by Joan Connor
Halfbaby doesn’t eat breakfast, just juice and coffee. Morning food makes her sloggy, like bees are droning in her head. She likes her head clear and light so that she can see time. She’s as thin as Rockmother is fat, looks more kin to the three sisters who are spindle thin like cob dolls, than she does to Rockmother.
Mornings, after she cleans the dishes, she likes to sit in the attic. Used to be mornings she had home school with Rockmother, doing figures and letters. Rockmother liked reading the horse hide Bible, where there’s a book named for her—not the Book of Rockmother, the Book of Ruth, her name before she hardened. Ruthmother.
Halfbaby liked the reading better than the figures. She never had knack with numbers. She thinks some people think numbers, some think words, or maybe scenes. The Cole boy used to think numbers, maybe he still did over on the mainland, counting like he used to do here: I been to the mainland twenty-two times this year. That spool’s got a good four yards yet. Takes twenty minutes to walk to the pier, twenty-four in snow.
He knew degrees Fahrenheit, the pound weight and ages of people he talked about, their shoe sizes, how many lamp posts and mail boxes lined the back cove road. He must have spent his whole life counting. When he talked to Halfbaby, his numbers made her dizzy. They cluttered her up.
The attic clutter didn’t make her dizzy. She knew everything that was there even if she didn’t count it up. From the high window she could see the bay, and the light from the window raised swirls of sequiny dust. Rockmother’s brace was there, the one for her back.The doctor made her wear it, her back bad, he said, because she was carrying two people in weight. Halfbaby can remember her wearing it like a skeleton on the outside of her body. But Rockmother outgrew it long ago, grew a third person, and Halfbaby can’t believe that it ever snapped around her like a slatted coat. Sometimes she crawls into it and lies on her back, imagining her stomach pouching out, her breasts swelling and swelling until she fills the brace like her own rib cage. But Rockmother even then was twice the woman she is.
She sits in the attic now, thinking about chickens in the poppies run red riot around the marsh farm, and she laughs again thinking about how they walk in two directions at once. Did the tail lead the head or the head the tail?
She can smell the varnish cracking on the high chair, feel the decal of the puddle duck curling from the wood. Someday she’d be sitting in the attic and the decal would be gone, finally crackled into paper, into dust. Then it could spangle the window light, settle in the floor crevices.
There’s a pile of guano on the floor by the chimney where the bats hang and a neat little pile of delicate bones—mice? voles?—where a barn owl nested once before they puttied glass back into the window frame. She doesn’t disturb it. Bones at rest. Pyramids of bones as delicate as ivory straws.
Hornets’ nests whisper, their papery cones hanging like bells on the framing ribs. A few water stains near the chimney. Some mortar unchinked and gravelly on the floor.
There’s an old immigrant’s trunk, its top mounded to shed water, and stuffed with Rockmother’s important papers, some old silvery photographs, some papers inked with letters that look like they were written with spider webs. Brown ink on papers as yellow as cream or old tea gloves. Another trunk of linens Rockmother says that she doesn’t need but won’t throw away. Nobody throws away anything on an island. Somebody took too many pains getting them there in the first place. So the linens wait, staining themselves with patience. Time itself could leave watermarks, Halfbaby knew.
A neat row of shoes, leather curing in the attic heat, wrapped, almost wrapped, in newspaper, the pages uncurling. Time has busy hands. Leather is cured now, but Rockmother’s plump feet outgrew the shoes some time ago. Time cures leather and people, Halfbaby knows, hardens them rather than heals them. Cures, cures. The word means twice at once.
Time cures the soaps too, drilled and strung on a rope to dry because it makes the soap last longer, Rockmother says. Enough soap that it will be living here long after she and Rockmother are gone; it gets that hard—like trying to wash with granite.
She rocks the cradle of the back brace with her hand. When it is time for lunch, the window light will cross the first wooden rib of the linen trunk and Halfbaby will bump down the ladder steep steps. And then it’s time.
Lunch is cheese sandwiches but first she has to trim the rind like the heel calluses on Rockmother’s feet. Beneath the crust, the flesh of the cheddar is still fresh. Rockmother’s feet harden under her weight, and Halfbaby has to peel them, too, Rockmother lying face down on the quilt while Halfbaby pares with her sharpest knife. Sometimes Rockmother complains, but Halfbaby knows that she feels it about as much as a mussel shell feels the shucking knife, not at all. Rockmother’s flesh is dead and crumbles in her fingers.
