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She stares at him with the suspicion of a person just awakened from a dream and still not sure whether they are seeing reality.
“Harder?”
“You are no more surprised than I,” he says. Then he grins tentatively. “Say, are you allowed to talk to me?”
“I don’t see Daddy here, do you?” She holds out her arms. He sets the tray down on her legs and hugs her.
Then he lifts her medical chart, lets out a low whistle, and says, “You must be tougher than you look, Knee-high.”
“Knee-high? No one’s called me that since . . . you know, since you left.”
“Left? Who left? I was kicked out.” He says it without obvious rancor, more in amusement.
“What are you doing here, Harder?”
He shrugs. “The draft board caught up to me. So here I am, like most Negroes, working as an orderly. Private Harder Marr: cleaner of bedpans and deliverer of trays. I put it in one end, take it from the other. Though I do wash my hands in between.”
Frangie grins. “My goodness it’s swell to see you, Brother.”
“It’s good to see you too, Sis.”
It is said by both with emotion verging on tears. Years have passed since Harder’s politics caused him to be disowned by their father. Harder is older, more serious-looking now, worn perhaps, tired but not defeated. He is the tallest person in the family, nearly six feet, and the lightest-skinned with features that seemed to be an uneasy cross between white and black, but Frangie knows there’s hardly a colored family that doesn’t have some white blood somewhere in their past.
“Well, the head nurse will skin me if I dawdle,” Harder says with a roll of his eyes. “But I’m off shift in a couple of hours. I’ve found a place out of doors that’s not too unpleasant, if you’re up for a ride in a wheelchair.”
“You have no idea what I’d give to see the sky,” Frangie says.
She sleeps after that, is awakened to be jabbed with a needle, sleeps, wakes again to be poked at by a doctor who communicates solely, it seems, in grunts. But the tenor of the grunts is satisfied. It seems her fever has left her weak and exhausted, but her wounds are all healing satisfactorily. The cast on her leg makes the flesh beneath it itch like mad at times, but that will come off in a few weeks, most likely. In the meantime she is to relax.
As evening comes on, Harder comes to fetch her. He has a thermos of coffee, a pair of sandwiches wrapped in a British newspaper, and a piece of venetian blind slat wrapped in gauze and tape.
“What’s that for?” she asks.
“There are one or two things we lowly orderlies know that you medics don’t,” he says. Then he demonstrates the ease with which his segment of wrapped blind can be slid down inside her plaster cast, providing a gentle but outstandingly effective scratching tool.
“My goodness, Harder, they should give you a medal for inventing that!” She unconsciously adjusts her vocabulary, which has begun to slip perilously close to the common soldier’s dialect. A certain four-letter word for sexual procreation is often used as verb, noun, adjective, and adverb (often modifying itself). So she consciously reaches for safe expressions, expressions an untainted Frangie would use. Goodness. My, my. You don’t say. Well, I never.
Harder pushes her wheelchair along the ward, past cot after cot filled with colored soldiers. It’s a cheerful enough ward since most of the soldiers are past the point of danger and only waiting for bones to knit together, skin to close, dysentery and malaria to calm and recede. Virtually everyone here will be back with their units within a few weeks.
The air outside comes as a welcome surprise, a face slap of damp chill. Harder has brought a blanket, which he tucks efficiently around his sister. Evening is coming on, with mist blurring but also magnifying the stars, so they seem to twinkle with unusual brilliance. They push down the central line of mud road along a sort of boardwalk that runs past identical long huts.
It is all much more peaceful than Frangie is used to. An ambulance rumbles by, but there are no tanks or half-tracks, no antiaircraft batteries being hastily shifted, no jeeps loaded with self-important officers.
It is far from a garden spot, being a vast field of mud barely punctuated by the few surviving patches of green turf. But beyond the camp there is the forest, and beneath the line of trees are three fires burning, campfires, each silhouetting men and women standing, hobbling, or rolling. As they get closer, with Harder struggling to push the narrow wheelchair wheels through mud and over ruts, Frangie sees that one of the fires has a distinctly darker-skinned complement and, to her delight, she hears a guitar.
“That’s Willie playing,” Harder says. “He’s an orderly too. If Bertha May is off duty, you’ll likely hear her singing. Beautiful voice. Like an angel.”
There is something in his tone that makes her turn to look back at him. She sees a wistful half smile, eyes gazing into some imaginary vision.
“Bertha May, huh?” she prompts. “I suppose she’s some ancient nurse . . .”
?
??Bertha May? Ancient? Not at all,” he protests. “Quite the contrary, she’s the most lovely . . .” He stops. “Oh, I see your game. Oh, you have grown tricky in my absence, Knee-high. But you’re wrong, there is no romance going on here.” This is said with a degree of conviction tinged with bitterness, a bitterness confirmed when he adds in a low mutter he must think she can’t hear, “More’s the pity.”
Around the campfire are a dozen men and women, more or less equally split. Harder is greeted with waves or shouted greetings. It’s clear he is liked, and Frangie finds this immensely gratifying. She’s had no choice but to guess what Harder’s life has been like these past years of separation, and her imagination had led her to dark assumptions. That he is respected and liked, here at least, relieves her mind.
Willie is a picker, not a strummer, with each note crystal clear, mournful, but with an edge of wry humor, and he accompanies himself in a tenor that seems at odds with his rotund and ancient (by army standards) form.
