Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush by Virginia Hamilton

Author:Virginia Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2010-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

EVERYTHING HAPPENED SO FAST, Tree didn’t get the chance to talk to M’Vy about the car wreck in Rush’s place. She wanted to ask, did it truly happen? Did you brother die?

But Dab had collapsed in the hallway outside the little room. Afraid of the little room and what she could sense, feel, but could not see there, M’Vy had hurried them out. And Dab had keeled over.

Tree had the sensation of him slipping fast. He had been right beside her; then he was like a thin column of air rushing to the floor. She moved to stop his fall, but she was too late.

“Get him into bed,” M’Vy urged. Tree was pulling at him, trying to hit him.

“Don’t! Don’t!” Dab shouted at her. “Who! Who, un-huh?” he said in a frenzy of wild talking. “The clean water walking all over. Throw me in the clean water!”

He whipped his body around on the floor in a fit. His eyes rolled back. Vy held his tongue until Tree could go fetch a washcloth. Then Vy rolled it and placed it between his teeth so he wouldn’t swallow his tongue.

“His temperature up high. His pulse racing,” M’Vy said, clasping his hand and wrist. Tree had never seen a big woman like her move so smoothly doing her job. But each time she touched Dab, he hollered in pain. Finally she gritted her teeth against his hollering and picked him up. She heaved him over her shoulder with his arms pinned under him. With the washcloth in his mouth, Dab couldn’t cry out too loudly. He was too weak to kick.

Vy got him in bed with the covers pulled up to his chin.

“Now. We make a search,” she said. Dab was out of it, not hearing much beyond his own moaning.

“A search?” Tree asked.

“We search the whole room,” Vy told her. She had taken the cloth from Dab’s mouth. He had calmed down and appeared to be moaning himself to sleep.

Tree had never searched for anything, except at church a few times when there were Easter-egg hunts. She had been a little girl then. How long ago had that been, she wondered.

She and Vy searched Dab’s room while he slept. It wasn’t like searching for a mislaid belt or lost watch stem. Once Tree had had to get down on the floor and practically comb it to help M’Vy find her watch stem. Found it, too.

“Don’t believe you eyes,” Vy told her now. “Believe what you can or cain’t feel. Feel under the chair. Feel behind the bureau. Sure’s I’m me, we’ll find something under or in back of.”

Tree found a stash under the windowsill. Two envelopes of pills. M’Vy found MJ taped to the back of the headboard.

No wonder he lay in bed half his life, Tree thought “He a stone junkie?” Tree wanted to know. She felt bad for him inside.

“Naw, he not,” Vy said. “He just want to shut down some pain and feeling crazy, he don’t know why. Tree, he a long story.

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