Gradle Bird

by J. C. Sasser

  “Let me hold him,” Annalee said, “Just once.”

  “It will do you both no good,” one of the nurses said. “Now rest, child.”

  But Annalee did not rest. She lay in bed and pulled at her eyelashes until she pulled the bottom lids bald. She got out of bed and paced the cold long hallways with blood running down her legs, trying to find where they had hidden her son. She opened every closed-off room, and at every locked door, she banged and scratched. When nobody came to the door, she banged harder until her knuckles bled, and still after no answer, she picked the locks with bobby pins. She threw every locked door back, bore her teeth, and raised her claws at nothing but dark emptiness.

  In the great big room with the metal beds lined against the wall, she made every girl get up so she could rip through their sheets and search under their bed. She went to the kitchen and opened every cabinet and looked in every pot and jar and searched through every sack in the pantry. She tore through flour and sugar and coffee and oatmeal, slinging them all over the ground. When she couldn’t find her son, she harassed the cook. She dumped the soup of the day out on the floor and picked through the vegetables and potatoes, looking for little pieces of her son. She was convinced they had cooked him. She picked out the potatoes and made his arms and then his legs and when she went for the cook with a sharp-blade knife, a nurse in white came from behind and stabbed her with a needle.

  She woke in her bed. Her wrists were banded with white straps and secured to the bedrail with chain. Home. Home. Home. All she could think about was home. But she wasn’t going home without her son.

  In the middle of the night, during the worst snowstorm that place had seen in over twenty-five years, she finally twisted and stretched the straps enough to slide her delicate hands through. The great big room was asleep, but down the hallway she heard the wailing and screaming of a girl giving birth. She grabbed her winter coat and the white eyelet dress she had packed with her the day she left for that place.

  She tiptoed down the hall toward the soon-to-be mother’s sounds. The girl was close. Annalee hid among the shadows, waiting until the labor pain ended and a nurse in white carried the newborn out of the birthing room. She followed the nurse down a dark hallway, and only once did the nurse pause, as if maybe something was tracking her trail. The nursed turned back, and Annalee ducked behind a steel cart.

  Lightning lit the dark hallway. The nurse, bouncing the screaming child, went to the window and looked out at the storm.

  Annalee followed the nurse around corners and down hallways until she led her to a room, one similar to the room where all the girls slept, except here there were little ones sleeping, boys and girls, in little beds, swaddled in little blankets. The nurse placed the baby in its little bed. There were so many of them. How was she to tell her own?

  Her hand turned the knob, and she slid through the door. She crawled through the rows made by the tiny little beds. The lights flickered from the storm outside. She waited until the nurse left, then she rushed through the rows, searching for her son. None of them had names, only dates. When she came to the last bed in the last row, her bosom began to hurt and swell.

  She lifted him from his bed and wrapped him in her white eyelet dress. A pair of nurses came through the door chatting about the storm. Annalee ducked. She cradled her son as she crawled through the bed rows in the opposite direction from where the four white shoes went. She slid through the door, ran down the hallways, around the corners, through the corridors, and out of the front door, barely escaping the monster’s mouth.

  There was a peace and quietness about the falling snow. It made the storm seem less violent and dusted everything in magic. But there was nothing peaceful and quiet about Annalee, nor was there anything calm, and whatever magic she had within her, it was dark. She ripped through the snowdrifts and tore through the woods, the cold a welcomed relief against her hot, sweaty skin.

  She walked all through the night, listening to her child wail and scream. Her breasts were on fire, but the baby would not take her milk. It had not come natural, and now that she had him, she had no idea what to do with him. He had inherited Leonard’s scent of carrots and his blue eyes, his big ears and hands, but somehow he hadn’t inherited whatever it was about Leonard that Annalee loved so much.

  She thought of leaving him, thought about hiding him in the snow, but every time the urge came on, she clamped down on the diamond ring, knowing that if she just got home everything would be okay. Everything would get better.

