“To replace your missing earring,” he said.
“This is not the sort of lantern I intended,” I said. “You said you’d make me a lantern earring. This is a real lantern.”
He had made it out of my leftover plum tomato cans, the ones I had strung in his weeping willow. You could still see the red tomato labeling on the inside of the lantern. He had punched holes into it in decorative patterns, like the kind of decorative patterns the pioneers used to make. I had seen these patterns in old library books. The old man had cut thin strips of aluminum from the cans and curled them into little curlicues and attached them to the top and bottom of the lantern for decoration. He had put a nail into the bottom of the lantern and spiked a candle on the nail. He had made a carrying handle for the lantern out of twisted wire.
“This is not an earring,” I said.
“Lanterns should be useful as well as beautiful,” the old man said.
I thought of my missing lantern earring, sinking ever deeper into the snow and mud. I imagined floodwaters sweeping it away, helpless in the torrent, down the Nine Mile Creek and into the Utica floodplain. Swamp gas enveloping my lovely earring in its evil vapors. Swamp worms curving around it, thinking it was some kind of treasure.
The old man took one of his furnace matches, gigantic long ones, and lit the candle. It was getting dark outside. Across Nine Mile Creek I could see the stained-glass windows of the church where Tamar and the other choir people were practicing. The old man put the lantern on the kitchen table and turned out all the lights. We sat there at his table looking at the lantern. He had punched winter into the lantern: snowflakes, stars, a snowman.
“I hate winter,” I said. “I hate snow. Winter is what killed Baby Girl.”
The old man turned the lantern around. On the other side he’d punched in summer: a sun with big rays, a flower, a robin. Across Nine Mile Creek the stained-glass windows went dark. Tamar would be driving up to the trailer park in exactly six minutes. She’s never late.
“This is a pioneer lantern,” the old man said. “For doing winter chores.”
“But what I wanted was a new lantern earring for my one remaining lantern.”
“It never would have been an exact match,” he said. “It never would have been the original.”
He turned the lantern around. Winter shone out at me. He turned it again, and it was summer. Outside the trailer it was pitch black. Tamar would be driving up in exactly three minutes. She would honk the horn and reach across to open up the door for me. It doesn’t open from the outside anymore. The old man turned the lantern around and kept on turning it. The candle stayed steady. It was stuck firmly on its spike. Stars turned into sun, snowflakes into flowers, a snowman was a robin with a big fat worm. I stared at the turning lantern. I held my head straight and did not blink, trying hard to train my eyes to see the possibility of beauty.
Chapter Six
Tamar has a father, which means that I have a grandfather. If A is Tamar, and B is her father, and C is me, the relationship is mathematically clear. He was in the truck when I was born in the blizzard.
“He lives way up in the Adirondacks,” Tamar said years ago, when I first asked her about him and she forbade me to mention him ever again. “Near the Vermont border. And that’s all you need to know.”
Way up in the Adirondacks near the Vermont border sounds like hermit territory to me. Is my grandfather a hermit? Why not? Nary a single visit to his only living granddaughter makes my grandfather a hermit in my book.
My grandfather lives in a tent in the middle of a primeval forest in the Adirondacks. You may think that upstate New York has no primeval forests left. You may think that there are no primeval forests on the east coast of America, nor in the middle west, nor on the west coast with the exception of the ones in Oregon and Washington that everyone knows about.
You would be wrong.
There is a small primeval forest in the hermit country of upstate New York, just before the Vermont border. It is composed of old-growth trees, trees that are more than five hundred years old. These trees have existed since before the American Revolutionary War. They were here when Columbus sailed onto Plymouth Rock, if he actually did. They were here for the Civil War. The Green Mountain Boys snuck through this primeval forest on their way to fight the graycoats.
Am I telling the truth?
I very well may be.
Who would know?
Is there anyone who has inspected every square inch of the Adirondack Park? Have helicopters and airplanes and surveyors and bloodhounds straining at the leash and hikers and campers and forest rangers mapped out every square inch of the Empire State? Has every square inch been traversed and retraversed? Is there anyone alive who can say with absolute certainty: “No. Not one square inch of Adirondack woods consists of primeval forest.”
Do you see what I mean?
The truth can be sought. The truth can be hunted down. The truth can be your one and only rule, but it is slippery. It hides. You think you’ve got it pinned down, but you don’t.
When I first started imagining my grandfather up in the Adirondacks, I wondered what he lived on. Was he totally self-sufficient? Did he trap furs in the winter and barter them for essential supplies? Every hermit must have some essential supplies, such as matches, flour, cooking oil. A hammer, a hunting rifle, and ammunition. Candles. Cornmeal. Tobacco, for the pipe he smoked while hunched over his campfire in the dead of winter. My hermit grandfather knew the fearsome power of snow and cold.
I still think about my hermit grandfather. I still wonder about him.
Some would say that I made him up, that he never existed. But I can see him in my mind, walking silently through the woods on the breast of new-fallen snow. Doesn’t that make him real in a way?
“Ma, is your father a hermit?”
I asked Tamar that, even though she had forbidden me ever to mention her father. Tamar looked at me.
“A hermit? My father, a hermit?”
