Sweet Vidalia

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?

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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!”

Robert patted her shoulder sloppily and spoke. He’d been so quiet that it startled her and scared her; his voice was casual, drunken. “You go on, baby,” he muttered as if he were encouraging her to go on to bed, and he would come a little later.

The way was clear now; she could have spun the wheel and turned. Driven across the broad boulevard and up into the horseshoe drive of St. Mary’s, past an ambulance parked there, right up to the double glass doors radiating light. Instead, like a cringing girl, like the law abider she was — she condemned herself later — Eliza obeyed the official voice. Her brain throbbing Wrong-wrong-wrong, she killed the engine. She withdrew the keys and dropped them out her window.

The policeman’s voice commanded: “Now open your door from the outside and get out! Keep your hands where I can see ’em!”

Eliza fumbled opening the car door and began to get out. “Lay down on the ground, lay — ” The policeman’s legs were braced, both hands on the black gun that pointed at her face. They confronted each other with disbelief. From the jerk of his features, Eliza saw he’d expected some armed-holdup hood or belligerent drunkard, not her graying hair and gold bifocals; she’d expected the hardened sneer of a union-busting bull, not an outraged child. Sharp-creased, badge gleaming in the six o’clock sunburst, belt loaded with leather scabbards, the patrolman loomed over her like a blond boy swollen to breaking with some sandbox injustice. He holstered the gun and scooped up her keys. “Lady, that’s the most reckless driving I ever seen!”

“Please, my husband — ”

“You know how many wrecks you just about caused?”

“Listen, I think he’s — ”

Eliza edged back, but he came on, shouting, “I been chasing you for blocks. Don’t you know what rearview mirrors are for?”

What could she do with someone like this? She glanced toward the traffic a lane away, drivers slowed, gawking. Looked up, stupidly, as Deliberate disregard, alcohol, license, registration rained down on her, to the pink light snared between bare, black branches of oak that lined the boulevard. Then back to the red patches suffusing the corded neck, the downy cheek.

“Doctor!” Eliza hollered up at the boy. “Doctor, doctor, doctor, doctor!”

Doctor penetrated the clenched angles of the young policeman by visible degrees, like a nail steadily driven into wood. His head twitched toward the hospital, and the muscles around his eyes sagged. He bent into the Fairlane’s window. “Oh God,” he said.

She was about to shoulder him aside, but he shoved the keys at her and sprinted away to his car. Eliza lunged through the window. A foam of vomit was sliding down Robert’s chin. She threw open the door, thrust the keys into the ignition, and scrabbled, hands and knees on the vinyl seat, to her husband. She was calling his name in a stream, Robert-Robert-Robert. His head lolled toward her, his expression still mild, and his left hand reached out to her. Gratefully Eliza grasped it — cold, so cold — and then Robert snatched it away from her. He let out a throaty, gargling noise; air hissed through his teeth. His weight slumped onto her, pinning her to the seat. She gathered in his right elbow and looked down onto his nape and the wine birthmark there. Eliza began to rock, the movement so slight that she did not notice she was making it. She went on this way, being crushed by him, weaving, whispering.

In this calm she dared to press a hand to his clammy forehead to measure the fever that was not there. His strained face cleared. Robert looked at her mildly again. That look frightened her silent, the lazy expression that told her he was separate from the cars crawling by on the boulevard, from the car he sat in, from her, from what was happening to him.

“Move away, ma’am,” a voice behind her commanded, “move out, please.”

Eliza protested, but she was dragged out. She staggered; her feet did not know where they should meet the pavement. It was dark here where she was; dusk shredded over lines of gray cars, street, fading trees, until it obscured like a backdrop. Revolving red lights whirlpooled around her. She turned her back and looked up beyond their range; the ceiling of the sky was wide lit with the fleshy, sprawled light of February. The cold, still air searing her edges, freezing the sweat beneath her coat, told her she had not escaped, was not currently escaping, that this was occurring now, this moment, that she was standing on a street in a moment that was not ending but being, going on and on without seam or relief. The lanes of traffic she had not turned into, had not forced to stop, were stopped, of course not the same cars but other cars, stopped, the intersection blocked by an ambulance parked haphazardly, its driver craned out. Blocked by the young patrolman, legs planted, both arms rigidly outstretched. That she saw steadily; there could be no mistake about the meaning of that posture — any car that attempted to pass would be met by the palms of his hands. The huffing, white-coated man who must have dragged her out had scrambled past her, the cold metal of his stethoscope had grazed her hand. He crouched now on the seat beside Robert. “Go!” He dragged out the syllable, chopping with his arm, then slid behind the wheel of her car. The ambulance straightened and fishtailed away. Her car — hers and Robert’s Fairlane — made the turn she should have made and glided across the boulevard and away, far up into the hospital’s horseshoe drive. Its glass doors popped open.

Eliza was disoriented by the emptiness of the turn lane. The car was something large and fast that she had worn and now it was gone. Beyond the patrolman’s red- flashing cruiser, a car door slammed; a woman’s voice asked her if she needed help. Eliza angled to see a woman in a scarf hesitate, then stride forward, saw a white swarm emerging from a rounded mouth, but she tilted herself toward the hospital. As she neared the middle of the street and the patrolman’s back, he turned so that their eyes met. The curved bill of the cap was pushed back; his eyes glittered. He was looking at Eliza with the exact expression Robert had had when she’d hurried up the driveway an age ago: pained, expecting blame. The young man’s lips moved; by some inexplicable delay, a white wreath wafted and began to rise before she heard what he said: “I’m sorry.”

That was how Robert’s message was delivered to her. On the cold boulevard, and in a colder second, one that flared, then clipped off, finished, she knew with certainty: that was what Robert had meant to tell her.

She ran. Somewhere far back in the three lanes of traffic, one car flipped on its lights, then another and another and another. Eliza ran through a gauntlet of headlights, up the horseshoe drive, past the ambulance, past the empty Fairlane, and through the hospital’s wide glass doors.

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From Sweet Vidalia by Lisa Sandlin. Used with permission of the publisher, Little Brown and Co. Copyright © 2024 by Lisa Sandlin.