He felt a sudden pang of regret for not stopping to buy her a rawhide or some other nice treat. Something to reward her for what she had done.
Instead he let her out into the yard so he could throw the ball for her.
He ran a hand through the tight ringlet curls on her chocolate-colored neck.
“So why was I so sure how that was going to turn out, then?” he asked her.
But her eyes were fixed on the ball he had just picked up from its hiding place on top of the fence.
And a better question, Nathan thought. How could I have been so preposterously wrong?
But he didn’t ask that one out loud.
Right through lunch he played ball with her. Almost until it was time for his afternoon appointments.
5 October 1960
The Day He Spoke His Piece For You
The home of Mrs. Ertha Bates was kept tidy, but it was old. Autumn leaves had gathered in great piles on the roof, and in the rain gutter. Nathan stood at the curb, taking in his surroundings. Thinking she should sweep those off before the first snows threatened. Nathan certainly would have had them off by now, if this had been his house. But he supposed she had no one to do the work for her.
That tight feeling had returned to his stomach again. And he didn’t enjoy it one bit. It was fear, plain and simple, and Nathan knew there was no point in denying or recasting it. His grandfather probably would have said that all men feel fear, but cowardly men deny it. Or perhaps he even had said that at some point.
But the truth was, Nathan did not ordinarily feel fear. This morning was only the second time in many decades. In as long as he could even remember. It seemed odd, and he wondered at the significance of it. It was as though only in the last few days had he had anything too important to risk losing.
The porch boards creaked and sagged under Nathan’s weight.
He rapped on the front door, into which was set an arrangement of tear-drop-shaped glass panes forming a half circle.
A curtain slid aside, and part of a woman’s face peered through.
Then the door opened, and the whole of the woman appeared. Nathan could only assume it was Mrs. Ertha Bates.
She stood on the sill, did not invite him in. She was a woman perhaps his own age or a bit younger — forty-something — but old-looking, as though used too roughly, with graying hair, a faded-but-clean dress, and a plain white apron.
“Yes?” she said.
Nathan held his hat in front of him.
“I’m the man who found your baby grandson in the woods.”
“I see.”
“Is that all you have to say to me? ‘I see’?”
He immediately regretted speaking to her that way. Although he had not raised his voice or betrayed anger. Still, there was a rudeness, an effrontery, to his comments. It had just come out that way, unbidden. Because he had anticipated some specific reaction, and not received it. Somehow he had expected more.
“I can’t know what to say to you,” she said, “until I know more about what you’ve come to say to me.”
While they talked, her hands worked across that apron, smoothed and smoothed, as if trying to smooth away … what? Nathan wondered. Like all of us, probably only that which she was able to reach at the moment.
Of course, Nathan thought. She’s afraid. Like me. That knowledge put him more at ease.
State yourself to her, he thought. Quickly. While you’re still sure of what you need to say.
“I wanted to adopt that boy.”
“So I heard.”
“But I didn’t come to argue that.”
“Good,” she said. “Because I am his flesh and blood.”
“Yes,” Nathan said. “That is incontrovertible. Now let me tell you something else that also is. That boy would not exist if I had not been in just that place at just that moment. I’m not suggesting there was any special heroism involved, or that anyone else couldn’t have done the same thing equally well. Only that it wasn’t anyone else; it was me. No one can take that from me, any more than they can deny your claim by blood.”
There. That had been perfect. Just the way he’d rehearsed it in his imagination for days. Smooth and definite.
“What do you want from me?” she asked, beginning to sound unnerved.
“Only this, and I think it’s reasonable: sometime in the course of that boy’s life, I want him to know me. I want you to bring him to me when he’s grown. Or half-grown. That’s up to you. And I want you to introduce me, and say to him, ‘This is the man who found you in the woods.’ That way he’ll know me. I will exist for him.”
Ertha Bates stood silent a moment, smoothing.
Then she said, “How would I find you?”
Nathan reached into his coat pocket and produced his business card. He’d been sure to have a supply along. And, in fact, he had even taken one out from its sterling-silver case, which had been a Christmas gift from Flora, so that he could produce it more easily. If asked.
Mrs. Bates accepted the card without looking at it. It disappeared into one big apron pocket.
Her eyes found his directly.
“I’ll have my hands full,” she said, “with managing the information this child will hear as he grows. This is not the largest town in the world, and he will all too likely bump into those who know more about the story than I might think he’s ready to hear at any given time. I don’t plan to tell him — ever — sir, that his mother threw him out like yesterday’s garbage. I don’t think it would be mentally healthy for a child to entertain such a truth.”
“I have always felt,” Nathan said, “that the truth is simply the truth. And perhaps does not exist for us to bend and revise. Or even filter to suit the feelings of those we love and want to protect.”
He watched her eyes, the change in her expression. She was leaving him, growing more distant. Closing to his requests.
Perhaps he had better take a more respectful tack. After all, this was not his grandson in question. It was hers. And she should be allowed to raise him using whatever methods and judgments she saw fit.
