“Now I gotta go back all the way to North Sterns to let you off. We all know you got a brain in that head of yours, little girl, you use it now.”
“I’m sorry, Tiny.”
Tiny revved the engine so I could feel it throb under my feet. I watched Tiny’s hand go back and forth from the bag to his mouth. When I got off he smiled at me. Little pointy black teeth.
You would not have known it to look at him, but the old man was a hero. In his life, he was a savior of babies, treed cats, and victims of natural disaster. In large and small ways and always for the better, the old man changed the lives of those who encountered him. I used to sit across from the old man at his cigarette-burned kitchen table and picture him as a young man, doing his heroic deeds.
The old man, as a young man, once saved a baby from drowning. Back where the old man came from, in his country that doesn’t exist anymore, natural disasters were not a rarity. Spring floods, winter storms, summer tornadoes: these were the realities of the old-man-as-a-young-man’s life.
Once, when the old man was only eleven, a spring flood came that was worse than the village had ever known. Flood legends that went back hundreds of years in the life of the village did not begin to match the enormity of what the old man and the villagers were seeing. The dikes, which were constructed of flower-patterned flour sacks stuffed with sand, gave way. Angry gray water foaming with yellow spume and filled with debris and broken dishes spewed over the top of the banks and exploded through the streets of the town.
“Georg! Climb to the roof!”
That was Georg’s mother calling to him, frantic that her son be safe in the face of the water that threatened to overtake him. Georg, heeding his mother’s cry, swiftly climbed the wooden peg ladder that leaned against the loft of the hut in which he lived with his parents.
“Where is Papa?” he shouted to his mother as he climbed.
“Still in the forge!” his mother called back.
Clutching her apron filled with the family’s most treasured possessions—a Bible, three silver forks, the white baby dress that Georg, and later his brother Eli had been christened in—Georg’s mother climbed after him. Together they huddled on the thatched roof of their cottage, holding hands and silently praying.
Remember, the old man was only eleven.
The roar of the water drowned out almost all other sound. For hours Georg and his mother crouched on the thatch, made slippery by the rain that accompanied the flood. The sky was dark and heavy with water. All around them the people of the village, neighbors they had known all their lives, huddled on their own roofs. On one, an old woman had managed to shove her pig through a hole in the thatch. She tethered him to the chimney with a rope and knelt next to him as he squealed and tried to push away the leash with his snout.
“Where, is, Papa?” Georg called again. Even though his mother was next to him, holding his hand, he had to yell because the noise of the thunder and rain and racing water drowned out sound.
His mother looked at him and said nothing. She shook her head.
“Pray,” she said.
Then Georg’s sharp ears heard a cry that was not of the wind or water. So faintly that he could not be sure he’d actually heard it, the cry of a newborn came drifting past. Borne on the wind of the storm, the cry was gone almost before it came. In the next moment it came again, and then again.
There’s a baby out there, Georg thought.
He looked at his mother, her eyes closed tight against the driving rain and the tears that were blinding her. Across the street now filled by raging floodwaters, the old woman had put her arms around her pig and was holding it as if it were a child. The infant’s cry came again, and young Georg felt his heart contract. He crouched and scanned the surrounding huts. Where was the child? The cry came again, and it was then that he saw her. Wrapped in a yellow blanket, placed in the forked limb of a black locust tree, as if someone in great haste had tried to do the one thing she could think of to save her child. Georg knew that it was up to him and him alone to bring the child to safety. Who else was there? Who else had heard the child’s cry?
His mother had buried her head in her hands by then. Unseeing, unhearing, she was lost in a chanted prayer for Georg’s father, still at the forge.
Quickly, before he lost his courage, Georg scrambled back into the loft and then down the peg ladder into the kitchen. Water had reached the halfway mark of the wall, and Georg lost his footing. Before he was swept under and out the door, he managed to take off his boots and soaked tunic. Then he was in the water, and part of the flood.
Getting across the street, which had become a torrent of water and debris, took many minutes. Every time he was swept under the surface of the frantic water, Georg held his breath and struggled to find his footing, struggled to the top again, gasped in a great lungful of air and shook the water from his eyes.
The baby cried, and cried again. Led by the thin wail of the baby’s fear and sorrow, Georg found himself at the scarred trunk of the black locust, fighting to stay upright. Above him the faded yellow of the blanket hung suspended in the crotch of the tree. A tattered corner dangled in front of his reaching fingertips. The baby’s cry was the cry of all babies, lost and alone and bereft. If I could just reach that baby, if I could just—
Do you see how it happens? Can you feel it growing inside your own heart? An old man tilts his shoulder in a certain way, or rubs his eye, and then it all comes over you. The yellow blanket, the raging floodwaters, a boy’s mother crouched on a thatched roof crying for her lost husband. It all comes tumbling out.
The real story of my birth is that there was no midwife.
Angelica Rose Beaudoin, American Midwife, never lived or breathed. She never delivered two twin girls in a truck in the ditch in the middle of winter. She never stayed with my grandfather and Tamar, sharing her chocolate bars and telling jokes and stories, making sure Tamar was resting and recovering and not bleeding to death, until the Glass Factory Road snowplow came through. It never happened.
