The Day's Heat Read online

  Closer, she could see the priest’s hand cupped over his mouth and bright red blood seeping out between his fingers. Ralph was right behind.

  “Oh lady, oh lady,” Ralph moaned, “I done gone and knocked Fadder’s toof out with my rake handle.”

  Father Palmer stopped and leaned against the car’s hood; his gray eyes were wide and strangely composed above the bloody hand. Immediately, Lee put Lill back into the car’s backseat and closed the door. The little girl bounced, making the seat into a trampoline. “Let me out, out,” was her muted call from behind the window glass.

  Without thinking, Lee went to the priest, and ordered, “Open your mouth, please. Let me see.” She said the words in exactly the tone she used when giving Cassie and Lill bad tasting medicine. “Open up!”

  The priest took his hand away dutifully, opened his mouth, and bent toward her. She stood on tiptoe to look.

  Blood was caked around and in the lines of his lips and ran down into the dark hair on his chin. The upper left front tooth was missing, completely gone, nothing but a triangle of bleeding flesh in the gum and a huge gaping space in between the other teeth.

  “Where’s the tooth?” Lee asked, turning to the old colored man.

  Ralph answered, motioning with his rake. “Out there some’eres. Pro’bly in one of them bresh piles, Lady.”

  Content to let the janitor explain, Father Palmer replaced his thick hand back over his mouth as if by hiding the injury it no longer existed or mattered. Only his head, inclined toward Lee, and his other hand balancing himself on the fender gave a token admission of pain and confusion.

  “Go find it. Right away!” Lee ordered. So what if she sounded bossy.

  Ralph dropped the rake, and, as though glad to make up for the accident, glad for something to do besides stand and explain, he turned and ran back across the yard.

  Lee opened the front door of the car. “Sit here,” she said to the priest.

  Again, just as he had opened his mouth to her demand, he came forward obediently and lowered himself onto the seat. His dark-trousered legs stuck straight out before him.

  “Stay here. I’ll be right back and take you to a dentist.” Lee grabbed up her daughter, who had stopped jumping and was now trying to crawl over the seat onto the priest. “Come on, little gal. You’re going to kindergarten.”

  Instantly, the child stopped her struggle, and Lee, feeling somehow outside herself, hiked Lill up on her hip and half-ran, half-walked across the short span of asphalt to the school room. Even as she crossed the sidewalk, she was recalling an article in the Ladies Home Journal: “What To Do In an Emergency.” The section was meant for emergencies with children and described a lost tooth. If at all possible, Lee remembered reading, replace the tooth in the gum and hold it there until you can take the child to a dentist. Back then, Lee had laughed out loud at the idea of trying to hold a tooth in Lill’s mouth and drive at the same time. But now, she thought, at least Father Palmer can hold his own tooth in—that is, if the janitor could find it.

  “Please, may I leave Lilith with you for a while? There’s been an accident,” Lee told Mrs. Thornton, the kindergarten teacher. “I’ll explain later.”

  The frizzy haired, worried-eyed teacher wore a black apron of thanks giving decals and nodded as though emergencies that couldn’t be explained were perfectly common at 9:00 in the morning. There was also a sweeping impression of soft inquisitive faces turned upwards, a field of white blossoms below them. Lee set her daughter down amid the low tables and chairs full of small bodies.

  In less than a minute, she was back to where Father Palmer sat, exactly as she’d left him on the front seat of the car. Ralph had returned, too, and held out the priest’s tooth to Lee. “I found it right directly, Lady, right on top of the bresh pile where it landed. Good thing we ain’t started burning yet. It would a been fried proper.”

  Carefully taking the enamel prize from Ralph’s soot-ringed fingers, Lee saw that the tooth was yellowish and square, a miniature shovel on one end and a curved talon of bloody root on the other. Not at all what she expected, but then what had she expected? All the loose teeth she’d ever seen had been baby teeth: small translucent porcelain things, the roots disintegrated to release them from the gum. This skeletal object that she held between her thumb and forefinger was large and ridged, and had all the qualities of a tusk—it was a grown-man’s tooth.

