Sweet Vidalia - excerpt

On the first of February, 1964, Eliza Kratke walked home in late afternoon from a neighbor’s and found her husband, Robert, in the driveway beside the Fairlane, the door standing open, his hand on the top frame of it. It was one of his rare weekends off from the railroad. Eliza thought that maybe he was going down to Dinwiddie’s to buy a hose for the Whirlpool or had been there and was just returning. Later she would find that he had not bought a hose, or anything, since there was no package in the car or the garage or any room of the house. Much later it would occur to her to wish she had noticed if the Fairlane had been cold or warm. But what woman would notice a detail like that while her husband of thirty years watched her walking toward him with such an anguished expression on his face?

Eliza knew she was about to hear it, this secret that he’d been on the verge of telling her. For months and months, Robert had been brooding. Not sharing the vivid little happenings from work that formerly had invited her into his day. His abrupt silences collapsed ordinary conversations. Suspense had returned to their life. Eliza disliked suspense. It made her anxious, and being anxious made her angry and impatient. She was a preparer. Holidays, she assigned dishes or accepted her own assignment; vacations, she packed from a penciled list; emerging from Hitchcock movies into the cool of night, she did not feel safely thrilled — she felt wrung out and disheveled. But look at him there — whatever thing Robert needed to say, she would hear now in their driveway, she was sure. Her rib cage contracted violently. The fear housed there slammed upward and spread jangling through her chest. She pulled her wool coat closer and held his gaze, her own inquiring, What could you have to say that I couldn’t stand?

Just before she reached him, his knees buckled. He caught himself on the door, clung to it, drew almost upright again. Eliza ran the last two steps and seized him around the waist. “There’s a hammer in my back,” he told the top of her head, “and in my front.”

She helped him heave himself into the car. He lurched over toward the passenger door. Eliza was scrambling out to call an ambulance but he shook his head, lifted his hand, thumb up, index finger pointing like a gun toward the Whelans’ house. She clambered in, understanding there would be no discussion and that he was not really pointing at the Whelans’ but beyond, where Maple Street led to Pershing Boulevard and the hospital, only two miles away. He meant they would be there faster than an ambulance could arrive, and as there was pain, they should go now. She grimaced in return, gave a half- shake of her head, put the car in gear.

They often communicated this way, expression and gesture accomplishing an agreement between them. This agreement was modified by her reservations, but the disapproving shake of her head had stated that for the record, and she didn’t protest further. With a flick of a glance over her left shoulder, Eliza tapped the brakes for the corner stop sign, turned right onto Maple, and drove the several residential blocks at forty- five, twenty miles beyond the speed limit. She turned left onto Pershing, a six- lane boulevard. Robert bent restlessly forward, then into the seat back; he could settle in neither position. When she asked him how he was, his answer was a tightening of the lips. She drove with one hand on his thigh, holding him in place.

She slowed for a red light at Ivy. Robert was grunting as he exhaled, eyes narrowed, lips compressed. These small sounds, full of the effort of withstanding, made her unable to wait out the light; she simply couldn’t. Eliza whipped her head to see that the street was clear and drove through the intersection, leaving three lanes of stopped cars behind. Scanning desperately ahead, clutching Robert’s leg, she took Walnut and Oak on yellows at fifty-five. As they reached Spruce, he folded, vomiting onto his feet. Eliza began to murmur, “Hold on, honey, hold on,” and in her sharply increased alarm passed a cement mixer grumbling toward Pine and got to the light just as it changed to red. A driver on the cross street to her right charging into an early green saw her and stood on his screaming brakes. Eliza stamped her brake and flung out an arm to protect Robert; his weight hyperextended her elbow, but she saw she’d clear the intersection if she gassed it, so she did, escaping past the driver’s shocked face. She trailed her hand over Robert’s neck, then grasped his arm; against her sweating palm, his skin was dry and very cold. She made the next two lights on green, tailgating every car in front of her until it surrendered the lane, laying on its horn as she accelerated past.

The police car caught them a block from the hospital. Because she hadn’t looked back, Eliza had been oblivious to the whirling lights, so the bleat of a siren switched to high volume made her jump in the seat and let out the cry she’d been continuously swallowing. She semaphored in the rearview mirror No, no, no without slowing down. Most of her life she’d been afraid of police, from the day she’d seen them wade swinging into a tussle of unemployed men, her father included, at the sawmill gates. It was the transformation that had scared her. The screech of a whistle — and the policemen’s neutral faces contorted into masks of naked, personal ferocity. It would not have occurred to her to stop and ask for the policeman’s assistance; besides, they were almost there. It was what she was begging Robert to believe: Almost there, almost there, hold on, hold on. She swerved to the left lane so she could make the turn ahead into the hospital lot; this abrupt maneuver cut off the police car, and he fell back, on her bumper now, siren blaring angrily. Red light pulsed over Robert, but he did not react to the violent red splashes. Anguish was gone from his face. Robert’s eyes were open now, and he looked almost bemused, as though he were puzzling over some small issue, his fingers hooked into his shirt. The left- turn lane curved ahead of her, traffic steady in the oncoming lanes so that she had to brake. She thought she would nudge out into the traffic anyway, force the cars to let her through.

Before she could do this, a policeman was shouting from directly behind her window: “Turn off your car!”

Eliza rolled down the window and stabbed her finger toward the hospital. Surely he would understand, surely he’d seen emergencies before: There was the hospital, here was a man with frost in his skin.

“Turn off your car! Throw your keys out the window. Now!”

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From Sweet Vidalia by Lisa Sandlin.