  A bright sun came with the morning. She found a road, and she knew the road led south because the farther she traveled it the warmer it became. A truck passed and pulled off on the side of the road. A man with a flat, scarred nose got out of the truck, his lips wrapped around a cherry-smelling pipe.

  “Where you headed?” the man asked.

  “Georgia,” she said, pocketing the diamond ring against the inside of her cheek.

  Smoke trailed from the man’s mouth. “I’m going that way to buy seed. I’ll take you as far as you need to go.”

  Annalee and the baby got in the truck. The man covered her with burlap sacks. She looked at him confused as to why.

  “Your lips are purple,” he said, put the truck in gear, and drove down the road.

  She did not feel exhausted or tired. In fact, she felt alert, perhaps a little jumpy. She bounced her knee and picked at her eyelashes, collecting them in a fold of her eyelet dress. She kept looking over at the man, thinking she knew exactly what he thought of her.

  “You think I’m a bad mother,” she said.

  The man removed the pipe from his mouth. “No, I think you’re a good one.”

  Annalee looked down at her son and waited for that feeling to come, the one all mothers are supposed to feel. But that feeling hadn’t come to her. Something else had. She bit down on the diamond ring.

  “What’s his name?” the man asked.

  “I haven’t named him yet,” she said. She kept picking at her lashes.

  The baby screamed and she offered him her hard and swollen breast, but he thrashed about and writhed his head away.

  “I don’t think we’re meant to be,” she said. She looked at the man, her eyes weeping.

  “How old?” the man asked.

  “A few days. Maybe three, I don’t know.”

  “He’s just getting used to breathing air,” the man said. “Give it time.” He reached over and offered his pinkie to her son. His little lips started sucking it, and for the first time since she had taken him away, he stopped crying, and with the silence they both fell asleep.

  It was late afternoon when they got there. Annalee directed the man through town and told him to turn left down Spivey Street.

  “Can you stop?” she asked, as they neared her house. Her eyes scoured their pretty, perfect home. The chandeliers were lit. Her father stoked the fire, and her mother was busy arranging flowers in a vase.

  “Is this it?” the man asked.

  “No,” she said. She directed the man back through town and down a dirt country road. “You can let me out here. My house is up a ways.”

  “I can take you all the way,” the man said.

  “I feel like walking.”

  She got out of the truck, forgot to thank the man, and started down the road. The truck’s engine and the cherry-smelling pipe faded in the distance. Her son began to scream. She stopped in the road and screamed with him. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. She screamed her throat raw and drained her eyes of tears, and finally she moved on down the road to the dump.

  Skeletons of weeds, brown and parched and hollow, tangled through the junk. A rusted plow was halfway buried in the ground, its sharp teeth rising up as if trying to bite its way back out. She removed the eyelet dress she had wrapped around him. Her eyelashes that had collected in one of its folds sailed like seeds in the breeze.

  He began to shiver. He was cold, but she couldn’t bear to part with her dress, to throw it away in the garbage lik
e her mother had done, so instead, she swaddled him in the burlap sacks the man had used to make her warm. She kissed him on his forehead and nested him inside the dumpster between two bags of trash. He stopped crying the moment she put him there, as if all his crying was a need to be out of her arms, and somehow in her twisted-up mind she convinced herself that leaving him here must be right. It wasn’t until she made the left on Spivey Street that she realized she hadn’t said a single word to him. No hello. No goodbye.

  A crepe myrtle petal fell in Annalee’s hand, and it did not melt. She had survived that cold, wretched place. She had survived the long journey home. But she never outlived what the weeds tangled through, what the hungry dogs raided, no matter how many times she bit down on the ring, because after what she did that day, the reminder of love was gone.

  She moved on, away from all of those abandoned things, down the dirt road, in search of Gradle. She came to a mailbox, rusted and padlocked shut. Written on its side were the words:

  NO TResPass-N. FoR FaNS aNd ReaLTrUe

  FrieENds ONLY. ReTuRN to SENDer if NoT.

