I think the doctor should come again and have a look at Dale, but Juna says no, he’s improving every day. He’s frightened of the doctor, and can’t you see his color is so nice and his breathing so easy? But still he isn’t right, not like he was before, and he sleeps, mostly he sleeps. Juna says he’s eating, but I don’t see because I’m too busy with the laundry and the tobacco and John Holleran.
While Juna tends to Dale, I take over her chores. The work is hard and my days are long. I spend them in the fields and do the things Juna once did. I snap the pink flowers from the tops of the tobacco that has survived the dry summer. I pull worms, learn to pop their heads off with a flick of my thumb and toss them on the ground. At night, every night, my knees and back ache. I clench and unclench my fingers to loosen the stiffness. I pat my face with a cool cloth to soothe my sunburned skin, peel the black grime from my hands, and my skin is raw from the lye soap I scrub with every night before supper. Juna tells me to eat and take care and not concern myself with Dale. She’s tending him and helping him to remember. By the time I come home each night, my fingers sometimes bleeding from the blisters that break open and my shins and forearms bruised and scabbed and my throat dry, Dale has eaten well and is resting. You really don’t want to disturb him, do you, Juna will say, and then she’ll pull out a chair and invite me to have a seat. Each night, I barely sit through supper before falling asleep.
John Holleran does what he can. Every evening and some mornings, he comes to help me because mostly these jobs are new to me and I’m not so handy with them. He lays in new firewood, and to keep the snakes from getting inside, the thing he knows I most hate, he cuts back the grass Daddy left to grow alongside the house. As we work, he talks about land and wanting his own and how he’ll one day have his daddy’s. It’s meant to pass on through the family from father to son, he tells me as we pour buckets of water on the garden to save the fall crop. John is easier with me now, talks more, smiles more. He’s happy, and as much as that’s my doing, it’s mine to undo as well.
When finally we send John for the doctor, Joseph Carl’s trial is two days away. Juna and I will not be making the trip. Daddy has already said no two daughters of his will be put in such a circumstance. Juna smiled to hear him say there are two of us.
It only took fifteen days for the grand jury—that’s what Daddy called it—to say Joseph Carl should be tried for his crimes. Ellis Baine showed the sheriff, showed anyone who would make the trip, the spot where Dale was discovered. The river where he was found is drying up, a little more each day. It swelled to its highest level in early spring, run off from the thaws up north, but every day, it’s lower and slower. The boy could have fallen, Ellis Baine said. Could have climbed a tree and fallen. But there was no broken branch and why would the boy climb so high. Particularly a boy such as Dale. He was soft, you know, softer than most. The boy was beaten. Beaten and left for dead.
Then make him talk, Ellis said next. The boy has yet to even name Joseph Carl. He won’t say a word. Make the boy talk. Make him say something. Get that girl, Juna, away from him and make him talk.
Doesn’t really matter, the sheriff had said. That man’s going to hang for what he done to the girl. Don’t much matter what really happened to the boy.
Times are tough, the sheriff is rumored to have said to Ellis and every other Baine brother. She promised those boys Joseph Carl would get himself a trial as fair as any man could expect. But she couldn’t promise nothing more. Folks want to see something evil, if only a single evil thing, get its comeuppance, she told them. Joseph Carl is that evil, and if seeing him pay will appease the one who might cause them more pain—and by that the sheriff meant Juna, though she didn’t dare say it—well, folks see it as justice worth serving. Folks just want a better life.
“I guess this’ll be the thing to haunt me all my days” is what folks say the sheriff last told Ellis Baine.
The doctor doesn’t wear his coat when he walks through the door this time because it’s late morning and the chill of the early hours has worn off, everywhere except at our house. He glances around when he steps inside, crosses his arms and rubs his hands from shoulder to elbow, up and down, warming himself. His heavy white brows nip together over his nose as if he’s wondering where that terrible draft has come from. I offer him coffee, an offer he declines, and because he already knows the way, he lets himself into Dale’s room.
“What in the name of our good Lord have you been doing here?” he asks, looking at me and not Juna.
I press my hand to Dale’s head. He was warm this morning, too warm, when I finally insisted we send for the doctor again. Juna had said it was the stuffy room and not enough fresh air. She said he’d finished a nice breakfast and was needing his sleep. Get on with your work, she had said, but still I insisted. He’s no longer warm; he’s hot. So hot I jerk my hand away.