We drove past the shuttered urinal-mint factory, then onto Route 17 toward Glassville.
“He told me about the time that she slapped that man and saved that girl.”
“Oh, I remember that one very well.”
“You saw it too?” I said with surprise.
She hesitated. “I did indeed.”
“I mean, that took guts just walking up and slapping the guy.”
“She had nerve, your grandmother—couldn’t abide injustice of any kind.” Audy Rae shook her head slowly, “Mmm, mmm, mmm… I remember that day like it happened yesterday. Must be nigh on thirty-eight, thirty-nine years. She saved a life that day.”
“How did she save a life?”
“Cause those men were gonna kill that girl.”
“He didn’t say that.” I was skeptical that anyone in a town like Medgar would do such a thing to a kid, but after Mr. Paul, I wasn’t so sure.
“Those men were taking that girl away and were gonna kill her for sure.”
“How do you know?”
“Some things you just know and you can’t explain why you know em,” she said, and turned back to the road and began humming again. I was silent for a while thinking of Mr. Paul and my grandmother. At the rise of the next hill was an old redbrick building. A sign announced, Glassville General Hospital.
“I wish I could have known her… my grandmother,” I said as we pulled into a parking space.
Audy Rae put the car in park and turned sideways to face me. She reached out and put her rough hand on my cheek and let out a long slow breath. “It’s a nice thing to think about, child, but don’t spend all your wishings on things that can’t ever be.”
As we walked into the hospital, my mind jolted to my father rushing into the emergency room holding Josh’s limp body in his arms—me right behind him negotiating the wake of death smells. My father screaming for help and a nurse intern dropping a metal tray and bringing her hands to her face. “Oh my God,” she said when she saw his destroyed bundle. Him screaming again when no doctor or nurse appeared. The toddlers in the waiting room who started crying from his shouts. Mom wandering in behind us, her quintessence taken in flames.
Mr. Paul was unrecognizable in the bed of the intensive care unit at Glassville General—face a swollen mass of purple flesh and blood-soaked bandages; drain hole drilled into the top of his head to relieve pressure from a bruised and swollen brain. A ventilator hissed and groaned and his chest heaved with it in a terrible death rhythm.
Paitsel was sitting next to his bed speaking gently as we entered. “… said she’s gonna open the salon for you tomorra and is gonna do all your appointments til you come back.” His voice was deep and steady. Audy Rae knocked gently on the open door. “Oh, look who it is, Paul. Audy Rae and Kevin. Please come on in. I was just tellin Paul that Mary Alice is gonna take over the salon til he gets back. He’s true bout keepin appointments, you know.”
I stood awkwardly in the room, not quite knowing what to do next. He stretched out a hand. “It’s good to see you again, Kevin.” I took it silently.
“How’s he doing, Paitsel?” asked Audy Rae.
“Well, Paul’s workin hard to get that darn swellin down. Aren’t you, Paul?” Paul’s eyes were shut tight, chest rising with each thrust of the ventilator. He didn’t seem to be working on much of anything, except dying.
Audy Rae went to the bathroom to fill an extra plastic water pitcher. She placed the flowers she had brought in it, then put the pitcher on the empty windowsill.
“We’re takin a trip to Louisville tomorra, aren’t we, Paul? The doctor there is gonna fix us up right, get all that swellin down, he is.”
Pops and I were alone on the porch that night. It had rained in the early evening for the first time in a month, and the air smelled like sweet asphalt.
“Napoléon was not a large man, you know,” he said to start the night’s conversation. “Barely stood five-six.” Despite the events of yesterday, I think Pops was determined to continue our routine so that some trace of normalcy came back into our lives.
“How did he get on his horse, then?” I asked, thinking he must have ridden a pony.
“He had wooden steps that his assistants brought with them everywhere. But his problem wasn’t the size of his body; it was the size of his ego. Like most tyrants he didn’t take advice from anybody. Kept pushing on to Waterloo.”
“Why did he always have his hand in his shirt?”
Pops sniffed. “Dirty fingernail, I suspect. People never bathed back then.”
“He must have stunk.”
“Well, everybody stunk in those days, so it was okay. Body odor is only a problem if you’re the only one who has it.”
Audy Rae opened the screen door, affixed her walking-home hat, and pulled her summer sweater tight around her shoulders. “See you gentlemen tomorrow,” she said sadly and padded down the stairs, out past the streetlamp. We watched her disappear around the corner.
“Have you ever met Audy Rae’s family?” I asked after a while.
Pops stopped spinning his sour mash. “Of course I have. Audy Rae and her family are almost like my own.”
“Is she married? Does she have any kids?”
“She and Frank have been married for over thirty years. He works over at the printing plant in Glassville. They raised four great kids. Tilly is in school in Raleigh and the boys are all spread out. Raymond’s a lawyer in Atlanta; Frank Jr. lives in Baltimore—sells insurance, I think—Curtis teaches school in New York City. As solid a family as you’ll ever know.”
“We were talking about that black girl that Grandma saved, Audy Rae and I.”
“Were you now,” he said, spinning mash.
“She said they were going to kill her. Is that true? Did Grandma really save her life?”
“That’s an open question. I don’t think so, but Audy Rae is convinced of it.”
“Why? What did she ever do to them?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“Why would they try and kill her? Were they ex-cons or something?”
“No, they were from old-time Missi County families.”
“They just must be evil.”
“Evil? I don’t think I’d go that far. However, what they tried to do to that girl was certainly evil. I’d classify them as just scared, insecure, uneducated rednecks raised by scared, insecure, uneducated rednecks. It’s kind of a pattern in these parts.”
“But if they’d killed that girl they would’ve gone to prison, right?”
“Probably not.”
“Why?”