Jumping the Scratch Read Free

even though it was dark, I could see her bright eyes shining and her head tilted slightly to the side like a crow as she listened. If I could have kept my eyes open, I wouldhave wanted to stay awake all night talking with Sapphy. She was like Mister: She knew how to listen, and I felt I could tell her anything.
    When my grandma Jeanne died, Aunt Sapphy found out she and Grandpa Will hadn’t paid their taxes in years. Between what the government said they owed and what the First National Bank of Traverse City laid claim to, the only thing of value left, once the dust settled, was twelve place settings of my grandmother’s good bone china. Each sister got four place settings, and Sapphy got to keep the gravy boat. I guess that was her reward for having stayed there until the bitter end. The real estate agent who handled selling the house told Sapphy it was going to be hard to find a buyer because of the smell.
    â€œDeath leaves a lingering odor,” she said.
    â€œSo does life,” Sapphy told her.
    Sapphy packed up and moved to the trailer in Wondrous Acres, where she lived by herself for a few years until she had her accident at the cherry factory. One minute she was standing there watching cherries go by on the conveyor belt, and the next thing she knew, she was lying in a hospital bed with her head all bandaged up. She doesn’tremember a thing about how it happened. She woke up in the hospital with a terrible headache, her hair shaved clean off, and twenty-seven stitches marching like a line of black ants across her scalp. We were told that a big metal pipe had come loose and fallen from the ceiling, hitting Sapphy square on the top of her head.
    While she was still in the hospital, a lawyer came to visit, and Sapphy signed a bunch of papers. After that, instead of a paycheck she got a disability check from the Cheery Cherry Corporation every month. The check wasn’t huge, but it was big enough to mean she didn’t have to work anymore. Even so, she couldn’t have kept living in the trailer. At least not by herself. After the accident Sapphy was missing more than just her hair.
    It was as if somebody had come into her head with a little pink eraser and gone to town rubbing things out. Not remembering the accident wouldn’t have been so bad if that had been all there was to it. But the blow to her head caused Sapphy’s memory to develop a skip, like an old phonograph record with a scratch. Although she could remember very clearly everything from her past right up until the moment the pipe fell, shelost the ability to make any new memories. Things that happened after the accident stayed with her only for about half an hour, and then they faded away just as if they’d never happened.
    I once saw an episode of The Three Stooges where Moe got hit in the head by a falling flowerpot and lost his memory. He couldn’t remember his own name or recognize the other stooges at all. He staggered around in a daze, seeing stars and hearing birds tweeting, until Curly accidentally hit him in the head with a long board and suddenly Moe was cured.
    In real life amnesia doesn’t work like that. Sapphy didn’t forget her name, and she knew who my mom and I were when we came and saw her in the hospital. But if I told her a good joke, she’d laugh her head off, and half an hour later not only would she have forgotten the punch line, but she wouldn’t remember that I’d ever told her the joke.
    I knew better than to believe hitting Sapphy in the head a second time would cure her, but I sure wished it could be that easy. I felt sorry for her, but I remember thinking she was lucky at least in one respect: She wasn’t to blame for her misfortune.That pipe would have fallen no matter what. She couldn’t help it if she was standing under it when it happened. It wasn’t her fault. But I was the one who let Mister outside that night, and I was the one who told my father to go