“There, there,” she crooned, rocking him back and forth. “You’re all right, honey. Don’t you cry now. Fiona’s here, baby. Fiona’s gonna make everything all right. And Glory’s here too, so—you poor, nasty, smelly little thing—don’t you fret! Fiona’s here. Glory’s here.” The words he didn’t understand had the hush of a benediction.
“Glory!” she called over her shoulder. “Put on the kettle and get that washtub ready. We’re gonna wash this child.” To the child, she added softly, “Can’t abide the smell of you another minute, little one!”
When the large, galvanized tub had been put onto the screen porch and half filled with water, Glory lifted the huge kettle from the stove, and using her apron as a protection against the hot handle, she poured the steaming water into the cold water in the tub and swished her hand through it, to check its temperature.
Fiona carried the child to the porch, holding him so that he was mashed securely against the garish peacock on her ample bosom. “That’s good,” Glory pronounced, wiping her wet hand on her apron. The child stood silently while Fiona and Glory started peeling the dirty clothes from him, tugging the dirty shirt over his head and bending his nose in the process. But still, he made not a sound. When they came to the diaper, they struggled against the terrible smell and discovered, to their dismay, that the soiled fabric was firmly adhered to his skin in the back. Discreetly, Glory lifted the front of the diaper away from the child’s bulging stomach and peered into it. “Boy,” she pronounced. “But we already figured that anyway.” Fiona made a few tugs at the stuck fabric in the back of the diaper, bringing forth the first sound he had made—a low whine of anguish.
“Lord have mercy! We’ll have to soak this off him,” Glory pronounced, and the boy looked at her closely, as if he agreed. He studied her dark face—far darker than the face he had seen in the bushes—and breathed in the musky aroma of her body. Her black skin was shining with perspiration as she bent over the tub of water that was to be his bath. Then he studied Fiona again, as well, the pale skin and blonde, corkscrew curls and the faint aroma of lemons from her hands. Silently, those hands lifted him into the warm, soapy water, and while Glory sponged his arms and shoulders, he studied her face—how the whites of her eyes were the color of coffee with milk in it—the way his Mama liked her own coffee. Studying Glory’s face, he could also see his mama’s face as she bent over a steaming cup, blowing into it, and smiling at him.
“It’s too hot, honey,” he heard her golden voice say.
“Hot!” he repeated.
“No, honey,” Fiona soothed him. “It’s not too hot. We wouldn’t put you into a tub if the water was too hot.” Still, Glory reached down and swept her fingers through the water, just to make sure that the boy didn’t have a valid complaint.
“It’s just right,” Glory pronounced, satisfied. So while the boy soaked in the tub of warm water, Fiona began slowly prying the filthy, dried diaper from his tender skin, bit by bit. Once it was off, she dropped it, dripping, into a trashcan and lifted him out of the tub.
“We have to get some fresh water now. Start all over again.”
So they wrapped the child in a towel and dumped the bath water right out onto the floor, where it streamed off under the banisters and fell into the Hydrangea bushes surrounding the porch. Glory poured in fresh water and added another large kettle of steaming hot water from the stove. Again, she swished her hand through it.
“That’s good,” Glory said, and Fiona removed the towel and deposited the child back into the tub. From there, the two women soaped down every inch of him, rubbing his soft skin with their warm hands, scrubbing his matted hair softly with their fingernails, soaping his arms and bloated stomach, cleaning him all the way to the pink toes and the bottoms of his feet, concentrating especially on the grime behind his ears and on the back of his neck and the tender, reddened skin where the diaper had been. And the whole time they bathed him, they murmured rough words of anger at first and glanced at each other, clucking their tongues. Finally, the clucking stopped, and their words became soft and comforting, little whispers that were almost like small songs. They even smiled a little.
“Well, what a handsome little fellow!” Fiona exclaimed. “Who would have thought his hair would be so blonde under all that dirt?” Once again, she lifted him from the tub, and Glory wrapped a clean towel around him.
“What’re we gonna use for clothes to put him in?” Glory asked, with irritation in her voice. “Can’t just let him run around wearing a towel, for Heaven’s sake! And what’re we gonna use for a diaper?”
“I think he’s ‘most too big for diapers,” Fiona mused. “But I’m not sure. We better tear up an old sheet and use that anyway.”
“We still got some of Mr. J. Roy’s old shirts in the closet,” Glory added. “Those’ll do for clothes ‘til we can get him something better. At least he’ll be clean and dry.”
“Yes,” Fiona agreed. “Somebody might as well get some use out of them.” And all the time they were talking, Fiona was rubbing down the small, pink body with a clean towel, and then she got a bottle of hand lotion from her dresser and rubbed the lotion all over him, right up into the edges of his hair, where his neck and ears were bright pink from being scrubbed, and on the reddened bottom where they had peeled away the diaper. The lotion felt smooth and silken on his tender skin, and he liked the aroma of it, the softest perfume-and-soap aroma and the lavender he’d smelled in Fiona’s hair. He rubbed his hands over the lotion she had smoothed on his distended stomach and smelled his fingers.