Halfbaby watches the chopping blade ease through the firm cheddar. But then she’s gone. Watching something else. A boat, prow up, just the bow poking up like a shrine in the phragmites which are rustling, gossipy, over the tip. Clam flats. She can whiff the secret rich muck of it.
“Halfbaby, how you coming with that sandwich?” Rockmother is trying to call her back to herself. The grandmother rocker creaks; it’s called a grandmother because it crouches close to the floor. When Rockmother sits in it, Halfbaby can’t see the stencil on the black top slat, but she knows that it’s there. Its feathery, faded gold, twin daisy eyes like the egg yolks, petals spoking out into a pattern of repeating twinned leaves, which diminish as they repeat until they stop.
Halfbaby’s rehearsing the stencil. The slab of cheese stands against the blade.
“I said, Halfbaby, how you coming with that lunch?”
And then the slice of cheese is in her hand, and her hand is laying the cheese out nicely on a bed of white bread, and Rockmother is grunting and creaking again.
“I found his boat,” she says.
“How about you find yourself some butter and grill me up that sandwich,” Rockmother says.
Rockmother’s voice is mad, but she isn’t. Not really. More like the warning growl from a fear-biting dog; they don’t mean it. Rockmother’s voice knows that she is having one of her spells. That’s what Rockmother calls them. But they aren’t spells. More like side trips. Like time took a side trip and landed at Halfbaby’s door, asking for directions. Problem is that Halfbaby never knows where they come from or where they’re going. They’re just there.
Rockmother tolerates the spells, because people come to Halfbaby for her second sight. That’s what they call it, second sight, though Halfbaby isn’t sure if she is seeing first or second, forwards or backwards. She just sees. And people pay her for seeing.
After lunch people come to the parlor and want Halfbaby to see. Sometimes she sees; sometimes she doesn’t. But Rockmother makes them pay her whichever way. Butter money.
There’s an expression makes Halfbaby laugh—when the minister’s wife said, “Why I have half a mind to tell her what I think.” Halfbaby knew that wasn’t what she meant. She laughed because she knew all about half a mind. She lives in the half mind, half here, half somewhere else, another place or time. Above-stairs, below-stairs. Attic and parlor. Here and there. But she doesn’t know if, like the yolks, they split or join. But she thinks that it is why she’s Halfbaby. Either that she is something extra or she is something missing. Phantom pain, the way she thinks that an amputated leg must feel, or the amputee. But it isn’t pain. It can’t be pain because it makes her laugh. She is laughing now as she butters the bread, laughing at the minister’s wife who doesn’t know that she is being funny when she speaks with half her mind.
And Rockmother says, “There’s places for people who laugh at nothing.” And her voice still burrs like a fear-biter’s. But she doesn’t mean it. She likes the butter money. And Halfbaby slaps the bread onto the hot skillet and it sizzles, and Rockmother rocks, and the afternoon pours honey thick into the room.
Later Cap Dobbins will knock on the door and Halfbaby will help him find his boat.
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Halfbaby sits on the cracked leather of the mahogany chair in the parlor, waiting for Cap. Rockmother is letting herself smother the red settee, her laps spilling out to the sides. Halfbaby is holding herself very still like a cup of tea on a tray. She is waiting to see.
“You having a spell?” Rockmother asks.
But it never happens like that. She doesn’t have spells; more like the spells have her. It’s like opening a door in your own house and finding a corridor there that you didn’t know was there. Like you scale the ladder steps and open the attic door only it’s the cellar, and not your cellar, but somebody’s because you can smell the use—the sweet rot of forgotten onions, coal dust, rust on the lids of the canning jars. Somebody’s been here. Somebody besides you. Somebody is beside you although you are there, too. Like a hand slipped into someone else’s glove, a second skin seamed taut over your own.
