“Nadine,” she called, sipping at her coffee. “Nadine. Tell Charles not to prune the hydrangeas. Or the rhodies. Not until fall. Nadine?”
She watched Nadine march across the drive, clenched fists at her side. “What a brave thing to do, hiring someone like that, Lydia,” Ed had said, but Mrs. Blessing knew people, and she had recognized in the young man holding jumper cables in the Wal-Mart parking lot that delicate balance between efficiency and servility that had characterized the very best servants of her childhood and youth. The cook here at Blessings had had it, and the head gardener, and the man who had tended the cows and taught Miss Lydia and Master Blessing how to pull down on the soft udders and aim right into their open mouths, so that the milk was warm and sweet on their lips. The maids in the city house had somehow never had it, but perhaps that was because of the way Father had treated them, brushing against them sometimes in the hallway, when he thought no one was looking, using the serving spoon so that the upper part of his arm gently touched the curve of a breast beneath a white bib and gray cotton. How handsome he’d been, with his center-parted yellow hair and his mustache and his full bottom lip and bright blue eyes.
When Nadine spoke to the new man Mrs. Blessing saw him jump slightly, answering Nadine over his shoulder as though he did not want her to see his face. He moved oddly, as though he were stiff, or hurt, as though he’d thrown his back out and couldn’t straighten up. Hard work never hurt anyone, Mrs. Blessing’s father used to say as he walked with her around the place, swinging his stick, although he’d never worked hard a day in his life.
Nadine was walking back toward the house and the young man had resumed his raking. He’d learn, this one, Lydia Blessing thought. She had a feeling about him. She’d just have to remember to tell Nadine to remind him to straighten up. There was no point in having him throw his back out the very first month on the job.
He hadn’t been this afraid since his first week in county jail, when he was convinced that any minute some big guy was going to jump him. Or as tired, for that matter. A deadbeat dad who worked with him in the laundry finally took pity on him. “You can get some sleep, junior,” the man had said, stuffing sheets in the big top-loading machine. “The worst it gets in here is when somebody bodychecks somebody else during a basketball game.”
“I don’t play basketball,” Skip had replied.
“There you go, then,” the older man said.
The rider mower was going round and round in a clean monotonous motion that was putting him to sleep. The windows of the house glittered in the sunlight so that it was impossible to see if someone was watching him. He hadn’t been this afraid since he sat in the parking lot at the Quik-Stop and watched Chris shout into the clerk’s face through the smoggy glass of the window. And at least then he’d known what crime he was committing, waiting with the engine running for someone with a cash register’s worth of dirty bills stuffed into a brown bag. He’d been afraid now for more than a week, but he wasn’t certain exactly what he was guilty of. When he looked into the bottom drawer of an old bureau he’d lined with a blanket at the baby, looking closely for any sign of life, he wondered whether this was kidnapping, or theft, or some sort of accessory thing. Maybe it was a parole violation of some sort, harboring a minor child. Mainly he wondered how long he could trim and tend two hundred acres of land with his spine curled around a baby strapped to his chest and an old woman watching him from the window.
“She must think I’m the hunchback of Notre Dame,” he said aloud without meaning to speak, and the small downy head stirred slightly. “Please please please please don’t wake up,” he whispered. “Please.”
He’d had a dog once, in that way he’d had everything in his childhood, ordinary but a lot less lasting. It had been a beagle-mix puppy of some kind, with a sharp bark and long incisors and a tail that swept knickknacks off low surfaces. One evening it tore open a bag of garbage left at the curb, scattering tin cans and pieces of waxed paper across the lawn; the next it soiled the thin beige wall-to-wall that was the jewel of his mother’s living room. “We gave him to a family with a farm, Son,” his father had said when he got home from school. “The farm deal,” Chris had said, curling his lip. “That’s what they always tell you.” Skip had heard his mother sighing on the telephone to her sister. “You don’t realize the constant responsibility,” she’d said. “Like the kind you have with a baby, where you can’t do a single thing for yourself.” It was the kind of thing she always said, as though he wouldn’t hear, or wouldn’t take it personally if he did.
