Don’t let Tamar’s feet freeze.
I went over to the sink. I took my hands out from my armpits where I had been keeping them warm. Always put frozen hands in your armpits. That’s something I learned from the pioneer books. I pulled at Tamar’s loafers until they fell off. They clunked into the sink. They weighed a thousand pounds each. I pulled her white socks off. They weighed a hundred pounds each.
Her feet were white.
Not a good sign.
Dead white is a sign of frozen flesh. What is hoped for, when removing a pioneer’s shoes and socks, is pink skin. Roaring red skin is even better. White is not what you want.
“Shut up, Clara,” Tamar said before I even said a word. “I don’t want to hear it. Keep your pioneers to yourself.”
The hot water ran and ran. My cold feet in my moon boots were getting warm. My fingers were warm. The furnace thrummed and hummed. The person’s house was getting warm.
“Go cover that broken window with a coat or something, would you Clara, please.”
That was unlike Tamar. Please is a word not prevalent in Tamar’s lexicon. I went and covered the window. Tamar ran warm water over her feet for a long time. I stood beside her and watched her feet. After a while she bent over and held her hands under the faucet too. Then she picked up the drainplug and plugged the drain.
“Dumb,” she said. “Running all this hot water. Probably used up most of it.”
Dumb is not a word used by Tamar. The hot water filled the kitchen sink and Tamar turned it off. Her fingers were bright red. That’s a good sign. She submerged her feet in the sink.
“Dumb,” she said again.
Tamar was crying. Tamar was crying and calling herself dumb.
“Ma?”
She shook her bright red hand at me. Drops of warm water spattered on my face. She turned her head away from me so that her brown hair hung down and I couldn’t see her.
“Sorry, Clara.”
Nor does Tamar say she’s sorry.
“It’s all right,” I said.
It wasn’t though. It was not all right. It has never been all right.
Winter is out there. It waits. It bides its time. Sometimes, when you’re lulled into a false sense of security, it comes roaring out at you and tries to destroy you. It is ruthless. It has no mercy. Victims fall prey to it. The bodies of dead pioneers, found only after the spring thaw, are buried beneath the ground. Baby Girl died because of winter.
Tamar’s shoulders shook with her crying.
“Did you try to save her?” I said.
That’s a question that demands an answer.
But no answer was forthcoming.
We stayed in the kitchen for a long time. The furnace kept humming. There was no moment when the furnace heated the house as hot as we wanted it and then shut off because there was no more heating to do. That point was never reached. The furnace kept on going, and we kept on staying. We stayed in that person’s house for three days, until the plow went through. It came through in darkest night. We were sleeping in the person’s bed. I kept dreaming of her as a Florida person, lying on her Florida beach, drinking soda from a glass with a small pink umbrella on it. The house was eighty-eight degrees. That’s the warmest Tamar has ever had a house. Usually she sets the thermostat at sixty-three.
“Put on a sweater,” she says when I start to shiver.
That’s one of her flat Tamar statements. But in that person’s house she cranked the heat up as high as it could go.
“We’ll fix the window,” she said. “We’ll pay their oil bill. They won’t mind.”
Tamar’s feet hurt when they thawed.
“Damn it,” she said, when they had been in the water a long time. “Damn it.”
She gritted her teeth. I could hear them gritting.
“Is the feeling coming back?” I said.
That’s a good sign. What you want is for your feet to hurt horribly, to be hideously painful. That means that the blood is returning to your extremities. Your feet will be saved. You won’t have to chop them off. Gangrene will not set in and it’s very possible that no toes will be lost.
She didn’t answer. It’s rare that Tamar feels the need to answer every question I ask her, despite the fact that most of the questions I ask her are ones that demand answers.
“Are they hurting?” I asked.
“They are hurting like hell,” she said.
“Good. That’s a good sign.”
After a long time Tamar let the water drain out of the sink and she dried her feet. Her hands were still bright red and her fingers did not move swiftly. Her feet were also bright red except for a few small white patches on some of the toes.
“You see those small white patches?” I said. “They may very well be frostbite.”
“Enough, Clara.”
I did not mention frostbite again. But still, I could tell. I’ve read enough pioneer books to know that small white patches mean frostbite. When we got home Tamar went to the doctor at Slocum-Dickson in Utica, who confirmed my diagnosis. Her feet hurt her now when it gets cold. Her toes are especially painful. I can tell. She walks in a certain way. Tamar would never admit to it but still, I know. Once frozen, your flesh will never be completely unfrozen. The memory of cold becomes a part of you. You never forget.
My hermit grandfather would have known better than to venture out in the winter. My grandfather knew full well the power of a winter storm. He had watched it wreak devastation on his own family, for it was he who was behind the wheel of the truck when it went skidding into the ditch. Sometimes I strain my memory, trying to remember my grandfather’s face. I must have seen it when I was born, even if only for a moment. I looked at Tamar, kneading her thawed feet, and it occurred to me that she might look like her father. She might be his spitting image. How would I know?
“Ma, do you think that a newborn is capable of remembering a face?” I said to Tamar.
