Wrapped in Rain(54)

"Miss Ella got up on her knees, and it was then that I saw what he had really done. Her right eye was cut. Straight across the cornea. Rex had done it with a piece of glass. It was oozing, deflated, and looked real bad. I tried to help her stand, but she was too badly bruised. She fell back on her knees, and I heard her say, `Lord, let not my enemies triumph over me.' She couldn't walk, so I knelt to pick her up, and that's when I felt the scissors. In her apron pocket was a pair of eight-inch scissors and two crochet needles. I just looked at her and said, `Why didn't you use them?' She shook her head, and blood bubbled out her mouth. `I don't want my light to go out either.'

"`But, Miss Ella ...'

"She shook her head, her eyes tired, and said, `What's been done to me ain't nothing when compared to what happened in three hours on a single Friday afternoon."'

I sat in the quiet for a minute, remembering the picture of her-on her knees and yet towering above me. "When I got to the hospital, Mose met me and consulted with the doctors, but after one look, he already knew what they'd tell him. They eviscerated her eye and three weeks later fit her for a prosthetic. Once they got her to a room, taped with a fat white patch over her eye, she grabbed my hand and said, `Go find your brother.' I left her about three in the morning and walked back into the house, where I found Rex sleeping against the bar with an empty bottle of Johnny Walker Black in his hand.



"In the corner stood my Louisville Slugger. I gripped the bat, sticky with pine tar, stepped up next to him, extended it, and tapped him on the forehead. No response. I tapped him again and his head rocked back and forth like Jello. I stood there for several minutes imagining the bat crushing his skull.

"Sometime before daylight I returned to Miss Ella's bedside and helped her swallow two more aspirin. `Where have you been?' she whispered. I gave her another sip of water and said, `The house.' She pushed the cup away and mumbled, `You repay evil with evil?' I shook my head. `No ma'am.' She squeezed my hand harder. `You look me in the eye and tell me that.' She had seen it in my eyes when I had that barrel stuffed down Rex's throat. She was making sure. `No ma'am.' She drifted off to sleep and I drove back to the house about 9:00 a.m., but Rex was gone. Cleared out. Car was gone, suitcase, everything. Even a few bottles. That meant he wasn't coming back anytime soon. I found Mutt a few hours later. Curled up around the cross he had given Miss Ella for her birthday. I tried to get him in the house or to the hospital, but he just shook his head. He didn't want to go see her and didn't want to go anywhere near the house."

Katie's forehead wrinkled as she turned the empty can in her hands. "Few folks knew about the fake eye because she learned to compensate, but Miss Ella died with a glass eye. I think that bothered her more than her teeth. She became real self-conscious and often turned her face so people didn't have to look at it, especially when the skin started to droop around it and makeup wouldn't cover it. I caught her looking in the mirror a few weeks later. She tried to shrug it off by saying, `I've been ugly my whole life, but he sure didn't help any."' I studied the road again. "Miss Ella was the most beautiful person God ever made. And if it hadn't been for her tugging on my ankle, I'd have pulled the trigger." I shook my head and fidgeted in my seat. "I didn't see him for about two years."



Katie checked on Jase and whispered, "What about Mutt?"

"Mutt and I took two different roads. I had an outlet. Baseball. Every time a pitch came across the plate or out of the machine, I slowed it down in my mind and envisioned Rex's face between the laces. Any pitch, no matter where it was, if I saw Rex's face on it, I hit it. So I retreated to batting practice and wore myself out. Somewhere in there, I lost the meaning of baseball."

I leaned forward, stretched, and downshifted out of overdrive to match the speed of traffic. "After my back injury, I just substituted one drug for another. Every time I squeezed the shutter, I burned a new picture into my mind and replaced the one of Rex that had been branded on the backs of my eyelids since that night."

I fell quiet for a few miles. "Even today, it's the same. But some images ... don't go away." I shifted again. "Miss Ella said love conquers all, but ..." I shrugged and held up the Canon. "Baseball and then photography became my narcotic."

I pushed my hair out of my face and took a deep breath. "I don't know all the details on Mutt, but he wandered a good bit. I know he took to riding more trains. Became a true hobo. He worked on a shrimp boat out of Charleston, a coal mine in West Virginia, the orange groves in Florida and Texas, and to this day, I don't really know how he found out about Miss Ella's death. How he ever showed up for the funeral is beyond me. Since then he's been down here, and Gibby"-I pointed in front of the truck"Dr. Wagemaker, has been feeding him a cocktail of all kinds of drugs. To be honest, I don't even know if I'll recognize him."



We rode in silence as the skyline of Jacksonville came into view. When the tear fell down my cheek and off my chin, I was too lost in the memory to realize it. Katie reached across the seat and dabbed at it with her sleeve.

We dropped down the bridge and turned south on San Marco Boulevard. "As for Rex, Miss Ella told me, `The devil got a hold of him long ago, so hate the devil, not Rex."' I shook my head and shrugged. "I didn't do very well."