The Healing

Chapter 40





The dawn broke with little help from the sun. Clouds hung low over the plantation yard, heavy with the rain the skies had threatened all night. The wagon rumbled up to the hospital, waking Granada from a fitful slumber punctuated by the growl of distant thunder. Through her sleep-bleary eyes, she saw that it was Bridger coming to see about Rubina.

Granada leaped to her feet and scurried into the house to wake the two women, but Polly and Rubina were already sitting at the table as if they had been waiting. Rubina’s head was cast downward. Polly had the woman’s hands in hers.

Bridger entered the room and swaggered up to the table. “You save the child?” he barked.

“Weren’t no child,” Polly said.

“There sure as hell was when I left her here. What did you do?”

“I told you there weren’t no baby. Happens. Woman thinks she got a baby growing inside of her, but her body fools her. Swell up just like she bigged. But Rubina didn’t have no baby growing inside her. I know you seen that before, ain’t you, Mr. Bridger?”

Bridger glared at her, his steel-gray eyes straining in their sockets. He worried the stock of the whip he toted at his hip.

Polly half smiled. “Least now you don’t have to tell Master Ben no hundred-dollar child died under your watch.”

Bridger opened his mouth to speak, but then shut it quickly, scowling in resignation. He stepped back from the doorway and nodded brusquely at Rubina, who got up to leave with him. He snatched her arm, not letting go this time until he had her legs chained to the iron ring on the sideboard of the wagon.

Rubina never spoke a word, but Granada knew. There had been a baby.

After the wagon had pulled away, Granada asked, “What you do with that baby? Did you hide it? Where is she?”

Polly raised her chin and cast her eyes over to the corner. Granada spied the large clay urn with a bloodied rag lying across its mouth. She stepped over to look, but Polly reached for the girl’s arm, pulling her back.

“The baby died?” Granada asked.

Polly was stonily quiet, staring into Granada’s eyes, signaling her the best she could without saying the words. While they stood there frozen in each other’s gaze, a flurry of brittle oak leaves blew into the room on a short gust of wind through the open door. They skittered about them on the floor. The rumbling thunder from the approaching storm was becoming more intense.

It dawned upon the girl what Polly had done. “You killed it!” Granada gasped. She clenched her jaws against the outrage that surged from her belly. She waited for Polly to answer, needing her to deny it all.

Still Polly didn’t speak. She looked haggard, her face ashen, the familiar light having deserted her eyes.

“You’re a liar!” Granada screamed. “You don’t care about the people. That baby was the people. Weren’t it?”

Again there was only Polly’s awful silence.

It was all a lie! Granada had lost everything because of this woman and her evil lies.

She slowly backed away, still watching the old woman’s stooped figure, giving her one last chance to rise up and set things right.

Granada turned away, released at last from Polly’s web. “There ain’t no magic,” she spat. “Never was!”

Granada took off in a fevered run across the yard. Raindrops as big as bullets splattered the dust around her.