  Father Palmer, skin waxy-pale above his dark mustache and beard, gazed off in the opposite direction as if at something of great importance was out under the trees. His hand was still clamped over his mouth.

  Lee wiped the tooth on the underside of her sweater, as the article had advised: “Rinse or wipe the tooth if possible.” Then she held it behind her, where the priest couldn’t see, and said softly, “Father, you’re going to have to let me put it back in.” She spoke as one did to a small, hurt child.

  Father Palmer’s wide smooth forehead wrinkled, and a sound, somewhere between protest and groan, came from behind his hand. “Aggg.”

  “I read it in a medical book,” Lee lied. She knew that the Ladies Home Journal would have no credibility with this tall, imposing man.

  In a curious reaction, the priest drew his legs up, set his heels on the edge of the car’s frame, and rested his elbows on his knees, arms extended. His black shirt sleeves, rolled halfway up his dangling forearms, revealed a swell of muscles under a network of dark hair. He spread his knees, an indication for her to come closer. She would rather he stood up again; still she stepped between his legs and took his chin in her palm. “It’ll be easier if you close your eyes,” she said, taking the man’s jaw with all its whiskers into her hand. The dark line of beard stood out markedly against his pale skin, and the prickly ends of hair and a tremor in the chin moved against her fingers. Now, in some sort of second-by-second perception, she was calm enough to notice that he had taken off his white Roman collar and there were irregular wet stains down the front and under the arms of the black shirt. A faint, not unpleasant scent reached her, an aroma she’d known forever, of all men after a day’s work: her father, his construction workers, her plumber husband.

  The priest looked directly into Lee’s eyes, then lowered his fringed eyelids, and opened his mouth.

  Not expecting this sudden cooperation, Lee wondered if she could really replace the tooth. The blood in the gum looked set, and the root seemed far too large to fit into such a small space. You will just do it, Lee assured herself, the way she’d once pulled a nail out of Cassie’s foot. Afraid of hurting her daughter, but also afraid of making her fearful, Lee had said silently, over and over: “Pull it out, pull it out.” Now, she told herself silently, “Put the tooth back in, put it back in.”

  The nail had come out after one determined tug, and the root of the tooth eased back in as soon as she pushed it past the first bit of resistance in the gum. Hardly believing the inch-long piece of enamel could slip so smoothly into place, she pushed a little more and tapped with her fingernail to line it up with the other teeth. A trickle of blood ran from her fingers, down her hand, down her elbow.

  “Oooh,” Ralph, who had been leaning close, said, and stepped back.

  The priest’s gray eyes opened wide, and his glance flashed from Lee’s face to Ralph’s and back again.

  “Here, keep your teeth together, and hold your hand just like you had it before,” Lee told the priest. She took his arm and directed him to turn and sit facing forward in the car. A bulge at the man’s temple said he was clenching his teeth tightly together.

  Ralph cheered, “You gonna be jest fine, Father Palm. She done put that ole toof right back where it belongs. As good as new, Miss Lady. Right, ma’am?”

  “Right,” Lee answered, and walked to the driver’s side of the car, got in, and closed the door. She leaned across the priest to close the other door, making sure to keep the back of her arm to him—not to touch him with her breast—then she drove in the direction she’d already chosen—to her own dent
ist, Dr. Obermon.

  The stunned look on the priest’s face, the blood around his hand, the clerical black shirt and pants, and Lee’s stained sweater—red—brought a frantic immediacy into the immaculate white of the dentist’s office. Blood! They didn’t have to wait. At once Father Palmer was shown through a door into a treatment room, a small cubicle, one of three.

  Dr. Obermon, white-haired, white-smocked, who seemed a logical extension of his pristine office, said, “You did the hard part, Mrs. Bettlemain, finding that tooth and getting it back where it belonged.” And then unexpectedly, he asked, “You want to see the rest?”

