Babbicam

by Rod Madocks

  One night, twelve days out, I pointed out to Addie the star Capella in the night sky and Arcturus showing the way west. I’d learned my stars from the sailor lads at Babbicam. Just then a white mewie came and flittered about the lights on the decks though we were far out in the deep ocean. One of the crew said it was a shearwater. I told Addie it was a blessing bird come to show us a new life.

  Fetal Death Certificate

  Kimmie and I weren’t that great really. The main thing was I was so grateful that she was with me and that made each day a blessing. She stuck me for two years, she put up with my numb heart and cold fumbling fingers all that time. I still wonder what she saw in me. The only thing she seemed to appreciate was that I knew stuff, she liked me to read to her from the Latin. I read her Horace mainly, sometimes Propertius. Do you know Elegy 4, the one about the dead returning to chide him? Dumb question. Anyway, in it the poet says: ‘phantoms have their reasons when they come’. Maybe I was remembering that line when I finally heeded little Georgia’s nagging the other day. Acting on impulse, I dug out the family papers that Grandpa kept in an old army box, an ammo chest for .50 cal, I think. I scratched around in there all morning going through old snapshots, papers about the house that was sold and even some medical reports about me. I found it folded up with my parent’s death certificates. It was a fetal death certificate—yep, there is such a thing. Apparently I had an unborn brother who died with them on that day. I never knew Mom was pregnant. Maybe they kept it from me. But Georgia knew. A bit of me still thinks that Georgia remembers repressed memories but I’m beginning to swing towards Propertius—maybe ghosts do have their reasons when they come. A brother too—snuffed out. I keep thinking I’ve hit bottom but always there seems a way left to go.

  Found something else in there. A cool, commemorative WW2 European Theater Colt .45 caliber auto with a silver nickel finish in an oak presentation box. It had some silver chrome bullets to go with it. Looked like Grandpa was fixing to shoot a werewolf. The gun itself seemed unfired. Maybe it was given to him by his veteran buddies. I’ve taken the pistol, I enjoy the sense of power when I heft it in my hand, I like to clack back the slide, sniff the purposeful gun oil smell in the chamber and look down into the zero of that recessed muzzle.

  Spool Nine

  The police come calling

  Milwaukee Wisconsin, 1934

  Doctor Kaiser: We have time for a session before my surgery.

  —Whatever you say, sir… Been thinking of our old place on South 10th. We always seemed to be needing ice, even in winter. That iceman was forever coming to our door with his gert big blocks. Addie had a refrigerator that seemed to eat those ice bricks. I’d hold them in my bare hands once the iceman let go of his pincers. Addie nagged at me to use a towel but I didn’t care. Ess, that old house on South 10th. An unlucky place. I guess I only wanted to numb myself after what had happened. I’d pay the man his 50 cents and take those blocks into the kitchen and stand there holding them ’til Addie slid them into the trays. Afterwards I’d look down at my cold hands. Grey as a plucked chickens. Old man hands. It was hard to believe they were part of me. You just want to be numb, don’t you, doc? I think you know the same thing.

  Doctor Kaiser: Yes, a bereavement can have that effect. What happened to you in that house?

  —It was twelve years ago. I was half asleep on the front room rocker when there was a banging on the front door and the sound of boots on the walkway outside. It was the city police calling to deliver bad news. They asked if it was 922 South 10th and was I Mister Lee? They said there had been an accident. They stood on the step. There was rain dripping from their cap brims and the leather of their Sam Brownes gleamed under the capes. My eyes kept being drawn to the silver badges on their chests. All my life the coppers had been seeking me out. Like going down from St Marychurch to Market Street Station that November day, walking behind Sergeant Nott. They said it was my daughter and hadn’t I better sit down. That was the moment our world had caved in. I will always remember the police there and Addie’s face behind me in the doorway. She had already sensed what I could not grasp on that October afternoon.

  Doctor Kaiser: They had brought you news about your daughter?

  —Ess, they told me she was gone but I could not take it in.

