“Don’t make us a pair,” I said. “I can’t feel no sympathy for her, neither.”
“She’s still a human being,” Mama said. “God makes all human beings, no matter who they are.”
“Well, he needs him a better mold,” Jinx said, “cause some of these he’s making ain’t worth the waste of material.”
Now, I ain’t proud of this next part, but we wasn’t sure what to do with the old woman. We didn’t even know her name, and really didn’t want to. We was also scared right then of going outside after all that talk about Skunk, and though we knew we’d have to in time, we decided it was more than we was ready to handle right then. So what we done was we took that bloody rug we had rolled up and laid aside, unrolled it, and wrapped her up in it. We done it so good you couldn’t see nothing left of her but the bottoms of her shoes on one end and the top of her cotton bonnet on the other. Then we put her and the rug in the closet and shut the door. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
So now the day wore on, and we looked around the house for some food and found some dried-out biscuits in the stove warmer. If there had been enough of them, we could have used them to build a wall around the house- and it would have been solid, too. We soaked the biscuits in water till they wouldn’t break your teeth off, and ate what we could of them.
I took some of the wet bread into Terry, who was starting to stir. He was covered in sweat, but then again, it wasn’t just his condition. We all were sweating. It was summer hot and the house was closed up tight as an old maid’s purse. The idea of opening some windows was mentioned, but no one wanted to be the one that let Skunk in, so we just grinned and stood it.
By the time I come into Terry’s room with the biscuits, Mama and Jinx had stretched out on some pallets in the living room, cause it was my time with him, and as that was the case, and as he was awake and needed to be fed, I closed the door and sat down in the chair next to the bed.
I tried to give him some of them softened biscuits, but he wouldn’t have none of it. He pushed the tin plate to the other side of the bed. He said, “You shouldn’t have allowed my arm to be removed.”
“There wasn’t no choice. You had been out of it for some time, and was sick and feverish, and that arm of yours was black as a hole in the ground, and juicy-like with pus.”
He sat there for a while, said, “What did you do with it?”
“We put it in a box,” I said.
“Where is it now?”
“It’s in the other room on a shelf.”
“On a shelf?”
“We hadn’t been wanting to go outside no more because of Skunk. The old lady knew about him.” I told Terry all she had said. I finished with: “The old lady is dead and rolled up in a rug and stuck in the closet.”
“What happened to the money and May Lynn?”
“Down by the river pushed up under some blackberry bushes.”
“You sure there wasn’t another alternative when it came to my arm?” Terry asked.
“If that means another choice, I don’t think so.”
“May I see it?”
“Your arm?”
“Yes.”
“What for?”
“I want to see the shape it was in.”
“It’s been cut off all day and it’s warm,” I said.
“I understand that,” he said.
“All right,” I said, and went quietly out the door and got the box. I went back to the bedroom, closed the door again, and set the box on the bed, opened it up. Stink came out of it like a dead fish. Terry wrinkled his nose, looked in.
“Close it up, Sue Ellen.”
I did.
“You did right,” he said. “It had progressed to an irreparable stage.”
“It would have killed you,” I said. “Old woman who kept us here was as rotten as they come, rotten as that arm, but she knew how to cut it off, though Mama had to finish up the job.”
“There’s an old woman wrapped in a rug?”
“In the closet.”
“After all we have been through,” Terry said, “something like that shouldn’t astonish me.”
“Terry, I got to ask you about something I think I’ve figured out, and I wish I hadn’t.”
He looked at me while I tried to find the words. I couldn’t find them, least not right away.
“I thought you might have something on your mind,” he said. “Way you’re staring at me, I doubt it’s just because I am a cripple.”
“It ain’t that at all.”
“Then let loose with it.”
“May Lynn, when we found her body, it had a sewing machine wired to it, tied off in a bow. Later, when I was down by the river, I came upon a bag you had tied. I had seen it before, the way you tied it off, but it didn’t hit me because I couldn’t believe such a thing. But it struck me then, way that bow looked. It wasn’t wire, but it had the same look about it that wire bow had. It got me to thinking. You was sure all fired up about burning her to ash and taking her off to Hollywood. Also, your mama, she was a seamstress, and your stepdaddy made her get rid of her stuff, and then it all come together.”
Terry looked at the wall the way you would if you could see enemy soldiers marching toward you.
“I don’t know why you done it, Terry,” I said. “That’s what’s been hard for me to cipher, but I think you done it. I feel bad for thinking that way, but it sure looks like-”
“I did it,” he said. “I am responsible.”
Even though I figured as much, hearing him say it made it feel like someone had ripped the bottom out of the world.
“Why?” I said.
“It isn’t what you might conjecture,” he said.
“Then what kind of ’jecture is it?”
Terry leaned back heavily against the pillows. The air in the room was as stuffy as if we was in a tow sack with a bunch of chicken feathers.
“We have all been so close for years,” he said, “and now it’s come to this.”
“How did it happen?” I said. “And why?”
“Me and her had begun to talk privately. I had come to the conclusion that she was on her way to Hollywood. I was glad for her, really, and even then I thought I might go with her. She confided in me about a lot of things, and one of those things was she was certain that she could cure me.”
“Cure you?”
“Of being a sissy.”
“Oh.”
“I believed my life would be enhanced if I could be attracted to girls. I knew from the way men acted around her that if I could be attracted to anyone, it should be her. But it wasn’t that way. Well, not the way it should be, boy and girl, that sort of thing. We were out at the swimming hole, at night, up in the old oak over the river, out on the big limb. It was night and she was stripped off, and so was I, like we had done many times before, and she stood up on the limb, and positioned herself on it with a knee forward, her hands on her hips, said to me, ‘Terry, how do you like my body?’
“I wasn’t entirely sure how to respond to that question, so I said something like: ‘It’s excellent. Very nice.’ This just made her mad. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. She said, ‘You can’t look at me and want me the way a man wants a woman?’
“I said, ‘I guess not,’ and May Lynn, she says, ‘Everyone wants me, and if you don’t, then you are a queer and you’ll stay that way,’ or words to that effect. She said that very mean, and I was so upset with her I pushed her. I didn’t mean to do it, or rather I didn’t even know I was doing it until she went backward off the limb and fell in the water.”
