The Incurables

This Man, This Woman, This Child, This Town

This Man, This Woman, This Child, This Town The teachers have left the front of the two-story brick building, where they’d gathered to greet students and parents on the first day of classes. Only Martin­ Williamson—Mr. W. to everyone at the Tree of Knowledge, a private elementary school—remains outside. He’s the physical education teacher, and his first class doesn’t begin until second period, at ten, but he came early today to be one of the greeters. He turns to look up Wise Road, which dead-ends at the school, expecting to see nothing. Instead, as if from the mouth of a winter blizzard, from dust as white as snow, he sees a woman, running. Two steps behind her is a girl, her daughter no doubt, probably in kindergarten. The girl is wearing a yellow dress to match her yellow hair. She is shielding her eyes from 41 _ This Man, This Woman, This Child, This Town 42 the dust and is moving with the care and uncertainty, but twice the speed, of a blind person. A minute passes before the woman, whose hair is a darker blond than her daughter’s, stops in front of him, panting. A moment later, the girl catches up. Her panting is more severe. Clutching her stomach, the girl begins to cough, and Martin is sure she’s about to throw up. He waits for the inevitable, but the inevitable doesn’t come. When the girl ceases coughing and stands straight, he says, “Let me get you some water.” “She doesn’t need water,” says her mother with an accent he guesses is Russian or Polish. She ushers her daughter through the open green doors of the school. Martin has lost sight of the two when, from inside the dark building, as if from inside a whale, the woman calls out to him: “Thank you.” The woman returns three minutes later, and he wishes he had retrieved a cup of water in the interim. He has nothing to offer her except conversation. “Car broke down?” he asks. She doesn’t answer for so long that he thinks she hasn’t heard him. But at last she says, “We don’t own a car.” “You’re taking the bus, then.” “No, I’m flying.” She doesn’t look at him, and his inclination is to take a step back and say, “Ouch.” But she laughs, and he thinks her laughter is intended to include him. “I’d give you a ride,” he says, “but I teach next period. Of course, if you live near here, it wouldn’t be a problem.” She glances at him before returning her gaze to the dust swirling off the road. “And who are you, if I could ask?” Martin states his name and his position at the school. He wonders if he ought to give other vital statistics: his age (fortytwo ), his height (six-foot, three-and-a-half-inches), his weight (252 pounds). She says, “The famous Mr. W.” He asks her name (Katarina) and her daughter’s (Mary). He is going to ask her more; he would be happy talking with her until his class begins, but Katarina looks at her watch, utters something in a language he doesn’t recognize, and starts run- This Man, This Woman, This Child, This Town 43 ning. As she disappears into the plumes of white dust, he can hear the grumble of a city bus as it makes its way up Deer Hill toward the stop at the intersection of Wise Road. When the dust clears, she is gone. _ Martin’s mother is white. His father is black, or so his mother told him when he turned thirty-three. Before this, she’d told him his father was a professor of Romance languages at Ohio Eastern University who’d died—in a civil war, of a snakebite, in an earthquake , her story varied over the years—when, after Martin was conceived but before he was born, he returned to the country in Latin America where he was from. Martin’s real father is named James or Jason, his mother doesn’t remember. “I thought he was the star of the basketball team, the center,” she told him. “He made me believe he was. We were at a bar, a club. We went to his car. This was before I discovered the Lord. A day or two later, I saw a picture of the basketball...