“Yes. That is the question,” I said.
“What possesses you, Clara? What goes through your brain?”
I said nothing. In the face of Tamar’s derision my dream was already crumbling into dust and blowing away like sand in a Thebes desert storm. I wanted to hang on to my hermit. Already I loved him.
In certain snow conditions you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Tamar and I were coming home from Boonville one winter day when I was nine. She was driving. It was whiteout conditions: snow blowing fast and furious, horizontal because of the wind. When you look out a window and you see snow blowing horizontally, it’s instinct to turn your head sideways.
Horizontal snow is a world gone awry.
Tamar and I were a couple miles out of Boonville, heading south to North Sterns, when it turned from slanted to horizontal and intermittently to blizzard. It was only midafternoon. Everything was a fury of white.
“Do not dissolve, Clara,” she said.
Tamar knows how I hate the snow.
She opened her window and stuck her head out. She slowed the car down but she didn’t stop. It’s better not to stop unless there’s a parking lot or something. On a back road you have no idea where you’re stopping. A plow, a sander—anything—can come up behind you on a back road in a blizzard and smash you to bits. That’s the risk you run, stopping.
Tamar had her head stuck out the window. Snow was already clumping on her hair and her eyelashes. Her head was tilted and she squinted against the snow. I saw what she was doing. She was sighting her way by the telephone poles. She was going just fast enough to find the next one after the first one receded. From telephone pole to telephone pole, Tamar kept the car going.
“Hang tough, Clara,” she yelled with her head out the window.
I hooked up my personal backup bungee cord belt system. I use it only in dire straits. Two bungee cords, one orange and one black. Emergency colors. One stretches from Tamar’s headrest over my left shoulder and fastens onto the door h
andle. The other stretches from my headrest and fastens onto the stick shift. They cross in my middle and pinion me.
Tamar’s head was out the window. She didn’t see me hooking up the bungee cords. They’re for extreme conditions only. Tamar hates them.
“Worse than useless,” she said when I first devised the system. “Those bungees’ll kill you before they’ll save you from anything.”
She unhooked the orange one and shook it in my face.
“You see this hook? Any kind of crash, even a fender bender, this thing’d come unhooked and slash your face up. Or gouge your eye out.”
She let go of the hook and I hooked it up again. She could tell I was not going to be intimidated.
“You are an odd child, Clara Winter,” she said. “You are truly strange.”
But ever since that day south of Boonville, when she was sighting her way by the telephone poles, she hasn’t said a word. She lets me hook up the bungees. They’re only for when I feel extreme danger.
Sometimes Tamar’s unarguability is useful. When we were driving in that blizzard and she was sighting her way along the road by the telephone poles, it was useful. I was bungeed in and chanting. If you chant when you’re in grave danger, you can transport yourself into a world of safety. You just chant and chant and chant, the same thing over and over, until you feel yourself transported.
mm, mm, mm.
That’s my chant. I don’t want it to be anything that makes sense, because then I would focus on the sense I was making instead of the world of safety. It’s all related to the ability to read. Are you beginning to see that? If you say something that makes sense, and you’re a reader, the words scroll across the bottom of your mind and there you are. You’re stuck. You’re focusing on the meaning of the words, the shape of the letters, rather than the meaningless sound of the chant itself and the world of safety it’s taking you into.
“Hold it together, Clara,” Tamar yelled in from the window. She had one hand on the steering wheel and one hand on the open window. I chanted and chanted but I was not transported. The bungee cords held me against the back of the seat and I opened my eyes to watch Tamar’s hand curled tight around the steering wheel like a spider on a web.
Then we went into the ditch.
Immediately Tamar’s head was back inside the car. She rolled up her window and shook her head so that the caked snow flew all over the dashboard. The snow on her eyelashes started to melt and melted snow ran down her cheeks. She reached across with her frozen hands and hooked her fingers through my bungee cords.
“You will, not, fall, apart, Clara Winter,” she said. “Hear me?”
I could feel how cold her hand was even through my jacket, sweater, turtleneck, and T-shirt.
“We are in the ditch,” she said. “Being in the ditch is not the end of the world.”
She forgets. It was the end of the world for Baby Girl.
Tamar started to undo the bungees. Her fingers were so cold that they didn’t bend right. When she got them undone, she undid the seatbelt.
“We’re walking,” she said. “Bundle up.”
She was unarguable. I had to crawl over the hump and then over her seat to get out, because the car was tilted into the ditch. She was already marching ahead. The car was already being snowed over. It was a true blizzard.
Did she think about my sister?
Did she blame herself? My grandfather? The snow?
On she marched. I ran to keep up.
“Wait,” I screamed. The wind took my words and whipped them away. I kept screaming out the word: wait, wait, but Tamar’s back kept getting away from me. I looked to my left. A telephone pole. You could barely see it through the driving snow. I looked for the next one. I couldn’t see it. Then she was there, Tamar, standing in front of me.
“Keep, up,” she yelled. “Do, you, hear, me? Keep, up. I do not plan to lose my daughter in a blizzard.”