  Lee nodded, followed, explained that actually Ralph, the janitor, had rescued the tooth. She also noted that Father Palmer, in easing into the back-leaning chair, had again raised his eyebrows and was again wrinkling his forehead. He’s squeamish, she thought. He couldn’t look at his own tooth and, now, certainly doesn’t want me to see what the dentist will do. But Lee wanted to see. She could have told the priest that squeamishness was something quickly cured by pregnancy and childbirth. Something he’ll never know about, she amended, and chose a place against the wall where she could look on and not be in the way.

  “Take some deep breaths,” Dr. Obermon instructed and fit a black triangle of mask over Father Palmer’s jutting nose. “It’s nitrous oxide, Father. It’ll calm you. You’re upset, more than you realize,” the dentist explained.

  In seconds, Father Palmer’s face, body, and spatula-like fingers eased. His fingernails, somehow like the tooth, were square and slightly yellow. From Lee’s viewpoint against the wall, all life seemed to seep out of the man’s long arms and legs stretched out on the reclining chair, and his thick-soled black shoes, still sooty from the burning pecan grove, fell to either side.

  The smell of the gas cloyed, reached Lee’s nose in sticky pungent threads, and caused a scratchy retching at the back of her throat. A golden haze sprang in at the sides of her vision and she knew she had to sit down at once or else faint. A white chair, the curved metal back like one from an ice-cream parlor, was in another corner. She stepped to it cautiously, eased down, and tried to breathe in slow, even inhalations. Her head swam, and the room started to spin. She bent forward, head over knees, and bowed in submission. Okay, you win, she silently told the little kernel deep inside her body. I’m pregnant, she admitted and gave in to the reality that she’d been trying so hard to deny. This child, a cashew nut in shape and size—another picture from The Mother’s Handbook—was incontrovertibly there, a newcomer taking up residence. The nausea confirmed everything. She didn’t need any more proof. She mouthed “Welcome” into her knees, which were no doubt, even at that moment, along with the rest of her organs, sending blood to this new little human, every cell doing its job, all on board for creation. The admission brought relief, her sight cleared, the room stopped turning. God help me, she thought.

  Dr. Obermon asked, “Are you all right, Mrs. Bettlemain?”

  Lee nodded, said, “It’s just the smell,” and waved a weak hand in front of her face.

  Then cheerfully, seemingly glad of an audience, the dentist stared into the priest’s gaping mouth and stated: “The front teeth are held in by a single ligament. Bing! Out they come with just the right hit. It’s like chipping a diamond. Tap or bang it exactly and out it flies.” The dentist unrolled a thin silver wire from off a tiny spool. “His wisdom teeth are the problem. Coming in, in the back there, crowding all his other teeth. That’s why the front one popped out so easily—pressure all round.” The dentist threaded the wire up and across the front tooth and snipped it off with miniature metal cutters. “Those wisdom teeth—they have to hurt. Wonder why he’s let them go so long.” Dr. Obermon half-turned, his cheerful blue eyes crinkling in question as though Lee had the answer. She shook her head and raised her shoulders: How could she know? The dentist removed the mask from the priest’s face.

  “What made you put the tooth back in?” Dr. Oberman swiveled on his padded seat and pointed a sharp-tipped prong of an instrument toward her.

  “Oh, I read it somewhere,” Lee whispered, not wanting Father Palmer to hear, although she could tell the soft tone was not needed. The man was dead out, his eyes closed, the lines from the mask etched on the skin of his sharp nose and pronounced cheekbones. A thought came: How could such a large handsome person—strong—standing like one of the pecan trees at St. Anthony’s, be up one moment and down the next? Who would take care of him at the rectory?

  “Okay, that’s it,” Dr. Obermon said. “Drive him home and tell him to come back tomorrow. I’ll check to see how it’s holding and cement it in. But he needs those wisdom teeth out right away, Mrs. Bettlemain. They’re impacted. Next week at the latest.”

  “Give me an appointment. I’ll see that he keeps it.” Lee spoke exactly as she did to her daughters’ pediatrician. And why not? The priest couldn’t hear.

  “He won’t wake up for a few more minutes,” Dr. Obermon said.

  Lee dropped Father Palmer off at the rectory, five miles away from St. Anthony’s School but only two miles away from the dentist’s office. There was hardly any conversation between them on the drive, although Lee tried.

