They took him to his home and Mrs. Merridew telegraphed his sister in Texas and Uncle Willy didn’t come to town for three days because Mrs. Merridew and Mrs. Hovis took turn about staying in the house with him day and night until his sister could get there.
That was vacation then and we played the game on Monday and that afternoon the store was still locked and Tuesday it was still locked, and so it was not until Wednesday afternoon and Uncle Willy was running fast.
He didn’t have any shirt on and he hadn’t shaved and he could not get the key into the lock at all, panting and whimpering and saying, “She went to sleep at last; she went to sleep at last,” until one of us took the key and unlocked the door. We had to light the little stove too and fill the needle and this time it didn’t go into his arm slow, it looked like he was trying to jab it clean through the bone.
He didn’t go back home. He said he wouldn’t need anything to sleep on and he gave us the money and let us out the back door and we bought the sandwiches and the bottle of coffee from the café and we left him there.
Then the next day, it was Mrs. Merridew and Reverend Schultz and three more ladies; they had the marshal break in the door and Mrs. Merridew holding Uncle Willy by the back of the neck and shaking him and kind of whispering, “You little wretch! You little wretch! Slip off from me, will you?” and Reverend Schultz saying, “Now, Sister; now, Sister; control yourself,” and the other ladies hollering Mr. Christian and Uncle Willy and Willy, according to how old they were or how long they had lived in Jefferson. It didn’t take them long.
The sister got there from Texas that night and we would walk past the house and see the ladies on the front porch or going in and out, and now and then Reverend Schultz kind of bulging out from among them like he would out of Mr. Miller’s Bible class, and we could crawl up behind the hedge and hear them through the window, hear Uncle Willy crying and cussing and fighting to get out of the bed and the ladies saying, “Now, Mr. Christian; now, Uncle Willy,” and “Now, Bubber,” too, since his sister was there; and Uncle Willy crying and praying and cussing.
And then it was Friday, and he gave up. We could hear them holding him in the bed; I reckon this was his last go-round, because none of them had time to talk now; and then we heard him, his voice weak but clear and his breath going in and out.
“Wait,” he said. “Wait! I will ask it one more time. Won’t you please quit? Won’t you please go away? Won’t you please go to hell and just let me come on at my own gait?”
“No, Mr. Christian,” Mrs. Merridew said. “We are doing this to save you.”
For a minute we didn’t hear anything. Then we heard Uncle Willy lay back in the bed, kind of flop back.
“All right,” he said. “All right.”
It was like one of those sheep they would sacrifice back in the Bible. It was like it had climbed up onto the altar itself and flopped onto its back with its throat held up and said: “All right. Come on and get it over with. Cut my damn throat and go away and let me lay quiet in the fire.”
III
He was sick for a long time. They took him to Memphis and they said that he was going to die. The store stayed locked all the time now, and after a few weeks we didn’t even keep up the league. It wasn’t just the balls and the bats. It wasn’t that. We would pass the store and look at the big old lock on it and at the windows you couldn’t even see through, couldn’t even see inside where we used to eat the ice cream and tell him who beat and who made the good plays and him sitting there on his stool with the little stove burning and the dope boiling and bubbling and the needle waiting in his hand, looking at us with his eyes blinking and all run together behind his glasses so you couldn’t even tell where the pupil was like you can in most eyes.
And the niggers and the country folks that used to trade with him coming up and looking at the lock too, and asking us how he was and when he would come home and open up again.
Because even after the store opened again, they would not trade with the clerk that Mrs. Merridew and Reverend Schultz put in the store. Uncle Willy’s sister said not to bother about the store, to let it stay shut because she would take care of Uncle Willy if he got well.
But Mrs. Merridew said no, she not only aimed to cure Uncle Willy, she was going to give him a complete rebirth, not only into real Christianity but into the practical world too, with a place in it waiting for him so he could hold up his head not only with honor but pride too among his fellow men; she said that at first her only hope had been to fix it so he would not have to face his Maker slave body and soul to morphine, but now since his constitution was stronger than anybody could have believed, she was going to see that he assumed that position in the world which his family’s name entitled him to before he degraded it.
She and Reverend Schultz found the clerk. He had been in Jefferson about six months. He had letters to the church, but nobody except Reverend Schultz and Mrs. Merridew knew anything about him. That is, they made him the clerk in Uncle Willy’s store; nobody else knew anything about him at all.
But Uncle Willy’s old customers wouldn’t trade with him. And we didn’t either. Not that we had much trade to give him and we certainly didn’t expect him to give us any ice cream and I don’t reckon we would have taken it if he had offered it to us.
Because it was not Uncle Willy, and pretty soon it wasn’t even the same ice cream because the first thing the clerk did after he washed the windows was to fire old Job, only old Job refused to quit.
He stayed around the store anyhow, mumbling to himself and the clerk would run him out the front door and old Job would go around to the back and come in and the clerk would find him again and cuss him, whispering, cussing old Job good even if he did have letters to the church; he went and swore out a warrant and the marshal told old Job he would have to stay out of the store. Then old Job moved across the street.
He would sit on the curb all day where he could watch the door and every time the clerk came in sight old Job would holler, “I ghy tell um! I ghy do hit!” So we even quit passing the store.
We would cut across the corner not to pass it, with the windows clean now and the new town trade the clerk had built up — he had a lot of trade now — going in and out, just stopping long enough to ask old Job about Uncle Willy, even though we had already got what news came from Memphis about him every day and we knew that old Job would not know, would not be able to get it straight even if someone told him, since he never did believe that Uncle Willy was sick, he just believed that Mrs. Merridew had taken him away somewhere by main force and was holding him in another bed somewhere so he couldn’t get up and come back home; and old Job sitting on the curb and blinking up at us with his little watery red eyes like Uncle Willy would and saying, “I ghy tell um! Holting him up dar whilst whipper-snappin’ trash makin’ free wid Marse Hoke Christian’s sto. I ghy tell um!”
IV
Uncle Willy didn’t die. One day he came home with his skin the color of tallow and weighing about ninety pounds now and with his eyes like broken eggs still but dead eggs, eggs that had been broken so long now that they didn’t even smell dead any more — until you looked at them and saw that they were anything in the world except dead. That was after he got to know us again. I don’t mean that he had forgotten about us exactly.
It was like he still liked us as boys, only he had never seen us before and so he would have to learn our names and which faces the names belonged to. His sister had gone back to Texas now, because Mrs. Merridew was going to look after him until he was completely recovered, completely cured. Yes. Cured.
I remember that first afternoon when he came to town and we walked into the store and Uncle Willy looked at the clean windows that you could see through now and at the town customers that never had traded with him, and at the clerk and said, “You’re my clerk, hey?”
