. I decided, yes.
“Raphael Roundtree,” I said carefully.
He seemed to be writing that down.
“Can you find out if he’s okay?” I asked. “And Claude, is Claude alive?”
“Claude…”
“The police chief,” I said. I couldn’t remember Claude’s last name, and that made me feel very odd.
“Yes, he’s alive. Can you describe in your own words what happened in the church?”
I said slowly, “The meeting went long. I looked at my watch. It was eight-fifteen when I was leaving, walking down the aisle.”
He definitely wrote that down.
“Do you still have your watch on?” he asked.
“You can look and see,” I said indifferently. I didn’t want to move. He pulled the sheet down and looked at my arm.
“It’s here,” he said. He pulled out his handkerchief, wet it with his tongue, and scrubbed at my wrist. I realized he was cleaning the watch face. “Sorry,” he apologized, and when he pocketed the handkerchief again I could see it was stained.
He bent over me, trying to read the watch without shifting me.
“Hey, it’s still ticking along,” he said cheerfully. He checked it against his own watch. “And right on time. So, it was eight-fifteen, and you were leaving…?”
“The woman next to me was about to say something,” I said. “And then her head wasn’t there.”
He looked serious and subdued, but he had no idea what it had been like: though when I thought about it, I had little idea myself. I could not remember exactly… I could see the shiny edge of the collection plate. So I told John Bellingham about the collection plate. I recalled Lanette Glass speaking to me, and I mentioned that, and I remembered helping the man up, and I knew I’d journeyed across the church to find Claude. But I refused to recall what I’d seen on that journey, and to this day I do not want to remember.
I told John Bellingham about finding Claude, about leading Todd to him.
“Was it you that moved the fixture off his legs?” the agent asked.
“I believe so,” I said slowly.
“You’re one strong lady.” He asked me more questions, lots more, about whom I’d seen, white people in particular of course, and where I’d been sitting… ta da ta da ta da.
“Find out about Claude,” I told him, wearying of the conversation.
Instead, he sent me Carrie.
She was so tired her face had a gray cast. Her white coat was filthy now, and her glasses smeared with fingerprints. I was glad to see her.
“You have a long cut on your leg. Some stitches and some butterfly bandages are holding it together. You have a slight concussion. You have bruising all across your back, including your butt. A splinter evidently grazed your scalp, one reason you looked so horrendous when they brought you in, and another splinter took off a little of your earlobe. You won’t miss it. You have dozens of abrasions, none of them serious, all of them painful. I can’t believe it, but you have no broken bones. How’s your hearing?”
“Everything sounds buzzy,” I said with an effort.
“Yeah, I can imagine. It’ll get better.”
“So I can go home?”
“As soon as we’re sure about the concussion. Probably in a few hours.”
“Are you gonna charge me for a room since I was out in the hall all night?”
Carrie laughed. “Nope.”
“Good. You know I don’t have much insurance.”
“Yeah.”
Carrie had arranged for me to be in the hall. I felt a surge of gratitude. “What about Claude?” I asked.
Her face grew more serious. “He’s got a badly broken leg, broken in two places,” she began. “Like you, he has a concussion, and he’s temporarily deaf. He has a serious cut on one arm, and his kidneys are bruised.”
“He’s going to be okay?”
“Yes,” she said, “but it’s going to take a long time.”
“Did you treat my friend Raphael Roundtree, by chance?”
“Nope, or I did but I don’t remember the name, which is entirely possible.” Carrie yawned, and I could tell how exhausted she was. “But I’ll look for him.”
“Thanks.”
A nurse came a few minutes later to tell me Raphael had been treated and released the night before.
A few hours later, a hospital volunteer gave me a ride back to my car, still parked a couple of blocks away from the ruin of Golgotha Church. She was civil enough, but I could tell she thought I’d mostly deserved what happened to me because I’d gone to a meeting in a black church. I was not surprised at her attitude, and I didn’t care a whole lot. My coat was in a waste-basket at the hospital because the back of it was shredded, and the hospital gave me a huge ancient jacket of sweatsuit material, with a hood, which I was grateful to wrap around me. I knew I looked pretty disreputable. Bits of my shoes were missing and my blue jeans had been cut off to treat my leg. I was wearing even older sweatpants.
The wound was in my left leg, which was fortunate, because it meant I could drive. It was painful to walk-hell, it was painful to move-and I wanted to be home locked inside my own place so bad that I could just barely endure the process of getting there.
I parked my car in my own carport and unlocked my own kitchen door with a relief so great I could almost taste it. My bed was waiting for me, with clean sheets and firm pillows and no one shaking me awake to check my pupils, but I could not get into it as filthy as I was.
When I looked into my bathroom mirror, I was amazed that anyone had been able to endure looking at me. Though I’d been swabbed at some, the hospital had been so flooded with injuries that cleaning up the victims had had low priority. I had speckles of blood all over my face and clotting my hair, my neck had a dried river where my ear had bled, my shirt and bra were splotched in blood and smelled to high heaven of all kinds of things, and my shoes would have to go. It took a long long time to get all this off me. I threw the remains of my clothes and shoes into a plastic bag, set it outside the kitchen door, and hobbled laboriously to the bathroom to sponge myself. It was impossible to get in the bathtub, and my stitches were supposed to be kept dry, too. I stood on a towel by my sink, and soaped with one washrag and rinsed with another, until I looked and smelled more like my own self. I even did that to my hair; all I can say of my hair after that is that it was clean. I dabbed more antiseptic ointment on the scalp wound. I threw away the earring still in my right ear-the left earring had been removed in the hospital when they’d treated my ear, and I had no idea where it was and cared less. I did look at my left ear to make sure I could still wear a pair of pierced earrings. I could, but I needed to grow my hair longer to cover the place about midway down the edge of my earlobe where there was, and would always be, a notch.
Finally-barely able to walk, full of medicine, and still oddly numb emotionally-I was able to lower myself into my bed. I flipped the volume of the telephone ring to its lowest setting, but left it on the hook. I didn’t want anyone breaking in to see if I’d died. Then I lay back very very carefully, and let the darkness come.
I had to miss two and a half days of work, and I had Sunday as a free day anyway. I should have stayed home
