The Twelve-Mile Straight. Eleanor Henderson
MANFORD RAWLS’S OFFICE WAS ON MAIN STREET, NEXT DOOR to Pearsall’s Drugs and down the street from his home. It was the only doctor’s office in town. There, between the hours of eight and four, he gave shots, set breaks, dispensed medicine, depressed the spotted tongues of children with his wooden stick. He was a stubborn old white man, no traveling country doctor. If you went into labor in the middle of the night, you fetched a midwife. If you caught a fever in the evening, you waited until morning. One night when Nan was nine, returning home from delivering a baby with her mother, a man flagged down the truck they were in, his flannel shirt a bloody belt around his waist. His stomach had been cut with the glass of a broken bottle, and Nan watched as Ketty took out her satchel and sewed up the wound with a needle and thread, the man lying on the green corn husks in the bed of the truck. He was a colored man; the driver was too. The driver, who two hours before had become a father, left the man with a jar of Jesup’s Cotton Gin on Dr. Rawls’s step, where he slept until the morning, and even then the doctor made him wait until he saw a white woman with a rash on her legs.
But when Dr. Rawls learned about the twins, when word had reached him that their mother had no intention of parading them into town, he made an exception to his hours. On a Friday evening, he drove his beady black Plymouth out to the farm. The puppies heard the engine and went tearing out to see who it was. He was a white-mustached man who’d begun to stoop, the pale, shaven flesh of his neck wrinkled as a rooster’s comb. He wore a black suit and a black Homburg hat and carried a black satchel, listing to the left with its weight, his right ear listening toward the sky for some signal.
“Babies need to be seen,” said the doctor, coming through the breezeway to the back porch, where he lifted a towel from the rocker that had not been offered him and seated himself in it. Nan and Elma were giving the twins their weekly bath, both babies squeezed into the aluminum tub, their skin soapy blue in the last hour of sunlight. The day was cool and crisp, the first day that felt like fall. Nan had been enjoying the evening, her hands in the warm water, the babies splashing. The doctor looked at them admiringly, as though they were a pair of his own prize pigs.
Juke sat on the top porch step, his shaving bowl between his bare feet on the step below, a tumbler of gin at his hip. His left cheek was smooth, his right still bristly with red and silver and gold. When Dr. Rawls took a seat, Juke shuttled the glass to the third step. He turned and tipped his straw hat, but he didn’t take it off, and he didn’t stand up. “Doctor.”
“Mr. Jesup.”
“These younguns got a sickness I need to know about?”
The doctor lifted Wilson out of the water, slipped him straight out of Nan’s hands like a fish. Nan and Elma were still crouched behind the tub, and Nan moved to stand up, but Elma yanked her down by the hand that wasn’t holding Winna in the bath, then slipped it into hers. The doctor settled Wilson onto the towel on his lap. “I’m just here for some preventive care. Standard practice.”
Juke slipped his straight razor into the bowl of water and leveled it against his right cheekbone, scraping it down to the wedge of his jaw. You could hear the blade on his skin, rough as a rake over stony soil. He was not going to offer the doctor coffee. He was not going to tell any stories. “Is it standard practice to call on a patient after supper?”
“In exceptional cases it is.”
“Don’t make no exception for us, please. These babies are as standard as they come. They got ten fingers and ten toes, same as anybody.”
The doctor was combing through Wilson’s hair with his fingers, inspecting his scalp, and Nan had to squeeze Elma’s hand to keep from leaping up again. “Miss Jesup,” the doctor said, not looking up, “you want your children to be healthy, don’t you?”
“Course I do.” Elma let go of Nan’s hand, scooped up Winna Jean, and wrapped her in a towel. “That’s why I keep them at home, so they won’t catch nothing.”
“They’s plenty a child can catch on a farm, even out here in the country air.” From his satchel he removed his stethoscope and fit the disk to the boy’s chest. “You folks don’t need me to remind you.” He turned his head and, for the first time since he’d arrived, met Nan’s eyes. “Tetanus. Smallpox. Diphtheria.” She remembered the first time he’d pressed that cold stethoscope to her skin, and the first time he’d pressed his tongue depressor to her bottom lip. When she opened her mouth and he saw there was nothing to depress, he jumped back as if she’d bitten him.
“They’re preventable diseases now,” the doctor said. “Medicine has come a long way.” In the doctor’s lap, Wilson stared transfixed at the shiny faces of his glasses. The doctor took a loaded syringe from his bag and sank it into the naked baby’s thigh, as casually as he might stick a cooked turkey. Wilson opened his mouth and released a cry.
Nan released a cry too. She shot up from the porch floor and clapped her hand over her mouth. It was the kind of cry she tried to keep inside, a lonesome, ugly cry, like an animal in pain. It had been so long since she’d made the sound that it sounded alien to her own ears. The others looked at her, eyes wide. She didn’t care. Without Elma to hold her back, she rushed to Wilson and took him in her arms.
“Doctor!” Elma said, and Nan was grateful for her voice. “What in Heaven!”
Wilson howled. Nan bounced him. Then Winna Jean, in Elma’s arms, began to howl too. Then, suddenly at Nan’s feet, Castor and Pollux joined them.
Now Juke did stand up. He took the final step up to the porch. He wasn’t a tall man, but his legs and scarred arms were ropy, and he had a way of making himself appear bigger, of filling a doorway with the wings of his shoulders. The skin at his open collar, already pink with sweat, went a shade redder, and his jaw, still wet, went stiff.
“Doctor, this mother would kindly like a warning. As a courtesy.”
The emptied syringe still dangled between the doctor’s fingers, his thumb on the depressor. Juke palmed the razor.
“Of course,” said the doctor. He dropped Juke’s glance and looked out at the fields, maybe looking at Genus Jackson’s shack, maybe looking for the still, maybe for the quarantine shack that had been burned when Nan and Elma were small. The babies had quieted a bit, the puppies with them. They lay down at Nan’s feet. The doctor said, “I reckon you grown folks are due for shots as well.”
“Ain’t no need for shots for no grown folks,” said Juke.
“A man’s impervious to no illness.” The doctor opened his case, displayed more glass vials. “I can do it here. No need to make the trip into town.”
“Put them shots away. Ain’t no one stuck me yet and I don’t intend to change that. You can stick the babies, but then you’ll be on your way.”
The doctor looked as if he might push further, but he replaced the vials in his bag. “You know something,” said the doctor. “All my years in medicine, I’ve never seen twins with separate paternity. I know some doctors who would be mighty interested in this case. It’s a rarity, I’ll tell you that. Something to be proud of.” He sat with his legs crossed at the knee, the creases of his pants legs sharp.
“Proud?” It looked to Nan like a smile curling the corner of Juke’s mouth. “I ain’t ashamed of my grandchildren, make no mistake. But I ain’t proud for one minute of their ‘paternity.’ Neither way.”
Dr. Rawls gave an ambiguous tilt of his head. He still seemed to be waiting for some sound from above. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”
“I reckon He does,” said Juke.
Juke looked on as Dr. Rawls gave Winna her three shots and Wilson the last two, and in the middle of the howling, the baby boy, like a fountain cherub, sent an arc of urine across the doctor’s creased pants legs. Elma rushed over with another towel, but the doctor laughed. “Well, aren’t you just full of piss and vinegar?” Elma laughed a relieved and joyful laugh. Wilson laughed too, which made Juke laugh in turn. Nan made no sound at all. She stood with her hands behind her