  [long pause]

  That unlucky house was quite near the lake. It’s strange how I’ve lived so close to water all my life. October used to bring early cold weather, mists and sharp east winds off the lake. I suddenly felt old in that house. I was older than Miss Keyse was when she died and she had seemed ancient to my young vulish self. When you get old it’s harder to screen things out. Everything leaks through you. I’d stare out the front windows on South Tenth; the front yard palings were all twisted and bent. A hole had appeared in the yard one day. It started as a dip in the ground then it gradually became a gaping gert hole. Evie must have been about 14. It was that year a black boy, James Cameron, I think his name was, he survived a lynching in Marion, Indiana. The papers said his neck was scarred by the rope. Apparently, they took him down when someone said he was innocent. Anyhow, Evelyn asked me what that big old pit was that had just appeared in our yard. I explained to her what the county engineer had told me. You see, thousands of years ago all here was ice and a great glacier came sweeping down from the north and stored up a ball of ice under itself. Stored it like a babby in its belly. That ball of ice hunkered in the ground after all the glacier has melted. It waited and waited all secret like ’til long after the rest has warmed and ebbed away, but the ice remained there underground to melt in its own time and to leave an empty space there, hiding, no one knowing, creating a space that shows itself in its own time. Evie asked me why that sink hole had finally decided to show itself now but I couldn’t tell her that. Things get to be hidden until the world is ready for them, I’d said.

  The twelfth of October was going to live with us for the rest of our lives. I was never much good at anniversaries but we were stuck with that one. The first anniversary was the one that’s clearest in my mind. It was the year of ’34. I should have been working—Mister Lee, the shipping clerk in his long brown coat. I was seventy years old and still had a job though so many were laid off. I was good at what I did and I always liked working round machines. I loved watching the long lines of gleaming autos at Nash’s, the flash Kenosha Dusenbergs for the quality market. I’ve been hiding all the time these last thirty years since I came to this country. Maybe hiding from myself. Early on, I thought I was making good and I felt strong. I was building a life that others thought I would never have. It all began to drift away after what happened to Evie. I kept on working for a while longer but there seemed no point to it. And then there were those October anniversaries.

  The first anniversary in ’34 set the way it was to go in all them other years. The geese always come over at about that time of year. They seem to signal that it was time to see her. I’d go out into the yard at night when I heard them yelping and I watched them go by in black threads against the moon. The geese were keeping to a way of doings things, just like me and Evie. Last year when I got sick was the first time that I had not kept the anniversary. I hoped she was not lonely. Never mind, I’ll soon be there myself to keep her company. They follow you about, don’t they doctor? Those that have died?

  Doctor Kaiser: Yes, in a way they do, sure.

  —For some reason I used to most sense her in the bathroom of the house on South 10th. It was a big yellow-tiled room. I’d be there shaving but somehow I kept imagining that there was Evie at my back. As a kid she’s stay in the bath for hours. I kept on shaving day after day and sometimes I’d talk to her as if she was still there. I became an old man in that mirror. People said I grew much grayer and thinner in the first year after she had gone. What had happened in the world that particular year? I used to study the papers real careful. I was looking for some sign, something that showed that Evie had mattered at all to the world. Still the same stuff happened. The people
still living in shacks in Lincoln Park; the strikes in the city; Mayor Hoan turning the tide; Dillinger shooting it out in Manitowish Waters where I had once took Evie and Addie on family outings; I think there was even a miracle story about the local boy who had fallen into a sewer and came out alive from a pipe a mile downstream. Well, there was to be no miracle for Evie and I could find nothing in the papers, nothing at all to show she was missed. Everything was a sink hole. A hole that bored into that horny shell I had growed around me.

  Doctor Kaiser: How did Mrs Lee cope with the loss?

  —Addie never wanted to come with me on my anniversary visits. Too painful. She preferred to remain at home as if nothing had happened and Evie was just going to come back through that front door from class or work. Addie would listen to the National Church of the Air on the radio or Betty Crocker Cooking Hour. She’d rather work in the house and stir soap flakes in the laundry barrel. That is how she coped. We didn’t even talk about it. What happened to Evie put a space between us and that grieved me.

