The Healing

Chapter 15





Polly was out front to meet Bridger when he drove in with the first wagonload of the sick and dying. Granada hung back, hoping to disappear into the shadow of the doorway. She figured she could duck out the back if Polly ordered her to touch any of those festering sores she had seen that morning.

“These are the worst,” Bridger said, looking at Polly with the same contempt as earlier. “Rest are coming directly.”

Granada risked a glance at the bodies that crowded the wagon bed. Lord, she thought! It looked like somebody had gone and dug up a graveyard! The one the master called Big Dante made no movement at all, and it appeared his body was already beginning to lock up.

Those like Big Dante who couldn’t walk, limp, or hobble were carried in on wood planks by Bridger and his man. They sorted the diseased as Polly directed, the sickest in the front room, closest to the fire and her remedies. By the time they were all situated, Granada heard the second wagon pull up into the yard. The process began again.

Things continued this way until two rooms and most of a third were filled with filthy bodies, foul smells, and horrible raspy cries. Polly went about her work without offering one word to Granada, not even throwing her a fleeting glimpse. Polly’s eyes slid over Granada’s face like she was a piece of furniture.

The grisly sights and the heat from the blazing fire in the hearth combined with the chaos boiling around her set Granada’s stomach to roiling. When she felt the bile rising up in her throat, she fled right past Polly, out the front door, and into the yard. Kneeling behind the ginhouse she vomited.

“I don’t belong in no sick house with no conjure woman,” Granada told herself between heaves. “I belong in the great house.” When the retching ceased, the tears began to fall.

What was she supposed to do? She had heard about slaves who had run off. The hounds got them if they were lucky, the gators or quicksand if they weren’t. Nobody ever got off the master’s land dead or alive without his say-so. At least that’s what Chester told her.

Chester!

Her spirits lifted at the thought of his name. He was so good with riddles, surely he could puzzle out a solution to her problem.

After wiping her eyes and brushing the dirt from her knees, Granada sneaked around the perimeter of the yard, careful to keep out of sight by ducking behind the outbuildings until she finally made it to the stables without being noticed.

Chester could usually be found around the lot taking care of the horses and riding gear, but now he was nowhere to be seen. There was only the sound of two stableboys laughing in a nearby stall as they curried and combed one of the mares. Deciding to wait, she slipped behind a light buckboard knowing that Chester never went missing from the stables for too long.

Granada had been there for less than ten minutes when she heard the sound of footsteps and hushed voices coming down the stable runway. Peeking between the spokes of a wagon wheel, she spied the hem of Aunt Sylvie’s red-checked gingham dress and Chester’s shiny stable boots.

Granada opened her mouth to call out but then stopped herself. Aunt Sylvie would surely send her straight back to the old woman, so she ducked down and decided to remain hidden until she could talk to Chester alone.

“I said stop pranking around and tell me ever thing you heard about this woman.”

Aunt Sylvie was impatient and Chester didn’t try to make her guess. He said straight-out, “Master Ben has bought himself a slave doctoress.”

“A what?”

“A doctor woman,” he explained. “Said she studied up under a midwife from Africa and an Indian medicine man in Carolina. Master bought her off a plantation-owning doctor up the country. Supposed to know a heap.”

“Don’t matter if she studied up under Dr. Jesus Himself,” Aunt Sylvie scoffed. “People ain’t going to trust nobody doctoring for the white man. She’ll be dead in her grave before folks tell her what ails them. And she looks old enough to be dead last week.”

“She best not lay down too soon,” Chester said. “I heard the master tell it to her face. He said she best teach somebody to take her place real quick. If she up and dies on him before he gets his money’s worth, she ain’t going to get no funeral. Master told her he’ll throw her in a ditch like a dog with nobody but the buzzards to grieve her out.”

“Umm-hmm,” Aunt Sylvie said. “So that’s why she chose Granada. To learn her to doctor.” Sylvie’s laugh was grim. “Least I know she ain’t no quality conjure woman. Nobody who got the sight would put all her eggs in a basket with a busted bottom.” Sylvie shook her head sadly and laughed. “Granada? A doctor woman?”