Now he knew she was right. That first day the baby had slept with a release and abandon that made him conclude it was sick or, sometimes, when the light did not fall fully on the small slack body, actually dead. He’d checked to make sure it was breathing right around twilight and then left to go shopping at the Wal-Mart. He figured that was probably a crime, too, leaving an infant alone, but he knew from watching one of the bartender’s girlfriends change their twins on the back table at McGuire’s that he was going to need Pampers and something to put in a bottle.
He’d picked up skim milk because it seemed healthiest, and Pampers with a stay-dry lining in the newborn size, and some plastic bottles with balloons painted on the side, and a book on baby care, and a canvas sling that let you carry an infant strapped close to your chest, and any piece of clothing with ducks on it that he could find. He had slithered up to the registers with his head down and the bill of his John Deere hat pulled low in case any of the girls knew him from high school or hanging at the bar, trying to get in and out and back to the house in the pickup truck before the old lady noticed he was gone, or the mottled squirming thing in the box awoke. He spent $81.19 at the Wal-Mart, half of it on things it turned out he wouldn’t need until later: baby food in jars, a cup that popped right back up when you tipped it over, a rattle.
When he’d pulled into the garage he’d listened and heard the baby screaming from above, tearing into it in short bursts like a car alarm. It was another reason to be glad that the garage was so far from the house, far enough so that maybe the old lady wouldn’t hear. Before he’d gone out he’d taken the baby out of the bureau drawer and put it back in the box and put the box under his bed, just in case. The damp flushed face was covered with a sifting of gray dust, like what was on the Christmas ornaments when he was a boy and they took them out to decorate the tree, he and his dad, on their own. The cheeks and forehead looked swollen, almost bruised beneath the ruddy sheen of baby rage, and the eyes were slits. The gray silt shone like mica in the down that promised to become eyebrows.
“Okay,” he had said, lifting the baby out of the box by the armpits, the flannel shirt coming unwrapped, the whole of the little body dangling, naked legs bowed like parentheses. “It’s a girl!” he thought to himself as he looked down at the shrimp-pink body, thinking that maybe worry was making him punch-drunk and that maybe there was a different kind of crime involved in harboring a girl baby. He carried her into the kitchen and laid her wailing on the counter while he poured the milk into the baby bottle and turned on the radio. “Okay,” he kept repeating. “Okay okay okay.”
And, Jesus, the blessed weight of silence when he put the nipple in her mouth and she shut up, no sound but Patsy Cline singing “Crazy” on the country station. Skip knew he should put a diaper on her, but he was afraid to remove the flannel shirt entirely, afraid to move her little legs, afraid to wake her again, once she’d dropped off after eating, her head hanging heavy to one side of his cradling arm. When he’d had her naked on the counter he was afraid that she was having a seizure; her arms and legs splayed and shook convulsively, as though she were trying to grab at the air. But now the tremors were gone, and he wanted to keep it that way. He was afraid to put her down, too, so he sat in an old rocking chair and rocked her gently, urine seeping warmly into his pants. “Don’t poop, baby,” he whispered. “Don’t poop.” He was still murmuring when she turned her head and vomited so violently that the milk hit t
he wall and the window.
“Oh, shit,” he’d said, and the crying began again.
He was amazed that he’d gotten through that first night: clean her up, put on the diaper, put on a shirt, put on the sling, pick up the book, read about formula, curse himself out, drive down the highway to a convenience store and buy enough cans of the stuff to feed a dozen babies. When the sun began to come up over the pond he was cleaning sour milk off the windowpanes with the baby in the sling and a new day stretched before him during which he was expected to rake the flower beds and clean the pond spillway and ride the mower.
