Free The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara

things.”
    “Yawl called me a witch.”
    “True. But for goodness sake, we were just foolish little creatures, no more’n eleven or twelve then. Later on I wasn’t too much the fool I didn’t learn to listen to you.”
    “Didn’t.”
    “Did too, so quit pouting. Remember how me and Sophie and Serge and Cleotus would hang around your candy stand?”
    “Messing with my papers and trying to steal the pennies.”
    “Naw now. We used to like to hear you and Wilder talking over the old days and things like that. I know you know that or you wouldn’t’ve been telling us kids things to do and think about and read and check out and reach for. We couldn’t’ve grown up without you, Old Wife. None of us.”
    “We going in the chapel, or you plan to talk these here flowers to death?”
    It seemed to Dr. Julius Meadows, leaning against the desk chagrined, playing with the buttons of the stereo, that the right hand of the healer woman was on its own, that she had gone off somewhere and left it absent-mindedly behind on the patient’s shoulder. And it seemed that the patient was elsewhere as well. So like the catatonics he’d observed in psychiatric. The essential self gone off, the shell left behind. Dr. Meadows ran a hand through his hair and it crackled as though there were a storm brewing outside the window. He gazed out wondering where catatonia was, if it might be in the woods behind the Infirmary. Wondered if the two women had arranged a secret rendezvous in the hills and if going there he would find them both transformed, the older woman in full lotus under a blanket like the weathered photos his roommate had brought back from India. The younger a laurel bush, as in some legend,blooming in pieces somewhere in storybook memory.
    He wanted to leave, but how to go without telling himself he was on a fool’s errand, how to find some rational reason for leaving that would answer any question he might pose to himself? Need some air, he thought, rubbing the starchy jacket. Need a smoke, he thought, patting his pocket. Inching toward the exit door, he noticed that no one was paying him the slightest attention. But then that was usually the way. His presence or absence mattered to no one, not even to his patients he worried over through the nights. The knob was cold, chilled him through and through. The new paint job, finished in time for this round of visitors he was sure, was blinding.
    Buster, walking himself and Nadeen closer, his right palm warm, alert to any movement on that side of her stomach, was certain that something was finally happening. He walked them still closer to see what. Mrs. Henry, his neighbor till she left bed and board, as his parents said sadly, twitched her face, cracked and crazed like the soup tureen in his aunt’s china cabinet, then it was emptied out suddenly of anything he could give a name to. It was just as though Aunt Sudie had gotten up from an unsatisfactory dinner and removed the ladle from the chipped bowl, muttering, then walked to the back door, inched her foot in the crack, then swung it wide with her hip, holding the door back flat with her behind while she dumped the contents into the yard. And for a second there, he’d have been willing to swear that he saw two faces at once on Mrs. Henry. Like in an artsy photograph or like when he took his glasses off too fast. Or like he felt sometimes waking with a bump, his night face sinking down behind the day one and him touching himself to be sure he was there.
    He patted the mother of his child while he searched for a “like” that would pin it down so he could be done with it andleave. He would have to be on his toes for the interviews with Dr. Serge and Mr. Cleotus. They had no patience with students who weren’t wide awake and all there. Like. Mrs. Henry’s double-exposure face was like. He bit his lip and sucked at the mustache coming in. Like at the airport at Christmas when his father, home from the Islands, turned at the