Hurt and angry, Granada had a hard time not leaping out from behind the carriage to tell Sylvie off. Instead she waited until the smart-mouthed cook finally left for her kitchen.

Granada scrambled from her hiding place. Chester took a quick step back and blurted, “What you doing in here? You ain’t run away already, have you?”

“Might as well. She don’t pay me no mind no way,” Granada sulked. “I don’t know what she wants me for. She’s mean and don’t tell me nothing. I want to go back to the kitchen.”

Chester sat down on a barrel and motioned for Granada to jump up on his knee. With her arm slung around his neck, she buried her face in his shirt and let her tears flow freely.

When she was all cried out, she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and asked, “Can I come and stay with you in the stables, Chester?”

“No, Granada. She’s put her claim on you and ain’t nobody going against her. Folks are right scared of that woman. They can already tell she ain’t the common run of midwife.”

Chester set Granada on the ground and then stood up. He walked over and peeked around the stable door to scan the yard. “Your conjure woman put the word out. If anybody gets caught talking to you without her say-so, they’ll get the cowhide. She told the master it was the only way she could break you to saddle. Said you was too much of a pet to suit her.”

“I told her I ain’t nobody’s pet!” Granada snapped, stomping her foot.

He looked back at Granada. “I’m sorry for it, Granada, but you best get on back to that sick house. Master ain’t fooling around.”

Granada couldn’t believe it. Chester was scared of Polly, too!

On her dawdling return to the hospital, she thought about what Chester had told Sylvie, the part about the master throwing Polly in a ditch. Granada sure liked the sound of that. Aunt Sylvie always said that without somebody to grieve you into heaven, you might not be able to find your way.

“Humph,” Granada thought. “That woman don’t belong in heaven! If God is great, He’s going to bar the door.” And if there was anything she could do to keep her out, she would gladly do it twice.

That was it!

The solution to all her problems became as clear as day. She would be the basket with the busted bottom Aunt Sylvie claimed she was. When asked, she would refuse to help. If forced, she would deliberately fail. She would stick to her plan no matter how hard Polly poked her in the chest with that bony finger. That would teach the old witch!

Granada grinned for the first time since she had been told to leave the master’s house. Polly would surely give up on her and send her back to her mistress where she belonged, or Granada, by being a bad student, would send Polly headlong to hell where she belonged.

Granada hurried to the hospital, anxious to work her plan. Maybe she would be back in the kitchen before first dark, eating supper with her friends! She stepped through the doorway and stood there, pretending she had never been gone.

For all Polly seemed to notice, Granada could have stayed gone. When the old woman needed a hand, she walked right past Granada and called out the door to enlist one of the yard slaves. By late afternoon she had a bevy of workers jumping to her commands. They helped her wipe the sick ones down with clean rags and lye soap, carry out buckets of waste, and wash the dirty clothes in a big black pot of boiling water under the live oak.

Polly grabbed a boy and told him to step into the woods and gather some early pokeweed and persimmon bark. When he returned at twilight, she got busy combining the ingredients with mutton tallow, and then by the light of lanterns held by her helpers, she rubbed down the open sores of the diseased bodies herself.

Aunt Sylvie showed up at suppertime at the head of a column of serving girls carrying tubs of roast lamb, steaming side dishes, and tureens of piping-hot broth. Polly poured the wine into tin cups and spoon-fed the sickest.

In all those hours, Polly never once asked for Granada’s help, and the only time she spoke to the girl was to tell her to get out of the way, until Granada found herself backed into a corner of the room, nearly hidden by a stack of baskets.

Darkness found the old woman moving much slower, but still she asked nothing of Granada. Sitting cross-legged in her corner, she heard Polly tell her helpers to set the lanterns about the rooms, instructing them to wake her if any of the sick needed tending during the night. Then she fell back into her cane-bottomed rocker and almost at once began snoring.

