The Second Coming

unblinking in her round heavy face. Tears ran down her cheek and caught in the dark down of her lip.
    â€œOh, I’m so afraid,” she said loudly with a little smile and a shrug. She pronounced afraid afred, like ladies in Memphis and Vicksburg.
    â€œWhat you scared of, honey?” asked one orderly, a giant black woman big as an old black mammy but young.
    â€œI’m afraid I’m never going to leave the hospital. Oh, I’m so afraid.”
    â€œYou be all right, honey,” said the black woman, her eyes absentminded, and put a black-and-pink hand on the patient’s swollen leg. “You gon be fine, bless Jesus.”
    Will Barrett was standing at the foot of the bed.
    â€œOh, hello, Will,” said the patient with the same smile and shrug. “Oh, Will, I hate to leave here!”
    â€œYes, I know,” he said. “I—” Oh Lord, I am supposed to know her. Was she an aunt? No, but she was one of ten or twelve ladies from Memphis or Mississippi he should have recognized. He made as if to give the orderlies a hand.
    As he came close to her, he could hear her heart, which raced and rumbled so hard it shook her thick body.
    He took her arm. It was not necessary. The other orderly, a sorrel-colored man who wore his mustache and short-sleeved smock like Sugar Ray Robinson, picked up the woman and in one swift gentle movement swung her onto the stretcher. He was an old-style dude who still wore a conk! He chewed gum like Sugar Ray. Where did he come from? Beale Street twenty years ago? After he centered the woman on the stretcher (ah, I know what that feels like, to be taken care of by strong quick sure hands at one’s hips) and buckled the straps, Sugar Ray leaned close to her.
    â€œListen, lady, I’m gerng to tell you something.” (That was the difference between them, the two orderlies, that gerng, his slightly self-conscious uptown correction of the black woman.) “The doctors know what they know, but I have noticed something too. I can tell about people and I’m gerng to tell you. We taking you to the hospital in Asheville and we coming to get you Tuesday and bringing you back here and that’s the truth, ain’t that right, Rosie?” And he smiled, a brilliant white-and-gold Sugar Ray smile, yet his eyes had not changed because they didn’t have to. The patient couldn’t see his eyes.
    â€œSho,” said Rosie, her eye not quite meeting Sugar Ray’s eye and not quite winking. “You gon be fine, honey.”
    â€œAh,” said the patient and, closing her eyes, slumped against the straps like a baby in its harness.
    Then how does it add up in the economy of giving and getting, he wondered, that the two orderlies cared nothing (or did they?) for the old woman, that even in the very act of their offhand reassurances to her they were probably cooking up something between themselves, that they, the orderlies, who had no reason to give her anything at all, gave it because it was so little to give and so much for her to get? 2¢ = $5? How?
    Does goodness come tricked out so as fakery and fondness and carrying on and is God himself as sly?
    In the hall he stood gazing after the three of them. Young big black mammy, Sugar Ray, and the sick woman, the great machinery of her heart socking away so hard at her neck, it made her nod perceptibly as if she understood and agreed, yes, yes, yes.
    9
    Mr. Eberhart was watering small pine trees with a green plastic mop pail. He walked in a fast limping stoop from tree to tree. Standing with one leg crooked and with his long-billed cap fitting tightly on his head, he looked like a heron.
    â€œWhy are you watering these pine trees? It rained yesterday.”
    â€œIt didn’t rain enough. They planted these seedlings too early. The rains don’t come till after Christmas.”
    â€œDidn’t you used to run a nursery in Asheville?”
    â€œAtlanta and Asheville. For forty years.”
    â€œHow would you like to run a greenhouse now? Perhaps several greenhouses.”
    â€œWhat kind of greenhouse?” He had not yet looked up.
    â€œAn old kind. About fifty by twenty-five feet. No fans, no automatic ventilation, no thermostats.”
    â€œThat’s the kind I started with. You cain’t build them like that now. What kind of heat? That’s what put me out of business. My gas bill was nine hundred dollars a month in the winter.”
    â€œNo gas bill.