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On a day when spring
had returned to the Carolina Piedmont with dogwood in her hair, Christina came
to the clinic to. She was a little bent in her back from working in the cotton
mill all those years before the mill closed up shop and headed south for the
cheap wages of
“132
over 86. That’s great. And
you look like you’re feeling well,” I said.
“Doc, I do. You know
how bad off I was when the bad thing happened, but I
got better, and I’m busy with the girls.”
The girls, Amy and
Courtney, 10 and 12, were sitting outside the exam room, all giggles, denim,
tees and Nikes. The bad thing that had happened a few years previously involved
their parents, Christina’s son-in-law and daughter. You couldn’t help but
notice that those two, Jesse Ray and Valery were cute together; kissy-kiss
still even after a few years of marriage and two kids.
Christina heard them
arguing that evening, but she’d heard it before, so she settled down in the
front room to watch Wheel of Fortune. Then she heard the smacking POW that a .22 makes. When she ran into
the back room, the room that had been a porch but it’d had it framed in for Valerie
and Jesse Ray, Jesse Ray had four bloody claw marks across his left cheek. He
was frozen in place, his mouth half open, looking at the pistol in his right
hand as if it were a serpent, not saying a thing. Valery was lying in the floor
looking straight up and she wasn’t moving either, and blood oozed from a wound
above her left eye.
Later, nobody
remembered what the argument was about, not the children, not Christina, and
not Jesse Ray. Still Valery was cold and dead and laid out in a stainless steel
filing drawer waiting on the pathologist with his sharp knives and his
bone-shears to make a canoe of her corpse so he could dictate his report into
the mike suspended by a cord above the autopsy table.
“I never spoke ill of
him,” Christina had once said. “I take the girls to see him once a month. We
always take him something. They don’t treat people good
down there, you know. I told him when you get out, you
have a place to live with us. It was all he could do to keep from crying, He
said Mama Chris, I don’t see how you can be so good to
me. I said, Jesse, those children are part you. I couldn’t do bad by you without doing bad by them, too.”
Everybody had something to say
about how Christina handled the bad thing, her taking the children once a month
down to that place where they don’t treat people good,
and taking him cookies and such. All the neighbors put their two bits in. The
sheriff said Jesse Ray was there to be punished, not to be coddled. The
preacher said Jesse Ray had sinned, and the wages of sin are death. But the
sheriff always says what he thinks will get him elected again next time, and
the preacher’s stories haven’t meant much to me since I quit believing in the
tooth fairy and such. But what do you think?
“Christina,”
was first published in Passion: An Anthology of
World Great Short Stories, Ed. Kumar Santosh.
© John R.
Guthrie
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Chickasaw
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