Wrapped in Rain(32)
"Woman, I don't give two cents ..." Spit formed in the corner of Rex's mouth as he reached through the car window and gripped her around the collar, choking her airway.
"But, Mr. Rex, I asked you last night while you were eating dinner-"
He tightened his grip again. "I don't give a rat's butt what day it is. You will NOT, NOT EVER"-he was screaming now-"take those boys to church." He pulled her face out the driver's window and glared into her eyes. His knuckles grew white, and a vein popped out on the side of his head. "You understand me, woman?"
"Yes sir, Mr. Rex."
Rex threw her back inside the car, straightened his robe, and quickly walked over to the lilies, where he stomped as many as he could. He turned in circles, making wide, swathlike arcs with his feet, cutting down everything he touched. He looked like a kid on the playground having a temper tantrum after the teacher told him not to climb on the jungle gym. Breathing heavily and peeling sticky lily petals off his robe, he walked back inside and Miss Ella gently eased the car back into the garage, trying not to let us see her crying. I can remember hearing her sniff beneath the sound of the tires crunching the tiny pebbles on the drive. "Okay, boys, you two go on down and play."
"But, Miss Ella," I broke in, "we want to go to church."
"Child." Miss Ella knelt down, a tear hanging off her chin and her eyes checking the back door for any sign of Rex. "Sweet boys." She took us both in her arms. "If I take you to church, that'll be the last time you ever see me."
I nodded because, even at six, I understood. Mutt stood blankly, blinking a lot, his brow wrinkled, looking at the back door through which Rex had disappeared. Mutt and I headed toward the quarry, where we knew to make ourselves invisible and stay out of Rex's way. It usually took him until after lunch to get over his hangover, or at least start working on another one, rid the house of his latest bedmate, and get on his way back to Atlanta.
"Maybe later"-Miss Ella brushed the hair out of my eyes and tried to smile-"we'll go get some ice cream."
We passed the barn, and out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Mose. Mose came around once a week to check on the horses and about every other day to check on his sister.
When Miss Ella sent Mose to college, South Alabama was a little short on black medical professionals, so he set his sights, flew through school in two and a half years, graduated, and spent two years in medical school learning to become a surgeon. Something most of his professors told him he would never be. Mose was tall, lanky, and so skinny that his belt hung on his hipbones. He had gnarled farm-boy hands, big ears, big eyes, and skin that was not white. But while his professors could control their medical school and who became what, they could not control a man named Adolf Hitler. WWII erupted, and Mose received his draft notice, checked out of school, raised his right hand, joined the army, and was promptly sent to the MASH units on the front lines of the European theater, where he learned to operate wearing a helmet-working two days on and four hours off. Oddly enough, while Mose was learning to doctor men, he also spent considerable time doctoring horses. In the European theater, veterinarians were in short supply; when one of the commanding officer's stable of four magnificent stallions-which he "found" in an abandoned estate in the wake of the 101st-came down with a cold or got the colic, Mose learned to doctor horses. Covered in American blood, screams, and dying confessions, Mose learned to sew, amputate, and remove shrapnel, but most important, he learned to heal. And Moses Rain was a good healer, not to mention a not-half-bad veterinarian.
After the war, Mose flew home, his chest covered with medals-including the Purple Heart. He returned to school, by that point a perfunctory obligation because he already knew how to be a doctor. With the help of the GI bill, he spent his residency at Emory in Atlanta, where his reputation preceded him and everyone called him "sir." At Emory, Moses learned to deliver babiessomething he didn't do much in Europe. He finished school, refused a half dozen offers, married a cute nurse out of Mobile named Anna, and returned home just south of Montgomery, where the two set up a family practice. When most of his colleagues were decorating their walls with diplomas, degrees, and this-or-that awards, Moses Rain hung a name tag on his door that simply read, "Mose."
His practice policy was simple: come one, come all. And they did. From everywhere. Mose never made much money, but he never went hungry either. He never lacked anything. When his car didn't start, he found a grateful father underneath the hood, turning a torque wrench, who wouldn't take a penny for his services. When the weather turned 16 degrees Fahrenheit and his heater went out, he found a load of firewood stacked up next to his back door and a man downstairs working beneath his furnace. When his refrigerator quit, spoiling dinner and tomorrow morning's breakfast, he and Anna came home from work to find a house full of saran-wrapped plates piled high with roasted chicken, lima beans, scalloped potatoes, and meat loaf. Cooling off in place of the old one, they found a new refrigerator, filled with a few dozen eggs, bacon, milk, and a key lime pie. And when a storm blew in, toppling a sycamore tree that split his house in half, the Rains came home to find a crew of eight men cutting away the tree and stacking firewood. Five days later, they had repaired the damage, nailed an entirely new roof across the house, and begun a small addition off the back porch. And when Anna died at the tender age of fifty-seven, the funeral procession was three miles long and took an hour to congregate, and the funeral home wouldn't take a penny of his money.