  D-5 Delvis MiLes The LoNe SiNger

  Rural RoUTE 1 BoX 56-B

  She followed the trail that led to a tiny shack. She walked through the yard among the collection of junk and rage of dandelion, and as she climbed the first porch step, a long ago yet familiar feeling came over her. Even though nothing was there, she felt her bosom swell.

  Through the front door a man appeared. He looked around suspiciously, as if expecting an intruder. He had blue eyes, great big ears, and great big hands. She caught a whiff of carrots. Her hand flew up to catch her dropping jaw. My, oh my, how he had grown.

  “WHO’S THERE?” DELVIS heaved in his whispering voice into the hot, muggy morning. He pinched his eyes at something. It was round and sparkly and floated at the foot of his porch steps. He couldn’t make it out one hundred percent, but something was there. He could feel it.

  He’d been on high alert all night, didn’t sleep a wink, waiting up for the Tooth Fairy to come. Gradle told him all about her after she yanked his tooth out with his pliers. She said the fairy was some kind of spirit, like a ghost, who would come in the middle of the night and bring you a gift in exchange for your tooth. All he had to do was put his tooth under his pillow, and she would come. He asked Gradle what she looked like, but Gradle said she ain’t never visited her, but she did say the Tooth Fairy was invisible. He wasn’t sure he believed that. Ain’t nothing in the world invisible. Not even the wind. He would bet all of his flying dragon scales he was looking at the Tooth Fairy right now, even though he couldn’t make her out one hundred percent.

  He walked to the porch’s edge to get a better look. The floating sparkle flew up and froze in the air. He almost peed his pants. It was definitely her, and now he could clearly make her out as plain as day. She was a tiny little thing, half the size of his pinkie nail, and she sparkled bright like a diamond.

  “I see you little Miss Tooth Fairy,” he said, reaching out his hand to grab her. She zigged left and zagged right. Then POOF! She disappeared just like them ghosts do.

  “Come back,” Delvis said. “I ain’t mean to scare you.” He waited for the fairy to come back, his eyes cocked and ready for her bright diamond spark, but she never came back in the three hours he sat on his porch and waited.

  He went back inside his house, excited to tell Gradle he had seen the Tooth Fairy, but when he checked on her, she was still in his bed breathing in sleep, her ribs poking through her dress like the gills of a fish. He smiled. She had to be the prettiest thing he’d ever seen.

  He didn’t want to wake her, although he thought he’d burst from excitement. She’d been sleeping most of the day, and he wondered when she might decide to wake up. It was past one o’clock, and he hadn’t seen her wiggle once since she fell over asleep in his bed early that morning. She must be real tired. It didn’t bother him none she took over his bed. He couldn’t sleep anyway, and if he needed to, there was a pile of clothes in the corner that would suit him just fine.

  A tingle ran up and down his body as he looked at her. He had never felt so happy. Never in all of his sixty years, had he had a real true friend, one that was human, and to have one as special and pretty as Gradle Bird proved something to him that had never been proved to him before. For the first time in his life, he felt accepted. It was a feeling he didn’t ever want to lose, and he worried that after she woke up, she might go back home and take this feeling with her. He hoped she’d stay right there and sleep forever. If he could, he’d capture her in a Mason jar and never let her out. But he knew he couldn’t do something like that, so he decided he would capture her in a different way. Like how he’d captured that unicorn he saw in the woods behind his house. He would draw her.

  He tried to remember where he put his drawing pad and No. 2 pencils. It had been a couple of months since he’d used them. Thousands of images flashed on the back of his eyelids like a shuffling deck of cards. His mind threw out half the deck and shuffled through what was left. He threw out another half and shuffled through that and kept on with the task until his mind stopped on the image of his drawing pad and No. 2 pencils. All this, and a second had not even passed. Half a second to be exact. He’d timed it.

