Rosy Mae came up a few minutes after Richard left. She had been living with us ever since the night she came in hurt and confused. She was still sleeping on the couch. She smiled big, said, “I swear, that Mr. Richard’s momma need to hold him down and pour kerosene on his head and get rid of them bugs. Or get him some lye soap. I got me some I made from hog fat and lye and boiled mint leaves, and I’ll give him a right smart piece, if’n he’ll use it.”
“He’s all right,” I said.
“He come to see you, didn’t he?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You is so polite. He bring them funny books?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then he all right, ain’t he? He better than his daddy.”
“How do you mean?”
“His daddy, he all the time nervous as a corn-fed duck on Christmas Day.”
“Nervous?”
“Uh huh. He got that religion, and ain’t a bit of it the way he understands it good to nobody but him. You know, twenty years ago, he a handsome man. But not now. He done let all that bitterness eat him up.”
“What’s he bitter about?”
“Lord if anyone knows. There’s just some people like persimmons, they bitter when they born, sweet for a short time, then they go fast rotten.”
Rosy Mae sat down in the chair Richard had occupied, picked up one of the comics from my nightstand, thumbed through it a bit. “I can read this and them movie magazines pretty good, but there’s words I ain’t never learned that throws me in books.”
“I can help you learn to read better,” I said.
“Can you now?”
“I can.”
“I don’t think I got the brains to learn more than I done learned.”
“Sure you do.”
Rosy Mae brightened. “Guess I can learn I want to. Learned to read them magazines, didn’t I? Even if I got to skip and guess at some words. Learned to read what I read now so I’d know prices at stores and such. Had to learn so the white man down at the store, Mr. Phillips, don’t overcharge me. He always adds a bit to colored people’s stuff. ’Course, since we got to buy through the back door, it’s hard to know he don’t mark them prices up before we sees ’em.”
Rosy Mae scratched at her woolly head.
“Either I gots me Mr. Richard’s bugs, or I’m thinkin’ I gots ’em. I’m gonna go down, wash up, and fix lunch. You want me to bring yours up?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“I will. And don’t you lay up here now and starts to feel sorry for yo’self. You jes’ got a broken leg. There’s boys can’t and ain’t never been able to walk. You okay. You gonna heal up. You a little white boy with a good home and good mama and daddy. You could’a been me.”
“All right, Rosy Mae. I won’t feel sorry for myself. But there’s nothing wrong with you.”
“I thank you for that, Mr. Stanley.”
“Just Stanley.”
“Uh huh. You know your daddy done fixed your bike. He straightened out some of them spokes, got another bike from some junk, and he used them parts to fix yours. He done painted it up for you too. But it ain’t that rust color no more. Now it’s blue.”
“That’s great.”
Rosy Mae went out, and contrary to her suggestion and my agreement, I lay there feeling sorry for myself, Nub lying across my chest, his eyes closed, one of his legs kicking as if he were having a bad dream.
Probably about the car that passed over him.
———
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS I mostly stayed in my room with Nub. Daddy had Buster run
I finally watched it from the veranda where there were speakers, and thought it was dumb. I could not believe anybody could be as stupid as Jimmy Stewart was in that movie.
Not long after that we got in a John Wayne cowboy movie. That one I liked.
My leg itched a lot and I straightened out a coat hanger to stick down in my cast to scratch. I carried that hanger with me wherever I went. I named it Larry.
Worse than the itch, however, was my head. It really ached. Not all the time, but often enough, and when the pain came it was like being hit all over again by that Mack Truck. It seemed as if there was a crack in my head and my brains were about to ooze out. But all I had was a big blue knot that pulsed like some kind of second head growing.
When my head wasn’t killing me, I read Hardy Boys books, and when I tired of that, I managed the box out from under my bed and took to reading the letters and the journal again, this time more carefully, and completely.
I began to know something about Margret, began to feel certain she was the Margret that ended up dead, down by the railroad track, her head cut off. There were hints in the letters.
She talked about how at night she could hear the trains go by and how they rattled the glass in the window of her bedroom and how lonesome the whistle sounded and how much her mother drank and yelled at her. She wrote about her mother’s “friends” and how her mother took them in and they paid her money. She never said what all the friends and money were about, but now from talking to Callie, learning about the world a little, it was all starting to click together fast.
I had also begun to notice an oddity. At night, when I lay down and closed my eyes to sleep, I had the sensation of someone being in the room. I felt cold all over, thought if I opened my eyes someone would be standing by my bed, looming over me like a shadow, perhaps the cronish shadow I had seen in the Stilwind house on the hill.
I feared whatever it was would take hold of me and drag me with them across the fine dark line that made up the border between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
After a time, the sensation would pass, and I would awake exhausted, usually with the sun shining through the window, Nub beside me, lying on his back with his feet in the air, his head thrown back, his mouth open, his tongue hanging out.
This feeling was so intense I began to suspect someone was actually entering my room at night.
Callie?
Maybe Mom or Dad coming in to check on me because of my leg, just making sure I was okay?
Maybe it was the letters and the journal entries that had me feeling that way. Thinking about Margret (I no longer thought of her as M, because I was certain it had to be Margret) and how she died, down there by the railroad track, her head cut off, stories of her ghost wandering along the rails.
In the letters, Margret wrote to J, telling how she missed him, that she hoped to see him soon. She talked about the trees where she lived, big dogwoods, and how she heard that the dogwood tree was the one used to make the cross that held Jesus up. That the white flowers that bloomed on the dogwoods had little red spots inside, like the drops of blood Jesus shed. That this was God’s message to remind us that Jesus had given his life on a dogwood cross.
This dogwood cross thing was a popular story of the time, though when I grew up and read about such things, I never found serious reference to it. Most agreed the crosses used by the Romans would have been made of almost anything but dogwood.
But Margret talked about all kinds of things like that. She was a dreamer, and I enjoyed her dreams.
There were pages and pages of the journal where Margret mentioned the pregnancy, said how they could keep the child, raise it, as she said, “In spite of everything.”
When I finally bored of the letters and journal pages, I put them back in the box and used my crutches to get me across the room to my closet. I put the box on the top shelf behind my cowboy hat and my Indian war bonnet,