“Then again,” he said, “it’s really not my decision. Is it? You are the one to decide how he should be raised. So if I have a chance to meet the boy, I won’t introduce any topics you might deem inappropriate.”
He continued to watch her face, but she betrayed little.
Nathan made a mental notation to commiserate with her situation. The way you would when speaking to someone who has lost a loved one. After all, her daughter was in jail. The whole town was speaking of the girl — this poor woman’s girl — as though she were the devil incarnate. And Mrs. Bates, at a rather inappropriate age, had been unexpectedly saddled with the care of an unhealthy infant.
The least he could do was express a message of condolence for her in this most difficult time.
Ertha Bates sighed deeply.
“All right, then,” she said. “All right. As you say. When I think he’s old enough to understand such a thing, I’ll bring him around to see you.”
“Thank you.”
Nathan replaced his hat, turned, and took a few creaky steps. Then he looked over his shoulder, hoping she had not gone back inside.
She had not.
“Does the baby have a name yet?’ Nathan asked. “Have you picked out a name for the child?”
She drew his card out of her apron pocket and peered at it closely, as though her eyes were not good.
“Nathan,” she said, reading aloud. “He has a name now, then.”
A flush of warmth came over his insides, washing away the tight knot of fear. At last. At last a healthy dose of the sort of feeling he had been pursuing.
“Thank you, Mrs. Bates.”
Though he knew it was an old-fashioned, overly polite gesture, he tipped his hat to her before heading away.
“Thank you, sir,” she said, as he walked off her porch. It was a huge statement, made all that much bigger by the way she spoke it. It caused the flush in his mid
-section to glow more warmly. This is what had been missing in her greeting of him. And only now, as he walked off her porch, was she willing to deliver it. Briefly, without much elaboration, but it was there. In that simple statement.
Thank you, sir.
Truth be told, Nathan had been anticipating gratitude. And, though delayed, it had eventually been delivered.
He turned back once more, realizing there was something he had forgotten to ask.
“Mrs. Bates … Is your daughter … A knitter?”
She burst into a nervous little laugh.
“That is certainly not how I expected you to finish your sentence. I’ve had quite a few questions about my daughter in the last few days. Believe me. Most I won’t even repeat. But not a single one went to her knitting abilities.”
“So she does knit?”
“Yes. In fact she does. Inherited it from me, I suppose. I’ll have to bring her some yarn in prison. She’ll have so much darned time on her hands.”
“Yes, ma’am. Well, I thank you for your time.”
Nathan turned and walked back to his car.
• • •
He had driven several blocks, replaying his parts of the conversation in his head, when he remembered with a start that he had forgotten his intention to express some type of condolence.
What had become of his manners of late? Why did everything seem to be shaken?
Nathan longed briefly for some aspect of life which had remained unchanged. But there was nothing as far as he could see.
7 October 1960
The Day He Tried and Failed to Find Out Why
Nathan arrived shortly before eight A.M. at the county jail. An overweight, sulky woman with two small children already sat in the lobby, avoiding his eyes. Avoiding everyone’s eyes. Other than she — them — he seemed to be the first to have shown up for visiting hours.
He logged himself in on a worn and dog-eared sheet carried over from yesterday’s visitations. He signed his name, produced his driver’s license — which he felt the officer behind the desk scrutinized too closely and for too long — and then filled in the name of the prisoner he was hoping to see.
Lenora Bates, he wrote in his careful script, hoping he was spelling her first name correctly.
The officer — if indeed he was some type of officer — took the clipboard, which held the form out of Nathan’s hands, turned it around. Began to read impassively. Then a deep frown unexpectedly furrowed into his brow.
“Have a seat,” he said. “This will take several minutes.”
Meanwhile a female guard opened a door into the lobby, nodded at the woman with children, whom she seemed to know, and allowed them inside.
Nathan looked back at the officer behind the counter. Hopefully. To see if he could go in, too.
The man shook his head. “You’ll have to have a seat. As I say. This will take several minutes.”
“It didn’t seem to take her several minutes,” Nathan said. Not combatively. Just in such a way as to invite explanation.
“I’m afraid your case will be more complicated. Much… more complicated.”
Nathan perched uncomfortably on the edge of the hard wooden bench the woman had just vacated. It was still warm from her bulk. Nathan had never understood how people could allow their bodies to get so large. Such a chaotic, uncontrolled existence.
Meanwhile the officer behind the desk picked up a phone and spoke into it quietly, in an obvious effort to keep his words from being overheard. But Nathan had always enjoyed unusually keen hearing.
“Ring up the watch commander. Tell him we need the coroner investigator over here.” A pause. Then, “Father, I think.”
Nathan ran the single troublesome word around in his head. Coroner. No one had died in this case.
Had they?
With a jolt like a baseball bat to his stomach it struck him that the infant, Baby Nathan Bates, who had been doing so much better last time Nathan called to check on his status, might have died.
He jumped immediately to his feet, and the officer looked up, surprised.
“A payphone,” Nathan said hastily. “Do you have a payphone here?”
“Yeah, there’s one out front.”
He ran outside. The October air had taken on an even sharper nip. Nathan had been feeling in his bones that the first snow would fall soon.