  Doctor Kaiser: What had actually happened to your daughter?

  —Gone and in the ground. Sudden as that. On account of a stupid accident, they’d said. I’m struggling to put it in words. I know I’m dragging on your patience.

  Doctor Kaiser: Tell me in your own way, it’s okay.

  —All that was left was for me to pay my respects to her each year. I’d put on my winter coat and grey hat and call goodbye to Addie. She’d be in the hall maybe holding the flowers. She used to get then for me from Euler’s, yellow chrysanths usually. Her face that had once made my heart run quick, it was so pale and handsome. Now a stranger would see she had the face of an older ’umman, as round and full as an old biscuit and with her green eyes hid behind glasses. She liked to fuss over me and tuck in my muffler. Then I’d be outside. I don’t suppose I’ll go outside again. Not ’til they carry me out that is.

  I usually didn’t take the Ford on my anniversary visits. I only really drove to work at the Cudahy yards once the family outings stopped. We had those wooden walk boards outside the house, ’n about then, for the first time in my life, I became frit of falling over and used to go real careful on those boards. We had a nameplate on the house. Addie wanted to call the house, ‘The Hollies’. I think that’s what her family house was called in Surrey back in her old life. For some reason I’d always remember that street in fall or winter, the catalpa leaves turning or dropping. There’d be snow slush and the sparrows squeaking and scrambling round the horse flop from the ash can man.

  Mrs Donahue next door always seemed to leave her windows open whatever the weather. You’d see her curtains fluttering in the cold lake wind. The neighbors weren’t bad considering that Addie and I kept away from folk. It was Evie that brought us out in the world. We saw the Hoelichs most of all. One Independence Day street party Mike said a strange thing to me that I’ve never forgot. I think he was a bit tiddly. He said that “in da old country”—that’s how he used to speak—“in da old country”’ they said you get given a ghost when you are born, they walk beside you all your life and go with you back into the dark when your time has come. “What you tink of dat, eh?” He kept saying. I guess I’ve got more than one ghost going along beside me though I didn’t tell Mike that. He worked at the Wauwatosa auto factory. He was lucky to have a job in those hard times. The City That Works, they said in the papers. I hit lucky I suppose in choosing this place as my home or I thought of it as lucky until what happened to Evie.

  Those high towers of this city, the big shoulders of the MGL building, the city hall spire and St Joe’s big onion, it all seemed a magic place once but there’s a doomy sad look to it and a dirty sulphur smell in the air these last few years. Especially when I set out to Forest Home on my yearly anniversaries. I usually took the No 7, TMER & L Street car down Forest Home Avenue. No one would notice me, the other passengers used to keep their heads in their papers and there’d usually be a few high school kids chattering and laughing. Evie came home once in second grade and told me that Milwaukee meant ‘gathering place’ in Indian. Only she called it ‘Muwahkee’ like the other local kids. Milwaukee had been that for me, a gathering place. But for me it had been somewhere to grow the private man, a drawing of a family around me and a getting rid of that bad old public face that had stood in for me. America had been a new start. Lord, I’ve had a few of those ‘new starts’ in my time.

  Doctor Kaiser: How did you get to come here in the first place?

  —On account of Jimmy Clabby, the world champion middle-weight boxer. I’d mentioned him afore I think. He had set me up with my first job with autos at his garage in North Downer, in that same year that Schrank shot Roosevelt at the Hotel Gilpatrick. Clabby really looked out for me and was good to his word though I hardly knew him really. Jimmy was the best sort of guy. An ’andsum boy as they’d say in Deb’m. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of him now? Just a name maybe.

  Doctor Kaiser: I remember hearing that he had died.

  —Poor old Jimmy died in the year after Evie. I read that they found him in a Calumet City flop house. I think he ran out of luck, lost hope and became a drunk. His fight place, the Elite Roller Rink on West National, also burned down about then. Jimmy carried the secret of ‘Babbacombe Lee’s’ whereabouts. I know that the papers in England still run articles about me from time to time about how I am a publican in London, or how I’d been found in a doss house or discovered as a laborer or mariner somewhere. No one guessed I would be quietly working shipping out car parts in the Midwest.