Halfbaby has a trick to ready herself. She tries to remember backward. Sometimes it helps when her mother rocks, the grunt, and creak, and rock of wood on wood, but there’s no rocker in the parlor, so Halfbaby has to play her trick on herself. She tries to remember backward, all the way back to the midwife giving Rockmother her name when her name still was Ruth. But she can’t get that far. She can only get as far back as when the words stop. Or before they begin. She is staring at the ceiling, only she doesn’t know the word. She is just staring. Light plays over the ceiling, and neither light nor ceiling have names. They are just what they are. But the light tumbles, and Halfbaby hears herself laugh. Then a face blocks out the light. The face is very close. Her hands are before the face. The face is Rockmother’s only not hard yet, Ruth’s. The light seems to be sparking from her hair which is yellow, not white. And the lips, the mouth mean something. But she doesn’t have the language for what they mean. Then the face is gone.
Rockmother says, “You there yet?”
But she isn’t. You can’t force it. It’d be like opening the attic door at night. She never goes into the attic at night. No light. She waits for the light, or the lightness. Her stomach feels hollow. She never eats until after the parlor. Supper, she eats. But not breakfast, not lunch. But she likes to cook for Rockmother. She is laughing now at the cheese rind.
Rockmother says, “Don’t go simple on me.”
But she’s not. She’s not simple. She’s just waiting for time to stop scratching around, to figure out like a chicken which way it’s headed.
When Cap knocks on the door, she feels a little thrill trill up her spine. She always feels like this when Rockmother brings people into the parlor, because she tries to see what they see, what she and Rockmother look like from outside. She tries to see their squat house with the peely paint, and rotted pilasters on the widow’s walk all rotten and askew, leaning like rum-mies against each other in the wind. She tries to see herself with her eyes closed, sitting straight-backed in the chair at the table. The globe of the hurricane lamp unlit. Rockmother humping herself onto the settee. But she cannot see herself from the outside; it all feels inside to Halfbaby.
She opens her eyes, and Cap is there. He wears a buffalo plaid jacket, a matching cap bunched in his hand. He has a lazy smile. She smiles back. He likes her. Halfbaby is pretty, she knows, because the Cole boy told her so when he was building the gates to keep the sisters in the house. Rockmother came and got her and told him to build himself a gate, but Rockmother didn’t need to worry. The Cole boy was old even then, before he went to the mainland. Halfbaby didn’t care about any old man like Cole boy. But she likes Cap’s lazy smile, and his eyes. They have no hurry-up about them.
But Rockmother’s all hurry-up. She says, “Sit down and get on with it. We haven’t got all day.”
But he moves slow into the matching chair at the table like he knows otherwise, like he knows all day is exactly what they’ve got.
“I’ve seen your boat,” Halfbaby’s says. “Least I think it’s yours.”
“Have you now,” he says and slaps his hat on the table, and it seems like too much gesture for Rockmother because Halfbaby hears her flap and re-form under her dress like startled jello.
“I think so.”
“Don’t that beat all. Where you see it?”
Halfbaby shakes her head, just half a shake. “In the reeds. Clam flats. I can smell some pogies rotting.”
“Jeezum,” Cap says. “That’s not much help. Could be anywhere.”
“Could be anywhere but it’s not,” Rockmother says. “It’s not on the ocean.”
Cap twists away from Halfbaby and she can feel the cords tighten in his neck. “That’s like saying it’s not on the moon.”
She feels his cords tighten on her neck now. Then she’s there and not there. But it’s not the boat. Not mud. She sees. Sees some other darkness. But it’s muck, too. Smells blood. But not clean like blood—salt and metal—sharp and used up like ammonia, like cellars. She can’t breathe. Choking on blood and that smell and the one who lies beside her, choking her, choking with her?
Cap says, “Mud. Mud is everywhere. Reeds everywhere too. How do I know that it’s even my boat.”
Halfbaby’s trying hard to breathe, sees red, tastes red, her mouth gaping. She feels like a fish from the inside. Hooked. Hook with a rusty barb. Mouth full of rust.
“See what you’re doing,” Rockmother says. “See what you’re doing to the girl.”
“Girl, shit. She’s older than I am.”
The room bulges. Halfbaby feels like a jellied eye centering the room which curves away from her everywhere. Rockmother is grunting, but it is taking her a long time to get up. Then she’s up and pulling Halfbaby’s hands away from her neck where she’s clawing herself. Rockmother’s trying to unbend her hands, saying “See what you done.”
Cap is still smiling lazy at her when she comes back. He’s shaking his head. “Quite a show you put on.”
