Everywhere thought extending itself into objects; he could feel the minds percolating around him, a gadgetry of ideas, comeuppances, answers for every problem. The smallest thing, that piece of equipment on the counter, the one with steel protrusions like round combs at the end of stalks. . he didn’t have time to ask about it.
“She worked here years ago,” he said, “but she got accused of killing a man and she had to leave town.”
The girl, woman now, with her hair shoved under a blue turban, cocked her head and said yes, she thought she remembered. “But I believe she’s passed on,” she said.
His knees went wobbly. A lightness filled his head and a pain pressed into his left temple. I shouldn’t have asked, he thought. He looked hard into her light brown eyes.
“There was somebody like that. . right here. I don’t recollect,” the woman said, flustered.
“Anybody around who’d know?”
“Miss Maylene. She helps out Miz Corona. And Miz Corona would know.”
He found Miss Maylene in the large first-floor bedroom converted to office use. It had another small room behind it that looked out on the garden. A tall woman in a yellow tulle dress, Maylene from Dalton, Tennessee, stood at the wide shiny desk, sliding wax paper in between layers of blue blouses. The room smelled of camphor. The woman waved her fingers, picked up a glass atomizer, and sprayed the air in front of her. Behind her, outside the window, somebody turned on a red light. The woman straightened herself and stood stiffly with one hand out in front of her as if holding off the atomizer spray, or feeling her way. She didn’t seem to know him, not at first.
“Yes,” she said, “I remember Cappie. She came back here several years ago. You work for the police, don’t you?”
“No mam, I never been associated with that outfit.”
She gave him a long birdlike look, cocking her narrow face to one side. Her wrists were spindly.
“Are you an army man?”
“Not anymore. They sent me home because of my leg.” He had scars on his legs — where he’d been lashed — if she wanted to check his story. “I’m Miss Cappie’s son — one of em.”
“Not the one that went to prison.”
“No, mam, I’m his older brother.”
“I see the resemblance. Well,” she said sitting down at the desk, “I am sorry about your mother. Sit down,” she said. Her arm like a relic. “That chair.”
He took the pink plush-bottomed reed chair in front of the desk and sank down until he could hardly see over it.
“That’s my mercy chair,” she said, smiling.
He propped himself on the edge. “I hadn’t seen her since I was a boy,” he said. After the first shock he felt calm.
“She was sick when she came here. A couple of people remembered her. It was just after the time that Miss Ellereen died. You remember her?”
“Yes’m, I do.”
“She got a wasting disease, cancer, or something, and we had to keep her in one of the little houses out back. She got it down in her testines and it was a little. . stinky, you might say.” She smiled in a funny way.
“Miss Ellereen?”
“You remember how big she was. Won’t nothing left of her when she died.” She smiled more brightly. “Then right after that your mother showed up. She arrived in a cab. She was wearing a leather dress, like a Indian squaw. What’s that called—”
“Buckskin?”
“Like she was a squaw. . or a cowboy woman — Annie Oakley or somebody. From out west.”
“I understand.”
“She was skinny as a bird. She had a flat white hat with little red cloth balls on a fringe around the edges. She was shaking so bad the little balls shook. I believe Miss Corona had just taken over, maybe it was that same week — I believe Miss Corona was afraid at first to let her in. But then a couple of the other women recognized her, or recognized her name. The girls, except for me and Miss Corona, were all too young to remember her. I believe Buster — the workman — he remembered her too. He was a friend I believe of your brother’s when he was living over here at Mr. Oliver’s — the funeral home?”
“Yes.”
“He was the one went up and gave her a hug. He reminded them of who she was — told them, I mean, like they was waiting for a explanation.”
“She was sick?”
“Sick? Did I say sick?” She glanced into her open palm as if the answer was written there. “She was run down and dog-tired. She didn’t say if there was anything else wrong with her. She just seemed real tired, wore out. They had to near carry her up the stairs. She made it all the way up to the third floor. They put her in one of the little rooms up there. She seemed stronger for a couple of days. She even came downstairs and sat out in the back over by the garden.”