  In this town they don’t give much of a damn where you are from. There’s little care for the past. Everything here is always getting torn up and replaced, not like Deb’m where they hold onto things for years. I liked all that rattling change at first. Especially after twenty-two years of prison stillness. I had swum with it then, but in the later years here it began to frit me. It was stronger than me, swirling me along on with no bank to grasp onto. Just like the city whisking by that street car on the way to Forest Home. That south side of the city was always covered in smoke from the American Metal Products chimneys. It made all the people on the streets seem ghost-like. They said the unofficial city motto was “rip it up and start over”, do you remember that? [no evident reply from Kaiser] Even when the city and the whole country were most in money trouble there were work gangs all over the streets on the mayor’s employment projects, jackhammering and pulling up everything. Also in the depression days you could barely see anything except those billboards, realtor shop signs, and liquidation adverts. Everything was getting whisked off and sold cheap.

  On the way to Forest Home cemetery that street car used to sail past The Riviera Movie House where Addie and I had seen ‘The Valiant’ in’29 with Paul Muni in it. There was something about that film that got to me. It was all about what happens before a man is executed. That night we saw it, for the first time ever, I had told Addie something of what really had happened at Babbicam. She had listened to it and said ‘Oh, John,’ at the end, that’s all.

  The trolley car generally stopped at Forest Home north gate. There was long drive there that went off away into the burying grounds. The whole place was like a gert wood in the middle of the city. I used to feel tired even by the time I passed the lodge house. Usually there would be no one about. There were stones all around even quite recent ones made of Wauwatosa limestone. They soon got eaten away to nort by the dirty Milwaukee smoke. I made sure ours would be of granite so they would last. I’d bought a family plot there in ‘27 for me and Addie both. I wanted to be sure that there was somewhere to rest for the restless. How could I have known that it would be Evie filling that place before us?

  I learned how to mark it out among all the stones, a few steps from a stand of red chokeberries. Near to a big white stone with an angel. A mound of yellow sandy soil that slowly grassed over and flattened off as the years went on. There was a wooden marker with her name on it for a long time. We couldn’t decide what to put o
n the stone. Addie wanted it to read, How Many Hopes We Buried Here?

  I was all addle-aided but I sometimes used to call out loud in the thin air asking Evie if she was there. But it would stay quiet there by that heap of earth. I had been bothered by spirits all my life but I could never make out anything from her. Well, maybe ghosts have their reasons. It seems like death has made a hole for Evie leaving only emptiness behind. Poor girl, with us old, tight-lipped parents fussing over her. She had her grandmother’s face but her voice was new and American. She could not understand how frit we were; nor why I used different names according to who was asking. She never really asked us about the past. She somehow knew in her gut that we couldn’t talk about some stuff. I taught her some Deb’m words, ‘ladybug’ and ‘flittermouse’ and ‘how be nackin’ vor’. But I never told her that I was ‘Babbacombe Lee’. I don’t suppose it would have meant anything at all to her anyway. Bringing up Evie and putting everything we had into her helped rub out the past. I didn’t need to prove anything while she was in our lives. It had all gone on in a far-away country and long ago, ’n scaffolds and hangmen belonged to another world. It’s only since she’s been gone that I’ve slid back to thinking about what happened in Babbicam and how to get things straight before the sun goes down on me.

  Doctor Kaiser: Tell me more about your girl.

  —She was called Evelyn after Addie’s mother. She was a late swallow, I was fifty when she was born in 1914 with the old country we had left behind hammering on towards war. She was Addie’s only child, something for Addie at last who had come into this country secretly under my first wife’s name. Evie was loved like no other. And with love had come a frit feeling beyond anything I’d been through before. We were frit of losing her. We had a foolish false notion that if you worritted about the worst that could happen then it would surely never happen.