There was only Tamar and my grandfather and me: me crying, Tamar half-passed-out and bleeding, my grandfather not knowing what to do with my baby sister who lay wrapped in a scrap of blanket on the seat between them.
That’s what I see when I think of the story of my birth. That’s why I prefer to think about Angelica Rose Beaudoin, the brave young midwife.
Had there been an Angelica Rose Beaudoin, she would have seen immediately what the problem was. A trained midwife would have known what to do. She would have breathed life into my sister, rubbed her tiny chest, warmed her until she was a living being. The midwife would have stripped off the space blanket her husband had packed for her in the recycled coffee can emergency road kit, wrapped my sister up in it and handed her to my grandfather, who would have cradled her and rocked her.
Then I would have been born. I would have been strong and healthy, screaming from the first. A healthy baby girl, the midwife would have said to Tamar. Two healthy baby girls. A story with a happy ending, the kind of sixth-grade fake book report that my teachers would give me an A on.
It was the dead of winter, a February blizzard. Tamar couldn’t get to the hospital, that was the whole problem. Her father was driving her in his truck. This was in the days before four-wheel drive. That’s what Tamar said the one time I heard her talking to the choir director about it on the phone. She said, “Now there’s four-wheel drive. That would have made all the difference.” She had me and my twin sister in a ditch halfway to the hospital in Utica. Tamar couldn’t hold us in. When babies want to be born they will be born. Nothing can stop them.
“We were born before four-wheel drive,” I said.
The old man nodded.
“The problem is that they never should have taken Glass Factory,” I said. “In a blizzard you never take Glass Factory. You take Route 12. You get to the hospital sooner. You don’t wait until the last minute. You don’t take Glass Factory hoping to save half a mile, hoping that some
midwife will just happen to be passing by in the middle of a blizzard.”
I had a twin sister. I think about her all the time.
If she were alive, people would talk about us in a different way. It would be “Tamar and her girls,” “Miss Winter and the twins,” “Tamar Winter and her daughters.” Tamar refused to name my sister when she was born dead. Bad luck, she said. But what I believe to be true is that all babies should have a name. When I think about my sister, there is no name attached to my thoughts. She is nameless. All I see in my mind is ________, which I have changed to Baby Girl.
Tamar never told me about my sister. If it had not been for the choir director, I would still be living my life knowing that something was missing but not knowing that something was my twin sister.
“Your mother has a beautiful voice,” the choir director said to me when I was nine years old, before I met the old man, when I used to have to sit in the sanctuary listening to the choir practice.
“Do you have a beautiful voice, too?” she asked me.
“Mediocre,” I said, which is true.
“Imagine if you had a beautiful voice and your poor dead twin had had a beautiful voice,” the choir director said. “The Twin Churches would have soared with the angelic voices of the three Winter women.”
That’s how the choir director talks.
“That poor baby,” the choir director said. “She never had a chance, did she?”
I shook my head. I said nothing. I waited for more, but none was forthcoming. Even though I was only nine at the time and Tamar had never mentioned a word, I knew that what the choir director said was true. I had a twin. I could feel it in my bones.
My baby sister was dead, my chickens wanted to kill me, and the old man came from a country that doesn’t exist anymore. Those were the kinds of secrets that I used to write down on my spool of green adding-machine paper, on Wednesday night when I visited the old man in his trailer. Soon I had unspooled enough paper to make several curls. Enough to hang to the floor.
I wish now that I had told the old man about CJ Wilson and the other boys and Tiny and the chickens. I wish that one cold night when my chickens were just beginning to be mean, and Tamar was at choir practice, and I had made the old man his coffee and me my hot chocolate, and we were sitting at his kitchen table and I was eating my toast spread with an inordinate amount of margarine and he was stirring his coffee with the handle of his spoon, I had told the old man everything.
Tamar says I’m crazy. Tamar says, That baby was dead before she was born. Tamar says, Give up.
But my sister was alive before she was dead, wasn’t she? She grew the same as me, swimming around in a little water world. We knew each other. We touched each other. We would have been together forever.
Winter killed my baby sister. Not only was she my twin sister; she was my identical twin. I can feel that in my bones, too. If it hadn’t been a blizzard, and if the truck hadn’t gone off the road into the ditch, and if the plow hadn’t chosen to do Route 12 before Glass Factory Road, my mother, Tamar, and my grand father would have gotten to the hospital on time and my twin sister and I would have been born in the hospital and my sister would have lived. This is what I believe to be true.
“My mother didn’t name my sister,” I told the old man after we were compadres. “She did not give her own child a name. Is that even a possibility?”
“Anything’s a possibility,” the old man said.
“But she buried her,” I said. “You don’t bury someone unless you think of her as someone. If she was someone enough to bury, she was someone enough to have a name.”
“You don’t know what was going through your mother’s head.”
“But her own child?”
“She was not your child, she was your sister,” the old man said. “There’s a difference.”
