“He’s my baby,” she said. “I takes care of him. Go on. Get back. I can hold him. What arm you want that drip in?”

Then she whispered to him and cuddled him down into her dress and picked up his left arm and held it out for the nurse. She immobilized it somehow and the nurse took the needle and directed it into the vein and strapped the sustaining board on the arm and taped it down. Jimmy was screaming, then sobbing, then still. “I got you,” Klane was saying. “I got you right here at my heart. Ain’t nothing going to hurt little Jimmy. Nothing ever going to hurt my baby.”

She lay Jimmy down on the bed and the nurses tied him down, and then, suddenly, I had not known it was going to happen, they began to roll the bed out of the room and down the hall toward the operating room. As they went through the door the suspended bottle of intravenous solution fell and broke all over the floor. “Oh, God,” I screamed. “No, you can’t do it again. Don’t do it again.” I began to fight the nurses, fighting to get to the bed but Klane had me in her arms and Malcolm was coming in the door. Somehow between them they got me to the bed and the baby left with his retinue.

An hour later he was back in the room and Klane was holding him and I was sitting on the bed. “You haven’t been home,” I said. “You haven’t had any sleep. Who’s been going to the jail to feed your husband?”

“Delmonica’s looking out for him. She took him some food this morning.”

“I thought you didn’t trust her with him.”

“I don’t. Well, Jimmy looks like he’s better this morning. I don’t think he’s as sleepy as he was last week. Look here, Rhoda. His eyes are brighter.”

I got up and went to stand beside her chair. Jimmy looked up at me. He didn’t look any brighter. He looked like my cousin, Baby Gwen Mayhew, with her big brown bedroom eyes we all said had come from her Mexican blood and distant kinship to Ida Lupino. Now I thought they had come from all the mosquitoes in Clarksville, Mississippi, from the long flat flooded Delta fields and the insect-burdened spring and summer air. Yellow fever, typhus, malaria, the scourges of our ancestors, now encephalitis to haunt the future. Inflammation of the mucous membranes of the brain, the cerebral cortex, spine, or brain stem.

The doctor had come into the room while I was lost in my morbid thoughts. “It’s over, Rhoda. You can take him home this afternoon. I’m going to start him on some new antibiotics. I want you to bring the other child in tomorrow and let us do some blood work. Are you listening?”