There was Otto Green Leaf. Otto lived only four houses down from Culver’s. It was a straight line home for him. But one night, he didn’t return home, and when his wife called for him the next day, the three or four men in Culver’s back room searched for him for hours. They found him in a field, two miles away. He said he’d gotten lost. His wife brought him home, but he kept wandering out, to sleep among the cabbages. He could only sleep in dirt, it seemed, from then on. After he’d found his way out of Culver’s room, you’d see him every morning rising from the fields, his shirt covered in mud and dew, blinking at the dawn.
There was Birdie Delilah, the only woman who regularly went to Culver’s. She became certain that her daughter, whom she’d lost in some way she never told any of us, had returned to her in the form of the woodpecker who lived under Culver’s eaves. All night, she sat in Culver’s back room, drinking corn whiskey until her eyes shone, waiting for the woodpecker to start her pestering when the moon was high. At the sound of the first knock, Birdie Delilah’s whole face, which before had been dour and cold and slick with sweat from the burn of her drink, would light up, and she would begin to suck her teeth in response to the bird, steady in her conversation.
And there was Pete Back Back, who came to us still covered in sores from the whipping that drove him to run. No matter what Mama did, what compresses or dilutions she tried, his back wouldn’t heal and his wounds remained as fresh as the day he first got them.
They were all there when we arrived with Mr. Ben’s sister. The room was warm and small and dark, lit only by a few lamps up high. It smelled sharp and too sweet. When my eyes adjusted and I saw all the regulars, I was not so afraid. Mama and I had seen the people of Culver’s back room out and about in town so often they no longer scared us.
But when Madame Elizabeth stepped in behind us, she drew her shawl over her mouth, and Miss Hannah, coming in right behind her, poor Miss Hannah began to cry.
Ben Daisy was sitting up, talking to Pete Back Back, who was steadfastly ignoring every word out of his mouth, in favor of the drink in his hand.
“She smelled like the ocean,” Ben Daisy was saying. “I only smelled the ocean once, back when I was in Maryland, but that’s what she smelled like. Good, clean salt. I told you ’bout her hair, didn’t I? And her eyes? I’d tell you about the rest, but a lady’s present …” Here, he looked sideways at Birdie Delilah, and then he looked up and saw his sister and he stopped talking.
Miss Hannah stepped a little more forward. “Ben?”
“So they got you here, too, did they?” He peered past Miss Hannah and caught Madame Elizabeth’s eye. “So you managed not to kill my sister this time, like y’all did me?”
Madame Elizabeth did not respond. On her face was a look of the utmost pity, which seemed to annoy Mr. Ben even further.
“She got you good, Hannah.”
“Ben, you look a mess.”
“You would, too, if you’d been through what I have,” Mr. Ben said. “Drug here in a coffin all by myself.”
Miss Hannah knelt down beside him and touched his arm. “I came that way, too.”
He wouldn’t look at her. Looked down at the floor instead. Took another sip of his drink.
“They tell you the food here is horrible?” he said.
Miss Hannah gasped, laughed, then finally allowed herself to fully sob.
She turned to Mama. “You let my brother live like this?” she said, her voice breaking. “You let ’em all live like this? These people are not well.”
Mama put her hand up to her mouth and only nodded.
“You said you was a doctor. She said …” Miss Hannah turned and looked at Madame Elizabeth. “She said you knew how to help people and make ’em safe.”
“I tried,” Mama said, but then stopped herself. Her words sounded so lost, in this small, hot room.
“He can’t stay here,” Miss Hannah said. “None of ’em can stay here.”
Culver looked up from his bench. “No one’s forcing anyone to stay. We stay together because we like it.”
Miss Hannah ignored him, pulled at her brother’s arm. “Come on,” she said. “Come with me.”
He did not move at first. He did not move for a long time. We all stood, and watched, while she pulled at his arm and said, “Come with me,” until it became almost unbearable—her ask, his refusal.
But finally, he stood up and put his arm through hers, and Miss Hannah guided him from the room.
I think it was that—more than Miss Hannah’s shaming, more than Ben Daisy’s glassy eyes and his lips muttering nonsense, it was the fact that he would follow his sister out of the room, because of Miss Hannah’s patience, that convinced Mama of how badly she had failed. And I saw her, standing right there beside me, disappear again, into the world of her ambition.
She was going to make him right.
I do not know when, exactly, she started it. The letter she sent to begin it all, she wrote alone—she took the rare step of not dictating it to me. She must have written it that
