Wrapped in Rain(52)

Over her loud objection, I quit school and tried to get as far away from both baseball and Waverly as I could. After driving a few days, I found myself back in Atlanta and took a job with the Atlanta Journal, shooting the court beat. Maybe I was trying to see if I could one-up Rex.

My beginnings as a photographer weren't stellar, but I dove in and tried to forget the pain of baseball. When they first hired me, they asked me, "What does a baseball player know about taking pictures?" Thanks to Miss Ella, I had saved some of my better pieces. I pulled them out of a folder and dropped them on this guy's desk, and to test my mettle, they hired me. I took every assignment they offered, and that meant I was gone a lot.

I guess Miss Ella saw my travel and resulting absence as a rebellious period, and knowing I needed space, she let me go. Like Rex, I was gone a lot, which left her there alone to walk the dank halls of Alcatraz. She didn't even let Mose know until it was too late.

I was in New York, delivering negatives to Doc, picking up a new camera, and getting my next assignment when I got the call. It was Mose. I caught the first plane back, walked in the door, and found Miss Ella in bed, cocooned beneath every blanket she owned, her face riddled with pain. I tried to get her to the hospital, but she just shook her head. Mose and I brought in a cancer specialist from Montgomery, but it was no use. The cancer had spread too far and too deep. He closed up his bag, took off his stethoscope, and uttered the three worst words I'd ever heard: "Won't be long."



I put down my camera, pulled up a chair, and just held her hand, asking God to let me take her place. The last three weeks were the worst. Miss Ella was in a lot of pain and too stubborn to take much medication. I tried to slip it in her soup or tea, anything that would dissolve it, but I had learned how to do that from her, so she was on to me pretty quick. She just shook her head. "Child, I don't need the pills." She patted the worn and underlined pages of her Bible. "Man don't live on bread alone, but every word that's right here. Just read." So I did. I started in Psalms and read all the underlined passages from there to Revelation.

On the day of the funeral, the leaves were in full color. Orange, red, and yellow splattered the landscape like the freckles on Miss Ella's cheeks. Mose dug the hole, donned his only black suit, and buried his sister next to their father, leaving a few feet on the other side for himself. He pointed down to Miss Ella and his Anna and said, "I'll join you both shortly." Out of nowhere, literally walking out of the trees, Mutt showed. Where he'd been and where he'd come from, no one knew, but his appearance told us what he hadn't been doing. Beard, hair knotted and matted, clothes torn, shoes missing. He hadn't showered in a good while.

Rex never showed.

For about three weeks, Mutt and I hung around the house, not speaking much. Oil and water. East and west. Roommates with little in common. In the fourth week, Mutt had one of his episodes. I'm a little better informed now, but at the time I had no idea what was going on. He stayed up for eight days straight and deteriorated in front of me. I heard the conversations, the all-night babblings, saw the facial grimacing and body posturing, and decided I had had enough. I was dealing with my own demons and didn't want to nurse-maid a maniac, so I got on the Internet, found Spiraling Oaks, drove to Jacksonville, and dropped Mutt on Gibby's doorstep. Worst of all, I never looked back.



Maybe the images were too much. Rex, Miss Ella, Mutt. Whatever it was, I left Mutt in the rearview mirror and plugged in my cell phone. If there was evil in my heart, it surfaced that day. I got to the top of the Fuller Warren Bridge and pulled over in the emergency lane. Just in front of me, at the bottom of the bridge, 1-95 went north and 1-10 went west. Sitting with my camera across my lap, eighty feet above the St. Johns River, I made my decision. I dialed New York and Doc answered the phone, sucking on a cigarette and holding a cup of coffee. "Doc?"

Doc almost choked. "Tucker! Where on God's green earth have you been? I've been calling you for two months. Almost flew down there myself but couldn't find Glopton on the map."

I simply said three words: "Send me anywhere." And for the last seven years, Doc's been doing just that.





Chapter 19


THE CAB OF THE TRUCK WAS QUIET AND DARK. I HEARD Jase breathing peacefully in the backseat, and it sounded like that kind of sleep most grown-ups only dream about. I scratched my right arm and twisted myself into a more comfortable position. Katie turned around and pulled the blanket up around Jase's ears and his three stuffed animals-something Miss Ella had done to me ten thousand times. Big Bubba and Lil' Bubba were a large and small version of the same horse, and Thumper was a dolphin. All three were tucked under his left arm as he lay crossways on the backseat.

She pointed behind the truck, toward Rolling Hills. "Old friend?"

"Yeah," I pointed, `Judge Faulkner. Got me out of a bind one time." I knew this was lying, but it was half-true. I just wasn't ready to tell the whole truth. "He's a quadriplegic, no family, nobody to talk to. I check on him from time to time. His mind is good, but his body's not."

"He like cigars?"

I smelled my shirt and asked, "That bad, huh?"

"Pretty bad."

"Sorry, he has a thing for Cubans and I'm the only one that'll hold it for him. I try to make it through here when I'm in town." I let it go and said nothing about Rex.