awful self-righteousness of mine.
Sabe had brought Handful home in the carriage while I’d been away at Bible study. Bible study. I felt shame to think of myself, probing verses in the thirteenth chapter of Corinthians—Though I have all knowledge and all faith, and have not charity, I am nothing.
I forced myself to look across the bed at Aunt-Sister. “How bad is it?”
She answered by peeling back the green leaf so I could see for myself. Handful’s foot was twisted inward at an unnatural angle and there was a gash running from her ankle to the small toe, exposing raw flesh. A row of bright blood beaded through the poultice. Aunt-Sister dabbed it with a towel before smoothing the leaf back in position.
“How did this happen?” I asked.
“They put her on the treadmill, say she fell off and her foot went under the wheel.”
A sketch of the newly installed monstrosity had appeared in the Mercury recently with the caption, A More Resourceful Reprimand. The article speculated it would earn five hundred dollars profit for the city the first year.
“The apothecary say the foot ain’t broken,” Aunt-Sister said. “The cords that hold the bones are torn up, and she gon be cripple now, I can tell from looking at it.”
Handful moaned, then muttered something that came out slurred and indistinguishable. I took her hand in mine, startled by how slight it felt, wondering how her foot hadn’t crumbled to dust. She looked small lying there, but she was no longer childlike. Her hair was cut ragged an inch from her head. Little sags drooped beneath her eyes. Her forehead was pleated with frown-lines. She’d aged into a tiny crone.
Her lids fluttered, but didn’t open, as she attempted again to speak. I bent close to her lips.
“Go away,” she hissed. “Go. Away.”
Later I would tell myself her mind was addled with opiates. She couldn’t have known what she was saying. Or perhaps she’d been referring to her own desire to go away.
Handful didn’t leave her room for ten days. Aunt-Sister and Phoebe carried her meals and tended her foot, and Goodis always seemed to linger by the back steps, waiting for news, but I stayed away, fearing her words had been for me after all.
The ban on Father’s study had never been lifted and I rarely set foot there, but while Handful convalesced, I slipped in and took two books—Pilgrim’s Progress by Bunyan and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a sea adventure I thought she would especially like—and left them at her door, knocking and hurrying away.
On the morning Handful emerged, we Grimkés were having breakfast in the dining room. There were only four children who hadn’t yet married or gone off to school: Charles, Henry, Nina, and of course myself, the red-headed maiden aunt of the family. Mother was seated at the head of the table with the hinged silk screen directly behind her, its hand-painted jasmine all but haloing her head. She turned to the window, and I saw her mouth part in surprise. There was Handful. She was crossing the work yard toward the oak, using a wooden cane too tall for her. She maneuvered awkwardly, thrusting herself forward, dragging her right foot.
“She’s walking!” cried Nina.
I pushed back my chair and left the table with Nina chasing after me.
“You’re not excused!” Mother called.
We didn’t so much as turn our heads in her direction.
Handful stood beneath the budding tree on a patch of emerald moss. There were drag marks in the dirt from her foot, and I found myself stepping over them as if they were sacrosanct. As we approached, she began to wind fresh red thread around the trunk. I couldn’t imagine what this odd practice meant. It’d been going on, though, for years.
Nina and I waited while she pulled a pair of shears from her pocket and cut away the faded old thread. Several pink strands clung to the bark, and as she plucked at them, her cane slipped and she grabbed the tree to catch herself.
Nina picked up the cane and handed it to her. “Does it hurt?”
Handful looked past Nina at me. “Not all that much now.”
Nina squatted unselfconsciously to inspect the way Handful’s foot pigeoned inward, the odd hump that had formed across the top of it, how she’d fitted a shoe over it by trimming the opening and leaving off the lace.
“I’m sorry for what happened,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
“I read what I could of the books you brought. They gave me something to do beside