Freeman Walker. David Allen Cates
did not look at me. When she finished in the corner, she cleaned up my puddle with a mop, and then she left me again, closing the door with a firm click, no more loudly or angrily than any time before.
That night I thought of defecating on the floor in front of the door so that she’d step on it when she walked in—then of standing on the bed and urinating on her when she knelt to clean it up.
But in the morning the door opened, and again I was petrified by her presence—this time with shame, not with fear. Shame likes company, though, and so I also began to feel anger. When she came in I concentrated all of my loathing in the hope that she would feel it and so do something that might make me stop hating her. I stared at her coldly but she didn’t seem to notice. So I unleashed a torrent of all of the worst words I had ever heard anybody speak, and she still refused to look at me. Oh how I hated her! And for a few hours hate was my companion. I paced the room and hated Miss Crinkle. I wished her dead. I thought about killing her. How? Beating her with my pillow, suffocating her, pounding her with my fists, stabbing her with a fork. We are all going to die, my father had said. So why not her? Why not now?
Why not, indeed.
Because the very next morning, to my horror and amazement, as she stooped to get my bedpan her face contorted, and her lips parted and issued a horrendous groan before she collapsed.
I sat up in the bed and looked at the floor where she’d crumpled in a pile of dress and hair—her gray hair had come all undone and splashed about her face. I believed I must have been dreaming, so unreal was the scene. I walked over to her, stooped to touch her head, and pushed the hair off her ashen face. It was the first time I had ever touched a white woman’s face or hair. I looked at the spittle in the corners of her mouth, and I laid the flat of my hand on her forehead. The hundreds of wrinkles seemed to have relaxed and the heat was already leaving her cheek. She wasn’t breathing, yet for a few moments she seemed conscious. There was a question in her eyes, and I could have sworn she looked at me for the first time. Did she know I’d wished her dead? Yet there was no anger in her look, no reproach, as the light in her eyes blinked out.
After the initial shock, I felt afraid. Who would bring me my food? Would I ever see anybody again? And would they know I’d wished her dead?
I crawled back up onto my bed. The door was open—why didn’t I go out? Perhaps I heard the dog barking. I must have been very tired because I fell asleep instead.
When I woke the body was gone and the door closed. There was food on my tray that I ate without pleasure. That night I couldn’t sleep. I paced the room with the restless step of a murderer. I walked and breathed, and stifled the desire to scream. For what? Perhaps I had only dreamed her dead body?
Regardless, I carefully stepped over the spot where I had dreamed her.
I felt my body get hot and then cold, and my brow sweat profusely. Suddenly I felt fine again, and I kept walking. Then I felt the chill return. Was that her spirit? So be it. I was too light-headed to be afraid. I remember feeling as though I were walking differently than usual. Walking just a few inches above the floor, but a new blast of sudden cold shook me to my bones and I lay down in bed. I curled up under my covers to get warm but her cold ghost was there, too.
Is this what it felt like to be a killer? Is that what I’d become?
Despite my chill, I can’t say I lay awake over it. In fact, for a brief moment before drifting off to feverish sleep, I admit the possibility thrilled me.
I WOKE UP IN a pool of wet sheets and a young woman was in my room with a stack of clean ones. I slipped off the mattress and watched as she made my bed. She had hair like orange rust, eyes green as grass, and freckles like flecks in cream. She kept her eyes averted, but she did not terrify me. I could see the slight flush of her cheek when she became aware I was watching her. I seized my advantage and ran past her as fast as I could to jump up on the bed.
I said, “Yiiiiiiiii,” and jumped so high I thought I might touch the ceiling, and this caused her to look at me with wonder. She stood with a hand on her hip for a moment and watched me and I thought I saw her lips change shape. A smile?
Again, I yelled, “Yiiiiiiiiiii!” and she reached for me. I avoided her and kept jumping. She lifted her broom and tried to sweep me off but I jumped to avoid the broom. Despite ourselves, both of us were laughing. She lifted the broom higher and swung this way and that until she finally managed to cock me alongside my head, which caused me to lose my balance and fall to the floor. Unfazed, I wriggled over to try to look up her skirt.
She shrieked, stepped back, and picked me up by my nightshirt and tossed me onto the bed. I bounced once or twice before coming to a thumping halt against the wall. Then she wagged a chubby pink finger at me and accompanied it with a sentence of such music I had to repeat the sound over and over again after she’d walked out and locked the door before I could find the individual words and the meaning became clear.
“You wee monkey,” she said, “is this how the niggers behave in America, jumping and shrieking like banshees and poking their wee mugs where they’re not supposed to be?”
A long way from love, I suppose, but it was a start.
The next morning I lay waiting for her, curled up in bed and pretending to be sorry. She looked at me as soon as she came in the door. I told her I was sorry I’d misbehaved. I told her I’d had a fever the night before and felt bad about the dead woman. I almost admitted to killing Crinkle but dared not. I told her I’d been in this room a long time. I started to cry.
She stood with her hand on her hips, suspicious. But my tears were real—they surprised even me. She sat down. Told me not to worry about Miss Crinkle—Tennyson, actually, Miss Tennyson.
“She’s happier dead, I’m sure,” she said.
“Happier?”
“Deaf and dumb her whole life long, the poor dear.”
“What?” I was having a hard time understanding her.
“As a doorknob!” she said.
I loved the way she smelled. I loved looking at her orange hair and skin like cream. But I couldn’t understand her when she talked.
“Deaf,” she said again, and pointed to her ears, and shook her head. “No hear! No talk!”
Oh! A light went on. I felt a weight lift. Miss Crinkle had never heard a word I’d said. She couldn’t even hear herself moan and groan.
“Why am I here?” I asked this woman whom I had already begun to love.
She smiled. “Poor wee monkey,” she said, “you must be awfully lonely. Ten days here already? Well, there’s been a plague of sorts about and the school doctor’s ran away with his wife’s sister to France and I suspect when you arrived ill from America they didn’t want to infect the others.”
I didn’t speak, I didn’t know what to say. My eyes were overrunning with tears. It wasn’t my fault my country was diseased.
“Be patient,” she said, and she put her arm around me and gave me a quick squeeze. “You’ll be out with your mates in no time at all.”
I didn’t know what mates were, but even if they were alligators I was still pleased they would be mine, and pleased I would be out with them.
She gave me a quick squeeze, called me her wee monkey again, and said a prayer for me when she tucked me into bed that night. Sitting on my bed and bending over me, she asked me about my one green eye and one brown, features to which I’d given little thought. My father had green eyes and my mother had brown, so why shouldn’t I have the two colors? But Bridget—for that was her name—told me she’d seen perhaps a few thousand people in her life and never one with eyes like mine. She asked me how many people I had seen, and she asked me to try to count them, and asked if I had ever seen a person with two different-colored eyes, and I had not, and soon lost count anyway, never having learned how to count past nineteen.
That neither