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mind for dreams of vengeance, images of illegal pleasure—even ambitious schemes of escape. Cutting into these big thoughts were the little ones. Another kind of medicine for the baby? What to do about an uncle’s foot swollen so large he can’t put it in a shoe? Will the landlord be satisfied with half the rent this time?
    While Frank waited for the hiring all he thought about was whether Cee was getting better or worse. Her boss back in Atlanta had done something—what, he didn’t know—to her body and she was fighting a fever that wouldn’t go down. That the calamus root Miss Ethel depended on wasn’t working, he did know. But that was all he knew because he was blocked from visiting the sickroom by every woman in the neighborhood. If it weren’t for the girl Jackie he would have known nothing at all. From her he learned that they believed his maleness would worsen her condition. She told him the women took turns nursing Cee and each had a different recipe for her cure. What they all agreed upon was his absence from her bedside.
    That explained why Miss Ethel didn’t even want him on her porch.
    “Go on off somewhere,” she told him, “and stay gone till I call for you.”
    Frank thought the woman looked seriously scared. “Don’t you let her die,” he said. “You hear me?”
    “Get out.” She waved him away. “You not helping,Mr. Smart Money, not with that evil mind-set. Go ’way, I said.”
    So he busied himself cleaning and repairing his parents’ house that had been empty since his father died. With the little that was left of his shoe money and the rest of Cee’s wages he had just enough to re-rent it for a few months. He rummaged a hole next to the cookstove and found the matchbox. Cee’s two baby teeth were so small next to his winning marbles: a bright blue one, an ebony one, and his favorite, a rainbow mix. The Bulova watch was still there. No stem, no hands—the way time functioned in Lotus, pure and subject to anybody’s interpretation.
    Soon as the blossoms began to fall, Frank headed down the rows of cotton to the shed that the farm manager called his office. He had hated this place once. The dust blizzards it created when fallow, the thrips wars and blinding heat. As a boy assigned to trash work while his parents were far away in the productive fields, his mouth had been dry with fury. He messed up as much as he could so they would fire him. They did. His father’s scolding didn’t matter because he and Cee were free to invent ways to occupy that timeless time when the world was fresh.
    If she died because some arrogant, evil doctor sliced her up, war memories would pale beside what he would do to him. Even if it took the rest of his life, even if he spent the balance of it in prison. In spite of having defeated theenemy without bloodletting, imagining the death of his sister he joined the other pickers who planned sweet vengeance under the sun.
    It was late June by the time Miss Ethel sent Jackie to tell him he could stop by, and July when Cee was well enough to move into their parents’ home.
    Cee was different. Two months surrounded by country women who loved mean had changed her. The women handled sickness as though it were an affront, an illegal, invading braggart who needed whipping. They didn’t waste their time or the patient’s with sympathy and they met the tears of the suffering with resigned contempt.
    First the bleeding: “Spread your knees. This is going to hurt. Hush up. Hush, I said.”
    Next the infection: “Drink this. You puke, you got to drink more, so don’t.”
    Then the repair: “Stop that. The burning is the healing. Be quiet.”
    Later, when the fever died and whatever it was they packed into her vagina was douched out, Cee described to them the little she knew about what had happened to her. None of them had asked. Once they knew she had been working for a doctor, the eye rolling and tooth sucking was enough to make clear their scorn. And nothing Cee