“No.”
“Not at all?”
“Not at all. A newborn doesn’t even know what a face is. A newborn has never been outside the uterus; a newborn wouldn’t know the difference between a human being and a goldfish.”
Coming from Tamar, that was the answer I expected. Every thing Tamar says must be taken with a grain of salt. You have to filter everything through the knowledge of what you know about Tamar.
“Do you believe in baby purgatory?” I asked Tamar.
“Enough, Clara.”
“But do you?”
“I said, enough.”
She wiggled her toes up and down. Her toes moved slowly, as if they had forgotten how to wiggle. I watched her right eye and saw it squint nearly shut while the left stayed wide open. Did my grandfather’s eyes do that, too?
You can’t blame my grandfather for becoming a hermit. He shunned society in favor of solitude. He had only his own thoughts for company. He depended on himself and only himself, except for his twice-yearly visits to town to trade his furs for cash to buy necessities. Maybe my hermit grandfather sang songs to himself at night, when he lay on his pallet. Maybe he went walking in the moonlight, only the stars and the silent moon and the watchful nocturnal animals as witness.
Maybe he thought about Tamar. He might have thought about her, his only daughter, and wondered what she was doing. He may have thought about me, the grandchild he had not seen since the day she was born. He might have thought about the other granddaughter, the ghost baby, the one he could not save.
Did he try?
Did he attempt everything he possibly could to try to save my baby sister’s life?
“Tamar, did my grandfather have any paramedic training?”
“Why do you ask, Clara?”
“Just wondering.”
“The answer is no. To my knowledge my father had no paramedical training.”
“So he would not have been able to resuscitate a hypothetical dead newborn?”
“Enough, Clara,” Tamar said. She held her hurting feet with both hands,
twisting them to the right and back to the left. “Enough, enough, enough.”
Chapter Seven
The old man was a hero for many reasons, not the least of which was that he once escaped from the solitary confinement to which he had been unfairly sentenced. Most often a solitary confinement is a hole in the ground, covered with a wooden door. Such was the case with the old man. When a prisoner is bad enough or, like the old man, unfairly sentenced for a fake offense—backtalk to a guard—they chain his legs and arms and drag him to a hole in the ground. They remove the chains and throw him in. They lock the wooden door in place and that’s it. Once, possibly twice a day, the door is opened and a bucket of water and another bucket of slop are lowered into the hole. That’s what the old man lived on. There was nowhere to go to the bathroom in the old man’s solitary confinement except in the mud at the bottom of the hole.
I can picture the old man as a young man, crouched in the bottom of the muddy pit, curling himself into a fetal position on the filthy scrap of old horse blanket that the guards had thrown down on him. I can see that poor young man so clearly, reciting stories and poems from his childhood in an effort to keep from going insane.
If you can see it so clearly in your mind, it’s real. Isn’t it?
Few prisoners survive more than a few weeks in solitary confinement. If they are not allowed into the light of day within a fairly short time, they start to rot. Once you start to rot death comes quickly. People need light. They need sunshine in order to keep on living. They need sound, which is another thing that does not exist in solitary confinement.
How did the old man survive? He had a secret life. He knew from the very first day in the hole of solitary confinement that he would not be able to survive unless he had two things: a dream and an escape route. The very first night, he broke off a tree root that was growing into the side of the hole. For the next year, he used that root to dig silently at night. Using mental maps, he tunneled his way directly underneath the prison kitchen. Eventually, by tracking the vibrations of the ground above his head, he figured out where the prison kitchen root cellar was and tunneled up to it.
This took a total of eleven months. He kept track of the passing days in his head. Each night he made up legends and myths and stories. Georg Kominsky knew that unless he exercised his brain as well as his body, both would atrophy. What kept Georg going? What prevented him from giving in to despair?
His dream.
He dreamed of his metalworking tools.
Georg Kominsky had a vision and he did not allow himself to swerve from that vision. Despite the cockroaches that swarmed over his pallet at night and the pale worms that writhed in his nightly food bucket, he forced himself to eat and sleep and exercise and make up legends. He did not once allow the thought of death to enter his mind. Night after night, day after day, the old man kept on going.
It might seem that a dream of metalworking alone would not be enough. It might seem that someone would need more than the thought of tin snips, a solder iron, and a forge to stay alive.
Not if you were the old man. I know this because that’s what he told me. Once, a few weeks after I told him about Baby Girl Winter and how I hated being without her, the old man looked at me and said, “You only need one thing, Clara.”
“One what?”
“One thing to keep you going. One thing will do.”
I looked at him. We were outside at his forge. He was working on a lantern, soldering decorative strips to the sides.
“Well, what’s your one thing then?” I said.
He pulled his safety glasses over his eyes and touched the tip of the solder iron to the tin. Gray metal-melt trickled down the side.
“This. Making useful and beautiful objects of metal. This, and the memory of my mother in a dark room, singing to my younger brother.”
“That’s it?” I said.
“That’s it.”
“That’s not one thing, that’s two.”