Not having been told where she should bed down for the night, Granada crept over to the worktable and sneaked a bit of cold lamb, gathered an armload of clean rags, and made a pallet for herself outside on the cold, plank porch, wanting to put as much distance between her and the woman as possible.

This was her first night away from the great house. She positioned her bed of rags to where she could see the lantern in Sylvie’s kitchen, where just last night she was lying on her pallet by the fireplace, the coals still warm from supper.

She woke shuddering from the chilled early-April wind. It must be late, she thought, because the lights in the kitchen across the way had gone dark. She had no warm quilt to snuggle under and she shivered so hard she feared she might freeze to death. She had no choice. Granada stole into the hospital and claimed an unoccupied piece of floor next to the hearth.

Granada woke again at dawn, hungry, by a dying fire. The room was thick with the gasping and rasping and snoring and coughing of the sick on their pallets and a failing lantern sputtered on the table where Polly kept her salves and bandages and the platters of leftover lamb. The bluish light of dawn filtered into the room, and Granada could see that Polly still sat in her rocker where she had fallen asleep. The chair was in motion, its creak mimicking the sound of some small animal that could have been trapped in the room.

The girl stole up to the old lady with head bowed. “You want me to tear up some rags, I reckon I can,” she said contritely.

Polly did not answer and her breathing remained steady and slow. Granada wondered for a moment if the woman had drifted back to sleep, but dared not look up, lest she find those snapping yellow eyes on her.

“I can gather up some kindling for the fire,” she mumbled. “Keep it stoked if you want me to.”

The slow rocking resumed once more, but Polly didn’t utter a word, forcing Granada to wait.

When the girl felt herself slipping between the floorboards, Polly finally spoke. “I thought you don’t beee-long here among all these dirty niggers,” the woman said in a raised voice, as if for the benefit of the sick who were waking in their beds. “What you care if they freeze or not?”

Granada’s face burned. She dragged the toe of her shoe along the crack between the planks, still avoiding Polly’s glare, as well as the curious gazes from those on the pallets.

“Just remember this, girl, the water you hate is the water that’s going to drown you.” Polly hoisted herself up from her chair with the grunting noises that old people tend to make when they shift their bodies around. She tottered a moment, reaching out for the back of the chair to steady her.

“Nobody here got no use for you,” she said, her tone not exactly angry, more matter-of-fact. “Not until you remember who they are.”

“Remember,” Granada repeated meekly.

“God gave you sight, girl. Look around you.”

With her chin still tucked, she tentatively peered out of the top of her eyes and scanned the room. She was first drawn to Big Dante. At that moment he was also looking up at her, studying her from his pallet. The whites of his eyes were scarlet, his tongue monstrous in his mouth, and his face still so swelled up Granada didn’t see what kept his head from busting open.

A man lying next to him had eyes that were swollen shut, but she had the feeling he was focusing all his remaining senses in her direction. From the next room, a woman pleaded for water in a voice so raspy that the words seemed to rip her throat like sharp-edged rocks.

Granada clenched her fists in defiance. She didn’t see anything here but dirty swamp slaves! She didn’t need to remember where she belonged because she already knew, and it sure wasn’t here. Is that what the old woman wanted her to say? Well, she wouldn’t. She might have to stay, but she sure wouldn’t like it.

Polly shook her head. “Suit yourself,” she sighed. “But remember this. When God wants to punish us, he gives us just ourselves to care for.” She turned her back on Granada. “Excuse me, I got folks need tending.” She dipped a gourd into the water pail and then proceeded in a stiff shuffle into the next room where the woman was crying out.

Granada stood there with the diseased and disfigured all around her. There was no sound except for their breathing, but the silence was potent. It demanded that she answer the question, to tell them where she belonged. For a moment she believed if she did not answer, the ground would open up and swallow her whole.

In a rising panic, Granada found her legs and bolted after Polly.