“Feel lots better, don’t you?” Fiona asked. “Tell you one thing: you sure do smell better.” But the child had already forgotten about the glorious scent of the lotion and was gazing through the screen door toward the back yard. He lifted one hand and pointed to the yard, whining softly. Fiona and Glory watched him silently. Then Fiona acknowledged his meaning: “I know. I know.” She crooned. “You want to go look for her, I reckon, but she isn’t there, honey. She isn’t there.”
Glory spoke up. “You gotta say it so he can understand. You gotta say, ‘She’s gone bye-bye.’”
“She’s gone bye-bye,” Fiona repeated, and the child moved his eyes from the door and gazed at her with a solemn expression.
“That’s right,” Fiona said. “Gone bye-bye, honey. So you stay here with us, okay? She’ll come back. You just be good and patient, and she’ll come back.”
“You ought not to tell him that,” Glory whispered. “We don’t know that for sure.”
“It’s okay,” Fiona assured her, but Glory clucked her tongue in disagreement. Then she sighed. “I’ll go get one of them shirts,” she said. “And calamine lotion for the mosquito bites.”
“See?” Fiona said to the child. “It’s going to be all right!” Her voice was bright and musical, as if she were reading a fairy tale to him. He glanced once more toward the screened door and then heaved a small sigh, as if he had finally given in to her words.
They dabbed calamine lotion on the mosquito bites on his legs and arms and then diapered the boy in part of a torn sheet, fastening the makeshift diaper with safety pins.
“Better try to find something like rubber pants to go over that diaper,” Glory suggested. “Else, the minute he wets, everything he’s got on gonna be wet too.”
“We need to make a list of things,” Fiona said. “So we can go in town in a little bit and get whatever we need. But of course, we don’t know how long we’ll have him here with us, so we don’t want to spend too much.”
“One of us better go and one stay here with him, leastwise until we get some of them rubber pants,” Glory said, and Fiona nodded in agreement. In the meantime, Glory had brought a soft old shirt from the closet, and when Fiona shook it out from its folds, she caught—for the least little moment—the faintest aroma of J. Roy’s shaving soap. Funny that his smell should still be in this shirt, despite it being washed and put away for so many years! she thought, but she said nothing. Strangely, s
he felt her eyes fill up, but she didn’t know whether it was because of J. Roy’s aroma still on the old shirt or whether she was feeling the sheer joy of taking such a pitiful little boy, cleaning him up, and putting him into fresh clothes. Regardless, she blinked away the tears that threatened to come, put the man-sized shirt on the child, rolled up the sleeves until his small hands appeared and then buttoned the front, which went all the way down to his toes.
“Well. That’s all we can do for now,” Fiona sighed. “Now let’s get some good food into him. Lord only knows when he last had something to eat. ‘Cause no telling where his mama came from, but not from around here, that’s for sure. And no telling how long she’d been traveling. A long way, I should think, from the looks of her. And out in that awful storm, to boot.”
The women both remembered again the thin, rain-soaked woman who had knocked on their back door long before dawn. Remembered her anguished face and heard her whispered words, “I’m sorry to bother you folks so early.” That was absolutely every word she said, but then she had pointed toward the tree and put her hand over her mouth, as if to stop herself from speaking further.
While Glory stood at the screen door, with the porch light shining behind her, Fiona picked her way across the yard and found the child asleep. When she turned to ask the woman what was going on, the woman was gone.
“Where’d she go?” Fiona called to Glory.
“Don’t know,” Glory hollered back. “Didn’t see her go. Just disappeared!” And then Fiona had gathered up the child, surprised at the weight of so fragile-looking a little thing, and carried him into the house. Time to find out what this is all about later, she thought to herself, because her entire attention was turned to the child who was in such an obviously miserable condition. While Glory held the door open, Fiona carried him inside and put him on her own bed, where he mumbled and turned onto his side, his small mouth making slight sucking sounds in his sleep. Fiona pulled a cotton quilt over him, over the filth and the wet clothes, as well. And immediately, they phoned Doc—the only person they knew to call—and he said for them to let the child sleep, and he would come by to see him as soon as he could. In the meantime, Doc would see if he could find out anything about the mother.
“Grits are probably done by now,” Glory said, breaking the reverie of memory for them both. They’ll be easy on his stomach, and a soft scrambled egg will be good, as well. But I still say a good dose of castor oil would do him just right.”
“Forget that, Glory. I simply won’t permit it.”
“Well. Don’t you go blaming me if he gets so stopped up he ends up with a fever.”
“He won’t.”
“Won’t get stopped up?”
“Won’t get stopped up or get a fever.”
All this time, the child looked from one to the other of the women, looked not with the typical curiosity one would expect, but with a calm, reassured expression, as if he knew, despite their fussing with each other, knew in some strange, non-verbal way that those strange women had been right: everything was going to be okay.
What he didn’t know—couldn’t know, at his tender age—was that his vision of the skirt would fade away so quickly, and that he would not consciously think of it again. But he also didn’t know that deep in his
heart, where he couldn’t see it or even know it was there—or that it wasn’t—something was gone, and that nothing would ever be the same again.
About Augusta Trobaugh
Augusta Trobaugh earned the Master of Arts degree in English from the University of Georgia, with a concentration in American and Southern literature. Her first novel, Praise Jerusalem!, was a semi-finalist in the 1993 Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Competition. Trobaugh’s work has been funded through the Georgia Council of the Arts, and she has been nominated for Georgia Author of the Year.
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