  “I’m glad Ralph was able to find your tooth,” she said, to which the priest replied, “Me, too.” Then with a stiff nod and a “Thank you, Mrs. Bettlemain for all your trouble,” he left the car and headed toward the rectory’s back door under a curved awning.

  Was the man embarrassed at having lost a tooth? Lee wondered. But it was already after 11:30: time to pick up her daughters. Plenty of time later to figure out that morning’s adventure.

  On the drive home, Lee slapped the top of the steering wheel with her outstretched hands and sang a nonsense song, drawing the words out awkwardly to fit the melody:

  The priest’s big front tooth

  was knocked out loose.

  Deep in the heart of Georgia

  Mommy put it back in.

  The blood was flyin’,

  The priest was cryin’,

  Deep in the heart of Georgia.”

  In the backseat, Cassie and Lill shrieked with laughter.

  “Didn’t I, Lill?” Lee asked, and looked up into the rearview mirror. “You’re my witness. There was blood and guts, but I was the cavalry coming to the rescue, wasn’t I, Lill?” She popped the top of the steering wheel again, felt an adrenaline energy pump through her that made her happy. Happy, in spite of being pregnant.

  Sitting straight-legged beside Cassie on the backseat, Lill tittered in agreement. No hiding and taking off her clothes now, for the three-year-old. She was acting exactly like her big sister. And except for size, the girls could be twins, a large and small version cut from the same pattern. Both had their father’s wide clear forehead and corn silk hair, cut Dutch-boy fashion. Lee often felt with a pang that she could take the role of the wicked dark stepmother to these two blonde fairy-tale children.

  “Blood and guts,” said Lill. “Right, Mommy? Blood and guts.”

  “Ugh!” said Cassie and threw her head back, complying with five-year-old girl behavior just recently learned in kindergarten.

  “Ugh!” said Lill.

  “Ugh,” Lee agreed, a poor choice of words, but now she sang along with a song on the radio: “Lee James to the rescue. Lee James to the res-heh-scue.” She turned the steering wheel, zig-zagging the car slightly to the beat. “Lee James to the res-heh-scue.” The improvised song went with the music, and she used her maiden name, James. Bettlemain had too many syllables.

  It was only after the car pulled onto the cracked concrete driveway of her stucco house and Lee saw the silver rental car in the carport that the elation of the morning slipped and faded.

  Chapter 2

  And Laban had two daughters; the name of the elder was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. Leah’s eyes were weak; but Rachel was shapely and well favored.

  Genesis 29:16

  It was her sister’s rental car.

&nb
sp; “Ray, Ray,” Lee said softly and smoothed back the tangles of black hair that had escaped from the rubber band.

  In high school, in a minor rebellion against their mother and the nuns, she and her sister had changed their names: Lee had dropped the “a” and “h,” in hers and added an extra “e,” and Rachel had started introducing herself as “Ray.” Later, when Lee had her own children, she better understood her mother’s choices of biblical names, the rich sounds, and that Leah and Rachel were actually sisters in the Book of Genesis. But Leah meant “bad eyes,” whereas Rachel meant “lovely.” It was hardly fair.

  Lee had chosen the names Cassandra and Lilith for her daughters, thinking they had unique classical sounds. Cassandra was a Greek prophetess, and also the name of a maid who had loved and cared for Lee in infancy, and who had suddenly, when Lee was six, disappeared. And Lee would never have known about Lilith, the first wife of Adam, except an old nun, Sister Justine, had emphasized this myth: Adam’s first wife was made out of the same clay as he was, but soon proved to be too independent, too mouthy for God to tolerate. It satisfied something in Lee to choose these odd quirky names, as though they had some unknown powers her daughters might grow into. Charles, her husband said he would name their sons if there ever were any. Claire, his mother, said she’d never heard names like that except for colored people. And later the names, losing all honor, were shortened to Cassie and Lill. What Lee valued was ignored by the Bettlemains and finally set aside by herself. Feeling some elevated ground slip away, ground she hardly knew existed, she began using the nicknames.