Her hips are smashed. Her pelvis, smashed. In the years to come, she will endure thirty operations on her right leg before the doctors give up and amputate it. Now, while Bessie lies in a coma in an Arizona hospital, Alcide arranges to take the girls back to Louisiana. The same local paper that announced Oscar’s birth runs a notice of the crash and a service to be held at a cemetery, ringed in pecan trees, in Jefferson Davis Parish.
At Hebert Cemetery, Alcide buries Oscar and the baby in an unmarked grave at the foot of his father’s stone, leaving space for when he dies, and beside him, a space for Bessie. As he stands at the grave and watches his children go into the ground, he must wonder how soon she’ll need it. He must square his shoulders and wipe at his eyes and pray to keep the family he’s been left with. Then he and the girls move in with Bessie’s brother Lyle and his wife, Luann. Lyle and Luann are strict Pentecostal. They don’t have indoor plumbing, and decades from now, at the time of the trials, they still won’t. They don’t play music. They take in children who need help, they’re kind like that—but sometimes, with Luann’s sternness and the way they keep taking in children even when the cupboards are bare, you never can tell if it’s generosity or if it’s that God won’t give them enough suffering to prove their faith to him, and so they’ll arrange privation themselves.
But they’re there when Alcide needs them. Soon he has a new job, a long-haul trucking company that will keep him on the road for days at a time. I imagine him that first morning. He rises early and stands outside, ready to go, just after dawn. He’ll walk the mile to the pickup spot. It’s October; the grass is wet and jungle-wild in the morning dew, the earth more pungently alive than it was even in California. He feels that new smell like a clot of earth in his throat. He could choke on all that’s new. Darlene and Judy follow him outside and stand in front of the house, silent, wide-eyed, watching him the way they’ve been all morning. Darlene’s almost four now and has said little in the past few weeks. Judy’s two and keeps asking, Where’s Oscar, where’s Mama, I want baby.
“You girls mind Luann and I’ll be back soon,” Alcide says. He doesn’t say home.
Darlene’s face twists like she’s about to cry.
“Aw, honey, you’ll be all right,” he says. He rubs at his neck where the collar itches. He’s had the flannel shirt for years, but Luann insisted on mending the elbow and starching the collar, and its stiffness is irritating him. In one hand he folds the brim of a new white hat with the trucking company’s logo. Flattens it, works it with his fingers, crushes it in a fist, opens it again. “You’ll be all right,” he repeats.
Then he goes.
*
To see him standing there on the grass, the sun beating on his broad face, the sweat settling into the folds of his forehead, I work from the picture the local newspaper ran of him and Bessie on their fiftieth wedding anniversary. His face is square, his skin rough, his eyes behind thick glasses are heavy-lidded with age. I try to scrub off time from the picture, erase all that the decades have brought.
But there are parts of the story where the record is so forceful, where what happens is so striking, that the facts overwhelm my imagination.
Such as what happens to Bessie. When she wakes from the coma, she’s transferred to Charity Hospital in New Orleans, a three-hour drive from where the girls live with Luann and Lyle in Hecker. It’s too far to be close to her babies and too close to be the kind of freeing far that carried her and Alcide to California. It’s just stuck, just waiting. In-between time.
There, in the state Bessie wanted so badly to leave, the doctors construct a cast to hold her body. They lay wet strips of plaster in rows from her ankles to the top of her chest, until all of her is imprisoned in stiff white. A hole over her genitals allows waste to exit. Her legs they fix splayed open, with a metal bar running between her ankles that the hospital orderlies will yank to move her. Only her arms are free, and when Luann takes Darlene to see her in the hospital—Darlene is just a child now, but someday she will be the one who rises and walks to the front of the courtroom to tell the story of her family—Bessie is able to lift her arms. “Mama,” Darlene says, and Bessie pulls Darlene to her and starts to weep. Darlene will remember that hug forever: the familiar pull of the familiar arms, her mother’s familiar love, the alarming tears falling wet on her mother’s face and, instead of the soft familiar lap, the cast.
Months pass as Bessie lies in the hospital. One month, two months, three. On her back, in the plaster cast, she stares up at the ceiling. What kind of in-body suffering is she doing alone in this place? What will she have to carry with her later? She stares at the ceiling for so many hours she must start to see patterns in the tiles. The tiles are cracked and have water damage. Sometimes the spindly rust-colored lines must look to her like a clawed hand, sometimes like the striated jasper rocks she used to pick out of the riverbank when she was a child. She loved those rocks when they were wet, when they shined and sparkled in the sunlight. But they always turned dull as they dried.
Encircled by a curtain that hangs on a track around her bed, Bessie is alone. But beyond the curtain the room is full of unseen women. Wards meant for twenty hold forty. Only their moans reach her, seeping through the thin fabric of the curtain.
And the smells. The way rot wheedles in, the awareness of nearby death that creeps up your nostrils, crawls over your skin. Infections pass through, too. Decades from now, a doctor will remember a night eight women died on just one ward, and give thanks that those times are over. But now Bessie is in the middle of them. She can do nothing but lie in her white cocoon and wait. Try not to listen. Try not to smell. In the months she lies here, guards from Angola regularly bring inmates to the hospital. Angola, where her son will someday be an inmate. A buyout scheme: The guards and the technicians and doctors who treat the inmates have been paid to look the other way while they escape. At least once, while Bessie lies in her bed, an inmate is discovered gunfire rings through the hospital. Through the curtain, she must listen.