He dug in his pocket for a dime, and called the emergency room of the hospital. He now held the number, memorized, in his head.
Dr. Battaglia answered.
“This is Nathan McCann,” he said. Not even knowing what to say next. He could hear and feel his own pulse beating in his chest and neck and temples. It felt nearly impossible to breathe and talk at the same time.
“He’s not here any more,” the doctor said. Sounding all too calm about it. “Sorry to say this ends our correspondence, unless you find any more babies lying around in the future.”
Nathan saw the world grow brighter and more glaring at the periphery of his vision. He worried he might pass out. He tried to speak, but no words materialized.
“Yeah,” the doctor continued, “we handed him over to his grandma yesterday afternoon. Poor woman. She’s probably nearly fifty and she won’t get a good night’s sleep for at least a year. Babies are for the young.”
Nathan very consciously filled his lungs with air.
“Then he’s not … he’s all right?”
“Yeah, he’s doing great. Told you they could be strong little beggars. It’s like God wanted ’em to get born and there’s nothing going to stop them after that. He even had good color when I saw him last.”
“Oh. Well. Thank you, doctor. You’ve been very kind.”
Nathan made his way slowly back into the lobby of the county jail, the muscles in his thighs feeling loose and liquid, like runny jelly.
He took his spot again on the bench, where he waited, thinking very little, for well over twenty minutes.
• • •
“Detective Gross,” a small man said.
Nathan rose and shook his hand.
Detective Gross was a young man, or at least appeared to be so. He didn’t look like he could be much over thirty, yet the hairline of his red head was surprisingly receded, giving his forehead a strange, angular look.
“If you’ll follow me to my office. Sorry to say it’s a pretty long walk from here.”
Nathan followed him outdoors, then into an adjacent building. Followed him down dingy halls with high windows that seemed not to have been cleaned for years. Followed him into a small office with a baseball-sized hole in one of its dirty window panes, casting a distinct beam of light at an angle across the room. Nathan took a seat on the other side of the detective’s desk. He looked up at the window briefly, and thought of the recent bond measure to build a new jail. He had voted against it. Thinking himself far too overtaxed as it was.
He still had not spoken a word to this new man.
“This is always the very hardest moment in my job. Hate it, really. Nobody likes this. Not one bit. But I’m the investigator assigned to the coroner’s division, and somebody has to do this, so here goes. I am dreadfully sorry to have to inform you that your daughter died sometime in the night last night.”
“Lenora?” Nathan asked. Confused.
“Yes. I’m afraid so.”
“Of … ?”
“Sepsis.”
“Related to her recent childbirth?”
“Yes. Exactly. Apparently it had been a difficult birth, with a lot of bleeding. Because she was so young, I guess, at least in part. Being barely eighteen, and very small …”
A long silence.
Then Nathan said, “Don’t you have medical care for your inmates? Oh, I don’t mean that the way it sounds, only … Well, don’t you? I mean, aren’t you required by law to offer medical attention to any inmate who asks for it?”
“Ah, yes,” Gross said. “And now you’ve just hit on it. Any inmate who asks for it. But we don’t go arou
nd asking each one every day if she feels OK. The inmate has to speak up and let us know there’s some problem. A raging infection with a high fever, for example. And your daughter never said a word.”
“My daughter. I think you must be confused. I have no children.”
The detective’s face went blank. “Lenora Bates was not your daughter?”
“No.”
“What was your relationship to the deceased?”
“None, really. I never met her. I’m just the man who found her baby in the woods.”
“So no relation to her family at all?”
“No, sir.”
“Oh, my. This is embarrassing. I shouldn’t have given you any information at all. We haven’t even had time to notify her next of kin yet. I’ll have to have a firm talk with the guy who told me you were her father. He’s put me in quite an awkward position.”
Oh, poor Mrs. Bates, Nathan thought. Her daughter dead, and here she didn’t even know the news yet. And Nathan did. It seemed sad, somehow, that he should be feeling pity for her before she even knew she’d become a pitiable figure. Well, an even more pitiable figure.
“I never said anything to suggest I was her father, I assure you.”
“Well, bad assumption on his part, I guess. Maybe he figured nobody else would visit her. But it was highly unprofessional, let me tell you. You could help me out a great deal, Mr… .”
“McCann.”
“… Mr. McCann, if you could keep this under your hat for a couple of hours. The media will be all over this soon enough, but it’s very important that her next of kin be notified properly before they hear it on the radio or read about it in the paper. I’m sure you understand.”
“I have far too much respect for poor Mrs. Bates to allow such a thing to happen to her.”
“Thank you. Well, not to be rude, but I’d best get going on doing this difficult thing all over again. Can you find your way back to the parking lot?”
“I’m certain I can,” Nathan said, and rose to go.
“Mr. McCann,” the detective said. Before Nathan could get out the door.
Nathan turned back. Watched a swirl of dust motes, stirred by his movement, fly in the beam of light from the broken window. Wondered what the detective would do for warmth when the snow began to fly.
When I Found You Page 3