Her insides were filling the room with a sound of water. A lake lapping against its edges and shifting the pebble and grit.
I handed Father the first lung and after he’d placed it inside her I did the detail work – the work his hands were too big for, stoppering and making seamless frayed holes and cords. Undoing as best I could all the strangeness her thin body had seen.
The second lung took quicker, squirming from Father’s hand and filling the space it had left behind. We closed her then, and bathed the blood away, and Father woke her.
Her mother arrived to collect her at a quarter past three in the morning as she’d been told. Father walked Miss Lennox out to the car and I stood in the door, letting the night-time cool settle ’round me.
They drove off. The car was an old one and sputtered, coughed. The headlamps were covered with dust from the road and only gave off a little light.
Father was walking his slow gait. From the middle of the drive he said
–Time for bed now, Ada.
–Might sleep late in the morning.
And then he walked past me, his arm grazing mine. I kept on looking out at the night. The moonshine was making silver the top of a tree that kept rustling, on and off, with the red-tailed hawk that nested there.
There are some technical terms around curing:
declension
auscultate
Father made me learn them but we never used them, not even to one another. I think teaching them to me was just another way to fill up the days.
He wrote poems for me, which worked better – small, simple verses to help me understand the work we did.
lest you tumble, slip,
or trip!
Hold firm, not tight, and
lift with both hands, however light!
I’d murmur them aloud while pulling weeds from The Ground or scrubbing strips of linen, but it took me a long time to fathom the long line of ailments ahead of me.
Chafed skin and chalky bones.
Too-thin veins and too-large hearts.
Every now and then Samson would talk about his sister, the recently widowed Olivia, how they’d grown up in a small room in their aunt’s house. How Olivia hated what she called ‘the poverty’, hated the whole town.
–When we were little she thought the only way she’d escape was the circus, but then she started meeting men. And then she met Harry. But then, Harry’s house was so big; I don’t think she knew what to do with all the different rooms.
He was sitting under a tree, shirtless in the shade, watching me wade in the river. For something to say, I said
–Harry was much older than her.
I’d cured him, one time, for a bitter bile in his stomach.
–She wanted to get married quick, before she had to work. She wouldn’t last a day in the fields.
–And what does she do with the rooms, now that he’s died?
He made a noise in his throat.
–His parents kicked her out, so she’s living with me again.
Which was their aunt’s house, the house they’d grown up in and which their aunt had left to Samson when she died.
I knelt in the water. It came up my shoulders, slipped under my hair.
–Do you have the space?
–Hardly. We’re back sharing a bed, like when we were children. See?
And he turned around, showed me where her knees had left bruises down his back.
Sometimes we didn’t go to the river but into the woods, deep into its middle where the branches gathered in knots and hid us from the hot blue sky. It needed constant tending: Samson’s skin the sun might set to singing, Samson’s want of shelter, Samson’s want of cool.
Often, when it came time to lie down together, he’d already be pink and dazed – weighted down by the sun. I caught myself at such times, thinking how little it’d take to open him, to be inside him and see how compact, how snug and how sound the mechanisms therein.
A warm sweep across my pelvic floor. A long exhale down my spine.
A heat kept just off the boil.
Lilia Gedeo
I’ve stomach problems, you see.
That and a tightness in the chest come springtime – the pollen! Yes, the pollen. It seems to stick to my throat.
So I was always up there, when I was young. Can’t count how many times I was put to ground. All that soil – and it was a different kind of soil. It never quite came out in the wash.
But I didn’t mind. Of course I didn’t mind.
I was just happy to have been made well!
Whether it was my stomach or my lungs. Or one of my headaches. I get desperate headaches, too.
We’ve a man now that comes around the houses, since Miss Ada stopped curing. He comes around with his bag of tricks and oh, it just isn’t the same.
When Mr Kault came to see us his neck was all bruised. Father said he must have been kneading himself, trying to loosen the knot at the base of his skull from his cerebellum growing twisted and hard.
Cerebellum.
Sarah-balloon.
Sear-bloom.
Edible-sounding, the name itself full of swell. Apparently supple when healthy.
We put him to sleep in the sitting room and then rolled him face down on the couch. I held his thumb in my hand.
He was the only man I’d ever seen of similar size to Father, though even as he lay still in the afternoon light I could see him shedding flake after flake of skin while all Father ever parted with was the mark of his mouth on his mug, maybe the fleeting indent of his hand on a Cure.
We’d opened him just enough to spy the withered, partial organ.
–There’s not that much to be done. This hard grind of muscle, we can bring that down. But the problem is deeper. Something we can’t fix.
–Why can’t we fix it?
–Because sick is sick, and it has to go somewhere, and some sicknesses are dangerous when taken out of a body.
By which he meant madness and perversion. Seeing as he let Mr Kault in the house I assumed it was madness. Maybe the glitching memory or the many-voices kind.
–And sometimes, even though it’s harmful, if a sickness has been deep-set too long a body doesn’t think to expel it.
–How d’you mean?
–It takes a toll on the flesh it’s leaving.
I looked at him blank though it irked him when I didn’t catch his meaning right away. He looked from me back to Mr Kault’s sore neck and said
–I mean if it’s left untended too long the body can’t live without it.
Sitting back on my ankles I imagined a small lamb come into the room and trying to suckle on me, moving its rough tongue from left to right. At first I didn’t know why, but then I remembered: Mr Kault’s cousin, Lorraine Languid. Some fifteen or so years before. It was the only time Father and I had together left the house, to the farm where Mr Languid lived with his wife and sons. Lorraine Languid was a young woman still and I was slowly finishing being a child. Father had made the rare exception to tend to a Cure in his own home and to distract herself Lorraine took me to the barn. The lambs were there, and the hay was all slick with their pursing mouths. I remember Lorraine tried to hold my hand, and I’d made it into a fist and tried to shake the feel of her holding it away. That curing had been a strong one. It gave Mr Languid another five years (at which point his heart would again make that smacking sound but he’d be far away, and not found until the bonnet of his truck had cooled). Father was at his strongest, then. Even his mildest touch did a lot of good.