The Lost Saints of Tennessee by Amy Franklin-Willis

Author:Amy Franklin-Willis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2011-12-18T16:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Six

For the first time since the rubeola when he was little, Carter stayed at Tolliver Hospital. The days dragged into weeks and the wind began to blow the leaves off the oak trees lining the front entrance, each leaf wider than my own palm. The nurses brought a cot into his room for me. Coffee and cigarettes were the only things I could manage after Carter fell into a coma. To have a child dance so close to death a second time filled me with a kind of anger I hadn’t felt before—it spread to every part of my insides until sometimes, at night, I would have to go down the hall to the toilet and throw up awful yellow bile.

My husband got called for a big job in Mississippi and left a month after our boy got hurt. With the bills piling up, he had to go. I’d never felt more lonely in my whole life.

Carter’s body slowly began to heal itself on the outside. The bruises along his broken jaw faded. The stitches on his face came out the second month, leaving a deep scar that ran from his forehead over his right eye to his jawbone. He would never see the same out of that eye again. Spiky brown fuzz sprouted from his scalp, shaved by the nurses that first night for the emergency surgery. Scars formed a map across the back of his head, their lines intersecting at points, like a tic-tac-toe board. Every day I touched his feet, his legs, his right arm, his hands, his chest. Every place those Smith brothers hadn’t. And I prayed over him. Thank you, God, for these strong legs. These beautiful fingers. Thank you for these lungs breathing in and out.

My son woke up two months and three days after the beating. He didn’t recognize me. Didn’t remember a thing, not even his own name. The doctors had warned me this might happen, given the swelling around his brain, but nothing prepared me for those first days after the coma. Carter just sat in bed with his hands folded in his lap, staring out the window. Wouldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom, though his legs worked fine. He didn’t speak a word. When I talked to him, I knew he didn’t hear me. This ghost boy was almost harder to bear than the comatose one. I wanted my son, my Carter, back. All of him.

Violet brought me dinner and drove her sisters over to the hospital every other day. I found out later that Rosie spent the night in the McNairy County jail after setting fire to the Smith boys’ house. They were out on bail (one of their cousins was a bail bondsman) and sleeping in their beds when she did it. Their mother smelled the smoke and called the fire department. Most of the house burned. Violet’s husband, Louis, had played high school basketball with Sheriff Duffy and was able to sweet-talk him into letting Rosie go.

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