“I can’t keep doing this,” he said to himself, but somehow he did.
He’d been doing it for ten days. A full day of work, most of it done with the baby on his chest, a wet spot of perspiration and drool always now faintly cool in the center of his sternum. Sometimes, after she ate, she would sleep so deeply that he felt safe leaving her upstairs while he sprinted around, caulking windows, spraying the tomato plants. He went back again to the Wal-Mart, this time to buy a monitor he saw on television, so that he could hear what was happening above the garage when he was outside. He learned how to slump on the tractor, hunch his shoulders to make a valley for the small rounds of head and bottom. When he saw the glint of Mrs. Blessing’s binoculars, he turned his back. He thought he knew what Mrs. Blessing would say about this. He didn’t know her well yet, but the first thing he’d noticed about her were those small sharp lines radiating from around her mouth, the lines a woman got when she’d been pursing her lips in disapproval for years at the wayward ways of the world. And he realized she would figure out what he already had: that someone had left this baby here not for him, the sad-sack caretaker who didn’t even have a checking account, but for her, the richest woman in Mount Mason.
“She say radio too loud at night,” Nadine called across the pond to him.
“Tell her I’m sorry and it won’t happen again,” he called back.
The radio was to cover the sound of crying, and the crying was for no reason he could fathom. Sometimes the baby seemed to have gas, and she would lift her knees to her chest, groan and fart and groan again, then scream, then drop off for twenty minutes, then wake with a start in his arms and scream some more. He rocked her and rocked her and turned the pages of the baby book and looked for an explanation and fed her and rocked again. “You’ve just been given the most miraculous gift imaginable!” the baby book said. Skip thought colic was a possibility. Or maybe she was just pissed off that her mother had ditched her at Blessings and hadn’t even had the brains to leave her at the big house. The fibrous stump of the umbilical cord, brown with dried blood, had been clamped off near the rounded belly with a blue enamel butterfly hair clip, the kind he’d seen the high school girls wearing at the mall.
In the mornings she always stopped crying, as though the thin light at the window mollified her. Sometimes she seemed to stare right through him, her eyes a dark clear blue, a small bubble of a blister forming at the center of her upper lip. Her legs and arms moved in strange calisthenics as he cleaned her with a warm cloth.
“Okay,” he said. “It’s okay. I’m gonna take care of you. It’ll be okay. Okay?”
But by the end of the workday he was ready to drop, so tired that one day he drove back to the pasture behind the barn and slept in the back of the truck in the midday sun, waking to find his clothes soaked through with sweat and half his face sunburned to an angry purple-red. Some days he was so tired that the percussion of the pistons in the rider mower would begin to put him to sleep, and he’d start awake and look back at the slightly wavy trail that came with cutting the lawn half-conscious.
Even when he did sleep it was hardly like sleep at all, more like slipping in and out of daydreams, like the sleep was as thin as the cotton sheets that were all he used in bed at night because it was so damn hot in the apartment over the garage. He had two fans. Mrs. Blessing had said something about it to Nadine, two fans, lots of electricity. What did she care, with all her money? He couldn’t tell her that one fan pushed the hot air over him, and the other over the deep bottom drawer to the old dresser that was filled with a wadded-up satin bedspread he’d found in the cupboard, and the baby he’d found in a box.
“What is it you want?” he’d said in an angry whisper one night just after four in the morning. “What the hell is your problem?” It was as if, unformed as she was, she could read the rough anger beneath the words. The incessant crying turned to choppy wails and she began to scream until she was gasping for breath, her face as brightly colored as his sunburn. He wanted to shake her. Instead he took her into a room at the back of the apartment that had one small window facing toward the fields; in it there was only a daybed and he laid her on it, closed the door, and walked up and down the hallway. “I can’t do this,” he whispered to himself. “I can’t. I just can’t.” After ten minutes he went back in and lifted her to his shoulder. “I can’t do this,” he said. Her face was wet against his neck. “This is nuts,” he muttered. “This is really crazy.” Four A.M. and the darkness had a quality of inexorability and menace as though it would never lift, as though, without anyone noticing it, the dawn of the day before had been the beginning of the last light ever in the history of the world. He finally felt the baby go limp as a half-spilled sack of flour just as he looked out the bathroom window and saw a line of blue-gray appear around the edge of the pond, signaling dawn.
