Free Home by Toni Morrison Page B

the bed and ran to Mr. Haywood’s house. He drove her to the hospital in Mount Haven. There, after a long, perilous wait in the corridor, she finally received treatment that curtailed further damage. Her speech was slurred but she was ambulatory—if carefully so. Salem saw to her basic needs, but was relieved to learn he could not understand a word she spoke. Or so he said.
    It was a testimony to the goodwill of churchgoing and God-fearing neighboring women that they brought her plates of food, swept the floors, washed her linen, and would have bathed her too, except her pride and their sensitivity forbade it. They knew that the woman they were helping despised them all, so they didn’t even have to say out loud what they understood to be true: that the Lord Works in Mysterious Ways His Wonders to Perform.

NINE

    K orea
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    You can’t imagine it because you weren’t there. You can’t describe the bleak landscape because you never saw it. First let me tell you about cold. I mean cold. More than freezing, Korea cold hurts, clings like a kind of glue you can’t peel off
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    Battle is scary, yeah, but it’s alive. Orders, gut-quickening, covering buddies, killing—clear, no deep thinking needed. Waiting is the hard part. Hours and hours pass while you are doing whatever you can to cut through the cold, flat days. Worst of all is solitary guard duty. How many times can you take off your gloves to see if your fingernails are going black or check your Browning? Your eyes and ears are trained to see or hear movement. Is that sound the Mongolians? They are way worse than the North Koreans. The Mongols never
quit; never stop. When you think they are dead they turn over and shoot you in the groin. Even if you’re wrong and they’re as dead as a dopehead’s eyes it’s worth the waste of ammo to make sure
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    There I was, hour after hour, leaning on a makeshift wall. Nothing to see but a quiet village far below, its thatched roofs mimicking the naked hills beyond, a tight cluster of frozen bamboo sticking up through snow at my left. That’s where we dumped our garbage. I stayed alert as best I could, listening, watching for any sign of sloe eyes or padded hats. Most of the time nothing moved. But one afternoon I heard a thin crackling in the bamboo stands. A single something was moving. I knew it wasn’t the enemy—they never came in ones—so I figured it was a tiger. Word was they roamed up in the hills, but nobody had seen one. Then I saw the bamboo part, low to the ground. A dog, maybe? No. It was a child’s hand sticking out and patting the ground. I remember smiling. Reminded me of Cee and me trying to steal peaches off the ground under Miss Robinson’s tree, sneaking, crawling, being as quiet as we could so she wouldn’t see us and grab a belt. I didn’t even try to run the girl off that first time, so she came back almost every day, pushing through bamboo to scavenge our trash. I saw her face only once. Mostly I just watched her hand moving between the stalks to paw garbage. Each time she came it was as welcome as watching a bird feed her young or a hen scratching
,
scratching dirt for the worm she knew for sure was buried there
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    Sometimes her hand was successful right away, and snatched a piece of garbage in a blink. Other times the fingers just stretched, patting, searching for something, anything, to eat. Like a tiny starfish—left-handed, like me. I’ve watched raccoons more choosy raiding trash cans. She wasn’t picky. Anything not metal, glass, or paper was food to her. She relied not on her eyes but on her fingertips alone to find nourishment. K-ration refuse, scraps from packages sent with love from Mom full of crumbling brownies, cookies, fruit. An orange, soft now and blackened with rot, lies just beyond her fingers. She fumbles for it. My relief guard comes over, sees her hand and shakes his head smiling. As he approaches her she raises up and in what looks like a hurried, even automatic, gesture