"Don't eat." Her mind tugged between the words. "and", she began to clean the rooms once more, "I will," she stopped to hold her temples as if to keep her mind in place, "I will love you!" Had she said these words aloud? the mother wondered in Tom's dream who was craving milk but his mother could only hand him sweaters full of holes made in the Dark Ages. "Mama it's me Tommy! Tommy! Tommy!" A sweater fell by his feet. Was it thrown? Did sweater mean love? Tom wondered as he looked at the little boy who was him and he heard the leg shout: "Mama! Mama!"!" He was in the New Jersey hospital childrens' ward that was heaping full of crippled children. Tom began to do a crying howl which reached her ears with the same urgency as when he was a six month old baby with his constant screeching that lasted for twenty-four days. She had searched his whole naked body to see what was causing the infant so much distress. On the twenty-fourth day her hand rested on his leg and the deadness of it shocked her to recoil her hand before allowing it to do a fitful massaging on the thing that was like a damp leaf to her touch. Harder and harder she messaged the leg trying to restore life into it. In the hospital just after giving him birth (or was it in her bed at home giving him milk he so greedily sucked?) she recalled how she had told her husband - a man who so easily could fall into womanly smiles - that she did not want to bring another mouth to feed into this world which was being strangled by the Great Depression but when he said if she ever dared to take the advice of her brother Deo: "To abort the thing" she and their three children would never see his face again. The leg remained lifeless to her touch. She would have made her fingers into deformities if all her messages could have brought the thing back to life back but it remained cold to her touch. "Mama, my leg," Tom whined. If you eat cripple, your leg will only get fat - not alive! she said to herself trying to hold her mind together. When she was trying even harder she would call him "schushod"; a dialect word which meant something broke and damaged. She wanted Tom to move and not die within the paralysis. To spur him on so her mind would not shatter into a million pieces as it had done the night she hemorrhaged Tom out of her body at the sight of seeing her husband on top of a woman of the bar in their semi-dark parlor. "Walk! Walk like the sun! Walk Tommy Polio!" she whispered harshly to the five year old so he would not stand rigidly in a prisoner of total paralysis .... "Mama! Mama!" Her other son Leny One N shouted. He was the one with the mighty hugs - while she was in Bellevue Hospital - who had brought all the pieces of her mind back together again. Six year old Leny burst into the kitchen yelling: "Look Mama! Look!" He opened his hands to yawn many many coins of different colors and sizes. Leny had stolen some of the coins from the newsstand on Fordham Road and the rest he earned by dishing out guys, who would become a Baldy gang member like he in a few short years, by outpacing them to scuffed shoes waiting to be shined. She held back her joy and would not show any excitement. Even small coins could help put food on the table. She remained rigid; not even allowing her hands to tremble a little as the change cascaded into them. When Leny was fully spent of all the coins that added up to eighty or so cents she said: "That's all?" The words froze upon her lips. This made Leny begin to cry. END

Links to other sites on the Web

Home