Passing through Perfect (Wyattsville #3)(38)

“I’m mighty grateful for the offer, Miss Claudia,” he answered, “but Delia will have supper waiting, so I’d best be getting on home.”

“I understand.” Claudia smiled and handed him the two dollars she’d promised.





The rain had slowed to a misty drizzle when Benjamin drove down Cross Corner Road and turned off at the road leading to his house. As he pulled into the yard he noticed there was no lamp burning in the front room, which was unusual. He climbed down from the pickup truck, worried that Delia or Isaac was sick in bed, but when he opened the door and called out no one answered.

“Delia?” he called again. Still no answer.

The house was small enough that she would have heard him regardless of where she was; nonetheless Benjamin walked through it room by room, calling out for her. When there was no sign of either her or Isaac, he began to worry. He searched around back in the smokehouse and in the barn. There was nothing. No sign of struggle, no Delia, and no Isaac.

In all the years they’d been married this was the first time she’d not been there when he got home from work. There was usually a stew simmering on the stove or the smell of fresh-baked biscuits. No matter how late he’d worked, there was always a warm greeting and a welcome home hug. Now there was no note, no indication of where she’d gone. It was all wrong. It was not Delia’s way of doing things. He tried to remember the women friends she visited: Bessie, Bertha, Mariam, Luella.

Benjamin got back in the truck and drove to the closest house, which was Bessie’s.

“I ain’t seen Delia in two, maybe three weeks,” she said.

He moved on to the next house and the next. By the time he got to Luella’s it was well past midnight, and there was not a single lamp lit in the house. Benjamin pounded on the door.

“Will,” he called out, “I got to ask Luella something!”

A sleepy-eyed Will finally opened the door. “What you want?” he grumbled. “Luella’s sleeping.”

“I got to know if Delia was visiting with her today.”

“Go ask Delia,” Will said and started to close the door.

Benjamin pushed against it. “Delia’s missing. Her and Isaac both.”

Will pulled the door back. “Come on in,” he said, then went and woke Luella.

Moments later she came rushing in with a bunch of worry lines tugging at her face.

“Delia and Isaac left here before suppertime,” she said. “They should’ve been home hours ago.”

“Did she say if she was coming straight home?”

Luella nodded. “Said she had to get supper started.”





Benjamin got in the truck, turned it around, and started toward home; this time he crawled along at a snail’s pace. As he drove he looked first right then left, his eyes all the time searching. About four miles down Cross Corner he caught sight of something pink alongside the road. He stopped and climbed out.

Even before he reached her, Benjamin saw the flowered print of Delia’s favorite dress. Isaac was lying face down a few yards away.

When he kneeled beside her he found Delia’s head swollen to twice its normal size and her breath coming in short desperate gasps. Benjamin let out a scream that rattled across the Alabama countryside and woke people in houses as far as five miles away.

“Don’t do this, Delia!” he cried. “Please, don’t do this!”

He lifted both Delia and Isaac into the bed of the truck then turned and headed back to Bakerstown, flooring the gas pedal the whole way.





The Bakerstown hospital served both colored and white. Coloreds were housed on the ground floor, whites on the second and third. On Wednesday night there was no Negro doctor or nurse on the floor, but Sam Goldsmith had gotten his medical degree at Columbia University in New York and didn’t hold with the segregationist ways of Alabama. He ordered both Delia and Isaac into examination rooms.

Delia was gone before Doctor Goldsmith finished his examination. She’d suffered two cervical fractures and internal bleeding. There was no hope of saving her.

He turned to Isaac, whose eyelids had fluttered open.

“Can you hear me, son?” the doctor asked.

No answer.

“Do you know where you are?”

Still no answer.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

Isaac closed his eyes.

“Get this kid to X-ray,” Goldsmith ordered. “I want the head, neck, and that right femur.” He then turned to the assisting nurse and said, “Call upstairs and have them get an OR ready.”

“Upstairs?” she replied wide-eyed. “Don’t you think we should wait and—”

“Upstairs,” he repeated, his tone severe and unapologetic.





For almost four hours Benjamin stood staring out the window of the colored waiting room. The rain drizzled against the pane, but he could see nothing of the outside world. The only thing he saw was his own reflection: a man wide and tall with tears streaming down his face and skin as black as the night.

“Why, God?” he moaned. “Why?”





Benjamin





Standing there looking at myself in that hospital window, I see a dead man. If God takes my Delia and our baby Isaac, then He might just as well take me too. Without the two of them, I got no reason to be living.