“In time,” she replied. “The board’s there so the bone sets right. It doesn’t matter how a bone breaks, it matters how it sets.”
“I’m sorry I looked at your things, ma’am,” I said.
She shook her head. “Don’t call me that,” she said. “My name’s Sarat.”
“I’m sorry, Sarat.”
“Why’d you do it?” she asked me.
“I just wanted to know.”
“Don’t ever apologize for that,” she said. “That’s all there is to life, is wanting to know.”
We heard the sound of the doorbell chimes; the front gate opened. I knew my mother and father had returned, and although I dreaded their reaction once they learned what I’d done, I was unconcerned. The strange bliss that enveloped me remained.
My mother came upstairs and when she saw me her eyes turned wide as wells.
“What did you do?” she said, over and over. For a moment she ignored her sister-in-law’s presence entirely, and I thought she was asking me. Then some accusatory deduction must have revealed itself to her mind, and she turned around.
“What did you do to him?” she said.
“He fell and broke his arm,” Sarat replied. “I splinted it and gave him some Bonesetters. He’ll be all right.”
“You didn’t call an ambulance? You didn’t call a doctor? You didn’t call us?”
My mother was moving toward her now. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she said. “A boy breaks his arm and you do nothing?”
Sarat grew silent. From the way my mother was standing before her I wondered if my mother would try to strike her. But instead she slammed the window shut and locked it.
“For God’s sake, don’t you understand? The war is over,” my mother screamed. “This isn’t Patience, this isn’t the front, this isn’t the prison they locked you in. You want to keep living in that world, go crawl back into that filthy little shed of yours and live it there. Don’t you dare try to pull us into it, you hear me? Don’t you dare.”
I watched Sarat walk away. On the way out she passed my father, who’d been drawn upstairs by the sound of my mother’s voice. She walked past him as though he didn’t exist. It seemed impossible then to imagine the two of them as siblings, as having come from any kind of overlapping past.
When he saw my arm, my father came to my bedside.
“Oh no,” he said.
“That’s all you’ve got to say?” my mother asked him. “She breaks your son’s arm and that’s all you’ve got to say?”
“She didn’t break it,” I protested.
“She’s damaged, Simon,” my mother said. “She’s a danger to us, a danger to your son. I don’t know what it’s going to take for you to see that.”
This time, they didn’t bother to argue in hushed tones. I watched them fight right there in my room. My father was upset and struggled to find the words he wanted to say, and this time my mother did not have patience. But I was not upset. At the time I had no idea it was just a chemical mirage, the Bonesetters coursing through my blood. Even later, when the warmth turned sour in my stomach and I threw up all over the floor, I still felt good.
In the clinic in Lincolnton, the doctor said the break looked worse than it was. He laughed when my parents brought me in, my arm still braced with the wooden plank. He asked if they’d found me in some old bunker on the Tennessee line, fighting the Blues.
He put a proper cast on and said in a month it’d be good as new. I was coming off the Bonesetters then, and embers were starting to glow again inside my arm, but I still remember the overwhelming sense of relief I felt when I heard those words: Good as new.
By the time we drove back to the house, it was almost dawn. My mother, who’d spent the whole car ride to the clinic digging her thumbnails into the skin of her middle fingers, had cooled enough to begin interrogating me about how I came to break my arm. But I held under the pressure. For some reason, the prospect of my parents entering House Thirty-six and discovering whatever it was that lived there was the outcome I most dreaded. When they finally laid me back in my bed, I fell asleep with a smile on my face.
ONE OF THE THINGS I remember most clearly about my mother is her capacity for stillness. Sometimes, when she was out planting strange new flowers in her backyard plot, or painting childlike pastorals on our riverside levee, she would suddenly become perfectly motionless. Once or twice I caught her doing it—frozen, as though trying to escape the attention of some passing beast. Once, after she went back into the house, I knelt by the levee and tried to mimic her, staring hard into the concrete. But wayward thoughts began to pile up in my mind, and in a minute or two I was ready to burst. I was young and I had no use for stillness.
The morning after I broke my arm, my mother went to see Sarat. The door to the shed was ajar and the light always on. Peering in, my mother could see her hunched on a stool over the worktable, sewing in the old way with a thread and needle.
“If you want me gone I’ll go,” Sarat said, her eyes still on her work, her back to the door.
My mother went inside. Even in the coolness of dawn, the shed was hot with the light of the incandescent bulb.
“This is where they kept us, the night they came for you,” my mother said. “After they took you away and searched the shed, they locked Simon and me in here with rifles at our heads while they turned the house upside down. I never saw Simon like that before, the way he screamed when he saw those guns.”
My mother sat on a stool near the bench on the other side of the shed. She inspected an old squirt can that once held oil and now served as a pen holder. “I always hated this goddamn shed.”
My mother turned her eye to the thing being sewn—a shirt of gray cloth, big and baggy as a potato sack. The stitch lines were wide and ragged, the needle disappearing within the massive hand that held it.
“It’s bad light for that kind of work,” my mother said. “God knows how you can even sleep with that thing on.”
“I forgot how to sleep in the dark,” Sarat said.
My mother grimaced. The shed smelled of meat, a butcher shop stink. An ancient fishing box sat atop the workbench shelves, its tackles rusted and never used.
“I was wrong to yell at you the way I did,” my mother said. “The doctor said it was good, as far as splints go, and Benjamin would have been hollering all night if you hadn’t given him those painkillers.”
“He’s soft.”
“Christ, Sarat, he’s six years old.”
“I didn’t mean it as a bad thing.”
“He told us he fell chasing a wolf away from the greenhouses,” my mother said. “God knows there hasn’t been a wolf around these parts in years. I think it might be the first time he’s ever lied to us.”
Sarat looked up from her sewing. “He’s a good kid,” she said. “He didn’t do nothing.”
“Oh I’m not mad at him,” my mother replied. “He’s lying because he likes you, and he wants to share whatever happened only with you. That’s how little boys are supposed to feel about their aunts. He likes you, Sarat. In spite of everything you do to keep your distance from us, he still likes you.”
“I thought they’d made a mistake when they told me about him,” Sarat said.
“When who told you about him?”
“For a while, when they were still trying to get me to talk, every now and then they’d tell me they’d arrested Simon or Dana or Mama. That’s how little they really knew—they had no idea which of us were dead and which of us were alive. Then one day they came in and said, If you don’t talk we’re gonna have to take Benjamin away. I thought, it’s one thing if they don’t know Mama and my sister are gone, but they don’t even know Benjamin’s been dead twenty years.”
My mother smiled. The first blue of sunrise crawled through the cracks and illuminated the dust in the air.
“Your brother’s a good man,” my mother said. “He’ll compromise on just about anything. But when we found out it was a boy, there was no way he’d have any other name. It’s the only time he’s ever put his foot down for as long as I’ve known him. Can you believe that?”