“Then I’m a lucky man,” he said.
There came a night when the old man broke through into the root cellar. From then on he led a secret life. Solitary confinement by day, prison kitchen by night. In the early hours of each morning, this brave man made his way into the prison kitchen. Careful never to take more than would be noticed, he built up his strength with raw turnips, raw potatoes, and leftover bread. He used the prison sink to bathe in. He shaved with a kitchen knife and the light of the moon. He did calisthenics to keep his muscles strong. Every night he stretched and stretched to stay limber.
When he had completed his nightly foray, the old man covered his tunnel opening with a wooden crate full of potatoes and headed back to the hole.
He never gave up.
He did not allow himself to think beyond the moment. He did not allow himself to think of the day beyond the present day, the weeks stretching into months, into years, into a lifetime.
He never once thought: my youth has passed me by and I will die in this hole, an old, old man.
He thought instead of his tin snips, his forge, his solder iron, and his mother in a dark room, singing.
After ten years they opened the wooden cover to the hole and brought him up into the light of day. Blinking and squinting at the sunlight that he had not seen more than a glimpse of for a decade, Georg Kominsky regained his freedom. He lives on in the hearts and minds of his fellow prisoners, a symbol of the human spirit determined to survive at all odds.
“What would you like to do tonight?” the old man said one Wednesday night when I arrived. I looked out the window above the old man’s sink. The choir members hadn’t even turned the lights on in the Twin Churches. We had two hours.
“I would like to have some hot chocolate,” I said.
I got out one of my hot chocolate packets from the cupboard. In the beginning, the old man bought me hot chocolate packets from Jewell’s. But when I figured out that he was poor I insisted on bringing my own. I used to get hot chocolate packets free at the bank, at the little refreshment table in the corner where the armchairs are. There’s a coffeemaker and a small wicker basket of tea bags, coffee bags, and hot chocolate packets. There are wooden stirrers and fake cream, which must be spelled creme or kreme. You cannot use the word cream if it’s not real cream. That’s the law.
They frown on nongrownups who avail themselves of the little refreshment table, but I used to take the packets anyway.
“It’s for a good cause,” I said once to the bank lady when I saw her giving me the once-over.
The old man was a good cause.
I don’t go in the bank anymore.
I put hot water on the miniature stove and waited for it to boil. It’s a fallacy that a watched pot never boils. I’ve proved it wrong many a time. While I was watching the pot and thinking about the young Georg Kominsky tunneling for ten years through dirt, the old man washed the supper dishes. The old man could stand in one place and reach the sink, the stove, the refrigerator, and the dish cupboard. He had just enough dishes. Two mugs. Three plates. Three bowls. Three forks. Three spoons. One table knife and one little sharp knife. He didn’t need any more knives because the old man rarely ate anything that required cutting. You might think that having three plates and bowls is having one too many, but you would be wrong. What about the serving plate and the serving bowl? You’ve got to have an extra to serve from.
The old man had white plates with orange borders. Sad to say, orange is my least favorite color. The only way I like orange is as it occurs in nature, for example, orange poppies in gardens, orange tiger lilies by the side of the road, orange and black Monarch butterflies, orange Indian paintbrush in the field. When orange occurs elsewhere, as in borders on white plates, it is abhorrent. It is a crime against nature. That is my belief.
“Where did you get your white plates with the orange borders?” I asked the old man as he was drying them. He used to dry every dish separately. Forks, spoons, everything. He was fastidious about his dish drying.
“Scavenging night,” he said.
The old man was a wonderful scavenger. I sometimes accompanied him on scavenging expeditions. He had a sixth sense.
“You’ve got to have the eye,” he said.
I don’t have the eye yet, but I’m trying. I’m training my eyes to be like the old man. It’s difficult for two reasons: (a) I know how to read and he didn’t, and (b) he saw possibility everywhere.
When you know how to read you can never get away from it. Your eye goes to words first and everything else second. The old man was not hampered by the knowledge of letters. His eye could roam free. He could take in the big picture, whereas I am bound to words first and foremost. Now that I know this I some times try to remember being a baby, before I was trapped by words. What was it like? I ask myself. I narrow my eyes and try not to see words and printing and letters. It’s hopeless. I’m a reader.
While he dried the dishes I asked him my death row question again.
“I will ask you a variation of the question you never answered,” I said. “Electric chair or life in solitary confinement with worms in your meal bucket every night and only a scrap of horse blanket to sleep on: which would you choose?”
He hung his dish towel over the oven door handle to dry. He always hung it in exactly the same way.
“Are they my only choices?”
“They are your only choices.”
“I ask because there are many other ways to live and die.”
“There are more ways to live and die, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your universe,” I said. “But you are allowed only two. Which do you choose?”
“Which would you choose?”
He used to do that sometimes, turn the tables.
“I believe, sir, that you were the one asked the question,” I said.
The old man finished washing and drying his dishes. No answer was forthcoming.
“It’s scavenging night tonight,” he said. “Do you want to go looking with me?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Do you need anything special?”
Shadow Baby Page 8