Woman on the Edge of Time

“Luciente! If person were early, you’d read arrogance into that, Bolivar thinking Sappho could not die without per. Till when.”

“It all seems … funny to me,” Connie said. “A bunch of amateurs.”

“Who’s professional at dying? We each get only one turn, no practice.” Luciente put an arm around her waist.

“In my family in Mexico, people died this way. But in the city poor people die in hospitals. The attendants put up a screen. The nurse keeps an eye on you if she isn’t too hassled … . My mother died in the hospital in Chicago … so scared. Before when she was in the hospital, they took out her womb.”

“We don’t do much taking out. When we do, we regrow. We program the local cells. Slow healing but better after.”

“I haven’t met any doctors. How come there’s no doctor?”

Luciente pointed. “Look! Erzulia is a healer.”

“A witch doctor!”

“You mean that as an insult? Erzulia works in the hospital in Cranberry. They have the hospital for this township.”

“What does she do in the hospital?”

“Oh, person teaches people to heal themselves. Does surgery. Manipulating, pain easing, bone knitting. Erzulia’s skilled! Person has trained hundreds of healers and pioneered new methods of bone knitting and pain easing. There’s a way of setting pelvic fractures in the aged named after per.”

She looked at the tall black woman sitting cross-legged on the cot with sweat pouring down her muscular arms and big breasts and she could not see her as a doctor in a white coat in a big hospital. “How can anybody be into voodoo and medicine? It doesn’t make sense!”

“Each makes a different kind of sense, no? How not?”

She was lying in bed with the doctor going rounds and cracking jokes for the amusement of his residents over the bodies of the women patients, mostly black and Puerto Rican, whom some female troubles had cast up on this hard white beach, this glaring sterile reef. They were handed releases to sign, carefully vague so that the residents could get practice in the operations they needed. In the bed next to her was a nineteen-year-old black woman on welfare who had been admitted for an abortion in the fourteenth week and been given a hysterectomy instead of a saline abortion. The woman had gone into withdrawal shock, which made her a quiet patient. Nobody bothered about her as she stared at the ceiling. The women with syphilis were treated to obscene jokes. All the doctors ever said to any complaint was, “We’re giving you some medicine that will take care of that.” They did pelvics and rectals seven or eight times in a row on interesting cases, so all the doctors and residents could get a look, all the time explaining nothing. “You’re a very sick little girl,” the doctor said to a forty-year-old woman whose intestines they had accidentally perforated in removing an embedded IUD.

Anger began to blur the scene and she moved closer to Luciente for support, feeling the ground solidify again beneath her. Suddenly excitement blew like a wind through the tent. “Bolivar is down,” Jackrabbit cried out. A bell began to toll.

“What’s the bell?” she asked.

“For death,” Luciente said.

“But she isn’t dead yet!”

“But person soon will be.” Jackrabbit frowned. “Pepper and Salt, it’s not always bad to die, is it? Who’d want to be built of steel and go on living after all the people born in your brooder in your time, all your mems and mates and mothers, all your sweet friends, had long gone down?”

Connie snorted and turned away. The bell tolled through the damp air in waves of heavy sound. Slowly more people began to drift into the tent, keeping away from the side toward the floater pad. Finally she heard a high-pitched warning siren and a fast-moving vehicle flashing red lights came shrieking toward them about a foot off the ground. It came to an abrupt halt right outside the tent and settled with a hiss. White Oak hopped out and a person—the voice hadbeen male, she thought—about five feet nine, compactly built, slid out of the other side and strode with quick, slithery grace toward the tent. Bolivar, she supposed, had kinky hair worn in braids fully as elaborate as Erzulia’s, but his skin was fair and heavily freckled with the sun. He wore a knee-length … she could not call it anything but a dress, with stripes on the bias.

Luciente nodded curtly as he swept by. “Erzulia has been holding Sappho for you.”

“Why not you? You could have!” he rapped out.

“Not with the person from the past in tow.”

“Ummmm.” Briefly he glanced at Connie, his skeptical eyes pale gray and cold as rock. Then he rushed to the cot, embraced Jackrabbit briefly and then put his hands on Sappho’s head beside Erzulia’s hands. After a moment Erzulia seemed to come to and slowly her grip loosened. She rolled off the cot onto the ground. As Aspen supported her, Bee came forward.

“I’ll take Zuli now. Person’s weary and must sleep.” Gently Bee rose with her slung over his shoulder and carried her off along the river path toward the bridge downstream, whistling softly as he padded off.