The Healing

Chapter 3





Violet slept soundly.

Gran Gran eased back in her chair, the old memories rising in her like smoke. Thinking about the dead, she figured, must be akin to breath on a dying ember. As the memory smoldered, she wondered if any of her words had penetrated the girl’s darkness.

“Don’t know what got into me, Violet,” the woman said, “talking to you about folks long passed. Telling you things that might not even be true. But that’s all I got. One day you’ll be telling somebody about all this. You’ll be telling about this old woman who you’d like to strangle in her sleep. I won’t blame you one whit. If that’s what gets you on your feet.”

Through the rest of the day Gran Gran sat watch by the bedside, placing her hands on the girl, forcing broths and potions for the fever, rubbing horse-hoof salve into her chest. But by evening the girl became agitated again. She threw her head from one side of the pillow to the other, as if a heated battle raged in her brain. Her eyes worked determinedly beneath the lids, sketching out pictures the old lady could not read.

The girl’s incessant babbling grew more hysterical until it turned into a terrible shrieking, sending the woman to the window to see if the awful racket had attracted trouble yet.

“Folks going to think I’m up in here murdering you,” she laughed bleakly. “They’ll sic the law on me sure as the world.” She looked at the girl. “I’m sorry, child, but I got to get you quieted down.”

Gran Gran turned to go back to the kitchen to fix a narcotic of jimsonweed, but she stopped short of the door. She glanced back once more at Violet as she lay whimpering in the bed, her face dark and desolate, tormented by some nightmare Gran Gran could not even imagine. It looked as if that child was taking on all the demons of hell single-handedly.

I could drug her, the woman thought, again remembering the mistress, but what about her soul? Probably wind up broken and lost, wandering from pillar to post, like too many others.

“Calming ain’t curing, is it, girl?” the woman asked aloud, shaking her head wearily. “Keeping you hushed might keep me out of jail, but sure as the world, calming ain’t curing.”

Gran Gran watched the girl as she struggled. “And I’d hate to see somebody with so much scrap lose the battle. You a fighter, that’s what you are,” she said, half smiling.

The old woman heaved a long breath. “Lord, help us both.” She returned to her chair by the bed where the girl was kicking at the covers.

“This is your battle, Violet. I can’t fight it for you. Like somebody told me when I was a girl, I can chew your food, but you got to swallow for yourself.” The old woman smiled, thinking how mad it had made her when Polly Shine had told her that. Gran Gran reached to take hold of Violet’s hand.

The girl yelped as if seared by a hot poker and yanked back her arm. The scare threw Gran Gran backward into her chair.

Violet bolted upright. Her face contorted into an expression at once of terror and grief, and then she let out a gut-wrenching shriek. It was like nothing human Gran Gran had heard before.

The girl’s eyes were opened wide and fixed, staring off into some region beyond the old woman. Her skin was afire with fever, and she desperately tried to get free of the covers that held her back. The screams continued, piercing the watchful quiet of the quarter.

The old woman drew Violet to her, stifling the screams in her chest. The girl beat her fists fiercely against Gran Gran’s humped back and clawed her neck, but the old woman continued to hold her tight, unflinching, until the struggling died out and Violet went limp in Gran Gran’s arms.

When she gently lowered the girl’s head to the pillow, her eyes were still open, darting wildly around the room but settling on no one thing. Her breathing was panicked and uncertain.

It was not over yet.

There was nothing Gran Gran understood to do. If the girl had a broken body, that was easy. But this, this was not what she knew. Afraid for both of them now, she did the only thing she could think of. She lay down beside the girl and drew the frail, spent body close, nestling Violet into the protective hollow of herself. She then began to whisper into the girl’s ear the words she had learned long ago, hoping they might seep into Violet’s dreams.

She chanted softly, rhythmically, “In the beginning God created in the beginning God created in the beginning …”

It was late into the night when Violet’s breathing finally took hold of the easy rhythm of the words and evened out.

Through the flickering light of the lamp, Gran Gran could see that the girl’s eyes were still open, but they had calmed. They seemed to have settled intently on the face of the old woman. The look was sad and wanting, but for now, the terror was gone.

The old woman rose from the cramped little cot and when she looked down on the girl, the panic seemed to rise up in her face again.

“No, I ain’t going to leave you, Violet. I’m going to sit right here. And we’ll have us a chat. I’m not sleepy, neither. Don’t sleep much anymore. Older you get, the more sleep seems like practice for dying. What you want to talk about?”

Gran Gran’s eyes fell on the girl’s shoes where they lay on the floor. Even covered in mud, they looked expensive. The woman drew one to her with her cane and picked it up. She wet a finger to clear a window to the leather grain below. The white man said he would send the rest of the girl’s clothes later. Gran Gran wondered if they were all this fine.

Gran Gran recalled the bloodstained dress she had taken off the girl. It was made of blue silk muslin and finely embroidered, stitched by somebody who knew what they were doing. She hated having to toss the ruined garment into the stove. The smell had sickened her. Since she was a girl, she had never forgotten the odor of beautiful things set afire. Such a waste!

She looked upon Violet where she lay watching. “I guess somebody sure loved you to fit you up in these first-class clothes. I know finery when I see it. Right there, you and me got a lot in common.”

Gran Gran ran her hands over the lap of her feed-sack dress, washed so many times she had forgotten what the print pattern used to be.

“I sure loved to wear fancy frocks,” she mused. “Some folks said I had a pretty face. I couldn’t see it. But, oh my! When I put on them dresses, I believed I was the best-looking little thing south of Memphis. I reckon you could say pretty clothes was my downfall.”