She puts it out of her mind. You already did lose your daughter in a blizzard. I couldn’t say that to Tamar though. After I showed her Baby Girl Winter’s death certificate, Tamar told me the bare minimum: the truck, the blizzard, the ditch. To her it was as if my baby sister never drew breath. Which is another of my questions: did my baby sister draw breath? Did her miniature lungs fill even once with frozen Adirondack air?
I saw that Tamar was wearing her loafers. She didn’t even have her boots on.
“Ma? You don’t have your boots on,” I yelled.
I had to yell. That was the only way you could make yourself heard that day. She didn’t say anything. She just kept marching. Her loafers were filled with snow. Packed with it. I did not allow myself to think of how cold her feet must be. In the pioneer days it was common to lose toes to frostbite. Pioneers were always getting lost in the snow. In the pioneer days blizzards were worse than they are now. Pioneers would often go out to the barn to milk their cow and then get lost on the way back to the cabin. The wind and snow drove so hard back in those days that they would walk right on past the cabin, just missing the log corner. They would walk right on into the wilderness. Lost pioneers would not be found until spring, when the snow melted. There they would be, curled up in a fetal position.
They say that death by freezing is not such a bad way to go. Once you get cold enough you actually feel warm. This is what I have read.
I wonder what their last thoughts were, though. I wonder what they thought when they knew they’d walked long enough to get back to the cabin. Did they try to turn around? Which way was the way back? Which way was north? This was in the days before compasses, probably. In those days they had only the stars to navigate by. With the snow swirling all around them, and the darkness of the sky above, nothing to light their way, the candle in their tin lantern blown out by the howling wind, I just wonder what those pioneers thought.
When Tamar was giving birth in the truck tipped over in the ditch, did she know that one of her babies was going to die? Could she possibly have foreseen what was going to happen? Did she even know she was going to have twins?
“Ma! Did you know you were going to have twins?”
I yelled this to her back. Her loafers disappeared into the mounds of snow with every step. My boots had my snowpants pulled over them. My feet were protected against the blowing snow.
She didn’t answer. She never does. She won’t talk about it. She leaves me to wonder about it myself, to try to guess what happened. She keeps me in the dark.
It took us a couple of hours of blizzard walking to reach a house. After a while I put my head down and focused on Tamar’s loafers. They were dark brown when she lifted them, with packed white around her feet. I kept my eyes focused on her feet. They became a visual blizzard chant: don’t let Tamar’s feet freeze. A rhythm set itself up in my head: don’t let Tamar’s feet freeze. One step for every emphasis. Don’t let Tamar’s feet freeze. The snow piled up on my neck. It sifted underneath my scarf, melted against my neck, and ran down my back. Then the process started all over again. Pile, sift, melt, run. Everything took on a rhythm in that blizzard. We walked and we walked. Walking became the only thing I could remember. I turned myself into the walking. There was nothing to think about because I was no longer a person. I was no longer a sentient being. I was no longer even a reader. My thoughts did not scroll across the bottom of my mind because I had no thoughts.
That’s the one time in my life that I was not a human being. I was only a thing that walked.
Tamar’s loafers that were dark brown and packed white around her socks changed direction. They turned. Because I was no longer a thinking being I did not know if they turned right or left. I followed because that was what the thing I had become did; it followed Tamar’s loafers.
Tamar’s loafers stopped. There was a tinkling sound outside the deafness of falling snow. Tamar’s loafers were lifting up high in the whiteness and then disappearing. I stood there because they were gone. There was nothing left to follow.
Then she grabbed me. The secon
d she touched me I went back to being a human being. Sentience returned. Words again started subtitling my brain: don’t let Tamar’s feet freeze.
“In,” she shouted. “Get your butt inside. Climb right through that window. Now.”
Then we were inside. It was somebody’s house. Somebody who was not there. Where were they? South for the winter? Immediately the person who was not there became a Florida person to me. I could see her, lying on the sand in the sun with a small, thick paperback book facedown next to her. There was a thermostat on the wall and I saw Tamar go over to it. She angled her elbow toward it and gave it a jab, and then there was a sound of heat. Nothing is like the sound of a furnace leaping into action, lunging and thrumming somewhere way down in the basement, when you twirl a thermostat in the winter.
“Why’d you use your elbow?” I said.
My words sounded unusual. They came out thick, like slush, into the frozen air.
Tamar didn’t answer. She was already gone. I heard water running. She was in the kitchen running water. Why weren’t the pipes frozen? In an Adirondack winter, pipes are always frozen. I went into the kitchen of the Florida person’s house.
“Why aren’t the pipes frozen?” I said. Still slushy-sounding.
“Why would the pipes be frozen? Whoever owns this house is probably stuck in the blizzard, just like us.”
My Florida person faded away. She turned into an Adirondacks lady sitting in Tam’s Diner on Route 12, cupping her cold fingers around a mug of hot coffee, her car in the parking lot disappearing minute by minute under the snow.
“Oh,” I said. “Why’d you use your elbow to turn on the heat?”
“Because my fingers are too cold to move,” Tamar said.
She was sitting on a chair with her feet in the sink. She was running water on her feet that still had their loafers and socks on. It was hot water. I could see the steam.
Shadow Baby Page 7