The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey - By Walter Mosley Page 0,44

a whole lifetime for a poor black family that he should keep it as a treasure that stood for our freedom. My grandfather was named Bill Hollyfield, but he changed his name to Wring to honor his mother’s gift to him.

“I want you to give that ring to your uncle and tell him to get bettah and that I want him to be well because he has been like a real man to me when I was down past my last dollar.”

Robyn felt the gravity of the old woman’s gift like a stone in her chest. She wanted to return Shirley’s family name and history but the old woman’s wounded eyes stopped her.

“I cain’t take this from you, Miss Wring.”

“It’s not for you, sugah. It’s for Mr. Ptolemy Grey. It’s me tellin’ him how much that ten dollahs he give me meant.”

“But this precious,” Robyn said. “This is worth much more’n that.”

“No it ain’t, baby.”

Shirley rose and touched the girl’s cheek.

“If he get real sick an’ might die, will you let me see him?”

These words brought Robyn to tears. She sat down on the well-made white bed, crying on the emerald ring in her hand. When she finally raised her head, Shirley had gone and closed the door behind her.

Just after Olga Slatkin gave Ptolemy his final injection Robyn had to help her hold the old man down. He was delirious, shouting unintelligible words and writhing in his big bed.

“Coy! Coy!” the old man shouted.

“What’s he sayin’?” Robyn cried as she held down his surprisingly strong right arm.

“He’s not making sense,” the Eastern European woman said. “Hold him for a moment and he vill calm down.”

A minute later Ptolemy slumped down in his bed, unconscious, hardly breathing.

“It is always like this after last shot,” Olga said. “They go to sleep for three or four days and then they wake up, most of the time.”

“What do you mean, ‘most of the time’?” Robyn cried.

“He is sick. This medicine is supposed to help, but vit some people it does not vork.”

“He wasn’t sick before you give him these shots.”

“But vy vood Dr. Borman tell me to give shots if he vas not sick?”

While the women talked, Ptolemy awoke on a grassy hill above a stream that flowed over big stones and made the sound of children’s laughter. He smiled and stood up without pain or strain. He wasn’t old or young or concerned with being old or young. The sun shone brightly upon his head and there were white clouds here and there. The sunlight was so powerful that it burned his face, but he didn’t care about that. The day was a particular one he remembered from his childhood. The river was the Tickle, and Coydog McCann was just a ways up from where he now stood.

“He wasn’t sick,” Robyn said somewhere beyond the blue, “before you give him the shots.”

“I cannot tell you anything more than vat they told me,” the plain-faced European country girl replied.

When Ptolemy scratched his head his fingers found hair up there. This seemed odd to him, but what difference did hair make anyway?

Coy was sitting on a tree stump by the water, holding a homemade bamboo pole with a twine line.

When the old man (who didn’t look nearly so old anymore) looked up, he frowned for a second and then smiled. Ptolemy had forgotten the two canine teeth that his friend had lost. It made his smile seem deeper than the average man’s grin.

“Is that you, L’il Pea?” the old man asked.

“Yeah, Uncle Coy. Yes, sir.”

“You come all the way back here just to see me?”

“I’ont know,” said the old man who was no longer an old man. “I just saw a white nurse from somewhere around Venice an’ she gimme some shots an’ then I woke up on the rise ovah on t’other side’a the hill.”

“I only got one pole,” Coy McCann said in apology.

“That’s okay. I could just sit next to ya if you ain’t just wanna be alone.”

“Hell no. I been waitin’ for ya.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah. You owe me a debt, and I been waitin’ till I get released.”

Ptolemy knew what the old man meant. This knowledge made him silent and so he sat down next to the fisherman and peered into the water.

The sun was bright but not bright enough to illuminate the shadows that lay between and underneath the large stones in the river. Catfish and crawfish and other creatures hid down under there in darkness, where bears and cougars and