Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

“You went away there for a time,” Anita said to Bethany and kissed her forehead because the girl’s cheeks were covered with marmalade.

“Huh huh.” The child could not remember very much about the last two days, but she did recall that last dream before waking, and in it she was still playing with the girl the dream told her was named Methuselah. “Me and Methuselah had a good time playing.” Anita took little note of what the child was saying, but she would weeks later, halfway between Veterans Day and Thanksgiving.

“How bout a day at the playground and then at the movies and then going to see Granddad and Grandma? How bout it?”

Bethany rubbed her hands together and did the dance again. In her nineteenth year, Anita’s illness disappeared and she was never sick again, not even a half day of sniffles. She tried to get a diploma based on what her mother had taught her, but the D.C. school people shook their heads and said it was either work for a high school equivalency diploma in the evenings or go to the regular high school. Though she had failed two grades during her sickness and though all her friends had gone on, she nevertheless decided to become a regular student. She was about two years older than most of the students in the senior class at Cardozo High School, but she was alive and well and hopeful about what was to come, and that mattered most. And then Percival, a star of track and field, saw her in the school library one day where he was conversing with friends. She had spent her teens not knowing the company of boys not her brother or cousins. Now, one of those people she knew little about came across the room and closed the book she was about to take out and told her that her feet must be tired because she had been running through his mind all day. Not even a twelve-year-old would have accepted that, but she had never really been twelve or thirteen or fourteen, except in a way that would not count in the real world. Later, when she liked to tease him, he became “a star of field and stream.”

“I had such hopes for you,” her father was to say before her senior year was done. He was in tears, and father and daughter were alone in the living room, a lamp with a flickering sixty-watt bulb across the way. “I had such very big hopes for you.” She was never to be a nurse, but in her file the D.C. government people kept at the District Building, they said glowing things about her year after year in her job as a manager at that almost forgotten outpost in Northeast. Her father would never completely forgive Anita, and that created an opening through which Percival Channing could step into all the way. With marriage, she called herself Anita Hughes Channing, but it was always “Channing” she was most proud of, and the name she emphasized. Her father warmed a bit, though, because Bethany became more important than anyone, but he was never the same man who read to his chronically ailing daughter before going off, renewed, to that second job.

Sergeant Channing found he could ignore the lump in his chest because most of the time it did not bother him, but one morning one and a half weeks after the episode with Sara Lee, he could barely get out of bed.

One of the doctors at the base, Captain Jerome Henderson, touched the lump as Percival sat on the examining table, and when the sergeant winced and shrunk away, the physician’s eyes widened and he said, most quietly, “Hmm….” The doctor was a smoker, and throughout the examination Percival kept thinking that whatever brand of cigarettes the doctor smoked, it wasn’t Marlboro. After two X-rays and three vials of blood were taken, Captain Henderson sent the sergeant away with two prescriptions for painkillers and an order to return in three days. The doctor saw dozens upon dozens of soldiers each day, most of them for no more than five minutes, and so while very few faces stuck in his memory, he recognized the sergeant’s right away, for Percival was only the second case of male breast cancer the doctor, at fifty-five, had seen in his life. What a wonder is man, he had thought the day before as he looked at Percival’s X-rays and then, for the third time, read the blood results. What a Godawful wonder is man….

The sergeant smiled when the captain told him what he had found. Percival knew the quality of doctors and equipment the army people had. He was again sitting on the examining table, this time still in his uniform. Percival, chuckling, pointed down at his crotch. “Doctor, no disrespect, sir, but you have noticed what we have down there.”

“I never take an inordinate, unprofessional interest in anyone’s ‘down there,’” the captain said. He should have been a major, but he often said mean words to people he shouldn’t have said.

“But breast cancer, Doctor, I mean, you know, come on, thas for women.”

“Sergeant,” the captain said, his arms folded and standing but two feet from Percival, “there is one thing you have in common with the billions of women on this earth—you all have breasts. Ask some old man. Ask any private you know.” He turned to the opposite table of cotton swabs and tongue depressors and opened the folder that was the Army medical life of Sergeant Channing and wrote two lines, underlining three words on the first line. When he turned back, the captain had the same serious look. “This isn’t some strike against your masculinity, Sergeant. I promise.”

“But breast cancer, Doctor. I mean, of all the things to get.” Percival, in seconds, had accepted what was, and now he was beginning to think that had he not done this or that with some bitch in some foreign city, he’d still be fine. Someone, while he was stationed in Germany, had told him to be careful because at the end of the day foreign cunt was very different from American cunt. The foreign had “properties,” that forgotten someone had said. The doctor placed a hand on his shoulder. Whatever breast cancer was, Percival was thinking, it was not in the same family as all other cancers. It wasn’t the lung thing, which he could have understood, given the thousands of Camels he had smoked. It wasn’t even the blood thing. When the doctor asked if there were people in his family with breast cancer, he said no because he had truly forgotten.

“This isn’t the end of the world,” the captain said. “It’s a new day now, and that wouldn’t have been the case a time ago.” The sergeant got off the table, though he had not been told to. “I need you back here in two days, Sergeant. Two days, and if you don’t show, I’ll have the MPs after your ass.”

The chemicals they gave him were to do nothing except, as he was to think later at Walter Reed, make the cancer mad. They gave him many brochures about those chemicals, and one evening in that hospital in Okinawa, as he waited for Anita to arrive from Washington, he looked up from reading one of the brochures and thought not about his wife or his daughter, but about a race he had when he was a junior at Cardozo, a race that ultimately came down to him and some no-account from Coolidge High. After he crossed the finish line first, he wanted to show to all who were watching what a big man he could be, so he took Coolidge’s extended hand in both of his. He didn’t bother to listen to anything Coolidge was saying, but simply offered a perfunctory “Good race” that should have handled anything Coolidge said. He lowered his eyes back to the brochure. Didn’t that kind of sportmanshit count for something? The brochure had pictures of only healthy women; it did not seem to have heard of men with breast cancer. Didn’t giving a whore an extra ten dollars count for something? Didn’t the big whoever see that it all came out the same? Why should ten ones count for less than two fives? “I heard your mother wasn’t well,” Coolidge had said. “I want you to know I’m praying for her.” “Good race, man.”