My sister is stuck forever at the spot where she was born. She was born there and she died there, while I lived and grew. I’m still growing. There’s no telling how tall I’ll be when all’s said and done.
Tamar doesn’t have the memory to connect her September blue sky and the smell of autumn leaves with the coming snow and what it means. She pushes it out of her mind. She pretends there never was another baby. She pretends that I was the only one. You don’t have a sister, she says, stop dragging her into conversation all the time.
“But what would you have named her?” I used to ask her.
I can’t help it. I’ve got to know.
“I wouldn’t have named her anything,” Tamar says. “She was born dead. And that’s the end of it.”
“But what if?” I say. “What if? Just tell me. Just give her a name.”
She doesn’t answer. She never answers. She has condemned me forever to think of my sister as Blank.
“She wasn’t ever alive!” Tamar says. “Get it through your head, Clara. You never had a sister.”
I did, though. She swam beside me for nine months. We might have held hands inside Tamar’s womb. Our noses might have touched. She might have played a game with me, pushing me around with her tiny unborn foot.
If you have seen a death certificate, you know what a small piece of paper it is. If you have ever searched your mother’s bureau drawer for something that would be proof of your twin sister’s existence, you might have been surprised at how small and simple a death certificate is. You don’t even have to put someone’s name down on a death certificate. If the person who died was a baby, all you have to put is “Baby” and the baby’s last name. For example, “Baby Girl Winter.”
If only the snow hadn’t been blowing horizontally the way it does in an upstate New York blizzard, if my grandfather had only been able to rock his truck out of the ditch. If only Tamar hadn’t mistaken early labor pains for indigestion and started for Utica sooner, if only we had just managed to stay inside her belly instead of forcing our way out. If only Angelica Rose Beaudoin, American Midwife, had been a real person.
But that’s a different story. That’s the story I would have written myself: my twin sister and I alive together, each the other’s half, one child under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all. That’s the kind of book report I would have written, if I had made up a book about me and my sister.
“I want my sister,” I said. “I want Baby Girl Winter.”
The old man said nothing. He got up and carried his coffee cup and the plate that my sugar cookie had been on to his miniature sink. He put the stopper in and squeezed one small squirt of dish soap into the sink, then ran hot water. I watched him do that the exact same way every single time I ever visited the old man.
Chapter Five
What sorts of books are placed by garbage cans on garbage night in the town of Sterns? Mainly they’re old class books, the kind people carry around in boxes in their basements for twenty years and then one day think: I will never again in my entire life open this book and there is no sense in its taking up valuable space in my basement, and they throw them out. Right out by the garbage cans they put them, in cardboard boxes with the bottoms falling out.
Books should not ever be treated that way. It’s a sin to treat a book that way. That’s what I believe to be true.
The world of my childhood is behind me now. I am no longer a child and I have put away childish things. But childish things come back to haunt you. The destruction of books is something I would not have visited upon even my most hated enemy. Had you asked me, I would have termed myself incapable of such an act.
There it is, though: I was a book ripper.
It hurts me now to think about it. I can’t remember the actual ripping as I was only a baby. At most, a very small child. Tamar told me about it on a day when I came to her holding a library book that someone had written in in purple magic marker. Not only that, but the top corner of each page had been creased, folded over in a triangle as if every page was a bookmark. It had to be the same magic marker person. A maniac.
“How can someone do this?” I said to T
amar.
She was making split pea soup, the only item of food that she actually cooks from scratch. A soup I like to eat but hate the smell of while it’s cooking.
“Ma? Look.”
I showed her the book, each page corner worn and creased, purple magic marker underlining certain paragraphs.
“And the thing is, the paragraphs that this person underlined don’t even stand out,” I said. “There’s not one thing special about any of these underlined paragraphs.”
Tamar took a cursory look. How I love that word. There may not be anyone in the world who loves the word cursory as much as I do. That’s how I am about certain words.
“See what I mean?”
“Doesn’t look so bad to me,” she said. “Considering how you used to rip books to pieces when you were a baby.”
She dumped two cupfuls of tiny hard green peas into the giant pot she makes soup in. They sank to the bottom with a clattering sound. Immediately the boiling water in the pot stopped boiling. It settled down and became ferociously quiet, working hard to start boiling again. The quietness of the once-boiling water made it seem as if the water was too busy to make noise. I mean business is what is meant by that absence of sound.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“You,” she said. “Clara Winter, defender of books. You used to rip them to shreds. Drove me crazy.”
The water in the pot began to hum in a sinister way. A low, gathering hum, bringing itself back to a boil as if getting ready to go off to war.
“Any kind of book,” she said. “Your baby books, my books, books belonging to other people. You’d rip the cover to pieces, then you’d start on the insides. You were possessed.”
She took a bite of honey toast, a big one right out of the folded-over middle. That’s something about Tamar. She greatly prefers the soft middle of bread, but she would not admit it, nor would she ever not eat her crusts. On her deathbed, Tamar will be finishing her crusts. That’s the kind of person she is.
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