Lost Man's River(283)
Whidden delivered this news early in the morning when he and Sally came to say good-bye, and hearing it, Andy House went red, very upset. “Henry is too old for work like that—that’s dangerous work! And Big Sugar don’t care nothing at all about their workers! He is very experienced and he ain’t a drinker, but he’s too old for hard and heavy work around big burns!”
Those empty plantations were miles and miles to the horizon and Henry had been way out there, beyond help. Running hard for an irrigation ditch, he had fallen and was overtaken by the flames. Burned over most of his body, he was not recuperating. He was lucid at times, yet seemed too weak to breathe and was not expected to survive the week, Lee Harden said.
In a tumult of feelings, Lucius took leave of the Hardens and headed north at once. He did not feel he had a choice about it. Andy House, who felt the same, talked unhappily about Henry most of the way to the hospital at Okeechobee.
“Henry told Lee Harden he wanted to leave me his gold-digging equipment, all his treasure maps, cause he wouldn’t have no use for ’em no more. Said he knew about some buried gold that was well off from the house on private property, where a man could go and dig at night, not get the dogs on him. He had made him a good map, wanted me to have it! Never heard that I went blind, I guess. Not that I would use it anyways. I don’t care for the idea of sneakin onto private property!
“That side of Henry always did surprise me, because he was the most honest man I ever met, and the most religious, too. Come the Holy Day, he would never do no labor, that was his rest day and he read his Bible. But when it come to gold, he didn’t see straight, it was gettin so he would break his own commandments and go dig on Sunday. I doubt he ever give much thought to what he’d do with all his gold if he ever found any, but after so many long years alone, I reckon he dreamed that striking gold might make up some way for the life that passed him by.”
At Okeechobee Hospital
At the hospital, they had to hunt for the old Negro ward, a long room with creaking fans and narrow shafts of dusty sun and decrepit cabinets which seemed to stand at odds with the streaked walls, in a sepia light and weary atmosphere which reminded Lucius of soldiers’ wards in old prints or daguerreotypes of the Civil War. Torn screens in high narrow windows let pass myriad small things which crawled and flew, and distant crow caws, and the airlessness of the hot woods.
The discreet figures wandering the ward were mostly black people. Seated humbly on small hard chairs by the door were two white men in dark Sunday serge with weathered, steadfast faces. Recognizing Andy House, they smiled and stood, but the blind man brushed right past their hands before Lucius could mend the situation.
Henry Short lay flat and still as if extinguished by the humid heat. Pinned to the coarse sheets like a specimen, the old man twitched and shifted in his purgatory. His blue cotton nightshirt was open down the front, and his chest was patched with cracked and crusted scabs, like a side of charred beef leaking thin red fluid. From his bed on its small roller wheels rose a peculiar odor of disinfectant, broiled flesh, and sharp urine. Yet the reddened eyes that peered out from the bandages seemed calm, observing Lucius as he guided Andy House around the cot. They stood beside him, one man on each side.
Through broken lips, the burned man murmured, “Well now. Mist’ Lucius! And Mist’ Andy.” Henry Short had first encountered Lucius as a boy of eight, down in the rivers. Even so, it astonished Lucius that this dying man had recognized a visitor he had not seen in two decades and could not have supposed he would ever see again.
Finding an unburned place on the inert forearm, Lucius pressed the cool skin with two fingertips. “How are you, Henry?” He spoke in a soft low voice in keeping with the hush over the ward. “How do, Henry,” Andy said, wide-eyed and smiling. Unable to see Henry’s dire condition, anxious lest he molest his awful burns, he extended his arm over the bed like a crude feeler as the black man, in great pain, slowly lifted a white mitt toward the blind hand. Lucius reached to draw their hands together just as both men lost faith and gave up.
Though Henry did his best to smile, his awful travail turned his eyes murky and twisted his parched mouth. “Fiery furnace!” Still working at that death’s-head smile he gasped out that phrase from the old spiritual. Teeth chattering, he closed his eyes and rested a little until he got his breath.
An old black woman two beds away called to the white men that Deacon Short was a true man of God, and if he had ever sinned, none could recall it. “Praise the Lord!” the old woman cried, and there came a shy chorus of assent rose from the hushed room. Like mourners in a slow procession, the ward visitors did not gather around Henry but continued walking, and now they began a crooning in warm harmonies. And the burned man muttered, “Hear them angels? Hope they come for me!” Though he struggled with it, he could not work his smile.