Halfbaby feels the sucking squooshy sound that the mud makes when it releases your boot and then she can see the umbrella tree and she knows where she is. “The hook,” she says. Her breath comes hard. “Your boat’s free. It’s down by the hook. The silty side. Blue boat,” she says. “Blue boat.”
“I’ll be damned.” Cap is standing. His hat is on his head, one ear flap jutting out. He’s unfolding money into Rockmother’s hand. Her hand looks yeasty, unbaked next to his. His hand is chap-hard and the nails are rimmed with grease. Dark crescent moons.
Halfbaby thinks that, flap down, he looks like a half-basset, but he is gone before she can say so. Gone hunting, half-hunting like half-bassett. Then Rockmother is stroking her neck and saying, “I thought that you were going to strangle yourself the way you went at your throat.”
Halfbaby swallows the half-bassett howl. Halfbaby is tired and hungry. Long trail. Too long. “I went too far,” she says. “I went too far back.”
And Rockmother is trying to shush her, stroking her hands. Her hands feel wet and sweet on Halfbaby’s, the way grape mash feels before it’s jelly.
“I’m not sure about the boat,” Halfbaby says. “I’m half sure, but I’m not sure.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Rockmother says. “He only gave me three dollars.You get what you pay for.”
Then Halfbaby hears Rockmother clattering in the kitchen. Rockmother will fix her supper—maybe beans, she’s very handy with beans—and brown bread, always brown bread with beans. A double yolk, lucky dinner. And then one of the sisters will stray by as they sometimes do and that will be today.
Then Halfbaby can dream like she does when she’s awake only no one will pay her. And she won’t need to worry about whose dreams they are and where they come from because she’ll be asleep. Maybe she’ll dream the blue boat. Blue boat. Maybe she won’t. Wherever the blue boat is, that’s where it is.
The sisters do not stray over. There is supper, brown bread, baked beans, grilled ham. Rockmother counts the butter money while Halfbaby washes the dishes, then goes to bed. In bed Halfbaby waits for sleep. She runs her finger down the se
am on her side. She cannot see it because she cannot see herself from the outside, but she knows that it is there because she can feel it with her finger, a seam like a seam in a glove running up and down. She thinks that it must be how the dreams sneak in while she sleeps. The way a tide noses a blue boat out or in. The way a stain weaves into linen, ink into paper. A seam in time.Yolks in a bowl staring cross-eyed at the flour sifting down.
It snows. Halfbaby wakes up to snow. That cannot be right. There are still flowers snaggling the gardens at the marsh farm, but there they are, heads poking up through the snow. So it snows.
Rockmother is already downstairs. She isn’t waiting for Halfbaby. Halfbaby smells bacon.
“It snowed,” Rockmother says when she enters. “Means hard winter. I’m going on the ferry to get a few things. Be gone all day. You stay inside till I get back.”
Halfbaby nods. She wants to be cooking the bacon instead of Rockmother. She doesn’t want to go outside. Rockmother’s boots flap around her ankles where she can’t close the zippers. An egg plops onto the skillet beside the bacon, shrivels. A single yolk.
“No luck” she says.
But Rockmother hears ‘no lock’. “No lock,” she says, “but you don’t have to let anyone in. No one will be out in the snow anyway.”
But Halfbaby knows that it isn’t true because Rockmother is going out. Then she does.
Halfbaby watches her tracks in the snow filling up till she can no longer see tracks. But then the sun cracks out. Cracks like an egg. Rainbows sparkle everywhere on the snow. She watches. Then no rainbows, no snow, just the tracks, little mounds of footed snow, mashed, leading away from the house. The world is wet and shiny.
Halfbaby watches the world from the attic window. Snow, then puddles. Some of the flowers shake themselves in the marsh farm gardens, unbending, standing up straight again. Slowly. The air is damp, sunny, and cool. It is fall, but it smells like spring. One of the sisters tilts outside, her black triangle of a coat sharp against the white clapboard of the farm. First, she looks like a wet leaf on a stick, then closer, larger, like a scarecrow but with a hat like a crow, trim and black, feathered. Then close up, she is Lily. Then gone. Halfbaby cannot see her, but she hears a knock on the door. When she opens the door, Lily is in the parlor.