William Gay - Little Sister Death

Turning, the doctor saw for the first time the man in the flatbrimmed hat, his upper lip was shaven clean but he wore a neatly trimmed white beard and muttonchop sideburns on his florid face, and his silver hair curled out from beneath the brushed hat and obscured the collar of the broadcloth coat. The look of a gentleman or at least a country squire. The doctor nodded to him and started a smile but something in the man’s face precluded it. He saw immediately why a doctor was needed. There was something wrong with the man’s mouth. It seemed swollen from the inside, so grotesquely that the face seemed deformed. The purple tip of a swollen tongue protruded between his lips and the cheeks looked peculiarly distended like nothing so much, Mayfield thought, as if you had sharpened the ends of a stick four or five inches and jammed it into the man’s mouth and forced him to clamp it between his teeth.

The man said something preemptory to him but Mayfield had not an inkling of what he had been told to do. Then the black took his elbow roughly and turned him toward a wagon hitched and waiting at the curb.

Old Marster say you come on, he said.

Mayfield knocked his hand away. Keep your hands to yourself, he said, but the Negro showed no offense. The black, shiny face was impassive save the yellow-looking eyes where glinted a detached light of amusement.

He was being forced toward the wagon.

Sick folks, the black man said. Sick folks need lookin after.

Sick folks? Where? What the hell you after, anyway? Is it his face you want seen to?

He was at the wagon, could smell the horses, a Mastiff across the straw-strewn bed, sleepyeyed yet watchful.

Where are these sick folks?

The white man nodded. Bout a day’s ride, the black man said.

That’s out of the question. Get your own doctor. I have patients in Mossburg to attend to.

No one said anything.

Is it an emergency or what?

The white man said something indecipherable and Mayfield looked at the black man’s face. The black was grinning, his crescent of yellow teeth like grains of corn. Mare foaling, he said.

Mare? By God! I’m not a goddamned veterinarian, I’m a—

The big white man had advanced and abruptly he shoved him, slamming Mayfield against the wagon, knocking his hat into the street. The horses stirred and subsided. He looked up. The man was standing over him, the broadcloth coat open. There was a pistol shoved into the waistband and his hand loosely clasped the grip.

Mayfield got up. He looked up and down the street. It was ten o’clock on a Sunday morning and there was no soul about. He stooped and picked up the hat, brushed it off with his handkerchief. That was when the man had taken the hat and jammed it on his head.

As they went past the city limits and into open country, the doctor said, Folks’ll be looking for me, you know

The whiskered man said something. The black turned toward him. Old Marster he say you hush your mouth, she ain’t missin you nothin to what she goin to.

He sat silent in the wagon and thought about his wife. She was waiting to go to church. He thought of her opening the door, looking impatiently up and down the road for him. The day wearing on, her worry mounting. After a while he tried not to think of her at all.

At noon they stopped where there was a stream. The horses drank. They were in a sylvan wilderness, a place that seemed never to have known human habitation. The men had something in a bag: food, biscuits, some kind of meat. They didn’t offer him any. The Negro ate in a silent concentration, his jaws working over the tough meat. The white man tried to eat and couldn’t and a rage seized him. He swore and threw the bread and meat at Mayfield, the biscuit striking him in the face.

They went on, and when they passed what Mayfield knew was the last cabin they blindfolded him.

He was asleep when the wagon stopped. He awoke sore and cold and disoriented at the abrupt cessation of motion and the ending of noises. He couldn’t number the many hours of the monotonous creaking of the springs, the grinding of the wheels on the frozen ground.

Rough hands at the binding of muslin and the blindfold fell away. The moonshine was black and silver, blurred from hours of darkness like an ink sketch left in the rain. His vision began to clear. The dark earth glittered with hoarfrost.

Light, the black man commented.

Mayfield climbed over the tailgate and fell against the wagon, his legs asleep. He righted himself and turned to look about.

He still had no idea where he was but he perceived dimly they’d reached an area of human habitation. He could hear the lowing of cattle, a dog somewhere barking. He had a vague olfactory sense of woodsmoke, a barn, an outhouse.

The cabin they led him to had no furnishing save a bed. He could see that much by the moonlight, then the door closed behind him and he was shut into a windowless darkness, a spiderlike negation of light against the paler black. The air in the cabin was fetid with the sour stench of sweat, old unwashed clothing, the stale smell of burnt-out fires, the odor of rancid grease.

He shoved angrily at the door but it had been latched in some manner from the outside. He lay wearily on the bed.

After a while the door opened and a heavy Negro woman came in carrying in one hand a kerosene lamp and in the other a plate. She moved slowly, deliberately, her face vacuous and benumbed as if she had been roused from sleep. She reached him the plate and he took it and sat on the side of the bed holding it. He could smell fried sidemeat, field peas. The angular black man stood in the doorway watching him.

Where am I? Mayfield asked the woman.

The woman didn’t look at him. Why, you right here, she said. Where did you reckon you was?

He awoke sometime in the night scratching all over from the bites. He could feel something verminous crawling about under his clothing. He got up slapping at himself. You filthy little son of bitches, he said, half sobbing, uncertain even as to whom he was talking. He took off his coat and rolled it into a pillow. He lay down on the floor.

In the morning there was more food, grits and greasy eggs fried hard and rubbery, their edges seared to frail black lace. He spoke to the woman but he might have been talking to the wall for the response he got. Later the man with the muttonchop whiskers and his black interpreter came. The man wanted something done for his mouth.

Mayfield had his bag, but there was nothing in it for such as this. Worse yet, there was nothing in Mayfield’s knowledge or experience for it. He didn’t know what it was. He didn’t even suspect what it was, so he did what doctors have done since time immemorial when they don’t know what else to do: he put on a confident manner and he swabbed the man’s mouth with antiseptic and hoped for the best.

All right, he said to himself when they had gone, I am stuck here at his beck and call. I am the house doctor, and they will keep me here feeding me grits and eggs you could half sole shoes with. Either that or whatever it is gets well on its own or eats the son of a bitch’s whole head the rest of the way off, either of which ought to result in them turning me loose.

He could find sense in this, of a sort. There was logic here, the reasoning of a functioning mind. Anything was better than yesterday. Yesterday had been random, senseless, as uncontrollable as the spill of dice from a cup. He had known in his heart they had been riding him to his death, though why they had blindfolded him was just another piece he could not explain.

He doctored the man’s mouth three more days, keeping track of the passage of time by the trips the woman made bringing meals and by the difference in the sounds he heard, then on the fourth they came for him in the middle of the night.