He could not have said when it was exactly that he decided to keep her, or why. It made no sense. He’d never thought much about having children, and having one now would cause considerable trouble, as he’d already learned. But he knew that there were things that seemed lunatic to the world that you decided to do anyhow. That was what his father must have felt, working as a long-distance trucker, seeing less and less of his son, meeting a woman who was waiting tables at the restaurant in the Quality Inn near Tampa, finding out once again how it felt to roll over in bed and find the sheets no longer cold, deciding to stay in Florida although he had a house and a son a thousand miles north.
Or maybe it was the damn dog he kept thinking about. Over the years whenever they’d passed a farm in his uncle’s truck he’d stared out the window at the barns and the fields and the long gravel drives and looked for an old beagle basking in the sun. He just wished there’d been something permanent about his life, something he could look at or hold or keep in his dresser drawer that spoke of years of cereal breakfasts, after-school milk, homework at the kitchen table, family trips to the county fair, or just those moments before sleep when the ceiling of your room was as familiar as your face in the mirror.
There was no premium in it for him. He was certain there’d be trouble if anyone found out, and he was certain that sooner or later Mrs. Blessing or Nadine or someone would hear a noise in the night or see the dome of the head peeking from the neck of his shirt.
But a couple of days in, he’d realized that, no matter how often and how haphazardly he put his index finger in her creased little palm, she would surround it with her fingers like a greeting. “Your baby will hold tight to your hand!” the book burbled, and without realizing it he’d fixed on that one word, the word your. Or maybe it wasn’t that at all. Maybe it was when he was raking out the old branches underneath the stand of birch trees along the fence that bordered Rolling Hills Road and was surprised by a small sound, like the one the deer made when they were startled, and realized that she had sneezed.
“Bless you,” he murmured, and when he knocked off at the end of the day he looked up “colds” in the book’s index.
Maybe he didn’t really have a choice, like so many people who wound up with children haphazardly, accidentally. When he thought of what else he could do, he could imagine only various cold and cruelly lit rooms that smelled of disinfectant. The hospital in Mount Mason, where he’d had his leg set when he was fourteen and his burns treated when the deep-fat fryer at Burger King spit back at his scrawny bicep just before closing one night,
leaving a magenta blot. The police station, that looked like an elementary school and smelled like one, too, Lysol and fried food and cigarettes, where he’d sat on a bench with his hands cuffed behind him after the robbery. The courthouse, that had been refurbished in the sixties, so that it was still a grand limestone hulk without but inside a maze of particle-board paneling and checkerboard linoleum and gray metal desks.
He wasn’t taking anybody to any of those places, those places of impermanence and phony concern. He might as well drop this baby down a well and listen for the splash. He knew those people. They’d piss away a couple of years, passing around paper, looking for a mother who just wanted to be left in peace. The little girl would be three years old and still living in some lousy foster home with people who spent the money the state sent on Camel Lights and a satellite dish.
He bought some disposable cameras, and he took her picture, sleeping, waking, even screaming. Her angry maroon color had faded, by the beginning of the second week, to an almost ghostly white with a faint mottling of pink, like the flowers on the magnolia trees along the drive. Her umbilical cord fell off, scaring the hell out of him until he saw the small neat navel in its place, and he took the barrette that had been clipped to the cord, and the cardboard box, and the flannel shirt, and put them all together on the top shelf of the closet in the back room. He put the cameras next to them. He was constructing a history for her the way he wished someone had constructed one for him.
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