Take My Hand(6)

When I drove up, at first I assumed that the Williams sisters lived in the neat, brick rambler with the two pickup trucks parked out front. A thick cloud of dust swirled around my mama’s little car, and when it cleared, I spied two little white boys standing on the house porch. I rolled my window all the way down, hoping they’d see my uniform.

“I’m looking for the Williams family?” I was positive I had read the number on the mailbox correctly.

One of them pointed behind the house, and I understood. I wound the car around the pickups, following the scant outline of tire tracks. The Pinto pushed through the ruts, bouncing so hard I was afraid I’d hit my head on the roof. I prayed I wouldn’t get stuck. The last thing I wanted was to have to walk back down to that house and ask those boys to go get their daddy. Fortunately, it hadn’t rained in a while and the ground was dry.

The trees cleared and the land swelled up into a hill. At the top sat a cabin. The car sputtered, but I tapped the gas pedal and somehow made it to the top. Everything leveled out, and the tire tracks disappeared into brush. Off to my left, I could see a wide field of green stalks. I didn’t know a thing about farming, but anybody with eyes could tell that was wheat growing out there. Cows grazed in a lot beside the barn. A lone chicken peeked at me as it stepped through knee-high grass. Up close, the structure was more of a wooden shanty than a cabin. And it looked tired, as though a wind had blown it askew and it hadn’t had the energy to right itself. A skinny black dog scratched its back in the dirt. In the rearview mirror, I could see my lips were dry. I licked them and my cracked bottom lip scratched my tongue.

I got out of the car and stepped into a huddle of gnats. The air smelled of burning wood. Something told me these girls couldn’t be in school. If they were, they didn’t go every day. They should have been expecting me, but they didn’t have a phone and I wasn’t confident they even knew about our appointment. They had initially been assigned another nurse who had quit the clinic the month before. I was there to pick up where she left off.

A girl wearing grubby pants and an orange T-shirt shaded her eyes with a hand. The backlight of the sun darkened her face.

“How you doing? I’m Civil Townsend from the Family Planning Clinic.” It didn’t make sense for us to be out here in our uniforms, but Mrs. Seager insisted. It was March chilly and I had left my sweater in the car. The wind reached my neck.

I stepped up closer. Someone had tried to braid the girl’s hair, but the roots were so matted with dirt that only the ends of the hair could be plaited. I clutched the file under my arm and tried to remember what I’d read. “Are you India?”

The dog rubbed against my leg, and I fought an urge to push the animal off. It sidled away. I looked down, and sure enough, it had left a brown mark on my white pantyhose.

“She don’t talk.”

I jumped. I hadn’t seen the other girl standing inside the screen door. I remembered the contents of the file. The younger sister was mute. I had skimmed that detail, but it came back to me now.

“Oh, okay. I’m Civil Townsend. I’m the nurse sent to give y’all shots today.”

“What happened to the other one?”

“I-I don’t know,” I stuttered. The nurse’s leave-taking baffled me, too. Maybe the demands of the job had been too much. Maybe she’d found something that paid more. Being out here on this farm wasn’t anybody’s idea of a good time. Even so, there weren’t government jobs just laying around, waiting to be picked up.

“Is your daddy home?”

“No, ma’am.”

I blinked as I pieced together their story in my head. Mace Williams, father, thirty-three. Milked cows, tilled the land, did whatever the white man told him to do in exchange for this shanty and a pittance of money. Constance Williams, mother, deceased. Patricia Williams, grandmother, sixty-two. In the distance, the inky outline of grazing cows flickered in the light.

“Your grandmama here?”

“Grandma, the nurse here!”

I tried to smile, but I wasn’t sure if my expression passed for polite. I didn’t know whether I should ask to come inside or if I should wait for the grandmother to come out.

The older sister settled it. I remembered now that her name was Erica. “You can come in if you want.”

She opened the door for me. The screen pulled away from the edge of the wooden frame, not much protection against the flies. It creaked on its hinges. I’m not sure if I said this before, but walking into that house changed my life. And yes, it changed theirs, too. I walked right up in there with my file and bag of medicine, ready to save somebody. Little old me. Five foot five inches of know-it-all.

The first thing that hit me was the odor. Urine. Body funk. Dog. All mixed with the stench of something salty stewing in a pot. A one-room house encased in rotted boards. A single window with a piece of sheet hanging over it. It was dark except for the sun streaming through the screen door and peeking through the holes in the walls. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that there were clothes piled on the bed, as if somebody had stopped by and dumped them. Pots, pans, and shoes lay strewn about on the dirt floor. Flies buzzed and circled the air. Four people lived in one room, and there wasn’t enough space. A lot of people in Alabama didn’t have running water, but this went beyond that. I had to fight back vomit.

In the middle of it all, their grandmother sat stirring a big pot of steaming something or other. I stepped closer to a hole in the ground in the middle of the room. A wire grating covered the hole and the pot sat on top. The heat rising from it warmed the cool air. Up close, she looked older than her sixty-two years, but she was still a good-looking woman with a bronze complexion and high cheekbones. Her eyes were hazel, but they had lost their glow; the surrounding whites were dark and yellow-tinged.