Part Four . “MY NAME IS HENRY”

Chapter 70

“MY NAME IS HENRY.”

I could barely hear.

“Can you hear me? I said my name’s Henry.”

I could barely see.

I could, however, tell that the person speaking to me was a woman. An ancient, bent-over colored woman.

“Henry. My name is Henry,” she said. “You in there, Mist’ Corbett?”

Most of her teeth were missing, producing a kind of whistly lisp as she leaned closer and spoke to me.

“Come on now, eat this,” she said. She held out a spoonful of something. I opened my mouth. She stuck it in. God, it was delicious: black-eyed peas cooked to death, mashed to a paste.

While moving the food around my sore, battered mouth, my tongue discovered the gaping hole on the left side where two teeth had been.

“Where am I?” I croaked.

“Abraham house,” Henry said. She poised another spoonful in front of my mouth.

I will never forget the taste of those peas. They remain to this day the single most wonderful food I have ever encountered.

I heard a familiar voice: “Now would you look at Mr. Corbett, settin’ up and eatin’ baby food all by himself.” Moody came around from the head of the narrow cot where I lay, at the center of their parlor, in exactly the spot where Hiram’s coffin had been.

Perhaps I was still in the midst of my delirium, but I thought she looked happy that I was alive and awake.

“This is Aunt Henry who been looking after you,” she said.

“Henry?” I asked.

“Don’t you be calling me Henrietta,” she said.

Moody sat on the little footstool beside my bed. “You been through a pretty rough time, Mr. Corbett,” she said. “When they cut you down, we just knew you was dead. But Papaw felt a pulse on your arm. So he run and got Aunt Henry. She’s the one with the healing touch.”

“Don’t make him talk now, child,” Aunt Henry said. “He still wore out.” Every time I opened my mouth she stuck in more of the black-eyed-pea mush that was bringing me back to life, a spoonful at a time.

“She been pouring soup in you with a funnel,” Moody said. “She done washed you and powdered you, shaved your face. When your fever went up, she sent me to the icehouse for ice to put in your bed. When the cut places started to scab, she put salt water on ’em so they wouldn’t scar.”

“How long have I been here?”

“Eight days since they cut you down,” she said.

I felt the dull pounding ache in both knees. I remembered how those men had kicked my feet out from under me, then gone after my knees with the toes of their boots.

“Did they break my knees?”

Aunt Henry frowned. “Near ’bout,” she said. “But you got you some hard knees. All battered up and cut up. But ain’t broke.”

“That’s good.” I managed a weak smile.

“It is good,” Aunt Henry said. “Soon as you finish this here peas, you gonna have one more little nap, and then we gonna see if we can get you walkin’.”

Moody said, “You’d best get him up running, Aunt Henry.”

I shifted onto my side. “What do you mean?”

“The ones that hanged you gonna find you,” Moody said. “Then they gonna hang you again.”

Chapter 71

AUNT HENRY WAS RIGHT. My knees weren’t broken. But they certainly were not happy when called upon to do their job.

Armed with wobbly wooden crutches and a short glass of whiskey, I went for a late-afternoon stroll between Moody and Abraham. My body ached in a hundred different places, all tied together by the pain in my knees. When I bent my leg to take a step, the knee shot a white-hot arrow of pain to my hip. My neck was still raw from the rope, and the mangled fingers of my right hand were twisted and so blackish blue they might yet go gangrenous and have to come off. The sweat rolled down my back, into the swollen whip welts, stinging like fire ants.

But I kept on, hobbling down the muddy board walkway. I knew I was damned lucky to have survived, with no broken bones. My pain was nothing. It would be gone in a few days, or weeks at the worst. I could deal with that.

But inside, I felt another, more disturbing pain. I had been beaten and left for dead. I had disappeared from the world, and hardly anyone had come looking for me. I mattered to virtually no one. Meg. Elizabeth. My father. My daughters. Jacob, my childhood best friend. The entire town of Eudora. I had mostly been forgotten. A few people from town had come, good, kind folks. L. J. Stringer had actually visited a few times. But my own father hadn’t come once.

“Abraham,” I said. “Could I ask a favor?”

“Ask it,” he said.

“Can you stop by Maybelle’s and see if she’s got any letters for me?”

He shook his head. “I went by this morning. Nothing there.” Then he added, “Nothing for you from the White House, either.”

I kept on, but the pressure of the crutches under my arms was getting to be too much to bear. Everything from my neck down was one big aching mass of bruises.

“Does Maybelle know what happened to me?” I asked.

“Mr. Corbett, everybody in Eudora knows what happened to you. I’ll tell you something I believe. There’s good and bad in Eudora Quarters, good and bad in the town of Eudora -probably in equal numbers. Problem is, there’s cowards in both places. That’s why the bullies can have their way, Mr. Corbett.”

“Abraham,” I said with a sigh. “For God’s sake. We’ve been through a good bit together. Would you please call me Ben?”

He patted my shoulder. “All right, Ben.”

“Thank you.”

“You welcome.” He smiled. “But now you got to call me Mr. Cross.” Abraham laughed out loud at that.

As I picked my way past the door of Gumbo Joe’s, two old ladies looked up and waved at me. “I pray for you, sir,” one of them said to me.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

We went on a few more yards. “The colored folks appreciate what you was trying to do, Mist-Ben,” he said. “We know your heart is not the same as some the rest.”

Moody spoke up. “Yeah, and the white folks know it too. That’s why they goin’ to kill him.”

Chapter 72

“YOU JUST PLAIN don’t need me no more.” Aunt Henry said it straight out as she dabbed at the wounds on my back with one of her secret potions.

“Fact is, Mist’ Corbett, you hardly even got any scabs left on you,” she said. “These is all healed up real good.”

I twisted around on my chair to pull on my shirt, wincing from the pain.

“Now don’t you be foolin’ with me,” Aunt Henry said. “You walkin’ good with no crutch.”

I knew she was right. Aside from the occasional shock of pain in my neck, or in my knees, I was feeling almost human again. I had no further need for Aunt Henry’s fussing and babying, which I had come to enjoy.

And it was time for me to go back to Eudora.

Frankly, I felt a bit reluctant to leave. There was something good about life as it happened in this modest little house. Certainly, the opportunity to see Moody every day was something I had enjoyed. But as much as that, I had enjoyed getting to know Abraham. With everything going against him-the death of his grandson, the increasing fear in the colored community, the lifetime of bigotry he had endured-Abraham was a man at peace with himself.

Just the night before, on a warm rainy evening when the mosquitoes were at their droning worst, we sat on a bench underneath the overhang of the porch.

We were working our way through a basket of hot corn muffins Moody had just brought out of the oven. I smiled up at her. She ignored me and turned back inside.

“Sometimes a man can sense something,” Abraham said. “Something small that can blossom up into trouble.”