  He walked to aisle three and stuck his hand into the wall between a box of tea lights and an empty can of L’Oréal hairspray. His fingers stretched and found the skinny drawing sticks and his drawing pad underneath.

  He sat in a chair and studied his subject. Through her funny looking glasses, he learned her eyelashes and their thick black curl. A little like spider’s legs, he thought. He was one hundred percent confident he could draw them just right because he had a lot of practice at drawing lashes. He might even consider himself professional at it. He learned her triangle nose and her lips, soft and plump like tobacco worms. His eyes wandered along her long neck and the bones of her collar. He learned all of her hollow parts and decided he would shade those with gray. He learned the stones in her knees, the little rocks in her ankles, and the pebbles in her toes. He learned her entire body and all of its young beauty until finally he was ready to make his mark.

  He squeezed the handles, and his switchblade knife clicked in position. He sharpened the pencil with the blade and pressed the pencil’s tip against the drawing pad, but he couldn’t bring himself to go any further. He felt bad, ashamed, as if he was stealing from her. He promised himself if he drew her, he would treat her picture with one hundred percent respect, but he didn’t want to make his real true friend mad or hurt her in any way, so he told himself, he would ask her permission first. It was the gentleman thing to do. So, he sat there and learned her some more so that when he did draw her for the first time, he would draw her perfect.

  Gradle woke up, blinded by the shiny edge of Delvis’s switchblade knife. She jumped and flattened her back against the wall and hit her head on the sill of a boarded-up window. She straightened her glasses. The inside of her mouth felt like a sweater. Her head throbbed.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” Delvis said, putting down his knife. “I’s just studyin’ you.”

  She took in her surroundings, trying to remember where she was. She spotted the empty Styrofoam box from The Western Steer sitting on the floor, and the night before all came back to her.

  “I been waitin’ up all night for the Tooth Fairy,” Delvis said.

  Gradle checked her ear for her earring and found it gone. She rummaged through the bed, stripped the sheets back, and lifted the pillow, but all she found was Delvis’s rotten tooth. She picked up his tooth and held it in her hand. She remembered telling herself she would exchange it somehow, even though she had no idea what to exchange it for. The only thing she brought with her to Delvis’s house was his steak dinner. She reached in her bra, thinking perhaps she could sneak a sequin from the letter he had written her, but the letter was not there. All she had was the Polaroid of Delvis, and the photograph of Grandpa, smiling beside her mother.


  “Maybe she’ll come back tonight,” she said.

  “No, no,” Delvis said. “I seen that Tooth Fairy this mornin’. But I scared her away on accident. I heard her magic wand sparkin’ outside so I walked out on the porch and saw her in the air right in front of me. She flew up and then stood still for a little bit, like she was surprised to see me, and then she flew off quick-like and disappeared.”

  “What’d she look like?”

  “Like a flyin’ diamond,” he said. I’m gone try to catch her next time.”

  “You can’t catch her, Delvis. She’s a fairy,” Gradle said. She put his tooth back under the pillow.

  Delvis cleared his throat. He put his fingers to his neck, coughed something up, and spat it in an empty Sanka can. “‘Cuse me,” he said. “I still got that bullfrog in my throat. I went up to Dr. Smith’s office yesterday, and told him just to pull it out with some pliers, but he told me there ain’t nothin’ in there and all it was, was a figure of speech.”

  “Maybe he’ll jump out on his own,” Gradle said, as she remade her ponytail.

  “I’ve had one in there before and that’s what happened. He jumped out in my sleep, and I found him hoppin’ around on the floor the next mornin’.” He cleared his throat again. “You hungry?”

  “Starving,” she said.

  “I got all kinds of eatin’ things growin’ in the garden. I’ll go pick us somethin’ to eat.”

  She followed Delvis out on his porch. Dark clouds threw a hot shade across the yard. A breeze picked up and swept flower petals into a dance along the porch. She wondered where they came from but couldn’t find a suitable home. There were no flower bushes around except for the hanging baskets of coral geraniums.